It’s been a while since I’ve shared any stories about the life and times of DP, and I haven’t really had much going upstairs that has formulated a worthy post. So today, we will share a story called “The Walker.”
I drove up to Maine a couple years back to get a dog. A rescue dog, because that was the right thing to do. Within a week, I realized this was an awful decision. I should have known when I met Brody in the Petco where the adoption people were meeting us to introduce the newest member of our family. Brody was going ballistic at everything in the store. The lady who was playing foster home was like, “I’ve never seen him like this… must just be all the excitement.” And away I went with the most broken beagle in America. In a matter of two weeks, my little 24-pound shit-show managed to chew the inside door of my brand new car. Another time, while I ran to the lawyers to pick up a document, he pawed the wooden front door of my then-apartment into kindling and chewed a hole through two sheets of drywall to get into another room that he was locked out of.
What I have concluded is that my dog’s previous owner was Michael Vick. Every time we saw another dog, Brody would go ballistic, and the one and only time I took him to the dog run, he managed to jump up and bite a dog that weighed roughly 150 pounds.
I was out of town on a business trip, and I called David and asked him simply, “Hey, think you can run over to my place, throw Brody on a leash, and take him for a quick walk around the block and refill his water and food?” He replied in the affirmative.
Several hours later, I get a text message from DP: “Fuck your dog. Don’t ever ask me to do that again,” accompanied by a picture of my little brother with a huge gash on his chin.
“Oh, this is going to be good,” I thought to myself. Shortly thereafter, I get a text from “Halvo”: “I can’t wait to tell you how walking your dog went,” followed by a bunch of emoticons.
So what happened, you ask? Well, let’s just say I should have named my dog Houdini.
David and Jon (a.k.a. “Halvo”) were at the bar getting some drinks. From what I gather, there was more than one drink… there was more than two drinks… iiiiin fact, there was probably something to the tune of half a case plus shots before my two victims, errrrr… volunteers took the gander over to my place.
As they walked in, they probably heard the moaning my dog would make when you left, followed by the incessant scratching at the door in hopes he (Brody) could dig his way through a solid fire-door. Never happened.
So, as David and Jon stumble up the stairs to my door, they open it. Out shoots a streak of black, white, and brown: Brody zipped out without a leash and was sitting on the first floor platform. David turns and calls out Brody’s name, to which my dog does nothing.
Rule 1 – When your dog gets out like that, get the leash and do not panic.
Rule 2 – Do not chase your dog… he/she will think it is a game, and the dog will nine times out of ten win.
Rule 3 – See Rule 1 & 2.
So immediately, David panics and goes trundling down the stairs as soon as he is about to snatch up Brody. Brody, thinking this is a game, bolts just in time for David to trip over his own foot and fall down a flight of stairs.
(Side story: My old building “The Cherokee” is a very cool inside-out building, with the stairs spiraling in the open air on the outside of the building. They are covered in something that is about as smooth as lava rock for traction year-round.
I have tripped up the stairs a few times, and let me tell you, this surface falls into my top three “don’t want to fall on this.” It is lethal.)
So here goes David, head first down a flight of stairs, and his chin acts as the brakes for his body. Meanwhile, my dog is just sitting, wagging his tail in the middle of the courtyard, ready to play some more “catch me if you can.” So now David’s bleeding, and here comes “Old Halvo”—the less-than-svelte Halvo whom you all know now—and apparently, although I could be embellishing a bit here, he also falls down the stairs but does not sustain the same injury. But this is 250+ pounds of pure energy now falling down a flight of stairs onto 5’7”, 160-lb. DP.
At some point, they manage to get a hold of Brody using some sort of improvised cattle-herding technique and shoosh my dog back into the apartment to get the leash.
My guess is Brody didn’t get a walk that day, but when I saw the cut on David’s face and the scrapes on Jon’s arms, I just started laughing. I was replaying the scene in my mind as they told me, and I could not help myself from laughing, watching this giant and this little guy both drunk-chasing a 26-lb. dog around the courtyard of my building while bleeding profusely over everything.
They told me this story in my apartment where Brody acted as if none of this ever happened. He was just rolled up into a little ball like you see above, being the perfect little angel he always was.
