Giant George (3 page)

She paused in her stroking and considered him for a moment, tilting her head to one side. “Hmm,” she said thoughtfully. “I need to look carefully. Let me
see, now…” The puppy looked back at her, bewildered.

“You know what?” she said finally. “He does. He
really
does.” So that was that. George he would be.

We topped up his water bowl and placed him back in his crate for the long journey home, but not before the woman, who’d just done the same with her new kitten, had a chance to have a quick stroke as well.

“He’s gorgeous,” she agreed with us.
“Absolutely gorgeous. And I tell you what,” she added, “
big
paws.”

Naturally, this didn’t mean a lot to us. All we could see was this cute little puppy. Who knew that one day he’d be doing what she’d suggested—strutting his stuff for the whole
world
to see? Right now he just looked plain old bewildered.

Once we got back to the car, Christie changed her mind about George traveling home in the
crate on the backseat. She decided he’d probably had enough of being stuck in a tiny box, and would much prefer to sit up front with his new mom.

“I’ll travel with him on my lap,” she announced, and that was exactly what she did. She pulled him out of the crate again, cooing at him all the time and stroking him really gently, and
soon his trembling began to stop. In fact, by the time we had reached
the outskirts of Phoenix, he’d evidently started feeling so at home with his new mom that he decided to mark his territory.

“Guess what,” Christie said, as we reached the big highway, “little George here appears to have peed in my lap.”

We both laughed, of course, because, well, it was pretty funny. But I also couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “Here we go…” Everything that had worried me about
becoming a dog owner would now, quite possibly, come true.

I didn’t say that, though, because I didn’t want to be a killjoy. Two were now three. We were committed.

It’s one thing to cheerfully adopt a good-guy, wife-pleasing persona, but quite another to actually live it. Much as I had committed to this novel idea of being responsible for the welfare of a small dependent being, maybe I hadn’t properly thought through the small print. We returned to our
apartment with our seventeen-pound puppy, and it soon became obvious that the reality of having him would require a heck of a lot more from me than the set of good intentions I’d committed to.

Right off the bat, it became clear that an unbroken night’s sleep was something we could wave goodbye to. Like many a control freak before me, I suspect, I had a set of rules loosely in place. The first
of these—and it wasn’t at all unreasonable, I thought—was that George would sleep in his crate in the kitchen. He was a dog, after all, not a baby.

Three things immediately derailed this plan. The first was that we had figured things wrong. We had this idea that we could pretty much put him in his crate, leave him there and he’d go to sleep. This turned out to be seriously wishful
thinking. As
soon as we were out of sight—even before we’d left the kitchen—he’d start whimpering at the top of his lungs. He’d change instantly from being this cute little fella with blue eyes and winning ways to a caterwauling banshee from Hades. It wasn’t that his howls and whines were demonic, exactly, just that they were high-pitched, interminable and superloud. To sleep through his noise would probably
require both earplugs and hard drugs, and even then I had a hunch it would still wake us.

The second problem, given our sleepless condition, was that the kind of parenting skills we’d sort of thought we’d possessed turned out to be impossible to apply. It was astonishing to me—if not to Christie, who was turning out to be naturally maternal—that even though George was not a human baby, there
was something about the woeful, intense tone of his whining that made it impossible to ignore him. Every whimper we heard created a picture in our heads of a tragic, abandoned pup, left unloved and alone, desperate for the comfort of his mother. It didn’t matter how much we rationalized things (warm crate, warm blanket, warm kitchen, squeaky bone), there was still a huge discrepancy between his quite
comfortable situation in our nice warm kitchen and the aural fiction he was peddling so well.

“Poor, poor little thing,” Christie said on our second night into this torture. “He must feel so bewildered. He’s so young, after all. One minute he’s snuggled up with his mother and all his brothers and sisters, and the next he’s miles from home, feeling wretched, lost, abandoned…”

I didn’t try to
argue with this. I didn’t bother commenting that he was a domestic pet; this was
normal
. What was the point? George’s misery was eating at me too.

So the sensible parenting was very soon dumped. Instead, we shunted George’s crate into our bedroom, putting it close to our bed so he could see us. And that’s where he slept from then on—though, to be fair to us, it wasn’t
just
because we wimped out.
The third problem, and, as it turned out, the biggest, was that the noise he made really was something. It was so loud that we didn’t think for a single minute that we were the only ones who could hear it. We lived in an apartment, which meant people on all sides of us. Even if the folks living beneath us didn’t hear him, chances were that the folks above did. And then there were the people to
the left of us, and to the right of us… Surely someone, in some apartment, would.

This was a problem in itself, but also because if that someone told the landlord we had a dog in our apartment, there were potentially serious consequences. No, we wouldn’t be sent to an enforced labor camp in Siberia, or even run out of town by an angry (if quieter) posse, but we’d be breaking the terms of our
lease and could find George and ourselves being given notice to leave—either move out or find George a new home. And it wouldn’t just be that we’d be asked to leave, either. I checked the documents. They could make us move and
still
demand we pay the rent for the whole period. They could even take us to court—it could all get very ugly.

To make matters worse, George didn’t confine his histrionics
to the nighttime. He would whimper and howl just about
any time
we left him, even for a half hour or so. And we didn’t simply guess this; we knew it. We knew because we both got so stressed about it happening that we checked for ourselves. One day, to be sure, we left the apartment without him, then waited right outside the door till his noise started up. Sure enough, within moments he was scratching
at the door and barking, throwing in the odd howl for good measure. The noise was
loud
. We headed off then, to check around back. The noise was still loud, and no less so when we went down to the courtyard. This puppy of ours could make noise for America. It was obvious that there was no way we could leave him at home alone for any length of time, even had we wanted to, which we didn’t.

We should
have known about this, of course. One thing about the breed that was on almost every website Christie had visited was that Great Danes like—and really need—to be with their “pack.” All the things that make them great pets—their lack of aggression, their attachment to their humans, their ability to seem to be able to read their owners’ minds and act accordingly—also made them more emotionally
sensitive than many other kinds of dog. These were dogs—and I’d read it myself too, more than once—that physically needed to be with you. And they really,
really
hated being left alone.

You take these things in, of course, but, like most things in life, you don’t know what they truly mean until you’re in that situation. And now we were in a situation where it was daily becoming clearer that leaving
this puppy of ours wasn’t an option. It wasn’t simply a case of him coming to work with me sometimes, or of it being okay for us to pop out for a bite to eat.
Nope, this puppy wanted in,
whatever
we were doing, whether it was a good place for a puppy to be or not.

So that was it. George became my workmate, my sidekick. And, initially, it wasn’t too bad; it was doable. Around the time we got him,
I’d begun fixing up a property I’d bought in the south side of Tucson. It was a three-bedroom, one-bathroom home, in an inexpensive neighborhood, that needed a lot of renovation. As well as painting and carpeting, landscaping and air-conditioning work, it had an add-on room that needed to be completely rebuilt. And since I was working there mostly alone, there wouldn’t be any problems if I brought
George along… or so I thought. I hadn’t factored in Nosy Rosie.

We didn’t know if Rosie was her name; it probably wasn’t. But even before we’d crossed the line on pet-owning issues, she pretty much fit the bill. She lived on the ground floor of our apartment building and clearly needed to get out more. As it was, she didn’t seem to want to. In fact, she didn’t seem much interested in any kind
of socializing—all she seemed to do was constantly peer through the slats in her blinds, checking out her fellow residents’ comings and goings, presumably in case any of us were felons.

Neither Christie nor I had spoken with her much, but it was clear from the start that she had our movements in her sights. This meant the business of sneaking George in and out of the building needed to be a covert
military operation. We knew—we just
knew
—Nosy Rosie would be the type to log our movements and report them to our landlord.

For the first couple of weeks, it wasn’t too bad. I’d sneak him
out, in his crate, cleverly disguised under a blanket, and when he needed to use the bathroom before bedtime, I’d take him out the same way and walk down the road until I could safely let him out to do his thing.

After two weeks, however, he’d already put on another fourteen pounds, which meant the crate was no longer big enough to take him. I decided to upgrade to a stout cardboard box, and would furtively carry him, in the manner of an illicit package, to wherever it was he and I needed to be.

He couldn’t remain illicit for too long, however. As with the separation anxiety, the question of George’s
growth was something we knew about, had read about, had definitely expected, but the reality of it came as something of a shock. As he grew—and, boy, was he growing—so did the effort required to carry him. Why hadn’t I figured on that before? And it wasn’t just a case of carrying him, either; I had to carry him downstairs and outside while
at the same time
locking doors, maneuvering handles and
unlocking truck tailgates. It wasn’t long before I had to abandon the box and simply gather him up under my arm, again covered in a blanket, like a convicted criminal on his way to court. What George thought of all this was anyone’s guess, but, since he knew no different, and was such a personable and enthusiastic animal, my hunch is that he found it all pretty neat.

But I was getting seriously
fed up with it. It wasn’t just the journey to work and back that was beginning to prove stressful, or the cover-of-darkness trips to go poop, all the while looking out for Nosy Rosie and wondering when the landlord would
come knocking; it was a complete nightmare when I was
at
work as well. How had I ever convinced myself it wouldn’t be?

While Christie had settled in well in her new job, and
would come home full of tales of the interesting people she’d met over dinner at work functions, the clients she’d acquired and the out-of-town trips she had to make, I was beginning to get behind schedule, as I had to spend half my day shepherding an inquisitive ball of energy with a voracious appetite in order to get anything done.

In the past when I was working I’d always gone to have a leisurely
lunch somewhere—to a local sandwich shop or deli. It was a good way to break up my mostly solitary day, because I could see people, chat with them and socialize a bit. But this was obviously no longer an option. I couldn’t take George with me because dogs weren’t allowed in restaurants, nor could I leave him at the house I was remodeling. What if somebody took him? The house was completely
unsecured. And I didn’t know any of the neighbors. Even if I did risk leaving him somewhere, he’d start yowling.

So it was all a little gloomy, and lonely, for both of us. Because I couldn’t leave him, I couldn’t get to the store to get parts for the heating and air-conditioning, so I would spend each day pretty much in solitary confinement. We’d eat the lunches I now had to prepare and pack
every morning—turkey sandwiches and chips for me, and puppy food for him—indoors, out of the 104-degree heat that was the norm for spring. And then I’d get back to work and leave George in another room,
unable to relax for a second for fear that he’d either find a way to escape or chew through an electrical cord or something.

I considered the yard too. It was large—a big patch of dirt—and it
was empty. It was still cool enough outdoors (104 degrees in Arizona is nothing compared to how hot it
can
get in the summer) that spending a short time outside wouldn’t hurt him. But the house was a mess both inside and out, and the yard was a minefield of potential puppy problems. There was no swimming pool for him to fall into, but there were plenty of other hazards, from the shards of broken
glass to the stray nails in bits of lumber and the scorpions that might decide to stop by. But the greatest hazard, in my view, was the cat poop—there were
dozens
of cat poops—and I knew he’d probably want to try some. But he’d not yet been inoculated, and wouldn’t be for a few weeks, so he could catch any number of horrible diseases. It didn’t escape my notice that a dog with diarrhea and sickness
would make my already stressful life a good deal more so. He really shouldn’t even have been out in public yet.