Travels with Casey Read online

  (Animal communicator Shira Plotzker says that “dogs can talk about pretty much anything . . . cats are more particular about what they want to talk about, and it’s mostly about themselves.”)

  Perhaps because of my conflicted relationship with Casey, I assumed that if animal communication was real (and I was skeptical about that), that pets might use their time on the therapist’s couch to reveal shameful secrets about their humans. But our pets rarely betray us, according to most of the communicators I spoke to. In fact, Debbie told me that animals just want their humans to be happy.

  “But what would you do if an animal told you that his owner was beating him?” I asked her. “What would be your responsibility there? To save the dog, or to report that to the human?”

  “That’s never happened,” she said. “I can’t imagine that someone who beats their animal would hire me to better understand their animal.”

  “It’s an interesting ethical question, though,” I insisted.

  “Yeah, I might say to the animal, ‘Okay, you sneak out the back and meet me in my car!’ ”

  I was curious about what kind of people hire animal communicators. I was certainly an unusual client; I was writing a book about dogs. But Debbie assured me that I was typical in one important way—I was going to take some convincing that her skills were real.

  “People are sometimes so desperate to understand what’s going on with an animal either behaviorally or physically,” she said, “that they’ll throw up their hands and call me and say, ‘I don’t really believe in this, but I’m willing to try anything!’ ”

  Many of those who hire communicators are looking for guidance about whether to put down an old or severely ill pet. Carol Gurney, a well-known animal communicator based in Los Angeles, told me about several such cases, including that of a seventeen-year-old Lhasa Apso named Ozzie. The dog was incontinent, could barely move, and wasn’t eating. Ozzie’s vet had recommended that he be put to sleep, but the dog’s owner, Valorie, wasn’t sure.

  “Valorie told me, ‘We as a family are willing to let him go, but we want to be sure that’s what he wants,’ ” Carol recalled. “So I asked Ozzie, and he said, ‘No, I’m not done with my job.’ ” Believing that Ozzie could benefit from some healing bodywork, Carol went to Valorie’s house. “Ozzie was on the bed and he looked almost dead. He couldn’t move. I really questioned myself. How could this be true? How could he not be ready to go? I asked him again. He said, ‘No, I’m not ready to go. I’m not done with my job.’ ”

  Carol says she encouraged Valorie to continue the bodywork after she left, and three days later Valorie called to report a “miracle.” Ozzie was running around the backyard like a dog half his age. “I almost didn’t believe it,” Carol told me. “I just figured we would make Ozzie comfortable, but he lived another year. And then I realized what Ozzie meant when he said he wasn’t done with his job. Valorie had had an aneurism when she gave birth and was learning to walk all over again. I understood that Ozzie was her best friend, and he wasn’t ready to leave until she was further along in her healing.”

  Carol and Debbie both told me that dogs understand death, but that they’re much less fearful of it than we are. “Animals that are connected to a human just want to know that they’re leaving us at an okay time,” Debbie said. “They want to know that we’ll be okay without them.”

  I didn’t outright reject the possibility that animals might have important things to tell us, but my phone sessions with several communicators about my relationship with Casey had done little to diminish my skepticism. Our talks had been remarkably devoid of “verifiable information,” which means that very little of what they said rang true.

  One woman, in particular, lost me early in our conversation when she announced that Casey wanted me to “have a special girl in my life.” Another said that Casey was a “fast and gliding runner,” when the truth is he’s slow and hobbles slightly. What wasn’t outright wrong was usually absurd (“Casey really wants to be on the cover of your book!”) or vague (“Casey likes to get along.” “Casey likes to play outside.” “Casey thinks rules are hard but he really tries.”).

  Although I’d been mostly unimpressed with the communicators I spoke to, I didn’t believe them to be con artists. I believed that they believed they could understand the yearnings of animals.

  I COULD tell my dad was growing impatient when Debbie had been at the house for thirty minutes and we’d barely even mentioned Cassie. “What has Cassie been telling you so far, if anything?” I asked her.

  Debbie was sandwiched on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, gently holding a tennis ball at the dog’s eye level. Cassie sat at attention in front her, pawing at the ball. They appeared to be having a moment.

  “She likes to divulge herself very slowly, so I’m not pushing her,” Debbie told us. She looked at my dad and stepmom. “Does Cassie ever get to see her sister?” They shook their heads. “Cassie’s been thinking about her, wondering how she’s doing, missing her.” (My stepmom had told Debbie that Cassie had lived with her sister in foster care.)

  “Cassie has a little bit of a loose bladder,” Debbie continued. We’d already told her that, too. “She gets a little upset when it happens. Getting her off grains will help with that. But I think it’s emotional.”

  Cassie stretched out on the carpet in front of Debbie. “She keeps asking me about my dogs, ’cause she smells them on me. I keep sending her images of mine—Cassie says she likes hearing laughter.” She looked at my dad and stepmom again. “When you guys go out, do you leave the radio on for her?” They shook their heads—they’d never done that. “Hmm,” Debbie said. “I wonder if that might have been from another place.”

  Debbie went on to tell us that Cassie seemed to have problems only with some dogs about her size or larger. “Because every time I send her an image of one of my dogs—I have tiny little furballs—she seems very interested. She seems to have been in a situation where another dog was aggressive toward her.”

  At that moment, Cassie stood up and stuck her nose in a bowl of bananas and oranges on the coffee table. “She was attacked by a larger dog, a large female dog. Is it mostly large female dogs she has a problem with so far?”

  “Yes, so far,” my stepmom said.

  “Well, we can ask her to change her behavior,” Debbie told us. “Whether she will or not . . . Dogs can be stubborn, just like humans.”

  The conversation then turned, unexpectedly, to peanut butter. “I have the sensation of peanut butter in my mouth, and that rarely happens,” Debbie told us. “Cassie says she loves peanut butter. If you ever need to get something down her, use peanut butter.” Cassie jumped up on the couch next to Debbie. “Oh, my, peanut butter is exciting!”

  I looked at my dad and stepmom. “Does Cassie like peanut butter?”

  “I think most dogs like peanut butter,” he said dismissively. “We’ve given her some a few times, but I can’t really remember. There’s other things we give her more that really seem to excite her.” My dad shifted in his seat and looked at Debbie. “Have we figured out why she’s nervous around Benoit yet?” He posed the question as politely as he could, but it was clear he believed we had thus far skirted the real issue.

  Debbie probably sensed the urgency in his voice. “What Cassie says is, you know how some people have nervous stomachs? Well, she has a nervous bladder. When she gets overexcited or stressed, the bladder leaks. As she gets older, there will be more strength there.”

  “We play and roughhouse all the time,” my dad said, “but it’s only with Benoit that she pees.”

  “Has this happened with any other person?” Debbie wanted to know.

  “The male vet,” my stepmom said.

  “It’s really men that she has a problem with,” my dad clarified.

  “Cassie’s showing me someone, prior to her foster care home, hitting her in the head. It looks like a man to me. I also see her in a crate. Do you know if she was crate-
trained?” My stepmom nodded that she was. “She keeps sending me an image of being in a crate, and I hear the reverberations of a metal kind of sound. I think someone might have kicked it, and it scared her.”

  Debbie suggested that we all walk into the guest bedroom. We’d told her that Cassie wouldn’t enter the room if I were in it, though we’d made progress during the two days before her visit. Cassie would stand in the hall outside the doorway, wagging her tail at me; she seemed to be scared of me and excited by me at the same time.

  I led everyone—dad, stepmom, and Debbie—into the room. Cassie followed us right in, as if she’d been hanging out with me in there for years.

  “What a good girl!” my dad said beaming.

  “Why do you think she came in this time?” I asked Debbie.

  “Cassie says she was unsure of having someone new in here, but that she’s feeling better now,” she replied.

  To her credit, Debbie didn’t try to suggest that her presence at the house had caused Cassie to overcome her fear. Instead, she told us, “It’s clear to me now that she has gotten close to you, because when we came in she was looking at you for assurance that I was okay to be in here.”

  Back in the living room, I turned the conversation briefly to my relationship with Casey. “For so much of life, I feel like I’ve been disappointing him,” I told her. “I worry that he’s bored a lot, that he’s frustrated with me.”

  When I’d said similar things to other communicators, they’d insisted that while Casey might occasionally feel bored, he loved me to death and wouldn’t dream of sharing his life with anyone else. “He cares about you deeply,” one had told me. “I’m feeling a lot of love from him. You know when you’re really proud of someone and you start to almost well up a bit? That’s what I’m feeling from him.”

  Debbie, though, took a different approach. “You may very well be picking up on his true feelings of frustration,” she said, before pivoting to the situation’s upside. “It sounds like you’re fortunate to have an animal that is good at projecting what he’s feeling and getting your attention!”

  I supposed that was one way of looking at it.

  Though the animal communicators I spoke to didn’t always agree on what Casey was thinking or feeling, they were more unified in their analysis of why the universe had paired Casey with me. They insisted that my dog was with me for a reason; he was supposed to teach me valuable life lessons.

  Several communicators spoke at length about my dislike of big groups, of my tendency to be a loner. “You can be a nonjoiner,” one told me. “You’ll have one foot in and one foot outside a group. You don’t really throw yourself completely in and let yourself be known.” Another said, “One of the many reasons Casey is in your life is to get you to go outside and explore the world, to meet people, to take risks.”

  When I’d lamented to one longtime animal communicator that my dog wasn’t meeting my needs (wasn’t “offering me unconditional love”), she smiled warmly back at me.

  “Well, maybe that’s not the reason he was put in your life,” she replied.

  “What’s the reason, then?” I pressed.

  “Maybe the reason you’re paired with him is so you can learn to give him unconditional love. Maybe Casey is here to teach you how to love.”

  I’d suspected that was true the second she said it.

  8. In which I hang out with Cesar Millan, homeless teenagers, and my former middle school English teacher turned dog masseur

  THERE WERE times during my journey across America that I felt so deliriously happy—so content, grateful, and blessed—that I considered staying on the road forever.

  One of those moments happened on Malibu’s Point Dume State Beach, which is tucked away under a promontory at the northern end of Santa Monica Bay. I was walking along the sand with Nic Sheff, a young writer who chronicled his methamphetamine addiction in the book Tweak. (Nic’s father, David Sheff, wrote his own account of Nic’s addiction, titled Beautiful Boy.)

  It was a glorious day, and Nic had brought along his goofy Bloodhound, Rhett, named after the character in Gone With the Wind. Casey and Rhett tumbled around in the sand; Rhett, on his back, pawed at Casey’s face. In the distance, Rezzy seemed to be coming alive right before our eyes: she danced along the ocean’s edge, her playful personality bursting forth in a joyous mixture of sand, mud, and saltwater.

  “If there’s anything better than being here right now with our dogs, I’m not sure what it is,” Nic said with an easy smile, his curly brown hair falling over his eyes. Those eyes can look vacant and sad in photographs, but on this day they were bright, hopeful. Nic is slender and boyish, and his wardrobe—blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up, thin track jacket, small backpack—gave him the look of a young indie rock star on a walkabout.

  “I’m so glad we’re here, doing this!” he continued. “Your dogs are awesome!”

  “Yours, too!” I said.

  We had all the giddiness of starstruck lovers, but we were far from that. Nic isn’t gay, and I wasn’t interested in him in that way. But our bond was instantaneous and undeniable, perhaps because we have so much in common: We were both raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. We both have divorced parents. We both have writer fathers. We both wrote publicly about our struggles with addictive behavior. And we both have dogs who helped us get better.

  In a 2011 article for The Fix, an online magazine about addiction and recovery, Nic wrote about the importance of dogs to his sobriety. At the height of Nic’s addiction, he wrote, he was homeless “and letting guys blow me for $50 a pop, so I could afford another gram of speed.” When his half-brother suggested that the solution to his addiction might be to get a dog, Nic angrily dismissed the advice.

  “It just seemed so condescending,” Nic wrote. “Like he was totally minimizing my problem.”

  But several years later, while Nic was drinking “a quart of vodka every day” and “lying to everyone” about being sober after the release of Tweak, he came upon an emaciated hound dog running through traffic in Savannah, Georgia, where he was living at the time. Nic brought her to the Humane Society, where she promptly attacked the vet. The vet told Nic the dog would have to be euthanized.

  “I could really relate to this crazed, homeless dog, and I felt like she deserved another chance—maybe the same way I still believed I might deserve another chance,” Nic wrote in The Fix. He didn’t let the Humane Society put her down. Instead, he took her home, named her Ramona, “and began the long, slow process of trying to rehab this psycho dog—while, at the same time, I guess, trying to rehab myself.”

  Before he knew it, Nic had stopped drinking. And though he concedes that therapy and medication helped in that endeavor, he believes his half-brother was right. “I needed to be responsible and accountable for a living creature that literally could not survive if I was off getting fucked up,” Nic told me.

  Ramona wasn’t at the beach with us on the day of my visit; she’s still “a handful,” Nic said, and occasionally can get aggressive toward people and dogs. “I’d never heard her make a sound until she started growling at me. It sucks when you can barely pet your dog, and she doesn’t want to sleep in bed with you. She’s even bitten me a few times when she gets anxious.”

  Though my problems with Casey paled in comparison to the challenge of living with Ramona, Nic was eager to talk about them. Before embarking on my journey, I’d briefly mentioned to him my Casey-related insecurities. “How are things going with you both?” he asked me, sounding genuinely interested.

  It was a good question, one I realized I hadn’t considered in the two weeks since adopting Rezzy. Though I’d tried not to neglect Casey, Rezzy had commanded practically all of my energy and attention. And, boy, did Rezzy love attention. Even when she was tired (as she was for much of those first two weeks), she preferred to be tired with her head in my lap. She was physical and loving in a way that Casey was only rarely; Rezzy wanted to be as close to me as possible. Nic noticed.


  “She’s so bonded to you already,” he said.

  As we sat in the sand watching our dogs, I realized that I hadn’t felt any frustration or insecurities around Casey in weeks. “It’s almost like rescuing Rezzy made me realize that dogs are different, and that I don’t need to expect Casey to be everything,” I told him. I was talking out loud, figuring out my thoughts and feelings as they came to me. “And I know I’ve been paying more attention to Rezzy than Casey, but that’s because Rezzy is so new, and she needs me right now. I know Casey is okay.”

  “Casey seems so easygoing about things,” Nic said.

  “Exactly. And I love that about him.” I paused and let that sink in. “I don’t think I’ve ever realized how much I love that about him. He doesn’t even seem to mind the RV anymore. He’s happy, he’s content. And he doesn’t get jealous if I have to pay a lot of attention to Rezzy.”

  “It seems like Rezzy is the perfect complement to Casey, even down to their colors—black and white,” Nic said. We laughed as we watched Rezzy dig a hole in the sand and stuff her nose in it, then run to us through a stiff wind and gently nudge her face in my lap. “She’s the most awesome dog. You really lucked out.”

  “You did, too, with Rhett,” I told him, as the dog chased Casey in a circle, Rhett’s droopy ears flapping against his head as he bounded through the sand.

  “You should have seen Rhett when he was little,” Nic said. “He was like this super runt of the litter. Nobody wanted him. So I took him, but he was always sick the first year. I spent so much time looking after him that a few months before my wedding my fiancée was like, ‘Why don’t you marry the dog?’ She felt like I was giving him more attention than her. But I was like, ‘He’s like this sick little puppy, and I have to take care of him.’ I had a sick puppy and a psycho rescue. They both needed me.”

  “And you needed them,” I said.

  “Yes! There’s no doubt in my mind—my dogs keep me sober. They do that by getting me out of myself, by forcing me to think about someone else before me. They make me less self-centered.”