Travels with Casey Read online

  “No cross-country trip with your dog is complete without stopping in [insert name of town, dog park, beach, etc.],” they insisted.

  In the first few days of my voyage, I’d posted a picture of Casey and Wanita on Amy Hempel’s couch, as well as a video of Casey inside Amanda’s studio. I’d also whined about spending $175 to fill up the RV’s gas tank every four hundred miles, which had prompted unexpected offers of cash.

  “My dog said he’d be more than happy to help you and Casey defray some of those outrageous gas prices,” one woman wrote on the trip’s Facebook wall. “Does anyone else think that would be a great way to take a little part in this trip we all wish we were on? Woof if you do!”

  In the end, I decided not to pillage the bank accounts of my Facebook followers. But, though I didn’t realize it that night in Jersey City, I would come to rely on Casey’s online admirers for a different kind of sustenance. Throughout my travels, these strangers would seem instinctively to know what I needed—whether it was a virtual motherly hug one lonely night in a ghostly RV park in Texas, or a kick in the ass to help me face an interminable drive through Wyoming. More importantly, perhaps, they would model how to love my dog in a manner that had somehow eluded me—unconditionally.

  If only my real friends had been as helpful. At about eleven that night, it occurred to me that Jason wouldn’t be calling me back. And I was pretty sure I knew why: he’d likely relapsed on drugs. He was nearly a year sober, but I’d lived through one of his previous relapses and knew the signs. If he’s hours late and not returning phone calls, he’s probably holed up somewhere getting high.

  I swung open the Chalet’s door, jumped out, and kicked one of the RV’s front tires. This turned out to be a stupid idea, as the migraine that had mostly dissipated returned. I turned off the motorhome’s interior lights, collapsed on my bed, and began calling friends in New York City. I reached one, James, who doesn’t particularly like dogs but who took pity on me.

  “Come by tomorrow,” he said. “You guys can stay at my place.”

  BEFORE HEADING to the city the next morning, Casey and I went searching for a patch of grass. We walked along the Jersey City waterfront, past sleek boats and high-rise buildings with well-kept courtyards. Just beyond a memorial to the Korean War veterans of Hudson County, we came upon a large grassy area shaped like a shotgun, with the barrel aimed at Battery Park City in Manhattan.

  There were a handful of dogs running about when we got there. I struck up a conversation with a brown-haired French woman named Julie, who was pushing her baby stroller with one hand and wielding a blue tennis ball launcher in the other.

  “I’m this awful stereotype of a Jersey City mom,” she told me with a laugh as her year-old Jack Russell, Maggie, zigzagged around us. “I’ve got the stroller, the dog, the ball launcher. You don’t have to pretend to find me interesting.”

  But I did find Julie interesting, and not only because she gave me the chance to speak French. Before moving to the United States with her husband, Julie had what she called a traditionally European perspective on dog ownership.

  “People love their dogs in France, but a dog is still considered a dog,” she said. “It’s not usually seen as a child, like so many dogs are here.”

  In France, Julie had never heard of a ball launcher, let alone a doggie day spa, pet health insurance, or a raw dog food diet. In fact, she was so surprised by how Americans treat their pets that she wrote an article about American dog culture for a French magazine.

  “Many French people have no idea how spoiled dogs are here,” she told me.

  It hadn’t taken long for the spoiling to rub off on Julie. Soon after bringing Maggie home, Julie began calling the dog her baby. “Now I always say that Maggie was our first baby, and that our actual baby”—she gazed at the infant bundled up in the stroller—“is our second baby.”

  Julie takes both her babies to this park three times every day for an hour, even if it’s “raining horizontal.” All that time outdoors has the added benefit of helping Maggie lose one pound, which would allow the dog to travel with Julie and her husband in the coach cabin on an upcoming flight to France.

  “She’s fifteen pounds right now, but we need to get her down to the fourteen-pound weight limit so they won’t put her down with the luggage,” Julie explained.

  “How’s it going so far?”

  “Not well,” she said. “One pound doesn’t sound like a lot . . .”

  “But on a little dog . . .”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “Have you considered doggie fat camp?” I joked, referring to the increasing number of camps nationwide that promise to whip your dog into shape. More than half of all American dogs are considered overweight or obese. The more overweight you are, the more likely that your dog will be overweight, too.

  “That’s another thing that would never happen in France!” she insisted. “French dogs aren’t fat.”

  “Maybe they’re just like French people in that way?” I suggested.

  It was fun to stereotype, but we were wrong. Though not as big (pardon the pun) a problem as in the United States, 39 percent of French dogs were found to be overweight or obese in a study published in The Journal of Nutrition.

  Julie launched the tennis ball toward some big rocks at the far end of the park. Maggie and Casey both dashed off after it, but Casey gave up after a few yards when he realized Maggie would get there first. I excused myself for a moment and led Casey to the edge of the Hudson, where I hoped to take a photograph of him with the New York skyline over his shoulder. I positioned him on a rock, told him to stay, and snapped pictures with my iPhone. Then I sat next to him and tried to meditate. I’d promised my mom that I’d carve out a few minutes of quiet time each day for myself on the road, but it hadn’t happened yet.

  Meditating on rocks with a Lab next to the Hudson River is not easy. I tried to focus on my breath, but Casey kept barking at me to throw him the ball. When we’re “on a walk,” Casey considers any lollygagging unacceptable; he’s never been very good at entertaining himself. I eventually gave up and returned to Julie, who was still launching tennis balls for Maggie.

  “She’ll run like this all day if I let her,” she said.

  I wished Julie luck and returned to Liberty Harbor, where I called car services until I found one willing to transport a dog. Getting a big dog into Manhattan without a car poses logistical challenges. Unless he’s a service animal, he’s not allowed on the ferry or the subway. And good luck hailing a cab. Nothing displeases most New York City taxi drivers more than chauffeuring a dog around.

  An African American friend of mine once told me that he loves competing for a taxi with a dog-wielding white person. “It’s the only time a cabbie will choose me,” he said.

  I HAD some time to kill before meeting James at his apartment, so I took Casey for a quick stroll through the East Village, a neighborhood overrun with dogs—mostly mutts. We stopped at a dog-friendly coffee shop, the Bean, where Casey promptly knocked over a woman’s iced coffee with his tail. The liquid barely missed the woman’s MacBook Pro, splattering instead on the floor near my tennis shoes. I rushed to the counter in search of paper towels, but by the time I returned Casey had lapped most of it up.

  “Uh-oh,” I said, as a Bean employee walked briskly toward us.

  To my surprise, he came bearing gifts. “I thought this big guy might want a few doggie treats,” he said in a baby voice, bending down to deliver the goods into Casey’s eager mouth.

  “Geeeeeeennnnnnnnntle,” I reminded Casey, who can occasionally bite the hand that feeds him.

  I led Casey over to a couch in the corner. He pulled at the leash, his nose pointing us toward a nearby woman’s chocolate croissant. “Casey, down,” I said forcefully. He dropped his head, sighed loudly, and stretched out on the floor at my feet.

  I took the opportunity to eat a bagel and read a few pages of the book I’d brought along, New York’s Poop Scoop Law: Dogs, the Dirt
, and Due Process. Written by longtime New Yorker Michael Brandow, the book is far more interesting than its title suggests and tells the fascinating story of how dogs came to be one of New York City’s most contentious political issues.

  Back in the 1970s, before picking up after your pooch was an expectation of canine ownership, the city’s sidewalks and parks had been littered with dog doo. In a 1975 letter to The New York Times, a grumpy New Yorker had lamented the sad, soiled state of Central Park: “It has become a dumping ground for defecating dogs. . . . The crisp green grass, the smell of blossoming cherry trees, the playing fields are all being taken from us by the hordes of dogs that romp freely. . . . Can nothing be done? Are we all to be slaves to people who find pleasure in keeping Great Danes in three-room apartments?”

  But when New York City mayor Ed Koch proposed the country’s first poop-scoop law in 1978, dog owners were aghast—and promised to revolt. “Like the Jews of Nazi Germany,” the head of New York’s Dog Owners Guild at the time complained, “we citizens, including the old and infirm, are being humiliated by being forced to pick up excrement from the gutter.”

  Many dog owners saw the proposed law as impractical (Koch made clear that dog owners were not to dispose of poop in public waste receptacles), and as a slippery slope with the ultimate goal being the eradication of dogs from Manhattan. Their paranoia wasn’t entirely misplaced. Dogs and their owners had been unfairly blamed for much of what ailed New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. Dog bashing at the time was a favorite pastime of many New Yorkers, best expressed by writer Fran Lebowitz in perhaps the greatest takedown of dogs ever published.

  “Pets should be disallowed by law,” she wrote in 1981. “Especially dogs. Especially in New York City. I have not infrequently verbalized this sentiment in what now passes for polite society, and have invariably been the recipient of the information that even if dogs should be withheld from the frivolous, there would still be the blind and the pathologically lonely to think of. I am not totally devoid of compassion, and after much thought I believe that I have hit upon the perfect solution to this problem—let the lonely lead the blind.”

  But dog issues weren’t just dividing New York. As dog ownership exploded across the country in the 1970s, the National League of Cities listed dog and other animal concerns as the primary issue about which local public officials received complaints.

  In New York City, dog runs and parks had been proposed as early as the 1960s as a solution to “both the grass shortage and the poop surplus,” as Brandow put it. (One landlord even built a rooftop dog run on his building and suggested that other landlords do the same.) But the idea that anyone should provide extra accommodations for dogs or their owners struck some as preposterous.

  Many New Yorkers “were not about to hand over parcels of public land, however miniscule, permanently to those filthy, marauding beasts that had, in their opinions plagued the city.” People worried that the runs would be breeding grounds of filth and disease and would invariably pollute surrounding areas. Underlying much of their anger was a belief that if a person wanted a dog that badly, then they should live somewhere with a yard. Even some dog owners disliked the idea of dog runs, which they saw as a kind of forced segregation. Others worried about whether their dogs would be safe there.

  “Critics imagined horrible scenes of loose predators, the large animals consuming the smaller ones in a single bite,” Brandow wrote.

  But though there is an occasional dogfight today in New York City’s dog runs, one could argue that dogs get along better there than their human counterparts. I got to see that for myself a year before my trip, when, in a moment of lunacy, I decided to spend a full day at the city’s oldest dog run, Tompkins Square (also called First Run).

  I’d wanted to experience the rituals and rhythms of an urban dog park. What I experienced instead would make a middle school recess—with its assorted cliques, cruelties, and comedies—feel like a conference on interpersonal ethics.

  I’D AWOKEN so early on the morning of our dog park adventure that Casey had looked at me as if I were kidding. Normally the word “walk” elicits all manner of canine gesticulation (spinning, leaping, barking), but at 5:35 A.M. on a cold weekday it elicited a strange, suspicious stare.

  “Now?” he seemed to be thinking. “Really?”

  We arrived at the park a few minutes after six (when it officially opens), but the gates were locked. Casey sniffed a fire hydrant while I tried to figure out what to do. About half a block down 10th Street, I spotted a woman and her large dog slipping through what I presumed to be a hole in the park’s fence.

  “We’re in!” I told Casey, who pranced along next to me, game for this early-morning experiment.

  The dog run is at the northern end of the ten-acre park. It’s enclosed within wrought iron fences and is divided into two sections—a larger one for big dogs, and a smaller one for little dogs. A gigantic wooden dog bone sculpture attached to a three-foot-high fence divides the sections.

  The woman I’d seen slip into the park was the only person in the run when Casey and I arrived. She sat on a bench in the large dog area, wearing a down jacket and clutching a cup of coffee. I sat down next to her and introduced myself. Her name was Robyn, and her dog’s name was Charlie. A big, friendly black and gray Siberian Husky, he’d been a gift from her ex-husband.

  “We’d separated after thirty years together,” she told me, “and he gave Charlie to me hoping that I would get back with him. Basically, he tried to bribe me with a dog!”

  “Did it work?” I asked.

  “Well, yes and no. I didn’t take him back at first. But, four years later, we did get back together.”

  “You made him sweat it out.”

  “Well, you know . . .” she said with a guilty smile. “Once I had Charlie I didn’t even really feel like I needed a husband. You know what I mean? Dogs can be a lot more fun than husbands. And Charlie is the most amazing gift in my life. Dogs are the most amazing gift! But you know that. I love your dog. She’s beautiful.”

  It wasn’t the first time someone mistook Casey for female. I’m not sure if it’s his name, his soft white fur, or his blond eyelashes, but my dog could win a doggie androgyny contest.

  I asked Robyn if she ever worried about owning a Siberian Husky in Manhattan. After all, she’d told me she’d lived in the same small, rent-controlled East Village apartment since she was a child. Was that really the ideal place for a dog originally bred to pull heavy loads across eastern Siberia?

  “Are you kidding?” she blurted out. “Charlie has the best life ever. I’m out here three or four times a day with him, in between my jobs as a housekeeper. He comes out here every morning at six for an hour and a half. I’m part of the morning crew.”

  “The morning crew?” I asked.

  “There are about six or seven of us who come here each morning when the park opens,” she explained. “We’ve become great friends over the years through our dogs. I mean, what other people besides your family and your co-workers do you get to see for an hour every day?”

  Just then, another member of the crew arrived with two dogs in tow. “This is Sean,” Robyn said, introducing us. “He’s a dog walker and has been coming here longer than just about anybody else.”

  “Yeah, I have no real life to speak of,” he said, eyeing me with suspicion. “But enough about me. Who the hell are you?”

  “This guy’s writing a book about dogs,” Robyn explained. “He’s spending all day at the run.”

  “All day at the run?” Sean guffawed. “Dude, you’re nuts. And your poor dog! He’s going to hate you by the end of the day.” Sean pulled out his smartphone. “What’s your name? I’m going to Google you.”

  “You’re going to Google me?”

  “Yeah, gotta see if you’re a real writer. Can’t be having strange people hanging out all day at the run pretending to write books about dogs.”

  We heard the clacking of the gate at the entrance to the run. Linda, a
woman in her early forties, entered with her retriever mix, a cup of coffee, and that morning’s New York Times.

  “This dude’s writing a book,” Sean told her as she plopped herself down next to me.

  “Congratulations,” she said.

  “No, about this dog run,” he clarified.

  “Oh, well, there are plenty of crazies here. You’ll have lots to write about.”

  Sean laughed. “There’s this saying—to own a dog in Manhattan, you have to be crazy,” he told me.

  “Or rich,” Linda said. She looked at me, then Casey. “Is this your yellow Lab?”

  Casey stuck his nose in her lap, and she fawned over him for a few seconds before her dog started humping him. “He likes Casey!” Sean said. As if on cue, Casey starting humping Charlie.

  I asked the morning crew if any celebrities were regulars at the run. Sean proudly ticked off a dozen names, including Molly Ringwald, Parker Posey, and Josh Lucas. Linda rolled her eyes. “Sean, you’re such a star-fucker.”

  “There’s a lot more,” he went on, undeterred. “Elijah Wood comes here sometimes. You know, the hobbit. He has a girlfriend who lives nearby and who has three small dogs. He’s as short as she is! I swear he’s like four foot nine. Oh, and Matt Dillon”—he pointed to a building on the corner—“lives right there.”

  “He doesn’t have a dog, though,” Linda said. “He just likes the attention.”

  Sean rolled his eyes. “A dog park is really a great place to meet people,” he told me. “We’ve actually had a few marriages happen between people who first met each other here.”

  “I try not to date where my dog shits,” Linda said.

  Linda used to live uptown and was a regular at the dog run in Madison Square Park, which she recalled as considerably less crazy than this one. “Down here, there’s so much drama,” she said. “The only time I can tolerate this place is early in the morning. The lunatics come out later.”