Travels with Casey Read online

  “So you guys don’t consider yourselves lunatics?” I asked with a smile.

  “There’s normal New York crazy, which is what we are,” Linda explained. “Then there’s batshit New York crazy, the people who have nothing better to do than start drama in the dog park. And don’t even get me started on the people over on the little dog side. They’re an entirely different kind of crazy.”

  LATER THAT morning, the cutest puppy I’d ever seen—a four-month-old Golden Retriever named Bean who looked like the dog in the Snuggies television commercials—bounded into First Run.

  There were about fifteen people there when Bean arrived, and for a good five minutes nearly everyone stopped what they were doing to take turns petting her.

  “Having a cute dog in New York City makes living here so much cooler,” Bean’s owner, a friendly photographer in his thirties, told me. “I’ll be walking her down the street, and people will just grin when they see her. People stop and pet her and talk to me. The biggest, meanest-looking guys are like, ‘Oh, it’s a PUPPY!’ ”

  (Had the photographer been in the market for a date, Bean would have proven even more useful. In a French study, women were significantly more likely to give their phone number to a man who asked for it when he was accompanied by a dog. Findings from another study—by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara—suggest that women are especially drawn to younger dogs. The study found that a Golden Retriever’s ability to entice strangers to pet it declined as it aged from ten to thirty-three weeks, with women growing markedly less responsive as the dog grew older. “The results suggest a human, and especially a female, preference for canine juvenescence,” the researchers wrote.)

  While Bean played with a stick, I meandered over to a young dog walker named Ryan. He was at the run with two dogs, including a friendly Pit Bull named Bullet. A regular at the run, Ryan told me he came here three times each day with a total of ten dogs. He likes holding in-depth conversations with them. He calls them “knuckleheads,” asks them how they’re doing, and philosophizes about their inner thoughts.

  Growing up, Ryan never thought he’d walk dogs for a living. In fact, he stumbled into the job after several years of bartending and an unsuccessful one-day stint as an office temp. “My boss at the office was like, ‘Wow, you really suck at this,’ ” Ryan recalled. “But he had a friend who was looking to hire another dog walker for his dog walking company. So he put me in touch, and I started my dog walking career the next day. First job I’ve ever had with health insurance!”

  Though he loves dogs, Ryan doesn’t have one of his own. “I spend all day out walking dogs,” he explained, “so if I had one at home, I’d have to hire a dog walker for him. That just seems silly. I have two cats. No need to hire a cat walker.”

  When Ryan left the run, I spent some time throwing a tennis ball for Casey. It was colder than I expected, and I’d underdressed by wearing only a sweater. A few minutes later, I noticed a pale, dark-haired young woman sitting on a bench near the run’s entrance. She sat staring straight ahead, her small hands folded in her lap. Though her eyes were open, she appeared to be meditating.

  I sat down next to her. As I did she smiled warmly and rotated her body—almost robotically—toward me.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “I just got out of a mental hospital, actually,” she said as her dog sniffed Casey’s rear end.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I scanned the dog park for a hidden camera.

  “I’ve had really severe OCD for four years,” she went on to say. “I’m an actress, and it’s been so bad I haven’t been able to work for the last year. But I’m much better now that I’m off my medications. I had a sort of intuitive dream that God told me to get off the medicine. It was all making me feel even more bonkers. It gave me seizures, and I would only talk in perfect Shakespearean rhyme for like two or three days straight, which made everyone in my life uncomfortable. They worried about me, you know. I also talked that way in the hospital. I would have everyone in stitches because I’d talk about the nurses, the doctors, everything, in perfect rhyme! I would rhyme about how the medicine we were all on wasn’t letting us feel our real feelings, and soon I was triggering all the patients in there to laugh and cry and have breakdowns—but the good kind of breakdowns, you know? I believe in God—I don’t know if you do—but I really do.”

  Just then a helicopter flew over the park. Several dogs in the run stopped what they were doing and looked up in the sky toward the loud, strange noise.

  “Since I’ve been out of the hospital,” she continued when the chopper was gone and it was possible to hear each other again, “I try to come to the run as often as I can. It helps me get back to my center, and it’s one of the highlights of my day. I missed my dog so much in the hospital. I just have to wink at her, and she knows what I want to do. She’s very in tune with me. Very in tune! When I was on a plane and having seizures because I was in withdrawal from my medicines, she started having seizures, too. It’s like she was feeling everything I was feeling.”

  She went on like this for a few minutes, stopping occasionally for air. Then she changed the subject.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked.

  “I’m gay, actually,” I replied. I could imagine a guy offering her a similar answer even if he wasn’t gay, but in my case it happened to be true.

  She cocked her head slightly to the side and squinted her eyes.

  “Really? You don’t seem gay. You don’t have that voice.”

  “We come in many voices,” I assured her.

  “I’m not sure that’s true,” she said. “But you’ve never been attracted to women?”

  “Not in the same way heterosexual men are attracted to women.”

  “Maybe if you met the right woman,” she insisted. “Men and women really just fit together more naturally. You just have to look for a restored version of Eve. There are a few women, including myself, who are restored to their full womanhood.”

  At that moment, Sean entered the run with two new dogs. (He has different shifts for the dogs he walks.) I never thought I’d be so happy to see him. “I need to go over there and ask that man a question,” I lied. “I hope you’ll excuse me.”

  The woman smiled politely. “You’ll find the right woman,” she said. “I’ll pray for you.”

  Sean seemed equally happy to see me. When I was within shouting distance, he smiled broadly and yelled, “Dude! I have good news, and I have bad news!”

  I asked for the good news first. “I looked you up when I got home,” he said. “You checked out—you’re apparently a real writer.”

  “And the bad news?”

  “Your last book’s available on Amazon for one cent,” he said with a chuckle. “Hopefully this one will fare better.”

  I told Sean about the woman on the bench. “She was either crazy, or the best actress in town,” I said. “And I think she was hitting on me.”

  “Oh, you’ll get hit on by all kinds of crazy people here,” he said. “Best to just get used to it.”

  I suggested we check out the little dog area. We stopped short of going in—Casey’s too big, as were Sean’s dogs—but we stood next to the fence that separated the runs and watched a Boston Terrier put a little white fluffy dog into what appeared to be a headlock.

  “Brutus, no headlocks!” screamed the dog’s owner, a man in a New York Jets cap.

  Sean then introduced me to a park regular who was there with his eleven-month-old terrier. For many years, the guy had come to the run with a 120-pound Mastiff. Then he went a few years without a pet.

  “But my children were becoming petless freaks,” he told me. “And I couldn’t have that.”

  “Petless freaks?” I asked.

  “Yeah, there are all kinds of studies that show that kids with dogs are better off,” he said.

  He was right. Researchers have found that children deeply va
lue their relationships with dogs, and that those who grow up with them are healthier (they’re less likely to suffer from asthma, for example) and have higher degrees of empathy and self-esteem.

  Psychologists at Oregon State University found that preschool children who were given a puppy to look after not only gained confidence and empathy—they also turned out to be more popular than puppyless kids. Looking after the puppy “made the children more cooperative and sharing,” researcher Dr. Sue Doescher discovered. “Having a pet improves children’s role-taking skills because they have to put themselves in the pet’s position and try to feel how the pet feels. And that transfers to how other kids feel.”

  But not everyone who grows up with a dog turns out to be popular, cooperative, or empathetic. For proof of that, I just needed to dig deeper into the lives of many of the regulars at this run—many of whom grew up with dogs. Sean described this place as a kind of “war zone,” and over the next few hours, I would come to understand what he meant.

  “I’M FROM a small town in Texas, so I’m used to dealing with idiots and bullies,” said Frank, a handsome man in his mid-thirties. We were sitting on a bench in First Run later that afternoon while his dog chased a mutt who took refuge under a picnic table. “But what I’ve seen in here is really beyond the pale. A lot of these people are nice until you piss them off, and then they will get personal and try to upend your life.”

  “What kinds of things do they say?” I asked.

  “Some people said I’d been to jail,” Frank told me, shaking his head. “It’s out of control. A lot of regulars have stopped coming here because they don’t want to deal with the drama. This run has a lot of bitter people. And I’m probably one of them. One guy got so upset by something another dog owner said that he pushed him right over the fence.”

  “Really? Over the fence?”

  “Yup. Right over the fence.”

  I chuckled. “And people say dogs need to be leashed.”

  “People are much worse than the dogs,” Frank insisted. “It’s funny to see all the dogs of rivals playing together. We’ll just kind of shoot dirty looks to each other from across the park while our dogs have fun. People will mutter under their breath, ‘Anna, get away from him!,’ but the dogs don’t know any better.”

  Frank turned to face a friend of his, a beautiful young woman who sat cross-legged next to us on the bench. “Did Sean and company ever warn you about me, or did they just give you dirty looks when you talked to me?” Frank asked the woman, who looked like she belonged on a Times Square billboard.

  “Just a few looks,” she replied, seeming bored by the conversation.

  Frank turned back toward me. “They’re definitely not happy we’re talking,” he said, referring to Sean and the run’s elected manager, Garrett, who were huddled together on the other side of the park. (Frank was wrong about that, though. Sean had pointed him out and suggested I speak to him in order to get a complete picture of the run’s warring factions.)

  “But how did all this drama start?” I asked. “What’s it all about?”

  “What’s it not about?” Frank said, sounding both resigned and deeply philosophical.

  In a 2003 New York Times piece headlined “Straining at the Leash,” writer Caroline Campion tried to unpack the breadth of contentious issues that have faced the Tompkins Square dog run. She found that “all manner of ethnic, racial, economic and class-related conflicts have played themselves out at the run. Gentrification, ownership of public space, animal rights, self-expression, politics—all these issues have reverberated in the dogs’ play space.” A park regular told her, “You could propose putting the Fountain of Youth in the middle of Tompkins Square Park, and people would get upset. There would be controversy.”

  In the last decade, park regulars have clashed over changing the run’s surface from wood chips to a sandy, crushed-rock substance; they’ve argued about whether small dogs should get their own section; they’ve revolted over an alleged lack of transparency about the park’s finances; and they’ve armed themselves with knives in response to several Pit Bull attacks in the run.

  Underscoring much of the dysfunction are class and racial tensions. In 2003, someone crossed out a sign that read “This is a community park” and scribbled, “This is a Yuppie catering service.” One park regular had a dog that would attack smaller dogs. “When confronted,” Campion wrote, “the woman complained that the problem was the new people . . . whose dogs deserved getting roughed up because they wore sweaters.”

  And then there are those who wish First Run wasn’t there at all. “Homeless people were moved out to make room for the dogs, dogs that have been enslaved for domesticity,” a homeless man said. “They should be in the countryside. Not a pleasure for rich people, the rich homosexuals and freaks of society.”

  Many dog park squabbles across the country have an undercurrent of class warfare. In Avon, Connecticut, a fierce battle erupted between longtime residents and affluent newcomers who’d moved into recently built homes. The latter group often commuted into Hartford, owned dogs, and wanted to run them off-leash in a public park. Many residents objected. Both groups formed action committees—“Save Our Park” vs. “Trails for Tails”—and claimed to be fighting over dogs and public space, though one could argue they were actually fighting over changing demographics and the soul of a town.

  When I approached Garrett later that afternoon to talk about the run’s various controversies and personality conflicts, he initially told me he wasn’t in the mood—his twelve-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback had died a few days earlier.

  “I’m here physically, but I’m not really here,” he said. “I’m still in a daze.”

  Later, though, Garrett opened up. “Dog parks are a lot like post-Apocalyptic culture,” he said as we sat on a picnic table. It was mid-afternoon, a slow time at the park. Casey was exhausted; he’d just finished a round of humping and was now sprawled out on the ground next to our table. “We’re all in this little piece of land, having a weird kind of power struggle and attempting to get along,” Garrett continued. “You’re forced to interact with people you normally wouldn’t. And every nut job in the world comes to a public park. Thank God for our dogs, or this place would be unbearable.”

  As we talked, a mustached man in a red scarf leaned his chest over the run’s fence and called out to any dog that might listen. Casey lifted his head and looked toward the guy, who kept saying, “Who wants a pet? Who wants a pet?” Likely sensing the possibility of food, Casey stood up on all fours and shuffled toward the man, who smiled at my approaching dog and clasped his hands on the fence in excitement. Casey accepted a few pets before realizing the man didn’t have the goods.

  “Where are you going?” the man lamented as Casey walked back toward us.

  “Do you think people sometimes forget about everything that’s good about this kind of park?” I asked Garrett. “It seems like I’ve heard a lot of complaining today, and not a lot of appreciation.” I pointed toward the man in the scarf. “All day, I’ve seen people walking by and stopping just to watch the dogs play. It seems like First Run is so important to this community, whether you have dogs or not.”

  “It is,” Garrett said. “Even with all the drama, people come here because it’s a community; it’s home. When 9/11 happened, everyone came rushing to the dog park. People felt lost, and we all wanted to be with others who would understand. And in this city where people don’t always feel connected, where so many people pay $2,500 a month to live in a shoebox, it’s telling that so many of us rushed straight to the run. It was the natural place to come.”

  “Did everyone forget about their grudges for a few days?”

  “Yes, all of that didn’t feel important anymore. But we’re human, and that feeling fades. And then people complain, especially if anything changes. The park is a lot cleaner now than it used to be, but some people—especially in New York City—get attached to their urban blight zones.”

  Though I’d in
tended to stay at First Run until sunset, after ten hours I desperately needed a change of scenery. Before leaving the park, though, I left Casey in the big-dog section and walked over to hang out with the little dogs. It was quiet over there, except for an occasional small-dog yap. I struck up a conversation with three women in their twenties and told them all about the trouble over on the big-dog side.

  “We have our drama here, too,” one assured me, “but we’re way more passive-aggressive about it.”

  “We have our crazies,” another said. “One woman wanted her dog to give birth in the run. We were like, ‘Um, no, they have vets for that!’ ”

  I looked back at Casey, who stared sadly at me through the fence.

  “You can totally bring him in here if you want,” one of the young women told me. “The people who would start drama about it aren’t here right now.”

  “I actually need to get out of here,” I told them. “I’ve been at the run since six this morning.”

  They looked at me like I had three heads. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” one said.

  On my way out of First Run with Casey, I bumped into Sean, who was walking back into the park with more dogs. He wouldn’t let me leave without a fight.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I have to get out of here,” I said.

  “You got a problem with this place?”

  “It’s a bastion of free love and goodwill, to be sure,” I said with a smile.

  Sean laughed and triumphantly raised his arms toward the sky. “Hey, man. If you can survive a dog park in New York City, you can survive anywhere!”

  TWO MILES from Tompkins Square Park, a different kind of human-canine drama was playing out at the Westminster Dog Show, the two-day all-breed dog show considered the Super Bowl of canine breeding. Westminster was first held in 1877 and is the second longest continuous sporting event after the Kentucky Derby.