Man Bites Dog

I sit and stare out the window, weaving back and forth in the chair, my head spinning, feeling like I’m gonna pass out. Maybe it’s the heat.

Yeah, right. More likely it’s the three tabs of acid and five beers I’ve had in the last half hour. Oscar looks at me disapprovingly, shaking his head. Or maybe my eyes are vibrating and it only looks like he’s shaking his head. He’s a dog, but I’m here to tell you that there’s a lot more going on behind those brown eyes than he lets on.

I lean back in the chair and think back on how we ended up together, Oscar and me. I was living in Minneapolis, cutting grass and plowing snow for a living. Hard work, but for some reason I liked it. It brought me peace and paid decent enough. My girlfriend/fiancée was waiting tables at a chain restaurant. We had just gotten out of a crappy student apartment building and were renting a house. Our house. Sure, the house was crappier than the apartment, being infested with mice and what not, but there were no all night parties (unless we threw them) and no banging on the walls, floors or ceilings. We were sitting around talking one night and the topic turned to dogs. I had always had dogs and really wanted one now. She had never had one of her own and thought it was a good idea. Sensing an opportunity to score some points I turned the conversation in a different direction but didn’t stop thinking about it.

I let a few weeks pass, summer turning into fall, before I acted on the idea. I started reading through the papers, looking for dogs that needed homes. I don’t like purebred dogs. In my experience they’re high maintenance, expensive and usually fairly stupid. Being inbred also produces lots of health problems that I don’t want to deal with. Besides, I don’t want a dog to show or breed, I want a companion, friend and family member.

My eyes fell on an ad from a woman who owns a farm in Buffalo, Minnesota. The ad said she had a litter of Boxer/German Shepherd pups that she would let be adopted for only $40. They had their shots, too. I called her up and asked some questions about the dogs and found out she had two males and a female and that they were about three months old. Call me sexist, but I prefer male dogs. She said they’d grow to be about sixty pounds or so, which suited me just fine. I feel the same way about little yip-dogs that I feel about designer dogs: No fucking way, thank you. So I drove out to Buffalo to meet the dogs.

I pulled up in the gravel driveway, tires crunching. I love that sound. Anyway, I got out of the car and walked over to the house. It was your typical farmhouse…brick, probably over a hundred years old, needed a new roof and probably windows but it would more than likely never fall down. I heard a voice off to my right yell out “I’m over here.”I looked over and sure enough, there she was, walking towards me. She was older than she sounded on the phone, probably in her sixties, but she looked strong and healthy. We met in the driveway and she shook my hand, hers warm, rough and calloused. We introduced ourselves and she told me to follow her out back. I did.

“Out back” is where all the animals were. I say animals because she apparently rescued more than just dogs. I saw a buffalo (or is it bison?), a camel, cats, a pot-bellied pig…probably some others I’m too messed up to remember right now. She led me to a six-by-six chain link pen that had the three litter-mates. The female was yellow, one male was a dark brown and the other red. The female and the dark brown male were wresting around a bit, playing like puppies do. They didn’t stop when I walked up to the pen, so I looked down at the red one. He stared at me, looked me right in the eyes and didn’t blink. That’s odd, I thought. I asked if I could open the pen and saw that she was already doing it. “They’re real gentle.”

The two that were playing looked up as the door opened, paused for a moment and then went back to biting each other’s legs. The red one looked at the door and slowly walked out. He walked up to me, sat down and looked me in the eyes again.

“Do they have names?” I asked her.
“Nope. But I think you may have found a dog.”

I thought she was right and said as much. I decided to ignore him and see what he would do. Nothing. Just sat there. I turned and walked to my car, the little red dog following me about a step behind. I opened the car door and he jumped right in the passenger seat, curled up and went to sleep. At that point I figured that I hadn’t found a dog, but rather the dog had found me and decided I was ok. I still get choked up about that.

Well anyway, I thanked her, paid her and went home. On the way there I figured I better give him a name. At the time, my favorite boxer was Oscar De La Hoya, so I named him Oscar, him being half Boxer and all. He seemed to like it.

By the way, it turns out he’s no Boxer/German Shepherd at all. No, he is, in fact, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, minus the ridge. And he goes about ninety pounds, not sixty. He just turned ten the other day, the same day I turned thirty-six. Yeah, that’s right, we have the same birthday. Karma? Fate? Destiny? Maybe.

I have a lot more stories to tell about Oscar, and I may tell them, but not right now.

By the way, this story is absolutely true. No lie.


M. PotPie