July 21, 2006

• Dog Story – Boulder Colorado 1972

  ANGEL

  The lead-in to this story is here.

  After about a month and a half in the Boulder County Jail awaiting
  extradition to Oregon for parole violation, I was set free with a full
  pardon.  I lived for a few weeks in a third-floor apartment in a
  big hillside complex on Broadway, largely inhabited by university
  students, where Stony had been living while I was in jail.  Then
  we moved into an old yellow wood frame house on Arapahoe.  We had
  pooled resources with two other couples and four single men to rent
  this ramshackle, creaky old place that appeared to have been built in
  stages with sections added at various times.

  The second story had several small bedrooms under the steeply sloping
  roof.  Beneath that were two big rooms that might once have been a
  dining room and parlor, with a single-story bedroom addition off the
  “dining” room in back and a big lean-to kitchen off the side next to
  the driveway.  A tire swing hung from a big shade tree outside the
  kitchen door.  The stairway’s placement suggested that the second
  floor hadn’t been part of the original construction.  The bedrooms
  were divvied up, and since it was the only room with a solid door to
  confine our pet raccoon, Stony and I took the front parlor as our
  bedroom.  One
  of our roommates moved his old upright piano into the dining room,
  and that became our common living room.

  While I had been in jail, Stony had lost Ladybitch, the puppy who
  followed me from Anaheim, California to Boulder and grew up along the
  way.  After he’d gotten the apartment, he had gone to the dog
  pound and adopted another dog as her replacement.  Smoky was a Siberian husky,
  gorgeous and full of life.  He was too full of life for me, needed
  more rough and tumble play and vigorous exercise than I could give him,
  and he was bonded with Stony.

  He was also undisciplined, without a trace of training.  After an
  incident in the park when Smoky tore my shirt off trying to get me to
  run and chase him, Stony decided he should get me another
  dog.  On my 28th birthday, one of our roommates took us in his
  pickup truck
  to the animal shelter on the edge of town.  Such places are always
  bittersweet experiences for me.  I love the animals and feel bad
  because I have to leave so many behind when I go home.

  I don’t remember how many dogs were in the long rows of
  concrete-floored pens in the big metal building.  Most of them
  were small:  puppies, adult  lap dogs, spaniels, beagles,
  etc.  Since we were sharing a house with so many people, plus Mr. Coon and two
  other dogs (one roommate had a Rhodesian ridgeback and Stony had
  Smoky), and I planned to go to work, a puppy would need too much
  attention and make too much mess.  I was only looking at adult
  dogs.

  My first requirement was a dog big enough that I would not have to bend over to
  pet it.  That narrowed down my choices to eight
  candidates.   I borrowed a leash from the attendant and took
  the eight large-breed adults out into a small grassy enclosure, one by
  one.  Smoky had never had even basic obedience training, and I was
  hoping to find a housebroken dog that knew how to sit, come when called, heel,
  lead, and stay.   My walking trials eliminated all but three
  of the big dogs.

  It wasn’t an easy decision.  In the end it came down to a choice
  between looks and the more intangible blend of intelligence and
  temperament.  The dog I finally took was a big ugly yellow
  mixed-breed male with a black muzzle, tail docked short, a torn ear and
  some other scars, who instantly obeyed every command I could think of
  to give him and watched me attentively with apparent affection, waiting
  for the next command. 

  His age was estimated at between three and five
  years.  He had been picked up on the street wearing a collar and
  New Jersey tags, including immunization tags.  I gave back the
  borrowed leash, took his collar in my hand and walked him out to the
  parking lot while Stony paid the fee and did the paperwork.

  Four of us had gone to the pound in the cab of the pickup, leaving no
  room for the dog.  I climbed into the bed and he jumped in beside
  me.  Stony decided to ride back there with us, and we headed 
  into Boulder.  Stony offered to hold the dog’s collar and I let
  him take a turn to rest my wrist and hand.  He asked me what I was going to call my new dog, and I
  started thinking about an appropriate name.  Nothing came to me at
  first.

  Then the dog saw a little black spaniel trotting along beside the
  road
  and almost pulled Stony out of the truck.  My new dog was halfway
  out of the truck
  when  I yelled, “No!” and grasped his collar.  I said,
  “come… sit… stay,” and he backed up and settled beside me, growling
  softly deep in his throat.  I was ready for it the next time he
  saw a dog, and the time after that.  He ignored passing vehicles,
  human pedestrians and every other distraction along the road, but
  jumped first and then started growling every time he saw a dog.

  Something about his
  aggression and belligerence, along with the vulnerability and warmth in
  his eyes, made me think of some men I had known, bikers, Hells Angels,
  and I named him Angel.  I held his head between both of my palms,
  looked into his eyes and said, “Angel,  your name is Angel.” 
  Then, I let go of him, looking around first to make sure no dogs were
  nearby, and said, “Angel… down… stay.”  From then to the end
  of that ride he lay still in the bed of the truck with his head resting
  on my leg.

  Stony and our friends had planned a birthday party for me. 
  Boulder’s freak subculture knew me before most of them ever set eyes on
  me.  A few of them had cycled in and out of the jail while I was
  there, knew my story and told others about me.  Stony was the
  gregarious type (which I’m not), and even though he’d been living with
  his new young girlfriend while I was locked up, everyone he knew also
  knew that he was waiting for his pregnant lady to get out of
  jail.  The old house was rockin’ and shakin’ that night.

  I introduced Angel to Mr.Coon and explained to each of them that the
  other one wasn’t prey, wasn’t food, nor a chew toy.  I sat on my
  mattress on the floor of the old parlor with the lights out while
  music, light, and laughter leaked in from the rest of the house. 
  With one arm around Angel lying beside me, and the other hand grasping
  Coon’s collar on my lap, I did my best to project the idea that they
  were brothers.  It must have worked (projective telepathy is the
  form of ESP on which I score highest in tests), because neither of them
  ever attacked or offended the other.

  I wasn’t sure enough of their compatibility to leave them alone
  together, so when I joined the party I took Angel with me.  That
  night we broke up several dog fights each with Smoky and the
  ridgeback.   After three fights, Smoky never again tried to
  be dominant with Angel, but the ridgeback never gave up, nor did
  Angel.  For as long as the Rhodesian’s owner lived with us, we had
  to keep the dogs apart or pry them apart.  Thinking about them
  now, I just recalled the image of their jaws locked together and their
  faces being stretched out grotesquely as the roommate and I tried to
  separate them.

  After a while, weary of the noise and crowd, I took Angel outside and
  sat in the swing talking to him, letting him relax into his new
  surroundings and get used to my scent, the touch of my hand and the
  sound of my voice.  As the party was breaking up, Stony followed
  some of his friends out to their car as they were leaving.  He
  asked me to come say goodbye.  With his arm around my shoulders
  and Angel heeling beside me, we stepped up to the driver’s open window.

  After a brief exchange of good-old-boy BS and friendly insults, the
  conversation turned to my dog.  The man remarked on his
  ugliness.  Stony pointed at the driver and said, “Get ‘im!” 

  In one smooth move Angel sprang through the open car window.  I
  yelled, “No!”  Angel dropped to the ground and held in a “down”
  position, tongue lolling out and eyes focused on the driver of the car
  as he rolled up his window without another word and backed out.  I
  looked from Angel to Stony and said, “That’s one command I just didn’t
  think to try.”

  In following months, I learned that Angel responded to both verbal
  commands and silent hand signals.  I never found any standard dog
  commands that he didn’t know.  I advised all our friends and
  roommates that “No!” would work on Angel in any circumstance except for
  a dog fight.  I could keep him from attacking other dogs by
  commanding him with no/down/stay, but if the dog attacked him the only
  way I could end it would be to pry his jaws open with my hands. 
  If Stony tried to pry Angel’s jaws open, he’d just hang on and growl,
  and the clear message was, “When I’m through with this dog, you’re
  next.”  It wasn’t the strength in my hands, but the strength of
  our bond that gave me control over Angel.

  Stony thought it was cool having an attack-trained dog, just as he
  thought it was cool having a pet raccoon that would ride on his
  shoulder.  The problem was that if he took either of them out
  without me he risked having someone get hurt because he couldn’t
  control either of them.  That really wounded his ego.  I’d
  handed him a few other ego-insults, such as the time when he was drunk
  and started to hit me with the plaster cast on his broken arm.  I
  just took hold of the cast in both my hands and hit him with it.

  That was before we got Angel.  He hadn’t tried to hit me again
  after that until one night when someone had given him a pint of
  Everclear and he was completely out of his head, in an alcohol
  blackout.  He raised his hand as if to hit me, and without any
  command from me, Angel went up on his hind legs, grasped Stony’s wrist
  in his teeth, pulled it down as he sank into a “sit,” and looked at me
  for further instructions.  I just told him to “hold,” until Stony
  got tired of thrashing around and passed out on the kitchen floor.

  Our friend Zeke loved Angel and it was mutual.  Zeke’s respect and
  affection for Angel were clearly evident and I didn’t hesitate to let
  Zeke take Angel out for long walks in Boulder.  We had determined
  to our own satisfaction that his previous owner had used Angel as a
  fighting dog.  That conclusion made sense of the docked tail, as
  well as the torn ear and other scars, and Angel’s tendency to attack
  any passing dog he saw if not called down.  Those who knew about
  the following incident didn’t tell me about it for months afterward,
  until we had moved out of Boulder.

  There was a dope-dealing pimp who liked to promenade on the Hill, the
  business area adjoining the University of Colorado campus, with two
  attack-trained dobermans, a matched pair.  He was semi-legendary,
  I suppose, though I never got out and about enough to have encountered
  him.  On his home turf, he was some sort of a demi-god, using the
  dogs for intimidation with his customers and his ladies, and
  occasionally releasing them to attack a stray dog or someone who had
  offended him or who owed him money.

  Zeke told me that the pimp sicced his dogs on Angel without
  provocation.  That may or may not be the true story.  Only
  Zeke saw the start of the fight, but enough people were around to see
  the end of it that I had no doubt of that part of Zeke’s story. 
  Zeke opted not to step in and try to separate the three dogs, and Angel
  ignored his commands to stop until one of the dobermans was dead and
  the other fled with its tail between its legs, and the pimp running
  shouting after it.

  After we left Boulder and moved up in the mountains to Breckinridge and
  then to Alma, Zeke, Stony and our friend Bruce would exercise Angel in
  a big field of several acres.  One of them would walk far out into
  the field and another would tell the dog to go get him.  Angel
  knew it was a game, and nobody ever got hurt.  Even so, each of
  them got at least one good scare when Angel’s jaws closed (gently,
  really) around his arm or leg before he was called off.

  When I left Alma headed toward Alaska, Zeke already had Mr. Coon and he
  asked me to leave Angel with him.  Knowing how uncertain my future
  was and how hard it is to explain a lack of funds to a hungry dog, I
  left Angel with Zeke.  If I knew the end of the story I’d tell it,
  but I don’t.  If you know Zeke, ask him.

  

  • 12:20 am
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