The Dog Walker (A Steemit Original Short Story by Michael J. Smith)

Seven months after I graduated from NYU, I decided that I would walk dogs to make ends meet while I pursued a career in acting. And by ‘NYU,’ I mean Manhattan College. And by ‘a career in acting,’ I mean I had never landed a role. And by ‘to make ends meet,’ I mean to make enough money to continue going out and smoking weed with my friends while I lived with my parents. I really did walk dogs, though.

Life was great. I’m fucking pathetic. No, really, it was great. I moved home to Cary, Maine, a small fishing town with residents that struggle so much they make my lower-middle class parents look rich by comparison. But I wasn’t like them; I wasn’t like my parents and I wasn’t like any other resident of Cary. I went to Manhattan on a scholarship and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a bachelor’s in theater. I was known for my audition tapes. If you’re ever around the theater department you should ask about me. But my professors didn’t really like my work, so ask my classmates. But they’ve all graduated. Actually, don’t bother stopping by Manhattan College at all. You’ll read about me some day. My mom loves my audition tapes.

My grandparents gave me money for a backpacking trip around Europe as a graduation gift. I flew to the Netherlands to start my trip in November. I landed in Baltimore in January. I called my mom from Baltimore. “…Yes! Completely different. And really accepting—no, excited to hear that I’m an actor…No, no, ha! I still want to act here in the U.S….Well, maybe someday, but then I’d have to find a job on the side and, well, next thing you know, five years have gone by and I’m still looking for my first part…Yes, I was hoping you’d say that. Thank you. It will only be for a short time. A year at most.”

As I drove to Cary, I passed through Knechtel, a very wealthy suburban town twenty miles south of Cary. In the year since I’d been back home, Knechtel had become much more developed. Condos were stacked on top of boutique shops that lined the pristinely paved streets. Some of the shops targeted such remarkably narrow niche markets that I wondered how they stayed in business. Perhaps the artisanal soap store was actually a sophisticated money laundering operation. Maybe drugs had entered Knechtel. Maybe that’s why I saw a homeless man a few minutes later. I thought it was strange that it was during this particular pass through Knechtel, during a time of obvious economic growth, that I saw the first homeless man I had ever seen in the town. I saw the reflection of his sleeping bag in the polished door of a parked Range Rover. The bag was tied to his backpack, shifting from shoulder to shoulder as he walked like one of those old hobo bindles.

When I finally made it to Cary, it was late, and I was exhausted. Somehow, it seemed fitting that an old Avril Lavigne song that came out the year I graduated high school played on the radio as I pulled into my driveway. I hated that song. But for some reason, it seemed oddly catchy now. I hugged my parents. I thanked them. I dropped my duffle bag in my room. My dad had left the light on. My mom had cleaned my room perfectly. I sighed. I had to get out of Cary.

I woke up early and explained my plan to my parents. I couldn’t take a full time job and try to get acting work on the side—I’d never have time for auditions. But dog walking would give me a lot of time to work on my demo tapes, which I could mail to agents in New York and LA. They nodded. I wondered if I’d already explained this to them before. Anyway, I created a profile on a website that set up dog walkers with clients. I got my first job within a few hours of being home. I felt very relieved. I could leave my parent’s house for a few days, water someone’s plants, walk their dogs, feed their cats—whatever. Then I’d just film myself the whole damn day and cash in when the client got home from work. It sounded like the best possible job for an aspiring actor.

As I pulled into the driveway of Luxury Heights for my first dog-walking job, I was surprised to find that L.H. was not, in fact, a baroque palace, but rather a frumpy brick tower with rusty fire escapes. I slammed on my brakes to avoid knocking over a shady looking fellow who’d wandered out in front of my car. The man stopped to look at me from under the hood of his synthetic fabric sweatshirt before walking on, hands jammed deep in his front pouch. He had sad eyes.

When I knocked on the door of apartment 3B, a chinless bald guy in his thirties opened the door with one of his short arms. He surprised me; I was expecting a woman from the job posting. I stared at him for a moment. He was wearing a Slayer T shirt and cargo shorts that hung halfway down his thighs. His face was somehow sunburnt in the middle of winter. He looked back at me with bugged-out eyes: one green, one gray.

As I looked over the man’s shoulder, I asked him if Sheryl Travers was home. Behind him was a very large woman in a bathrobe reclined so far back in her La-Z-Boy chair that she was nearly supine, sprawled underneath a TV dinner stand propping up an ancient Toshiba Tecra. She had an oxygen tank next to her. The tank’s clear plastic tube snaked around her chair up into a coil in her lap, with the last of it tucked up into her nostrils. One of her hands was sandwiched between her leg and a faded pillow. The other hand was on the chair’s beige armrest, trembling, as if she were shivering or something. She stared catatonically at a palpably bright television set stacked on top of old copies of Redbook.

The man stuck out a hairy-knuckled hand and told me his name was Kyle. He ushered me into a drab orange apartment that was humid with smells of vinegar and lemon disinfectant. Kyle swung a pointed finger in a windshield wiper motion between me and the woman on the couch, all while mumbling my name followed by Sheryl’s name, and then our names in the reverse order. I waved at Sheryl. She lifted a trembling finger. Kyle sat down and picked up his Xbox controller to continue designing his video game’s female protagonist, who was currently running out of clothing for Kyle to remove. I wondered if the game took place in a warm climate, otherwise I would assume she’d get cold very quickly. I could see Sheryl’s hand quivering in the corner of my eye.

Sheryl turned her head in my general direction, but her eyes were empty and translucent. She asked me how much I charged for a walk and, without any apparent awareness of the irony, lifted the hand tucked between her leg and the pillow to offer me a check.

But the check was blank. It had taken me twenty minutes to drive to her house on the outskirts of town so…. I tried to perform a series of quick calculations in my head to procure a reasonable rate, but the pressure of executing the feat of numerical deftness on the spot made me feel like an elementary school dropout trying to calculate a fifteen percent tip at a dinner with the future in-laws, all while my imaginary future father-in-law was staring at me, face in palm, shaking his head because his daughter could have married such a nice doctor or lawyer instead… I looked up into Sheryl’s pale blue eyes and asked if ten dollars was okay. She smiled, activating all the well-worn lines of kindness in her face. Sheryl blurted out with no lead-in that she was legally blind. She added that Kyle would need to show me the dogs. I liked Sheryl.

Kyle, eyes still firmly attached to the pixelated superhero-like curvature of his videogame demigoddess, called the dogs names, Loubell and Cindy, respectively, in a singsong voice. I heard the dogs’ collars jingling as they came trotting around the corner. I had never seen dachshunds before, but I quickly learned that they were the dog version of a centipede; with stubby little legs to support their Oscar Mayer parade float bodies. They limboed their heads back to look up at me with their pitiful Dobby The House Elf eyes.

“They’re a little shy.” Sheryl said affectionately. I could see that. Both dogs were shrinking their heads back into their shoulders like turtles retreating into their shells as they backed away around the couch, making quick furtive glances as if every part of the apartment was the location of some puppyhood trauma. Sheryl hollered at Kyle to grab the dogs.

Kyle paused his video game just as his heroine was performing an acrobatic kick to the head of an alien. Her short leather skirt fanned out like the canopy of an umbrella. “Nice.” Kyle said, his hands on his hips as he admired the fortuitous timing of his pause-button-pressing. He snapped back to reality with an “Oh!” accompanied by a quick shoulder shrug as if he were startled. He chased down the dogs and snapped their leashes onto their collars, and handed me one nylon loop. One loop? I looked down and saw that the loop connected to a double-leash that forked out at the end. “Ready?” The vectors of his gazes pointed toward each one of my ears.

“Sure.”

Kyle gestured to each dog as he informed me that Loubell was the mom and Cindy was the daughter. I now felt like I had a better understanding of why Cindy’s fur was sleek and shiny, while Loubell’s looked like a stained carpet. Their relative ages also explained why Cindy was dragging Loubell around like a prisoner’s ball by her end of the double-leash. Kyle added that Loubell had arthritis. It was all coming together.

As we strolled along the gum-shadowed sidewalk, I quickly learned that Loubell and Cindy hated walking, a hatred which resulted in frequent pauses, words of encouragement from Kyle, and eventually pleas by him toward the dogs to keep walking for the love of God. I noticed that Kyle’s voice underwent an impressive tour of his vocal range during these pauses, from the peaks of high-pitched tones appropriate for reassuring an infant taking her first steps, down to the baritone trenches of vociferations that the dogs had better hurry their keisters up, or they sure as fuck weren’t getting any Beggin’ Strips when they got home.

At the end of one such outburst, Kyle’s tone went from explosive to conversational in a seamless transition to tell me that Loubell was usually a good girl, but she’s been actin’ real lazy ever since they upped her dose of dog morphine. He then put a hand to the side of his mouth conspiratorially and whispered that it did make video games more fun, though. It only took me a second to rectify the initial image of a dog playing video games that his statement had conjured in my mind.

After a 360 degree turn back toward the apartment, Loubell and Cindy caught their second wind and found new strength—sobering, morphine-busting strength on the part of Loubell—to sprint with such vigor that attempts to pull back on their leash caused them to lift off the ground, their T-Rex-like appendages still clamoring in mid-air suspension.

Without any pauses from the dogs to inspire a full opera’s worth of contrasting octaves from Kyle, the remainder of our walk was fairly quiet. I had already perfected my perfunctory chitchat with fellow dog-walkers (“Hi”; “beautiful day, isn’t it?”; “Watch out, these two are killers”), and Kyle had seemingly exhausted himself of all possible angles with which one could analyze how his job handing out promotional swag at the local radio station, 98.4 KBHT, basically put him, like, eight spots away in the line of succession toward his dream job as a radio DJ (he made me take note of the fact that his occupation’s proximity to the zenith of radio jobs was comparable to that of the Secretary of Agriculture to the President—he looked it up).

It was during the last of the return trip’s many long awkward silences that Kyle’s girlfriend, Tammy, mercifully broke the lull with the most alluring voice I have ever heard out of a morbidly obese woman with a prominent laryngectomy. She squealed a gravelly croak as she jumped into Kyle’s arms, her Crocs making a rubbery thwapping noise as they thwapped together behind Kyle’s back, her girthy legs stretching the circumference of each leg hole in her Daisy Duke shorts to its limit.

As I stood there, watching the beautiful train wreck of the two lovers necking passionately in front of me, I suddenly became aware of the pity that I felt for them, and the self-reproach that followed. What I was feeling was the worst kind of pity: that I thought they were verifiably inferior, and that they were somehow obtusely failing to fathom how pitiful and unhappy their circumstances really were. As is most often the case when this sort of feeling arises, it was not actually Kyle and Tammy for whom I felt contempt—it was myself: both in the sense that my perceptions had no place in judging the veracity of their happiness, and that my own insecurities were at the controls of the giant Wizard of Oz façade of conceit.

I felt like shit.

I wasn’t an actor; I was a dog walker living with my parents just like Kyle was living with his Mom. I was about as close to being an actor as Kyle was to being a radio DJ—actually, probably even farther away; I was like the Secretary of Transportation or Veteran’s Affairs or something.

After Tammy had climbed down from Kyle and asked him if he wanted to come inside for some “din-din”, I hung my head and followed the two smiling, handholding people back inside the apartment while I held onto Loubell and Cindy’s leash.

Tammy generously offered to microwave an extra plate of macaroni and waffles for me, but I declined with a hand-wave that I hoped showed signs of appreciation instead of dismissal. I have no idea what my face showed.

My eyes were pointed toward the plastic laminated countertop where a wrinkly eviction notice dotted with greasy fingerprints lay half-folded up. The familiar groan of the microwave revving up coincided with the feeling of my heart bungee jumping down the length of my chest cavity. I could hear Sheryl’s voice asking me if I could walk “the girls” a couple times a day while Kyle was at work. It didn’t take me too long to do the math on that one. Kyle tried to hand me my first paycheck for ten dollars, but I turned him down. I told him this first one was on me.

I walked out of that apartment high as a kite on what a good person I was. This feeling of altruism was so addictive that I swore off ever taking a penny from that family; I resolved to walk their dogs for free.

I hopped into my 1998 Ford Explorer with a new sense of rejuvenation. I flipped on 98.4 KBHT and that same damn Avril Lavigne song started blasting. In my rearview mirror I could see a rail-thin old guy in suspenders looking at me with judging eyes, shaking his head. Fuck it. I turned that Avril Lavigne shit up.

The engine roared as I accelerated out of the driveway, still looking out my rearview mirror at that old guy, still thinking what a creepy fuck he was, when I felt my whole car give one violent shake from front to back, like the recoil of a shotgun blast. I slammed on the brakes just as I saw a hooded figure smear up my windshield and roll over the top of my car. I rammed the stick into park and leaped out of my car while it ding, ding, dinged that I left the engine on. That fucking Avril Lavigne song was still blaring as I looked down at the bloody mess of a person lying there on the pavement. I realized with horror that it was the hooded-sweatshirt guy I nearly hit on the way in. The one who’d stared at me. The one with really sad eyes.

The old guy in suspenders came running up to me screaming, “You killed him! You fucking killed him, you fucking idiot!”

Meanwhile, I was frozen. I didn’t help the guy. I didn’t give CPR. I didn’t call an ambulance. I just stared. Avril Lavigne’s angsty voice was like one long monotonous ringing in my ears as I thought about how I’m going to jail for the rest of my life; instead of reenacting Shakespeare in the park, I’m going to be shaking while a guy named Moe parks a spear in my ass.

“Are you fucking drunk?!” The old guy was still yelling at me. He knelt down and started shaking hooded sweatshirt guy—basically doing the exact opposite of what you should do for someone who might have suffered a spinal injury.

I hate to admit it, but this whole time I wasn’t even thinking about whether or not hooded sweatshirt guy was okay. I was thinking about how damn happy Kyle was when Tammy jumped into his arms, how proud he was when he told me he handed out promotional swag at the local radio station, how amused he was by a scantily clad diva warrior made of pixels, and how at this very moment I would do anything to trade places with him. I was thinking about how few real friends I had, and how all of them were far away working real jobs with salaries and benefits and 401Ks and social mixers and societal respect and dignity. I was thinking about how I was going to end up an old man in suspenders realizing too late that I wasn’t hot shit, and if I’d been brutally honest with myself, I would have changed my major the eighteenth or nineteenth time a director from Manhattan College told me they had no parts for someone who sucked as much at acting as I did.

“He’s fucking dead!” The old guy screamed in vain at the sky, holding hooded sweatshirt guy like he was a martyr from a decades-long battle of civilizations. Meanwhile I’m listening to Avril Lavigne pour out of my driver side door at a regretfully high decibel level, thinking to myself that things have gotten quite complicated indeed.

Hooded sweatshirt guy wasn’t dead; he had a concussion and a broken rib but he walked away from the scene. Meanwhile, one of Cary, Maine’s finest was making me chest bump the hood of a police Crown Victoria so he could cuff me.

My parents weren’t too happy with me, but after a couple weeks of yelling at me followed by another six weeks of giving me the cold shoulder, I think they figured I’d had enough.

Yeah, they yelled at me for a couple weeks. And not from the other side of one of those clear plastic barriers that separates prisoners from their visitors. I was home. I’m still home. I’ve been under house arrest for the past year, and I’ve got another year to go. The patch of skin underneath the GPS tracker on my ankle will probably get itchier.

I worked out a deal with the judge to let me still walk dogs, though, so I went back to Luxury Heights about a week after I nearly killed hooded sweatshirt guy. Kyle opened the door and invited me inside with this kind of bashful look on his face. Sheryl and Tammy weren’t there. Kyle got two cans of Mr. Pibb and offered me a seat on the brown sagging couch. He kept looking down at the floor and then back up at me sheepishly, taking little baby sips of his soda as he stole an occasional glance at the blank TV. I was still beating myself up over the whole nearly-killing-someone thing, so I didn’t say anything.

Finally, Kyle spoke up in an overly loud tone, as if he needed to yell what he had to say quickly or he wouldn’t say it at all. “I can get you a job at the radio station!” He started wincing emphatically, closing his eyes as he thrust his head forward. He looked as if he’d regretted what he’d said. If I had to venture a guess at what he was thinking during those wincing head thrusts, it would be something like: Stupid Kyle, why do you have to be so stupid?! Stupid! Stupid!

I told him that he didn’t have to offer me the job; that it was really fine. He was still grimacing when he looked up to tell me that he really wanted me to come work at 98.4 KBHT, but he was just embarrassed to ask, because he figured I would definitely say no. He said he heard I was getting sued so he wanted to give me a chance to make some more money.

I closed my eyes as my heart swelled at the poignancy of Kyle’s thoughtfulness. I looked up at the counter but it was empty. I stood up reflexively, knowing that I had to get out of the apartment or I was going to start tearing up. I told Kyle that I would love to hand out promotional swag at 98.4 KBHT with him, but that I thought I should keep trying my hand at dog walking for the time being. He nodded and put his hand on my shoulder to show his understanding. He had a very gracious manner.

As I walked out of his apartment, Kyle yelled after me that he was glad I hit that guy with my car. I stuck my head back in the door, looking like I couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly. He repeated what he’d said. He was looking down at the floor, tracing an arc with his bugged out eyes, a sheepish look on his face. He said that hooded sweatshirt guy was named Bobby Donnan and he used to beat Kyle up and shove him in lockers and hold him down while other boys farted in his face and made fun of Kyle’s eyes and called him hammerhead shark.

I wish I could tell you that this didn’t make me feel a hell of a lot better, but it did.

“Fuck Bobby Donnan.” I said. I caught a look of delight on Kyle’s face before I shut the door.

I skipped down the steps of the fire escape two at a time, humming that damn song—you know which one. It started snowing as I got into my car. I started the windshield wipers and checked every blind spot there was, and probably even a few that didn’t even exist. I backed out at a half-mile per hour and basically crawled to the stop sign. My heart instinctively jumped when I saw a pedestrian cross in front of me. But I waited—you’re damn right I waited. I waited and I watched the person crossing. I looked into the eyes of this teenage kid walking by; he was clutching his books to his chest like a child holds a teddy bear. This kid’s eyes were the saddest pair I’d ever seen. I don’t know if it’s because he looked so damn sad or if it’s because he was wearing just a windbreaker in the damn snow, but I stuck my head out the window and hollered at him if he needed a ride. I was astonished that he accepted my offer.

Anyway, I took him home not knowing if he was a Bobby Donnan or a Kyle Travers, but I figured it was safer to have him inside of my car than outside of it.