Stephens - The dog walker: an anarchists encounters with the good, the bad, and the canine

THE DOG WALKER

Copyright 2015 by Joshua Stephens

First Melville House Printing: September 2015

Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT

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facebook.com/mhpbooks
@melvillehouse

ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-452-3

Design by Marina Drukman

v3.1

For Blake, an anarchist and once dog walker who, given the opportunity, wouldve written a far smarter, far funnier book than this one

This book began (in earnest, anyway) in a vegan restaurant off Manhattans Union Square, over a dinner marking my thirty-sixth birthday. Seated at the table that night was sometimes anarchist academic James Birmingham who, in keeping with the conventions of such occasions, inquired as to whether I was ever going to do anything with the idea of writing about my time as a dog walker.

Didnt you do some interview with The Washington Post or something? he asked.

It didnt really have anything to do with writing a book, but he wasnt wrong.

In 2011, the style section had run a story on a worker-cooperative dog-walking agency Id cofounded back in 2006. Having already relocated from D.C. to Brooklyn, Id initially only seen the web version. But further into the day, seated in Madison Square Parks dog run, next to a handful of what looked like soccer moms busy rehearsing two-syllable, outer-borough-accented pronunciations of the word whore, I noticed someone fingering through the print edition. I was shocked to find that the story had somehow made the front page of the A-section. Above the fold.

Below the fold was the latest on New York congressman Anthony Weiner, who was resigning from office after tweeting his barely concealed penis to some young womanand thereafter, the world. And then, for some time after the image was leaked, bewildering everyone by pretending he couldnt place the obvious piece of side-pipe staring back at him. By the time the Post came knocking, Id actually already left the dog-walking cooperative in question. But even so, I took some joy in the Posts layout that day. Top story: Anarchists provide proof-of-concept. Also in the news: disgraced, politically reprehensible politician falls victim to (a) own horrible decisions and (b) cock quips.

Joining us at the table that night was Jay Cassano, a freelance journalist covering technology and social movements. Hed come into my life more recently, and had never heard me say a word about the book idea. Jay reminded me of our mutual friends (then) fianc, who works at the publishing house that would eventually get behind this book. But even this bit of insider info failed to stir me in any immediate way. Coasting on four years of lazy, idea-stage inertia, I shrugged, and returned to what seemed the far more pressing matter of shoveling strawberry shortcake into my face.

Remarkably, against all likely odds, here we are. What youre holding in your hands prevailed against both my nonexistent attention span and New York Citys unparalleled vegan dessert offerings. Im still sort of shocked no one beat me to the punch. Someone sharper, more enterprisingat the very least, more proactive. Dog walkers, after all, are a cultural institutionand theyve steadily become more and more visible in the developed world. An urban scene for a film or TV show can scarcely be staged without an extra cast as one, passing in the background. Theres a built-in intelligibility to dog walkersa set of automatic assumptions. They signifycorrectly or notvarious features of urban (and, more and more, suburban) life. Conspicuous consumption. The quaint priorities of aging Gen Xers whove graduated to professional life and have begun to hire Millennials, who themselves are scraping by amid the diminishing returns of artistic pursuits. These angles arent wrong, exactly, but the authentic aspect of the trade they tend to capture is superficial at best.

As adult professionals increasingly postpone having families, dogs have become starter children, and thus dog walkers feature in everyday life much as babysitters have for generationsthough with virtually none of the broad familiarity or detailed rendering. While nanny diaries fly off shelves and make for blockbuster cinema (and this is after decades of cultural dominance by the Baby-Sitters Club) and bike couriers receive both action-film and reality-TV treatments, the urban figure nestled between, who in many ways combines the salient features of the two, slips in and out of frame in the background, not unnoticed, but nonetheless unknown. This opacitya kind of incompleteness of perspectiveconceals two very rich narratives. The first: the (often ethically questionable) antics one can get up to when one has unfettered access to the lives of others, combined with relative anonymity; the second: just how many of our secrets and stories are known by these relatively anonymous figures.

Also, there is poop. And animals mounting one anothers faces in front of small children.

Itd have been easy enough to pack my story with navel-gazing reflections on the contrast between conventional careers and healthy priorities la Oprah, or Gwyneth Paltrow, or some other bright-eyed lifestyle charlatan. I know this because such sentiments were buried in the refrain of virtually every liberal-minded actual adult who ever inquired as to what I did for a living. It was always a nakedly vicarious and invariably unsettling sort of approval, with a predictable refrain nestled somewhere within it: find something you love and do it for the rest of your life. And if you can weave in some cute animals, so much the better. Theyll enrich your experience, bring you back to the simple things in life, and remind you not to sweat the small stuff.

Someone somewhere is bound to write that book.

This is not that book.

In fact, its my quiet hope to preemptively torpedo the authority of such an effort. Because theres a lot more to this storyto this lifethan the warm wishes and charmed fantasies of strangers. Dog walking, after all, is a line of work. Like all work, the social, political, and economic backdrop against which it unfolds matters. Not only does that matter, Im convinced that its far more compelling to any reader than, say, what I learned from gazing into the eyes of a retarded corgi, or how many times I jerked off in the homes of congressional staffers.

I wouldnt wish some book full of tears and pithy life lessons on anyone. I certainly wouldnt write the thing. Which is not to say dog walking didnt teach me a great deal. It most definitely did. Further, it afforded me enough quiet and introspection to fully investigate what I was both learning and witnessing. An unfortunate side effect of quiet and introspection, however, is that when most people acquire any quantity of either, they squander it, simply by assuming its a product of their own unique grit and determination; as if they deserve it more than anyone else does. Id like the record to reflect that I did not deserve it at all. My years as a dog walker thus served as a sort of master class in the practice of gratitude. And in giving some account of those years, Ive tried to convey something nominally less assholish than the self-convinced entrepreneurial insight such a book would typically give center stage. Ive tried to say something at least worth the time someone wont get back, having read it.