Hellhounds on My Trail
They said, these people who gave me their big advice, “you ought to get out of your brother’s basement and get into the service industry! People are busy these days and living increasingly time-deprived lives! Provide some needed service that they just don’t have time for, I know what: walk their dogs! People love their dogs, yes, you ought to be a dog-walker, that’s something that even you can handle.”
These people always have big ideas. They’re always happy to tell you what you should do.
Well, it’s not that simple. If everyone could do the dogwalking thing and make a living, then everyone would be doing it.
You have to get the word out first of all, then you have to build a clientele. And there’s competition. It’s hard to distinguish yourself.
So genius me put out this stupid tri-fold brochure that said “all breeds accepted.” And I really sealed my fate and said “difficult breeds welcome.” It was a color brochure and the colors always seemed too bright to me, and they ran together in unusual ways too.
I was talking Pekinese. I was talking those bitchy little poodles. I was talking some of those yappy little balls of fury at the end of a leash you see all over the place that have their first nervous breakdown at birth and then they’re off and running from there. I was talking terriers and bulldogs and irritable mutts of all kinds.
I wasn’t talking The Hound of the Baskervilles, which, if you recall, was a spectral hound that haunted Dartmoor in Devonshire, who howled terrifyingly for blood and who Sir Charles Baskerville died upon merely seeing, his face twisted in stark terror.
Whatever.
I don’t ask the dog’s history when I take them on, I’m trying to get a volume operation off the ground here, this is what all these people advising me say I need to do, and when this descendant of the Baskervilles saw my tri-fold brochure, and called me right up and told me she had a special dog that needed walking, guess who raised their hand and said “please let me do it, please, please, please”’? None other than genius me. She was a cute girl, had an English tweeds thing going on like you’d expect from someone from a courtly family, the outdoorsy fox-hunting type you might say. Never heard from her again. Genius me.
So there I am, walking this supernatural or, frankly, hellish dog with mangled black fur, glowing red eyes, super strength and speed, ghostly or phantom-like characteristics, with the reputation that if you look in his eyes three times you’ll surely die, thinking to myself “’get into the service industry,’ they tell me, ‘make something of yourself.”
Not true by the way, the whole dead after three stares thing. Me and The Hound have had staring contests for hours at a time, and if anyone is delivering withering glares it’s me, not him.
Soon enough he looks away in that sheepish way that dogs have, hellhound or not.
He knows which one of us has been leaving sulphuric piles of waste on the sidewalk every block or so.
So the word goes out, just what you’re supposed to want, the old word of mouth. But what I did not want was the Barghest, Bargtjest, Bo-guest, Bargest or Barguest – man, these breeds, I can’t keep them straight – who preys on lone travelers, or the Black Shuck with his malevolent flaming red eyes, haunting graveyards, sideroads, crossroads, and dark forests, or Cŵn Annwn, one of the spectral hounds of Annwn, the otherworld of Welsh myth or Gwyllgi, a mythical dog from Ireland that appears as a frightful apparition of a mastiff with baleful breath and blazing red eyes and is referred to as The Dog of Darkness and The Black Hound of Destiny. Whatever. I refer to him as The Great Pain in The Butt of Destiny. The Great Maker of Dog Waste of Destiny. The Great Craphound of Destiny. This is more like it.
I likewise did not count on The Black Dog of Bouley when I was putting together my business plan, a monstrous hound with huge, black eyes the size of saucers and (in some versions of the legend) a chain which it drags behind it, the sound of which is often the first warning victims have of its presence. Those big black eyes must have looked mighty appealing when he was a puppy in the window of the pet shop. Now he just looks weird.
Add to the roster the Failinis, which supposedly caught every wild beast it encountered and could magically change any running water it bathed in into wine.
Umm, how about more like it jumps back in fright every time a squirrel chattered at it, and can magically change any running water into eventual rivers of dog pee just by drinking it? This is more like it.
Then Cerberus, guardian of the Greek Underworld, there to greet you on the banks of the River Styx, Cerberus, the dog from hell, literally, just barking his fool heads off, yapping away, yap yap yapping away, and yes, I said ‘heads’ because he has three of them, which means – you guessed it – he needs three collars, unsupplied by the owner and paid for by yours truly, though never reimbursed. Genius me again.
Get this, guess who next gets into the act: Dracula, yeah, that guy, the Count Dracula, the very one, who wants me to walk the freaking wolves outside his castle, the ‘children of the night’ as he calls them. I am not a master negotiator, I freely admit this, so the conversation went a little something like this:
Me: Well, I’m pretty booked up right now. Leave your number and if a spot opens up you’ll be the first one I call.
Count Dracula: I’d seriously like you to consider this engagement.
Me: I mean, I’m a dog walker! They’re not even dogs.
Count Dracula: They’re a related species. It is said that dogs descended directly from wolves.
Me: No, I just don’t think so. If I’m ever looking to expand my offering I think wolves, or ‘children of the night’ as you say, would be an interesting direction. An interesting possible direction. But I just don’t see how I could right now.
Count Dracula: Your brochure says you take all breeds.
Me: Well, you know how marketing talk is.
Count Dracula: And you take difficult breeds as well. (Holding up the damnable tri-fold brochure. I wish now I had never heard of tri-fold brochures, especially those that make the colors all run together) It says so right here. See? Right here. Right there where my claw-like finger is pointing. Right here. ‘I take difficult breeds.’
Me: Let’s talk again in a few months.
Count Dracula: If you don’t do this I’ll rip the flesh of your throat and drain your blood.
Me: Oh, all right, I’ll walk your damned wolves.
Count Dracula: I’ll have you locked in a cell where you’ll slowly go mad and both speak to and eat various insects native to the region.
Me: OK, OK, I said all right! Sheesh.
Mr. Negotiator, that’s me.
I wish I could be more like my friend Mark who got into the guttering business and who negotiated with Dracula as well.
The existing guttering of the castle was pulling away from the roof and the cornering like it had had just about enough with a difficult relative and was turning its back on the structure once and for all, and someone had told Dracula he really ought to get three bids, but Mark was the only one who would come out.
Dracula tried to pull the old ‘rip the flesh of your throat’ thing with him, but Mark just looks at him cool as you please and stares off in like this wondering manner and says, “so who you gonna get to take down this old guttering and put something up from the current century if I’m a dessicated half corpse-like thing? I’m not going up a ladder in that condition. That’s what I’m wondering.”
I can just see him with his sleeveless jeans shirt and his white pants all spattered with paint from various jobs!
Mark would have taken a drag from his cigarette right about them and squinted through the smoke and said, “No, the way I see it, you can either pay me now or pay me later. But if you think you’ll ever move this heap on today’s real estate market with the guttering hanging down in an all-too-evident state of disrepair, you’re even crazier than people think you are.”
And you know what? Dracula paid him! No more negotiating, no more threats, not a mention of eating insects. He just paid him.
I wish I could be more like that. Genius me.
Instead here I am walking demon dogs all times of the night and day, barking fire and crapping lightning – literally – and scaring the neighborhood old ladies to death, not to mention getting the Homeowner’s Association up in arms.
I get a lot of what you might call ‘buried-accidentally-or-sometimes-purposely-on-ancient-Native-American-burial-grounds-and-now-come-hideously-back-to-vengeful- life’ breeds too. There’s more of them than you’d think and the owners are often at their wits end.
They’re a handful, right up there with Pekes and poodles, which I still get a fair number of. That’s right, I’m trying to walk demon dogs and ordinary pain in the butt little yappers in the same trip and up and down this street that my brother lives on.
Like I say I’m trying to build a volume operation.
They tell you when you get into this business that you should text the owners all through the day and tell them what their darling dogs are up to at just that minute so they can kind of glow in the second-hand pleasure of their pet’s day, which I do – which I do – but frankly it’s all made up. What they mainly do is crap all over the place and who’s left to clean up after them?
Genius me.
