Pigeons

“Pigeons” said the voice, quite insistently. A minute later, there it was again, “Pigeons!” I tried to figure out what was going on and realized I was asleep. I swam towards consciousness, opened my eyes and rolled over. Ah. Sitting next to my bed, staring at me with a mixture of impatience and concern, was my aging pit bull, Stella. I looked her in the eye and she said it again: “wooowooo”, in her low sexy smoker’s bark. Come on, get up, I let you sleep in, now get up and let’s go. When she was younger, she would have jumped on the bed and stood on my chest, shoving her giant face into mine until I gave up the ruse of ignoring her and woke up. I’d rub her ears and squish her big head the way she likes, and she’d lick whatever exposed skin she could get her rough tongue on. Now she needs a boost to the bed. She’s figured out how to ask for one when she wants up, but now you can see the hesitancy on her face when she looks up at the bed and considers whether she can make the jump without slipping and falling on her ass.

The only thing sadder than a pit bull who used to sport 6-pack abs falling on her ass in a botched attempt to jump on the bed is watching the same pit get her ass kicked every day in wrestling sessions by the half-Muppet/half-collie stray we acquired on the mean streets of East LA. Tilly, the Muppet, celebrates her victories by humping Stella’s head. She does this victory dance daily, after Stella’s bad knees have given out and she’s sat down, surrendering, with a bewildered look on her face. Sometimes I try to even up the match by holding up Stella’s weak rear end while they bat at each other, but youth and beauty win over age and treachery in this duel. I wonder if the Muppet knows she’s beating an old lady. Granted, an old lady with an anvil for a head and who has 15 pounds on the wiry Muppet, but still.

I’m not always sure how I’d make it out of bed in the morning at all without my two little monsters. My boyfriend once remarked during an especially dark period that they seemed to be the only thing that brought me joy. It made me wonder if I hadn’t picked Tilly up off the street and brought her home because of some latent self-preservation instinct; so I won’t jump off the Golden Gate Bridge when Stella dies. Unfortunately, Tilly seems to think she’s Stella’s dog rather than mine and I think it will be me talking her out of jumping, rather than the other way around.

I first got Stella when she was about a year old. A friend of mine, Janine, who lived in a bad part of Oakland had heard a dog barking all night for weeks on her block. She finally investigated, and found the dog chained to a tree in a neighbor’s yard, with open wounds from the chains and a look of utter hysteria in her eyes. Janine’s not the type to shy away from a pit bull in distress and considered stealing the dog, but instead knocked on the door and asked what the story was. The owner was in jail and had left her with his 90-year-old wheelchair-bound grandmother, so the family chained the dog to the tree and occasionally threw food out for her. She managed to run away several times, earning the nickname Houdini for her talents of escape, but was always dragged back, and additional chains applied. Janine offered to take in the dog and they readily agreed. I was never quite clear if there was some expectation that Stella be returned when her owner was paroled, but this isn’t the kind of detail that Janine would get hung up on — instead, she talked me into taking Stella in, 10 miles and one bridge away.

Over lunch one day in the city, Janine pulled out a stack of photos. “you can have dogs in your new place, right?” she asked. I had finally bought my own condo in San Francisco, and yes, I had access to the shared yard and the homeowner’s agreement let me have one pet, no more than 45 pounds. “Sure”, I said, “and I was thinking I’d get a dog eventually, maybe when I’m done remodeling.“ Janine started flipping through her photos of the 60-pound Stella, apparently unaware that most people find Stella’s appearance alarming, if not actually terrifying. I once compared the circumference of her neck to her waist; the waist won by a mere one inch. While warily eyeing Stella’s clipped ears and bulging muscles, I tried to demur that I wasn’t ready for a dog, but eventually agreed to meet her.

A week later I went to Janine’s house in the bad part of Oakland, and after navigating her collection of damaged feral cats and greeting the exceptionally sweet rescued Rottweiler she found wandering the streets of New York four years prior, finally met the famed Stella. She was behind a kiddie gate in the kitchen because she’d expressed a little too much interest in the cats, especially, apparently, the deaf one that walked with a chronic tilt, like the world was rotating beneath it and the poor cat couldn’t quite make it to a steady patch of ground. Stella jumped straight up in the air behind her kiddie gate, showing she could have easily cleared the gate but was respecting its boundaries. Or she was too stupid to realize she could just jump over the gate and eat the cat — I wasn’t clear which option was true yet.

Against my better instincts, I left that night with Stella ensconced in the passenger seat of my car and a used dog bed in the back seat so she’d have something familiar and somewhere to sleep. About halfway across the bridge she threw up (who knew dogs could get carsick!), coating my right arm, the stick shift, and most of the passenger seat with dog puke. She thoughtfully missed the floor mat, that being the one thing in her path that could have easily been cleaned up. Since stopping on one of America’s busiest bridges to mop dog vomit off your arm is frowned upon pretty severely in this town, I drove home like that. Well, technically, I also had to spend the rest of the drive physically keeping her from eating the chunks of her own vomit strewn around my new Honda. I confess that I gave up on the last part of the mission once I realized it would make cleanup easier.

In that first week, Stella peed on my bed, ate most of the trim off of my bedroom doorframe, ushered several pairs of shoes to their doom, stole an entire extra-large pizza, and triggered multiple concerned phone calls from the neighbors, who reported that she was hurling herself head-first at the glass panel in my front door in a frantic bid to escape whenever I dared to leave the house. I did the obvious and logical thing and told Janine I was bringing both dog and dog bed back to Oakland and dumping both on her doorstep.

OK, I’m kidding — come on, do I seem like the kind of person who could return a used dog? I signed us up for obedience classes (where poor giant-headed Stella looked like a football linebacker forced to play kickball with a bunch of kindergartners), bought her a wide array of expensive “heavy chewer” toys that she promptly shredded into nano-bits and scattered around my flat, and gave up on getting her to sleep in her own bed. Dogs, it turns out, are like vampires with a fortune-cookie curse: once you’ve invited them in, you can’t them out (in bed, as the joke goes). And, of course, Stella has no qualms about stealing all of the covers and shoving you to the barest edge of the bed, and she snored like a fat middle-aged drunk. You can see why I’m so ready to boost her up every night, now that she’s gotten a little rickety. Who could say no when she stands next to the bed, staring at you impatiently until you give in? She’s added a charming talent for farting to her nighttime repertoire, just to keep things spicy I think.