Sh*t My Dad Says

Sometimes It’s Nice When People You Love Need You

After having lived in Los Angeles for about a year, I decided that it would be cool to get a dog. Notice that I said “cool,” not “a good idea” or “cool to think about.” I wanted a dog and wasn’t considering nondog options.

When I was a kid, my family had a dog named Brownie, who I enjoyed playing with, particularly when my older brothers were no longer living at home. I loved that dogs just seemed to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted; it was a quality I admired. One time during a family dinner when I was around thirteen, I looked outside and Brownie was in the backyard, licking himself vigorously until he ejaculated on his own face. Then he lay down and went to sleep as if nothing had happened. Self-administering oral sex is not my cup of tea, but you have to hand it to him for his ruthless determination to enjoy himself.

A year out of college, I had a decent job waiting tables at an upscale Italian restaurant where I only needed to work about three days a week to make ends meet. I spent most of the rest of my time writing in my bedroom. I thought getting a dog might spice up my life a little bit.

“You can barely take care of yourself. Where are you gonna keep him?” my friend Dan asked.

“My apartment,” I said.

“You don’t have a yard. Where’s he gonna go to the bathroom, or run around? Dogs need to run around. They can’t just sit around an apartment.”

“I’ll get a small dog. If I was tiny, my apartment would seem huge, right?”

I knew my dad would probably have a similar response so I didn’t tell him, or any of our family members who might leak the news to him. My roommate had grown up with dogs in her house and did not object. So I made a trip up to the pound in Lancaster, California, which is about fifty miles northeast of L.A., and scoured the narrow, cage-lined halls, passing dozens of sad and snarling faces in search of the perfect puppy.

“I want something that’s gonna stay small,” I said to the pound employee who was guiding me.

The worker assured me she’d help me find a small dog, and led me to a cage filled with six tiny brown puppies. I couldn’t tell what kind of dogs they were; they just looked like mutts. I pointed out the smallest one, and a week later, after he had gotten his shots, I returned to the pound to pick him up. I named him Angus after Angus Young, the lead guitarist of AC/DC.

Very early on, I realized I might have made a huge mistake. Angus was a fun, loving dog, but he had an unbelievable amount of energy and suffered from serious abandonment issues. Every time I left him alone in the apartment, I’d return to find my living room carpet covered in dog crap. Evidently, he’d take a rebellious—or emotional—dump, then step in it and walk around the house like he was re-creating a Jackson Pollock painting. At first, I thought he did this because he had to empty his bowels, so I started taking him out to do his business right before I left. He’d go right away, but still, when I came back home after leaving him alone, his feces would be everywhere. I’d have to get out my cleaning supplies and go to town for an hour on the mess, just to make the apartment bearable. My roommate was a good sport, but she was quickly tiring of the situation.

About two months after I got Angus, I returned home to find that he had gotten into the cupboard where I kept his dog food. The door was open, and little pellets of dog food had spilled all over the kitchen floor. Normally, as soon as I walked through the front door Angus would greet me with a slobbering grin and wagging tail. This time I heard nothing. I turned toward the living room and saw him lying on the couch on his back, paws in the air, like a man who had been challenged to a pie-eating contest and had won in double overtime.

“Angus, nooooooo!” I intoned.

He rolled his distended belly toward me, then gave me a look that I had only ever received once in my life—from a sorority girl stumbling in front of my college apartment complex, right before she projectile-vomited on the ground. What happened next did not happen to her, fortunately.

I picked Angus up by the sides of his belly and, like a plastic IV bag whose hole had been stretched, a steady stream of diarrhea shot out of his butt onto the couch and floor. That was the final straw. The power of denial is strong, but seeing—and smelling—your furniture covered in fresh dog diarrhea is stronger. It was time to give Angus away.

But I loved him, so I wanted to give him to someone I would be able to visit on occasion, to check on him. My brothers and all of my friends immediately turned down my request to take Angus. That left one option: my parents. They had a big backyard, and Angus was growing at a ridiculously rapid rate. A dog that I was told would be no bigger than thirty pounds when fully grown weighed thirty-five pounds at only four months.

Angus was adorable, and I knew that the best strategy would be to casually show him to my parents before dropping the bomb on them. I wasn’t worried about my mom; she was always easy to win over. My dad, of course, was a different story.

So, on a sunny Saturday morning in April, I drove down to San Diego with Angus on my lap, and walked into my parents’ house unannounced, carrying him like an oversized baby.

“Awww, look at him, he’s so cute!” my mom said, coming out from the kitchen, where she had been cooking, to pet him.

“That is a good-looking dog right there,” my dad said, reaching over and rubbing his ears.

“Wait. Whose dog is this?” my mom asked, suddenly suspicious.

“Well, here’s the thing,” I said.

I went on to explain the whole scenario, fudging a few details to make me sound less impulsive and Angus like less of a handful.

“We can’t take this dog. This is your responsibility—we can’t just take a dog because you didn’t think things through,” my mom said, her tone increasingly annoyed with every word she spoke.

I was surprised and became worried because if my mom was reacting like this, I could only imagine what my dad was going to say. He was quiet for a few moments, and then he grabbed Angus and held him up.

“We can take care of him.”

“Sam?” My mom was as surprised as I was.

“It’s a dog. It’s not like Justin knocked up some lady and he’s walking in with a kid.”

“Yeah, I didn’t do that,” I said, chuckling.

“You bet your fucking ass you didn’t,” my dad snapped, without an ounce of humor in his voice.

My dad took Angus outside, rubbed his belly, and set him down on the ground.

“This is your new home. Shit and piss where you like,” he said to Angus.

I felt the way I did at age twenty-one when I gambled in Las Vegas for the first time and won a hundred dollars on my first slot machine pull: unsure about what had happened but confident that I should take off before my luck turned.

“Okay. Well, I better get going, you know. I’ve got work tomorrow, and it’s a long drive, so….”

And with that, I hurried down the driveway, got in my car, and drove back up to Los Angeles.

Every couple months or so, I’d head home, and each time, Angus would be larger. Eight months later, he was 105 pounds. He looked like Scooby-Doo on steroids.

“Dad, he’s so… buff. What are you feeding him?” I asked, during a visit around Angus’s first birthday.

“In the morning he gets a half pound of ground beef, half pound of potatoes, and two eggs, then I cook that together and put some garlic salt on it.”

“Garlic salt? Like he wouldn’t eat it if it didn’t have garlic salt?”

“Listen, the dog likes garlic salt, so I give him fucking garlic salt.”

“So he’s eating, like, three thousand calories a day?”

“Well, probably more, since I give him that same meal at night, too.”

“Jesus Christ, Dad. That’s why he looks like a WWF wrestler.”

My dad explained to me that he had tried lots of traditional dog foods, but that Angus liked human meals cooked for him best.

“Isn’t that a lot of work? I mean, you’re like his personal chef.”

I followed my dad outside as he carried the bowl of food he had just prepared for Angus. The instant he smelled the meal, Angus jumped up in excitement and put his paws on my dad’s chest like a long-lost lover.

“Okay, okay, take it easy, you crazy son of a bitch,” my dad said. Turning to me, he added, “Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but he’s my friend.”

I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. Was my dad becoming sentimental in his old age?

“Wipe that stupid fucking look off your face. I ain’t crazy. They’re called ‘man’s best friend,’ for chrissakes. It’s not like I made that up.”

I told him I was glad that Angus had become a good friend.

“You know, I was never really a dog person before this. I mean, Brownie was great, but he was your brother’s dog. And I had lots of dogs on the farm, but they were work dogs. I guess with all you guys gone, and Mom working all the time, it’s nice to have somebody around who depends on me. And who tears up my fucking rose garden—goddamn it, Angus,” he said, turning and pointing toward the churned-up soil that had once hosted his red roses.

“He’s just like you: He’s a pain in my ass, but I love him. And he shits everywhere. Which is mostly why he’s like you,” he added with a smirk.

“My flight lands at nine-thirty on Sunday…. You want to watch what? What the fuck is Mad Men? I’m a mad man if you don’t pick me the hell up.”

“Your brother brought his baby over this morning. He told me it could stand. It couldn’t stand for shit. Just sat there. Big letdown.”

“The dog is not bored. It’s not like he’s waiting for me to give him a fucking Rubik’s Cube. He’s a goddamned dog.”

“Do these announcers ever shut the fuck up? Don’t ever say stuff just because you think you should. That’s the definition of an asshole.”

“You’re like a tornado of bullshit right now. We’ll talk again when your bullshit dies out over someone else’s house.”

“Do people your age know how to comb their fucking hair? It looks like two squirrels crawled on their head and started fucking.”

“You sure do like to tailgate people…. Right, because it’s real important you show up to the nothing you have to do on time.”

“The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and just ain’t spitting it out.”

“It’s never the right time to have kids, but it’s always the right time for screwing. God’s not a dumb shit. He knows how it works.”