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.
