Wogart

Memoir part 5

Part 1:

The Trick is to Drink it Quickly

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Wolf-Dog

Before any men in my life, good or bad, there was my dog Wogart. I was probably closer to him than I’d been to anyone. I had never been able to enter easily into conversation with people—I didn’t have a ready laugh or an open manner, but dogs were never fooled, and around Wogart I could always be easy. 

     He was a wolf-dog mix, mostly wolf, as it turned out. I’d found him in a pet store, sitting in a cage. I had come home after dropping out of music school. My friend Ken had just died and I had the money my great-aunt Elsa had given me for school which she said I could use however I wanted and what I wanted was to leave, to leave school and to leave home which is where Ken had lived. I decided to move to Prague, but I didn’t want to be completely alone so I found Wogart in the pet store in my home town and bought him.

     I think it's been proven by now to be a bad idea, breeding wolves with dogs, but at the time I thought it was really cool. In any case it was something which I knew nothing about, so I got all the books I could find and began to learn. The first thing I learned was that wolves are not dogs, and this became clear in both good and unexpected ways.

     Unlike a dog, Wogart was never subservient. He had a kind of dignity, and although he was mostly compliant, it was as if he did what you asked as a sort of favor. Although I was nominally in charge, the truth is that we lived together more or less on his terms. He commanded respect, and you felt that his standards were high. You wanted him to approve of you. He was like one of those people who makes you feel better about yourself when you’re around them, and you find yourself behaving better around them, too. I was at my best around Wogart. 

     He rarely barked, but when I spoke to him he would listen, then throw back his head and reply. The sounds that he made had a kind of musicality to them and sometimes he would howl, which sounded beautiful and a little eerie. 

     Communication between species has a special quality, a sense of depth that spoken language can interfere with. The pang that you feel when your child first learns to speak—when they begin to use their voice, and some of the expressiveness of their eyes and gesture is lost forever …that never happens with dogs. 

     After I had moved to Nevada City, my parents would sometimes come to visit, and Wogart, who was bent on seeing as much of them as possible, would go downstairs while I was still sleeping and let himself out—which he did by taking the front door knob in his mouth and turning it—and make his way the two miles downtown to their hotel. In our little mountain town it wasn’t unusual to see a well cared–for dog cruising around by himself, and after watching me do it for a while, Wogart began to stop at the street corners of his own accord. When the road was free of traffic, he would cross. It was clear that he knew what he was doing, and people let him be. When he got to the hotel he would sit and wait on the pavement outside the lobby “sometimes for over an hour,” the doorman said, impressed, until my parents emerged.

     Eventually I got a job and had to leave Wogart at home more than he liked. At first I tried leaving him outside in the fenced yard. But he figured out how to stand up on his hind legs and use his paw to open the latch of the gate. The first time he did it I couldn't find him—but then a neighbor told me that she'd seen him near the elementary school. After that, if he wasn't home, I wasn't too worried. I knew to look for him up at the school around three-thirty. There he would be, sitting quietly on the edge of the basketball court, calm but engaged, his head turning from side to side, as the kids ran the ball down the court, and back again.

     He was social, very fond of people and cats. He liked to pay visits and soon developed a routine: he'd wait until I left for work, then start out on his route, stopping at the same people’s houses at the same time of day, one after the other. He would slowly make his way like that into town, where he'd visit the back doors of several restaurants, hang out with the hippy kids in the square, have a drink from the fountain, and slowly make his way back to the house. He was usually back by the time I got home, waiting to greet me.     

     His last stop before heading home was the parking lot behind the mini-mart where the homeless guys hung out. They liked and respected him, his independence, and it struck me that there were more similarities between Wogart and those men than there often is between people and their dogs. Sometimes they would offer me beer or food or a hit off a joint, and I knew they were being so nice to me because I was Wogart’s owner. “Such a cool dude!” they said, and I felt the compliment, because such a cool dude was my dude. Sometimes I’d get off work early and meet up with him there, and then we’d walk home, together.

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Next:

The Grove