Dog Days
The Jeromes take on a pet project.
by Jerome Przybylski
Illustrated by Jerome Ferretti

April 29, 1998

It was a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining. The sky was blue. I had everything but a companion. I called Ferretti.
"I'm lonely," I said.
"Get a dog," he answered.
"What kinda dog?" I asked. He suggested a dog that looks like me so I can stroll with an alter ego on a leash.
I telephoned the pet department at Kmart.
"I need a dog," I said to the clerk. "A bald one. With acne."
I searched the pet stores. I searched the dog pounds. I searched the Internet. I found no bald dogs with acne.
Everyone suggested I consider reptiles. But they're cold-blooded and brainless. Dogs are different. They're half-smart and constantly adjusting to their
limitations. They get frustrated. They act out. They dig holes in the yard and pee on the carpet and sulk when reprimanded. Just like humans, their life is skewed by a single constant: the need to bond.
"I'm the alpha male of nothing. NOTHING," I told Ferretti. "That's why I've always been a loner. But it's time to move forward. I wanna whole herd of dogs. It doesn't matter what they look like. I ain't shallow."
Pet prejudice
We got in Ferretti's pickup. We drove to an animal shelter in Detroit. A black clerk was eating a Whopper behind a bulletproof window. A Latina was pleading with her. "Please find my baby. I lost my peet bull."
Ferretti nudged his way forward. "Release the dogs," he told the clerk, "all of them. They're coming with us."
The clerk frowned and wagged a finger. Scolded! Scalded! I filled my lungs with Bruce Lee's dragon spirit. I curled my fist. I was set to smash the bulletproof glass and grab the woman by the throat and scream the unspeakable truth.
But Ferretti yanked me by the ear. He threw me into his pickup. There were bricklayers' tools on the floor, a woman's garter hanging on the rear-view mirror and the Sunday funnies on the seat. He turned on the radio. He tuned in a Tigers game. He said everything was gonna be OK.
"Whaddaya mean OK?" I screamed. "You're as bad as the rest. That's the problem. Nobody will open their eyes. If I'd been black she'd have let me take all the dogs."
Ferretti scratched his beard. "I think," he said, "you're a little oversensitive."
"I'm a man," I said, "a white man. You could be, too, with a little starch in your soul."
Ferretti pulled up to a pet shop on Eight Mile Road. I got out of the pickup. Ferretti started to drive away.
"Hey," I yelled. "Did I say something wrong?"
"Obviously," Ferretti said, "you want a parrot for a friend. I should leave you here." He lit a Marlboro and watched kids pile out of a station wagon and run into the pet shop. It seemed their feet didn't touch the ground. They were dizzy with happiness.
"Have you been spending a lot of time alone?" he asked. "You're fixated on the alpha male stuff."
Shadow society
We walked into the pet store. There was a 6-foot albino boa constrictor on the floor. It was the color of butter. It was crawling up a metal magazine tree.
An employee was on his knees. He was trying to get control of the serpent without damaging the merchandise. His mettle was tested. The closer events crept toward savagery, the more surely he had to use a gentle touch. Around him gathered parents and kids. Brothers and sisters held hands. There was a spontaneous bonding among rivals.
"This," I said, "is wrong. These brats should be home watching space invaders get blown up on television."
"Maybe pets are too complicated," Ferretti said. "How about a garden? A rock garden?"
"I'm a M-A-N," I said. "Where are the poison snakes? Where are the scorpions?"
A clerk guided us to the tarantulas. Each looked like an unshaved armpit with legs. Around them were jumping insects.
"Gimme that one," I said. The clerk refused. The cricket was dinner for the tarantula.
"Gimme the goldfish with the pirate's patch," I said. But it was dinner for the piranha.

I next learned that my favorite red-eyed rat was dinner for the python.
A pattern emerged: I identified with the shadow society in pet stores, just as I identified with the shadow society in life.
It ain't funny. I'm fated to be dinner for the gold-toothed carnivores that run the USA. Ferretti must feel the same. We're aging morsels of counterculture protein. We let the clerk show us ferrets, chameleons, turtles, salamanders, gerbils and parakeets.
He told us that dogs sleep 16 hours a day. He said that for the price of a Himalayan bobcat, we could get 10,000 garter snakes. He could give us 10 percent off on a full aquarium setup, and include a complimentary plastic shipwreck.
He had a business card. He had a beeper. He had a cellular phone. He was well-versed and well-groomed and a lusty young believer in an expanding economic universe. The kid scared me. I saw the 1950s in his eyes. His faith in American corporate culture was rhetorically retro.
I saw him entering the slipstream of progress and opening franchises in the Third World. Pet shops in Africa. Pet shops in Brazil. I had to salute his unwavering vision.
I returned to the tarantula cage. The doomed cricket knelt in the dirt. I witnessed the noble poverty of a deeply religious insect. So pure. So pious. I wanted to call National Public Radio.
Save-O-Rama
The clerk put the cricket in a matchbox. It wasn't going to be a spider's lunch. I'd saved a life. It's hard to describe the feeling. I'll elaborate in my acceptance speech. The liberation of one cricket can lead to the liberation of the whole Cricket Nation and, subsequently, to the Nobel Peace Prize. It'd look good next to my bowling trophy.
While driving down Woodward Avenue I felt a great moral dilemma. Crickets are more than our friends. Their nocturnal chirps remind us to call for love in the dark. The Japanese have yet to invent a cricket leash, and I felt uneasy about keeping one indoors. There's only one way to domesticate the insect. It works better than religious training or chemical sedatives or brow-beating.
I opened the box in Ferretti's truck. I placed it under his nose. "Jake," I said. "Male or female?"
"Damnit," he answered. "You can't neuter a cricket."
Sunny-side up

I released the cricket into the wind. I closed my eyes. I napped as Ferretti chatted with the clerk at the KFC drive-in window. He told her I was dead. He said he didn't know me. He said I'd broken into his truck last night, pushed the seat back into a comfortable position and died.
This was no joke. As he spoke I felt my soul leave the tired and stinky husk of my body. It soared. I flew as one with the Holy Ghost.
Then something happened. Ferretti burped.
I woke up feeling clumsy and dumb. "I'm in a cage," I said.
"Love," he said, "is the way out. It takes skills that can be learned with pets. They're dependent and you're reliable. A relationship develops. A person becomes a link in a heavenly chain."
"Damn, Jake," I said. "I ain't never talked to a man 'bout love before."
I went back to my apartment building. I locked the door. I pulled down the shades. Then I reached under my mattress and yanked out the only self-help stuff I knew. Hustler magazine. Gent magazine. Penthouse magazine. This is the nonsense at which Ferretti won't laugh.
"You wouldn't feed your stomach with pictures of tacos," he says. "Why feed your heart with pictures of naked women?"
Slowly I tore the magazines to shreds. I put the strips in a cardboard box with a milk bowl. Little baby mosquitoes danced in the lamplight. Spring was in the air. I'd begun to feel like God's Top Draft Pick when the phone rang.
"Tomorrow we're goin' back to the animal shelter," Ferretti said. "You're gonna talk to the woman behind the bulletproof glass. Whaddaya gonna tell her?"
"That I want a bite of her Whopper."
"No, damnit. Whaddaya gonna tell her?"
"That I can have only one dog. That it has to be the dog that resembles me on the inside. The neediest dog in the shelter. My alter ego."
A siren howled outside my window. I turned on my police scanner. The cops transmit coolly in the face of danger. Their disgust, fear and anger are channeled into a uniform handsomeness. The problem is the dead spot that such work puts in the soul.
I looked at the moon. It was a dead spot that got light from the sun. I thought there had to be a pet that would shine on me in similar fashion this spring. It could be only one pet: the saddest and ugliest dog in the whole shelter. I would name it Sunny.

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