I Wanna Be Your Dog

The radio was playing NPR when I turned on the car to go to work. Liv must have been listening to it on her way home from the closing shift at the dildo store. She always came home with interesting work stories. Just two nights before a woman visiting from out of town had invited Liv to her hotel room to rub the other woman’s feet after work. She nearly said yes, but I reminded her she had an early doctor’s appointment the next day.

I usually don’t listen to the radio on my commute because it’s less than 10 minutes on the interstate. But that day, the host was interviewing a dog trainer who provides service dogs to veterans with PTSD. She explained the unique challenges of training the dogs in her program last year when the country was locked down and there were no crowds to desensitize the dogs to. I thought about my own dog; a 20-pound terrier mutt that Liv and I had adopted a couple months into quarantine. We played YouTube videos of fireworks and babies crying to her as a young puppy to try to get her used to loud or grating noises. She’s fine on the 4th of July, but she gets very jumpy and anxious when we pass by people in the neighborhood on our walks, so it clearly wasn’t enough.

The dog trainer on the radio continued explaining how each dog is trained to recognize general signs of stress, like the smell of adrenaline, but also individual nervous ticks unique to the person they are intended to help. Trainers ask the recipients’ family members for examples of specific behaviors, like tapping their leg or pacing. The dog is trained to notice those behaviors and attempt to interrupt them but jumping on the person and licking them and wrestling them to the ground. The dog then lays on top of the human and provides deep pressure therapy until the human calms down, and a panic attack is avoided. The veteran on the radio described his experience of finding it annoying when his dog would do this but getting used to it as he realized how much it actually helped.

Later that afternoon, as we were eating dinner, Liv’s brother texted to ask if he could call her. He found out he was getting evicted and needed someone to talk to. She said yes and put him on speaker phone so I could listen in. Rowan told us he put in an application for a house near us but was rejected when the leasing company found an eviction he didn’t know about on his record. His current landlords had been harassing all the tenants in his building for weeks, claiming they owed a second deposit because the ownership had changed, making up fees and charges out of thin air, calling the cops to kick people out. New for rent signs appeared on the sidewalk, and police patrolled the neighborhood stopping cars for minor or imaginary traffic infractions. It was clear that the neighborhood was being gentrified and all the poor people kicked out so that the new owners could renovate and rent for higher prices. Everyone knew what they were doing was illegal, but all the people who lived there were too poor to fight them in court, and the cops had already sided with the property owners. Now they had escalated to filing evictions without informing the people they intended to evict. Rowan had no idea how long ago this eviction had been filed and how long he had before he the landlord acted on it. He had been trying to find a new place since the last time the landlord came by to kick a neighbor out. But now with an eviction on his record, most of the other rental companies in the city would automatically reject him as a bad tenant.

I could see Liv getting more and more upset as her brother described his fear of coming home from work any day now to find his furniture and clothes scattered on the lawn and his cats set loose and lost in the surrounding woods. She bit down hard on the skin on the back of her hands and rocked in her chair while Rowan talked about how expensive application fees are and what’s the point in applying to so many places if he will be rejected for having too many cats or bad rental history? Liv’s voice cracked as she tried to tell him to take a break and rest. He protested that he had to work on an art commission to scrape together as much money as possible while his future was this uncertain. I looked across the table at my wife and I wished her brother would just hang up already. He couldn’t see how much this was upsetting her like I could.

When he finally hung up, Liv laid her head on the table and hugged her arms around her torso. I stood up and came around behind to hold her in my arms. I told her to stand up and come into the bedroom and lay down with me. It would be easier to hold her that way.

We walked into the bedroom and she laid face down on the mattress. I laid on top of her and spread my body weight as evenly as possible across her back. I considered putting on some music, but I had left my phone in the other room. We laid together like this for about 20 minutes. I rested my chin on my hands with my palms flat on her shoulder blades. She didn’t start crying and her sweat did not acquire that bitter tang it gets when she sobs. I was happy to find myself as useful as a trained service dog.