Sadie


All week I was telling people we were going to kill her on Friday. I even told her. I said stupid, faux-macho things like, "Well Sadie you’re gonna get the needle on Friday… doggie Heaven for you Baby!"

I even joked that we might kill Max too, the big Shepherd, at the same time, a kind of canine death camp; I mean, Max is about due himself, in as much as he can barely get up on his front legs to get in his wheelchair and spends the rest of the time lying in a pool of offal and urine (despite daily baths, diapers and whatever we try to do for him). Max is ready for Dr. K. after a long life of noble, loyal, well-mannered affection.

But Sadie, Jesus! This was an animal in the absolute prime of life. A few minutes before we killed her I joked with two other people in the waiting room, "Come on Sadie, how about some kittens for lunch… or what about that Newfoundland?" But she just lay there calmly indifferent to my entreaties for justification of the evil I was about to commit. How many wedding guests must I tell how with my "cruel bow I laid full low," if not an albatross, man’s best friend, a thing both great and small…for the dear god who loveth us…He made and loveth all.

It had been a week since she had bitten the two Schitzus and indeed, it would have been easier to have killed her the very next day when anger, fear and disgust coalesced into resolution. But for legal/medical reasons one is obligated to keep the dog around for at least a week after such an incident. Maybe it is a Rabies thing. But even that doesn’t make sense; whether the little dogs come down with Rabies or not the killing has to happen. Why prolong our agony?

Unfortunately, this was not the first time Sadie did her little paranoid-schizophrenic killer routine on some other living thing. As a matter of fact it was the last in a very, very long list and we are inordinately lucky that all there is is a litany of relatively harmless incidents and not a list of lawsuits for horrible deaths done to people and beasts.

Needless to say, she hated the yard guys and their mowers and blowers in California and would throw herself at the big glass patio door trying to get to them. She very nearly ate a hole through the redwood fence trying to attack some workmen in the neighbor’s yard one day. She attacked the husband of a friend of Tookie’s, a huge, jovial Tongan. Fortunately, it was winter and he was wearing thick gloves and a heavy jacket. Once, after we had moved out of our house we spent a week with my brother and his wife in Mill Valley. Sadie had been perfectly agreeable all week. Just as we were leaving, saying final good-byes by the side of the car and that sort of thing, my brother’s wife tried to give Sadie a parting pet through the window of the car and Sadie metamorphosed into a snarling snapping monster so fast Kafka himself would have been horrified! En route across the country she chewed up the vinyl interior of my car trying to get to every dog between the Golden Gate and the Garden State. In Gunnison, Colorado my wife spent a few days with one of her best friends. It was not a happy sojourn thanks to Miss Sadie. Within ten minutes of being there, as my wife was carrying her suitcase into the house she heard a blood-curdling scream and went running into the back yard to find her friend Peg waving a snow shovel frantically trying to keep a menacing Sadie at bay. Later, that evening, as they were walking around the neighborhood, Sadie, sans leash, attacked a woman who was shoveling her porch; her own porch! This mischief did not sit well with my wife’s friend who happens to be the local judge.

A couple months after we had been in the East, one day a friend of my wife’s, a petite, effervescent, Sunday school teacher kind of woman, stopped by and as soon as she came in the kitchen Sadie bit her. Of course she always snarled at my brother-in-law who exudes a rough demeanor, but a sweet, dog-loving little lady? I forgot; once in California a friend was visiting, had been there for several days and one day her little girl, about four, was sitting on the floor and picked up her blanket and suddenly Sadie went for her. Somehow, by the grace of God, my wife intervened in time. Sadie bit the watchman at the family shop, she bit the cleaning woman, she bit the neighbor.

I loved Sadie’s athleticism. I guess because she was a Pit people said I was crazy to rough–house with her; especially to play with the stick. My theory however, was that part of her problem was an inability to distinguish between play and reality or, at least, the reality of Manhattan, from which she had come, and the reality of suburban comity. She needed to learn that here, with us, she did not need to go into killer mode ever again. I was trying to teach her that whatever it was she had learned in the first six months of her life on the streets of New York was not applicable in the comfort of upper-middle-class suburbia. She loved jumping up and grabbing a stick. The best thing was an ax handle. While she clamped on to this stick I would pick her up and twirl her around and around until finally she would fly off and tumble in the grass and immediately launch herself through the air after the stick again. Her jaws would begin to chatter as we played this game. My hand got crunched many times until she finally learned to aim an inch or two away from my hand. She also loved it when I would wrestle with her with the stick and throw her down and drag her along the grass as she tried to regain her feet and then just as she got up to her feet I would flip her over again and then drag her and then sometimes pick her up straight in the air and see how long she would hang there before her jaws gave out. Sometimes she would hang there a whole minute as I whispered lovingly in her ear until she finally dropped.

On the other hand, she did not like regular wrestling and play-fighting like some of my other dogs have done. I mean, our Siberian really loved hard, panting, bone-jarring wrestling and I would wear an old leather-sleeved letter jacket which he would grab as I had a handful of his neck fur. And much the same with our first Lab…they both understood that despite the intensity of the rough-housing, it was play just like you see little lion cubs wrestling with each other. And both the lab and the Huskie understood my tone of voice when I was done, I would just say, "Okay, that’s a good dog." And with a single pet they understood and ceased the rough housing and went into docile mode immediately. But Sadie never got into that sort of thing. I always wanted to teach her to grab my wrist or hand without crunching it. Maybe she was such an irredeemable killing machine she could no more play at it than Mike Tyson could play patty-cake, patty-cake.

Although she loved chasing balls, she was not a gifted retriever. When she lost sight of the ball, she lacked the retriever’s natural ability to zig and zag, nose to the ground, and eventually find the thing. And when a new family moved in next door, with two little girls who, we discovered right away, were terrified of dogs, this brought Sadie’s fetching to an end.

Speaking of bad retrieving and bad eyes she would often seem startled by me in different clothes. Or if I was standing there in the kitchen in a long overcoat she could be fine but if I pulled the coat up over my head, right in front of her, she would growl menacingly and get into attack mode. So actually, I used to do that a lot with her, sometimes pulling the coat over my head before she had seen me and coming in and she would emit her low killer growl and I would advance toward her, sometimes in a crouch or on hands and knees until we were nose to nose and I would kiss her and hug her…again, my thinking was to try to "play" out of her her suspicion of every damn thing with a strange shape or color. I would much rather have been successful in teaching all watch-dog paranoia out of her than have her going wacko at every stranger that came in the house.

And, I might add that I have done this sort of play with at least a dozen other dogs with no apparent deleterious results. I mean, I don’t pretend to be a knowledgeable dog trainer but I have taught dogs to do all the standard things (come, sit, stay blah blah) as well as find my wallet in the woods, follow my daughters to school and return, swim to the bottom of a swimming pool to retrieve things and climb trees and jump fences. I am not unfamiliar with Pavlov, Skinner and a host of lab trainers, whose books I read avidly, as well as an admirer and student of old Conrad Lorenz in Austria and a reader of Herriot and Mowat…not that any of that makes me qualified to say what is right for a neurotic Pit Bull… but I tried.

The same day we killed her I had to drive six hours back to my studio in the Adirondacks. I could barely see the road for the tears and then that night, as I was preparing my bed in the back of my car, I broke down again thinking of all the times Sadie would mess up my sleeping bag with her muddy feet. I loved taking her with me when I used my kayak in the Hudson or the estuaries of New Jersey, knowing that for those few hours I was away from my car, parked in lugubrious places, that I would still have a car when I got back. Once, when I got lost in a bombed-out part of Jersey City I was glad to have her in the seat next to me.

While I was feeling sorry for myself making my bed in the back of the car that Sadie had torn apart, my wife was walking Max that night with her own broken heart. For two years Max, Sadie and my wife made the rounds of the neighborhood twice daily for exercise and evacuation. Now it was just the two of them. My wife cried all the way around the block. Chelsea, my daughter had called earlier and told her how she had been unable to work that day because of thinking about Sadie. She said she just grabbed some casual acquaintance and wept inconsolably on the poor guy’s shoulder. I haven’t even mentioned my oldest daughter, Hilary, who has two ebullient border-type mutts of her own. She too bonded with Sadie and shares this heartache.

No, when one conjures up the list of atrocities there is absolutely no question but that Sadie had to go. We could not have lavished more affection on this dog than we did; but to no avail. She was a killer. She was so cuddly, her short hair and muscular body so sensuous and wonderful to hold. When I would get down on my hands and knees to hug and kiss her goodnight she would emit euphoric little groans. In the morning when I would come into the kitchen, where the dogs slept, her tail would wag so hard and fast you couldn’t help but wonder what kind of muscle could make a tail wag so furiously. My mother-in-law who hated Sadie thought of her little tail as a whip and complained that it hurt when it wagged against her leg. It did wag hard and when it would hit the glass panel of a cabinet I was always afraid it would break the glass as it went, "Whap, whap, whap" against the glass.

I am shocked at the devastation I feel with her gone. I thought I knew that the most humane thing was to kill her as lovingly as possible so as to preclude an imminent disaster. We had a Lab once that bit a little neighbor boy and we got rid of him faster than you could say euthanasia. We had a magnificent Kuvasz who just barked at a neighbor kid and we got rid of him. We always said we would never own a dog that barked at or intimidated anybody. Despite low self-esteems neither my wife nor I need macho dogs to express ourselves…but then along comes Sadie.

Well, it goes back a long way, as far back as "Wounded Knee". One night about five years ago, about eleven, as my wife and I drove in our driveway in suburban California, in the ghastly glare of the headlights we saw a bloody, mangled creature on our front lawn. I carried it into the garage and Tookie made a bed for it and we gave it water holding up its head so it could drink. Our other three dogs sniffed it with interest and perhaps sympathy and then just walked away. My wife felt it all over and concluded nothing was broken and opined that it might live if we just gave it time, space and love to heal. Indeed it did and within a month the most beautiful Pit Bull in the world was romping joyfully around the house like nothing had ever happened one awful night. She was much prettier than Sadie, was as affectionate as our Lab, as smart as the Shepherd and in every other respect, the perfect pet. But we hardly needed another dog.

Nobody responded to adds in the paper and we did not want to give her away to just anybody. When our youngest daughter came home for Christmas she too fell in love with Wounded Knee. But how practical is it to have a dog when you are a student at New York University? But her boyfriend said he would take her sight unseen! At the end of Christmas break Chelsea returns to New York with Wounded Knee in a box and her so-called boyfriend doesn’t even meet her at JFK. But she gives him the dog anyway (and he proceeds to change her name) and two weeks later they break up. Not a few times I have thought of looking this guy up and teaching him some manners the way we used to before lawyers and laws against physical disfiguration.

So, six months or maybe it was a year later, one day Chelsea is walking down Broadway and some guy has this little tan Pit for sale. In Chelsea’s eyes it was the spitting image of Wounded Knee and she bought her for twenty bucks. Unless you are rich, owning a dog in Manhattan is a pain in the ass. A few months later Chelsea shipped Sadie out to California. I think our yellow Lab had died in the meantime so there we were back to a comfortable menage a trois. Sadie was still a puppy, probably about a year old, so the ancient Lhassa and middle-aged Shepherd had no trouble indoctrinating this newcomer to house rules.

After we sold the house in California my wife and I drove across the country in the two Saabs, she with the two dogs (the old Lhassa had since died). Once, somewhere in Arizona, Sadie was attacked by two desert mongrels and barely escaped back to the car. Actually, I saw part of the scuffle and I must say, I was not impressed with her fighting instincts. She looked about as much the soldier as Bill Clinton. And, at least twice she and Max disagreed on something or other and each time Sadie came away with a couple very expensive holes in her neck. I mean, I never saw the infamous "fighting dog" in Sadie. However, having said that, twice in the past year, she attacked my mother-in-law’s eighty-pound Standard Poodle with near-deadly, very bloody, very expensive results both times.

Even as the vet had the needle in his hand this morning Tookie asked one last time if there was some alternative. His sad silence told all…we had been through all that dozens of times. We had gone to the Internet and found virtually no alternatives – other than meeting a few very kind, sympathetic people – no rescue groups take biters. We even tried Prozac. We tried a muzzle. We considered removing her teeth and I even thought about surgery to weaken those formidable jaw muscles. I thought about finding a junkyard for her. I actually gave some thought to taking her to Mexico with me and just letting her go someplace…. Or giving her to some rich guy in Nicaragua for protection. I thought of giving her to some homeless guy in New York. I think this last was one of the most realistic alternatives…somebody who would keep her on a leash at all times, around whom there would never be children, and with whom Sadie would find joy in companionship.

On Thursday Tookie and I drove into New York with Sadie so Chelsea could say good bye to her. Rather than eat out we ordered sandwiches and ate them at Chelsea’s in order for Chels to have more time with Sadie. Sadie could not have been happier as we all sat on Chelsea’s couch taking turns holding Sadie in our arms as I took pictures.

Friday morning we got up early to take my car in for servicing. Tookie took Sadie in the wagon. After we dropped my car off the three of us went into Westfield and Tookie and I had a bagel while Sadie was delighted to snooze in the wagon. We picked up some paintings at the bank and then we went to a little neighborhood park and walked Sadie around the edge of the pond. She showed absolutely no interest in the geese. The three of us sat awhile thinking about what lay ahead and then we drove to the vet’s. We took in her blanket and doll. The receptionist asked if we were determined to go through with it and we said, "Yes." I made some stupid comments to the other people waiting and then they led us into one of the examining rooms. I picked Sadie up and held her in my lap as we stroked her soft belly and nuzzled her velvety ears and told her how much we loved her. The vet came in and said it would be best if we put her on the table. She was comfortable on her blanket as Tookie held her face and I held her haunches and the vet inserted the needle. She did not even flinch. I heard Tookie saying over and over, "We love you Sadie, We love you. You’re a good girl. We love you." She felt warm and strong. She was dead within seconds. She felt no less warm and wonderful to touch and only when Tookie stood up and hugged me did I know something… so huge and hopeless to conceive…parting is all we know of heaven…and all we need of hell.