Damien Galeone

I realized at an early age my general incapacity towards taking care of other living beings. Growing up, I was unable to keep a hamster alive. Not one particular hamster who dined on roast beef and smoked Marlboro Reds. Any hamster who ended up in the cage in my room met his end in under a few days. I didn’t do anything bad to them, I was no goon or budding sociopath, It was evidently the sight of me that keeled them over. Hamsters everywhere were sent to me to die. I was the Florida of hamsters.

Not that this stopped me from trying to own animals. There was a pond near our house, where I would try to collect fish and frogs for my homemade terrarium or aquarium. Not possessing the first idea how to take care of a pond animal – we didn’t have the internet then, so researching things like this took more than 3 seconds – these animals would go on to their great chum block in the sky very quickly. I soon stopped trying to collect these animals as I wanted nothing to do with hurting them. Not that it mattered, as it became clear that the clarion call was out on me at the pond, and upon my arrival it would go dead silent as all the pond life would go deep, dummy up, or play dead to avoid interacting with me. I took the hint and stuck to feeding bread to the ducks, who kept one eye on the bread and the other eye on me.

Later on, we got a golden retriever. His time with us was very brief. He was too big and too wild and my dad had (i.e. has) the patience of an SS guard with a bad hangover and a hemorrhoid the size of a table lamp. There were four kids in our house, and not a day went by that one of us wasn’t bleeding, lost in the woods somewhere, or bashing his or a sibling’s face into a wall in the name of cartoon scientific research. If Tom and Jerry can do it … Neither ADHD medication nor medical marijuana had yet to reach the mass market, so my mother spent a lot of time in the middle of the Battle of Little Big Horn wondering what exactly she had done to deserve this. Yet, for some reason, my dad decided that what my mother needed was a large, energetic dog who needed to be walked and entertained roughly 140 hours a day. This dog’s time with us was brief. I believe we gave him to a man who had 16 kids and hunted turkeys for a living.

A few years later we ended up with a Yorkshire terrier named Abby that the whole family adored. This was my first taste of lapdog life. Its poop was much smaller than the retriever’s. This worked in Abby’s favor. She remained on our couch until she passed away some years later.  

Later on, as a single man living a single man’s life in a single man’s fat, I found my pet sweet spot with cats. Well, one cat in particular. This cat seemed to embody the sociopathic urges that resided within me. It liked the same TV shows as me too. Well, if she didn’t like Columbo, she never said anything about it. With few exceptions, the cat cleaned its own butt. Cats remain the only animal I’ve ever known to make a human bleed and then demand food and a clean toilet from those they have harmed without threat of eventual litigation.    

I had resigned myself to a life of being a Cat Guy. It suited me. It resided within my wheelhouse of lackadaisical caregiver and not cleaning up poop more than 3 times a week. Life was good. It made sense.

And then, along came Burke. And before long, I was no longer a single guy living a single guy’s life. I had to – Dog help me – consider the feelings and interests of another person. A human, this time. And one of those interests, it became clear, was a dog. A small dog. A lapdog. A shih tzu.

The search began. Shih tzus aren’t on every corner in the Czech Republic, so we had to track one down. We were sent pictures and videos from breeders across the Republic. It was harder than I thought it would be. But things became real as we began amassing things for dogs: a gate that made a little crib, a water bowl, a leash, a jacket. A jacket for a dog should have sent off alarm bells, but I was busy building a crib for a dog. In hindsight, there were lots of alarm bells.

Every time we thought we were close to getting a dog, the road would abruptly end and we’d have no dog at the end of it. I was secretly happy about this. I wondered if maybe this pursuit would be fruitless for long enough for it to be forgotten. This is often my method of compliant-non-compliance. I’ll go along with things that I don’t want to do, and then when the interest or motivation peters out and things don’t work out, I simply avoid the topic for a decade or so. This is how I successfully kept from eating mushrooms and visiting Disneyworld. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, and that tunnel was dogless. I just had to keep mum and distract Burke with TV.

But then, we went out drinking one night. We sat at the pub next door to our flat and ordered beers and I had a Becherovka. A while later, Burke, in a burst of energy only brought on by healthy doses of Becherovka or methamphetamines, sent out a spree of follow-up whatsapp messages to the breeders we had already contacted that had gone dry. In the middle of beer number 5 and Becherovka number 3ish, the phone dinged.

‘We have one more shih tzu. You can have her for less money. Nobody wants her because she runs away from people.’

The message came with two videos, both of which supported the woman’s claim. In both videos, a bunch of tiny baby shih tzus were being oohed and loved by a couple of people. One of the dogs, clearly having had enough of the attention, ran away and hid behind a radiator.

‘I guess that’s our dog if you want her.’

‘Should we?’

As if on cue, shot 4ish arrived.

The following afternoon, we were on the 1:45 train to the small near-border town of Chomutov in the north. We arrived at 3:59. At 4:01 we were in the train station’s parking lot where I called a number and heard a phone nearby ring. A car door opened up and a woman got out with a small pig in her right hand. On her approach, I realized it was a dog. The woman took our money, kissed the dog goodbye and we got on the 4:10 train with the dog. Our dog.

Halfway home, the dog whined until we opened the roof of her case. She stuck her head out and looked at me and then Burke. She blinked in confusion. Then she stuck her face into the corner of the bag and whined softly. I felt terrible; I was a dognapper. I justified our actions by remembering that nobody wanted her. Nobody wanted the cat either, and she was currently sitting in my flat watching Columbo. We had found our dog. We had found our lapdog.   

I pet her head and rubbed her ears. She climbed out of the bag again and squirmed around on my lap. I tried in vain to keep her still. She was very small, but hard to control. She finally found a sweet spot of comfort and joy lying across my left forearm and resting her chinless face in the crook of my inner elbow. It’s there she fell asleep.   

I didn’t know it then, but I had become a lapdog owner.