Central Park Is Creepy at Night

September 21, 2009 By

Since CJ was born, Beezus has been getting less of our attention. Our vet told us she could stand to lose few pounds, so we’ve started taking her off-leash in Central Park to let her run around.

dog at play

Off-leash hours in all New York City parks are from 9pm-9am, and there are few things in her life she enjoys more (see picture). Normally, we take her in the mornings, but lately we’ve been taking advantage of the abnormally temperate nights. So we’ve been going into the Park at night.

Central Park, and New York in general, is not nearly as dangerous as many people think. We’ve never had any problems, and as long as we stay out of the Ramble at night, I don’t imagine we’ll have much to worry about. But just because it isn’t particularly dangerous, doesn’t mean it’s not downright creepy sometimes.

On a recent night, Beezus and I were walking with a friend and his dog when we strolled by a bench, upon which were some very fancy red cowboy boots.

“Don’t look at them,” said my friend.

“Why not?”

“A guy puts them there, and then hangs out in the bushes and watches people. If they look at them too long, he jumps out of the bushes.”

“And does what?”

“Hassles them, I guess. I’ve never given him the satisfaction of looking at the boots, but I see them there every night, and I’ve seen the guy in the bushes.”

“Where is he?”

“Tonight? I don’t see him, but he’s here, and I’m sure he’s watching us.”

I looked around, making sure Beezus was within a few yards of me. I felt my skin start to crawl.

“How do you know he jumps out and hassles people?”

“I’ve seen him do it. I was on the other side of the street, but later I talked to the people he accosted.”

“What did he say?”

“‘Don’t look at my boots,’ I guess. They weren’t really clear.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“I doubt it. It’s just his thing.”

“His thing? His thing is really creepy and f**ked up!”

“I know. That’s why I don’t look at them. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.”

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New York Dog

April 24, 2009 By

“Is that Beezus?”

It was a cold January night. I had my collar up and my hat down, and was trying to convince my dog to pee. This is more challenging than it sounds, as my dog had recently started doing the fakey: she squats as if she is going to pee, and then changes her mind. She was on her third or fourth fakey when another dog owner approached us.

“That’s Beezus, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It is,” I replied, stroking her inquisitive Ridgeback behind the ears. Beezus pulled up from her squat, leaving the sidewalk dry beneath her.

º º º

We had taken her to the vet, worried that this new behavior was the symptom of a bladder infection. Nope, said the vet. The problem was psychological, not physiological.

This wasn’t surprising. Beezus can charitably be called odd.

A few years ago, Sally and I contemplated getting a dog. She had never had one, and I grew up with one that I wasn’t especially fond of. But, we both loved our friends’ dogs, and it was on my list, #35 – Own a dog. One Saturday, we went to a mobile adoption event at the Petco on the Upper East Side. Just to look.

We went upstairs and met the people from Northshore Animal Shelter. Our plan was to talk with them about how realistic it was for us, living in a tiny Manhattan apartment, to adopt a dog. They assured us it wouldn’t be a problem, and pointed us towards the puppies.

There were three that I could see, all long-haired and very vocal. Neither trait was appealing, but I asked what breed they were.

“Those 3 in the front are shepherd mix, and the one in the back is a boxer mix.”

“Boxer?”

Several of my friends had boxers, and I love every boxer I’ve ever known. I squatted down and saw this mild-mannered, short-haired, fawn-colored little puppy wedged into the corner of the crate. The guy from Northshore took her out and handed her to me.

She was incredibly calm. No trembling, no whining, she just curled up in the crook of my elbow, and fell asleep. I talked with the guy for another half-hour or so, about quality of life issues for a dog living in Manhattan, about the adoption process, about whether our life could accommodate a dog.

He asked for 2 references, people he could call who would verify we were capable of being responsible dog owners. While he was on the phone with them, I asked Sally, who had been circling us and taking pictures with her phone, what she thought.

“Are you going to put this back in that cage?!?”

She thrust her phone under my nose and showed me this:

beezus-puppy1

º º º

“I thought it was her. I see her with the dog-walker all the time.”

One thing about owning a dog in Manhattan, and having a full-time job, somebody has to take your dog out at least once during the day. Most people hire dog-walkers to come and grab their dogs in the afternoon, take them out for a quick walk, and then drop them back in the apartment.

Beezus wasn’t quite so easy.

When we first got her, she did little more than whine, as most puppies do when first separated from their litter. In fact seeing her sitting calmly in the crate while the other 3 puppies yipped away was a big reason we were attracted to her.

For the first couple weeks, she was sick and lethargic. We also discovered that she had been spayed the day before we got her, so her mellowness was probably just the general anesthesia still in her system. One day, I was goofing around after getting out of the shower. Sally pulled off my towel, and I ran away from her, mock-giggling like a school girl.

From the top of the stairs came an ungodly sound. Part baying, part yelping, and a whole lot of barking, it froze us in our tracks. We turned and looked, and Beezus was standing there, this horrible sound coming out of this tiny puppy. She had found her voice.

º º º

“Did you know she’s in the New Yorker this week?”

“Ummm….. what?”

“Yeah,” said my neighbor, “she’s mentioned by name. The writer was interviewing the dog-walker and she’s with him and gets a name-check.”

After Beezus found her voice, she never lost it again. If we left her in the apartment for longer than an hour, she would start barking, and wouldn’t stop until one of us got home. When our neighbors complained to the landlord, we decided to leave her with a dog-walker all day. It was that or face eviction.

She barks when the neighbors walk by our door. She barks when an unfamiliar man approaches her on the street. She barks at sanitation workers, mail carriers, police officers, anybody in a uniform. She barks at balloons.

We’ve tried everything humane to address it, but nothing has worked. Our vet told us we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that we have a barky dog.

All of our neighbors know her. Many of them don’t like her, and I can’t blame them. But those who like her, love her. If she trusts you, she is the most loving, submissive dog you’ll ever meet. After I decided to stay home with CJ and we cut out the regular dog-walking dates, one of her walkers cried when she dropped her off for the last time.

º º º

“I was in bed last night,” my neighbor continued, “reading the new issue, and I said to my husband, ‘I know that dog!’”

Beezus finally peed, and I took her to an all-night newsstand. I picked up 4 copies of the New Yorker, thumbed through one until I got to Talk of the Town. There in the fourth paragraph of “Shaggy Dog Story” is my dog:

Beezus, a mutt….

Many people have asked how we can live with a dog in Manhattan. Where else could we live, and get our dog mentioned in the New Yorker?

Many more people have asked how we can live with a dog that cannot be left alone. I have asked myself that same question many, many times.

I stood in front of the newsstand and looked down at her. She looked up at me and wagged her tail.

Sally’s question came back to me, and I asked it of myself again.

What was I going to do, put her back in that cage?

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Life in a New City

September 16, 2007 By

We lived together in Brooklyn for about two weeks, but before I came out, I told S that if I was going to live in New York, I wanted to live in Manhattan, and she found a small apartment on the Upper West Side. The first weekend of November, my 14 boxes arrived, and S hired some movers to transport her stuff from Cobble Hill. We were both used to a lot more space, and not sharing it with anyone, but after a few months we adapted.

Life was very different on the East Coast. I had lived in Los Angeles, Portland, and the Bay Area, so I knew what living in a city was like. What I wasn’t prepared for was the difference between the two coasts. In Portland, drivers only honked their horns if there was imminent danger, and even then it seemed a little rude. In New York, it was rude not to honk if you noticed something holding up traffic for everyone else. The first time I felt like a New Yorker was the day, a few months after moving here, that a horn honked and I looked, not at the person honking, but at the idiot who was making the other driver honk.

New Yorkers will never admit they’re wrong. I’ve seen guys come to blows, even after it was obvious that one of them was wrong, knew it, and was defending a ludicrous position to the point of physical harm. I once nearly got hit by a bus while crossing with the light. I clearly had the right of way, and there was even a sign that stated turning traffic must yield to pedestrians. When I backed up a step to stop from getting crushed under the wheels of the bus, the driver stopped, opened the door and started yelling at me to watch where I was going. When I called him a jackass, and pointed at the sign and the crosswalk signal, he said that buses in New York always have the right of way. This is utterly a load of shit, and I told him so, and when I asked for his route number, he told me to fuck off, closed the door, and drove away. (About a year later, I saw the aftermath of an accident where a man was struck and killed on the very same corner, and couldn’t help but wonder if it was the same bus driver, and was I partly responsible for not having reported him.)

For some things, though, New Yorkers get a bad rap. While they may not be especially friendly, they are incredibly helpful. They won’t smile while they’re doing it, but they’ll help you if you need to find something or figure something out on the street. Sometimes they even stop and offer help without being asked. As a contrast, when I lived in the Bay Area, it was fairly common practice to “help” tourists by pointing them in the opposite direction of where they were looking to go.

The first time I was in Central Park, before I lived here, I got turned around and couldn’t tell east from west. I was holding a map and apparently looked confused. A guy walked up to me and asked, “Where you wanna go?” I told him where, he pointed to it on my map, and then showed me how to get there. He never smiled, and never once appeared happy to be helping me. He seemed slightly annoyed that he felt obligated to help me.

A few years later, after I’d been living hear for about 3 years, I was walking out of the subway, and noticed a German couple struggling to get through the floor-to-ceiling turnstiles. I remembered the first time I tried to go through one of them, and lost $2 because I stepped to the wrong spot and it didn’t turn far enough to get me through. I just watched the same thing happen to the man, as his wife stood helplessly on the inside, having already made it through. He tried to swipe again, but apparently had an unlimited card, and it wouldn’t let him use the same card again for another 20 minutes. I stepped out of the turnstiles,walked over to where he was standing, and swiped my card. I pointed at the spot where he was supposed to walk through, and somewhat curtly said, “There.” He walked through and I just walked away. As I reached the sidewalk, it occurred to me that I had done exactly what a New Yorker would have done; I helped them, but treated them like idiots.

New Yorkers also have a really extraordinary opinion of themselves, for no other reason than that they’re New Yorkers. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve heard someone say, when asked how they handled a particular inconvenience (transit strike, subways closed due to flooding, severe weather), “Hey, I’m a New Yorker. I can handle anything.” What they are really saying is that through it all, when inefficiencies in the system, other people’s greed, or centuries old infrastructure, cause serious inconvenience, rather than complaining about it or trying to fix it, they just get in line with the other sheep and let the system grind them down.

During the transit strike of December 2005, I began to understand it. That the transit workers would choose this time to shut everything down was truly reprehensible. It was freezing cold, snow and ice on the ground, and the week before Christmas, prime tourist season. That they chose this week, was probably no coincidence, as they “proved” how important their services are. Admirably, most New Yorkers still made their way to work through it all, with the same attitude they always do. While I was walking the 60 or so blocks to one of my clients, huddling against the icy wind, I found myself thinking more than once, “Yeah, fuck these guys. I’ll do this for months if it means they don’t get an extra dime.” Walking through the freezing city was my own personal protest against those things I couldn’t control. On the third day of the strike, my mother called to ask me how it was going and how I was dealing with the strike. I told her, “I’m a New Yorker. I can handle it.”

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Moving to New York City

September 14, 2007 By

When I was a kid, around 10 years old, and living in Portland, my mother had a co-worker who would join us for dinner every couple of weeks. Mark was, at the time, a youngish man who had some interesting ideas about life. One of the things I remember him saying was that everyone should live in New York City for at least two years. While he had yet to do so, he thought that living in a major metropolis should be a part of any well-lived life.

This idea stuck in my head. Through my teen years, through college, and into adulthood, there was a part of me that longed to live in Manhattan.

S and I met in college, dated for a few years, and then lost touch. 4 years ago, we were both back in Berkeley, and re-kindled the old flame. Unfortunately, I was living in Portland, and she was living in New York. I was working on a massive ERP implementation, and work in her field was scarce in Portland, so the idea of either of us moving was out of the question. We dated for two years this way, she flying out nearly every month (she was working freelance), and me flying out to New York about twice a year.

A few months before my project ended, I was fortunate enough to have an interview with a small consulting firm. After being offered the job in late September, I put in my notice, and left my old job 1 month after the ERP project went live. I sold about 90% of my books, gave all of my household stuff away to friends and the Salvation Army, and packed what was left of my life into 14 boxes and a suitcase. On October 22, 2003, I boarded a red-eye flight to JFK, and was on my way to fulfilling #9 – Live in New York City.

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