The Blue-Eyed Bandit

This is the story of the blue french bulldog that stole my heart, became my quarantine muse, and inspired me to take the plunge on the rocky road to adopting a dog of my own.

The First Dog

I can’t remember the time I felt particularly connected to a dog since my very first—a black miniature poodle named Ziggy, whom we brought home when I was four years old. Ziggy would hold a legendary place in my childhood lore, so much so that my best college essay (one for Tufts), would feature him. “Tell us about the world you come from,” the question asked, and I told them about Ziggy, who had become Buddha-esque in his old age, soaking up the energy of the room in closed-eyed meditation, a perfect state of Zen for the Zendell household that was anything but.

He lived for tennis balls, and nothing would drive him wilder than a summertime in my grandmother’s backyard. As my aunts, mother, and grandmother, hip replaced, sipped peach iced tea, they watched me and my cousins return serve and hit the ball back and forth, with Ziggy chasing along. His ears pricked up and eyes lit up with every smack of the felt ball, his paws bled from the heat of the court and the quick changes in direction, and his mouth hung open, panting and happy—all the happier when that open mouth was stuffed with a fresh ball.

When I was a little bit older, my parents decided that Ziggy needed a companion to keep him young, and in the seventh grade, we picked up a new poodle from the same breeder out in Long Island. It was a trip made memorable as much for picking up a puppy as for being wine drunk for the first time in my life, as I downed the dregs of my parents’ wine-tasting glasses at some C-grade North Fork winery. The next morning, I was hung over as we went to the breeder to pick out the new addition to our family. Out of the pile of poodle pups, I preferred the tiny runt that curled up in my arms and slept. My mom chose the animated, energetic one that was jumping around and acting crazy. She’d name her Zoey and the dog would prove to be mentally unstable, biting my mother repeatedly, scarring her hands and sending her to the hospital for stitches on three occasions, one of which got so infected she got acutely ill. Awful as Zoey was, she did keep Ziggy young and had another attribute that was remarkable as her temperament: she had an iron stomach that handily digested socks, camera straps, rubber bands, and the foam pad off a Total Gym exercise apparatus.

Ziggy passed away while I was in college, and my mom quickly replaced him with Louie (who I like very much), and Pepper (who replaced Zoey once she could hardly walk, was blind in both eyes, and, still vicious as hell with her blunted teeth, was finally put to sleep). None has quite compared to the original model, so to speak. Louie, while wonderful, didn’t capture my heart and imagination in quite the same way—probably because my mom got him after I’d long left home and as a replacement for Ziggy once he died, and while Ziggy was ‘my’ dog, the others were my parents’ dogs.

I thought, for much of my adult life living alone in Boston—and then, co-habitating—that I would much rather spend my money and time on myself than I would on a pet. I didn’t envy vet trips that friends told me about in which they’d spent thousands on their cat swallowing a rubber band or their dog needing their anal glands extruded. I always thought my mother’s frequent trips for grooming the dogs were excessive and the fees outrageous. Why spend so much money and time getting these dogs groomed only for the dogs to rip the bows out of their fur and tear the tiny bandannas to shreds in a matter of hours? You’d think my mother’s poodles were going to Westminster given how pampered and preened they are.

Even after living in multiple buildings and neighborhoods with very cute dogs in Boston, I didn’t see the appeal of the everyday caring and keeping of one of my own, especially in a small, metropolitan apartment. I didn’t envy every dog-owner in the city walking around with their leashes with the doggie bags attached, pausing to extract a green-brown compostable bag from the plastic bone vessel, opening the thing bag with its characteristic crinkle, and then wrapping their hands in the tiny green bags and picking up warm shit.
 
What would ever possess me to acquire a creature that—for the next 8+ years—would be a reliable mess: vomiting in the car, peeing on the carpet, destroying socks and shoes and underwear and furniture, becoming a source of additional insurance and liability and medical expenses, even adding to my own vacation expenses on account of needing to put him up in an expensive ‘hotel’ stay at a doggie resort?

I don’t know. I blame quarantine for turning me into the kind of person who might low-key create a photo shoot calendar of my future furball. 

From the classic ‘Best in Show.’

Pet-ception

The inkling of a pet began back in March as my boyfriend and I began the adjustment to living and working and doing every other waking thing at home.. The window to the courtyard in our building became my anchor to reality and a source of comfort—one that couldn’t be found in the stream of Zoom calls, on the endless insta-scroll, on any news outlet, or in my own head, thinking through the ways the world had changed forever and my own life forced to adapt along with it.

At the beginning of quarantine, I did these frustrating interval workouts at the beginning of the workday, seizing the cool, quiet light of dawn in early springtime, and as I did, I watched all the pet owners in our building take their dogs out for their first walk of the day. People stayed indoors and did as they were told per the Massachusetts guidelines—”SHELTER IN PLACE,” they told us—but they had to take their dogs out for walks. It would be cruel and inhumane not to.

From our window, I watched the season turn from the marshy rain-snow-extended-winter that is March into proper springtime, with the trees outdoors blooming and the rent expenses applied toward manicuring the hedges and mulching the soil. As my entire life spent between an office and a gym got redirected toward home, I felt a deep sense of emptiness that bottles of wine, bountiful puzzles, and a nonstop queue on Netflix couldn’t quite fill—but the dogs could. I took readily to the dog-watching and found myself amused by the daily show:

There was the beagle, with his floppy ears and erect tail, with his primary walker, a chubby Chinese guy with a reddish-dyed mullet and Balenciaga slides, walking his dog in the fashionable styles and trappings of the Sino-American nouveau-riche.

Then there was the tiny poodle mix, a rusty-colored pup whose dad was an Indian man, I think, and in the medical profession, as he always walked the pup in his full scrubs.

There was also a fluffy, snowy-white Samoyed, whose name, we’d discover, was Walt, but Walt was shy and unsociable. Much as I wanted to pet Walt, Walt had no interest in letting me do so. He scuttled away, looking at me with one eye from behind the leg of his owner, attempting to be furtive and acting as if the enormous, fluffy mass of him was somehow invisible to me behind his owner’s scrawny leg.    

Then, one morning, there was a pup that stole my heart. The tiny blue French Bulldog that would rank as highly as Keytar Bear in my Boston-based life as a source of joy and omen of hope and positive things to come. His name was Marty. He looked a little like this girl who went viral for eating her way out of a watermelon—adorably.

The Marty Chronicles

The first time we saw Marty outside our window must have been in April. His owners were typical yuppies—the man wore his backwards hat and basketball shorts, and the girl, pale, slender and wore trendy joggers or (shocker) yoga pants as they split responsibilities for walking their tiny puppy outside. The most notable thing about the otherwise-basic owners was their dog, who was too tired to do anything after doing his business. He would lie flat on the ground, exhausted, and wait for one of his owners to collect his tiny body (with an oversized head) in their arms and take him back home.

“Aww, he’s so cute and small—and so tired all the time!” my boyfriend and I exclaimed. Soon enough, we found ourselves excitedly waiting for the next moment we’d see the puppy again.

For the following months, my boyfriend and I would go on “Marty Watch” and alert the other if we happened to spot Marty “in the wild” of the tiny courtyard. We watched him grow and take a few more steps each time he went on a walk before, inevitably, plopping down to rest and having one of his owners carry him inside. One day, we squealed with delight as we heard a dog bark down the hall and, wondering if it was him, confirming it was, indeed, Marty, as his owners opened the door and the little blue-eyed heart-bandit emerged. We watched him fight a much larger dog (including Walt) and playfully nip at one closer to his size, cheering him on in both cases. I nearly teared up with pride at a dog that wasn’t my own when Marty made it for a full walk without needing to be carried at the end of it. Our boy (that totally wasn’t our boy) was growing up!

I had two choice moments of meeting Marty in person, and it totally lived up to the hype.

The first was around the Fourth of July. I’d choked previously when my boyfriend crafted this scheme. This time, I knew it was now or never. The plan was to collect and take out all my cardboard recycling—which you’re supposed to take to the dumpster and not drop in the trash chute—and, on the way back from disposing my corrugated cardboard, strike up conversation and try to meet Marty.

I tried to play off the sweating to the humidity and the summer heat, even though I was definitely sweating out of nervousness of attempting to pet the little dog I’d quietly watched, coveted, and adored from my window for months. I’m surprised I didn’t trip in front of Marty and his owner, falling headfirst into my bundle of household recyclables. I tried to play it cool, slowly walking to the dumpster, and, depositing the box filled with empty Tide bottles and cans of cider, made the short return trip into the notorious courtyard. Marty, who had been near the uppermost corner of the yard, was now in the corner nearer to me, and had come into my path close enough for me to coolly ask the owner, “Your dog is so cute! Can I pet him?” I asked, “What’s his name?” even though I already knew his name. I don’t even know how I knew his name—my boyfriend or I must have overheard it.

He was bigger than I’d imagined and squirmier than I thought he’d be, and when I bent down to pet him, he licked me cleanly on the chin. In the same way that people talk about shaking celebrities’ hands and not wanting to wash their hands again, I felt the same about Marty’s little kiss. I didn’t want to wash my face again. When my coworkers asked me how my quarantine weekend number 12 was, I said it was my best one yet because I’d met Marty. I explained that if they’d been on a call with me where I had a big smile or gesture of awe and joy on my face and was clearly carrying my laptop to another place inside the apartment, it was because I’d seen the little, joyful, grey furball that was Marty.

The second meeting with Marty was one morning as I was preparing to go to the gym. I’d already left home once since I’d forgotten something in my apartment. I like to think it was a twist of fate that I needed to go back home and then attempt to leave a second time, because those extra minutes were the difference of a major Marty moment happening—or not. I walked toward the end of the hallway and heard the jangle of a collar and saw a tiny grey blob in the distance. It paused and took me in its gaze. “No way,” I thought. But the puppy and I locked eyes and I knew, squealing inside my head, “AAAAH! YAY! IT’S MARTY!” His owners called him back, but instead, he rushed up to me and greeted my with joy.

Had I gone mad that I was melting over a dog that costs over $6,000, is notoriously high-maintenance, and was happily beloved (even if frustrating for his owners), and, to reinforce the point, wasn’t even mine? Maybe. Or maybe it was the sign I was ready for a dog of my own.

Gimme Shelter

Last weekend, the unthinkable happened, the thing that my boyfriend had joked about for months in order to get a sad rise out of me: “What would we do without Marty?”

I was in Chicago when I heard the news in a sad text from my boyfriend: “Marty is moving, confirmed :’(” It would become a household tragedy—Marty’s owners were moving. There would be no more speculation of what foods Marty enjoyed, what he thought about all day, how we might get the chance to pet him again, or joke about ways that we would steal him and give him a better life than his current owners—filled with tummy rubs, wagyu in his kibble, and endless carrying if he never wanted to walk again. My boyfriend and I texted back and forth over the tragedy, and the words I never expected to speak came out of my iMessage bubble. “WHAT. OMG NO. MY HEART,” followed by, “I guess we need to get one of our own.”

Starting that evening, we began investigating dogs for adoption, and any illusions I had of the process being simple or straightforward were immediately dismissed. Petfinder.com (which may as well be PetTinder.com) showcased thousands of dogs in shelters near and far, posturing pups with their very best information and smiling, slobbering faces.

Working in eCommerce, I thought about how this exercise of browsing a pet marketplace was not a particularly optimal one—too many clicks, slow-loading, inaccurate filters that didn’t stick from load to load. I wondered about the ways pet-finding experience could become more frictionless, but reminded myself that, unlike buying a pair of shoes, this experience is probably supposed to be harder (in the spirit of finding the right home for the dog) and had a much less lenient return policy.

Hearkening back to my own Tinder experience, I felt like I needed to re-apply my old habits from dating platforms to the occasion of finding a dog—reminding myself to read through the actual description, not purely judge on looks, and be open-minded when it came to “finding the one” that was meant to be ours. Amusingly, I probably had more restrictive criteria for choosing a dog than I ever did for choosing a match on Tinder—after all, picking a dog implied commitment, whereas swiping right made no such promises. It could turn into commitment, but was little more than confirmed flicker of interest (ideally while sober).

My dating wish list, if I were to summarize it in retrospect, was something like “Takes care of himself, employed, smart, caring, goal-oriented, not intimidated by me. Ideally taller and bigger than I am. Respectful. Not an asshole.” I was pretty open to what that outcome would look like and wasn’t terribly prescriptive.

Meanwhile, for a dog, our criteria were pretty discrete for determining compatibility. It couldn’t be a big dog (since our apartment space wouldn’t be comfortable for one) or a pitbull mix (liability), and ideally it wouldn’t be one that shed terribly. It had to be a dog that could tolerate being alone for 2 hours a day while my boyfriend and I went to the gym and could be trained not to destroy or urinate on everything while we were out. For my boyfriend’s sake, it couldn’t be a dog that required frequent exercise outside of short walks—he wasn’t planning to go on 5K dog walks on the daily. Ideally, the dog was already trained so we could spare that expense. We had a shortlist of breeds.

I’d never thought of all the potential criteria that could come into play when choosing our best ‘fur-iend.’ I began to wonder if my mom had chosen poodles all her life because, aside from ‘hypoallergenic,’ it was easy to continue picking the color, breed, and size of dog she’d already lived with again and again instead of having to further analyze and evaluate the considerations of a new, different breed.

Much like Tinder, some dogs were clearly popular and swept up instantly, having their inverse “pick of the litter,” so to speak when it came to adopters. The cute, moths-old, previously-housebroken dachshunds and frenchies with perfectly-lit and composed pictures closed themselves for adoption within hours. The older, infirm dogs, the mutts with touches of Pitbull and sea of lab/retriever mixes lingered online, day after day, sad, living, unadopted inventory.

Unlike Tinder, saying ‘yes’ to a given pooch was less like ‘swiping right’ and more like writing a college application, with requests for references, information on your lifestyle and extracurriculars, and even short essays on what makes you an ideal adopter, and why you deserve this particular dog. We applied for Badu the dachshund, Clemmy, the Italian Greyhound mix, and, a fan favorite, Bobo, the Boston Terrier. We still haven’t heard any replies, but we’d be happy with any one of them. I wondered if it would become worth hiring someone to review our dog adoption application or otherwise provide consulting services for how to write a winning pitch. The applications were becoming a source of self-doubt. Is it bad that I don’t know what kind of leash to use? That I can’t build a small fence in our apartment courtyard? Are these things dealbreakers? Is it bad that we’ve never owned a dog before and that we don’t have kids? What are the good and bad things in our favor and what on earth are these questions getting at?

This story is to be continued as we eventually get called (I hope) by one of the many shelters and agencies to which we’ve applied all over New England. I’m uncertain as to who will be inspired by our pitch and give us the gift of our very first dog. But most of all, I’m surprised that I am in a state where I am prepared to spare no expense—just like my mother, like everyone in the building, and like every other basic dog-owner—to make some creature other than myself or my partner the happiest thing alive. 

PS: As I write this—and as I previously told others about Marty—I realize that I sound like a complete weirdo obsessed over someone else’s dog. But in the absence of places to go or better things to do with the state (and country) locked down, can you blame me for my heart and imagination being captured by this creature?