Bonzo to Beefy

My life in dog years.

I got Bonzo on my seventh birthday. Later that afternoon, my stepfather took me to the circus, and we saw a baby elephant named Bonzo, too. It seemed like a good omen.

My Bonzo’s coat was a soft, thick carpet sample of black and chestnut, and he grew matted clumps of fur under his ears that Mum had to scissor off, leaving him with vestigial stumps, like dangling earrings.

One Thursday, a lady I’d never seen before rang our doorbell, sharply and several times. Flanked by two policemen, she told us that Bonzo had either bitten or lunged or just growled at her child. The police left with Bonzo in their car and took him to live in the country. I imagined him chasing geese with a rosy-cheeked farmer’s wife trimming his earrings. I never saw Bonzo again.

Hammy came from Switzerland. He lived in a small cage smelling of cedar chips, and he would stuff carrots and sticks of balsa wood into his cheeks until they bulged. One afternoon, when we were staying in a hotel near Rawalpindi, I let him out to stretch his legs. They were very tiny legs, and they looked like they could use some stretching, so he wandered free while my grandparents, unaware of Hammy’s newfound liberty, took me down to the hotel dining room. When we came back, Hammy was nowhere to be found.

Two days later, I was working a jigsaw puzzle on the carpet when Hammy waddled out from under the portmanteau to offer his assistance. I stuffed him back in his cage and from then on restricted his leg-stretching to the little exercise wheel bolted to the bars of his cage.

On the long drive back home to Lahore, we stopped to visit Herr Schwitzer, an engineer working on the Tarbela Dam. Frau Schwitzer wouldn’t allow “vermin” into her house, so Hammy had to stay in his cage, in the Mercedes, in the sunny driveway. After we finished eating our lunch of boiled chicken and cauliflower, Hammy wouldn’t get up and just lay there in the cedar shavings, his eyes closed, his body still. At the next rest stop, our driver took him, cage and all, and disappeared behind the chai stand. I never saw Hammy again.

Nicky was my grandparents’ dachshund. Though we lived in the same house, he certainly didn’t belong to me or particularly even like me, but he was a dog, and I was a boy, and we shared certain interests. When the front lawn flooded each monsoon, Nikky and I would chase each other back and forth, shouting and barking, while the head gardener yelled from the footpath, warning us to stay out of the rose beds.

When my mum came to Pakistan the next year, Nicky bit my sister Miranda’s cheek. She was 2, and she got 4 stitches. A month later we left for Israel, and I never saw Nicky again.

Pogo was the daughter of my great-aunt Shula’s Binga. I chose her from a cardboard box full of siblings and named her after my favorite comic strip. Her jaw grew undershot, like a cartoon bulldog, and her curly tail waved silky white streamers.

When Pogo went into heat, dozens of dogs lined up outside of our apartment building, howling, baying, and scrapping. Nine weeks later, she crawled under my bed and popped out a grab bag of pups, each a different color and shape. I lettered a sign in Hebrew, “Free puppies,” and by the end of the weekend, they were gone.

Pogo had one more litter before my family packed our belongings into a giant wooden crate, and we were all shipped from Haifa to Naples, then on to New York. Pogo traveled in a boisterous kennel in the belly of the SS Raffaello, and twice a day I would clip on her leash and walk her on the poop deck, aptly named.

Every morning when our family left for work and school, Pogo would slip out the front door to stroll the streets of Brooklyn Heights. As I walked back from school, I would often see her, across the road, heading in the opposite direction, but she always made it home in time for Gainesburgers and Milk Bones.

Pogo’s free-range ways ended abruptly when she moved with my mother to her boyfriend’s house in Westchester. Senile, half-blind, and unfamiliar with her new neighborhood, Pogo wandered out the door and never found her way home. Every day after work, I would take the train up to tape “Lost Dog” signs to the phone poles of Pelham. I never got any calls, and I never saw Pogo again.

When I was 25, I got a girlfriend who would become my wife, and feeling domestic, I went to the Jersey City Pound. I picked out a black-and-brown mutt, like a pint-sized German Shepherd, but with a laughing face and a sweet demeanor.

A friend in a bar told me that to house-train a dog, you should put the end of an (unlit) paper match under the tail with just the sulfur end hanging out. It would stimulate his butt to do his business in the street. Odd, but it worked on Frank.

I named him Francis Albert, after Sinatra. Frankie was the first dog who was truly mine. He slept on my bed and under my desk, and stood waiting for me by the door when I got off the PATH train from Madison Avenue. And he stayed by my side till he grew incontinent and befuddled, and Patti and I walked him one last time through Washington Square Park to the vet who took him behind the door, and I never saw Frankie again.

It was Patti’s idea to get a miniature dachshund. Joe was by far the most handsome dog I’d ever owned. In photographs, he looked like an Irish Setter. My boy Jack named him after a book about a dog he’d read called “Beautiful Joe.”

When Joe was a year old, we adopted his half-brother by another mother and named him Tim, because he was timid. Tim was worried and neurotic. Joe was handsome and not terribly smart. They made an odd couple.

Tim and Joe would ride on Patti’s electric scooter, Tim in her basket and Joe hiding underneath her skirts. If people walked too quickly towards Patti, Joe would stick his head out and bark ferociously, wagging his tail.

When Tim was nine, he ate a bellyful of sand in the dog run and was dead by dinnertime. We worried Joe would grieve for his lost brother, but he just lapped up the extra attention and treats and didn’t seem to notice Tim’s absence at all. He died of lung cancer just after he turned fourteen.

We mixed Joe and Tim’s ashes with Patti’s and buried them together. I’ve never seen any of them since.

Jenny and I decided to take a year-long hiatus from dog ownership, which stretched to three years, then four. When the pandemic locked us in our house, we decided it was finally time to get a dog again. Jenny’d had a pug when she was younger, and Lily was always her ideal of what a dog should be. I thought pugs were, well, pug-ugly, but Jenny sold me, and I started scouring the AKC website for breeders.

A Baptist minister in Compton sent us videos of the cardboard box full of puppies he’d bred in his living room. One puppy stood out, rambunctious, wild, constantly teasing and wrestling the mother and father pug. A real handful. Not for us.

By the time we drove across California, he only had two left. The first he brought out was meek and withdrawn, but the rambunctious one was still available, and so, of course, she was the one we ended up with. We registered her with the Kennel Club as “Twigle

t Delight Gregory.” Twiggy for short. Also Twigs, Beefy, and Beefer.

A year later, worried that Twig was lonely all by herself, we decided we should get a second unit. We heard about Clover (née Opal) from the San Diego Pug Rescue. Her previous owner had given her up because she was torturing her golden lab. Soon she began torturing Twiglet instead. Clover has caught a rabbit, jumped on the dining table, and pooped on our bed, but she makes me laugh every day.

Squealing and yapping, Twiglet and Clover woke me up just before dawn this morning, as they do every morning. They can’t wait a minute longer for breakfast and snacks and a walk around the neighborhood. Then they take a nap.

This record is incomplete. I’ve left out several gerbils, a 50-gallon tank of fish, several budgerigars, two cats named Waz and Minge, and a black puppy named Arkla, who died in her sleep at 8 weeks.

I’m not sure how many pets I’ve yet to own. But I can’t imagine living without a furry friend or two under my chair, on my pillow, or waiting for me by the front door.

Your pal,

Danny

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P.S. If this made you think of the animals in your life, join me for a live drawing workshop this Saturday, October 10, called “Let’s Draw Pets.” It’s three hours on Zoom, 9 am to noon Pacific, all levels welcome, with a replay if you can’t make it live. Twiglet and Clover will be in attendance, probably snoring. Sign up here

P.P.S. First time with Sketchbook Skool? Use the code NEW15OFFCOURSE for 15% off.