My most vivid memory of the now-famous Dave Portnoy involves running down the side of his house while his family’s dog, which I don’t think was big, barked at and chased me. I remember tears in my eyes. I was probably eleven or twelve years old. We had gone to his house either before or after Pop Warner football practice. That was the last time I ever went to Dave Portnoy’s house.
I remember walking down the hill across from the basketball court with my best friend beside me. We’re maybe ten or twelve years old. A sleek black dog shoots out from a driveway across the street to our left. Without care for my friend, I drop the basketball and streak down the hill. Before my heart beats twice, I am down the hill, across the busy street, and through the fence to (what I somehow imagine) is the safety of the basketball court. I don’t remember what happened behind me, but I know the dog did not attack my friend.
I’m maybe fourteen years old. I have a job washing dishes at a pizza joint within walking distance of my parents’ house. My oldest brother, a pizza-delivery driver, got me the job. Except for the owner, everyone who works there is from the neighborhood. I’ve known all of them (at least by reputation) my whole life.
The walk from work to home takes me past backyards I’ve played hide-and-go-seek in. I know which neighbors don’t mind kids on their property and which ones will yell at you. I’ve lost a good number of toys in these trees. This is my neighborhood and has been for (maybe?) fourteen years.
But for some reason, I don’t know the dog whose owner hasn’t tied it up on a property that doesn’t have a fence around it, nor do I expect the dog to dart from the shadows of those thick bushes like a monster from my nightmares; but my body knows it needs to run.
I decide which closest mother in which closest house will save me, and I run to her. I spent my formative years standing in the back vestibule of her apartment, hovering between the screen door to her backyard and the door to her kitchen, waiting for one of her two sons to come out and play with my brothers and me. Sprinting down the avenue, I hope she’ll be able to answer her front door before this dog, this monster I hadn’t known to be wary of, catches me between its jaws and violently ends my life.
My memory of this terrified sprint begins like a crane shot in a movie. A short, skinny teenaged kid races across the bottom of the frame only to be followed by an athletic dog on the chase. The memory smashes into my first-person perspective as I grab the metal railing at the bottom of my neighbor’s stairs and pivot my direction ninety degrees without losing momentum. I’m up the stairs in a bouncy-camera kind of way, and the camera looks back over my shoulder as the dog clumsily tries to make its cut without the benefit of the railing. Somehow I’ve wedged myself between my neighbor’s metal screen door already, shielding my body from the dog’s sure-to-be-blood-stained fangs. With one hand, I try to turn the black knob on my neighbor’s front door, and with the other, I pull the outer screen door tighter against me. I scream for help and beg at the top of my lungs for the dog to go away. The dog leaps at the door repeatedly. Its nails scrape against the metal; its snout pushes at the screen. The monster barks and barks.
I don’t want to die.
The door opens behind me, and I stumble backward into the front vestibule and into my friends’ mother’s plump body. She catches me before she knows who I am, and then a look of concern and confusion comes over her face as she recognizes me. The dog’s weight against the screen door slams it shut, and the dog barks and barks on the other side of it. I hear its desperate desire to mangle my body.
My friend’s mother looks out at the animal, brushes me aside, opens the door, steps out onto her porch, and commands the dog to go away. To my surprise, it does. It spins and bounds down the stairs with no animosity towards her nor any fear of her authority. From the bottom of the steps, the dog turns and looks up at me, and I realize it just wants to play. I look up at my friend’s mother, and I can see on her face that she’s embarrassed for me. I ask if I can stay for a little bit and catch my breath, but secretly, I’m giving the dog enough time to run back home.
“Of course,” my friends’ mother says.
I choose to wait in the vestibule.
My fear of dogs was a known thing in my neighborhood. The other parents knew that when I came over, they would have to put the dog “away.” Usually, they just let it into the backyard and that was that. If they forgot, I’d sheepishly ask my friends’ mothers if their dogs could go outside for a while or if it could get shut inside a room, and there would always be a look when I asked, a kind of eye roll or a “for god’s sake,” and even as a small kid, I knew they were embarrassed for me.
I remember sitting on the floor of the dining room of my friend’s house. We’re playing with our G.I. Joe action figures. His little gray dog, which they’ve “put away,” scratches on the opposite side of the door next to me. I remember trying my hardest not to ask my friend to put the dog in a different room, one that was farther away. I remember trying to be brave.
But I also knew that if he didn’t stop his dog from scratching at the door, the tiny little monster would rip through it and tear me apart.
My terror overwhelmed my ability to think. Terrified, I leaped from the floor, ran from his house, and burst down his hill. At the bottom, I turned left, dashed up my street and down my driveway. I charged up the steps, through the back door and across the kitchen floor. I sprinted down our three-step hallway, grabbed the wooden banister on my left to support my at-speed-one-eighty, then onetwothreefour double-steps up the stairs, onto the landing, and into my bedroom. I slammed the door shut behind me, creating one last irrational barrier between me and that terrifying, ankle-high, perfectly-loved, little gray dog.
I still don’t know what my friend thought happened.
Now I’m forty-four years old, and thanks to some beautiful people and their animals, I am no longer terrified of dogs.
I got over my phobia when I entered into a relationship with a young woman whose family owned a dog; love and lust can cause many a person to transcend their fears.
I remain in control of the fear because I recognized it as a phobia — specifically (as the Internet tells me), cynophobia. As such, I see it as just another symptom of my Generalized Anxiety and Panic disorders.
I am lucky enough (at the moment) to have (what I believe) are decent handles on my disorders. I still have panic attacks — the last one was bad enough that I woke my wife in the middle of the night to help me. Still, bad ones are few and far between, and the not-so-bad ones only result in an extended period of irritability (which I try my best [and often fail] to curb for the sake of my family, friends, students, and colleagues).
As I write this, our eleven-month-old dog snores on the couch next to me, her neck surrounded by a blue, blow-up, donut-shaped cushion that we hope will prevent her from tearing at the stitches where her ovaries used to be. I love the little bitch with all my heart.
Despite this undeniable, unconditional love, I daily imagine her cute, sharp teeth tearing the flesh and muscle from my cheek [FLASH] my daughter’s cheek [FLASH] my wife’s cheek. I see it clearly: her crazed, wonky, little eye looking down at me as her fangs tear my face. She doesn’t know what she’s doing — the animal has taken over.
Thankfully, though the anxious vision remains, its effect on me has changed. I don’t run from dogs anymore. I don’t ask my friends to put their dogs in different rooms. I put my face up to my dog’s snout dozens of times a day, and I fall asleep each night with her nails poking in my back. I pry Lego pieces from her mouth, hold her when she barks at the mail carrier, and wrestle with her at playtime.
I might imagine her ferocity, but I know: it’s only my fluid imagination (hey!, that’s the name of this blog!).
The love I feel for our dog makes me sad for the childhood I could have had.
My family owned dogs before I was born, but they didn’t have one when I came along. My oldest brother brought home a puppy when I was three or four, but it bit me too many times and was too much work for my parents to deal with (on top of the three boys they already had), so we got rid of it.
If I hadn’t developed my phobia, I might have begged long enough for my parents to try again. I might have grown up with a dog (or two) and learned the kind of love a child only learns from a dog.
Further, I might not have avoided my friends’ houses throughout elementary, middle, and high school and thus not missed out on critical moments of friendship building.
I might have…I might have…I might have.
But I didn’t.
Thankfully, now my daughter can.