Free Howl by Bark Editors Page B

street and took him home and then I gave him a bath. Where should I send him?”
    “You need to get in touch with the Humane Society,” said the man on the other line.
    “OK.”
    “And, because you handled the dog, you might have mange.”
    “What?”
    “Mange. Scabies. You should check with your doctor in two weeks. It usually doesn’t set in for a month to six weeks. And if you have it, then everyone you come into contact with will get it too.”
    “Are you saying I shouldn’t touch anybody for a month?”
    “Just to be safe.”
    “Mange?” I said. “Are you
sure
I’m going to get mange?”
    “Go to your doctor,” he said. “You have mange.”
    This seemed impossible. I’d bathed the dog with disinfectant shampoo and washed my hands afterward. I’ve come into contact with stray dogs many times. And yet mange is not on the list of diseases I’ve contracted. Nevertheless, I ran home in a panic.
    “We have mange,” I said to Regina.
    “What?” she said.
    “You need to take off all your clothes and put them in the washer.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “Do it! NOW! And take off Elijah’s clothes, too! And Hercules’s collar!”
    “Oh, come on.”
    “Dammit, Regina,” I said. “We have mange! Mange!”
    “Nooooo!” said my son. “I’m cold. I don’t want to take off my clothes!”
    If anyone is trying to decide whether or not to become a parent, let me provide you with this image: Regina and I forcibly undressing a three-year-old because his clothes might be infected with mange. If that doesn’t dissuade you, let me try another image: All three of us in our underwear, shivering, afraid of having contracted mange, and watching
Monsters, Inc.
    What the hell were we doing here?
    We quickly determined that Hercules’s heartworm medicine protects him from mange. Also, we learned that while people can contract mange, it’s an entirely different disease from the one that afflicts dogs. So we were safe. By the time we went to bed, our frenzy of disinfecting had ended.
    That night, the French girl took her sad mutt to a shelter. A couple of days later, Regina came into my office bearing a concerned look.
    “I’m worried about that dog,” she said. “Will you call the shelter?”
    Some dogs are born into families that dress them in argyle sweaters and feed them steak, while others are destined to walk the earth in misery, desperate for the sweet relief that death provides. It’s never pretty when you run into one of the latter dogs. I called the shelter. Of course they’d put the dog down immediately.
    Rather than putting us off from dogs, this incident actually made us like them even more. Regina started sidling up to me, just as she had right before we adopted Hercules. She put her head on my chest. She stroked my hair.
    “Puppy, puppy, puppy,” she said. “Puh-peeeeeee! Puh-leeeeese! Puppy!”
    “Oh, God,” I said. “Not again.”
    “They’re so cute.”
    “We don’t need another dog,” I said.
    “Of course we do,” she said.
             
    As of this writing, we’re still a one-dog family. That probably won’t be the case by the next writing. Recently, we put in an application online for a Boston Terrier named Shaq, but he had a dozen other suitors and we lost him. We found an adorable little Pug named Ella whom we liked, but to acquire her we had to go meet her at a fair, which we found out about too late. Regina liked another Boston named Chloe, who sounded cool from her online description. I rejected Chloe because she had a nasty-looking overbite. My wife was getting frustrated.
    “It’s just so hard to find a dog in L.A.,” Regina said.
    Not true, I told her. Dogs are ubiquitous here if you want them. You just have to be prepared to deal with a little mange.

Dog Whores
    [Margaret Cho]
    I LIKE WET dog noses resting on my skin, and feeling the fine, downy soft hairs of a sweet muzzle underneath. I love dogs, mostly all dogs. Possibly one or two I have met in my