The Daddy Diary
Musings on Babies, Bulldogs, and Beer
Gus
Because I lost my little buddy last week, It seemed appropriate to share another excerpt from the book. This post is a little long, but Gus deserves an entire chapter to himself. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about Gus in the near future.
I wrote this over two years, and I had no idea at the time how true that last line would be.
Chapter 3: Gus – The Bulldog Beta Test
Since Michelle and I were both considered geriatric in terms of baby making, we thought it might take a while for us to get pregnant. We assumed that we would have to wait a year or two until my little swimmers did their job. We made the decision to move downtown into a high-rise loft figuring this would be the only chance we would have to live that urban lifestyle. It sounded like fun – not needing a car, walking everywhere, going to a different bar or restaurant every night, working our way through a line of panhandlers like a running back breaking through the line of scrimmage, watching drunks throw up in the street, driving at .01 mile per hour during rush hour.
We also decided that this would be a great time for me to start understanding the responsibility of caring for another living being. We got a starter baby – a dog. I never had a dog growing up, but I always wanted one when I was a kid. I never got one when I was single because it looked like a lot of responsibility, just another restraint. “Want to go to happy hour after work?” “Sorry, I have to go feed the dog.” “Want to drive to Austin for the weekend?” “Sorry, I can’t find anybody to take care of my dog.”
Michelle and I had a top five list of the breed of dog that we wanted. German Shepherd was at the top of my list, Golden Retriever was at the top of Michelle’s list. Having a big dog in an apartment did not seem like it would be fun for anybody, so we both moved to number two on our list. We both had the same breed as our number two – bulldog. So, we got an English Bulldog. We named him Gus.
Our timing on both these decisions could not have been worse because it turns out my little swimmers are like the Dara Torres of procreation. She swam in the Olympics at age forty-one; we got pregnant one month after moving in.
What better time to get a dog than right before you find out you are going to have a baby. Raising a child is not challenging enough, so let’s throw a puppy into the game as well. You cannot control having twins, so the only way to ensure that you will have two toddlers at the same time is to get a puppy right around the time you find out that you are having your first child. Although I am not sure that any relationship counselor would advocate the approach, getting a pet is a fairly common method of preparing for children. It’s probably best to go through this step before you get pregnant because if you learn that you can’t handle the responsibility of owning a dog, raising children will be impossible. Once you are pregnant, it’s too late to learn whether you can handle it or not.
We chose a bulldog because we were looking for the most difficult animal to train in the history of the animal kingdom. We knew they had a reputation for being stubborn, but we wanted a medium-sized dog, and they seem really funny. I did not know at the time that owning the most stubborn animal in existence would be great practice for raising a toddler.
Plus, when I saw his puppy picture, I was hooked. Try not bringing that face home with you.
I got the first glimpse of parenthood the second day we had Gus. Michelle and I went to church, so we shut Gus in the bathroom (with food and water, do not call the SPCA). When we came home, I went straight to the bathroom to check on my little buddy. When I opened the bathroom door, I saw Gus sitting behind the toilet with his face in the corner. When he turned around, I saw the saddest face I had ever seen. He looked up at me, I could read his eyes. “I didn’t think you were coming back,” they said. My heart melted into my stomach. It was the first time I felt my heart melt. It would not be the last.
Right there I vowed that I would never leave him alone again. My vow lasted exactly twenty-one hours when I left for work the next day I knew at the time it was a vow I couldn’t keep, but these are the things you tell yourself to feel better in the moment.
Owning a puppy prepared me for parenthood by helping me learn to function on little to no sleep. Nobody told me that buying a puppy is just like buying a living alarm clock except you don’t get to decide when the alarm goes off every morning. Apparently, Michelle and I bought the 3:41 a.m. model. Every morning at 3:41, Gus would let us know that it was time to play. And our wake-up call came after waking us up several times during the night for other biological reasons.
Out of the five senses, I usually get woken up by sight, sound, or touch. But once I had a bulldog, I had to get used to another awakening sensation – smell. I actually got woken up by a smell. I am not an expert on modern weaponry, but I cannot imagine anything more lethal and powerful than bulldog gas. I think the war to end all wars will not be fought with guns and bombs but with aerosol cans of bulldog gas.
In college, somebody told me that a great way to make sure that you wake up in the morning is to put your alarm clock across the room from your bed. This way, you have to walk across the room to turn the alarm off, ensuring that you will stay awake. I disproved that theory when I discovered that I could easily walk across the room, turn off the alarm, walk back across the room, climb back into bed, and fall asleep. Gus solved this problem by leaving little (not so little anymore) “secondary” alarms throughout the room. I have found that nothing wakes me up faster than the feeling of a moist dog turd oozing between my toes. A close second is walking through dog pee with socks on. The effectiveness of these alarms is that they wake everybody up. Instead of a constant beeping sound, they use high-decibel profanity.
I get embarrassed easily and live my life with the determined goal of going out in public and never having anybody notice me. I quickly learned that owning a dog was not going to help me achieve that goal. Apparently, dogs do not have a problem with embarrassment. (I would later learn that toddlers do not either.) When I was single, I would quietly judge dog owners when their canine companion would do something embarrassing like relieve themselves in public, and I vowed that I would never be that person. I was never going to be that guy. It took less than a month of owning a dog for me to become that guy.
Because we lived on one of the upper floors of a high-rise apartment building, we had to take Gus down seven floors to the community dog run whenever he had to go to the bathroom. We would take the elevator down to the ninth floor, and then walk down the hallway that led to the outside social area, which included the pool, grill area, and dog run. You do not want to be the owner of the dog who relieves himself in that or any heavily trafficked hallway.
One morning I took Gus down, but he did not pee when he got to the dog run. He had not peed in the apartment and he had not been outside since the night before. I knew he could not hold it all night long, so fear and dread crept in as I realized that he must have gone somewhere along the way. I didn’t bring any cleaning supplies with me, so I thought I would do the most neighborly thing possible and just pass it off as someone else’s dog. After all, there were a lot of dog owners in the building, and nobody else was around at this moment. “Nope, you just saw us at the dog run. Gus made it all the way there. Must be someone else’s dog.” My plan was flawless except for one minor detail – Gus was the only bulldog in the building and bulldogs waddle when they walk. As I took Gus back down the hallway to the elevators, I saw the canine smoking gun – a zigzag trail of dog pee that ran the entire length of the hall. Little Gus completely emptied his bladder and didn’t even break stride.
I was officially that guy.
I had to apologize to everyone I passed in the hallway as I frantically ran back to the apartment to get floor cleaner and a mop. But here is what I noticed – while I was mopping the floor, every dog owner who passed me just half-smiled and gave me that nod. No judgment. No scorn. They had all been there and knew the feeling. Everyone just gave me that look that said, “I know, man. I know.” I remember hoping that parenthood had the same secret agreement when my kid cries on the airplane or throws themselves on the ground during a tantrum in public.
Tough Love
There is no definite playbook for disciplining children or dogs. Everyone is overly eager to share his or her experience as if it should be written in a textbook. There are guidelines from experts and people have written books about things that worked for them, but pet (and child I would learn later) is a little bit different, so you frequently have to call an audible and change the play.
We tried some of the common disciplinary tools that you can find in any pet store. Some might seem cruel to some people, but sometimes parents just need results. Gus would not stop chewing the Christmas tree, so we bought a little shock collar. The collar came with a hockey puck-shaped beacon that went under the tree. If the dog came within two feet of the beacon, it would send a small electronic pulse to the collar and shock the dog. Then, the dog would learn to avoid that area, and you could eventually remove the collar. Nice theory. We placed the collar on Gus and turned on the beacon. Within seconds, he went straight to the tree because defying authority is in his genetic makeup. He proceeded to pick up the beacon in his mouth, carry it to the corner of the room and chew away. According to the monitor, the collar was working, so Gus was being shocked the entire time. Gus don’t care about no electronic shock. I guess the shock was worth the joy of chewing something new to pieces. Okay, common tools were not going to work, so it was time to enlist professional help.
We hired a dog trainer to come to the apartment and work with Gus. He had trained with Cesar Milan, the “Dog Whisperer,” so we got an education about the mentality of dogs. Little Gus basically defied everything that the dog trainer told us. “Dogs aren’t vindictive,” he told us. I had to enlighten him with the story about the time I scolded Gus for doing something wrong, and I put him in his crate for a couple of minutes. When I opened the penalty box to let him back in the game, he walked to the pee pad, which was sitting right outside the door of his crate. Gus proceeded to push the pee pad against the wall, and then took a dump in the exact location where the pee pad was previously sitting. And he made sure to maintain eye contact with me the entire time just to reinforce the fact that this was not an accident. I could tell that the battle for alpha in our house was going to last longer than the Vietnam War. Every man wants to be king of his castle, but I was quickly learning my place. I knew that if any of our children were girls, I would only be hoping for a solid third-place finish at best in my home. Now I found myself behind the dog. I would be playing for the household sportsmanship trophy for the rest of my life.
Since that incident, I’ve noticed that my bulldog has the gastrointestinal superpower to always have a turd in the chamber because he can fire off a revenge poop within three seconds any time he feels like his authority is challenged.
Before I had a bulldog, I never got to experience situations like coming home from work and saying, “Who tracked mud in the house? There was nobody home all day.” until I realized that the Roomba ran over a Gus turd and dragged it all over the house.
When I found him sitting in his bed, he looked up at me and his sad puppy dog eyes said, “I’m sorry, Daddy.” I quickly forgave him after seeing the look in his eyes. To this day, I have not forgiven the Roomba.
We also tried the crate-training method to potty train Gus. Dog trainers claim this method works because dogs will not pee in their bed. The dog gets used to holding it because he does not want to pee in the same place where he sleeps. That makes perfect sense in any house other than ours. Our sweet little bulldog will just pee in his crate and take a nap while lying in his piss. That is a special kind of lazy.
Gus still marks everything in the house that he possibly can. You would think after three years he would understand that he owns the entire place and does not have to prove that to anybody. Granted, he hasn’t paid his share of the bills, but he still feels the need to remind us that this is his territory, which is why we have three categories of laundry in our house– whites, colors, and things that Gus has peed on. I will let you guess which category gets washed most frequently.
Through time, I have come to notice that Gus does not like to share. His motto is “Su casa es mi casa.” Everything in the house belongs to Gus. To date, we are on our 16th remote control. We found that it is cheaper to buy a new Amazon Fire Stick with a remote control than a standalone remote control. In a few years, we should be able to provide enough Fire Sticks so my entire home state of Mississippi will have access to streaming services. We wish Amazon offered “subscribe and save” service so we could just get a few remote controls automatically delivered every month. In fact, Amazon should offer a subscription package for bulldog owners. Every month they would automatically send you five remote controls, four pairs of shoes, 3 dining room chairs, two windowsills, and an area rug.
All these anecdotes make it hard to explain why I love Gus so much. Despite everything I have said, I could not love that little punk more than I do. I say little, but somehow at night a bulldog can defy the laws of physics, geometry, and personal space and take up more room on a queen-sized bed than two grown adults. Before we brought Gus home, I vowed never to let an animal sleep in the bed with me. That policy was doomed from the beginning. When there is a thunderstorm outside and your dog jumps up on the bed to snuggle between his people, how does momma say no to that? And who else in my family gets so excited when I come home that they run to the door and shake feverishly? That fact alone warrants some space in our bed every night.
Gus taught me lessons that would later prove useful when raising a toddler. I learned that a sign of loving someone is the inability to stay angry at them, no matter how bad they act. As difficult as he can be, I am sure that I will be heartbroken when he is gone and I’ll miss the puddles of pee and piles of poop that he left for me.
One Comment on “Gus”
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The Daddy Diary 
Oh such a sweet story. Gus was truly blessed to have you as his family. Unless you have had a bulldog it is hard to understand how different they are. Our Winnie was like Gus except she was rarely gassy which was a blessing. Someday I hope to get another one. We now have a Havanese and he is wonderful and does not shed. Just don’t get a Yorkie. We had several and they are worse at potty training than any bulldog. RIP Gus look for Winnie she will be waiting for you
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