Our Dog the Abstract Expressionist

We have a pathetic little dog named Max. My wife acquired him years ago from some people who kept him on a short chain in their front yard through all kinds of weather, including the most inclement. Finally, Susan had enough of watching their neglect of the dog, knocked on their door, and asked them if they really wanted him. They admitted that they didn’t and gave him to Susan there on the spot.

But no good deed goes unpunished.

We believe Max is a poodle-schnauzer mix. Or something. He has long black and white hair and an extreme under bite that makes his lower jaw jut out, giving him the profile of a grouper. The protruding lower teeth are crooked and yellow. We don’t know how old he is.

He has cataracts and he sleeps with his eyes open. When he's asleep, his staring, cloudy eyes and his limbs splayed out in all directions make him look for all the world like he has shuffled off to the next plane. But so far he has never turned out to have been sincerely dead.

Max has no manners at all. Someone could say that’s our fault, and maybe it is, but I think his earlier life had left him largely untrainable by the time my wife rescued him. He erupts into barking fits at the slightest provocation and charges people who come to our door. It's embarrassing.

He's expensive to maintain, because he has allergy problems. The allergy problems and the scratching they provoke make him stink most of the time. You don’t have to get close to him to smell him; you can just walk into a room where he is and immediately want to do an about-face. My wife bathes him several times a week, but it seems like each bath kills the stink for only an hour or two. She takes him to the vet for cortisone shots for his allergies, but the vet says it’s dangerous to give the shots too often, so Max often suffers severely from the allergies near the end of the period of the shots’ effectiveness. And the harder he scratches, the more he stinks. When the shots stop working and we’re still waiting for the time to come when it’s okay to give the shots again, we can only rely on the allergy pills, hidden in Cheez-Whiz. They don’t work very well, but at least he enjoys the Cheez-Whiz.

Apparently, Max’s butt itches a lot, despite Susan’s diligence in keeping him medicated with worm medicine. So it’s not unusual to see him scooting along the floor to scratch his butt. It would be funny to watch if he were someone else’s dog in someone else’s house. For some reason it reminds me of the late Michael Jackson doing the moon walk.

Because Max has long hair, his feces occasionally get caught in the hair around his rear end. We send him to the groomer often to try to keep his hair short, but there’s only so much we can do. And my wife bathes him often. But still.

Most of the house has wood floors, and you can imagine that if you were a dog looking for a place to scratch your butt, you wouldn’t want to do it on a wood floor. Thus Max’s favorite, indeed exclusive place to scoot is the carpet at the entrance to our bedroom; he likes the nubby texture. I’m sure you can see where this is going. He’s got feces caught in his long hair. He scoots on the carpet. He leaves skid marks.

For a long time, it would gross us out when he left a skid mark on the carpet, and we would call the carpet cleaners right away (since our do-it-yourself efforts at getting the stain out never worked very well). But the carpet cleaners are expensive, and over time we’ve learned to ignore the skid marks for longer and longer periods before calling the carpet cleaners. And that means more skid marks accumulate, all in the same place.

There are more skid marks at the entrance to our bedroom right now than I believe there have ever been at any one time. In this most recent episode, I first noticed one brown line that started faintly at the edge of the carpet, grew darker and bolder as it extended further into the bedroom, curved, and then faded away. A few weeks later, I noticed another line that crossed the first and made a curving, loose, stylized “X.” Now this started to get my attention. Then another one or two short lines showed up, intersecting one of the two main lines of the “X.” Each line varied in thickness and darkness in soft, subtle ways, almost like calligraphy. And because there are several overlapping skid marks, I’ve started to see them as forming patterns--which means I’m looking at them as though they were art. The pattern of skid marks reminds me a little bit of the “action painting” of Jackson Pollock.

Jackson Pollock at work

Pollock was more extravagant than Max has been, though. Max takes a more minimalist approach.

MAX, Dogshit Composition No. 1, 2010

I should say it’s minimalist so far, since it’s a work in progress. I suppose if we tolerate it long enough before calling the carpet cleaners, it might start to compare with Pollock in the density of the work, and the carpet at the entrance to our bedroom might start to look like one of Pollock’s finished paintings.

JACKSON POLLOCK, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950

But I’m pretty sure we won’t let it go that far.