Make-rovers

Photos by Tim Barber

If there’s one enduring symbol of pure, off-the-grid living, it is most definitely the street dog. Fuckin’ getting by on his natural wits, answering to no one, crashing under the stars every night—this is the way life was meant to be. Shit, I bet God himself spends most days just padding the pavement and letting ’em flop.

As penance for its freedom, however, this most real segment of the dog population is forced to endure the constant threat of capture and coerced adoption. A lot of people will try to stick up for Animal Control, saying things like “they provide a coordinated system for maintaining uniform standards of health and hygiene in urban cats and dogs and handling animal-related emergencies” and “Ed Bochs, the new director of New York Animal Care and Control has revolutionized this city—instating a no-kill policy for the first time in its history,” but come on, folks, authority’s authority. And tell me this: Have you ever once seen a cartoon dogcatcher that wasn’t a dick? Please.

In keeping with the theme of this issue, we decided to reaffirm our allegiance to the wild animal kingdom by hunting down the most scruffy, free-spirited dog locked up in the New York City shelter system, busting him out, and taking him to a swanky Manhattan pet salon to get tricked out in the latest electropunk / nouveau-hippie style, kind of like if Devendra Banhart was a dog and he joined the Scissor Sisters. Très now. We wanted to give an extreme makeover to our very notion of dogs.

We called up Richard Gentles, the director of New York’s Animal Care and Control Center, to get an idea of the kind of red tape they’d be throwing in our way. He evidently had no clue what kind of a punk-rock fashion explosion his little agency was in for, ’cause right off the bat he cheerfully agreed to help locate an appropriate pooch and arrange transportation for the project, claiming it would be a great way to not only raise public awareness of the city’s teeming shelters but also help line up a home for the dog in question. I could not fucking wait to see the look on everyone’s faces when their “lucky mutt” came trotting back up to its gray square cage with a row of liberty spikes and like eight ear piercings.
 

This is Shitzie outside the shelter. Here he is just before they “expressed his anal glands.” Under the freezing-cold fur-drying machine. You can adopt Shitzie yourself. New York Animal Care and Control is amazing. Check out nycacc.org.

After setting up an appointment with the manager of LeChien, the hot grooming spot at Trump Plaza, I rode up to the Manhattan Adoption Center to meet my prospective emblem of canine liberation. Chewbacca, a stray two-year-old shih tzu, was exactly the dog I was looking for: a 40-pound ball of natty, tangled fur and total fuck-off attitude just waiting to be let loose.

When we got to the salon, Chewie immediately caused a scene, completely freaking out all three groomers on the floor. Here was a real dog, not some pampered, hybrid purse rat. After giving his proud, untamed coat a nervous once-over, the head groomer fed us an obvious excuse (“This hair isn’t matted—it’s pelted to the skin. There’s no air getting under there, which could be causing all sorts of skin sores or hematomas. This is probably very painful”) and said he needed to be taken to a vet. Chalk one up for Chewie. Some people just cannot deal with the reality of nature.

So Richard helped to track down a replacement dog—another stray shih tzu, although this one was a great deal less frizzy. We could tell right away from his shivering and anxious barking that he’d been held captive from his native sidewalks and alleyways for a good while, but then one of the animal technicians said he’d only been picked up a few days before and hadn’t even been named yet. Weird.

Then we realized this dog would make an even better subject than the first, as the whole makeover process would reawaken his primal instincts and latent thuggery, effectively proving that no amount of cage-time or vaccines can take the street out of the dog. The first step was choosing a proper name. Shitzie came quick and effortlessly and somehow managed to offend our assigned technician, Luis, as “too rough” (welcome to a little place called New York, square).

Already reinvigorated by his christening, Shitzie took an improbably long piss and then shuffled over to the van to be loaded in. Having pretty thoroughly burned our bridges with LeChien, we headed to another Upper East Side dog salon, Karen’s, and met up with Donald, the groomer who would usher in Shitzie’s profound transformation. The first part of the process, shampooing, seemed to be going smoothly until suddenly, in the middle of lathering the legs and scrot, we caught Donald slide both thumbs right into Shitzie’s ass. Not on, right?

We let him know that type of shit was uncool with us, to which he lamely replied, “That’s just expressing the dog’s anal glands. You ever see a dog scoot around on his butt? Every time he goes to the bathroom, a little bit always gets left behind and can cause irritation, so what we do is just express it.” Oh.

After rinsing out his fur and giving him a few quick swipes with the eye-booger comb, Donald bundled Shitzie in a towel and took him over to his own little square platform to be dried and fluffed. In place of a conventional blow-dryer, the salon uses what they call a “force-dryer,” which is basically a big square compressor in the middle of the grooming room with four long vacuum hoses. Our growing concern that Shitzie’s “extreme” makeover was little more than frou-frou pampering was temporarily allayed when we felt the ice-cold air blasting his freshly washed fur.

“We have one force-dryer that does warm air more quickly,” Donald explained, “but we only use that for big or really hairy dogs. Shitzie doesn’t need that one.”

“Naturally,” we thought. A scrapper like Shitzie probably welcomes the feel of the cold winter wind like an old friend. Once his fur was dry, Donald gave him a complete brush-down to straighten his hair, then used what looked like an elongated hamburger masher to rake out the few hair mats on his legs and stomach.

“See how I hold the fur right at the body when I do this? That’s so I’m only pulling the fur and not tugging on the dog.”

Now that he was completely fluffed, the real magic could begin. Donald busted out the electric razor and asked us what kind of look Shitzie was going for. “I’d suggest a basic kennel cut, which is just using a nine- or ten-blade to get the fur good and short for summer, kind of like a crew cut,” Donald said.

Sure that’d be pretty comfy, but can you say “boring” while you make pretend you’re yawning really dramatically, please? This dog needed something that would mark him as an individual, not just another play-it-safe family mutt. We decided to give him a pair of furry shorts. Donald buzzed his front legs and torso down to the waist and then did his back paws up to the knees. Things were starting to shape up, but then he began trimming up Shitzie’s summer trunks with a pair of thinning sheers while saying, “I’ve got to get this excess hair off him or else he’s going to be really warm back here when he’s outdoors.”

Some people just don’t get it. Donald went back with the razor to appease us by adding a little belt line to demarcate the zones, but the damage was already done: what were once distinctive burly shorts had now been thinned into foppish pantaloons.

We tried to salvage some semblance of cool by asking for a devil-lock or a Dali mustache. “I can trim him a mustache like a schnauzer, but we don’t have any sort of product we can use to stiff it out,” Donald told us. Whoa, whoa, whoa—no gel at a salon? “People may dye their pets on their own, but there’s no way to tell whether or not any substance is going to irritate their skin or get into their eyes without causing the dog pain. That’s why there are no serious pet-styling products on the market.”

This was absurd. I called up Luis back at the shelter and asked him if he knew any human barbers that could pencil Shitzie in for a little detail work, like maybe getting “Dawggg” shaved into his side.

“You want to write graffiti on the dog,” he said. “No way. Besides, he has to get back to the center to be neutered.” Ah, cold! We tried to explain the plan to him (after all, he lives and works in Spanish Harlem, he had to know the importance of street cred). He seemed like he was going to go for it, but finally decided to defer back to Richard, who said, “Absolutely not, we’re trying find him a proper home and are not going to let you do anything to him that could potentially turn people off.” That’s it—the boss had spoken.

But what about those people not interested in your grandmother’s shih tzu? We could turn a whole generation on to an otherwise forgotten breed, right? Richard finally told me to speak with their PR coordinator, Rosemary.

“You want to shave a word into a dog, which we couldn’t even make sure would be safe or sanitary, and put something in its fur that is meant for people and could irritate its skin or nose, all for a crazy picture,” she asked. “Look, we just want all our animals to be comfortable and to find them a good home. I’m afraid taking the dog to a barber is completely out of the question.”

There you have it: the Man simply cannot understand what it’s like on the other side of the leash. Never has, and never will. Damn.

DEE O’GEESE
Thanks to everyone at NYCACC for dealing with this stupid joke. Visit NYCACC.org