My first load was a six pound chihuahua. The moment we were alone, the innocent cherub transformed into Cerberus, screaming and clawing at me. Neither food, nor toys, nor any other conventional instigator of canine playfulness could tame his maniacal fury. In the end, though, when I handed him over, teary-eyed, back into the arms of his owner, he had picked up some formidable new abilities, including the first of 12 techniques for scraping runny diarrhea from a city sidewalk.
It turned out that the rich are drawn to exorbitant prices like moths to a flame, and it was so that after I bumped my rates to three figures, the app started handing me one jeweled bug after another. I would drag a suitcase to the subway and, for weeks at a time, live in a stranger’s huge penthouse. I babysat a schnauzer for a real estate mogul who I was sure had CCTV cameras trained on me in the bedroom while he slept; a nervous French bulldog in need of Xanax for a Hollywood big shot; a trio of overweight dachshunds who had never set foot on the street below, had been trained, rather horribly, to relieve themselves on the balcony.
For everyone I knew, I was living some kind of magnificent fever dream, except for my parents, who found my second job humiliating. My mother grew up in a cold, sparse village in China, and she had studied and worked her entire life for me to avoid the kind of menial labor that involved pulling dead rats from the jaws of farmers. My dad, when he talked about taking care of dogs, he just shut up. It was only years later that he told me one reason he had been so reluctant to fulfill my childhood wish for a puppy: When he was much younger and poorer, he bonded with a stray puppy who eagerly followed him around the corner. his family’s house. on the rural outskirts of Beijing. One day, the austere government policy forced his family to kill the beloved mongrel who, until then, had been his best friend. According to local custom, to honor his life, they ate him for dinner. He cried for days. The name he had given the dog was Gou, or in English Dog.
Here’s a partial list of things I learned from being a dog sitter for New York City’s wealthy elite: various ethically shady stock tips; a Rolodex of niche glassware designers favored by CEOs; the exquisitely haughty expression that allows you to stroll down a white-glove lobby, barefoot, in your pajamas, without raising an eyebrow. During that decade, I wandered through hundreds of lifetimes, learning how wealth speaks, travels, and warps, but learned nothing about what it means to nurture, nurture, another living creature.
That didn’t happen until the pandemic hit, when an animal shelter I volunteered at asked me if I could take in a scared stray dog with deer ears that had just had a front leg amputated. The real dingo was not trained. He kept peeing on the couch. He was positively wild with strangers. Within weeks, he was filling out the adoption paperwork.