On Wednesday, August 24th 2011, I was sitting on my back stoop. It was a beautiful day. Sun was out and there wasn’t too much humidity yet. I can remember feeling, for the first time in 18 months, relief. My girl’s father had moved out three weeks earlier and I had an agreement in place and everything was signed and approved. My mother and Sam were still alive and I remember feeling the sun on my face. I also remember saying thank you to God for this feeling of everything being just so. My beautiful little girl was weeks away from Kindergarten. She was playing in her frog shaped sand box when all of a sudden things changed.
“Hey, hey you little girl, come here. Is this your ball?”
Those words changed everything. They were uttered by a neighbor who lived in back of me. He didn’t know I was sitting there watching my child and decided to approach my fence. My girl froze in fear. I stood up and began yelling for him to get the fuck away from my fence and don’t EVER speak to my child again. He stumbled and said that he had this ball in his yard and was just seeing if it belonged to her.
“Bullshit.”
My peace was short lived and I was pissed. How dare he or anyone scare a child like that and how many others has he scared or worse. The first thing I do is go on a bunch of watchdog websites and plug in his address. There was nothing on record. The second thing I did was call my sister. My brother-in-law, over protective as he is, gets on their other phone and starts pricing out alarm systems. That day I talked to alarm companies and decided to make another call. I called my friend Cherry.
Cherry is not her real name. Cherry comes from the fact that she is a motorcycle riding lesbian with a talent for spoken word and knotting cherry stems with her tongue. She likes to do this to uptight suburban women in front of their husbands. This is one of the million reasons I love her and am glad she is my friend. She is also a very responsible dog breeder and trainer. I called her and asked her if she ever decided to breed her Belgian Malinois to please let me know. I would buy one of the pups. Well, she tells me it just so happens that her dog is due any day and she would let me know.
Literally days later, the pups arrive. She holds one of the tiny pups in her hand and says,
“Behold your dog.”
I told her prior that I told Cherry I would take the runt and only if it was female. I got the first of the litter because my dog was born with a broken tail and I left it like that because, at that time, I felt we all had broken tails.
My mother died nine weeks later on Halloween. The following Monday, November 7, I got my dog. I named her Valentine after a character in a movie and gave her the middle name of Marie because we are an Italian-Catholic household and you must have at LEAST one Saint’s name.
That is how my beast got here. It hasn’t stopped the pervert from the back fence. On April 24th I have to go to dog court, AGAIN. You got it, my dog is a criminal. Why? I will tell you why, BECAUSE SHE BARKS. Seriously, she does. You know what she barks at squirrels. You know who feeds squirrels off of his back porch? The pervert neighbor I will call Noballs. He has me in the biggest catch 22 ever. See, unless I can capture him on film feeding squirrels and then prove that the squirrels in question are the squirrels my dog is “excessive howling or barking” at, I am just another crazy lady yelling at her dog in an oversized bathrobe while drinking coffee. I am fucked. I will be honest; I am not above trying to enact revenge. I would do this I just don’t have the equipment or the time. The good news is that I am on a first name basis with most of the officers at animal control(except the one I made come down here last spring and collect “Mitch” the half eaten squirrel)and they have all met and played with my dog. I am dealing with a loon here.
The “excessive” part of the charge means that she was barking consistently for 15 minutes or more. She is never outside when I am not home and I can’t take her barking for 15 seconds before I tell her to knock it off. She is a good beast and I can pretty tell the outcome. I will go down to court. I will present all her papers and the two anti bark collars that she has managed to get off and chew and present them to me. I will tell the kind officers to just give me the fine and let’s call it a day. They will say if I can keep her out of trouble for 30 days that they will waive the fine and we will see each other again in six months.
Welcome to my world.
