Animal come from, and how can we send himback?At the end of the day one of the assistants,
clipboard in hand, told us the shooting lineup was
still undecided for the next morning. “Don’t
bother coming in tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll call
if we need Marley.” And to ensure there was no
confusion, he repeated: “So unless you hear from
us, don’t show up. Got it?” Yeah, I got it, loud and
clear. Gosse had sent his underling to do the dirty
work. Marley’s fledgling acting career was over.
Not that I could blame them. With the possible
exception of that scene in The Ten Command-
mentswhere Charlton Heston parts the Red Sea,
Marley had presented the biggest logistical night-
mare in the history of cinema. He had caused who
knows how many thousands of dollars in needless
delays and wasted film. He had slimed countless
costumes, raided the snack table, and nearly top-
pled a thirty-thousand-dollar camera. They were
cutting their losses, writing us out. It was the old
“Don’t call us, we’ll call you” routine.
“Marley,” I said when we got home, “your big
chance and you really blew it.”
Marley & Me
❉ ❉ ❉
The next morning I was still fretting over our
dashed dreams of stardom when the phone rang.
It was the assistant, telling us to get Marley to the
hotel as soon as possible. “You mean you want him
back?” I asked.
“Right away,” he said. “Bob wants him in the
next scene.”
I arrived thirty minutes later, not quite believ-
ing they had invited us back. Gosse was ebullient.
He had watched the raw footage from the day be-
fore and couldn’t have been happier. “The dog
was hysterical!” he gushed. “Just hilarious. Pure
madcap genius!” I could feel myself standing
taller, chest puffing out.
“We always knew he was a natural,” Jenny said.
Shooting continued around Lake Worth for sev-
eral more days, and Marley continued to rise to
the occasion. We hovered in the wings with the
other stage parents and hangers-on, chatting, so-
cializing, and then falling abruptly silent whenever
the stagehand yelled, “Ready on set!” When the
word “Cut!” rang out, the party continued. Jenny
even managed to get Gary Carter and Dave Win-
field, the Baseball Hall of Fame all-star who was
making a cameo in the movie, to sign baseballs for
each of the boys.
John Grogan
Marley was lapping up stardom. The crew, espe-
cially the women, fawned over him. The weather
was brutally hot, and one assistant was assigned the
exclusive duty of following Marley around with a
bowl and a bottle of spring water, pouring him
drinks at will. Everyone, it seemed, was feeding
him snacks off the buffet table. I left him with the
crew for a couple of hours while I checked in at
work, and when I returned I found him sprawled
out like King Tut, paws in the air, accepting a
leisurely belly rub from the strikingly gorgeous
makeup artist. “He’s such a lover!” she cooed.
Stardom was starting to go to my head, too. I
began introducing myself as “Marley the Dog’s
handler” and dropping lines such as “For his next
movie, we’re hoping for a barking part.” During
one break in the shooting, I walked into the hotel
lobby to use the pay phone. Marley was off his
leash and sniffing around the furniture several feet
away. A concierge, apparently mistaking my star
for a stray, intercepted him and tried to hustle him
out a side door. “Go home!” he scolded. “Shoo!”
“Excuse me?” I said, cupping my hand over the
mouthpiece of the phone and leveling the
concierge with my most withering stare. “Do you
have any idea who you’re talking to?”
We remained on the set for four straight days,
and by the time we were told Marley’s scenes were
Marley & Me
all completed and his services no longer needed,
Jenny and I both felt we were part of the Shooting
Gallery family. Granted, the only unpaid members
of the family, but members nonetheless. “We love
you guys!” Jenny blurted out to all within earshot
as we herded Marley into the minivan. “Can’t wait
to see the final cut!”
But wait we did. One of the producers told us to
give them eight months and then call and they’d
mail us an advance copy. After eight months when
I called, however, a front-desk person put me on
hold and returned several minutes later to say,
“Why don’t you try in another couple months?” I
waited and tried, waited and tried, but each time
was put off. I started feeling like a stalker, and I
could imagine the receptionist, hand cupped over
the phone, whispering to Gosse at the editing
table, “It’s that crazy dog guy again. What do you
want me to tell him this time?”
Eventually I stopped calling, resigned that we
would never see The Last Home Run,convinced
that no one ever would, that the project had been
abandoned on the editing-room floor on account
of the overwhelming challenges of trying to edit
that damn dog out of every scene. It would be two
full years later before I would finally get my
chance to see Marley’s acting skills.
I was in Blockbuster when on a whim I asked
John Grogan
the clerk if he knew anything about a movie called
The Last Home Run. Not only did he know about
it; he had it in stock. In fact, as luck would have it,
not a single copy was checked out.
Only later would I learn the whole sad story.
Unable to attract a national distributor, the Shoot-
ing Gallery had no choice but to relegate Marley’s
movie debut to that most ignoble of celluloid
fates. The Last Home Runhad gone straight to
video. I didn’t care. I raced home with a copy and
yelled to Jenny and the kids to gather round the
VCR. All told, Marley was on-screen for less than
two minutes, but I had to say they were two of the
livelier minutes in the film. We laughed! We cried!
We cheered!
“Waddy, that you!” Conor screamed.
“We’re famous!” Patrick yelled.
Marley, never one to get hung up on pretenses,
seemed unimpressed. He yawned and crawled be-
neath the coffee table. By the time the end credits
rolled, he was sound asleep. We waited with
breath held as the names of all the actors of the
two-legged variety had scrolled by. For a minute, I
thought our dog was not going to merit a credit.
But then there it was, listed in big letters across
the screen for all to see: “Marley the Dog . . . As
Himself.”
C H A P T E R 1 7
In the Land of Bocahontas
❉
One month after filming ended for The Last
Home Run,we said good-bye to West Palm
Beach and all the memories it held. There had
been two more murders within a block of our
home, but in the end it was clutter, not crime, that
drove us from our little bungalow on Churchill
Road. With two children and all the accou-
trements that went with them, we were packed,
quite literally, to the rafters. The house had taken
on the pallid sheen of a Toys “R” Us factory out-
let. Marley was ninety-seven pounds, and he
could not turn around without knocking some-
thing over. Ours was a two-bedroom house, and
we foolishly thought the boys could share the sec-
ond room. But when they kept waking each other
up, doubling our nocturnal adventures, we moved
Conor out to a narrow space between the kitchen
John Grogan
and the garage. Officially, it was my “home of-
fice,” where I played guitar and paid bills. To any-
one who saw it, though, there was really no
sugarcoating it: We had moved our baby out into
the breezeway. It sounded horrible. A breezeway
was just a half step up from a garage, which, in
turn, was nearly synonymous with a barn. And
what kind of parents would raise their boy in a
barn? A breezeway had a certain unsecured sound
to it: a place open to the wind—and anything else
that might blow in. Dirt, allergens, stinging in-
sects, bats, criminals, perverts. A breezeway was
where you would expect to find the garbage cans
and wet tennis shoes. And in fact it was the place
where we kept Marley’s food and water bowls,
even after Conor took up residence there, not be-
cause it was a space fit only for an animal but sim-
ply because that’s where Marley had come to
expect them.
Our breezeway-cum-nursery sounded Dicken-
sian, but it really wasn’t that bad; it was almost
charming. Originally, it was built as a covered,
open-air pass-through between the house and
garage, and the previous owners had closed it in
years earlier. Before declaring it a nursery, I re-
placed the old leaky jalousies with modern, tight-
fitting windows. I hung new blinds and applied a
fresh coat of paint. Jenny covered the floor with
Marley & Me
soft rugs, hung cheerful drawings, and dangled
whimsical mobiles from the ceiling. Still, how did
it look? Our son was sleeping in the breezeway
while the dog had full run of the master bedroom.
Besides, Jenny was now working half-time for
the Post’s feature section, and mostly from home,
as she attempted to juggle children and career. It
only made sense for us to relocate closer to my of-
fice. We agreed it was time to move.
Life is full of little ironies, and one of them was
the fact that, after months of searching, we settled
on a house in the one South Florida city I took the
greatest glee in publicly ridiculing. That place was
Boca Raton, which, translated from the Spanish,
means literally “Mouth of the Rat.” And what a
mouth it was.
Boca Raton was a wealthy Republican bastion
largely populated with recent arrivals from New
Jersey and New York. Most of the money in town
was new money, and most of those who had it
didn’t know how to enjoy it without making fools
of themselves. Boca Raton was a land of luxury
sedans, red sports cars, pink stucco mansions
crammed onto postage-stamp lots, and balkanized
walled developments with guards at the gates. The
men favored linen pants and Italian loafers sans
socks and spent inordinate amounts of time mak-
ing important-sounding cell-phone calls to one
John Grogan
another. The women were tanned to the consis-
tency of the Gucci leather bags they favored, their
burnished skin set off by hair dyed alarming
shades of silver and platinum.
The city crawled with plastic surgeons, and they
had the biggest homes and most radiant smiles of
all. For Boca’s well-preserved women, breast im-
plants were a virtual requirement of residency.
The younger women all had magnificent boob
jobs; the older women all had magnificent boob
jobs andface-lifts. Butt sculpting, nose jobs,
tummy tucks, and tattooed mascara rounded out
the cosmetic lineup, giving the city’s female popu-
lation the odd appearance of being foot soldiers in
an army of anatomically correct inflatable dolls.
As I once sang in a song I wrote for a press skit,
“Liposuction and silicone, a girl’s best friends in
Boca Raton.”
In my column I had been poking fun at the Boca
lifestyle, starting with the name itself. Residents
of Boca Raton never actually called their city
Boca Raton. They simply referred to it by the fa-
miliar “Boca.” And they did not pronounce it as
the dictionary said they should, with a long O,
BO-kuh. Rather they gave it a soft, nasal, Jersey-
tinged inflection. It was BOHW-kuh!as in, “Oh,
the manicured shrubbery is bew-tee-fulhere in
BOHW-kuh!”
Marley & Me
The Disney movie Pocahontaswas in the the-
aters then, and I launched a running spoof on the
Indian-princess theme, which I titled “Bocahon-
tas.” My gold-draped protagonist was an indige-
nous suburban princess who drove a pink BMW,
her rock-hard, surgically enhanced breasts jutting
into the steering wheel, allowing her to drive
hands-free, talking on her cell phone and teasing
her frosted hair in the rearview mirror as she
raced to the tanning salon. Bocahontas lived in a
pastel designer wigwam, worked out each morn-
ing at the tribal gym—but only if she could find
parking within ten feet of the front door—and
spent her afternoons stalking wild furs, trusty
AmEx card in hand, at the ceremonial hunting
grounds known as Town Center Mall.
“Bury my Visa at Mizner Park,” Bocahontas in-
tones solemnly in one of my columns, a reference
to the city’s toniest shopping strip. In another, she
adjusts her buckskin Wonderbra and campaigns to
make cosmetic surgery tax-deductible.
My characterization was cruel. It was unchari-
table. It was only slightly exaggerated. Boca’s
real-life Bocahontases were the biggest fans of
those columns, trying to figure out which of them
had inspired my fictional heroine. (I’ll never tell.)
I was frequently invited to speak before social and
community groups and invariably someone would
John Grogan
stand up and ask, “Why do you hate BOHW-kuh
so much?” It wasn’t that I hated Boca, I told them;
it was just that I loved high farce. No place on
earth delivered it quite like the pretty-in-pink
Mouth of the Rat.
So it only made sense that when Jenny and I fi-
nally settled on a house, it was located at ground
zero of the Boca experience, midway between the
waterfront estates of east Boca Raton and the
snooty gated communities of west Boca Raton
(which, I relished pointing out to the very zip-
code-conscious residents, fell outside the city lim-
its in unincorporated Palm Beach County). Our
new neighborhood was in one of the few middle-
class sections in the city, and its residents liked to
joke with a certain reverse snobbery that they
were on the wrong side of both sets of tracks.
Sure enough, there were two sets of railroad
tracks, one defining the eastern boundary of the
neighborhood and one the western. At night you
could lie in bed and listen to the freight trains
moving through on their way to and from Miami.
“Are you crazy?” I said to Jenny. “We can’t
move to Boca! I’ll be run out of town on a rail.
They’ll serve my head up on a bed of organic
mesclun greens.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You’re exaggerating
again.”
Marley & Me
My paper, the Sun-Sentinel,was the dominant
newspaper in Boca Raton, far outpacing the Miami
Herald,the Palm Beach Post,or even the local
Boca Raton Newsin circulation. My work was
widely read in the city and its western develop-
ments, and because my photograph appeared above
my column, I was frequently recognized. I didn’t
think I was exaggerating. “They’ll skin me alive
and hang my carcass in front of Tiffany’s,” I said.
But we had been looking for months, and this
was the first house that met all our criteria. It was
the right size at the right price and in the right
place, strategically located between the two offices
where I split my time. The public schools were
about as good as public schools got in South
Florida, and for all its superficialities, Boca Raton
had an excellent park system, including some of
the most pristine ocean beaches in the Miami–
Palm Beach metropolitan area. With more than a
little trepidation, I agreed to go forward with the
purchase. I felt like a not-so-secret agent infiltrat-
ing the enemy’s encampment. The barbarian was
about to slip inside the gate, an unapologetic
Boca-basher crashing the Boca garden party. Who
could blame them for not wanting me?
When we first arrived, I slinked around town
self-consciously, convinced all eyes were on me.
My ears burned, imagining people were whisper-
John Grogan
ing as I passed. After I wrote a column welcoming
myself to the neighborhood (and eating a fair
amount of crow in the process), I received a num-
ber of letters saying things like “You trash our city
and now you want to live here? What a shameless
hypocrite!” I had to admit, they made a point. An
ardent city booster I knew from work couldn’t
wait to confront me. “So,” he said gleefully, “you
decided tacky Boca isn’t such a bad place after all,
huh? The parks and the tax rate and the schools
and beaches and zoning, all that’s not so bad when
it comes time to buy a house, is it?” All I could do
was roll over and cry uncle.
I soon discovered, however, that most of my
neighbors here on the wrong side of both sets of
tracks were sympathetic to my written assaults on
what one of them called “the gauche and vulgar
among us.” Pretty soon I felt right at home.
Our house was a 1970s-vintage four-bedroom
ranch with twice the square footage of our first
home and none of the charm. The place had po-
tential, though, and gradually we put our mark on
it. We ripped up the wall-to-wall shag carpeting
and installed oak floors in the living room and Ital-
ian tile everywhere else. We replaced the ugly slid-
ing glass doors with varnished French doors, and I
Marley & Me
slowly turned the bereft front yard into a tropical
garden teeming with gingers and heliconias and
passion vines that butterflies and passersby alike
stopped to drink in.
The two best features of our new home had
nothing to do with the house itself. Visible from
our living room window was a small city park
filled with playground equipment beneath tower-
ing pines. The children adored it. And in the
backyard, right off the new French doors, was an
in-ground swimming pool. We hadn’t wanted a
pool, worrying about the risk to our two toddlers,
and Jenny made our Realtor blanch when she sug-
gested filling it in. Our first act on the day we
moved in was to surround the pool with a four-
foot-high fence worthy of a maximum-security
prison. The boys—Patrick had just turned three
and Conor eighteen months when we arrived—
took to the water like a pair of dolphins. The park
became an extension of our backyard and the pool
an extension of the mild season we so cherished. A
swimming pool in Florida, we soon learned, made
the difference between barely enduring the with-
ering summer months and actually enjoying them.
No one loved the backyard pool more than our
water dog, that proud descendant of fishermen’s
retrievers plying the ocean swells off the coast of
Newfoundland. If the pool gate was open, Marley
John Grogan
would charge for the water, getting a running start
from the family room, going airborne out the open
French doors and, with one bounce off the brick
patio, landing in the pool on his belly with a giant
flop that sent a geyser into the air and waves over
the edge. Swimming with Marley was a potentially
life-threatening adventure, a little like swimming
with an ocean liner. He would come at you full
speed ahead, his paws flailing out in front of him.
You’d expect him to veer away at the last minute,
but he would simply crash into you and try to
climb aboard. If you were over your head, he
pushed you beneath the surface. “What do I look
like, a dock?” I would say, and cradle him in my
arms to let him catch his breath, his front paws
still paddling away on autopilot as he licked the
water off my face.
One thing our new house did not have was a
Marley-proof bunker. At our old house, the con-
crete one-car garage was pretty much indestructi-
ble, and it had two windows, which kept it
tolerably comfortable even in the dead of summer.
Our Boca house had a two-car garage, but it was
unsuitable for housing Marley or any other life-
form that could not survive temperatures above
150 degrees. The garage had no windows and was
stiflingly hot. Besides, it was finished in drywall,
not concrete, which Marley had already proved
Marley & Me
himself quite adept at pulverizing. His thunder-
induced panic attacks were only getting worse, de-
spite the tranquilizers.
The first time we left him alone in our new
house, we shut him in the laundry room, just off
the kitchen, with a blanket and a big bowl of wa-
ter. When we returned a few hours later, he had
scratched up the door. The damage was minor, but
we had just mortgaged our lives for the next thirty
years to buy this house, and we knew it didn’t
bode well. “Maybe he’s just getting used to his
new surroundings,” I offered.
“There’s not even a cloud in the sky,” Jenny ob-
served skeptically. “What’s going to happen the
first time a storm hits?”
The next time we left him alone, we found out.
As thunderheads rolled in, we cut our outing short
and hurried home, but it was too late. Jenny was a
few steps ahead of me, and when she opened the
laundry-room door she stopped short and uttered,
“Oh my God.” She said it the way you would if
you had just discovered a body hanging from the
chandelier. Again: “Oh . . . My . . . God.” I
peeked in over her shoulder, and it was uglier than
I had feared. Marley was standing there, panting
frantically, his paws and mouth bleeding. Loose
fur was everywhere, as though the thunder had
scared the hair right out of his coat. The damage
John Grogan
was worse than anything he had done before, and
that was saying a lot. An entire wall was gouged
open, obliterated clear down to the studs. Plaster
and wood chips and bent nails were everywhere.
Electric wiring lay exposed. Blood smeared the
floor and the walls. It looked, literally, like the
scene of a shotgun homicide.
“Oh my God,” Jenny said a third time.
“Oh my God,” I repeated. It was all either of us
could say.
After several seconds of just standing there
mute, staring at the carnage, I finally said, “Okay,
we can handle this. It’s all fixable.” Jenny shot me
her look; she had seen my repairs. “I’ll call a dry-
wall guy and have it professionally repaired,” I
said. “I won’t even try to do this one myself.” I
slipped Marley one of his tranquilizers and wor-
ried silently that this latest destructive jag might
just throw Jenny back into the funk she had sunk
into after Conor’s birth. Those blues, however,
seemed to be long behind her. She was surpris-
ingly philosophical about it.
“A few hundred bucks and we’ll be good as
new,” she chirped.
“That’s what I’m thinking, too,” I said. “I’ll
give a few extra speeches to bring in some cash.
That’ll pay for it.”
Within a few minutes, Marley was beginning to
Marley & Me
mellow. His eyelids grew heavy and his eyes
deeply bloodshot, as they always did when he was
doped up. He looked like he belonged at a Grate-
ful Dead concert. I hated to see him this way, I al-
ways hated it, and always resisted sedating him.
But the pills helped him move past the terror, past
the deadly threat that existed only in his mind. If
he were human, I would call him certifiably psy-
chotic. He was delusional, paranoid, convinced a
dark, evil force was coming from the heavens to
take him. He curled up on the rug in front of the
kitchen sink and let out a deep sigh. I knelt beside
him and stroked his blood-caked fur. “Geez,
dog,” I said. “What are we going to do with you?”
Without lifting his head, he looked up at me with
those bloodshot stoner eyes of his, the saddest,
most mournful, eyes I have ever seen, and just
gazed at me. It was as if he were trying to tell me
something, something important he needed me to
understand. “I know,” I said. “I know you can’t
help it.”
The next day Jenny and I took the boys with us to
the pet store and bought a giant cage. They came
in all different sizes, and when I described Marley
to the clerk he led us to the largest of them all. It
was enormous, big enough for a lion to stand up
John Grogan
and turn around in. Made out of heavy steel grat-
ing, it had two bolt-action barrel locks to hold the
door securely shut and a heavy steel pan for a
floor. This was our answer, our own portable Alca-
traz. Conor and Patrick both crawled inside and I
slid the bolts shut, locking them in for a moment.
“What do you guys think?” I asked. “Will this
hold our Superdog?”
Conor teetered at the cage door, his fingers
through the bars like a veteran inmate, and said,
“Me in jail.”
“Waddy’s going to be our prisoner!” Patrick
chimed in, delighted at the prospect.
Back home, we set up the crate next to the
washing machine. Portable Alcatraz took up
nearly half the laundry room. “Come here, Mar-
ley!” I called when it was fully assembled. I tossed
a Milk-Bone in and he happily pranced in after it.
I closed and bolted the door behind him, and he
stood there chewing his treat, unfazed by the new
life experience he was about to enter, the one
known in mental-health circles as “involuntary
commitment.”
“This is going to be your new home when we’re
away,” I said cheerfully. Marley stood there pant-
ing contentedly, not a trace of concern on his face,
and then he lay down and let out a sigh. “A good
sign,” I said to Jenny. “A very good sign.”
Marley & Me
That evening we decided to give the maximum-
security dog-containment unit a test run. This
time I didn’t even need a Milk-Bone to lure Mar-
ley in. I simply opened the gate, gave a whistle,
and in he walked, tail banging the metal sides. “Be
a good boy, Marley,” I said. As we loaded the boys
into the minivan to go out to dinner, Jenny said,
“You know something?”
“What?” I asked.
“This is the first time since we got him that I
don’t have a pit in my stomach leaving Marley
alone in the house,” she said. “I never even real-
ized how much it put me on edge until now.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “It was always
a guessing game: ‘What will our dog destroy this
time?’ ”
“Like, ‘How much will this little night out at
the movies cost us?’ ”
“It was like Russian roulette.”
“I think that crate is going to be the best money
we ever spent,” she said.
“We should have done this a long time ago,” I
agreed. “You can’t put a price on peace of mind.”
We had a great dinner out, followed by a sunset
stroll on the beach. The boys splashed in the surf,
chased seagulls, threw fistfuls of sand in the water.
Jenny was uncharacteristically relaxed. Just know-
ing Marley was safely secured inside Alcatraz, un-
John Grogan
able to hurt himself or anything else, was a balm.
“What a nice outing this has been,” she said as we
walked up the front sidewalk to our house.
I was about to agree with her when I noticed
something in my peripheral vision, something up
ahead that wasn’t quite right. I turned my head and
stared at the window beside the front door. The
miniblinds were shut, as they always were when we
left the house. But about a foot up from the bottom
of the window the metal slats were bent apart and
something was sticking through them.
Something black. And wet. And pressed up
against the glass. “What the—?” I said. “How
could . . . Marley?”
When I opened the front door, sure enough,
there was our one-dog welcoming committee,
wiggling all over the foyer, pleased as punch to
have us home again. We fanned out across the
house, checking every room and closet for telltales
of Marley’s unsupervised adventure. The house
was fine, untouched. We converged on the laundry
room. The crate’s door stood wide open, swung
back like the stone to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morn-
ing. It was as if some secret accomplice had snuck
in and sprung our inmate. I squatted down beside
the cage to have a closer look. The two bolt-action
barrel locks were slid back in the open position,
and—a significant clue—they were dripping with
Marley & Me
saliva. “It looks like an inside job,” I said. “Some-
how Houdini here licked his way out of the Big
House.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jenny said. Then she uttered
a word I was glad the children were not close
enough to hear.
We always fancied Marley to be as dumb as al-
gae, but he had been clever enough to figure out
how to use his long, strong tongue through the
bars to slowly work the barrels free from their
slots. He had licked his way to freedom, and he
proved over the coming weeks that he was able to
easily repeat the trick whenever he wanted. Our
maximum-security prison had in fact turned out
to be a halfway house. Some days we would return
to find him resting peacefully in the cage; other
days he’d be waiting at the front window. Involun-
tary commitment was not a concept Marley was
going to take lying down.
We took to wiring both locks in place with
heavy electrical cable. That worked for a while,
but one day, with distant rumbles on the horizon,
we came home to find that the bottom corner of
the cage’s gate had been peeled back as though
with a giant can opener, and a panicky Marley, his
paws again bloodied, was firmly stuck around the
rib cage, half in and half out of the tight opening.
I bent the steel gate back in place as best I could,
John Grogan
and we began wiring not only the slide bolts in
place but all four corners of the door as well.
Pretty soon we were reinforcing the corners of the
cage itself as Marley continued to put his brawn
into busting out. Within three months the gleam-
ing steel cage we had thought so impregnable
looked like it had taken a direct hit from a how-
itzer. The bars were twisted and bent, the frame
pried apart, the door an ill-fitting mess, the sides
bulging outward. I continued to reinforce it as best
I could, and it continued to hold tenuously against
Marley’s full-bodied assaults. Whatever false
sense of security the contraption had once offered
us was gone. Each time we left, even for a half
hour, we wondered whether this would be the
time that our manic inmate would bust out and go
on another couch-shredding, wall-gouging, door-
eating rampage. So much for peace of mind.
C H A P T E R 1 8
Alfresco Dining
❉
Marley didn’t fit into the Boca Raton scene
any better than I did. Boca had (and surely
still has) a disproportionate share of the world’s
smallest, yappiest, most pampered dogs, the kind
of pets that the Bocahontas set favored as fashion
accessories. They were precious little things, often
with bows in their fur and cologne spritzed on
their necks, some even with painted toenails, and
you would spot them in the most unlikely of
places—peeking out of a designer handbag at you
as you waited in line at the bagel shop; snoozing
on their mistresses’ towels at the beach; leading
the charge on a rhinestone-studded leash into a
pricey antiques store. Mostly, you could find them
cruising around town in Lexuses, Mercedes-
Benzes, and Jaguars, perched aristocratically be-
hind the steering wheels on their owners’ laps.
John Grogan
They were to Marley what Grace Kelly was to
Gomer Pyle. They were petite, sophisticated, and
of discriminating taste. Marley was big, clunky,
and a sniffer of genitalia. He wanted so much to
have them invite him into their circle; they so
much were not about to.
With his recently digested obedience certificate
under his belt, Marley was fairly manageable on
walks, but if he saw something he liked, he still
wouldn’t hesitate to lunge for it, threat of strangu-
lation be damned. When we took strolls around
town, the high-rent pooches were always worth
getting all choked up over. Each time he spotted
one, he would break into a gallop, barreling up to
it, dragging Jenny or me behind him at the end of
the leash, the noose tightening around his throat,
making him gasp and cough. Each time Marley
would be roundly snubbed, not only by the Boca
minidog but by the Boca minidog’s owner, who
would snatch up young Fifi or Suzi or Cheri as if
rescuing her from the jaws of an alligator. Marley
didn’t seem to mind. The next minidog to come
into sight, he would do it all over again, unde-
terred by his previous jilting. As a guy who was
never very good at the rejection part of dating, I
admired his perseverance.
Outside dining was a big part of the Boca expe-
rience, and many restaurants in town offered al-
Marley & Me
fresco seating beneath palm trees whose trunks
and fronds were studded with strings of tiny
white lights. These were places to see and be seen,
to sip caffè lattes and jabber into cell phones as
your companion stared vacantly at the sky. The
Boca minidog was an important part of the al-
fresco ambience. Couples brought their dogs with
them and hooked their leashes to the wrought-
iron tables where the dogs would contentedly curl
up at their feet or sometimes even sit up at the
table beside their masters, holding their heads
high in an imperious manner as if miffed by the
waiters’ inattentiveness.
One Sunday afternoon Jenny and I thought it
would be fun to take the whole family for an out-
side meal at one of the popular meeting places.
“When in Boca, do as the Bocalites,” I said. We
loaded the boys and the dog into the minivan and
headed to Mizner Park, the downtown shopping
plaza modeled after an Italian piazza with wide
sidewalks and endless dining possibilities. We
parked and strolled up one side of the three-block
strip and down the other, seeing and being seen—
and what a sight we must have made. Jenny had
the boys strapped into a double stroller that could
have been mistaken for a maintenance cart, loaded
up in the back with all manner of toddler para-
phernalia, from applesauce to wet wipes. I walked
John Grogan
beside her, Marley, on full Boca minidog alert,
barely contained at my side. He was even wilder
than usual, beside himself at the possibility of
getting near one of the little purebreds prancing
about, and I gripped hard on his leash. His tongue
hung out and he panted like a locomotive.
We settled on a restaurant with one of the more
affordable menus on the strip and hovered nearby
until a sidewalk table opened up. The table was
perfect—shaded, with a view of the piazza’s cen-
tral fountain, and heavy enough, we were sure, to
secure an excitable hundred-pound Lab. I hooked
the end of Marley’s leash to one of the legs, and
we ordered drinks all around, two beers and two
apple juices.
“To a beautiful day with my beautiful family,”
Jenny said, holding up her glass for a toast. We
clicked our beer bottles; the boys smashed their
sippy cups together. That’s when it happened. So
fast, in fact, that we didn’t even realize it had hap-
pened. All we knew was that one instant we were
sitting at a lovely outdoor table toasting the beau-
tiful day, and the next our table was on the move,
crashing its way through the sea of other tables,
banging into innocent bystanders, and making a
horrible, ear-piercing, industrial-grade shriek as it
scraped over the concrete pavers. In that first split
second, before either of us realized exactly what
Marley & Me
bad fate had befallen us, it seemed distinctly possi-
ble that our table was possessed, fleeing our family
of unwashed Boca invaders, which most certainly
did not belong here. In the next split second, I saw
that it wasn’t our table that was haunted, but our
dog. Marley was out in front, chugging forward
with every ounce of rippling muscle he had, the
leash stretched tight as piano wire.
In the fraction of a second after that, I saw just
where Marley was heading, table in tow. Fifty feet
down the sidewalk, a delicate French poodle lin-
gered at her owner’s side, nose in the air. Damn,I
remember thinking, what is his thing for poo-
dles?Jenny and I both sat there for a moment
longer, drinks in hand, the boys between us in
their stroller, our perfect little Sunday afternoon
unblemished except for the fact that our table was
now motoring its way through the crowd. An in-
stant later we were on our feet, screaming, run-
ning, apologizing to the customers around us as we
went. I was the first to reach the runaway table as
it surged and scraped down the piazza. I grabbed
on, planted my feet, and leaned back with every-
thing I had. Soon Jenny was beside me, pulling
back, too. I felt like we were action heroes in a
western, giving our all to rein in the runaway train
before it jumped the tracks and plunged over a
cliff. In the middle of all the bedlam, Jenny actu-
John Grogan
ally turned and called over her shoulder, “Be right
back, boys!” Be right back?She made it sound so
ordinary, so expected, so planned, as if we often
did this sort of thing, deciding on the spur of the
moment that, oh, why not, it might just be fun to
let Marley lead us on a little table stroll around
town, maybe doing a bit of window-shopping
along the way, before we circled back in time for
appetizers.
When we finally got the table stopped and Mar-
ley reeled in, just feet from the poodle and her
mortified owner, I turned back to check on the
boys, and that’s when I got my first good look at
the faces of my fellow alfresco diners. It was like a
scene out of one of those E. F. Hutton commer-
cials where an entire bustling crowd freezes in si-
lence, waiting to hear a whispered word of
investment advice. Men stopped in midconversa-
tion, cell phones in their hands. Women stared
with opened mouths. The Bocalites were aghast.
It was finally Conor who broke the silence.
“Waddy go walk!” he screamed with delight.
A waiter rushed up and helped me drag the table
back into place as Jenny held Marley, still fixated
on the object of his desire, in a death grip. “Let me
get some new place settings,” the waiter said.
“That won’t be necessary,” Jenny said noncha-
Marley & Me
lantly. “We’ll just be paying for our drinks and
going.”
It wasn’t long after our excellent excursion into
the Boca alfresco-dining scene that I found a book
in the library titled No Bad Dogsby the acclaimed
British dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse. As the ti-
tle implied, No Bad Dogsadvanced the same be-
lief that Marley’s first instructor, Miss
Dominatrix, held so dear—that the only thing
standing between an incorrigible canine and
greatness was a befuddled, indecisive, weak-
willed human master. Dogs weren’t the problem,
Woodhouse held; people were. That said, the
book went on to describe, chapter after chapter,
some of the most egregious canine behaviors
imaginable. There were dogs that howled inces-
santly, dug incessantly, fought incessantly,
humped incessantly, and bit incessantly. There
were dogs that hated all men and dogs that hated
all women; dogs that stole from their masters and
dogs that jealously attacked defenseless infants.
There were even dogs that ate their own feces.
Date: 2015-12-17; view: 730
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