The Smell

We lived in a very nice neighborhood in Santa Monica, on Tenth Street between Montana and San Vicente Avenues. It was within easy walking distance of the shops and restaurants on Montana, the Third Street Promenade, and the beach.

All in all, it was a terrific place to live.

Unless you lived near us.

The homes were on very little land, with modest backyards and no more than fifteen feet between houses on either side. So, neighbors fifteen feet away, thirty or forty dogs … you do the math.

Our dogs were always house-trained, which in itself was remarkable. We rarely know the histories of the dogs we rescue, but certainly many must have been “outside dogs” before we got them. The law of averages says that it has to be the case, but there is also anecdotal evidence. Many times our dogs will have large calluses on their elbows, a sure sign that they’ve spent substantial time lying outside on hard, rough concrete.

If a dog was going to live outside, then there was no reason, and really no opportunity, to house-train it. Yet once these dogs came into our home, an interesting process took place. The other dogs would teach them to go outside; the newcomers would simply follow the group at bathroom time. I can’t think of any other explanation for it.

But all those dogs doing their business in a backyard of maybe a thousand square feet presented some issues. It obviously had to be cleaned regularly, a task neither Debbie nor I relished, but which we did religiously. Unfortunately, urine cannot be swept up with a scooper.

So the place smelled.

And our neighbor complained.

We tried a number of things to deal with it. We sodded the area, but the urine quickly killed the grass. So we sodded it again, this time with better sod, and the urine killed it again.

If you’re ever in a game of “sod, urine, scissors,” you can be sure that urine beats sod.

Then, I forget why exactly, I had the bright idea to bring in sand and cover the backyard with it. So we did. We trucked in sand and turned the entire area into a beach; it was like watching a canine Baywatch. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen a blind Saint Bernard frolicking on the beach.

It turned out to be an exquisitely stupid idea. The dogs hated it, probably because the sand was hot and annoying on their feet. They then tracked it into the house, destroying carpet and floor in a matter of days.

And it didn’t stop the smell. Not even close.

Debbie was a tad critical of my sand idea, so I left it to her to come up with a different solution. And she did … borax. We removed the sand and then sprayed borax over the entire side of the yard near the neighbor’s house. It was July, but it turned the place into what looked like a winter wonderland, as if pure snow was covering everything.

Within twenty-four hours the snow was 25 percent yellow, as the dogs got to work. And that percentage increased daily, so we spread more borax to cover it up. The borax got so deep that the dogs could barely walk in it, but, ever resourceful, they still managed to piss on it.

And still it smelled, so we decided to ditch the borax. Unfortunately, removing knee-deep borax is not the easiest thing in the world. There are no borax-plow operators in Santa Monica; it’s not even that easy to find a snow shovel.

But we cleaned the stuff out, just in time to try our next trick. We got this perfumey, anti-smell stuff and sprayed it on the area at least five times a day. People driving by in their cars were gagging from the stench; it was like being trapped in a vat of cotton candy. Not surprisingly, the neighbor informed us that the new smell was far worse than the old one.

We had pretty much run out of ideas, and based on the quality of the ideas we had run out of, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. So in a desperate measure, we constructed two parallel chain-link fences leading from the back of the house to the rear of the backyard.

This created a corridor about six feet wide for the dogs to use, a sort of bathroom bowling alley. It had the advantage of confining the origin of the offending odors to an area much farther from the neighbor, and it actually seemed to do the trick, at least as far as he was concerned.

It was just another example of life in the fast lane.

Because of our “open door” policy, flies were becoming particularly annoying, and Debbie came up with a way to deal with it. She bought a product called the Big Stinky, which was to be hung outside the room near the open door. It included a packet of some kind of solution, and to it we were supposed to add a quarter pound of raw fish.

This would apparently keep flies away, since flies are not idiots. Why would they want to be around the most disgusting thing in the history of the world?

Our experience with the Big Stinky lasted just one day. We never gave it a chance to see if it actually kept out the flies, because it’s fair to say that there has never been a product more aptly named.

People often ask how we manage to keep the inside of our house clean. Of course I don’t want to quibble, but that assumes that the inside of our house is clean. It isn’t. In a perfect world, we try to minimize the level of dirty.

Hair is the biggest problem; it is everywhere. I recently took a laser printer in to be repaired, and when the guy opened the back, there was enough hair in it to make a coat.

It’s a myth that dogs shed when the weather goes from cold to hot so that they’ll be more comfortable in the summer. The truth is that they shed 365 days a year, twenty-four hours a day. I have no idea where all the hair comes from; maybe the groomer uses Rogaine on them. Otherwise they would be bald by now.

So we do the best we can. We go through vacuum cleaners at an amazing clip; in our garage in California we had six broken Orecks lined up against the wall, looking like a vacuum-cleaner version of the Rockettes. We also groom the dogs on a rotating basis, two or three a week, in an effort to cut down on the shedding.

Of course, hair is not the only problem; certain “incidents” take place with remarkable frequency, all with the capability of leaving stains. There are about 4 million products designed to clean up dog accidents, and trust me when I tell you that none of them works as advertised. Or maybe we just overwhelmed them.

One day Debbie and I were in bed watching television. There was a commercial for a dog cleaning product, and it showed a woman cleaning up after her boxer made a mess. At the end she’s praising the product, and she holds it up and turns to the camera, a big smile on her face. “And I really need it,” she says. “I have six of them.”

Then the camera cuts to her dogs at her feet. The implication is clear: this woman is hilariously eccentric for having six dogs.

Of course, the camera didn’t cut to the bed that Debbie and I were in, which we were sharing at the time with seven dogs. Add in the ones in the bedroom but not on the bed, and it totaled twenty-one.

If the lady in the commercial was nuts, what did that make us?

Totally nuts.