Charlie

When volunteers work at mobile pet adoptions, they are generally assigned a specific dog to sit with and care for. They are expected to introduce potential adopters to the dog and explain its appealing traits.

Debbie sat with a dog named Charlie at a mobile adoption in Century City for an entire day, getting increasingly annoyed as the hours went by and no one showed any interest in him. He was listed in the shelter records as an Australian shepherd mix, but there was really no way to know his breed. Charlie was a mutt, in the best sense of the word.

His age was also a total guess. Vets make the judgment by looking at the condition of a dog’s teeth, but it’s an inexact science in the best case, and especially so with shelter dogs. They’ve likely lived outside a good portion of their lives, and could have done things like chew on rocks. They’ve also rarely had their teeth cleaned. In Charlie’s case, the guesstimate of his age was nine, which meant that he was going to be very difficult to place in a home.

So Charlie sat in Debbie’s lap all day, blissfully unaware that his euthanasia date was approaching. By day’s end, she had fallen in love with him, and had decided that there was no way she was going to put him back in a shelter cage. The idea that they might kill a healthy, wonderful dog like this seemed unfair to the point of being absurd. So we adopted Charlie ourselves and took him home.

The idea was better in theory than in practice.

The problem was that “home” was an apartment we had moved to on Ninth Street in Santa Monica, one in which dogs were prohibited. So Debbie called the landlord and gave him a poignant speech about a dog she had taken off “death row,” and he relented. Debbie can pretty much convince anyone to do anything; by the time she got off the phone, the landlord had probably sworn off veal.

Charlie was ours.

And so was Phoebe, a husky mix we fell in love with the following week in the shelter. Her time was up, and we watched as a potential adopter debated for two days whether to take her, and ultimately decided not to. We could not bear to watch her die, so she became ours.

And so did Sophie, a nine-year-old golden retriever who redefined sweetness in a dog, and who we were not about to let suffer in a shelter. In fact, when we arrived at the shelter that day and saw her there for the first time, I immediately took her out of the cage and announced to anyone who would listen that she was officially our dog.

And so was Harry, a Newfie/Lab mix who was hilariously psychotic—way too crazy and huge for anyone else to want.

So we had four large dogs in an apartment that didn’t allow any, though we had dispensation for one. We decided to be sneaky about it. We’d take one dog at a time for a walk, sometimes going down the stairs, in off hours using the elevator. We smiled and chatted with anyone we met, never letting on that we had more than one dog and hoping they wouldn’t notice or care.

If they did catch on, they didn’t say anything, except for one tenant, who people called “Mr. Jack.” He was in his seventies and completely blind, so I can only assume he could smell the difference between the dogs.

“They let you have that many here?” he asked, and we said that they did. He smiled and said, “Great.”

I was the one who finally suggested we move. Football season was approaching, and halftime was simply not going to be long enough to walk each dog individually.

So we went looking for a house to rent, and we found a great place not too far from the apartment. We signed a lease that was silent about allowing pets; though the pets in that house would prove to be as far from silent as is possible.

In any event, we knew we had reached our limit. More dogs would be unmanageable; even the four that we had made the house feel small.

Four dogs were certainly more than enough.

One year later we had twenty-seven.