My family is in the import/export business. Things. Product.
We're not drug-lords or anything glamorous like that, but we do all right. Right
now we're in the business of importing Attack Dogs from Armenia. Wolfhounds.
They're called Gompers.
It's not so much that we're importing them for profit-- though I'm told that
is ultimately the plan. Really, it seems that that we're more interested in
the idea of introducing a new species of predator into the hills of the resort
town I grew up in. As anyone in the oil business can tell you, there's nothing
like fucking with the ecosystem for a few shits and giggles. I can see the headline
now, "Golfer, 69, Dismembered by Pack of Hounds at Ojai Valley Inn."
It wouldn't be the first time we made the headlines; I'm sure the clipping "Burglar
Crippled After Breaking Into Wrong Man's House" still occupies a place
of honor in some family scrapbook somewhere, probably right between my brother's
first concealed-weapons permit and the falsified manifest for a shipping container
of "Italian Granite" which, to this day, I still believe actually
contained black-market human kidneys.
Anyway, they're adorable, these Gompers. As puppies, they look
more ursine than canine, like little bear-cubs. I'm not sure how they get here,
but I know that upon arrival we often find bits of ham and baguette in their
cages; and we sometimes have to vacuum tea away from their recently-clipped,
bandaged little ears. It's rather as though each cage originally included, in
addition to the dog, an Armenian peasant who was promised safe passage to the
new world and encouraged to pack a lunch. I imagine these hapless souls making
it a bit more than halfway through the journey before realizing that no comparable
in-flight meal has been provided for the Gompers, and that the latter are beginning
to eye their human companions the way shipwreck survivors on a life-raft do
when their buddies start morphing into juicy T-bone steaks. If there is any
foul play, though, the evidence is long gone by the time the plane touches down.
Full grown, the dogs look something a feverish Jim Henson might have dreamed
up after mistaking PCP for TheraFlu. Tall, gangly, seemingly all legs, fluff
and teeth, they sport crazed, bugged-out eyes and big, black, silly noses. They
prance around ridiculously, romping, pawing and snarling, and I could easily
fit inside of one. (Come to think of it, so could the new family nanny-- another
recent import-- but that's another story.)
You might think a country as small as Armenia would want to keep
its domestic animals to a reasonable size. (Then again, if you didn't know better,
you might think that 90-year-old drivers-- who hardly have all the time in the
world, after all-- would be in more of a hurry.) I know that if I were designing
an attack dog for a tiny Balkan state, I would breed them to be no bigger than
apricots: small, fierce, and with a piranha-like feeding-frenzy mentality. I
could sneak whole packs of them around in my purse, dispatching them in swarms
through the ventilation systems of my enemies' houses whenever the opportunity
presented itself.
The Gompers' progenitors, however, took a different tack: the
dogs are huge. There's a photograph of my brother rolling around with one of
his. It's a playful photo, just some guy playing with his dog-- but the dog
is the same size as my brother, and my brother is 6"5 and weighs 300 pounds.
While the family dog-importing business has yet to turn a profit
financially, in terms of sheer volume of blood spilled, the Gomper trade has
been an undeniable success. My brother's alone has already attacked the cable
guy, an Australian investor (his comment: "That bitch could tear up a kangaroo"),
the gas guy, my mother, and most recently, my best friend when I took him along
to the family compound for Thanksgiving dinner.
I saw John hesitate before he entered the gate. The dog, Tork,
also saw John hesitate and, with the unerring eye for weakness that allows predators,
pack animals, and playground bullies to instinctively and instantaneously apprehend
their place in the evolutionary pecking order, immediately seized the advantage.
I heard this awful gurgle and growl coming from Tork, who sprang, and John was
down. Before I could scream, "Act like you're not scared of him!"
(how, precisely, this order was to be carried out in the presence of an animal
bred to smell fear by the distant ancestors of Genghis Khan I have no idea),
the dog had John by the arm and was dragging him down into the lavender bushes.
John is about as burly as a folding chair. I saw legs kicking,
arms flailing, and I heard screaming and shrieking. I could do nothing but stand
there. I was frozen solid in horror, watching a imported Armenian attack dog
rip out my friend's throat out. The dog was still a little jumpy from his run-in
with six police officers the night before, and I know better than to get between
a dog and his bone.
"SnnnnNNaaaRRRLLllll, GgggRRrrowWwwwllll," said the dog.
"Get this fucking dog off me," said John, understandably
miffed. Either he was still putting on a brave face, or possibly, being the
product of a civilized society, he simply refused to grant the possibility that
a person could be killed by a dog whose name he knows in the presence of the
dog's owners.
"SssnnnaRRrrllll, GGgrrowwwllllll," the dog continued, settling into
his role.
CHOMP!
YELP! YELP! YELP!
"HELP, HELP!!" I realized I too was hollering.
Eventually, my brother came out and pried the dog loose. We took John into
the house and had my uncle take a look at the wound. (He's a dentist.) It was
mainly a crush injury. My brother dabbed at it with some cotton and Mercurochrome,
slapped a band-aid on it and made John a Bloody Mary. John was shaking. He was
as white as a sheet, and he turned to me and asked, "How did I sound?"
"What?" I asked.
"How did I sound?"
"How did you sound?"
"Did I sound brave?"
I thought about it for a moment. "Well," I answered,
"You sounded about as brave as a man being attacked by a dog can sound."
My brother came up to him and slapped him on he back and said, "Don't worry
about it, John. You showed real moxie. Tork was about to rip yer fuckin' throat
out. You sounded fine." Which was bullshit. In truth, John had been screaming
like a school-girl with her braid caught in a swing.
"Your friend-- he idiot," the nanny said to me the next day while
hand-feeding the dog pears. "He should know what dog is thinking."
Besides showing a touching degree of deference and respect toward her employers,
this comment demonstrated typical Armenian logic: If a man doesn't know better
than to not enter a yard with a slavering, barely-domesticated attack dog in
it, he deserves to be attacked by it.
In John's defense, I will say that Tork did not attack me
when I walked in the gate, and it was not beyond all reason for him to assume
that he would escape mauling as well. It is, after all, not unheard of in the
21st Century for people to keep pets who do not immediately regard invited houseguests
as prey. In retrospect, it is not clear how I avoided being savaged myself--
perhaps the dog remembered my smell. I'll never know for sure, because after
seeing what Tork did to John, I now use the back door to get into my brother's
house.
Later, when recounting this story to my aunt, she said, "That's
some real Sally Jesse Raphael shit goin' down in Ojai." Stepping back and
looking at it as I imagine it would look through the eyes of someone not raised
by wolves, I suppose she's right. The only difference between us and your average
dog-fighting hillbilly is firepower. (For the record, we've got more.)
Alena Nahabedian is currently hiding from her family
somewhere in Spain, where she is completing a book of short stories, Armed
and Dangerous, based on her experiences being raised by the aforementioned
wolves.
