The Dog in My Apartment

When I went to college in San Jose, the first thing I wanted to get myself was a dog. I don’t know what it was with me. For most guys, I guess that the first priority was to get a girlfriend or girlfriends and the dog would come at some point later in life when you were all, like, settled down and stuff. But for me, the dog came first. I grew up in a house where we always had a dog. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I come from a broken home and my dad just upped and left me, my mom and my little brother Jeff when I was only nine years old. So the dog didn’t exactly replace my dad. That’s for sure.  But I think that it really, kind of, helped, you know. It was fun to have him around even though we mightn’t have all been feeling like a whole heap of fun - you know what I’m saying? I mean, I think that my dog Shep (at the time) was someone or some dog, that seemed to understand what was going on some sort of level. And he was really good to me and seemed to understand - understand kind of what was going on, you know? What I’m saying, I guess, is that my dog knew what was going on in our house and in my head somehow, and he was a comfort to me for all those years as I went from being a scared child to a confident adult. California isn’t quite the land of dreams that a lot of stuff on TV and movies would have you believe. It’s a place just like any other, mostly. Sure - you may say that we get a lot of sunshine and we do, but we’re not the sunshine state. Know what I’m saying? Florida is. Man, I’d like to get me to Florida someday. Maybe when I’m done college, I’ll get me a job there. Anyhow, for the first few weeks at least of getting my new dog, I was beginning to kind of regret it already but I didn’t have the heart to get rid of it. I called him Lucky, because he was one lucky son of a bitch (that’s what he is, really - look it up) that I didn’t throw him out first day. He used to use my home as his own latrine for so long. Man - it smelled so bad, no way would I be able to convince a girl to step inside the door. I was green around the ears and had no clue how to get rid of dog urine smell or how to get urine smell out of carpet. I drove down to our nearest pet supplies shop and got stuff that was supposed to take urine off anything and go stuff for carpet stain removal too. I didn’t know how to get dog urine smell out of carpet and I still don’t really know, because the place still stank after all my, like, efforts. In the end, I had to put poor Lucky in dog diapers while I tried my best with all the cleaning stuff. After ten days, the smell went and that night, it was me that go lucky! Snap!