In my humble opinion I concluded that Billy needed at least a month of impulse control training, which is normal for a one-year-old dog who has just been neutered and has zero discipline or socialization. As I mentioned before, pit bulls have been bred to have a high arousal rate, and it’s important for their and your safety to make sure they’re able to stop doing whatever they’re doing when you ask them to so they don’t run into traffic or jump on you when you’re in a pair of overpriced white pants that are probably going to get ruined anyway, but you’d rather it not be before you even leave the house.
By day three, Billy was following me wherever I went. If I was in the shower, his nose was on the glass, ogling me. If I was in the tub, his chin was on the side of the tub. If I was on the toilet, his chin was on my feet, but only because I wouldn’t let him rest his face between my knees because it felt like we were bordering on something illegal.
That evening I tried to see if Billy could make it through the night in the crate. No dice. He was screaming his head off, so I moved the crate into my bedroom so he’d be able to see me. Even less dice. I finally acquiesced and let Billy sleep in the bed just as I do any man who shows the slightest bit of neediness.
When I let Billy up on the bed, he plopped his impossibly-heavy-for-its-size block head on my chest. When I looked at a selfie of us (I mean, come on, I had to take one), I was able to see a look of relief on his face. Maybe I was projecting, but the boy finally seemed to believe that he was safe. I tried to push him off me so I could breathe, but he just bounced back, desperate for physical contact. This little dude wasn’t taking any chances.
The next day I planned to dedicate some time to etiquette training with Billy. But since I myself wasn’t yet trained in etiquette, I spilled coffee all over myself and the floor. The cup shattered all over my bedroom. After yelling about five iterations of the word fuck, I bent over to start cleaning up the mess. One of my dogs, Daisy, the one who looks like a tiny cow made out of ice cream, came over and licked my face. My dogs always know how to calm me down when I’m stressing. Pills make me gag, so dogs are like Xanax but without the almost puking part.
I had found Daisy on the street a couple months earlier, and she still had a bunch of random bald spots and scrapes, so I started examining them and assuring her of all the things I wished someone would have assured me about when I was a kid. Side note: I’m convinced that when people talk to their dogs, they’re saying things they subconsciously need to hear. You’ve all seen people who meet a new dog and within ten seconds are saying “I love you,” a phrase it could take years to say to a human being. I can always tell a lot about someone based on what they say to their dog. My go-tos are usually “I promise I’ll never leave you” and “Here’s some food,” two phrases I wish someone would say to me on a regular basis.
Billy came over to join in with some of his backward clumsy eel kisses. I assure you there’s a ton I don’t know about dog psychology, and I’m sure I make training mistakes all the time, but I do know some things about training dogs, or at least what has worked for me and my weirdo pack. It works for me to establish myself as the alpha, which means I have to act like, well, a goddamn alpha bitch. For example, I learned you walk through a dog, not around a dog, even if it means having to slow down and push them out of the way with your legs. This helps them understand that they’re in my house, not vice versa, and that I’m the pack leader. Behaving this way was hard for me at first because I thought it was mean, but the meanest thing you can do with a dog is be unclear and submissive given they’ve evolved to be led by us. Otherwise they feel they have to be the leader, which makes them aggressive, territorial, stressed out, and they start to pee on stuff you care about. This basically means I have to own my space by walking around like Beyoncé, which does not come naturally to me given my genetics.
To be the alpha I also feed myself before I feed my dogs, I walk through a door before they do, look them in the eye, and so forth. I try not to be on the floor with my dogs too much because they could interpret that as my being submissive or their being equal to me. They’re not equal to me. They’re better than me, but they can’t know that. My dogs are so submissive at this point that my being on the floor with them every now and then doesn’t mess up the power dynamic. Also, I trip and fall a lot, so not ever being on the floor isn’t really an option.
Even if I’m on the ground, I still enforce the alpha dynamic. If I’m done playing on the floor with them, I push them off me and claim my space to make sure my dogs always understand boundaries. It was hard for me at first, because as you well know, it’s hard for me to tolerate the discomfort of others, but unlike a lot of confusing people, dogs do very well with discipline. Anyway, I was ready to get up, so I pushed Daisy to the side. With my other hand I pushed Billy to my other side.
Then it happened. What exactly I’ll never completely know, but within seconds my ear was hanging off my head.
I don’t remember that much, but here’s what I specifically don’t remember: growling, fighting, struggling. I do remember pulling away and Billy getting stuck in my hair. I felt hairs pulling out of my head. I mean, of all the days, the one day in the past ten years I was actually wearing my hair down, it had to be this one. Billy and I were both panicking, and even though we were both bred to fight, neither one of us wanted any part of this sloppy melee. We may have been emotionally entangled, but neither of us wanted to be physically entangled.
From what I’ve heard, when mammals get injured, a surge of adrenaline basically turns them into superheroes. Out of nowhere I was able to stand up without using my hands. I somehow flew from my bedroom floor to my bathroom, guided by core muscles that came out of hibernation. Apparently the sight of my own blood makes me instantly capable of parkour.
What I saw in the mirror was more confounding than horrifying. My brain was obviously in denial about what had happened because I couldn’t figure out why I was wearing a giant hoop earring. “I don’t wear hoop earrings,” I thought. It dawned on me that it wasn’t an earring. It was an ear. My ear. Dangling by a thread, which I now know are technically called elastin fibers. My neck, my hands, and the right side of my face were covered with blood. It was very clear what I should do next: Call 911 and get an ambulance to come pick me up. So what did I do? Grabbed my keys and got in my car.
I drove about three miles like I was in Grand Theft Auto before I realized that driving while holding a flaccid, hemorrhaging ear was a very poor decision. I’m already a bad enough driver with both hands and ears available, so with only one of each, this move was borderline homicidal and suicidal.