Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [23]
Faced with such chaos, the owner will look plaintively into the camera and drop vague hints about canine homicide. “I don’t want to get rid of Fluffy,” they’ll say, “but I’m worried about my child/other, smaller dog/nice furniture/standing in the community. I just don’t feel like I have any other choice but to send Fluffy back to the pound.” Of course, the owners know they have another choice: they’re talking into a TV camera, after all. They know help is right around the corner—in the form of the Dog Whisperer.
Cesar to the rescue. He shows up at the house and asks the owners to explain Fluffy’s behavior. Often, before they even have a chance, Fluffy pees or barks or bites or does whatever Fluffy has been doing to bring Cesar there in the first place. The owner looks at Cesar with a shrug: See what I’m talking about? And then Cesar asks the owner to leave. It’s time for some Cesar-Dog communing.
Cesar calls it Letting the Dog Know Who’s in Charge, but mostly it looks like he’s kicking the dog’s ass. This is where the “biting” comes in—repeatedly. Without fail, Cesar calms the mutt down, and, within thirty-five seconds of National Geographic Channel screen time, Fluffy is licking Cesar and happily fetching whatever Cesar tosses him. (“To a dog, you’re a giant walking tennis ball,” Cesar says.)
Then the owners come back in the room—and Fluffy freaks the fuck out again. They look at Cesar, who blames them for not understanding the dog. Then he says it’s time for Fluffy to come with him. He needs to be deprogrammed. He needs, for a little while, to join a family that understands him.
Thus: the Dog Psychology Center. Set up in a converted auto mechanic’s shop in the industrial zone of South Central Los Angeles, this is where Cesar’s dogs live.
This is a family I can handle. This is the family I want.
My sister and I grew up with my happy, well-adjusted parents in Mattoon, a tiny central Illinois town surrounded by other tiny central Illinois towns. When adulthood came, she moved to San Francisco. I moved to New York City. My mother jokes that we just went in opposite directions until we hit water.
In high school, I didn’t drink, never stayed out past curfew, made the honor roll, and played on a conference championship baseball team. My younger sister had several experiments with drugs—all successful—and relationships with several tattooed boyfriends who referred to themselves by one-letter names, (J, for example, or Rad K)—which were less successful. She was generally the holy terror that teenage girls are supposed to be.
My natural instinct is toward peace and calm: I just don’t want any trouble. My sister is the opposite. Chaos is the void she must fill, and if there’s no void available she’ll blast one open. This is impossible for me to handle, and I suspect that my smug self-satisfied piety—well, I follow all the rules—only provokes her to act out further. This bothers me a lot more than it does other people. When my sister does something outrageous or loud and garish and embarrassing, everyone else just laughs: that’s just Jill being Jill. Meanwhile, I’m hiding under something, seething and shaking.
Yes, she’s a lot more fun than I am.
I love my sister dearly, but there are times when I believe God put us both on earth as a cosmic joke on my parents. My father is an electrician, my mother a nurse—they have regular human jobs in