VII
cnn, cci, tv, and tk

AS FAR AS I know, I’m the only writer who has appeared often on the best-seller list but who has never done a national or even a multi-state book-publicity tour. I also have never stabbed my wife, as Norman Mailer stabbed one of his, nor have I dissed Oprah Winfrey, as Jonathan Franzen did, nor have I faked a bad-boy history and invented a colorful past as James Frey did: I am a publicist’s worst nightmare.

I dislike most publicity, aside from radio interviews, which I enjoy because of the energy and intelligence of the folks who work in that medium. Besides, I can do six hours of early-morning radio programs with bed hair, without shaving, with sticky-bun stains on my T-shirt, and listeners will assume that I’m as scrubbed and as perfectly coiffed as Donny Osmond on his way to church.

Cubby Greenwich, the writer who is the protagonist of my novel Relentless, has my aversion to publicity and explains it better than I can: “Protracted self-promotion drains something essential from the soul, and after one of these sessions, you need weeks to recover and to decide that one day it might be all right to like yourself again.”

I do as much publicity as feels fair to my publishers—and as little as I can persuade them is fair. In 1998, I was new to Bantam Books, having published one novel with them and having delivered a second that awaited publication. When they asked me to do the CNN biography program Pinnacle to support the release of Seize the Night, I probably grumped a little, just so everyone would know what a humongous and debilitating imposition it was, no less traumatic than open-heart surgery, but I agreed.

Trixie had been part of our lives less than a week when the producer, film crew, and program host for Pinnacle came to Newport Beach to spend two days with us. Already, we could not imagine life without her.

The day before the CNN folks showed up, Gerda and I took Trixie to meet her veterinarians. She was scheduled for a full physical and, of course, for a bath and grooming to ensure that she was properly fluffed for a national television appearance.

We did not yet realize that our veterinarians would become such an important part of our lives. Good ones give you the confidence to entrust your furball to them, they gentle you through scary crises, and one day they help you to bear a most devastating loss. We found two fine vets in a practice near us: Bruce Whitaker and Bill Lyle.

For almost nine years, Trixie went to their office for medical attention and also once a week to be bathed and groomed by Heidi, for whom she was always quick to present her belly in greeting. Often when we went to pick up Trixie, she was not in the holding area at the back of the facility, but roamed free with the women who worked up front at the receiving station. A couple of years later, Heidi told us that she didn’t cage our girl after a bath because by her presence she calmed other dogs that were nervous about being bathed.

On our first visit, we were amused when the receptionist said, “Dr. Whitaker, Trixie Koontz is here for her appointment.” Trixie was now Trixie Koontz, officially a part of the family.

A joyful dog elicits from you a long list of nicknames. For a while I occasionally called her TK, but that was soon supplanted by Furface, Short Stuff, Love Puppy, Trix, Trickster, and others.

For the CNN interview, TK was super-fluffed, and throughout the experience, she remained properly unimpressed that she had become part of a celebrity family.

Weeks prior to the Pinnacle interview, the producer spoke with me by telephone, walking me through the subjects they might want to discuss. Everything went smoothly until he said, “And because yours is basically a sedentary profession, we’d like to get some footage of you and Gerda engaged in colorful leisure activities.”

I explained that aside from having taken six years of ballroom-dancing lessons, we had not done anything colorful. In fact, we strove to avoid the colorful in favor of the comfortable and the safe. We did not sky-dive, wrestle bears, charm snakes, or ride a motorcycle in tandem while wearing horned Viking helmets.

Television thrives on color and movement, so we were at a crisis point. After much mulling, I suggested that Pinnacle accompany Gerda and me to Canine Companions for Independence, at its Oceanside campus, because the organization was such an important part of our lives and would offer the producer all the color he needed. Besides, I am always trying to get CCI publicity that will bring them more donations. The producer was baffled and could not imagine what would be visually interesting about assistance dogs and a bunch of people in wheelchairs. He agreed to go with us to Oceanside on the second morning but “just for an hour.”

Thereafter, he wanted to return to Newport, where Gerda and I would walk on the beach for the camera and do other semicolorful things. Maybe I could climb a date palm, chase the rats out of their nest at the top of the tree, and even catch one in my teeth. I did not actually suggest the palm-rat-teeth scenario, but I’m sure that if I had, the producer would have sighed with relief and said, “Yes!”

To that point, my experiences with the press had been mostly dismaying. In an interview in a major newspaper, a reporter had invented every quote that he put in my mouth, had written that I worked in a windowless room, when in fact it featured an eight-by-five-foot window, and made forty-six other errors of fact in an attempt to make me appear to be an even bigger fool than I am, which itself is a fool’s errand. No one can make me appear more foolish than I already am. An artist might as well try to paint a hippopotamus that is more of a hippopotamus than the real animal. Given open-minded attention by a reporter, I will be as preposterous as anyone since time immemorial, thereby saving him the need to invent idiocies to attribute to me.

The Pinnacle team showed up on schedule, and they were a pleasant surprise. The producer and crew were friendly, considerate, professional, and they all had a sense of humor that put us at ease. Beverly Schuch, the on-camera host and interviewer, was a gracious woman who joined in the crew’s joking.

I am publicity-shy, but Gerda is an extremely private person who might want to shoot out the limelights if you directed them at her. I was surprised that the Pinnacle folks induced her to participate so fully in the program. Years after, I enjoyed reviewing the parts of the tape in which she appeared, so lovely on a warm September day.

Trixie, however, had none of Gerda’s hesitancy. We learned with Pinnacle that she enjoyed the limelight. She did everything asked of her—walk here, walk there, turn this way, sit, smile—as if instead of going through assistance-dog training, she had attended modeling school. She was in fact a camera hound.

Early on the second day with Pinnacle, we traveled to the Oceanside campus of Canine Companions for Independence. Gerda’s brother, Vito, and his wife, Lynn, were in their second week at the beach house, and they agreed to accompany us to take care of Trixie if we were with the film crew just when Short Stuff’s schedule called for food or a bathroom break.

Judi, the Oceanside campus director, gave Pinnacle a tour of the facility and encouraged them to film a session with the trainers and the current class of dogs heading toward graduation. Everyone from CNN became so enthralled with CCI that they remained not “just for an hour,” as the producer initially envisioned, but for the entire morning and the early afternoon. Later that year, they filmed a one-hour special about CCI that ran in the Christmas season.

During our tour, we came to the kennels, in which puppies were currently housed, all of them eight to ten weeks old and soon to be handed over to the volunteers who would raise them. Judi suggested that Gerda and I go into the play yard between kennels, get on our knees, and meet the puppies, which she would release from their pens with the flip of a switch. In these two days, Gerda had been in front of a camera more than she hoped to be in a lifetime, so she backed off, leaving me to face the ferocious pack alone. When the puppies were released, most proved to be golden retrievers, the others Labradors. They raced exuberantly to me. In an instant, I was wearing a live-puppy coat.

In the care of Vito and Lynn, Trixie watched me go into the fenced kennel and pressed to the chain-link with interest, as if saying, I used to live here, Dad. But why would you want to? The house on the hill is way better than this.

Then the puppies exploded into the play yard and clambered over me. I laughed with delight—and Trixie at once turned her back on this display and refused to watch. Vito and Lynn tried to get her to turn to the fence once more, but she clearly disapproved of me cavorting with cute puppies.

We took this to mean that after just a few days, she had bonded with us, and she did not want to consider that she might have to share our affections with another dog. Hour by hour, we were more certainly a family of three.

Long before that day, Oceanside had thoughtfully set aside a large tract from which the city council intended to carve gifts of land to be granted to worthy nonprofit organizations. CCI’s Southwest Chapter had previously been quartered in the San Diego area, but had moved north to accept Oceanside’s generosity. In a moment between sessions with Pinnacle, Gerda and I asked Judi Pierson what CCI intended to do with the substantial portion of their land they had not already built on, and she described a project that intrigued us and that eventually became an important part of our future—and Trixie’s.

After returning to Newport Beach that afternoon, we took the Pinnacle team to dinner at Zov’s Bistro in Tustin, for years our favorite restaurant. Zov didn’t have a pro-dog policy, but that day she made an exception and allowed us to bring Trixie. Our golden girl went under the table, facing out, and got up only to lap at a bowl of water.

An hour before the end of dinner, when I glanced down at Trixie to be sure she remained content, I saw her head raised. Something interested her. A piece of chicken the size of a plum lay on the patio floor, twelve inches from her nose. Evidently another diner had tossed it to her, but she was trained to disregard anything that might distract her from the person with disabilities whom she served.

In CCI’s large training room, food is sometimes dropped at various places before the day’s lesson begins. The dogs then go through their paces, learning to ignore the treats and remain focused on the needs of the trainer who is a sit-in for the wheelchair-bound person with whom the dog will eventually be paired. While in working mode, assistance dogs also must ignore other dogs, as well as cats, rabbits, birds, and anything else they might ordinarily want to chase, such as butterflies and Peterbilts.

On the patio, at dinner with the CNN folks, Trixie was retired, had no person with disabilities to serve, yet she remained faithful to her service-dog tradition. When we left the restaurant an hour later, she had not touched the chicken; as we departed, she stepped over the treat with more pride than regret.

Largely because of the time constraints of a television show, the finished episode of Pinnacle got a few things wrong when my answers to some questions were trimmed and spliced. But that had nothing to do with any agenda of theirs and everything to do with my tendency to ramble.

Near the end of the program, pressured by the producer, Gerda and I did a minute or two of swing dancing—without benefit of music, silently counting the beat—to demonstrate the result of all those years of lessons during which I had broken the spirit of more than one dance instructor. This is my favorite moment of the show, not because of our dancing but because the camera slowly zooms in on Trixie, who is watching us intently, as if she has never seen dancing before and as if she is solemnly wondering in what other peculiar rituals her new parents might engage.

   

VIII
i screw up, dog takes the rap

GOLDEN RETRIEVERS HAVE glorious thick coats, and they shed with exuberance, especially in spring, when they create billowing clouds of fur each time they shake their bodies. Because we preferred not to live in drifts of Trixie’s cast-offs, we combed her for half an hour to forty-five minutes after her walk each morning, and another ten or fifteen minutes in the late afternoon or early evening. In addition, every floor in the house was swept at least once a day. No visitor ever saw fur on the floor or went home with more than a few golden filaments on his clothes.

Trixie delighted in these daily grooming sessions, as if they were the doggy equivalent of spa visits. She learned the sequence of the comb-out, and lying on her grooming blanket, she extended a leg just when you needed to comb the feathers on it, rolled from one side to the other with a dreamy sigh. For Gerda and me, grooming this dog qualified as meditation and induced in us a Zenlike state of relaxation. As a result, her coat was always lustrous and silky.

Not long after Trixie became a Koontz, we invited friends to Sunday lunch, already confident that Trixie would be better behaved than I would. Mine is not a high standard of conduct, so her behavior was impressive only because it exceeded mine by a wide margin.

After combing Trixie, we had more tasks—preparing appetizers, arranging flowers, setting the table—than time to accomplish them. We raced this way and that all morning, and as eleven o’clock drew near, our anxiety escalated to panic. A moment after we completed preparations, the doorbell rang.

Our friends found Trixie as delightful as she found them, and the next four hours unfolded so well that Martha Stewart would have pinched our cheeks in approval. Toward the end of lunch, Short Stuff began to bump her nose against my leg and paw at me for attention while we were still at the table. Just in case anyone has ever affectionately referred to Martha Stewart as Short Stuff, let me clarify that I am speaking here of Trixie. This bumping-pawing was uncharacteristic behavior. I told her, “Down,” a command I would never have issued to Martha Stewart but one that good Trixie obeyed, lying on the floor beside my dining-room chair. After a few minutes, she sought my attention again, and I said, “Down,” and as before she at once obeyed.

After lunch, we adjourned to the living room with coffee, to continue our conversation. Trixie sought my attention and Gerda’s more than once. We petted her, rubbed her ears, stroked her chin, but she began to paw at us again, as if she was impatient to play. We denied her in a firm but loving tone of voice. We would play vigorously, but only when our guests had departed.

Finally Trixie stopped seeking play and sat directly in front of the sofa, staring solemnly and intently at me, as if she had recently read a book about mind over matter and hoped, with nothing but focused thought, to levitate me. When I ignored her, she finally left the room for a while and later returned in a less insistent mood.

A few minutes after our guests departed at three thirty, I found a wet blot on the off-white carpet in the family room. Pee. Trixie had gone to the farthest corner, where our guests would not see this faux pas when they passed by the archway, but it was pee nonetheless.

Because Gerda was once a Girl Scout, she learned to be prepared for anything. Trixie had never had an accident that left a “biological stain,” as the label on the Nature’s Miracle jar referred to it, but Gerda was ready with a cleanup kit in a canvas carryall. We set to work on the carpet, hoping to address the spot before it became a permanent mark.

Trixie sat at a distance, watching us with what I took to be embarrassment. Her ears drooped, and she hung her head.

Although she was irresistibly cute, I steeled myself to speak to her in a soft but disciplinarian tone. “This is not good,” I told her. “Bad. Bad dog. Bad, bad dog. Daddy is disappointed.”

She settled onto her belly and crawled across the room as if she were a soldier in a war and my soft words were rifle fire spitting past overhead. She went to a corner as far from the pee as she could get. She lay there with her nose against the baseboard, her back to us, beyond embarrassment, mortified.

As we cleaned the carpet, I kept glancing at Trixie. She looked so pathetic, facing into the corner, that I wanted to go to her and put a hand on her head and tell her all was forgiven. Gerda suggested I do just that, but I said the dog must have been testing us to see if we had the spine to be good masters. We must do the right thing or risk further such challenges.

And then … then I remembered what we had been told the day they brought Trixie to us: “If this dog does something wrong, the fault will be yours, not hers.” I now understood that when she bumped my leg with her nose and pawed for attention at the dining-room table, when she stared at me as if attempting to levitate or teleport me, she had been telling me that she needed to toilet. With horror, I thought back to how frantic we had been all morning as we prepared for our guests, and I realized that I had forgotten to take her outside for her late-morning pee.

I had failed to follow her schedule, and the pee on the family-room carpet was my fault as surely as if I produced it from my own bladder. As Trixie had been mortified, I was chagrined, which is mortification compounded by disappointment in oneself. I went to her, stroked her, apologized, but she continued to hide her face in the corner.

Gerda had not joined in the verbal disapproval—“Bad dog. Bad, bad dog”—so as usual I was the only hopeless idiot in the room, but she felt so terrible for Trixie that she wanted as much as I did to get us past this moment. “It’s her dinnertime. After her kibble, give her a cookie, two cookies. Let’s take her down the hill to the park, throw the ball as much as she wants. When we come home, we’ll give her a Frosty Paws,” which was a frozen treat, ersatz ice cream for dogs.

We did all of that, and through every step of reparations, we kept saying, “Good dog. Good Trixie. Good, good Trixie. Bad Daddy. Gooooood Trixie. Bad, bad Daddy.”