When I was a struggling college student, I did a lot of shitty jobs.
I wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to stand behind a cash register, dealing with problem customers, or slinging hash in some steamy kitchen. I considered myself too smart for that. I wasn’t going to college for nothing, after all. As far as I knew, I was the first in my family to pursue higher education. The rest of that sorry lot still worked in and around Greeley, either as farm hands, or shoveling shit in some stinking meat packing plant. I didn’t intend to fall into that death trap, so I held out for less labor intensive work.
My thing was the gig economy. To support myself I did writing jobs on Fiver, pretending to be an Indian for certain clients, who wouldn’t fucking hire you if they suspected you lived in a country with functioning labor laws. I also wrote on Medium, where I posed as a hot Asian chick in a bikini, supported in my lie by a sexy classmate from Manila who agreed to sit for photos for a cut of the profits.
I carried out scams like these across several platforms, including Substack, until the assholes there shut me down for alleged fraud. Then Medium started going broke after opening its Partner Program to previously excluded Asian nations, so they culled the herd there, too. I was as full of righteous indignation about this as anyone, even though I was carrying out the same scams the Asians were, disguised beneath a red, white and blue banner of American respectability.
My righteous indignation amounted to nothing in the grand scheme of things. With my financial situation dire, I realized I might actually have to leave my campus apartment to do a little honest labor. Though I feared wilting in the sun, with no other recourse I sucked it up, and started driving for Door-Dash. But when my ancient Ford Pinto kept breaking down, and even my mechanically inclined hayseed cousins had trouble keeping it running consistently, I knew it was time to move on.
Desperate for money, I scrolled Indeed, Monster, and LinkedIn, searching for anything that didn’t involve me working up a sweat, or raising my blood pressure.
On one of my quick scans through thousands of postings, none of which seemed to conform to my exalted self image, I stumbled upon an ad for Dog Walker.
Now that looks easy enough, I said to myself. I loved to take walks. I did it for free all the time. Not only did a brisk pace keep my body trim without resorting to the sweaty, undignified tedium of running, but it allowed me to “accidentally” bump into hot cougar babes who were fitness buffs, and preferred a young man who wasn’t flabby around the midsection, like their husbands.
I met many of these fading flowers out walking their dogs – Retrievers, Labradors, Yorkies, you name it. These bags wouldn’t even talk to you unless you gushed over their slobbering, furry canine on the leash, believing it meant you had a sensitive side, unlike their growling, stone-faced husbands.
To get in good with these milfs, a buddy of mine who lived close to the school in Fort Collins let me borrow his pooch sometimes.I guess that qualified as experience, so after contemplating the limitless potential of the job, I answered the ad.
The online application seemed to have very little to do with animal handling expertise, and was more like the admission form for prison, if there was such a thing. What states have you lived in the last five years? Do you possess a current US passport? Do you frequently travel outside the country, and if so, where? Have you previously worked under any aliases? Please provide links to your Facebook and other social media accounts. Stuff like that.
These questions seemed more than a little intrusive. Had I been in favorable economic circumstances, I would have said screw you and clicked away. But I was desperate for something to keep me in beer money, and I think this dog walking company understood that. Maybe they thought that if you’ll stoop to scoop feces as part of your job description, they could make you jump through hoops too, and you’ll muzzle yourself and just take it.
I answered the questions to the best of my ability, submitted the application, then cracked a 24 ounce Steel before I started scrolling through the other postings, assuming nothing would come of the dog waking gig. In America you have to have a license for everything, practically even to wipe your own ass. I was pretty sure the company would background check me, figure out I didn’t have the required certifications, then use my application to wipe their own asses, like so many other prospective employers had.
I got a little drunker that night than usual and decided to sleep in. I was a little surprised when my phone rang at eight thirty in the morning.
Nobody I knew ever called me that early. Even my Mother was reluctant to shake me out of sleep, when the sun clung so close to the horizon it bulged like her aging waistline.
What the fuck, is somebody dying? I asked as I groggily stirred myself from slumber. Nothing less than impending doom ever got me out of bed, and even that depended upon the person doom had chosen to impend itself upon.
I picked up the phone and rubbed my eyes hard, trying to yank them out of dreamland to see the phone face.
Dusty’s Dog Walkers, the caller ID on my phone screen said.
What the hell? So soon?
My need for cash uncharacteristically overrode my desire to hang up, roll over, and go back to sleep. I didn’t even answer the phone sometimes for my Mom if she called in an inconvenient moment, but I answered this time.
“Hello?” I said in a muddled, foggy tone.
“Oh I’m sorry,” a young, sweet sounding female voice on the other end said, the kind of voice designed to be a pied piper snare for kids like me, to drown us like rats in a river overflowing with our own stupidity.
“Did I catch you sleeping?”
“Oh not at all,” I answered, knowing there was nothing to be gained by honesty here. “I was up all night cramming for finals.” It was my standard answer for authority-figure adults I was forced to deal with.
“Oh,” the sexy voice of Dusty Dog Walker said. She didn’t sound pleased by the report, but in retrospect, maybe she persisted because she knew my ass was lying. School had been out for summer a while now.
I heard Dusty take a deep breath. I had already fucked up the interview.
Her voice lost its perkiness. “Are you still interested in the dog walking job?”
“Of course. I love animals and I look forward to interacting with them,” I said mechanically.
I got the feeling this was not the response Dusty was anticipating. Saying all the right things was the wrong thing with her. I got an icy pause before she resumed.
“I see you have a shoplifting charge on your record from three months ago.”
Fuck. The asshole cops told me they wouldn’t report it if I paid Walgreens for the condoms.
“Yeah, but that was a misunderstanding. I put the item in my pocket on my way to the register. I was going to pay for it.”
For the first time the interview lady lightened up. “Ha ha, no need to explain. Would you like to come in for an…interview?”
What the hell? “Sure,” I said.
“What time?” she asked, still overflowing with sticky syrup. Like in a Venus flytrap, a voice warned me.
“How about now? Just give me a little while to get dressed.”
Dusty texted me her address details, and with the love of lucre driving my heel, I hurried half-hungover to the interview, hoping to get there before someone else beat me to it.
To my disappointment, Dusty Dogwalker didn’t live up to the image of her silken phone sex voice, not at all. Instead of a statuesque blonde sex kitten, as I had imagined, she was a doughy-faced, frumpy, squat little plump brunette, who looked kind of like a slime mold growing on her office chair. I could tell by her wastepaper basket how she had become so rotund. The receptacle was overflowing with candy wrappers and the carcasses of dead frappuccinos.
Dusty’s hair was tied up in an unkempt bun, and her similarly dull-colored eyes looked up obliquely at me from her roundish head, plopped atop the summit of her equally roundish body. Though she definitely didn’t entice me romantically, at that moment I was kind of at her mercy, and couldn’t allow even the tiniest sparkle of fat-shaming mirth to flicker in my eyeballs.
Dusty didn’t motion me to sit. She merely acknowledged my presence with a little nod, leaned forward at the citadel of her desk, then wiped her brow. I couldn’t tell if this was a symbolic gesture, or if sweat had actually accumulated there, perhaps from intense calorie consumption.
“I was starting to have my doubts about you,” Dusty said as she glanced up from the faux wood of the desk, “but I can see your application matches your reality.”
I knew my application was sketchy, punctuated with half truths and sometimes bald faced lies when the situation called for it, but how could my physical appearance reflect that? Okay, I had thrown on my dress shirt and black dress pants in a rush, but they weren’t as wrinkled as my soul.
“Excuse me?”
Dusty made a motion with her hand like she was shooing away a bug.
“When can you start?
Was this a trick question? Job interviews never proceeded this easily and I should know, having done a helluva lot of them, mostly unsuccessfully.
What should I do? This woman seemed to be more impressed by sketchiness than respectability. If I told her I owed my former employer a week’s notice, or some kind of bullshit courtesy like that, she might back off.
“As soon as possible,” I said.
Dusty told me to be there the next day and I eagerly agreed, looking forward to making some fast cash. I was so stoked I couldn’t wait to call my mother with the news.
I knew it was my Mom’s day off from her job as a manager in a distribution warehouse. She worked strange hours, four AM until noon or something like that. Most people would protest such a schedule but she liked it because she was out of sight there, and out of mind. She had always worked weird hours like these, starting with my earliest memory of her employment, as a night cashier in a convenience store. She left me home sleeping every day, and sometimes I woke up terrified to find myself alone. But I never complained, even as a tiny tyke. I absolved my Mom of any sin, instinctively knowing she had to bust her ass to keep us in dinosaur nuggets, our staple food. Instead, I pointed the finger at my sperm donor Dad, whoever that bastard was.
I teased my mother about her employment pattern, calling her a vampire who went out at night and returned home by day to sleep in her coffin. I didn’t know what the hell she was hiding from, but I knew she would be home around this time getting crocked, popping open her second six pack by now. This was her daily routine. I sometimes wondered if she was drinking herself to death. I sometimes wondered why it didn’t bother me more. I carefully avoided answering either question.
I could be the only thing keeping her alive now. She always answered the phone for me, regardless of her state of stupefaction.
“Hello baby,” she said, forming her words slowly and deliberately, to avoid slurring them. “What are you up to?”
“I got a job, Mom,” I answered, expecting her to be proud.
“Another one?” she replied, her numbed tongue tripping over the ‘th’ a little. I felt disappointed. Was my failure to maintain gainful employment really that obvious to everyone?
She must have sensed hurt when I didn’t respond right away, but I only paused because I was wondering how to explain this weird gig to her.
“Oh son, of course I’m proud of you. What is it this time?”
She probably assumed I was slinging burritos, doing barista duty, or some other typical undergrad shit like that.
“I’m walking dogs, Mom,” I said.
She laughed exactly like when she used to drag me shopping with her, and in boredom I would stand alongside department store mannequins and imitate their poses, to amuse passersby. I think a little beer must have squirted out of her nose because I heard her cough. When I didn’t laugh back, she swallowed her cheer and grew serious again.
“Walking dogs? Seriously? They pay people for that?”
“I guess so, Mother,” She knew when I used the word Mother instead of Mom, I was teed off by her farting around.
“Is that really a thing now?”
“People with a lot of money won’t get off their asses for anything,” I said. “They hire nannies for their children, and dog walkers for their pets. Makes you wonder why they have either, if they can’t deal with them.”
I didn’t mean this as an accusation against my Mom, who I found infallible, but maybe she took it as such. She went quiet for a moment. It wasn’t her first or last awkward pause during this conversation.
“So what part of Fort Collins will you be walking dogs in, son?”
“Oh, the job is actually down in Snowmist, Mom.”
I heard a loud thump on the other end. Did she drop her phone? She really must be drunk off her ass.
“That’s a long drive. I hope your car holds up. What part of Snowmist?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I heard her breathing heavier into the line, though I couldn’t tell if this was drunkenness or nervousness.
“We used to live in Snowmist, you know. When you were a baby.”
“Oh really? I didn’t know.”
“I have to go, son. Sorry, I’m not feeling well. Call me and tell me how it went.”
“Yeah, sure.” It wasn’t the first time she had to run for the toilet in the middle of our conversations.
The following day I returned to Dusty’s office. I was expecting some simple dog-walking instructions at least, perhaps safety precautions on calming an angry beast when they get riled up, something of that nature. There would probably be a boring classroom training session with several newbies in attendance where the company put you through the legal paces, schooling you in dog-walking ethics, then making you sign a form saying you understood everything, so you couldn’t sue the shit out of the company in case the sweet doggie on your leash turned and mauled you. Normal crap like that.
Instead, I found nobody in the building except Dusty Dogwalker, who called me into the office alone. She motioned me to sit down this time. She had a half-full box of donuts by her on the desk, but didn’t offer me one. By the look on her face things were going to get serious.
“Okay, here’s the drill,” she spoke. “There’s a van out back with a dog in it. HIs name is Bruno. Don’t worry, he’s completely harmless.”
When someone says don’t worry, that’s usually the overture to the apocalypse. But before I had time to worry Dusty reached into her drawer and pulled out a xeroxed map, a cellular phone, and some car keys, which she slid across the desk to me. The cell was an antiquated flip-phone model. It looked like one of those cheap burners criminals use on TV shows. A sticky note was attached to it, with a phone number written in pencil.
“Memorize that number then destroy the sticky,” Dusty said.
I was confused, to say the least.
“Why can’t I use my phone?” I asked, staring numbly at the burner.
“If you want to succeed in this job,” she answered, looking at me obliquely as always, as if face to face contact revealed her devil horns, “you won’t ask a lot of questions. In fact, if you’re really smart, you’ll leave your own phone at home. Can you manage that? Some people can’t.”
I picked up the crappy little cell and weighed it in my hand, like an archaeologist examining a stone tool he found in a cave, beneath several strata of clay pot sherds.
What could I say? I needed the job, and Dusty was giving me some not so subtle hints here.
“Okay,” I nodded.
“Good. Here’s your map. Walk Bruno around all these neighborhoods there. Don’t worry, he won’t get tired, that mutt will walk forever. He’ll walk your ass off. While you’re walking, observe the houses on the block. In particular, watch for ones that have old people living in them, particularly old farts who look like they’re not very mobile anymore. For instance, maybe you see some granny open the door to fetch her newspaper or get her mail out of the box, and she’s on a walker. If you see something like that, call it in immediately to the number on the sticky.”
“Hmm…uh…”
“You’ll get a feel for it after a while, hopefully. The best dog walkers can see the subtle signs without thinking too much. Are you with me so far?”
“I think so.”
“You’re also going to look around for houses that appear to be vacant. Do you know what a realtor’s key box looks like?”
Dusty saw my hesitation, so she reached into her desk and took out a gizmo that looked like an oversized padlock, with a big closed hook on one end and a numbered keypad on the face.
“You’ll see these things hanging on the doors of vacant houses. Realtors store keys to the property in them so they can go in and show clients around. But too many clients are bad, so avoid houses with For-Sale signs in the yard, even if you see these gizmos. We prefer houses that aren’t a hot commodity, a slow sale, maybe because they’re a little run down and potential buyers don’t want a fixer upper. Homes like this probably won’t have any curtains or drapes in the windows. If you see run down, lock box, and no drapes together, that’s a triple crown. Call it in. You got it?”
Something told me I had not been hired because of my dog-walking skills at all.
“Sure,” I said, with a bit less hesitation this time, sort of getting into the spirit of things.
“Good, you look like a smart kid. Now, here’s how it goes. You get here early, walk Bruno around these neighborhoods on the map, and make mental notes about the residents like I told you. Mental notes, don’t write anything down. When you’re done, come back, then leave the dog in the van, in the shade out back with the windows open. Use the orange cones in the van to save your space while you’re out there. Then go home, go to school or your other job if you have one, whatever the fuck it is you do normally, I really don’t give a shit. Nor do I want to know. Then come back in the evening to walk Bruno again, through the same neighborhoods.”
I rubbed my chin a bit doubtfully. “Isn’t that…?”
“Suspicious?” Dusty barked, like she had gone native down here, nuzzling up to her fuzzy clients. “Let me worry about suspicious. I’ve been in this business a while. Do you have a dog? Do you think he only poops once in the morning, or what? Dogs shit all fucking day. It’s not suspicious at all for people to walk them in the morning, then again in the evening when they get home from work. That’s why I don’t own one. They’re little furry shit factories, is what they are. Who needs that kind of headache?”
“Okay,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed. Truth is, I didn’t know squat about dogs, or animals in general.
“Now pay attention. After doing whatever creams your panties all afternoon, on your second go round I want you to focus on houses you spotted with no cars in the driveway on your morning walk. See if any cars have arrived there yet. If not, take a closer look for a doorbell camera. Do you know what a doorbell camera looks like?”
This time I sat up straighter and nodded proudly, like an eager kindergartener. My grandparents had a doorbell camera.
“Okay, good. We don’t want houses with doorbell cameras, okay? If they have one, forget about it and focus on other places. Got it?”
“I think so,” I said, concluding this was going to be a more exciting job than I expected. Rather than being repulsed by the implications of the activities I would be dealing in I felt stimulated, unlike any grunt work I had done before.
“One more thing,” Dusty said. “I can’t stress enough not to take notes. Writing stuff down looks sketchy as shit. You’re a college kid, so hopefully you have half a brain to remember things without making notes. That’s why I prefer to hire college kids, because they’re not total dumbshits. Also, wear decent clothes. Don’t go out in homeless rags. And groom yourself. We groom the damn dog, so try to look at least as clean and trimmed as he does. Blend into the neighborhood vibe as much as you can. Any questions?”
I raised my eyebrows and rubbed my chin again.
“Yeah…uhh…how much do I get paid? And how?”
“That’s the spirit. That’s what I like about you, you’re the entrepreneurial type. Here’s the deal. You get paid on commission, not by the hour. The more business you bring in, the more you’ll get. Believe me though, it can be lucrative. And all of it will be in cash, under the table. This same table you’re sitting at. You won’t have to sign any W-2s or report anything to the IRS. I insist you don’t, in fact. But I don’t take you for some goody two-shoes fussbudget anyway, or I wouldn’t have hired you. Are you with me?”
I felt pleased Dusty didn’t find me a fussbudget, and wondered if that was really something I should be happy about.
“Yes,” I answered, my agreement feeling like a handshake with the devil.
“Bruno’s in the back parking lot,” she said without looking up, already moving on to other things. I took that as my cue to get busy.
NEXT>>>
Image by Gemini, from author’s prompt