Months after Beaker’s (named that because he sounded like Beaker from the Muppets) passing, my mother decided to adopt a dog. She had grown fond of Beaker and missed having someone around the house that she could take care of and would love her for it. Her kids had grown up and left the house so that it was just her and my dad, but he satisfied none of those requirements. I suspect she just wanted someone that needed her, because don’t we all just want to be needed? Either that or she just enjoyed pissing my dad off.
I’ve grown up with Dobermann…well, except that one time my mom adopter a German Shorthaired Pointer, but let’s not talk about that. He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named was a pretty tough dog. After that, we all went back to adopting Dobermann.
After Beaker’s passing, my mother almost immediately started looking to adopt a dog. She wanted a Doberman and would peruse multiple local (and not-so-local) shelters hoping that a Doberman would pop up. But after a few months, she started getting impatient. So, one day out of the blue, she called me at work and told me to take Friday off because she wanted me to go to the closest Dobermann rescue and adopt a dog. She apparently had been lurking on their site and saw multiple Dobermann she wanted to meet and adopt.
Being a dog lover myself, I was all for it. At least until that Friday, when I learned that the “closest” Dobermann rescue was three hours away! I didn’t mind the long ride. COVID had reduced the amount of time I got to spend with my parents, so it was nice getting to spend some time together.
The shelter was everything I imagined it to be! Dobermann everywhere! They were all barking up a storm, excited to see a visitor, or maybe just someone they could maul. It was hard to tell. I imagine COVID had reduced the number of people adopting dogs. When we got there, we were told there were 90+ Dobermann available for adoption. There were beautiful black-and-tans, red-and-tans…oh the variety!
My mom, forgetting that she was a frail, seventy-year old Asian woman that was barely five feet tall, picked a young, 2 year old muscular black-and-tan Doberman who the rescue had named “Throttle” because of his energy. When she walked him, he dragged her around like a runaway horse would its rider, but she loved him instantly and decided to adopt him almost as quickly.
The three hour ride home with “Throttle” was uneventful, save for the constant stream of farts that emanated from his red, swollen asshole. Every few minutes, you’d hear a pppffffffffffttttt followed a few seconds later by a smell that could only be described as rancid pickled fish.
During the drive, I asked my Mom what name to give “Throttle”. I don’t know what I expected from someone who named her previous dogs Sassy and Charlie.
“I really like the name Ozzy,” she said.
My mom is not an Ozzy Osbourne fan, at least I don’t think so. I could be wrong though. Growing up, she never seemed to be religious, but then suddenly when my sister and I were in college, she was a devout Christian and her gay daughter was suddenly an affront to God.
And so my mom and I brought Ozzy home to find my Dad, furious that we had gone and adopted another dog. To my dad, dogs only served one purpose – as food. To him, it was a waste of time and money to care for a dog and not ultimately eat it.
“Animals were put on this earth for one purpose and one purpose only – to be eaten by man,” he’d used to say. As a kid that had been brought up in the United States, it was disturbing to hear, but over the years, we ignored him and attributed it to the ravings of an angry Chinese man.
As the pandemic was at its height, there was some difficulty adopting dogs. Excluding the pandemic, Ozzy (and many other dogs at the rescue) had a number of factors working against him – he was a Dobermann, he was large, and the rescue was out in bumfuck nowhere. This resulted in him being at the rescue for over 8 months.
I’ve never experienced being caged up outdoors with 90+ other dogs for over eight months, but I imagine it’s not a very pleasant experience – it likely resulted in some of his…idiopathic quirks, such as the tendency to eat anything that he could swallow (much like the human proclivity to stress eat). This included dog toys, towels, and everyone’s left shoe.
In my family, we don’t wear shoes in the house, so they are all left outdoors or in the garage, which just so happened to be where Ozzy slept. In his first month home, I would get calls from my mom every other day to the effect of, “Ozzy ate my shoe again! It was a really expensive pair. Oh, he also ate one of your dad’s slippers.”
Ozzy also had a terrible case of worms. Every time he took a shit, there seemed to be equal parts worms and feces that came out of his asshole. One time, after taking a particularly large shit, he turned around to sniff his work and when his head came up with a small white worm, wriggling at the end of his nose. We weren’t sure if it was because of his time at the rescue or because of his diet of towels and shoes, but it took my mom nearly half a year of medication to finally clean the words out of him.
Ozzy was also a canine racist. He hated small white dogs. Any time he saw one, he would go ballistic, aggressively pulling my mom toward the dog so he can sink his teeth into its tender white flesh. It was a bit sad to see that racism and hatred for anyone different than ourselves spanned species.
But over time, Ozzy grew accustomed to my mom, and she to him. Ozzy also grew accustomed to my dad – he knew that my dad didn’t give a shit about him – and he was fine with that, since the source of all his love (and his food) was my mom. They grew close together in a symbiotic relationship without realizing it – Ozzy needed someone to put up with his neurotic tendencies and to continue to supply him towels like a dealer would a crack addict; my mom needed someone utterly dependent on her and would unconditionally love her for who she is.
Ozzy was not without issues. His hair started falling out almost immediately, his skin would get extremely hot, and he seemed to be constantly itchy. My mom took him to multiple vets, spent more than my college tuition trying to figure out what was going on with him and how to help him. Every few weeks, he’d get a steroid shot. At home, she’d rub coconut oil on his skin in an attempt to soothe the itch and try to heal him.
My sister and I suggested giving Ozzy a bath, as he was getting extremely dirty. Dirt seemed to crust onto his skin and whatever fur he had left. We tried, but each time, Ozzy would buck and contort himself to the point it looked like it hurt just to get away from the water. And so my mom would give him sponge baths and continue to rub coconut oil on his skin – more fur would continue to fall out and his skin would scab over. We’d try every few months, but he’d always resist with all his being, as if he’d been waterboarded or something in his past. We eventually gave up and sent him to a groomer for a bath every few months. He seemed to improve after each bath, but we couldn’t afford to do it more often.
Ozzy grew weaker, and eventually became lethargic. We took advantage of it by leading him out to the yard and gave him a bath. We’d give him a bath every other week to remove all the dirt and grime and coconut oil that had built up on his skin over the past year, and his condition seemed to improve. His skin started healing and hair started growing back where it had previously fallen out.
However, when the holidays came, Ozzy again grew lethargic. He stopped eating, and didn’t want to do anything but lay around. My mom, worried about her child, took him to the vet. The first visit didn’t result in anything as my mom didn’t actually tell the vet anything. She just mentioned that he was lethargic and would occasionally throw up. The vet took a look at Ozzy and mentioned that there didn’t seem anything wrong, so sent them home. However, Ozzy’s condition didn’t improve, so she took him back to the vet and mentioned that he had been eating a lot of towels and recently hadn’t eaten any towels.
“He’s been eating towels?” the vet exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me this last time?!” X-rays showed that his intestinal tract was blocked by towels (what a surprise). `The only way to resolve it was by surgery.
My mom isn’t one to make big decisions on her own. She called around, asking my sister, myself, and even my cousin (who used to be a vet), but each one of us told her that it was a decision that only she could make as Ozzy was her dog. She ultimately decided to go forward with the surgery. The vet successfully a grapefruit size ball of towel from Ozzy’s stomach. He asked my mom if she wanted to keep it as a memento – she declined, but I thought it would have been nice to have put it on a pedestal over the fireplace at home, which happened to be right over the television. I was thinking my dad would be able to watch TV, and occasionally glance at the balled up towel bits over the TV and just laugh at the idea that the balled up towel bits cost more than the TV he was watching.
Ozzy came home and seemed a bit loopy, but his appetite was slowly coming back. On Christmas, I visited with him, and he seemed to be returning back to his old neurotic self, albeit slowly.
However, two days later, my mom called me. “Ozzy passed last night,” she said quietly.
The night before, he apparently collapsed and wasn’t able to get back up. My mom valiantly dragged him into the car and took him to the vet, where they took him in for observation. However, hours later, the vet called my mom and told her that Ozzy didn’t make it. He had an infection from the surgery that had spread through the rest of the body, and he was too weak to fight it.
I got this news while I was staring at Moxie, my own shelter dog. I stared into her aqua eyes, glowing brightly with youth. I wondered what it would be like for Ozzy to slowly drift off to sleep like that, alone in a cold, sterile environment, without his one true friend. My eyes welled up at the thought; I cleared my throat and hugged Moxie fiercely.
I asked my mom what she was going to do.
“I don’t know, but I really miss Ozzy right now.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I do too.”
I asked her if she was going to get another dog.
“Not for a while. If I do, I think your dad will really follow through and eat it before long.”
Ozzy, you will be missed.
Ozzy was a really good boy. He was so sweet despite his rough life before being adopted home.