Bite me…

Never walk up to a pair of Dobermans and say, “Bite me!” even under your breath. Doberman pincers like to bite people… I know, I’ve been bitten by them before. So here I am at a campground and I was a 17 year old smart-Alec kid and there is this guy in a campsite across from ours playing a guitar – something that I was acutely interested in at the time. These people also had two Doberman pincers – dogs that I had absolutely despised. Let me tell you, I have never had good experiences with Dobermans. Like my earliest recollection with one was the three legged one down on the corner that used to chase me whenever I rode by on my bike – and would have gotten me if it had that 4th leg. I had gotten to know the people that owned the dog (or that the dog owned as the case may be) and though I enjoyed these people’s company, I loathed their dog. Well, as I visited and later got a babysitting job from them I had to get to know the dog. This dog and I had a mutual “understanding" I be nice to him, and he doesn’t attack me anymore. So here I am sitting in the living room staring at “Josh” (well, glaring would be probably more appropriate) and I’m waiting for the girl to wake up (who, believe it or not was more of a pain than the Doberman) and being as quiet as a mouse so I didn’t wake her up. I wasn’t an avid reader, so that left me with a lot of time to come up with ideas that only a 13-year old could come up with. My game was to whisper, “Josh!” as soft as I could without him hearing me. Now Doberman Pincers have a very acute sense of hearing – as I had discovered through this experiment, and they are also very smart – and I might add that they’re very demanding. I would start out speaking audibly, “Josh!” and watch his ears perk up from across the room. Then I would get softer “Josh!” and eventually it was “Josh!” which I knew I couldn’t hear and to me seemed like I was mouthing the words, but he heard it. So this three-legged dog would get up and hobble across the room not to just see what I wanted, because in his mind he had already figured out what I wanted. I wanted to pet him – that’s what he decided and he was going to prove his point by leaning on my legs and pinning me against the couch until I had sufficiently petted him as much as I wanted to. Well, needless to say, I didn’t try that experiment that often. Once the babysitting job had ended, the dog was back to chasing me on my bike and I was back to pedaling like the dickens to get past.

Then there was this Doberman that I had never even seen before... I had a paper route that was spread over about 8 miles distance and I did the whole thing on my bike – every day. It was also the responsibility of the paperboy to collect the money for subscriptions. This is the part I hated worse about the job. Back then it was more common for people to have biting dogs and I had had several run-ins with these dogs. Here’s how the scenario usually went: I would go up to the door, the dog would come running from around the house – foaming and frothing from the mouth with its teeth bared and the owner would always say, “don’t worry, he won’t bite” and before I had a chance to even relax my defensive stance, that dog would be munching on me. Then came the “surprised” response of the people, “He’s never done that before, I’m so sorry – bad boy” (speaking to the dog, of course) Since it was almost impossible to collect money from these people because they refused to pen up their dangerous animal, I would often times avoid collection from these people – and delivery of their newspaper would cease (well, I wish I would have thought of that part back then). Anyway, after attempting to collect money from one of these deadbeats and finding nobody home still, I got back down to the end of their 500 foot gravel driveway, at the bottom of the 12% grade hill – I was waiting at the road to see if there were any cars going by… and out of nowhere and without warning I felt a piercing, penetrating pain in my buttocks. I turned around to see this Doberman staring up at me with the look on his face as if to say, “yeah, I just bit you in the butt – so what are you going to do about it?”

There were other encounters like the stupid Doberman (which is rare for Dobermans) that jumped on my bike and got caught in the spokes – bending the spokes and possibly breaking his leg… and believe it or not I actually had sympathy for the creature. Other encounters I have forgotten because they were either insignificant or I have been protected from the trauma by amnesia, but I vividly remember that encounter at the campground where I whispered a barely audible, “bite me!” to those two Dobermans that were thankfully chained up securely. The guy came out and tried his best to calm down his vicious beasts – meanwhile chastising me for tempting his dogs as his wife stood there with her hands on her hips – with the look of, “how stupid could you get” in her eyes and his preteen daughter smirking at me.

The nerve of some people.