The Dogman of La Jolla

By Karl Roeseler

People do not see me as a dog. My face is not puffy. My eyelids do not droop. Dogs, though – they know. They know me as the Dogman of La Jolla. 

For a long time I had no idea of my status. I don’t even like dogs. I do, I guess, but I don’t love them. I love cats. Dogs are too dependent on people.

Some friends of mine live with a dog. When I visit these friends, I visit their dog. I didn’t think about it much – although I did notice I felt disappointment when the front door was thrown open and only my two friends were there. My friends were fond of saying: “Pin-pon really like’s you but he’s playing in the backyard now.” Or: 

“Pin-pon doesn’t let us scratch him there.” Or: “Listen to that happy growl!”

Pin-pon enjoys tugging on my pantsleg or sleeping by my side. Sometimes Pin-pon sleeps with his chin resting on my shoe.

One day I walked down Girard Avenue after exhausting a cup of coffee at the Pannikin. A dog and a woman strolled up the sidewalk toward me. Out of habit, I scratched the dog beneath its collar. The. Woman said, “That’s amazing. She’s usually not that friendly!”

The realization came later on, in the evening of the same day. I thought about Pin-pon and I thought about the dog on the sidewalk. I thought: dogs sure like me. Then I thought of my landlady’s constantly-barking guard dog. That dog does not like me. I thought again of Pin-pon and the woman on the sidewalk. She had pale green eyes, a green so pale that I noticed their paleness before I recognized their color. I sighed and climbed the stairs of my little cottage to go to sleep. I sleep on the floor. I have a blanket which I place over the throwrug my landlady provided. The cottage was built as a guest house, then the landlady’s idiot son lived there with his girlfriend and the nasty guard dog. The nasty guard dog bit a chunk out of the one corner of the throwrug, so it’s just as well that I cover the rug with my blanket. Then I cover the blanket with a sheet, cover part of the sheet with my body and part of my body with the sheet. In this envelope of sheet and blanket I sleep. 

I realized that night as I lay on the floor of my little cottage in the village of La Jolla why dogs like me so much. They smell the smell of the landlady’s nasty guard dog – a dog-smell which only dogs can smell.

Since the realization, I think differently of myself.

“The Dogman of La Jolla” was originally published in slightly different form as “La Jolla” in Exquisite Corpse (Vol. 4, No. 5-8, May-August 1986).