Home On The Mange
Big news from Tinseltown, where unimaginable glamour meets cold-blooded reptilian business sense at the crossroads of your dreams. In the last two days, Teacake, my wife's enormous ancient arthritic tabby who is covered in benign cysts, has urinated on my bathmat twice, my favorite pair of jeans once, and my treasured shoulder bag. I've told Regina that if he pisses on anything else I love, either he goes, or I go. Even if that ultimatum lands me in a residential hotel in downtown L.A., I'm still standing fast to the principle. She says it's because I don't clean the litter box often enough. As if.
The other hot holiday gossip is that Elijah took a shit in the bathtub last night. We've experienced most iterations of fecal matter since becoming parents, but this was our first floater. We stared at it with equal parts admiration and horror before flushing it down the toilet. Then we drained the bathtub, cleaned it and filled it back up again, because baths keep Elijah busy in the evenings and we wanted to have a glass of wine.
But now the meat of the matter. There's a house directly behind ours, owned by the same landlord. In it lives a French woman, who's a bioengineering graduate student at USC. She's friendly enough, though she never thanked us for the cookies we gave her on Christmas. The other night, she knocked on our door in the middle of a terrific freezing rainstorm.
"I have a leetle problem," she said.
"What?" I said.
"Eet's a dog."
She opened the door further. Behind her was a medium-sized terrier. Its fur had been torn away in chunks from its torso, leaving a rash of red-raw skin and sores. Its bones were eminently visible. It was soaked and desperate to come inside. It stank like an entire animal shelter full of filth, with that certain kind of desperate putridity that presages death.
"Eet followed me home. I don't know much about dogs."
"We have a dog!" I said proudly.
"I know," she said. "That's why I'm asking you for help."
I'd been in town for two weeks, and was already feeling useless. This was the perfect mission to break my slump. A great surge of heroism and duty welled in my chest. I began barking orders.
"Regina! Get me some dog food! And a bowl! No! Two bowls! And a towel! And some treats and some doggie shampoo! We're going to clean this mutt up!"
A few minutes later, I walked through the rain to the back house. The French girl's place already smelled like the dog throughout.
"Eet's a he," she said. "I looked."
He hovered in her kitchen, but when I offered him doggie treats, he just looked confused, like he'd been hungry so long that he'd forgotten food's purpose. So I skipped that step, picked him up in a towel, and carried him to the bathroom, where I placed him in the tub, soaked him with water from a cup, and scrubbed him town with Johnson's Baby shampoo. He behaved himself. At least the water was warm.
When we were done, he still smelled like death, but at least it was now a clean death.
"Now what do I do?" she said.
This woman had obviously spent so much youth in microbiology labs that she had no idea how to function in the world of the mundane.
"Um. Call a vet?"
For some reason, she handed me the phone book and phone. So I called the Eagle Rock Emergency Animal Hospital.
"Yes. I have a dog here. I found. Well actually, my neighbor found him on the street and took him home and then I gave him a bath. Where should I send him?"
"You need to call the humane society," said the man on the other line.
"OK."
"And, because you handled the dog, you might have mange."
"What?"
"Mange. Scabies. You should check with your doctor in two weeks. It usually doesn't set in for a month to six weeks. And if you have it, then everyone you come into contact with will get it too."
"Are you saying I shouldn't touch anybody for a month?"
"Just to be safe."
"Mange?" I said. "Are you sure I'm going to get mange?"
"Go to your doctor," he said. "You have mange."
This seemed impossible. I bathed the dog with disinfectant shampoo and washed my hands afterward. I've come into contact with stray dogs many times. And yet mange is not on the list of diseases I've contracted. Nevertheless, I ran home in a panic.
"We have mange," I said to Regina. "You need to take off all your clothes and put them in the washer. NOW! And Elijah's! And take the collars off the animals! Except Teacake!"
So soon, my entire family was sitting around in its underwear, watching Monsters, Inc. Remember that image if you haven't yet decided to have a family and do with it what you may.
The next day, it was determined that Hercules' heartworm medicine protects him from mange. And that mange for people and dogs are two different things. The dog had been taken to the shelter, where I fear he will not meet a good end. Our panic had created nothing other than fear of the packs of lunatic dogs that roam our neighborhood. But we probably should be fearing them anyway. There still remains a possibility that the cats will contract mange. One can only hope.
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