When I left home for college, I moved into a house with a huge backyard, prompting me to adopt a six-year-old Pit Bull named Scooby. When Scooby was a puppy, an investigation into a Pit Bull fighting ring led animal control to a home where thirty dogs were imprisoned in deplorable conditions and regularly forced to fight to the death. The man responsible was arrested and the dogs were taken. Nearly every dog in the ring had become so aggressive that they could not be rehabilitated. Only two puppies were spared; one of those was Scooby. While he was gentle and shy around humans, if he encountered another dog he instinctually clenched his jaw around their throat and wouldn’t let go.
During college, I met and married Rocco, a marijuana dealer from Northern California. He moved into my home in Olympia, and we bought another Pit Bull—a puppy who we named Zoey. I feared Scooby would try to kill her, but instead they became best friends, cuddling together, cleaning each other, and playing friendly games of tug-o-war with my underwear. During my senior year, I applied to MFA programs and was rejected by all of them. I graduated, but instead of pursuing my dream to become a writer, we moved to California to grow marijuana.
A year later I left Rocco for Aaron, a street fighter who’d spent most of his life in prison. Rocco and I split the dogs—Rocco took Zoey, and of course, I kept Scooby. While waiting for an apartment to become available, Aaron and I stayed at a motel. The motel didn’t allow dogs, so Rocco agreed to take Scooby until I moved into the apartment. He left Scooby and Zoey alone on the mountain where he grew marijuana while he went into town. When he returned, Scooby had been shot and killed. He and Zoey had run off to a neighboring property and Scooby attacked the neighbor’s dog. The neighbor claimed that he tried everything to break up the fight but Scooby wouldn’t stop, so he had no choice but to kill him. At the time of Scooby’s death, Michael Vick and his abused dogs were regularly in the news, stabbing me in the heart whenever I heard a new report. The effect of Pit Bull fighting wasn’t just my issue, it was a national headline.
A few months before Scooby’s death, Falcons quarterback, Michael Vick, was implicated in a state and federal investigation of a dog fighting ring. Reports surfaced of dogs being hanged, drowned and electrocuted when they had become too injured to fight. Horrific photographs of mauled dogs appeared on every news channel in the country. Vick and his co-defendants plead guilty and by December of that year, he began his 23 month federal prison sentence. Pit Bulls have a long history beginning in the19th century. They were originally bred with the intent to combine the gameness of a terrier with the strength of a bull dog. They were used mainly as hunting, herding, and guard dogs. The Pit Bull, once a symbol of independence, strength, and loyalty, is today considered a menace to society. They have been outlawed in several states.
My memoir weaves together three themes; the history of Pit Bulls and dog fighting, my academic tribulations and failed relationships both human and canine, and the attribute of gameness. Gameness, when used to describe a Pit Bull, is the unwillingness to give up, even under the most difficult of circumstances, despite the threat of injury or death. I had always had a tendency to cling. I would get attached to a person, a place, or an idea and I would make it the number one priority in my life, even when doing so did more harm than good. Sometimes such doggedness served me well, but many times, it became the source of my problems. I clung to relationships that had long passed their expiration and stayed in places where I’d obviously worn out my welcome. I wasted a lot of time in fantasizing about my future, forgetting that dreams are achieved in the real world. When I should have kept going, I’d give up and when I should’ve given up, I kept going. Always, I mistook letting go for failure. This is a story about finding the right symmetry between gameness and letting go.
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