He Won’t Bite

I hate dogs. When I was five years old my mother got a part time gig delivering phone books. For the kids out there, a phone book was like the Google of the telephone world back in the day. Ancient man scoured these huge scrolls to find phone numbers…and shitty coupons in the middle. So anyway, we used to load up her Chevy Sprint and ride around town dropping these things off. DC in the 80s wasn’t exactly a safe place so some people would lock their gate so that crackheads would have a hard time getting in their yard. My job was to jump over the fence and drop the books on the porch.

(Cue the Behind the Music song)
Then tragedy struck.

I hopped the fence, dropped the book on the porch and turned around to leave. When I play it back in my head, it’s almost like that scene in Boyz In The Hood when Ricky gets shot. I see 5-year old me turning around and then all of a sudden everything goes silent. I’m walking in slow motion with a dumb grin on my face and I look up to see my mother yelling at me and motioning to run like Ice Cube. I look back and see the dog from Man’s Best Friend burst through the screen door. His eyes were on fire, smoke was coming out of his mouth. In my mind, it looked like that dog from Ghostbusters. So, like Morris Chestnut, I started running. Then I remembered that the gate was locked. So I just started doing laps in these people’s yard all the while my mother is yelling instructions out to me, but running from one of the horseman of the apocalypse tends to make it hard to understand what someone is saying. Plus I was running full damned speed. So every lap, I heard a different word.
Lap 13: “RUN…”
Lap 14: “in”
Lap 15: “the”
Lap 16: “house!”

I eventually run up the porch and into the house where some lady grabs the dog and starts cursing at me asking why I’m in her house.
Me (Crying with snot running down my nose): My (choke) mommy (choke) told me (choke) to (cough) run (wheeze) in here. So she goes outside and gets into an argument with my mother who is always ready for a fight and they argue for a good minute while I go sit in the car and just thank little baby Jesus for not letting me die.

But this is just one example. Tune in tomorrow for Episode Two of my Dog Wars,  The Empire Strikes Back.

Imagine this dog plus a lion having a child. That's what attacked me.