Meet Humper: The Wonder Dog

I love our dog. I love the fact that he’s mildly retarded, that he thinks every command means beg, that he has an uncanny, nearly supernatural ability to sock me in the balls every time he jumps up into my lap, and that he eats watermelon and popsicles. He is unbearably cute and truly remarkable and I’m going to miss him but he has to go.

My dog’s name is Ty, we got him from a rescue society who found him along the side of the road in Utah. Should’ve been our first clue. He was damaged goods, harboring a deep wound from his past, nursing a growing neurosis that would one day blossom into an obsession of unrelenting power, a full-blown unmitigated perversion: our dog, that cute little puppy, likes to hump the children.

When I say “likes to hump the children” I mean that he is ceaselessly driven to stalk unwitting fourth graders and pounce on them the moment they lose a lego under the couch. The kid bends over and HUMP! Ty is locked on.

It’s a sickness, I know, and I ought to just train it out of him but I think I may have accidentally encouraged his perversion and I feel responsible. See, I had this party and I served some decent Scotch and a buddy of mine, a young comic book writer, thought holding your liquor referred merely to volume and by the end of the party, was slumped in the corner of my dining room locked into a slurred beratement of my poor dog, attempting, apparently, to teach Ty to sit.

Ty is untrainable. Although he clearly understands English, he misinterprets everything as being in FRAT dialect.

Sit=Dude!
Beg=Dude!
Roll over=Dude! Dude-Dude!
Play dead=Dude Dude!
*&!!@#$! idiot dog!=Dude! I love you, dude!

So my buddy finally stands up and declares that he has trained the dog, spins to the right, and staggers into a bedroom where he falls face first onto the bed, his ass in the air like a dirty cartoon and Ty, who has been in training with the man for the last hour, jumps into bed with him because the bed the man falls into just happens to be the one Ty sleeps in every night. I don’t think much of it, I’m just glad the guy finally shut up. A couple of hours later I stop by to do a drunk-check and Ty is going at it like a coke-addled Chihuahua on my poor friend who’s dead to the world and here’s where I went wrong.

I laughed my ass off. I did. I hung on the doorjamb and howled while Ty kept going, big stupid dog tongue hanging out, big grin on his snout. Who am I to interfere with true love? So like ten minutes later I kicked him off my friend and locked him in the basement where I’m almost sure he abused the sofa cushions all night.

So a few weeks later my son has a friend over and they’re in the basement eviscerating storm troopers when I come down with a load of whites and see Connor’s friend madly jiggling the controller while the dog’s madly jiggling my son’s friend.

The kid’s pretty much ignoring the dog frottage so he can focus on slaying drones.

“TY! Cut it out!”

The kid glances back at me, still playing, says “Oh, he does that all the time.”

I picture the parade of 4th grade boys who’ve been hitting the basement game-room all summer and suddenly see each and every one of them attacked by my grinning, perverted, horny dog.

I crate Dog Juan and counsel the boys to punch him the snout next time he tries it. It’s a power thing, I tell them, he’s just proving who’s boss.

Connor doesn’t miss a beat. “If that’s proving who’s boss, I’m never getting a job.”