Postscript For The Dogs, Part 1: There Will Be Blood
This year, on January first, I realized something devastating: I had to close my business.
Gradually and then suddenly -- that’s how it happened.
That’s also how Hemingway describes the process of going bankrupt in The Sun Also Rises.
For close to a year I’ve been struggling to figure out how to write about the events that led up to the closure of my small business -- the final chapter of a kind of accidental venture that sapped a third of my life, made (and lost!) some ten million dollars, and changed me in as many ways as there are meaningful GIFS from The Office.
None better than this one:
Ya know, it would be super if Hemingway could just write about the whole ordeal for me. I mean, he put down stories about mid-century Cuban fisherman and post-war Pamplona bull fighters. I would’ve loved to see his treatment of a pandemic-era East Village dog training studio owner. I bet he could have distilled 14 years of small-business ownership into a couple of crisp paragraphs. But I’m sure I’m going to be the better teller of this tale, if only because, unlike him, I’m alive.
If it weren’t for this Substack, I think I might not even try to recount the story of the end of the protracted small-business ownership phase of my life. Thing is, there are many other things I’ve been wanting to write about in Substack land, with the vague assumption of some reader out there who cares (Hello!). But until I address this major life event, I feel like I can’t conquer anything else. It’s less “Writer’s Block” than it is “Writer’s Bottleneck.”
As a former big-city newspaper reporter, I know the maxim “if it bleeds it leads”…so let’s start with a bloody part of the story.
Not the bloodiest part. But the first bloody part.
You see, sometime shortly after last Thanksgiving, I started bleeding. And not from my nose.
It was just a little bit at a time, but it went on for a good while. At first I kept thinking I was about to get my period. Then I thought maybe I was having a long, very light period. It was weird, but I wasn’t particularly concerned. If I’m to believe the Facebook ads that follow me around, perimenopause was coming for me. Was this its grand entrance?
But another reason I wasn’t too concerned was because I was just really busy. I had two kids under age six, had just published a book, was a defendant in a frivolous lawsuit and was working full time (and then some) trying to keep my foundering Manhattan storefront afloat. For a couple years I had been trying to use pandemic-issued loan money to get my Covid-damaged concern back on its feet, but I’d pivoted until I was dizzy, and, by 2024, the dollars that were left were mostly being spent just filling in the gaps during the months where I wasn’t whole.
How many down months could I go and still have enough in the bank to save the day? The question plagued me. I felt like I was trying to outrun a tidal wave. I didn’t go to school for this! Prior to opening my own business, I had never managed employees, or worked in a store, or created a budget. I come from a family of artists and had spent my post-college years as a professional writer, mostly working as a freelance lifestyle reporter for papers and magazines. On something of a whim, at age 30, I enrolled in vocational school to become a dog trainer - we were just coming out of the recession, publications were shutting down left and right, and it seemed like a more straightforward way to support myself.
I didn’t really think I was starting a “business” as much as I figured I was just going to be engaging in a new type of self-employment -- one that wouldn’t require the stress of pitching stories and meeting deadlines, or provide the joy of chasing down invoices. I was going to go to people’s houses, train their dogs, and then get paid. Simple enough!
“Are you going to go to dog-trainer school and then write a memoir about the experience?” one journalist friend asked me. “No,” I said. “I’m going to dog training school and then I’m going to… train dogs.”
Fast forward a few years, and I was no longer training dogs: I was running a business that felt like it was running me.
In 2012, along with a neighbor who was also figuring out how to switch careers, I converted the living room of my Manhattan railroad apartment into a training center. We papered the neighborhood with flyers announcing our puppy kindergarten classes and put up a Yelp page.
At first, I called our effort The Dogs, because I had been writing a blog I called The Dogs, and I thought that my writing and my in-person training were going to be related enough to be able to share a name. I liked how it was a name that was so simple that it was almost funny. Pet-related service providers tend to be called things that are cute and punny. The word “Paws” often does heavy lifting (Paws + Learn! Pawsitive Behavior!). But then I thought maybe, in calling it The Dogs, I was too laconic. So I tacked on a couple of words.
Thus was born School For The Dogs…
