Gotsdiner lost his cozy job after twenty-seven years. All sorts of inadequate reasons were given: the industry was retooling its paradigms, his mentors were dead or retired, the computers were down, there was not enough work, there was too much work, the market needed correcting, the new governor was a schmuck, there was a power struggle, the times they were a-changin', nobody seemed to know. The excuses ran on and on, as endless as history, but not nearly so entertaining. Gotsdiner, however, knew the truth: they fired him because, for no particular reason, they could no longer stand the sight of him. So they canned him, and there he was, age fifty and out on the street.

He sent out 279 resumes to total strangers in the private sector, and waited. While he waited, Gotsdiner watched TV. It was even worse than he remembered. Everybody there, it seemed, wanted to sell him car insurance. Lithe young actresses peddled exercise machines. Many other commercials he could not understand at all. Images rocketed by him, accompanied by music that seemed to have been performed on a dentist's drill. They had guitars now that sounded like jackhammers.

Most of the total strangers to whom Gotsdiner sent his resumes responded. They sent him letters. Gotsdiner referred to these as T.S.G. letters. Thank you, Sorry, Good luck. They all said that. But Gotsdiner knew that T.S.G. didn't really mean Thank you, Sorry, Good luck. T.S.G. really meant Tough Shit Get lost.

* * *

Gotsdiner called one of his oldest and dearest friends, the executive director of a local firm of substance. Gotsdiner greeted him warmly.

"Who?" the friend asked, disbelief and fear mingling in his voice.

Gotsdiner repeated his unlikely name, but the friend was drawing a blank.

"Who?" the friend wailed.

"I’m looking for a job, old buddy," Gotsdiner said, recounting old college days and drunken frolics and suspicious misadventures of youth, in which he and the old friend had often been partners and co-conspirators.

"Who?" the friend cried.

"It’s Gotsdiner," Gotsdiner said. "I’m looking for a job."

If friends greeted his inquiries with deafening apathy, total strangers were sadists, honing their skills of treachery and betrayal to points of exquisite fineness. The world, it seemed, was now run by nineteen-year-old girls. They answered the phones, they occupied the receptionists’ desks, they snarled, irritated at Gotsdiner for showing up just as they were about to repair to the ladies' room to take yet another home pregnancy test.

Gotsdiner quit dining out, bought little or nothing, stayed home, watched TV.

TV had changed since his youth, when there were only three channels. Now there were seven hundred. There were special channels devoted to religion, pastry, exercise, iffy real estate practices, athletics, classical music, and fishing. Some channels showed nothing but the black-and-white comedies and dramas of his ancient youth. Gotsdiner had disliked this crap in the fifties, and he disliked it now. The announcers who introduced this dreck, though, seemed entranced by it. They spoke of old episodes of Leave It To Beaver and The Munsters with the wonder and awe that should have been reserved for promoting Die Zauberflote at Covent Garden. Gotsdiner wondered why the Library at Alexandria was gone, but reruns of I Love Lucy were readily available at any time of the day or night.

On the dizzyingly false theory that he was just killing time until he "found something", Gotsdiner took a job at the post office. He lasted a week before conceding that it wasn't the snow, the rain, or the dark of night that kept him from the swift completion of his appointed rounds, but rather the militaristic, dictatorial, fascist nature of the management, which drove him to the voluntarily resumption of his unemployment, his idleness, his sloth. Somewhere between the diplomacy of Idi Amin and the patience of Vlad the Impaler lay the character of his supervisors. They had all served with distinction in the army, so they said. And they made it clear to Gotsdiner that only proud veterans of the various illegal wars in which his country had engaged during the last thirty years were morally worthy of federal employment, that they and they alone packed the ethical and patriotic gear needed to deliver mountains of unwanted junk mail to the housewives of his town. They had no use for his dearth of military experience, and what they perceived to be a latently pacifistic (i.e. commie) mindset. When he at last pointed out that of the entire local postal corps, he alone had packed the brains to stay the hell out of the army, that, as they say, was that. Gotsdiner went home and turned on the TV. He watched reruns of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, whose teenage characters with names like Maynard G. Krebs and Zelda Gilroy, faced with the first rumblings of a disquieting world, smiled and said "Surely you jest" in moments of stress. It seemed to work for them.

There were times when Gotsdiner himself, rattling around the house in despondent—and, increasingly, alcoholic—despair, found himself muttering these very words. After a morning of being rejected by an endless host of haughty H.R. teenagers, Gotsdiner shouted "Surely you jest!" at no one in particular. He went to a local print shop and ordered a Surely You Jest rubber stamp in capital letters. For a week, he spent every afternoon stamping the T.S.G. letters and returning them to the baffled senders.

Gotsdiner's neighbors, the Hendersons, bought a dog. He was a big guy. They named him Duke, probably after John Wayne. The neighbors' children were little girls, much too small to walk a big dog like that. And mom and dad worked all day and were probably too tired at day's end to go for a walk. Gotsdiner looked out his kitchen window in the morning and saw the jumbo puppy sitting in his yard, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for a party, a job, some kind of action. It seemed mean to keep him waiting, but human and corporate cruelty had worked such a savage number on Gotsdiner's own spirit that he had almost become inured to pain. Almost. The dog sensed a soft touch next door and stared at Gotsdiner’s house. Feeling sorry for the pooch, who languished ignored and unloved in the neighbors' yard, Gotsdiner volunteered to walk him during the day. The man of the house accepted the offer immediately. The guy clearly hadn't wanted the dog in the first place, and had only caved in under severe pressure from the wife and kids.

Duke was black and brown and white, part Huskie, maybe a drop of German Shepherd blood and probably could have pulled a sled through arctic terrain with joy and ease. Gotsdiner bought a leash, and it got a workout, for once Duke got over his initial shyness he expected to be walked every day, two or three times per day if possible, and why wasn’t it possible? The dog seemed to know a sucker when he saw one. He knew Gotsdiner was unemployed and had nothing else to do. He read Gotsdiner like a dime novel. The dog's eyes were knowing and pure, and they spoke: Why not walk me? Why vegetate in sloth and despondency when you can breathe fresh air, exercise those atrophying limbs and do something useful for a change? Everybody loves doggies and nobody loves you. Come walk with me. Let us be happy. Let us find friendship. He was hard to argue with.

Hard to resist, too. Everyone loved Duke. They liked his name, heard in it suggestions of dignity and grandeur one didn't see every day in these gray and pointless streets. John Wayne, the Blue Devils, Mr. Ellington: the dog's name came from a long line of winners. Duke was a winner. Everyone loved him. Some of this respect, if not exactly affection, rubbed off on Gotsdiner. People who would never otherwise have given him the time of day greeted him as he walked, just as an excuse for saying hello to and greeting and petting Duke. Some of them called Duke "The Dukester" or "Dukerino." The dog was a hit. For the first time in recent memory, folks were actually nice to Gotsdiner. The dog's good fortune at being rescued from the kennel had rubbed off on him.

At first, Gotsdiner walked Duke once a day, usually after shaving, bathing, staring at his sad and silly resume. Gotsdiner trudged. Ahead of him, Duke pranced, strutted. Pedestrians of all ages and creeds stopped to pet Duke. Curmudgeons, career cynics, psychopaths, parolees, whackos and malcontents alike all shed their sociopathic tendencies for a few seconds when they met Duke on the street.

Only Mr. Fitzwaugh failed to be moved by the beauty and nobility of Gotsdiner's new friend. Fitzwaugh, who was said to own the rendering plant on the other side of town, was a widower, and a recluse and remorseless crabapple of long-standing. All Gotsdiner knew about rendering plants was that they took animal carcasses and melted, burned and otherwise blasted them into some new, unimaginable product. The resulting stench made the plant's neighborhood uninhabitable, save for the Wagnerian and subterranean trolls who worked there. It was no accident that Fitzwaugh himself didn't live anywhere near the place.
His antique brick home of Dickensian gloom languished two blocks from Gotsdiner's. The old man was said to leave the house rarely since his wife, who no one had seen during the last ten years of her allegedly painful life, had gone to her reward. Occasionally Fitzwaugh left to preside over the disposal of putrefying carcasses down at the plant for a few hours, but otherwise he stayed home. Gotsdiner first saw the old coot while following Duke on a morning canter. As dog and derelict went by, Fitzwaugh emerged from behind the kind of door that might have once borne the reflection of Marley's Ghost. Duke stopped on the little strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk—city ordinances referred to it as "The Parking"—and was carefully investigating something Gotsdiner couldn't see and didn't want to. Fitzwaugh emerged from his Victorian despond and stood in the doorway, wearing a black suit, white shirt and black tie.

"I don’t appreciate that," he said. His voice was all money and dust.

Gotsdiner looked up. "I don’t either," he said. "It gets boring, watching him poke around like this."

Fitzwaugh reddened and pointed a shaking finger at the dog. "I mean, I don't appreciate that."

Gotsdiner looked at Duke, who smiled and wagged his tail. The animal had a wonderful innate patience with idiots.

"It's all right, he didn't defecate," Gotsdiner said. "Besides, even if he did, this is 'The Parking.' City property. Not yours."

Fitzwaugh’s face became a fist of confusion. The smell of the rendering plant had done a job on his complexion, and his face throbbed in a variety of unknown and slightly scary colors.

"That there's my property," he said.

Gotsdiner's job had once required some familiarity with the city code, and he had actually read the unreadable thing, which was more than could be said for the folks who had written it. He knew what "The Parking" was.

Gotsdiner cleared his throat and assumed what he hoped was a slightly imperious, professorial tone of voice. "'The Parking'," he announced, "is the area of land between the curb and the sidewalk, and is under municipal jurisdiction."

"My property," Fitzwaugh sneered, his voice a kazoo of rage.

Gotsdiner thought about debating the old coot, but Duke strained at his leash. The dog had no need for dialogue at all, which was one of the reasons Gotsdiner liked him so much.

Gotsdiner followed Duke, but turned as he walked away. "It's The Parking," he said. "Municipal property."

Duke and Gotsdiner walked down the street. They didn’t see Fitzwaugh walk down the steps to the sidewalk and stare at them as they turned the corner.

After a couple months of walking Duke, Gotsdiner developed a reputation. A following, even. A local joke, he figured: Look at the old man walking somebody else’s dog.

During one walk, a lady gardening in her front yard stopped Gotsdiner and asked him if he would baby-sit her pet while she and her husband visited their daughter in Duluth for a week. His neighbors had recommended him.

Gotsdiner agreed. The lady offered to pay him real cash money for visiting her home once in the morning and again in the evening, feeding the puppy, and walking him. Gotsdiner was given a key to the tidy and touching home. Gotsdiner opened the refrigerator, looking for beer, found none. Lots and lots of dog food, though. The dog itself wasn't much. Very small, for starters, with a tendency to yap when addled, which was often. Gotsdiner was a little self-conscious walking this hyperactive animal. Its legs moved with the speed of a jackhammer, making little rapping staccato sounds on the pavement. It walked with purpose and a certain amount of self-assurance and pride, but lacked the Dukester's poise and nobility of spirit. He got the feeling that people were laughing at him behind his back, but when the lady returned at the end of the week and wrote him a check for a hefty bonus, the wounds to his pride healed quickly.

Encouraged by this success, Gotsdiner placed a little ad in the newspaper, offering his services as a dogsitter. Soon his phone rang several times a week. People were leaving town, vacationing in Europe, visiting the grandkids in Schenectady, going to prison for a few months, rehab, that sort of thing. They may have let their personal and professional lives go to hell, but the pets were well provided for, and soon Gotsdiner found that he had, quite unintentionally, become an entrepreneur. He incorporated, sought advice from the Small Business Administration, worried about the tax implications of it all. But usually he was having too much fun to worry. He liked the animals and they liked him. And not one of them ever called him a dipshit or tried to get him fired.

Sometimes he went to the animals. Sometimes they came to him. He became a dog valet, and on occasion, even a cat chauffeur. Animals took to him as no human being ever had.

The only drawback to all of this personal fulfillment, not to mention a fair-to-middling cash-flow, was Fitzwaugh. In the pre-Duke days, Gotsdiner had never encountered the man. He had, in fact, gone years without seeing him. But now, walking pets through the neighborhood, Fitzwaugh seemed to be around all the time. Usually Gotsdiner steered clear of Fitzwaugh's street, but sometimes he forgot, and one day, walking a frisky Dalmatian, he heard the unmistakable whine of malice and rendering coming from the ancient oaken front door.

"I don’t appreciate that on my property!" Fitzwaugh puled, a little Rumpelstiltskin, an Albrecht, a skinny Mussolini frantically looking for a populace to abuse.

On The Parking, with a slightly dyspeptic pooch on the leash, Gotsdiner was temporarily helpless. "It's biodegradable!" Gotsdiner chirped, but it didn't do any good.

"My property!" Fitzwaugh certainly was a territorial old geezer. Was this an extension of his capitalistic nature, or had he been a creep before striking it rich? Probably the latter, Gotsdiner reflected. After all, he thought, I'm a small businessman myself now. And I don’t bother a soul.

"The Parking is municipal property," Gotsdiner repeated with a sigh. "It's not yours. Besides, it's only a dog, and this is only—”

“My property!” Fitzwaugh was inches from his face.

"Don't make yourself crazy, it's just nature," Gotsdiner muttered, and yanked the dawdling pooch to attention, half dragging him away.

"It's my property!"

"It will deliquesce."

"My property."

"Municipal ground."

"Mine."

* * *

The cop who knocked on Gotsdiner's door that evening seemed embarrassed about the whole thing, but he was young, and Gotsdiner figured the kid had to do many dumb things anyway, at this stage of his career.

The uniformed lad said there'd been a complaint about an alleged violation of Municipal Code chapter twenty-eight section nine, Animal Management. Gotsdiner knew how defensive cops got when discussing The Law. They didn’t like to get the idea that anyone else had read the darn things, and most certainly did not like hearing the statutes quoted to them, but Gotsdiner couldn't help it. Ever so humbly, he explained that he too had read the ordinance, and while it proscribed allowing leashed animals to eliminate on private property, there was no such ban on said activity on "The Parking."

"The what?" the officer asked.

"'The Parking,'" Gotsdiner explained. "The area of land between the curb and the sidewalk is under municipal jurisdiction. It ain't private."

The officer looked disappointed.

"The dog has never defaced Fitzwaugh’s private property," Gotsdiner said. "Nor anyone else's." Looking over the officer's shoulder, he saw Fitzwaugh lurking across the street, a miasma on legs, trying to pretend he wasn't there and doing a poor job of it.

The officer shuffled and looked at the ground. Gotsdiner had pre-empted his lecture. Under the circumstances there was nothing for the kid to do but either walk away in futile disgrace, or unsheathe the nightstick he had been fingering and administer a good beating to Gotsdiner. Might as well get something out of this visit. Wisely, he thought better of it and went away without a word.

Gotsdiner watched as the officer and Fitzwaugh conferred across the street. The old renderer gestured frantically toward Gotsdiner’s house while the cop listened patiently, shrugged, and returned to his vehicle. Fitzwaugh remained on the sidewalk, glaring, fuming like tar.

Gotsdiner grabbed a leash and sprinted down the street a few blocks to his next engagement. He walked a Lhasa Apso—a small, territorial little beast—collected his modest fee and went home. There was a dufus on his doorstep.

"Ricky Rusher, Neighborhood Improvement Association, how are you today?" said the adolescent carrot-top whose frantic smile and overdone personification of goodwill had no doubt been pasted on by years of Jaycee membership and reading godawful self-help books that were peddled on afternoon talk shows and sold at airports.

"I'm out of breath, and you don't look so hot yourself," Gotsdiner said.

The kid didn't miss a beat. "I've been asked for your assistance in making this a better neighborhood."

"If you're taking up a collection for kindling with which to burn Fitzwaugh at the stake, I'll write you a check for the whole enchilada," Gotsdiner said. "Otherwise, begone, go back to Oprah, leave me be."

"Mister Fitzwaugh," the kid said, his grin becoming more panicked by the second, "would appreciate it if your dog would not evacuate on his property."

"The only things that ever evacuated Fitzwaugh's property were his sanity, and his old lady, who had the good sense to meet her Maker rather than spend another hellacious night with a guy who burns animals for a living," Gotsdiner said.

Ricky's community spirit reached an almost hallucinatory zenith as he silently, frantically turned the pages of his memorized copy of the Emergency Manual for Dealing With the Public, a Jaycee tome that he always kept on file in his active if not particularly fertile mind. Chapter Nineteen: How to Behave Around Older People Who Say Things You Don't Understand. Section One: SMILE!

"Mr. Fitzwaugh wants to be your friend!" Ricky croaked.

"Mr. Fitzwaugh hates my guts and wishes me dead," Gotsdiner said. "I, however, am merely a humble businessman. I wish none harm. Neither my charges nor I have ever deposited any matter, organic or otherwise, on Mr. Fitzwaugh's property, nor on anyone else's. 'The Parking'—defined under the city code as the area between the curb and the sidewalk—is municipal, not Fitzwaughian, property. The animals are perfectly free to investigate, occupy and make contributions to said property in any manner that Mother Nature deems fit. I shall continue walking my dogs, cats, furry friends."

Ricky Rusher fled, having concluded—as a mentor at the Jaycees had once told him—that You Just Can't Deal With Some People.

Gotsdiner went inside his house where he fielded phone calls and job offers from owners of German Shepherds, Pomerians, Sharpeis, and even the odd anonymous Muttus Americanus, as well as kitty-cats, hamsters, the occasional ferret. He was beginning to thrive.

* * *

After sending out nearly a thousand letters, resumes and transcripts, and receiving as many T.S.G. letters, Gotsdiner picked up a ringing phone one day, expecting a date with a Doberman, but heard instead the dulcet tones of the new Director of Human Resources at the heartless concern that had deep-sixed him. That dark day was now, in the happy bedlam of Gotsdiner's newfound prosperity, an event so remote that it seemed to have occurred in another life. In fact, it had. Did he want to come back? The paradigms had been retooled. Parameters had been aligned. Infrastructures had been stratified and harbingers had been acclimated and God was now back in His Heaven and the coffee was ready and Gotsdiner's old job was back, if he wanted it.

"Surely you jest," he shouted.

Gotsdiner dropped the phone and pirouetted around the room, performing, in his inimitable arthritic and clubfooted way, a balletic ode to joy. His dance was a poem, albeit a dull-witted and derivative one. He didn't care. He was alive again, alive, reborn.

No sooner had he returned the instrument to its cradle than it pealed again. A summons from neighbors called out of town on an emergency, and could he come fetch their Shih Tzu right away, maybe keep him a week? They offered a handsome sum, but he would have done it free; maybe he would! He burst out the door. Outside, Duke the Dog waited in his yard, ready to run. Gotsdiner opened the neighbor's gate and the dog was out like a shot. Together they spirited down the street, toward money and love and a new friend, and all the things that the world of jobs had never once in twenty-seven years come close to offering him.
Duke and Gotsdiner zipped down the street, a warm wind at their backs and sunshine on their faces. Their destination lay at the end of Fitzwaugh's block, but at this time of day the geezer was probably at work, rendering something, turning some once-loving critter's carcass to oil and lard. They decided to chance it; passing Fitzy's place, they turned their pace up a notch, threw it into high, and sprinted, serene and free.

They were too transported by joy to hear the ancient portal of Fitzwaugh's wreckage of a house creak open, or to see the little man emerge from the doorway, shotgun at the ready. He wasn't much of a marksman, but pure concentrated hatred made his aim correct and true. Gotsdiner's spinal cord accepted the first shot as if it were just another T.S.G. letter. Duke hyperspaced around the block and back toward home, where he hurtled the fence and was just in time for supper.

Back on the sidewalk, Gotsdiner lay paralyzed, relieved, if only a little bit, that he would not have to be dealing with any more teenage H.R. departments. As for the Dukester, he knew he needn't worry. That dog would always have a job.
Gotsdiner watched with grim fascination as Fitzwaugh trudged toward him to administer the coup de grace. When the shotgun was inches from his forehead and Fitzwaugh's rancid mottled trigger finger began the last human action his victim would ever see, it dawned on Gotsdiner that this, in a way, was probably the job he had always been applying for, interviewing for, and seeking, right from the start. His search was over.

Thank you, he said, right before the metal pierced his brain. Sorry. Good luck!