What the internet should know about Dexter's penis

Almost two years ago, during a trip to Humacao, Puerto Rico, my friend Bailey found a tiny, five-pound, fungus-ridden mongrel under a car. Smitten, she took a picture and emailed it to Miya with a message that read something like, “you want this?” Miya, smitten, wrote to me. Miya knew that adopting Bailey’s Peurto Rican street mongrel was a terrible idea. She needed me to be the strong one. She needed me to say, “listen, we’re about to move across the country, and finding an apartment in San Franciso is going to be painful enough without jobs. We certainly don’t need to try to find a place willing to house two unemployed twenty-somethings and a mangy fungus incubator.” But that’s not what I said.

Down in Humacao, Bailey went to a vet who administered the pup’s first distemper shot and wrote a note that gave the general impression that, if we’re lucky, this dog is only covered in fungus and brimming with worms. Apparently, that note was good enough for Delta, who let Dexter fly home on Bailey’s lap.


Though Miya and I fell in love with him right away, there were some immediate concerns about his overall health and - because Miya wanted him to look sharp in a handbag - his aesthetics. Dex was so malnourished that when his puppy hair fell out his adult hair didn’t grow in. So we believed we’d adopted a mangy, bald dog. Though, on the upside, four different vets assured us that Dex would probably grow up to be about 20 pounds, and that’s a perfectly reasonable size for a handbag.


Our boy is now a well-nourished, handsome, happy, 60-pound dog. But, his misspent youth has left him no stranger to disease. So I wasn’t too concerned when he started peeing all over himself.

Well, I was a little concerned. But mostly for our comforter.

Here we were, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, with a newly incontinent dog. He didn’t seem to mind that he was piddling all over the place. He was totally unmoved by my motivational taunting. “Oooh, did you pee on the floor again, you little baby?” No reaction. “Do you need a nap in your crib, stupid baby?” Nothing.

We took him to the vet, whose blood and urine tests were equivocal. She decided to put him on an antibiotic to treat a urinary tract infection, mostly, it seemed, because there wasn’t much else to do. As we waded into the new year, Dex’s puddles were smaller, but hadn’t been eliminated. Back at the vet, there still weren’t any good options. She suggested we wait for the antibiotics to wear off, then catheterize him and get a urine sample from his bladder. The vet admitted that this was unlikely to turn up anything new. Though I know nothing at all about sticking tubes up dog penises, I don’t think this particular procedure would qualify as a “good option.”

So we went home and waited. The antibiotics were metabolized and we never called the vet back. Dex still didn’t seem like he was in any discomfort. For a while we assumed that his peter must be bothering him, because he seemed to be constantly licking it. But we soon realized that he was more frequently licking his leg, stomach, and the comforter beneath his peter. He’d be relaxing and unconsciously dribble a little pee on his leg. Then his anal retentive nature would kick in (it’s hard to believe he’s not my biological pup), and he’d frantically try to clean up the dribble.

So I set about diagnosing Dexter myself. For any reader unfamiliar with my diagnostic regimen for assessing all illness, I typically begin by determining the patient’s humoral composition. Hippocrates believed the four primary humors to be blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. I think it confers no disrespect on that great physician to modernize his theory. Accordingly, I assert that the body exists as a dynamic equilibrium between the following four elemental fluids: orange juice, coffee, beer, and water.

If we haven’t already established that a major in English and a stint teaching first graders in the Bronx doesn’t qualify someone for admission to medical school, let’s all declare this to be an unequivocal truth right now.

Back to Dex. It would appear that, in this case, his diagnosis would be easy. To my knowledge, Dexter drinks water exclusively. One might claim that this would throw his humors completely out of whack. If one believes that, one’s an idiot. We’re talking about a dog, kids. This isn’t a person. Dogs don’t drink coffee or orange juice, so clearly this schema is applicable only to people medicine.

I began to think harder. I mean really hard.

And then it came to me. Dexter started leaking only when the weather started getting really cold. Being an island dog for generations back, Dexter was not equipped for the kind of sub-freezing misery that accompanies a New England winter, so we went out and bought him a snazzy coat to keep him warm. If he’s neurotic enough to lick up any drops of pee in our house, it’s perfectly likely that he would go to great lengths to not pee on his gorgeous new coat. Thinking back, Miya and I remembered that he didn’t leak at all during our trip to New Hampshire for Christmas. During this time, of course, we were too embarrassed to show our loved ones that our dog wears a coat, so it stayed in the suitcase.

Poor Dexter unfortunately gained control over his small bladder problem at precisely the same time that his dad developed this completely nonsensical, dog-psychology-based hypothesis for his condition. So our poor pup, snatched from the beaches of sunny Peurto Rico, now wanders the streets of New York City protected from the winter elements only by his God-given fur.

In conclusion, if anyone knows the helpful gentleman on 10th street who told me yesterday that I was irresponsible for not putting a coat on my short-haired dog, could you give him a swift kick in the nuts for me? It’ll really hurt, so you may need to follow it up by giving him a pint of beer and a half of a glass of OJ. Thanks!