Attacked

Trooper abed just after we brought him home from the animal hospital.

The big shepherd mix flashed into view under the street lights in front of our condo building, charging at us full speed, its teeth bared. Trooper, never one to back down from a threat even if it was three times his size, forged ahead against his leash.

I stepped forward to block the 50-pound shepherd and promptly fell off the curb into the street, unable to separate the two dogs. Seemingly in slow motion I rolled over, regained my footing and lunged forward, shouting at the top of my lungs, “Get outta here!”

Somehow I found myself again flat on my back, but recovered again. How many times I fell on the concrete I don’t know. Maybe three. 

I remember being back on my feet screaming as the big dog finally retreated, and looking down at Trooper, limping. I picked him up. His left hind leg flopped loosely. 

A woman in her thirties loomed in the street, gripping the big dog by the collar. I could not understand what she said, but shouted, “Get that dog the fuck out of here!” She did. 

The next thing I remember is lying on my side, up on an elbow, outside the foyer to our building, gasping for breath as a woman beckoned from a car stopped in the street. The woman with the dog had returned, presumably having put it in a safe place, and squatted by the door. She was concerned, as was the woman in the car. Both spoke to me.

I could not understand either of them, nor, I suspect, could they me. I was stunned, in a stupor, not thinking clearly, puffing like a sick locomotive. Had I had my wits about me I would have asked the dog’s handler for her name and address.

But I did not. All I could think of was getting medical help for Trooper. “I’m OK, I’m OK,” I kept saying. “I’ve got to get my dog to the vet. His leg’s broken.” The women spoke and I could not understand them. I shook my head and said, “I’m deaf.”

I fished my iPhone from my shirt pocket and texted Debby, upstairs in our apartment. “Come down. Attacked by dog.” (She did not get the message until much later.)

Somehow I found the strength to stand and scoop up Trooper, who was by now crying in pain. The two women were still there, but I said “Thanks,” and waved them away.

What happened after that I barely can remember. Somehow I got upstairs to tell Debby and we immediately drove to an emergency vet in Skokie ten minutes away.

"We’ll set the leg," said the vet, "but he’ll probably need surgical care tomorrow.”

While she was doing the job we went to the Evanston police station and were interviewed by a young cop. It was only pro forma. Filing a report wouldn’t do much good because I hadn’t obtained the name and address of the dog owner.

We returned to the emergency vet. She showed us the X-rays. Clean break of the tibia right above the joint. There was a small puncture wound in the skin of the leg at the break from the other dog’s bite. She hadn’t been able to reset the limb properly and made an appointment in the morning for a surgical vet in Northfield not far away. 

Trooper was splinted and woozy from the sedative, and we took him home, taking turns lying on the floor all night next to the pillows where we had laid him. By midmorning the veterinary surgeon had seen him and was ready to do the job. “It’s fixable,” he said.

Before noon it had been done, with a metal plate and five screws holding together Trooper’s tibia. We visited him in the animal hospital’s ICU early in the afternoon. To our astonishment he was awake and alert, struggling to stand and lick my face. The prognosis, the vet said, was good.

He’s now home, lying on pillows on the floor in my small office, its door closed so he doesn’t wander around the apartment. When we carried him outside to the parkway, he peed readily. He seems to understand that that’s his job now. Not the others.

The tasks he had been trained for as a hearing service dog are on hold. We’ve taped up a sign on our apartment door asking people not to knock. We’ve muted the telephone ringers. In short, we’ve tried to minimize all the sounds he’s trained to work. We don’t want him jumping up on me to alert me, jeopardizing his injured leg.

Recovery will take about four months. For the next two weeks we’ll have to carry him outside to do his business. For now, the distance to the grassy parkway is too long for him to walk. 

We’ve resigned ourselves to paying some $3,700 in vet bills. (The emergency vet and surgeon did give Trooper a 20 per cent discount because he’s a working dog.) Worth every penny, for Trooper is a valuable piece of medical equipment as well as a beloved companion.

As for me, I was uninjured by the tumbles in the street. My jacket and pants were scuffed a bit, but that was all.

We’re staying home for Thanksgiving instead of spending it with Conan and his family in nearby Edison Park. It’s doubtful that Trooper and I will go to to Washington to be with Colin and his crew for Christmas. Late December will just be too early for him to travel.

One irony is that I had worried about stray dogs assaulting Trooper during shore visits on Caribbean islands during our recent cruise. The actual attack came right in front of our own home. Go figure.

Trooper on his feet an hour after coming home.

Trooper's shakedown cruise

Trooper and the Nieuw Amsterdam at San Juan, Puerto Rico, last Nov. 9.

Last Nov. 6, as Trooper and I approached the turf-filled wooden box on the Nieuw Amsterdam’s promenade deck, right under the ship’s forecastle, my heart clambered into my mouth. Would he or wouldn’t he? My fuzzy little black service dog took a tentative step into the box and . . .

Let me backtrack a bit. Debby and I long have been planning a luxury cruise for our 50th anniversary next June—possibly a month’s voyage down the South American coast and up the Amazon River.

But when Trooper came to me last December, we worried how he would fit into our plans. Would he adjust quickly to shipboard life? Could he get used to being underfoot in close quarters among a couple of thousand passengers? Would they accept his presence as a working dog even in the dining rooms while they had to leave their own pets at home? 

Most of all, would he take to the 4-foot-by-4-foot relief box, filled with mulch or grass, that cruise lines provide for service dogs? There isn’t anywhere else for a dog to transact business aboard ship. Trooper was highly trained in service-dog tasks as well as housebroken in normal fashion, and had qualified in stringent tests in order to accompany his handler to all sorts of public venues. But not this one. 

Trooper on not the ship's putting green.

I would have to train him myself to use a shipboard potty. And so, last June I constructed a 16-square-foot pine box and placed it his enclosed pen in the back yard of our cabin on the shore of Lake Superior, filling it with garden mulch and old leaves raked from the driveway. I intended to lead Trooper to it on leash and say “Go potty!” while holding a treat out of sight. Sooner or later, he’d get the idea, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he?

There was one glaring flaw in that plan. Scores of chipmunks abound in the yard, both inside the fenced enclosure and out. As a miniature schnauzer mix, Trooper is a terrier, and terriers have extraordinarily high prey drives. They were bred to keep rats out of the barn. You guessed it: every time I took him out, he wanted to nail a chippie, not learn a task.

Weeks went by. Trooper deigned to use the box a few times, but way too few to be considered trained. When we came home to Evanston in early October, he hadn’t progressed much since June.

All that time I worried and worried about Trooper’s toilet habits to the point of obsession. I started to dream about being put ashore on a desert island because he peed on the ship’s expensive carpet. (Other service dog handlers confess to the same fixation. Our dogs must behave.)

In August we had decided that I’d take him on a short seven-day Caribbean voyage in early November, an experiment to see if my efforts would somehow bear fruit. If they didn’t, well, then Debby and I would just do something else for our 50th anniversary.

Still, I hoped we’d meet success. I am in my mid-seventies, and cruising is a good way for a gimpy old guy to travel when hiking even short distances on guided tours has become painful. Cruise ships stop almost daily at ports in various countries where senior citizens can travel inland aboard tour buses. Holland-America ships in particular cater to us; it’s fondly known as the Geezer Line. Cruising isn’t as satisfying as the independent travel we enjoyed when young, but it’s better than staying home.

One onerous task was obtaining permits to import animals from every country we visited. Such permits are required even for a six- or eight-hour visit, and getting them is a lot of work and expense. Trooper needed a U.S. Department of Agriculture Form 7001, the international health certificate most countries require in addition to proof of rabies vaccination. That has to be filled out by a veterinarian and endorsed at a USDA office.

Trooper on the beach at Half Moon Cay.

Then there are local requirements. Sint Maarten, one of the Nieuw Amsterdam’s port calls, requires its own version of the health certificate, with vaccinations and tests not often needed in the United States. So does Turks & Caicos, which also wants the dog to undergo expensive blood tests for rabies. Both countries must issue import permits as well, and for a fee. The Bahamas will accept the 7001 and the rabies documents, but, like the others, wants an import permit before the dog is allowed even a short visit.

Doesn’t matter if the animal is a service dog. A dog is a dog is a dog. No exceptions.

All that took several days of frantic emailing and running back and forth between our vet in Evanston and the USDA office in Des Plaines. In the end I decided not to go ashore at either Sint Maarten or Grand Turk. Just too complicated and expensive. We’d visit only Half Moon Cay, the Holland-America captive island in the Bahamas, and San Juan on Puerto Rico, a U.S. entity that doesn’t require jumping through documentary hoops.

The Nieuw Amsterdam was to sail out of Fort Lauderdale on Nov. 6. I decided Trooper and I would take the train rather than fly from Chicago to Florida. Both of us are veteran train travelers and know every good pee stop between Chicago and Washington, and we quickly learned the best places between Washington and Fort Lauderdale.

When we arrived at the cruise terminal, Trooper and I were quickly ushered through the formalities and placed aboard at the head of the line. After stowing our luggage in our roomy verandah cabin—a nice upgrade from the smaller one I had booked—Trooper and I set out to find the relief box. Forward on the promenade deck, the front desk said. So there we went.

And then came the moment of truth, the instant that would determine our future.

Trooper stepped into the box and quickly lifted a leg. Good boy!

From then on, every time we paid a call, he immediately repeated the feat. Even better boy!

In fact, he batted 1.000 for the entire voyage. From both sides of the plate.

As for the rest of the cruise, things went swimmingly. Trooper behaved as a service dog should, dozing on a towel beside my deck chair and lying at my feet in the dining room, only occasionally attempting to sneak under the next table for a dropped tidbit. He slept on a doggy blankie atop the pillow fort I made for him next to the bed. The slight rocking of the ship didn’t faze him.

Trooper and cabin attendant Pita.

Our fellow passengers, except for a few sour old grouches, smiled every time we ambled by. With few exceptions they asked before petting him. So did the Indonesian crew, dog lovers almost to a fault. Every time she came in, our cabin attendant would fall to the floor and gather Trooper into her arms. She greatly missed her own dog back in Jakarta.

I benefited from Trooper’s presence in other ways. I am a shy wallflower in most social situations, but the sight of the shaggy little terrier invited strangers to comment, and this often led to interesting conversations I’d never had while traveling.

The sole moment of difficulty occurred at Fort Lauderdale airport after the cruise. For reasons known only to itself, TSA decided that I must be thoroughly patted down head to toe and guggle to zatch, and my bags rifled rather than my steel knees simply wanded and the luggage X-rayed. Twice, first in the morning when we arrived, and second in the afternoon after Trooper and I went outside for a relief walk.

Both times Trooper, who is a protective sort of dog, objected vocally to the uniformed stranger’s hands intimately exploring my person, and it was a chore to hold a lunging terrier at arm’s length with the leash. Fortunately the TSA agents were pleasant guys with a sense of humor.

Despite taking pains with my corpus, they did not touch Trooper at all, nor examine his vest pockets. Maybe they didn't think plastique could be shaped into poo bags.

We flew home first class because it was our first flight together and I thought Trooper needed a little more room than cattle class could offer. He sat in my lap on takeoff and landing, but slept on the floor the whole way.

And now Debby and I are looking forward to our anniversary cruise in June. But not that Amazon River voyage, which would involve stops in nine countries and that many permits to bring Trooper ashore. We’re taking a two-week cruise out of Seattle to Alaska instead. Much less paperwork. Much less worry.

Close encounter of the suspicious kind

Today, for the first time, Trooper and I encountered another service dog in a restaurant.

The occasion was lunch at a favorite cafe across the street from our condo building.

The other dog was a big golden retriever, beautifully mannered and calm even in the enthusiastic face of Trooper, a bumptious terrier who never met a dog he didn't want to play with.

I asked his handler what the dog did for her. I didn't catch everything she said, but it seemed that the dog helps her with postsurgical balance and walking. A sturdy handgrip lay on the back of the service-dog vest. That seemed reasonable to me.

But then I noticed that the handler, an older woman, repeatedly fed scraps from her lunch to the dog—an absolute breach of service-dog etiquette and a disturbing indication that what appears to be a service dog team may not be genuine.

What's more, the handler allowed the retriever to sprawl right in the middle of foot traffic rather than tuck the dog out of the way, as the Americans with Disabilities Act requires. That was not only unmannerly but also dangerous; a waiter had to step gingerly over the dog while carrying plates to patrons. On the way out I had to pick up Trooper to get past the retriever.

Maybe that service dog team was real—that gorgeous, well-behaved golden could indeed have been trained specially to perform a service for a person with disabilities—but that woman clearly had no idea how to behave and handle her dog.

I don't have doubts about the dog's authenticity. I do hers.

OCT. 29: A friend in Washington, D.C., who knows something about service dogs says she has unhappily watched several legitimate handlers doing the same thing that woman did—feeding table scraps and paying no attention to the dog's whereabouts. The human side of a team sometimes needs to be retrained in service-dog etiquette.

Sheriff's star

Mike P., a regular reader of this blog, suggested I fill up a little of the blank space on the wraparound cover of The Riddle of Billy Gibbs (see the post just below) with a sheriff's star.

Capital idea, I thought. So I set to work with some public-domain clip art and my trusty Photoshop Elements software and came up with the accompanying effort.

Not too bad, but I need to tweak the background color of the circular inset so that it doesn't look quite so flat and artificial. Also I need to see if I can figure out how to render "Sheriff's Department" right side up rather than upside down. Maybe I should gray all of the text slightly, so that the art doesn't look so cut-and-pasted.

I'm no expert with Photoshop Elements, but it's not difficult to learn. What's hard is remembering all the steps involved in fashioning a piece of artwork.

Workin' on the Railroad

Here's my latest attempt at a wraparound cover for The Riddle of Billy Gibbs, coming in January. The first try consisted of the present front cover, plus yellow text on a flopped image of the cover photograph for the back cover.

Too many people said the back cover was hard to read. I had to agree.

So I threw out that flopped image and used a plain light blue background instead for the back cover and spine, with black text. I've tried hard to match the blue with one of the shades on the front cover, but I'm just not skilled enough with Photoshop Elements. I think the current blue is good enough for government work.

What say ye?

(Click on the photo for a large version.)

Teaser: Have a free read of Chapter One

Chapter One of The Riddle of Billy Gibbs (coming in January) is now online at henrykisor.com.

Adventures in self-publishing

WARNING: This is a long post. It will appear at the end of the sixth Steve Martinez novel, The Riddle of Billy Gibbs, to be published next January 1.

In the authorship game, I’m like a journeyman ballplayer that bounced around the big leagues for a few years before being sent down to the minors for good.

In the 1990s, major New York publishing houses—Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Random House, and HarperCollins—issued my first three books, all nonfiction. Reviews were good (the New York Times Book Review praised all three) and sales were modestly successful (one book made enough to send a son to a private college for four years).

When I switched to mystery writing in the early 2000s, the first three whodunits in the Steve Martinez series—Season’s Revenge, A Venture into Murder, and Cache of Corpses—were issued by a competent second-tier publisher of genre fiction, Tom Doherty/Forge. They were well reviewed but not heavily promoted.

In 2008, when the Great Recession had thoroughly staggered the publishing industry, Forge let me go. Though my notices had been good, sales of regional mysteries—especially mine—had just been too modest. I joined a host of similarly orphaned novelists struggling to find new publishers.

Finding a fresh vendor wasn’t easy. Publishing houses are loath to take on a fiction series in midstream. Because they don’t own the earlier books, they can’t depend on revenues from them to support taking a risk on new ones, hoping their writers will someday become best-sellers. And so for more than three years Hang Fire, the fourth in the Steve Martinez series, languished in limbo until Five Star/Gale, a specialty house that markets genre fiction chiefly to libraries, rescued it for the 2013 publishing season.

Five Star has been a good choice for young writers seeking to break in as well as older ones hoping to keep their careers afloat. In 2016 it also published Tracking the Beast, the fifth Martinez novel. Both novels have done well enough to earn back the tiny advance payments and generate additional royalties.

At the beginning of 2016, Five Star suddenly decided to stop publishing mysteries entirely, and focus instead on romances and Westerns, both booming genres in the library market. Five Star did not say why, but it was easy to guess the reason: Mysteries were no longer doing so well in its market.

The Riddle of Billy Gibbs had been acquired but not yet contracted for, and so Five Star set it adrift along with a number of other mystery novels.

Rather than ask my agent to shop it around for months and even years, I decided to publish Billy Gibbs myself and get it out into the sun sooner rather than later. Although I couldn’t give myself a fat advance, the royalties I could pay myself down the line might not be so bad.

But isn’t this self-publishing? Only a decade ago, when I was the book review editor for the Chicago Sun-Times, there was a real stain to the idea. Professionals looked down on the wares of “vanity presses” as beneath their notice. Reviewers assumed that a book that hadn’t gone through an agent and a genuine publishing house couldn’t possibly be worth reading. Selling such a book was nearly impossible without reviews, and countless authors ended up with hundreds of unsold copies on skids in their garages.

As the recession has slowly lifted, some things clearly have changed. Self-publishing is no longer considered a mug’s game. The advent of easy-to-produce ebooks and publish-on-demand paperbacks have eased the task of creating a book by oneself. Of course, nothing can replace the skill and experience of a good agent and a veteran publishing house, but the alternative is a lot sunnier than it used to be.

I’d had some experience in the book game on the production side as well as the writing. In 2009 the rights to my first book, What’s That Pig Outdoors: A Memoir of Deafness reverted to me, and I decided to bring it up to date and see if I could get a university press interested in the project. That happened, and the University of Illinois Press republished it in 2010 as an academic paperback.

My agent was then attempting to sell Hang Fire, and I thought its chances to find a new publisher would be helped if the earlier books had reappeared and were building an audience. And so I won back the rights to the earlier novels and brought out Season’s Revenge, A Venture into Murder, and Cache of Corpses as $3.99 ebooks on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com in 2011.

The big job, as with Pig, was scanning the original hardcovers into electronic form and cleaning up the text. I still had the original electronic manuscripts, but the publisher’s considerable edits had been done on paper. It was simply easier to scan than to hand-insert the changes.

Next came interior design—not difficult for an author of several previous books—and then the front covers. I didn’t think I’d ever make enough royalties to justify hiring a jacket artist, so did them myself. They’ve been through two iterations so far, and they’re still not quite right.

The total cost: Nothing, except for my own labor. Amazon and B&N don’t charge a dime for production and distribution of ebooks—they just take a modest cut of sales. What's more, I don’t need to keep a large inventory of copies.

At first those three reissued mysteries brought in only enough money to take Debby out to dinner once a month (twice if it was a good month), but sales have slowly increased to the point where I can now treat her twice a week. I have done no real marketing for those titles, except for a few library presentations, but Five Star’s publicity efforts for Hang Fire and Tracking the Beast piqued reader interest in the earlier books.

In 2012 I decided to get back the rights to my other two nonfiction titles, Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America and Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet, and reissue them as ebooks.

The same year I discovered Amazon.com’s CreateSpace “independent publishing platform,” as it calls its print-on-demand paperback scheme. For someone with the skills I’ve learned over the years, it’s an easy way to produce actual printed books of reasonably high quality. Many readers, especially older ones, would rather have volumes they can hold in their hands rather than peer at ebooks on an electronic reader. Two months after the ebooks appeared, Zephyr was also reborn in CreateSpace form. Not Gin Fizz; the market for old aviation books is too small to be worth the effort.

This time I had the sense to use actual photographs as book covers rather than scratch out amateurish art. The toughest part was deciding on the fonts for the title and cover text.

These two forms of self-publishing have been highly fulfilling, for it enabled me to use—and hone—the skills I had learned not only as an author but also as a newspaper editor with training in computerized page design and graphics production.

Gin Fizz has languished—books on aviation no longer command sizable audiences—but the rail buff community loves books about trains, and Zephyr has stayed afloat among it, especially since I’m able to promote the book on railfan web sites and Facebook pages.

In 2016 I republished the first three Steve Martinez novels as one omnibus ebook and as a single print-on-demand paperback called Porcupine County. The latter is a 726-page doorstop of a volume, and despite its $9.99 ebook tag and $25.95 paperback price, sales have been heartening.

I followed that later in the year with three separate $12.95 paperbacks for readers uninterested in an omnibus.

The toughest part of this enterprise, of course, is winning the attention of potential readers. I still have to go out and peddle the product, mostly in presentations at libraries. With one or two exceptions, bookstores have not seemed interested in selling print-on-demand paperbacks, let alone ebooks.

Getting reviews is still difficult. Book review sections have dried up with the rest of the newspaper industry. A few surviving magazines, including those geared to libraries, still review books—but most don’t touch self-published efforts. Neither do most literary blogs and Web sites devoted to mysteries (some will, but only for a fee, and I refuse to pay). Fortunately the five previous novels in the Steve Martinez series provide a built-in readership for every new novel, thanks to my Steve Martinez page on Facebook and my web site, henrykisor.com. Yes, the web site is self-published; I had to teach myself HTML coding.

Now you are holding the latest example of my efforts—The Riddle of Billy Gibbs.

Being a one-man publishing house has been a gratifying pastime during my retirement years. I certainly am not making a living at it, but it keeps my aging brain limber—and it also keeps all my books in print, gaining new readers every day.