Rocky Doggie
He was the world’s greatest “bad” dog, and my family loved him with everything we had—a year ago today we lost him
The thing is, I didn’t want a dog—no goddamn way.
“We’re NOT getting a dog!” I yelled at my family when the idea was calmly presented to me. My thinking was simple but selfish—a dog would place undue restrictions on the family (which meant me), chew our furniture to a pulpy mess, leave urine and poop stains everywhere, whine in the middle of the night—you get the point. I expressed every possible reason to my wife and sons why we were not getting a dog.
I even stopped yelling.
“We are,” my wife calmly told me. “We’re getting a dog.” Our boys nodded in humorous agreement, amused at my illogical behavior, their eyes quietly applauding their mother like she had just sunk a 30-foot putt before breaking into applause.
“We’re getting a dog, DAD,” they said in unison. “A dog!”
I slumped my shoulders, began thinking about a dog and what it might actually mean to me, the boys, and especially to my wife, who never had a dog as a kid.
“I’ve done a little research,” my wife continued. “A French Bulldog is what we should get. A Frenchie. I’ve heard and read they are great.”
So I quickly succumbed—not like I had a choice—and the wife and I sat together on the couch, surfed on our phones to the Puppy Spot (internet puppy purchasing store), and gasped—no, gagged a little—at the cost of a Frenchie. But after just a few minutes of scrolling, I stopped on an adorable, pied Frenchie pup (a pied is a French bulldog with a white coat and large, dark-colored patches).
Boom! The puppy had been named Xavier by the breeder (yes, yuck). But man, he was cute. I took one look at that little guy and knew he was ours. And damn, just looking at him, I knew his name was really Rocky—he became our little Rocky doggie.
And so began my family’s magnificent dog adventure.
Rocky was an adorable pup. I loved looking at him. He was hard to train, but we didn’t care. He was playful, bouncy, and barked a little—or a lot. Rocky was all dog, all Frenchie.
Rocky loved to play fetch, 10, 12, 15 times. On walks, he’d sniff, smell, and pee on every plant he saw, eventually parring them down to favorites. He had other little rituals, like walking through a little gully or trying to eat flowers when they were in season. Joyful dog things.
The best thing Rocky did was make us love him, which in turn made us get another Frenchie—Cliff (our sons named our second Frenchie Cliff, a wonderful little creamy). My wife dubbed the dogs, “The Apple Dumpling Gang,” and they were a terror on walks when they saw people and especially other dogs—of course, that was because of Rocky.
We took the pair to Arkansas on a baseball trip (the KC Royals AA ballclub) to see how they would travel—four hours in the car and then four hours alone in the hotel room. At the ballpark, halfway through my first beer, I got a call from the hotel.
“Sir, your dog is barking nonstop.” Rocky, Cliff, or maybe both. I was going to leave the game, but the woman told me to wait, and if it didn’t stop, she’d call back. It stopped, and I had another beer.
Other Rocky things: he threw up in our van, ate chicken bones left on the floor by my oldest son, and, during our panic, promptly threw them up. He did many other little endearing things—he hated to have his nails trimmed, shivered uncontrollably while getting a bath, loved to sneak under the blankets, especially when my wife was using one. Oh, how Rocky loved my wife. We figured out that when he went nuts in public with her, it was because he felt she was being threatened. When he let go of a yodeling bark, he meant business.
Rocky loved to climb on your lap and sit like a Sphinx, lording over the room. It was strange but cool. He never licked you—Rocky would stick his nose as close to your face as possible without touching and smelling you while barely making a sound.
Then, there were the Shih Tzus in the neighborhood. Whenever we went on a walk, and they were outside, the Shih Tzus would wildly yap at us. Rocky would pull the leash hard, barking back, ready to kill.
“Those Shih Tzus got nothing on you, Rocky,” my wife would tell him, and we’d pull the dogs away and head for home.
Getting ready for a walk was an adventure itself—Rocky went nuts when we said the word “walk,” but he wouldn’t let us put the harness on without running around, doing the downward dog, wagging his nub of a tail, then finally succumbing to the process.
And the zoomies. Rocky was a monster zoomer, a loud lapper when drinking water, a ferocious hater of the dogs next door. A picky eater.
When he was bad, well, we had never experienced anything like him. He barked at everyone who wasn’t his family. He was scared of almost everything—he’d stand at the front door, looking out as people walked their dogs, or jogged, or got their mail, quivering and shaking, barking for no reason. If you dropped a piece of food on the floor, forget about it—he’d snatched it and gobbled it down almost before it hit the ground.
We tried socializing him at a dog park, and the stress on him was so severe that we never tried it again. We would remain his only people. Strangely, if you visited us in the house, he would eventually warm up, but only after a while. He truly loved my oldest sister.
In the late summer of 2023, Rocky was not doing well, and it scared me. He was acting strange, circling and circling, acting like he was in pain, among other things.
Then he had a seizure.
We took him to our vet, and they seemed to have a good diagnosis—but it wasn’t. At first, they thought he hurt his back, or he had a severe ear infection, or something else. Finally, they told us to take him to Blue Pearl, the pet emergency hospital. We raced to the hospital, checked in, and they took him for an examination.
So we waited. And waited. The longer it took, the better I felt; I’m not sure why. When the vet finally returned with Rocky, she was almost smiling, and then she started talking about a few different conditional symptoms and possible problems.
“But,” she finally said, “I can tell you that he probably has a brain tumor. It’s almost a slam dunk.”
Slam dunk? Slam dunk??!! What in the actual hell? What kind of vet talks like that to pet owners?
“You can get a CAT scan and surgery, but because of the size of his head, there is no chance of curing him” (I’m paraphrasing most of this; my mind went blank when she said brain tumor). For good measure, she told us to set up an appointment with the neurologist just to be sure. But we skipped it because we knew, we already knew.
Rocky was terminal.
When she was finished, I gently gathered Rocky in my arms, and my wife and I walked to the front to check out, both of us in deep shock. As I cradled Rocky and walked to the exit, a well-meaning man looked at him with much admiration.
“He’s beautiful. Is he going to be OK?”
It took everything I had not to start screaming at the man. Instead, I turned back and simply said with a touch of sad sorrow, “No.”
Rocky was prescribed prednisone to help with the symptoms, and for four months, he was himself again, four months we were all grateful for. But prednisone is a harsh drug, and the effects of it, coupled with the tumor, slowly took him away. We went up and down on the dosage, and that helped, but prednisone, combined with the tumor, was too much. He drank massive amounts of water, quit barking at the neighbor’s dog, got a little snappy, was hungry all the time, and began eating poop (I know). But he didn’t have any seizures.
Rocky was born on March 15, 2019—the Ides of March. Whether that meant a foreboding of doom for him, I highly doubt it. French bulldogs are prone to developing brain tumors, more so than other breeds, especially at a young age. Their short nose makes them more likely to develop certain types of brain tumors. Other maladies also fall upon the breed, and none are good. The pied life expectancy is 10 to 12 years, so I feel not just cheated but robbed. The whole family does. Rocky died four days short of his fifth birthday.
I was in Mexico with my oldest son on his senior high school spring break trip when Rocky died. I won’t go into the details, but it was rough for my wife and younger son—Rocky had several seizures. My wife was a champion through the ordeal.
I might be driving, running an errand, walking the track at the gym, or cooking eggs. And there’s Rocky, filling my brain and heart simultaneously, and all of a sudden, I feel the hard pull of sad love on my eyes, even a year later, and I fight like hell not to start tearing up.
I knew this piece would be hard to write—that dog. I know I’ve forgotten some wonderful and endearing things he did—or bad—so be it. In his short Frenchie life, Rocky gave me a sense of pureness I didn’t think was possible from dogs. He was always happy to see me, beyond thrilled to see my wife and our sons. I’ve heard it described that dogs always react like they’ve won the lottery when they see you at the end of the day, in the morning, or whenever. It was the other way around for me; I always felt like we won the Powerball with Rocky. And since we still have Cliff, maybe we did.