Dog Boy

Still one of my favorites, sigh, 'A boy and his dog.'

Back in the day, long before I acquired such luxuries as a wife and children, I met the adventures that came the way of a Hollywood bachelor with a little black and white dog by my side. Her name was Bodhi, and she was my best pal. She showed up at the door of my apartment one fateful afternoon as I returned from the hospital with 35 stitches in my right hand from a matte-knife mishap -- and it was the most unlikely rendezvous, since to find me she had not only to negotiate two flights of stairs but also to choose my door, from a dozen identical others on that flight, outside of which to wait (whether minutes or hours I would never know) for a prospective new friend. Neverthess, as I approached my door, right hand wrapped like a big white boxing glove, there she sat bruised and abused from dark adventures on the L.A. mean streets to which I would never be privy (she was scratched and scared and barely resembled the coquette she would become) .

An immature, irresponsible young man in his mid-twenties, I had no business owning a dog at that point -- still, there she was just as I needed a companion in my convalescence, and her charm was irresistable. I was then making my living (as I do now) in the film industry, then as a set decorator in commercials and rock videos. It's the set decorator's job to find and provide all the set dressing that will grace the given sets of a given shoot, and such involves a great deal of shopping. Before the money is actually spent and dressing acquired (usually on a weekly rental), it's customary in commercials for the director to review and approve photographs of the pieces in question.

Days spent film crewing are usually long -- on the order of twelve hours or more -- and I was loath to leave Bodhi locked up in the apartment for so long. Thus I got in the habit of bringing her with me. A Border Collie mix, Bodhi benefited from the breed's extraordinary intelligence; thus she proved a well-behaved companion who, despite the fact that I never leashed her, never failed to observe good form and thereby charm whatever proprietor who might otherwise eject her from a given establishment. Thus did I become, in certain Hollywood circles circa 1988-89, become known as "Dog Boy," whose arrival was always met with a smile (at least for Bodhi, whose social graces always eclipsed my own).

Little Bodhi had one quirk which never failed to amuse: while I was photographing innumerable desks, sofas, chairs, tables and the like, the little black and white scamp showed an uncanny ability to get herself into the frame at the moment the shutter was triggered. She'd jump onto the seat of the chair, dash through the frame, sit and regard me with head cocked and ears up (as in the timeless shot, above)... one way or another, Bodhi made sure to steal any exposure that I attempted. One can imagine the comic scenes that subsequently played out as a given director reviewed the proposed set dressing for an upcoming project, only to find the enigmatic Bodhi featured in frame after frame after frame. Some believed the truth, that I was an innocent pawn in Bodhi's modeling career, others suspected that we were in cahoots in a bid to make her a star (although she appeared in only one project over the years, a delta airlines commercial that found her on the tarmac of LAX -- a misadventure that, I suspect, was instrumental in the loss of her hearing in later years).

Now that my dear old friend has gone on to her eternal reward in unknown galleries in the great hereafter, I wish most fondly that I still had a collection of those old set dressing polaroids in which she so regularly appeared. A representative sample -- even twenty or so of the hundreds of frames she managed to command -- would now truly be among my most treasured posessions.

Lacking that, I do thus I give you the exposure above, still one of my favorites of the incomparable Bodhi: 1986-2005. RIP my dear old friend.