Part 2: My Neighbor Called The Cops On My Pit Bull For Barking All Night — When She Came To The Hospital To Apologize, What I Told Her Made Her Sit Down On The Floor
I want to tell this from Howard’s point of view, because it is his story, and because he is the one who lived through the bathroom floor for six and a half hours, and because he is the one who said the thing to Jeannine in the hospital room that I cannot stop thinking about almost a year later. I am Marisol the dispatcher, but I am going to step out of the story now and let Howard tell the rest. He wrote most of this down himself. I am putting it in the order it happened.
— Howard speaking now —
I tripped on the bathmat at 1:14 a.m. I know the time exactly because I had glanced at the digital clock on the dresser as I was getting out of bed. I am seventy-seven years old. I keep track of times. It is something Doris taught me. She always wanted to know what time things had happened.
I went down sideways. I felt the snap in my hip on the way down. I felt my right wrist take most of my weight against the tile floor. I heard a sound come out of myself that I had not heard since I was nine years old and I broke my collarbone falling out of an apple tree in 1956.
I knew, before I had stopped moving, that I was not getting up.
I am going to spare you the detail of the next six and a half hours, because you do not need it. I will tell you only the things that matter.
I could not reach my phone. It was on the nightstand in the bedroom. Twelve feet of hallway away. May as well have been twelve miles.
I could not crawl. The angle of my leg under the towel rack and the weight of my body against the toilet base meant I could not get any leverage. I tried for what felt like an hour. I could not.
I could not stand. My right hip was broken. I would learn later that it was broken in two places. The pain was the kind of pain that arrived in waves and made me black out for short periods of time.
I could not slide down. My leg was stuck.
I could not call for help loud enough to be heard through walls. I tried. The bathroom door was open about ten inches. The hallway was empty.
I called for Pearl.
I said, “Pearl. Pearl, honey. Come here.”
I heard her toenails on the wood floor.
She came to the bathroom door. She looked at me. She did not come in. The space was too tight, and I think she understood — somehow, in the way dogs understand things — that climbing over me was not the right thing to do.
She lay down on the hallway carpet with her chin on the threshold of the bathroom door, looking at me, eyes locked on mine.
I said, “Pearl. I need help. Pearl, please.”
I do not know how to explain what happened next without sounding like I am embellishing. I am not embellishing.
She lay there for about thirty seconds. She thumped her tail twice. Then she stood up. She walked back down the hall. I heard her toenails on the wood. I heard her in the kitchen. I heard her at the front door.
She came back to the bathroom door. She lay down again. Same spot. Chin on the threshold.
Then she started barking.
She barked once. Then again. Then again. A steady, clear, deliberate bark, every five to seven seconds, with the kind of measured pacing that an animal uses when it is trying to be heard, not trying to scare something off. She did not run out of breath. She did not get hoarse for a long time. She did not vary the rhythm.
She just barked. Every five seconds. For three and a half hours, until my next-door neighbor Jeannine finally got up and called the police.
I knew, lying on that bathroom floor in the dark, that Pearl was doing the only thing she could do. She had assessed the situation. She had determined that I was not going to be able to fix it. And she had decided to make as much sustained noise as she possibly could, in the most consistent way possible, for as long as it took for someone outside the house to do something about it.
She had to know it would make someone angry. I am not going to claim that a dog “knows” the way a human knows. I will only say this: Pearl had lived next to Jeannine for six months. Pearl was a quiet dog. Pearl had probably noticed, in the way dogs notice things, that loud noises in our row house were unusual and that they bothered the people in the next house. She had probably noticed that the people in the next house had a strong opinion about quiet hours. Whether or not she “knew” any of this in the conscious way a human would know it, her behavior that night was perfectly designed to produce the only outcome that could save my life.
She made herself a problem.
She made herself a problem so loud and so sustained that the only solution to her was for somebody to come into the house.
— end of Howard’s section —
Back to me, Marisol, the dispatcher.
Officer Kowalski made entry through the front door of the row house at 4:54 a.m. He had requested a battering ram from the trunk of his cruiser. He took the door at the deadbolt with one hit. He announced himself. He called out for any occupants. He heard the dog barking from upstairs.
He said into his radio, “Female Pit Bull at the top of the stairs. Looks calm. She’s not coming at me. Going up.”
I held my breath. The body cam footage I have watched since shows what happened next.
Pearl was lying in the hallway upstairs. She had not moved from her post outside the bathroom door. She did not bark at Officer Kowalski. She did not growl. She did not stand up. She watched him climb the stairs, and when he got to the top, she thumped her tail twice on the carpet — twice, the same thump that Howard would later tell me was her standard tail-greeting — and then she got up and walked the four steps over to the bathroom door and lay back down with her chin on the threshold. She turned her face up toward Kowalski.
She showed him.
Kowalski stepped over her and looked into the bathroom. He found Howard wedged between the toilet, the wall, and the towel rack. He immediately called for paramedics. He went down on the bathroom floor next to Howard and held his hand and told him help was coming. He said, “Sir. Your dog. Your dog is the reason I’m here. I want you to know that.”
Howard, by his own account, was unable to speak at this point. He was conscious but he had been in and out of consciousness for the last hour. He squeezed Kowalski’s hand. He looked at Pearl in the doorway. He cried.
— Howard speaking again now —
The paramedics got me out of the bathroom at about 5:20 a.m. They had to take the towel rack off the wall to do it. They got me onto a backboard. They carried me down the stairs. Pearl did not follow. She did not move from her post. I told Officer Kowalski to please call my former student Anthony — the vet tech who had given me Pearl in the first place — and ask him to come and take her home for the night. Anthony was at my house within forty minutes. Pearl recognized him. She let him put on her leash. She walked out of the house behind him with her tail thumping in slow heavy arcs.
I want to write down what happened in the hospital, because it is the part most people want to know about.
I was at Jefferson Hospital for nine days. They did surgery on my hip the next afternoon. The wrist was a clean break and they set it in the ER. They told me, the morning after the surgery, that if I had been on that bathroom floor for another four to six hours without medical attention, I would have likely died of dehydration and shock. They were specific about it. The orthopedic surgeon said to me, in that calm doctor’s voice they use, “Mr. Howard. Whatever made the police come to your house, that is what saved your life. We need to be clear about that. You were close.”
I knew what had made the police come. The hospital had told me Officer Kowalski had been dispatched on a noise complaint. They had told me my next-door neighbor had filed it.
I had not seen Jeannine yet.
She came on day eight.
She came alone, in the early afternoon, when she had taken off work for a doctor’s appointment and was already in the hospital. She was carrying a small bouquet of yellow flowers and a card. She knocked on the door of my hospital room. I told her to come in.
She did not sit down. She stood in the doorway with the flowers in front of her like a shield. She looked terrible. She had not been sleeping. I know what the look of a person who has not been sleeping looks like.
She said, “Mr. Howard. I — I don’t even know how to say this. I am so sorry. I was the person who called the police on Pearl. I called because I was angry about the noise. I had no idea. I had no idea you were —”
She started crying.
She said, “I have been trying to figure out how to come see you. I almost did not. I have been so ashamed of myself.”
I want to be honest with you. I had thought, for the first three days in the hospital, that I was angry at Jeannine. Not because she had called the police. The opposite — because of the reason she had called the police. Because she had been irritated. Because she had been thinking about her sleep and her meeting and not about what the dog might be doing. I had been telling myself — in the way you tell yourself things when you are lying in a hospital bed at three in the morning unable to sleep — that she was the kind of person who calls the cops on a Pit Bull at four-forty-seven in the morning because she is the kind of person who calls the cops on a Pit Bull.
By day eight I had stopped thinking that way. I had thought about it for a long time. And by the time Jeannine actually walked into my hospital room with those yellow flowers, I had figured out what I wanted to say to her.
I said, “Jeannine. Sit down. Please.”
She sat down in the vinyl chair next to my bed. She put the flowers on the rolling table.
I said, “I want you to listen to me. I am not angry at you. I want you to never apologize to me for this again. Do you understand me?”
She started to argue. I held up my hand.
I said, “Jeannine. You called the police because of my dog. The police came because of your call. The police came in because the dog kept barking and they could not get an answer at the door. They found me on the bathroom floor. I lived because of the call you made. I lived because you got out of bed at four-forty-seven in the morning, annoyed at the noise of my dog, and decided to do something about it. If you had stayed in bed and put a pillow over your head, I would have died on that bathroom floor.”
I paused.
I said, “Pearl was barking so that someone would call the police, Jeannine. I do not know how she knew that was the way to get help. I have stopped trying to figure it out. But she was barking for hours, and she was barking next to your wall, and she was barking the way a dog barks when she is trying to make someone do something. She was making herself a problem. She knew you were on the other side of that wall. She has watched me wave at you over the front gate. She knows you. She made a problem you would have to fix.”
Jeannine put her hand over her mouth.
I said, “You did not ruin my night, Jeannine. You ended it. You ended the worst night of my entire life. I am alive because the call you made was annoyed enough to wake up a dispatcher and send a police officer to my door. Don’t apologize for that. Please.”
She started crying harder.
She said, “Mr. Howard. I almost didn’t call. I almost just put earplugs in. I almost —”
She could not finish the sentence.
I said, “But you didn’t. You called. Thank you, Jeannine. Thank you.”
She slid out of the vinyl chair. She sat down on the floor of the hospital room next to my bed with her back against the wall, and she put her face in her hands, and she cried into her own hands for what must have been ten minutes. I did not say anything. I did not have to.
When she could finally talk again, she said, “Mr. Howard. I want to do something. I don’t know what. I want to help. I want to — can I walk Pearl for you? While you’re in here? While you’re recovering? Can I do that?”
I said, “Jeannine. I would be honored.”
She walked Pearl for the next four months. Twice a day. Through my entire recovery. She walked her in November when it was raining. She walked her in December when there was a foot of snow. She walked her in January when it was nine degrees out. She did it without being thanked. She did it because she had to.
— Marisol again, and then I’m going to wrap this up —
Howard came to the dispatch office three weeks after he was discharged. He came on a Saturday morning when he knew I would be off shift. He brought a small box of cookies from a bakery in his neighborhood. He asked the desk sergeant if he could leave the cookies and a note for the dispatcher who had taken his neighbor’s call on October 22nd at 4:47 a.m.
The desk sergeant called me. I came in.
Howard was in the lobby in a wheelchair. He had a cane next to him for when he could stand. He stood up — slowly, with help — when I walked in.
He took my hand. He held it in both of his.
He said, “Marisol. You sent help. You did not send a noise unit. You sent help. I want you to know I know the difference.”
I cried in the lobby of my own dispatch office in front of a Saturday morning desk sergeant who has worked with me for twelve years and had never once seen me cry.
Howard told me about Jeannine. He told me about the bathroom. He told me about Pearl lying in the hallway with her chin on the threshold for six and a half hours. He told me what he had said to Jeannine in the hospital room.
He told me to write it down. He said, “Marisol. People do not know that the dog they hear barking might be a dog who is trying to save somebody. People do not know that the neighbor they are angry at might be the only person who can save the person on the other side of the wall. People do not know about Pearl. They should know about Pearl.”
So I wrote it down. I am writing it down now.
Howard is seventy-eight now. His hip is healed. He walks Pearl himself again, twice a day, slowly. Jeannine still walks with them sometimes. She comes over for dinner on Sunday nights.
Pearl is five. She is still mostly quiet. She has barked once since the bathroom — at a hot-air balloon last summer, exactly the way Howard’s wife Doris would have laughed at if she were still alive.
If you ever hear a dog barking at four in the morning, and you cannot get her to stop, please. Knock on the door first. Ring the bell. Try one more time before you put in earplugs.
Sometimes the dog is barking for a reason.
Sometimes the dog is trying to make a problem so big that you have to fix it.
Sometimes the dog knows you are on the other side of the wall.
And sometimes — sometimes — the angry call you almost did not make is the call that ends the worst night of somebody else’s entire life.
If this story moved you, follow the page — there are more like Howard and Pearl I haven’t told yet.
