"Are You Good?"

Unlike most dog walkers with their plastic bags ready to collect dog poop, I prefer to carry a pooper scooper with me when I walk dogs. It’s kind of my personal brand on the street.

People have strange reactions upon seeing the pooper scooper. Cops once asked, tongue in cheek, “You need all that shovel for such a small dog?” Another time, 2 nervous teens were relieved to get a closer look. “We thought it was a gun,” they explained.

Tonight (1 a.m. on May 8th) provided a third example. The homeless encampments under the W-X freeway were awfully noisy at 1 a.m. as I dropped some letters into a mailbox at the post office. A restless crowd there.

Jasper and I were walking near the McDonalds when an authoritative woman’s voice asked, “Hey - You good?” I looked up and saw a white woman wearing a kind of poncho propped upon the handlebars of a bicycle ridden by a black man. Both were heading east on Broadway and appeared to be in their early thirties. The woman was in charge. She repeated, “Hey, are you good?” I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. They both came rolling over.

“What’s that?” she asked as she gestured toward the scooper. “A shovel?” She looked a bit wasted. Her mouth was open and her eyes were glazed. “It’s a pooper scooper,” I replied. This concept seemed altogether too difficult to grasp. She stated disbelievingly, “You’re walking around with a fucking shovel.” “Yes,” I said. Just too much to absorb.

As they prepared to roll away, she asked, “Where you from, bro?” “Here,” I replied. “I live around here.” They both absorbed this tidbit of information about this weird dude and headed back west on Broadway.