Historical October 1993 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Imagine that you are walking through a dense forest of blackened trees.
The foliage is so thick that you can hardly see the sky.
Then all of a sudden, without warning, a two or three-hundred pound glob of Vaseline falls from above and surrounds you. You arc immobilized; you can’t breathe!
Then giant fingers come from the heavens to pluck you away and wrap you in a huge Kleenex. Shortly afterwards, you are flushed down the toilet. “What in the world kind of fantasy is this???” you might be asking. Well dear friends, it’s no fantasy, ITS FLEA SEASON! And what I’ve described is the fate of the fleas on our dogs. Yep, the ultimate solution, I’m convinced, is a Vaseline one.
But before the first wife and I got to this point, one of truly high sophistication, we went through a journey of trial and error of flea removal; much more error than trial. Here, then, is the saga of us versus them, man versus flea.
It started one Saturday morning a little over a month ago.
I was lazily lying in bed, drifting back and forth between being asleep and being awake.
In the back of my mind I could hear a thumping, rhythmic noise.
I would fall off asleep, only to awaken a couple of minutes later with the thumping getting louder. Finally the noise became a din; as I sat up it became clearer in my mind. “Was someone knocking at the door?” I wondered.
I could definitely hear a beating noise.
I went downstairs to find Moxie, our #1 dog, sitting on the wood floor, feverishly scratching.
The leg he was using to scratch kept hitting the floor: thump, Thump, THUMP.
I came closer and looked and found a dozen or so tiny little fleas, jumping around on his belly.
They weren’t doing the Mexican Hat Dance or anything fancy, just kind of crawling around, commuting.
We have two dogs. So I knew that if Moxie had fleas, Boomer, #2 dog, • would also have fleas. Sure enough.
A look at her belly showed ten or so fleas, all scurrying back and forth. I’ve always advocated having pets.
I think that pet ownership teaches responsibility.
But our pets having pets, the dogs having fleas, is taking things too far. No problem, I thought. We’ll simply give ’em both flea baths. So the first wife and I pulled both dogs to the bathroom. They’re not small pooches, so we have to wash them in the tub. Already this was not going the way I’d planned it.
They hid, stiffened, and even growled. Our dogs, you see, view being bathed as a fate worse than death.
All I can figure is that as puppies they must have had some sort of traumatic experience in the tub. Maybe they saw “Psycho” too often.
We finally dragged both dogs into the tub, I joined them, we closed the curtain, and I turned on the shower. Their fuzzy hair grew wetter and wetter.
The steam rose and the bathroom began to feel a bit like a tropical rain forest. And the dogs?
It was pitiful.
If someone from the SPCA had come to the front door, I’m sure that they’d put me in jail for torturing the dogs.
They looked mournful and they wailed. Howling might be a better term. Between the sound of the shower beating down on them and their yelling, YEEE000000AAAAHHHH, I could hardly hear myself think. (One neighbor actually called and asked if everything was all right!) “Quick, hand me the flea shampoo,” I said to the second-incommand, “now that the doggies are wet, I want to get them lathered.” “What flea shampoo?” she replied, “I thought you had the flea shampoo!” Once again, a great plan was stymied by a lack of coordination. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t in charge of D-Day; we’d all be speaking German.
I rolled my eyes and grimaced in a theatrical manner.
A MAJOR eyeroll. Unfortunately, since both the shower curtain and the dogs’ eyes were closed, there was no one to see it. “Give me something, then,” I said, “quick!” The wife made a judgment, and, to be fair, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Her thinking was that regular, adult, shampoo probably wouldn’t do the trick. And besides, who wants poodles that smell like roses? Heck, even the poodles don’t want to smell like roses. So with nary a nano-second of thought, she handed me the container of dishwasher fluid that happened to be sitting on the counter. And with nary a nano-second of hesitation, I squirted it all over the dogs. And I began to rub. And it began to bubble. And I rubbed faster and harder. And it began to bubble more. Soon the entire bathroom began to smell like a lemon.
It wasn’t a minute or two before I realized our mistake, but by then it was too late. Bubbles and foam were everywhere.
I could barely see the dogs; the entire shower and tub was filled with thousands, millions, of tiny white soap bubbles.
The dogs were still howling, YEEEE- 000000WWWWWWWWW, and the bubbles were still multiplying.
It was like a giant bubble-bath, gone bad. Lawrence Welk would have loved it, but the dogs hated it.
I have no ideas how the fleas felt about it.
I could hear the wife laughing from the other side of the shower curtain. And all I could see was white.
I felt like I was lost in the Arctic somewhere, surrounded by snow with a rainstorm pelting me from above.
My dogs and I were wandering along the Iditerod.
Then it happened. Moxie.
I think it was, bolted from the tub.
He was tired of pulling the sled, and was making his break for freedom.
I grabbed, but without his collar on, it was impossible to hold him, and he was gone. Boomer, ever the follower, sprang from the tub too.
As they say at the Fairmount Track, “Aaaaand they’re ‘OFF!” Both dogs charged down the steps. At least I think that it was the dogs.
From the tub all I could see were two giant swarms of white bubbles, with legs, running away.
But since the swarms were barking, I figured that they were the dogs.
The wife and I caught the dogs in a bit, but not until after they had turned the furniture into an obstacle course. That meant that every chair and couch in the house looked as if someone with a dirty scrub-brush and soap had done a perfunctory rubbing on it.
The dogs were captured, and since we still didn’t have flea shampoo, we decided that we’d pick off the fleas, one by one.
After all, I thought, how hard can that be? Answer: hard. Seeing the little buggers wasn’t difficult, but grabbing them was. I’d either miss them or they’d spring from my fingers when I checked to see if I’d gotten them! Either way, I was getting far fewer fleas in my hand than in my beard. And now I was scratching! That’s when the Vaseline solution hit me.
I quickly grabbed a jar and a box of Kleenex and began my expedition. Sure enough, a glob of Vaseline would stop the flea-boy or flea-girl in its tracks. That would allow me to scoop down from the sky and encapsulate the flea in my Kleenex.
From there the flea would be semi-hermetically sealed in the Kleenex until sent to flea heaven by way of River Des Peres.
It wasn’t the easiest of tasks, and not something that I’d call fun, but hey, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. And the dogs don’t mind this either.
For some odd reason, they think the Vaseline is tasty, and enjoy licking their bellies afterwards. So things are back to some semblance of normalcy in the household. Our pets no longer have pets, at least not too many, and we’re stocked up with flea shampoo for the next time.
In the meantime, I’ve started a new business, cleaning upholstery. You can find me in the Yellow Pages under “ROLLING POODLES UPHOLSTERY CLEANERS – we come to your home!”
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, October 1993.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1993_10.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
