And Your Little Dog, Too, by David Sedaris

“He just bit me!” I said.

The woman stood upright and pushed her hair away from her face. She was pretty except for her mouth, which was thin-lipped and hard-looking. “Huh?”

“Your dog just bit me!” I repeated.

“No, it didn’t,” one of the men said.

I raised my pant leg and pointed to the broken skin. “Yes, it did,” I told him. “Look!”

The group collectively shrugged and turned back to the business of smoking fentanyl.

“How is this O.K.?” I asked.

Blank expressions.

“You should wash it,” the woman said, leaning again into the baby carriage with a lighter in her hand.

“I should call the police is what I should do,” I told her.

“Whatever,” one of the men said.

If I had a dog and it bit a man who was just passing by, I’d freak out, and hard. After apologizing until he begged me to stop, I’d give the guy my phone number and e-mail address. I’d offer to take him to the hospital. I would execute the animal in front of his eyes—whatever he wanted. Here, though, the only one who cared was me.

“The baby carriages are fairly new,” a pharmacist at the drugstore I went to afterward said. “People use them to get sympathy and to hide their drugs in.”

She asked when I’d last had a tetanus shot, and suggested that I go to the emergency room. And I meant to, really. Then I recalled the people whose dog bit me. The thought that their day would proceed uninterrupted while mine would be spent in what I imagined would be a very sad and busy hospital was more than I could bear. And so I returned to my hotel room deciding I would rather die.

That night, I had a show in the town of Salem, and, boy, did I talk about my afternoon, at least while I signed books beforehand.

“You have to understand that these addicts, especially those with an opioid-use disorder, lead incredibly difficult lives,” the first person I spoke to, a woman with long, straight hair the color of spaghetti, said.

“How is that an excuse?” I asked. “Her dog bit me.”

“Well, you’re still better off than she and her friends are,” the woman continued.

Unfortunately, I had already finished signing her book.

“I was bitten by a dog today,” I said to another woman sometime later. “It was with these people who were smoking fentanyl and pushing a baby carriage.”

“What kind of dog was it?” she asked.

“Whatever Toto was in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” I told her.

“Oh,” she moaned. “A cairn terrier. That poor thing.”

“Did I leave out the part where it bit me?” I asked.

“ ‘End feudalism’? Do I need to tap the sign?”

Cartoon by Maddie Dai

“People like that aren’t in any condition to take care of their animals,” the woman said. “That’s the really sad part.”

“Is it?” I asked, pointing to the bandage on my leg. “Is that the really sad part?”

The next person in line asked, “Did you get their names?”

“I really don’t think they’d have given them to me,” I told him.

“No,” he said. “The names of the dogs. It might have helped the authorities rescue them.”

That was when I quit talking about it. I mean, how hard should it be to get a little sympathy when an unleashed dog bites you? What if I were a baby? I wondered. Would people side with me then? What if I were ninety or blind or Nelson Mandela? Why is everyone so afraid of saying that drug addicts shouldn’t let their dogs bite people? Actually, I know why. We’re afraid we’ll be mistaken for Republicans, when, really, isn’t this something we should all be able to agree on? How did allowing dogs to bite people become a Democratic point of principle? Or is it just certain people’s dogs? If a German shepherd jumped, growling, out of one of those Tesla trucks that look like an origami project and its owner, wearing a MAGA hat, yelled, “Trumper, no!!!,” then would the people in my audience be aghast?

A few months before the incident in Portland, news broke of a Canadian tourist who was wading in the Atlantic when a shark she was trying to photograph bit off both her hands. I read about it on half a dozen websites, and on each of them the comments were brutal. How awful, I thought, to lose your hands and get no sympathy whatsoever, not even “I’m sorry you’re so stupid.” That’s what keeps me from feeding bears in national parks, or attempting to hug a baby hippo with its mother watching. In my case, though, all I did was walk down a street two blocks from an art museum.