By Christopher Ketcham

On the east side of the Gowanus Canal, where it touches with its smell of rotten eggs the unsturdy homes zoned athwart a spice factory and a mill that weaves cheap Persian carpets and a machine shop that fashions pistols at 9th St. and 2nd Ave., where I lived half a decade ago, there was always the complaint of cats being eaten by roof dogs. The complaints came both from owners lamenting on stoops under rat-infested trees and from the poor felines themselves, wailing in darkness, gritting teeth, running away. At night from my window I watched the dogs in tight pacing formation on the silver-painted roofs; I could hear them bark and snivel. I’d wake my girlfriend, and she’d shoo me off, and I’d say, “But look! Dogs! Wild dogs!” Once, with the full moon firing off the silver paint, I saw dogs in a ball launch across the rooftop and disappear, and then there was a chorus of crying out.

The refurbished tenement where we lived stood high and alone over the silvery roofs that in winter storms drew the wind in short, hard tugs, and then it felt like we lived in a tree house. In the room below ours, a couple fought daily with tinny screeches heard through air vents, felling anvils, pianos, Tupperware, cans of tuna, Milk Duds, buckets. Later the girl on the stairs with blackened eye and pulped cheek kept her face turned away, and went out the door, swallowed up by the stony brown flats of Gowanus. That was the feeling, at any rate, and it was something to be savored in a city that is less and less vacant, less the ancient abandoned place I knew when young. Now, too many restaurants and bars, too many flocking splendors on corners, too much money to become indebted to.

At night there was always this terrible, awing loneliness in Gowanus. It felt like the desert, and I liked the way the train on the trestle of the F line passed elsewhere. I liked on Sundays the afternoon light that came aslant from New Jersey, across the salt piles by the canal, under the steel chords of the wide arc of the expressway and through the girder webs of the F tracks. And I liked at dusk the alien hue of the canal’s poison liquid, once an estuary salt-fed from the tides of New York Bay and freshened from the streams of the highlands of Brooklyn. The water grew oysters and clams as lavish and lovely as dinner plates; the Canarsee chief Gowane fished its reedy banks, trading shell-fish with the Dutch. In time, tanneries and soap factories and gas-yards and cement works arose on the mile and a half of bulkheaded canal that formed the southern terminus of the Erie system. Carroll Gardens and Park Slope flushed their toilets into it, and deep in the sludge biologists soon found cholera, typhoid and dysentery waiting like hot farts.Still, as if to remind us that this was water, a schoolgirl recently caught a blue crab that had migrated from the harbor; others found shrimp, moon jelly-fish, minnows. A harbor seal was spotted. Even a swan appeared with a bathtub-ring the canal had left on its feathers. The bird rose up, and with its supple wings buffeted the stillness, and was never seen again.

Flood season in Gowanus makes the animals come out, just as in the desert. The sewer streams underground run down to the old swampland and surface in the storm eye into scuddable foam, two and sometimes three feet deep, that boys get out boogie boards to surf.

The adults meanwhile curse at the water that steams and rages in buttermilked spouts that lash breakers against the walls of the warehouses. Manholes pop open and dash in the stream like discuses, and from them white-brown geysers frolic, four feet in the air, and around the geysers the water bashes in boiling waves, pauses in eddies, and shoots off in a tomato-colored stream west, making for the waterfalls on the banks of the canal, which speeds in its ebb to the sea.

Jeanie the hooker, who made a bed in the weeds of the bulkheads, was driven from her cardboard. Shayaq the importer’s basmati rice hoard was ruined, and so, too, a weaving machine, water-damaged, at the rug factory. The ink suppliers, printing house, garbage depot, the Anatolia iron-works, several foundries of clay and cement, a custom marble cutter and a maker of espresso machines escaped damage. But three homes were flooded in their basements, sump-pumped, or ceilings cracked, plaster gunking the carpets, old floor-tiles bursting; jewels washed from a mother’s collection in the basement of Marlene the Mexican, who had five cats killed by roof-dogs. Even the weapons at the gun factory threatened to debouch to the bay, while the Mayan-faced workers stood in stone wonder.

I saw a rat with his head above-water and his eyes wide, beating for safety against the current. I saw another drowned and drifting. And on the lips of the rooftops, dogs crooned at the lightning, and one among them, a demonic-looking creature large as a mastiff and coal-black, wanted to leap into the water and show who was master.

Blackie, as I called him, was the mightiest of the roof dogs, the alpha of the tribe. One night in stifling summer, I saw a drunk man praying on the deserted street at 3 a.m., on his knees before the one-story warehouse where Blackie lived. 

When Blackie barked, he drooled and dripped, and I marveled that with his short snout and bulldozerish jaw he looked like a bear loosed in Gowanus, not knowing what to make of the utter urbanness of the place: no trees, no green, no life anywhere except the lonesome and almost extinguished stick-figure of a human praying up to him on the empty street. I noticed gum wrappers on the ground shivering like origami in a breeze that I couldn’t feel on my face, and perhaps only existed three or four inches above the Gowanus ground, pumped by the feet of rats and dogs. The drunk man prayed violently: I hear you, you know my sins, I been not too frugal. O Lord, I been bad, and Blackie redoubled his cries.

It was only after several years of watching the dogs of Gowanus, trying hopelessly to make contact, that I learned who ruled them. Jeanie the hooker told me there was a man who lived next to the canal in a warehouse with a hundred dogs, maybe more. Sometimes he went abroad, late at night, surrounded by the pack. Along the canal she had gotten to know them free of their master; she would shout them away at dumpsters. 

This was news to me. Little Jeanie, with her pants falling down and her eyes looking for wallets, in a fight with the feral beasts. “There’s a thin little mama dog who goes around. I call her Baby. She’s always looking so sad,” says Jeanie. “Always pregnant too. Baby lives with the dog-man.” I had seen Baby, I thought, walking on 2nd Ave. at the head of a line of males much larger than she was (were they her sons?), with her eight swollen teats swinging above the petals of broken glass.

I took to hunting for this hundred-dog house. Several times I tried following the animals, but this was usually short work. They used the rooftops, or cut through impossibly narrow alleys, or rat-wild lots, or shimmied somehow unhurt over tiers of razor-wire. Blackie, meanwhile, watched my every move, screeching homicidally until one day he went hoarse, and wasn’t heard from for a week. So the dogs went about their business, and I gave up on the search for their master. 

Many months passed. Then, in October of 2003, sitting on my fire escape in the cool night, I saw him. He pushed a heavy cart, which he was piling with old circuit-breakers that had been dumped in a garbage can, and with him were six dogs. I tore out of the house and down the stairs and into the street, and then, trying to appear calm, I walked up to him as gingerly as I could, given that here, after all, was the fabled dog-king of Gowanus. 

He had chocolate-black skin and wore a wilting blue down coat and was humming a song. In age, he might have been anywhere from 35 to 60. The dogs stood in archipelagoes up and down the sidewalk, but rose ominously at my approach, coalescing about their master. I introduced myself, but kept a distance. The dog-king said his name was Kenny Rogers, then he noticed my fear of the pack. He called each by name—“Suzy! Charlie! Carol! Say hello!”—and they came to him at once, and, seeing that Kenny and I shook hands, came to me with tails low. They then resumed their sentry at ten and twenty paces, dispersed most tactically, like sphinxes, ears perked but eyes half-closed, no doubt a practiced deception. There was a collie, several German shepherds, several Labrador mixes, working dogs, service dogs. Baby was not among them.

I told Kenny I thought these were wild dogs. I think he sensed the disappointment.

“Nah,” he said, fishing through the circuit breakers. “Trained ‘em myself. These are my babies. Get some good money for these switches,” he said, holding up the hardware. “Gotta feed my dogs tonight. Get a little something for me, too, of course. Little soup. Watch some TV. I got 20 dogs, used to have a hundred dogs.”He puzzled a second, counting in his head. “More than a hundred dogs. I kept ‘em all as my own children. A lot of ‘em died. Children do that. Been here for 20 years with my dogs. Some of ‘em work security on the warehouses around here. Watching the roofs. Watching the insides. Killin’ rats. I keep ‘em fed and clean and happy, and get paid for it.”

I asked about Blackie.

“That’s Petie. Mean.He stays on the roof. Loves nobody but me. Hates everybody else. What a voice! I’m headin’ home. You wanna see a loving pit bull?”

I said sure, and we started to walk. The praetorian dogs herded us.

“Everyone thinks pit bulls are just the worst. Killers! It’s just how you train ‘em! You give ‘em love, they give you love. Everybody wants to make killers outta dogs. Turn ‘em even against their own nature.”

We walked on 2nd Ave. under the drippings of the F line to a dirt-pocked alley where warehouses sat snug under the armature of the trestle, and followed the alley west to within two hundred feet of the canal, whereupon Kenny opened a thick-barred gate that entered on a loading dock. Beyond the dock was the converted portion of the warehouse where he lived under a tin roof with his tribe. Immediately, the muscled figure of a pit bull bolted from the darkness of the dock. More dogs appeared, their eyes flashing, their feet pattering. At Kenny’s suggestion, I reached under the pit bull’s jaw and caressed it, and the dog licked my hands, and Kenny smiled approvingly.

Once upon a time, he told me, his dogs had failed him. It was 1997 and he was patrolling the rooftop of the gun factory, alone, when a thief emerged from the shadows and shot him above the heart. He lingered awhile, and then he died, and floated to heaven, but God told him to go home. I imagine the dogs surrounded his body on the roof and howled to the sky. 

I moved out of Gowanus not long after I met the dog-king, but once in a while I would go back to find him at the dock or walking at night with his pack. One night, his dogs surrounded me hatefully and chased me away on my bicycle, and I called out, “Kenny! Help!” The shape of the neighborhood changed. There is a bagel shop near the F stop in a building that was abandoned. The vast cavernous shell of the old post office depot that sat across from the dock was torn down and last year replaced with the purpose and bustle of a Lowe’s hardware store, whose beavering engineers paved the dirt-pocked alley to Kenny’s door. When I saw him a few weeks ago, he said several of his dogs had died. He was down to just three. 

Much earlier, when I first got to know Gowanus, I would eat psychedelic mushrooms and wander along the barren streets and look for the dogs and the rats and listen to the distant sea-hush of the Gowanus Expressway. Sometimes I would think of The Great Gatsby, those last whispered lines that spoke of Brooklyn and Long Island: “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.” I had a dream, living in Gowanus, that someone had returned all the animals to their rightful place by the water, renaming the girders into logs and the logs into sticks and the sticks into fire by the side of river Gowanus; naming each with a finger on the sunken iron of Atlantean roads… The moon dulling to cinder over the bay: a hefty-hatted fisherman turning ropes into coils, counting each crab, crayfish, the motto of the sea painted with fingers that once pulled oysters big as dinner plates. And all the animals returned to Gowanus: the dogs were let free of their kennel cough, the old hookers became trees at last and gave fruit, the rats became seals and the sea ran over the land and took it back. I thought of Chief Gowane in the tall grasses.