Mao and Me

If it seems too good to be true, it often is. Dylan Muhlenberg discovers the high price of ‘free’

We were on the N1 when we realised that perhaps we’d made a mistake. Our arms looked like a self-harming emo kid’s, and the Mazda’s already paltry resale value was dwindling fast.
After exhausting my clichéd dog knowledge (‘There’s no such thing as a bad dog, just bad owners...’) we drove on in stony silence, except for the occasional yelp from my wife.
   We’d found Mao on a Gumtree ad that had only been up for 15 minutes. I was the second caller and Mao’s master assured me that if for some reason the first caller couldn’t take the dog, Mao would be ours.
Even though we’d never considered a chow, Mao’s USP – he was free – made us learn to love the breed. So we waited for the good news while feverishly googling images of chows and imagining our new life with this particular puppy. 
   Unable to contain my excitement, I phoned Mao’s master a second time to ask him whether a small donation would help bump us up the list. It wouldn’t, and he said some gibberish about finding the right home for his dog. I informed him of how my wife and I had just invested in a little pocket of suburbia, that I’d shown my four-year-old daughter a picture of Mao, which she loved, and how we really, really needed this dog to complete our Norman Rockwell family portrait.

Get the full article in the September issue of GQ. On sale now.