I should add...

McLeans are copycats; I mentioned this way back. We bought a dog because my uncle and aunt got a dog. We already lived on the same street, and my uncle and aunt were also Dad’s brother and Mom’s sister, but just to make things all the more familiar, we both got dogs from the same litter. Bandit was the runt, the last one not yet sold, and when we went to check him out he fell asleep in my brother’s arms. There was never really a question that we’d take him home.

I honestly don’t know who came up with the name Bandit. I think ‘Gizmo’ was the only other real contender. If my brother and I had our way, he would have been either Axel or Slash. This is why you don’t let your kid name things. Case in point: Bandit’s brother, named by my cousins, was called Booger.

I’m trying to think about the strongest memories I have of him, but I can only really think of his traits in general. He was loud for a little dog. Back when his sight was still good and he wasn’t totally deaf, it took him about a half an hour to calm down when strangers were in the house. He would bark and growl no matter how many times you said it was okay or told him to stop. You could even perform a small pantomime, with hugs and handshakes to demonstrate your friendship towards the new person; it didn’t matter. Sometimes—not always—if you had the stranger feed him a Kraft Single, he’d calm down in a instant. Mostly, you just had to wait it out.

He had a small bed in the corner of my parents’ room. He usually slept there half the night, and then came whining at my door around two in the morning. I’d let him in and up on the bed, then he’d climb under the covers and curl up on his side with his back against me. Three years from now when I find out I’m sterile, I’ll blame all the nights I unintentionally let the dog slow bake my crotch.

And I can’t write about Bandit without writing about Filet-O-Fish. The phenomenon didn’t make a lot of sense in real life, and it’ll make even less written down, but here it is. Bandit went mental over the words “Filet-O-Fish.” But you couldn’t just speak it, you had to kind of sing it in a high-pitched voice. And the longer you stretched it out, the better: fileeeet-o-fiiiiiiiiish! Damn, that dog would howl when you did that. I mean, he would howl over anything if you sang it that high pitched—eventually. Filet-O-Fish was an instant trigger. Why those words in particular? I vaguely remember one time when he was still just a puppy, where he was chasing my brother around the house. Barry could get away from him pretty easily, and he would hide in closets or behind doors and make noises until the dog found him. Or didn’t occasionally. Eventually, for no good reason I can think of, the thing my brother started calling out was fileeeet o’fiiiiiiiiish. He’d call that out, the dog wouldn’t know where he was, then the dog would go mental. Pavlov had meat powder and saliva, we had Filet-O-Fish and RAAAAOOORAAAOOORAAAOOOOOOOOOO!