#themarkedones

Rosalie Oliva Benedict

The upcoming web novel hit! Don’t miss your chance to see it! It’s going to be exciting.

“It’s like a one-step Rube Goldberg device that starts with money and ends with smiles.”

This was the soundbite I used on my podcast. It was the opening tag.  A cold open, if you will. Now, my podcast sucks. It used to suck a bit more, it now sucks a bit less. It’s a podcast out of Denton, Texas about local characters and bands and art. Anything I can come up with that can fill an hour once a week. Denton is a medium sized town about half an hour out of Dallas. It’s like Austin but with no public relations. More accurately, it’s like if all the people who were born in Denton who could do public relations moved to Austin to get jobs in public relations. It has a decent music scene. It’s like a mini hub of liberals in the Republican sub-continent of Texas. There’s a band, The Marked Men, they came out of Denton. A couple people have heard of them. On my podcast I interviewed their bassist’s brother.

It’s my third most downloaded episode.

The brother of the bassist of a band you’ve never heard of. And he was a blast.

His name is Dave Klein and he trains dogs.

“So you train dogs, right? What’s that li-“

He cuts me off.

“I don’t just train dogs, man! I create franchises! I make mutts that I find in dog shelters-rescues man!- into money making, capital building entertainers. I used to be a CPA. Certified Public Accountant. And it was just this abstract thing. Money. Dollars and cents. Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. And I hated it. I hated the desk I sat at, the company letterhead on our paper stock, the breakroom, the coffee pot, the receptionist. Like, AAAAAHHHHH!, pulling out my hair, I hated it.”

“Oh man, that’s the worst. Working in a job you have no passion for can really be-“

He cuts me off.

“It can be soul sucking, right? I know. You’re telling me. So on my lunch break one day, as I’m plotting my eventual suicide- No, can you cut that out? I’m just messing around, that’s too heavy- as I’m walking around bummed out and just low as dirt, I’m on my way to get a sandwich. This is before I go vegan. So I’m walking downtown, tum-tum-tum, stupid-ass me, wearing a suit and tie I hate, I’m walking to get a sandwich. And then, BOOM,” he claps his hands together right next to the compression microphones making us both wince from the instant headache coming from our cans. That means headphones.

I have a podcast.

“Hell, sorry, man.” He whispers,  “Boom, what do I see?”

He actually pauses for a second. Waiting for an answer to the most rhetorical of questions.

“I have no idea. Your brother?”

“No man, sorry I don’t want to talk about him. He wasn’t in town anyway. What do I see?” He leans in closer.

“Um, well I was hoping to talk about him some. In the e-mail we discussed talking about The Marked Men and you providing some insight into their new album that just dropped Tue-“

“I’ll tell you what I saw. Downtown there was this guy wearing cargo shorts that were so full of cash that the pockets stuck out like pimples just asking to be burst. Or pimples that were so full that your girlfriend would ask to bust them. You ever get that? Chicks just want to bust those fuckers- sorry, can I curse on this show?”

I shook my head side to side, “We try not to-“

“Cool, so anyway that wasn’t even the remarkable thing. This guy, this GENIUS! He had a monkey. One of those little guys. Like Ross had on ‘Friends’? So this guy had his little pall on his shoulder and a crowd was gathered around. Like eighty people. You’d think Mick Jagger was there-“

I interrupted him, trying to regain control of my show, “Yeah, on your brother’s new album there seems to be an homage to the Stones on track-“

“But it wasn’t anybody famous, it was just some asshole - sorry, regular guy- with a monkey. A macaque I think. The type of monkey.  And then I see the people in the crowd, they all have dollar bills in their hands. And one by one the monkey comes by and takes their dollar out of their hands, bows and puts it in a bucket. And the people freak out! They clap their hands and are just overjoyed that a monkey took their money and put it in a bucket. And that’s entertainment at its rawest. You give some money, see something cute, or funny, or shocking, and have this burst of dopamine and oxytocin and feel happy. Happy that you have less money and a bucket has more. Because something furry was the transporter. So I sat there and watched this guy, for three hours. I didn’t go back to work.”

At this point I just bailed on the whole premise of what I thought the interview was.

“So you just quit?”

“I just got started. There’s a difference.”

That seemed like either a stupid thing people say to sound smart or a mantra. Maybe both. I’m still not certain.

“But you train dogs, correct? Why not monkeys?”

“Because monkeys are basically people and I don’t believe in slavery. And they’re a pain in the ass and crazy hard to train. You ever train a monkey? You have to break them. It’s like ‘Shawshank’ except they want to throw shit at you instead of play classical music over the P.A.”

“Fair.”

“And in the end it’s basically the same thing. Dogs are more fun, more relatable. I grew up with dogs, tons of people do. Anytime there is a crowd half those people had a dog.”

“So you trained a dog to take money? And people want this?”

“In droves man! Personally, I don’t get it. I mean, bullshit, I kind of get it. So what I do is, once a month I go to a shelter and pick a dog that looks smart, not too pretty. You don’t want it to look like a bred dog. You’re cultivating an image. I train the dogs to stand on their back legs, to stand. Begging. And when people, kids, tourists, whoever, pull out a bill, the dog gingerly, really carefully bites down on it and takes it from their hand. You have to make sure they do it softly, one kid gets his hand bit and you’re screwed. So the dog takes the money walks over to the owner. So the owner sticks his hand out and the dog acts like he’s going to give it to him but then fakes him out and drops it in a bucket. And the bucket has the dog’s name on it. Sparky or Marley, or Krishna or whatever the hell. But he doesn’t give it to the owner. So here you have a dog begging. The one thing dogs aren’t supposed to do, but he’s being cute, standing up on his haunches. And people give him the money. They don’t give the owner the money. They don’t give some bum a handout. That’s why the fake out and then the drop into the dog’s bucket. Like it’s his cash. He earned it. You don’t give money to homeless. You give money to an animal. An entertainer! Like he’s gonna go out and buy dog biscuits and a new collar with it.”

“So you just train these dogs, you don’t actively go out and set up on a corner or downtown?”

“Hell no, man. I train these dogs. I’m not gonna go beg for money. I’m a professional. I get a thousand dollars a dog. And I make people happy. I created this thing, this performance. I puppet master it. I just train the dogs and sell them to carnies and people who go to music festivals, crap like that. And people love it. Kids especially. And I built it. It’s like a one-step Rube Goldberg device that starts with money and ends with smiles .People can’t help but want to give these things money. Kinda Pavlovian. Get it? Cause Pavlov- ”

I cut him off.

“Well that’s really interesting David, so before we wrap up is there anything you’d like to say about your brother’s band, The Marked Men?”

“Yeah, well they tour all over the damn country, and I bet- I BET- at each festival they play, you’ll find one of my dogs. And if you do, don’t be stingy. Remember, it’s for the dog.”

It was a great podcast. You know for the standards of my show. But the show is kind of a passion project now. Nowadays most of my income comes from my dog. He drops all the money in a bucket labeled “DeKlein”.