Trip to Doggie Wash With Colossal Canine Is a Hairy Ordeal

It probably started with those do-it-yourself carwash places, where you drop about a dozen quarters in a slot and blast your car with a high-powered water nozzle like some carwash Rambo.

Then came restaurants where you cook your own steak. (But if you wind up with a charcoal briquette for a meal, do you stiff yourself out of a tip?)

So what’s next? A concert where you write your own symphony? A psychiatrist’s office where you lie on a couch and tell yourself about your terrible childhood?

These sarcastic thoughts boiled up in my head recently when I drove past U-Wash Doggie, a do-it-yourself dog- and cat-grooming shop in my Studio City neighborhood. Has society come to the point where we need a special location to shampoo our Shih Tzus?

Unless your pet is a Clydesdale or boa constrictor the size of a telephone pole, put the smelly little bugger in the bathtub and scrub. What’s the big deal?

But being a sensitive, ‘90s kinda guy, I decided not to cast stones until I had investigated. After all, most of my pet experience has been with a cat that takes care of his own personal hygiene. The day I have to help lick his fur is the day he goes to the violin factory.

This is why I found myself one day recently in the doggie wash, being introduced to a colleague’s 85-pound border collie mix named Pikku. The name supposedly comes from the Finnish word for “small,” but this animal was the size of a Shetland pony with hair like Don King.

I knew immediately there would be trouble when Pikku yelped and struggled as her owner wrestled her through the shop’s door, grunting: “He hates baths.”

“Great,” I replied.

Fancisco Gamero, who launched the U-Wash Doggie business three years ago, explained that for $10 to $14, depending on poochie’s size, you get the use of an apron, shampoo, a bathtub, brushes and an industrial-strength hair dryer. Or for $20 to $40, you can drop off your putrid pooch and the shop does the dirty work.

Gamero explained that he got the idea when he was having troubles washing his golden retriever in his bathtub years ago, deciding that “if I’m having problems with my dog myself, other people are too.”

(“Problems?” Like what? I was soon to learn.)

Gamero opened his first shop in Santa Clarita. The messy-mutt biz grew so rapidly that he sold partnerships for shops in Studio City and Burbank and plans to open several more, including one in Woodland Hills.

He is not alone in this business. Shops with names like E-Z Pet Wash and My Beautiful Dog-O-Mat have sprouted all over town.

My first problem was getting Pikku into the tub, which was about 3 feet off the ground so I wouldn’t need to bend over to scrub her. Gamero offered a stepladder specially made to get mutts into the tub. Pikku would have nothing to do with it. She just sat on the floor, staring at the tub, eyes rolling in terror.

Finally, Pikku’s owner lifted the dog into the tub. I chained her to the side to keep her from squirming around.

I was ready to fire a burst from the hose when Janet Benedict, one of the shop owners, suggested that I first comb off excess hair with a soft wire brush.

Oh sure, great idea. By the time my arm grew tired of brushing, I had about 10 pounds of hair in the tub, on the brush, on my hands and in the tub’s drain. But Pikku could still audition for the woolly mammoth role in the next cave-people flick.

Once I got Pikku sudsed down, she did what comes natural to wet dogs: She shook, hurling gobs of suds and long, coarse dog hairs in all directions. My white sweat shirt looked like a sort of odd, gray wool anorak.

Benedict had taught me a trick to keep dogs from shaking--just lift one of the dog’s front legs so she would be too unbalanced to shake. This had no affect on Pikku, an incredibly well-balanced dog who could have gone on shaking if I hung her upside down from the ceiling.

OK, I wouldn’t do that (because I couldn’t do that), but she howled as if I had. Long, loud howls that pierced eardrums for miles, baying worthy of an entire pack of heartbroken hounds. I could see the headlines in my own newspaper: “Reporter Arrested for Canine Cruelty; Editor Promises Animal Rights Groups Instant Dismissal.”

Benedict lowered the noise level by tossing dog treats in Pikku’s muzzle every time she began to howl.

Several shakes and howls later, I was ready to hit Pikku with the industrial-strength hair drier that was supposed to dry off the average head (human, not canine) in five minutes.

Pikku’s furry bulk soaked up about 20 minutes, more time than I need to wash and dry a pickup truck.

The final touch: cologne. Gamero sprayed Pikku with a delicate aroma sure to drive the male dogs in the neighborhood mad with passion.

So there’s Pikku, fluffy and shiny and smelling like the perfume counter at Sak’s.

And here’s me, looking like I had been dipped in tar and dragged through a toupee shop.

That’s when it struck me. The tub.

The tub was lined on all sides with long black hairs that formed groovy little designs like those on the tie-dye shirts we all wore in the ‘70s.

“A disaster,” Pikku’s owner agreed.

Looking at that tub, I realized why do-it-yourself pet grooming shops are the Amgen, the Apple Computer, the boom biz of the ‘90s. I may have been a mess, but at least when I got home, I could clean up in a tub that does not look like it is lined with gray shag carpet.