The Dog That Ate Topanga

I am sitting here with mounds of things to write about that will enlighten future generations and change the course of human history, but I’m going to put that aside for a moment and instead say goodbye to a dog.

His name was Hoover and he glared at me for the last time the other day, nuzzled me to say the glare was all show and then closed his eyes forever.

It wasn’t a bad way to go.

Every old dog faces death sooner or later. Hoover was 18 by human standards. Everyone has a different idea of what that means in dog years, but he was up there, that’s for sure.

My wife, Cinelli, brought him home as a puppy. He took an instant disliking to me and tried desperately to get away. In his haste to escape, he ran into a wall.

“Is he blind?” I said. She shook her head. “I think he’s just dumb.”

Well, he was dumb all right and not very pretty, with a long pointed nose and beady, close-set eyes that seemed incredibly empty.

Hoover lived well and fell apart slowly, remaining fiercely independent to the very end. His last act of mischief was to maim our cat so badly that it cost me $800 to have her patched up again, and then the coyotes got her.

At the rate I paid to have the cat restored, it was like they were dining at Rex il Ristorante.

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There are about 50,000 dogs in L.A. County, and the death of one will not cause any disruptions in the rhythms of animal life. But still, I’ll miss the old hound and his annoying mannerisms.

We kept him in a large fenced yard of his own because he had a habit of trashing everyone’s garbage can in the area and they’d come knocking at my door with mayhem in their eyes.

He also had a habit of sleeping in the middle of the street, forcing cars to stop and drivers to get out of their cars to chase him away. They’d have to do that two or three times because Hoover would return to the middle of the street as they were getting back into their cars. Then, finally, he’d tire of the game and saunter off triumphantly after having caused someone an incredible amount of misery.

I wanted to get rid of the dog almost from the first moment I laid eyes on him. He was impossible to train, was never house-broken and barked in a high-pitched falsetto that caused neighbors to believe I was beating him.

When we fenced a portion of the yard for him, he spent his life scratching at the door to get in. Most dogs will scratch for, say, 15 minutes and give up. Hoover would scratch steadily for hours at a time, and such was his persistence that he wore a hole in the door. It’s still there.

He disappeared once and I thought he was gone forever, so I wrote a touching column about the old dog that vanished in the rain, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t return, causing me no end of embarrassment. It was one of the few times I saw him smile.

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I’m looking for a new dog now. An online service says that the ideal pet for me would be a Jack Russell terrier. The breed was created by a British preacher obsessed with sin and fox-hunting.

I’m not interested in flushing foxes or owning a dog that can recite the 29th Psalm. I just want an animal that can learn a few commands, bark at burglars and not urinate on the rug. His religious beliefs are his own.

Cinelli came home one day recently dragging what looked like a clump of used rags at the end of a rope, and when I asked what it was she said it was a dog. I damned near died.

“I’m not having another homely animal in the house,” I said.

“His name is Dave.”

“I don’t care if his name is Franklin Roosevelt, he’s as ugly as a manatee and he’s not staying.”

Dave had a bark that sounded as though he was saying “wow” in a kind of low-pitched voice. Wow, wow, wow, wow. . . . He went around the house wowing and mumbling. Thank God we were only watching him for a sick friend and when she got well a couple of days later, Dave went home.

Just after Hoover died, we saw a play called “Sylvia” that featured Stephanie Zimbalist as a dog that barked by saying “Hey!” I told Cinelli that was the dog I wanted, but she said if I thought I was going to spend my life sitting around scratching Stephanie Zimbalist’s stomach I had another think coming.

I’m still looking, but no matter what I come up with I’ll always have a place in my memory for an old dog with a long pointed nose and close-set eyes who stood alone and proud until the day he died.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com