My neighbors and I parted ways, and within half a block everything changed. I saw a group of kids on bikes ahead of me and turned to avoid what looked like trouble. Two stray dogs came charging toward me, but I was too slow to realize it was because someone was about to club me from behind. Because it was from behind, I never got a good look at who it was, but he probably used a two-by-four to hit me, a popular weapon in New Orleans these days. I hit the pavement and skidded across. It was the kind of impact that leaves logic knocked loose, so when the kids jumped on top of me asking “What have you got?” I lifted my head as if to respond. Fortunately, the damage from the blow kept me from saying what I was really thinking, otherwise they might have finished the job. I lay paralyzed in the middle of the street while I felt their hands in my pockets. They took my iPhone, left the cash, and then they were gone.

Now, as I picked myself up from the street, I scolded myself for being so stupid. I should have driven. I found my glasses where they had landed across the street. The skin on my knuckles was scraped off and bleeding. Someone called the police, and since there was little chance they’d arrive soon, I continued around the corner to complete my errand with blood coming out of my ear. It was partially the stupor, and partially my dedication to multitasking: I was supervising a group of volunteers at an event in the park, I had the proofs to our pit bull calendar to deliver, and another event later that night. I didn’t have time for injuries.

The detective assigned to the case met with me several days later to tell me how difficult her job was. She told me that since I didn’t see them hit me, it would be impossible to get a conviction. Did she think I was an idiot? I wasn’t expecting a conviction. Two years earlier I had sat in the courthouse and watched a jury acquit David Bonds in the murder of Dinerral Shavers. Before the verdict came in, I saw the teenage witnesses on the stand and knew that no matter the verdict, the great tragedy would be that they’d all likely end up dead. And a week later, the key witness was gunned down. So I wasn’t in this for a conviction; that’s a losing game. I just thought it might be smart for someone to prevent these kids from eventually killing someone, or prevent someone from killing them.

I gave the detective a list of witnesses and names of other people who had encountered this gang — a journalist who had seen the gang just before they got to me, a man who had their photos on a cell phone they had stolen and returned. I even learned their approximate address and that, like many New Orleans children, they had no parents in the city. They were on their own. There was even a video of them causing trouble at a local convenience store — a video the police didn’t know about until it aired on the news. But the police did nothing with this information.

In the weeks that followed, I learned that the damage to my ear was severe. There was a large hole in my eardrum, which resulted in a 40 percent hearing loss and recurring infections. When it didn’t heal on its own, I had a skin graft, which required that my ear be removed from the side of my head and then sewn back on.

This crime was classified as a simple robbery.

In fact, it had been six months since I’d taken a walk on these streets, after a bunch of kids shot 16 rounds in front of my house; the police arrived, barricaded my car and refused to allow me to leave for an event. “We need to talk to you,” they said and then left without speaking to me. Once they were gone, the kids stowed their weapons under the house next to mine. A few months later, I found myself running through my dark yard to retrieve my dogs while someone in the yard behind me fired a machine gun into the air. This is the New Orleans I now know.

If you are looking for drugs, you have a wealth of opportunities for comparison shopping on my little block. There are gangs selling from half the stoops, although they don’t actually live here. They drive in to do business, taking over the stoops of the elderly, who are too frightened to report anything. Early in the morning, you can watch people picking up their stash for work, and then again in the evenings on the way home. Sometimes, passage through the block is impossible, due to the stalled vehicles hoping for their dealer to return. The police tell me they have the situation under surveillance. They’ve been telling me that for the past two years. When I recently wrote to our new police chief to ask how many years of observation were necessary before action could be taken, I didn’t get any response at all.

It wasn’t always this way. Three years ago, when I moved from a rental in Bywater to purchase a renovated house in the Holy Cross neighborhood in the Lower Ninth Ward, there was no crime here. There were virtually no people. Friends expressed their concern at my living in a completely abandoned neighborhood, but I quickly grew used to the glorious quiet. The silence was broken by tour buses, hoping to survey the destruction that still hadn’t been cleared, surprised to see that there were actually people living there again, stopping to ask which way it was to the Brad Pitt houses they’d seen on CNN. In the mornings I could walk my three dogs past block after block of empty housing, the doors still standing open with debris visible inside. The last time I walked my dogs, one of the dealers outside the bar on the corner said he’d shoot my 10-year-old mastiff if he ever looked at him funny again.

Whenever I call the landlord of the house next to mine, to let him know about the guns, or the constant drug dealing, or the dirty diapers tossed from his property onto mine, he says he is powerless to take action. After all, he left the city to avoid dealing with people like the ones to whom he currently rents — and with Section 8 paying a premium, he’s just one of dozens of slumlords who have poisoned the neighborhood for all the true neighbors who have returned.

Because the Industrial Canal separates the Lower Ninth from the Upper, and because there has been no substation installed on our side of the canal, and because the police are too lazy or uninterested to cross the bridge and drive through and even maybe sometimes get out of their cars, my neighborhood is a prime location for illegal business of any kind. Although we are one of the city’s targeted “Recovery Zones,” the only businesses that have opened are liquor stores. Two blocks from me, a gas station sells booze without even bothering to get the proper permits. Anything goes. Because the city allows it. Because, like the slumlord next to me, they feel no responsibility for anything other than their own sorry ass.

So five years after Katrina, I find myself longing for those early, golden, empty days, when the streets were barren and we could find parking anywhere we went. Back then, I took great offense at the people who voiced their hope that many of the displaced might never return. Now, in spite of my better judgment, I’ve become one of them.

A month after my mugging, while I was still deaf on one side, I saw my attackers again. I was sitting in a coffee shop, a few blocks from where they had left me lying in the street. They were standing at the counter, harassing the woman who was working her shift alone. Two were asking for water, two were edging closer to joining her behind the register. Then they locked their eyes on me, froze for a moment, and began to run. I sent an e-mail to the precinct captain, who in the intervening weeks had assured me she wanted to do all that could be done. I told her that I’d spotted them, let her know their location, the direction they were traveling.

“Now remind me,” came her response, “what was it that they’ve done?”

This is New Orleans five years after the storm — not so different, after all, from what it always was. 

It was a bit of a surprise when this epiphany arrived. Five years ago, when I had my first pacemaker implanted in my chest, I went home in a stupor that led me to Google, which brought me to understand that I was indeed part man, part machine. “I am a cyborg,” I announced to my freshman comp class. They were unimpressed. And as the years passed, I wasn’t that impressed either.

Of course, there’s a certain amount of social anxiety that comes with being part machine. In the new film, Tony masks how sick he is, measuring the growing toxicity of his blood using a pocket-size fingertip monitor similar to my own oximeter, though mine comes in a variety of designer colors and measures the oxygen levels in my blood. Convinced he is dying, Tony has a wild final birthday party, in which he embarrasses himself by getting drunk and then getting into an Iron Man fight with his best friend, Roadie. In the original comic series, things played out in a much more realistic, subtle fashion, with Tony excusing himself from dates with hot chicks in order to recharge himself by plugging into the razor socket of the nearest bathroom. Who among us hasn’t done something similar?

“Iron Man 2″ also introduces a new nemesis: Mickey Rourke as a sort of giant Russian defibrillator that runs around throwing bolts of electricity at our pacemaker hero. I’ve had similar experiences too; last month, outside my local gym, I was shocked back into rhythm with a jolt of electricity so strong that it blew me out of the stretcher restraints I was in. At the hospital afterward, technicians were able to download a record of the “incident” directly from my chest. It seemed there was no need to talk to me at all; they just needed to interface with the machine part of me, and I watched as reports squirted out from their souped-up laptop. Later, much later, I laid awake as they cut the old unit away, and just like Tony, I received a sophisticated upgrade to my chest. (“It’s hard to know where to put them in a skinny person,” I heard one doctor say. It was the first time I’d been called skinny in about 20 years.)

My new implant, the Concerto II (the original Concerto was found to be defective), can deliver an electric shock to my heart if an arrhythmia occurs, but more than that, it can communicate wirelessly with my doctor, can be reprogrammed, and even sound an alarm if necessary. It’s also much larger than the previous one, and can be seen protruding slightly from my left pec. This is particularly noticeable if I’m wearing a T-shirt, and my current crop of students don’t hesitate to interrupt class to point it out. “I can see your pacemaker now,” they call out. But at least it’s not as noticeable as Tony Stark’s, which often glows blue through his form-fitting black T-shirt. Now, that’s the kind of thing only Robert Downey Jr. can pull off.

More recently, in the rebooted Iron Man comics like “Extremis” and “Stark Resilient,” Tony has chosen to continue his mechanical-magnetic enhancements, even though he could have gone on without the repulsor implant after his shrapnel was removed. He’s even allowed this physiology to reorganize itself around the mechanics of his machinery. Marvel editor Alejandro Arbona told me, “a second heart … the augmentation he subjected himself to has made him dependent on it for his continued existence.” In my life, this is called “pacemaker syndrome,” when the augmentation of electronic pulses weakens the heart so that it paradoxically requires more help from the pacemaker than it did in the beginning.

Would I, like Tony, choose to keep the implant after I no longer needed it to survive? Can I use the pacemaker-defibrillator to catapult myself to a bigger, better version of me?

Clearly, I have some work to do. I don’t have a lavish, indestructible concrete palace on the coast. I don’t have a pretty assistant named Pepper Potts. I have yet to save the world, or even my own town, from destruction at the hands of corporate evil. But I know now that as a real-life cyborg, all of these things are within reach.

Ken Foster is the author of a memoir, “The Dogs Who Found Me,” a collection of stories, “The Kind I’m Likely to Get,” and essays, “Dogs I Have Met.”

We are used to displacement here. We still measure things as before or after Katrina, as if there is somehow a possibility of moving back in time and slipping into the still familiar order of life before the storm. Perhaps that is why I regarded the misplaced gulls as simply a fact rather than a tragedy. Or more likely I was distracted by the fact that for one of the gaggle of dogs at the end of the leash, this would be a final walk before going to the vet to be put down.

This was new to me. In spite of volunteering in make-shift shelters after Katrina, and the dozens of pit bulls I rescued since the storm, I always managed to avoid this final part of the story. There were dogs that you knew weren’t going to make it, but this time I would be in the room. I wanted the dog in question to have the best day possible, and I wanted to pretend that I was ready for this, too. I wanted to pretend that I was thinking clearly, and that none of my judgment had been clouded by any of the growing mess around us, the oil spill in the ocean, and my own mysteriously deteriorating heart.

It had been just two weeks since I had returned home after suffering an arrhythmia at the gym, being defibrillated by EMTs, and spending nearly a week trapped in the overflow wing of an incompetent hospital waiting for someone to do the tests that would establish what was wrong and send me home with a new pacemaker, an internal defibrillator and a variety of medications, including Rush Limbaugh’s favorite pain pills. In my mind I plotted the course of the events, trying to establish a timeline: the collapse of my heart function, the explosion off at sea, the daily hemorrhaging of 200,000 gallons of oil into our fragile ecosystem and economy, and the life of a dog.

While I was walking the dogs, another class of New Orleanians were gathered downtown, celebrating the inaugural of Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who we all hope will turn things around simply by virtue of his not being C. Ray Nagin. It was a day of celebration, but the oil spill was on everyone’s mind — what would be lost, what would be required of us.

Later in the day, the vet would come into the room where I cradled the dog in my arms. “Just let me know when you are ready,” he would say, and I would answer, “We’re ready,” not because we were, but because there wasn’t any other option. Are you ready for another evacuation? Are you ready to rebuild the city? Are you ready to volunteer to clean? We always answer yes, not because we are actually ready, but because we have no choice if we want to move on. Perhaps it is this bravado that confuses the more simple-minded people like Rush Limbaugh, who earlier this week suggested pain pills as a solution to the BP mess, or the Los Angeles Times, who recently published a story with the headline, “Gulf oil spill: The Big Easy takes the news with a shrug.” It isn’t lack of caring that makes us act this way; it is caring perhaps too much.

Life in New Orleans has a wide dynamic range, with elaborate celebrations merging imperceptibly with tragedy on a daily basis. Over the past two weekends, people crowded the Fairgrounds for the second weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, loading up on music and particularly on seafood, aware that it might be a long time before we have it again. There’s something a bit off about eating excessive amounts of seafood for fear that the creatures will be killed at sea, but that didn’t stop anyone. I sampled crawfish enchiladas, crawfish bisque, bowls of gumbo, oyster salad and on the way home, picked up three pounds of fresh Louisiana shrimp which I immediately froze to unpack and cook at some future date.

We have, as a region, learned in the last few years how to weather a disaster that has no clearly defined end. You try to remain poker-faced. You try to focus on moving ahead. You try to act certain of what to do, even as the news provides an animation of your entire coastline turning from blue to black. Even as you watch the life drain from a dog that you loved. So I returned to clock into work at NOCCA, the high school for creative arts, and was greeted by a colleague who recognized my cracked expression and asked, “How are you doing?” There was no point in lying any more. “Kind of awful,” I said. “Is it the oil spill?” she asked. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe it is.”

Ken Foster is the author of a memoir, “The Dogs Who Found Me,” a collection of stories, “The Kind I’m Likely to Get,” and essays, “Dogs I Have Met.” 

Those of us who were near a television two years ago as the city flooded, then drained and flooded again, witnessed two horrors: the destruction of our city and the misguided reinterpretation of our home by reporters tasked with deciphering the remains of a civilization that had, at least for the moment, disappeared. Like novice archaeologists, they mispronounced streets and invented neighborhoods with names that had never existed before the storm. The city’s population was divided into a few easily identifiable types: the wealthy protecting their wine cellars, the eccentrics drinking at bars, the poor who couldn’t escape.

Shortly after returning to New Orleans in October 2005, I agreed to meet with a journalist who was a friend of a friend. She had been in town a few days when we sat in a cafe with a map and she attempted to make sense of east and west, north and south, levee locations and storm surges. Finally, I agreed to drive her around. “Was this a white neighborhood or a black neighborhood?” she asked at each corner we crossed. Or, “Was this rich or poor?” After the storm, it was all a mess, but she seemed confused when I insisted that even before the flood the distinctions weren’t so clear. I drove her through my own “Upper Ninth” neighborhood; then, in the Lower Ninth, where the destruction was notoriously bad, she asked, “How far is your house from the breach?” “About a mile,” I said. “I don’t think so,” she insisted, and I wondered what it was she had trouble believing.

“Oprah’s people just called,” a friend tells me. She waits a beat, then this: “They’re looking for a typical housewife.” She’s already been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Anderson Cooper, and just about every other media outlet around.

“What did you tell them?”

“That they had the wrong number.”

This is what it has come to for many of us: Instead of jumping at the opportunity to speak, we’re perfectly willing to take a pass. A day later, it’s Oprah’s people again, at my local cafe, looking for positive stories about New Orleans. The cafe owner, anticipating their arrival, has prepared a list of everyone who is likely to be in the vicinity, annotated with all of their good deeds. She’s ready to pitch our community like a highly paid publicist.

Meanwhile, a producer from one of the networks is on the phone with me, looking for a “typical family” who is mourning the loss of a loved one due to violent crime. I begin spouting off candidates. There is no shortage. The producer interrupts me: “We don’t want it to be a teenager, or gang related, or have anything to do with drugs.” This, of course, eliminates the majority of the homicides in town. Instead, I offer cases that are in the court system and the complications they have met reaching trial. “Well, we aren’t really interested in that,” the producer says. “What we’re looking for is a case that hasn’t gone to trial because of police incompetence.” The list of stipulations whittles the pool down to a handful of victims, exclusively white. When I mention this, the producer gets defensive. I suggest a handful of other tragic cases, but their trails aren’t as cold as she’d like. I feel like a salesman in a boutique, working with a customer who wants to try everything on.

“This is a great opportunity for you tell your story,” they tell us. The term “great opportunity” is their currency, particularly when trying to persuade someone to speak of the dead. An acquaintance recently had the “great opportunity” to speak to the media about the homicide of her husband. “But aren’t you angry with the police?” they asked, unaware that she came from a family that had worked in law enforcement for generations.

Several weeks ago I was lured to a French Quarter hotel to participate in an episode of the BBC’s “World Have Your Say.” It was, as they say, a “great opportunity.” I’d never listened to the show, but it struck me as awfully similar to “Vox Populi” from the brilliant satirical film “Network.” The BBC brought 40 community leaders into the room, and a moderator asked the world, “Should anyone care what happens to New Orleans?” Phone calls and e-mails poured in from Afghanistan, India and all over, and most people seemed to think the answer was no.

Meanwhile, a team of producers ran through the room asking the assembled crowd to explain why people should care. When a caller from Portland suggested that nothing should be rebuilt in a setting as geographically dangerous as New Orleans, I waved my hand in the air, eager to bring up earthquakes and volcanoes, which the Portlander apparently doesn’t regard as a threat.

But they didn’t bring the mic to me. Instead I watched each person who was called to speak slip in a careful reference to a pet project: levee reform, The Road Home, the defense of William Jefferson. The woman next to me leaned over and said, “You just keep getting redder and redder.” I bit my tongue, afraid of what kind of nonsense might spew out.

Of course, New Orleans is a city of storytellers, a place where the line between public and private has always been a bit blurry, even before the exteriors of our houses literally came crashing down. Still, it is easy to see where this constant public performance may get in the way of our ability to heal. A few months ago, when I turned my phone off for an afternoon, a television crew spent several hours shuttling between my two known hangouts — Coffea and Sound Café — desperate for the sound bite necessary for a piece on crime. Finally I relented, on the condition that they allow me to multitask by interviewing me in the midst of a late afternoon walk with one of my dogs. They got their quote and as a bonus, some B-roll footage of the pit bull at my side.

But the truth is, I could have stayed home. I could have not answered the phone. I could refuse to allow visiting photographers their photo of my “Make Levees Not War” T-shirt. I could live my life in the disaster zone without considering how to package my concerns into easily digested concepts, particularly when the situation we find ourselves in is far more complex than anyone outside the zone could possibly understand.

So, why do we keep talking to the cameras — and why do the cameras keep coming back? Because in the absence of leadership, the citizens have become the sole voice of record. We are the Whos in Who-ville, chanting “We Are Here! We Are Here! We Are Here!” as the dusk speck we are living on is lowered over the boiling vat. We hold tight and continue chanting, hoping that eventually someone gets the story right.

“She’s too nice to be a pit bull,” a friend said on the day I found Sula as a stray. One eye was torn open, there was a crack across her nose from being hit with a stick, she was in heat and her heart was infested with worms. I was living in Florida at the time and called all the local animal shelters — none would take her, except to put her to sleep. I brought her home, temporarily I thought, and then we fell in love. I already had a pit bull mix that I had adopted in Manhattan, where the shelter had registered him as a shepherd mix. “We don’t want the city knocking on your door,” they said, worried that the city might come to get my dog if a pit bull ban was passed.

No one came knocking on our door, but six years later, New York City is once again considering breed-specific legislation. The idea of targeting specific breeds — and their owners — is spreading to city councils across the nation. Here is the Bush-era logic: By limiting or banning pit bulls altogether, they will not only reduce what is frequently (but inaccurately) termed a “dog bite epidemic” but also rid the community of the unsavory characters associated with these dogs — as if drug dealers, gang members, and dogfighters will all disappear once the corrupting element, the American Pit Bull, is banned. This concept sounds too idiotic to make it through the courts, yet breed-specific legislation (known as BSL) is coming to a town near you. Among the municipalities that are currently or have recently considered some form of BSL: San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Baton Rouge, La., Baltimore and virtually the entire state of Ohio. In fact, there isn’t a state in the country where BSL is not being considered, even if, as in New York, there is a state law preventing legislation that identifies dangerous dogs strictly by appearance rather than individual temperament.

The terms of the legislation vary from mandatory spay/neuter and higher licensing fees to mandatory euthanasia. And while the primary target is the American Pit Bull, in many cases the list of evil breeds includes Akitas, boxers, chow-chows, Dobermans, mastiffs and German shepherds. In Ontario, after legislators successfully banned the pit bull, word spread (though was later discredited) that the government was also considering a ban on Labrador and Lab mixes, since — due to their popularity — they are responsible for more bites in the province than any other breed. The goal, according to the politicians who endorse BSL, is keeping people safe. They don’t seem to care that the ASPCA disagrees. The American Veterinary Medical Association disagrees. The American Kennel Club disagrees. And the Centers for Disease Control disagrees, although an old CDC study on dog bites is frequently misquoted for the purpose of supporting the idea of targeting specific kinds of dogs.

Two years ago, Denver began enforcing its own ban, which had been on the books for 17 years. Pit bull owners had to give up their dog to be euthanized, or they had to get out of town. At a Border’s cafe just across from Columbine High School, I huddled with several pit bull owners who spoke in whispers and looked over their shoulders, making sure no one could overhear. Over the phone, I spoke with a Denver journalist who told me about a secret society of pit bull owners who had defied the law and kept their dogs in town; she knew about the group because she was one of them. And I met Mike and Toni, who sheltered dogs from the Denver exodus on their property, named Mariah’s Promise. The night we spoke, they checked into a Super 8 Motel with two of their dogs and were awakened by a knock on the door — someone had seen pit bulls enter the room and called the cops. From what I can tell, this is what BSL accomplishes — it makes dog owners fearful, it drives them into hiding, and it does nothing to stop anyone who is truly breaking the law.

One problem with enforcing BSL is that no one is entirely sure of what a “pit bull” is. The American Kennel Club recognizes no such breed, while the United Kennel Club (a separate organization) recognizes the American Pit Bull Terrier. But the generic term “pit bull” is used to refer to any number of variations of the bully breeds: boxers, American bulldogs, mastiffs, etc. And so the laws are written broadly, so that no dog is excluded: The definition generally includes American Staffordshire terriers, American Pit Bull Terriers, pit bull mixes and … any dog that looks like it might be in some way related to a pit. One Mississippi ordinance specifically stipulates that just because a dog might not demonstrate any of the characteristics in its definition of a pit bull, that doesn’t mean it can’t declare it a pit bull.

So demonized are pit bulls that it’s often assumed if a dog committed violence, it must have been a pit. Recently, when a man died on the property of actor Ving Rhames, it was reported he had been mauled by a pit bull that went psycho. Eventually the dogs were identified by the police as “friendly” mastiffs, and the cause of death was declared unrelated to any dog attack — but the story of the pit bull mauling lives on. And last summer, the Chicago Tribune ran a series of articles in which they followed up on a pit bull attack from the previous year. The term “pit bull” was used in the headlines, and throughout the stories, even though the dog was ultimately identified as another kind of mix, a yard-bred dog whose aggression had gone unaddressed by his owner.

I have a T-shirt that says “I Love My Pit Bull” in groovy 1970s-style lettering. Actually, I have three of these shirts, so that I know that there is always one that is clean and ready to wear. People see me wearing it and ask where I got it, or they point and say, “That’s funny!” because they know pit bulls as dogs that are undeserving of anyone’s love. “But I do love my pit bull,” I tell them, and their smile fades. Pit bulls, to them, are ghetto trash, drug dealers’ props, trailer park ornaments, symbols of desperation and anger. “There’s only one kind of person who owns a pit bull,” these people say, and often I imagine that the person they are thinking of is poor and black.

It would be a mistake to assume that pit bulls are a hallmark of poverty. Around the corner from me there’s a house on the market for $750,000, and the real estate listing features the current tenant — a pit bull — proudly sprawled in the middle of the exquisitely appointed rooms. Gorgeous celebrities own pit bulls: Jessica Beal, Adam Brody and Rachael Ray are just a few who can be found walking their beasts in the pages of supermarket tabloids. But there is an economic component to the pit bull’s popularity. When you live in an area so poor that even the police don’t bother responding, you may want to have a little protection, and while any dog is likely to defend its owners from intruders, a pit bull at the door sends the message a bit quicker than the miniature schnauzer. And breeding just two litters of pit bulls in your yard can bring nearly as much cash as working full-time in Wal-Mart for a year. And then there is dogfighting, an illegal sport driven by gambling that has been around for centuries, but only recently seems to have made the news, through the power of Michael Vick’s celebrity.

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It wasn’t always this way. If you look into the history of the American Pit Bull, you’ll find that a century ago, the breed occupied a far more elevated status in American culture. In 1903, a stray pit bull named Bud became a national celebrity when Horatio Jackson plucked him from the side of the road and took him on the first cross-country road trip. During WWI, it was the pit bull, then referred to as the American Bull Terrier, that was placed prominently on a series of American propaganda posters. In one, the pit bull, wearing a U.S. flag around his neck, is surrounded by the Russian wolfhound, the French bulldog, the German dachshund and the English bulldog; the caption reads, “I’m Neutral, but not afraid of any of them.” Later, Buster Brown sold children’s clothing and white bread with the help of his “American Bull Terrier” Tige. The pit bull was also featured in ads for sheet music, perfume, nearly anything offered for sale. Children got dressed in fancy outfits to pose with pit bulls in photographers’ studios. A pit named Petey starred with a group of children in the “Our Gang” comedies.

When did the tide turn? In “The Pit Bull Placebo,” Karen Delise suggests the dog’s image was forever changed after a 1987 Sports Illustrated cover featuring a snarling, nearly unidentifiable dog with the headline “Beware of This Dog.” News stories began slipping the term into headlines as shorthand for dangerous dog, even if it was a different breed involved in that particular crime. “Pit bull” entered the mainstream as an adjective, as in “I hope you’ve gotten yourself a pit bull attorney.” Yet, when two Florida lawyers used a pit bull in an ad a few years ago, they were reprimanded by the Florida Bar for dragging the profession down to the level of these animals.

Self-appointed experts will tell you that fighting is in the blood. And dogfighters use this cliché to support their “sport.” It would be cruel to keep them from fighting, they say. Yet if fighting were purely dictated by genetics, there would be no need to feed dogs gunpowder, insert glass shards beneath their skin, or to engage in any of the other cruel forms of “training” in the underworld of dogfighting. And if it were true that pit bulls, through their bad breeding, are prone to unexpectedly attack, the streets of New York City would be littered with victims of its estimated 300,000 pit bulls. It is easier to believe that the dogs are somehow to blame, rather than their human counterparts. It is easier to point to faults in the DNA.

The dog world is ruled by bloodlines, whether for fighting or for show. The AKC now offers DNA tests that can establish the parenthood of purebred dogs, but they insist that the test cannot determine or identify the breed. No matter, several private companies have stepped up to offer that service. The Mars Wisdom Panel MX Mixed Breed Analysis “identifies more than 130 AKC-recognized breeds that may be present.” While the advertised purpose of the tests is to better understand the health and behavior of your mutt, it isn’t a stretch to imagine that the test might eventually be brought into courts and animal control offices, where your 10 percent bully breed will be stuck on death row with the rest. And, since dogs are often used in trials for procedures that eventually get approval for humans, we may eventually see Orwellian courts being ruled by blood tests that can determine the criminal intent present in the defendant’s DNA.

Does the fact that my pit bull love is forbidden make it that much more intense? Possibly — because I know that I saved her life. And, like all forbidden love, from “Romeo and Juliet” on down the line, each time anyone questions or disapproves of our love, we defiantly love each other even more than before. But I think, like most other pit bull owners I know, that my love of Sula has more to do with this: She makes me laugh; she doesn’t hesitate to turn and run away from bad music on the street; she likes to hug. And she loves to play practical jokes like hiding my glasses when I’m not looking. We even have our own song: Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Like a Star” was, I am certain, written for us.

We are not immune to nepotism. I put Sula on the cover of my last book, because … well, because I could. And I wondered if it might be the wrong thing to do, since the pit bull image is so loaded with dread. But instead of alienating consumers, Sula lured them in. I was taken aback by the number of people who told me, “I bought the book because I have never seen my dog on the cover of a book before.” What they had seen, up to then, was their dog as the image of pure evil, on the news, in movies, on TV.

In Los Angeles, on the first stop of my book tour, two enormous pit bulls joined the crowd at Skylight Books. In Portland, Ore., I arrived at Powell’s early to discover several rows in the front occupied by some nice suburban women all talking about their pit bulls. In Tallahassee, at a reading in a crowded and darkened warehouse, I asked for questions and was greeted by an enthusiastic yip from a pit bull that emerged from the back of the house. Even at a stop in a small public library in Michigan, I arrived to find a pit bull named Rose waiting for me in the stacks. People bring me photographs: their pit bull and their cat, their son’s pit bull, the photo of a pit bull who died years ago but is still missed.

Pit bulls are loyal. They are known to sing, proudly, in ridiculously operatic voices. I know pit bulls who have nursed kittens and another who adopted a piglet as its own. And this I know from photographs of them in New Orleans wading through water up to their necks: When you take away their unmistakable dog bodies, their round skulls and even-set eyes make them look remarkably like infants or old, bald men, or occasionally like the overly pancaked face of Judy Garland in decline. And like infants, old men and Judy Garland, pit bulls are capable of expressing anguish and despair, as well as their euphoric joy at being alive.

In fact, I wonder if these very human characteristics somehow inspire their abuse.