Imagine reaching into a closet for a shirt, or maybe a sheet, and instead making contact with what feels like a dead ferret. It’s furry, but instead of soft and fluffy, it’s hard and grimy, like it hasn’t been cleaned in 18 years. Because it hasn’t. Because it is my husband Ian’s college Halloween costume, the one he has worn nearly every year of his adult life, in four cities and nine different homes. It is Wolf Dawg. And I can’t convince him to get rid of it.
Wolf Dawg is not a reference. There is no Wolf Dawg cinematic universe and there is no Wolf Dawg meme, or at least there wasn’t when my husband bought the costume at a thrift shop near Ohio State, in 2008. It is not a wolf, nor is it a dog. It is a silky, polyester, stop-sign-red shirt with WOLF DAWG emblazoned on the chest, in what I can only describe as a Halloween typeface. But its hallmark is its arms: those coarse, furry brown arms. The whole thing is decrepit now—and, my husband assures me, would surely disintegrate in the wash—but it was already falling apart when he got it, with little pills all over and runs at the collar. Still: It was, he told me, “love at first sight.”
My first reaction to seeing Wolf Dawg was mild repulsion. My husband was almost 30 when we started dating, which now I see as young, but at the time I saw as old enough to know better. Call me a misandrist, but to my mind, there’s something unbecoming about a grown man wearing a cheap novelty Halloween costume, let alone such a bad one. That the costume didn’t give me enough of the ick to leave is a testament, I think, to how much I’d already fallen in love with him. Sweet, innocent, 27-year-old me: I didn’t consider that I’d be sharing precious closet space with Wolf Dawg for the rest of my life.
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The weirdest part about this is that my husband is an obsessive culler and refresher. Of the two of us, I am the hoarder. My mother grew up in China, during an economically depressed era, and even after making plenty of money, she was the kind of parent who couldn’t imagine spending $20 on new towels when the crunchy ones worked just fine. My husband has taught me to recognize abundance when I have it, to spend for joy and not only for need. He buys my favorite overpriced pastries just for the sake of it, and he has lightly shamed me into buying new sneakers when the old ones—although technically wearable—have worn-down treads. I also may be the only woman in America whose husband buys more new clothes than she does.
Wolf Dawg wasn’t intended to be a forever costume. My husband can’t quite recall what drew him to it, but like many 21-year-old men in the early aughts, he was into CollegeHumor and owned a shirt of the company’s that said the right to bear arms and featured an illustration of a man with literal bear arms. Wolf Dawg’s striking resemblance to that man might have been part of the appeal. Yet from the beginning, my husband understood that Wolf Dawg would stand alone. It came with a fuzzy-eared hat, which he tossed immediately. “I didn’t want to wear a dorky hat,” he said. “Wolf Dawg is cool. That hat was lame.”
The first year he wore it, his friends were all a little confused. “The initial assumption was Oh, Wolf Dawg is a werewolf,” his college buddy Brady told me. “But no, Ian would insist it’s just Wolf Dawg.” Nobody understood it, because there was nothing to understand. The second year he wore it, his friends considered it a matter of thrift: Sure, why not get your money’s worth? “But year three rolled around,” Brady said, “and it became clear this would be the only costume he’d ever wear again.”
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My husband had a sincere reason for the annual ritual. Modern adult Halloween, he said, is exhausting: a Sisyphean pursuit of cleverness and terrible pun-based costumes about current events, as if the worst of social-media discourse was forcing itself into regular parties—all faux intellectualism and very little celebration of artistry, craft, or horror. Wolf Dawg was commentary. Wolf Dawg was easy. Wolf Dawg was clean, if not physically then at least socially. “I don’t have to participate, but I can participate,” he said. “I never had to try and win.” When people asked what the costume was, he’d simply respond, “You know: Wolf Dawg,” as if they’d asked him who Spider-Man was.
The costume became legend among his friends. At some point, Brady remembers it changing from Wolf Dawg to Guy Who Is Dressed as Wolf Dawg, which only added to the lore: “This guy is so excited about his half-ass costume that is fully labeled—the name right there on the shirt—and he still has to explain it to everyone.” My husband reveled in being a contrarian and would pursue a joke even if it made only him laugh. “I think he knew some people might be confused and annoyed,” Brady said, “and that was funny to him.”
The truth is, though, that Wolf Dawg persisted for one important reason: girls. The ladies loved Wolf Dawg. They’d come up and ask to pet the arms. Sometimes they wouldn’t even ask. “It was insane,” Brady confirmed. Any party, every party—in off-campus apartments in Columbus, Ohio; in dingy New York City bars; even at a crowded comedy show in Washington, D.C. Wolf Dawg is likely coated in the pungent remnants of dozens (dozens!) of beer-pong games. The girls apparently touched that grubby fur all the same. Most days, my husband struggled to approach women. But for one night a year, here was Wolf Dawg: the ultimate wingman, inviting women to discover his most charming and silly self.
By the time I met my husband, Wolf Dawg’s peak wingman days were over, or maybe I initiated its demise. But in case it’s not already obvious, my husband loves a gag, and Wolf Dawg is his longest-running one. I also don’t actually need him to get rid of it, as much as I would love to avoid the jump scare during spring cleaning. I didn’t even realize that Wolf Dawg had never been washed until I asked him about it for this article, because my husband does most of the laundry. (And the cleaning. And, while we’re at it, probably more of the child care too.) The man I know wouldn’t typically let something so objectively gross remain in our home.
My husband does seem like a different person in the old Wolf Dawg photos. In them, he still has all of his hair, which he’d lost long before we met. He’s drinking, which he stopped doing a few years ago. He’s smirking, a little self-satisfied. That young man felt compelled to make a statement, felt a need to impress in his own way. He believed that traditions were dumb, that the institution of marriage was a farce, that he’d never have kids, that he had nothing to lose and everything to say.
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Now he’s never the first person to announce his opinion. He’s thoughtful. He trusts his own point of view, yet has no interest in persuading everybody around him to conform to his beliefs. He has less to prove. (He also, thankfully, has graduated from some of the most cringey aspects of 2010s Millennial humor.) I have trouble envisioning the version of my husband that the pictures reveal.
Really, I owe Wolf Dawg. Perhaps my husband wouldn’t have gained the confidence he has today had he not slipped into the costume. Perhaps I wouldn’t be married to him if not for all the young women who caressed those fur arms. Ever since we met, he has been transforming, as I have. Every year that he puts on Wolf Dawg, the distance between who he was and who he is grows. In this way, Halloween is exactly the ritual it should be: a commemoration of time’s passage—an honoring of who we were, and who we have yet to become. Deteriorating polyester and all.
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