And then one day it hit me. What was my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world? Riding shotgun in the Porsche, far and away. Sitting up high, wind pushing my face all out of shape, and sights and smells – rushing by so fast I couldn’t take it all in. Speed, rush, sensation. I knew about getting high, had been high lots of times.
-- Chet (Chapter Two paragraph Page 9, paragraph 4)

Importance: As the novel opens Bernie Little returns home to Chet – his 100-pound mix-breed dog and the novel’s narrator – after staying out drinking later than he intended. While Chet recognizes both the smell of alcohol and how it changes the way Bernie feels and acts, he doesn’t really understand the human need to get high using alcohol or drugs – which he learned about when he was in K-9 police dog school. For Chet, nothing beats the high he gets when he is...