Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  When I landed with a thud in Boulder in 1992, I was barely holding it together; it only took another six months for me to lose my shit entirely. I was self-medicating heartily while working as many dead-end jobs as I could find to earn enough money for rent, dope, food (human and cat), and guitar strings. I was an idiot savant with a posse, letting others do my thinking and then blaming them for not doing it with my best interests foremost in their minds. In retrospect I see that I was surrounding myself with lightning rods, both human and chemical, rendering myself vulnerable to the inevitable ground strikes that eventually reduced me to a mass of exposed nerves, rocking incoherently under my covers and fully dressed, trying desperately every day to just get to work.

  I was seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist, one to listen to me and the other to write prescriptions. I begged both to hospitalize me, just briefly, long enough to get my bearings. Instead, the psychiatrist led me down what was to become a ten-year rabbit hole of psych meds. Of course, like a good addict, I blamed her for all of it, the loss of everything I held dear. Never mind that the rabbit hole cost me everything, every human relationship, my band, my creativity—on the way down to the bottom, I was introduced to my best frenemy, Klonopin.

  The miracle was that, though all of my artistic endeavors seemed to be lacking true humility—really, how does a rock and roll songwriter claim humility in the first place?—over the next several years, as my songwriting muse left me, she resurfaced in animal form.

  When I read in the want ads that HSBV was hiring again, I was immediately nervous—butterflies in the stomach nervous—and simultaneously sad. The universe was rubbing my face in poo all over again. This provided all of the gross, unwanted emotion I needed to push my bender to all-time super-deluxe status. It was a scorching hot summer day, which, when coupled with whatever I had taken/drunk that day, made my sweat cold in the heat. I was standing almost buck naked on my balcony, playing my songs as loudly as I possibly could. I had three roommates with me, singing along. Across from us were the homecoming king and queen, tanning on their balcony. They were obviously not happy with the fact that I was drowning out the Phish soundboard jam they were tanning to.

  “Really?” Barbie said. “Would you please?”

  No answer, just that embarrassing-in-retrospect Chris Cornell/Robert Plant head nod, lost in dreadlocks.

  “You’re not even GOOD!” she shouted at me. She reminded me of the gig I had played to an empty house weeks before, save one table of girls who looked like her, absolutely tanked, interrupting me midsong so I would sing “Happy Birthday” to one of them. Remembering this made me sing and play even louder. I broke a string. I was completely out of tune and, I think, loving it.

  “Jesus Christ,” Barbie went on, incensed, “do you have to be such an asshole?”

  I flipped her off. My roommates laughed extra hard and loud.

  Then her life-size Ken doll stood up. I swear he turned his six-pack into twelve just getting out of his hammock. Using the breath from every pack compartment, he measured his words through his teeth: “Look, dude. I. WILL. CALL. THE COPS. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?”

  And I snapped.

  “This is what YOU want. You WANT. TO. Shut the fuck up or else I’m absolutely going to burn your house down and when you run out from the smoke I’ll punch you both in the face and make you cry!”

  I remember getting hoarse. My roommates were definitely not the kind to try to quiet down a confrontation, especially when loaded and in the middle of a Sunday when we actually had some energy. I screamed at Mike to get me scissors. Like a fool, he did. I swear I did this unconsciously in the moment, just to get a reaction and irreparably nauseate the doll twins, but looking back it was that moment of clarity…. I grabbed the scissors and cut off a dreadlock. I held it to my nose, feigned taking a deep inhale, and held it away in disgust like it was a sock worn three days straight in August.

  And then I hurled it at them, hitting Ken right in the abs.

  He screamed like a thirteen-year-old girl with Bieber Fever, and it was game on. I kept cutting, screaming obscenities, and hurling hair grenades. The perfect couple came gradually unglued, and every time it looked like they were going to score a point I’d hit them squarely with a big, braided, chunked-up, dyed orange or purple piece of hair that hadn’t been washed for months if not years. They’d get grossed out and back away. Mike stood behind me and cut the rest off, like we were stockpiling snowballs for the big assault on our ice fort, and we all took a few and pummeled Barbie and Ken mercilessly.

  Finally, it was over. I took a bow, left the stage… errr… balcony, went in, and shaved my head, which felt really amazing. Dreads tug at your scalp, and they have heft, especially with trade beads and coins and such in them (not to mention the occasional embedded twig). As I emerged, I felt different, lighter; still me, but somehow less of a human zigzag.

  Again, retrospect is a genius part of the human-experience multitool—wear it on your belt with pride! I got to conform in the most rock and roll way possible. I was now buzz cut, yet I had done it with my freak flag flying proudly. “They” didn’t make me cut my hair; it was just a radical part of making a completely forgettable drunken point.

  I couldn’t wait to go back to the shelter. “I was in the neighborhood” was, I believe, the unbelievable line of shit I fed Audrey when she looked at me, with a not-contained smile plastered on her mouth.

  And this time, goddammit, that job was mine.

  The Rapids,

  the Monster

  and the 45 Kisses

  I’m not at my best when the pressure is on and I’m in a new situation; it’s the stuff actors’ nightmares are made of. My first day at a new school in seventh grade was the first time I had encountered concepts like class schedules, periods, lockers, and, of course, combination locks, and the overload I felt was freaking me out. I was flop sweating my way through that day, and having spent eight minutes getting my locker combination wrong, I was busting ass to get books out for math class along with pencils, compass, protractor, and WHAM, I stabbed myself in the hand with a pencil, breaking the tip off. I wound up, after bleeding a puddle in front of my locker, at the school nurse, who told me I had nothing to fear, but said I had probably just given myself my first tattoo. I liked that she assumed there would be more. And she was right—I still have proof of my shaky embrace of things new and unfamiliar in the palm of my right hand.

  My first day at HSBV was only marginally more successful. I was more hungover than usual—nervous about my new job (remember, I had lied my way in; I had zero experience as a shelter volunteer), I had made sure to take an extra helping of my cough syrup, weed, and red wine combination the night before just so I could sleep. Even though I had been given training materials and a step-by-step manual of how to get through the morning duties, the moment I walked through the door my seventh-grade panic button went off. On the positive side, I was kept so incredibly busy from that moment until 5:00 that my mistakes became a blurry comedy of errors.

  Lesson learned. When you’ve passed out on the floor five hours previous and now you enter the lion’s den, hundreds of animals yelling for food, banging through your skull like cartoon frying pans, it just gives you a gentle hint that you might want to modify your nightly rituals, or at least adjust the drugs of choice. And this all hits before the rest of your being is taken by the smell; dog areas, cat areas, and the barnyard are all very specific street corners in hell, scent-wise.

  My first exposure was in dog adoptions. Allison was the lead, the person in charge of putting me through my paces. And Allison could be on the short-tempered side, which I found out within minutes. I was already sweating. The room was large and acoustically unforgiving, with tiled walls and only small windows near the top of one far wall. A low wall made of cinder blocks divided the two long blocks of dog runs so that our residents wouldn’t get into stare downs with a dog across from them. My recollection is that there were twelve long dog runs on either side of
the half wall. These runs had metal dividers in the middle, which were used, when the shelter wasn’t full, to guide dogs into one end so you could feed and clean on the other end. When the place was full, the divider also functioned as a wall, making two adoption runs.

  On my first day, working in galoshes, shorts, and my green HSBV scrub top in the visible humidity and the equally visible stink and sound, I felt like I would crumble twelve times before lunch. It was as if the animals knew I was the new sucker on the block. Not only did I lose a few dogs out of their runs, tripping over my galoshes imagining a dog riot while they went parading to their neighbors and enjoying their infamy like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, I also couldn’t handle the multicolored nylon slip leads that experienced animal welfare associates used like tender lassos and wore over their shoulder and under the opposite arm, giving themselves the appearance and bravado of fourth-world generalissimos. The veterans of the trenches I immediately identified and gravitated toward, like Suzanne, Dustin, Kim, and even my feared trainer Allison, had a confidence in their movements, playing those slip leads like violins, relocating dangerous dogs with catch poles, “gloving” feral cats—these were talents I envied while everything from four-leggeds to stainless steel bowls continued to slide through my fingers.

  “Jesus,” snapped Allison after I put my nylon slip lead on wrong for the third time, “it’s like you’ve never done this before.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Seriously. Whatever. Just get it right.”

  The rest of the day, blessedly, was a blur.

  The first six months on that job were a complete whirlwind, physically, emotionally, psychologically.

  Animal Welfare Associates trained in the back first, working directly with the animals. We cleaned cages in the morning, fed the animals, got the adoption area ready for opening. Fast. Socializing with the animals, showing them some love, was limited to the time spent as you relocated from cage to cage, left a dish, picked up a dish. We had less than three hours between our drag-ass arrival and the opening of the adoption area, by which point every animal had to be cleaned and fed and the place made spotless. Spare moments were not to be had. Cigarettes were inhaled while running food out back to the pigs and roosters. Soon I started doing front-of-house work: taking in surrendered and stray animals, supervising visitations with guardians whose animals were being held by the courts for a variety of reasons, adoption counseling, matching people up with the right animals, and the very best part of the job—adopting our residents to new homes, getting them the hell out of that building.

  At the end of the day, there was a circle of us who would convene at a coworker’s home and do what we could to fix the damage the hours at the shelter had wrought. We had spent the day full of adrenaline, burning holes in our skin-colored thatched roofs. And now we had to chemically repair those holes, and try to glue our feet back to the earth. We would go to Lonnie’s place—he was the front supervisor—and get copiously stoned, after which I would take a shower, because not long after getting the job I had moved into a warehouse with no running water, and then off to band rehearsal.

  It really was an exhilarating time. I was no longer going to work just to take home a check—I was going to work to clean, to comfort, to keep spirits up, to find new homes, to help facilitate the human/animal bond, to learn about every animal that came under my roof, to protect, and to love.

  But it wasn’t just about learning to execute the job; it was about learning to execute it with compassion while also being comfortable—or at least OK—dealing with life and death on a daily basis. I cleaned and loaded the crematory, I believe, on my first day. I knew the smell of dead wildlife in my first hour. It was, after all, summer. Roadkill got ripe in a hurry.

  Shelter work will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about trench warfare, keeping your focus on the immediate because any further downfield will drive you to distraction. Very soon after starting, you begin training to perform euthanasia. You’re handling death right away because no shelter wants to invest time and energy in somebody who is going to burn out, so you might as well find out if the newbies are going to fall away quickly. It’s so easy to dismiss shelter workers as automatons, heartless. Hard as it is to swallow, I’ve never met anyone as passionate, as unflaggingly “there” for the animals as the ones who show up day after day to care for and, too often, kill them.

  The vet at the spay/neuter clinic where I cross-trained in my first few weeks was completely burned out, and she really shouldn’t have been practicing at a high-volume spay/neuter clinic. I mean, I was a rookie, but you had to be blind to miss her simmering resentment. I was helping with a term spay (essentially an eleventh-hour abortion) of a lab mix. There were something like six or seven puppies inside this dog; the vet was pulling out the puppies in their embryonic sacs and I would then inject the embryos with sodium pentobarbital, what we called blue juice. The embryos would turn blue and then—this was fifteen years ago and I still remember what it looked like, I still remember the sound the puppies made when they hit the stainless steel bowl. I really wanted to prove I could handle this kind of truth, didn’t want to seem naive and ask a question like, “Why kill puppies that would fly out the door as soon as they were old enough?”

  The vet started giving me a cold speech as I injected the unborn pups, one she’d obviously given 1,001 times before: “What’s your name again?”

  “Jackson.” The sound of embryo on steel.

  “OK. Jackson—” The contempt began to drip from the corners of her mouth; she said my name as if it were the name of the deranged uncle who smacked her around when she was a girl.

  “Jackson, this is what happens when people don’t spay their animals.” A dead puppy embryo hit the large bowl again. She used it as punctuation. And although I was mortified, as she went on my vague trembling began to take another shape—from nauseous fear to nascent rage. Trying to pull some Scared Straight shit with me. “I don’t run a puppy mill, bitch,” I thought to myself. “I’m one of the good guys.”

  I suddenly remembered the phrase that Lonnie had introduced to me as I took a hit from his two-foot ceramic bong just the night before: compassion fatigue. As far as I was concerned, this vet was the compassion fatigue poster child. I knew that no matter how long I worked with animals from that point on, she would occupy that picture in the pages of my inner dictionary. Lonnie told me that it was really common among shelter workers and, in his experience, would just sneak up on someone and bury them. Once you’re just cleaning shit, processing paperwork, using embryonic puppies as punctuation marks—it’s over for you. You care so deeply about the animals you serve, and you feel such empathy for them, and they never stop coming. There are always more. And eventually you can get to the point where you’re all cared up, and you look for somebody, anybody to blame all of this suffering on. It creeps up on you, day by day, and you never even notice it.

  I was obviously in no danger of burning out at that moment. I was on a semihysterical slide down the rapids, careening through a new life as an animal advocate as if it were actually mine. Of course there was a hidden branch, waiting to hang me from my belt loops—my enthusiasm, and the little lies that I inhabited like the world’s best actor/salesman, were about to catch up to me in a big way. Euthanasia was something I had absolutely no experience with, and it was speeding at my head like a major league fastball.

  When I saw my name on the daily E/C (Euthanasia/Cremation) schedule, I was nervous as hell. As much as I was electrified by assuming the role of guardian, caring for a whole lot of somethings outside of my selfish existence, there was a lurking worry. In every corner of this building, death was standing and waiting, waiting for us to stop fighting and give in to the inevitable. I was face-to-face with my extreme naiveté. I was actually going to have to do it. I swore I would be an equal part of this tight-knit team, and euthanasia was what made us all equal. We were equal in the cold, damp eyes of the last house on the block, the heavy metal
door that at some point had actually opened into the crematory but that, by the time I set foot in there, had been painted over scores of times. Now we had to sneak the animals we’d killed out the back door of the shelter, making sure no visitors joined us in the hallway, to put them in the crematory.

  The first animal I assisted with was a dog—a bully breed, of course, a Pit-Lab mix; back then, as now, Pit Bulls and Pit mixes represented a disproportionate number of dog breeds killed in shelters. This one was scared and led to the room on a catch pole because he was found stray and unpredictable. In order to keep my shit even remotely together, I paid attention to tasks. Remember the combination to the safe. Take out the sedative. Remember the amount to give to a dog of his weight to “take the edge off.” Wait for the edge to come off. We used a combination of ketamine and Rompun. One of the unnerving side effects of this cocktail was a disassociative state, a rhythmic hallucination that made the animals look side to side as if watching a tennis match. Talk to the dog. Be his advocate in these, his most treacherous moments. Keep your shit together. Fucking breathe, Jackson, rhythmic, even, slow, because even with the sedation he knows whether you’re freaking, and if you are, he will, too. Draw up the blue juice. How much will it take? We weren’t that far past the days when animals were killed en masse in decompression chambers or gas chambers; we were making up the rules in terms of comforting (did we do this in the dark or with the lights on? Alone or with people?). Learn restraint—gently bringing the head to the side, teeth away from the lead animal welfare associate who was injecting. Remember how to find a vein, roll it to the top of the leg. If not there, a back vein. In the course of my years there, I learned how to inject meds pretty much everywhere: IP (intraperitoneal cavity), IM (intramuscular), even heart sticks, when an animal was all but dead but a heartbeat was still present. I learned the angle of injection needed so as not to blow a vein. (This was the ultimate nightmare, especially when assisting with owner-present euthanasias. You do NOT want to have to find another vein in an elderly animal, causing him even more discomfort, while his guardian stands in front of you awash in sorrow.) What you wanted was peace for this animal. Yes, the concept seems absolutely sideways, but you do what you have to do in those moments. The Pit mix has his head and neck in my arms. Audrey injects. I feel him sigh and leave. Put him gently on the towel that’s already below him. Spend a minute or so in silence, a habit I fell into from that moment on. Not really mourning for me, more like respect, giving him the time to settle into his new reality. It helped and helps me to see this life and death as transitional. I’ve felt the energy of this life leave so many times now that I really can’t count. I’ve never once, though, taken it for granted, with my animals or the animals of others. That being said, I’m no monk; death sucks. Losing beautiful animals because of preventable reasons is a horrible and continuous ache, plain and simple. And my choice, slowly, became to not accept it. The job had to get done, and I would do it, but I would also do everything in my power to change the necessity at its source: I would commit to spreading a strong message about spaying and neutering, and I would work on shelter-based behaviors that I could channel. I could help keep these guys from slipping away in energy and spirit, which was, in most cases, what had led them onto the daily E/C list and into this, the last cold, damp room inside the last house on the block.