Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  Within a couple of months I had been promoted to front-desk supervisor. Seriously, go figure. Turnover at that position was pretty damn high, because it was a job built for burnout; working at the shelter was hard in any position, but the front-desk supervisor was the one who got to deal with the people part of the equation—dropping off the animals they’d had for twelve years because “there just wasn’t room anymore,” for instance. Many of us came to the shelter because of our respective levels of human burnout. Getting put at the front desk meant you had more of that diplomatic je ne sais quoi than the others, which was truly a backhanded compliment. The pressure at that desk was palpable. The supervisor at that time, Lonnie, was like the valve on a pressure cooker. He diffused difficult situations expertly and calmed us pretty brilliantly as well. It was obvious, though, that it was beginning to get to him. Going back behind a closed door and kicking holes in the drywall or the copier. Then he started spouting off at me and other coworkers. One day, the pot blew the top clear across the room. He absolutely exploded at something, however inconsequential and camel’s-back-breaking it was, threw papers in the air, and literally walked out. On his way out he took the master cash-register key, hanging like the front-desk crown on a lanyard around his neck and whipped it, I’m sure unconsciously, smacking me in the back of the head with it. Lonnie has left the building. Thank you, and good night. The next day my friend and I, hired in the same week and with less than six months of experience each, became cosupervisors.

  Everyone knows the feeling, or at least I hope they do—I’d hate to be alone on this one—you get to a destination and it’s… not it. The job you wanted, the apartment you wanted, the city you wanted. You wake up one day, and you say, “Boulder. That’s the place. That’s where my creative peaks will be hit and that’s where I’ll be inspired and the people will move me and I will love the mountains….” You don’t even have to see the place. You figure that you will reach personal peaks in the land of peaks. And if you don’t, well, it’s as safe a place as any to have a nervous breakdown. After living in your car for a summer so you can afford the move, after literally and figuratively investing everything, one morning you look up at your snowcapped neighbors in deep but removed admiration and look back at yourself and say, “This. Isn’t. It.”

  Well, this promotion was one of those its that it wasn’t. This was a ton of paperwork, a ton of headaches. I hated being an administrator. We had to turn people down for adoptions. We had to collect large sums of money from people whose animals had gotten lost and subsequently been impounded. I gingerly guided more red-faced, neck-vein-bulging, spit-hitting-me-in-the-glasses people than I can count into a conference room so as to avoid a domino-effect mass tantrum. Sure, we also facilitated adoptions, we made sure the fit was right; we did a lot of positive work. But I felt the pressure cooker churning. I was not in any way a confrontational person, so I began to dread the angry ones, and of course my oversensitive self could spot them the instant they walked in. I did my best to use my verbal aikido skills to take negative energy and throw the offender off guard by letting it pass through me, but I could only do so much.

  “I don’t believe this!” a guy started screaming at me one day when I told him he was going to have to pay us to get his impounded Corgi back. He looked around—the counter was three deep on an especially busy Saturday—like he was trying to get a posse together. The crowd was big enough that I couldn’t speak in my reassuring jazz DJ voice.

  “But, sir—”

  “You’d rather put my dog in the gas chamber than give him back to me!”

  His ticket was fifty dollars, and he was wearing a Rolex that clearly cost more than I would make in the next two months. “I don’t think—”

  “You Nazi fucks!”

  And I blew. I lost it. I pulled a Lonnie. I dove over the desk to grab him by the neck. Luckily, he took one step back and I awkwardly landed on the floor. My coworker guided me into the conference room and I sat there, recalling the day I interviewed with Audrey in that very seat not six months earlier. I had completely crumbled in such a short amount of time, and with my mental state already in such a precarious place, I knew it was time to say that this wasn’t it. I needed to move forward. I had to know what bigger purpose I could serve.

  I started spending a lot of time with Daisy, our Community Outreach Coordinator, who had a gift for educating people without talking down to them. As opposed to the “teaching” demonstrated by the burned-out spay/neuter vet, Daisy was genuinely excited by her job, by her role as animal ambassador. When she spoke to me about taking “boots to the pavement,” it was with a smile and enthusiasm so encompassing that her skin would flush in blotches on her face and chest. She took our message of compassion to the public at a time when the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was one step away in the public eye from terrorists. Daisy brought our ideas about spaying and neutering and anticruelty into classrooms, expanding the message of compassion from a starting point of domestic companions to all animals, sometimes using graphic, undercover PETA videos. We’re talking sixth-graders, tenth-graders; we’re talking children to whom you could bring a new perspective at a very critical time in their lives. Daisy and I spoke often about the concept of stewardship—we are not “owners” of animals in the same way that we are owners of lawnmowers and book bags. We are stewards. We are their guardians. Daisy, more than almost anybody else in those days, shaped the core of my understanding of our job in relation to the animals with whom we share the world.

  Daisy was way too karmically correct to explain why she had decided to leave, but it was a done deal before the gossip machine could even start to spin. Regardless, when she said to me that she was leaving, I immediately wanted to honor her by continuing her job. The problem was that actually coordinating—unsurprisingly, an important part of the job of Community Outreach Coordinator—was a little beyond me, as I had begun to demonstrate with my fragile grasp over the front desk. Per usual, though, that didn’t stop me. I figured my intensity, my beliefs would make up for my distinct inability to organize.

  So, as I had done originally at HSBV in just getting a job there, I acted “as if.” I squeezed into the clothing of Outreach Coordinator at HSBV, and convinced my superiors that it was a perfect fit. In many ways the formfitting suit highlighted my natural gifts. Theater is my home, and I was a natural at anything performance based; that is to say, I talked the shit out of animal welfare, spaying and neutering, our role as guardians, the mission of the Humane Society, from elementary-school rooms to boardrooms and all places in between. My ability to connect with an audience from the stage transferred easily into rooms full of children, corporate suits, the press, or whoever I was with on any given day. I knew what they could digest and tolerate as if it were printed on a page in front of me, and I played to those places and pushed their fences to almost bursting but not quite. I got the message across in ways they had never heard (or felt).

  But my mind doesn’t work in organized ways. My mind works in spurts of ideas. If someone or something is around to catch the spurts, all the better. But more often than not it’s just me, and then the ideas all slip down the drain, which meant that I absolutely sucked at projects that required long-term concentration and planning. I could envision the final appearance of, say, a twenty-minute PowerPoint, but the execution of said presentation was just this side of impossible. If my attention span was challenged in any way, I could find myself in an hour-long quest at Office Warehouse for the perfect-feeling fountain pen by which my project would live or die. All respect to the administration, because they hung in there with me. They brought in a professional organizer, they hired an assistant for me, they gave me all the time in the world to accomplish goals, and they didn’t tighten the screws until they felt like I had left them no choice.

  But even as I did (some of) the job of Community Outreach Director, it was when working with the cats that I felt most at home. And then I crossed a threshold.

 
On that June night at about 2:00 a.m., I was where I would always be with a deadline looming; cold sweating my coffee at the shelter face-to-face with the familiar and sad realization that if I wanted to keep this position, I had to do my work when distraction was at a minimum. The eastern part of Colorado had been dry as a bone for what seemed like forever, and now we were getting some serious weather. The rain pounding the roof frightened me, because the shelter was actually right in the middle of a flood plain, and if the rain got too heavy on ground that was as thirsty as it was that night, we would be in some major shit. Inspiration for this presentation had run aground and I was subsisting on pure will at this point, knowing that every passing minute meant another half hour of lost sleep and that much more “up” drugs I’d have to do in the morning just in order to get to this place tomorrow. And to top it all off, there was the noise. The echo in our building was this side of torture—on a night like this, with the rain and thunder crashing, all you had to do was walk ten paces in any direction to catch the desperate pleas of the different holding areas; if I had to pee then I’d catch the dog impound area; to the soda machine, dog adoptions; the copy machine, cat adoptions; and just sitting at my desk, staring at the growing water stains in the corner of the ceiling, feeling the creeping clamminess of too much coffee (and other stimulants) and too little sleep, the cherry on top was cat impounds.

  They. Were. Screaming.

  In my highly agitated state I understood why new parents need to count to ten so they don’t shake their babies. I knew we had a few new moms and litters. We had taken a transfer of cats from another shelter helplessly bursting at the seams in the aftermath of kitten season, plus our normal load of strays and “owner surrenders.” They were all screaming; the noise from the rain and the barometric shifts had riled them up, and the worse the weather got, the worse the cats got, because they had to voice their anxiety somehow. I could feel my blood pressure surging to the point where my ears were ringing more than normal. (I had long ago developed severe tinnitus from my earplug-defiant performing.) I remember my head hitting the desk in final exasperation. When I raised it back up, it was with a plan.

  Anitra Frazier, from my hometown of New York, was one of my first “remote mentors.” In my new cat endeavor I was pretty shy and lacked the self-esteem necessary to make the phone calls to the precious few others established in my field, so I read their books instead, voraciously, having imaginary conversations with those who shared my thinking. Anitra seemed to me to be the Mary Poppins of holistic cat thinking. She went from consult to consult on a bicycle through the streets of my childhood neighborhood. She worked with multiple modalities and wasn’t afraid to fuse behavioral know-how with the unshakable confidence that her empathic instincts were right.

  One of the concepts Anitra brought to light was the “Cat I Love You.” She walked down Manhattan streets, she wrote in The Natural Cat, going from brownstone to brownstone. She’d reveal her face to the cats lounging in the midday picture windows and, to introduce herself in a nonthreatening way, greet them with a slow blink while thinking the words “I love you.”

  When I first read about this trick, I had immediately tried it on Velouria, one of five cats living with me at the time. And it worked—just like Anitra had predicted, Velouria returned the blink and visibly relaxed.

  The importance of the Cat I Love You, and the variations on the move that I was messing with, cannot be overstated. This is our “in” as humans into the communicative world of cats. They reach out with many of their vocalizations, which were obviously designed for humans. Cats do not meow at one another, by and large; they use it for us, to get something from us. So when you think about it, we owe them an attempt to listen, even when it means hopping to their side of the communicative fence.

  As a cat behavior newbie, I thought that the Cat I Love You could very well be the feline Rosetta Stone. Almost hysterically tired and stressed out as I was, my idea was to put everything else aside—sleep might not happen tonight but for a few sweaty spurts with my head on my desk, and the presentation might not get done—but unless I got the cats to quiet down, it was all going to hell anyway, so I might as well experiment a bit.

  I step toward cat impounds; moments later, a huge thunderclap scares me into the room. And as if they aren’t already screaming, every cat in the room steps it up to 10 in response to the thunder/human presence one-two punch. I turn the light on—a mistake, I realize a moment after I do it, because there are no windows nearby and the cats think it is morning and time to get fed. So they turn it up to 11.

  I count forty-five cats. The room is a small square, maybe 14′ × 14′, but the banks of stainless steel cages around the perimeter make it seem even more intimate. I decide I don’t want to wind up painting myself into a corner; in case I happen to calm a cat down, I don’t want to chance walking past her cage again and reenergizing her. So I start at the bank of cages closest to dog impounds. Which, you know, is great. The dogs can smell me through the rickety swinging door and they start the cascade of manic verbal dominoes. This is going to be like navigating a room full of armed mousetraps. I’ll start high right, go left, then a row down and right. This is, by far, the biggest challenge my fragile focal span had to face. Ever. How do you pay attention to one tree when the whole forest is screaming?

  Nevertheless, I take a deep breath. I step forward. I come face-to-face with a shorthaired tuxedo-patterned cat. Eyes opened but lazy: “I”—slowly closed, “Love”—and open again, “You.”

  Nothing.

  THE CAT I LOVE YOU

  Anitra’s Cat I Love You isn’t just for cat behaviorists. Try it yourself. First, look at your cat. Soften your gaze, remove all challenge to his perception. This is important: understand the difference between staring and soft eyes. Then match an eye blink to the silent phrase “I love you” like this:

  Eyes open— “I”

  Eyes fall slowly closed— “love”

  Eyes open again slowly— “you.”

  If you’re truly relaxed and your intention is focused and genuine, your cat will respond, first by blinking—and then by relaxing, dropping his guard just a tiny bit.

  “I.”

  “Love.”

  “You.”

  Screaming.

  Deep, cleansing breath. Frustration out. Healing intent flowing through me.

  “I.”

  “Love.”

  “You.”

  I want to soothe you, goddammit, can’t you feel that?—I will heal you whether you like it or not!

  Wait, Wait, no, that doesn’t work.

  “I.”

  “Love.”

  “You.”

  Pause. Breathe. Do it again, Jackson. Believe your words.

  And then I realized: He may be a cat but he’s an audience. Convince your audience of your desire for them….

  “I.”

  “Love.”

  “You.”

  There. There it is. Not a blink back but a pause in his terror, a relaxation in his eyes. His pupils suddenly not so dilated….

  “I.”

  “Love.”

  “You.”

  (And the newly added cleansing breath.)

  Finally, as if I’ve not necessarily made a friend but worn down my friend’s enemy, he slowly returns the blink. No more does he look for an escape route. His fight/flight mechanism alarm bells are finally reset by the promise of security that my eyes have brought.

  “I.”

  “Love.”

  “You.”

  Easier now. We are officially cool. I desperately want to reach out and complete the new understanding with touch, but my instincts as a teacher inexplicably emerge to outweigh my simplistic emotions. I have a job to do; one down, forty-four to go.

  I’m hooked in, and the feeling reminds me of that seemingly long-ago morning in a ripped-up panel van delivering baguettes in the middle of Colorado February, sunk into my source and writing a song that my forefathers would be proud of. T
ime slows and choices are all right. If they aren’t they can be discarded with ease and lack of personal attachment. They are fruit from an everbearing tree. The difference is that here I’m not dealing with melody, tempo, story, and the almighty chorus; here I’m dealing with an unfolding language, where I have uncovered a few precious words in common. The rain isn’t letting up, and I have to let everyone know that if they allow themselves to trust me, I won’t leave them and it’ll be OK. Have faith in me; see my relaxation in the face of potential danger and mirror it back to me.

  The night slid along like an acid trip, sometimes peaceful and sometimes harrowing but all part of the same singular thought. My job was to smooth out the room and demonstrate peace through “I” “Love” “You.” I remember at one point stripping down to my underwear because I was tied to these clothes now for the next working day, and I didn’t want them to be as wet as I was making them. I also liked the freedom of being alone with cats, finally completely unselfconscious. I spoke in different silent tones from one cat to the next, from old to kitten, from solo to mom. I was present with each individual. As soon as I began to take my burgeoning process for granted, the next cat would bitch slap me into submission again. With renewed humility, I’d move on to the next.

  How long was it? All I know is that when the room was “suddenly” silent, I slid down the wall, completely spent. Reveling in the quiet, I noticed the sun coming up outside my office window. It had been hours. There was a moment where I felt some of the forty-five cats sitting in their glorious silence, as confused by the outpouring of mutual support and newfound lingual skills as I was.

  I found the energy and the focus to finish the presentation even as the crew poured into the shelter a few hours later to begin feeding and cleaning. There was motion all around me, but I found the slowness that one also finds in meditation. And when dealing with cats in general, or cats one by one, that slow reality is absolutely invaluable. Cats can fall into a zone while watching birds—fully immersed and engaged in the “activity” but conserving energy until they seem, for all intents and purposes, completely still. That night I met them at frantic and helped guide them back into their most natural state of confidence and stillness. The gift for me was the inner-body knowledge of what a confident cat looks like. Even in a cage, even without possessing a grain of territory, without a family or any place to go besides a 2′ × 2′ cage, cats can still exude confidence. Getting the cats to that point not only helped me in a very selfish way, I believe it provided them with another important thing—feline confidence, what I refer to today as “cat mojo,” that one little oomph that a lot of these guys needed to navigate life at a shelter somehow intact, that helped them present in such a way that they simply went to new homes faster.