Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  Obviously, the leg would be coming off. It wasn’t a big deal; I knew plenty of “tripods” who had gotten along just fine in life. Kate, however, took a different view; from the way she objected you’d think it was her own leg we were discussing. “Fine,” I said to her. “Let’s make a deal. We’ll schedule the surgery, but if you can rehab him before then and he’s not getting his leg caught in the chair or loops of fabric from the carpet or invisible leg traps that we can’t see but that immobilize him, we’ll call it off.” The deal was just a formality; Kate knew as much about rehabbing a cat’s leg as I knew about cutting it off. Besides, we still had no idea whether there was nerve damage. I set the surgery for a month from that day. And still, Kate doggedly pursued a course of isometrics. She got him on his side and pushed his leg gently up toward the pelvis, let it relax again, pushed, relaxed, pushed, relaxed. She did this for weeks with almost no response from Benny. Unless his getting annoyed enough to bite her counts as a response.

  I delayed the surgery upon Kate’s insistence. She could be very insistent. Then, finally, six weeks later, the order came down from the shelter gods that we had to either amputate the leg so we could move into the next phase of Benny’s foster care, which would involve socialization and readjustment to territory with his new physical challenges (how would being a tripod affect his litter-box habits? how would he handle linoleum?), or bring him back and put him up for adoption.

  Still, though, she wouldn’t stop pushing that leg, letting it relax, push, relax, push, relax. She did it over breakfast, she did it before rehearsal, and nothing was happening. It got to the point where I was starting to feel sorry for her. Until one night, as we were watching TV, something changed.

  “Oh, shit, Jackson! Jackson! Jackson! Look at this!”

  I didn’t look. “Cool.” I was busy being annoyed that her new haircut was blocking my view of the TV.

  “No, look!”

  “I am.”

  “Get over here.” She dragged me off the couch by the sheer force of her stink eye, waited for me to settle, and pushed his leg up toward his pelvis—and he resisted.

  I was shocked out of my stupor. “Holy shit,” I said. “Do that again.” She did. More resistance. “Let me try!” She did. Then he bit me. I definitely had that coming.

  I remembered what Doc Rachel had said about “no reflex response” and “nerve damage.” Good job, buddy, I thought, surprised that I suddenly cared about keeping the leg. Way to show her!

  As the days went by, Benny started offering more resistance, pushing more and more against Kate’s hand. Once I realized that there was a chance the leg might be saved, I joined in the rehab enthusiastically, even though it did involve admitting I was wrong.

  Pushing back on a hand, though, was one thing; actually using the leg was another, and the clock was ticking.

  Benny was scheduled for surgery on Wednesday morning. Literally at the eleventh hour, during his last-chance Tuesday late-night rehab session, it was as if he was suddenly made aware that his leg was going to be cut off. “Excuse me? You actually meant that??!” He leapt up and began running around the house, over shelves, across tables, under beds. “Seriously!! Let’s be rational here! Look… look. Look here, goddammit! It works! I’ll wiggle my toes! Chase bugs! Climb the shelves! Papasan chair, take that! Hey, human, are you freaking watching me? Here—I’ll run up to you, bite your ankle, and escape like I’m made of fog! Cut my leg off? I don’t think so, you… you… fucker—I thought we had an understanding!!”

  This did nothing for the I-fell-asleep-in-a-chair-and-now-I’m-a-what? expression; all it meant was that he was bewildered, but moving faster. It was midnight. I was going to have to call Doc Rachel in the early morning and cancel the appointment again. In fact, now I was going to have to beg for the leg. Not for another extension, but to explain the act of god she had half-jokingly referred to two months earlier. In this moment of watching Benny’s triumph over fate, I felt something shift and realized that, whether he ended up a tripod or not, it was game over once again.

  Benny wasn’t my foster cat anymore. He was my family.

  Kate disagreed violently, and that honestly shocked the hell out of me. Having rehabbed him, she was happy to return him to the shelter to be adopted by the right family. Now I was going to have to bargain with Doc Rachel to keep his leg and with Kate to keep the rest of him. What Kate was willfully ignoring was that I was the right family. When you go to the shelter to adopt a pet, we told our visitors, you have to try not to feel overwhelmed by the numbers, by that feeling of “I just want to take them all home.” You don’t pick an animal; an animal will pick you. So it was with Benny—watching him run around the apartment to keep us from amputating his leg, I realized he’d picked me. The teacher arrived when the student was ready to learn. Through a combination of begging, bargaining, cajoling, pleading, manipulation, and lies—virtually every con I had ever picked up—I managed to convince Kate to let Benny stay. He gradually—very gradually—started to get used to his new home, and it seemed like things were finally settling down for him, at least a little. He’d had so much tumult in his short life; it must have been heaven to be in a place where things stayed the same.

  That didn’t last long; the concept of “same” in my life was a barely contained inside joke. Our lease ran out and we decided that rather than pay the increased rent, we would use our money to record a proper album. Money that we would generate by magically finding a place where the whole band could live and rehearse and where the cops would come over only every other night. In the meantime we had to go—winding up in the welcoming arms of Kate’s boyfriend Jeremy’s house.

  It was a Victorian, and like most houses from that period, big and confining at the same frustrating time—I guess Victorians liked living in places where there wasn’t room enough for them to actually move. Jeremy and Kate slept in the master, Jeremy had another friend staying in another bedroom, Beth, my band’s keyboardist, was in another, and I was in the fourth, which was more like a Victorian closet. In addition to our five cats (Rabbi, Benny, Velouria, Samantha, and Maggie), Jeremy already had a cat, Trapper, his friend had a dog, and there was also a very loud bird that nobody would admit to owning.

  At first there were no problems; the animals, four- and two-legged alike, went about our business as if nothing were amiss. Rabbi was the benevolent corrections officer, making his rounds and keeping peace among the inmates, all of whom—including Benny—respected his rule. By this time Rabbi and his rhinotude had already struck so much fear into Velouria, Samantha, and Maggie that they gave way to him simply because it was the easiest thing to do. Benny, for his part, remained a detached observer.

  But not for long.

  One night the five of us humans settled on Jere’s couch, staring at the TV. Benny was parked underneath the TV stand, staring at us staring at the TV. As Rabbi walked by, he crossed paths with Benny. This kind of path-crossing usually has the same look; if two cats are on the same stretch of track, neither ceding right of way to the other, they’ll sniff one another and glare until somebody blinks or hisses or raises a paw, breaking the tension and ending the game of chicken. Benny showed no out-of-the-ordinary body language at all.

  Then he struck like a snake.

  Where one moment there were two calm cats exchanging information through their gaits, their eyes, their tails, in the next a mass of fur rolls around the floor like a robot vacuum cleaner gone berserk, scratching, screaming louder than a kindergarten class in a haunted house—

  —and then perfectly still for an instant, somehow two cats again—just long enough to think, maybe I can reach over and grab—

  —and then it explodes again, like the plunger pulled on a pinball machine, and an all-devouring ball of feline anger launches toward the front of the house, hits the front door, bounces off and retraces its gruesome tracks toward the back, and then rolling faster and scratching harder and screaming louder, and faster and harder and louder, hitting the ba
ck door, ravaging again toward the front, moving in a manner that was funny and horrifying at the same time down the hallway, and just as I think that this is the longest catfight I have ever seen, there comes another instant where they are two cats again, and in that instant Rabbi does something he’s never done before: he turns tail and runs.

  Defuse the Cat Bomb!

  After living with people for any length of time, cats and other animals will adapt their behavior to mirror that of the humans around them. Issues of aggression often display themselves during energetic spikes: the “waking up and getting ready for work/school” spike, the “coming home and getting ready for dinner” spike, and the “closing up shop and getting ready for bed” spike.

  Knowing your spikes means you can head off potential moments of overstimulation for your cats. If you engage your cats in play ten minutes before a spike, redirecting their energy in an appropriate way, you can defuse the cat bomb.

  I go instantly into fierce, overprotective mother mode. “No, Benny, bad cat, Rabbi, Rabbi, where are you, oh, God, wait, are you under that table, is that blood?? Shit, no, Benny, how could you, oh, God, Rabbi, yes, come to me, come on, come on, you don’t need to hide all the way behind the couch, Kate, get behind the couch, Jere, what are you doing sitting there—help me goddammit! Come on, come on, COME ON, Kate, get out of my way, help me move the couch, okay, Rabbi, here I am, Jere, will you grab Benny? Gently—just put him in the bathroom—turn off the lights. Oh, Rabbi, thank God, it’s all right, I’ll make everything okay, are you hurt, oh, sorry, I don’t mean to squeeze you so hard, Benny, you fuck!, Rabbi, please forgive me, Benny what kind of… you little fucking monster! Oh, God, Rabbi, please be okay.”

  When Rabbi had first shown up at my door (literally, I opened the door and looked down at a four-week-old kitten), not knowing any better, I set him in the living room in the middle of four other cats (rather than giving him a safe “base camp” in which to decompress and learn the scent of the territory). Completely panicked, he scampered up to a windowsill, where he stayed for the next four hours, sitting perfectly erect, taking in the subtle movements of every two-legged and four-legged beast around him. He did this until his tiny little kitten body could take no more, at which point he went to sleep, fell off the windowsill, and face planted on the living room carpet.

  Seven years, two states, and eight homes later, I’d never seen him scared again. He was Big Daddy, close to nineteen pounds and the protector of all things predictable, the champion of stability—which is necessary for cat coexistence, especially in larger communities.

  New Cat Arrival?

  Set up Base Camp!

  Whoever says that when introducing cats to one another you should “just let ’em sort it out” is dead wrong. When introducing cats to cats:

  Set up base camp. New arrivals need to feel secure in their territory. Start them in a space small enough to claim, with their own belongings and equal doses of your own scent and theirs.

  Introduce via positive associations. Mealtime is your perfect opportunity—introduce cats to one another through scent only, by feeding them on opposite sides of a closed door. Work in cat-to-cat eye contact during mealtime at their pace, not yours!

  Practice site swapping. Make it clear that no one cat, or one group, owns the home. Everyone owns everything, just at different times of the day.

  Know when to say when. Use your intuition to know when to try letting everyone out together. Setbacks are inevitable, but chaos is preventable.

  But the stable social structure had come gracelessly tumbling down before my eyes. And my response was the antithesis of what I preach today. Now I’m all about showing my clients (and anyone else who will listen) the value of becoming semidetached observers. Watch what’s happening so that you can report back to me in detail, and I can string the moments together in a way so that cat sense makes human sense. It’s the emotional entanglement that gets human and cat nowhere (and naturally continues the negative dynamic between the animals).

  The timing couldn’t have been worse; we were about to play our first gig at the Fox Theater, the biggest venue in the valley. Three days later, when the gig was over, I took Rabbi to see Doc Rachel. He hadn’t sustained any real injuries during the fight—his nose was scratched and a few tufts of hair were missing, but that’s to be expected when two cats get in a brawl—but he had lost his swagger, his cat mojo. He was navigating the house like a pariah, tiptoeing around the edges. I told her that there just had to be a reason for what amounted to an abdication of the throne. All I could think of was this documentary I’d seen on lion prides in the Serengeti. At some point the alpha cat of the pride grew fat and old, was challenged, and, humiliatingly (from my perspective, at any rate), was run off by a young-buck challenger.

  But Rabbi was only seven. Fat? Yeah. But not old.

  “Well, it looks like Rabbi and Benny understood what was going on a lot better than their humans did,” said Doc Rachel. “Rabbi’s diabetic.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “He… he’s not drinking excessively, he’s not losing weight, his appetite hasn’t changed, Christ, he’s grooming regularly—he doesn’t even have dandruff.”

  “Look,” She handed me the analysis, and of course she was right. “He has the glucose levels of a pot of honey.”

  The situation I couldn’t understand then is clear to me now as I write this: The makeup of the cat society had changed, and Rabbi, with his health problem, was sending out signals that he was no longer the best cat to keep stability in the daily time-sharing rituals. The group had grown larger and more complex, and at the same time his ability to keep it stable and safe had diminished, especially in the face of this incredibly high-stress time of territorial instability and transition. It was amazing to watch what happened over the next few weeks. Rabbi was relieved. His body became more relaxed, he was now content to lie down and observe rather than skulking unhappily on the fringes of the community. Rather than face the stress and pressure of performing a task he wasn’t up to, he was glad to step down and let Benny do the job he could no longer do himself.

  Rabbi, sadly, slid downhill head-spinningly fast. He was resistant to every treatment we tried: sheep insulin, human insulin, you name it. He quickly developed the symptoms I’d told the vet were absent—an insatiable thirst which meant he urinated constantly, peripheral neuropathy (weakness in and eventually lack of control of his rear legs, which made litter-box trips a nightmare), and precipitous weight loss. (Little did I know at the time that I had a choice: instead of insulin, I could have switched him to a grain-free meat diet alone, and it might have saved his life. Once I learned this, years later, I blamed Doc Rachel for a while for not being educated in cat nutrition—but just like I couldn’t play victim to the doctors who prescribed me narcotics for so many years, I have to accept my own responsibility for not educating myself.)

  Rabbi left us about four months later, and Benny, Velouria, and I moved into a new place with Beth, who had just broken up with her girlfriend. My history with her was as long as my tenure in Boulder, and its dynamic had become pretty predictable: we played music and got each other high. We were enablers of the highest order. We invited few people over, and the only place we ever spent time besides rehearsal and work was at our dealer’s house.

  The Catkins Diet

  Cats are carnivores, born to hunt prey and eat it. Not wheat, corn, or even fish. Meat. A high-protein, low-carb diet is what’s best for the long-term health of felines.

  I prefer a raw diet for cats—yes, raw meat, especially since it’s become so easy to prepare, thanks to small companies dedicated to providing animals high-quality meaty alternatives. Being obligate carnivores, cats have a short, straight digestive tract perfectly suited for eating raw meat. Besides, you never see a cat in a field roasting a mouse over a spit, right? That being said, if a raw diet is too much, just stick to the “Catkins Diet” and seek out a high-quality grain-free wet food. How do you know high-quality? T
he same as you know for you; read the ingredients!

  I know there are some out there who say, “Pshaw—I’ve always fed my cats the same kibble and my last cat died at twenty-three.” I’m sure you’ve seen stories of 112-year-old humans who attribute their longevity to a steady diet of absinthe and Cuban cigars. Sure, it happens—but why bank on luck?

  Over the next few years my using went from bad to ridiculous. Whatever remaining shreds of pretense I had held on to disappeared; when I think of that apartment, all I can see is the garden-level quicksand pit where I became exactly what I had always feared. I couldn’t tell people I was “partying” anymore, so I just didn’t tell them anything. I hid in my bedroom, gradually even away from Beth. I was even too ashamed to use in front of my using buddy because she never did anything besides smoke weed and occasionally drink whiskey while she played pool. I was alone in my room, chopping coke, making lines, remaking them, reveling in the perfection of the ritual. Quiet, small movements. I’m not getting high to go anywhere. I’m going through beautiful motions. Under my own spell. The coke snort is, by its nature, loud but carefully disguised by rustling paper just in case Beth can hear. Clean it up with a finger to the small mirror and a freeze rub to the gums. Now I’m jacked enough to start the rest of our program; first we take a handful of Klonopin. We have forty minutes till blastoff. That’s fifteen minutes to polish off what’s left of the wine, go out to the living room to share my weed from one of our many bongs, pipes, etc. Since weed stinks (especially the increasingly fine shit we were buying), I can’t hide that in my room—have to share. Then, after getting high, sneak back into my room to “pee” (a few more lines to stave off passing out)—I come out “nursing” a fine glass of Australian Shiraz (that’s right, I actually thought I was a connoisseur, not an alcoholic). And THEN I pass out. To this day, I don’t know whether Beth understood, the few times she discovered me facedown in the kitchen, that I had ODed. It happened, to my memory (admittedly spotty), three times. It was too dark for her to see that I was facedown in spit and little bits of puked-up wine. She asked “Hey, you OK?” and as I struggled to say “No—I can’t get up, please get me in bed. I can’t crawl. My arms are too jelly. I can’t even get to my knees. I’m too big, I know, but you can just drag me and I’ll get into bed? Just don’t panic and take me to the hospital.” But nothing would come out. And she would go back to bed. Our relationship, begun when she was underage and I was some kind of driven songwriting savant, continued through years of struggle and ridiculous gigs in the middle of Colorado winter, wrecking our van on a freeway and still making it for the set, sharing proper beds (she was such a hardcore lesbian even I didn’t try to seduce her), backseats of cars, running out of gas in the middle of the desert and laughing about it—our relationship had come to this. Lying ridiculously half alive in the kitchen and her leaving me there. This is your friendship; this is your friendship on drugs. Any questions?