Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  My work at the shelter was consumed, unsurprisingly, by the same quicksand. When the capital campaign for a new building went into full swing, I would go into strategy meetings first thing in the morning. Fifteen minutes and a quad latte later, I’d excuse myself to go into the bathroom, sit on the toilet, and fall asleep. As outreach director, I was responsible for making the word of the Humane Society good in the public eye and showing people how we were a vital part of the community, and I was good at this—but I was used to doing it in classrooms, at pet stores, not in the paper, over the radio, not on any larger scale. I had become very skilled at improvising my presentations while pharmaceutically quicksanded, but what was called for here was far beyond my capabilities. So, naturally, I was shocked when they replaced me as outreach director.

  It would’ve been really easy for them to fire me. I wasn’t getting the job done. Instead, they recognized my value. I think what I was doing with cats outweighed my incompetence as an administrator. The alternative they gave me was to keep doing my cat work and head up the mobile pet adoption unit (PAU), which was me (a dangerously broke-down Cat Daddy), driving around in a (dangerously broke-down) Winnebago full of animals and one volunteer, three or four times a week.

  This was a welcome change. I was really good at it, and out from the confines of the building, out in the world, not just bringing the concept of animal stewardship to the community, but actually bringing the animals to the people was so breathably simple and direct. Every day I’d make my rounds with my volunteer; we’d pick five or six cats and one dog (and sometimes a rabbit) to go out with us for the day to a supermarket, a street fair, a festival—you name it. I’d always pick the animals that needed the exposure the most, meaning they’d been at the shelter for a long time, showed signs of going a little kennel-crazy, or were “too” something: too old, too fat, too timid, too bold, too black to easily go into a home. The staff would tell me, “Hey, listen, this guy needs to get out of here,” and I’d pick him up and off we’d go.

  “Mommy, mommy, come look at the kitties!” I would hear as I sat at the diner-type booth inside the PAU in the parking lot of a supermarket, highlighting passages in the behavior book I’d read through once already that morning.

  “Okay, Joey, after we have lunch and Mommy has convinced the store to take back the machine they sold her that does everything but what they said it would do…” the answer would come. Twenty minutes later a poor, beleaguered woman with a hyperactive six-year-old would be standing in front of me, and I’d put down the flash cards I’d made while they were in the store, and I’d introduce the kid to the cat in a way that allowed the mother a few moments’ peace. Sometimes, half an hour later, as my volunteer quizzed me, Joey’s mom would have realized that a cat was just what they needed, and as they drove away, I’d know that yet another cat was on its way to a good home. On days when we had fewer visitors, I’d work out a new technique in my head and turn to the cat or the dog (or sometimes the rabbit) and see if what I was thinking held water. I was incredibly lucky to have a job that gave me such an opportunity for learning about behavior. In the end, the PAU found homes for so many cats that we qualified for a grant, to help pay for me to design and have built a brand-new adoption cruiser.

  In the meantime, the live rock scene in Boulder had been dying on the vine. Other friends’ bands that we had played so many shows with were scattering like roaches to Chicago, Austin, Seattle. We should have known when the Fox Theater, the most kickass place in the area to play, started a night called Disco Inferno, with a DJ. It immediately did so well that the ripple effect started spreading to other clubs, and the bands froze as if we had been hit with a collective bat, just like the hair metal bands on the Sunset Strip dove for cover when Nirvana hit big. Pope of the Circus Gods started having trouble, both financial and interpersonal—we fought all the time—and finally, a year or two after I took over the PAU, the band broke up.

  Through all this, however, I was still working hard in the world of cats, where I was affectionately known by this point as “Cat Boy.” I wrote articles for our newsletter and for newsletters of other shelters (“Cat Mojo 101”; “Cat Boy’s Holiday Dos and Don’ts”), I was starting to give workshops to the staff at our shelter and to other shelter workers, volunteers, foster parents, and so on. Then Danielle, our CEO, had what I consider to be a game-changing idea; she started pushing me toward the concept of at-home consults for behavior. She thought it was worth the shelter’s dime (and the possibly empty cage) to send me out when somebody would call and say, “I’m about to bring my cat in to you guys, I can’t take this anymore.”

  “What’s going on?” I would say when I got to the house.

  “My cat won’t stop peeing on my kids’ toys,” the harried mother would say. “They’re all under the age of eight and he’s ten, and I think he resents them. I don’t want to make a choice between my kids and my cat, but I—”

  “Don’t go there yet, OK? Come over here. Let’s look at this litter box.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now look at the toys.”

  “Okay.”

  “See how the toys are forming a fortress around the litter box? Making loud noises and moving on their own? He probably feels surrounded and attacked by chaotic energy.”

  “Really? He’s not saying he hates my kids?”

  “No. He’s saying, I HATE this feeling! I own this space, and it is under attack! Your cat is defending the Alamo. All you need to do is create a different play area for your kids or a different Alamo area for your cat. If he doesn’t have to share, he won’t feel threatened, and it’ll stop.”

  “It can’t be that simple.”

  “It’s not simple or not simple. It’s trying on a different pair of glasses, you know?”

  But it was simple; it was a pretty basic problem, a sympathetic solution and one more cat who didn’t have to come to the shelter. These at-home visits were gold for my new process. It was essential that these guardians understand cat mojo, or how cats see the world.

  This was the outcome of about seventy-five percent of my house calls. The other twenty-five percent of the time, the guardians in question really just wanted permission to surrender. I would fix the leak and they would get the Look on their faces (Benny’s former guardian had had the Look), a panicked expression even they probably hadn’t expected, and suddenly another leak would spring. I would stop the cat from peeing on the wall and suddenly it was, “I think my son is allergic to the cat.” Or, “You know, we were thinking of having a baby anyway and I heard that they aren’t good with babies.” Once it became clear what was going on, I began a form of shelter triage, trying my best to reason with the guardians until I was sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that re-homing was the best (and ultimately only) option.

  The other consults I would do were for cats who had just been adopted from the shelter, to help keep them in the homes they’d just gone to. This sounds elementary, but it was a step instituted by Danielle because it led to a reduction in pet returns. Every four-legged body that didn’t come back to the shelter was an animal that didn’t have that black mark of being returned for litter-box issues or being bad with kids or other pets, a black mark that could lead her to being euthanized for lack of space either at our shelter or another one.

  Millions were raised and a state-of-the-art shelter built, but, selfishly, I found it a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it was new. Spanking, gleaming, spaciously, hygienically new. Solitary caging for cats who didn’t play well with others, group living condos for those who did, better soundproofing, a central meet-and-greet room—wonderful improvements, especially if you’re a cat.

  But there was also a distinct separation between the administrative world and the animal world. Even though the old building had had two stories, offices were strewn throughout both of them, wherever there was space; with all of the positions I’d held over the years, in fact, I never worked upstairs until we moved. In the new building, you could go upstair
s to the administrative side and forget that there were any animals there. It didn’t smell. There’s something to be said about the smell of animal permeating every square inch of the building. You remember where you work. Some days I just wouldn’t remember unless I was out with the adoption unit, or I would just force myself to go downstairs and work with the cats. It just didn’t feel like our building anymore. It’s probably bullshit on my part to romanticize the nights where we would run around with buckets to stop the rain from flooding the old place because the ceiling was full of holes, but those kinds of experiences have the ability to galvanize people. It’s like when you’re young and you passionately love a shabby band that only you and your friends know about—until they sign with a major label, and then you and your buddies all disown them.

  We had been a community. The move made us feel like a corporation. I was mourning the loss and feeling lost myself. I’ve always been a little conflicted when it comes to my life getting big. I wish for big—big success, big acclaim, the biggest stage for big causes and big actions—but when big comes knocking it turns out to be the big, bad wolf, with sharp teeth, the better to eat me with. I was acutely aware that my time at the shelter was drawing to a close. I was also getting hints from the universe and friends (not necessarily in that order) that I could move on and become an independent contractor. The only other cat behaviorist I knew told me one day that she wanted to close up shop and that, any time I was ready, she would gladly refer her current and any future clients to me. I was already making decent money on my own time, doing at-home consults.

  Then I met Jen.

  Stuff That Broke

  and the

  Big Goddammit

  The first time I laid eyes on Jen, I was working in the glass-enclosed showcase in the shelter lobby with a few of my more reticent, hard-to-place cat charges, frustrated because none of the slight adjustments I was making to hiding spots seemed to affect their confidence level. I was actually in the midst of hanging butcher paper on the glass. Maybe if we gave them the privacy they needed, I was thinking, and then gently desensitized… challenged them at their own pace…. Through the stripes of paper and outside world I saw a woman come in the front door, briefly address someone at the front desk, and start making her way toward the adoption area.

  God, she’s beautiful, I thought. No, I corrected myself, she’s hot. It had been over a year since I had broken up with my last crazy girlfriend, and I was spiraling downward quickly enough that I knew I had to enter the social world again before my mojo completely left me. I caught up with her as she was walking out of the adoption area.

  “Can I interest you in taking home one of my friends?” (This is why I don’t do pickup lines.)

  “I’m not ready. My cat died, and I’m just here to be around cat energy.”

  I switched immediately into grief counselor mode. Somehow I feel comfortable letting down my shield when it comes to opening up about the canyons of hurt our animals leave in us when they go. Helping people navigate their way through those canyons has always been a strange sort of honor.

  She had inadvertently started a fire in her apartment complex, she told me, with one of the myriad candles she had burning around her home. As her complex was turning into an orange-and-red beast around her, she found one of her two cats plastered to the wall under her king-size bed; the bed was just way too heavy for her to move, and her cat was out of reach. Finally, to save herself and her other cat, she was forced to run out of the burning building.

  Holy shit, my inner monologue continued. This is tragic, Galaxy—tragic. Turn off the mojo, quick, for the love of God—before she catches you looking in her eyes, at her hair, or down her shirt!

  Self, I thought in response, shut up. She’s gorgeous. AND damaged. Which kind of makes her even hotter. Oh GOD. I just thought that. I need to get back into therapy for real.

  I don’t ask women out. The best I can do when I see one in a restaurant or bar is turn my eyes all smoky and seductive, hoping it is construed as an invitation, or at least piques their imagination. And then I hope that they are so confident and liberated that they will take the “invite” and run with it. And that doesn’t ever happen. When I see other guys try tired lines and not take no for an answer, finally walking away waving a napkin with her phone number on it like they’ve captured the flag, I always look on in disbelief, always wonder if I’m resentful or honest when I shake my head, saying under my breath, “If that’s what game looks like, I’ll sit this one out.”

  Luckily, I’ve been a performer most of my life. Between music and the theater, falling in love with someone has always been a natural occurrence. And as if by magic, the words “Do you want to go get some coffee?” came out of my mouth. I’m sure Jen shared my feelings of equal parts grief, attraction, and shame from acting on that attraction. Finding out today would require speaking to her, and getting that restraining order was hard enough in the first place. I’d just rather not risk it.

  It was in October that we met, so on Halloween, I went over to Jen’s apartment, where the two of us waited and waited and waited for her friend, dressed as if she was actually late to a Renaissance fair party next door, to realize that she was being ignored and leave. The moment that door shut with the two of us alone, I was literally thrown against it. I turned Jen around and grabbed her by the shoulders. This was not going to be a gentle affair. The next few hours were an explosive horn blast that signaled the beginning of an affair that made the eruption of Krakatoa look like a spilled glass of juice.

  I speak from experience when I say, if you don’t listen to that little voice in your head, and you ignore your friends when they say your new girlfriend is “edgy and not in a good way,” you should at the very least listen to your animals. I didn’t. But Benny and Velouria didn’t like Jen at all. An avowed cat person, she would constantly grab them and squeeze. Eventually, whenever she reached for them I automatically winced in that oh-God-the-bomb’s-about-to-go-off kind of way.

  “It’s great how much they love me!” she’d say after Velouria leapt out of her arms as if she’d been electrocuted. “Give mama a kiss,” she’d say as she aimed her menacing head at Benny, and in the moment, I swear to God, I thought he looked like nothing more than Penelope Pussycat squirming wildly to avoid the loathsome embrace of Pepe Le Pew. When he escaped, he stood just off in the distance, looking at me in that way that reminded me again of Ben Weisser, the half-bemused, half-disgusted composer. If my friend could have been with us, wearing a burgundy silk scarf and holding a long cigarette in a distinctively European way, he would have shaken his head and said, “Now this is going to be entertaining.”

  A Piece of

  Noncat-Related Advice

  When the picture your girlfriend conjures up in your head is of a cartoon skunk, reconsider the relationship.

  As Jen and I continued dating, Benny began making his displeasure clearer. His biting, for instance, always started cute. “Aww, he’s just mouthy,” I would say in my crazy cat-lady voice. But cute would escalate very quickly and often draw blood (not cute). He would get overstimulated, his body would simply take over, and then, to deal with his physical frustration, he would bite. This would happen even with people he knew and loved, so imagine how much worse it was with Jen, whom he detested.

  One night Jen came over and Benny totally picked up on the fact that we had just had a huge fight. The first sign I had that the situation was dangerous came when we were sitting on the couch and Benny assumed a post on the couch cushion above our heads, which is, I was learning specifically from him, not a safe thing to let happen with cats who like to dominate space. He was in a classically offensive position, stalking from the other side of the couch with head low and rump high. And Jen looked over to him and they got locked in a momentary stare down. I saw what was coming, but before I could stop it, Jen tried to break the ice. “What’s up, Bubba?” she started to say at the same time as I tried to say “whoa, whoa, WHOA!” but before either o
f us could even finish our respective three words, Benny slapped her across the head three times, knocking her glasses off her face, and then he went for a bite on her head. Whapwhapwhapchomp! All in the span of a second. Jen was deeply hurt—not physically, though I’m sure it was painful (you really feel those tooth bruises to bone for a while)—but more shocked that Benny would see her as a threatening trespasser, that he didn’t love her back. This was a destructive dynamic that I had begun to observe more and more often in my clients and one I went to great pains to point out before their own projections brought their relationship irrevocably tumbling down. This wasn’t about Jen; it was about the tension in the room, pushing Benny to that point of violent frustration.