Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  I was two weeks clean when Danielle took me into her office at the shelter and fired me. She was two sentences into explaining the economic reality of the new building and the cutbacks needed to… staffing priorities… donation levels… and my mind was filled with the story about the guy who lives in a state of panic about taking his beloved but absolutely filthy jalopy to the carwash because he has a secret fear that the dirt is what’s holding it together. Maybe the dirt was what had been holding me together. When I got clean, there would be no more dirt, and I would fall apart. Everybody who gets sober knows that there is a period of time where it’s like your legs were cut off and you just have to learn how to walk again.

  My work at the shelter had already gotten me press in the form of newspaper, TV, and radio; all I had to do now was follow the path. The problem was that the path was a crooked and ridiculous one. Very few people in the country without veterinary degrees were making a halfway decent living being cat-behavior consultants. But Danielle told me the shelter would take care of me—in the months to come, their referrals would be my main source of income.

  I walked out of the shelter, blinking against the sun and the shock. I paused with my hand on the handle of my car door. Sighed and bowed my head. Suddenly paranoid that someone was watching me grieve, I switched gears and, with all of the “act as if” confidence I could muster, got in and slammed the door, ready as I’d ever be to set up shop on my own.

  Completely

  With (out)

  It was on the way to my first consult after getting fired that my truck broke down.

  Within a week after I left the shelter, my computer literally melted into the floor, and I was driving from the nicotine-stained, windowless apartment of the agoraphobic genius who had said he would try to repair it (he had gone from saying, “This is a pretty easy fix” over the phone to “This is a serious problem” when I dropped it off). I had just spent something like $1,600 on the truck a week before I was let go from the shelter, and the mechanic warned me before starting, “I can’t promise you this is gonna fix it, and if you hear this kind of ‘ka-ka-BANG!,’ then you know that it didn’t.” I was white-knuckling the drive, sweating through the calculations of how much I was going to spend on the computer versus how much I stood to make on this consult, and, oh yeah, panicking about the consult itself, when the truck made the ka-ka-BANG. The whole car just seized up. As I coasted to the side of the interstate, the cross fade began.

  The truck slows to the point where I can hear individual pieces of gravel crunching under the wheels, my emotional fever accelerating, its rising tempo and volume morbidly familiar from the days when my sanity had slipped from view. The corpse of that 1987 Ford will never be driven again, I realize, so figuring it might as well serve some purpose, I use it as a safe place to lose my shit altogether. The momentum of tears and heaving convulses me over the wheel and I begin to rip apart everything that isn’t nailed down and then, as the fever rises, I’m literally ripping the dashboard to pieces. I pull my legs up and kick the speedometer through the gaps of the steering wheel. I tear the leg of my jeans as they get stuck in the stick shift. Finally, with one exhausted heave, I kick and rip off the metal Bronco logo plate along with the glove compartment door. I want a goddamned souvenir.

  Now, in the quiet of my broken mess, I know: This is what it feels like to be completely without.

  That morning, I had just had no money and no job. That I could deal with. But now that I had no money, no job, no computer, and no car, I was lost, because, money, job, computer, and car aside, what I really didn’t have any more of was life lube—I had nothing to make my existence feel less bone on bone. I was three weeks’ clean. I wasn’t even remotely equipped to deal with the situation I found myself in. When addicts, in the midst of an intervention, start listing all of the important things they had to do in the next two weeks that would make going to rehab impossible, this is what they’re trying to avoid. We know absolutely fuckall about finding faith on the other side of fear, desolation, and the endless bottom. We just see pain and run headlong in the other direction.

  On the side of the road, crying, I called my father. “How did you do it?” I said raggedly. “You came to this country with no English. You built a business from scratch, you supported a new family while your in-laws were sitting on the sidelines, just waiting for you to fail. How did you do it?”

  Silence.

  “There was a certain point in every day,” he finally said, “especially in the beginning, where I knew that every missed sale was a bill unpaid. I lost a sale every day. I got one every day. My English was terrible. And the thing that could pay my rent was in someone else’s hands, the customer that I saw earlier. Could I call them at 9:00 at night while I chewed my fingernails? No. I had to give up. I come from war, fear, no food on the table. I was here, I was all in. I learned to believe that it would get better tomorrow. What choice did I have? What choice do you have?”

  “OK.”

  “Now,” he said, like the grizzled trainer icing his fighter down between rounds of getting his ass kicked and ears chewed off by Mike Tyson, “that’s what you do later tonight, when you have time to lick your wounds. Right now, you have a cat who needs you. Get your ass down there and do what you do!”

  So I did.

  I spent the taxi ride cleaning myself up from the aftermath of my tantrum. My jeans had begun the day with that oh-so-fashionable rip in the knee, and once they had snagged on the gear shift, they became a slit skirt, leaving very little imagination as to the color of my boxers. So much for hiding my freak flag—it was coming out, increasingly sweat-stained, whether invited or not. I sat in the taxi backseat, repeating my new mantra, the serenity prayer: “Higher Power, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” I caught myself hitting the imaginary gas pedal and death gripping the imaginary wheel at 10 and 2. Not used to being a passenger. But as I was to learn in the recovery meeting rooms, whenever given the wheel to the car, addicts will invariably drive it into the wall or off the cliff. Or rip the fucking thing limb from limb.

  When I finally got to the client’s house, I was scared shitless. It had been one thing to go to somebody’s apartment as a shelter employee and work with a cat. If my advice somehow made the cat worse and his guardian ended up bringing him back to the shelter, I knew that I had been going above and beyond in the first place, and would be able to take care of the cat in the shelter, advocate for him, and help behaviorally prep him for a new home. Now that I no longer worked at the shelter, though, I had no guarantee in terms of my “pull.” If I made a mistake, this cat could, most likely would, enter the system and possibly—probably—die.

  Add to that the fact that, where an unsuccessful consult used to mean I shrugged off the ego blow, chalked one up to being a student, and went into work the next day, now an unsuccessful consult would be lethal to a new business in terms of word of mouth. I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent. Or feed Benny and Velouria. Or myself.

  Like I said: scared shitless.

  I was tattered and torn, and somehow some black oily substance had autographed streaks on my clothing and, as I wouldn’t find out till I got home, on my face, too. With a deep breath I realized that my attempt at marshaling my forces was simply a joke that my higher power alone was laughing at, and I said the serenity prayer again, this time with an addendum that I still use and modify every day: “Higher Power, grant me the serenity and selfless clarity to bring peace to Smoky, Donna, and her family.” One more breath, and I rang the bell.

  “His name is Smoky,” Donna began once we had sat down, “but we call him Trouble these days.”

  “I understand,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.” Deep breath. “Now, I usually start by asking the client to tell me what’s been going on,” I lied, praying that she wouldn’t point out she’d already told me everything via e-mail, because I’d left the printout in the beat
-up, broke-down remains of the Bronco.

  “He’s just become so aggressive,” she said, her voice thick with frustration. “He didn’t use to be like this. He just attacks people completely at random now. And he’s so big it gets really frightening.”

  “How big is big?”

  “Eighteen pounds.”

  Of course, I thought. You couldn’t throw me a cat who was peeing on something. Today of all days. Really? This is going to hurt. I just know it. At least I’m dressed for a fight.

  Smoky was apparently, to hear Donna tell the story, very much like Benny—which was the first hint of good news I had heard all day, albeit in a pretty backhanded way. As change was presented to him, Smoky got more and more unpredictable. First as they moved into this house, then as the family continued to grow. There were six-month-old twins in the nursery and two other children, aged three and six. Every time something shifted, Smoky crept away from being the loving cat Donna and her husband had adopted as a kitten and toward being, as she called him, “the spawn of the devil,” at least according to the in-laws, extended family, friends, and neighbors.

  And there was the rub… Smoky never laid a paw on Donna, her husband, or the kids; it was everybody else who lit Smoky’s quick-burning fuse and brought his claws of judgment down on them.

  “He tends to hang out at the top of the stairs,” Donna said when I finally began my tour of the territory. Sure enough, there he was on a landing halfway up the Gone with the Wind staircase, a beautiful but, sure enough, menacing gray cat with green eyes. He was fixed on me and nerve-rackingly still.

  Even though Smoky’s energy literally gave me a chill up my spine, like my own fight or flight instincts were being activated, I was present enough to remember that you have to enter feline territory with quiet confidence. Otherwise they feel it, and it has a fingernail-on-the-chalkboard vibe. I walked up to him on the landing and very gently said, “Hey, Smoky,” in the voice that I had spent a few years perfecting, the one I knew melted cats’ hearts. Again, one of the duties of the cat detective is exploring the totality of your vocal range, and finding, for each individual cat, where in the accepted range their sweet spot lies, where they become receptive. This technique has been especially helpful in cases where I try to establish a line of trust with a feral cat, where hand contact, at least at first, is impossible.

  Smoky just held his gaze and I held my breath a bit. I adjusted my approach. I figured just coming at him from a straight line was a mistake; he might perceive it to be an offensive move, one that left no escape routes. So I stood on the floor off to the side of the banister, and said again, “Hey, Smoky, hey bud…”

  And Smoky flung himself from that landing, which was probably twelve feet in the air, directly onto my head. Donna was right; he was eighteen pounds of solid muscle, and when he hit me it was like getting punched in the face with a fist. A fist with claws. And teeth.

  I stayed surprisingly calm, though, as I was having the ever-loving shit kicked out of me. While the slow motion carnage unfolded, Donna’s voice a dull yet incredibly high-octave scream in the distance, I realized that if I was ever shot at close range, I could stay present (and conscious) enough to apply my own tourniquet. I spun slowly toward the stairs, taking the time to unhook Smoky’s front claws from my skin (one of those eternal cat frustrations is that it’s the most aggressive cats who have the sharpest claws, because nobody has the guts to get near the things to clip them). In the meantime, he entered full-on vampire mode; dealing with his claws had been one thing, but getting his teeth out of my neck was another thing altogether. I scruffed him and crouched down, dipping him like my partner in a perverse tango. I wanted to bring him to a vulnerable position, with his back to the floor, so he would instinctively release his hold on me to see where he was in relation to a potential fall to earth. The fugue state broken, he was “in his skin” again long enough to abandon the fight and run instead. Run right back to that spot at the top of the stairs to resume his job.

  As soon as the tornado of shit-kicking was over and I knelt bleeding on Donna’s marble floor, the pressure eased up. I mean, unless the shoe bomber was hiding in the pantry, I felt safe in assuming that I had just experienced the cherry on top of the most screwed-up few days of my life. I understood Smoky better now than I possibly could have beneath the miasma of career panic and strange aggressive cat dread I had felt minutes before. And he had proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who was boss here.

  “See? That’s what happens,” Donna said while fetching me some damp washcloths. “Nobody is remotely safe in this house!” She was beginning to hyperventilate, looking at the damage he had caused me. I was telling her it was OK, to breathe, but I’m sure that meant little coming from me at that point. It was beyond important that I get cleaned up and stop the blood coming through my clothes. This energy in a room, the beginning of the avalanche triggered by the realization of the guardian’s worst fears about a cat, had become a very familiar one; after a few disasters, I knew now what to do: Get out of it; find a silver lining. Otherwise, Smoky’s fate, along with the other cats like him, was already sealed.

  The thing is, it didn’t bother me that I was oozing blood. I was just relieved not to be thinking about the fact that my life depended on the results of this consult. I was dealing with Smoky, the cat, the troubled individual, and that was something I knew how to do. I was dealing with Donna, her tearful, all-consuming stress. That was something I knew how to do. I didn’t have any questions about my ability. This was just one being relating to other beings, all of us in the same vulnerable space, and it came naturally. I felt, despite what must have been my absolutely hideous beat-up appearance, that I was working in my wheelhouse.

  “Well,” I said—emerging from the bathroom as cleaned up as I could get, tissue all over my neck, head, and chest like I was the victim of the worst manscaping accident ever—“it’s pretty clear that he’s guarding something upstairs.” I smiled, as if to convey to Donna that this happened to me all the time (which it didn’t), and that I was fine (which I wasn’t, not even close). “Let’s go take a look at what’s up there.”

  Be a Cat Detective

  My experiences have taught me really important skills in terms of remedying behavior issues:

  Disengage The first step as a cat guardian who is “at the end of your rope,” is climb back up a bit. Nothing will get solved while you’re spinning out over the problem. Disengage, become a true observer, even if it is your house, your body, or your sleep that is affected. Remember your cat is not doing ANYTHING to spite you.

  Journal! *Nothing* your cat does is random. He is built for routine. Chronicle your activities and his activities. When does he use the litter box? When does he act out? What time do you wake up and come home and how does the energy change in the house? Noting the details is indispensable, especially as you try to work out a behavioral plan of action.

  We started up the stairs. This time, I would not overthink the approach, and I would absolutely ignore Smoky. Just invent something to talk about as we passed him so all he heard was an ease in the cadence of my voice. Of course, I also had Donna lead the way, so as to mitigate any possible territorial stress he was feeling. As we talked about it, it turned out that this final insane behavioral turn hadn’t started until the new babies had come into the house. And as soon as I saw their room, just to the right of the landing, everything made sense quickly. We all know that the nature of cats is a territorial one; Smoky, as more children arrived in the territory, recognized them as über-important components to the safety of the whole; he would assume this “protector” persona, and, sure enough, it worked! Strangers kept their distance from that all-important seat of the territory. With the arrival of twins, the combination of his perceived job coupled with the territorial overload had simply proven too much. He was stressed out, and as a result, he could no longer inhibit his actions.

  We started by letting Smoky know that, in fact, every room was important. That might s
ound counterintuitive now, but I thought that if everything was equal, the castle would be, to a degree, indefensible—and he would have to release his tight grip of control over it and perhaps surrender.

  We took one of the twins’ blankets and rubbed it all over the place. I brought the rocking chair and Donna brought the babies downstairs so she could nurse and tell stories in the middle of the living room instead of doing it in the nursery. They had been feeding Smoky upstairs, too, so we brought his food downstairs, brought his toys down, spread everything out. And finally Smoky could say, “Ahh, that’s right, there’s my food and my water. Oh, I smell the baby right here. Litter boxes with my scent spread throughout. Great, that’s mine, too. All of this is mine, and there’s no Alamo to defend.” By the time we were done, we could see Smoky relaxing in front of our eyes. He was a different cat.

  When I got home, I looked in the mirror and the gift of recovery unfurled, because I could remind myself that I had something after all. I had a bed to get into, a door to lock, a window that looked out over the beautiful Flatirons. I had a remarkable experience that I was sober enough to remember and feel grateful for despite the oozing and throbbing souvenirs. Gratitude was a new feeling; I actually felt grateful that I got to experience and, better, feel the things I did in the two previous days. I moved through pain and didn’t let it turn into suffering. Smoky had given me not just scars that I carried for quite a few years but also invaluable lessons past the swirling, ominous, and ultimately misunderstood energy. He taught me how to approach people like Donna better. This is a lesson none of us can forget. You can be a cat god and it doesn’t mean shit at the end of the day if you don’t have equal sympathy for the humans. Without their buy-in, you’re a cat god surrounded by dead or turned-out cats.