Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  Hurricane Benny, meanwhile, continued to rage, with his litter box problems, his bullying problems, all his other problems. The odd and yet great part of all this was that I started to use his energy in a positive way. With every leak that sprung from the dam, it became easier and easier for me to emotionally detach and see the issue as just that: a puzzle to solve. This apartment, this fortress of solitude, and the unreal rebellion by Benny became a chance to learn. And I’d be damned if I looked this gift horse in the mouth. It would have been so easy for me to keep “Goddamn, Benny is the most impossible cat to deal with” on a repeating loop in my head, but that, too, was addict behavior. It was a chance to victimize myself, to chalk it up to the universe’s desire to shit on me. Recovery taught me that I was able to turn that energy around and say, “Okay, Benny likes routine. He likes stability, he likes sameness. He thrives on those things.”

  Whenever Benny got into a fur-pulling place, for example, he ended up looking like a poodle, his back end and part of his flank spotty like a lawn overmanicured and burned with fertilizer. I’d be sitting there watching TV and out of the corner of my eye I’d see that jerky head movement, and I’d look up and see him with a mouth full of hair, trying in vain to push it out with his tongue.

  I drove myself crazy trying to understand what was going on with Benny, because I kept looking for that one unifying principle that I just knew lay behind his issues, the control switch that my inner addict desperately needed to find. There wasn’t one, but I couldn’t see it because, in order not to go from zero to red in an instant whenever I saw that mouth full of gray-and-white fluff, I was relying on science instead of empathy—working from the neck up instead of from the neck down, which, I know now, will always lead me to a dead end. It is so limiting, because as I was trying to unify, to take the one symptom and give it one root, the cause of the fur pulling was different almost every time. A food allergy, an environmental allergy, shedding his coat for the spring and fall, stress—stress over what? God, it was Benny; it could be stress over Velouria chewing her dinner differently than she did yesterday—sometimes a combination of any or all of the above. Just when I thought I at least had it isolated to certain times of the year, he poodled himself in the middle of July. It wasn’t about to be spring or fall, it couldn’t be a food allergy, because he was on a special diet, it wasn’t cold so it couldn’t be stress because of his broken pelvis; it didn’t conform to any of the things that I had thought of before.

  When What They’re Eating Is What’s Eating Them

  Many animals suffer from undiagnosed allergies their entire lives—many are even allergic to the most common ingredients in pet food, i.e., chicken, fish, corn, beef, and wheat, to name a few. While allergies can be difficult to diagnose, if your animal develops rashes around the face, hotspots, or diarrhea, or starts licking excessively, it’s important to work with your vet and rule out food allergies through an eight-week food trial, using a novel protein like venison or rabbit as a nutritional baseline. Environmental allergies are also pervasive, and require more specialized veterinary assistance to diagnose.

  Holistic remedies for allergies include natural anti-inflammatories like slippery elm and skin-healing supplements like fish oil. If the route you want to take with your cat in terms of its health is a more holistic one, find a holistic vet in your area by going to www.ahvma.org.

  Then I noticed that he had started keeping vigil, walking back and forth in front of my air conditioner, and finally jumping on top of it. He basically formed a fur-bearing perimeter of stress; he pulled huge chunks of fur off himself and licked them all together, leaving cat-hair origami pieces arranged on the floor around the air conditioner in a huge rectangle. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when it got hot enough for me to turn on the air conditioner, at which point the smell of piss instantly filled the living room. I took my black light outside and, sure enough, there were cat piss stains all over the outside of the air conditioner—and I mean all over—dripping down off the vent, onto the wall beneath, and finally pooling on the ground.

  So I began opening the shades, which I usually kept closed. Later that day two totally unfamiliar cats jump up on the air conditioner and… just sit there, as if knowing their presence would end in a fun show. When Benny jumped up on the other side of the air conditioner, the teams, separated only by glass now without the addition of the shade, began going berserk, and I knew I had my answer. Benny had been killing two birds with one stone, so to speak, relieving the anxiety through pulling and also leaving a visual (and scent-filled) marker with the fur perimeter. Most other cats would have fought fire with fire, spraying the walls and window on our side of the AC, establishing the “line in the sand,” but, naturally, not him. He marked territory with his own fur. Benny had shown me yet again that there is no cookie-cutter when it comes to cat behavior.

  Threats from Within Versus Threats from Without

  When dealing with territorial insecurity that manifests as inappropriate marking, pay attention to two things:

  Threats from within. Is the cat competing with other cats, dogs, or children for important resources or socially significant spaces?

  Threats from without. Are there community cats wandering outside your house that your cats can see through a window or smell from under a door? Their presence will induce what I call the “Alamo response,” and your cat will defend his territory by whatever means necessary. If he can’t go outside and beat the cats up, he’ll pee on the door or below the windows.

  I used various enzymatic cleaners to clean the living hell out of that wall and got a remote-control-operated air blaster; every time the cats walked up they got shown that the grass was definitely greener elsewhere. My neighbors got blasted quite a few times, too, but since their cats were also being hassled by the strays they forgave me. The offending cats moved on in two days, and Benny stopped pulling his hair out… for a few months.

  But my challenges were far from over. Because, though I was going to my meetings and working my program, I was still lying to myself on the deepest level. Drugs were still controlling my life. I could pretend that they weren’t, because they were prescription drugs, not street drugs, but what it all boiled down to was that I was still a junkie.

  Providing Greener Pastures Somewhere Else

  Discouraging, or training a cat away from a certain area is impossible to achieve as a human. This is because it has to happen

  within two seconds

  with consistent intensity

  every single time they come within the forbidden perimeter

  If you’re at work, you can’t spray the cat with water when she jumps on the counter. Do yourself a favor and get a remote training device! You won’t need it for more than a few weeks. For instance, one such device is a compressed air canister with an electric eye. The cat jumps up on the counter, the can sprays a spurt of air. The cat jumps down. She won’t have to do this too many days in a row before she just decides that the counter is unfriendly. That being said, don’t forget my rule of thumb when discouraging a cat from doing something: Behind every “No” there needs to be a “Yes!” If your cats are insistent about the counter, use your cat mojo and figure out why it’s so important. Then, give them a perch right nearby that’s acceptable to you and achieves the important objective for them.

  Surrender and

  the Falling Scales

  I think the only way I can explain the way Klonopin burrowed into my fabric is to start by telling the story of the breakdown I had six months after moving to Boulder with my girlfriend.

  As per my focused career plan, I had started playing gigs almost immediately after getting to Boulder. I was lucky enough to get regular shows at a few clubs, which allowed me to develop a following quickly. Socially it was a perfect storm—moving to a new place and finding a bunch of people who loved my music and consequently wanted to party with me. I fell in with all sorts of different people, most of whom have faded into the smoke.

&n
bsp; And then there was Dan, who worked with me at a coffee shop. He just showed up, having decided to relocate from LA for no reason. Red flag number one. His dad, Dan explained, was in the music business, and he himself, a bass player, was living off the royalties from a hit song he’d written for some two-hit wonder band; naturally, I was thrilled when he said he wanted to start a band with me. He wanted to record a demo of my songs and get it to his people in LA so they could sign me. Finally the stars were aligning, as I had known they were meant to from the first time I put a record on that magical old Motorola.

  We started working on the demo constantly; as soon as I got off work, Dan and I would go into the studio (my bedroom) with my crappy little four-track cassette recorder, and very quickly I found out that Dan was a terrible bass player and an even worse singer. The only thing Dan was good at, it seemed, was telling me what to do or, as he phrased it, producing me. So of course I did what he told me to do, which included playing my own bass as well as every other damn thing on the demo. And the tweaking went on for months.

  Finally one day he called the coffee shop in the middle of the morning rush. Whoever answered the phone seemed exasperated that he wouldn’t take no for an answer, ending her exchange with him by throwing the receiver in the metal sink.

  “Guess what?” he said.

  “Dude, I’m getting the stink eye from twenty people right now. What is it?”

  “My guys in LA called, they love the demo, they want more!”

  And I started—this is so embarrassing—running around the coffee shop singing the theme to The Jeffersons. You know, “Movin’ on up…”

  So we began work on another demo. The first one, three songs, had taken almost as many months to complete, as I programmed drum machines painstakingly and played the rest of the parts over and over again until I got them right. I wasn’t exactly savoring a repeat, but I was blindly following the lead of someone who knew what it was going to take. We started recording again.

  And all along, without my realizing it, Dan was, little by little, devouring my entire life. Too little to notice at first—he was like a slow-motion vampire. It’s too simple to say that Dan was on the grift; he had talent. It seemed like everyone he met, especially females, wound up literally and figuratively screwed. It’s not like he was some kind of sculpted Adonis; he was handsome but a lout, his loud, messy, shirts always riding up to expose his gut on one side and his ass crack on the other. But he sold ice to the Eskimos. He convinced girls that he was Valentino; Christ, he convinced me that he was a musician. The core of his brilliance, like the best con men, was unshakable confidence and skills of manipulation. He was an absolutely astonishing liar. I’ve never met—and I hope never to meet again—anyone else who could flat-out lie, eyeball to eyeball, like him. It was amazing, except I thought somehow I was immune to it. I guess so did everyone else.

  In short order he had moved in with me and my girlfriend—brilliant idea, right?—and was seducing her, or at least it seemed that way to me. I figured how could you fight like that without having the same passion on the flip side? The tireless Dan was also busy seducing our drummer and fucking her up to the point that she was showing up drunk as hell just to get through rehearsals. He was a walking id, a dick-shaped time bomb, and eventually he went off. Screaming matches with whoever was in earshot. Punched-out holes in the wall. Busted-out windows, calls from neighbors, and being dragged away in handcuffs. The energy of rage scared the hell out of me (as it always has—energy that goes floor to ceiling makes me want to hide; where do you think I developed the skills to “whisper” to new cats?). So I alternately defused the bomb (by placating Dan) and just stayed away. I got home from work and left immediately to play guitar on the street, leaving him and my girlfriend to hate or love on each other, which in my increasingly paranoid state I believed could only happen if they were also screwing.

  I could feel myself losing it. I was in therapy, I was trying to get hold of what was slipping away from me, but it was like trying to take hold of water. The harder you grip your sanity, the faster it runs out of your hands. The end came when I needed to go to Dan’s room to get something and found pages and pages covered in my forged signature. I started looking into things more and realized that not only had he been stealing money from me—not that I had much—running up phone and cable bills with porn in the middle of the night, signing my name to thousands of dollars’ worth of checks, but also that all his stories about his father and the demo and his people in LA had been complete fabrications. I confronted him, had the conversation I had rehearsed endlessly with my therapist, and told him to get out of town or I would have him arrested. By the next morning he was gone.

  But I was through. That last act, instead of giving me relief, just flooded my psychic engine completely. I couldn’t be of use to anybody. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t make music. I couldn’t have human relationships anymore. I was just finished.

  Even today, this is almost embarrassing to write about. Oh, this guy came into my life, caused some chaos, and I’m going to blame him for the fact that I went crazy. But that’s not what was going on. He simply exposed an enormous flaw. I lived like a child, I trusted like a child. I was a lifelong artist who looked to be enveloped by others’ caring because I had absolutely no life skills. I’m not talking about typing or filing. I had never developed a way to cope with anything. My house was not the straw one blown in by the big, bad wolf; mine was made of tissue, torn apart by the breeze of a few harshly spoken words, and as Dan ran out of Boulder, back to the safety of LA or wherever the hell he actually came from, the only thing that happened was that I could finally breathe enough to have a complete nervous breakdown.

  “Please,” I begged my psychiatrist. “Just hospitalize me.”

  “Jackson,” she said soothingly, “you don’t need to be hospitalized. I think you’re just suffering from some real anxiety.”

  “No, you don’t get it. I am going insane. Put me away. A seventy-two-hour vacation.”

  “I’m going to write you a prescription for Klonopin, which is an antianxiety medication,” she said, handing me a piece of paper. “Don’t take it unless you absolutely need to. But you’re going to be fine.” And then she eyed the door—my hint to get the hell out.

  Don’t take it unless I absolutely need to. Right. No amount of the substances with which I normally medicated myself could put a dent in the anxiety and the depression, so during my lunch break at the coffee place I called my girlfriend and insisted she bring the pill to me at work, because I couldn’t stand it one more minute and at the same time I didn’t have enough money to stagger off into the sunset. I had to get through these days. She came over and we sat outside on a bench while waiting for it to take effect. Much of the next ten years is in-and-out, but the next forty-five minutes after taking that first pill remain my clearest memory until detoxing. She watched me intently, worried about the wind kicking up around my mental card house. At the forty-minute mark it hit me. Like the wet hallucinogen dreams but with no edge at all. My mouth fell open wide enough for the magic carpet to fly out. This wash came over me, this knee-knocking, slow-motion, warm tidal wave. It started at the knees and went to the groin, this beautiful buzz, and rose from there, until the final place it hit was my mouth. (Later on, everyone would know when I was buzzing—practically ODing—on Klonopin, because my slur was really bad. To this day I know when people are on medications like Klonopin or Xanax or other benzodiazepines, because the dry mouth and the slurring are just dead giveaways.)

  I remember looking up after the initial nod, what must’ve been a few minutes later, and seeing my girlfriend crying. And I remember, mercifully, not caring. Years later I asked her why she had started crying that day and she said that, in that moment, she knew she had lost me for good.

  She was right. In the few months that followed, I completely pushed her away. When I was pilled, I experienced everything at a distance. Emotions like love and loss were, in my state, matches burn
ing under a house of cards. I had to protect the house and that meant extinguishing the fire. My girlfriend and I had been through so much—she had fought for me harder than anyone ever had, and within a few months, she was gone. And I don’t remember her leaving.

  But I was OK with that, because my finger was finally removed from the ungrounded outlet and the shock was replaced with gentle waves. I had finally solved my oversensitivity problem. Klonopin was the essence of going away. And for the next ten years, this was the one thing I could rely on. Weed, coke, booze, acid, mushrooms—those things could be good or bad on any given day. But with Klonopin, I always knew exactly what was going to happen. And, just as important, when it would happen. Forty minutes. No matter what degree of teeth-grinding, death-spiraling, send-me-to-a-dark-corner-gripping-my-knees-and-rocking-back-and-forth hell I was going through, I knew I could hang on for another forty minutes. And it was legal, and I got it from a doctor.

  So on that day, ten years later, when Dmitri, the fast-talking lawyer, and his friends had come over to my house to get rid of my stash, it seemed perfectly reasonable not to tell them about the Klonopin I had hidden in plain sight in other prescription bottles, in the nightstand, in three different decorative pocket pill holders, under the sink next to the toilet paper. After all, Klonopin wasn’t drugs, I reasoned; it was medicine.

  Maybe this attitude was the reason my twelve-step sponsors kept firing me.

  My first sponsor was a young guy who seemed to be everybody’s sponsor. He had a sense of humor, he had a wife and a kid, he had stability, he had a good head on his shoulders. And maybe that’s why he was the grand pooh-bah of Boulder sponsors: you pick a sponsor who has what you want, and he had a lot—he was a young grownup.

  We met three or four times, and he kept getting hung up on Klonopin. We glanced over the first few steps, but finally one day, over coffee, he just stopped and said, “We can’t go any further until you clean up.”