Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  So twenty-four hours into my visit I’m trying every technique that I know to reintroduce cats, but I feel like I’m going through the motions. Because now that I’ve lost my protective bulk, the world is closer… and I don’t know what to do with it. This is the curse of lifting the veil: you can’t exist as a cookie-cutter advice-giver anymore. I know plenty of behaviorists, veterinarians, doctors, teachers, people who have lost their inspiration, who do it by the numbers. Their work is done remotely through phone or e-mail or both. They say okay, well, you have problem a, b, or c, this is how you deal with it, and they recite the same thing that they’ve been reciting for twenty years. But I couldn’t do that. The veil can only be lifted, not dropped. You can’t go back. And when the veil comes up, it’s not just about knowing cats better—you’re more open to emotional states of any kind. And the human psychology involved here was talking as loudly as the cat psychology.

  That night I called Karl from my hotel room. “I’m trying so hard,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t be trying. You should know by now that your efforts to control the world are irrelevant to those living in that world.”

  “No, I mean, honestly, I’m doing everything I know how to do, but these cats don’t want to be together.”

  “Jackson, it’s not the cats who don’t want to be together. The universe doesn’t want you to put this together. It’s not meant to be put together. These cats don’t like each other. They’re trying to send everybody a message, and nobody’s listening.”

  I didn’t want to accept this. I pictured Phil, his wife, the cats, all doing some happily-ever-after dance, and I decided, just like Phil, that I would make that picture happen, no matter what. I began a food reintroduction plan, and they were doing pretty well. In fact, these cats were two feet away from each other, on opposite sides of the door, and they were doing just fine. But when you opened the door or when they ran out of food, Sugar went to murder Spice. She would chase her through the massive house and I would tear ass after them up the stairs, down the stairs, into the garage, and you would lose track of where they were until you heard the screaming.

  Cat Reintroduction 101

  When two cats have fallen out, the way to reintroduce them is by using positive association—which means food!

  Feed the two cats on either side of a door so they understand they only smell each other when they get food, and they only get food when they smell each other. “Hmm,” they’ll start thinking, “maybe this other cat isn’t so bad.”

  Gradually move the bowls closer, keeping each on the opposite side of the door. Then crack the door to add a visual element to the reintroduction. You’re on your way!

  The next day I’m in one of the huge bathrooms with Sugar. And while Spice is running around—she’s a kitten, she’s not buying into this drama, she just doesn’t care—Sugar’s locked up in the bathroom tossing off the stink eye to me from the top of a cat tree in the corner. I start talking to her, saying in increasingly desperate tones, “Pretty please, I am out of ideas here. Your dad spent $1,200 to get me here and he doesn’t quite know yet that I’m a fraud. You have got to help me out. Please get along with this kitten. Dammit.”

  And I let her out the door of the bathroom and I felt like she was with me, but the second she saw that kitten, all bets were off and I was chasing after her up the stairs down the stairs until Spice was cornered up on the dining room table.

  The awful thing was that the worse these sessions went, the more absolutely verklempt Phil became; finally, his stress level was interfering with the process so badly that I banished him from the house. His wife and I could do the sessions while he walked around the block. And the cats got better when it was just me and Jessica. They didn’t become best friends, but you could feel the storm cloud lift. And then Phil would come back in with his nervousness, his doom and gloom, and the fact that he was a walking ultimatum ruined everything.

  To put it mildly, it was a complete failure.

  So at the end of the day I gave them tools, I gave them options, but I told them I didn’t see these cats ever wanting to live together. I couldn’t make this happen, nobody could make this happen. I don’t think I could have reached this understanding before getting totally clean—the understanding that this was not about me being a success or failure or fraud or genius, but only about these two cats and what they needed. In previous consults, when I knew things were falling apart, I would just cut bait. I would just do the basics of the consult and never check back in because I knew it was going to fail and I didn’t want to examine why. But now I couldn’t not examine why, because it was staring me in the face.

  I suggested a zoned existence for the cats.

  “Absolutely not,” said Phil. “There’s no way. I’m never going to do that.”

  “Ok,” I said dubiously, “you can keep working this program, but…” I didn’t have the guts to tell him he was using the cats as fodder for his pride, the same way we use a child or a dog or a house or anything else that can’t talk back. And it’s fine with a house; you can validate your success by building a huge house on the banks of a golf course, but you cannot force sentient beings into the shape you want them to take.

  Phil called me about six months later and said that Jessica had left him. He said it was all about the cats, that he saw a life with both Sugar and Spice, and Jessica just didn’t get it, so she left him. And not only did she leave him, but she took up with another guy who lived on the tenth hole, and he would see them from his solarium, he said, “drinking mimosas on Sunday mornings on the deck of this new guy’s house.”

  But we all know that they didn’t get divorced over the cats. I think he felt her slipping away from him and he made a doubled-up effort to create a fortress, a manifestation of a happy home, and those two cats were part of that manifestation, along with home improvements and perfectly cooked dinners with candlelight. He had a picture in his head of what life should look like and she, goddammit, was going to follow him, and these two cats, goddammit, were going to follow him.

  A Little Help

  After years of doing this work, I’ve realized I’m half human therapist. If you’re arguing with your partner about the cat, it will only create tension in a way the cat can perceive and make the situation worse. Bring in an unbiased, disinterested third voice to help you work out the situation.

  I think Phil’s a fantastic guy. I love him. I still hear from him. But I’m also sad, because he still expects, nine or ten years later, that someday these two cats are going to get together. They’ve spent a decade site swapping—which, by the way, I see no problem with—but the thing I find so distressing is that they’ve had to live their whole lives feeling the energy of the disappointment of human expectation.

  New and

  Still Breaking

  Benny had come to me with a shattered pelvis, and like any other traumatic physical alteration, it changed his physiology. As I’ve mentioned, declaw a cat and it’ll change his physiology forever. Think about it: if you cut off one of your toes, you’d walk differently for the rest of your life. You can’t rehab a cat’s broken pelvis; you just live with it. Staying in a cage for a few weeks doesn’t put everything back to normal. So by the time Benny was seven or eight, he was pretty gimpy with arthritis. Remember, in the wild, cats’ job in life is to hide pain—they’re literally dead meat if they display any vulnerability—so though he tried not to show it, as time went on, year by year, one of his paws began to atrophy and become misshapen from the compensation, and he started to have some trouble. He groomed the malformed leg even more obsessively than he always had, and when he was in pain he would often stop in the middle of a stride and collapse, his mouth around the offending appendage.

  There were also geographical problems, because in Colorado we don’t just have winter, we have Winter, and we don’t just have altitude, we have Altitude. The resulting barometric swings wreaked havoc on Benny’s joints and broken places, leaving him even more attached to
the earth than normal—an über-bush dweller. He would have nothing at all to do with jumping, not even on the couch or bed, so I made sure his bush beds were plentiful, and heated. The litter box, too, would sometimes become unfriendly, but I had an idea about that, too. When Rabbi was dying of diabetes, he had developed a peripheral neuropathy, so he walked on his hocks (the cat equivalent of knees), and it made getting in and out of the litter box ridiculous. It was then that I discovered the puppy litter box—spacious, with a dipped opening in the front that was just a few inches above floor level. It was perfect for Rabbi, and now it proved equally perfect for Benny during the challenging times.

  Once again, I kept trying to find one hallelujah cause, kept trying to tie everything together. These aren’t things that exist in a vacuum, I decided, these are symptoms of one root problem. (I often did this in my consults, too. I didn’t consider, for instance, that a cat could be peeing outside the box in the same location for two different reasons—because she’s threatened by outside intruders, for example, and because the intruders have upped her stress levels to the point where she’s developed a urinary tract infection. Which is not very sound science at all, but I’m not a sound scientist.) So if Benny was pulling out fur and it was wintertime I would check his arthritis; if he was missing the litter box I would manipulate his joints trying to find pain where often pain didn’t exist.

  For about seven months I theorized. This is what I tend to do. I jotted notes, I said, “Come on, Benny, talk to me,” staring at him, resorting to telepathy…. But as I gathered the symptoms and made a whiteboard out of his symptomatology—don’t ask me why I hadn’t learned my lesson by now, hadn’t figured out a way to ignore that well-known behaviorist’s voice telling me I needed to do this scientifically or not at all—it just didn’t add up.

  And eventually I said, screw it, I’m just going to deal with the symptoms. So I began to look at things in terms of cues. If he’s giving me this cue then I have to look in this direction. I couldn’t always be looking for a touchdown pass, a discovery that, oh, my God, all of these six symptoms together mean that he’s foreseeing his own death through hanging. Because whenever I thought I’d found one, he’d be like, you idiot, and he would do something that proved it couldn’t be that.

  In the end, the key for me, once again, was empathy—working from the neck down instead of from the neck up. So going back to an instinctual and empathetic place, I said, how would I want to be touched if I were in pain? So I thought, he’s been living with a broken pelvis for all those years during Colorado winters. I’ve got bad knees, I know what that feels like, so I started giving him what I thought I would want, which was heat and traction. I would rub my hands together to create friction heat, and then I would wrap my hands around his whole underside, and I cradled his pelvis. But uniform pressure on cats tends to freak them out, so I also pulled a little bit, stayed active instead of static, because the fact is, they’ve got to trust that touch. And finally, with the addition of a Spirit Essences formula called Creak-Away and occasionally some anti-inflammatory medicine, I was able to keep his arthritis at bay as much as I could.

  The good thing was that this process did lead me to some cool discoveries. I wouldn’t have found animal chiropractic work, for example, if it hadn’t been for Benny’s pelvis. I was looking for any help with the problem. I had a history with bodywork so I could practice qigong, craniosacral massage, energy release, but these are subtle modalities, and he didn’t like them. He rebelled against subtlety at all times in his life. Energetic information has to be collected and processed. He had no time for that. Chiropractic, though—you’re being manipulated, and there’s nothing subtle about it.

  Stroking Versus Holding

  If you stroke cats, there’s an end in sight, and they like that. If there’s no end in sight—it’s not a stroke but a hold—that tends to tense them up more than relax them. (It’s totally the opposite with dogs. With dogs you can hold them and they’ll melt into your hold. And that’s the theory behind products like the Anxiety Wrap or the Thundershirt—feeling swaddled calms dogs.) In another example of being a cat detective, just like finding the sweet spot in your vocal range that works for your cat, do the same with your touch—what degree of pressure relaxes her and which touch, like the big hug, makes her shrink back, twitch, or head for the hills?

  But it took me months. I kept theorizing and overthinking and making charts, because I had that animal behaviorist’s voice in my head, I had my father’s voice in my head, I felt I had something to prove, when what I actually had was a cat who needed me not to think but to feel.

  As Benny got older, he began to get sick more and more often. The first time I ever saw his asthma in action is impossible to forget. I had that moment when he was hacking and I was hovering over him going, vet or no vet? Vet or no vet? Vet or no vet? And then I instinctively took two fingers and rubbed his throat up and down; I just wanted him to pass whatever it was. And my rubbing actually did relax his throat a little bit, and the hacking stopped, but it was only coincidence, and the hacking kept coming back. Thank God for the Internet, because when I started googling I found Fritz the Brave. Fritz and his guardian are now gone, but fritzthebrave.com is still an invaluable resource. On the Web site there was a video of Fritz having an asthma attack and it was identical to what was happening to Benny. It looked like he was trying to put up a hair ball but there was no wetness to it whatsoever, it was just a hacking dryness, nothing was ever brought up.

  So I started doing research on asthma, and I called Jean, and I started doing things like changing from clay litter. This had an immediate effect, because there wasn’t this plume of ash and dust every time I’d pour the litter out of the bag or every time he’d scratch in it. I also took the hoods off the litter boxes so that at least the dust still there would disperse through the apartment instead of getting stuck around the box itself.

  Don’t Be a Litterbug!

  Clay litter isn’t just bad for cats’ health. In addition to the problems it can cause for cats with asthma, it also contains silica, which causes cancer in cats and humans. Furthermore, the clay it’s made from is usually mined in a way that damages the environment, and once you throw clay litter away it never biodegrades in the landfill—it will be here long after we humans are dead and gone.

  I tried to change from dry to wet food, to raise the water content in his body, but naturally, he being the cat he was, no matter what wet food I put down—and I tried every last brand—he would walk up, sniff it, and gag. Wet food and Sharpies: he consistently gagged. Finally—finally—I discovered that he would eat Whole Foods deli-case herb-roasted turkey. And that was it. No turkey from the regular supermarket, no Whole Foods smoked turkey. It was Whole Foods deli-case herb-roasted turkey or nothing.

  This was infuriating, because dry food irritated his lungs and his trachea. I was able to go to a grain-free food, but it was still inherently dry. So we tried to hydrate him with a portable nebulizer, twice, and each time he panicked so badly at the sight of that mask that he had an asthma attack twice as bad as it had ever been. His typical attacks could last a few minutes—two, three, four minutes—but both times we tried to use the asthma medication with that big mask, an attack would last ten to twelve minutes, until he was really gasping for air, and it just wasn’t worth it. So for the rest of his life he was on our Easy-Breather from Spirit Essences, and usually prednisone. But the asthma never went away.

  Once my weight came off, and I was breathing for the first time in years, I opened to the idea that Benny’s, Velouria’s, and my time in Boulder might be at an end. The music scene had been shifting for years away from bands toward dance music, and besides, sober I just didn’t have the manic energy—or the need—to get up onstage wearing a diaper and a baseball cap with a blinking bicycle light on it and recite a thirteen-minute monologue underscored by hypnotic music from my band. Hell, let’s face it: the only thing keeping me in Boulder was my inability to own my life enough to
pack my shit and go.

  My first trip to visit Jill (rather than to hook up in some mutually convenient city) was to help guide her when her dog Reilly was going terribly downhill and she couldn’t face the decision to let him go. I felt her pain and his, and was on a plane the next night. It was the Fourth of July. As I descended into the LA area at exactly 9:00 p.m., fireworks exploded with socioeconomic impunity, fire in the sky from Compton to Manhattan Beach. Of course I believe in signs; this was going to be my next stop. After all, I had been making a long, slow crawl across the country for more than twenty years. Why not go from sea to shining sea?

  I knew Reilly for less than twenty-four hours. He was a fairly enormous yellow Lab. Reilly was the alpha of Jill’s pretty-damned-populated home (when I showed up, there were five dogs and eight cats), but he was immobilized. It was so sad. She loved him so strongly and he was patently unable to perform his “job.” He couldn’t direct traffic. He couldn’t walk. I carried him to the car. I carried him into the vet while Jill waited, hysterically crying, in the car. I was his guardian in those last minutes. As I would find out quickly, Jill’s work life was just like mine—there was no down time. She still had to work that day, completely shrouded in grief. When she finished, we held hands, and in the dark, punctuated by a few fires, we made our way to the waves of the Pacific on Hermosa Beach. I waded in up to my calves.

  And in that moment, my notoriously noisy mind, the city that I had been seeking escape from for fifteen years in the mountains of Colorado, went deafeningly silent.

  It was a completely ecstatic feeling. After all this time, I remembered that I came from an island. I was a water person, living in exile among ice-climbing earth worshippers.

  I was ready to go.