Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  The physical part of the move to California was a piece of cake for me. I was, after all, ready. I had spent fifteen years in the place voted by my inner city best place to have a complete nervous breakdown. I had had said breakdown, wallowed in it for years, and then embarked on a radical and redefining journey of regaining my marbles while shedding my addictions. It was time, and I was so not scared; I could taste the glory of change, the promise of life at the other shining sea.

  Of course, just because I was ready to go doesn’t mean I was ready to go. I fought like hell to keep change at bay. The only way I’d move to California, I told Jill, was if she could find a place in her area no more than three blocks from the beach. We had to have a yard for her dogs. We couldn’t spend any more than two thousand dollars a month together. I put enough obstacles in the way to make the goal unattainable. But Jill rose to the challenge and found us a home.

  Once I accepted the inevitable, the only thing that had me stressed in the least was Benny. As we’ve established, he wasn’t exactly the king of smooth adaptation from place to place; move his dinner bowl and he might turn into Gandhi. I felt like I had to cover every conceivable base, so that he would make it to the promised land in one piece.

  I call it the promised land not so lightly, either; Benny was not well. By now, his asthma was often completely debilitating. He had also begun to “snarfle”—there was a problem in his sinuses now as well as in his bronchial tubes. The most heartbreaking aspect of this came when he would cuddle up to me, in itself a phenomenon that had only manifested in recent years, and begin to purr. Inevitably the love would get too big; the purr would take over, and one end or another of the broken breather would rebel and cause an awful gag and choke. His eyes bulging, he would swallow hard and regain his cat composure. It had taken Benny so many years to settle into his felinity—I felt horrible that now it was almost like he was being punished for embracing it. The promised land meant the move from the climatic unbearable, at least from Benny’s perspective. No more bone-crunching winters, no more dry apartment heat, no more airless altitude. Benny’s life would be spent breathing in sea-level humidity, sipping in oxygen like it was a giant fruity cocktail served up in a tiki-head glass.

  Now, we just had to get him there.

  Cat Travel 101

  When you travel with your cat, make sure you embark prepared!

  Put together a go kit with food, no-spill bowls, harnesses, disposable litter boxes, bottled water, and a feline first-aid kit (in mine I have gauze, instant ice pack, mini-scissors, quickstop, thermal blanket, hydrogen peroxide, tweezers, Q-tips, eye wash, eye dropper, emery board, and antibiotics).

  Travel with copies of your cat’s medical records. Don’t wait for the last minute to request them from your vet!

  Research pet-friendly lodging before you make any reservations.

  Make sure he’s microchipped and tagged with your current address information (your new address, if the travel is a move).

  As you plan your route, check out shelters on the Web, just in case you get separated!

  Pack photos of your cat in case you need to show people what he looks like.

  I decided that I would rent a U-Haul trailer and hitch it to my Blazer, and whatever would fit, would fit. That would leave the Blazer itself for Jill and me, and I would flatten the seats in the back to make a home away from home for Velouria and Benny. Dishes, litter boxes, familiar scents. It was so important to keep a sense of sameness throughout what would undoubtably be a tough couple of weeks.

  That trailer was packed so tightly, in true gypsy style, that I actually had to toss my couch. My one symbol of grown-upness, my king-size bed, also had to be put aside. My plants had made it, at least, but that trailer had not one single cubic foot left in it. I might be a gypsy, but I’m also a guy; I know how to pack the hell out of a car.

  I timed the trip so that I had to stop for gas ten miles out—once again Benny’s doing. I had learned that, no matter what I ever tried, within the first seven miles of any trip, Benny would poop, puke, or both. So you just went with that particular flow. You waited for the inevitable, stopped, cleaned it up, and you were on your way. By the time I gassed up, I also was wiping the back of the Blazer clean. Then, it was onward and upward.

  But it was 100 degrees that Labor Day weekend, and I was driving that 2000 Blazer up I-70 on a steep, long hill out of Boulder Valley, dragging that trailer chock-full of my life. You do the math. It was precisely at the worn sign that proclaimed “Buffalo Bill’s Burial Site Ahead” that the smoke began pouring from under the hood. Then the unmistakable sugary smell of antifreeze. And then, the gas pedal just stopped gassing. The choice was to pull over or risk gravity taking the four of us back to the valley floor.

  Ward off Carsickness!

  If your animal gets carsick, it’s pet detective time again. Here are some things you can experiment with:

  Make sure she associates the carrier with good things—take her fun places in it, try feeding her in it—before you leave for your destination!

  Try a smaller or a larger carrier.

  Give her more or less visual access.

  “Can you get out here?” I said to AAA on the phone. “I need to get this car to a mechanic.”

  “A mechanic? On Labor Day? You’re kidding, right?”

  Shit.

  “Just send a tow for a Blazer and a packed trailer. We’ll take it from there.”

  And then, as Jill put Benny and Velouria in their carriers and got them out of the overheating car, a swarm of bees descended on us.

  I had to walk away. I was trying to demonstrate my adaptive abilities to the woman I was moving decidedly far away from my comfort zone to live with, and this was what was happening? How was she going to have faith in me to handle things? (Never mind that my ability to handle things not having to do with cats or guitars was pretty much purely theoretical at this point.)

  I’m not sure what exactly I began to mutter. In the prism of my recollection, it was the Serenity Prayer, but in reality it could well have been the Gettysburg Address.

  “Oh, God,” Jill later told me she said to her mother on the cell phone. “Jackson’s talking to a telephone pole. Whoops, no. Jackson’s yelling at a telephone pole.” Once again, I make the courageous choice to change my life, and once again the god of cars throws a two-ton monkey wrench at my good intentions. Or maybe the universe was telling me, not so gently, that it was time to surrender.

  As the tow truck pulled us into the Boulder U-Haul, Benny began to pant. As I picked up the phone to call Jean and ask her what to do since Benny was about to die and I couldn’t do anything right, I remembered that even though it was 100 degrees outside I had put an old cable-knit sweater he loved in his carrier. I turned to tell Jill to get it out of there, but she was already doing it, because he had crapped in there again. I guess it had been seven miles from Buffalo Bill’s grave site. At least he was still performing like a Swiss watch. That was reassuring. Gag-inducing, but reassuring.

  All we could get from U-Haul was a small panel truck, which meant we went from the entire rear of the Blazer for the cats to literally nothing. No backseat, nothing. Their carriers were piled on top of each other in between our seats. And it took forever to get this rental, so not only was my perfectly planned cat trip going to absolute shit, but we had to spend the night at a crappy roadside motel in Arizona. I mean, we couldn’t exactly be choosy; the cats were deal-breakers at many a fine establishment.

  I concealed my fear of Benny’s adjustment to this new place underneath a tidy internal to-do list. Get cats in, get cat-and-Jackson-scented blankets on the bed. Get scratching post out from back of truck, position it by door for territorial security. Get litter box in, set dishes up on counter with food and canisters like they’ve always lived there, execute dinner ritual like every single night.

  Benny wouldn’t eat.

  I could barely disguise my outright panic. The only thing that stopped me from heading outsid
e to talk to a telephone pole was my knowledge of his needs. I had to center myself. I concentrated on feeding Velouria, hoping that he would follow her lead. He wouldn’t. And I would not let him sway my center. Acting as if it were a regular night, we settled in, watching TV in the desert dark. And, as the day began to fade into sleep, I heard the crunching of dry cat food and a slight snarfle. Phew.

  Once we were in our new place, Jill and I had mixed success in brady bunching our pets. Kalee, Jill’s older black Lab, always deferred—six-pound Velouria whacked her in the snout once and from that day forward she simply turned her head away whenever one of the cats made eye contact. Jill’s cats Chips and Tom quickly developed working relationships with Benny and Velouria.

  But Zeke, Jill’s third cat, only two weeks on the scene, was twenty pounds of bully. He’d been bullying Chips since setting foot in the place and when Benny arrived he was just more low-hanging fruit. Karma from Benny’s domination of Rabbi and Velouria years before had come back to bite him in the ass. So in a true test of the methods I’d been working for years, we zoned the 950-square-foot beach house and site swapped religiously. But nothing in my new home was cut-and-dried. Sure, I could keep Zeke away from Benny and Velouria, which was wise; Velouria was back to pulling her “run like prey” routine in this unfamiliar spot, and every time Benny came face-to-face with his nemesis/challenger, his snarfling betrayed his alpha facade. He’d bow his chest out in challenge to the punk in the alley, and the bowing would make him cough. Old man, you ain’t what you used to be. And Zeke would charge. It was, of course, both familiar and necessary to establish long-term stability.

  But I was human, not just a detached robot observer. It made me so totally unhappy to see my poor boy stressed and defeated in an alien space. Furthermore, although Benny had eaten at the hotel, he decided that would be the last time, at least for that particular brand. “This particular taste in my mouth,” he might as well have been saying, “reminds me of the time you shoved me in a carrier with not enough space and made me crap on a wool sweater in 100-degree heat, so no thanks, I’ll pass.”

  So the fevered experimentation began. Cats on hunger strike can be awfully scary: too fat and they are prone to hepatic lipidosis, or fatty liver disease, which is often fatal. Too skinny, like Benny, and you can see the negative wasting effects after just two missed meals. Thank god for the California phenomenon El Pollo Loco; he loved and devoured their chicken, so though I had to mix it with dry food (shockingly, fast-food chicken isn’t nutritionally complete for cats), at least I got him eating again.

  Unfortunately, as much as I really felt amazing in my new life at the water’s edge, where I most definitely belonged, Benny was going downhill. Even though I had provided a better climate, his body was just not happy—the straw was crimping at both ends: his mouth/nose and his lungs. I continued to look for ways to circumvent the anatomical realities—I took him to new vets, both holistic and traditional. Acupuncture seemed to provide some relief for his stressed-out breathing, but, having just relocated my practice to a brand-new area, I wasn’t making enough money, and I couldn’t afford treatments every few weeks. He began to have trouble smelling his food well enough to be interested in it. I took to putting El Pollo Loco chicken in a food processor and making a paste, which I would then heat up just a bit to release the scent, and then I would put it on top of his dry food. Eventually this was filed, as so much would be, under “good intentions.”

  In retrospect I guess I didn’t even see him slipping and sliding. I was used to his various manifestations, the pulling, the whining, the grouchy outbursts; I just wasn’t used to looking for the subtle signs of surrender. It was literally weeks before I realized he was doing the absolute minimum—food to litter to brown bed. Lather, rinse, repeat. Benny actually stopped overgrooming himself. Not because he was “cured”—that would just be too perfect and naive. He had begun to surrender. And it maddened me. Because even though I circled surrender in a mating dance as if it were the summer sex and perfume smell of my first love, I had no idea what to do when it said yes. Of course I made it about me. We only hate things, traits, defects, the beings that remind us of our own struggles, the things we hate about our deepest selves.

  Jill indulged my manic quest—oh, yes, I never stopped—for the answer, the “something” that would make him better. I experimented like mad to find a litter that was dust-free, made of natural ingredients, and unscented, yet clumped and retained scent well enough for use by five cats, one of which had renal failure and peed like a racehorse. (Hint: said litter doesn’t exist.) I ran humidifiers in every room. I was chopping, supplementing, turning his food into warm stew that could get through the crimped straw of his sinuses. The boy had taken the path of least resistance, and I was spewing every ounce of resistance I could summon onto that path.

  One night, when Jill and I got back from a dinner out, I bent over Benny to kiss his head and saw that his right pupil was completely dilated.

  Don’t. Panic. He’ll feel it.

  I wouldn’t give in to the weakness in my legs. I would not, goddammit, fall. Here lies one of the lessons that have assimilated into my thick head only as I write this: I would not feel the truth in that moment, the truth being that there was undoubtedly a tumor somewhere in his sinus passage, pushing against the optic nerves. The unifying theory that I had searched for was right there, but it wasn’t what I wanted to see. This was my addict, coming back to gloat. This was the result of my best thinking for years and years. My best thinking got me into strange beds, strange bars, ingesting strange things, waking up in vomit or in a hospital bed. Now, because I couldn’t bear the truth, and now, when the universe manifested the defining clue so insanely fast after all of this buildup, I resorted to a classic New York City survival technique: turn your eyes down and cross to the other side of the street.

  “I got it,” I told Jill, already feeling her eyes roll behind me. “I know something has to be wrong with his tooth.” I had seen a forensic dentist talking about some murder mystery on some murder mystery reality show and the next thing you know—it’s gotta be his tooth. “He has a rotten tooth that’s abscessing, and the abscess is basically leaking this poison into his nasal cavity and causing his eye to react.” But I wanted, needed confirmation. It was 8:00 on Sunday night. Confirmation was not forthcoming.

  The next morning, the veterinary dental specialist seemed to understand me. He knew instinctively that I had been to eight different vets in eight months, looking for answers that were acceptable to me. He smiled wanly after a cursory exam. “There’s nothing wrong with his teeth, but there’s definitely something wrong with his eye. Maybe we need to get him across the hall to the eye doctor?”

  This kind of hospital was a wet dream for a conspiracy theorist like I was becoming. “Sure, let’s do it.”

  “Jackson,” said the eye doctor, “there is something for sure happening here, but without being able to anesthetize him, I can’t get the images we need. And with his breathing issues, I can’t guarantee that he’ll come out of the anesthesia.” I was nodding the whole time. Then came the worst part, the part that I was not in any way ready to hear: “I think you just need to make sure he’s kept comfortable.”

  … And It’s All

  About Me

  He’s not dead yet, but clearly not here. The concept of “keeping him comfortable” really is just about the waiting. And the watching. And the constant stab and restab of the diagnostic scalpel in the hands of a guy who’s not a doctor but plays one on TV.

  In these moments when my brain relaxes long enough to let the anger and sadness take hold, I realize that I haven’t cried for Benny. I’ve willed him to health so many times over his life that I just assumed I’d do it again. But now my will itself is presenting as a disease, corroding my contact points with the earth on one end and the universe on the other. And my gray-and-white gift/curse/friend/teacher (oh, and cat) suffers for it.

  I have felt, at my worst moments in the
past few months, that the universe was mocking me. Every time I felt a secret was being leaked from the sky or earth directly to me, I’ve gone running to my medical friends or hustled Benny into someone else’s office so that they could tell me they didn’t know and couldn’t find out.

  “So in essence,” I’ve found myself saying over and over, “I just stressed him out to no end to bring him here, paid you the money I needed for rent, and you’re saying that all you can do is hold a piece of tissue in front of his face, say ‘hmmm—see, breathing compromised a bit,’ and send me on my way?”

  We have to towel him twice a day, to give him antibiotics, bronchial dilators, steroids, appetite stimulants, painkillers, and fucking children’s nose drops. And what hurts most of all from this is that I’m buying into this fucking mockery. I’m trying to pill the hurt away instead of actually listening. Because the “cat listener,” or whisperer, or shrink—it’s all a pile of steaming bullshit in the face of losing my little man. All of my learning, all of the intuition I’ve been so blessed in having and honing—all gone. After being clean and sober these seven-and-a-half years, in this moment all of the tools I’ve learned and applied in recovery just aren’t as good right now as being high, or at the very least, numb. I want to numb my pain and Benny’s into submission.

  I do what I do so well when the storm hits: I go into the cellar and lock it down tight so I can get through my days, work, and not lose my mind. That’s how I do the storm. But Karl keeps calling, pulling that Jewish grandmother shtick that works like a charm every time. And thank God it does. When I speak to him I realize I’m in the storm cellar. I honestly haven’t known it until now. I spin around and realize there are no windows, no daylight. No spiritual life, just powdered eggs and bare lightbulbs. And most important, I’ve left Benny in the storm while I stayed below and “strategized.”