Cat Daddy Read online

  Cat

  Daddy

  JEREMY P. TARCHER / PENGUIN

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York

  JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2012 by Jackson Galaxy

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  ISBN: 978-1-101-58561-0

  Printed in the United States of America

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  BOOK DESIGN BY NICOLE LAROCHE

  Some of the names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  Neither the publisher nor the authors are engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician. All matters regarding your health require medical supervision. Neither the authors nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.

  While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors assume any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  This book is dedicated to Benny and his brethren—every busted up, discarded, and caged cat, left waiting for the shining promise of home.

  To anyone who has ever put their dreams on hold in order to make these lives more tolerable. Shelter worker, animal-control officer, foster parent, rescuer, feral champion, legislator—your sacrifice has meant everything.

  And finally, to anyone who has ever adopted an animal, often decidedly averting their gaze away from the eyes of logic when a helpless one called out; thank you.

  We are together the reason why animals will all have a home someday—and because of our efforts, someday will be sooner than we thought.

  Preface

  I’m a cat behaviorist.

  In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, when I say that, whoever I’m talking to says, “You’re a what?”

  “A cat shrink?” I try. Blank looks. “Cat therapist? Cat whisperer?” Nothing. “If your cat were peeing on your bed, I’d come to your house and help him stop.”

  Recognition. Maybe. And then, inevitably: “Can you really make a living doing that?”

  “On a good week.”

  This was how I answered the reporter who wondered what I said when people asked me what I did for a living.

  “Well, to be fair,” she said once I finished, “you’re not exactly what people think of when they imagine the Cat Guy.”

  She was right. I’m not. I’m pretty well covered in tattoos. My head is shaved. There are huge earrings dangling out of both my ears, almost down to where my beard reaches, which is normally just a bit north of my chest.

  But it’s okay, I told her, because it’s all part of my plan. We need to explode the concept of what a cat guy looks like, what a cat girl looks like. We need a country literally full of cat guys and cat girls, bikers, politicians, clergy, and everyone in between, in order to keep millions from dying without homes.

  I did this interview about a year before the premiere of my show, My Cat from Hell, on which I help people find ways to strengthen their relationships with their cats, using methods I started developing in the shelter where I worked and in whose trenches I learned how to love, appreciate, and work with cats on a higher level.

  Since I began working with cats, I’ve met tens of thousands of felines, in shelters, in homes. But this book is about the one who taught me the most.

  Benny was seven pounds of feline frustration who I loved with all my heart. I do not play favorites, and my house was always full of critters, but Benny demanded more than the others in every way. He was challenged physically and challenging behaviorally. He put me through my Cat Daddy paces for almost fourteen years and kept me humble while the larger world came a-knocking. When I moved from Boulder to California, I left the network of health professionals I had known before, so when Benny’s health issues began to dominate the landscape I desperately reached out for new connections, veterinarians who shared my belief in an integrative approach. During Benny’s first acupuncture session at a new local vet, I watched the way he almost seemed to melt beneath the well-placed needles. The doctor had a bedside manner, however, only marginally better than that of a potted cactus. I thought of blogging about the experience, but at that moment I realized my journey with Benny encompassed too much for a blog entry: growth, learning, setbacks, lessons in surrender and love. I wanted to write his story. Just like with My Cat from Hell, the idea is for viewers/readers to see the absolute most off-the-charts behavior, know there could be a way to salvage things, and look at their cat with renewed appreciation: “Well, that cat’s issues rate a 10, and you’re only a 6. I can handle that.” I had no problem with the idea of presenting my little companion in that light. I’m sure he did. But then again, he had a problem with just about everything.

  At the same time, Benny was witness to and participant in the most chaotic period of my life. I thought it important to talk about things that, quite honestly, I’ve kept exceedingly close to the vest. The thing is, I treasure beyond words the relationships I formed with animals in the past seventeen years. I find no drama in saying that without them, I would have long ago passed from this world. So in honoring them, I needed to reveal the dark corners they led me safely away from, despite my best efforts to hand grenade every single gift the universe placed at my feet. Benny was one of these animal ambassadors’ toughest and most rewarding representatives. I am genuinely proud that we can share our journey with you.

  Introduction

  My relationship with Benny was long and tumultuous.

  A petite gray-and-white domestic shorthaired cat, he challenged me every day for more than thirteen years. Every
time I let myself get complacent in my knowledge of cats, in my place in their world, I’d take a deep breath, lace my fingers behind my head and lean back in my chair, and look over to Benny… who was flipping me the bird.

  Our story was one about two broken beings who fixed each other. His previous guardian, handing him over to me, called him “unbondable,” even as he sat in a cardboard carrier, his pelvis shattered by the wheels of a car. I was an animal shelter worker, commiserating with and hiding among the only other beings I felt a part of. My life as an artist—a songwriter, singer, guitarist, bandleader, actor, performance artist; hell, my life as a vital human being—was being sucked from me. Having crawled out from the teeth of a nervous breakdown, I resorted to self-medication and a life of social and emotional solitude. For a time, my hermitage was a windowless warehouse with no phone, no running water. It worked for me. I was getting by, pissing in bottles, paying very meager bills, and, through an incredible array of addictions, staying necessarily numb.

  Somehow during this time, I managed two things: my band and my growing empathic connection with cats. Believe this—I wanted nothing to do with developing a career working with animals. I just wanted the constant chattering in my head to stop. I wanted, as I wrote in one of my many unfinished twenty-minute-plus songs, “Peace from the Noise of the City.” Just clean litter boxes, scoop poop, facilitate adoptions…. But instead I was becoming Cat Boy, the go-to source for what cats were thinking and how we could make their lives better while they stayed with us. Despite the sweaty layer of pharmaceutical shrinkwrap that muted my physical, spiritual, and psychological self, I forced myself to read, to study, to observe, to learn. Despite what I didn’t want to be, something was growing.

  And then, the first time I opened that carrier and met Benny’s eye, my self-centered fantasy of living the indecently sweet life of one removed from humanity went poof. The challenges Benny presented throughout our life together were almost constant, whether physical, behavioral, or in that realm of ether that encompasses neither and both. Every day of my time with him I was either throwing up my hands, asking him for assistance, bouncing ideas off of other humans and other cats, just to get answers to bring back to him. He was aggressive to humans, felines, canines. He would decide to abandon litter box etiquette, seemingly on a whim. He would go on hunger strike. His body language and feline communicative skills were absolutely inscrutable. His shattered pelvis compromised him; his asthma was at times crippling; the still-mysterious ailments that took him finally brought me to my knees. And that, believe it or not, is a good thing.

  I believe that without Benny, I might still have been successful as a cat behaviorist. But my experience with him brought me to a place where I had no choice but to abandon my comfort. For years I did OK living a life of disengagement. The things I believed kept me sane—strict cinder-block boundaries, addiction, cynicism, and self-sabotage—were unacceptable if I was ever to hear him. And if I was unwilling to hear Benny, I was unwilling to hear, learn from, be with every other cat in the world. I had to get clean of alcohol, drugs, and food. I had to accept humility. I had to be present and willing to learn and change. Things I would never do for another human (or myself) I did for the sake of Benny.

  During his final months, he taught me how to die. I have seen a lot of death. I have killed animals as a part of the world of animal sheltering. I have held countless others through the release of their animal companions and I have experienced it for myself. Benny wasn’t done teaching me a thing or two even as his light flickered. I was at that point considered an authority on cats. And yet due to a combination of ineptitude (on the part of quite a few vets), stubbornness and a God complex (on mine), and continuing inscrutability (his), I was laid bare. Brought back to the person I was as a sixteen-year-old songwriter, throwing myself around the stage, singing my truth into the eyes of the audience until they had to look away. It took surrendering to the process of Benny’s death to lift me spiritually and teach me what pain, loss, and love were about.

  The day he died—actually, while I waited for the vet to come into that room and euthanize him—I told him exactly what his story would be; I’d write a book about how we cohealed, how we refused to let each other live broken ever after. And contained in that story would be practical advice: methodology and techniques specifically born from our time together. Maudlin as it may seem, I was committed to his living on. His level of difference allowed me to see the mind and body of a cat like I never had before. All cats—all animals, for that matter—took me to the water of understanding. Benny held me under until I drank. And now that I’ve come up to gulp some air, I want to tell you what I’ve learned.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  Oversensitive and the Well-Dressed Demons

  The Rapids, the Monster and the 45 Kisses

  Omni Presence

  Stuff That Broke and the Big Goddammit

  Completely With (out)

  The Problem with Letters and the Bum Within

  Surrender and the Falling Scales

  Everything Still Tastes Like More

  The Last Supper with My Compulsive Other

  Sugar, Spice, and Everything in a Million Pieces

  New and Still Breaking

  …And It’s All About Me

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Oversensitive

  and the

  Well-Dressed Demons

  My game plan felt pretty ironclad. I would find the most autopilot-esque jobs conceivable. Barista. Pawn-shop employee and guitar buyer/seller. Landscaping (which, in the towns above Boulder, Colorado, at 8,000 feet, meant lugging rocks in a wheelbarrow from one end of a property to the other). Cleaning books-on-tape rentals with a damn toothbrush. I would have no investment in my work, other than to put a semihonest day in and get a paycheck out. Then, and only then, could I have enough creative fuel to imagine my songs during the day and flesh them out at night with my band, Pope of the Circus Gods. I remember when I was working for some bakery delivering baguettes at 4:00 in the morning, it happened: I was bundled up head to toe, since it was February and there was a gaping hole in the side of my van, and the words to one of my favorite songs came to me all at once, the tempo, I’m sure, in sync with the chattering of my teeth: “In another story I would have waited up for her all night long/And when she’d finally pick my lock with my credit card I’d pretend to be asleep.” The chorus, with a sweeping, anthemic melody, came to me next, and as the sun cast her red spell over the Flatirons, my song “Notes from the Shed” was born. This was an unfathomable relief; ever since I had discovered that I was good at this, when I was eleven or twelve, I kept assuming the well was going to run dry sooner rather than later. So every time a song came to me in this way, I took a nice deep breath—I was still viable.

  To be sure, there were many more mornings than not when this type of revelation didn’t happen, but I hung my artistic hat on that particular dawn as proof that my plan could work. I was deluding myself. In reality, the Breakdown of six months before had sapped me of my mojo, and the ensuing cocktails prescribed to me made it almost impossible to access that deep, dark well that I had always relied on instinctually; in a cruel twist, that was exactly what the prescriptions were there for. Maybe it was that, maybe it was the increasingly desperate self-medication, but the end result was a reduction in life aspirations. My goal was just to get out of the mental rabbit hole I had fallen into and stay out. Writing was not so conducive to that, nor was an investment in life beyond the absolute minimum.

  The problem was that I could never keep my ambitions too far in check. At the pawn shop, I became the dreamer—I had visions of turning it into Boulder’s first classic and collectible instrument store. At the coffee shop it wasn’t good enough to be a barista; I had to be an artisan, a roaster. Imagination and ambition were constantly colliding with the fear of insanity and the incredible quantity of substances I ingested in a d
esperate attempt to keep it at bay. If you’ve never rubbed shoulders with insanity, he is a sweaty, foul-breathed cab driver who locks the door and takes you wherever he wants. The more you squirm to get out, the happier he seems to get. Insanity loves—no, needs—company.

  Once my short-lived career in the kitchen of a reputable restaurant died in a rockets’-red-glare moment when the bloody Band-Aid that slipped off my finger reemerged in a patron’s mouth, I decided I was done with serving people. When I saw in the paper the next week that the Humane Society of Boulder Valley (HSBV) was looking for an Animal Welfare Associate, I took it as a sign; I would serve animals instead. My relationships from that point forward would be as pure as I could possibly make them. I was, after all, in search of simplicity. Write my songs, be with my band, serve the animals—I nodded vigorously as I ran this by my inner board of directors—a workable idea!

  The funny thing about decisions based on signs or gut or visions is that they’re usually nothing but noble outs. Just another way to sabotage yourself and keep your bigger life at bay. Beneath the nobility was a deep sense of emotional poverty; I couldn’t afford truthful relationships with humans anymore. I was simply too beat up, too wary, too paranoid about where they would lead.

  I walked in to interview at HSBV, therefore, after the restaurant, after the pawn shop, after the tape cleaning, after the rock carrying, more confident than I’d ever been at an interview before. My tattoo sleeves were just beginning to take shape but still, I felt I had no reason to hide who and what I was. My name was Jackson Galaxy—I liked big jewelry, I wore Elton John–ish glasses, and I had a head full of dreadlocks, dyed every color of the rainbow, with African trade beads and various and sundry other toys laced through them. Take me for my passion, I thought. Take me for my experience volunteering with animals (absolutely invented) and take me because nobody will scoop shit and pressure wash cages and care for the animals in your charge for very, very little money better than I will.