Cat Daddy Read online

  Audrey was the shelter manager. She was knowledgeable, driven but laid back, and hotter than July. I remember having one of those out-of-body events where I marveled that not only wasn’t I nervous to be interviewing for this job, but I was flirting. Not overtly, not butterfly collar, gold chain, and cheap cologne, but just subtle enough to just make it seem like I was taken—but charmed.

  When you’re absolutely, positively convinced about the rightness of a fit, armed with the knowledge that the universe plopped you down like a UFO in Roswell for the sole purpose of making cosmic puzzle pieces seamlessly join together, you don’t have to worry about coming off like a used-car salesman. As we spoke, there was never a need for anything with the subtext of “So, what do I have to do to get you into this beauty today?” while gesturing toward what used to be a beat-up 1974 Monte Carlo. When Audrey asked me if I had experience in a shelter setting, I just began to improvise a complete lie about my volunteer time at a New York shelter. I didn’t think about Audrey doing her due diligence and calling; I was going to leave so little doubt that she would immediately skip the formalities and promote me to vice president.

  “Do you have experience with aggressive animals?”

  I pointed to my arms—imaginary points already covered in tattoos—“See this one? Akita mix. Kind of scary. But this one,” I winced as I showed a group of freckles near my left wrist, “this really hurt. Believe it or not, a kitten. I’ll take big-dog bite any day of the week.”

  “Agreed!” Audrey added emphatically.

  Ever have a dream where you’re walking, strutting almost, and you look down and you’re on a tightrope? Suddenly then, you fight your balance with the 50/50 shot that you’ll fall off. Well, in this lucid dream, I just refused to look at my feet, and nothing then affected my purpose, my strut, my vision of myself as Travolta on the Brooklyn streets in the opening moments of Saturday Night Fever. I worked the living shit out of that interview, even through the requisite warnings.

  Adopt, Don’t Buy

  Approximately four million cats and dogs will die in U.S. shelters this year. We’ve come so far by emphasizing the spay-and-neuter message, but we should be adopting the ones who need us instead of literally manufacturing more.

  While approximately 30 percent of the animals that enter shelters are purebred, we as a culture still support mass breeders, commonly referred to as puppy and kitten mills.

  We have two choices—to accept and embrace our role as guardians to animals or perpetuate a culture that deems them disposable. There simply is no in between.

  “Jackson, we all are responsible for euthanasia here. I can’t hire you if you are not willing to do that job.”

  “Of course—that’s the only way it could be done. I can’t imagine just shoveling that burden off onto one person. It’s not fair, right?”

  “So you’re OK?”

  “OK is relative. If I was completely OK with it, and I were you, I’d run the other way. But I get it, and with your help I’ll get through it.” This at least, by the way, was absolutely no line of bullshit. It was just projecting what it would maybe feel like. Audrey was giving me the numbers. At this point, in the early ’90s, ten to twelve million animals were being killed in shelters every year. There were simply not enough homes. A no-kill world was not even an imaginable idea at this point to most, much less a workable goal, as it is today. Our job was to educate the public, push the spay/neuter message as hard as we could, and be there for the unfortunates. While we euthanized them. And that’s what I told her.

  “Animals come in here horribly abused and so traumatized that we can’t save them.”

  I nodded. I swallowed hard as I tried to form words, an embarrassing nervous tic left over from a thirteen-year-old’s first exposure to a large audience.

  “You will be responsible for loading and emptying the crematory.”

  Again, a slow, wordless assent.

  “You will have to assist or perform euthanasia at the owners’ request with them present.”

  And then there was that hard-swallow response again. This was maybe the only time I looked at my feet on the tightrope that day; I was genuinely scared that I would have to try to find a vein while comforting both animal and human. It was hard to continue my Zelig-like projection into this tableau. I tried, though, as I sat there fumbling for a confident response.

  “I’ll be sort of mentored into this role?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Until you can do it with relative ease, we don’t want the guardian completely stressed out while you sweat the job.”

  “Phew. Good. No problem, then.”

  Audrey was fishing for bigger cracks in my good intentions. There must have been a flood of applicants like me during her tenure, inexperienced yet seemingly committed, who wound up folding like a cheap umbrella in a nor’easter. I, however, refused to give in, even though there were definitely moments where my fight or flight instinct had me out the door of that conference room and onto the street.

  Ironically, it was the presence of the shelter mascot, a cat named Cheeks (so called because of his tailless status), that brought my blood pressure to a manageable place when Audrey’s probing got me sweating. I would touch him as he paraded around the white laminated tabletop, cool to the touch in the summer heat, and he would just flop over, diffusing any tension dangling in the air.

  At the end of any one of these moments, Audrey would ask, earnestly, “Are you OK with that?”

  “I’m OK. I’m in. I want to be of service.” And that was the truth, surprising the shit out of me as it came out of my mouth. What I couldn’t see then was that, underneath the layers of shrinkwrap in which I’d covered myself, something in me really did want to experience life and serve someone else.

  After an hour, the deal was all but sealed; Audrey took me on a tour of the building. While we were outside in the barnyard, looking at the pond, I asked when they were making a final decision; she said, verbally winking, “Oh, later today, I’m sure.”

  I went home knowing that my life had entered a new phase. This one didn’t have the same “cool, I’ve got some cash coming in, rent and dealer will be paid” vibe of the other jobs. I just knew that there would be an actual emotional investment, and, despite intermittent spasms of fear, I was cool with it. The animals I had just visited, the dogs who licked my fingers through the bars, through the din of the adoption area, shrill barking echoes starting as one dog saw me, with the others falling like dominoes, the cats staring out from 2′ × 2′ cages assessing the threat level—all of them, I found instantly, speaking to me… I was still seeing them all as I drove home and, as I later told the people gathered in my house, I felt needed, I felt the call to service, and that felt good. It would save me. At any given time, there were up to a dozen people in our living room, band members and others. I was the elder statesman of the bunch. Passing the bong around the tribe, gathered nightly in a circle on our floor, serious as any council of elders, I knew everyone could feel it. My intent, my focus, my relief at finding a purpose heated up that room like a solar panel.

  And then Audrey called me to tell me that I hadn’t gotten the job.

  “Really.”

  And there was zero sarcasm in that question; it wasn’t even a question. I was simply stunned.

  “Really?”

  Usually I would have internally clocked out at that point, but I just couldn’t. I was getting pissed. “I must have read that interview completely wrong.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Well, I…” My face was flushing an ugly red from the combination of anger and embarrassment at the thought of holding court, cross-legged like a big dumb Buddha, telling my friends that my life had taken a dramatic turn.

  “No. Take my word for it. You didn’t. We just need to go in a different direction.”

  “Which… um… direction… would that be?”

  Diplomatic pause, measuring what to say that wouldn’t lead to an HR nightmare. “I’m sorry, Jackson. I
hope you apply again.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Me, too… umm….”

  Click.

  What the living fuck had just happened?

  I looked at the receiver and hung it up as if it were radioactive. I immediately felt concussed, sore, nauseated, and radically depressed.

  I wandered semiconsciously around the house; up the stairs looking for a roommate, or drugs, or a roommate with drugs. Funny thing was that I had just left about nine people and nine cats sitting in the living room, downstairs, thirty-six eyeballs silently following my movements. When they saw me, nobody asked, because they all knew something really unfortunate had just bitch slapped me.

  “Screw HSBV,” I thought. “If they don’t know the best thing that ever came their way happens to be a gift in wrapping they didn’t like, then they don’t deserve me.” I was always a masterful self-saboteur/suffering artist. I would write a hit single and then stretch it out so it was thirteen minutes long, taking an amazingly catchy verse, chorus, and bridge and adding a goiter of a three-minute monologue that I would absolutely refuse to cut. Take me, all of me, or none of me.

  I’m not sure when exactly I found out that it was my dreadlocks that cost me that job, but I got confirmation from the inside. Not getting to join those people and those animals in that organization took me beyond a place of just pissed off; I went on a serious bender. I was dangerously loaded for weeks. I had recently discovered a new cocktail: Klonopin (my antianxiety med) mixed with weed, cough syrup, mushrooms, and antidepressants. It was a crazy, hallucinogenic, totally mindless world to inhabit, taking me from amped to drooling in a predictable daylong sweep. I started “seeing” a girl, the sad memory of whom has burned through that particular blackout to live with me today (although her name is blessedly gone). We drank, snorted, popped anything we could find and, at some point in the night, had a few bumps of “break glass in case of emergency” coke so we could fool around without falling asleep midway through. We flailed in slow motion and kissed, our lips missing each other, kissing teeth or chin, laughing awkwardly but not self-consciously. The point of the black hole we created was to lose all sense of self while with another person so you didn’t feel like crying in the middle of it. If I could have woken up just for a minute, I probably would have recognized that here was the point when “partying” became a collection of desperate measures, like trying to bail out a sinking boat with a jelly jar.

  But I didn’t wake up; I relied on the universe to take care of me, to not let me die.

  For most of my life I have seen myself as eggshell-like, ill-prepared to deal with the gentle rinse, let alone the spin cycle. Others saw me, they repeatedly told me, as “oversensitive.” I walked around for years like I was about to witness a car crash. When I was a child, my maternal grandmother, briefly a vaudeville performer and the only other person in my family with an artistic bone in her body (except rhythm—my parents met at a dance club and transcended their language barrier with some dance-floor-clearing moves), liked to tell me the story about how on the first night of her honeymoon in Niagara Falls she woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and shook my grandfather awake. “Cy!” she yelled, gathering their belongings, “We have to leave right now!” And they did. He knew better, even as a newlywed, than to argue with her. And their hotel burned down to the ground later that night. She would tell me that we were made of the same psychic material—she could see it in me. (She was right in more ways than one; she was an addict and died of lung cancer from smoking. The last time I ever saw her in her hospital bed, she touched my face and said, “Everyone’s going to try to get you to quit smoking, honey. Don’t do it!”)

  Although this oversensitivity jangled my nerves 24/7, it also created an incredibly invested sense of wonder in the human and animal condition. It made me almost predetermined to be an artist and not, say, a CPA. There were things I knew about you by watching you walk, watching your hips move from across Broadway.

  And then one day my Hungarian-born father brought home this old Motorola record player, a big tweed box; you opened the front speakers like a book and put records on the turntable in the middle. He had gone to the nickel bin at the bookstore and picked up random records, and I was completely hypnotized. It didn’t even matter what the songs were. Of course once I discovered other 45s, my first being the Jackson 5’s version of “Rockin’ Robin,” I was hopelessly lost in music. My parents were devotees of doo-wop and I absorbed and regurgitated everyone from Dion to the Shirelles. I would put on a show every night for them consisting of one song—usually “Chantilly Lace” by the Big Bopper, complete with phone in hand as the song starts with a ring and that lush baritone: “Hellooo Baby!” I now knew, before I hit adolescence, what my life would be. Without the trappings of planning, without the trappings of worrying about success, without the trappings of even thinking about flying too high and having my wings clipped or any of that, I understood that I would die with that Motorola around my neck.

  As a singer (and, for that matter, as a writer, actor, and inveterate flirt), the oversensitive energy my grandmother saw in me served me well, because I could channel it into something useful. (It didn’t hurt that my “something useful” came with the toy surprise of being able to yell at the top of my lungs. I have always been scared of shouting in real life. One of the reasons I walked away from acting and embraced performance art was that I was continually typecast as a raving lunatic. But as a singer, I like to think, I exploded the “sensitive singer/songwriter” stereotype into a million bloody little Dan Fogelberg–shaped pieces. Background music I have never been.)

  My life as a performer provided me with constant access to the feeling of high. I stepped onstage for the first time when I was not even a teenager. It was home, immediately. All of the frustration, the self-consciousness I felt walking through the rest of the world just faded away, ironically, when I stepped into the spotlight. My mom used to tell me a funny story about how I would walk down the street with her, decked out in Day-Glo colors, huge earrings hanging to my shoulders, glaring at everyone passing, and wondering loudly what they were staring at.

  Once I discovered the guitar, I discovered songwriting. They were almost simultaneous. And once I discovered songwriting, I had to play the songs for people. I didn’t know that it had a name, but I took to busking on the streets of Manhattan. Money dropped in the case was a nice side effect, but, more important, I needed that urban version of white noise in order to concentrate. The attention I got was immediate. My observational skills got very sharp early, then sharper through college and acting grad school as I took theater into my embrace along with music. Whether it was my initial in—which was writing scores for productions—or then, as I obviously wasn’t happy behind the scenes, acting, the methods, the questions asked, were the same. I would go to the park and watch people and ask: What is the inner life of these people? What happened in the moments before and after they make contact with me? Where are they going? Who have they left at home? Why does he lead with his chest and why does she slump her shoulders? From all the clues I gathered, I would make up a story that I could re-create in myself. It was all about investing your imagination in the story you created around these people (or, later, cats), and filling in the blanks believably and with high stakes.

  It wasn’t too long until I found other things that could bring the feeling of buzz and home without being onstage. I discovered weed soon after cigarettes, around the time I turned fourteen. Drink was actually always a distant second to other things, but it was more readily available. I’ll leave out the boring and all-too-familiar story about what, where, and how; suffice it to say that there wasn’t a buzz that I didn’t want more of. The way young girls have dreams about losing their virginity to the man who would be the love of their lives, I had dreams about mushrooms, LSD, peyote. I would wake up with my heart beating as if I had just had a wet dream. Which, I suppose, I had.

  Yeah, I was that kid. Everything tasted like more.

&nb
sp; I kept my demons well dressed for quite a while. I was always a high-functioning addict. I didn’t miss work, I didn’t miss school. I kept writing music at a high level and never flaked on a gig. I held together various relationships, some with normies and some with fellow partiers. I finished college not as bad off as some friends, and I made it through grad school without too many hitches (unless you count my playwright classmates’ always casting me as psychopaths a hitch).

  However, by the time I moved to Boulder to be an artist and—finally!—a full-time singer/songwriter, I began to feel unsteady, glancing at my feet on the tightrope I had been walking for years. As a functioning adult, oversensitive served me not at all. I just never had the right amount of boundary to get through the world. Blessing and curse, right?

  So many artist/addicts tell the same story: We used drugs to help us reach new creative heights and to keep the high of being onstage alive during the more ordinary hours of the day. We also needed to shut the lights off at some point. Somewhere along that path, though, we lost sight and turned our chemical spirit guides into sledgehammers. Not to fall into the trap of artistic cliché, but you do have to access some deep, dark and unknown shit in order to get to the truth, to get from the point of looking through the cosmic windows of understanding to the point of pushing through them. And sometimes, before pulling the bullet out of your shoulder, you want an anesthetic shot. Inevitably, it becomes easier to be proactive about the shot. Bad things, things that are just too much to process or that you don’t have the tools for, could be right around the corner—so why not be prepared for them ahead of time by staying numb? It’s like the cat who patrols his home nervously and sprays the corners by the windows and doors. He figures that doing this is keeping the “outsiders” from invading, so he’d better just do it even though they haven’t been coming around. Just in case they do, they’ll know who this piece of the world belongs to.