Cat Daddy

by Jackson Galaxy

  Not this again. “Tony, I am clean. How many times do I have to tell you before you believe me? I don’t smoke pot, drink, snort coke, take hallucinogens, drink cough syrup, I don’t do any of that stuff anymore.”

  “Yeah, but you still abuse prescription drugs.”

  “No, actually, I don’t. I take what I’m supposed to take. What is prescribed to me.” I didn’t mention that it was prescribed to me by two different doctors, neither of whom knew about the other.

  “I’m sorry, Jackson. You’re not clean. Find another sponsor.”

  And that hurt, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was going out with Jen, I probably would have quit. But I wanted her to approve of my recovery. She wanted me to have a sponsor, so I met with another potential one. And I don’t even remember his name, because we only met once, and he said, “Come back when you’re off Klonopin.”

  Meanwhile my friends in recovery—especially my friend Karl, who would ultimately become my sponsor, guiding me and keeping me level through every peak and valley since then—all of them were raking me over the coals. They said if I wanted to be clean and sober, not just dry, I had to lead a life of unflinching honesty. So finally, just to shut them all up and show them they were wrong, I went to the doctor and explained what was really going on.

  He had an office very clearly designed to project the fruits of his labor. It was very, very fruitful. He had a massive gently flowing water wall behind him, and the first thing he said, leaning over his desk, separating from his reflective watery background as if he were about to tell me where the Holy Grail was hiding, was, “You’re taking enough Klonopin to kill a rhino.” I couldn’t just stop, he explained, because I would have seizures and die; I needed to step down slowly, but I had to do it immediately.

  I admitted to the doc that for most of the time he had been treating me I had also been an alcoholic and a hopeless dope fiend. Dignified but disgusted, he told me he wasn’t going to sit around and watch me die. He would oversee the step-down, he said; he knew my other doctor and called her to say she couldn’t refill my scrip. The jig was up. His reaction was the mirror I needed to look into, the wall to fall back against. The only thing that has ever saved me in this life has been the walls that I have been backed into. This time it just happened to be watery and backlit.

  I brought the news back to my recovery allies, especially Karl and Jen (who couldn’t stand one another but rallied around me from opposite sides), and their support was unflagging.

  And thank God for that, because getting clean from Klonopin would be like, in Karl’s words of warning, pulling a rebar out of my ass one inch at a time. Every time I stepped down over the next three months, it just fucking hurt, physically and mentally, and in the last three days the pain was unbearable.

  As the step-down came to a close I was going to meetings constantly—the last seventy-two hours before the last pill and the seventy-two hours after were simply the worst days of my life. The pain of withdrawal was bigger than the crazy I had tried to escape ten years prior. The emotions behind the imbalance were just off in a corner, just past my peripheral vision, getting bigger every day. So when I lost access to the “off” switch, the gentle tidal wave turned into a gigantic cold washing machine and kicked the shit out of me. I wanted to be dead. The first twelve hours after Klonopin, I would puke, drink tea, and Jen would put a washcloth on my head and say things like “this too shall pass,” but I didn’t think it ever would. Suddenly my synapses would begin to fire again and I would hallucinate all kinds of waking nightmares. And then I would puke again.

  For weeks afterward I needed to be driven to and from places after dark because of the tracers I was still seeing, the photosensitivity. My sponsors were right. At Karl’s nagging, I reset my clean date, wiping out six months of what I had thought was sobriety, as I began to climb the biggest hill I would ever encounter.

  It was in this state—raw, tender, newly hatched—that I went back to New York three months later to visit my family. My relationship with my parents had deteriorated over the course of my addiction—and the closer to ninety days of true sobriety I got, the closer to the surface my emotions toward them swam, the more irrepressible they became, until I couldn’t tolerate even being near my parents. These new emotions felt like teenage rebellion times forty. They pierced any wall you tried to erect as if it were made of applesauce. It sounds awful but it’s true—the gift of recovery is that you get to experience those fucked-up feelings. I got to feel that things I saw in my parents were in me, too. I was a continuation of them. In this extended moment, that realization affected me constantly, as if I were sewn into the itchiest sweater on earth; I hated the parts of us that were exactly the same. I could no longer play the wronged one; the three of us were all perpetrator and victim alike. I just wanted a simple target at which to point that easiest of emotions, rage. Instead, my confusion made me hate them, myself, the whole world—and that feeling was simply intolerable.

  So I was out to lunch with my cousin one day, swimming in the deep end of these complex, fucked-up feelings, and I found myself screaming. They need to do this, they need to do that, they need to be more of this, they need not to be so much that.

  And my cousin looked at me and said, very innocently, “Jackson, what do you expect from them? They’re in their seventies. Do you really want to change them?”

  “Of course I want to change them!” I said loudly enough that we both looked around to see if I was going to get kicked out of the diner. And as soon as the words came out of my mouth I realized how ridiculous they were. There was nothing I could do to change them. I was powerless over them.

  Any time you prove to an addict that he can’t control the universe, it’s a massive blow. I went almost immediately from being full of rage to being equally full of sadness. I started a decline into depression. A week later, on a hot, muggy, disgusting New York summer day, I went to my brother’s place, because I couldn’t stand being at my parents’ for one more minute, and being there made things even worse, because my brother was in amazing shape. I didn’t exactly want his life, but he had all these things that I knew I was forever removed from, a dream reserved for lighter sheep than I. A great job. A terrific wife who was about to give birth. Stability.

  Feeling like I was watching them from the wrong side of a TV, I felt paranoid. Judged. I left to go back to my parents’ apartment, and as I walked toward the bus stop, that removed vibe just grew until it swallowed me; I felt so far outside of the experience of the people who were walking past me that I couldn’t even imagine what it must be like to live a normal life.

  And when I got to the bus stop, desperate to hunker down into myself for the twenty-block ride to my parents’ place and then just to hibernate there, I realized I didn’t have bus fare.

  And then it started raining.

  It wasn’t enough that my parents had had their fingers on my buttons for years. It wasn’t enough that my brother and his perfect life were right in front of me to show me how deeply I had screwed everything up. Now God was laughing at me. (As an addict I take everything as a sign from God. It was pouring on about eight million people but I was the only one getting wet.)

  I started talking out loud. In all of my years as a drug addict I never talked out loud to myself, but when I got sober I started. “What do you want from me?” I said, to the universe I guess. “What am I supposed to do?” And it wasn’t God, it was the voice of my sponsor and everyone who had been fed up with me saying, “Surrender. Hit your knees, you egomaniacal son of a bitch. Surrender to victory.”

  In a truly desperate attempt not to rip off my clothes and run through the streets screaming until a merciful cop picked me up and gave me seventy-two equally merciful hours in Bellevue, I went through my meager twelve-step toolbox, reciting and responding: The first of the twelve steps is, “We admitted we were powerless over drugs and alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” Right; done. I was unmanageability personified. The sec
ond, “We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Well, of course. This much we know… at this point I’d seen everything through the warped sunglasses of the lower power, so obviously the higher had to be a smarter choice, right? And the third, “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.” This was that moment. Showtime, asshole. What could I lose? I had literally tried every other way. I was so tired. So tired.

  I turned my will and my life over to the universe.

  I hit my knees on the corner of 98th and Broadway and looked up, seriously straining to see the universe through the light-reflected purple muck of the raining Manhattan sky. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I had never prayed in my life. I mean, I had prayed for stuff—I had prayed for sex, I had prayed for drugs, I had prayed for a record contract. Foxhole prayers are easy. Bargaining with the Almighty for an easy way out of a very messy situation. “Please, God, I’m about to get my balls blown off, if you rescue me I’ll become a rabbi.” But this was decidedly different… difficult. I didn’t want anything. I wanted to cry. It had been a while. I wanted to stop being angry. I wanted for this rain to make me clean. I wanted to throw my body into the maternal arms of the universe and have her rock me to sleep.

  Whenever I would overintellectualize recovery, so as not to feel it—from the neck up offered an easier, more familiar out than from the neck down—Karl would tell me, an eye roll not so hidden in his voice, “Jackson, just hit your knees first thing in the morning and last thing at night. You don’t have to pray, really, just do the action. Act as if you are humbled and grateful not to be the master of the universe.” And I did it. I gave up.

  I surrendered.

  I would love to say this was the only moment in my life I had to drop to my knees—the only instance in my life that I pushed myself to the brink and then had to surrender again, but I’ve done it so many times I can’t even count. In nine years I’ve grabbed that steering wheel back and had to let it go again once a day, sometimes ten times a day, sometimes I go a couple of months without doing it. But I surrender every time, because now I know that it feels good to admit that I can’t control the universe.

  When I got back to Boulder, deep in the heart of the vulnerable and the surrendered, observations seemed to become invested with more than detached, “scientific” curiosity. I suddenly felt what I saw.

  It’s 7:00 p.m. in early November. I’ve always been very sensitive to the turning back of the clocks. Early darkness screws me up 100 percent. Now, I love seasons, I love the Colorado winter. But the darkness, man, I’m going to have to fight that sonofabitch for the next four months. I’m not complaining: four consults in a single day feels like I’m on the verge of having an actual job. But I’m so bone-dragging tired. Absolutely nothing about today’s consults was automatic. One after the other where I really had to look for universal guidance, as well as guidance from the cats themselves. Dropping my bag at the door, I fall into some kind of waking, standing coma. Benny walks in, in full “I’m a cat?” bus driver mode. And just like it happened a few weeks ago, after all the overthinking and deflecting, I find myself on my knees in the rain again. Benny has changed.

  Or am I changing?

  Stay with it, Galaxy, don’t think your way out of this particular paper bag. Just let it go….

  I’m so afraid to blink, I’m tearing up. The TV, mindlessly babbling since I always leave it on for the cats, tries to distract me. Just disinvite it to the party… tune it out… I am so afraid to move, afraid this dream will end and drift off into the slate chill of outside. I’m moving but not moving. I see him completely and feel that he sees me. Without the hallucinogens I thought had been providing me with some extraterrestrial insight for all these years, I can do the bullet-dodging, slow-motion dance of human and bullets in The Matrix. Benny is not just a cat who I take care of but a confused, frustrated being who is exactly the same as me. This is the flipside of the same avalanche I just lived through with my parents, I resisted then, as now, the things that made us the same. Now there were just two misfits staring at each other in a funhouse mirror. Resentment doesn’t work. Rage has no seat at the table. Even confusion steps out for a cigarette.

  And the scales fall from my eyes.

  Benny and I are both socially isolated, behaviorally unlubricated, two fingers on the same hand caught in the massive gears. This is what differentiates sympathy from empathy. No matter how much I care for you, it’s not until I recognize me in you and you in me that the veil of gauze is lifted on the world.

  I hit my knees. And then I’m on my ass. The cheap floor of my apartment shakes and Benny’s ears turn 180 degrees away from me. The shame rushes in as the dream rushes out; I can’t believe how selfishly I’ve been seeing him, how I’ve been holding him to human standards, standards that are neither higher nor lower than cat standards but completely irrelevant. Now that my brain is finally free from all the shit I was drowning it in, I see, in the shock of a new connection, how little I’ve truly understood him, and I am filled with horror and shame. All of the time I’ve laughingly dismissed his “bus driver who fell asleep and woke up a cat” looks—he’s shared my life for years and just now I realize the deep level of his frustration and resulting anxiety?

  It would be awfully poetic if I could say I cried like a baby when I saw him walk into the living room at that moment, bus driver to cat. But sobbing, losing myself in the release of sadness, was something that wouldn’t come back to me easily for years. Nevertheless, I misted up and asked him to come to me. It’s a pointless exercise to ask a cat for forgiveness. You do what you do when they do what they do—move on. They scratch the couch, they piss on the carpet? You have no choice—move on. You feel sorrow and shame for the dismissive and overly simplified shapes that you’ve imposed on the animals you revere? No choice…. Not that this stopped me. As much as he hated it, I held him tightly. This is one last moment just for me, bud, I thought. The rest will be yours.

  At that moment, once again, I started over. There was no space left for embarrassment, just rediscovery and reinvention. I began to approach him as the cat he was, not as a differently shaped human, and he responded. In the days that followed, I took it back to the start and simply followed him. I watched every tic, put it in the context of this new being that I felt I had just met, building for him a story that matched his outside. It was just like it had been when I was studying acting—I asked questions: What is the inner life of this cat? What happened in the moments before and after he makes contact with me? Where is he going? What has he left? Why does he lead with his chest and why does he slump his shoulders?

  Once again, from all the clues I gathered, I made up a workable story, one that I could re-create in myself. I settled on a being, a character out of an Oliver Sacks book, who, every time he woke up, had to be reassured who he was, that he belonged, and that he knew how to the operate the complex machinery that made up a cat. I did this through my communications with Benny as well as adjusting his physical environment—even more than before, “sameness” was the order of the day. And then he needed to figure out how to claim and settle into his territory from day to day. I used one specific treat that he enjoyed to guide him from socially significant spot to spot. We did it the same way every day. Each meal would be placed identically; I would scoop boxes and keep the same amount of litter. This ritualistic stability included his relationship with me and Velouria. I would invite him up to the bed at night to displace Velouria. I felt it was good for both of them, to have a time-sharing arrangement revolving around the territorial throne, the bed. I just had to keep reminding him every night that come twenty minutes after lights out, after she had chest time with me, he could come around and claim it. She would take up residence at the far end of the king-size bed, and another day of retraining a cat amnesiac would come to a close.

  Believe it or not, this complicated-sounding routine was suddenly second nature to m
e. Given the merciful space and time that my new apartment/laboratory presented, my observational skills became just that much sharper. Just as the early experiments with Cat, I Love You proved to be sort of a Rosetta Stone into the inner world of cats, Benny brought that sense of discovery to life. Everything I tried on him and Velouria, I brought back to the cats I worked with. I found a world of similarities, and just as important, a new stillness inside me—I could breathe through the process, and just wait for each cat’s next move.With Benny, I just had to give his behaviors a context that worked for me, a picture my actor self could inhabit or my artist self could paint, and we were off to the races. And the more I did this, the more I was able to work with all cats, not just him, on their level and not on mine. This is what I do when I work with your cat today. I gather clues to create a life story; then I give you that story infused with the lessons of Cat Mojo 101 so you can understand your cat’s behavior from her perspective instead of yours. That’s when bonds deepen and problems are given the space to untangle.

  This was what my brain and emotions coming back to life allowed me to do—I could be present in the moment for an animal who needed me to be present in the moment.

  The problem is that addicts have a mortal fear of being present in the moment.

  Forgive and Move On

  Cats have a short-term attention span of less than three seconds. This in itself makes the concept of discipline a farce. Here’s how to deal with troublesome behavior:

  In the moment: Count to ten, clean up, forgive and move on. Anything else you do right now will erode the bond between you and your cat.

  Moving forward: Develop a long-term behavioral action plan informed by past moments of transgression.