by Laura Clery
I walked out of the animal shelter with one kitten in each palm. Later I found out that Stephen doesn’t even like cats. He had one when he was little and it was an angry little fucker that would bite and scratch him all the time. So he was a little afraid of them. He just wanted me to come over all the time and he was willing to do anything to make that happen. Which is sweet, but also totally insane. Suddenly he was stuck with two of them running around his apartment, peeing on everything, and climbing into his guitar amp. He didn’t even think about the fact that he would be stuck with these cats forever if our relationship didn’t work out.
But, bygones, because we had them now! We named the gray one Allen after my grandfather. Totally kidding—that would actually make sense. Our actual nonsense reason was that naming a cat “Allen” just made us both laugh really hard.
The skittish black-and-white one, though, we did name after someone we knew. We decided to call her Maggie, after my childhood best friend (who, by the way, is still very much a part of my life). When I posted a picture of Maggie (the cat) on Instagram with her name as the caption, I got a text from Maggie (the human) that just said: “Really, Laura?”
Now, my conversations with Stephen about Maggie go like this:
“Oh God, Maggie is pissing everywhere again.”
“Cat or human?”
“Cat, but perhaps human as well. I haven’t checked in with her this week.” It’s a valid question, seeing how much Maggie and I peed in public as kids.
The way the cats were at the shelter pretty much stayed the same as their whole personalities developed. Allen was fearless, loving, and kind; and Maggie constantly thought she was going to get murdered. Maggie sort of has the traits of an untreated alcoholic. She’ll steal Allen’s food and eat all of it, but she never knows when enough is enough. And just like an alcoholic . . . Maggie eventually hit her rock bottom.
When Stephen and I moved from the one-bedroom apartment to the two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica, the cats were so upset. Cats HATE moving. They hate moving more than they hate water. It just makes no sense to them. Why leave your home for a new home where you don’t know where all the footholds are and you have to relearn how to climb into all the drawers? I actually agree with them: moving sucks.
Maggie was stalking around all wide eyed and scared. As soon as we got settled in, she made a break for it. I think she wanted to find the old apartment, her REAL home. Two days passed and I was so worried. She wasn’t familiar with these streets. She didn’t know how to come back. Stephen, on the other hand, was fully convinced that she was dead. “Well, the circle of life,” he’d said with a shrug.
Allen would go out to look for her. He’d cry out here and there, but after a while he just accepted the reality that she was gone. Animals are great teachers in that way; they get on with life quickly.
I, however, was not ready to get on with my life. One week turned into two, two turned into three, and eventually she had been gone a whole month. Every day, I would go to our local animal rescue, asking if anyone had seen a skittish black-and-white cat.
“No, sorry.”
And then again: “No, sorry.”
And then: “No, Laura, sorry. We just got an orange one in though. His name is Hamilton. Want to take a look?”
The employee at the shelter, Craig, was a skinny boy who always wore the same baggy shelter-volunteer T-shirt. The next time I ran into the rescue, Craig was sweeping the floor. He looked up and automatically said, “She’s not here, Laura.”
“But did you look??”
“Yes. It’s my job to look! I’m always looking! Laura, cats don’t come back home after a month.”
No! This wasn’t true! Maggie was my freaked-out, skittish, black-and-white CHILD. She was not gone.
“Your mom doesn’t come back home after a month!”
“What?”
“YOUR MOM—I don’t know . . . I’m sorry.”
Craig put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay. Grief is difficult.”
“Your mom’s difficult,” I whispered. But he heard me. And then demanded I get the fuck out of his shelter.
I wasn’t about to give up hope, though. One night at around four a.m., I heard a cry from outside my window. It wasn’t so much a cry as a horrified meow. I ran out onto the balcony and there she was, looking like she had just stepped off the battlefield. She had scaled up the wall to the second story of the building and climbed over our balcony. She was wheezing! CATS DON’T WHEEZE.
I hurriedly pulled her inside and took a look at her in the light. This black-and-white cat was now completely black. She was covered in dirt and so skinny. She was crying. I put a bowl of food in front of her and she dove into it, eating as fast as she could and crying at the same time. And then she would throw it all up. We’ve all been there, am I right? No? Anybody?
She repeated this for an intense ten minutes: eating, crying, throwing up, crying, eating again. It must have been a while since she had eaten, because her body just wouldn’t accept food. When she was done, I placed her in the sink and washed her fur. On a normal day, she would have scratched my face off if I tried to bathe her, but Maggie was so dirty and exhausted that she just accepted it.
The next day we took her to the veterinarian (with a short pit stop at the shelter to prove to Craig that miracles do happen). The vet checked her out and found nothing wrong with her except a urinary tract infection. Really Maggie, a UTI? Must have been living it up in the great outdoors.
Since then, Maggie has never tried to get out again. She’s got some heavy PTSD from whatever happened out there. It was like she went on this crazy month-long binge, hit rock bottom, and won’t ever do it again. It’s just incredible that she found her way back.
Maggie and Allen feel like my spiritual teachers sometimes. Allen goes through life leading with love, and Maggie leads with fear. I learned this from reading A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson, which says that we are constantly in a state of either love or fear, and these states control the choices we make and the way we live. This idea really helped me in early sobriety because I used to be so fear-driven. I was hindered by this self-seeking fear that I was going to lose what I had or not get what I wanted. Then I read this book and realized that I could choose to lead with love and walk through my fear. I chose to start looking at life through a loving, giving lens, asking every day what I could give rather than what I could get. I wanted to know what my life would look like if I focused on tolerance and forgiveness. The answers are right in front of me in the form of Maggie and Allen. I’d either be happily basking in the sun and getting belly rubs from everyone around me or vomiting and crying next to my food bowl at four in the morning.
Then there’s our one-eyed pug, Oliver. I have to preface this with the fact that there is nothing spiritual about Oliver.
Three years after we got married, Stephen would hint that he wanted a dog by randomly texting me dog pictures. Some guys send dick pics, Stephen sends dog pics. That turned into full-on links to dog profiles on adoption websites. And that turned into pulling me into animal shelters to “just peruse.”
Dogs are a huge responsibility that I didn’t know if we were ready for. We already had Maggie and Allen, and although they were both very low-maintenance pets, another pet just felt like a lot. One morning we went out for coffee, and as we were walking back to the car, we saw a pug rescue nearby. Stephen’s face lit up.
“Let’s just look,” he said while hopping around like a kid on sugar.
“If we go in, we’re going to walk out of there with like ten pugs!”
“No, no, let’s just look! I can just look!”
Yeah right, but I said okay and we walked inside. And then . . . I saw them. Just tons of ugly, misfit pugs. Pugs are pretty weird-looking to begin with, but since this was a rescue, these ones were next-level funky-looking. Which is to say they were amazing and I WANTED THEM ALL.
Stephen went off on his own with so much exuberance it was like his
dreams were coming true. I strolled around and then saw him. The One.
He was facing a wall, not moving, except for some nervous twitching. I picked him up and he started foaming at the mouth. I think that means he likes me? He had only one eye, which hopefully explained the staring at the wall. He was super skinny. The dog slipped through my hands a little; he was . . . gooey. Did something spill on him? I took a closer look at his skin and saw that it was irritated, oozing pus and goo. He was fucking disgusting.
From across the room, I saw Stephen holding one pug in each hand.
“Laura, look at these!” He had a healthy-looking black one, replete with two eyes, and a cute beige one, also with two eyes.
“Look at this one!” I turned the gooey pug around to face Stephen.
“JESUS!” Stephen startled at the sight of him. He composed himself and asked, “Are you sure that is a dog?”
“He is more dog than you’ll ever be,” I lashed out. The dog’s mouth foam dripped onto my hand.
“Well at least he’s . . . alive, isn’t he?”
“He’s hanging on! Let’s take him home.”
Stephen’s joy at getting a dog quickly surpassed his disgust at my choice of a gooey, one-eyed pug. We spoke to the employee about taking him home. She frowned. “I don’t think you want that one. He can’t, um . . . he can’t see very well.”
“Yes, we want him,” I interjected before Stephen could express any doubts.
The employee picked up another dog. “Have you seen Kathy? Just take her for a spin. Kathy is just awesome. So smart, SO funny. She LOVES to watch TV. Her fav show is Judge Judy. Just don’t even flip the channel while it’s on or she’ll bite your fucking face off.”
I just wanted the goo dog. Who else was going to rescue the pug facing the wall? We signed the paperwork to take home our new dog. We named him Oliver.
We headed to his foster mom’s house to go pick him up, and Oliver was itching his goo-skin like crazy. His foster mom was so friendly and clearly drunk, so when I asked her why he was itching so much, she said, “Oh, he’s just crazy.”
I looked down at Oliver, who was facing a wall again. “Can he see?”
She took another sip from her “coffee” mug. “Completely. That one eye really does the job. He’s just crazy!”
We brought him home and put him in the living room, but he kept bumping into stuff. I looked at Stephen, worried. “I feel . . . like that eye doesn’t work.”
We took him to the vet to get his eyes checked out and learned that he was 100% blind. Also he’s allergic to everything. Okay, that makes sense! We found out that in his last home, the owners kept him in a dark garage and neglected him. With so much time in the dark, he slowly lost his vision. After he became completely blind, he bumped into a sharp object that pierced his eye. The owners checked on him days later, after it had gotten infected and it was too late to save the eye.
Living with Oliver had really changed my perception of dogs. Now when I see a fully working, two-eyed dog that can do things like find his water bowl and not hit his head on everything, I’m just so impressed. What else can you do, work the front desk at a gym? All of the people who had come in contact with Oliver told us he would never do things like a normal dog. He would never be able to go on walks, or play fetch, or poop in the right spots.
I didn’t want anyone to limit Oliver! This dog was going to learn to play fetch. I threw his favorite toy and he would sniff around the living room trying to find it. A minute passed . . . then five . . . then ten. By then I had forgotten we were playing and turned on the TV. And then . . . squeak squeak! He had found it! When Oliver successfully fetches his toy . . . it’s like he’s won the Olympics. It’s like WE won the Olympics.
One day I was working upstairs and heard Oliver crying from the floor below. I came out to see him trapped on the first step of our staircase. He was too scared to go up, and too scared to jump down. I picked him up and brought him upstairs with me.
The next day I came out to the stairs to see Oliver on the third step, crying.
The next day he was on the FIFTH step before he started crying. Would our fantastic blind dog beat the odds and be able to climb a whole staircase?
The answer is yes. He did it once. And then he might have gotten overwhelmed when I screamed for ten minutes, “WHO’S A GOOD BOY?” After that, he never tried again, but who needs mobility when you can just get airlifted up the stairs by humans?
Oliver is a real rags-to-riches story. He was a rescue, and now he has forty-thousand followers on Instagram telling him what a good boy he is every minute of every day.
I don’t know if he can hear me anymore. We used to clap and then he could find us, but now he doesn’t really respond to sounds.
That’s okay. He still has normal dog experiences like going for walks (we carry him around in a bag because he is too scared to walk) and visiting dog parks (he sits in the center of the field feeling overwhelmed and foaming at the mouth) and playing with Allen and Maggie (Maggie hides from him and Allen boxes him in the face and Oliver gets scared because he can’t see where the blows are coming from).
If I was still drinking and using, I would never have thought to rescue an animal. I never wanted to take care of any being other than myself. It was always me first—I needed to be able to do what I wanted when I wanted to. The biggest part of my sobriety was changing from self-seeking to being of service to others. “Others” includes carrying my very special Oliver to his water bowl as often as he needs. I’ve gotten to experience so much joy living with these animals. They’re my goofy-looking family of misfits, and I wouldn’t change them for the world.
Sometimes I look at them and I feel so lucky. I’m lucky I found Stephen. I’m lucky he spontaneously agreed to cats. I’m lucky Oliver isn’t gooey anymore and I can take good care of him and all his needs. All of these things feel like the gifts of sobriety to me; reminders of why I’m so happy to be who I’ve become.
CHAPTER 11
Walking Through Fear
I’m a completely rational person. Well, okay, I am NOW. But . . . certain things just get to me. Before I started creating my own content, I was a working actor, supporting myself solely by booking jobs. I didn’t give myself a plan B, and that worked. But . . . I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I was auditioning all the time, I’d book a pilot and it wouldn’t get picked up, I’d get a call back and then they’d offer the role to someone else. It was this constant anxiety and stress and lack of control over my career.
When I booked a role, I’d feel this urge for a more interesting character to dig into. I’d been acting so long, every character felt like repetition. I wanted better lines and more complexity, but you know what? Who cares! Give me another airhead model to play because THAT’S APPARENTLY ALL I CAN DO.
See? The grind was getting to me.
I wanted so badly to be on the next Friends, to be the next Lisa Kudrow. I got so angry I wasn’t on a sitcom that I did not want sitcoms on in the house.
Stephen loves sitcoms though. So . . . he had to watch them secretly in the bathroom. My eyes would narrow if I were getting dressed in the bedroom and could hear the faint sounds of . . . “IS THAT A LAUGH TRACK?”
“What? No! It’s just fetish porn!”
I’d burst into the bathroom and snatch the iPad from his hands. “The IT Crowd, Stephen?!”
“I’m so sorry. Chris O’Dowd just gets me.”
I was SO angry I wasn’t on a show like that, that I had to GO FOR A TWENTY-TWO-MINUTE WALK.
After one of these meltdowns, Stephen came home with a camera. He handed it to me. “You have characters. You can write. Create your own stuff. Post videos on YouTube. Think of your own series and shoot it.”
Stephen was so supportive of me. That, or he wanted to watch his sitcoms in peace. Either way, he was one of the first people in my ear saying, “You can do this.” He was a huge inspiration for me. But also, no. How could I post videos of myself online? That was terrifyin
g. And it didn’t seem like a “real” path to my goals. How was making videos going to get me on the next Friends?
I was so tired of the audition grind, and I had been for a long time. Years earlier, I decided to try stand-up. I knew I wanted to write and be a creator, and stand-up was the only way I knew of doing this. I was around twenty years old and I was a total noob. I had no idea which open mic to go to, so I hopped on the computer and googled BEST COMEDY OPEN MIC.
The first result was for The Comedy Store on Sunset. That sounds good, right? Little did I know that The Comedy Store is NOT where first-time stand-ups go. It’s where already-famous stand-ups go to surprise their fans. It’s where veterans go to try out their new material. It’s not—I repeat—NOT a gentle crowd. New comedians are supposed to go deep into the Valley to Joe’s Café and Check-Cashing Open Mic or something like that. But nope, twenty-year-old, never-done-stand-up-before Laura Clery went to The Comedy Store. To make matters worse, I had no idea what my comedic voice was at the time. I tried really hard to fit into what I thought female comedians had to be—basically Janeane Garofalo. I wore thick-rimmed glasses and spoke in a really monotone, deadpan voice. It was so not me: I was blonde and overly animated.
I got up on the stage and looked out at the faces in the audience. They were looking for any reason in the world not to laugh. My sister Colleen and her friend Rebecca were the only smiling faces. I cleared my throat awkwardly and told a very stupid story.
“How many people here hate getting haircuts? Show of hands. No one? One person right there, great.”
I tried to be very cool, but I was very not cool. I got through the set as fast as I could. To say I bombed would be an understatement. It was Pearl Harbor. I finished my set to a few halfhearted cheers from Colleen and Rebecca and I skulked off the stage in shame. The emcee came onstage after me, took the mic, and pointed to me.
“That was Laura Clery! Looks she’s a ten, comedy she’s a two!”
Colleen and Rebecca were cringing so hard in the audience. We all ditched the rest of the show. I don’t remember the rest of that night because I went home and drank it all away. I was so scarred from that experience that I didn’t try stand-up again for years.