Reveal the Best of Me

In early summer ’07, my closest friends left town without saying goodbye. There’s a story behind this, the lack of parting salutations, but I didn’t hear it for two years. The short version: one of these friends, the wife in a married pair, told her husband and, apparently, everyone else she knew that I’d been stealing not only money from her, but her medication for chronic back pain. Three different groups of people, none of whom knew or now know each other, eventually told me this story, several admitting that they’d kept it from me because first, they didn’t buy it, but primarily because they suspected I’d react with a discomfiting level of rage which might end in aneurysm.[1]

For the record, the rumor wasn’t true—I’d never stolen so much as a smoke from them. Having heard that this woman’s since been chucked from a number of jobs on suspicion of theft, best I can figure is that she was gobbling her own pills too fast, dropping joint-checking account cash on more pills to cover it up, and to justify the financial hemorrhaging, she decided that I was the perfect patsy—I’d never made any secret of the fact that I indulged in a pill or three,[2] the same way most folks might sip a highball or joint, just home from work.[3] Though I discovered Vicodin in a legitimate effort to ease the fairly constant pain in my knees—probably from years of table-waiting—I quickly discovered that the love buzz I got from it made the analgesic effect just an ancillary benefit.[4] Before giving in and getting a shrink, before prescribed antidepressants and anxiolytics, the stuff did wonders for me, made me feel like I was being hugged.[5] Hell, it made me friendly.

In February, I’d had an engagement suddenly break off. Actually, “suddenly” doesn’t cover it: One night, my fiancée called “sprawl privilege”—a term we’d developed for those nights when one of us (nothing personal) just really wanted a bed to ourselves. We’d both called for it before, but in this case, the next day she disappeared. We hadn’t been fighting. With some effort, I was able to establish that she wasn’t dead, but still it was about two weeks before I got some face time. She’d been boning up for medical school and said in a text message that, after what had been a busy work week and the frenzy of the GREs, she needed a few days’ space; I didn’t want to be “that guy”: suffocating, smothering her; storming in on her at work. I hate that guy; everyone hates that guy. So I waited patiently as long as I could. When we met face-to-face —yes, inevitably on the fourteenth—there was little explanation. None, really. Just an affirmation of what I already knew. She passed the ring back, said, “I can’t,” then handed me a sack of those pretty little pills and said, as I tried to cry dignifiedly,[6] “Hey, these might help.”

They didn’t hurt. Or rather, they did: between occasional fistfuls and Johnnie Walker’s Red Label, I managed to wake in a puddle of puke—not hot vomit, but cold, coagulated, stinking puke—two times that spring, discovering in each instance that I’d been unconscious a day. Give or take. Brain damage? Maybe. Anyone’s guess, really. I try not to think about it.[7]

Years later, I heard that during those “few days’ space” my fiancée discovered cocaine and, by the time she returned the ring, she had habit on par with Rick James and was banging her way through the Rochester dealers’ scene. Enough people (who didn’t and don’t know each other) told me this that I didn’t and don’t have much choice but to believe it.

But, like I said, I didn’t know any of this then: the friend-wife’s tale, the fiancée’s move from MCATs to measuring eight balls. ’Til late 2008, all I knew was that everyone in my life, every regular presence, had quit calling me back. These were friends so close, they’d called me family, and a girl who was supposed to become just that: family. Apparently, I was so fundamentally loathsome that, without effort, I was able to alienate everyone within six months.[8] And—perhaps because of the dad who resented me from conception, as he’d had himself a vasectomy (botched, obviously), and who begged unsuccessfully to end the pregnancy, then took off right quick after I arrived, before I formed any memory of the man[9]—I have some abandonment issues. The first half of aught-seven turned into quite the bender: I slept in a restaurant where I’d been accidentally left and was woken by cops when, rolling from a booth to the floor, I set off the alarm; I passed out behind a dumpster[10]; I gained a good thirty pounds, and either slept through whole days or not at all. And there were those pesky ODs.

Yes, by the time of everyone’s exodus, I would have been the perfect patsy—and I’d certainly come up with more inventive lies a decade back, trying to hide a killer coke habit. So they bolted without saying goodbye, my friends. The married pair and the other spare, the fourth wheel[11] who used to keep me company and run with the three of us.

By July, I was back in a dismal and familiar hole: my depressive low, where I start shopping the sporting goods section of Dick’s or the back desk at Gander Mountain, looking at handguns and wondering How much of a hassle will this paperwork be? How much is too much for something I’ll only use the once? Will I be so nervous during purchase that I’ll give myself away as a crazy? I’d made this trip on more than one occasion. During this particular spell, I had home internet, so I could do the browsing in the dead of night, dead drunk. This time around, I was sitting down and could browse while I drew up my plans.

In a funk a few years earlier, I tried to drink bleach.[12] Five years prior to that, I tied a rope to a rafter and went through with the act, but botched the job and ended up with nothing more than some awkward throat-localized rope-burn. I’ve always been pretty miserable, but I’d learned well to navigate the ever-present white noise of my particular flavor of malaise. But three or four times, the bottom dropped out—seemingly for no obvious/proximal reason. And on those special occasions when I found myself in a hole twice my own height and from which there seemed only one way to self-extricate, my depressive tendencies were no joke.

Funnily enough, the thing that stopped me that summer was spite. The feeling that it would be silly to kill myself just three months shy of my four-year degree—especially considering, if I did it in December, I’d’ve proved I could do it, the academic bit, to those who thought me incapable. Then I could take the emergency exit. A mix of spite and pride: I had a 4.0 streak to maintain, and I’d scooted through with one lobe tied behind my back—most of my classes were attended drunk, hungover, stoned on tramadol or hydrocodone, or not at all. In my lower moments, when all I had was spite and pride, I used to fantasize about giving a valedictory speech in which I revealed this: “That’s right, fellow dematriculators, I beat every last one of you and I was ability-impaired the entire time.” In my lowest of low moments, that speech was capped by a “Jeremy”-style[13] exit.

The drinking, the drugging, was part and parcel of a seven-year bender born in mourning. I’d begun my higher education at the beginning of a six-month metastatic luge ride my mother took to her grave; continued it when I moved back to my home town, alone and rending garments, gnashing teeth.[14] After I capped off my two-year degree, I found myself pulling in boatloads of loot serving food at the cool vegetarian restaurant, and decided I didn’t need that baccalaureate. Plus, I was in love. I quit academics, but then the girl—so inimitable, exciting, brilliant, beautiful that I could hardly believe she existed—split, leaving me with my Elliott Smith records, a penchant for scotch, and one memory that doesn’t fade, of her saying, “I’m so in love with you, sometimes I think I’m going crazy.”[15]

Once dumped, the bender went on. In occasional sober moments, I thought through my situation: that girl had her master’s by twenty-three; her family was kind, clever, and high class; so I decided I’d go for my bachelor’s just to prove to her (and her family) that I wouldn’t be wasting her time—that she wouldn’t just be “slumming” with the sleeved-out guy who liked to read. In my mind, I clung so tenaciously to hope of reconciliation it seemed, sometimes, a certainty. Never mind that we’d been broken up for months, if ever we were truly labeled “dating.” Never mind that we no longer spoke because, when we did, I became loathsome: insecure and insane.[16] And never mind that I strove for that degree with a nightly BAC average twice the legal limit.[17] I had something to prove and, goddamnit, I planned to prove it. So I enrolled in yet another program. In the end, since I matriculated again into the bachelor’s class of 2007 to no other end except to impress her, the girl, I suppose I have her to thank, in part, that the academic life I’d taken up, yet so despised, put on hold my plans to kill myself.

But going into that final semester, I still didn’t feel like I had a single reason to live. I didn’t want to kill myself. I don’t think anyone ever does. But sometimes it seems the house is burning down and the only exit you can reach is a twelfth-story window. I felt like a hollow tree; had a townful of drinking buddies but, it seemed, no real friends. Uninterested in my writing, uninterested by music or movies, I was unsure if I remembered how to love anything or, hell, if I’d been doing it right in the first place: I had, after all, driven everyone I loved out of my city. Perhaps my brand of love was, in layman’s terms, all fucked up. I felt repulsive, repellant to everyone. Which is why, after failing to sleep a wink on First Class Day-Eve, I found myself at the pound.

I told myself I was just going to look. I’d had a cat previously and, when I was forced to move, but couldn’t find a landlord who would let to a tenant on my budget with a pet in tow, I left him, the cat, in temporary custody of an angry ex only to find that she had almost instantly sent him to a shelter, where he was put to sleep. I’d had a dog for a while, but restaurant life can be a bitch: fourteen-hour days sometimes happen. And even if I wasn’t mad to find the pooch had pissed the carpet or shit the bed, she hung her head and tail, knowing the rules of being housebroken. After a while, it became plain that I couldn’t care for her with any degree of responsibility, so for her own good I gave her away. I’d sworn there would be no more pets until I owned a home of my own: someplace I couldn’t be kicked out of; a place where a cat could count on coming across the same sunny patch every single day; a crib with a yard in which an excitable pit/lab mix might sprint. August 27^th, 2007: I was only there to look. To waste away a few of the hours before class, to make sure I didn’t accidentally fall asleep and miss my sessions.

The little glass cubicles were full of unenthusiastic animals: rabbits who sat fat and surly; cats whose slit-eyed stares seemed to say, “The fuck are you looking at?” Some were well past chubby, a few were beyond ancient. The majority were boys and, after smelling for years the territorial piss left in my car’s carpet by a scared male, I’d decided that I was “just looking” for girls. A couple of weeks-old kittens in an open inner sanctuary caught my eye. But higher in the cell wall was a slightly bigger white one, a little over four months old. She was watching me; I must have jumped when I looked up and caught her staring.

I wanted the white one. I’d always wanted a white cat and I don’t know why.[18] I wanted this one specifically, I think, because as I spied her through the noseprinted glass panel, she winked at me. I filled out the requisite forms and sat in the colorful cinderblock-walled acquaintance-making chamber, waiting.

Soon enough, an older woman in floral scrubs greeted me with a Balkan accent and said, “Now, you know that she’s a special kitten, yes?” And suddenly, I didn’t want to touch her. It’s amazing how, in the proper context, the word “special” can be horrifying. “Your baby will have special needs.” “We recommend your daughter be placed in special education.” “I’m sorry, but the only cereal left is Special K.” And so on.

The woman wore the cat draped over her forearm like a sommelier’s cloth. From feet away I could see that some portion of the kitten’s pink underbelly had been stitched shut. What I couldn’t see was a fourth leg. That’s because it wasn’t there. Crushed by a car (presumably), she’d been brought from the nearby town in which I attended college to an emergency vet., and then left with the volunteers and techs in this shelter. The leg bones had been pulverized, I was told; there was nothing left to repair. The limb had to come off. I’d always had interesting luck with the people I invited into my life but, I wondered, what were the odds I’d walk into an animal shelter and stroll directly over to the only amputee on the block?

Draped as she was over the volunteer’s arm, she seemed quite docile. This, I guessed, was a side-effect of the medications she was on for mites. And worms. And something else disgusting which made me shudder, the specifics of which I don’t remember. I could see her ribs. Another set of stitches from spaying. But I didn’t want to appear petty, so when she was offered to me I held her. I also held my breath. The tech left us alone. I was relieved when the cat settled down on my lap, purring, without my having to touch her.

At the time, I was working on a book I’d researched to a ridiculous degree.[19] Coincidentally, its protagonist was an amputee. Phantom pain was the text’s central conceit. It’s a horrifying phenomenon; badly understood and sometimes chronic. Often excruciating. Imagine having an itch you can never scratch, a knuckle you can never crack, a foot you can never dry. Imagine a burning finger you can’t place on ice, or a frostbitten toe you can’t warm. Imagine feeling broken bones that can’t be set. A limb broken and bent through itself. This is the tip of the iceberg, so far as reported variations of the sensation are concerned. I knew too much about it. Which is how I knew, no matter what, I couldn’t take in a stray in who’d have to live like that. The merciful thing to do would be to let them put her to sleep. I made a note to wash my hands and, feeling sorry for the nasty little creature, I decided to pet her head. Poor pitiful thing: If she was kept alive, her life might be little more than long years of torment; if they put her down, she’d be dead. No winning for this kitten, I figured. She couldn’t be saved.

She did enjoy the petting, though. I gave her a good scratching behind the ear she couldn’t reach because there was no leg to reach it. Seemed like the least I could do. Imagine having mites tickling, stinging the inside of your ear and not being able to scratch at them. She seemed to thoroughly appreciate the gesture. When I quit, she shook her head and yawned; she stood, arched her back, and turned to face me. She winked at me again, closing one of two tennis ball-green eyes rimmed with pink. Then she leapt to my shoulder—impressing me with her agility, considering she’d jumped from an unstable surface (lap) to a small space twice her height using only one uncentered leg—sniffed my cheek and licked my ear. I made another note to wash my face and pate, letting her sit there, as she’d decided to groom my shaved head. Cute, I thought. She’s returning the favor.

When it came time, I sent her away, asked for some hand sanitizer, hit the bathroom to rinse her off, and saw two others, both little and grey. Bright blue eyes. The rules of the place dictate that a person can only visit with three potential pets per day. It was either time to leave, or admit that I wasn’t “just looking.” I picked the second kitten: black tiger stripes, big paws. The tech went to prepare the paperwork. I stepped outside for a smoke and tried to think of a name for her.

Instead, outside, I ended up thinking about the other one, the white cat. The cripple. I recalled an article or two in which it was suggested that animals may not feel chronic phantom pain, that it was because humans attach meaning to their missing limbs that the condition can get so serious, permanent. I remembered reading that cats and dogs, when confronted with an amputee, tend to respect the space a limb once occupied. Meaning, if your leg had been amputated and you were to call your dog to your lap, she would likely walk around or step over the space where the limb should/used to be. I started to wonder if, really, it would be better for her or just easier for me if the pound put her down. I wondered if maybe that whole line of thought was just rationalization—for not wanting to have to deal with any complication more arduous than a filthy litterpan; for not wanting to touch something ridden with nests of little six-legged creatures, burrowing worms, and whose meat was grotesquely sewn like the edge of a seventh-grader’s home-ec pillow.

My cigarette tasted terrible. I made yet another mental note: quit. I’d kicked cocaine, meth, other amphetamines, and weed, Valium and Ritalin—all of this with minimal issue. I’d also failed three times to give up smoking. I’d quit for two non-consecutive years and still, each time, knowing I’d have to go through the whole awful ordeal of both psychological and physiological withdrawal all over again, I relapsed. Full-steam, too. Always at least a pack a day.[20] I recalled a scene from the movie What Dreams May Come, in which an institutionalized woman says that her shrink considers smoking “a life-affirming vice.”

I recalled some books I’d read that tell pet owners the complex rules of eye contact in the wild. Eye contact carries manifold meanings for mammals and is of profound importance in communicating intentions: one’s status as friend or threat, predator not to be meddled with or cowardly potential prey, can be quickly detected by many animals, by paying close attention to eye contact. Winking, (or sometimes a slow two-eyed blinking) I’d read, is actually a not uncommon gesture of pets. The closing of one eye while staring with the other is a way of saying, “I trust you.” “I’m willing to let my defenses down around you.” “I’m willing to give a little bit of deference.” Most of the books deem the act equivalent with kissing and, of course, phrase the sentiment anthropomorphically as “I love you.” Such cloying colloquialism would usually bother me but, really, perhaps because trust does not come easy for me, I think the words “trust” and “love” are fairly synonymous.

I thought about that white cat and considered why I’d really come. August 27^th: all I knew about that year, 2007, was that I’d found a way to alienate everyone I loved—every regular presence in my life. I was alone. Wretched, toxic. And though I’d found a reason not to die,[21] I hadn’t found any real reason to keep myself alive. The white cat, with her stitches and missing limb, her mites, and worms, and other parasites, she’d been kept carefully sequestered, so as not to contaminate the other strays. She was wretched, toxic. And she might be in pain for the rest of her life. What if they don’t put her down, and someone else adopts her, but doesn’t understand that? I wondered. I considered why I’d really come: I felt repulsive and repellant to everyone, but needed to prove for my own sake that I wasn’t all monster, that I could do better.

Earlier in the summer, I’d read the seventh Harry Potter in one sitting (seven hours, starting at midnight on the day of its release, so that no one could spoil the ending for me), and maybe it was because I was exhausted, but I ended up bawling after an exchange (600 pages in) between Dumbledore and Severus Snape. Wretched Snape had agreed to devote the remainder of his life to protecting the orphaned son of the woman he’d loved, but had inadvertently caused to end up dead. The only caveat was that this white hat act be kept secret. Snape demands secrecy be promised him. Dumbledore replies, “[You want] My word, Severus, that I will never reveal the best of you? Very well…if you insist.” I’d sworn for years that there was something at my core, something different, something other than the short-tempered, doleful misanthrope that the exigencies of my life had helped me to be. I wanted there to be a best of me, but by summer 2007, anymore, I wasn’t sure it was true. My heart felt like grey paper, and I worried about that old apothegm use it or lose it. As it was, it needed an iron lung to keep it alive in the meanwhile and some serious rehab to get it back in working condition.[22]

As insipid a tautology as it is, it was the thought it’s easy to love something lovely that shot me up, caused me to flick my lit cigarette into some shrubbery, and dash back inside to physically accost the Russian woman in her flowered scrubs. I grabbed her wrists. Her watch was chilly on my hot palm. Loving something you find immediately lovely is like trying to build muscle by working out with zero-pound weights. “I changed my mind,” I panted, “I want the white one. Please tell me it’s not too late to take the white one.” The look on her face made me think that she saw it coming.

Some of the blind, wary of both the obvious difficulties and deleterious effects of sightlessness, acquire what is commonly called a Seeing-Eye Dog to fill in for that supremely important sense which they have lost due to trauma, are losing—perhaps because of defective genes—or were born without to begin with. Perhaps the best decision I ever made was acquiring a Feeling-Heart Cat, which I named Alexandra,[23] for precisely the same reason.

People will tell you that the best thing about pets is the unconditional love. Those people are full of shit. Pet love is extraordinarily conditional. More so than human love. You punch your son enough times, and he’ll resent you, sure, but he’ll feel conflicted about it because, well, you’re his parent. Every battered wife in the country knows more about unconditional love than any cat I’ve ever met. Unconditional love is, well, idiotic. At the very least, it’s dysfunctional—and usually masochistic. Cats, at least, don’t suffer the cognitive dissonance that comes with disliking someone negligent or downright abusive who happens to also be its owner. Slap your cat around a while and watch how indifferent it can get to your existence. If your cat treats you like a vending machine, there’s a reason. Their love is conditional. Which means that, for this interspecies relationship to work, you never get to quit giving.

Packed in a corrugated crate, I took Alexandra home with me, planning to somehow create for her the best existence which a cat could envision. Of course, I had no idea how exactly one would go about doing this.[24] Nevertheless, I swore to this kitten as we drove home that I would prove to her that it was still possible for me to love by loving her; I’d prove to her that I was loveable by earning her love. The bonus was that, by making her happy, I would simultaneously prove all of this to myself. And, during the next depressive low, I would know that, at home, there was a pitiful little creature who depended on me to live at all, much less live a good life. More than capable indoors, if she was let loose, she might not survive the wild without that extra leg—as adept as she is, there are a few things she can’t quite do.

No fucking way I could kill myself. Someone needed me.

When she got that cockeyed look on her face, one eyelid fluttering in a way that’s different from a wink, who else would know to hurry up and scratch just inside her left ear? The look is accompanied by the faintest twitching of residual muscle tissue near her missing hip joint and means, I’ve deduced, that she either needs to and cannot scratch that side, or (more in the human tradition of phantom pain) that she is bothered because it feels to her ghost leg like she already is scratching, but nothing’s happening on the other end.

When, as happens sometimes to cats missing a back leg,[25] she had trouble with the litterpan, and stumbled or collapsed into her own scat, who else would cheerfully pick her up, trim away the foul, gooey debris, then rinse away the rest of the mess?[26] I’ve since read that handicapped animals develop a greater dependence on their owners, possessed of an at least rudimentary understanding that there are needs that, crippled, the critter cannot for herself fulfill. Often, this increased dependence is balanced out by a greater distrust of others. How long would it take Alex to learn to trust another enough to let him do this, permitting such baths with nary a hiss nor scratch?[27]

Who else, when confronted with the realities of feline periodontal disease, would brush her teeth every evening?[28] Who else would comprehend the delicate situation that is clipping her hind claws? She’s sensibly defensive about her one remaining rear limb. Who else would let her ride contentedly around the house like a stole on his shoulders; who else would have figured out[29] that she would do this because she liked and wanted to be close, but didn’t dare risk getting trampled underfoot, as he performed chores?

If I offed myself, who would pack her favorite stuffed animal with fresh catnip every other night?

Who would stick to the vet’s wet food suggestion, despite the incredible inconvenience of the stuff, and the fact that she’s such a finicky eater that she wastes a full third of most cans?[30] And who could be trusted to stick to her gustatory rotation, knowing that, yes, she has a favorite flavor—chopped chicken hearts (not whipped chicken bits or sliced chicken breast, only chopped chicken hearts)—but that she shouldn’t have it more than twice in every seven cans because it’s dangerous to let a cat grow dependent on a single specific food?[31]

Who could be trusted to take plenty of baths and then, when the tub was drained, call to her and remain waiting, knowing the look of pure bliss she gets when allowed to cuddle there while the porcelain is still warm? Who would take the occasional catnap with her, there and then?

If I were dead, who could be counted on to drop to her level every time he returned home, and greet her enthusiastically, scratching her belly and neck, kissing her eraser-pink nose, and repeating her name because, it turns out, cats not only recognize it, but like to hear it spoken.[32]

Who would else would understand that, if you’re lying together, when she stretches her neck to get closer to your face and squints her eyes in this one particular way, what she wants is to give a kiss on the lips? Who else would let her do this? [33]

If you, Reader, have answered all of these questions with the sentence fragments, “Who else? Probably a lot of other people,” you’re probably not incorrect. Plenty of other folks would be as sedulous in their attention to a pet’s needs and wants. But that’s not the important part. What matters is that I can do all of these things, and I do. Happily. Most nights, when I sleep, Alex crawls into bed next to me, and puts her spine to mine.[34] She does this of her own free will. Regardless how long I’m out, she never wakes me up for food or just from sheer petulance—a common complaint of cat owners—but when I rise, she’s usually right there beside me, purring, and ready with a kiss or a wink. I take good care of her. And it appears that, as a result, Alex actually likes me.

Shortly after I swept her from the shelter, I saw some internet advert about the autopsied lungs of a baby raised in a homeful of smokers. I was appalled. I recall thinking that, if second-hand smoke could do that to a kid, the little pink lungs of a cat Alex’s size didn’t stand a chance. I’d kicked cigarettes a number of times, to no avail. I always ended up back with the habit. I was familiar with the traditional twelve-stepper’s insistence: you can’t quit for a girlfriend or mother; you can’t give it up for someone else. It has to be for you—that’s the only way it will last. Turns out that’s bullshit, too. I waited ’til the end of the semester, and on December 12^th, 2007, I had my last smoke. I didn’t quit for myself. I quit for the cat. And it stuck. A thousand days later, I haven’t had a puff. I may not think much of myself, I may never. But I do love her. So I’ll be damned if I give her cancer or end up with it myself, unable to take care of her.

In a way, she saved my life twice. Not bad for three-quarters of a cat.

Eventually, I got to see Behind the Scenes of 2007. I heard the backstories of why, suddenly, all of my people decided to leave me without even a wave goodbye. In the end, I learned that it wasn’t my fault. None of it. But long before I found out that fact, I’d more or less quit caring. Today, Alex turns four years old. Three and a half years back, Alex saved my life, sure, but better than that she helped me find what was lost: Even if it’s not obvious or often accessible, there is still a best of me. And it is possible to love me, that part of me. Not unconditionally, dysfunctionally, but because I can earn it.