Cat Person 😻

“ARE YOU READY?” my tattoo artist asked, as he always does, before puncturing me with a needle thousands of times. Usually, I say, “Yep.” This time, I exclaimed: “To be a cat person??”

He laughed. I’d commissioned him to draw a portrait of my cat, and he was about to etch it forever into my arm. I had so many tattoos already. But I couldn’t believe this one was really happening.

“I never saw you as a cat person,” my mother said when I got Thomas, two years ago.

“Neither did I,” said my friend Ryan. “But now, I can’t see you without one.”

When I was a kid, we weren’t allowed to have a cat. My father was allergic. Once, a family down the street was feeding milk to a found kitten, and when I walked over, there it was, barely standing, tiny and adorable outside their back screen door, the first I ever laid eyes on.

I can’t imagine anyone laying eyes on a kitten like this and not wanting one. But I definitely did.

It was a hard No. My father talked about his dangerous asthmatic reactions as a child, and I wonder if on some level that made me want a cat even more. If, even now, having a cat makes me feel safer. I’d been inside the house of the family down the street before, too. The room of their little girl felt like a place no one got raped.

But you don’t need to wish your father was dead to love Thomas.

Incest - The Faggot-Witch Whenever

Award-winning writer Gabriel Mac’s magazine about lessons in self-love. And sex. And gender, RV life, and incest honesty.

The Faggot-Witch Whenever

“I hate cats,” I used to say. Maybe because I, too, turned out to be violently allergic. Maybe because once cats grow up, they can be so boring. More likely, I think I couldn't deal with the grief of being denied one. “I usually hate cats,” I started saying after I met Thomas, with whom I was immediately taken. In the summer of 2023, I was sitting in the outdoor smoking tent at Wolf Creek “Radical” Faerie “Sanctuary.” He’d sauntered over and jumped up onto my lap, pressing his nose and mouth into mine.

And I was fucking in love.

For the rest of the week, I would notice him—maybe I was looking for him—in the distance as he trotted across the vast, open acreage (↓), his movement mesmerizingly jaunty. Free. “Confident,” professionals unfailingly call him when I take him to the vet. But he is so sensitive, too, a product of much trauma, desperate to attach to as much safety as he can.

Someone once said the two of us were exactly alike.

Transgender Jedi Flip, Part One

T4T 4-eva.

The Faggot-Witch WheneverGabriel Mac

I RETURNED TO Wolf Creek a few months after my first visit. Thomas started crouching under my RV, just out of view, patiently waiting to dart inside anytime I opened the door. He roamed the 80 acres there like the king he is then, the very-outdoor, traveling cat of my transient then-boyfriend. But it’s so cozy in here, and he appreciates peace—and good textiles. I like to think that he also appreciated my energy, and that which I cultivated in my space.

Eventually, I stopped shooing him back outside.

He curled up in the captain’s chair, and spread out across the dinette bench. My boyfriend and I eventually started leaving him inside alone, hard asleep in the afternoon, when we went out. One night, I shocked myself by letting him leap onto my bed.

Growing up, we had a string of dogs when I was in grade school. But they were not allowed in our bedrooms. So I had never let a pet onto one of my mattresses before the first time Thomas jumped onto mine, walked up my chest, and stared into my face.

What could I do? I petted him, running my hands down his little cat body, marveling at the newness of the experience while freaking out that cat hair was going to get on my sheets. He wasn’t activating my cat allergy, which doctors say pass only rarely, and mysteriously. After I’d let him onto my bed a few times more, I stopped caring about pet hair, caring only about his presence—a stance I’d never understood. How did people not mind that everything in their houses had pet hair on it?? I’d always wondered. But suddenly I was struck by the not-minding, a cat-loving streak of lightning.

“There was a dog-shaped hole in my heart that I didn’t even know was there,” my friend Cody told me a few years ago, when he got a new dog. I understood the sentiment—like, cognitively. I understood that he was full and complete in some way he hadn’t been before. But I did not understand how that was possible. Recently, I was watching Love Is Blind UK, a show in which, if you’re unfamiliar, people can choose to get engaged with strangers they’ve been dating through a wall for a few weeks and have never seen. If they do get engaged, they get to meet their betrothed in a reveal that takes place in a weird, long hallway, after which many of them say: “Best moment of my life.”

Jesus! I think, every time. THAT is the best moment of their life? Meeting a person they’d talked to like a dozen times? But watching the second or third or maybe even fourth person say this, I suddenly wondered, What was the best moment of MY life?

And then I thought, and felt totally bonkers for thinking: It was when I met Thomas.

I’D BEGGED MY parents for our first dog. Not just begged: screamed. Which was not a thing I otherwise dared to do.

I was obsessed—obsessed—with dogs. Every week, the teachers in our grade school took our class to the musty little school library, and every week, I walked straight to the same section and took out a nonfiction book on caring for dogs, though I did not have one. I would copy, word for word, the text of the books into notebooks by hand with pencil, not being old enough yet to use pens. When I’d exhausted the small dog section at the school library—I remember asking the librarian several weeks running if there were any more dog-care books, though she’d already told me no—I started taking out the books at our much bigger city library and copying the text out of them, too.

I was deflecting. I was projecting my utter dehumanization at being treated like a dog by a child-rapist into a total fixation with how to care for them. I prized my notebooks full of pirated intel. One was a pink notepad inside a puffy, cream-colored cover that had a cool velcro closure, one of my most beloved possessions. When it ran out of pages, I had to start using a regular spiral-bound notebook. This went on long enough that I became old enough to use pens. When I’d gotten through all the nonfiction books, I was forced to resort to the child-friendly fiction books about pet ownership (not a quality genre at the time). I read but didn’t copy them, because they didn’t contain the information I needed to someday be the best dog-owner the world had ever seen.

Enter dog-supply catalogs.

I don’t remember where I got my hands on one, but it was the most exciting thing I owned. All those color pictures and descriptions of dog accoutrements, beautiful beds and sweaters and bowls, and all being used by beautiful dogs. And all those beautiful houses, certainly not the sort of place where people got raped! The dog-models had names in their photo captions, and I stole them for a list of potentials I was keeping. “Pepper” felt especially upscale and excellent for my eventual dog. I kept another list, of the items I wanted to buy. And another, of my favorite breeds. My father had a thing for Weimaraners, always commenting on how gorgeous the one tied up in a neighbor’s yard was, so I pretended to favor them, too, feeling like they were my best shot—though really, I wanted a beagle.

Finally, desperate, one year I staged a silent protest ahead of Christmastime, refusing to speak to my parents unless it was to repeat that the only thing I wanted was a dog.

I did not maintain my resolve. I pitched some epic fits, a thing I was, again, usually too terrified to do, but suddenly couldn’t stop myself from doing. I even dared to scream I hate you over it once as I stomped up the stairs, and I remember the thrill of getting away with it, cold and electric inside my ribcage. I imagine that my parents—or my mother, at least, having no context—must have been baffled over this virulent dog-mania that had consumed me, the Well-Behaved One. I believe my father truly believes himself innocent of his crimes now—it’s not uncommon for people to block out actions that don’t align with their idea of themselves, in ways both big and small. But at the time, they were still occurring. So I wonder if he did remember, then, the way he and a fellow pedophile named Frank had locked me in Frank’s collie’s cage. They threw a blue towel over it, like I was a bird that needed shutting up, while another, younger child screamed.

My parents did not get me a dog for Christmas. But one spring, after I’d given up, after we’d stopped at the pet store on the way home from church one Sunday and oohed and aahed over the cocker-spaniel puppies in the window, my father left for an errand. When he returned, he walked in the back door holding its little body in one hand, which he extended toward me.

I COULDN’T CONNECT to our first dog, Sherlock. My mom named the tiny golden spaniel, who arrived in our house always sniffing around as if for clues. He was terrified of men, especially my father, melting down out every time he walked through the same door he’d brought Sherlock in to begin with. It started to piss off my father, who took it personally. I wonder if at least subconsciously he found the dog’s terror appropriate. Me, I tried to make Sherlock my best friend, like people do. But he was aloof and uninterested, like too many other people in my life.

I cried, hard, but briefly, with everyone else when he died. “In surgery,” I was told following his euthanasia, after a few years of relentless medical issues. The replacement puppy, also a golden cocker spaniel, whom my mother named Watson, turned out to have violent, blood-spewing epileptic seizures within days of our bringing him home, and was handed over to a vet nurse, I imagine for euthanasia as well. The Dalmatian we got later was too energetic for the amount of attention she got in our house, and was re-homed.

“I have dog triggers,” I tell people now. My last boyfriend, Thomas’ custodian at the time, had a giant poodle, and he smelled strongly of dog. The day my ex and I did mushrooms together, the first thing I felt was how hard my nervous system was working, had been working, to deal incessantly with the aroma, which smells first to me like rape and degradation and shame, and second, like death, separation, loss.

FOUR YEARS AGO, when I became suicidal in a way that felt final, irreconcilable—not for the first or last time, but for the closest time to fruition—a cousin came through the Bay Area. I was about to run out of money to keep my apartment and was looking for an RV so I wouldn’t become street homeless. We sat on the back deck of my extraordinarily expensive rental, looking over the rolling hills of Marin, and she cried big, unapologetic tears as she begged me to stay alive. We’d met only a couple of years prior, but she was the only relative with whom I was in touch aside from my mother. And the only one who ever wept for my life.

“You should get a pet,” she said. People had been telling me this for years, the ones who worried I wouldn’t make it, who worried I was too lonely when I kept separating from husbands and boyfriends. I told her I’d been considering a cat: One had started circling my place every day, mewing quietly but lengthily, making me wonder if it was a sign. My landlord eventually scared it off with a hose. I’d almost brought it inside, but couldn’t imagine how I’d handle a cat when I still hadn’t found a place to live. My cousin encouraged me over and over to get one anyway; after she left, she sent me a video (↑) of kittens a friend of hers was giving away.

“All I want is two nose piercings and a cat,” I told some redwoods in a Santa Cruz RV park soon after, after finding my RV just days before I had to leave my apartment. I was surprised to hear myself say it; it’s so simple and weird and specific. I already had the piercings. How long had I been harboring the desire for a cat?

“You don’t get everything you want,” the redwoods said. So I stopped looking.

THOMAS WAS BEING attacked.

My ex had another cat, which suddenly started assaulting Thomas. It had been going on for a while before I returned to Wolf Creek, but it was getting increasingly violent—and Thomas, increasingly desperate—when I was there.

As soon as he climbed into their lidded litter box, the other cat would jump on top of it, reach into the hole, and claw at Thomas while he couldn’t escape.

While the cats spent all day roaming outside, the coyotes and winter cold made it necessary for them to sleep in my ex’s cabin with us. Thomas would wake us up in the middle of the night by leaping onto our bodies and scratching at the window directly behind my head, frantic like a coke fiend, a starved person, a hostage. My ex said he’d never done that before, and locked him in the cold kitchen with the litter box, alone, where he’d scratch at the door for a long, long time, before finally conceding to using it.

“What if you guys didn’t have to separate?” my ex asked me when I was leaving for a few days and I said I was going to miss him. Thomas had started coming to me, running to me, when my ex and I returned from errands, even though, as my ex put it, “You don’t even feed him.” So I took him, partly to keep him safe, and partly because Thomas and I were so clearly in love. We did the same thing again soon after, when I was leaving for a longer period of time. Eventually, my ex and I broke up, and he conceded that Thomas was better off with me.

From shortly after we met, I had been so afraid of losing him. Now, I didn’t have to.

And now I could do exactly the thing I’ve always watched people with pets do that I never wanted to do!: projected my neuroses directly onto this feline. I worried that he’d be miserable inside my house, parked too close to a road then to let him roam, after having the run of 80 acres all day long. I took him on long, meandering walks where I put him on a leash but followed him wherever he wanted to go, his time to be in charge. Still, having once been enslaved myself, I worried that I was keeping him too captive.

Is it enough? I wondered. Those supervised visits with nature, where he very slowly sniffed and dawdled and ultimately, hopefully, chose a place to go to the bathroom? While he wouldn’t—has never—shit on my floor or in my sink, or throw up or do any of the other messy expulsions some people’s cats do, he doesn’t want to go in his litter box. And so if I didn’t take him out, he held it.

Would he rather be killed by a car after five minutes of freedom than be stuck inside with me? I agonized over it, but I never let him out alone, asking myself the same questions over and over, even as I followed him dutifully on his long daily walk. Am I doing enough? I wondered. Really, I was wondering, always, Am I enough?

“YOU MAKE ME excited to get up in the morning,” another suitor said, on a another reality marriage show. And I thought: Oh, god.

I’d recently started having that thought—about my cat. About a cat. Turning in for bed one night, I’d suddenly brightened while realizing that in the morning, Thomas would either be sleeping next to me or climbing my body to wake me up, and I wasn’t sure which but I was looking forward to the next day in a way I never had before. And I had thought, even then: For a CAT?

I’ve had many people express to me before that their pets—dogs, usually—were not just a factor in their will to live but the factor, the biggest one—despite also having spouses. But when I saw these people taking care of their pets, all it looked like to me was a colossal pain in the ass. So much work, the feeding and the veterinarian-ing, and walking and cleaning and stuff-purchasing. When I heard years ago that another friend’s cat woke him up way too early before work, every single morning, I’d found it unfathomable that anyone would live like that.

Thomas has, many mornings, sauntered up by body and stood expectantly on my chest before I was ready to wake up. Many times during the first year and a half, I immediately had a meltdown about how tired I was and would be for the rest of the day, vestiges of the panic I felt as a child who knew my escape would be to do well in school, however exhausted, kept up by my father or the other men he brazenly brought into our house, my bedroom, at night. But even with that trauma activated, I’d still find a way to pet him for a minute, then roll over to go back to sleep, often with him along with me: precious, precious moments.

Yes, I do feel weird about it that it feels more precious to me that Thomas will go to sleep with me than it does that any of my romantic partners have. But there is a specialness to our meeting in rest, one common language between this domesticated animal and other, less domesticated, animal.

There have been mornings or middle-of-the-nights that he wouldn’t stop prancing around on top of me, which was violating and terrorizing, being attacked and kept awake in my own bed like that. He’s stepped right in one of my eyeballs, which I imagined had to be where pink eye came from, and put his dirty feet in my mouth. In our first several months together, I ran myself ragged trying to give him whatever he wanted, and the more I gave him exactly what he wanted regardless of how much I didn’t want to do it, the less satisfied he became.

I’ve had boyfriends like this. After a while, I noticed that bending over backwards for Thomas’ every demand only made him—like those boyfriends—more of a jerk. I’d been in this relationship dynamic before. And so, I stopped. I started ignoring him, and started saying No. And he started complaining less.

We live on a farm now that’s protected enough for him to roam. I’m happy he has his freedom—he really does pretty much whatever he wants. But as much as I often did not want to take him on his daily walks at the other farm, occasionally making him wait hours of looking at me expectantly, patiently, as he refused to use his litter box, our rambles often ended up being the best part of my day. I experienced him experiencing the farm differently than I did, following him around laughing as he leapt at some smell or inched bravely toward the horses. “I’m gonna take you outside,” I said to him once, as I put on my boots to conceded to his special needs, “because I’m obsessed with you.

“And that’s okay.”

“ARE YOU READY?” my tattoo artist asked, two years after Thomas started living with me, as he prepared to ink him into my arm.

To have Thomas forever by my side? I am—usually. That night, I petted him, kissing his ultrasoft black fur. It often smells inexplicably of incense, my temple cat from another lifetime. “You make everything worth it,” I said to him.

Weeks later, I was panicking that I should re-home him.

It still happens sometimes. I get activated and feel like he doesn’t love me enough because he doesn’t cling to me like a hungry puppy; it reminds me how much of my life I felt like no one did. But on this farm, he has many other human companions who adore and dote on him. He’s surrounded by love, but he still loves me. He has choices, but still, he comes home every night. He is pleased to sleep with me though I’ve never had sex with him, and that’s not something I’ve ever experienced, either.

I don’t deserve this, I thought while brushing my teeth the other night, getting ready to lie down with this beautiful cat in my beautiful bed. All the ways I was taught I was wrong and unworthy, Thomas was the first being that made me feel otherwise. I still struggle to accept it sometimes, two years on. But apparently, there was a cat-shaped hole in my heart. And clearly, it’s filled.