Notes on a Cat’s Butthole
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“HE’S MY STINKY little guy,” my ex-boyfriend used to say, constantly, about his then-cat. “I’ve never had a cat whose butthole smelled like this.” Thomas’ butthole was detectible from some distance then, its sharp scent more reminiscent of a whole bag of unhealthy buttholes than just one.
“His butthole is stinky,” I said to the vet when I first took him in, after I got Thomas in the breakup with my ex.
Gabriel Mac
To be clear: This is not butthole squeamishness or shaming. I put my tongue in the buttholes and unwashed armpits of many lovers. One night, about ten years ago, I was driving a cishet couple and my second husband somewhere when we entered a patch of highway with a hot-fermented stench of too-old, never-rinsed butt sweat and imbalanced bacteria. It smelled, I said, like bad ass.
The woman in the backseat asked incredulously, “Is there such a thing as GOOD ass?”
I immediately started hollering, even more incredulous. Even my husband, who did not eat—and largely resisted the eating of—ass, backed up my protestations, offended by the idea that a person could be unaware that good ass was good.
“Like people, some cats just have stinkier butts,” the vet told me. But she also offered a probiotic, because, also like people, cats need good cooties in their guts.
Thomas was born and raised in Slab City, a sprawling houseless camp in the Sonoran Desert, where for a long time he was fed only run-off bacon grease. When my ex took over his care, he started giving him cat kibble, if the cheapest kind. I sprinkled meat-flavored probiotic powder on Thomas’ food—still cheap kibble, which I got at the food bank. But lo, after a week, his gut health was repaired; his butthole stank no more.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
THOMAS’ FUR SMELLED like sweet incense. People would ask me if it was because I burned it.
“No,” I said. “He just smells like that.”
Two and a half years ago, he became mine after trying so hard to get into my house the whole time my ex and I were together—hiding under it, then darting in anytime we opened the door. He availed himself of every soft surface, which, in this house, is almost every surface: the captain’s chair, comfy and squishy under its original, striped fabric; the dinette cushions, redone in plush white microfiber; a couple of repurposed rugs on cushy rug pads; a loft bed with linens befit for even bougie human guests. He stretched out on them so lengthily and thoroughly that my ex and I started leaving him inside when we left, though I’d never let anyone’s pet in my house for more than a few minutes, let alone without me.
Very quickly, I couldn’t imagine living without him.
Last month, on May 28, Thomas was stretched out leisurely in the driveway, soaking in a sunny afternoon. I could see him out my window as I wrote—he lying there, I lying here, parallel to each other, just a few feet away. And then, a terrible noise, as my land mate backed up their car right over him.
He wasn’t dead. I tore out my front door barefoot, yelling for them to pull forward. He was splayed out but conscious, and could get up to take a few steps away from me as I tried to pick him up. When I did, he sank his teeth deep and repeatedly into my elbow and upper arm, which throbbed and poured blood as I rushed him into the car and asked my land mate to drive, quickly, to the emergency vet. They wrapped Thomas in a blanket, and I held him in my arms, telling him it was okay, it’s okay baby, as he gasped, horribly, and soon died.
He was so soft. “Thomas the soft,” a trans kid I know called him. He made me feel loved first and better than anyone else had. Back home, I carried him around the property, swaddled, sobbing from the cavern of grief that had ripped open in my chest. He’d stopped looking like himself the moment he died, his living body having oozed with his personality. Still, for hours, I thought that somehow he would wake up, and we would all see how mistaken we’d been.
“IT WON’T FIX it,” my friend Cody said when he called me that night, and—after I sobbed, over and over, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now”—I asked him, still crying, how long he’d waited before getting another dog after his last one.
“Not long,” he said. This was true of every queer person I knew: a dog died; a new dog was swiftly adopted. Maybe it’s true of cishet people, too. My queer friends always said they did it because they had to, even if they felt weird about it.
And I’d thought it was weird, too. But the moment Thomas died, the chronic suicidality I’ve lived with since childhood flared to a 9.5 out of 10, and I could not imagine how I’d survive this grief.
A new pet wouldn’t fix it, Cody advised. But he advocated that I swiftly adopt another cat anyway. Because it would probably help keep me alive.
Gabriel Mac
“MY NOSE SMELLS like my cat’s butthole,” I said at Thanksgiving dinner last year, for reasons I can’t now remember or guess. The room was full of super-attractive cis gay men. None of the ones around me had a cat.
“Why would you know what your cat’s butthole smells like?”someone asked me, snarkily, making a snarky face to the man next to him.
Many cats climb around on your chest when you’re reclining; when they turn around, many of those cats put their butthole an inch from your face. Thomas’ healthy-gut butt had a new, appropriately faint scent, kind of like earring holes. As I have four piercings in my nose, occasionally—as that day—the smells matched.
These weeks since Thomas died, I’ve rarely showered. One day, what I was unconsciously doing finally worked: One of my nostrils got a little funky, and it smelled like Thomas’ butt. I pressed my finger against it, inhaling hard, over and over.
“THAT WAS A rough butthole situation,” I told my friend Chris recently, after we left the Humane Society.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said. “But I noticed that.”
Eight days after Thomas died, I filled out an application to meet a cat I saw on the shelter’s website. I’d spent the previous week bawling and cursing my soul for picking such a bullshit fucking life at a seaside RV park, paid for by queer and trans friends who Venmoed me money for possible grief needs—leaving town, acquiring black accessories, drinking my face off.
I watched hours upon hours of murder shows, slightly soothed by other people dying. I took my antibiotics, prescribed for Thomas’ bites at the emergency room, where I was warned I might still get an infection so bad I’d have to be admitted to a hospital. I tried not to commit suicide while googling which of my meds might kill me en masse, and I picked out a dress to die in. I stood at the shoreline, eyeballing how far I’d have to swim out before I wouldn’t be able to make it back, my bitten arm swollen stiff, throbbing, unusable. Awash in despair, I proposed to Chris over text that when I got home, we go meet some cats.
Gabriel Mac
Thomas had been my first cat. Since he’d chosen me, I’d never chosen one before. I fretted that I wouldn’t know if I met the right one. I pored over the shelter’s website, applying online for another tuxedo who sounded like she might be a good fit. Before Chris came to pick me up, I asked my ancestors and transcestors to guide me.
When I got in a room with her, it was an obvious no. We didn’t particularly connect. She’d also come from a cat-hoarder’s house, and was too shy to bring to this wild homestead where Thomas had roamed confidently between the houses and happily murdered rodents in the garden. One night when he was still with me, I’d showered and just gotten clean and cozy into bed—and he jumped through the window and dropped a dead mouse on my bare chest.
Those were the most important elements. But also: This shelter cat’s butthole just wasn’t one I wanted in my face.
“Not everyone has it,” my landlord said, shrugging, when I got home and told him.
I hadn’t gone to the Humane Society with designs on a kitten. Online and then in person, I’d looked closely at all the adults, reading their detailed profiles, and on our visit asked the volunteers to open some of their doors. But there was a pile of kittens in a plastic enclosure, a litter of four resting intertwined behind a clear door. When I walked up, one of them opened their eyes, looked at me, and stretched an arm out in my direction.
She pulled herself out of the pile to come over and press herself against the door, where I was holding up my index finger.
That’s the one, said the voice inside me.
I went back to see her twice more, only through the clear door, since she wasn’t yet fixed or vaxxed and allowed visits. A week after the first time I saw her—two weeks after Thomas had left me for his next cat-spirit assignment—I took her home.
SASHA SMELLS LIKE honey, but only sometimes, when she’s just woken up. In her little container at the shelter, she mercilessly pinned her littermates, joyfully wrestling them to the ground. In my house, she tears back and forth across the floor at full speed, breaking only to wrestle curtains, cords, apron strings, stuffed animals. A seat belt. She doesn’t sleep as much as the internet says a kitten should. When she does, she snores.
She has less than 20 percent of Thomas’ bodyweight, but she takes the exact same size poops.
She seems lonely. Having just been separated from her siblings, she mewled at the top of her lungs for days. I’ve wondered many times why my intuition and guides chose her, and if I’d really heard right. On her second day at home, I cried in therapy that I couldn’t be enough for her—just like I’d felt I couldn’t be enough for Thomas.
Just like I have always felt: I can’t be enough, for anyone.
Trust, my ancestors reminded me. Patience.
She just fell asleep on my elbow, making it hard to type. She doesn’t put her butthole in my face, but she jams her entire snout up each of my nostrils, one at a time. And in a wild turning of the tables, she climbed under a blanket yesterday and suddenly jammed her face in my butt crack.
She makes me laugh. She wears me out. I’m proud of how bravely she adapts to new situations I’m carefully introducing her to. She gives me too much to do—dangling mice and feathers when she’s awake and tiptoeing around when she’s asleep—to lie around contemplating suicide. My grief over Thomas still exhausts me, weighing down my whole body. But it sounds less often like I cannot live without him or I will not; today, I had access, for the first time, to I really, really, really, really don’t want to.
And so, me and Sasha cry. At night, she crawls into the crook of my armpit, looking for warmth, or comfort, or safety, or company, or out of desperation or commiseration—like all of us sometimes. Maybe all the time. Often, she can’t quite get comfortable, shifting into many different positions as I stay still to accommodate her. We grow our own unique intimacies, feeling each other out, nervous about loving again.
“You get lots of soulmates,” my therapist said, encouraging me that just because the last one died doesn’t mean that Sasha isn’t one, too. Together for only five days, we don’t know at all what kind of relationship we’re going to build. Me and this creature are destined even if we don’t know how, we two, scared and sometimes upset and confused, but both of us, still trying.
