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I have become known for my cats because I have made my cats known. I talked about them constantly on my radio show and now on my podcast. I want it to be known now that I am not a “Cat Guy.” I am a “My Cat Guy.” I don’t care about your cats. I will pretend to if I come over. I will say things like, “Awww, lookitthatguylookitthatnicecat.” Secretly I will be thinking, “What a sad, fat, ugly dumb cat you have. Look at that thing. It’s a feline train wreck. It looks like it’s days away from hanging itself from its scratching post. It can’t even muster up the gumption to play with what’s left of that fake mouse you gave it. It doesn’t go outside? It’s just a hostage to your pain and neediness. Wow, you should probably put that cat down before it dies of ennui.”

I don’t say all that. I say, “Aw, lookitthatlittleguysocute.”

I grew up with dogs, lots of dogs. Over the course of my childhood we had four Old English sheepdogs. A good part of my
young life was spent covered in dog hair, cleaning up shit and pulling different-sized dogs off my leg. My father wanted to show dogs professionally. He was obsessed with it. As with all his obsessions—skiing, stereo equipment, cars, guns, vitamins—the family was just expected to fall in line behind his dog-show dreams.

I don’t know why he chose Old English sheepdogs but he did. Our first was Mac Duff. Mac is the dog that set my father off on the addictive cycle of amassing dogs. It wasn’t Mac’s fault; Mac was a fun dog but he got cancer and my mother had him put down. He wouldn’t be the last. Over time my mother became the Dr. Kevorkian of animals.

Mac Duff wasn’t Mac’s whole name. Breeders have this thing where a dog’s entire genetic chain has to be represented in the name, for instance, our eventual champion Cheerio Lord Raglan. A royal name for a dog that was too genetically thoroughbred to be a good pet. Cheerio Lord Raglan was inbred and nervous, crazy even, but really beautiful. He didn’t know his own strength and would snap at you for no reason. A bite from a stunning dog doesn’t hurt any less. It’s actually worse because you have to defer your pain to the privilege of owning a champion. You just have to suck it up. This dynamic also applies to living with beautiful women.

Our family vacations were centered around dog shows. It was all about the dog. There were travel cages, grooming tables, special leashes and food, and walks. There was a lot of brushing going on. My father would sit and brush a dog for what seemed like hours on the floor next to a pile of gray dog hair. It seemed like one of us should have been spinning it into yarn. All these vacations culminated with my father trotting around a ring like an idiot with a leashed and terrified mass of bouncing fur.

Then there was Samantha, whom my dad got suckered into buying from some cons who convinced him she was a show dog.
We thought Sam was a clean genetic machine. Turns out, not so much—her snout was too long, or maybe it was her brow. The point was, she had a flaw and that made her a pet disappointment. She seemed to know it, too, moping around in a lifelong apology for something that was out of her control, as so many of us do. Great dog, though.

Then we bred the Lord with some other guy’s dog, which the owner claimed was of noble lineage, and got Disco, again not quite on the genetic money. Disco was nuts like her father but unshowable. By the time my father lost interest in showing and breeding dogs we had three: a retired champion, his townie wife, and a fucked-up kid from another marriage.

So I was never going to be a dog person; even my masochism and desire to revisit childhood trauma has its limits. But there were cats around in my childhood, too. My mother liked to talk to them. When asked why, she used to say, “They don’t talk back.” It usually took her three names to get to mine when she was calling out to me in the house, and two of them were animals. Still, I always liked the cats. There was Garfield, the large, lean field cat, and Gimper, the long-haired black princess with a limp. They weren’t show animals; they were hunters and gatherers. We lived on three and a half acres so you never knew what they would bring home: lizards, snakes, birds, large bugs. It was always a treat to be presented with any of this vast array of dying gifts.

I once had an unforgettable, primal bonding moment with Garfield, a bizarre episode shared by two males of different species. I was visiting home one day after I’d already moved away and started doing stand-up. I was in my mid-twenties and had gone to do a set at a club in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I hooked up with one of the waitresses there and had no choice but to take her home to my childhood room for the sex. We had to be quiet because
what was left of my parents’ marriage was sleeping upstairs. In the middle of the hungry, grasping intimacy of two strangers having a go at it I heard Garfield come into the room. I lifted my face up and saw that he was carrying the corpse of the biggest field mouse I had ever seen. The thing was almost as big as the cat. He took it under my desk. The woman did not notice any of this.

I was stifling my sex noises, she was stifling hers, and Garfield was savaging a rat-sized mouse a few feet away. I could hear his snorting and tearing. I came like a teenager in his bedroom, a compressed and quiet climax so as not to wake up my parents. The woman and I got dressed and I walked her out. As I was walking down the hallway back to my room I saw Garfield walking out. I went in and looked under the desk and there on the floor, neatly arranged, was the tail, the head, and what looked to be a fetus of a field mouse. I wasn’t disgusted. I was impressed. I felt that we had connected on the great timeless arc of animal drives. I didn’t read too much into it other than the hope that it was a good omen. I hadn’t used protection.

I went years without any pets, but in the middle of my divorce from my first wife, Kim, my then-girlfriend Mishna brought me a tiny black-and-white female cat I named Butch. I called her Butch because she had swagger. I was seeing Mishna while my divorce was being processed but she wasn’t living with me. It was just Butch and me. She was a very small kitten and I wanted her to have everything. I went to holistic pet food stores and got her raw food so she would have the right bugs in her guts to survive outside if necessary. I even made her fresh cat food for a while but that proved to be ridiculous and she really didn’t like it much. I think I wanted to treat Butch the way I wish I could’ve treated myself. I wanted life to be perfect for her since mine seemed to have crumbled. I invested a lot of love and caring into that cat.

When my divorce was complete Mishna and I moved to Los
Angeles from New York City. She left her Forty-sixth Street walk-up and I sublet my apartment in Astoria. It was a big ordeal. We rented a U-Haul, put all of our stuff in it, and set out. I had to get there in three days to make a meeting for a show I was trying to sell. In light of all the chaos, including the truck breaking down, our primary concern was Butch. I drove the truck and Mishna drove my old Honda Accord with the cat. Butch rode in the back of the Accord with a plant she had taken a liking to. She always slept in the pot of this plant, which was adorable. Of course in the car she had no use for it but I still have that plant.

After we made it out to L.A. we adopted a shelter cat called Boomer to keep Butch company. The cats at the shelter were mostly older cats. They looked as though someone had forgotten them or had had enough of them. There was one cat that seemed to be out of his mind. Completely nervous and unfriendly but young. I wanted that cat. That was Boomer. Having dealt with other cats since then, I know now that Boomer was feral. I liked his energy. I like anything I have to fight to get to like me. During this time we also found out that Butch had a genetic heart defect. Her heart was too big. The vet told us that she wouldn’t live long.

Mishna and I got married in our backyard in L.A. and tried to build a life there. The problem was I wasn’t working very much, so I decided to take a gig as the morning host on Air America, a new liberal-oriented radio network. I took the job hoping to take down the Bush administration but definitely to make money. The show was based in New York, but Mishna didn’t want to join me—she was an actress, comedian, and screenwriter. An aspiring actress, comedian, and screenwriter. She wanted to be in L.A.

I still had the lease on the old beat-up apartment in Astoria so I moved back in, furnished it with IKEA garbage, and started the hardest job of my life. I would go to sleep at 8:30
P.M
. and wake up at 2:30
A.M
. to get it together to get to the studio by 4:00
A.M
. Then I would start crunching the news with my staff and partner
to get on the air with something to say by 6:00
A.M
. After a few weeks of that schedule I became completely detached from regular life or my version of the same. There was no going out, there was no staying up, there was no real socializing except on the air and with my staff. I did stand-up on weekends. I never really felt rested. I was walking around like I’d just been in a long pillow fight, dazed but not hurt. All my energy went into keeping alert enough to function.

So now I was doing morning radio in New York while my wife was learning how to stop loving me in Los Angeles. The hours and distance were straining my marriage. The only time we could talk was right before I left the house. It would be 3
A.M
. my time and midnight in L.A. and I would spend most of the conversation berating her for her imagined betrayals and unwillingness to do the only thing I wanted her to do: to care for me. It was deeply awful and I could feel the marriage disintegrating. I was a jealous, angry person. I knew that what was going on in my mind was not real but I could not stop it from coming out of my mouth. I kept finding myself at that horrible moment when you are about to say something hurtful to someone you love and you know you shouldn’t but can’t seem to stop it. You just watch it leave your mouth, hang in the air, and mold itself into a rock that plows into your lover’s face. The phone connection was like a transcontinental slingshot. That was my marriage.

Then I would take a car into work, stopping on the way to pick up a large silo of liquid crack at Dunkin’ Donuts and two packages of M&Ms. I would then caff einate and sweeten myself into a mania amplified by exhaustion, by the angry fear that I was destroying my marriage, and by a deep hatred of all things Republican during the bleakest years of the Bush administration.

A few months into the job I got a call at the office at 4
A.M
. from Mishna. She told me Butch had died. I was furious. She had been telling me for days that Butch seemed sick. I guess her large heart
got too heavy and Mishna never got around to taking her to the vet. In my mind she had killed my cat. It confirmed my worst suspicions about our marriage. She only cared about herself and wasn’t responsible enough to take care of a hurt animal. Me, or the cat. My cat was dead and my wife was a coldhearted child. She buried Butch with the help of Ernie the fix-it guy, in the same backyard that we’d gotten married in. I still regret missing the funeral of my cat. I think our marriage was buried that day, too. I hated Mishna.

As the months went by, things just deteriorated. Mishna would come to New York for a few days or I would go home for a few days but the distance between us became hard to navigate. I was lost, angry, and tired. About this time I began noticing a pack of stray kittens in the back of my building. I would go out in the middle of the night to put my trash in the bins and these five kittens would be scrambling around eating the garbage in the dark. They were so clean, cute, and focused. Like most of life, the scene was simultaneously adorable and awful. I thought to myself, “Someone better deal with this or these cats are going to fuck each other and we’ll have an army of incested kitties out here.”

This went on for a couple of weeks and I began to fall in love with these cats. There was this orange tabby with a tuft of hair on its nose that was a little asymmetrical and made him look like a monkey. There was a calico, a black-and-white longhair, a mean-looking, skittish striped cat, and this gray and white dwarfy fist of feline beauty that I would eventually name LaFonda. LaFonda is crazy, like Vietnam crazy. It’s my fault.

Their mother was also around. The slut. I really didn’t know what to do with the cats. They wouldn’t let me get near them, but something had to be done about them. I just kept hanging on to the hope that someone else would deal with it. The truth is I was completely taken with two of these cats. I just thought they were too good to become alley cats. They were so perfect and clean and
innocent that I didn’t want them to live that harsh alley-cat life. I think the impulse to save animals is, aside from being empathetic and humane, also symbolic of saving some part of ourselves. I wanted these cats to be okay. I wanted to be okay.

The night before the 2004 Republican National Convention I was freaking out. We were going to cover the convention live at a booth in Madison Square Garden, behind enemy lines. I was nervous and couldn’t sleep. So, of course, I decided I was going to deal with the cat issue. That’s how I do. When life is scary and chaotic I like to make it more so.

I took a large shoe box and cut a hole in it. I put a small can of food in the box and set it out by the garbage can while I stood behind the basement door and watched. I had recruited my neighbor Jodi to help me; her job was to make sure I didn’t completely freak out. I saw the first cat get in the box. I scrambled outside, quickly covered the hole in the box with a piece of cardboard, picked the box up, and ran it up two flights of stairs to my apartment. I released the animal into my place and it scurried scared and crazy behind the stove. “It’s freaked out,” I thought. It will grow to like me.

Over the next few hours I performed this same procedure with four of the five kittens. Once I finally had them in the house it was like I’d released a pack of wild ferrets into my living room. They weren’t acting like house cats. I didn’t realize at the time that if a cat is eating on its own it’s not a cute housekitten: It’s feral. I had trapped and released four wild animals into my apartment.