Morph

My cat is smoking.  I found cigarette butts next to the litter box, alongside Condé Nast and Cat Fancy.

How do you deal with this?  You never expect your cat will get addicted.  He sleeps eighty percent of the day, so when does he have time to take on a vice?
Maybe I should have recognized his addictive personality earlier.  When he was a kitten, he loved catnip.  I was running late for work and tossed him a sachet of catnip, figuring he’d bat it around for a while as I got out the door.  Instead, he caught it with his teeth, and RIIIIP!  An herbal explosion.  He looked stunned, a kid in a candy store.
Generally, catnip is harmless.  Cats will play with it until the sensation wears off.  When I returned that night, it was like walking into a mausoleum.  The pile of catnip trailed into the bathroom.  Behind the cold porcelain toilet lay my cat, stoned out of his gourd.  He lazily lifted his head and blinked at me.  I swept up the remnants.  An hour later, he staggered out to his food bowl. A voracious attack of the munchies.
So, now, cigarettes.  I confronted him as he lay sprawled on the window seat.  He is a long orange tabby with a crooked whisker.  “I know about the cigarettes.”
He stared stonily at me.  Then he cleaned his butt.
There’s no talking to him sometimes.
At the dog park, I ran into my neighbor, Roy.  His pug and my golden retriever are great buddies.  I told him about the cigarettes.  He wasn’t surprised.
“What else do you expect him to do all day?  He gets lonesome.”
The divorce has been hard on him.
“He won’t talk about it,” I said.  “He just looks away.”
Roy nodded.  “Let him have his fun.  Listen, what’s the life expectancy of a cat, anyway?  Ten, twelve years?  Fifteen tops.  So proportionally, it’ll only shave off a year or two.”
“I’m surprised you’d say that, given what you’ve been through.”
“Yeah,” he sighed.  We both looked at his pug, who had the spastic distraction of a cocaine addict.  “I still remember finding those glass vials.  Pugs, they snort, you know.”
What I couldn’t figure out was how he was getting the cigarettes.  He’s an indoor cat.  So, who’s his supplier?
Then I spied my golden retriever digging in the grass.  When I stood over him, he looked at me guiltily – a kid pretending he hasn’t stolen a cookie.  Lowering his head in shame, he vomited a wad of garbage – twigs, acorns, candy wrappers and – cleverly mixed inside – cigarette butts.  Kools, Marlboros, Virginia Slims.
Great.  A co-dependent dog.
I left a note for my dog-walker to make sure that the dog didn’t bring garbage into the house.  Clearly she didn’t follow my request, because soon I was finding cigarette butts by the litter box again.
What bothered me more was the shot glass next to them.  I could smell the whiskey.
I called my ex-wife, Marva.  “The cat’s been drinking.”
“Again?  I thought he was on the wagon.  Four years sober.  That’s like twenty-eight for a human.”
“That’s in dog-years.”
“I read there’s a high rate of recidivism in cats.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
“We?  He’s your cat, remember.  He’s what you wanted out of the custody battle.  Try explaining that to your daughters sometimes.  Do you know why he’s smoking?  Is anything upsetting him?”
“He’s a cat.”
“Animals can sense when humans aren’t happy.  Maybe he’s picking up something from you.”
I hung up.  If Marva wouldn’t stay on the subject, I didn’t want to talk to her.
At the dog park, I ran into the regulars:  Roy and Josie, Celia and Ben.  I told them about the cigarettes and whiskey.
Josie said, “I had a turtle that was agoraphobic.  Hid in his shell all the time.”
“I had a hamster.  Obsessive-compulsive.  Running on that little wheel,” said Celia.
Ben said, “I had a Doberman that chewed off his fur.  We had to give him Ritalin.”
Though they could commiserate, no one had a solution.
I contacted the vet.  He prescribed a nicotine patch.  That didn’t work.  Now my cat’s got a bald patch.
I called my dad.  He said, “I had a snake with an eating disorder.  All my brother’s mice.  Then a guinea pig.”
“What happened to him?”
“Choked to death.  Bunny slippers.”
I staged an intervention.  After dragging my cat from under the bed, I placed him on the hassock in the middle of the living room.
He growled, his ears back, his crooked whisker flush with the side of his head.  This was going to take Tough Love.
“It’s time to face the truth.  You can’t hide it anymore.”  I dumped the garbage pail right in front of him:  cigarettes, whiskey bottles, catnip.
He sounded like a freight train squealing to a halt.  I never saw the claws.  First blood.
He disappeared into the basement.  The sign of a true addict.
Ben recommended a group.  Al-A-Pet.  I checked out their website.  Before-and-after photos of a crack-addicted tabby.  They blanked out his eyes to preserve his anonymity.
They met in the basement of the local animal shelter.  Most had brought their dogs or cats, in various stages of recovery.  A chameleon, deep in denial, tried to blend into the background.
The leader of the group, Alice, presented her Persian, a big fluffy monster.  “I was powerless before her addiction.  I kept her in diamonds.  A little choker, a tiara.  It got so bad, all she wanted was to watch the Home Shopping Network.  But she’s been clean for two years.”
We applauded.  What bravery.
A man told a story about his St Bernard who had died in a snowstorm.  “A savior complex.  He thought he could rescue everyone.  But he couldn’t even save himself.”  Overcome, he sat down.
A woman had a horse that had been confined too long in its stable and would compulsively masturbate.
I have to look up that one.
By the end of the evening and all the stories, I felt a strange release.  I wasn’t alone in this.  Addictions are universal, and we all suffer our private grief.
Still, I was going to break my cat’s habit if it killed me.
Unfortunately, it killed him first.  The next morning I heard him hacking.  Then I heard the thump.  By the time I got to him, he was gone.  In his fall, he knocked over his whiskey, which the dog promptly lapped up.
I was sad to see him go, but maybe it’s better this way.  There’s a small pet cemetery in town.  It was a quiet ceremony; no one else came.  I wanted time alone with him.  Maybe if I had tried harder.  Maybe if I had cared a little more.
As if on cue, a little boy and girl approached me.  The girl took my hand.  “Don’t cry.”
I wasn’t crying.
The little boy asked, “What’s his name?”
“Morph.”
“Like the computer animation?”
“No,” I said, “as in anthropomorphic.”
They didn’t understand and eventually wandered away.