"Queer as Faith"
by Nathan Gunter

Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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Week 16:
Cat Person

Dixie doesn’t like it when I’m outside. If I was at all sensible, I’d see that her longing stare out the windows is her best kitty attempt to get me to stop smoking, to focus my considerable anxiety at loving and petting her rather than lighting Marlboro Lights one after another. Rather, I see it as kitty neediness. I tell myself that if she were a child, not a cat, she’d be in therapy so fast because she obviously has a bad case of kitty codependence.

I think I’m special.

There’s this great scene in the movie 28 Days with Sandra Bullock, where one of the people in her rehab group asks how long they should wait during sobriety before pursuing a relationship. Their counselor tells them to get a plant. If the plant lives a year, then get a pet. If the pet lives for a year, then it might be okay to look at maybe dating. At the end of the movie, Sandra Bullock’s character runs into this same guy – this lovable, goofy gay German guy – at a plant store, crying over a dead fern, begging the man at the counter to tell him what he has to do to make it live. She taps him on the shoulder and he turns to her and begins to cry, and they cry and laugh together.

I skipped the plant. I’ve never been an alcoholic or had a substance abuse problem – well, okay, I may have a tiny addiction to cigarettes but those are hardly life-destroying… unless you count the cancer – and so, as a tribute to my lack of alcoholism, and as a way of leading myself out of depression, I got a cat.

I’ve always been a cat person. Not that I don’t like dogs. I love dogs. But when I was two I was eaten by a large dog on my aunt’s farm and still get a bit jumpy when a dog skips happily up to me and bounces on my chest. I get creeped out when I read Clifford books. So I got a cat.

I was living with my mom at the time, and we were arguing a lot. We were both depressed and unhappy and taking it out on each other. I thought a cat might lighten the mood, bring a bit of fun and sunshine to the house. At least, I thought, it would give us something else on which to take out our unhappiness. PETA should be calling me anytime.

So I got a cat, and one of my aunts called me and asked me to get her one as well. My friend had found a litter in a field, alongside a dead mother cat, and had sheltered them in his garage. So I went and picked out the two prettiest ones and brought them home. My cat was a gray, fuzzy little sweetheart of a kitten that I named Jasmine. The other was a white-with-tiger-stripes little shit that I named Glory, after my favorite Buffy villain.

Jasmine died pretty fast. She was always a little slow and weary, and after a few days we found that she couldn’t move her back legs. The next day, mom came home and she was dead.

I’ve lost a lot of cats in my life. It’s always the same when you’re a kid. Your cat dies, mom or dad puts it in a Wal-Mart bag and buries it in the back yard and then you have the talk about how this is the circle of life. After a few days the pain goes away and then you think maybe you’ve learned how to deal with grief, and you just might make it if you lose something else, oh, say, grandma.

Of course that’s never how it goes, but you dream.

When Jasmine died we performed the ritual, and now she’s next to mom’s flower bed with no marker and few memories. When my aunt came to pick up Glory the next week she decided right away that she didn’t like her at all and so Glory became our cat. She was a complete hell kitty. Always into everything, always breaking things and attacking people. She had long, sharp claws she used to tear apart things like the couch and my friend’s forearm. Her only saving grace was that she learned real quick how to use the litter box. And that her eyes were gorgeous – one was green, the other a bright, piercing blue. She looked like a Siberian Husky cat.

Then I moved, and I decided to wash my hands of dear Glory by letting mom take care of her. After all, I had people I would be living with while mom was going to be alone in her house. And when we all moved in together, my roommate Erica decided to bring her two cats. So in the end, I got a good deal.

These cats are exactly the opposite of Glory. Dixie and Romeo are sweet, adorable, and loving, if not a little skittish when I do things like play the piano or look at them wrong. But they stay out of trouble, they keep one another clean, and every night they come in my room and sleep for a few hours on my bed.

When Erica was in the hospital for a weekend, the duty of caring for the cats fell to me and I relished it. They slept with me all through the night, and would wake me by walking around on my legs. Romeo likes to talk – he walks around the house mewing to himself, or to anyone from whom he wants attention. He’ll stroll right up to you and meow loudly until you finally begin to pet him, then five seconds later he’ll get bored and walk two feet away where you can’t reach him, then begin meowing again until you move and pet him some more. He’s dragged me around the living room and into the kitchen with this little game a few times, and now I just look back at him with loving sarcasm.

As the cooler, marbled weather of September fell, the annual cricket invasion of Oklahoma happened and Dixie and Romeo discovered insects. They find them on the carpet and bat them around for awhile, and I watch, enthralled and laughing. Then Dixie always does something horrible: she eats the bug, and my joy turns to horror and she looks up at me as if to ask, “What? What?”

Today I came home from running some errands, and as I opened the door, the cats didn’t come running to me for validation like usual. They were sitting over by the fireplace looking intently at something I couldn’t see on the tile. Both of them, just staring, as if the best kitty movie in the world was playing next to the piano. I thought maybe a piece of our wall clock had fallen off – as it’s wont to do – and they were batting it around. So I got down on all fours and looked with them. They looked up as I approached, excited. Look what we found!

There was some kind of caterpillar on the floor, trying to make its way across the tile, impeded by these two giant feline gods who would bat it around, watch it for awhile, inch away as it got closer, and then bat it around some more. We played with it for awhile until two things happened.

One, I realized that the poor worm was oozing its guts all over the place. Obviously the cats had been playing a little too rough. Second, Romeo looked intently at the caterpillar. He got his face right up next to it and stared for awhile, then began to lick – lick!! – this disgusting thing as if preparing to eat it. Dixie followed suit while I watched, horrified, then got up to get a paper towel to take it outside. Their expressions said I had betrayed their very love and trust, and that I was a bad, bad person.

It’s a little – just a little – like being a parent. “What the hell are you doing? You are so grounded!” Back when I thought I was going to be a parent I practiced lines like this – as little cursing as I could muster – and shouted them at my imagined child. Now I’m using the cats. Trying to wean myself off parental authority.

I decided it was time to move on from the “cat” phase of recovery when Romeo was being especially affectionate one night and I looked at him, sadly, and said, “Romeo, you’re the closest thing to a boyfriend I’ve got.” His eyes went wide – I think he understood – and he skittered off. “Wait! Come back! Call me!”

The next night I went to the club.

And I met a guy, and we talked and hit it off, and so we had a date. I made him dinner and we talked and talked over pasta and wine, and things seemed to be getting a little bit better in general. I know I’m not depressed anymore, despite my continued anxieties over money and what I’m going to do with my life. And after my date with this amazing guy – who we’ll call Lucas because that’s his name – I realized that when I was depressed, not because things sucked so badly, but because I wasn’t giving myself permission to feel any of it. In essence, I was saying to my life, and to God, “Things are horrible right now! What’s the deal? Everything should be great and wonderful, and if you knew what you were doing at all, they would be!”

You see, in my Bad Mind my image of God is not a pretty one. It’s the one forged by years of fear and fundamentalism and hiding in the closet. It’s the God who treats me like Dixie and Romeo treat their insects. He bats me around for awhile, lets me keep going in the illusion of security for just a moment, and then hits me again and my wormy guts spill out. Through becoming a believer I’m gradually learning that God is, in fact, neither mean-spirited nor impatient, and that she’s gently stroking my forehead and whispering in my ear as the virulent fever that is my impatience, fear, anxiety, loneliness, and sadness are slowly trickling out of my body by divine grace.

Now, things are better. Not by a lot, but better. I’m not fighting with mom. I’m living on my own. I’m giving myself permission to put myself out there and date and forge new friendships. I’m even trying to be good at my job, which I hate. But I still don’t have enough money to pay my bills, and things are still pretty rough in a lot of ways. But I’m feeling it and looking at it head-on rather than hiding in my unfeeling little Bad Mind part of myself, and that’s a step.

We have to go through these times. Have you ever met someone whose whole life seemed so monumentally easy that you both envied and loathed them at the same time? You know the people that I’m talking about. “I don’t know if I should wear this shirt, because you can really see my six-pack through it, and I don’t know if that’s the image I want to convey.” Or, “I’m having to decide between accepting this job in Paris or staying here with my girlfriend and taking this other job with great pay and benefits!”

I don’t call people like that very often, and a secret part of me thinks that God doesn’t like them very much either. But they say that you can be pretty sure you’ve made God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do, so I try to be forgiving and let it go. We are taught, after all, that it is the least of these who are the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven, and that, if we’re going to look honestly at ourselves, we will be looking right into the eyes of these same least. So slowly, very, very slowly, I’m learning even to forgive myself if things aren’t going great. It’s not a thing you can ever do quickly, but if you learn to do it at all, you’ll feel around inside yourself and find these tiny spaces expanding around your heart, and that light and fresh air are getting inside you. It feels like being able to breathe, just a little bit, after a bad asthma attack, and you find that one foot still fits quite well in front of the other and slowly, surely, you’re moving again.

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