February 7, 2014 by Michael Lane

TOWARD NOT EATING ANIMALS

From Wikipedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2pigs.jpg
By Titanium22

I got sober from drugs and alcohol in 2000. In the process of recovering I realized that from then on spirituality was going to be an important focus of my life—that it had to be, since the connection to a Higher Power was necessary to keep me sober and alive.

I didn’t realize that recovery would connect me to myself as well, to what was really inside me.

During the early part of my recovery I realized that spirituality could be an open field to play on. I grew up around Catholicism and I didn’t feel like it was that way at all when I was young. I realized that my Higher Power could be one of my own understanding—that I had a lot of room to explore.

So I started exploring. One day I was reading a passage written by a Buddhist monk that was addressed to people of the West. I came across this section where he wrote (I’m paraphrasing):

Can you be a spiritual person if you are participating in the cruelty and suffering of animals by eating them?

This is the first time that it really sunk in that there was a possible connection between spirituality and not eating animals.

Months after I read this passage, I was talking with a friend of mine, and she mentioned that she had become a vegetarian. When I asked what had sparked her conversion, she said it was her cat. Her cat? Yes, she couldn’t look at her cat after eating a plate of meat. She felt guilty.

I thought about my own cats. Through my drinking years, my cats were probably my one shred of connection with anything remotely spiritual. I adopted my cats Bandit and Hooper in 1995.

Bandit on the left, Hooper on the right.

Girlfriends came and went, guy friends came and went, cars came and went crashing, my job came… and almost went three times, because I showed up to work drunk or didn’t bother showing up at all.

The one constant was the drinking. And the cats.

No matter how drunk I got I still fed them. No matter how depressed, I played with them. No matter how many times I was hungover and late for work, I was early (and sober) for vet appointments. No matter how many times Bandit had to meow at me to turn that thumping AC/DC off—which I would blast at two in the morning—he seemed to forgive me. My neighbors sure didn’t.

No matter how self-loathing, self-destructive, self-pitying I was… they crawled into my lap, purred, and loved me.

I realized they were not just pets. They were family. And they had carried me through. What love I had to give was given to them. What love I could receive was through them.

What spirituality I had was given to me was through taking care of them.

When I awakened from the nightmare of drugs and alcohol, although it wasn’t in my consciousness, I think deep down I was aware of this bond that had been formed.

What these two little animals had done for me.

As I recovered, grasping for my own image of what a spiritual life would look like, I realized that my empathy for all animals (and humans, for that matter) was deepening. That caring for animals was going to be one of the core principles in this spiritual life I was trying to live now.

I was told that in order to recover from drugs and alcohol I had to have a complete psychic change.

I think this was starting to qualify as one. I think I wanted to become a vegetarian.

But was it even possible to not eat meat? That was the thing. I wasn’t sure. Which, in retrospect, was silly—alcohol was the biggest obsession of my life for almost 20 years and I wasn’t drinking anymore.

For the first time, I thought about what I was eating. I thought about if I even really liked the taste of meat. This is not a silly question. Looking back, I hated the taste of alcohol—all of it, from cheap beer to hundred-dollar-a-bottle whiskey, from my first drink to my last. That’s the truth. People talk about how refreshing beer is or wax poetic about wine—I don’t get it. I drank to get drunk, to wreck myself, and booze was always hard to get down.

Was it the same for meat? I liked a good burger from time to time. I liked pepperoni on pizzas. But did thinking about this stuff make my mouth water? No. The inherent flavor of meat—the taste of the flesh itself—was that something I enjoyed? I didn’t think so. If I ate a steak I wouldn’t enjoy it unless it was doused with spices, external flavorings.

Raw meat absolutely repulsed me. I had a hard time buying it at the grocery store.

I was starting to think it was possible to quit meat—to realize that the flesh itself wasn’t really something I needed or even wanted.

I joined PETA but wasn’t interested in watching any of the graphic videos they sent me. That stuff was too extreme. On the other hand, I was interested in the founder of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk. She was obviously a person who cared deeply about animals, a kindred spirit, and I was interested in what made her decide to do what she was doing. HBO broadcast a documentary on her life and her work called I Am an Animal and I decided I’d try to watch it. I figured I could fast forward through any of the “rough” parts.

One of the images I recall was video of an adult cow in a slaughterhouse. I realized I had never seen what the inside of a slaughterhouse looked like. The cow was terrified as it was shoved out of a door onto the floor of what looked like a warehouse.

From Wikipedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calf_with_eartag.jpg
By Dave Young from Taranaki, New Zealand

I held my breath. I didn’t fast forward. I couldn’t look away.

The cow was wounded, flailing. It was trying to get to its feet but it couldn’t because the floor was a lake of blood. I could see it screaming.

I saw a monkey held down in a lab. I couldn’t tell what were the monkey’s limbs and what were restraints or electrodes. Its whole body looked stretched out and pinned. The monkey screamed as it was prodded with something.

From Wikipedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mink_in_the_park.jpg
By qmnonic

The other scene I recall was on a mink farm. The face of a tiny, ferret-looking mink was in close-up in the foreground as a man’s boot came into frame. This man stepped on the mink’s skull first with one boot, then brought up the other one. The rodent struggled, the bones of its skull crunching under the man’s boots, blood gushing out of the mink’s nose. The film then cut to a different mink being skinned alive—I could clearly see the animal’s mouth opening to scream with each stab of the knife.

As I watched this… out of me came this sound. It was a howl that shook the room. My cats fled in terror and I could only imagine what my neighbors thought. Nothing that’s come out of my lungs has ever been that loud, lasted that long, or come from so deep a place. Then I burst into tears.

The next day I was a vegetarian. Over time I have become a vegan. I have never looked back, and could not live any other way.

I know now that this was a profound spiritual experience. The only comparable experience I have ever had is my moment of clarity about my alcoholism—a sort of “burning bush” that some, but not all, alcoholics experience. My burning bush was a voice in my head: If you keep drinking, things will get worse.

A simple truth perhaps. One that the whole universe was aware of—I was the last person to find out. But for me it was a thunderclap of wisdom. This was a thing that I knew to the core of my being—it wasn’t just a fact, it was a part of me.

There’s knowing in your head and there’s knowing in your soul. This was knowing in the soul, and this is the same place as my howl for the animals came from. The deepest place there is.

In both of those moments I knew I had to change. That I must.

In both of those moments, I discovered connection again. To a Higher Power, to myself.

And to animals.

September 26, 2013 by Michael Lane

THE ELEPHANT INSIDE ME

While I was struggling to write my next blog post about my Thailand elephant adventure—a struggle which has been particularly embarrassing since I put the words “part one” in the subheading of last week’s post, and so not having part two ready to go already feels like I have a loaded gun at my head—my girlfriend sent me the photo below:

Image of an elephant fetus in a womb. A series of different representations, using ultrasound scans and 4-dimensional scanning technology, have been created for a documentary called Animals in the Womb that will be screened in the UK on Channel 4 over Christmas. (Channel 4/PA)

So imagine this assassin standing behind me, call him “Mr. Part One,” who was mild-mannered and loving humanity a week ago when he was on the page, but now he’s pissy and homicidal because he just wants to hold me to my word and see this “Mr. Part Two” I was promising. His dead fish-finger is on the trigger, the gun barrel is tapping my skull, and he doesn’t care about anything else, like me eating or sleeping or feeding the cats, and he certainly isn’t interested in me getting all googly-eyed over a picture of an elephant floating in a womb.

Like anyone would do with a gun to their head—I tell him to hold on for a second.

Besides the fact that this image is just flat-out cool, there is something that it is illuminating deep inside me, a firecracker spinning and popping down into a warren of green and blue glowing caves that leads to who-knows-where. So I’m going to duck a few hundred shrieking bats and try to see what’s down here inside me.

In a literal sense the photo above is, of course, “just” an elephant. But since in the few pockets of the world where they still roam they’re either vulnerable or endangered—what with poaching, exploitation, habitat destruction, and their own super-long gestation period (two years from conception to birth)—there’s no “just” about even one elephant. Most people reading this will likely never see one except in a photograph. So looking at this image reminds me of how unique and fragile the entire species is. Even a powerful giant like an elephant is vulnerable in the womb—and at this point the entire species is hanging by a thread “in the womb.” Imagine losing such a remarkable creature.

Another facet of the image is that I see a resemblance to a human: look at the head, blot out the trunk and ears and focus on the eye and the mouth: those two features in particular, at this stage in the womb, make me think of a human baby.

Most mammals are born with 90% of their brain weight—they are who they are and know what they know at birth. Humans are born with 28% of their adult brain weight, which reflects what will be a long and complex learning process from birth to adulthood. Elephants are born with 35% of theirs—pretty close to humans—and they learn as they grow just like us.

Also like humans elephants grieve, play, mimic behaviors, learn to use tools, show compassion, cooperation, self-awareness, and even communicate with each other.

We already know about their long memories. They also live about as long as humans: 50-70 years. And, if you happen to die first, and are particularly nice to elephants, like famed conservationist Lawrence Anthony, they might even make the trip to attend your funeral. (The Facebook page describing this incident is here and it has a striking photo of the “funeral procession.”)

When I look at the womb photo I also think of elephant astronauts floating in space. I can’t help it. I imagine them in baggy silver space suits and dark-visored helmets that make them look like they’re all wearing giant-sized Ray Bans. They are treading zero gravity up there, pumping their tree trunk legs, and clenching death ray pistols in their trunks so they can repel space aliens. I could go on with this one.

Looking at the photo again and digging deeper… in the last year or two I’ve spoken to some close friends about how I feel like I’ve been “reborn” just in the past couple of years. So when I look at this image I think of all the garbage dumps, sucking swamps, and blasted-out moonscapes that I’ve walked through to get here. All the alcoholism, workaholism, fear, low self-esteem, people pleasing, all the crap-sandwich years of mostly self-imposed suffering—they’re all fading away like old shitty 70’s polaroids in a cheap flip book that I threw into the trash can.

Now I feel like I am this baby elephant right after birth—wobbly and falling on his ass a lot… and yet with this new gentleness, compassion, and capacity for great strength and power.

My tusks are coming in quite nicely.

I also see in this image the thing I am doing right now, in this moment, with “Mr. Part One” standing behind me with the loaded gun, rolling his yellowy snake eyes at me.

I am writing.

As a boy I was writing almost since the moment I could read. I never learned how to hold a pencil properly—I squeezed the pencil in a caveman grip like I was trying to strangle it—so I would write and write and get big ugly blisters.

I stopped writing in my 20’s when alcoholism and “careerism” got me in their grips. I didn’t write too much more than emails for over twenty years. My career in that time was as a trailer editor, and I wrote some copy for the trailers I cut here and there—mostly out of necessity, to fit what I was cutting.

If I saw a trailer I cut on the big screen I was less impressed with my edits than if the copy I wrote made it to the final version: I’d smile and say to whoever I was with, “I wrote that”—exactly like a six year-old boy would say it.

But copy writing to a writer is like being a champion long distance runner who is shut in a tiny room with a creaky treadmill.

I thought I would die without really writing anything ever again. I was terrified of this—because deep down I knew, I knew that I needed to strangle a pencil again.

You know that expression “the elephant in the room”? Well, the elephant in my womb was the writing… it was always there, and it turns out that I didn’t need to worry about never writing again.

Because you know, that’s a freaking elephant in there, and it has to come out.

So as I perform a judo move on “Mr. Part One”, disarming him, whapping him on the bridge of his nose with the butt of the gun, and telling him “Mr. Part Two” will come out when he’s good and ready…

What I want to know is, do you have an elephant inside of you?

I’d like to hear about it.

August 30, 2013 by Michael Lane

BREAKFAST WITH THE CATS

Bandit on the left, Hooper on the right.

Recently I found this video that someone sent me a while ago (re-posted below), and it reminded me of my first two cats, Bandit and Hooper, and how they would wake me in the morning.

I adopted both cats in the days when I was drinking a lot. Bandit was part of a litter of black kittens that was thrown into a dumpster. Luckily the dumpster was behind an animal grooming business, so the kittens’ mewling complaints were heard by the right people. Bandit was my first cat.

Hooper I got at a pet store adoption event, but it took two tries. The first try he purred, nuzzled, and licked me when I petted him—and I chose a beautiful gray kitten with blue eyes over him. The gray kitten didn’t give me anything, no affection, he hardly even acknowledged that I existed on the ride home. He was like a beautiful painting of a kitten. But men are like cats in that I went for the shiny sparkly one over the one that was the best for me.

When I got home there was a message on my answering machine—this was in the 90’s—informing me that I had inadvertently kidnapped the gray kitten. He was supposed to be at the pet store for a grooming, and he got mixed up with the adoption cats. I probably could have ransomed him back, he was that beautiful.

When I returned the gray stunner, Hooper jumped into my arms—to make sure I got the message this time.

When I brought Hooper home to meet Bandit, it was the easiest cat introduction I’ve ever had in my life (and I’ve gone through a few by now). They both liked each other almost immediately. They made a good team.

Based on some information I had, it was likely that Bandit was part of a Hispanic family—until they decided to throw him out. Hooper’s origins were a complete mystery, though he had an odd bent tail that I thought might point to a wild and dangerous time out on the streets.

Of the two of them, Bandit was slightly dominant, but he was laid back about it—the cool, behind-the-scenes leader.

I was an erratic father to the two of them because of the drinking. I had a lot of love to give, but it was stuffed under twenty layers of armor. I was a knight stumbling blindly along, always about to teeter over… and land on a yowling cat.

I was terrible about feeding them breakfast on time, especially on the weekends. My hangovers were like bombed-out buildings, and on some weekends you couldn’t dig me out of the rubble before two o’clock.

Feeding time for the cats was at eight in the morning.

I suspect after the first dozen or so times of me feeding them so starvingly late, they figured something had to be done. Here’s how I imagine it might have went down, with my Mexican-American black cat, Bandit, and my streetwise one, Hooper:

BANDIT: Hooper, my compadre. look at eem. He’s not moving.

HOOPER: Yeah, no shit. He drinks like a fish. Stinks like one, too.

BANDIT: Ohh, compadre… don’t say fish. Please, my friend…

HOOPER: Oh, give me a break. I’m fucking famished too. You know, I’ve been thinking… maybe it’s time to do some serious pooping outside the litter box. Send him a message.

BANDIT: Um… do you mean “thinking”? Thinking outside the box?

HOOPER: No, I mean Cheesing the Mousetrap. Down-Periscoping the Submarine. Warming the Porcelain Globe.

Bandit sits on his haunches, blinking at Hooper.

HOOPER: Trumpeting an Elephant? Chumming the Chocolate Water? Dropping the Ring into Mount Doom?

Bandit blinks…

BANDIT: Ohhhh—pooping. You mean literally pooping.

HOOPER: Well shit, yeah. I mean, what the hell, did you go to cat finishing school or something? I’m from the street, my friend. Look at this tail. Of course I’m literal. I could literally eat a fucking dead horse right now.

BANDIT: Yes compadre, me also… but I don’t think Dropping a Doom Ring would do anything except get us sent to the vet…

HOOPER: Hmm, you’re right about that. Don’t you love how he throws a treat into that cat carrier prison when he tries to get us to the vet? Like that’s gonna fool us. Oh yeah—no thanks, dude. I ain’t going to jail for some Fred Flinstone-looking vitamin shit treat. Seriously, who does he think he’s dealing with?

BANDIT: Yes, yes, compadre… But what we need is a plan… okay… here’s what we’re going to do…

Bandit raises a paw to cover his mouth as he leans in to whisper in Hooper’s ear… Hooper’s eyes widen as he listens to the details…

HOOPER: Yeah… uh-huh… okay… meow, that’s interesting…

Plotting.

And after that meeting, when I was in those dozes that were like drowning in my car at the bottom of the Chappaquiddick River, I would feel this wetness on my ear, like the kiss of an angel…

…actually, it would be the wet nose of my cat Hooper, as he tried to gently nudge me awake.

I’d swipe at him—not to hit him or anything, but to force him off the bed—and he would jump down.

Bandit would watch from a high place, like a window jamb or the top of a book shelf. He was the general on the mountain top, while Hooper would launch sorties into the lumpy fortress of my hangover. I imagined Hooper was disgruntled and resentful, assigned the dirty work of stirring me from the deep caverns of my boozy sleep… while Bandit would sit up there and egg him on: “You’re doing great, compadre, doing great… just one more time… don’t worry, my friend, I have your back…”

Generally, it would take five to ten tries. Hooper would wet nose-stamp my skin, paw my scalp, lick his lips in my ear, or—my favorite—my eyes would flutter open to witness the Cat Stare, that peeling metal look that cats share with convicts.

If that didn’t work, then Bandit would basically yank the “fire alarm”: he’d jump up on me and march back and forth over my body crying and yowling, the cat version of cursing a blue streak: “What the fucking-fuck?! Seriously, this shit is old! We’re so hungry we’re crapping mouse toys! My food bowl just laughed at me! Get up, you bastard! I mean, god damn it, what the hell does a cat have to do?”

“I still say we should start pooping everywhere,” Hooper would add. “Maybe poop on his head.”

Bandit takes a breath before unleashing another string of obscenities at me.

Bandit cursed at me like this whenever it took me really, really long to feed him and also when I played AC/DC on the stereo. Anything by them. The first chords would rumble through the speakers and he’d be in my lap, swearing up and down at me. “This godforsaken head-bashing shit again?! Can you please lighten up? I’d give my left paw for some Julio Iglesias. Seriously—turn that shit off!”—And I would.

One night the cat alert duo was pressed into duty in the middle of the night. I stumbled beer-soaked and blind into the apartment at three in the morning and had a sudden urge for a hard-boiled egg. I threw the egg into a saucepan with a few inches of water, blasted the gas flame…

… and passed out.

I dreamed of Redwood trees dancing on hardwood floors… John Wayne Gacy clowns tunneling underneath in the crawlspaces… fires in the middle of forests eating witches… smoke from the fires downing birds and bricking up my lungs…

… and cats screaming in my ear.

For real.

I woke up with the apartment filled with smoke. I stumbled into the kitchen. The water in the saucepan had long since burned away. The saucepan—it was metal—had scorched black through and through and cracked open. There was a deep greasy bomb blast scar on the ceiling. The egg had undergone a flash-rotting in the intense heat—it looked like the charred fetus of some hell-bound rodent.

And the fire alarm was shouting the neighborhood awake—but I had slept through that.

It was the cats that woke me up.

After that I didn’t swipe at Hooper any more when he tried to nudge me awake. I still was late feeding them a lot of times though.

It would go like this: After a few paw bats, nose kisses, and Cat Stares, Hooper would hang it up, slinking off the bed, and Bandit would descend from his perch to take over. At the instant of the tag-team paw slap—that’s when I would get my ass moving.

Now Bandit and Hooper are gone, and with them the best alarm clock I’ve ever had.

The cats I have now don’t wake me up like this. They don’t need to. I’ve stopped drinking. I’m punctual at their feeding times.

BANDIT: Yes, that’s because of us, dumbass. We taught you, compadre.

HOOPER: Damned straight. And we also noticed that you don’t try to pull that stupid throw-the-treat-into-the-carrier crap any more, either.

BANDIT: A-men.

Direct link to the video on the creator’s website is here. Quality is better I think.

August 9, 2013 by Michael Lane

TATTOO ME

This post is the next installment in a series about my trip to Thailand to volunteer helping elephants.

At Base Hut one day a girl approaches me. She has a beer in her hand. It’s Chang beer, the most popular beer in Thailand. Chang means “elephant” in Thai. The logo on the label has two elephants facing each other.

“So Mike,“ she says, “Are you ready to take the plunge?”

I break out in a sweat. I’ve been sober for years now, but I am out in the middle of the jungle with a bunch of hard-partying kids.

Other volunteers are watching. Some of them move closer. I feel trapped.

Chang Beer.

Something about this feels familiar. –Ah yes… high school peer pressure. In my high school you weren’t cool unless you drank.

At sixteen, I didn’t want to drink. From my vantage point then alcohol tasted bad, made you stupid, and transformed merely weird relatives into downright deranged ones.

But at that age, I desperately wanted to fit in. The way everyone talked about drinking—the house parties, the keggers in the woods, the quarters games, the crazy stories—I definitely felt on the outside looking in on all the coolness. Plus I was a Dungeons and Dragons nerd, which was like being a coolness narc. If my D&D gaming was found out I’d be shot and found stuffed in a trunk somewhere, my mouth full of twenty-sided dice.

It took me a while, but I finally caved. I drank. And I guess I was a little cooler. For a while.

Back at Base Hut, the girl is smiling at me, waiting.

“Am I ready to take the plunge on what?” I say.

The girl’s eyes glitter. She taps my arm with her beer bottle. I take a step backward.

Drinking gave me years of trouble. My twenties were a blur. My thirties were a long slog to put my life back together. There was no way that now, in my forties, I was going to put my whole life at risk for some leftover teenage-fueled desire to fit in, was I?

“A tattoo,” she says.

I blink at her. “A what?”

“A tattoo. Are you ready to get a tattoo?”

“Yeah, Mike,” one of the other volunteers chimes in, showing fresh ink on her ankle. “Everyone’s doing it.”

Oh… Oh!

Thailand is the land of a thousand smiles and the land of a million tattoos. Many of the volunteers planned out their tattoos before they even arrived. The price for a tattoo in Thailand is a fraction of what it would cost in most countries, and the experiences in Thailand tend to be worth commemorating. There’s something magical about this place–not to mention all the elephants walking around.

But I would have never imagined that the new version of peer pressure would revolve around getting one.

I still wasn’t comfortable in my own skin here. I talked very little. I felt a little bit at ease with the volunteers that I came in with—sharing a very long ride with them from Chiang Mai helped to break the ice—but the veteran volunteers frightened me.

That sounds weird, a 45-year-old man scared of 20-somethings. But there it is. One of the symptoms of alcoholism is that it can feel like I am walking around in perpetual high school-outsider status. By its very nature alcoholism separates, disconnects.

New situations can be tough.

Neil and Jess, a married couple in their mid-twenties, particularly scare me.

They are among the longest tenured of the volunteers, and are coming up on the end of a six-month stay at the village. They have lived and breathed the village and the elephants. Jess gives many of the lectures on the elephants that are part of the program here, and I make sure I don’t miss any of them.

From where I stand, Neil and Jess are like the prom king and queen of the volunteers. (And they’re British, so the king and queen part fits.) Guys like me didn’t hang with prom royalty.

Neil and Jess.

Weekends are free for volunteers to do whatever they like, and often people schedule trips either back to Chiang Mai or to Pai, a smaller city that is friendly to tourists. Almost always people return sporting new tattoos. At first I look at them more out of politeness than interest.

I get the appeal of them: to make a permanent life event marker, a physical manifestation of the emotional or spiritual. I considered getting some sort of cat tattoo when my cat of almost eighteen years died. The bond with him was closer than with many humans, and I wanted to honor him.

But I didn’t go through with it. Perhaps it’s because I tend to get lost in the details: if I’m going to paint a permanent picture on my body, even to honor an animal that I loved like a twin soul, then the tattoo had to be planned out carefully. It must be perfect. And perfection is the enemy of actually completing anything.

Raeah, a volunteer from Canada, returns from Pai to show off her new tattoo: two elephants ringed around her wrist, joined together trunk to tail. It’s colorful but simple, evocative. It’s beautiful.

I start to cave.

The next time I am asked if I want a tattoo, instead of laughing I grunt something like, “Hum,” and sort of shake my head no.

One of the two elephants in the ring around Raeah’s wrist.

After another city venture, Neil has added to his gallery of tattoos.

By this time Neil and Jess have begun to abdicate their thrones—the imaginary thrones that I put them on. We’ve shared some meals, gone on a couple of hikes, and Neil and I have played together in a couple of soccer games (or “football” games, as it’s known to everyone else except us Americans).

In the football game against the mahouts, Neil is a crazy demon running up and down the field and the de facto captain. He eggs me on and calls me the “football warrior”.

They are a warm, generous couple. I like when I can make Neil laugh, because his mouth gets big and his whole face seems to explode—he reminds me of a blissful little boy when he laughs.

Neil’s returned from Chiang Mai with the mother of all tattoos. It’s of Tong Dee, the matriarch of the elephant herd. It extends from his elbow all the way up to the top of his shoulder. Tong Dee pokes her head through the leaves of a lotus flower. The lotus blooms over Tong Dee’s head. Neil tells me the tattoo took seven hours to complete. I put that fact out of my head for a minute.

Views of Neil’s tattoo of Tong Dee.

Neil.

Tong Dee is my favorite elephant. Every time I am close to her in the jungle, I am struck dumb. She’s always in my thoughts.

The shoulder blade, I’m thinking. I want Tong Dee there. Simpler than Neil’s version of Tong Dee, of course—no way will I writhe under a tattoo gun for seven hours my first time—but I want Tong Dee there. I need her there.

Tong Dee. The face that launched dozens of tattoos.

Even after I took that first drink as a teenager years ago, I still didn’t fit in. I took a million drinks after that. I hated the peer pressure and vowed I would never exert that same pressure on anyone else.

(Years later, I was reminiscing with a friend who I went to high school with about how level-headed and tolerant I was with other people after I had found the magic elixir of alcohol. I looked back fondly on my “Buddha of Booze” period.

“Yeah,” my friend said. “You were real tolerant as you were yelling at everyone, ”DRINK, PUSSY!”)

DRINK, PUSSY!

One night at Base Camp I witness the ‘home school’ version of getting a tattoo. The tattoo artist is a local man named Root, one of the most colorful personalities in the village. Instead of a tattoo gun, Root uses a pointed bamboo stick. Root doesn’t charge very much, and most of the payment is usually in beer. Chang beer.

Most of the volunteers who get tattoos in Thailand will get at least one from Root. His tattoos are cruder than most machine tattoos, but they’re perfect if a person wants a minimalist tattoo or one that has a word or a phrase that means something to them.

Maressa, a young volunteer in her twenties, is a recipient of one of Root’s “homemade” tattoos. She is getting “plays with fire” in Burmese tattooed to the side of her foot.

I watch. Maybe this is the way to go. A simple tattoo first.

Maressa is nervous but excited. She’s never had a bamboo tattoo done before. She has a couple of Chang beers ready to use as her anesthetic.

First, Root draws the words on her foot with a marker. Then he takes his sharpened bamboo stick and dips it in ink. He bends down, tapping her skin with the sharpened bamboo.

If someone asks me now if I want a tattoo, I will say yes. This will be a great thing, a wonderful epidermal monument to my time here.

Then I see Maressa’s face. She is one of the friendliest volunteers, with one of the most genuine smiles I’ve ever seen. Now that smile is stretched tight, showing too many teeth.

She chugs the beer.

I ask her if it hurts and the way she says, “Yeah, it hurts”–sounding like her natural cheeriness has been punched out of her—tells me very clearly that there is no way in hell I will be getting a tattoo any time soon.

Maressa. Still smiling. Root is on the left.

Maressa’s tattoo after it was finished.

Jess worries that she will have some difficulty finding a job back in England after the trip. It’s because of the tattoo on her hand. She shows it to me.

It’s a tattoo of Ganesha, the elephant god. The Destroyer of Obstacles.

Hand tattoos. Jess’ tattoo of Ganesha is on the left.

It surprises me that someone might say no to her because she has a tattoo on her hand— especially considering that tattoos are generally accepted today. Jess’s tattoo is beautiful. It’s art. And It’s an elephant god. Who would say no to an elephant god?

Not me.

By the end of my trip to Thailand I will have a picture of Ganesha on my bedroom wall. I will have T-shirts of Ganesha and the Chang beer logo with the two elephants facing each other. I will have a simple elephant necklace. I like the feel of the little silver charm against my heart.

I will feel comfortable with everyone. I will be myself.

No tattoos though.

It’s okay. I know it’s not about being cool any more. It’s not about tattoos, or drinking, or fitting in. My age isn’t an issue either.

It’s about knowing I’m enough.

All it took to figure that out was forty-five years, plus a few extra weeks in Thailand. And a million drinks.

One day I am at Base Hut and another girl approaches me. She puts up her index finger like Caesar at the Roman Forum.

On her index finger is a tattoo of a smiley face.

March 31, 2013 by Michael Lane

Escape Artist

In my late twenties I was a drunk and I suppose I was what many like to call a functioning alcoholic, though for me the functioning part was mostly an illusion. But I did manage to hold onto a job, and a girlfriend for a little while, and I had two cats.

Hooper was my second cat. I named him after the stuntman character of the same name in the Burt Reynolds film from the 70’s that is mostly forgotten–probably for good reason–though I sure loved it as a kid. I was a fan of Burt Reynolds movies from the 70’s, movies like Deliverance, White Lightning, Shamus, and The Longest Yard. My first cat, pal to Hooper, I named Bandit, but not after Smokey and the Bandit—I picked Bandit because he was a black cat and I just thought it was a cool name.

Like Hooper the stuntman, Hooper the cat could jump up to, and down from, ridiculously high places. He was young, agile, and he even had an old injury, perhaps from a stunt gone awry—a tail that bent almost ninety degrees about five inches down from the end of his tail. I got him from a rescue organization and they knew nothing about his history but I always liked to believe he got the bent tail bouncing out of a near-fatality with a car.

Hooper was sweet and outgoing. He was the only cat I ever had who would go up to a person on the first meeting. He usually met them at the door. That is beyond rare for a cat—that kind of brazen openness is dog territory. He was a good friend and playmate to my cat Bandit, and when I spoke Hooper’s name he would flop over on his side and writhe happily. The more I chirped his name and the higher my voice went, the more he flopped around in what looked like utter joy, as if he just couldn’t believe how great his name was. Or maybe he was just celebrating being a cat.

And he was acrobatic. He provided endless entertainment with his somersaults up the walls onto shelves and cabinets and the top of the refrigerator. But a lot of cats are acrobatic. Hooper, unlike most other cats, also had a special ability that I have not seen in any other cat before or since. Hooper was an escape artist.

In Los Angeles all my cats are indoor cats. There’s just too much traffic to even entertain the thought of letting a cat outdoors. But Hooper performed his first escape within the first week. Thankfully I had a second door behind my first one in the apartment I lived in at the time, at the bottom of the stairs. So when he flew by me, scampering down the stairs, he was stopped dead by the front door at the bottom. I was alarmed at how quickly he had moved. It was as if his secret identity had been revealed. Sweet cat by day, then by night he would slip out to do some contract killing for the C.I.A.

He was a master of the feint, where I might be answering the door and he’d pad by in a casual way like, Hmm, isn’t this nice you have a guest, I bet he’s a very nice pers—and here I fucking go, you’ll never catch me!–and he’d easily dodge feet and legs and bolt through a narrow opening in the door.

Needless to say, I was very attached to him, and didn’t want him going anywhere. Nor did I take his constant attempts to escape personally, as a judgment of me as a caretaker. I just figured he was an outdoor cat in his past life, and at certain times, he just got the urge to be out there again. To get another taste of the streets, or the wild, or wherever he came from.

This was new for me, because at that time I took everything personally. My girlfriend at the time was young, creative, and adventurous. She was taking improvisation acting classes and she was good at it. I was insecure and wanted to level the playing field by weakening her. On a subconscious level, of course. With all the booze I was imbibing I hardly ever knew what I was doing, and loved her in my stumbling way.

So I was constantly argumentative. I froze her out at every slight or modest disagreement. I was moody (a necessity for an artistic life, I thought) and opinionated. My heart was ghettoized by self-loathing and jealousy moved in to build sleek black condominiums. I was desperately anxious that she’d leave me.

One Saturday morning she left for work and after sleeping off the hangover as much as I could, I got up to feed the one cat. Wait–one cat? Bandit was there, but where was Hooper? I combed my tiny apartment but I already knew Hooper had escaped, and this time, he got by the second door. He had finally made it. And based on the past attempts, and his wild impulse, he was probably far away by now. He had no collar, he was not microchipped. And my girlfriend, who knew very well about Hooper’s secret identity, had carelessly let him out when she left the apartment. He was lost. I circled my apartment, dizzy, paralyzed. Color seemed to bleed out of the world.

I picked up the phone, and my first call was not on behalf of my lost cat, but to let my girlfriend have it. Anger for me was so close to the surface that I could go from zero to apeshit in no time. But something happened in the fleeting moments before she answered the phone. I simply told her what happened, my voice cracking with anxiety. She was mortified, and almost hysterical in her empathy for me. And it took her empathy to uncover in me what was buried beneath the mountain of booze and insecurity: love. Not just for my cat, either. For my girlfriend. For myself—allowing myself to feel grief and loss. Real love, not tainted by strings or conditions or what’s-in-it-for-me.

She helped me make lost cat fliers. In addition to the bent tail, Hooper had an overbite that made him look like he was part donkey. She drew the tail and the teeth perfectly. We paraded up and down my neighborhood calling Hooper’s name and putting up fliers. “$200 reward” I put in big bold writing. In those days, $200 was big money for me, probably a third of all the money I had to my name.

Two days went by and I got two calls. One only offered that they ‘maybe saw’ a cat that looked like Hooper about 2 miles away, which made me even more forlorn, and the other said the cat he saw was wearing a collar, so it couldn’t have been Hooper. It was not looking good.

My girlfriend hugged me. “I can’t believe you’re not mad at me for letting him out,” she said through tears. I didn’t answer her. But she was right–I wasn’t. And I didn’t blame her. It surprised me as much as it did her. Hold on, how come I’m not being a self-righteous dick about this? I searched myself, and I saw there wasn’t any resentment or bitterness. Just grief… and something else… another ‘g’ word was sinking in. Grace.

I hadn’t come within a hundred miles of grace in my whole life—didn’t even know what it really meant–but in this moment, with my cat escaping and sadness and loss whirling around me, grace found me, and I knew what it meant.

It was on this second day that a woman knocked on my door. She was my next door neighbor. I hardly knew her, because I kept most people at arms length.

“I think I have your cat,” she said.

Hooper was sitting there in her backyard. He meowed when he saw me and he took a weak step forward. I saw that he had a terrible crooked limp. Later when I took him to the vet I found out his right rear leg was broken, and based on everything we knew the vet and I guessed that after scampering out my front door he had climbed up the rear porch of the apartment building, then jumped or fell into the neighbor’s yard. The neighbor heard him meowing and took him in immediately. This all probably happened within minutes of his initial escape.

Total distance Hooper had traveled while on the lam: approximately forty feet, with twenty-five of that being vertical.

Hooper had to be confined to a cage to immobilize him while he was recuperating. It took about two months and he played with his buddy Bandit through the cage. The leg healed completely.

Hooper lived many years after that and he kept trying to escape. The girlfriend escaped, too. It didn’t take her quite as long.