How my cats look when jonesing for crack food.
  • Charles Mudede
  • How my cats look when jonesing for crack food.

Addiction is something you can never miss. It reveals itself straightaway in the eyes of the addict. You look into their pupils and you find you are looking right through their core being. There is an absence of self that the addict's eyes just can't hide. In the place of their person is a vibrating void that needs the peace of a fix. And so it was one morning not too long ago, when I looked down at my cat, who was looking up at me with an intensity I had never felt before, and saw in his eyes that he had become an addict.

He (my cat has no name) was no longer himself. He was just pure, vibrating need. And what did he want so badly? He was not hungry. He and his imposed friend (who was hiding her eyes from me) had eaten two bowls of some cheap cat food I bought the night before at the mart of a nearby gas station—it was a quick replacement of the regular and more expensive stuff I forgot to buy at a distant supermarket.

I fed them before I went to sleep; I fed them a second time in the middle of the night while I was haunting the house with my insomnia; and in the morning, as the sun rose in the kitchen's window, rose above the trees framed in the backyard, I realized from my cat's biggish eyes, I had basically been feeding the poor things crack. He wanted more badly. And he no longer meowed in a normal way, but aggressively: Give me that crack you bought yesterday! I want it right now, damn it! Put it in that fucking bowl! Meowrrrr! And I did, and both cats went at it like fiends. I left the house with the box of crack food and dumped its remaining contents in the compost bin. End of story. Never doing that again.