Part Three: The Cats Of The Animal Companion Book Circle

Peaches as a kitten

Andrew

            Part Three

Peaches And Andrew

            Peaches and Andrew are brother and sister.  They are also high officials in the secret feline cabal known as the Orange Cat Contingent.  Few people are aware of this powerful entity, founded many thousands of years ago by the venerable orange tabby known as Tutankhitty.  Peaches and Andrew came to us by way of a feral cat rescue service.  Andrew is the only member of the Book Circle who can't read.  He's slow.  Literally.  I don't mean that he is stupid.  His orange coat is so huge and thick that it's impossible for Andrew to do much of anything.  He's a prisoner of his coat

            Andrew moves in increments.  One seldom sees him in transit from one place to another.  He simply arrives.  Fox and I can be in bed, alone, reading.  We turn the pages of our books.  Andrew is suddenly between us, settled and calm, purring.  How did he get there without a hint of disturbance, without moving a single molecule of air?

            Andrew may be a prisoner of his coat but he is also an alchemist.  He has taken his imprisonment and turned it into a form of enlightenment.  It's obvious that he loves being with us, with his family, and that his love is deep and it brings him great joy.

            When I read aloud for the Book Circle, he sees everything as a movie.  That's cool, because Andrew's rare comments help me evaluate the potential for film adaptations of my books.

            Peaches is a short haired orange tabby, virtually the opposite of Andrew.  She never shuts up.  "I want a treat, I want a treat," she says.  "Scratch my tummy or I'll keep making this noise.  Yeooowwwwwww, yeooooowwww.  What's up today?  Are you gonna read aloud or do I have to do homework?  When are you going to write a mystery?  Or a police procedural?  Your stuff is boring.  Too much mystical crap.  I want a good explosion or two.  How about a firefight between a tribe of cannibals and a unit of Navy Seals?  Yeoooowwwww!  Where's my treat?"

            At this point I must give Peaches exactly three Whiskas Chicken-flavored Dentabite Treats or she will not stop making that noise.  The other animals receive a single Dentabite.  These treats are fattening and expensive.  To keep the peace I lure Peaches to a location where she can't be seen by the other members of the Book Circle.  She gets her three treats and she's quiet.  Three treats buys her silence for a while.  We can continue our discussion of my poems, novels, satires and essays.

            You have now been introduced to all the members of the Animal Companion Book Circle, a group formed to discuss my literary works.  We have Bear, Gabriel, Obsidian, Peaches, Andrew and General Stonewall Jackson Cichlid.  We meet in the front room of our RV.  The General's aquarium is on a table a few feet from my computer.  The other members gather where they may.  Peaches likes the dashboard, where she can get elevation over the rest of us.  Andrew crawls inside a cube-shaped cat-house with a circular door.  He puts his head on the lip of the door and watches the proceedings.  Bear must, I repeat MUST, sit between my back and the back of the chair.  This forces me to lean forward and sit with half my butt off the chair but it's out of my control.  If I don't let Bear  into his little squeeze-space, he'll sit on the floor at my side and make a sound, something between a whine and a command.  "Whup," he says.  "Whup."  It's a quiet but insistent sound.  Frankly, it's obnoxious.  I move forward and Bear jumps into the space between the chair and my back. 
            You might discern that our friends are spoiled and manipulative. I've seen far worse.

            Gabriel sits on the couch with Obsidian.  They metamorphose into a composite creature, a brown ball of fur with four alert eyes.

            Thus gathered, we begin our experience of the extraordinary work of the world's most obscure talented writer, Art Rosch.

            I am Art Rosch and this is my reading audience.  I don't mean to exclude my wife, Fox.  She's read all of my work, many times.  She keeps the RV clean, she makes sure the bills are paid on time, she feeds the dogs and cats and cleans the cat box.  Fox is always nearby and ready with a pithy comment or a wry observation. 

            Every creature aboard this thirty eight foot RV is committed to the support of my writing.  I may remain the world's most obscure talented writer, but I am not without a core group of devoted followers.  I'd like to expand my fan base.  Sooner or later, readers will recognize a good thing and they'll subscribe to my blog.  An agent will realize that I'm a hidden treasure.  He'll make a three book deal with a big publisher.  My life will change.  I'll miss the peace and quiet of my RV and my little circle of friends.  I'll appear on the Daily Show and be appalled at how fat I look.  I will be mistaken for Philip Roth, who will be mistaken for me.

            There is no such thing as real life.  It's all a fantasy in which the characters exercise bad judgment, get into trouble, and mostly blame everyone else for their misery.

            My definition of a hero is someone who takes sole responsibility for his or her predicament and fights to change it for the better.

            My effort to change my predicament for the better is right here.  It's my Animal Companion Book Circle. 

            It's always good to know who are your true friends.

Coming next, a discussion about the novel, CONFESSIONS OF AN HONEST MAN in which General Stonewall Jackson Cichclid blows a lot of hot air.

           

           

             

The Animal Companion Book Circle

                                               from l to r: Bear, Gabe, Kiani





In my efforts to remain the world's most obscure talented writer, I have enlisted the help of my household animal friends. I've told the story of Little Bear's rescue from the puppy mill. http://www.artrosch.com/2010/09/bathing-dog-who-bites-even-though-i.html

I've told of my encounter with General Stonewall Jackson Cichlid. http://www.artrosch.com/2010/11/interview-by-fish.html
I'd like to introduce the other members of the book circle and give a thumbnail description of each of my friends-slash-literary critics..

Little Bear is certainly the leading intellect of the group. He is willful, stubborn and sometimes hard to motivate. He learns dog tricks as if they're beneath his dignity (which they are) but in order to please us he sits, shakes hands and rolls over.

Bear is the most loyal of fans. He loves my writing and his critiques are incisive and sometimes painful. But that' as it should be. A writer needs to hear about failures from someone who is supportive. A book circle such as this one, dedicated to the work of a single author, is a special vehicle for the writer's work.

Bear's loyalty is demonstrated in his absolute devotion to his sex partner, a stuffed dog named Samantha. Here it is, almost a year since his nuts were cut off, and Bear still humps Samantha two or three times a week. He has no shame in these public displays. He does a little dance around Samantha. He jumps up and forward in a canine declaration of love and dominance. It's a complex movement.

His hind legs make a motion as if he is kicking dirt backwards into the faces of rivals. Bear raises the front of his body to a forty five degree angle. This is accompanied by a simultaneous hop forward of a few inches. It resembles the movement of a big mountain ram smacking the horns of another big mountain ram.This dance is done in a circle around Samantha before Bear begins the serious humping. Maybe he 's an Aries.

"Ufff ruff," he says. In other words, "dig me, I'm Da Man!" Samantha lays on her side. She's a toy, she's inanimate. It doesn't matter to Bear. When he was just a puppy he had his first girlfriend, a brown stuffed dog named Greta. Somewhere between Greta and Samantha, and before we had Bear's nuts chopped off, we mated Bear with a living toy poodle named Snickers. That's a story I plan to tell very soon. The union produced another member of my Book Circle. This is Gabriel Kuruk (pronounced koo-roook).

Gabe is a dog of mischief. He was the runt in a litter of two. His sister Kiani is about the size of Snickers. Gabe barely weighs three pounds. Bear is a hefty hunk of muscle tipping the scales at seven pounds. Undaunted by his smallness, Gabe is fearless and clever. As a critic of literature he's a joker and is apt to make snide comments about my Philip Roth-style stories of Jewish life in the suburban sixties. Still, it takes all kinds to make a dynamic Book Circle.

We know that Gabe prefers comic books. We also know that he's not stupid. He takes his time learning things like "shake hands" but once he's mastered a skill he takes it to breathtaking extremes. Gabe shakes hands with everyone and everything. At four in the morning Gabe is shaking hands with the back of my shoulder.  Or he's shaking hands with Fox's big toe.  He is so thrilled with his mastery that he can't  help
but proclaim to the world, again and again, "I'm shaking hands!  I'm shaking hands!" It would be easy to understimate Gabriel's wit and cleverness.  As I have said, he ain't stupid. He usually gets what he wants.  If Bear has a chewy that Gabe wants, the chewy is Gabe's before too long. His tactic is to bore bear into giving up the chewy.  "Gimme chewy, gimme chewy, gimme chewy," Gabe repeats.  Three are fifteen chewies scattered about the place, but the chewy Gabe wants is Bear's chewy. At length, Bear sighs and lets go of the chewy.  Gabe does a triumphant set of insane laps, up and down the length of the RV. His paws make a sound like distant machine gun fire.

Bear always knows which end of Samantha is the business end. Gabe doesn't care. He messes with Samantha just to piss on his father's head. So to speak. On our walks with the double leash it's Bear who usually pisses on Gabe's head. It only seems fair that Gabe will take any approach to Samantha: head first, hind end forward, I don't think he really knows the difference. It's not like he's practicing for anything. He lost his nuts the same day Bear did.

The practice of stuffed doll polyandry seems to have done little damage to the father-son bond. They may tease one another, but they remain close.


(More tomorrow about the Animal Companion Book Circle, sharing the works of
the world's most talented obscure writer, Art Rosch.)