Automatic Transfiguration Conquistadorian

Automatic Transfiguration Conquistadorian Loves His Kitty

Buster the cat is almost twenty years old. His yellow hair is matted and thin. His flesh is dwindling and his bones rising. His hind legs will barely hold him up now and he's making the most plaintive cries day and night. I'm afraid he's suffering. I don't have any money for a vet. I guess I'll have to put a bullet in his head. I don't want to do that. Several years ago his brother Catsup became very ill and was suffering so I took him out in the backyard and put a nine mil. hollowpoint in his ear. To my great anguish it didn't kill him instantly so I shot him again and then again. The highway patrolman next door came to the fence and asked me what I was doing. I had tears in my eyes. I looked at the gruff, crew-cut, scowling trooper his buddies called "Niggerchaser" and shook my head. He left me alone. I'd always made sure that he thought I was crazy. I learned the hard way that's the best way to handle cops.

When you put your own pets to sleepy bye bye you have to hurriedly dig a deep hole and cover them in lime. You don't dig the hole beforehand because you can't stand to think about what you're about to do. While you're digging, your eyes burn from the tears and you ask yourself why such creatures have to put up with a world full of humans. When you're through filling the grave with dirt you have to put a little cross there for your kids. Then you think about what it means to live with animals who speak a different language. Animals who have lived with you and slept with you and shared moments great and small. Who have helped calm you during those times of turmoil and stress. Animals who have stayed the same even when the whole goddamned world seems to be crumbling.

Buster wasn't even a friendly cat for the first several years. It was like he was autistic. Try to play with him and he'd dig his claws into you so deep he'd bring blood. I don't know what happened but he changed all of a sudden. I can't explain it and don't give a damn if no one believes it, but when Rita got sick and my mother had a stroke and I couldn't sleep to save my life, to save anyone's life, and I was strung out and thought I was going to lose my mind, Buster must have sensed how cast down I was because he did something he'd never done before. He started sleeping on my pillow. He'd never even slept in the bedroom before and he never got up on the bed. The first time he did it it really startled me. I thought, what the fuck is this crazy cat going to do, shit on my head? But he just curled around my head and purred. And since Rita was in such bad shape at the time she couldn't stand to be cuddled, Buster was the only creature contact I had. And just like that my heartbeat slowed, my anxiety diminished, and I slept for the first time since those traumatic events occurred. Every night for the next twelve or thirteen years, at bedtime Buster would hop up on the bed and curl around my pillow. Usually, after he knew I was asleep he would get down and take care of his other responsibilites. I never told Buster I was allergic to cat dander. My pharmacist knew.

Last year when we were still in Oklahoma, Buster started having trouble jumping up on the bed. When he couldn't make it he would sleep on the floor on my side. I had to be careful not to step on him when I had to get up to piss. Now that he's sixteen hundred miles and almost twenty years away from his birthplace, his legs are failing and he is surely announcing his death with those agonizing pleas for mercy. Rita is better now and we can cuddle again like we did the first night we spent together thirty seven years ago after I persuaded her to leave home and embark on a great adventure. Along the way we have had many animal friends but none I love so much as this loving old cat. He is worth more to me than most of the humans I've met in my life. And now I have to kill him and it's killing me.

Automatic Transfiguration Conquistadorian

Automatic Transfiguration Conquistadorian Blues

What do you do
when your heart turns
against
you?

And your eyes can't see
in the dark
anymore

And your feet sit
still in waiting rooms
that used to make
you squirm

And wrapped up in your bed at night
you dream and toss and
dream and turn dreams
that cause you to wake crying
and you can't understand
why

those fucked up years in junior high
are suddenly so
goddamned important

Feels like treachery creeping
in, some cellular kamikazes
of karma, dying for
your demise

You can't say you weren't
forewarned

My grandparents on my father's side (both of whom were dead before I was born) and two of my aunts. The strange looking little girl who looks more like a ghost is a mystery. No one remembers her. My grandmother died having my father. My grandfather was an itinerant preacher, a cook, a carny, and all-around hellraiser.  

The Wichita Mountains, the second oldest mountains in the western hemisphere, holy place to the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians, and home to the largest herd of buffalo in North America. Geronimo is buried only a few miles away at Fort Sill. The wonderful writer, N. Scott Momaday, wrote of the Wichitas in The Way To Rainy Mountain. The hawk in the picture could have ridden the wind to any of the places I grew up in a matter of minutes.  

My amazing half-Cherokee, half English royalty descended mother, with dogs. This place was where a road dead-ended. We considered ourselves lucky to have electricity, but there was no telephone lines, no running water (until we dug a well), no indoor plumbing, and the house was a shack so run-down most people probably thought only ghosts occupied it.Big Beaver Creek was only a mile away and it used to rage with a big rain, sometimes washing away our wheat or cotton crops that we depended on for our meagre living. 

From left to right: My brother, Wayne, my father, Henry A. Norsworthy, my second doggie, Roscoe, and me. The time was 1958.  

My first dog, Ole Boy, the best dog who ever lived 

Review of my critically acclaimed story collection, Indiahoma 

Opposites: A one-act play
by A. Ray Norsworthy



Marie: (looking offstage) Here they come. It's about time.

Enter Breck and Michael

Marie: What took so long?

Michael: Breck was transubstantiating.

Breck: (singing) Eleven trannies toking, ten dildos pumping, nine winos whining...

Marie: (to Breck) What are you on?

Breck: ...eight butches boffing...

Michael: Christmas spirit, can't you tell?

Breck: I'm one of Santa's helpers. Seven shleppers shlepping, six shtuppers shtupping, five gold nipple rings...

Marie: Breck, you promised me...

Breck: Four call girls, three French fries, two turtle soups...

Everyone stares at him, waiting for him to finish.

Roberta: (tossing her cigarette down in disgust) Well, are you going to finish it or are you waiting for the Vienna Boys Choir to arrive?

Breck: Nope. It's a form of discipline. Denial of the easy riff. (long pause) Oh, all right! And a Par-tridge Family or-gy.

Roberta: Your singing lacks soul. Come to think of it, so does the rest of you.

Marie: I think Breck has a lot of soul. Everyone has soul, you dig down deep enough.

Roberta: Sure, he's a combination of James Brown and Gandhi.

Breck: Roberta, you of all people, should know better than to judge anyone. You cover your own imperfections with your fancy words, your East Village artist personna! You use words like duct tape. You know what duct tape is? This grey industrial looking stuff that's real sticky and makes a screech when ya peel it off. It's tough too. I had this friend once, his name was Duncan. He was a cokehead, but he was a fucking genius, I mean this guy was genuine, his art was on a level that I could only dream about. A lot in common with Dubuffet. You know, art brut, except he's not French so his brut is more brutal. So one night, we get really shit-faced, you know, just drunk for the hell of it--I was out of coke and out of money, frustrated, horny, full of self loathing and desperation--so I start punching holes in the wall with my fist. What the fuck, it was a dump anyway, condemned. And it was kind of conceptual violence, if you think about it. (yelling) Tear down the temple and let my people go!

So anyway, Duncan had this huge box of duct tape, 'cause his father was a plumber, you know, and like every time I punched a hole he would cover it with tape. Well, this went on for hours, at least it seemed like it. Finally I just passed out. (pause)

What I didn't know was Duncan had some coke stashed that he didn't wish to share with Mr. Greedy nose. I remember waking up the next morning and Duncan had taped the whole fucking apartment. Windows, doorways, everything! Ashtrays, beer cans, magazines, stray shoes, my favorite Klee poster, some leftover Fettucini Alfredo in the fridge that we had splurged on. He'd even taped the toothpaste and the toothbrushes, for Christ's sake. About the only thing he hadn't covered with tape was me. He even taped himself like a goddamn mummy! Duct tape from head to toe!

(Roberta listens in rapt amazement)

Just lying there amidst all the carnage, so to speak, like some kind of industrial mummy. Well, I am speechless, completely amazed at this scene. At first, just puzzled you know, like what got into this boy, he really flipped out, but the more I thought about how bizarre, how fucking...outrageous it was, the more it made perfect sense. This was Duncan's ultimate artistic statement, his crowning glory, you might say. You talk about conceptual, this was real self-expression--this wasn't conceived, it exploded from the morass of his fucking imploding existence. And it was the last artistic statement of his life.

Roberta: You mean he was dead?

Breck: Of course not. He moved back home to Brooklyn and became a plumber.

copyright A. Ray Norsworthy, 2005

Automatic Transfiguration Conquistadorian

Automatic Transfiguration Conquistadorian

The bells in my head are ringing; the vibrations shake the dust. The twilight sings. I'm on a hill between nowhere and Olympus. Earth moans, the horizon
is on fire. I want to dance like a drunken groom, I want to dance like Tevye from Fiddler On The Roof. I want to kick out the jams, Jellyroll.



Turning in circles like Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music, I grope the Nazi wind's naked breast and lick the sweat from her lips. Her face is wet with tears of sound. She's beginning to look a lot like Christ on the cross-town Expressway.

Earth moans, the horizon is on fire. I'm not one of Santa's helpers, I'm a blind soldier of doom, I'm auditioning for a role in a police line-up. Too bad I'm cracked up, spinally. Stargazing is for dreamers, I cry to the hills lapping at my feet like dogs.

The moaning changes to a hum. The orchestra hasn't been paid. Feed the string section to the wolves. Where are the strippers and dwarves? Whose back alley is this? Where do I sign? This is a bird's wing, not a broken bottle, biddy biddy bum.

The Little Drummer Boy inside my head drums me to my knees on this dance floor of death, I fall into the lap of dusk, I roll down the hill toward the songheart, gathering speed and crushing the breath of words where the sun falls to its knees in the welcoming dust.

copyright A. Ray Norsworthy, 1999

For Blog so loved the world...

he gave you me.

Symbiosis
by A. Ray Norsworthy

Welcome, traveler
This way station is for you,
And you alone.
Others may visit, of course,
But you are the one who
is here now
Who shares my thirst
You are the wanderer
who has crossed the vast
desert between us, for barely
enough water to sprinkle
your parched mind

By drinking from my cup
dipped in this cool
well, you sustain my
life. Without you I am
dust.