Fuckin’ With the Fish

(This would be a comedy routine, should I ever have the nerve to try such a thing. Who knows?)

I’m a painter, a housepainter in Georgia, and when you paint an exterior of a house— that’s the outside part, for those not in the business — and it’s, say, anywhere from May through September, it can be a little traumatizing. The heat, the humidity — I wish it were just a cliche. But a cliche has never given me crotch rash. (Walks like John Wayner up to pharmacy counter.) “’Scuse me, ma’am, where d’ya keep yer Gold Bond powder?”

So when you finish one of these jobs, you feel you’ve got a right to a little time off. I take it. I fuckin’ need it. During these rest-times, I sneak in a little work, just enough to call it a work day. I might look at a house a friend told me about that needs pressure washing. I call my buddy John. We meet at the house. We look at it. “Yep, that’s a dirty house,” we agree. Maybe we snap a few photos.

Then it’s time to knock off for the day. I always make sure the house we looked at is near a bar we like, and the last one we looked at, well damn if it wasn’t just a mile up from one of our favorite holes. I looked at my watch, saw I didn’t have one, and then we headed for the Butt Hutt.

It was too early for a daytime ball game to be on. We ordered our beers, and then fixed our eyes on the TV screen a few feet in front of us. It was wide, but it was muted — like an overweight retarded man on meds. Showing was a fishing show, one that featured a man clad in what looked to be a NASCAR pit crew costume standing on a zippy little motorboat. We didn’t know what he was saying, but he was saying it to the camera — us, really — and after a while, if you’re drinking beer, and it’s the afternoon, and you feel like everything’s just kinda, well, fucked up, you start inserting the script: Your own script for what this pathetic, privileged white Southern douchebag is saying.

First of all, we thought the title of the show should be “Fuckin’ with the Fish,” which eventually would evolve into FWTF, because…well, that’s what we do here. The guy talks for a while, probably about a previous fish he caught, checks one of his four poles he’s got mounted on his boat, sees one of them is bobbing up and down (ever notice it’s not two or three at once? We don’t get to see him running from pole to pole like some redneck Jerry Lewis — “Whoaa! These poles!” And then trying to hold all three poles at once, and inevitably all three fish end up on the boat, but they’re all tangled up together, and Jerry Lupus is trying to disentangle them, and then maybe some passing fisherman shoots him dead) and proceeds to pull in a decidedly-too-docile largemouth bass.

And he holds it up to the camera. We see it, we see it there and we can’t help but imagine this poor fish thinking, “What the fuck? What are you doing? Kill me already!” But no, this guy just keeps fuckin’ with it. He’s holding it this way, then turning it over so we can see the belly, and then — oh yeah, forgot — he pulls out the razor-sharp hook from the back of the fish’s mouth.

Does he throw him back yet? No, he’s not done mansplaining about the fish. But as we watch him, whilst drinking our beers and gnawing on our onion rings, we can tell he’s going off manscript, and soon he’s gesturing with the fish. The fish, still alive, is an extension of his hand. “Then Corky gets in his boat and he’s pissed, and he’s drunk (gestures with fish in a wobbly way), and he starts it up and goes (pans fish across screen) to the other side of the fuckin’ lake. And we start wavin’ to him (waves fish) and he won’t even look at us.”

Eventually the story is over — and he just kind of flippantly flips the fish back into the lake and goes on with his little fishing show.

The climax of the episode, what it all led up to, was, oddly, or perhaps fittingly, a Charlie Daniels tribute. The NASCAR wannabe white privileged piece of shit with a speedboat is there, waving another fish at the screen, and this time it’s a big one, and then he sets it down without having pulled the hook out yet — he’ll get to that when he’s good and fuckin’ ready — and then suddenly he’s holding a guitar. A quick switch to a picture of Charlie Daniels, looking all fuck-you-I’m-white-and-pretentiously-counter-culture, and then it’s back to the guy, and he’s strumming what I know — because I’m a would-be musician too — is just two chords, A and E over and over, and singing what I assume is a Charlie Daniels song about, I don’t know, fuckin’ with fish? Fucking fish? (Whoa, Charlie, you are a maverick!) And the whole thing suddenly seems like a vanity project.

I guess it could have been worse. He could have used the fish he’d caught as a guitar prop — “here, gimme that fuckin’ oar” — shoved it down the fish’s throat, and (pantomimes air guitar) started rockin’ out: “The devil went down to Georgia, he was lookin’ for a fish to fuck with….”

Thank God he didn’t catch a pike, or a gar. One of those long skinny fish. It would have reminded him of a story, the time he saw a sixty-point buck in his neighbor’s back yard. “And I went (raising gar up to eye, holding it outward) boom! Dead.”

But no. It wasn’t that bad. Or maybe it was.

It’s probably better for my sanity if I just behave as if 80 percent of the things broadcast into this world don’t exist.