catfish 5

 Well I'm glad that you are enjoying Catfish.  It is as you said, a fictional story borrowing heavily from my experiences,  Some of the stuff in it really happened and some of the characters are loosely based on people I knew, and some of them are entirely made up.

I had kind of hoped that my previous post about getting too old would elicit stories from the dogs about the cars they drove, maybe how they learned to drive, how they felt about having to take road tests lately, that sort of thing.  But I guess that is a pot that cannot be stirred.

Back to Catfish.

After Farmer City we were back on the interstate, just a smooth twenty mile ride until Champaign, and I have to tell you my toes tingled, ah to be stepping onto those sunny sidewalks once again, to be Catfish once again.  See back in Lacrosse I was just John, just the guy who they went to high school with, who played a pretty good centerfield for the baseball team, made some flashy plays even, but at the plate, not so hot, just another picture in the yearbook. Some guy who was working at the Goddamn 7-11, and living in his parents' house.

 But in Champaign, these college kids you know, I was kind of a character for them, kind of Joe Sixpack personified, kind of well I remember one of the babes I nailed there early on, said, cooking up eggs and bacon the next morning, "Catfish," she had said, looking back at me lounging in her sweet little bed, "You are just so,” looking back at me with a shiny smile, “You are just so authentic."

 Authentic, what the hell did that mean?  Well I knew what the word meant, but why was I authentic?  Well these college kids, you know they are all kind of rich and they come from big cities, and they are just taking classes while around them most people are working, and in some way they don't think they are real people, just the way it is, and so when she called me authentic, I didn't skip a beat and just sat down to that plateful of eggs and bacon.  And that's what I was thinking about, eggs and bacon frying up in the pan, cooked up by some college cutie wearing maybe just a sweatshirt in the morning careful to keep those bacon spatters away from her milky white thighs, Goddamn Catfish was back in town. 

 I Gathered up my stuff and got ready to push past the fat old guy, but he was gathering up his stuff too, getting off at Champaign just like me.  "Nothing like Champaign in the morning huh?" I said, by way of making a little conversation, and he stopped gathering his stuff up and looked me straight in the face and said, "No, nothing like it.  I Feel kind of good about it, this time I’m hoping that - " and then someone coming down the aisle bumped him so he never got to finish that sentence, and he looked back at me, and then just kind of shook his head like he realized then that I had just been making conversation and shoved himself into the aisle and I followed him bumping down towards the front of the bus until my feet hit the good solid ground of Champaign.