catfish 8

 Thank you very much Beagles.  That's why the writer writes, the painter paints, the musician bangs away on that old piano, to get some feedback, to know that my god, they aren't here all alone.  Oh it's nice to hear something good, but even, this is stupid and so are you is better than nothing.  

I wrote this maybe fifteen years ago, and I  have been editing it off and on since then, even now I am making little changes here and there.  It's loosely based on my days in Champaign.  Some events are altered and some are completely made up.  Some characters are based on real people and some are just made up.

I am sorry to hear that your wife is having health problems and I hope that comes out well.

Well shit and fuck.  I had made my entrance, I'd gotten laid, I really had no cause to complain.  I could have spent a few more hours curled up next to Tammy, caught up with more sleep, pressed myself up against her little blonde butt, maybe had another go at it, given her a true Catfish performance, but I was afraid she was going to puke again.

 So it was maybe 7 AM, same time I had gotten off the bus twenty four hours ago, and I was walking up Fourth Street back up to the bunkhouse with an empty stomach.  What with everybody buying me drinks the night before I still had plenty of money.  I could have stopped in at Carmen's and gotten a good breakfast, but I just never felt that I should have to pay for breakfast.

 Claudette was her name.  She was my first lay, the first time I ever showed up in Champaign, just a kid brother, Anne's kid brother.  Didn't even want to visit her, seemed like a boring thing, folks wanted me to do it.  "You're not doing anything this summer, why don't you just drop into Champaign for a visit, you know she would appreciate it."

 And I liked Anne well enough, we had always gotten along, but we all knew what the real reason was.  They wanted me to get a taste of that college thing, thought I might like it, might want to go myself.  That's what they wanted me to do, go to college.  Just something I didn't want to do at the time.  High school was tough enough, all that crap, was just glad to be done with it-

 Anyway I went, up to Champaign to visit my sister, just to keep a little peace in the family.  And it was just as bad as I thought it would be.  She was living in like this commune, some old house where all they ate was brown rice and sometimes for a treat a little broccoli, and talked about dumb stuff all night long.

 And come Sunday, I was checking out that bus schedule.  And Anne was feeling bad, that I was feeling so bad, and she asked if there was something that I'd like to do.  "Well I'd like to go to a bar," I said, and as it turned out there was a bar that her crowd went to once in awhile.

 The Great Wall, which was not a real bar, just a bar in a restaurant, a Chinese restaurant at that.  But still they had beer there so I was happy to go along.

 I didn't expect much of it, figured the crowd would be pretty dead like in Anne's commune, just going on and on about stuff that didn't make any sense, each one just wanting to show that they were smarter than the other, but beer you know, beer can make any time a good time. 

 It was kind of rough though getting enough beer to make it a good time.  Anne's crowd they just sipped their beer, my glass was empty and theirs were still three quarters full, and I didn't feel right getting another until they were all done.  I was never going to get drunk at this rate.  But there was this one guy in the commune, Ed, who I hadn't noticed right away, kind of quiet and working nights and getting home late, but he wasn't working that night and when the subject of going out to a bar came up he just lit up.  His glass was empty as soon as mine was, and he got up to go to the bar, and seeing me sitting in front of an empty glass, he asked if I didn't want to go up and get another.  Boy did I.  When we got to the bar there were a couple of empty stools and we slid right in. 

 This commune crowd was really into movies.  It was one of the things they talked about endlessly, what this meant, and what that meant, they drove me crazy.  Especially foreign movies which to me were really boring, black and white and the characters spending a lot of time just staring at each other, say something, anything, I wanted to shout at the screen, but they just stared.  Ed was into movies too, but the thing was he made movies.  Not real movies, but he had a camcorder and he made movies of the comings and goings of the commune.  Oh they liked that well enough, they liked to think that they were like beatniks, that one day this one would be famous for writing and this one would be famous for painting, and I don't know what all, but they would all be famous one day, and it was a good thing that somebody was around to film this all.

 So they really liked Ed's movies, mostly because they were all in them, which was the main reason I didn't like them that much.  And Ed could be a little boring, he kind of droned on about camera stuff, but his beer was empty at the same time that mine was, and we were having a pretty good time.

 Which I could see, glancing back from time to time at her table, was making Anne nervous.  Anne believed that drinking was perfectly fine as long as you didn't get drunk, which made no sense at all to me.  Maybe Ed and I had gone through three quick beers by the time she untangled herself from her table and was standing next to me all smiles and I could tell she was trying to get the words out about how you didn't want to get too drunk, but wasn't sure about how to get into the subject, when she saw Claudette sitting at the end of the bar.

 "Oh John," she said, "I want you to meet a very good friend of mine."  Her main motivation was to get me away from Ed and those quickly emptying glasses, but she was my older sister and I let myself be practically dragged away to the end of the bar. 

 "Claudette," she said, almost shrieked the way girls sometimes do. "I want you to meet my brother."  Claudette looked up a little startled.  And then with that same force that she had dragged me to the end of the bar with, she put me into the stool next to Claudette.  She swiveling to greet Anne, and myself swiveling in our knees knocked. 

 Which got my attention, but before I could stammer out some kind of apology or whatever Anne was going on, about how Claudette was a poet and had been published in the campus literary magazine, which what the hell would that have to do with me, but like I said this was all about getting me away from Ed, and possibly some way of elevating me, though I can't say I ever remembered seeing Anne reading any poetry.  But her mission was accomplished, and a pat or two on Claudette's and my shoulders and she was off and I was left with Claudette the poet with whom I had just knocked knees.

 "Poetry huh?" I said, the smoothest line I could think of at the moment, and she paused a second and came back with, "Can I buy you a drink?" and my head bobbed up and down, and I came back with, "Now that's poetry," and she laughed, and like they say in that movie that the Healey commune was so crazy about, this began a beautiful friendship.
 
This and that and this and that, she didn't want to talk about poetry and thank God for that, but she didn't talk much at all and that was a problem, so I just launched into talk about LaCrosse, which there wasn't much to say about that either, so I kind of threw in some tall tales, just to make it interesting, and it seemed like she liked that so I started laying it on heavier, and she liked that even more, and here way back then was the beginning of Catfish, the spinner of tales, and the beers kept coming, and she was putting away her little dainty glasses of wine, and the next thing you know we were stumbling arm and arm down to her apartment, and I got laid for the first time in Champaign, hell for the first time anywhere for me.  I had bragged a lot with the guys in LaCrosse, but the fact was that I was no great shakes there, never even gotten, like we said there, the stinky finger.
 
I was in love.  Went back up to LaCrosse at the end of the weekend and basically just packed up my stuff, and moved rightaway to Champaign and into Claudette's apartment.  Which was fine, just fine.  She was a little skinny but she had these big beautiful eyes, soulful eyes, sad eyes, which sounds pretty and they were, but they were sad, and that gets on a guy after awhile.  She was a bit of a lush, and nothing wrong with that, but she wanted to do all her lushing in her dark little apartment and I was into bright lights big city.  It didn't end up well, her big sad eyes all wet, and me packing up my stuff.  I felt bad about it, but truth be told not that bad anticipating that bright playing field ringing the bar of The Great Wall.
 
And things hadn't gone that well for Claudette.  That poetry thing doesn't get you that far, and whatever she was doing in school didn't do that well for her either, and the last I heard she was waitressing at Carmen's, and I didn't want to run into her there , and that's probably the main reason I didn't want to go to Carmen's.
 
Made me sad, I have to tell you, walking a block out of my way, just to avoid passing by Carmen's, avoid passing by that plate glass window, where I knew I'd have to look inside to see if Claudette was still there, walking up to the kitchen to see if her order was up, if it was sliding those eggy dishes onto her tray, turning that slow sad turn of hers back towards the tables, big eyes blinking as she adjusted the tray on her narrow shoulder, stepping between the tables in her comfortable waitress shoes, looking up for a second, just long enough to see me walking past on the sidewalk and glancing in.
 
Oh geez what was I thinking?  It was because I needed sleep, needed to collapse on Dan's red couch, forget about pukey Tammy, about this Don guy, about that fat old guy on the bus, just a little shut eye that's all I needed to get back to normal, to become Catfish again.