catfish 9

"When I think of all the good times that I've wasted, having good times..."

That's maybe the essence of the catfish story.  In September of 1971 I returned to Champaign, the draft behind me, having done my duty to my country, and free as a bird.  The House of Chin was just opening its expanded bar downstairs and my buddies had secured me a job tending it.  The work was easy, fun even, just like hanging out at the bar, which is what I did when I wasn't working there, except that every now and then you had to interrupt your conversation to pour a beer.  I got one or two, depending on my shift, good Chinese meals every shift I worked, and of course I would drink my way through each one, trying to stay only sober enough to count out the cash register at the end of the night.

The bar was full of people and entering it of a night, I had my choice of friends to hang with.  It was like walking into one of those Indian buffets where I always have to have a little bit of everything and end up eating way too much.

As customer or bartender I closed the bar every night.  Good times.  

But eventually most of my good time buddies moved on to more responsible things and I was left talking to the dregs and in January of 1985 I moved to Texas.

Now when I talk to some of my old pals about the good old says many of them wince, a little ashamed of their past behavior.  But I am not at all, I look at the days of irresponsible good times with rose colored glasses, and that is mostly what Catfish is about.

And now we move on to another development.

 Slap, slap, slap.  What is that?  Slap, slap, slap.  There it goes again.  What the hell?  Oh it's Dan.  I am waking up on his red couch in his frontroom, and Dan, Diamond Dan, is walking back and forth, pacing really, and slamming a baseball into a glove.  What the hell?

 Turning back from the far end of the frontroom, he looks at me like he is surprised he woke me up.  He tosses the ball up, puts a little spin on it and snatches it with a downward swoop of the glove, "Catfish, are you a baseball player?" he wants to know.

 What the hell?  "Oh yeah, I'm just hanging here, waiting to see how those contract talks go.  If they don't pay me my millions the Cubs can just find themselves another centerfielder."

 A little frown on his face at my mention of the Cubs.  I'd have said White Sox if I had more time to think about it.  I was sitting up on the couch at this point and he plunked himself down right next to me, looked me in the eye like he was sizing me up, and then resumed slamming the ball into the glove.  "We could use a centerfielder."

 "We?" I asked.

 "The team," he answered.

 "What team?"

 "The softball team."  He'd been slamming the ball all this time, but he stopped when he said that, fixed me with this stare like he was Moses climbing down that mountain. 

 He got up again, started pacing again, slamming the ball again.  "I've been thinking," he said, "Maybe we should have a softball team, you know us guys at The Great Wall, lot of us guys, you know, probably we could put a pretty good team together.  What do you think?"

 What did I think?  I thought it was a terrible idea.  Who the hell wants to play softball?  Oh it was popular, it was like the rage in Champaign at the time.  Every bar and dry cleaner in the city seemed to have a team, you'd be sitting in some bar all nice and quiet, and maybe putting the moves on some quiet little chick, and then bam, the doors would fly open, and a bunch of guys in red jerseys would pile in and raise a ruckus.  If they won they would all be slapping each other on the back and yelling, and if they lost they'd gather in little knots, all pissed at each other.  Dumbest idea in the world to get involved in that.  Last thing I would ever want to get involved in.

 But I was staying at Dan's apartment, sleeping on his couch, paying no rent, and as I watched him slamming that ball I recognized that glove.  It was my glove, the one I had shoved into my bag, God knows why, when I was packing up back in LaCrosse.  It must have spilled out when I'd laid the bag down.

 And so you know, I didn't know why, but I felt a little like I was responsible for putting this idea in Dan's head.  Oh it had maybe been percolating for some time, but a lot of ideas percolated in Dan's head, and most of them just faded out, but maybe that glove, just laying out in the open on that raggedy carpet had sparked him.

 And I owed him, that was for sure, and maybe it wasn't that bad an idea.  Those fish stories, they were getting a little old, and truth be told I wasn't a bad centerfielder.  I could see myself running, running, running, putting the glove up at just the right time, right at the top of my leap, the smack of the ball into the glove, myself into a somersault or two on the sweet forgiving grass, and rising pointing to the ball  secure in my glove, and the umpire declaring OUT, and the batter and the runners on first, second, and third all looking outraged, we wuz robbed, and myself trotting in from the outfield like it was no big deal. I could do that.

 I was pretty sure I could.