Monday Three-fer
A three letter series from Letters to Trout Fishing in America.
PRELUDE TO MANTIQUES
September 8, 2006
Dear Trout —
I had just ordered my first shot of pickle juice when he finished his third or fifth PBR.
I drank pickle juice in bars because I was five years, nine months, and 17 days sober.
Five years, nine months, and 347 days ago, I would’ve ordered a bourbon-and-keep-them-coming.
Roger Miller sang King of the Road from the jukebox.
The bartender put another PBR on the bar and went back to wiping down glassware and chewing on a toothpick.
“I’ve caught trout all over this damned country,” he said.
Trout fishermen can always tell when another trout fisherman sits down next to them at the bar and orders a shot of pickle juice.
The words emerged from his beard like a ventriloquist as he lifted and considered the can of PBR. It could’ve been the PBR speaking. I honestly couldn’t tell.
“You want to hear a story?” the PBR asked.
Of course, I said yes.
Roger Miller finished singing and Jim Morrison lurched into People Are Strange.
The bartender put the bottle of pickle juice on the bar. Just in case, I supposed.
I also supposed he’d heard this story before while wiping down glassware and chewing on toothpicks. I wondered if the pickle juice could talk, too.
It started at 10 years old, he said, when he made $59.50 in tips on the last day of his first week as a paper boy. He delivered the Daily Messenger to 85 homes and apartments in his neighborhood — mostly women in their 60s who answered the door in bathrobes and slippers or dressed for gardening or their weekly bridge game or in their aprons dusty with flour and middle-aged men who answered the door in dirty white t-shirts looking like the complaint department at a plastic bag manufacturing plant or like they were losing the battle with a microwave turkey potpie and a refrigerator with a dead lightbulb.
He carried an oversized newspaper delivery bag carefully loaded with 65 carefully folded and carefully rubber-banded newspapers. If it was snowing or raining, he would put them in individual blue plastic bags.
The women greatly appreciated his carefulness and would add an extra 25 or 50 cents or a dollar or freshly baked cookies or hard candy from green or yellow glass dishes when he collected their weekly subscription payment.
The men hung their heads in frustration when the newspaper was delivered in a plastic bag. They paid with worn-out singles from their worn-out wallets and exact change that they’d count out of old ceramic ashtrays on small side tables by the door or scrape from their worn-out kitchen tables while he stood in the open doorway with the smell of turkey potpie drifting past.
After finishing the last day of his first week, he rushed to the fishing tackle store on his Huffy 10-speed with his first $59.50 windfall and stood in the trout fishing in America section among the endless selection of lures and flies.
The shopkeeper came over with his curled mustache and red suspenders. The shopkeeper recognized the boy from his many previous visits to the bass fishing section.
“Trout fishing, huh?” the mustache and red suspenders said.
“I’ve never been, but I want to,” the boy said.
“It’s a dangerous sport,” the mustache and red suspenders said. “Many men have spent their entire lives and life savings trout fishing in America and died in happy poverty with the realization that trout was not what they were really fishing for.”
The boy looked at the mustache and red suspenders, puzzled.
“Here,” the mustache and red suspenders said, gathering several lures and flies. “You’ll want to start with these in your tackle box.”
More to come —
An old friend
MANTIQUES
September 9, 2006
Dear Trout —
The clock behind the bar pointed at numbers I hadn’t seen since I woke in the drunk tank naked and covered in lamprey suction marks five years, eight months, and 364 days ago.
The Sheriff told me at one point I had climbed on the bar during my karaoke rendition of Hound Dog spilling drinks with my swiveling hips. A woman with two kids, big brown eyes, and a snug t-shirt with a winking red-lipsticked lamprey recognized me in the grocery store weeks later and told me my singing and hip-swiveling were almost as good as the real Elvis.
I had switched from pickle juice to ginger beer and the man had cleaned the bartender out of PBR and had switched to Genny Cream Ale.
“Speaking of Stream access laws, did you know that I bought my own trout stream?” the Genny Cream Ale said.
We had not been talking about stream access laws.
I like him better as Genny Cream Ale already.
“I saw an ad in the back of the April 1960 Boy’s Life magazine with two boys on the cover fishing in a boat and a pelican flying off with a fish flapping in its big mouth,” he said. “The boys looked stunned.”
“The Cleveland Wrecking Yard had a used trout stream for sale. The ad had a leaping cartoon rainbow trout with the words:
USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE.
MUST BE SEEN TO BE
APPRECIATED.
CLEVELAND WRECKING YARD
(216) BUY-USED
“It was 1974, so I suspected the ad might be out of date and the Cleveland Wrecking Yard might not have any used trout stream left. I called just to make sure.”
“‘Hello, do you have any used trout stream left?’ I asked the salesman who answered the phone.”
‘No, we sold the last section about seven years ago,’ he said. ‘Had a run on our inventory in 1967 that cleaned us out. But if you’re in the market for a German tank, we have a Thursday scratch-and-dent sale going on right now and a three-for-one on ordinance.’
I told him, ‘No, thank you.’
‘I did receive a call last week, though,’ the salesman said. ‘A man had purchased 563 feet of used trout stream from us for his niece, but she wanted a pony. He wanted to return the stream, but we have a strict no-return policy. You’d be surprised how many people try to return toilets and dry-cleaning presses and paint and trout streams after they’ve abused them.
‘Anyhow, I told them they may want to try Mantiques,’ he said. ‘They said thank you and hung up.’
“I said thank you and hung up as well,” Genny Cream Ale said. “I was quite relieved that I wouldn’t have to drive across the country to buy a used trout stream since Mantiques is right here in New York. I borrowed my dad’s pickup truck and hoped for the best.
“Mantiques occupied a refurbished single-story barn surrounded by farm fields. A rusty Packard was parked in the front yard, doing its best to keep from being swallowed by tall grass and soupy ground. Gas station pumps lined either side of the double glass front doors and a sign in the window stated: NO GAS, SO DON’T EVEN ASK.
“Inside, the place was full of jukeboxes, restaurant booths, beer signs, pinball machines, free-standing bar-tops, reclaimed construction materials, winches and come-a-longs, and taxidermied wildlife, including a full-body buffalo, a snarling lion’s head, five whitetailed deer, a moose rack, two sets of elk sheds, and a ten-foot-tall floor-mount of a giraffe head and neck to the shoulders. It was a very impressive collection.
“I asked the man behind the counter what the giraffe was going for.”
‘$10,000,’ he said over his reading glasses and immense mustache.
‘Any real interest?’ I asked.
‘Tire-kickers,’ he said, returning to the newspaper on the counter.
‘How about used trout stream?’ I asked.
‘Well, well, well,’ the salesman said, putting the newspaper back down. ‘Funny you ask. I do.’
‘How much do you have?’ I asked.
‘563 feet. Some guy bought it for his niece for her birthday, but she wanted a pony.’
‘How much is it going for?’
‘$6.50 per foot for the first 100 feet. $5 for every foot beyond that.’
“I did some quick math. I was really good at math in school,” Genny Cream Ale said, motioning for another can of his namesake.
‘So, $2,965 for the whole lot,’ I said to the salesman.
‘That’s correct.’
‘What about the trout?’
‘They come with the stream. German browns and some rainbows. The fishing is very good.’
“He walked me outside to a back lot where the 563 feet of stream was stacked in various lengths and widths,” Genny Cream Ale said. “I looked in each section to see if there was any damage or excessive turbidity. I can’t stand fishing in chocolate milk. The stream was clear as a bell, and I could even see some fish hiding under a bank on the far side of one section.
‘I’ll take it,’ I said.
‘All of it?’ the salesman asked.
‘Yep. All of it.’
‘You sure you don’t want to leave a small section here for me to fish in during lunch?’
‘Sorry.’
“The salesman helped me load the sections into the bed of the pickup truck and threw in four moving boxes of insects to go with my purchase.”
I was completely hooked by his story. “Where did you put the stream?”
“It’s in my dad’s old barn,” he said. “As I unloaded the stream from the pickup onto our front yard, my dad came bursting out the front door, furious that there was a trout stream running through his perfectly manicured bentgrass, so it’s been stacked in the barn and covered by a big tarp and pigeon shit ever since. Once in a while, I pull the tarp back and fish a short section that has some really big browns. My son did, too, before he enlisted. They love to eat hoppers.”
Narratively —
An old friend
A TROUT STREAM IN EVERY HOME
September 15, 2006
Dear old friend —
We will see a day when the President vows there will be a trout stream in every home and apartment and neighborhood and on every city block. People will place furniture on their banks and gather to watch the news of the day while eating leftover leftovers. Trout streams will replace toilets and sinks and bathtubs. Trout streams will refrigerate cold cuts and six-packs and condiments that say refrigerate after opening. People will sleep restfully all night long while doing the dead-man’s-float in bedroom trout streams. Homeless will find shelter in trout streams. Cars will be parked in trout streams between tool benches and treadmills and storage totes and kid’s bicycles or along their banks on alternating days. Tire swings will be hung and forts built with scrap wood in trout streams. White picket fences and well-manicured flower beds will surround trout streams. Family dogs will bury their bones and squirrels will bury their nuts in trout streams. Some Saturdays will be spent mowing trout streams and barbecuing meat and drinking craft cocktails and playing bocce in their currents. Other Saturdays will be spent buying groceries and babysitting kids and going to or coming from work and paying bills and shooting hoops and studying history in trout streams. Weekdays will be spent wrenching on engines and driving combines and tending to livestock and making car parts and framing houses and skidding timber and fracking shale and long-haul trucking and programming software and lobbying politicians and treating patients and educating kids and fighting for human rights and conserving our environment in trout streams. Robins will pick worms from trout streams. Trout streams replace be fire escapes and balconies and front stoops. Cancer and dementia and abuse and fear and sadness will hit trout streams. Birthdays and engagements and anniversaries and retirements and celebrations of life will be hosted in trout streams. Holiday dinners and Christmas mornings will happen around trout streams. First kisses and underage drinking and pot smoking and awkward sexual experiences will happen in trout streams. Divorces and reconciliations will happen in trout streams. Garbage cans will be placed next to trout streams for the garbage collector. Drought and fires will hit trout streams. Storms and flooding will hit trout streams. Resilience and recovery will flow in trout streams. Trout streams will replace church services. Trout streams will create new belief systems and social structures and reverence for nature. Trout streams will restore truth and human decency.
Trout streams will be a hot commodity.
Here’s to stock going up —
T
matt! i love the absurdist quality of these letters. peace, love and trout streams for all.