| western watershed romance |
| about | episodes | musings | voyeur room |
It was horrible, horrifying, it, they and me – no
us. No – same locale, but different galaxies. The scene: me, the new
kid, a scrubby freshman, fuckin’ fraying K-mart clothes and no-name
shoes, sloppy bowl haircut, head hung down, slouching alone on a
concrete square in a searing noontime sun, the dreaded lunchtime
period, no warm pizza slice or burger from the high-school cafeteria,
only a stale peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich on imitation WonderBread
from crinkled paper bag, with a bruised banana I loathed so tossed in
the trash. A working-class kid, if that, no dough for a decent lunch or
quality, let alone fashionable, clothes. Bewildered, ashamed,
resentful, scared, of them, of me, and not knowing why. Puberty’d lit
something that’d laid dormant for many years that’d already polluted
that which should’ve flowered in innocence. Damned before birth,
tarnished to some degree forever – a blooming, deformed, cancerous
flower. So desperate to realize the flower without the horror, but the
cancerous growth was incomprehensible, inexorable, undeniable yet
unacceptable, and so there I sat, staring mostly at the concrete
pavement but occasionally glancing up furtively with such forlorn
longing at the budding young women strolling by, swirled within this
conundrum, which they felt and so avoided me.
Loner and loser, withering in a deepening dissociative haze on the
concrete square in the seething sun of a psychotic torture San Diego
of southern California – no saint for me. A prime candidate to pick up
a gun and splatter those I so envied in a senseless, pointless,
unjustified externalizing of hate – they didn’t deserve it, but neither
did I.
But I never showered student blood
onto the school square with blazing bullets, and it was because of the
twin nurturing continuous streams of my life, the wild and art,
manifested first in fishes and fringe music, respectively. Both saved
me, us, from psychopathy,
though I took longer to open and empathize with the fishes fully and
treat ‘em as they deserved, with love and respect and restraint. Fringe
music – it was the first savior in that vicariously I’d finally found
my people, people who, like me, were fucked up, not of mainstream
society, not like the pretty blooming ladies or muscle-burgeoning jocks
carelessly strolling by, yet there they were living, creating, morphing
destructive energies into beautiful art. Instead of picking up a gun
and blasting away, they snatched up guitars and microphones and
strummed and sang away. Siouxsie was my first and lone vicarious friend
as that first high-school year aged, and she kept what little empathy
I’d still had smoldering, ironically when she sang, “…and I have seen
all I want to, and I have felt all I want to…” Like me, and though I
felt such despair, agonized by so much that I wanted but could never
have, without remaining able to feel that despair, she and I
wouldn’t’ve been able to relate, and then maybe I really would’ve
beaten Klebold and Harris to the punch by a decade.
And she wasn’t alone – no, an entire society of similarly disenchanted
and disenfranchised people existed, and I owed my introduction to ‘em
37 years ago to my step-cousin, my one living relative (I assume – she
may be dead, my last contact with her over a quarter-century ago) whom
I still consider family. She was our best: gifted in learning’s three
branches (intellectual, aesthetic, and athletic – she kicked my ass
much), already remarkably insightful as a teenager, and funny as fuck.
She’d asked me what music I liked as we sat in the back seat of a car
bumbling down Lake Arrowhead roads, and I barely understood the
question since I’d had such little exposure to music that I really
didn’t know about different styles – I said something such as “radio
stuff,” dominantly bland hair metal (I’d Poison and Def Leppard tapes
I’d play the night before biking to Lake Gregory the following dawn) as
well as “I Think We’re Alone Now” Tiffany. She ridiculed my taste,
which I also didn’t quite grasp – again, I’d no reference points for
comparison. Later in her dungeon-like basement bedroom, seemingly to
irritate me, she spun several fringe music records, but the effect was
exactly opposite – Siouxsie and Bauhaus and the Specials and Crass,
they seemed to strum my heart, were the tribe I’d always wanted but
never had. The instant after that pivotal moment, when I had both cash
for a cassette and means to reach a music store, I bought Siouxsie’s Peepshow, and the rescuing began.
That I took longer to really feel the life in the fishes was because
they were there in front of me, breathing, spirit flowing, more
intimate and intense than the plastic spinning in the cassette-player:
lives with whom I’d a direct connection. I couldn’t escape the look in
their eyes. Even exposing myself to empathize with those animals,
subconsciously, I must’ve felt too threatened by – humanity’s betrayals
had slashed very deep, much blood lost and blackened to tar. Too, I
didn’t much know how. The paradox of the relationship between predator
and prey further complicated, where the great predator loves his prey –
can’t survive let alone live without ‘em – yet kills ‘em. And my
relationship with the fishes at that point was still very young,
inchoate, crude, though genuine. I absolutely felt exhilaration and
elation when I caught well, a resounding success, and a success I
desperately needed because of how much I was failing in the mainstream
world, my grades during that first high-school year proof: many Fs. And
because that success coupled with resentment and frustration and a
desperate need for recognition as well as an inability to clean and
preserve and cook fish well (and no one to teach me), I killed many
fishes unnecessarily and even tortured some – shameful, which, thank
Medb, I still feel so intensely.
One such
episode remains especially vivid in memory. At Chambers Pond for the
first of many times, this lovely little wild pond in the sere rolling
hills west of Poway, a creek flowing in and out, fringed with cattails,
croaking big bullfrogs, racoons scouring the shoreline for rambling
crawdads come dusk, the only shore access being a bare bank on the east
side and a wooden pallet someone before me had tossed onto the cattails
on the northwest side. I’d the clunky mass of gear with me – bulky
tackle boxes, a medium-power baitcaster, a light spinning rod. My
mother, Reta, had dumped me there in late morning on her work commute,
promising to return at dusk when her shift ended. I hauled my gear over
to the pallet, and perplexed on how to fish her, I mindlessly casted
out a mealworm with only a split shot to sink it – that must’ve been
based on my success with bluegill at Pyramid Reservoir, where I fished
the same rig though with redworms or nightcrawler chunks. Surprisingly,
I was rewarded uniquely and richly: I caught four big dinnerplate
redear sunfish, glittering iridescent turquoise backs and canary
chests, candy-apple-red crescent earrings. They were so big I even
broke one off. As was my wont at that time, I didn’t even consider
releasing ‘em – no one would’ve believed me if I had – so I stabbed ‘em
onto a stringer. The ‘worm bite died come evening, so I lugged back
over to the east bank and, killing time ‘til Reta reappeared, began
literally playing around with the medium gear, tinkering with each lure
in my box that I’d little experience with, Rapala minnows and
spinnerbaits (both massively overrated), Hula Poppers, Jitterbugs, and,
come dusk, the buzzbait – a ¼-oz white one. As the light dimmed and
blued, mind wandering, the buzz skittering, a bubbling anxiety since
Reta’d yet to show, the water exploded right near my bank, frightening
me – at first I wasn’t sure the source, but then guessed a fish
might’ve swiped at the lure. Shuddering, I recast the buzz, and,
spitting and whirling, as it neared where the splash had occurred, the
water erupted again, but this time the rod buckled and confirmed my
hunch. My heart throbbed violently as the rod lurched because I’d never
hooked a fish this large, and I desperately wanted to land her. Seemed
a lifetime in what was probably only a minute or two, and then, in near
blackness, I lipped a fine biggie, at least a foot and a half, easily
my largest fish by that point. I was shocked, in part because the
buzzbait seemed such a silly lure, but it sure as fuck got serious here
with this relatively big largemouth in hand. A great fish…and I stuck
her on the stringer with the vibrant redear.
Reta called to me shortly thereafter, and I excitedly raced up with my
heavy catch, pining for that approbation I never really received and
still couldn’t accept would never come. Didn’t then – Reta loathed
fish, even when they clearly sparked my ailing life. Once home, I
placed my catch (they probably still had a touch of suffering life) in
the garage fridge, an ancient puke-green machine dragged from Lancaster
earmarked for my fish and bait – the former Reta could never envision
as food to go into the kitchen fridge with the masquerade of generic
cola and fuckin’ Stankquet microwave “dinners” – such irony. I don’t
think I even bagged ‘em. And there they laid for seemingly ever,
dulling, drying, eyes skinning, slowly though imperceptibly rotting.
When I finally scored a few friends late in that freshman year, our
connections fused through fishing, and they visited my house, I proudly
opened the puke fridge’s door to show ‘em my trophies. They didn’t,
however, shower me with compliments and eye me with admiration –
instead, they were uneasy, equivocal, and they questioned not only why
I’d killed ‘em but why I hadn’t preserved ‘em properly or eaten ‘em. I
couldn’t answer ‘em, for not only was I unsure myself, but I was so
frail inside that I couldn’t admit that I didn’t know how.
It was that summer when I tortured those beautiful, hapless, helpless black crappie up at Gregory,
and there, too, another friend certainly wasn’t admiring or
complimentary but horrified. Symptoms of a sick, deteriorating,
deformed nascent man – fuck, like a distant, mild echo of the bona fide
psychopath Ed Kemper, who said he couldn’t kiss a woman unless he
killed her, who brought home his victims as if trophies. Me? With the
bass and redear and with trout at Gregory, I couldn’t be a fisherman
without killing ‘em and possessing ‘em as keepsakes in the fridge…or in
the case of those sweet, glittering panfish, torturing to death.
I was blessed, however, because soon after, those behaviors ceased,
largely because fringe music had engulfed me – I’d now far more albums
than Peepshow, and of various forms [noir (i.e., “post-punk,” “goth”), punk, industrial, ska, good rock (i.e.,
“alternative rock”)], which served as a widening bridge across which
myriad new connections with real humans formed, especially with my crew
in my late high-school years, and so to my growing vicarious people
were added my real people. And then my empathy rose, flowed more
strongly and more broadly and beyond humanity.
During winter break of my sophomore year, I hiked over underdressed in
a bone-clattering brittle cold of early morning to Catfish Cove on
Gregory, Siouxsie’s “Land’s End” rolling on repeat in my mind’s stereo.
I tossed out an inflated ‘crawler on a sliding-sinker rig into the
opal, calm, cold water, and come mid-morning, the line straightened,
the rod bent, and I connected with a good trout. A typical wintertime
sunken wrestle, and then I held in my hand a perfect 15-inch rainbow,
seemingly a wild fish, arrow-straight fins, hooked on the lip, just a
harmless little piercing. I stuck a stringer through the thin membrane
of her lower jaw, a habit now rutted for several years, and placed her
back in the water, she swimming with such vigor, such life against the
agonizing anchor stringer. But she stayed there only shortly – she’d
touched me. I removed the stringer from the bigger piercing, a greater
injury than the little hook hole but much less than if I’d jabbed the
stringer through her gill, then held her gently by the tail in the icy
water, my hand chilling to ice. She soon dashed away with dignity.
I’d
finally realized, at least subconsciously, that it’d never come, and
even if it had, I still would’ve been wrong to kill her. And it was
ultimately because of the grace of she and she.