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Little Hughes Lake, perched in a little nook of
the San Gabriel Mountains. The bullheads were wonderful. Pretty sure
they were browns, but they could've been either yellows or blacks. My
mother took me there once on a crisp morning; we sat on cheap folding
lawn chairs that slowly sank into murmuring mud. She said little to me,
paying more attention to her ubiquitous crossword puzzles. My fishing
technique with her was crude, ignorant - I remember using a fixed
plastic casting weight for my sinker, not even realizing that it was
for practice, and I caught no fish. Then I went with the old man a few
times, and I'd made the sensible switch to actual sinkers and sliding
rigs - that paid off. Once, I think the old man had come straight from
work - his stupid grocery-store job - to pick me up, then drove us to
Hughes in diminishing evening light. We walked down a dirt road, the
atmosphere silent other than the chattering cottonwood leaves and
sighing lake water, and plopped down at a bare bank where we could get
clean casts and sets. He was still wearing his cheap black slacks, his
spring-spool key ring filled with keys to myriad grocery-store doors
still clipped to his belt. Shiny, distracting - a symbol. After
daylight died, the bulls went on an unprecedented feast, and several
chocolaty foot-long nighttime denizens greeted me at the bank. Even the
old man, who had no talent for catching fish, caught a bull or two. A
rare shared success. I killed and cleaned those fish and gave 'em to
this white-trash woman at the local fishing-goods store: fucked-up
teeth, rail-thin body - likely from meth - hair-metal-fan mullet
hairdo, prematurely crinkled skin, but with an inherent warmth,
reflected in a joyous laugh and, what seemed at the time, a genuine
appreciation for the catfish I gave her. A priceless gratitude, which
my parents couldn't understand - to them, wild fish as food was
inconceivable.
It took tremendous effort -
emotional and physical - from my parents to tote me all the way to
Hughes and then sit by me for a few hours since both were so tired and
weak and scared. The old man must've been exhausted - he worked long
hours at the grocery store, although that was really his first love -
it kept him from having to deal with the people at my house, who
horrified him. A child in a man's body needing to do a man's job. And
my mother - she, too, was likely pretty beat, having worked all week at
some soul-killing job - flipping burgers at Burger King, answering
phones at a medical office, filing paperwork at a hospital. Like my old
man, she was totally unable to deal with the complicated human
relationships she helped create, exhibited when she'd immediately drown
herself in fucking recorded Days of Our Lives VHS tapes after returning
home from work, then falling, falling asleep in her well-worn recliner.
Tragically, they never left their distractions, their delusions, to
strain for, to struggle for, to actualize their potential for living
well. But in those few hours at Hughes - they tried.