(A mere warning: the punctuation will be fucked up no matter what. I can't figure out which is worse: Brink's "easy to use format," which is fucked slam up, or simply importing Word documents, which are inevitably equally fucked up but at least set in a legibly large font. Anyway, in order to vent some -- like saying this new version genuinely sucks hind tit -- and to heap praise on a recent submission, perfect in its entirety, I suppose I need to furnish some content. So here it is. But I'm not done pumping up what I think is probably the most outstanding contribution to this forum I've yet seen. Check out "The Marina Experiment." Be brave. Watch it all. The letter/story/memoir below is only shared to give "The Marina Experiment" a plug. It's so goddamn good and has elicited so very few comments that I'll confess to wondering if I had become the butt of a monstrous practical joke. -- And with Portnoy
and Strokes out there wandering around, all manner of diasaster and mayhem seem possible if not gauranteed. "The Marina Experiment" is 57 times better than anything I've ever posted here. Even what follows next, and it's a damn fine tale of sadness and delight...)


Ed Period, you nasty fuck:

This joint is so slack today I've decided to give you all the enormous great
gift of my sensitive and earth-conscious Audobonism. Glad you're fishing: I
really like giving flyrods to folks I care for. There's a world to be
learned in the water.

Yeah, the one in the picture is a channel cat, the best eating of the
different cats. (You'd be surprised at how many slightly different varieties
there are, but in the US you'll basically only find yellows, blues,
bullheads and channels.) And almost none west of the Mississippi. They're
often thought of as bottom feeders, and they are to an extent. But solely
bottom-feeding fish (commonly called suckers) have evolved to having mouths
sort of on the underside of their chins. That may not make any sense at all
because fish don't have chins. I was kind of trying to use a human analogy.
What I mean is that suckers have mouths oriented toward their underbelly.
Catfish don't. They'll rise to anything they can smell or otherwise sense as
food. Catching a cat on the surface is rare, but I've had it happen. Catfish
are a lot like pigs: they're omnivorous. They respond to smell in a big way,
more than any other fish I know of. They like meat and they'll go high or
low in the water to feed. Live (or dead, but organic) bait is the most
productive way to fish for cats. Traditionally, folks in the South used
worms or cutbait (you catch a small fish -- a bream, say, or an undersized
bass, cut into chucks and run your hook through the chuck) or, if they could
afford it, chicken livers. But chicken livers fall apart in he current
pretty quickly. Pork liver works way better.

Anyway, should you land one -- large or small -- there are some handling
tips you need. First, the kind of cats you're going to encounter have three
"horns" -- one centered on the base of its head which can stick straight up,
and the others on either side of its head behind but in line with its jaw
hinge. These two horns (they're like bony fins with several small points on
the end) can stick straight out so imagine this

_ I _

That's the orientation you'd see if you were looking tail to head at a
catfish laying flat. These horns have a toxin within. They can stick you
could and it'll hurt like hell. Not life-threatening, but you'll feel as
though a big-ass bee has stung you. They way to hold a cat is to let your
thumb cradle _behind_ the horn on the left, let the topmost horn rest
between your pointer finger and your fuck finger, and then to cradle the
right horn with your ring finger. This'll work up to the 15-lb range or so.
Above that, your hands aren't big enough and you'll have to cradle the beat
with both of yours.

Never ever attempt the thumb and forefinger lip-hold you'd use with a bass.
Your thumb paralyzes the bass. Don't nothing paralyze a cat and they've got
the strongest jaws on any creature on this planet. Don't stick anything in a
cat's mouth. One like that shown in the picture you sent could snap a broom
handle in two as easy as pie.

Also, cats don't have scales: they have skin. I'll tell you the best way to
clean a catfish if you want. My method (the old hick way) requires a hammer,
a 16d nail, catfish pliers and a tree.

Here's a nice catfish story. At the lonesomest time in my life, I used to go
fishing at Salem Lake before I went to work a couple of days a week. Have
the boat on the water at dawn, fishing back and forth for black crappies,
white-striper hybrid bass and largemouths. I knew the lake really well and I
could be just about guaranteed of catching a mess of fish. Wistful days,
this was about two months after Annie was born, late summer '78. I had
caught (and kept) a stringer of crappie to fry, turned a couple of
unimpressive bass, struck out on the whites and hybrids and I was slow
trolling into this lovely, deep cove where a nameless creek comes in.
Drinking coffee with only a little rye out of my old thermos.

I haven't thought about this in a long time. It was really a lovely morning,
a hint of the changed color of the sun that autumn brings. The lonesomeness
would be hard to explain, I guess. I was setting the world on fire at work,
people begged for an invite to my drug-addled Wednesday poker game, offered
pussy was pretty brazen, and every sign indicated that I would live forever.
But I wasn't _connected_ to one person on the planet.

Eventually, Annie turned into more than a smelly machine and things began to
change, but the day on Salem Lake that I'm thinking about I was alone on
this flickering globe. Easing down the north bank of this splendid cove and
I hear this _bloop_. Look over my shoulder and see the rings emanating from
the left bank maybe 60 yards deeper into the cove. Keep side-casting a
Spence Scout for bass. Another _bloop_. I'm figuring something's topwater
feeding down there, a hatch maybe,

although it's mighty late for mayflies.
Another _bloop_ and more rings and teeny ripples. So I turned the trolling
motor off and used one of the sculling oars that my father used to whittle
(I've still got a bunch of 'em) and headed diagonally toward where the
bloops were coming from I go easy and wait just barely within casting
distance of the shore. It's a pretty sight, a little cutbank with a huge
catalpa tree for an overhang.

I draw back to cast and as I'm following through I see an odd motion in the
air, hear a bloop, _think_ I see a fish rise just as my plug sets down. For
once, a pretty fucking accurate cast. I'm watching the ripples of that last
bloop recede when I see a fish rise and take my plug. I set the hook and
enjoy a vigorous fight -- in open water -- with a good, strong fish. Get him
to the boat: a channel cat as pretty as I've ever seen (Salem Lake is very
deep, very cool and very clear) and I toss him into the live well. Perfect
eating size; I'm thinking I'll clean and freeze the crappie and eat Mr. Cat
for supper.

Time to head in, lies to be written for the newspaper. But before I can get
the outboard cranked I hear another _bloop_ so I scull over to see what in
the hell's making the noise. After a while I see a blur of movement again
and I hear the _ping_ of something hitting the aluminum bottom of the jon
boat. It's a fucking grape.

I look up and only then see that the overhanging branches of the Catalpa are
plaited through with a wild grape vine, can't remember whether they were
scuppernongs or muscadines. I sculled back a little and watched until
another end-of-the-summer grape fell. Watched, and heard the _bloop_, and I
believe I smiled. The sound of falling grapes had led me to a meal.

I went home and cleaned the crappie -- they turn mighty quick, get stiff and
white-eyed in the relentless heat of August -- and froze 'em in a baggie or
two. I was running late so I left the cat in the livewell in the boat in the
shade beneath the carport and went on to work. Took the rye with me and
drank carefully through the day while I continued unraveling the mystery of
a banker named Boomer Duncan bugging the FBI and how Southeast Asian heroin
had made it back to the States in body bags and how the two were connected.
Wasn't long after that I made the connection and put all the shit together
and ended up, semi-fucked up as usual, in a military airbase hangar in
Dover, Delaware -- where the last of the body bags were unloaded, the body
bags that held the shattered remains of poor dumb kids and sacks of China
White.

Unloading the bags is _sacred_ duty within our Army. The loading in Saigon
and the unloading in Delaware were the duties of the Sergeant of the Army.
That's an odd title, Sergeant of the Army. That fucker is an enlisted man,
but he's _the_ enlisted man and he makes about as much money as a senior
congressman. The Sergeant of the Army was Leslie "Ike" Atkinson.

It was Ike's sacred duty to tend to those untouchable, holy, thick, black
neoprene-and-canvas sacks of dead heroes. And glistening white heroin.

I don't really understand the word _sacred_, I suppose. I woke up this
morning hating August with a ferocity you cannot imagine. August isn't hot,
it merely wishes to be. August is cool, aloof and ashamed. But I'm happy to
have thought of a bright day in an August long past. So I thank you, Ed.

Sitting outside the barn at Ike's farm in Oxford NC, drinking rye whiskey
and lemonade -- Ike was a teetotaler -- and me dipping into his healing
powder from time to time, we were finally talking the truth. We were also
shooting bumblebees. That's hard. But Ike's fading sedum was drawing those
strange humming wizards in droves. I told Ike it was fun to hit them with a
tennis racket, that they'd up in another county with even a shabby
backstroke. Bumblebees are _hard_.

"Let's shoot 'em," Ike said.

I said, "Okay."

Ike liked him a pistol. I declined the shotgun he offered, but went over to
his truck and got a .22 off the rack, right under the umbrella and he
hollered that there was a box of long-rifles on the dash. But I found about
a half box of rim-fire shorts somewhere else. Ike had Christian tracts on
the front seat of his truck and something mercifully unrecognizable hanging
from mirror. It was organic, that's all I could determine before I decided
never to look at it again.

Then we started shooting bumblebees. Ike made a lot of noise. Sometimes he
was off-target so much that the hovering bee didn't budge. I shot a couple,
only a couple, before I ran through his half-box of rim-fires. Shooting bees
is fucking _hard_ Tried to teach him how to shoot a dime in the air, but
with no success. I've been able to teach this trick only to Drew Williams
Construction and my son.

I don't understand teaching any more than I understand the word sacred.

Ike and I talked until dark. He was doomed, and he knew it. He gave me the
nod on where the greenest cash was, in a tiny little Northwestern Bank
branch in fucking-nothing-nowhere Advance NC, body bag cash, stashed in
safety deposit boxes. I traded that tip with the FBI -- my friends for life,
the Hoover boys, the shiny black shoe fags -- to get the link that led me to
where the big bundle was: in a faceless bank on Grand Cayman Island. Forget
his name, the branch manager of that Advance (pronounced AD-vayance) NC
Northwestern bank branch. Odell something. He died in the pen. So did Leslie
"Ike". Boomer Duncan skated, despite frankly admitting hiring a Bethesda MD
snoop named Marty Kaiser to bug the FBI. Marty built a micro-bug with a
cordless soldering-iron in the witness stand in Federal Court. It was
fucking fascinating, even as messed up as I was.

Laura has the hard copies of all this stuff and I doubt if she'll ever
forgive me for my hellbent erasure, the careful destruction of the trail
that leads to the things I did. Seems possible that she wants to be proud
not _of_ me but _for_ me.

Northwestern was the first small bank middling small NC bank First Union
devoured after Ron and Nancy decided to let the banks loose to refresh us
all with the glory days of Robber Barons. Then First Union and Wachovia
mated, like dogs, and got locked, like dogs. NC banking rules the world now.

Couldn't teach Ike how to shoot a dime. You flip it off your right thumbnail
with your right pointer while you hold the rifle in your left hand, shoulder
it and slip that same right pointer through the trigger card. When Franklin
Delano Roosevelt comes most nearly still and parallel to our earth, you
shoot him in the head. It works, makes a lovely sound even a deaf Quaker can
here. It's the New Deal, I suppose.

Dark was falling. Ike was disappearing into the shadows. He said, "You can
some more shoot."

What do you say to that?

He said, "You'd'a probably made a good soldier."

What do you say to that?

He said, "They can kill my niggery ass but they ain't going to find that
money."

What do you say to that?

He was quiet for a while. I had put the car in reverse, but my feet held the
brakes and the clutch down. He leaned close to the window, too close to my
face. He said, "I made a fortune, pussy boy. Quaker, my ass. Now get off my
land."

And what do you say, what do you say to that?

This vile convoluted mess is what I was working on that awful August 27
years ago. I did good. Bought me a ticket to the big times. I fucked up
there, too, though, shooting bumblebees. If you can find an eye for when
things grow still, for a specific moment, you can send your will toward
whatever you want at an explosive and terminal velocity. This is how you
shoot yourself.

This is how I remember catfish, Ed. A beautiful morning within a month grown
weary and sad to me. Anne Macbeth grew up and grew delightful. Talked to her
just a minute ago. She and Katie are concocting some sort of mischief. I'm
too old and beat up to much wonder what.

I was young back then, unerased.

Went home and the cat was still alive. Nailed his head to a poplar tree to
kill him and skin him with wide-ass pliers. Chopped his head off with a 4-lb
camper's axe, then chopped his tail off. Rinsed him good with the garden
hose and took him inside with my filet knife. Dressed him out at the kitchen
sink.

Still can't recollect what _sacred_ means, but I cleaned that fish. Cut away
the poison horns and made that final slit. Anne Macbeth was gurgling. Her
mother was distressed with me for something I had undoubtedly done. They
left the house together for God alone knows where. I slid the knife the
length of the body cavity and spread the ribs apart.

That fish was full of grapes.

Maybe I ought to have stuck with catamounting around with the Sergeants of
the Army or played a little more ball. Or gotten better at beating people
up. Instead, I suppose, I learned to erase myself and to dine alone. August
is when Hell returns. My meal that night was splendid.

That fish was full of grapes.