A basketball game came on the TV, and as the national anthem was being played I arose with a ceremonious air and hoisted my conical glass and the three wondrous white onions impaled on a toothpick within to the beautiful young woman singing and the enormous flag held parallel to the ground like a safety net by a contingent of artfully arranged Marines. I became belligerent afterward because no one else had stood. “I guess I am the only one standing up for a lady,” I am afraid I declared. “A lady called America!”
At another blurry juncture, I tried to persuade the frightening bartender to turn over the personal telephone number of Sandy Baker Jr. In retrospect, it should have given me a clue to his nature that Sandy was so secretive in his refusal to reveal those very digits, which should have been tucked in my wallet seeing that we had become business partners of a sort and even partners in crime, for what had I done but robbed my wife’s company under her very nose, like a mastermind for whom the FBI agent in charge of the case develops a grudging respect?
Yet thank goodness the fearsome barkeep did not comply! I was left bereft of the contact information I so assiduously sought.
What a condition I was in: drunken, combined with doubts and anger. Given the volatility of my intended communicant, I cannot imagine that the confrontation would have gone well.
What if I had used Sandy’s number as a means of finding his address? What if I had gone over to his apartment or hovel and banged on the door in a rage?
In one such imagining I am pinned to a wall by the projectile of a crossbow and my body, once pried free with some difficulty, is dumped in the old farmer’s catfish pond, along with so many others. I suppose most catfish are farm-raised now, and it is a good thing. They are awful creatures, monstrous to gaze upon, and will eat anything, including my remains. To name a thing like that after its supposed resemblance to a cat is the gravest insult. I hope you do not have a pet catfish because chances are he will never be a movie star! Ha ha!
I should pause to admit two things:
1) Sometimes I call my cat “Catfish” as a nickname because of her cute little puffy fish face.
2) There is a movie called Catfish and for all I know it has a catfish in it. We should all be more scrupulous and not fling around generalizations with abandon. Why am I imagining a catfish circling and circling in a cheap inflatable wading pool? Is that something I read about in a review of the film? A catfish is possessed of extremely sharp and painful cartilaginous (I guess) “whiskers.” Anything inflatable, which might be endangered by harsh poking, would be an unwise container for a catfish. Perhaps that is a central metaphor of the movie, the folly of keeping a catfish in a rubber wading pool. I have not seen it, so I hope I am not giving anything away. Somebody apparently put his catfish in a movie long before my cat became a movie star, so hats off to that enterprising gentleman (or woman). The more I think of it, the less can be said with any certainty on any subject whatsoever. My tongue is a small sea creature indeed, thrashing about so crazily in the hull of an enormous fishing boat christened Ignorance. Wittgenstein was right when he philosophically told us all to shut our big kissers for good. I believe that wily old German went so far as to say that we shouldn’t even make pronouncements like, “The sun will come up tomorrow.” But just try telling that to Little Orphan Annie. Who said that Wittgenstein is necessarily right about everything all the time? Why shouldn’t we say, “The sun will come up tomorrow”? What if it doesn’t? In that case, we will have lots of worse things to worry about than what we said about the sun yesterday. In actual fact, what we say about the sun has very little effect on the sun at all.
When I thought about what to say to Sandy Baker Jr., not every outcome I considered ended with me dead, a clunky bolt shot through my throat.
I also imagined that I might murder Sandy Baker Jr. in self-defense.
What if he came at me with his crossbow raised? What choice would I have but to pick up the novelty “lava lamp” I imagine he would have sitting on an end table for irony? I might smash the lava lamp in his face, releasing its scalding contents, which would blind him. Or perhaps a shard of it would sever one of his arteries. Were it still plugged in, it might well electrocute him.
Thank goodness, then, for the professionalism of the reticent yet ugly bartender. A bartender is used to receiving many slurred requests, few of which he fulfills, unless they involve a fresh drink. That is as it should be. One thing we can be content to know in this world is that we can count on most people to do their jobs in good faith.
One thing from which the unattractive if dedicated service professional could not save me was a wretched hangover. When one’s spouse goes out of town, the initial thought is, “Welcome back, bygone days of bachelorhood. I may as well loosen up and have some wholesome fun!” The reality always ends in pain.
Upon my wife’s return, I managed to choke out a catalog of my misdeeds.
For business purposes, she has been endowed by her employer with an American Express card devoid of any limit. With it, she pays for meals and necessary sundries on business trips. She then files an expense report to the accounting office. Once it has been approved, a check is issued. My wife deposits the check and uses the funds to pay off her corporate American Express card in a timely manner.
Potentially limitless funds! You can see the unfortunate temptation for a spouse who wishes to turn his cat into a movie star.
I regret to say I “borrowed” my wife’s corporate credit card without her knowledge. It was with an excess of adrenaline that I met Sandy Baker Jr. at the prearranged spot: a particularly shabby and generic automatic teller machine near a diseased tree.
My hands were quaking as I slipped the stiff rectangle of fiduciary plastic into the appropriate slot. The source of said quaking was twofold: first, what right had I? Could my actions get my wife fired, or even jailed? Second, my attempt at entering the personal identification number represented the sheerest of guesswork. Perhaps an entirely random number had been assigned by my wife’s company. I chose to assume, however, that this card shared the “PIN” of all our other cards and accounts. (An interesting side note: I almost just told you what it is before deleting it! That is how at ease I feel with you, dear reader, with whom I share so many dreams and goals. But that is no reason to throw caution to the wind entirely, as I am sure you will agree. Suffice it to say, the number bears a poignant romantic association for my wife and myself.)
Luckily (or unluckily) my marital instinct paid off to the tune of three hundred big ones. Sandy Baker Jr. could not possibly have been more delighted.
In contrast, my wife’s response to this tale was not a good-humored one.
“You’ve never kept secrets from me,” she said. After a pause, she added, “Have you?”
I suddenly realized what my breach of trust had done! It had thrown everything good and true into question.
She was also upset because a credit-card payment was imminent, and where was this extra money supposed to come from? She did not say it, for she is the least cruel of persons, but the implication — whether intended or not — was that no extra money might be had from any source, thanks to my unemployment and despair.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You let this vagabond into our home? And he took pictures of our cats? What else did he take? Do I need to inventory the china? I can’t believe you let this character near our cats!”