In God We Trust

by Jean Shepherd

  Well, these Coleman lamps may not have drawn fish, but they worked great on mosquitoes. One of the more yeasty experiences in Life is to occupy a tiny rented rowboat with eight other guys, knee-deep in beer cans, with a blinding Coleman lamp hanging out of the boat, at 2 A.M., with the lamp hissing like Fu Manchu about to strike and every mosquito in the Western Hemisphere descending on you in the middle of Cedar Lake.

  ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTTTT

  They love Coleman lamps. In the light they shed the mosquitoes swarm like rain. And in the darkness all around there’d be other lights in other boats, and once in a while a face would float above one. Everyone is coated with an inch and a half of something called citronella, reputedly a mosquito repellent but actually a sort of mosquito salad dressing.

  The water is absolutely flat. There has not been a breath of air since April. It is now August. The surface is one flat sheet of old used oil laying in the darkness, with the sounds of the Roller Rink floating out over it, mingling with the angry drone of the mosquitoes and muffled swearing from the other boats. A fistfight breaks out at the Evening In Paris. The sound of sirens can be heard faintly in the Indiana blackness. It gets louder and then fades away. Tiny orange lights bob over the dance floor.

  “Raaahhhhhd sails in the sawwwwnnnnsehhhht.…”

  It’s the drummer who sings. He figures some day Ted Weems will be driving by, and hear him, and.…

  “… haaaahhhhwwww brightlyyyy they shinneee.…”

  There is nothing like a band vocalist in a rotten, struggling Mickey band. When you’ve heard him over 2000 yards of soupy, oily water, filtered through fourteen billion feeding mosquitoes in the August heat, he is particularly juicy and ripe. He is overloading the ten-watt Allied Radio Knight amplifier by at least 400 per cent, the gain turned all the way up, his chrome-plated bullet-shaped crystal mike on the edge of feedback.

  “Raaahhhhhd sails in the sawwwwnnnnsehhhht.…”

  It is the sound of the American night. And to a twelve-year-old kid it is exciting beyond belief.

  Then my Old Man, out of the blue, says to me:

  “You know, if you’re gonna come along, you got to clean the fish.”

  Gonna come along! My God! I wanted to go fishing more than anything else in the world, and my Old Man wanted to drink beer more than anything else in the world, and so did Gertz and the gang, and more than even that, they wanted to get away from all the women. They wanted to get out on the lake and tell dirty stories and drink beer and get eaten by mosquitoes; just sit out there and sweat and be Men. They wanted to get away from work, the car payments, the lawn, the mill, and everything else.

  And so here I am, in the dark, in a rowboat with The Men. I am half-blind with sleepiness. I am used to going to bed at nine-thirty or ten o’clock, and here it is two, three o’clock in the morning. I’m squatting in the back end of the boat, with 87,000,000 mosquitoes swarming over me, but I am fishing! I am out of my skull with fantastic excitement, hanging onto my pole.

  In those days, in Indiana, they fished with gigantic cane poles. They knew not from Spinning. A cane pole is a long bamboo pole that’s maybe twelve or fifteen feet in length; it weighs a ton, and tied to the end of it is about thirty feet of thick green line, roughly half the weight of the average clothesline, three big lead sinkers, a couple of crappie hooks, and a bobber.

  One of Sport’s most exciting moments is when 7 Indiana fishermen in the same boat simultaneously and without consulting one another decide to pull their lines out of the water and recast. In total darkness. First the pole, rising like a huge whip:

  “Whoooooooooooooop!”

  Then the lines, whirling overhead: “heeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooo!”

  And then:

  “OH! FOR CHRISSAKE! WHAT THE HELL?”

  Clunk! CLONK!

  Sound of cane poles banging together, and lead weights landing in the boat. And such brilliant swearing as you have never heard. Yelling, hollering, with somebody always getting a hook stuck in the back of his ear. And, of course, all in complete darkness, the Coleman lamp at the other end of the rowboat barely penetrating the darkness in a circle of three or four feet.

  “Hey, for God’s sake, Gertz, will ya tell me when you’re gonna pull your pole up!? Oh, Jesus Christ, look at this mess!”

  There is nothing worse than trying to untangle seven cane poles, 200 feet of soggy green line, just as they are starting to hit in the other boats. Sound carries over water:

  “Shhhhh! I got a bite!”

  The fishermen with the tangled lines become frenzied. Fingernails are torn, hooks dig deeper into thumbs, and kids huddle terrified out of range in the darkness.

  You have been sitting for twenty hours, and nothing. A bobber just barely visible in the dark water is one of the most beautiful sights known to man. It’s not doing anything, but there’s always the feeling that at any instant it might. It just lays out there in the darkness. A luminous bobber, a beautiful thing, with a long, thin quill and a tiny red-and-white float, with just the suggestion of a line reaching into the black water. These are special bobbers for very tiny fish.

  I have been watching my bobber so hard and so long in the darkness that I am almost hypnotized. I have not had a bite—ever—but the excitement of being there is enough for me, a kind of delirious joy that has nothing to do with sex or any of the more obvious pleasures. To this day, when I hear some guy singing in that special drummer’s voice, it comes over me. It’s two o’clock in the morning again. I’m a kid. I’m tired. I’m excited. I’m having the time of my life.

  And at the other end of the lake:

  “Raaahhhhhd sails in the sawwwwnnnnsehhhht.…” The Roller Rink drones on, and the mosquitoes are humming. The Coleman lamp sputters, and we’re all sitting together in our little boat.

  Not really together, since I am a kid, and they are Men, but at least I’m there. Gertz is stewed to the ears. He is down at the other end. He has this fantastic collection of rotten stories, and early in the evening my Old Man keeps saying:

  “There’s a kid with us, you know.”

  But by two in the morning all of them have had enough so that it doesn’t matter. They’re telling stories, and I don’t care. I’m just sitting there, clinging to my cane pole when, by God, I get a nibble!

  I don’t believe it. The bobber straightens up, jiggles, dips, and comes to rest in the gloom. I whisper:

  “I got a bite!”

  The storytellers look up from their beer cans in the darkness.

  “What …? Hey, whazzat?”

  “Shhhhh! Be quiet!”

  We sit in silence, everybody watching his bobber through the haze of insects. The drummer is singing in the distance. We hang suspended for long minutes. Then suddenly all the bobbers dipped and went under. The crappies are hitting!

  You never saw anything like it! We are pulling up fish as fast as we can get them off the hooks. Crappies are flying into the boat, one after the other, and hopping around on the bottom in the darkness, amid the empty beer cans. Within twenty minutes we have landed forty-seven fish. We are knee-deep in crappies. The jackpot!

  Well, the Old Man just goes wild. They are all yelling and screaming and pulling the fish in—while the other boats around us are being skunked. The fish have come out of their hole or whatever it is that they are in at the bottom of the lake, the beer cans and the old tires, and have decided to eat.

  You can hear the rest of the boats pulling up anchors and rowing over, frantically. They are thumping against us. There’s a big, solid phalanx of wooden boats around us. You could walk from one boat to the other for miles around. And still they are skunked. We are catching the fish!

  By 3 A.M. they’ve finally stopped biting, and an hour later we are back on land. I’m falling asleep in the rear seat between Gertz and Zudock. We’re driving home in the dawn, and the men are hollering, drinking, throwing beer cans out on the road, and having a great time.

  We are back at the house, and my father
says to me as we are coming out of the garage with Gertz and the rest of them:

  “And now Ralph’s gonna clean the fish. Let’s go in the house and have something to eat. Clean ’em on the back porch, will ya, kid?”

  In the house they go. The lights go on in the kitchen; they sit down and start eating sandwiches and making coffee. And I am out on the back porch with forty-seven live, flopping crappies.

  They are well named. Fish that are taken out of muddy, rotten, lousy, stinking lakes are muddy, rotten, lousy, stinking fish. It is as simple as that. And they are made out of some kind of hard rubber.

  I get my Scout knife and go to work. Fifteen minutes and twenty-one crappies later I am sick over the side of the porch. But I do not stop. It is part of Fishing.

  By now, nine neighborhood cats and a raccoon have joined me on the porch, and we are all working together. The August heat, now that we are away from the lake, is even hotter. The uproar in the kitchen is getting louder and louder. There is nothing like a motley collection of Indiana office workers who have just successfully defeated Nature and have brought home the kill. Like cave men of old, they celebrate around the camp-fire with song and drink. And belching.

  I have now finished the last crappie and am wrapping the clean fish in the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune. It has a very tough paper that doesn’t leak. Especially the editorial page.

  The Old Man hollers out:

  “How you doing? Come in and have a Nehi.”

  I enter the kitchen, blinded by that big yellow light bulb, weighted down with a load of five-and-a-half-inch crappies, covered with fish scales and blood, and smelling like the far end of Cedar Lake. There are worms under my fingernails from baiting hooks all night, and I am feeling at least nine feet tall. I spread the fish out on the sink—and old Hairy Gertz says:

  “My God! Look at those speckled beauties!” An expression he had picked up from Outdoor Life.

  The Old Man hands me a two-pound liverwurst sandwich and a bottle of Nehi orange. Gertz is now rolling strongly, as are the other eight file clerks, all smelly, and mosquito-bitten, eyes red-rimmed from the Coleman lamp, covered with worms and with the drippings of at least fifteen beers apiece. Gertz hollers:

  “Ya know, lookin’ at them fish reminds me of a story.” He is about to uncork his cruddiest joke of the night. They all lean forward over the white enamel kitchen table with the chipped edges, over the salami and the beer bottles, the rye bread and the mustard. Gertz digs deep into his vast file of obscenity.

  “One time there was this Hungarian bartender, and ya know, he had a cross-eyed daughter and a bowlegged dachshund. And this.…”

  At first I am holding back, since I am a kid. The Old Man says:

  “Hold it down, Gertz. You’ll wake up the wife and she’ll raise hell.”

  He is referring to My Mother.

  Gertz lowers his voice and they all scrunch their chairs forward amid a great cloud of cigar smoke. There is only one thing to do. I scrunch forward, too, and stick my head into the huddle, right next to the Old Man, into the circle of leering, snickering, fishy-smelling faces. Of course, I do not even remotely comprehend the gist of the story. But I know that it is rotten to the core.

  Gertz belts out the punch line; the crowd bellows and beats on the table. They begin uncapping more Blatz.

  Secretly, suddenly, and for the first time, I realize that I am In. The Eskimo pies and Nehi oranges are all behind me, and a whole new world is stretching out endlessly and wildly in all directions before me. I have gotten The Signal!

  Suddenly my mother is in the doorway in her Chinese-red chenille bathrobe. Ten minutes later I am in the sack, and out in the kitchen Gertz is telling another one. The bottles are rattling, and the file clerks are hunched around the fire celebrating their primal victory over The Elements.

  Somewhere off in the dark the Monon Louisville Limited wails as it snakes through the Gibson Hump on its way to the outside world. The giant Indiana moths, at least five pounds apiece, are banging against the window screens next to my bed. The cats are fighting in the backyard over crappie heads, and fish scales are itching in my hair as I joyfully, ecstatically slide off into the great world beyond.

  IX I INTRODUCE FLICK TO THE ART WORLD

  “It hasn’t changed a bit,” Flick said.

  Two truckdrivers had taken places at the far end of the bar. Flick ambled down; served them up a pair of boilermakers. One of them got up immediately, crossed to the jukebox, dropped in a coin, pressed the buttons, and returned to his stool. Immediately a wavering reddish-purple light filled the room as the enormous plastic jukebox glowed into vivid neon life. Waterfalls cascaded through its plastic sides. I watched it for a moment, and, forgetting where I was, said:

  “Pure Pop Art.”

  Flick paused in his glass-polishing. “Pure what?”

  It was too late to back out.

  “Pop Art, Flick. Pure Pop Art. That jukebox.”

  “What’s Pop Art?”

  “That’s hard to explain, Flick. You’ve got to be With It.”

  “What do you mean? I’m With It.”

  I sipped my beer to stall for time.

  “Flick, have you ever heard of the Museum of Modern Art in New York?”

  “Yeah. What about it?”

  “Well, Flick.…”

  X MY OLD MAN AND THE LASCIVIOUS SPECIAL AWARD THAT HERALDED THE BIRTH OF POP ART

  I “hmmmmed” meaningfully yet noncommittally as I feigned interest in the magnificent structure before us. “Hmmmm,” I repeated, this time in a slightly lower key, watching carefully out of the corner of my eye to see whether she was taking the lure.

  A 1938 Hupmobile radiator core painted gaudily in gilt and fuchsia revolved on a Victrola turntable before us. From its cap extended the severed arm of a female plastic mannequin. It reached toward the vaulted ceiling high above us. Its elegantly contorted hand clutched a can of Bon Ami, the kitchen cleanser. The Victrola repeated endlessly a recording of a harmonica band playing “My Country Tis Of Thee.” The bronze plaque at its base read: IT HASN’T SCRATCHED YET.

  The girl nodded slowly and deliberately in deep appreciation of the famous contemporary masterwork, the central exhibit in the Museum’s definitive Pop Art Retrospective Panorama, as the Sunday supplements called it. I closed in:

  “He’s got it down.”

  I paused adeptly, waited a beat or two and then, using my clipped, put-down voice:

  “… all of it.”

  She rose to the fly like a hungry she-salmon:

  “It’s The Bronx, all right. Fordham Road, squared. Let ’em laugh this off on the Grand Concourse!”

  I moved in quickly.

  “You can say that again!”

  Hissing in the venomous sibilant accents of a lifelong Coffee Shop habitué that I always used in the Museum of Modern Art on my favorite late afternoon time-killer—Girl Tracking—which is the art most fully explored and pursued at the Museum of Modern Art. Nowhere in all of New York is it easier, nor more pleasant, to snare and net the complaisant, rebellious, burlap-skirted, sandal-wearing CCNY undergraduate. Amid the throngs of restless Connecticut matrons and elderly Mittel European art nuts there is always, at the Museum, a roving eddying gulf stream of Hunters and the Hunted.

  It was the work of an instant to bundle her off to the outdoor tables in the garden where we sat tensely; date and cream cheese sandwiches between sips of watery Museum of Modern Art orange drink.

  “Marcia, how many of these clods really dig?” I shrugged toward all the other tables around us. “It’s really sickening!!”

  “Bastards!”

  She whistled through her teeth. I sensed the stirrings, faint but unmistakable, of an Afternoon Love. Up to her pad off the NYU campus, down to the Village by subway for a hamburger, and then.…

  “Only the other day,” she continued, “at the Fig, I said to Claes: ‘Top Shmop. Art is Art, the way I see it’….”

  She trailed off moodily a
nd then bit viciously into the raisin nut bread, her Mexican serape sweeping the ashes from her cigarette into my salad.

  “Good old Claes.” I followed her lead, “He lays it on the Phonies!”

  I wondered frantically for a brief instant who the hell Claes was!

  “And they lap it up,” she added.

  Our love duet was meshing nicely now. Point and counter-point we wove our fabric of Protest, Tristan and Isolde of the Hip.

  A light fog-like rain descended on us from what passes for sky in New York. We ignored the dampness as we clutched and groped toward one another in the psychic gloom.

  “What do these Baby Machines know of Pop Art?”

  I nodded toward a covey of Connecticut ladies eating celery near us. Our eyes met intensely for a long, searing moment. Hers smoldered; mine watered, but I hung in there grimly. And then, her voice low, quivering with emotion, deliberately she spoke:

  “Pop Art, as these fools call it, is the essential dissection of Now-ness, the split atom of the Here moment.”

  We looked deep into each other’s souls for another looping instant. I took three deliberate beats and countered:

  “Now-ness is us, baby. The Now of Here!”

  Her hand clutched convulsively at the smudged and dog-eared paperback copy of Sexus. A Henry Miller. I knew my harpoon had struck pay dirt!

  Suddenly, without warning, she stood up and called out in a loud voice:

  “Steve! Oh Stevie, over here!”

  I turned and saw striding toward us over the marble palazzo, past a Henry Moore fertility symbol, a tall broad-shouldered figure wearing black cowboy boots and tight leather pants. Marcia hurriedly darted forward.