Neanderpundit

Amazing how the mind works. I’m thinking about goldfish, which leads me to think of my old bike, and next I’m thinking about Gogi Miller.

Gogy (gary. He had a speech impediment that made it hard to say gary so he said gogi, and that’s what everyone called him) was at our house with his family, (this was before they became Jehovah’s Witnesses and all-around god-botherors) and we’d all had some of mom’s excellent potroast. We kids were playing in my room, while the adults watched TV (the millers had a black and white, we’d just upgraded to color)

Anyway, halfway through a game of “sorry” Gogi gets up and goes into the living room, whispers in his mom’s ear.

“You can use the bathroom here, it’t in the same place as our house!” (the homes in our neighborhood were all practically identical or at worst, mirror images.) More whispering “okay, go home, but come right back.”

So gogi left and ran down the street, hopefully, making it to the bathroom on time. Anyway, we all sit in the living room, waiting for Gogi to come back, and soon enough the TV has distracted us. Marlin Perkins is telling Jim to go wrestle the lion while Marlin stands behind the big rock. I Stick my head up over the back of the couch and peer out the window, and see Gogi coming down the street.
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The story immediately below reminded me of my very first bike, an ungainly Flexible Flyer with balloon tires and a sprung front fork. It was originallly Ford Black, had a tank style frame, and had been painted with goats-vomit green rust-o-leum. No chrome was intact. the seat was mostly there, but later had to be held together with tape and rope. I learned to ride this bike, remarkably enough, by the sink or swim method.

How does that apply to bikes, you might ask? Well, you have your next door neighbor Gogi help you drag the bike to the top of a steep hill, where he helps you mount the bike and gives you a healthy push, sending you careening down the hill towards the road.

The first several times I managed to only stay on the bike until his hand left it, and spent the rest of the trip downhill sliding on the right side of my face in the hard yellow indiana clay. By the fifth or sixth time, I had managed to make it halfway down the hill astride the flyer, but my depth perception was going to hell as my face was being distorted by the friction of the dirt against my face. “it’s normal” said Gogi. “some fish also have both eyes on one side of their head, they’re called hallabutt”. I stopped for the day figuring i’d let the headwounds heal before moving on to phase 2.

Next day, as soon as Dad left for work, I dragged the Flyer up the hill, vision still distorted somewhat, when Gogi snuck up on me by standing immediately in front of me. “Oh, goge, I didn’t see you there. Wanna help me with the bike?” I asked. “Mom says I better not or your parents will probably press charges” he responded. So I push the bike up the hill by myself, and hop on. It’s a boys bike, and I’m none too tall at nine plus years old, so I’m tottering back and forth on my tiptoes as the frame insures I won’t have a whole houseful of kids unless I adopt. I put one foot up on the pedal and lift myself to the seat and the bike begins to move, powered, for the first time, by me! I’m so excited I barely get the other foot on the other pedal as I start off downhill, wobbling and overcorrecting, but RIDING!

Of course I fall off after six feet, and this time enmesh myself in the bike frame. Several spokes break off and embed themselves in my buttocks like porupine quills and the handlebars are now making an intimate acquaintance with my kidneys. My feet are, remarkably, still on the pedals, but they’re the WRONG pedals. Inertia continues to carry the bike forward down the hill so that I may brake my progress by digging my shoulder into the gravel at the street.
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One day, lo these many years ago, a girlfriend and I attended a county fair. “let’s toss ping pong balls at goldfish” she said. “it’ll be fun. We could win a goldfish!” So i fork over a buck and she misses with all three balls, to a whispered “YESSS!!” from me. “Oh, let me try again!!” SO I fork over another and she gets not one but TWO goldfish, in tiny little glass bowls the size of softballs. “I’ll keep one and you keep one” she says. ugh. So I take said goldfish home. And proceed to neglect it. It thrives.

I figure it’s going to be dead in a couple days but it’s still swimming around in it’s bowl a week later, so I go get a small sample packet of fish food. I feed it for a month, and it still lives. I never change the water in it’s bowl. I add water when it needs it by taking ice cubes out of my diet coke. By the end of two months I’ve broken up wiht said girlfriend, who at the time tearfully told me HER goldfish had died. I offered to give her mine but she says ‘don’t you want anything to remember me by?” SO i keep it. Through two jobs, three apartments. The bowl now has a coating of green on the inside. I rinse out a glass and pour the fish in it, scour out the bowl with a brillo pad, more or less rinse it out, throw in the fish. Put some chlorinated tapwater in with it. I feed it every day, and it begins to grow, slowly, and I eventually end up putting it in a deep casserole. No gravel. No teeny castles. No plants. No nothing, just the fish and some water. I go away on vacation, I come back,the casserole has dried almost completely out, the fish mummified and nasty, I take it to the sink and rinse it out, and the GODDAMNED FISH STARTS SWIMMING AROUND AGAIN. I sit it on the counter in the kitchen and occasionally accidentally drop toast into the dish, and the fish lives on. I rescue the fish from the neighbor’s cat’s mouth, and after a couple days of bleeding from pinprick sized bite marks, the fish is as hale and hearty as ever. Fully two years elapse before I finally find a lake and set it free, where it now, I’m sure, is the size of a buick and will eat me for my past sins should I ever set foot in said body of water.

Speaking of fish and buicks:

In 1969 I was ten years old, riding my green Flexible Flyer down the road circling Cedar Lake Indiana. Cedar lake had been a cesspool for many years, and carp were it’s most plentiful inhabitants. To try to tone down the carp population, the locals went out and dialed up some fish. For anyone who don’t know this, you take a little hand-cranked generator, the type you find in old telephones. You take this out into your (wooden) boat and drop a couple lines over the edge, turn the crank vigorously, and gaff and billy the fish that float to the surface, all around the boat. THis goes on for days. Anyway, I’m riding my bike and see this buick Electra deuce and a quarter withit’s trunk open, the head of a carp hanging out one side, the tail hanging out the other. Easily seven feet long. In little cedar lake!! I was stunned. The fish, however, wasn’t, or wasn’t as much as I’d have desired- I reached out to touch it and it snapped at my fingers. I pedalled furiously all the way home, my jeans soaked with urine. Damned fish.