My Aquarium

It is four a.m. The fish, my fish, Vacuum Bag woke me. Actually, the sound of the gravel dropping on the glass bottom of the aquarium woke me and now I am making coffee. Prior to getting out of bed, before thinking about coffee, I could see in my mind’s eye Vacuum Bag swimming to the top of the tank with a large glass marble in her mouth and dropping it. Her species, Cichlids, are earthmovers.

I don’t like being woken. Nobody does. I have my back to the fish, but V.B. refuses to be ignored. She bangs her head on the glass cover of the tank. My fish acts like a dog. I suppose the simple thing would have been to feed her. Instead, I place some beans in the coffee grinder, push the start button, and silence the pest.

I don’t want the fish to be aggressive, but the fish is aggressive and, when I feel the chafe, I watch TV.

I am a comfortable man living in a comfortable home seated in a comfortable chair watching a show.

At one time, Vacuum Bag had playmates, organic food, a three-stage filter, the best of the best, but that doesn’t matter. Her obnoxious behavior increased along with her size.

A barren aquarium containing one huge vicious ugly fish is not what I envisioned. I imagined something enchanted, bucolic, a tank with many fish, and hiding places, catfish and snails, but Vacuum Bag slaughtered all her tank mates. She didn’t eat them. She worried them into starvation and lost interest when they floated belly up.

The last little guy was compelled to swim to the surface and try to get some food. He could not live on the crumbs, which came out of V.B.’s gill plates when she crushed food pellets.

So yes, the little guy’s tail pointed down when he mouthed a pellet. That’s when V.B. snuck up and tore off another piece. The little guy dropped his food and headed for cover where he arrived a little hungrier and more damaged.

My TV friends don’t want anything from me. They never get complicated.

V.B. doesn’t have the grand ambition of winning all at once. She contents herself with small victories. One pellet of food or one tiny piece of tail fin suffices. None of the little guys lived long enough to get a name.

I spend more time watching TV then I do thinking about my fish. I don’t think about the fish when I watch. My attention is on a significant ring of a doorbell, the arrival of a vehicle, or chirping phones. I cannot see myself reflected in the people on TV because they are never alone watching TV.

I purchased a cute treasure chest that opens when air collects beneath the top. The salesman had no problem convincing me.

V.B. isn’t supposed to be the most aggressive of the Cichlid family. She’s an Oscar. Red Devils and Green Terrors deserve their names, but despite the Oscar’s lowly place in the hierarchy of aggression, V.B. crushes snails.

When I placed the pirate’s chest in her tank, V.B. attacked the lid and broke the chain. She rammed it with her head.

I thought perhaps the noise of the lid opening and closing upset V.B. I wondered if the chain made difficult/unpleasant sounds when it stretched to allow the lid to open.

I replaced the chain with a piece of fishing line. V.B. couldn’t break the line, but she managed to knock the little treasure box around with such force and determination that paint flaked off. She thought it was food and munched some pieces. That is what led to the paint panic.

I thought for certain that V.B. would be poisoned. I purchased a fine mesh net and started dragging it through the water, but V.B. objected. She caught the bag end of the net between her teeth and tore a hole in it and didn’t let go until the last of her tail cleared the water.

So now my new net has a hole big enough so the stuff I’m trying to strain passes through; it goes right out the back. My fish inspires me to watch television.

TV is kind of like comfort food, reliable, predictable, the opposite of adventure, because I know what will happen before it happens. No surprises, clean bathrooms.

When I built the aquarium, I imagined bubbly water sounds, fin flickers bound with sunlight, and graceful movements, a private Eden. Instead, I got mayhem. She’d uprooted the plants meant to enrich the water. Vacuum Bag wasn’t going to let me have things my own way. Perhaps I should have gone with Angel Fish. When there was nothing in the tank left to vanquish or destroy, Vacuum Bag began moving the gravel on the bottom until she’d made a crater in the center, which exposed the mirror-like surface. Then she attacked her own reflection.

I think one of my favorite shows is about to start.

I love when actors appear in a new role, playing a different character. It’s sort of like reincarnation. Sometimes, I wave.

 

Bull’s Eye

What kind of embrace led to your conception? Was it loving, mechanical, or a drunken bed rattler? Does the spirit in which the effort is undertaken affect the outcome? My name is Tiger Lily, and this is the tale of how I came to be.

Joe, my father, the ancient poet, had received an invitation to read at the Saint Mark’s Church on the Lower East Side of the island of Manhattan on New Year’s Eve because an acquaintance recalled him when they needed “a filler person” for an early slot. The discussion went something like this:

“What about Joe? His work isn’t bad.”

“Ok, yeah. He’s been around forever.”

“That guy has been sitting in the audience for at least twenty years. This is a promotion.”

“Last time we spoke he told me he was content to be a bearer of the art spirit.”

“Meaning his poetry will not survive his death. The Institute of Dead Poets isn’t going to rent a venue and host a wake, famous guys aren’t going to read his poems and tell Joe stories. Do you know any?”

“Enough. He buys our books.”

Dad lived in Queens his entire life and worked at the university library, never had a passport. He spent his days in the stacks and his nights writing. He was a modest man, but regal in his modesty. Genius, he believed, was something other people called you. He submitted to the New Yorker, but little magazines made of folded paper and held together with staples published him.

While seated in a plastic chair at the back of the stage waiting for his turn to read, Joe felt significant. He wondered if Allan Ginsburg had sat in this same chair while waiting to read “Kaddish.”

Joe rehearsed the opening lines of his imaginary writing class because tonight someone might ask. “Avoid Algorithms… Anything but Warhol’s soup can. Your can! A can I’ve never seen before.”

The ancient poet on the stage, my father, assumed the lady in the audience, my mother, was looking at either the man seated to his left or the woman to his right, not the old man between them discreetly wiggling his toes and massaging his thigh. Of late, his right leg went numb sometimes when he stood. He hoped he’d make it out of the chair and onto his feet on the first attempt.

When the announcer called his name, the lady in the audience wearing a beat-up cap that said Books are Magic stood.

He couldn’t believe a reader of tiny magazines without any circulation was walking down the aisle toward the stage as he walked toward the podium. The delight not only cured his uncertain legs, but the hum of his anxiety. Joe had his first erection in a decade.

As Joe approached the podium she waved. He’d never had a fan.

His opening lines were sonorous and authoritative. The closer she came to the stage the better he read until somehow they were together in a cab holding hands en route to his place, and baby names were popping into his head: Tiger Lily for a girl and Socrates for a boy. Joe was dancing to the song of his DNA, an ancient tune.

When his fan paid the fare, Joe promoted her to the status of patron. He lived on a skinny budget, a subway guy. He only had ten dollars in his pocket; he never carried more.

Joe’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a walkup. Most days he paused at each landing to check his pulse and wonder what would happen to him when a trip to the fourth floor became his Everest. But this night, on New Year’s Eve, he ran up those same steps. His fan-patron stood between him and extinction.

Then they were doing it on his folding couch. He’d never had a groupie. She wrapped her legs around his back as though she wanted his child, like she heard all his thoughts and agreed. That thought, the connection, caused Joe to climax. And when he did she pulled tight and down with both legs as though she wanted to pull him inside her.

They both heard Joe’s spine crack. It was the kind of sound neither of them would ever forget. Louder than a car wreck.