Why Does A Northeastern Yankee like Myself Hold Such A Strong Bond With The South?

THE SHIPPING OF TROUT
FISHING IN AMERICA SHORTY
TO NELSON ALGREN


Trout Fishing in America Shorty appeared suddenly last
autumn in San Francisco, staggering around in a magnificent
chrome-plated steel wheelchair.

He was a legless, screaming middle-aged wino.
He descended upon North Beach like a chapter from the
Old Testament. He was the reason birds migrate in the
autumn. They have to. He was the cold turning of the earth;
the bad wind that blows off sugar.

He would stop children on the street and say to them, "I
ain't got no legs. The trout chopped my legs off in Fort
Lauderdale. You kids got legs. The trout didn't chop your
legs off. Wheel me into that store over there."

The kids, frightened and embarrassed, would wheel Trout
Fishing in America Shorty into the store. It would always be
a store that sold sweet wine, and he would buy a bottle of
wine and then he'd have the kids wheel him back out onto the
street, and he would open the wine and start drinking there
on the street just like he was Winston Churchill.

After a while the children would run and hide when they
saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty coming.

"I pushed him last week, "

"I pushed him yesterday, "

"Quick, let's hide behind these garbage cans."

And they would hide behind the garbage cans while Trout
Fishing in America Shorty staggered by in his wheelchair.
The kids would hold their breath until he was gone.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty used to go down to
L'Italia, the Italian newspaper in North Beach at Stockton
and Green Streets. Old Italians gather in front of the newspaper
in the afternoon and just stand there, leaning up
against the building, talking and dying in the sun.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty used to wheel into the
middle of them as if they were a bunch of pigeons, bottle of
wine in hand, and begin shouting obscenities in fake Italian.
Tra-la-la-la-la-la-Spa-ghet-tiii !

I remember Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out
in Washington Square, right in front of the Benjamin Franklin
statue. He had fallen face first out of his wheelchair and
just lay there without moving.

Snoring loudly.

Above him were the metal works of Benjamin Franklin
like a clock, hat in hand.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty lay there below, his
face spread out like a fan in the grass.

A friend and I got to talking about Trout Fishing in America
Shorty one afternoon. We decided the best thing to do with:
him was to pack him in a big shipping crate with a couple of
cases of sweet wine and send him to Nelson Algren.

Nelson Algren is always writing about Railroad Shorty, a
hero of the Neon Wilderness (the reason for "The Face on
the Barroom Floor") and the destroyer of Dove Linkhorn in
A Walk on the Wild Side.

We thought that Nelson Algren would make the perfect
custodian for Trout Fishing in America Shorty. Maybe a
museum might be started. Trout Fishing in America Shorty
could be the first piece in an important collection.

We would nail him up in a packing crate with a big label
on it.

Contents:

Trout Fishing in America Shorty

Occupation:

Wine

Address:

C/O Nelson Algren
Chicago

And there would be stickers all over the crate, saying:

"GLASS/HANDLE WITH CARE/SPECIAL HANDLING/GLASS
/DON'T SPILL/THIS SIDE UP/HANDLE THIS WINO LIKE HE
WAS AN ANGEL"

And Trout Fishing in America Shorty, grumbling, puking
and cursing in his crate would travel across America, from
San Francisco to Chicago.

And Trout Fishing in America Shorty, wondering what it
was all about, would travel on, shouting, "Where in the hell
am I? I can't see to open this bottle ! Who turned out the
lights? Fuck this motel! I have to take a piss ! Where's my
key ?"

It was a good idea.

A few days after we made our plans for Trout Fishing in
America Shorty, a heavy rain was pouring down upon San
Francisco. The rain turned the streets inward, like
drowned lungs, upon themselves and I was hurrying to work,
meeting swollen gutters at the intersections.

I saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in the
front window of a Filipino laundromat. He was sitting in
his wheelchair with closed eyes staring out the window.

There was a tranquil expression on his face. He almost
looked human. He had probably fallen asleep while he was
having his brains washed in one of the machines.

Weeks passed and we never got around to shipping Trout
Fishing in America Shorty away to Nelson Algren. We kept
putting it off. One thing and another. Then we lost our golden
opportunity because Trout Fishing in America Shorty disappeared
a little while after that.

They probably swept him up one morning and put him in
jail to punish him, the evilfart, or they put him in a nuthouse
to dry him out a little.

Maybe Trout Fishing in America Shorty just pedaled down
to San Jose in his wheelchair, rattling along the freeway at
a quarter of a mile an hour.

I don't know what happened to him. But if he comes back
to San Francisco someday and dies, I have an idea.
Trout Fishing in America Shorty should be buried right
beside the Benjamin Franklin statue in Washington Square.

We should anchor his wheelchair to a huge gray stone and
write upon the stone:

Trout Fishing in America Shorty
20 cent Wash
10 cent Dry
Forever
 
Kane said:
All this emphasis on WE and yet you're against group think? Well we know you sure don't have any academic blood in you.
Click to expand...

I was waiting for you to show up.

What's this we .. pegged pants?

You'd better tell your associates to lay off immediate family members.

I said I never lived in the south in the first place but this attack on immediate family is way over the line as much as you enjoy it none the less.

People like you love to smear the people of my blood line because it's so PC perfect to do it.
 
THE MAYOR OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

London. On December 1, 1887; July 7, August 8, September
30, one day in the month of October and on the 9th of November,
1888; on the Ist of June, the 17th of July and the IOth
of September 1889

The disguise was perfect.

Nobody ever saw him, except, of course, the victims.
They saw him.

Who would have expected?

He wore a costume of trout fishing in America. He wore
mountains on his elbows and bluejays on the collar of his
shirt. Deep water flowed through the lilies that were entwined
about his shoelaces. A bullfrog kept croaking in his watch
pocket and the air was filled with the sweet smell of ripe
blackberry bushes.

He wore trout fishing in America as a costume to hide
his own appearance from the world while he performed his
deeds of murder in the night.

Who would have expected?

Nobody !

Scotland Yard?

(Pouf !)

They were always a hundred miles away, wearing halibutstalker
hats, looking under the dust.

Nobody ever found out.

0, now he's the Mayor of the Twentieth Century ! A razor,
a knife and a ukelele are his favorite instruments.

Of course, it would have to be a ukelele. Nobody else
would have thought of it, pulled like a plow through the intestines.
 
philly rabbit said:
I was waiting for you to show up.

What's this we .. pegged pants?

You'd better tell your associates to lay off immediate family members.

I said I never lived in the south in the first place but this attack on immediate family is way over the line as much as you enjoy it none the less.

People like you love to smear the people of my blood line because it's so PC perfect to do it.
Click to expand...

Seriously, what does pegged pants mean bruncle Philly? And no I'm not telling anyone to lay off, if you don't like it, ignore them.
 
ON PARADISE


"Speaking of evacuations, your missive, while complete in
other regards, skirted the subject, though you did deal briefly
with rural micturition procedure. I consider this a gross
oversight on your part, as I'm certain you're well aware of
my unending fascination with camp-out crapping. Please
rush details in your next effort. Slit-trench, pith helmet,
slingshot, biffy and if so number of holes and proximity of
keester to vermin and deposits of prior users."

--From a Letter by a Friend


Sheep. Everything smelled of sheep on Paradise Creek,
but there were no sheep in sight. I fished down from the
ranger station where there was a huge monument to the Civilian
Conservation Corps.

It was a twelve-foot high marble statue of a young man
walking out on a cold morning to a crapper that had the dassic
half-moon cut above the door.

The 1930s will never come again, but his shoes were
wet with dew. They'll stay that way in marble.

I went off into the marsh. There the creek was soft and
spread out in the grass like a beer belly. The fishing was
difficult. Summer ducks were jumping up into flight. They
were big mallards with their Rainier Ale-like offspring.

I believe I saw a woodcock. He had a long bill like putting
a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener, then pasting it onto
a bird and letting the bird fly away in front of me with this
thing on its face for no other purpose than to amaze me.

I worked my way slowly out of the marsh until the creek
again became a muscular thing, the strongest Paradise
Creek in the world. I was then close enough to see the sheep.

There were hundreds of them.

Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly
more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and
the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that
smelled the most like sheep, was the very sun itself. When
the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of the sheep decreased
like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the
sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like
a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee.

That afternoon the sheep crossed the creek in front of
my hook. They were so close that their shadows fell across
my bait. I practically caught trout up their assholes.
 
philly rabbit said:
Here's a clue.

It's in the blood.

Professor Reactionary Feminist Rana .. who along with your fellow feminist witches made faggots out of so many boys instead of men in America:

Stop trolling my post and take a guess. "It's in the blood" is your clue .. so you can link that to sex and that should get you thinking instead of trolling.
Click to expand...

How can it be in the blood if neither side of your family ever lived in the South?
 
THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI


Once water bugs were my field. I remember that childhood
spring when I studied the winter-long mud puddles of the
Pacific Northwest. I had a fellowship.

My books were a pair of Sears Roebuck boots, ones with
green rubber pages. Most of my classrooms were close to
the shore. That's where the important things were happening
and that's where the good things were happening.

Sometimes as experiments I laid boards out into the mud
puddles, so I could look into the deeper water but it was not
nearly as good as the water in close to the shore.

The water bugs were so small I practically had to lay my
vision like a drowned orange on the mud puddle. There is a
romance about fruit floating outside on the water, about
apples and pears in rivers and lakes. For the first minute
or so, I saw nothing, and then slowly the water bugs came
into being.

I saw a black one with big teeth chasing a white one with
a bag of newspapers slung over its shoulder, two white ones
playing cards near the window, a fourth white one staring
back with a harmonica in its mouth.

I was a scholar until the mud puddles went dry and then I
picked cherries for two-and-a-half cents a pound in an old
orchard that was beside a long, hot dusty road.

The cherry boss was a middle-aged woman who was a real
Okie. Wearing a pair of goofy overalls, her name was Rebel
Smith, and she'd been a friend of "Pretty Boy" Floyd's down
in Oklahoma. "I remember one afternoon'Pretty Boy' came
driving up in his car. I ran out onto the front porch. "

Rebel Smith was always smoking cigarettes and showing
people how to pick cherries and assigning them to trees and
writing down everything in a little book she carried in her
shirt pocket. She smoked just half a cigarette and then threw
the other half on the ground.

For the first few days of the picking, I was always seeing
her half-smoked cigarettes lying all over the orchard, near
the john and around the trees and down the rows.

Then she hired half-a-dozen bums to pick cherries because
the picking was going too slowly. Rebel picked the
bums up on skidrow every morning and drove them out to
the orchard in a rusty old truck. There were always half-adozen
bums, but sometimes they had different faces.

After they came to pick cherries I never saw any more of
her half-smoked cigarettes lying around. They were gone
before they hit the ground. Looking back on it, you might
say that Rebel Smith was anti-mud puddle, but then you might
not say that at all.
 
I never said anything about him or his family, I would suggest someone find that post if they want to make those insane claims. I made a joke to Soc about third cousins, I was joking about myself, duh.
 
They should construct a Statue of Servitude somewhere on the Mason-Dixon line. The inscription could read:

Give me your shallow, moronic, and inbred.
Give me your traitors and haters of freedom.
Rise up Southern Man, and pollinate your Sisters!
 
THE SALT CREEK COYOTES

High and lonesome and steady, it's the smell of sheep down
in the valley that has done it to them. Here all afternoon in
the rain I've been listening to the sound of the coyotes up on
Salt Creek.

The smell of the sheep grazing in the valley has done it
to them. Their voices water and come down the canyon, past
the summer homes. Their voices are a creek, running down
the mountain, over the bones of sheep, living and dead.

O, THERE ARE COYOTES UP ON SALT CREEK so the
sign on the trail says, and it also says, WATCH OUT FOR
CYANIDE CAPSULES PUT ALONG THE CREEK TO KILL
COYOTES. DON'T PICK THEM UP AND EAT THEM. NOT
THEY'LL KILL YOU. LEAVE
UNLESS YOU'RE A COYOTE.
THE M ALONE.

Then the sign says this all over again in Spanish. i AH !
HAY COYOTES EN SALT CREEK, TAMBIEN. CULDADO
CON LAS CAPSULAS DE CIANURO: MATAN. NO LAS
COMA; A MENOS QUE SEA VD. UN COYOTE. I12ATAN.
NO LAS TOQUE.

It does not say it in Russian.

I asked an old guy in a bar about those cyanide capsules
up on Salt Creek and he told me that they were a kind of pistol.
They put a pleasing coyote scent on the trigger (probably
the smell of a coyote snatch) and then a coyote comes
along and gives it a good sniff, a fast feel and BLAM! That's
all, brother.

I went fishing up on Salt Creek and caught a nice little
Dolly Varden trout, spotted and slender as a snake you'd expect
to find in a jewelry store, but after a while I could think
only of the gas chamber at San Quentin.

O Caryl Chessman and Alexander Robillard Vistas ! as if
they were names for tracts of three-bedroom houses with
wall-to-wall carpets and plumbing that defies the imagination,

Then it came to me up there on Salt Creek, capital punishment
being what it is, an act of state business with no
song down the railroad track after the train has gone and no
vibration on the rails, that they should take the head of a
coyote killed by one of those God-damn cyanide things up on
Salt Creek and hollow it out and dry it in the sun and then
make it into a crown with the teeth running in a circle around
the top of it and a nice green light coming off the teeth.

Then the witnesses and newspapermen and gas chamber
flunkies would have to watch a king wearing a coyote crown
die there in front of them, the gas rising in the chamber like
a rain mist drifting down the mountain from Salt Creek. It
has been raining here now for two days, and through the trees
the heart stops beating.
 
philly rabbit said:
That sounds like a faggot response to me.

What's lame and boring about it?

I think it was a good topic. It's not my fault that you're a progressive south hater. I'm just making a connection here to my people.
Click to expand...

In answer to your question... a thread started by a lame and boring person that is all about said lame and boring person, is, almost by definition, gonna turn out to be a lame and boring thread.

And yer peeps are all comin' out of the fuckin' woodwork to hang with you. Impressive response by THAT crowd!
 
THE HUNCHBACK TROUT


The creek was made narrow by little green trees that grew
too close together. The creek was like 12,845 telephone
booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors
taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out.

Sometimes when I went fishing in there, I felt just like a
telephone repairman, even though I did not look like one. I
was only a kid covered with fishing tackle, but in some
strange way by going in there and catching a few trout, I
kept the telephones in service. I was an asset to society.

It was pleasant work, but at times it made me uneasy.
It could grow dark in there instantly when there were some
clouds in the sky and they worked their way onto the sun.
Then you almost needed candles to fish by, and foxfire in
your reflexes.

Once I was in there when it started raining. It was dark
and hot and steamy. I was of course on overtime. I had that
going in my favor. I caught seven trout in fifteen minutes.

The trout in those telephone booths were good fellows.
There were a lot of young cutthroat trout six to nine inches
long, perfect pan size for local calls. Sometimes there
were a few fellows, eleven inches or so--for the long distance
calls.

I've always liked cutthroat trout. They put up a good fight,
running against the bottom and then broad jumping. Under
their throats they fly the orange banner of Jack the Ripper.

Also in the creek were a few stubborn rainbow trout, seldom
heard from, but there all the same, like certified public
accountants. I'd catch one every once in a while. They
were fat and chunky, almost as wide as they were long. I've
heard those trout called "squire" trout.

It used to take me about an hour to hitchhike to that creek.
There was a river nearby. The river wasn't much. The creek
was where I punched in. Leaving my card above the clock
I'd punch out again when it was time to go home.

I remember the afternoon I caught the hunchback trout.
A farmer gave me a ride in a truck. He picked me up at
a traffic signal beside a bean field and he never said a word
to me.

His stopping and picking me up and driving me down the
road was as automatic a thing to him as closing the barn
door, nothing need be said about it, but still I was in motion
traveling thirty-five miles an hour down the road, watching
houses and groves of trees go by, watching chickens and
mailboxes enter and pass through my vision.

Then I did not see any houses for a while. "This is where
I get out, " I said.

The farmer nodded his head. The truck stopped.

"Thanks a lot, " I said.

The farmer did not ruin his audition for the Metropolitan
Opera by making a sound. He just nodded his head again.
The truck started up. He was the original silent old farmer.

A little while later I was punching in at the creek. I put
my card above the clock and went into that long tunnel of
telephone booths.

I waded about seventy-three telephone booths in. I caught
two trout in a little hole that was like a wagon wheel. It was
one of my favorite holes, and always good for a trout or two.

I always like to think of that hole as a kind of pencil
sharpener. I put my reflexes in and they came back out with
a good point on them. Over a period of a couple of years, I
must have caught fifty trout in that hole, though it was only
as big as a wagon wheel.

I was fishing with salmon eggs and using a size 14 single
egg hook on a pound and a quarter test tippet. The two trout
lay in my creel covered entirely by green ferns ferns made
gentle and fragile by the damp walls of telephone booths.

The next good place was forty-five telephone booths in.
The place was at the end of a run of gravel, brown and slippery
with algae. The run of gravel dropped off and disappeared
at a little shelf where there were some white rocks.

One of the rocks was kind of strange. It was a flat white
rock. Off by itself from the other rocks, it reminded me
of a white cat I had seen in my childhood.

The cat had fallen or been thrown off a high wooden sidewalk
that went along the side of a hill in Tacoma, Washington.
The cat was lying in a parking lot below.

The fall had not appreciably helped the thickness of the
cat, and then a few people had parked their cars on the cat.
Of course, that was a long time ago and the cars looked different
from the way they look now.

You hardly see those cars any more. They are the old
cars. They have to get off the highway because they can't
keep up.

That flat white rock off by itself from the other rocks
reminded me of that dead cat come to lie there in the creek,
among 12,845 telephone booths.

I threw out a salmon egg and let it drift down over that
rock and WHAM! a good hit! and I had the fish on and it ran
hard downstream, cutting at an angle and staying deep and
really coming on hard, solid and uncompromising, and then
the fish jumped and for a second I thought it was a frog. I'd
never seen a fish like that before.

God-damn! What the hell!

The fish ran deep again and I could feel its life energy
screaming back up the line to my hand. The line felt like
sound. It was like an ambulance siren coming straight at
me, red light flashing, and then going away again and then
taking to the air and becoming an air-raid siren.

The fish jumped a few more times and it still looked like
a frog, but it didn't have any legs. Then the fish grew tired
and sloppy, and I swung and splashed it up the surface of
the creek and into my net.

The fish was a twelve-inch rainbow trout with a huge hump
on its back. A hunchback trout. The first I'd ever seen. The
hump was probably due to an injury that occurred when the
trout was young. Maybe a horse stepped on it or a tree fell
over in a storm or its mother spawned where they were
building a bridge.

There was a fine thing about that trout. I only wish I could
have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but
of his energy. I don't know if anyone would have understood
his body. I put it in my creel.

Later in the afternoon when the telephone booths began to
grow dark at the edges, I punched out of the creek and went
home. I had that hunchback trout for dinner. Wrapped in
cornmeal and fried in butter, its hump tasted sweet as the
kisses of Esmeralda.
 
philly rabbit said:
You're low.

And like most people such as yourself, you'd thought you'd be PC funny and you went after immediate family members which should get you an immediate banning if we weren't talking about the southern Scots Irish and my blood connection to them.
Click to expand...
Not so much talking about any particular member of your family, but more about your family tree, which is actually more of a pole.
 
philly rabbit said:
I saw your picture in your profile if you want to talk about horrors.

You're quite the witch. You should have posed with your feminist broom for that photo op.
Click to expand...

It is not my picture, it is my mother's and I think she is beautiful, I am sorry if you think she is a horror. I do not have ny pictures of myself posted, sorry. My mother is 90 years old in that particular picture and I think she looks quite remarkable or her age. Again, I think she is beautiful!

Now, you may continue your angry rant.
 
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