The Big Hard

For spring break 1990, Caitlin and I drove down to New Orleans to visit Woody, my old friend from college who was studying chemistry at Tulane. We savored the increasingly warmer winds of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, playing and replaying Paul Simon’s Graceland album, loving the voices and rhythms of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Just a month before, South Africa’s President De Klerk announced that he would repeal apartheid and free Nelson Mandela after more than twenty-seven years in prison. We drove past Civil War monuments and, somewhere in Alabama, pulled into a park and slept in our car. I got up early, pissed, and walked down a trail, staring into the deep woods and out past a fresh green field. I imagined a line of slaves working the rows while a white overseer rode on a horse above them. The fields were hemmed by a pretty creek. There was no one fishing.

We drove into New Orleans, following Woody’s handwritten directions down Carrolton Avenue toward the river, parking on Short Street, and knocking on his chipped door. He had a small dark apartment. There was no bed, just a sleeping bag and some blankets folded on the floor. The place had been picked up a bit, but the kitchen counter and sink were piled with pots and pans and crimson crab shells. “I’m gonna make you a nice Cajun dinner,” he said. It was great to see Woody, and he and Caitlin got talking about New Orleans and poverty segregation and liberal reform. The city had shined up during the 1980s oil boom, but there were still poor parishes, political corruption, and countless social problems. Woody was informed and fairly open-minded but more cynical than usual. “It’s all bullshit,” he would say over and over as we talked politics. “This ain’t no Big Easy,” he said. “It’s a Big Hard.” When I asked about graduate school, he said it was bringing him down.

“You’re a TA now, right?” I asked. “How’s the teaching?”

“Shit, Hughes, you know it’s work. And my supervisor’s a prick.”

We drank some cheap wine and ate Woody’s fine supper of wild rice covered in a zesty crab sauce with a side of smothered okra. Woody led us down St. Charles, and Caitlin admired the mansions draped with sleeping cats. “It would be great to live here,” she said. “Expensive as shit,” Woody scowled. Back on Carrolton at a lowbrow blues bar, we had a round of bourbon and just listened. I felt relaxed walking back to Woody’s. He wanted to do a bit more drinking, but we said we were tired. We stopped by his car, the side window taped up in plastic.

“Last month they fucking broke in and stole my fishing poles,” Woody said.

“No.”

“Fuck, yeah. This ain’t a great neighborhood.”

“I’ll bring my rods inside.”

“What about my car?” Caitlin asked.

“Maybe we better park it up by Cheryl’s.” Woody’s girlfriend lived a few blocks away in a safer neighborhood. Woody and Caitlin drove off to park, and I sat on some steps and looked over the railroad tracks and levee to a flickering stretch of the Mississippi. Two teenaged black guys walked by.

“Hey, you need a little weed, man?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“A’right. We’s right up the street. You ask for Whisker.”

“Okay, thanks,” I answered and smiled but didn’t want to get too friendly.

The next morning Woody had to set up a lab at school. I drank a cup of instant coffee, ate a couple stale beignets from on top of the fridge, kissed Caitlin, donned my new fishing vest, grabbed my medium spinning rod, and stepped onto the cool and quiet streets, past a couple homeless guys sleeping under a tree, over the tracks, and up and down the levee. At the base of the levee were long pools of trapped floodwater, and I walked around them and found a trail down through the brush to the river. This river is huge, I thought, looking out over the Mississippi’s oily gray complexion shifting with the cloudy sky. Heavy tugboats pushed barges. There were smaller boats and some kind of dredge chewing away upstream. I wasn’t sure what to do with all this water, so I just started casting a chubby auger-tailed white worm on a quarter-ounce jig head.

Without any bites, I kept moving upriver, where I met an older black man with a meaty catfish on a stringer. “Nice fish,” I said.

“Once in a while the good Lord gives me one,” he said. We had a long talk about fishing and the river. He looked at my lures and said I might catch a green trout, a largemouth bass, but if I wanted catfish I better use some bait. “You wanna lit’l bit of dis here?” he asked. “I make it.” He showed me marble-size balls of dark clayish bait. I found an old bleached chicken liver container in the bushes, and he dropped in a few pieces. “Good things come to those who bait,” he chuckled. “Now if you got time an’ a car, you ought to go over da river to da West Bank towards Belle Chasse or Lafitte and try for some redfish an speckled trout. They bitin’ right now I heard. An artificial wid a piece of shrimp on it no problem.” I thanked him and told him my name. “I’m Delmar, nice to meet ya,” he said and made another cast.

Upriver beside a bight where the water swirled and stalled, I rigged for catfish, stuck on Delmar’s special bait, cast, and sat down. I fished for three hours without a bite, listening to the sounds of industry and commerce along the river. Two men in their thirties set up chairs nearby and fished lazily into the weekday morning. I thought of Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong singing about skipping work and hanging a sign, “Gone Fishin’,” though I preferred a more discreet approach, calling in sick and angling far from campus where my students wouldn’t see me. In any case, a fishing escape from the workday seemed in keeping with what I still wanted to believe was the Big Easy, a city reputed for its laid-back, love-to-play attitude. Things were different back in the busy Big Apple, but there was the New York legend of Rip Van Winkle, who avoided profitable labor to “fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nibble.” Then again, old Rip caught hell from his wife. I looked at my watch and reluctantly started back over the levee.

Down in the long flood pool, I saw a fish. Getting closer, the lines and scales of a huge carp, three feet long, became clear. I approached gently and presented the bait near his head, but it only spooked him and he yawed off a few feet. I made my next cast way ahead of him, and gently dragged the bait along the bottom toward his barbels. “Come on,” I whispered. For a moment he seemed interested, and then he moved away. I took off the catfish bait, lightened my lead, and looked in the grass for a worm or grub, finding only a torn pretzel. It was rock hard, but I managed to drill the hook into a shard. The bait floated nicely above the split shot, and I gently presented it to the carp. I could see everything. The carp slowly approached the pretzel, touched it—its thick lips round in low note embouchure—then turned away. “Come on!” I couldn’t believe it. I tried for another half hour, but this fish wouldn’t bite. The carp was in shallow water, clooping at the end of a tapering pool. Maybe I could drive him up the shore and grab him. It would be great to show up at the apartment with this Mississippi monster.

I took off my vest, set down my rod, and, with jeans and sneakers on, I waded into the pool up to my knees and then turned and walked toward the carp. He faced away from me, hovering in a foot of water. This looked promising. I came up slowly, watching the feathery undulations of his fins and fanning gills, got right over him, and sent my hands down into the water—ready, so ready. The moment I touched him he bolted, plowing a wake through the shallows and into the deep end of the pool. When I stepped out of the water to higher ground I could see him. He composed himself and swam back into the shallows. I composed myself and made one more ursine effort but failed.

Walking across the grass toward River Road I saw that weed-selling kid, Whisker, talking to Delmar. Delmar walked on, carrying his gear and two fine catfish. I waved, he stopped, and I told him about the carp. “You try doughballs?” he asked.

“Pretzel,” I said.

“It’s been a day of blessings,” he smiled. “Maybe I’ll give it a try.”

“Good luck, Delmar.”

When I got in, Caitlin was a little annoyed. I was over an hour late and soaked below the waist. “Did you fall in?” she asked.

“No, I tried to grab a carp.”

Woody came in, set down his bag, and listened to my account of the huge fish trapped in the levee.

“Let’s shoot ’im,” Woody said, grabbing his duck poaching .22 from the corner of the room. “Let me get some more rounds.”

“Great!” I said.

“Are you two crazy?” Caitlin boiled. “You’re just gonna walk through the streets with a gun?”

“Dis here is N’awlins, dahling,” Woody exaggerated an accent and grin. “Just a little redneck recreation.”

“Shooting a fish? No, I’m not sticking around for this. I’ve been waiting here to do something in this city. This is ridiculous.”

I knew what I had to do. “All right, Woody. We’ll let this one go.”

Sensible, mature women have on several occasions saved me from reckless folly. I changed into some dry clothes, and we picked up Woody’s girlfriend, Cheryl, and drove south to Magazine Street, where we spent a lovely, languorous, drink-and-food filled afternoon at Miss May’s and The Club. Cheryl was a bright, attractive woman with full strawberry hair and green eyes, and Caitlin and I enjoyed her company very much. She did have more conservative viewpoints and made some comments about affirmative action and the failure of African Americans to educate themselves that angered Woody and led to a low-level fight that clouded the afternoon.

I told Woody about Delmar and asked about catching some redfish. The next day, Caitlin, Woody, and I got an early start and drove Caitlin’s car south over the bridge and down the expressway across Harvey Canal, where Woody said he caught some big catfish, one with a bird in its stomach and another stuffed with cigarette butts. Fish, like people, put the craziest things in their mouths. We stopped at a tackle and charter shop in Lafitte. The air was muggy and fishy. Gulls and pelicans billed around the canal. A chartered boat trip was out of our price range, but Woody pressed a blubbery, bald man behind the counter with questions, and I listened. “You know where dat strip club used to be?—try behind there,” the man drawled, rubbing his belly. There were other conversations about “ditch crawfish, if you know where they’s at” and some kind of fish gravy “made wit carrots, onyun, and celry.”

Past the long town of Lafitte and down a gloomy gravel road, we found a bayou that looked promising. Caitlin was worried about leaving her car parked in a “creepy swamp,” and I was dying to explore the place and start fishing. “Come on, Cait,” I said. “We’re here,” as if that settled it. We walked a spongy trail to its swampy margin. There were tall trees draped in Spanish moss and the eyes and snout of a small alligator ventured into the sticky air. We caught nothing, and Caitlin insisted we check on the car. “Another half hour,” I begged. Something swirled in the tea-colored water. There were turtles, mud hens, and the distinct crack of a gunshot a few hundred yards away. I thought of the pirate Jean Lafitte slipping through the mist with his rum and gold. “That’s it,” Caitlin said when we heard another gunshot. We found the car unmolested and drove to a lunch dive where the waiter’s tie was so stained and flecked with food it would have boiled down into a nice fish gravy. The special was redfish and rice. “I hope I don’t get sick,” Caitlin held her spotted water glass up to the light. You could buy alcohol almost anywhere in Louisiana, and I ordered a round of straight vodkas as a preventive measure against microbes. After lunch we stopped at a bulkhead along a brackish canal and tried plunking some shrimp for redfish. Two rough-looking white guys whistled at Caitlin and asked if they could buy beer from us. We gave them a couple cans from our cooler and were glad to see them move along. Again, no fish.

Woody popped in a Stevie Ray Vaughn cassette tape, and we picked up some catfish fillets from the market and drove back to Cheryl’s for dinner. She and Woody seemed okay. Cheryl made her mother’s recipe of blackened cat, dipping the fillets in melted butter and rolling them in a bowl of paprika, cayenne pepper, black pepper, white pepper, salt, garlic powder, onion powder, dried basil, thyme, and God knows what else. She dribbled a little more butter on the crusty fillets and set them in a red-hot cast iron skillet and covered it. We drank wine, heard crackling sounds, and after three minutes she lifted the lid to a cloud of delicious smoke. Cheryl turned the fillets and dampened the chimney once more. The very air had become a tantalizing appetizer. After a few more minutes, the catfish came smoking out of the pan, the spices roasted dark to the flesh. I had no trouble telling Cheryl, “This is some of the best fish I’ve ever eaten.”

Caitlin and I took long walks downtown and through the French Quarter. We talked, listened to music, admired the filigreed ironwork, ate oysters, shopped, drank different things, toured graveyards and little museums, and lingered around buskers and bookstores. Sometimes tensions rose between us about what we might eat or buy, what we might do in the next hour or in the next year, and I felt this must be the continuous challenge of a relationship. One time New Orleans author Kate Chopin wrote about marriage and that “blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.” Caitlin stroked a black cat stretched out on a shop counter.

“I wish we could get a cat,” she said.

“Won’t that be a hassle with school and everything?” I frowned.

“You love cats,” she said. “You don’t even know what you want.”

But when things were right with us, they were very right. Out in the sun we sat on a bench and kissed long and deep. “The Big Easy,” I whispered, swimming a hand up her skirt. Caitlin smelled of lavender and clean sweat. “Not here,” she smiled and pushed my hand down. I felt close to her body, and at night, with Woody snoring, we made love.

Still, I would sneak out for a couple hours each morning and explore the Mississippi. At the end of the week, I saw Delmar talking to Whisker again. When Whisker walked off, I went down to Delmar. “You know that guy?” I couldn’t resist asking.

“Yeah, he’s my son.”

“Really? Whisker?”

“Sounds like you know him, too. That name’s from fishing, cause he’s good at it. Or was, when he did it. The Lord ain’t done with that boy, that’s for sure.”

I considered Delmar a man with far fewer opportunities than someone like Woody, yet he seemed much happier and hopeful—a man who knew how to keep himself afloat in the big waters of life. Delmar went on to tell me about the stranded carp. It just wouldn’t bite, but now it was gone and maybe somebody got it with a pitchfork. “I’m heading home tomorrow,” I said, and he looked right at me. “May God bless you, son, and grant you a safe trip.”

On the last morning, Woody and I walked up to the north end of Audubon Park. Delmar was there. “You get around,” I said and introduced him to Woody. Woody nodded, “I’ve seen you around. At least someone’s catching fish.” Delmar had another catfish on his stringer.

I was glad to be in Audubon Park. I had recently read a biography of John James Audubon and knew that he spent time in New Orleans when he was still an emerging artist. I told Woody that here in 1821 Audubon met a beautiful young woman who commissioned him to draw her in the nude. He was nervous, but he did a good job, and she paid him with a fine new gun, asking only that he keep her name a secret. “New Orleans got all kinds of secrets,” Woody said and smiled over the story. Audubon loved hunting, but he found fishing a bit boring. He may have appreciated wading a stream and casting flies to trout, but there wasn’t enough action in plunking bait. I felt the same way today and tied on that oily white auger-tail, worming it around the pilings. After twenty minutes, a fish hit like thunder and made erratic runs back and forth between the poles. “Hallelujah,” I cried. Woody came over, and Delmar watched. It looked like a big pewter porgy but longer, swirling up to the bank, where I reached down and pinched its gills. Whatever it was, somebody in this town will eat it. Deep bodied with a divided dorsal of sharp spines and soft rays, it felt to be a solid three pounds. When I set it down it creaked and groaned like a tight lid on wooden box. This creaking-groaning-croaking voice reminded me of the Long Island weakfish, a member of the drum family that includes redfish. Males of these species vibrate muscles against their swim bladders to create what some call a drumming sound. I told Woody it must be a drum.

“Dat d’re is a gaspergoo,” Delmar declared.

“Gasper-goo?” I repeated, relishing the word.

“It’s good eating. With fish gravy.”

We wouldn’t have time to prepare the fish, and we offered it with respect to Delmar. “Sure,” he said. I was curious what the drum was eating and asked if we could gut it right there. “Don’t see why not,” Delmar said. The stomach was heavy and crunchy with small snail and mussel shells. I later learned that the gaspergoo, a freshwater drum, could live more than seventy years and that the older males make the most noise. “You keep that fiber in your diet, and you’ll be grunting into old age, too,” Woody told me on the phone months later when we reminisced. School hadn’t worked out too well for Woody.

“What about New Orleans?” I asked him.

“There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad. It’s tempting to stay in a place like this, but it could do you in. I’m telling you, man. It’s the Big Hard.”

Maybe drink and cynicism got the best of Woody, but he kept on fishing. “Sure, I’m still fishing,” he’d say in a late night drunken phone call. “What else is there?”

Caitlin and I had a good relationship, but our prospects waned. I finished my degree in 1990, hung around West Lafayette, and taught part time, while Caitlin applied and got into graduate school. We celebrated, but everyday life felt increasingly low and muddy. I had little money, my car was breaking down, and Aunt Lil had just been diagnosed with cancer. Should I go back to Long Island? Maybe follow Caitlin to grad school in Pennsylvania? “You should go to Japan,” my fishing friend Sean advised. “They love drinking and fishing. And there are jobs for English teachers.” When I told Caitlin that I had applied to teach in Japan, she was upset.

“Don’t you think that’s something we need to talk about?”

“You’re off to grad school. What am I gonna do?”

“Come with me?”

“And do what?”

“Maybe I’d like to go to Japan.”

“Would you?”

“We should at least talk about it.”

We talked, meditated, jogged together, talked some more, but it was clear that we were going to be apart. “How long?” Caitlin asked, and I said I didn’t know.

Men are afraid of commitment, it is often said. Is it because they fear it will limit their pleasure or power? Everything from evolutionary biology to pop psychology has been used to explain or excuse male behavior that favors multiple partners and social roving. True or not, it’s a shame that these fears and forces prevent some men from ever enjoying the kind of deep and lasting union that rewards so much better than a dozen flings. I would eventually come to understand that commitment is not restriction but rather form—like the meter and lines of a sonnet or the angle and rhythm of a fly cast—that shapes a crucial part of our relationships. There are conventions that dictate these arts—including the art of being together—but every couple must also find its own way of getting along. So much is possible if one is sensitive, creative, and flexible within certain boundaries.

I appreciate that form now in my late forties, but I didn’t much at twenty-five. My reluctance to renew living together with Caitlin was a rejection of form. I wanted the freedom to come and go as I pleased. I wanted to fish like crazy. At least I was honest with Caitlin about my ambivalent feelings and my increasing desire to be on my own. It was the Big Hard of loving and enjoying someone very much but still feeling incomplete and unsatisfied in the wider world of wonder.

The summer after her graduation, Caitlin came out to Long Island. The traffic was heavier. More forest, field, and farmland had been turned over to housing and shopping centers. We drank tea and talked in the backyard with Aunt Lil. Lil put seed out every day for the birds. Caitlin smiled and asked, “What’s that one?” pointing to what I thought was some kind of warbler. My brother, David, came quietly through the gate and called the delicate flit of green and brown a vireo. David was almost six foot, broad shouldered and barrel-chested, his straight sandy hair cut short like a guy going into the Army. He was going to be a junior in high school, and he reported on his summer job down on the docks. Caitlin told Lil she had “done a good job raising her boys.” Lil smiled and said she thanked God every day for his help. We could see that Lil was sick, but her spirits were steady, and she was glad to be retired. “Would you like a little pickled herring?” she asked. It was one of her favorite snacks, served with sour cream on little squares of rye bread.

Lil had taken part of her pension purse and bought my brother a new boat, a seventeen-foot center console Mako with an eighty-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor. Lil spoiled David, telling me quite explicitly that she was trying to make up for the loss of his mother. “Well, that’s one mother of a boat,” I said to Lil, suddenly realizing how stupid and insensitive that sounded. I was jealous. “You are one lucky kid,” I told David. “I never had a boat like that.” My father gave the old China Cat to a carpenter friend who wanted to restore it, but the boat rotted away in his yard.

Material jealousies wear off fast if we really like someone, and Caitlin and I happily crewed on David’s craft, which he let me christen Queequeg, after our beloved pagan hero from Moby-Dick. Trolling around Buoy 11, not only did we hook the familiar schooling blues but ten- and fifteen-pound striped bass, one after another. “Where did all these stripers come from?” I asked my brother, and we would both learn that commercial restrictions, habitat restoration, pollution controls, and sport management had brought them back. These were large fish but under the thirty-six inch limit, and we carefully released them back into their schools. After comparable environmental and catch management efforts, fluke were also on the rise. Fluke, sometimes called summer flounder, are predatory, toothy flatfish that hunt the shoals for sand eels and other small fish and squid. We rigged for fluke with a two-ounce sinker, three-foot leader, and a feather-dressed wide-gapped hook baited with shiners. A fluke grabs its prey and swims off before swallowing, so we drifted along the shoal with the sinker just tapping the gravelly bottom, feeling for the tug and letting out another few feet of line before setting the hook.

“Now,” I shouted, and Caitlin set the hook on a bolting fish.

“That’s no fluke,” my brother punned when the net slipped under its creamy belly. We caught several, their topside colors varying from speckled tan to dark gray, according to the bottom. Caitlin landed the only keeper—a chocolate brown, lightly spotted, twenty-seven-inch doormat of a fish. That night I steamed the thick fillets the way Sean showed me, and Aunt Lil said it was so good and healthy. “Who needs all that grease?”

The fish news wasn’t all rosy, however. The winter flounder of my childhood were all but gone. Sea bass and weakfish numbers were way down, and for some reason the mackerel no longer recruited to the north shore in great numbers. A variety of depleted stocks meant that far fewer draggers, lobstermen, and clammers were able to make a living off Long Island. For many, the old ways of life on the water were disappearing.

“Plenty of eels still around,” Herbie said, trying to cheer us up despite reports that American eels were also diminishing. Having just retired as a union laborer, Herbie devoted himself to eeling and fishing. Life hadn’t been easy for Herb, but as Washington Irving once said of a venerable old angler and seaman, “His face bore the marks of former storms, but present fair weather.” Herbie hired a friend to build him a wooden skiff, and he paid cash for a new outboard, mooring his simple craft in Setauket Harbor. Looking out over the green haven made me think of William Sidney Mount’s painting, Eel Spearing in Setauket Harbor, 1845. It was on the cover of our college American literature anthology, and when I was in South Dakota and Indiana I would stare at the image of the black woman, spear poised, as the young white boy paddled in the stern, thinking about my home waters.

Herbie took Caitlin and me trolling for blues, and I admired his new outfits, graphite rods with carbolite guides and deep, narrow Daiwa reels loaded with bright wire. “It’s all Japanese now,” Herbie said. “Good stuff.” We trolled the old spots but couldn’t find the schools and didn’t get a single hit. We talked and drank a little beer. When Caitlin had to pee, he pulled out a low cut bucket and told me to lift the bench cushion as a privacy screen. “He’s more of a gentleman than you let on,” Caitlin told me as we crossed the inlet. When we docked and Caitlin walked up to the car, Herb squinted and said, “Nice ass. I bet she’s fun in the sack.” Herbie was born poor on rural Long Island, had little schooling, served in a tank crew during the allied invasion of France, and then shoveled dirt and hauled bricks for forty years. He made a few extra dollars selling furs and eels, and he ate what he caught. “Stay in school,” he used to say. “You don’t wanna do the shit I did.” At sixty-two, he was retired and smiling from his boat, telling me a story about some old lady trying to pick him up at the hardware store. “I’ll show her some hardware,” he laughed, rod between his legs. But just as suddenly as he earned his time, his time was gone. At the end of that summer he complained of abdominal pain, thought he pulled a muscle, and asked his doctor, an old fishing buddy, to give him some Vicodin. People helped Herbie when they could. He finally drove himself to the hospital, but his appendix had burst and he died. His car was packed with rods and tackle for the next morning.

There are some days I need to fish alone. In the dark of early morning, I parked by the Port Jefferson docks where my mother and I released the shark. I slipped on my fishing vest, picked up my spinning rod and fish-walked East Beach, past where Theresa and I had our goodbye swim, rounding Seaboard Hole as the sun came up. There were the black wooden ribs of the Priscilla Alden, the old ferry that carried my father’s family from New England in the 1920s, and fox tracks under the wild plum bushes that made me smile. Tucked in the strand line I found a little dried seahorse, maybe two inches long, that somehow crystallized my sweet sadness. There was the dawn-burnished Long Island Sound of so many fish and people come and gone. “The water’s the last good thing about this place,” Herbie would say as they bulldozed the topsoil off another field for a car dealership. But he was dead. Caitlin was inland at school; my brother was still in bed. I had no idea what Tim, Theresa, Birch, Janet, Woody, or Sean were doing. I stepped to the water and made a cast.

“Some things will be hard,” Eugene said, driving me to the airport later in the week.

I nodded.

“You’ll miss people,” he went on. “You’ll have to learn Japanese and sit on the floor. But some things will come easy. You’ll see.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like fishing,” he said.