“Fishtail”

 

c. 2025 Rod Ice

All rights reserved

(12-25)

 

Trying to remember

Trying diligently, to recall

A character from my own antiquity

A cartoonish chuffer

Drawn from nothing at all

A magazine creation

Written for California consumption

For bikers on the west coast, who I hoped would receive

My imaginary protagonist, gratefully

I called him Fishtail Redman

A fellow of generous stature and girth

A burly bomber, like no other

Known to spit and curse

Indigenous in the blood

A vagabond, dipped in motor oil, and mud

Riding a greasy motorcycle, built from castoff, garage spares

Barbed wire and bare bolts, everywhere

And he of a humble birth

Cherished its meager worth

A kickstart, upstart

Whom I fashioned from the ether

A potent, literary vapor

Leftover, after reading tales penned by seasoned sots

Who imagined themselves to be what they were not

Hemingway, reincarnated

The pages of my youth, populated

By such wild prose

Naked and blunt, and rendered like pork fat from a roasted pig

Dripping into the fire

Each word charred with authenticity and purpose

As it met the nubile flesh of my brain

I was too young to bear witness

A low-riding loser, of few miles and fewer inhibitions

Daring to imagine

Traveling lonely, two-lane routes between one city and the next

A phantom in the flesh

I chalked up this image on the side of a barn

Drunk on Wild Irish Rose

Bought with dollar bills found along the sidewalk in Collegetown

A chance inheritance

A gift gotten from an unknown god

The cloudy, clairvoyant essence of that chemical fruit

Seeped into the crevices

Where my creation was lacking fullness

It gave me the talent

I did not possess

Stumbling sideways, down the hill from Cornell

A stain on the concrete, where I fell

I lay exposed and numb

Bruised and bleeding

Yet no longer needing

To study the existence of a misanthropic bum

This is what I had become

For only a moment, in the mind, of course

Long enough to scribble the outline

To wire up my leather-clad Frankenstein

And set him off on an adventure

Shaggy, gray sideburns

Wafting in the wind

No family, no friends, no fear of sin

Nicotine flecks and bug bits in his teeth

Coughing up broken relationships

And jailhouse trips

With a severity delivered, first-hand

This was my primal experiment in portraying a man

Unlike myself in every way

I sat at the typewriter for several weeks

Stubbing my fingers on the manual keys

Tore through an ink ribbon spooled

From a mismatched donor in the stationery section

Of a local store stocked with writing tools

Holding my breath in between lines

Sentences spaced evenly wide

On the carriage spline

My manuscript corrected with a ballpoint quill

Notes in the margin

Until every blank space was filled

Ink-white and tape

A crude form of cut-and-paste

My parchment reeked of Camel cigarettes and black coffee

The envelope bulged when complete

I found an address listing in classified ads

Thousands of miles into the postal doo-dads

For a magazine publisher with whom I had no connection

Except as a newsstand hitchhiker

A teenaged piker

Plunking down my coins for the latest issue

With nothing better to do

Than to stay up late, swooning on the rotgut fermentation of an inglorious vintner

And the mashup of seedy journalists and amateur writers

Cruising toward the destination of a headache

And perhaps

An epiphany in red juice

My instigator, in engineer boots

No-fail Fishtail

Appealing by the virtue of his tattoos and scars

Pierced and pockmarked

Gnarled fingers clutching wrenches of various kinds

Chapped skin and a sentence of hard time

Fed on redeye gravy and grits

My manufactured monster, raised from the repair-shop tar pits

Unalive, yet a real reflection in the looking glass

I reckoned he would charm the hardest heart of an editor

Into giving me a pass

I waited by the mailbox every day

Watching and wondering

Until this gambit had been played

My rejection letter arrived on a Tuesday in the fall

I took a deep breath

And put my fist through the drywall