Belly Up

4/3/05

My fish died today. That’s right, dear reader, Mr. Tickles is no more. Of course I’m a little upset; I mean, he was only a goldfish but I’d had him for some four years and, if not quite emotionally attached to him, I was used to his quiet presence. Our relationship was pretty one-sided, I have to admit. It mostly consisted of him swimming around all day long with a vapid look on his face, waiting for me to come home and feed him strange flakes that smelled like spoiled lettuce. I don’t know for sure that he was vapid; for all I know he could have spent the day scrawling differential calculus on the interior walls of that little castle in the tank, but the fact that every single time I went to feed him he reacted as if he’d never seen me before, diving and spinning around inside the water, leads me to believe he was of limited intelligence.

The two of us had a long and interesting history together. I was operating under the blissful hallucination that he would live to be the oldest fish in the world through the force of my will. How Mr. Tickles began life is a mystery to me as he was a very guarded cold blooded animal concerning his past; I have my suspicions that he was in the witness protection program. He looked Italian to me.

The two of us found each other at Twin Oaks Country Club, no lie. My roommate was working there at the time, myself having been summarily dismissed from that employer a year hence. At any rate, I had come to pick him up from work and was waiting around while he and the other tuxedo-clad peasants finished cleaning up after some function called Seafood Buffet. Apparently the proprietors of Twin Oaks thought it a brilliant stroke of marketing genius to set each table with a wine glass full of water, each containing a single depressed goldfish. This just strikes me as sadistic and evil; forcing a fish to float in a container not even big enough for it to turn around in and watch as large, white, bloated shapes shoveled cooked versions of their brethren into the gaping holes in their faces. Sick.
Back in the kitchen I found a large bucket of water full of the mentally damaged fish lucky enough to have survived sitting on someone’s table all night without being eaten by some drunken frat guy on a dare. On a whim I grabbed a Styrofoam cup and scooped one of the poor orange fellows inside, capping it off with the intention of taking him home and probably finding him dead the next morning from suicide. Much to my delight, Mr. Tickles as he came to be called, was still alive come daylight and thus began our long and twisting life together. I procured an old fifteen gallon aquarium from my mother’s garage and tried to make the lad as comfortable as possible down in the basement of my house. I like to think he was happy, though I would come to regret not saving more of the little fish from the demons at Twin Oaks. I could’ve been like some kind of aquatic Schindler or something! Ah well, could’a, would’a should’a.

The first real test of Mr. Tickle’s metal came on a night when numerous human beings had congregated at our home after the bars closed for a sort of drunken celebration of someone’s birthday or wedding or Bris or first menstruation or something; I don’t remember. Much revelry was had by all until an underage drunk girl who probably went on to star in someone’s amateur porn (not mine, I’m sad to say) lost her balance on the weight bench upon which she was perched, falling over and knocking the fish tank to the concrete floor where it shattered and bathed the basement in lots and lots of rather dirty aquarium water. It would take us weeks to get the area to smell like anything but a fish-packing plant in July. I rescued Mr. Tickles from the cold floor and kept him alive in a wine carafe until a new aquarium could be purchased the next day. The inebriated lady who had caused this madness was apologetic, but not sorry enough to the point where she would put out, apparently. What a bitch. When you, even accidentally, attempt to kill someone’s fish the least you could do is give him a hand-job, I mean come on.

Years passed and Mr. Tickles flourished, growing from the length of a quarter to the size and girth of a three-quarters eaten hot dog. A few months ago Mr. Tickles came down with a bacterial infection and I began to panic. His little fish eyes bulged from his skull as if he’d been inflated by a bicycle pump and a large, squishy protrusion swelled out of his side as if my pet had swallowed a large grape. I learned of the most likely cause of the situation and ordered an antidote that smelled not unlike angry turpentine. But it worked! Mr. Tickles got better and it seemed all would be well. Life was good again.

Then, today I fished my pet’s corpse out of the aquarium with one of those little green nets and secured my friend in a Ziploc bag, placing him in the crisper drawer of my refrigerator, where he still sits; he always did like vegetables. My plan is to have a Viking funeral for Mr. Tickles, probably on a boat made from popsicle sticks in a large saucepan filled with water out on my balcony.

I think Mr. Tickles had a good life, though I always wondered if he was freaked out by the fact that I masturbated in front of him; his home was right next to the TV.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll go get some hermit crabs. For now, dear readers I shall say goodnight. Anyone interested may attend the Viking funeral of my friend Mr. Tickles tomorrow sometime after the apartment manager leaves for the day so I do not get evicted for an open fish pyre on my wooden balcony. Bring cash in lieu of flowers.