COVERED n’ CHUNKED
LIVEBEARING TRUMPET NO. 43

By Joe Middleton
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Joe, I need a brief, concise, un-
profane article from you about the 
ACA convention (I know writing 
anything about the ACA might be 
considered profane, but you know 
what I mean).  First thing tomorrow 
would be OK. 
 
--this is from Van

This isn't brief or concise, but I hope you like it...

A few days have passed at home and it’s all still there.  Memories and phantasms of living things in liquid, dead things floating in liquids, imbibing the liquids themselves and then eliminating them, only to collapse by morning and to start again when regaining consciousness.  I was drunk, man, man was I drunk!  Then there were the prescription anti-depressants mixed in, a part of the chaotic brew.  One week before the fest I became bogged down in a late-season cold that clogged my sinuses and coated my lungs.  So, in fine addition to the other drugs, I was popping yummy orange pseudaphedrine caplets at the rate of one or two or three when I forgot how many was one once every two conscious hours.  Slip in a salty dog or a Singapore sling every now and then and once gets the idea:  I was a drunk, sweaty, shaky, wired mess... thank God, Satan, and the Holy Ghost!  And I remember it all, all of the sordid points acted out in some sort of non-contrived, warped, burlesque -- but genuine -- reality.
 

Wednesday

I moved to the refrigerator and opened a beer.  It was another, ice cold Rainier pounder.  The morning was a typical morning for a day off, me standing there in my T-shirt with no underwear, wearing glasses and thinking about food and sex and in that order.  I picked up the beer and went back into the main room, sitting on the hardwood floor in front of the television and flipping channels.  I twisted off the cap and found public television.  An exercise show was on and women were on the floor, stretching and moving their muscles underneath spandex tights.  This pulled in my attention for a moment and I sat there, drinking my beer and leering at the women and their workout.  I thought about beating off as thinking about beating off was part of my morning routine, also.
I sat there and thought about it and looked at the clock and decided there wasn’t enough time before the show ended for me to get hard and blow my wad before the Teletubbies came on.  So I turned off the television, grabbed a blanket off my bed, and went into the kitchen turned den of my studio, pulling up my desk chair in front of the computer.  I drank some more, turned on the PC, and looked out the window.  A cloudy day.  Not good, not bad, and not raining.  I logged in.  I checked my e-mail.  The usual bullshit.  

The day was a July in Wednesday, the 22nd, 1998.  The convention showroom was being set up thousands of miles away at some airport hostelry.  Pat Tosie probably had the day off, and was sweating and swearing nailing stands together or duking it out with the hotel officials.  Looking at my e-mail I deleted a lot of the messages without looking at them, as usual.  Then I closed my mail and opened up MS Explorer for a browse of the Internet, checking my favorite porn sites and making sure my pipes would be clean for the trip.

I found some workout women on the net, beat off, wiped off onto a sock, rinsed my hands off in the sink, crawled back into bed, stared at the ceiling.  I left my pounder to get warm and flat next to my PC.

So eventually I woke up again a couple hours later and moved toward the suitcase and the big piles of clean clothes I left on the floor from laundry the night before.  I threw all sorts of stuff in there, most of which I needed unlike last year, when I included books I never read and other shit I didn’t need.  This time, I took my street clothes and left most my fish shirts at home.  Also I packed my medicine kit and a half dozen extra-large rubbers.

I thought about going to Chicago the previous year and the worst part in Chicago for me was that I didn’t get any and was never close to getting any, even though I brought some condoms along just for the cause.  I didn’t get any in San Jose, either, but at least I came close, and I had the fun in getting there.  The fun of that, of course, was the fun -- that second side for me -- that made it all worthwhile for me.  San Jose was great, getting chased around by some really fucked-up women and watching people blow chunks and wet their pants in the hotel lobby.  I didn’t get any then, either, but instead I got Caroline Estes, Molly Thompson, Ella Chin and Ella Kamooks pinning me to the stairs behind the show room, and Eric H. getting the whole thing on video while the dangerous bitches mauled me.  Now, going to St. Louis, this time I was intent on getting a piece of ass.  I was the running, no doubt.  At points I could have been trying too hard but the fact that I was really hunting for it...just the same.

So I continued with all that shit and I was done but ready to go with a good deal of time.  Thinking about the condoms I went to lay back on the bed and thought about beating off again.  This time, though, I had to prove I was doing because I loved myself, and not because I wanted to clean my pipes.  I decided to forego it, this time, just so I could save myself something to do if I got bored on the plane.

I know this sounds crazy, but if I think about it for awhile, the ACA in Chicago in 1997 was a flop.  It had the largest attendance ever for any ACA convention, it made a huge bunch of money both for the ACA, the host club, and the Guy Jordan Endowment Fund itself.  But, on the second side, there was way too many people for any sense of a second element to really stand out until the very last night when the toga party took over.  For two nights, fun was a tobacco smoke-filled suite with cheap beer on the twelfth floor.  Then, the hospitality room when to the lobby level vendors’ room where it was going to be a total bust if a few of us, on a last minute decision -- Eric Hanneman, Dennis Bobbitt, and I -- showed up togas, which busted the whole scene wide open.  But then it all went to pot the next day as Sunday quickly came on and out, a 120-degree auction tent on the hotel’s back lawn, sweating and drinking and watching the fish go tits up in their bags.

I worked my way up and out and checked and rechecked everything, previous nightmares about leaving shit behind keeping me from heading on out and looking forward to my next buzz, hopefully from bummed beers in a basement underneath a beauty school where Steve Lundblad built the Cichlid Exchange, his wholesale fish and hatchery business.  Much beers were opened and passed around, and the air became blurry and hot and sweaty.  Steve keeps the whole basement at about 84 degrees Fahrenheit.  That doesn’t seem like to much until you factor in all the drippy tanks, the open water barrels, the puddles of water on the floor from a heavy water change schedule, and the occasional open piss pools from his and Ella Kamooks’s dogs.  Plus, figure in the drugs:  this day was the first day I began to put the liquor on top of the pseudaphedrines in heavy loads.  To compensate the downing effects of the beer, I popped more of the caplets, and so forth.  I went high and low, high and low.  Like a bird learning to fly.

Finally, our trip began to move forward late Wednesday night, with the Shawn and Van Van Doren taking our whole Portland clusterfuck to the airport for our red-eye midnight flight.  Our group was consisted of Steve Lundblad, Roland Holtz, Ella Kamooks, Ella Kamooks, Peta Greenway, Layn Luedtke, Ella Kamooks, and myself.  Norm Edelen had left a week earlier to meet with his family there and we planned to meet up with him there once we arrived at the hotel.  We had all our luggage, plus the new GPAS T-shirt and the Club Snail shirts and other materialistic stuff, and something extra that is known in certain circles as "The Black Mutt."  The Black Mutt is kind of like Roland’s respirator, a portable keg tap and refrigerator.  It was a huge black thing with odd holes and small attachments and hinges.  The kegs for the Mutt we checked as luggage at the gate.  Roland wanted to take the tanks on the plane but we feared that the things would blow up.  Air Florida going down in the swamp again, except this time its not the muck but instead the flanks of Mt. Hood.  A call to the airline solved this issue.  Then we called Pat.  Pat agreed get us the tanks when we got there.

Of course, no great trip could begin without a some sort of drunken, sending-off party.  Our sending-off party was at the McMenamin’s Tavern at Mall 205 in SE Portland.  We were intent on getting ploughed before we got on the coach seats. Sending us off there were the Van Dorens, as well as Amy Luedtke and Jaba the Butt. Jaba was Norm’s old high-school chump from way back when.  When Norm went out to ACA in Chicago last year Ella called Jaba the Butt up "for coffee."  Then, one night after picking me up from the airport from a business trip, Norm found Jaba the Butt and Ella walking up the sidewalk together holding hands while he stopped in for a pack of smokes.  It all went to pieces from there.  

Jaba the Butt is like this big guy with some sort of attention deficit disorder.  By big I mean he is tall and somewhat muscular, and wears this pompadour hairdo.  Being that he has no span of attention at all he constantly tries to wrap conversations around his finger.  He can’t simply shut up or not say anything -- his jaw is constantly flapping.  He looks out and doesn’t give a damn about what anyone else has to say, just rambling on and on.  It’s weird but it’s probably true that Ella left Norm’s bed for Jaba the Butt because she didn’t know anyone else in the world and Jaba the Butt was probably -- and sadly -- more her ideal mind.  Seems to have no real mind or guts or strength, just some cookie cutter image of some objectionable asswipe that typifies the basic, subnormal macho scum of mankind.  So here’s Jaba the Butt sitting at the end of the bar next to his new pussy Ella and going at it vocally, saying shit and fuck and piss and cunt and all of that, joculating around wildly, showing us to his all his manlihood like a horned-up peacock fowl. 

I made no attempt at hiding the fact that I was drunk and getting drunker with every minute.  The group really needed somebody to hold up the show, especially with Jaba the Butt’s untamed, booming voice bellowing out across the table.  I started to think about Jaba the Butt’s stature and his long pointy feet, and thought if his dick was proportioned in the like, too.  Wondered if Ella went for that, and thought about my big sausage.  We all started to get up and move out to the cars to assemble ourselves.  At this point I began to start dropping bombs.  I had been thinking a lot about myself, and, at that moment, decided to pony on up to Jaba the Butt, and, after grabbing his shoulders, I firmly announced to him and the few passerby that I was fifty-fifty confirmed gay.

Everything after that started to fall into a blur.  I remember wanting to smart alec the clerk at the check-in point, but I did not.  What I really wanted to do most was pee and then get on the plane.  I wasn’t up to hassling with the rent-a-cop fucked-up security guards.

So we got on the plane and it was an uneventful, extremely boring flight.  I wanted to go to sleep but was anxious to get to St. Louis and see all the people that I haven’t seen in a year.  Due to the nature of the ACA events, it is very easy to make good friends with people.  And, after going to a couple of the events, one really looks forward to meeting up with these people, extensions of the fishy social group.  I was up most of the night, trying to follow some ridiculous novel and occasionally ordering drinks.  It got light, and I started to gaze east across the horizon, watching a magenta sun rise up through hazy plains skies across puffy cottonball clouds.  Looking down, I watched the plane follow a wide floodplain right down to a tightly-clustered city punctuated by a large, gleaming, steel arch.  Sort of nice but weird, nothing but brown fields of flat stretching outward to all horizons and then a city with green trees and gently rolling hills: an isle in a brown sea.  We landed about an hour later: I was pretty tired, kind of drunk but mostly stressed.

I even forgot to beat off in the lavatory during the flight.

Thursday

So somehow we got from the airport to the Renaissance Hotel, which sat at the end of the runway opposite the airport.  It seemed at first like some sort of strange and unusual punishment, planes taking off and landing with all their jet noise just a few hundred yards away.  As soon as we got there, Ella Kamooks checked his luggage and went on the Cahokia Mounds tour.  I could have cared less.  He was starting to get on my nerves.

Ella Kamooks is this short little GPAS member who smiles a lot but doesn’t say anything.  The smile is done to be as if he is secretly smiling at us, not with us.  He’s got his own agenda.  On top of that, he smells like serious horse sweat.  Ella doesn’t bathe much or enough or maybe if at all, so it seems.  During the ACA he smelled not that bad.  Usually, though, he smells like a crap heap.  

Anyway, I avoided him until he sought me out, and when he sought me out it was always a tolerate, tolerate thing.  

Some of us began not to tolerate something else -- not Dave, but the beer.  The terrible beer from the St. Louis area that all around that region suck down with gusto as if it were the mother’s milk.  Find Pat, get the tanks for the Black Mutt.  Roland and I found Pat and got the tanks -- Ro was all grins and shits and giggles and handshakes -- and headed upstairs to Norm’s room, as another member of the group found him.  We hung out for awhile with Norm, in his room.  It was a period of rest and waiting -- the first keg drew a thick, creamy beige lather and not much beer.  We needed to let it settle from the long flight and maybe take time for ourselves, too.  Those sitting there who smoked lit up at once. Brows were getting rubbed tiredly with thumbs as the fingers clutched the remainder of the butt.  A long, sticky, sweaty beginning.  I was evasive as I was sleepy:  I felt no need to keep much conversation in the room. My scrotum began to chafe and rash in the humid Missouri climate.

We were hungry and tired and decided that we didn’t like the thought of eating in the hotel.  Of all the times I have eaten in hotels, the hotel takes advantage of the lodger by screwing them with shitty food at an expensive price and crappy service to boot.  Lucky for us, there was a Waffle House nearby.  A true American institution:  cheap food, spit in the hash browns, and smoking everywhere.  Ella got the shits eating there:  she has problems swallowing as it is.  I knew it was home for me.  A slab of pseudoham, scrambled eggs, wheat toast and jam and something that sat like Sanka.

On the way back, parts of the group went and checked out the pioneer cemetery in back of the hotel.  This was one of those graveyards oif people that time all but forgot, wedged between the hotel and the viaduct that held the freeway from the airport.  It was a place of thick crabgrass, toppled stones, and bodies relocated a few decades back for the construction of the overpass.  Some lesson in there for all:  if six out of seven of all the world’s population died in the next ten years, who would remember them fifteen years later?  It could have been the appropriate epitaph for the weekend to end:  enjoy yourself, it is later than you think.  It seemed that guys had fucked each other in there.  Shit-stained condoms draped over the tops of headstones.  At least they practiced safe sex.

Sitting in Norm’s room smoking cloves cigarettes and drinking some of the local brews he provided (he was there a whole week before us, visiting his family -- a native Missourian himself), Peta Greenway said something about going to the zoo and before I knew it a tired, sorry-ass clusterfuck of us -- Steve, Roland, Ella, Peta, and I -- were being led by her back to the airport so we could board the local rail to the St. Louis zoo.  Upon our arrival at the airport station and boarding the train, she promptly sat down and fell asleep in the waiting car.

89 degrees heat and same percentage for humidity made the day sticky and my jockey shorts clingier and clingier.  What was once a rash now began to blister.  The zoo was huge, stuck in the middle of some swampy rolling hills just outside of downtown, and was made huger by the unquenched thirsts of our two girlies, Peta and Ella.  The two women wanted to see everything the animal prison had to offer.  I was almost sick to my stomach when I was pushed through the Children’s exhibits.  However, we somehow missed the masturbating monkeys, probably the section with which I could most easily sympathize.  Not much else to do in the rest home, might as well slap the meat or molest thy neighbors.

It seemed like the dull drudgery kept going on and on.  The reptile house, though gorgeous in its architecture, proved to be only a grotesque highlight in which dead baby pinkie mice floated, drowned and dead, in a tank with a giant, wrinkled salamander of some sort.  Coiled cobras and sedentary reptiles hid in fake brush, behind rocks or underwater behind thick glass panes.  In some new part of the park sat some weird exhibit named Natural World, in which a large pavilion sported several wings, three gift shops, and two restaurants.  The center of the pavilion featured greater-than-life-size replicas of such deepwater bastards as giant squid and white sharks, each wired into uneasy, dangling positions which certainly drove tripping minds insane with mad fear.  In the Diversity Hall, semi-robotic animatrons of Charles Darwin and Rocky Raccoon clacked and grinded to canned tape presentations of some phone operator like voice, hardly enough to keep a kid’s attention for more than a second or two.  It was like a Chuck E. Cheese’s pizza store stoned on education.  But instead of a cartoon rat and lion it was a doddering old fart and a drooling, fake varmint puppet.  Roland:  "Wait, I wanna see Darwin stand up!"  He and I stood there for a moment, watching the robot cratchet up into place as gravity acted on the robot’s lower jaw, causing it drop down lifelessly into a featureless gape.

The big thrill of the whole goddamned scene was the septic tank-sized plexi tank along one wall of the Nature World hall.  Though the tank was only home to a few native fish species, it was so big and thick and huge it left Steve envious and Roland drooling over it, the big Penis-Extension Aquarium (PEA) that it was.  In the pea, turtles lay on fake rocks and logs above the water, while large chubs laze below, trying to avoid harm from a pair of bluegills ceaselessly guarding some sort of territory while trying to fuck.  A screen in the middle of the pea separated the water section in two so that smaller fishes, such as dace, minnows, and shiners, could be kept in the same tank without getting munched by the turtles and the sunfish.  In this section, fathead minnows were seen defending spots under rocks, hoping to get some coitus in on some willing females.  More lessons about spawning and fuckage: for most animals, that’s all that they have.  Humans invented drugs like beer and religion, and that set us apart from the rest.  The fatheads were boldly colored, something like kaiser Tropheus or subocellatus kribs with thick bands of dark on light.  But that wasn’t the end of zoo.

The girls we were with forced us through the bird section, with Ella leading our own tired asses all the way.  Steve could only beg without losing the pussy that kept his pecker fed well.  We got to see the birds even though we were all ready to drop dead due the heat and the lack of sleep.  It was our ultimatum to back at the hotel by 4:30 p.m. and we smashed through this barrier, returning to the hotel by five.

By the time 6:00 p.m. Thursday night rolled around I probably had about five hours out of thirty-seven in which I had spent sleeping.  Earlier that day, that Thursday morning when my room was not ready, I look back, and then I realize the my room was ready but I couldn’t check in until Eric flew in the long route from Eugene, Oregon.  I wasn’t going to go see the Cahokia lumps or whatever the hell they were like the bunch of the others, and I didn’t really want to sit around the hotel bar, drinking expensive bad drinks and shooting my budget all to hell and picking my nose and eating it while watching ESPN on the telly or some other crap. 

At that time the yuks that went on the Cahokia trip were stumbling back into the hotel and more folks were coming in from the airport.  Seeing Eric H. and getting into room rejuvenated me.  I took off my underwear but put my purple Dockers shorts back on:  my groin reddened with an intense rash that caused me to scratch my dick endlessly.  I hoped that my cock wouldn’t droop too much and hang out my leg -- this is something that I need to worry about more than others.  Last year, at the hotel suite, I stowed my suitcase neatly in the closet.  This year in this room I threw all my shit on the floor by my bed.  Maybe that’s why I was so screwed up last year, I mean, taking my day planner with me and folding my clothes.  This year, my shirts lay in a pile, my cock against my shorts’ zipper and my day planner at home on my desk.

After deciding I was still too tired and limp and sore to sit in the room and jerk off, I got up off the bed and go downstairs in some mad attempt to remember the faces and names of people I hadn’t seen in a year.  This is the part that is seems like a real crime.  People see me right away and know who I am and what strange shit I pulled in the previous year.  Meanwhile, I can’t remember who the hell they all are and, with only a few exceptions, have to read their name tag off their shirts as if they were some checkout clerk at the grocery store.  Gary Wagner and Steve were over by the windows, watching some pretty muscular guys unload a pickup through the glass, a truck with Ohio plates.  "Nothing stands out more than a bunch of Ohio lowbrows...!" said Gary, a wise ass remark that caused Steve and I to both cackle aloud.

By about this time the beer was kicking in.  For most, that’s a calm concession as many often say.  But ours was a bit stronger than normal.  It was the infamous Deschutes Black Butte, or the Black Butt, the latter being a little moniker that our own Wayne Leibel can attest to.  It pours black, goes in black, goes through black, and comes out black.  About seven-point-four compared to the usual three-two lagers.  A can of Bud or two and one can feel a little giddy.  But two twelvers of the chocolaty Black Butt goes straight to the cortex, not causing one to fumble and mumble but instead just to smile high and stoned and act off above below the normal level.  The hotel bar had beer, and it was priced in accordance with most hotel beers at fish conventions, so it was expensive shit.  Domestics and a sparse selection of imports were $3.50 to $4.00 plus tax plus tip.  And to that I’ve always tipped big.  Something Norm said about that, tipping is always expected so tip big and it will repay.  And so to this I’ve clung.  I tip big and it works, they are happy with that and I am happy.  I recalled that in Sacramento, during the big Lake Aquaria event put on by Jim Lawson and Roberta Steele, there was an only exception to the highly-priced swill standard that most hotels adopt.  Back in 1996 when the show was held (and meeting Ella  -- then a girlfriend of Peter Unmack and now -- in 1998 -- a girlfriend of Steve’s) the Holiday Inn had cheap beer -- Humpback Ale, it was called -- that tasted good.  The bar also had a karaoke machine for drunks to play on, and was dimly lit so that no one notice when you spilled you beer in your lap.  That it was, so to speak, the ways of The Greatest Convention You Never Been To, back when the Tropical Fishkeeper’s Exchange had it all in Sacramento, California, in October of 1996.

Though, back here at the Renaissance Hotel in St. Louis, though, it would cost the whole penis and testicles and labia and clitoris and urethra and the whole bit, the whole shit and shinola.  A Heineken was $3.50 plus tax plus tip.  To interpret this spew, this meant that the average drunk of the type sort would have to blow at least $30 to $40 to tie a good one on, before even getting a good, heavy buzz.  That, plus the bar was sunk into the lobby, in plain sight of the hotel’s front desk.  There was no anonymity for the alcoholics there in the bar, as the clerks loomed from their faux wood pedestals into the very bowels of the bar itself, spying on its inhabitants to track and filter out its very inhabitants itself.  No way to get away with what I wanted:  you turn into asshole, you get thrown out on your asshole.  Damn worms, fucking agents of religion.  As one might guess, partial nudity in the bar wasn’t an option either, whether it meant sashaying your underwear through one’s fly or stripping down for the Full Monty.  A few of us reconnoitered and decided that we had to get out of the hotel to get our own liquor.

There was this guy Jeremy Wheatley who was basically Rusty Wessel’s valet.  Now, not like it’s a parasitical thing or anything like that, but this was the guy who Rusty relied upon to move about the boxes and handle his shit when Rusty was doing his Central American escapades thing, like collecting and bringing back the real Herichthys bocourti and his latest discovery, the odd Theraps wesseli when no one else was or had any idea.  So the good student he was, Jeremy followed us closely, the hardcore fucking ass Snailers that we were, and by this I mean Dennis Bobbitt and myself.  So the three of us, Dennis being Ella Z.’s ex-beau from the time being in existence from Peter U. to Steve L., and also a great kind of asshole which one like I can readily communicate and fathom, we piled into Jeremy’s truck in search of the booze...the precious liquor store which, with some hope, would hold the very sought-after alcohol of which we all sought.  The bag check at the hotel door, when prodded, the African-American gentleman he was (we were all honky shit-eating whiteass trash, you see), told us the location of several package stores in the area.  We drove southeast along the main drag for about a half mile to some simple place dubbed Airport Liquors.  This place was a bust -- a major, absofuckinglutely bust!  Bud, Bud Light, Miller High Life, MGD.  That and a wall of phony-cum whiskey.  We went out of there empty-handed and pissed off.  Stopped at two more places, a Latino grocery and a tavernia.  The grocery was closed and the tavern had only Budweiser in cans.  Nothing.  We finally went two miles northwest of the hotel and settled outright with a six-pack of Rolling Rock (tasted okay), a six-pack of Sam Adams (tasted like shit but better than Bud), and two six-packs of Grolsch plus two pints of DeKuyper Cactus Juice (Yay!).  That, plus a church key to open the bottles with, a Pepsi in twenty-ounce bottle, and two packs of Camel wides.   The total bill: $65 dollars!  Fucking highway robbery for these assholes, but our tired asses were done with searching and we all wanted to go back to the hotel.  I put it on my Visa.  Let’s get the fuck out of here.  Got to go to the party.  No need to cry over the green.

I don’t remember quite how it happened, but by now it must’ve quite have almost happened, but apparently, it kind of almost did.  It kind of happened in a weird way as it did.  
"Ella Kamooks’s hunting!" said Eric.
"What do you mean?"
"She wants it, she’s looking for it!"
"Now, wait a minute, the women always run, and the guys always chase!"
"But she wants it!"
I knew I had brought those condoms for a reason!
Eric had this sixth sense about Missouri.  He’d been born there, raised there, got laid there, and bottomed out there.  Something about the air and the relative humidity.  That and the taxes, the shrubbery.  The limestone and cow pee in the water: white asphalt streets and sinkholes sucking down little homes with people in them.  You can walk about on the sticky tar and white rock all day and feel that strange air clinging to you.  That’s what it was: lust for air.  Eric had this.  Eric knew what Ella had wanted.

This in mind, I sought her out, her attention and interest.  I wanted nothing more than some of that Carolina cunt, that poontang which oozed like sticky sap from a dark gum tree.  Think artistic, though, she likes that.  Ella comes to these ACA functions with all of these shirts, each one of these cotton tees adorned with some great artwork of the piscine kind, selling them off to make her way with the BITCHes and all of the horny fish men.  Plus, like a true bastard, I could blow my wad the first night and spend the rest of the weekend as an asshole, bragging about the whole goddamned shit.

Ella and I were in the hospitality room the first night, talking about the whole weird art scene and was getting a boner in my shorts.  I wanted her, and began to saw what a beautiful, sweet innocent creature she really was.  Poor, sweet, innocent.  Just like Todd said.  I was quite drunk, putting away the hard bought beers from the liquor store as well as some of the sweet rum Rusty and Keith brought back from Honduras.  Not too bad, as I would get on and on in the later nights, just happy and mellowy drunk.  This could be commercial, no doubt, as on this night I was clearly on my best behavior, except for Sunday when I was just too plain-ass tired.  This night it might be as it was if it were to just work for me.  I was happy and giddy, with boner up hard and half mast but too bad through my shorts as Ella had to look at me to talk to me.  She didn’t see the hard turkeyneck in my pants.

Somehow, we got roped into a stoner circle, passing a tightly-woven, crude cigarette with two other party-goers, far from the hospitality room itself.  Towels tucked under the door.  Drool chomped bit and burning paper.  Giggles, farts, heavy rapping, the whole works.  That ended and Ella and I went back to my room.  My room was a weird thing.  Last year, in Chicago, my suitcase was stowed neatly away in the closet, clothes handing from racks and hangers, better than if I was at home.  That was before the Prozac.  This year I threw all my shit down at the end of the bed.  This was after the Prozac.  Alongside this shit was all that beer that Dennis and Jeremy and I just bought.  That and some dis-rubber banded fish bags, miscellaneous crap.  As we (Eric and I, not Ella and I) realized as the time wore on, we were intent hoping this shit would fall out and hang over our bags, leaving us no option but to hang out in Rusty’s room next door.

So there we were.  My cock was hard in my shorts, rubbery going on firm.  "You’re so young," she cooed, "Ooooh!  So young!"  I could hear small sounds: my heartbeat, the airport out the windows, guys talking in the hall.  All of these were unimportant to me now. Sure, I’ve been laid before: haven’t you?  Ella and I moved towards the chairs and table by the curtains. I was a little nervous.  I was mostly drunk. And what a sneaky, creaky bastard I thought I was!  Staring down into the drippy, clammy wetness seated before me.  I reached forward with my hand as if to gently caress her face.  Her arm began to reach up to me.  There was this noise coming from Rusty’s room next door, like drunks stumbling about.  We were startled, and I whispered, smiling, "Oh it’s just Rusty, they are trying to get into their room."  Thin walls for me to hear that, I thought.  What a cheap hotel.  Got to work on that insulation.  I drew my eyes back from the room and looked into her eyes.  I began to move forward along the chair.  I heard a voice, loud and clear, as it if were standing on the other side of the beds.

"Ella Kamooks!" drawled Keith, "All alone with Joe Middleton in his room!"  He stood at the foot of the bed closest to the door.  Garland and Rusty came marching in at that point, busting up laughing, with Garland falling on the bed, his face in his hands, shocked and amazed.  Rusty collapsed to the floor almost doing a half somersault, guffawing drunkenly and drooling.  For the most part, though, Keith was pissed. They got in their before I could have gotten out with my turkeyneck.  We stood there, our arms frozen in space for all about two seconds.  Ella sat there, cheeks red with embarrassment.  I talked some but I was mostly pissed, and when I get pissed I don’t remember much of that.

The doors between the rooms proved to be a real showstopper. For as Ella and I got to my room for some "heavy talking," The doors between ourselves and our room and our neighbors’ room were as wide open as could be. Earlier in the day, though, a knock on the door brought us tasty rum drinks and cervezas galore, much due to the fact that our neighbors were good alcoholics like us, so good they were willing to share the booty.  Now, though, it was disturbing the peace.  I simmered and flared.  Somehow, the rest of the night went to hell, some big, wet, dripping nothingness.  The whole group went down Ella Herlong’s room, following Rusty.  I guess I wanted to see how bad it could get.  We were in there with Herlong and Craig Morfitt and others.  Somebody ordered some pizza and I was putting it away, shoveling it down my throat, just to try drive the whole scene from consciousness.  

I shifted my mind from food back to fucking as I looked over at the bed.  It was Ella sitting in the middle, her back against the headboard.  On either side flanked Keith and Garland, leaning up against her.  They got her. I wanted to vomit.  All the guys in the room now had some bad air about them, conceited with their tank size and certainly not very interesting.  The gamut of the white cichlid hobby, I guess.  Southern Republicans.  Assholes.  Testosterone.  Users.  The type that give their secret mistresses abortions so the wives don’t find out.  The kind that find God to prevent losing their asses in a nasty divorce.  What was I doing here?  My dick had softened.  Limp and dribbling.  No interest in pleasing anyone now.  And there was Ella in the middle, giggling with Keith doing all the sweettalking.  Disgusting.  Might as well act off, separate myself from all of this whitebread shit.

I went back to my room and Eric was asleep in bed.  It was zero-dark-thirty in the morning and I sat on the toilet, pulling at my dork and checking for life signs.  I got kind of hard but lost my concentration and stopped.  What was I trying to prove?  All the pent-up urges in the world was trapped inside of me, some really sick white vice.  This was the one time of the year for me to go outside and squeeze it all out of my big, hairy meat, but not all over the bathroom tile here in the hotel.  I stopped, wiped, got up, flushed, and stood there in the mirror, looking at my flabby gut.  I got ready for bed.  I sat there in bed for a few minutes, making sure the door between Rusty’s room and ours was locked.  The mattress was hard and the box springs mushy.  As I closed my eyes and leaned back I hoped that I wouldn’t awaken to the sound of moans and squeaky bedsprings someplace.
 
 

Friday

From the second I got up all Eric did was bitch about my snoring.  On and on.  In the past I snored but not this loud, and I had put on weight, blah blah blah.  I was to 255 at my first ACA in 1995.  Now I weighed a tad under 300.  I had apnea.  I also had the cold, and not only seriously congested but also spent a degree of my waking hours picking my nose and eating it when I thought nobody was looking.  At night, when asleep, I thrashed all about, knocking the sheets to the floor.  This is typical:  I like to act out my dreams. Sometimes I wake up fucking the pillow but this weekend it didn’t happen.  Not this time.  I do drool in my sleep, though mostly if all fall asleep upright.  No wet dreams though, not this weekend.  No nosebleeds either, despite all of gold-digging.  Just a lot of noise, and a lot of thrashing.

Got up to pee.  Showered quickly, and got dressed.  A card on the toilet bowl explained that due to some shit about saving water, room service has been trained to wash all the towels unless they’ve been thrown on the floor.  Using a green excuse to try to save a buck on soap and labor.  After shaving I threw all of the towels on the floor.  I inhaled my medicines.  Prozac, Sudafeds, Peptol (I was cutting some really bad farts).  I took some extra Sudafeds and shoved them in my pocket, they always help with my hangovers.  I coughed up and spat out a big wad of snot into the sink.  More traces.  I took a big, greasy shit and then wiped.  Then I put on my clothes.  At the zoo on Thursday when I picked up my big rash I wore my smallest pair of jockey shorts under my purple Dockers shorts.  This morning I opted for my black Levis and no underwear at all, my narves to all but hang and swing free and poke through the denim.  I got out the bathroom, re-parked my suitcase on the floor at the edge of the bed.  I told Eric I was going to meet him downstairs (he was yuppie-like, drinking hotel coffee while reading the free copy of USA Today), turned to the door, farted a big one, then headed out, down the hall, and to the elevators.  I was breaking wind all the way.

Picking the busses for the big roadtrip sucked.  Eric came down and people were piling up fast.  Three busses for the Gateway Arch, Budweiser factory, and Beldt’s Aquarium tour.  It’s too bad they couldn’t sort out the coaches into three categories: drunks, AAers, and hardcore Christian wackos.  There was probably three black guys at the whole convention, five Asians, and an occasional this and that, so all the busses were 99.9 percent white and 85 percent male.  Eric and I got on the bus with Joe Kane and his cute, leggy daughter, who’s name I have forgotten (she just turned 18, it’s okay to talk that way now).

There was also this really chesty girl with fine legs that all the guys were looking at, one hardcore Christian told me later that she was blessed with fine looks, but not like he liked to look at her or anything (bullshit -- bastard probably beat off to a mind image of her every night!).  She had a magnificent ass too, and wore a tight fitting, stretchy gray cotton shirt and small white boxer shorts, only to strut her stuff all the more.  She was supposed to be the daughter of some big, fat greasy fish breeder but acted like his mistress.  I wanted a piece of it -- I mean I really wanted a piece of it -- and she was there, sitting right next to Joe Kane’s daughter, talking and giggling.  When the busty girl laughed her breasts wiggled.  Her own, young, real breasts.  I wanted a piece of it but I was really just jealous that some warty old fatso fishkeeper’s seed could create such a young, sweet chunk of eye candy T & A.  Through her little low-cropped shirt you could see this great, sharply curving cleavage through which most men could bury their hard dicks in.  Since I knew I couldn’t touch -- sitting there, all geeky and sweaty with my stupid Club Snail T-shirt on -- I just stared down her bosom, following the smooth olive skin up her chin to her lovely lashes and Betty Page bangs.  Thought seriously about changing seats to sit across from Ms. Busty and Joe’s daughter, or going to the bus W.C. to beat off.  Chose the latter but all I could do was fart repeatedly and scrape the dingleberries off my ass with my fingernails and moistened toilet paper.

Also on our bus were Ella and Rich Kamooks, a couple of Californians who were busily aging gracefully.  When I first heard of the Kamookss through Steve I thought of your typical aquarists.  A pudgy, fat, alcoholic work slut of a guy with a whiny old, cigarette-smoking witch of a wife.  Heart problems and fights, watching the television at night and reeking of body odor.  When I first saw the Kamookss I saw them as bicyclist yuppies:  athletic, well done, conservative democrats.  After the shit I pulled in San Jose with the noisemakers they didn’t like me too much but I have been trying to work myself closer into their camp since.  Plus that and Eric has some sort of secret crush on Ella.  It’s not a sexual thing he has, just a weird teasing thing he likes to pull, like when he puts on a blonde wig and bustier and lipstick and looking into the mirror -- that’s him doing a Ella.  Some act, a puppy dog drooling thing he does around well-toned women, just like what he did in Chicago the year before with the body builder woman from Long Island who won that best of show with the brown Neolamprologus leleupi.  This time Ella was wearing glasses like Rich but that didn’t seem to stop Eric in his tracks.  If it gets to be anything more than some mental masturbation I will never believe it.  Just a mindtoy, like how I look at Ella Kamooks.

Also on the bus were some others, it was full.  I didn’t know the rest very well, if at all.  It didn’t really matter to me, the rest were just plain dull, a dime a dozen.  The type that die without a peep or a ripple, ending up back up in the graves behind the hotel underneath the freeway.  A great place to hang the condom over after buggering thy neighbor.

I looked out as the bus pulled away from the curb and saw Norm and Ella and Layn come running out of the lobby and into the parking lot, trying to find a few empty seats.  Always late.  They running in flip flops and Birkenstocks with shorts and shirts and their cameras.  None of the busses had any extra room.  There was a fourth bus that neither Eric nor I saw that looked in a lot better condition than ours: it seemed like a party bus, all sleek and modern with moon windows and a shiny newness not seen the coaches that were pressed up against our faces.  It was down at the edge of the lot, out of the way of view from the general populace.  Well, I’ll be damned.  The three of them got on that bus.  Norm, Layn, and Ella were all dripping wet, like they’d all just got out of the shower together.  I thought I had a weird night, but they looked they must have got hosed or something.  There were now four busses on their way out of the hotel, down the street to the expressway and to the Gateway Arch.

We got downtown and the wisecracks over the whole deal were mounting.  We caught a few glimpses of the Arch through the buildings.  I boasted that the Arch one sees today was actually once golden and there was another one right next to it until it was washed away in the flood five years ago.  What the hell, what could have been more fitting?  Supposedly symbolizing the westward movement of the whitey in the 1800s, history tells us properly that that had actually took place upriver from St. Louis -- the Lewis and Clark Expedition -- in what is now St. Joseph.  But, as history in the 1900s would tell us, the city of St. Louis wanted to build a big tourist trap right where all of the river slums were.  So they leveled the slums and made a huge park.  History also tells us that the term "Arch" is really slang for the monument’s real name.  It’s really called the Jefferson Western Expansion Monument, for whatever its worth.

The busses parked at the edge of the park so that all of us could deboard and walk in for the ride up the gleaming metal structure to the top.  We passed through the arboreal growth or something or other to where the arch stood, in a clearing, an eighth of a mile high.  To get in, we had to enter at one of the stairways at either inside end of the two bases.  Underneath the arch sits a big underground museum.  the museum was typical government work, done up in some sort of fifties steel and glass industrial style.  Much like the neo-classic styles of the eighties, this architecture style will get laughed at for decades to come, until someone or some newspaper or magazine decides it is classic for its period or some other ridiculous shit and (a) either appreciates it enough to see it fit to pay some assholes to refurbish it to some sort of fake original asinine splendor or (b) decides it is a reason to give it some sort of high-profile historical status so then can (i) get a tax break or (ii) give it more hype on the website.  Simple, poignant, but gross.  And definitely worth the time to visit it.  Some will like it, others won’t.  But all will gawk in amazement.

It was about this time I met up with the Brits.  They flew here from the U.K. for the scene, not the scenery.  One of them was a tall, strongly-boned gal with a penchant for rugged jeans and black tank tops.  She also had short hair, pixie-like.  I’ve always been a short-haired women man.  She was no exception.  And, as Dennis later pointed out, she swaggered around like John Wayne.  I never got her name.  Caroline later pointed out her necklace she wore every day at the convention, a double-bladed axe.  "She swings both ways."  So it was her, the busty girl, Joe Kane’s daughter, and -- perversely -- Ella.  How desperate we can be for the few women that perpetrate and endure our ilk!

So we waited in line for twenty fucking minutes so we could all go up to the top of the arch.

The line for the tram went far into the belly of the beast.  There was this big long path and a few flights of stairs which took us deeper into the ground.  At the bottom of the walk, sightseers were packed five each into the cars, which sat like a string of tuna cans connected by bicycle chains.  We got down on the path and were sealed in.  I shared a tuna can with Eric, Dennis, Dave, and our Club Snail webmaster Ad Konings.  They shoved us in these tiny cans that were hot and humid, and lit by fluorescent bulbs.  Then the ride started.  Clickety-click, clackety-clack.  Carefully balanced counterweights on cables pulled the tram up along the internal tunnel produced by the arch.  The cans took into the curve, turning on their axis so that all the people remained almost perfectly upright for the whole trip.  The small windows in the doors of the cars allowed a dim view into the arch’s throat:  a small, ever-winding staircase that grew tighter and tighter with every ascending yard to the top.  Or, near the top.  The tram then slowed and coasted to a stop.  We got out, perched oddly on a weird stairway slope near the crest.

So you get up to the top with the help of a little flight of stairs and you pretend to be good little tourists.  All of you.  You take out your expensive cameras and take some pictures.  You take some pictures of Busch Stadium -- that’s right, as in "Busch" the beer -- and the big Mississippi and the rooftop swimming pools in downtown St. Louis.  Don’t recognize some of the people, though, as some of the people aren’t looking at the scenery, the external scenery, that is.  The arch is an upside-down triangular column or prism at the top, and the window panes that look over the landscape are setup so that in order for one to look out the windows, they have to lay their bodies against the carpeted wall of the arch.  So here are a couple of these perverts, all gawking at members of the opposite camp as they lay their Brittish butt cheeks up there all up in the air.  Yes!  And then there are these two little girls, with fine shorts and trim legs and one with these heaving bussoms.  Nice.  And then one little Japanese-American girl in cute little checkered shorts.  Mmmm-hmmmm.  But the Brit, with those faded jeans, let’s just say I have this thing for faded jeans.  Nice, very nice.  No room to beat off at the top of the arch, though.  And then that rash...oh, forget that, then.  Damn hot muggy air.

So we remained good sports.  I sneaked peeks at the cheeks of the asses of all four of the women.  Then I looked out the windows myself.  It was a swell view, about as good as could be expected.  There was this hatch in the middle of the floor of the observation deck, I joked openly with Eric and Dennis that Herlong should be pushed through it.  Some joke.  Then we went into the line that led us to the tram back to the bottom of the arch.  Another sweaty tuna can ride, something hot and we all looked forward to getting out of soon enough.

Eric went over and introduced me to his favorite hobbyist as of late, Wanda Jacobsen.  So Eric and Wanda and even Paul Loiselle and even Herlong got all to talking.  Thorichthys, ellioti Thorichthys, blah blah blah.  Firemouths and such.  Ellioti, maculipinnis, ellioti and helleri.  Something about a river not supposed to contain one of these fishes.  Meeki, Christmas meeki.  Hyonorynchum.  Etc.  As they were talking down there, I just started looking around.  At this time, our group began to fragment out.  Norm and Ella and Dennis and Roland and others went someplace in old St. Louis where, it was said, Dennis made a real scene out of himself and barfed all over the sidewalk or something like that.  Wish I had been there.  Instead, those of us still inside were all waiting to go see an IMAX movie called Raping the Wild West or something like that.

So we sat there like cattle, waiting to be served up a big kettle of steaming shit.  While in line, I was looking at this big pond.  This big, blue pond sat in the middle of the Western Expansion Monument museum.  It had a fountain, and was made square by its architecture.  The water in the pond had been died blue, like turquoise.  Weird, but true.  The entrance to the museum standalone exhibits themselves could be seen on the opposite side of the fountain, at the west side of the rotunda.  The entrance to the exhibit hall featured none other than a giant, stuffed grizzly bear, forced to bare its teeth a ferocious, terrifying manner.  Mysteriously absent were actual preserved samples of the smallpox-tainted blankets given by the whiteys to the North American natives.  There was these old samples of pioneer tools and other crap.  Gone was an animatron of General Custer reaming a twelve year old Indian squaw up the ass.  There were some clothes that some of the pioneers wore.  Gone was an explanation of how lonely mountain men buggered each other with a fistful of elk fat.  Gone was a mannequin of a beat-up hooker in a turn-of-the-century Nevada brothel, blood streaming from her nose and anus and cum sprayed upon her chest and thighs.  Gone were the deadened corpses of Chinamen and Negroes, bodies spent hard on the building of the railway metal and hard lines that sent telegraph messages back home of lands to plunder by the honky asshole.  Gone were the fat, bloated white bodies of the European, sucking the blood and the life of the land.  Gone was a big statue of Ella Herlong spewing his sweaty load into a field of tobacco, someplace out in the Carolinas, contributing his maligned zygotes to some fund named out west after one wild pioneer and his Hispanic cichlid of some sorts.  All this and more as I wandered back into the IMAX line.  I looked over at Ella Herlong with bland, weakened eyes.  Rewriting the American holocaust, and me soaking it for all it’s life more and more.

This IMAX movie, with its sheer, gleaming lines, and we all sat there, bored, stifled, and amazed.  the flick tried to convey the message that the French were stupid, the pioneers smart, and the Mormons good folk.  Some people fell asleep.  It was all, all bullshit.  An hour and a half long, summed-up sweetness of how whitey won the west.  All I wanted was a little beer or a sip of bourbon in the meantime.  And in the meantime, in the meantime, and in the meantime, Dennis was busy throwing up on a cobble sidewalk more than a few blocks away.  I wanted a beer and to stroke my meat into a piece of ass.  If only the museum had one of those life-size imitation brothels I sought, complete with the saloon and cheap, bleeding whores.  I make a show with those animatrons, teaching the crowd a thing or two about the Old West.

We got out of the theater and headed out of the whole fucking museum.  Pain, hangover, the Sudafeds were lagging off.  Time for some more.  Time for two more on top of that.  And all of that, and that and that and that...

We were to spend the next two hours in a real life Mississippi casino.  Maybe there was something I could fuck in there, I thought.  Yee Haw!  Somebody give me some of that fine cichlid-babe ass cheek to squeeze!   So we went across the park at the perimeter of the monument and down the hill to something that looked like a giant, shiny, floating Airstream trailer, with moorage and ropes hinging it into the bank alongside the river.  This was the casino.  In Missouri, you can’t gamble legally except on the riverboats.  So the whitey put up this barge, called it a boat.  Made it several stories high and filled it with craps tables, roulette wheels, one-armed bandits, video poker machines, and keno screens.  Everytime you get on the barge, you are officially "on cruise," even though the "boat" is tied up to shore for permanent keeps.  Underneath the boat, the brown river churns with yielding eddies and dark meats, all of turds flushed out of the septics from Butte, Montana to Nashville, Tennessee.  And the whole while, this goddamn casino barge turns, tumbles, pitches, and rolls slightly to the surge of the purging liquids.

Upstairs the assembled motherfuckers -- now Ad, Wanda, Eric, myself, and maybe even the shithead Dennis -- where’d the hell he come from -- we all load up on the third story of the floating superfortress, on the food of the banquet which was offered in the registration package.  Ham, potatoes, roast beef, turkey, coleslaw, peach cobbler.  Go get a clean plate and start all over again.  Fight for a place in line with all the old ladies.  Jell-O salad, chocolate cake, lemon meringue, soft serve ice cream.  Load up again.  Leave some on the plate for the cheapshit waitress.  Couldn’t get a job elsewhere, junkie hag.  Smokies, baked beans, more chocolate cake.  Food replaces sex.  Fill repressed sexual energy with food binge, looking forward to the big, anus-rubbing shit, the throbbing, muscular sphincter pinching off that big, ripe, meaty loaf, it’s all just twelve or so hours later.

We all file out of the hole, people still in line, waiting to get in.  Eric and I wander downstairs to spend our gambling tokens.  Big deal, lose it in a hurry.  More nasty cruise signs.  Guys in the stalls, when look for a rest room, drinking and farting and shitting and losing their money down the pipes.  We get the hell out of there.  The security on the whole place is tight.  They demanded that they take Eric’s camera away from him before he boarded on the "cruise."  So Eric got it back with much haggling but no money spent.  We departed down the gangplank and across the milky waters of the mighty mud.  We reach the shore, the flanks of which on our side is covered with shelves of cobble and mortar.  I reach out and toe the waters with my right shoe, feeling all that thick water rolling on past with a ferocity that I have never seen yet, in all of my unwordly travels.  So I withdraw the toe and head back up the bank, Eric muttering all the way about his meaningless stories of him growing up there in that town, fighting fireflies and all that shit.  There are nerd busses and there are nerd busses.  We look over at the meanest, most modern, sleekest vessel in the chartered ACA fleet, the one which Norm and Layn and the tasty Ella boarded at the start.  We decide to board.  Ella did not come on our bus.  I really wished that she did.  Come on the bus.  Come on the bus with me.

The Anheuser-Busch tour was next.  This was simple getting to.  Everyone got on the buses, the buses were pointed the other direction, and the whole caravan got pointed south and the drivers got down the main road to the brewery.  The Anheuser-Busch brewery is lots and lots of bricks, some really huge buildings, metal tanks the size of yachts, lots of assembly lines, and propaganda.  The gift shop was neat, kind of, but especially good if you liked to buy shit with the name "Budweiser" emblazoned on it.  The start of the tour featured cute little eighteen to twenty-year old girls as tour guides and some video production instructing us of the science of the beer.  The beer is beechwood-aged, you see, that’s supposedly what makes it so great.

We got to the stalls to see the Clydesdale horses, and I was standing next to Dave Herlong where I made some sort of remark about how the stalls were so clean and there was no horseshit crayons anywhere.  Dave made some sort of remark and I forgot what it was.  My mind tends to block out memories of those who fart out through their teeth.

While in one of the large fermenting warehouses, Eric swiped a chunk of beechwood for a personal sample.  Ad felt inspired to comment that the real nature of the beechwood in the beer is that it is a cheap substrate for the mass growth of the yeasts that make the alcohol, or something or other scientific-like that.  It made me feel good to be stuck between Ad and Eric for the whole tour: fish and beer veterans using the sciences of two vaguely intersecting planes for guidance and support through the trip.

At the end of the tour everyone old enough in the crowd was given two beer tickets to spend in the tasting room.  I went right up to the bar and got to be almost the first in line.  I went for what I thought to be the most strongest, some malt liquor called Midnight Express or something like that.  The persons working the taps seemed surprised I ordered that:  strangely, the malt liquor was dropped from the list by the time I could guzzle my first cup and get in line for the second.  Some of the other beers weren’t that bad, though.  Some people didn’t use their other ticket and gave them to our table.  Ad, Eric and I were able to go back and get more than our share.  I tried the Michelob Dark, and, next to the Midnight it was the best.  The favorite after that was the Michelob Honey brew.  Not too bad, but hardly much honey flavor.  Michelob, Busch, Bud, and the malt, and others:  all brewed by Anheuser-Busch.

We all got back on the busses and headed off to Beldt’s Aquarium.  This was, to me, going to be the real highlight of the tour.  I used to have a copy of the Nature Conservancy magazine from the 1930s, it had an advertisement from Beldt’s.  Beldt’s at that time was selling complete aquarium fish set-ups with plants, so they would send out a packing tin with paradise fish, goldfish, darters, and minnows for the aquarium of those days.  Back in the 80s, when the last St. Louis ACA convention was held, Beldt’s was the highlight of the trip, convention-goers lamenting over one particular pair of Thorichthys pasionis which glowed a canary yellow while guarding a school of fry.  That was the sort of place Beldt’s was, a pioneer that has had decades of success, the success largely attributed to staying on the forefront of the aquarium hobby, and then specializing in advanced wares of the specialist.  For the longest time in an old house and warehouse in a tidy St. Louis suburban enclave, the store eventually moved its retail operation into some pricy new mall slot that was built in front of the house.  All in all, I was anticipating something great from the visit.

The buses got stuck in traffic and most of the people fell asleep.  The bus ride from the south to the east of the city took two hours.  It was a hot, sticky, tired sweaty sort of affair.  Nothing to look at out the windows.  We finally got off of the freeway and found Beldt’s Aquarium.

Since the early 90s the aquarium hobby has seen a downfall as keepers have turned from the living world of an aquarium on a stand to the living, pulsating, creative world of a computer on a desk.  There is little doubt that if the personal computer has not already set off the swirling descent of the aquarium hobby it has certainly forced a revolution in the way we carry out this pasttime.  With this slide we saw the closure of big aquarium societies, the downsizing of fishrooms, and the overtaking of small, unique, individual aquarium shops by the big industry generalist pet supply chains.  Going into the old Beldt’s and taking it in firsthand almost made me wish that I’d rather had been in the hotel jerking off to their old advertisement in Nature magazine I had seen years before.  Concrete bins that burdened with platies and swordtails and goldfish by the thousands at one time now held puddles of water and collected grime and gravel.  Cracked grey walls and years-old algae stains like some sort of aged, sundried tattoo on the cement.  Some tanks showed promise but then embarrasement upon closer inspection:  Gymnogeophagus balzanii with gill cover issues;  assorted mixed african cichlids; occasional large red devils that looked like they had been there for the long haul.  A back warehouse proved home to some water with duckweed in it and other plants that were dying or dead.  Some old bird cages and lizard pens: empty, old, animals long gone dead or shipped out.  Disappointed, I went into the mall store trying to keep spirits up and found something slightly less nice than any other typical mall store.  Shelves dusty and moderately stocked.  Not much variety in brands.  Money seemed pinched.  Tanks were mislabeled.  No special potion here.

I stood outside for awhile, mostly bored.  The busses at the end of the lot began moving, jostling around so that they would be pointed out to the street once they got underway.  I went to the busses, where people were standing around and it became known that the first bus that was full would end up going back to the hotel first.  All order fell out of place and instead of keeping to their original busses, people were trying to fill them one by one.  I chose the first one, and got on wearing the latest Club Snail t-shirt, the one with "Stroke My Mbuna" on the back.  The bus headed out to the Interstate that would take us back to the airport freeway, which, of course, would take us back to the Renaissance.  I looked around at all the passengers:  I recognized none of them.  This bus must have been the local crowd, the crowd that drove to the convention instead of flying in.  The crowd was all-white and pretty staunch.  Two guys ahead of me started talking about their angelfish hatcheries and then about White Castle burgers.  And then they started into the wholesome hobby thing, there were some definite bad vibes coming out then, I knew what bus I was on -- this was the Bible Belt bus!  No hedons here, just plain whitebread Christian fundamentalist trash and their families.  The moral obesity all around, and here I was sitting there in the middle with my ejaculating auratus shirt on.  I liked the shirt and I liked myself but I was greatly outnumbered.  I added little bits of wisdom I could about the conversation, but mostly I was sitting upright and nervous, hoping no one would recognize me and lash out.  We got back to the hotel and I was the first one out and went right to my room and changed my clothes.

Eric got back to the room some time later, not unglued all up over the fact I left him without telling him I was going to part ways.  Damn depressing sight Beldt’s was, we agreed.  I had showered and was resting, watching the television.  Eric wanted to do the same but also was working together a crew to go get out of the hotel again and find some place to eat.  I was all game for that:  getting out of the fish circle and into some strange area meant that we could escape the bounds of the convention and let loose.  I our white trash crew was Rusty, Keith, Garland, Jeremy, and some others -- all southeastern U.S. white males.  I could not recall the rest’s names when asked, but they all seemed to know who I was:  the first that goes out the window when I get fucked up is the ability to remember anyone’s names.  Jeremy’s fiance was there, the only female of the group, and then there was Eric and I, about ten total.  The whole crew loaded up in Rusty’s minivan and headed out, in the direction of downtown.

If we weren’t already a little bit drunk and loose we were all definitely very loose.  I was cracking farts and fart jokes all along, the van without the back seat and a lot of us sitting on the floor.  The general air was carefree.  We took an exit somewhere where we thought the St. Louis suburbs might be, a treed-over neighborhood and headed south until we found some restaurant with a huge parking lot.  The lot was nearly full with nice cars, Lexuses and Infinitis and a few Cadillacs and such thrown in for good measure.  We had ourselves a real class joint.  The sign read "Michon’s" and we all right away pronounced this as "mitch-ens."  There was a plus to the seemed popularity among the locals:  there were neon beer signs in the windows as we all noticed as we piled out of the van and walked towards the door.  I was at the front of the pack and Eric was at the back, when Eric piped up and said "Michon’s -- That’s not pronounced ‘mitch-ens’ but ‘meesh-awns.’ I bet this place is a black place."

I was the first one in the door and the place was very typical homestyle cuisine, and at the end of the hall there stood the head waiter, who was black.  He smiled politely and the smile widened bigger and bigger as the whole crew of us came right in through the door.  Then it hit us:  we were the only white people in the whole restaurant.  The staff, the cooks, the band, the clientele -- were all black.  We couldn’t just walk out, some of us wanted too.  By the items I the menu it was obvious that the found was southern and genuine.  We had a table while the southerners followed en route, nervous and trembling and silent.  So we got in and Eric and I sat behind the table, with our backs against the wall and facing out into the room:  the rest all cluttered outside so they could view the walls and our faces.  One guy really began to sweat.  They were in the wrong place and they, though they never wanted to admit it, ever, were extremely uncomfortable amongst all the Negroes.  Just be PC and smile and be polite and watch what you say.  One might call this karma coming, and they were in for some sort of big, big lesson.

The menus popped up and we were served quickly.  Pitchers of beer came up with appetizers:  hush puppies, cornmeal-fried catfish strips, and bologna, the latter being a hamlike meat in a thick, sweet red sauce.  The food was getting bit into by our clan and we were in for a real treat.  The food came in tasty, large portions.  We soon got whole cooked chickens, shrimps, and more of the popular bologna.  It turned into some sort of Viking fest, the food being engulfed by our hungry mouths and being washed down with gulpfuls of icy cold beer.  The meats were hot and flavorful:  the mustard greens steamed with butter with chunks of pork.  There was no end to this feast: most of us forgetting where we were and wiping our faces with paper napkins and licking our fingers clean.  Though there were still a few of us that sweated not because we were hot but because we were far, far out of their control.  Maybe some sort of guilt, something having to do with our enslavement of most darker-skinned individuals’ ancestors and the continuing prejudices still floating around today.

We ate and ate and ate and got out, paid the bill and went out to the van.  We went out to the parking lot in one large group and one small group.  Rusty was coming up from behind in the smaller group.  The smaller group got caught up behind us, for reasons unknown to us.  We thought we had a real steal on the meal and then Rusty hit us with what he had been hit with once he tried to leave the restaurant.  "Hey, those white guys tryin’ to leave without paying da bill!"  They put our tab on two tickets and only served us one when we tried to pay up and leave.  We, being humbled whiteys stuttered lots and gave out more money.  But the real case was that it was a simple misunderstanding.  Them waitresses fucked up royally, not understanding us real white folk and who was the boss here.  We coulda hung them niggers out to dry, them lazy spearchuckers.  But now the law allows them highly rythmic individuals to own them there own businesses, and now we whiteys gonna take the heat.

Rusty’s will and no-pay on bill.  We gave Rusty the money and we felt guilt.  Some said they were gonna go back later and get food as they felt sorry for themselves.

The vendor’s room was there again, as it was every year, but I only went in there this time to chat with a few folks like Mike Schadle and try to get closer to Ella again, seeing if what was supposed to come out Friday night would instead be saved for Saturday.  I clung onto Ella, like the one-timer getting stood up and calling back endlessly, seeing if I could get luckier in parting those labia a second time through.  There was a group of students in there from a local high school.  The students pitched in some of their dollars to buy a supply of oxygen tablets, so that fishkeepers at the convention could keep their fish in their holding containers alive for the duration of the show.  The group was then going to use the money start up a high school aquarium society.  It was really special to see them organize themselves in this manner.  For me, I know I would have jumped at the chance to be a member of such a group when I was in school.  Seeing that within hours after the depressing Beldt’s letdown left with some small glimmer of hope, a satisfaction that the hobby might not completely disappear but remain small and obscure.  Images of dancing, spawning rasboras getting flushed down the toilet or thrown out or donated to Goodwill with the soiled copy of Innes’ Exotic Fishes.

I also met up with Ella Soares again, who looked okay but kind of worn down.  Apparently he got into the hospitality room after I left for the night on Thursday and had his way with it.  Learning Dave had been there made me think hard about what sort of encore I would carry out this night.

Getting drunk and wild.

A few years ago in Austin, Marc Whittle showed me how to take out my belt and fold it over once end-to-end, into a tight strop.  Then, you snap it hard by pushing to the two ends together and drawing it tight, taught, and hard, so that the loud crack can be heard from round the room.  I recalled and distributed that practice over and over Saturday night, something which I knew  pleased Caroline Estes to some degree, but also disrupted the crowd easily with the lashing of leather against leather.

Eventually this collapsed into plain old butt lashing.  I let a couple of licks out in the general direction of Caroline and also Kevin Plazak, then I offered to let people take their turn on my ass.  First to step up to the plate was none other and Ad, who could, no doubt, sense the opportunity at hand.  With the belt sashaying about in his clenching, swinging fist and his cup of keg Budweiser in the other, Ad let me have it with all of his might.  He whipped me good and hard, and it sure stung good.  All throughout, my jeans slid lower and lower and I was showing some serious crack.  Ad then relinquished the belt over to Joe "the Sprinkler" Sprinkle.  Joe was very excited at this opportunity:  you could see the bulge in eyes as well as his pants.  He had been following little Ella around all weekend puppy dog-like, and now, with Ella nearby, he wanted to show her how it was done.  He took both ends of the belt in one hand, and, drawing it back, he whipped the belt backhanded like a tennis player’s backhand, shooting the leather at my fat buttocks.  His swats really stung.  Once I turned back amidst all the fake phony howls and looked Joe right in the eye from my prone, hands on my knees position.  His stare was cold and knowing, his cheeks and forehead red and sweaty, his smile thin and fixed.  I thought he was either going to turn on Ella right then and there or take me from behind.  I flinched and had enough.  I tried to take the belt from him.  I had to fight to get it back.  My only defense to get it out of his hands was to, as I had done all weekend, try to convince him I was queer.  I expressed this gayness by attempting to get some roundeye of Kevin Plazak through my pants, something he certainly did not appreciate and limped away shocked and embarrassed, as I had grabbed him by roping my hands across his belly and drawing his ass towards my crotch, bumping it for several seconds.  This ploy worked and I got my belt back.  Apparently the Sprinkler liked virgins instead.

Looking up dresses, a cheap trick:  pretending to fall down the floor.  A laugh getter.  Damn show-off.

I went over to the keg and tried to pour another cup of beer but was having a great deal of trouble keeping the beer in the cop and not spilling it down the front of my shirt and onto the carpet.  I was having a real time of it, my cheeks still trembling and tingling and the cup getting too full and spilling over, me trying to save the precious liquid from waste by sucking at the edge of the cup and licking the spillage from the sides of the plastic and my hand.  When I finally did manage to pour a cup, I would empty it down my throat within a minute and go through the process again.  The ice beneath the Bud keg was melting into a sickening swill of spilt beer and booze, with little cigarette butts floating in it.  With every pour, the lightening keg sloshed around in its ilk, splashing the putrid bucket brine out onto the floor with small waves and an occasional spent cigarette.

There were still about thirty or so still in the room as I zigzagged my way back down the halls, using the walls to hold my body and one arm to hold up pants.  It was there, right there in the hall that I found Ron Georgeone, talking to the pretty, busty girl who was on the tour the day before.  Swaggering and spitting, I gave one last whip of the belt in their direction, like some sort of final blessing to his cause.  That was it.  I remember heading toward the elevators in the lobby, not wanting to attract too much more attention.

I pushed the button to go up and waited for what seemed like an eternity, almost passing out in an upright position but needing to piss again.  Elevators always seem to take twice as long getting to you when you have to go pee.

Saturday

It was weird -- the whole thing -- the whole trip was weird, the whole goddamned, motherfucking ACA convention scene.  It is some ways like Mardi Gras for the aquarists -- the late summer annual purging of evil spirits before the fall harvest, when the weather goes to shit and the kids return to school and you have to get the snow tires put on the car and then, before you know it, its Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Then, after that, the new year begins and work really is hell, and the hostilities being to pile up.  The koi pond freezes over as do the pipes and no matter how many water changes you do the tanks go to hell, even when you are trapped inside in the thick of it.  The Tropheus bloat up and die, and the discus eat their eggs -- again!  We look forward once more to release ourselves, three of four days to lose our inhibitions and go our of our fucking minds.  Some line up after Ad’s talk to get his signature on his books:  on the other hand, I get his signature on my mighty ass with a thick leather belt.  One group bullshits about angelfish on the bus, strangers from St. Paul meeting strangers from Des Moines, Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class America meeting to practice their social skills and brag about their kids.  The flip flop happens when Caroline ties Jon Van Asch’s hands behind his back and stuffs an inflatable sheep into his zipper, asking others to contribute money to the Guy Jordan Endowment Fund by stuffing cash in the sheep’s latex orifice.  More than just a Saturday night out at the movies.

From this we can clearly see that there are two breeds, or maybe two sides of an aquarist at the convention.  One side is serious, wearing a mask, while the other is all out energy, flowing, thinking, spontaneous, outrageous.  One is our looking at new fish with great envy and buying new tanks and setting up airlines and electrical cords and shit, the other side is the soul that laughs at the dried up potato chip behind the tank that was once the price fish that they sought.  One side is the spirit that wants to win awards, visit seminars, and look for rare fish at auctions, through price lists, or even in the wild.  The other half is the reason that we’re all in it together, and why we all gravitate together and socialize and form clubs and groups and all go out after the meeting to eat pizza and drink beer and chat till the bars close.  It is this second part that makes us go set up hospitality rooms, to condition ourselves for socialization between new people, and, eventually, new members of the aquaristic pod.  It is from this that all the beer flows and all the weirdness spurts forth.  The recognition that goes beyond the imprisonment of small, helpless lifeforms in glass prisons all around the world.  It is the way in which aquarists structure their instincts: socialize, share, express, experience.  Calling it recreation is too much a starched and empty connotation:  this is not recreating anything, this is the very existence of living.  Without this, we are lost.  Without this, we are just being pushed around by our bosses, our banks, our governing bodies, and our fraudulent religious beliefs, as it happens entirely to many others -- most others -- during the other 361 days of the year.

Originally, the birth of Christ was commemorated in the summer, July 25th to be exact.  But, to coincide with the pagan’s holiday of commemorating the actual new year, the winter solstice, and hence, to celebrate the end of the year and starting soon of a new harvest, Christmas got moved to winter.  This is, of course, basic knowledge and nothing new to most educated folk.  So, Christmas and family and buying shit happens in the winter.  The Nationals, as Caroline calls it, or as the American Cichlid Association Annual Convention, as many commoners call it, is the fish pagans’ Christmas -- the celebration of the longest days of the year, when the fishroom year ends and a new one begins, when summer nears its end the weather goes to pot and fish people come back indoors and fill their tanks with fresh, clean water again.  The fishkeepers inoculate their tanks with the good, aged water and get them going.  The fall leads into fine fish-shipping weather as the polystyrene boxes don’t overheat as the fishes are shipped.  As the trees go dormant and drop their reddened leaves the tanks sprout new life the fish people stop mowing their lawns and start hatching out the baby brine shrimp.  A new litter is born inside as the winter sets in with its chill.  It’s that, that weirdness alone which causes one to really wonder about fish people, who seem to live in some sort of backwards existence from the norm.  Especially with the pagan rite of the hospitality room at the major fish shows.  Drinking, imbibing, intaking, floor-kissing, dancing, it’s not just a bunch trite angelfish breeders sitting around drinking wine.  It’s the reality pursued actively by most of the fishy crowd, their heads stuck so far into their tanks that they know and really don’t care about knowing little else.

What’s really weird is that I can say all this shit but the terrible, burnt irony of it is that here I was, slogging around in the piss and turds with the rest of them.  Like last year, I even stowed condoms away in my medical kit, though it was the intent that this year I was simply prepared for anything: last year I wanted simply to fuck.  And, like all the other fishkeepers, I brought my favorite fish club T-shirts, as some sort of flag of pride t wear across my flabby gut.  In Chicago, I made attempts to break from the crowd by wearing a standard, single-color pocket tee and jeans.  Now, in St. Louis, I was fish geek all the way and and eating it out, too.

I even went to a few seminars, and was glad to.  This time I only went to the ones I wanted to.  Before, in the past two conventions, I went to all of the seminars, thinking I would have missed something that I didn’t want to.  This time, I could care less.  I saw Don Conkel do his talk and Rusty Wessel do his talk.  I stormed into Wayne Leibel’s talk -- a great talk, though I have done and seen it recently before -- because I was looking for Eric H. and I also came in at the end of Ad’s talk just so I could play with Caroline’s hair.  Shamelessly said, I didn’t bring the condoms for Caroline, nor did I end up thinking I was going to get the chance to use them on her once I got there.  I was just drunk and high and wanted something to do, and that something to do seemed like a good thing when it came to Caroline’s now-lengthened hair.  I tried to braid it but I was too bombed and my attention span was too short to carry it beyond a couple a twists.  And then, Caroline would come back with her hand from time to time, raking her fingers between her dark strands and straighten the mess all out, like an eraser taken to a chalk board.  I would then wait a second or two and then start all over again.  Ad’s talk was going on and on, and he was a great speaker, the whole crowd titillated with orgasmic envy.  All of those great fish, all of those great words, on and on.  And Caroline kept straightening her brunette locks.  I looked at someone’s watch.  Beer.  I was thirsty.  Beer.  it was time to get some beer.  Caroline looked onwards, looking at all those fish slides.  I was stiff and rubberlike.  I moved on.

The banquet.

Ella couldn’t sit next to Dennis, though Peta suggested otherwise, him looking like her boyfriend from years back.  Ella taking charge again, her reddened eyes adorning thick contact lenses.  Everyone dressing up for the big thing, some sort of masquerade ball where fish nerds try to dress up fancy and look like what they think normal people should like when they dress up for their best.  Guys who graduated high school in the early 80s wearing skinny ties and dark blazers with jeans.  Old retired folk from the country wearing pressed wool Pendleton shirts and thick trousers and loafers.  Even I donned Dockers and clean shoes.

Not all the fish were on slides.  In those instance where there were no slides of the class winners, pictures of a flower arrangement were offered instead.

So finally, after the big, long, boorish line of awards and award-winners was read off to the crowd, Charley Grimes took the stage and microphone in some attempt to commandeer the audience into his lap.  The thing was, however, when the audience climbed up there all they found was a shriveled-up, smegma-encrusted weenie.  Instead of the usual outlandish barrage of humor-blackened shit streams aimed at the aquarium hobby, Charley burned his air by (1) proudly insulting the various members of the ACA and (2) assaulting the audience with a stream or rude jokes aimed at the Mexicans, the Swedes, the Italians, the Irish, and the physically-challenged.  The jokes were awful and flatly unoriginal to those who are on e-mail lists where such things were the typical shit one reads.  Rusty and Keith down in Mexico, trying to introduce bungee jumping as a sport, Keith getting beaten by a baseball bat, the spics think he is a pinata.  A guy in a wheelchair out in the desert finding the fountain of youth, goes in the water and comes out, "Look! New tires!"  Some long-drawn out affair about an Italian and his son, telling to get a gun to shoot or some stupid thing.  Just more sElla, something else to knock down the time.  

Could it have been some inane attempt to break out of the politically correct mould, to officially declare risk and risqué-free PC passé?  Maybe so, but the hearty guffaws brought on by the audience proved otherwise.  The cichlidists actually liked this shit!  An old, gray-haired smiling fat white guy bellowing racist pundits through a hotel microphone and podium.  High art on gallery First Thursdays in the avant gardé circles out west, but here in this steamy southern plains hotel the jokes were taken point-blank.  Those who laughed laughed hard, those who didn’t laugh sat there in hard shock.  The cultural line between the clusters of knowers and seeners and the drones of low-brow Linkhorns could not have been more visible even if it were crudely etched upon the ballroom carpet with a thick, black felt tip Magic Marker.

The only casually interesting thing about the whole banquet was a big, fat pile of cheap, cheesy medals given to Ron Georgeone, a guy who shoots all of his free time to hell by taking his cichlids to ACA-sanctioned fish shows.  This guy spends much time raising and grooming each specimen to the peak of their fitness, like some fine art, a Zen master.  Each medal was placed around his neck in steady order, the total number not once mentioned and the monotonous sequence barely listened to.  I met Ron in the elevator on the way down to auction the next morning.  He obviously remembered me from the Friday night.  "It’s you, the guy with the belt, whipping it around like a cowboy!"  A cowboy?  I then remembered the mayhem from that night after the banquet, in and out of the hospitality room, spilling out into the hall and the lobby.  Just like Ella Soares when he was escorted back to his room by the security room, I had that night to me as well.

It all fell apart after that.  The best night of the weekend.  Lost track and forgot to take notes.

Eric’s shirt:  a kindler gentler TP editor/bite me.  I said that Dave Herlong should get a shirt like that, but he was in the audience and I was embarrased because I am sure he doesn’t ever hear the end of it from us.  It’s one thing to be hated by lots, but it’s another thing to be hated by nearly everyone.

Chuck Rambo’s talk.  Much better than the other Chuck or Charles or Charlie or Charley.  Rambo kicked ass without slamming around the audience’s heritage.  Great blackmail photos.  Everyone agreed, the other banquet speaker’s shit sucked eggs.

Duct tape to BITCH, BITCH trying to take over our instigated events and claim them as their own.  The big bitch claims.  I can’t remember whom but they duct taped someone other than John Van Asch all up.  I was going to give it out but chickened out.  Eric gave it to the BITCHes for me.

Caroline’s worm dress.  This was some bustier or camisole with fishing worms hanging and dangling off of the bra line.

Holding the hospitality room hostage until all the cichlids are set free.  Wigs and bananas and bandanas.  Eric and I stormed in there at some point in the night, we killed the lights.  We were wearing wigs on our heads, dark glasses and bandanas.  We brought on the lights and started screaming over and over.  "NOBODY CAN GO UNTIL ALL THE CICHLIDS ARE SET FREE!"  This was a blur as I was really out of my head.  I don’t remember much.

The sheep.

Dietrich shouting out the raffle winners.  Club Snail gave out the sheep, a William Shatner CD, and some art by Liz Brodle.  Caroline did all sorts of obnoxious things with that sheep.  She wanted to raise money for the Guy Jordan Enjoyment Fund for the ACA, so she got out the sheep and stuck its hind feet into John Van Asch’s pants and gave the wig I wore to John to wear on his head so we could market him as Pat Tosie.  Then they duct-taped his arms behind his back.  Shove the money into ersatz Pat’s crotch and it goes to GJEF.

It was a snap decision by Roland and the support of Layn Leudtke plus room chief Jim Yaekel that had us get another keg before the hospitality room opening that night, and we got it just before the room opened, some six hours earlier.  Now it was clear that this last, eighth 15.5 gallon beer barrel would be gone and done with by the time the room shut down for the night.  I decided I would not be there to see it.  I had spent my grandeur and now was finding extreme difficulty in standing upright in front of the stall long enough to hold my dick and go pee out of it.  Add to all the beer and the pills was a pint of Cactus Juice I picked up at the liquor store.  I was finished.  Barely conscious at that.  It was 2:30 a.m.

Sunday

The only getting out from the auction chicanery insanity was a trip back to the Waffle House for grits.  Norm and I went, we also took someone else.  Waffle house with lil’ Ella.  I get the grits covered n’ chunked (covered with cheese shreds and chunked ham), and a trip to some hole in the wall brewpub named Biddy’s with my friend James Maney, from Rochester, Washington.

James is the one odd man out that resembles the one that is alone like many of us. Like the antithesis of Paul Loiselle except for alone part.  Driving around in the hot St. Louis streets, James big and recently clean-shaven but with thick glasses and a long ponytail.  We went plugging around the streets in the Dodge Vista we somehow managed to swindle from John, who was left back at the auction up to his armpits in pure, typical auction bullshit, wearing the wig on occasion just for the fact of funsies.  James and I managed to find some weird bar with a Guinness sign out front, and figured it would be a good shot.  What we found inside had to be St. Louis’ one and only Irish brewpub.  Taps pouring hard ciders and ale.  Green shirts.  Irish flags and photos of the Sinn Fein.  Somehow, a true oasis smack dab in the middle of fucking Budsville.

We take this big wooden bench and James goes to sit down I get up and go take a leak and then go stand in line for the drinks.  Kept looking back at him, he was there sitting next to some shiny guy with shorts, a baseball cap, and a mock Irish accent.  Little did I know that the baseball cap guy was trying to get the server, some cute little redhead bitch, to pinch my butt cheek for a single specimen of the fine American green.  She didn’t take.  After about a ten-minute wait for the drinks I went to the bench and sat down, palming two glass pints of the deep black and dark Guinness, one for me and the other for James.  The shiny guy claimed he didn’t drink alcohol, which was, for me, more shit than I cared to listen to.  The guy was queer, no doubt.  I mean, I don’t mind fags hitting on me, I just don’t want to think about fags cumming in my ass or on me or shit.  This fag was gum on the bottom of shoe.  He just stuck his drunken soul to us and wouldn’t let go.

It was about this time James and I thought about some nice Goodeidae.  Though it was a bit far from the Cichlidae we were there to partake, the time was right for the discussion:  the pub, barring the homo, was starting to grow on us.  We talked of our two favorites, the Xenotoca and the Xenoophorus.  We even had some of the later on us, some pretty nice fish with good scaleage.  There was no shame in lighting up a cigarette and passing it back in forth.  The air started to melt and I began to fly.  I saw the change as my mouth went dry.  Mmmm, some fine goodeids indeed.

This queer seemed to think that James was my father.  He spilt some of his clear drink from his pint glass, this liquid being faintly beige-like, like light pee.  I caught a few drops of the spilt liquid with my fingers as the liquid was on its way down to the floor and sniffed at it.  The hard shit.  Pure, bitter, strong apple cider.  This fag was really putting it away, too.  Out of control.

A band was starting up, us thinking that some Irish ballads or other such noise would cloud the air around us, drowning even the chorus of belches, burps, farts, and guffaws from the shiny cider guy, who was now beginning to prod us as to whom we were and more and more.  "Whatcha like in your type, aye?"  The lead to the band got up and went up to check the microphone, him sitting beforehand no doubt putting away the ale and playing with himself.  "Testing, one, two...," then he began to grunt and howl.  "Heh!  Hehh...hehh...hehh."  There was no musical accompaniment to this blather.  The rest of the band was either still unpacking, snorting brews, or playing with themselves.  Obviously unsatisfied with the acoustics in there or with his checking or some other crap the singer began to hiss and spit into the microphone.  Really annoying.  "Sphh!  Sphht!  Sphht!  Sphbat!"  The sound spurting out of the singers pursed, spittle-glazed lips into the microphone, and then rupturing out through the speakers, was unbearable.  Strangled ejaculations, squeaks, and crackling mayhem.  Horrible.  Play your goddamned tool, assholes!  Every time the speaker spat James squinted up like a shrunken head.  Show me, asshole, or shut up!  We were drinking faster -- hoping to get the fuck out of there -- as the spurting shouts and slugged squirts built in volume and momentum.  

"Let’s face it, the acoustics in here sure suck, but let’s stay anyway..."  Never cared, or didn’t care while we were there, at least. There was this one lass.  Looking across the bar, she was pretty.  Looking at her, older but with red and more hair than I.  Supple cheeks and a dark black coat.  On the ax, I sure thought, but that was not the case.  She beckoned.  I followed her into the corner of the bar.  About five foot five and thick, meaty gal.  I picked her up, and without her words, picked her up and placed my mouth into her legs, touching, pulling, ripping.  I pulled the coat back and let go with my tongue.  Rasping, radula-like, scraping off and peeling.  The force was so great, little gasps of air sounding out from the redhead’s lips.

Get up and go now.  I followed James out of the bar.  A hard lump in my pants.

We were there, at least.  Got to go on back on to the hotel, there’s a party brewing there.  "Check, Check!"  "Phhppt!  Phppt!"  Our ears were at no mercy.  We were be glad to be out of that mess.

On the way back to the hotel we picked up Joe Mann and his girlfriend.  It was raining slightly:  the air was warm still but the sky overcast.  The two seemed all smiles.  I remembered Joe from the Chicago convention.  That time he was a frequent hanger-on, showing up at our door to talk fish and share beers.  His girlfriend I remembered from Chicago, too.  She and him smiled lots, he was from Idaho and he worked for some factory out there in the desert.  One of those people you always see, good folk.

When we got back we split up and drifted out through the crowd.

There was a small commotion outside the auction room.  Steve and crew set up a Club Snail booth out there, selling shirts and other wares.  Some kids hired by their fathers sat next to him, selling carved rainbow rock for people to put in their aquariums.  One kid, a son of one of the hardcore Christian angelfish breeders I met on the bus Friday, went over to the Snail booth, and took a chair.  He said "I need to borrow this!" and walked off with it.  Then he stood on it the whole time.

I went back and stole the chair back from the little nerd.  He just looked at me.  The father said something and I ignored it.  Do unto others as they screw onto you.

Dinner out.  Getting to sit next to the John Wayne girl.  She had the English accent but swung her hips and buttocks wide and swaggered around.

New section on Caroline’s worm dress and sheep.  My sheep has worms.  Her sheep.  The sheep.

Monday

Dave Kamooks finally sought me out and had his way with me, that little piece of shit.  Wanted to form a committee where they would preview each article coming into the club newsletter and edit it for content.  And then he talked about he would have member in the society write down what property they had and their possesssion and sign their names to it, making them legally responsibly for it.  The little bastard was just too fucked up, just like the Nazis.

Insert on Lee Finley’s / Ella Ball’s good-bye...kind of touching.  And sad.  Be back next year?  Maybe...maybe.  Too tough of year will tell.  Shit, $600 to fucking Detroit.  And Cleveland Hotels are going to be $100 per night the year after that...the rumors fan out across the hobby.

Life as usual.  Getting home I check my e-mail, resubscribing to my porn Usenet lists.  Too burned out, I make the decision to bow out of running the Club Snail chat channel that night.  I send out the following missive:

<<INSERT HERE when finished with the article.

Response was swift and painful.  (???)

Jaba the Butt called me up on the phone, said he didn’t want any more of the faggy shit I flung upon him.  Fuck that slimeball.

More bad turds bobbing in the foul waters.  Like a spent Q-Tip, so are the days of my mundane.  Guess I can’t have fun when I don’t warn humans first.  The fools take pride in their complaints, sputtering anuses spewing dark dung dust.  Meanwhile, I just yearn to go oshiko lots.  I opened the fridge and open a Rainier pounder.  Damn, it’s too hot in here.  I take off all my clothes, hot and sweaty, scanning the responses on v-mail and e-mail.  "May the Lord have mercy on you swine!," as Duke said, while I pop another pseudaphedrine and wash it down with a big swig of beer.