Man vs. Wild: Goldfish Edition

Throughout my elementary school years, my parents would sign me up for day camps at the local 4H center.  These were generally fun and sometimes even taught useful skills.  For instance I still, to this day, know how to make peanut butter from scratch; that art can be made from a hammer, a nail, and a foil pie-tin; and that a rainstick can be used to not only simulate the sound of a rainstorm, but also to bludgeon the booger-faced kid who made fun of your “gay” foil pie-tin drawing.

One day, my parents dropped me off at the 4H center to learn how to take care of pets.  They didn’t just drop me off hoping I’d figure it out, there was a program being led on the subject. 

Six hours later, when my Dad came back to pick me up, he walked into the building to see a ponytailed gentleman handing me a bewildered looking goldfish in a thin, plastic bag.  Upon seeing this, my Dad jogged up to the dude.

“Hey, hey- what is this?”

“Woah, easy man.”  The guy threw his hands in the air and took a step back.  “We’re giving them to all the kids.”

My Dad looked around to see every individual in the room below the age of ten toting around bagged goldfish in various stages of bewilderment.  Suddenly his tone shifted from suspicion to annoyance.

“Really?  A goldfish?”

“Don’t worry.  They only live like a week or so,” he reassured. 

I, of course, didn’t hear this.  I was too busy poking at my new bag o’ fish and saying sternly “look at me when I’m talking to you.”

It’s not that my Dad didn’t like fish- he was actually weirdly into them.  We had an aquarium at home that he built and stocked himself.  It had an expensive vacuum filter, aquarium rocks chemically designed to combat the formation of algae, and a model of a sunken ship submerged in the center to lend occasional shelter to the $40 dollar fish swimming around inside the tank.  He definitely liked fish.  But this goldfish, this “county fish” as he called it, was too pedestrian.

In his defense, it wasn’t a very pretty fish.  This thing looked like Steve Buscemi with flippers. 

My Dad dug out an old fishbowl from storage and we cleaned it out for little Steve.  Dad even used his fancy pH balancer on the water so that Steve could swim without… unbalanced pH I suppose.

The rest of that first day and about half way into the next, I sat by Steve’s bowl and played with him.  “Playing” isn’t really the best term for it, though.  There are really only so many games you can play with a goldfish, and after winning 35 rounds of checkers in a row, you start to wonder if it’s even trying.

Pretty soon, a week had gone by and much to my father’s dismay, Steve was still alive and still ugly.  By this time, it had been days since I had forgotten that Steve even existed.  My attention span rivaled the goldfish’s in brevity and soon Steve’s wellbeing became my father’s onus. 

Dad wasn’t too upset after the first week that Steve continued to exist.  But when week three rolled around and Steve was still doing little fishy laps in his tiny fish condoquarium, my Dad really started to get annoyed.

“That damn county fish won’t die!” my Dad growled to my mother.  They both stood in front of the fishbowl, arms crossed. 

“Well, Patrick loves it, so thank you for taking care of it,” my Mom said, giving my father a smooch on the cheek and walking out into the hall.  

               

“Maybe if I put it in the big tank with the other fish, they’ll kill that little bastard,” my Dad muttered, his mouth twisting into a grinchly smirk.

When I got back from school that day, Steve had been transplanted into the big aquarium with the rest of our fish.  I wasn’t sure why my Dad had integrated the schools, but I was happy that my goldfish was going to have more room to do his fish activities.  It took Steve a while to adjust, though, and for the first few days he continued to swim in tiny little circles in the corner of the big tank.  Steve may have been ugly and now verifiably dumb, but he was a hell of a survivor.

Shortly after introducing my goldfish to his aquarium, my Dad’s expensive fish started to die.  The first to go was the big, white and yellow angelfish that we found floating upside down, half cooked by the lamp.  Soon after that, we found one of the small neon fish that glowed in the dark bobbing on the surface of the water.  Sometimes two or three fish would die in a single day.  Not Steve though; ole’ Buscemi was still kicking.

My Dad was irate.  In his plan to off my fish, he had made a horrible miscalculation.  He had hoped that his exotic fish would see how ugly my goldfish was and put it out of its misery in a totally justifiable mercy killing.  He had not counted on the fact that my fish would be so exceedingly ugly that its mere presence would drive his flock to suicide.  Steve was clearly not aware of his effect on the other fish as he swam merrily around the tank, dodging carcasses as he went.

Pretty soon, my goldfish was the only fish left in my Dad’s tank.  He tried to introduce new fancy ones but none of them even lasted a week, which ironically is how long my “county fish” was intended to last.

A year and half later, my goldfish died, overstepping his seven day expiration date by 10400%.  I didn’t find my fish dead, I simply came home one day and he was gone.  My Dad said that he had died and that his body had been sacrificed to the mighty porcelain throne while I was at school.

I’m not convinced that Steve actually died.  Knowing Steve, he probably would have outlived us; I should have named him Methuselah.  What probably happened is that my Dad just finally snapped and flushed my fish.

I wasn’t too torn up because the only time I remembered that I even had a fish was when I was looking directly at it.

In retrospect, though, I’d like to think that Steve is still alive somewhere and that after Shawshanking his way through North Carolina’s sewer system he found his way to a beach in Mexico where people don’t care about how ugly he is.