THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
a story by E. Hemingway of Polyps
Editor’s Note: From the year 1940 up until the time of his death and a few years after that, the American author E. Hemingway resided in a Cuban estate which he called Finca Vigía (which translates into the English as Finca Vigìa, with that little slash over the I leaning the other way). E. shared this manigua-thicket covered palace with thousands of cats, each of whom had only three toes, and along with many wives, who had generally managed to hang onto all ten of theirs.
What most literary scholars and researchers fail to recognize is that E. also spent a summer in the small precancerous village of Polyps, Vermont, where he wrote an earlier and much more meaningful draft of one of his greatest stories.
He was an old man who fished in the waters they called Joe’s Pond and he had gone forty-seven years without getting a halfway decent entry in the Molson Fishing Derby.
"He is unlucky," the others said of him. They used the terrible woodchuck word for unlucky. Snake-bit/horse-shit.
"No, this is not true," the boy said. For the boy was loyal to him. "It is not that he is snake-bit/horse-shit, it is because he does not use the bait. He is an old one, one who has old ways. Last week I saw him cutting up some used Bag Balm tubes to place upon the hook."
"Yes," the others agreed, "and we have also seen him using globs of Ben and Jerry's on the hook. He said it is the food for the Big One. Yet the ice cream was weakened, and it melted much, and caused stains upon the water."
"So you see," the boy said, "it is not a question of bad luck, it is simply that he is such a frolicking asshole."
"Well, to be born an asshole is to be unlucky, is it not?" they asked. And the boy was silent. Later he thought, “Perhaps the old man is just snake-bit/horse-shit after all.”
Everything about the man was old, except for his eyes. He awoke with the sun, thanking God for his ocular transplant surgery. He used the eyes of a twenty-year-old to look around his shack. The walls were made of royal palms they called guano, but the boy had told him, “You know that guano is just bat shit, right?”
The flour sack that was his sail was folded neatly on a shelf. Perhaps, he thought, he should use a bigger sail, that might help.
On the wall was a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe. And of the great DiMaggio.
The two were pictured in the back of a taxi cab, sharing their lust. It was obviously Photo-Shopped by the sex shop in Nogales where he had picked it up for a buck. The old man could not afford the hologram version in which the figures actually moved.
As he walked down to the ocean and to his boat, the boy called to him, “You know, you old snake-bit piece of horse shit, you may never again catch a fish. Canned sardines don’t count. Nor do polliwogs.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” the old man answered him, “for I have many tricks. Here, reach into my pocket.”
“Oh no,” the boy said. “You’ve used that trick before. There is no pocket.”
It was the third day of the Fishing Derby. The old man could sense the Big One, two hundred feet beneath the sea, licking at the Ben and Jerry’s on his hook. “I wish I had left on some of the cone,” he said aloud.
The Big One took the hook, and as it pulled the old man out beyond the inner bay, out past the island they called Mud, he remembered the years that had passed, and what had happened.
He remembered the lions on the beach, up by his camp in West Milton. They had taken much of the garbage from him, and from the can which had held it. He had loved the lions, for they made him feel young, until his wife pointed out that it wasn’t lions stealing the garbage, only raccoons that sort of looked like lions in the dusk. After much beer.
Later he had taken beer again and told this tale to his table mates at Vinny's Hot Spot, how the raccoons had fooled him by looking like the lions.
And each of those at the table had said to him as one, "Not to me they don't. You are such a frolicking asshole."
He said to them, “Perhaps I am just snake-bit/horse-shit, did that ever occur to you? Did the great DiMaggio get a hit today?”
“Dead a long time,” they snickered.
There were other things that he could not remember so clearly. Had he run with the bulls at Pamplona, or simply gotten involved in a fracas with some Holsteins and hoochi-coochi girls at the beer tent at the Tunbridge World's Fair? Perhaps they were the same. Perhaps it had not happened at all. And yet, there before him was the lawyer's bill, stuffed in the front pocket of his bib overalls. Right next to the bail bond receipt and the court date summons.
The Big Fish continued to tug the boat to the east.
"I will take you, Big One, you will be mine," he said to the fish, "and then I shall be able to rest. Then it will be time for the retirement community."
There he knew that he could still be a man, because they offered to him twenty-four-hour nurse supervision, and ESPN. But would there be those who would get down and wrestle with him on the rug in such a place? And could he bring along his pontoon boots and his “Rocking Throbulators” tapes? These things he did not know for certain.
On the fourth day, the sea was a powerful woman. She did not forgive, she did not forget, she brought troubles to man. Sort of like Roseanne Barr.
The Portuguese Man of War floating on the surface of the waves was a cruel mistress. One contact would leave the skin with purple welts and painful sores. Sort of like Roseanne Barr.
The Big One towed him to the east for ten more days. “I bet the junk mail and catalogues are piling up,” he said aloud.
On the fifteen day, he ate a tuna fish sandwich that he had packed. It had mayo, which he knew should never be eaten in any month that contained the letter R, but it smelled okay. “Never again will I go out fishing without Fritos,” he said aloud.
His left hand began to cramp into a claw, like an eagle. It became a useless, humiliating whore. Then his right hand did also. Both hands were useless now. He undid his trousers anyway, and he wished that the boy was with him.
At dusk of the sixteenth day, he looked back at the harbor lights. He was at least fifty yards from shore.
The big fish jumped and came out of the water endlessly. Its eyes were the size of home plate, its sword the length of three baseball bats. Its tail was like the right field foul pole, and it had fins like the tarpaulin they used to cover the infield when it rained.
“I’m going to need a bigger boat,” he said aloud.
He remembered arm-wrestling in Havana with the giant Negro who only had one hand. The match went on for many days, and there was much betting. The old man cried out, “No fair! No fair!” when the Negro began twisting his hook into the old man’s palm. “That hurts!”
Finally the Big One was taken, and so he lashed the fish to the side of his skiff, for he did not like its smell.
"Now it is you and me, Fish," he said. But he used the old word for the fish, the good word. He called it "Phish.” With a P H. No F.
“We are brothers, you and I,” he said to the Phish.
“Half-brothers,” thought the Phish. “My mother was a sturgeon, our father was a pervert.”
"Now, Phish, it is you and me against the dreaded lamprey eel," he said. "For I must not let them destroy you, as they have destroyed many others. These devils will latch onto you. Then they will suck at you harder than Paris Hilton in a homemade porno video." He smiled and reached for his can of “Eel-A-Way.”
The sharks came. They were blue and silver, smooth and handsome, with noses like shovels, and lips like strawberry wine. “I wish the boy was here,” he said aloud. “I could toss him over and keep the sharks busy for a while.”
He took his oar and batted at the sharks like the great DiMaggio, but finally had to take two and hit to right.
Then he had an attempted bunt and a strike-out looking. It was humiliating.
Back on shore, there was nothing left of the Great Phish but the thin pole of its spine. No wait, that was the boat’s mast. He guessed the raccoons must had taken the skeleton.
He was tired like never before.
He slept well that night.
He dreamed of lions on the beach, raccoons in the garbage, the great DiMaggio at the plate, Roseanne Barr, Paris Hilton, and for some reason, Rosie O’Donnell.
A man can be defeated, but not destroyed. So the next morning, in a shocking plot twist, he got up early to head up Bernie Sanders’ political campaign.
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