KillerWhalePettingZoo

Cleaning metal tables with Windex was a task so humbling, I could feel my Bachelor’s degree quivering on my parent’s living room wall. I tried to lurk away from the office, so as not to be assigned to some other menial task when one of the editors informed me, “You’re going on a fishing trip with Ween in 2 hours.”

Granted I was probably the most bearded intern they could throw a yellow poncho on and pass off as some sort of glorified fisherman, but the prospects of night fishing on a boat left me woozy and scrambling for a Dramamine prescription. I hadn’t even thought about the band Ween in over 5 years and immediately images flashed through my head of some sort of Deadliest Catch “VICE Edition” where on sinking ship, greenhorn interns lacking life preservers are forced to construct their own and sleep inside the carcasses of dead tuna on a deserted coastline. I left full of justifiable apprehensions with Rob Lanham, writer/founder of Free Williamsburg. He rented a ZipCar, aka some piece of shit Toyota that was stuck in 2^nd gear for the first half an hour and hovering at 7000rpm. Why we didn’t just wake up at 4am and drive to NJ still escapes me, but we ended up at a sports bar in Long Beach Island with Dean Ween and his friend Nick, the vagabond travel writer, all poised on our forearms anxiously watching the World Series and assuming various stages of drunken shit talking/peanut-throwing.

After a few miniature hot dogs and chats with the bartender who allegedly, “Won the Mega Millions lottery twice!”(yet still pours drinks in a vacation town offseason?) we crammed into Dean’s trailer. He ran back out to his truck and told us he had outtakes from Dancing with the Stars UK edition; we looked around at each other puzzled, but he came back inside with the cult classic JAWS to get us in the mood. The DVD player broke halfway through the movie, but we got to see a bit of carnage to mentally prepare us for using “The Punisher,” his oversized hammer used to beat the living daylights out of a great white shark, or whatever we dragged flopping onto the beach.

I would have been perfectly happy to go to the rundown strip club and just claim we went fishing, but Rob was adamant that without a fish we didn’t have a story. I agreed and imagined out loud, “Think how glorious it would be to strap the catch to the roof of the ZipCar and then plop down a mutant striper in the magazine’s lobby. The entire office would huddle around a mini-Weber grill and have a bonding experience.” Nick changed the channel to the Public Access Network. It’s a 24/7 continual loop about the marine conditions and community events. Dean claimed to fall asleep to this woman every night; it’s like therapy. Her voice was tantalizing, it was robotic and borderline erotic. “Seas 3 feet from the Northeast. Winds at 5 to 10 knots, knots, knots…” Her prerecording got stuck on various words and she convinced me that the local spaghetti dinner was the highlight of any socialite’s week. After too many beers we hustled back to the decrepit motel for check-in. I started taking pictures of the exterior and the elderly owner asked, “Why’s that boy taking pictures of my property?” Rob replied, “Well sir you’ve got a beautiful hotel.” “Yea, I know. Here’s the remote. This controls the television. You press this to change the channel; you press this to change the volume. Checkout is at 11, but you’re the only ones staying’ here so you know, you know. Well, you boys have fun tonight…” Did he think we were a couple? Fucking Christ. We turned on the TV to discover of the 5 channels available, Jimmy Kimmel re-runs dominated 3.
Combined with Rob’s snoring, a questionable version of JAWS starring Jimmy Kimmel and talking tuna would haunt my subconscious for the duration of the night.

I’d tell you about the gigantic striper we caught, about not having waders and losing the feeling in my legs from the icy Atlantic, or about the shell-shocked-post-stroke-non-fishing war veteran, who informed me that there’s no such thing as El Nino; that climate change and their coastal flooding problem was a direct result of Earth’s axis shifting from a gigantic hole and change in weight distribution left behind by Middle Eastern oil extraction. But based on how large the fish grew by the time we arrived back in Brooklyn, I wouldn’t believe any of that bullshit either.