The Macho Fish

I’m thinking seriously about what it would be like if there were a short story called “The Macho Fish.”

It would be about a fish who has a chip on his shoulder.

He has had a hard life. He has suffered. But he only makes it worse, the way he takes it out on the people who love him, who despite his behavior look hard to see the good they know is somewhere inside the Macho Fish.

I appeared last weekend at the Kansas Book Festival in Topeka, on a panel with the great short story writer Kate McIntyre, whose book Mad Prairie came out recently.

Mad Prairie, by Kate McIntyre

The moderator was Stefanie Wortman, a great poet and fiction writer that I’m married to.

The panel was titled “Politics of the Surreal.”

We talked, in short, about what it’s like to write weird stuff, and how it can be an odd conduit for making statements about the real and yet still pretty weird world we all inhabit.

I said some things. Stefanie asked and said other things. Kate said some really good things, too, and when she was in the middle of saying some of the things—which really were excellent things; Kate is the best—a man in the front of the room, who was probably about sixty years old, and was of course white, interrupted Kate to ask me a question.

Right in the middle of the thing Kate had been saying, he started talking.

He wanted to take me to task for the passage I’d read earlier from my novel Weird Pig. He perceived it to be a veiled argument against having children. He had a problem with that.

He wasn’t wrong to perceive the passage that way—because as I explained later, at the appropriate time, the passage I’d read can come across as a veiled argument against having children, though it wasn’t at all what I intended by it. I was only pointing out how having children under capitalism puts you in a strange bind, in which you have these great children that you love so much, but you also know that by bringing them into this world you’re feeding them to a carnivorous economy that is designed to extract as much from them as possible while giving back as little as it can get away with, and which will inevitably strand them in a subdivision beside the interstate without a community to speak of but with a wide selection of television shows to watch on demand.

That’s not the important thing, however.

The important thing about our situation was the way that guy interrupted Kate—the way he, a man, addressed me, another man, as if Kate hadn’t been speaking at all. Like the things Kate had to say were white noise.

When he interrupted her like that, it made for one of the many situations I have found myself in, where I know exactly what is going on, and I know just what to do about it, but by the time my perception of the situation has caught up with the situation it’s too late to do what I know is right and I feel lost.

It made me pretty angry. I wanted to stand, point at the man with my cane (I was walking with a cane because I hurt my back; I don’t know what’s wrong with it; it’s pretty much okay, now, I think; it’s really weird), and order him out of the room.

Of course I didn’t do that, because I never act decisively.

And I don’t know what was going through that man’s sorry excuse for a head, to make him talk over Kate, but I absolutely hate the way his interruption implicated me. Whether he intended it or not, his interruption of Kate, addressed to me, implied that he and I, being men in a room populated mostly by women, were the ones whose conversation took precedence over everyone else’s.

Maybe he didn’t mean it that way. But that’s what it means.

And it doesn’t help matters that I’m terrified of men like that. White men his age are capable of anything.

I mean, I guess anyone is capable of anything in a country where you can buy guns and ammunition like they’re kitchen accessories. But whether it’s fair or not, it’s the aging white guys with empty lives and money to burn that I’m most afraid of.

It’s really depressing. It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder if the best course of action for me would be to withdraw altogether, to never make appearances, to stop trying to publish my work, and cease to be a beacon for the shittiest people around, who unfortunately have a lot in common with me. Or at least a few important things: maleness, and whiteness.

And I’m not indicting everyone who’s white and male.

Plenty of white men are fine and doing great. I’m friends with a bunch of them. I like to think I am one of them.

It’s a tricky situation.

Anyway, I didn’t wave my cane and shout. I let the man ask his rambling question, and so did the forty or so other people in the room. We deferred to him, and it wasn’t until after he was done talking that I told him I’d address his question later, but that I wanted to hear what Kate had been saying.

Part of me wishes I’d told that man off. A bigger part of me is relieved that I didn’t.

You just don’t know what people are going to do. Maybe if I’d bellowed at that man that he should be more polite he would have gone to his car and come back with a loaded shotgun.

I hate to be so bleak about it, but this is the country we live in. It’s kind of why I wrote Weird Pig in the first place.

It was a good panel. We had that one interruption, but the rest of it was good.

And then, when it was over, I traveled to my hometown in West Virginia. From there I drove with my mother to the vicinity of Pittsburgh, where at a used bookstore I found a copy of Weird Pig that was being sold for $8.99.

Weird Pig, only $8.99

If you go and look, it might still be there. But you’d better get there fast.