You can get a Marine Band "C" at the Cracker Barrel Restaurant in Missoula, Montana for $3.00 or so, I guess now he spends $80.00 or more for one that makes you sound a whole lot better than we did when we were just starting out!
We both bought harmonica's at the pier in Embarcadero in San Francisco one night on a hoot. I could play "When the Saints Go Marching In" pretty good in about a half an hour. I still play that about as good as I did then.
He plays lead and stands up front. I play back up and sing and dance just as good as you want.
It is only right since I take the lead on enough other stuff. It is much safer for me as well. He is much more physically capable than I to fend off stuff thrown at us when we get up to play to the public for free drinks.
Besides
"A mans got to look good even when he is just showing off."
We both love sailing. There is just about nothing in the world more satisfying than getting blown along in the wind for free in the pursuit of high adventure.
When we were first coming up we both would be constantly on the look out for boats full of pretty girls with bulging bikinis and beer lockers. We would cut them off for the booty.
We both like fast cars, late night drinking, stupid stories, uncle pervy dirty jokes, Willie and Wayland, Jimmy Buffet , running "a muck" in general and the beauty, love and patience of the women we took for wives.
He is a union man left swinging democrat that hasn't read much after high school and hasn't needed to. He got good marks in school and graduated on time and got a good job right afterwards in the trades. He hasn't had to compensate for any deficiencies with a continuing higher education because he was gifted with good looks, a great personality, athletic ability, an unusually gifted hand for mechanical things, an eye for art and the ability to create it, a musical bent and good hair and health.
When he goes fishing he fishes with worms and keeps and eats every fish he catches. He sees it as the only right thing to do. If the fish are not biting he considers bringing the dozen worms less the one he used back to the store for a refund. Matter of fact he kind of thinks everybody ought to get free worms from the government cause they live in the ground that belongs to us all for Christs sake.
He does not fret over the future of the world and does not see that he has much at all to do with how things are going.
He drinks beer and lives in the moment and is damn proud to say he has personally eradicated many local streams of every fish there ever was swimming there. Any responsibility to those to follow is not of any great concern to him. He leaves that up to his effete intellectual friends who go for that sort of thing and talk about it mostly when their heads are full of learning and expensive European wine.
Me, oh well, I'm a catch and release man. When a fish shakes about and loosens himself from my barbless hook I refer to it as an "early release." Sometimes I imagine, after a brilliant cast, that sets my dry fly lightly on the surface tension of the stream that if a fish just comes to look at it, that alone, is considered, by the end of the day as "a catch."
I read Kierkegaard and King James, Burns, Dylan Thomas, Emerson and Thoreau, the Economist and the like, and watch all the Sunday morning political pundits and read volumes of history so I can look for predictable events to expect and avoid in the future and fret and stew about myriads of things. I like to dabble in all manner of heady stuff to compensate for the lack of all the God given gifts my friend enjoys.
I drink enough Chianti to really know my stuff. I labor in the belief that words mean and can accomplish things and that thinking can make a strong nation endure.
It is a well known religious belief that God does not take away any time from the sum total of your life for the time spent fishing. The truth be known the time spent fly fishing gains you credits on the overall span of your life and dry fly fishing earns you a bonus round. It is common knowledge with the literate.
Jesus was a fisher among men. He hung out with disciples who were most probably net and seine fisherman. The apostles were trawl line and rod fishermen and Jesus of course was a dry fly fisherman.
He guaranteed a strike on every cast!
The only thing I had to swallow was that it was "cat fishing" "You can use flies if you want to," he told me, "just as long as they are a pretty good size like at least two to three inches long" and if I didn't mind them "getting chewed up a quite a bit." He knew they were time consuming to tie or expensive to buy.
Well, I was in the pick up in about a second with my wife and my fly pole strapped in at my side to call bullshit on that little guarantee of his as quick as humanly possible.
We arrived lickety splitly to find he had already rigged up to two Zebco closed faced reels on six and a half foot fiberglass fishing poles that he had owned since grade school. The thirty pound test line inside had never fouled and was the original line that came on the reel sold to him by the Sears and Roebuck salesman friend of his fathers. There were two colors to choose from. Anodized coated metallic red and another in green. The green one had a couple of chips knocked off of it as it had been the one used most often. The red one was for back up. Today, as usual, I would play the back up pole.
The poles were leaned up against the handrail of the fishing deck and while I felt a little put upon to use one of these inferior rigs but it was easier than going back home to get my old reel that contained old beat up line. I wasn't going to throw my expensive floating double tapered Orvis line into that tangle of bushes and bunch grass he was fishing in.
He gave me a pointer that the best place was to sidearm cast so I could tuck my fly up right under an overhanging bush. My first cast fell short and I was quickly advised the guarantee did not extend to people who could not "cast a Zebco."
My second cast was right in there where he pointed out as the place to find the cats "honey hole." Sure enough there was a flash and a blurr and a pull on my line like you would not believe. I had never felt a strike like that before!
"What was that" I hollered. My friend said it was likely the one they had named the "Himalayan." I pulled back too hard and lost the damn thing. My friend reminded me the guarantee was not to land the big cats just guaranteed to get a strike every time.
So I rared back a let another one fly right into the bush that held the beasts.
To my amazement another cat jumped clean up into the bush for a taste of my feathered bait. I suppose you got a name for that one too I taunted. Yep we call him the "Persian."
The next one was a "Tabby" then "Scrappy" and then-------------------
The Barbecue was ready and the cats had gotten tired of chasing our lines and left the lawn for scraps of Salmon thrown to them from the patio deck.
Now a word from our sponsor HOT DOG TRAVELER reminding you that no animal domestic or feral was harmed in the writing of this story.
GENERAL CHOW is still willing to sell you the food for the people and guarantees it makes damn good cat food as well.
