A Genuine Fish Story
Let me be clear. This article is about neither Brian Williams nor Bill O’Reilly. It will say nothing about their habit of varnishing the truth. And I will not slip in one of my own favorite sea stories even though I reserve the right since I at least served in the Navy for four years. Go ahead. Ask me my service number.
This piece is about bloody, stinking fish. I mean that metaphorically, of course. By the time the good but badly-shaven fish monger has put these souls on ice at my local Shop Rite, I can imagine being at a fine Manhattan restaurant listening to some guy I don’t know say “My name is Randy and I’m here to serve.”
When I’m tired of Facebook and groggy from looking at Netflix, I go to my favorite fish counter to shoot the shit, as military people are wont to say. As a rule, I speak to the fish monger about his health. He had a heart attack three years ago so I bug him about exercise, checkups, and buying a pedometer so he can count his steps. Sometimes, I even have to remind him to eat fish. The man intones that he just passed his treadmill tests, thank you very much.
While he is carving a perfect 2.5-pound piece of salmon just flown in from the Great Northwest, I notice a label that says branzini from Greece. He explained that was an Italian name for a white fish that is farm-raised in in Greece, Turkey, and in Northern Italy. I remarked that seemed to be a long way to bring a rather ordinary-looking fish. He said, you know, once something gets mentioned on the Food Network, it is all the rage. People would kill for the damn thing. Europeans put the fish on ice for the flight and two days later I have him on naked on a cold slab. My man occasionally talks about death but he is rarely so dramatic.
A woman enters the conversation and notices the object of our affection, a singular, freshly imported branzino, the only creature presently on yard of ice. That’s a milkfish, she says. I have two small fish farms in the Philippines. You raise them in fresh water, I ask. No, in sea water she responds. They are in cages. They breed faster that way.
The lone branzini/milkfish had yet to see the carving knife and I asked the woman if she ate the head. She laughed and said, of course. The fish monger follows on and asks her about the eyes. She laughs and said, of course not, though sometimes they use it in soup.
The counter man makes a face, sufficiently exaggerated for affect and I have to remind him not to make fun of other people’s cultural habits. The woman laughs again and proceeds to order five milkfish. And leave the heads on please, she adds. The man in charge rolls his eyes and takes on his most proper fishy look.
As I am backing away I hear some guy say, that thing looks like a sea bass to me. Another voice, surely from Calabria by way of the Bronx, says almost incredulously, where I come from that’s a f-ing spigola. I wish the man had shown a little more early morning style and slipped into the less demanding “cazzo” or show his Southern Italian spirit with the delicious “minchia.” Vulgarities are so much more palatable when delivered in Italian.
At least no one had the audacity to inform the crowd that there is an image of this silver-skinned fish in a first century Roman mosaic, courtesy of Pompeii, surrounded by snakes, eels, and an assortment of pike.
During our fish toss, the fish guy asked no one in particular about the word that describes all this sea level banter. Is it multiculturalism?
We will have to be careful.
