When I was a kid, I loved it if my parents let me watch the Phil Silvers Show. When I got older, I watched the reruns and so saw them all. Phil Silvers played Sergeant Ernie Bilko, the ultimate con man, who never got ahead because he had a heart of gold and in the end always wound up doing the right thing. In one of the episodes, he conned Sergeant Ritzik ( Joe E. Ross) into believing that he had to paint his face, wear chicken bones, sneak out of his house at midnight, and go sit under a tree on the army post in Kansas. As he is climbing out of the window, his wife, Lucille, comes into the room and asks, “What are you doing?” Ritzik answers in his gruff and annoyed and defensive tone, “What’s’a matter? Can’t a guy wear chicken bones if he wants to?”
In about 1990, I received a (literally) engraved invitation from a colleague to attend something called the San Francisco Fly Fishing Invitational at Rick’s Lodge on the Fall River. I didn’t realize it was a competition, or I never would have gone. Competition is anathema in my book when it comes to fly fishing. At the end of the weekend, there was an awards dinner, and I was given an award for being the “ best dressed” — no kidding. The so-called award was one of those “necklaces” from which you can hang clippers and forceps and other important, but lightweight fishing paraphernalia.
The necklace languished on a hook in my cellar for more than 20 years, among my fishing gear, until recently, when I hired a guide who does all of the fishing things for me, and I didn’t need my entire vest with its myriad stuff — just a couple of simple gadgets. After attaching a forceps and clipper (actually two) I had some other places to add things, and that’s when I remembered Bilko, Ritzik, and Lucille . . . and the chicken bones.
I dried and attached two chicken wishbones to my necklace before I left on a guided fishing trip on the Klamath River. The response was kind of like fishing: I had laid the fly on the water. It drifted naturally and was picked up by the fish — in this case one of the guides. He looked at my necklace and asked, “What are you wearing?” I answered in my best Sergeant Ritzik voice, “What’s’a matter? Can’t a guy wear chicken bones if he wants to?”
They laughed, but I had to explain the joke, and I knew that it was funny only to me, because explaining a joke will never make it funny. But that was OK, too. I had waited decades to say that.
And although our guides, John and Anthony, did everything for me over the two days, and I didn’t use either tool on the necklace even once, I will be wearing those chicken bones in the future, because I caught a lot of big fish — steelhead. And the good juju with which the chicken bones undoubtedly enveloped me was shared equally and thoroughly covered my fishing companions, Dick, George, and Pearce, who obviously benefitted greatly from the power of the bones, as demonstrated by the fact that they, too, each caught a lot of big, pretty fish. To what else could that be attributed?
Here’s to juju.
