This is a fishing story, sort of, set in what is to my mind one of the least fishy destinations on earth: Las Vegas. Not counting the obvious metaphor — all anglers are gamblers — and the promise of the Colorado River, an hour away, fishwise, this city’s a busted flush. Still, you may find among the clubs and glittering diamonds a fisher whose heart might be a lonely hunter.
Or not. I don’t know, because I’m not sure how an occasional urge to find solitude becomes a need for isolation, or if it does, how much this differs from a compulsion to write, complete the New York Times crossword puzzle every morning, or fly fish obsessively, alone. I’m certainly loathe to judge people whose nature directs them away from team sports, sorority rushes, and raves, and the idea that recluses are “missing out on life” seems like a projection by those who imagine we are, innately and ideally, a herd or schooling species, like anchovies and wildebeests.
Not universally, I think. And note that badgers aren’t “antisocial,” because going to ground by themselves is their norm.
Badgers. They’ll come out to play once in a while, and nicely, too.
So did a fellow I will call Cross here. Or at least he came out; playing “nicely” is relative, a matter of perspective. I last saw him a few minutes before midnight, ten days ago. He was leaning on a stool in front of a blackjack table — actually, he stood rigid, sweating, swearing profusely and loudly while glaring at a dealer he blamed for shearing him of $800 — but he turned instantly when I said, “Time to say good-bye.”
And just like that, his whole demeanor changed. “Hey, it’s been a f—ing pleasure, and I mean that,” he said as he reached for my hand. “We’re going carp fishing together this year, I swear, at Lake Powell or Flaming Gorge, or at some ponds I know where they’ve never seen a f—ing fly except mine. We will kill them, destroy them; I’ll show you everything I’ve learned — this insane crayfish pattern I designed. No shit, it will be f—ing great.” Could happen. “I hope so,” I said. “Meanwhile, remember: that dealer’s just doing her job.”
Instantly, again, he changed, riveting her with his stare. “It’s f—ing bullshit, I tell you,” he snarled, as a pit boss arrived to take a station behind her shoulder.
“Hang on a second,” he said, turning back a last time. “Let me give you my card. We have lots to talk about.” I took it, then we shook hands again.
I walked away mildly worried, but smiling to myself. I knew how the dealer felt under Cross’s withering stare, hearing a fountain of epithets. He had done the same to me when we first met, forty-eight hours before, and not for just a minute.
Some context, first.
A birthday party and reunion. The Lisa Person and I had been invited by her brother to celebrate our sister-in-law’s fiftieth at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. We go back thirty years. So do Lisa’s sister, her husband, and I. The wild cards, for us, are the birthday lady’s oldest and closest friend, and Cross, her long-distance sometime boyfriend. Well in advance, I’m told that he inherited money and now fishes “all the time, all over the world, so you guys will have tons to talk about.”
Well, maybe. And just FYI, my family knows fishing’s not my only topic of conversation, though given our politics, I think they believe it’s my safest subject. While it’s usually true that anglers have an important subject in common, that’s not always a happy gambit. I had no idea if Cross even fly fishes, for one thing. And even if he does, it was just a couple of months ago when a similar apparently obligatory matchmaking went surprisingly far south very fast — one of those mercifully rare angst-at-first-sight encounters. It got worse the third time this high-handed fellow insisted that “no California trout river compares with the South Platte,” something “everybody knows,” and so should I, “if you want me to take you seriously.” By then, I didn’t care how he took me, but would have enjoyed us spending time together armed with 9-weight nunchucks.
Back to Cross. There was also the carefully expressed caveat of one brother-in-law: “He’s unique, that’s for sure. Has his own way of looking at the world. And a few opinions.”
Just so . . .
Cross arrives late to this Las Vegas extravaganza and quickly demonstrates his own variety of exclusiveness and attitude. He is a fly fisher, it happens, one who spends a month or two of every year fishing the Everglades and Gulf Coast for tarpon, redfish, and sea trout, also two hundred more days angling for other species in various parts of the world. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s his most passionate and abiding obsession that stuns.
“Carp fishing,” he says defiantly, spreading his big legs wide on a restaurant chair, humping heavy shoulders and narrowing his gaze in an expression as challenging as a Halford priest responding to a heretic suggesting that “trash fish” are worthy adversaries. “I catch carp with flies because they are the best f—ing freshwater game fish you will find anywhere, anytime, anyplace.”
No kidding.
“But f—ing trout fishermen don’t know that. Why? Because they’re as stupid as f—ing trout are I mean, here I am, sight casting to forty-pound monsters in crystal-clear water — fish with better eyesight than trout, smarter and more selective, spooky as hell, with a 12-weight rod, 20-pound fluoro, my drag set to a full-on seven pounds. And I’m supposed to listen to trout fishermen? I am supposed to listen to them? Not . . . f—ing likely.”
Note that this opening salvo is fired face to face from two feet away at the far corner of a table where ten of us are assembled for a welcome lunch. Note also that this outburst isn’t the tip of an iceberg — it’s the frost on the iceberg tip’s tiny top. In seconds, the man is just wroth, so close to the edge that he’s drawing alarmed looks from a waitress.
Despite shushing by his lady friend, Cross goes on for ten minutes straight. That’s a very long time in real conversation, enough for me to wonder if he, like me, had been prepped for this encounter, and had anticipated the opportunity to nunchuck somebody he presumed represented traditional fly-fishing elitism.
Maybe, but I’m pretty sure Cross does this at every opportunity — that he might even hurl himself at travelers carrying rod tubes in airports. On the subject of carp, he’s passed the line from passionate to lunatic. Unlike the South Platte twit a few months back — a trial lawyer — Cross isn’t trying to browbeat or coerce a concession. He’s presumed we have no common ground and can’t have any, because everything he presumes I stand for is bullshit.
He wants to offend, and is so intent on doing so he cannot understand why he’s failing miserably, which amplifies his rants. Perhaps he interprets my grin as amused disdain; certainly there’s pride at stake. Cross, I learn, considers himself a fly-fishing-for-carp pioneer — “the fastest f—ing growing part of the sport” — one of the first in this country to appreciate these carp as top-quality quarry; and now, after twenty years spent pursuing them, believes himself a master of the art.
It takes him . . . forever . . . to realize I’ve been delighted from the outset. Sympathetic, enthusiastic: that except for the trout and trout-fisher slamming and profanity used as verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and punctuation, I’m on board and eager, so pleased by his up-yours nonconfession and advocacy I don’t mind when he bulldozes every attempt to cut a word in edgewise — not with an axe, I couldn’t — or that he invades my personal space when we scoot our chairs back to distance ourselves from more civilized people. He pushes forward his head, hands, and broad shoulders toward mine.
And I push mine toward his. I spent decades working on locked wards with people really beyond the pale. Cross is crazed, not crazy; full-in, not out of it.
I suspect we look like gigantic toads conferencing. He’s tiring a little, so I make a statement emphatically enough to earn a “What did you say?” expression that a second later he asks aloud.
“I said, ‘Lefty Kreh thinks carp are great.’”
A moment of silence. Then, suspiciously, he says “I know that,” with only a halfhearted snort. “I’ve known that a long time.” More silence as looks at me hard, to figure out if I’m having him on or just saying what he wants to hear.
I don’t blink. He does. “You . . .” he begins. “You started to say something before, about lab rats. What’s does that have to do with carp?”
“I’ve read reports they have the same maze-learning abilities.”
“Lab rats? I heard something once about pigeons or parrots.”
“Would make sense.”
Cross is off balance, but not about to abandon his expectations of conflict. “Yeah? Well people say carp don’t fight. That is such —”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit! Right! Big carp, they fight like —”
“Bulls.”
“Bulls! You got that f—ing right! The Europeans, at least, know that, even the dumb-ass English, with all their fishing stations and fish alarms —”
“‘Electronic bite indicators.’”
“Right, right! Electronic what the f–ever. Chumming with bread balls all day before bait fishing them all night —”
“‘Boilies,’ they call them. And how about those flavors?”
“Hundreds! They shoot them out there with slingshots!”
“‘Catapults,’ as they say,” I inject, because I can be as much a pedant as anybody. “I did a piece about coarse fishing for Gray’s, way back when. Incredible, how seriously they take carp.”
“Yeah? Gray’s Sporting Journal?”
“And another one for Field and Stream, back in ’88, I think.” Then I quote for him a sentence from that essay, which has already appeared in this column: “Apocalyptic myth has roaches inheriting the earth. They’re welcome to it, but the first roach to test water will find itself carp kibble —”
“That’s what I say! I tell that to people all the time. F–k cockroaches, carp will own all that’s left. ”
“And one of the reasons — you know how they can last so long out of water?”
“Half an hour! I’ve seen it!”
“Because they have live yeast cells in their blood. Take away their oxygen, carp start self-fermenting, making and breaking down ethyl alcohols into sugars to keep themselves alive. And getting drunk in the process, of course.”
“Really? No shit. I did not know that…… That explains things. How they can live in almost solid ice.” “And in stagnant pools.” “Absolutely.”
He nods, digesting this information in silence. He’s also recognizing that this conversation hasn’t gone and won’t go the way he expected, though it gets much more interesting.
He makes that transition, I believe, because he wasn’t all about intimidating or browbeating. As he will reveal repeatedly, carp fishing with flies is an important part of his life.
End of provocation. End of inflated oration, castigation. End of pedantry and blow. For the next twenty minutes, we talk earnestly. Mostly, I listen and ask questions because, unlike Cross, I’ve not pursued carp seriously, and while I prepioneered him in a trivial way, he’s the one whose learned most.
By then, lunch is over. And that’s when something odd happens.
Everybody else decides they’ll change in their rooms and reunite at one of the hotel pools. Loud again, Cross declares he won’t — that he needs a nap, and wants to spend time with his lady friend watching the Cowboys-Broncos game. It’s a choice met by silence, since this will also pull sister-in-law’s best friend out of the pool mix; also, maybe, because it’s said in a cranky way that suggests he doesn’t care about that.
I can’t go pooling. I really can’t, because I’ve three writing deadlines to meet. I don’t announce this, of course, nor for a moment do I imagine my wife won’t be poolside, enjoying good company.
At dinner that night, it’s obvious that Cross and I enjoy each other. He sits down across from me at the end of another table and instantly begins thumbing his cell phone. “Look at this,” he says, showing me a small, clean-looking boat he’s customized for carp, with a bow-mounted casting platform that incorporates a fly-line capture net he invented. “It’s not perfect yet, but it beats the shit out of standard stripping baskets, I’ll tell you that.” He follows this with a photo of a twenty-eight-pound fish he took the week before, one of thirty-six he landed in a day. But that wasn’t SOP, he quickly insists; he has to work hard for old, wise fish. “I tell people, if you can stalk cruising carp, put your fly where they will take it in the middle of the water column, catch them the way I do it . . . you can catch any species anywhere on a fly. F–k, tarpon are so simple, really, though a lot like carp. And I should know, I’ve caught hundreds of both.”
He lists these, fish and locations. It’s less immodest, because he seems most intent on making a point: that he knows enough to say carp are great. We talk about prey and patterns, tactics for seasons, water conditions, and winds. Occasionally, he does some bashing, “I’ve nothing against trout, more about the snobs who fish only for them, and then there’s those Atlantic salmon dickheads,” but is quick to return a subject more important. He wants to convert me, or at least promote carp’s value.
At the same time, he’s torn by trends he welcomes and resents. For so long he had carp to himself, a quarry that American fly fishers disdained, in places where he could fish alone. Now there are new aficionados, and even crowds. “Take the South Platte, for instance” — I am thrilled he chooses that example — where he used to catch five or six monsters a day, riding a mountain bike pool to pool. Now the big carp are “so f—ing educated. I’m lucky to get a pickup Do you know they have goddamn carp fly-fishing derbies now? Fifteen-hundred-dollar prizes, f–ing trucks and SUVs at every turnout . . . I ran into one of those f–ing fiascos, turned around and went home.”
I can see him doing that, and instantly remember a T-shirt a friend sent me. “Does not fish well with others,” reads the front. On the back: “If you can read this, you’re fishing too close.” The slogan fit me, too, though the shirt’s too small at the moment.
My conversation with Cross at dinner that night begins as it finished at lunch: sane and interesting, intense, but not noisy; warm, even. But then I find out Cross and I were not popped from the same mold.
This restaurant is Spanish, a local hangout, discovered by the host brother-in-law when Vegas was part of his sales territory. He volunteers to order an endless series of tapas, small plates of superb food: tuna tartare, anchovies something, smoked scallops, glazed prawns, bacon-wrapped dates. We’re sharing these, passing them around, oohing and ahing.
Cross will sample none. He doesn’t like fish, or any seafood. And while he tries to keep his objections in check, when sliders appear topped with blue cheese, he’s furious. In a minute or two, everybody knows he doesn’t like blue cheese a bit, and most hear “Isn’t there anything on this f-ing menu I like?”
He’s petulant. It’s awkward. Cross is again a bull in a china shop, and it’s not clear to me if he’s oblivious, knows he’s out of line and can’t help himself, or knows but doesn’t care.
Soon I must ask myself questions about my own behavior. “This conversation isn’t over,” Cross says to me as we leave for a club, but it is: we’ve stayed away too long from this party and need to make amends. We do, I think, over the next few hours.
The next day, I hear that Cross stayed late at the tables, losing until 3:00 a.m. I get this when almost all of us go out for breakfast — Cross and his lady don’t make it. After that, I return to my room to write until we join again for a truly grand birthday dinner — a ball. That’s followed by a visit to one of those members-only clubs, one that looks a lot like a very expensive Hindu brothel: mixed drinks are $23, we discover eventually, bottles of wine range from $600 to $9,000; young women are sent up by the casino to wait the attentions of much older portly fellows in pricey suits and even more pricey casual clothes. Not my favorite place, but it does have a high view of The Strip, an electric avenue. Better yet, by my lights, I notice that the three-hundred-thousand-watt search beam shooting moonward from the Luxor pyramid attracts millions of moths and so myriad bats, which wheel and flash in the bright white column for as far as our eyes can see.
Obviously, a fisher cannot help but wonder how this phenomenon would work out on a trout lake. Illegal, unfair, but an idea Cross and I reflect upon in our only exchange of the night.
Folks are frayed by the end of the evening. Everybody except Cross, who decides he’ll win back what he lost the night before. When I can’t sleep, I wander down to the casino to say goodbye.
I do. His card in hand, I make my way back across the casino toward elevators that will raise me to my room. But I’m distracted.
Ahead of me is a “type” I’ve seen in Vegas before and in casinos all over. She’s an older woman, silver-haired, a little bit dowdy though expensively coifed, dressed in gray-and-white tweed despite the season, hunched at a slot machine tray beside two empty highball glasses and an ashtray overflowing with thin, lipstick-smeared filters.
There’s no one else sitting at her row. I doubt she’d notice if there was. She’s completely engaged, utterly engrossed. I watch her lose, watch her win: her expression doesn’t change. It’s hard to imagine she has a husband or children or friends, though probably she does. She’s alone, but . . . lonely?
It strikes me that I have a strong sense of Cross, and I like him, but I have no idea about why he is as I find him or what makes a warm guy with passion offensive by accident or design. I can see him fishing by himself, and wonder if his expression changes when he hooks up and lands a big carp — a vaguely “if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears” question.
Twenty years is a fair piece of change. Until pretty recently, the idea of fly fishing for carp was anathema. It still is, to most, and certainly when Cross started, he was a heretic. I didn’t have a chance to ask him how he began, or why. Did an accidental catch intrigue him — engross, engage — and he pushed ahead, everybody be damned? Or, given what I’d seen, was it the chance to be damned himself and damn back that made catching “trash fish” more attractive? I’m still watching the old woman at her machine. It’s easy to study her, because she never looks up or around, that she’s sealed herself in a clear cave. Abstractly, I wonder if her heart is, or was once, a lonely hunter. I’ll never know and am about to walk away when a drink waitress circles nearby; as if by magic, the old woman’s head swivels like an owl’s.
The bar waitress is a type, too. Older than most, all in black, net stockings, pale breasts pushed up so high they must hurt. Her expression suggests she’s too bored to smile, also, that she knows she won’t get tipped enough or at all by this nickel-and-dime player. But dutifully, she approaches her customer’s cloud of smoke.
The old woman says something. Suddenly, the waitress laughs, nods, and puts a hand on the old woman’s shoulder. They’re both smiling and chatting as the waitress writes on a pad.
It’s only a fine coincidence that they look like badgers, caught in bright lights by chance.
