The Riverside

I’d always loved fishing. And now, still, I love to fish. The quiet. The patient anticipation. I like to be amongst the trees and the shore at once with only the slightest margin of error for a successful cast. And I like to be on open water in a john boat, or in a bass boat, the subtle current like making love, my line far from me, tracing the sunlight diagonally, disappearing to depths I can only imagine. I like the way the sun feels on my back and the way the beer tastes colder than cold from the cooler in back. I like the sounds of insects and birds and stillness and breeze. I like the way my eyes begin to ache from watching the sun-kissed water, trying to refind my line just to the left of where I tend to look. I like the hint of a pull that I feel at once in the fragile part of the rod and a millisecond later in my wrist. I like knowing she is there, cautious and reckless, but unable to ignore me, and so she tests me…

And so it was that day when I was still a child and excitable that my brother-in-law picked me up mid-morning to go fishing. The day was young like me and full of promise and fish to catch. The lake was forty-five minutes away. Clark Hill was both Georgia and South Carolina and life had always been a border to me anyway—to blur lines was not so foreign. Jimmy wanted to stop at the Riverside in North Augusta for a beer before we made the lake. The Riverside was but a stone’s throw from Augusta, still a distance from the lake. Each moment we spent not driving seemed to me a moment spent not fishing. Although only ten, the bar was familiar to me. It was like others I’d been in. It was dim and offered a smell that would take me many years to appreciate and later embrace. The Riverside catered to bikers and prostitutes primarily. Both groups were regularly decent to young boys my brief experience told me. I was certainly safe though uncomfortable. Inside, one beer turned into several and Cokes kept appearing in front of me. Jimmy knew everyone. He’d served three years in prison and had developed the right mix of friendly and dangerous. His was not a bad lesson to learn. Eventually, Jimmy disappeared with a woman they called School Teacher. His only words to me were I’ll be right back. But he wasn’t right back. He was gone forever in ten-year-old time. The bar filled around me with gentle rough-looking men. Someone put on a blue comedy cassette to which I made sure to laugh at all the right parts (I was a veteran of Richard Pryor and Gene Tracey). When someone noticed me paying attention, the tape was respectfully stopped until Jimmy reappeared and told them, Ahh fuck, he’s heard worse than that and it started again. Jimmy ordered another beer and asked if I needed another Coke. He proceeded to tell me about School Teacher’s special talent. It indeed seemed pretty special.

On the way home we were pulled over by a State trooper. I don’t remember why. Jimmy handed me his open beer and got out of the car to meet the cop. Even young it seemed to me a terrible idea. But ever smooth, Jimmy played it perfectly. He was off with a warning and I was on my way home.

Jimmy took me into his confidence that day. He told me not to tell anyone that we hadn’t gone fishing. We simply had not had any luck. I was tired and disappointed. Perhaps a little disillusioned. But I was somehow much wiser in a way I could never attempt to explain. My relationship with Jimmy was never the same after that. And that’s not a bad thing necessarily. Jimmy went to school that summer day. But I was the student. Sitting alone, more patient than any fisherman before me; my barstool a seat in an aluminum boat; my line there in the distance appearing, disappearing, the beads of water steady and precarious, catching perfectly the sunlight as it played through the pines. Strike after strike, I was just a sigh too slow. But my timing improved. One day I would be a fine fisherman.

Jimmy asked me not to tell anyone about the Riverside that day. And for twenty-seven years, I never said a word.