Steal Smoked Fish
Steal Smoked Fish
There is no logical reason to spend eighty dollars on a seven-inch vinyl, but standing in the living room on Christmas morning, cashed checks from relatives pending in my back account, their empty shells scattered across the record player, that’s exactly what I do. Two songs that I already own several times over digitally, loaded into my cart from an online retailer then, before I can think better of it, I click purchase.
On the recliner next to me, my partner holds our sleeping baby. Snow, rare along the coastline of Washington State where I now call home, has blanketed the entire area, coming up to the six-week old’s knees.
“This is stupid, huh?” I ask my partner, “I probably shouldn’t have done it.”
“It’s fine,” my partner says, rolling their eyes, “you’ve wanted it forever.”
A child of public-school teachers, who spent years in a family of four living on one Idaho teacher’s salary, I never buy things as soon as I want them. My father taught me that you cannot know you want something until it has been at least a day, that it will almost always be there the next day. I watched the digital marketplace for several years, noticing the slow creep upwards of the prices, the sellers shuffling in and out. Coveting it as if it was something more than the little grooves of two songs pressed onto a record, sitting in a reseller’s garage in Colorado, waiting for the day I finally cave.
*
There were four of us. Will, Rich, Lee, and I. We were friends in the way we knew how to be, the way men around us had passed on to us. We held a meanness in our mouths that would turn the flesh of our gums to cancer. We threw insults as if they were lighter than air, and everyone had their own exposed heel: Will was skinny, Lee was stupid, Rich was fat, and I was sensitive, girly, or more simply, queer. There was nearly nothing off limits, the belt so low that punches struggled to find purchase beneath it. You had to be one of us, drenched in our special brand of cruelty, to even think we were friends.
We didn’t make much sense from the outside either. Our tastes in music, hobbies, and our beliefs wandered and shared only the tiniest sliver of a Venn diagram. We were logs lashed together in frayed rope, our untrimmed branches and roots twisting and scraping at each other, floating with trepidation down a river we didn’t know, towards an ending we’d never put thought towards, hitting every rock we could.
*
It is in the realm of miracles that the song exists. The Mountain Goats have a long history of not releasing some of their best songs, leaving them as demos, outtakes, or rough sketches in a notebook that will sit on a dusty bookshelf somewhere in North Carolina until it is played once in a city you’ve never heard of.
They sometimes exist as evictees from an album. “We Shall All Be Healed” and “Attention All Pickpockets” from We Shall All Be Healed. “The Day the Aliens Came” and “High Doses #2” from The Sunset Tree. “Ethiopians” from Tallahassee and “Heel Turn 1” from Beat the Champ. Or they exist as orphans from any sort of thematic container. “Sign of the Crow #2,” “Hail St. Sebastian,” “Down to the Ark,” “The Plague,” and “You Were Cool.” Fans gather these songs onto playlists and Google Drives, follow the YouTube pages with the dozens of songs we have yet to hear, and scrape out corners of the internet to debate them.
“Steal Smoked Fish” is somewhat different in that it, along with the B-Side, “In the Shadow of the Western Hills,” was released as a promotional single. The first thousand pre-orders of Transcendental Youth got the 7” thrown in for free. An alternate take, trading out guitar for piano, was released in Japan as a bonus track.
The song was recorded on little more than a whim. John Darnielle, the songwriter and only stable member of the group in its over thirty-year existence, stated in an interview with Joseph Fink that he didn’t know whether he wanted to put it out at all. There was just a studio in Portland that had been booked with Brandon Eggleston, a longtime collaborator, and he needed songs to play.
Both songs on the single were recorded live to tape, then the tape was transferred directly to the stamper, in an attempt to get as close to the live performance as possible. There were no overdubs or fixes. In my mind, even the strings are a little old, that special coating they sometimes give them worn from gold to a browned silver. Even the guitar is a little scratched, the headstock a little scuffed from a smack after a miscalculation in a doorway. That is to say, when I put the 7” on in my living room, I imagine myself to be somewhere in a cramped studio in Portland, listening to the song, holding my breath to not make a noise.
*
I got to know Will from a health class where he made me laugh harder than I had in weeks. He was tall and lanky, with dark hair and a pale face, as if he had been genetically bred to be in a third-wave emo band.
We played guitar together in a band that could never get it together enough to write any of our own songs. I had played longer, but he worked harder, and soon mastered solos and alternative and drop tunings while I struggled to keep up. He was athletic too, with dreams of a college baseball career outside of the tiny North Idaho town we lived in being whispered out in the earliest hours, when the heavy weight of reality gets lighter and we are so close to sleep that we let our dreams escape a little easier.
He was the best looking of us, with the kind of aloofness that is easy to adore from the outside, but makes any sort of reciprocity in a friendship hard to come by. He kept things close and would half-jokingly threaten to kick someone’s ass if they asked too personal of a question, if they touched too close to whatever he wished to hide. By the end of our years of friendship, I felt I barely knew more about him than I had to begin with.
*
“Steal Smoked Fish” is a Portland song. More specifically, it is a song from the time in 1985/86 when Darnielle lived in the city. Anyone familiar with Portland can find a footing in the lyrics of the first verse: rain, bridges, region-specific convenience stores. Anyone familiar with Darnielle’s work knows what is coming towards them.
It is a hard thing to go back to a place in which you had a traumatic experience, and as a touring musician, Darnielle did it often. He talks candidly about visiting the places of his past: finding an opening to the apartment building he used to live in, a scuff mark he left on the door still there fifteen years later. He talks openly about the experiences too: overdosing, being up for days, and the disappointment of discovering the tinned fish you slipped up a baggy sleeve doesn’t taste as good as it looked on the package.
For a band that has written entire albums about professional wrestlers, Dungeon and Dragons, and Pagan persecution in late antiquity, the autobiographical mode is less common than one might expect. “Steal Smoked Fish” is unique too in that it both nods to a time in the band’s history before heavier instrumentation, while eschewing some of the proto-folk punk roots of the time as well: the fast paced strumming, vocals near yelling, with the hum of the cassette recorder sleeping beneath it. The song, then, is a vulnerable one, a tender nod to a past you weren’t sure you would ever make it out of.
*
Rich was that impressive combination of clever and smart. The kind of person who had the wit to get back at someone who had given him shit, while also knowing he was going to skip the grade they were in anyway.
He was also one of the few Latino kids in our overwhelming-majority white town, and that, along with his weight, caught him enough hard times that eventually he decided to take the offensive and go after you before you could go after him. Since we were friends, and I stayed on his good side, I saw the spaces where he was less prickly. I knew he wanted to be a Doctor. I knew he was from a town in Southern Idaho not too far from where I was born. I knew he loved his brother almost as much as he was annoyed by him.
Rich was the one who always seemed to catch me at my most vulnerable: crying, writing bad poems. Most of the time, he wouldn’t bring it up in front of the other guys, so there was a kind of mercy between us, perhaps even a kind of half-knowing from him of what I was and who I was eventually going to become.
*
I don’t really know a song until I’m playing it. There is something about the notes from my hands, the words from my own lips, that lets me stretch out my legs in a song, especially one that first hooks me from another’s performance of it. It is somewhere between performance and close reading, putting me with one foot back in the dingy clubs I used to play in and another in the windowless rooms I took literature classes in.
“Steal Smoked Fish” is only hard on the right hand, the frantic strumming of early Mountain Goats songs returned, but now balanced under the partial muting of the top strings under the flesh of the inside palm. It’s a certain balance of the hand over the strings, not insurmountable, but a stretch the first time I played it.
I don’t know when it joined the rotation of songs I would play when I’d notice my guitar perched on a stand in the corner of the room and go to it, and I don’t know when it jumped from the kind of song I’d have to start over when I forgot lyrics, test runs at a kind of mastery, to the kind of song I could play barely having to think about what my hands or lips were doing, letting my mind roam towards whatever it might reach for.
But I do know that I found the song shortly after I left North Idaho. Around the time when going back started to mean a six-hour drive. When I started to notice my hands involuntarily trembling as I crossed the bridge over the Spokane River and saw the state border up ahead. When I started to avoid places and people that would remind me of the past, of the lesser days that having survived, I didn’t wish to go back to. When I started to notice the cars my friends used to have passing by on highways and check every time to see who the driver was.
*
If there was ever a person I could’ve leaned on when needed, it was Lee. He was the only one of us who had been born in North Idaho, which gave him a weird kind of status to those who thought often about who “real” Idahoans were, which ones of us truly belonged, which, in a place full of people from California who hated other people from California, were fairly common.
His house was three miles off the highway, on the complete opposite side of the county from where I was, and over ten miles from the closest town, which had a population of less than a thousand. Horses I rarely saw ridden strolled in pastures punctuated by dirt bike jumps and you always had to watch to make sure the dogs didn’t run out in front of your car.
Lee held a kindness towards his friends that I didn’t see between most other boys. Like the rest of us, he knew how to find the tender parts of someone and shove their nose in it. But he was also the first one who, after a long-time girlfriend broke up with me because I could not be whatever she thought a boy or man should be, asked how I was, if I needed anything. Even after others did the same, his was the only that felt honest.
If there was anyone I would’ve told about what I was doing, how I was feeling, who I was finding myself to be, it would’ve been Lee. I like to imagine that he would’ve helped, in whatever incomplete or incorrect ways he could, and that he would’ve done his best, and that I would’ve loved him for it.
*
Death comes in the second verse and having once made itself clear, can never really step back into the shadows. It is here too that the “we” of the first verse fractures into the “you” and “I,” when the narrator takes a step back from a past remembered to look up at the history about to befell them. The narrator holds onto them for the time they have left, but with the luxury of having survived, knowing their ends.
It would be a year after Darnielle left Portland that the first drug for AIDS treatment was approved by the FDA, azidothymidine (AZT), but it would take nearly another decade for the more effective two and three-drug cocktails to come on the market. But then as now, medicines rarely make it to everyone who needs them, and none of the friends hiding under bridges from Portland rain made it out alive. Lives cut down in months. I don’t know what it is like to lose friends like this.
*
The first time I remember wanting to die I was ten-years old. Showing a D I got on an art assignment to my parents seeming worse than an end to my own existence, but it took a few years for that choice to feel like anything other than an immature impulse, for it to start to grow a beating heart of its own. Shame grew from poor grades to a deeper one about who I was finding myself to be, and how incongruent that self was to the world I knew, and as it did, suicide felt more real and honest. By the time I was thirteen, I would’ve been circling the “Nearly Every Day” choice on depression and suicidal ideation screeners.
It took five years for me to tell anyone. When I met my first psychiatrist, she seemed shocked I hadn’t used drugs or alcohol or self-harmed at all in those years, and the farther I get from it, the more shocked I am about it too.
*
Things fell apart for us in Portland too. We went on little more than a whim. Rich had a girlfriend to meet, and Lee and I had nothing better to do, so we piled in Rich’s white Jeep and drove the eight hours to a city none of us had really been to before.
By the time I went to Portland, it was a completely different city than the one Darnielle had lived in. There were no TV shows about Darnielle’s Portland, there were no efforts to keep it weird. Whatever one sees in a city that makes them drive their bulldozers over old buildings and erect more expensive ones in their place, hadn’t been seen yet. To Darnielle, I imagine it to be a city to escape to when you are from Southern California, and San Francisco feels too close to whatever you’re wanting to leave.
To me, Portland was the first time I saw queer men in real life, the first time I saw a rainbow flag in a store and everybody acting like it was the most normal thing in the world. While now I sometimes scoff at what can feel like a commodification of a community, businesses draping their towns in rainbow flags every June, it is hard to overstate what it meant to see myself as something other than something to be made afraid or disgusted by.
On the drive home, I planned my exit. Being around straight men in the closet can feel like you’re a spy behind enemy lines. I got to know, intimately, how the people I had surrounded myself with, the people who in no small way were part of what kept me alive, felt about people like me. I could count on one hand even the neutral things that were said to me about queer men, and none of them came from the people I was sharing a car with on the ride home. No matter how hard I tried to push it off, their words, once made clear, would not step back into the shadows.
*
I don’t know if there is a good way to move on from a time like Darnielle’s in Portland, but the third verse takes explosives and destroys all the evidence of his time there. This might be gentrification, the losing of the weird of Portland to the whims of people who wished to sanitize and capitalize on it. It also might be a nod to the kind of thing common, but not unique, to queer people: severing what keeps us grounded when the ground we were given is falling apart beneath us.
*
The last time I saw them was at a wedding. Rob, the only mutual friend all of us still kept, rented out the local fairgrounds for all the family and friends from North Idaho and Western Montana a wedding could muster. I knew some, Aunts and Uncles and Cousins from pictures in Rob’s parents house, but there were a few dozen I’d never met.
It was a dry wedding, a demand from a religious family member, so I snuck out to drink huckleberry vodka from a flask in my car. Will and Lee kept beers in open in the cupholders in the center console. We alternated when we went out to drink, to try to keep a low profile, and by a few hours in, we were all delightfully buzzed.
We talked about how they’d been, what they were up to, the light kinds of things from near-strangers that weddings seem to often elicit. Will was about to leave the Marines, his four years were nearly up. Lee hung cabinets in the houses being built on the disappearing prairies between our hometowns. I had lived in Western Washington for a year and was about to get married on a lavender farm out there. There were no attempts to exhume what had been laid to rest, no attempts to blow out hot breath on cool embers, and by nightfall we all went our separate ways.
*
It was mid-January when “Steal Smoked Fish” arrived, sandwiched between two sheets of cardboard that had been hand-cut to size. The snow from Christmas had given way to the wet and frozen earth and the nine-week-old slept under a blanket of white noise.
As the needle hit the groove, I thought about my old friends, what I’d heard from Rob in the years since the wedding. Will had left the Marines and went to college, there was a wedding coming up next summer. Rich was fixing mountain bikes in Boise and had a serious girlfriend. Lee had begun to parrot talking points from the Ben Shapiro Show so much that even Will, his friend since fifth grade, had stopped talking to him. I was glad to have Rob keeping these connections, however loose and weak, alive.
At the end of each verse, and throughout the bridge, Darnielle wishes for God to bless his friends from Portland. Being a devout Christian, with an entire album of songs named after scripture quotes, it is not a surprise to hear this in a Mountain Goats song. But what is a surprise is the feeling in myself, an agnostic for a decade, of wanting those same blessings from a God I do not believe in to people I hadn’t seen in three-and-a-half years.
By the end of the song, I’m picturing each of them. What they must look like now. What lives they must have found. I make stories to fill in the gaps and imagine the best scenarios possible for each of them. Will graduating and being happily married. Lee moving to Alaska like he said he wanted to. Rich loved and whole in Boise. I focus my eyes on the flame of the candle I lit next to me, and as the needle crawls across dead wax, imaging blessings like carrier pigeons shooting out overhead, hoping they reach the people who kept me alive, even when I didn’t think I wanted to be.
Keegan (he/him) is a writer currently living in Washington State with his family. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review, Salon, the Offing, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fourteen Hills, Phoebe Journal, and Tahoma Literary Review, among others. His chapbook, My Own Private Idaho, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. His book, Fairyboy: Notes on Growing Up Queer in Rural North Idaho, was selected as the runner-up for the 2024 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize.
BACK TO ISSUE