Rose & Thorn Journal - Fall 2009
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Tyke Johnson has contemplated writing a biography but hasn't chosen a subject. He fears all the greats are dead, so until he finds one, he will have to do. He lives in Los Angeles, CA, and has been published in Opium Magazine and Cause and Effect, among others.
Tyke Johnson
I grew up hating fish. I hated the smell, the taste, the idea. I hated how they baked on the always-burnt, not-quite-washed cookie sheet my mom pulled out from the drawer under the oven. I, or one of my brothers, was responsible for washing it when last my mom made brownies, so the corners still had forever-hardened batter stuck along the edges.
The problem was the cookie sheet was too big, and brownies were too much of a novelty to inspire fervor for chocolaty goodness beyond three-fourths of the tray. Therefore, the leftovers—depending on the amount of sleepovers that occurred during the brownies’ existence—would end up lasting an extra five days past the point of their life expectancy, like a poor old man stuck in a nursing home for years, each month losing one more basic function.
“I heard Mr. Lester lost the ability to blink yesterday.”
“Yep, Sally has to lubricate his eyes every three minutes now.”
“On the bright side, there are leftover brownies from his ninety-seventh birthday in the rec room.”
“Yeah, but they’re all hard and stale now.”
And so the cookie sheets in my house forever had some sort of “burnt on” food attached. Even now, the cookie sheet underneath my oven has everlasting rust formed on it from years of poor washing. I feel non-stick spray is one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated upon the American public.
Now you may wonder what a cookie sheet has to do with fish. If so, you must not have grown up Catholic. As a Catholic, I was forced—though I shouldn’t say forced—to refrain from eating meat on Fridays during the mystical time of Lent. I also wasn’t allowed to eat candy so I could relate to the hardships Jesus faced during his forty days in the desert. Still, I highly doubt Jesus tempered his desire for sugar by drinking Tang.
Until I graduated high school and was free to choose grilled cheese or tuna fish sandwiches, every Friday from the age of one—Lent or not—I ate “fish sticks” for supper.
The box bore the winking image of a bearded Atlantic fisherman, circa 1927, in full wet-weather gear. My father bought the economy-sized container from Price Club or BJ’s or Sam’s Club, depending. It sat in the basement freezer all year long, stored below the fifteen loaves of frozen bread, thirty pounds of frozen ground beef, twenty pounds of frozen pork chops, and a five-gallon jug of “vanilla swirl” ice cream. The “swirl,” as I understood it, was a mixture of leftover chocolate syrup and caramel from recycled Hershey jugs. At no point in my childhood did I ever eat ice cream without freezer burn, so I didn’t notice. It wasn’t until a fieldtrip to Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, that I learned ice cream actually had flavors besides “cold dairy.”
Captain Abraham sat in the dark of the storage freezer, as if at the bottom of the ocean, until the week leading up to Ash Wednesday. Then he would emerge in all his yellow glory, and sit atop the mounds of beef and pork products for a month.
On the first day of Lent, my father sometimes treated us to a fish buffet feast, our ash-crossed foreheads labeling us publicly as saps to the marketing genius of The Golden Corral. Otherwise, my family and I celebrated at home with what the daring Captain mockingly called “cod fillets.”
Each cod fillet measured roughly five inches long by two inches wide and about an inch thick, though when first pulled from the heap, they seemed much bigger. This was not because of some chemical reaction to oxygen, but because five to six remained frozen together until broken apart with an ice pick.
If I were lucky enough to avoid food preparation, I would lie to myself hoping that my mom had forgotten it was Friday, and that distinct smell, which crept upstairs to my room, was just a ghost memory, like for a man who’s lost a limb. Sadly, the bottle of McCormick’s tartar sauce on the kitchen table would bitch slap me back into reality.
And there they were: twelve golden bricks of penance all laid out on a pan ruined by decadence, sloth, and laziness. It was as if our sins were being purged and forgiven by the holy-water-like attributes of the fish stick oil.
This was fish. This was all that was fish. Nothing else, to me, was fish. Each terrible bite of each terrible stick was fish. I couldn’t imagine a more intense penance. I lost all respect for past martyrs and saints. Sebastian and his arrows and Lucy and her eyes meant nothing to me because they were never forced to consume this abomination of sustenance approved by the FDA.
I think my mom knew how bad they were, too, for she never seemed to cook side dishes on those fateful, fish stick Fridays. The table was bleak and empty and cold because my mom knew what we were all up against and didn’t want to beat around the bush—didn’t want to doll up a dud. She wanted us to stare right into Satan’s eyes and cover them in tartar sauce. And no matter how much my dad pretended to enjoy them, or how much tartar sauce he caked on, we all knew he was struggling, too. Though he probably wasn’t cursing the Church founders as I was, he most certainly was cursing Captain Abraham.
My mother argues now that she made other dishes on Friday, but there’s no documented proof to back her claims—no receipts or tax write-offs for religious causes. In her defense, I do recall her making spaghetti with scallops once, but that had me sounding off the pleasures and platitudes of Capt. A’s cod fillets. And that’s not to say my mother isn’t a good cook. She’s a great cook. But we were all raised on meat and potatoes, and fish was just too damn expensive when a quarter of each month’s income was spent on milk alone.
Fish was a rarity in my childhood. I didn’t believe anyone actually ate the fish displayed in cases at the market. Whole fish on ice were only props from a movie, bashed through the glass during a car chase scene on a San Francisco wharf—as insane as chickens hanging in Chinatown, as outlandish as my Korean friend Sang Jeoung eating squid for breakfast on the bus. It wasn’t until I took a sailing trip to the Abacos Islands after graduating from college that I realized fish wasn’t just food for the rich and Asian. A middle-class Irish boy like myself could indulge, as well.
Even now, no matter the amount of grouper sandwiches or fish tacos I eat, I still have a hard time blocking out those Friday night culinary memories. When I order fish and chips, it’s not because of a craving, but for healing. So with every bite of grilled salmon, I see myself standing before a kitchen sink in Monroe, Connecticut—the failed fragrance of resistance, acceptance, and forgiveness in the air. And I’m once again washing a sink full of dishes. I scrub away the greasy fish stick outlines from the cookie sheet and leave behind a tattooed trace of the hardened brownie corners, as if to forgive the pan of its latest efforts and remind it to never give up hope, there are only a couple Fridays left.
Captain A’s Fish Fillets
I grew up hating fish. I hated the smell, the taste, the idea. I hated how they baked on the always-burnt, not-quite-washed cookie sheet my mom pulled out from the drawer under the oven. I, or one of my brothers, was responsible for washing it when last my mom made brownies, so the corners still had forever-hardened batter stuck along the edges.
The problem was the cookie sheet was too big, and brownies were too much of a novelty to inspire fervor for chocolaty goodness beyond three-fourths of the tray. Therefore, the leftovers—depending on the amount of sleepovers that occurred during the brownies’ existence—would end up lasting an extra five days past the point of their life expectancy, like a poor old man stuck in a nursing home for years, each month losing one more basic function.
“I heard Mr. Lester lost the ability to blink yesterday.”
“Yep, Sally has to lubricate his eyes every three minutes now.”
“On the bright side, there are leftover brownies from his ninety-seventh birthday in the rec room.”
“Yeah, but they’re all hard and stale now.”
And so the cookie sheets in my house forever had some sort of “burnt on” food attached. Even now, the cookie sheet underneath my oven has everlasting rust formed on it from years of poor washing. I feel non-stick spray is one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated upon the American public.
Now you may wonder what a cookie sheet has to do with fish. If so, you must not have grown up Catholic. As a Catholic, I was forced—though I shouldn’t say forced—to refrain from eating meat on Fridays during the mystical time of Lent. I also wasn’t allowed to eat candy so I could relate to the hardships Jesus faced during his forty days in the desert. Still, I highly doubt Jesus tempered his desire for sugar by drinking Tang.
Until I graduated high school and was free to choose grilled cheese or tuna fish sandwiches, every Friday from the age of one—Lent or not—I ate “fish sticks” for supper.
The box bore the winking image of a bearded Atlantic fisherman, circa 1927, in full wet-weather gear. My father bought the economy-sized container from Price Club or BJ’s or Sam’s Club, depending. It sat in the basement freezer all year long, stored below the fifteen loaves of frozen bread, thirty pounds of frozen ground beef, twenty pounds of frozen pork chops, and a five-gallon jug of “vanilla swirl” ice cream. The “swirl,” as I understood it, was a mixture of leftover chocolate syrup and caramel from recycled Hershey jugs. At no point in my childhood did I ever eat ice cream without freezer burn, so I didn’t notice. It wasn’t until a fieldtrip to Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, that I learned ice cream actually had flavors besides “cold dairy.”
Captain Abraham sat in the dark of the storage freezer, as if at the bottom of the ocean, until the week leading up to Ash Wednesday. Then he would emerge in all his yellow glory, and sit atop the mounds of beef and pork products for a month.
On the first day of Lent, my father sometimes treated us to a fish buffet feast, our ash-crossed foreheads labeling us publicly as saps to the marketing genius of The Golden Corral. Otherwise, my family and I celebrated at home with what the daring Captain mockingly called “cod fillets.”
Each cod fillet measured roughly five inches long by two inches wide and about an inch thick, though when first pulled from the heap, they seemed much bigger. This was not because of some chemical reaction to oxygen, but because five to six remained frozen together until broken apart with an ice pick.
If I were lucky enough to avoid food preparation, I would lie to myself hoping that my mom had forgotten it was Friday, and that distinct smell, which crept upstairs to my room, was just a ghost memory, like for a man who’s lost a limb. Sadly, the bottle of McCormick’s tartar sauce on the kitchen table would bitch slap me back into reality.
And there they were: twelve golden bricks of penance all laid out on a pan ruined by decadence, sloth, and laziness. It was as if our sins were being purged and forgiven by the holy-water-like attributes of the fish stick oil.
This was fish. This was all that was fish. Nothing else, to me, was fish. Each terrible bite of each terrible stick was fish. I couldn’t imagine a more intense penance. I lost all respect for past martyrs and saints. Sebastian and his arrows and Lucy and her eyes meant nothing to me because they were never forced to consume this abomination of sustenance approved by the FDA.
I think my mom knew how bad they were, too, for she never seemed to cook side dishes on those fateful, fish stick Fridays. The table was bleak and empty and cold because my mom knew what we were all up against and didn’t want to beat around the bush—didn’t want to doll up a dud. She wanted us to stare right into Satan’s eyes and cover them in tartar sauce. And no matter how much my dad pretended to enjoy them, or how much tartar sauce he caked on, we all knew he was struggling, too. Though he probably wasn’t cursing the Church founders as I was, he most certainly was cursing Captain Abraham.
My mother argues now that she made other dishes on Friday, but there’s no documented proof to back her claims—no receipts or tax write-offs for religious causes. In her defense, I do recall her making spaghetti with scallops once, but that had me sounding off the pleasures and platitudes of Capt. A’s cod fillets. And that’s not to say my mother isn’t a good cook. She’s a great cook. But we were all raised on meat and potatoes, and fish was just too damn expensive when a quarter of each month’s income was spent on milk alone.
Fish was a rarity in my childhood. I didn’t believe anyone actually ate the fish displayed in cases at the market. Whole fish on ice were only props from a movie, bashed through the glass during a car chase scene on a San Francisco wharf—as insane as chickens hanging in Chinatown, as outlandish as my Korean friend Sang Jeoung eating squid for breakfast on the bus. It wasn’t until I took a sailing trip to the Abacos Islands after graduating from college that I realized fish wasn’t just food for the rich and Asian. A middle-class Irish boy like myself could indulge, as well.
Even now, no matter the amount of grouper sandwiches or fish tacos I eat, I still have a hard time blocking out those Friday night culinary memories. When I order fish and chips, it’s not because of a craving, but for healing. So with every bite of grilled salmon, I see myself standing before a kitchen sink in Monroe, Connecticut—the failed fragrance of resistance, acceptance, and forgiveness in the air. And I’m once again washing a sink full of dishes. I scrub away the greasy fish stick outlines from the cookie sheet and leave behind a tattooed trace of the hardened brownie corners, as if to forgive the pan of its latest efforts and remind it to never give up hope, there are only a couple Fridays left.
