I had this friend when I was a kid. Let’s call him Fish. Lost track of him many years past. He was a hoot. Fish might be an example for us all. I’ll explain.

His family was a huge Irish affair. There were something like eight of them packed into this little split-level ranch. Eventually, the older siblings got married, and their spouses moved in, too. I swear you could see the walls of the house breathing in and out with their respiration. Their septic system spawned an Okefenokee in the side yard.

Fish was a rough and tumble kid. His parents would send him outside in the spring wearing nothing but a pair of jean shorts, cut off raggedly from some pair he burst through at the knee on their first day in harness. He’d stay like that until the first frost. He was barefoot, wild, and free. I was never any of those things. He was the neighborhood Huckleberry Finn. I guess that makes me Tom Sawyer. If there was a Becky Thatcher, she kept indoors.

But not Huck, really. Huckleberry Finn was uneducated, if not dull, and simply had some version of moral genius to carry him along. If my friend, Huckleberry Fish, had any morality in him, it wasn’t visible underneath the carapace of dirt he was coated with. He’d never do anything bad, mind you. He was simply a wildman. Two different things. Morality doesn’t enter into it.

My friend was smarter than the other kids, too, not just a knockabout waif. His family would play cards to amuse themselves, just like ours did. Whist was the game then. It was our lower middle class version of playing Bridge. Bridge was strictly for dentists or Presbyterians or something. Whist requires a non-Vegas-level, but high requirement to count cards, and remember what’s already been played, and who played it. It’s fast and fun, with an element of audacity in bidding based on mental arithmetic. There’s a single round of bidding after the deal, to determine who calls “trumps” (the suit that “trumps” the others), and who gets to swap the four hidden cards in the kitty for their worst cards. If you’re bold, you can leave your opponents holding a handful of cards they could beat you with if they won the bid, but were too timid to bid high enough.

I was very, very good at Whist. It appealed to the analytical part of my mind. Fish was a wizard at it. He’d sit there, dressed like a coolie, dirty, teeth spaced like headstones, a hayrick of hair hanging in his eyes, and beat the pants off all comers. It was all I could do to keep up with him. Likewise, he looked out the window all day at school, but passed all the tests anyway. I know intelligence when I see it. I’d recognize a Bigfoot, too, on sight, because it’s about as rare.

I could tell many stories about Fish. People like him spawn many wild tales as they swim up the stream of life. But there’s one that comes to mind that explains him to a T, and is perhaps a lesson for us all:

We rode bicycles all the damn time. All over, everywhere. We delivered newspapers. Rode to the little convenient store and bought bread and milk for our moms and enough candy bars for ourselves to make Bridge-playing dentists rich.  Whenever there was nothing to do we’d ride bicycles to get to the place to not do it.

There were dogs all over the place back then. Maybe even more than now, if that’s possible. People used to treat their dogs like pets, though, not like hemophiliac children that need to be carried everywhere and get their food catered. They’d tie them up in the yard, play with them from time to time, or just let them roam around some. When we rode our bikes, getting chased by dogs, snapping at your heels, was pretty common. We’d just smirk and ride on by when the little yipyip dogs took a run at us. We learned pretty quickly where the biggest beasts that could do some damage were prowling, and avoided riding past their houses.  Eventually, I got a ten-speed bike, and it had one of those hand air pumps that fit between two pins on the bike’s frame. It made a pretty handy billy club, if a little light. Swinging it wildly was enough to keep most Cujos at arm’s length.

One day, Fish and me were riding far afield, and encountered a substantial canine on the loose. German Shepherd. He came tearing after us, snarling and slavering, all business, if your business was the perimeter fence in a prison camp, anyway. I was a timid soul, and my mind shifted back and forth between pedaling faster and reaching for my pneumatic billy club. Fish wasn’t having any of it. He stopped dead, threw his bike on the tarmac, and started snarling and barking right back at the dog, which had closed to maybe ten yards. His canine brain (the dog’s, not Fish’s) couldn’t process this turn of events. Surprise is an unusual expression on a dog’s face, but he had it. But Fish was just warming up. He started chasing the dog.

The beast shied, and flinched, and then scampered away with that skulking, circuitous motion dogs get when they get a rap on the nose. Fish never wavered. Just went after it like a missile. The dog switched from confusion to plain terror, and finally tried to bolt in a dead run. Fish tackled it, grabbed two fistfuls of the fur on its back, and bit it, hard, on the ass.

What a howl that dog let out. Real terror, the kind brought on by a combination of pain and fear and confusion. The dog lit out like it was on fire, and Fish calmly walked back to his bicycle, and we rode off. He didn’t say a word about it. It was just business, as the mobsters used to say. We rode our bikes many times past that same house, untroubled from then on.

Sometimes, as Pascal in Big Night so colorfully expressed, you have to sink your teeth into the ass of life, and drag it to you. It is never too much. It is only not enough. Lately it’s occurring to me that everything good in my life has happened when I channeled my inner Fish, and sank my teeth into the ass of life, and dragged it to me. I’m thinking of doing it again. The dog’s going to bite you anyway. Might as well go for it.