A River Sucks Through It

"You're no Brad Pitt."

I've heard that my whole life. No matter what I'm doing, I seem to get compared, unfavorably, to Brad Pit. I just couldn't quite pull off Jeffery Goines in my Intro to Drama production of Twelve Monkeys. "Close Luke, but you're no Brad Pitt." Double-faulting a third set tie-break to lose in the second round of the district tournament. "Good try Luke, but Pitt would've nailed that serve."

"99th percentile on those SATs? Not bad, but not Brad."

I've been a failure my whole life, but before Thelma and Louise, people just didn't quite have the resources to effectively tell me how I had failed to stack up.

"You're no Billy Crystal," was common, but didn't really affect me, because even as a child I knew that I was at least as good as Billy Crystal at most things. Not being completely unemployable outside the awards show circuit for one.

Lacking a concrete human persona, critics were forced to mine the ether of that most beguiling of linguistic constructs, the adjective. 'Twas gallantry I lacked, or chutzpah, verve, that certain something, je ne sais quoi, whatever. It was always something, they were always adjectives, and they were always in the negative. "Ya ain't got it kid," my uncle would say, affecting the tone of a prohibition-era dock worker, despite having never left the Inland Empire. None of this was very convincing to an eight year old because the criticism was never tangible enough. I still don't know what chutzpah means.

As mentioned, Thelma and Louise changed this. It put a heaving, virile face to my secret shame and began my decent into the annals of the also ran. By the time Cool World hit, I knew I'd be playing second fiddle for the rest of my life. He has a string of hit movies, undeniable talent and a hot wife. All of this despite being a transvestite.

Lately though, I'd been mounting a comeback, and the change was more in perspective than tangible success. Essentially, I stopped judging myself vs. the Brad of the present. Luke 2004 just can't stack up to this year's model Pitt. So I started comparing us at points in our lives, i.e. Pitt at 23 vs myself at the same age. I was comporting myself rather favorably. I've graduated college (Baumgarten, 15 : Pitt, Love). I've never yet had to chauffer strippers (30, Love) or dress as the giant chicken "El Pollo Loco" (40, Love) to sustain myself. I've never lived in Oklahoma or Missouri (game Baumgarten).

This weekend though, a long, sour note from the non-first violin of failure burst my eardrum of pride; shattered my champagne flute of hope.

We were hiking in the Cascades, though not very high up. This was a lazing about, communing with mother nature and slaughtering some of her creatures kind of weekend. My pre-pubescent brush with hunting exorcized whatever desire I may have had to kill a fellow mammal, so I had to find some other phylum upon which to unleash my preternatural blood lust. Unfortunatelly, furry things are pretty pervasive, and snakes can fight back, so my only recourse was to guilelessly dangle a line and hook in the water with the hope of snagging one of the slimy bastard rejects from kingdom Animalia: the fish. But the plan had a kink. The only rod I had access to was specifically designed for fly fishing. Initially I saw no problem with this, I'd seen A River Runs Through It, starring my arch-nemesis; I'd read the book. I'd been fly fishing as a child, caught a fish that would have fit in here. Further, so my reasoning went, fishing isn't even a real sport, it's nature's equivalent of a doctor's office visit: little action, a lot of waiting. And I can sit circles around anyone.

Norman Maclean wrote that as a child, he thought Jesus must have been a fly fisherman, and John, the most beloved among the apostles, would have been a dry fly fisherman. After crunching the numbers on this weekend's fish haul, I place myself right under Judas Iscariot, who occupies his own ring of hell, holding the can of nightcrawlers for the lesser apostles (see: St. Thomas, St. Matthias et al.) and their conventional fishing rods. I have a long way to go before I'm even allowed to look at a traditional set of bait and tackle, even longer until I get to dangle a bloated worm and stare intently at a giant red and white bobber.

Forget for a moment that I failed to catch a fish, or that it took me upwards of an hour to get my various lines tied. Forget that I snagged the pole on every bush and low-hanging branch on the way to the inlet of Peete Lake. Forget that I had no waders, and seeing no pools of slow moving water close to shore, I decided to wear flipflops and shorts to trudge through thorn bushes and brambles on my way down to the river--in the hopes of getting deep enough to find some fish. Forget that the poor traction of my flip flops, together with my crippling lack of coordination gave me a pumping arterial hemorrhage and left me face down in what I can only describe as a den of asps. Forget the shrieks of pain piercing the mid-afternoon calm as they ricocheted of the peaks of the northern Cascades.

Forget all that and I made a pretty good show of fly fishing.

Luckily Peete Lake is very close to Roslyn, Washington, home of Northern Exposure and the worst web page ever. There I was able to enjoy a tasty burger and get some perspective. I may never be as good as Brad Pitt at anything, but, without even trying, I'm better off than pretty much any of these poor bastards. The guy from My Big Fat Greek Wedding excluded.