The Dead Fish Club

by Mark Wutka

I sat in the classroom of Poetry 101 wondering what I was doing there. I looked around at the 30 other pimply faced boys who sat wondering the same thing. We were rich, we would be successful, and nobody ever needed poetry while holding a board meeting. I would soon change my mind.

He entered the classroom through the front door, whistling a song vaguely familiar - the theme to "The Andy Griffith Show." I would later learn that its real title was "The Fishing Hole." He strolled through the class and out the back door. As we sat in wonder, he popped his head back in and said "Well, come on, then." We followed him out into the hall.

"Men, I want to read something to you, " he said.

"I gaze upon the still waters,
 my hair ruffles in the quiet breeze,
 the worm in my fingers squirms to be free,
 he does not like the hook.

 O worm, how many of those like me,
 didst thou consume before today ?
 a long dead fisherman perhaps are you ?
 to help me with my task."

Ralph Finkel did. Ralph always knew. "It means 'Seize the Fish!'"

"Yes! Seize the Fish! It means that life is too short to spend your time in school. Go fishing, my boy! Look at the faces in these pictures, " he said as he pointed to one of the many pictures in the display case. "these are young men just like you. Can you hear them calling out ? They are saying 'Carpe Piscus - Seize the Fish.' They stayed in school, wasted their precious moments studying instead of fishing. Life is too short for this. Go Fishing!"

Needless to say, we didn't know what to think. Here was a teacher telling us to ditch school. We decided to investigate this man a little further. George Dingus went to the library and found an old copy of the Bletchley Blotch - our yearbook. We saw the entry for John Flounder. He was a pimply faced little squirt like the rest of us. He was involved in the chess club, the pi-memorization club, and something called the "Dead Fish Club." As hard as we looked, we could find no other mention of the "Dead Fish Club."

Our next day in class turned out to be as interesting as the first.

"Why do men write peotry ?" he asked.

"To express one's feelings ?" suggested Freddy Beaker.

"No! To woo women!" Flounder replied.

"Why would we want to do that ?" asked the obviously virgin Mr. Beaker.

"So you don't have to clean the fish yourself."

We were enlightened.

After class, we asked Mr. Flounder about the "Dead Fish Club." He told us that it was a secret society that met in the old cave around midnite to swap fish stories. It was at that moment that we decided to revive the old "Dead Fish Club."

The "Dead Fish Club" soon became our nightly ritual. We would meet at the cave and begin with a short poem, usually beginning with something like "There once was a man from Nantucket." Then the fish stories began. We began to notice an obvious trend - the length of the fish in the stories increased with time. By the end of each meeting, someone was catching a blue whale with a paper clip. It was not these meetings that led to our downfall, it was how we got our inspiration.

"Carpe Piscus" was very real to us. We went fishing as often as we could and usually ditched class to do it. Mr. Flounder changed his philosophy a little and started saying that we should only sieze the fish when we had free time. Unfortunately, we never heard him since we were ditching his class. We ended up flunking all our classes, except Home Economics. We never missed Home Ec since we were allowed to cook our fresh fish. We ended up dubbing the class "Home Ich", a joke that was only funny to greeks and ichthyologists. Our parents were quite perturbed at our grades and demanded an investigation. The "Dead Fish Club" was officially disbanded and our fishing licenses were revoked. But the last thing was the unkindest cut of all.

Mr. Flounder was fired for encouraging our delinquent behavior. We always thought the circumstances were somewhat fishy, but that's life.

I saw Mr. Flounder a few years later. He had gotten a job with a TV station doing a fishing show every saturday. He was pulling in a million a year just for fishing. Maybe we didn't quite understand "Carpe Piscus" as well as we should have.