The Novel Begins

"The Old Man and the Seizure:" Read It Here!

Charles Dickens used to serialize his novels in magazines, writing a chapter every month or week. I like that idea, so here’s chapter one of my novel, “The Old Man and the Seizure.” A book with a similar title was published 72 years ago, not by Dickens but by Ernest Hemingway. I thought a re-examination of its themes might prove interesting, because now very few old men go to sea alone and battle sharks; they join AARP and take their meds five times a day. I am one, so I know a little about old manhood, maybe more than Hemingway, who never really got old. (He suicided in late middle age—61)

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish and twelve days without taking a defecation which he thought was a personal record but he could not be sure because one did not keep track of such things.

One just didn’t, that’s all. The moving of the bowels was not considered a fit subject for casual conversation let alone statistical analysis but was referred to only in the fine print of medical textbooks.

And yet everyone did it. Go figure.

In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the parents of the boy had told him that the old man was now totally and completely and finally aguisalaptuguè which meant fucked and they ordered the boy to go with another boat and that boat caught three good fish. Why the boy had to keep going with boats at all was not clear; he made good grades in the school and might have tried to become an accountant or a registered nurse, but this town was not known for its logic or critical thinking.

It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty but pretending it was full. The boy always went down to help him carry the invisible catch to the fishmonger who would weigh the nonexistent fish on his scale and say, “Another good haul, old man. Anyone who says you are aguisalaptuguè is guacahualagagawacko.

Then the fishmonger would pay the old man in pretend money.

The old man was gaunt and haggard with deep wrinkles on the back of his neck and everywhere else. His pale blue eyes were even more wrinkled but he could see with them, though in wrinklevision. He lived in a wrinkled world. The skin cancer on his blotchy forehead itched horribly but he would not give it the satisfaction of scratching. His off-white hair was sparse and wiry but carefully arranged in an elaborate comb-over which two older women in the town found attractive enough that they provided the old man with regular sex and a third was seriously considering it.

 The old man was not what he used to be in the sheets of the bed, but then which of us is? I know in my case, it is almost impossible to—

What am I doing? I must stick to the story of the old man and not be distracted by my own tiresome and squalid problems which are not pertinent to the narrative. That is what the reader deserves and everything must be for the reader—that is my credo, even though I have dedicated this book to my publisher and my literary agent.

The old man had no name. Not naming a character gives him an iconic, every-man quality that make him seem symbolic. It is one of the many techniques we best-selling literary authors use to make our writing good and clean and true.

“Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. In this town it was the custom to call those who had no name Santiago.

“What, Santiago?” the old man replied.

“I could go with you now. I made a little money with the boat that is not aguisalaptuguè, which means--”

“I know what it means.”

“Anyway, I am ahead of the game.”

The old man had taught the boy to fish and also to whistle with such a piercing effect that people had to cover their ears and the boy loved him.

“No,” the old man said. “Stick with the winners. That is what the great Trump would do.”

“But remember when you went six years without a fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks?”

“I remember. It got me a three-page spread in Fisherman Illustrated magazine. I know you did not leave me because you doubted.”

“It was papa made me leave. I must obey him for I am a boy. Also he has a baseball bat.”

“I know,” the old man said. “He is a child and wife and manatee abuser who should be in the jail but the police are corrupt and useless.”

“They exist only to serve the wealthy and powerful and to protect their, um, wealth and power.”

“Please, Santiago. I do not like it when you talk like a communist.”

“Sorry,” said the boy. “Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace, where the fishermen go after work?”

“They will all make fun of me,” said the old man. “But I do not care for I am very thirsty, having worked so hard to pull in all those good fish.”

The boy shook his head. Sometimes the old man was clear in his thinking and other times he had the dementia and you never knew which would pop out at any given moment. The neurologist had prescribed some pills for this but the old man did not always remember to take them.

They sat on the Terrace and many of the fishermen made fun of the old man.

“Hey, old man,” one fisherman yelled. “How many invisible fish you catch today?”

“Hey, old man,” another fisherman yelled. “You catch many fish today that nobody else can see?”

 “Hey, hole of the ass,” the first fisherman yelled to the second. “That is the same taunt that I said.”

“No, it is not,” the second fisherman yelled. “You said ‘invisible fish.’ I said ‘fish that nobody else can see.’ That is a different taunt.”

“You moronic idiot,” the first fisherman yelled. “It is the same idea. You stole the concept from me.”

The second fisherman took umbrage at being called a moronic idiot, a phrase he found disrespectful and somewhat redundant. He got up from his table and charged the first fisherman, who stood and took up a boxer’s stance. Immediately the two were pummeling each other and soon their friends joined in and there was a general brawl.

“Now they are happy,” the old man said. He and the boy sat quietly sipping their beers as the fighting swirled around them.

“Yes,” the boy said. “In two years I will be old enough to join in the rumpus. I cannot wait.”

“They are great fun,” said the old man, who was too old to fight. “I really miss them.”

Someone on the floor slid into the legs of their table and the old man politely raised his foot so that the man’s face would not strike his shoe.

 “Hello, Emiliano,” the old man said but Emiliano was unconscious and did not reply.

“Where are you going tomorrow?” the boy said.

  “Far out,” the old man said. “That’s where the big ones are.”

“But are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?”

“I think so. And there are many tricks. I know them all for I have fished for more than fifty years and I have read the book “The Many Tricks of Fishing” by the great Kimmel.”

“Jimmy Kimmel?”
“Yes. He is a mediocre late-night talk-show host but he is the greatest fisherman among all the celebrities.”

“Greater than Obama?”

“Much greater.”

“Greater than Oprah?”

“No contest. Kimmel is greater even than Henry Winkler.”

“Him I do not know.”

“No, you would not, for his star shined only from 1974 to 1984 and never before or after.”

“I was not born until 2012.”           

 “He was in ‘Happy Days,’” the old man said. “He was The Fonz. Everyone loved The Fonz.  But the show was canceled and he disappeared. He was not like the great Newhart, who starred in one show after another.”

“They say that is a very tough business, the sitcom business.”

“We all thought The Fonz would be spun off with Winkler getting his own show but it did not happen.”

“Very sad.”

“Yes. Especially because it was The Fonz who was the first to jump the shark.”

“My uncle Alfredo Menendez was jumped by a shark,” the boy said. “So was Quint in the ‘Jaws’ movie. Neither survived.”

“That is different,” the old man said. “The Fonz jumped over the shark on water skis. All of us fishermen were amazed. We had never seen that done before.”

“Yet you say Kimmel is the greater fisherman.”

“By far.”

Another man came sliding across the floor. He had a bloody nose and was groaning loudly. The two ignored him.

“Let us take your stuff home now,” the boy said.