The Spam Brothers

I.

Sam stopped painting after the divorce and before playing the accordion for eight months on the cruise ship. For the three friends with whom he had long and fished, this sudden return to the musical instrument of his youth begged more questions than it answered.

Their companionship had, in part, led to the divorce. Leo, Jon and Mel stood a roll call of petty and major vices, questionable syndromes and simple character weaknesses. Each had wandered into one Twelve Step Program or another, proving that the Ten Commandments had been replaced by the One Hundred Twenty Steps. Leo, a card carrying member of three groups battling drugs, alcohol and gambling, had won the addict’s trifecta.

The combination of rich food, unlimited beer and eight months of no more arduous activity than playing “Lady of Spain” life transformed Sam from gaunt painter to portly, middle-aged man. As his weight ballooned, a gay Mexican steward let out Sam’s tuxedo trousers and had sewn garish multicolored darts into his ruffled silk shirts.

Sam’s accordion career resulted from serendipity and two acts of forgery. Soon after Sam’s restaurant failed, he found the accordion in the attic and began playing incessantly. When he drove to the Left Coast to visit the few family members he was not estranged from and escape the Montana winter and the bankruptcy signs posted on the windows of The Game Chef, he crammed the accordion into his battered jeep almost as an afterthought.

One morning, after a glass of grappa with an expresso chaser, Sam found a newspaper advertisement for an accordion player. At the audition, his fellow players constituted the infirm, the halt and the grizzled. One pushed a shopping cart into the music hall containing pile of rags, newspapers, crushed cans and a Petosa AM 1100 accordion. That the cruise line’s entertainment director hired Sam was more a commentary on the turnout than his musicianship

He was ordered to report to the line’s offices in a week with his union card and a letter from a doctor certifying to his good health. The union card was easy. Sam merely bought one for $20 from a stumblebum at the audition. Changing the name on the soiled, dog-eared card was child’s play for an artist.

The health certificate was more difficult. “You’re a physical wreck,” one of the medicos advised. “Frankly I’d be afraid to give you a lift to Fisherman’s Wharf,” the second had said. High blood pressure, a hint of gout, and a cholesterol count over 250, merely scraped the surface. Sam honestly didn’t feel as poorly as the doctors suggested. With several sheets of stationery purloined from a third doctor’s office, he bought a few minutes of computer time at Kinko’s and authored his own clean bill.

Sam played “Laura” and “Three Coins in a Fountain” during dinner and for a couple of hours following. When the comedienne and the four piece swing-jazz-blues- rock band took over the stage, he grazed through pastries and sat at the end of the bar methodically working his way through assorted ales before finishing the night with a Guinness Stout

Upon returning to San Francisco, Sam called Mel, who claimed sex addiction and recreational drug use as excuses for his life’s problems, and asked him to get the cabin ready for his return.

The cabin was Sam’s only surviving tangible asset after the divorce and the restaurant debacle. Earlier, he had shrewdly bartered paintings to a gun dealer, a rod manufacturer and one of Montana’s premier fly shops in return for carte blanche. He would never again have to pay for a fly, a shotgun shell or waders. The merchants, in turn, had also dealt shrewdly with Sam who’s large paintings sold for $30,000 to $50,000 each.

In return for a five-painting suite, an action-adventure movie star, the only man in Montana with a ponytail, had deeded over 100 acres from his 20,000-acre ranch and hired a contractor to erect the cabin. Sam didn’t much care for the actor or his movies, but at least with the cabin he would have a place to live as he decided his next steps.

. Sam retrieved the dust covered Jeep from storage and drove to an Army-Navy surplus store where he outfitted himself in more capacious clothing. He didn’t set any weight-loss goals; he was beyond setting goals for anything. He merely intended to steer his way back into a more active world, one with limited supplies of both pastries and ales..

After months of the majestic vastness of the ocean and the contrived colors of the cruise ship and its ports of call, Sam was ill-prepared for the explosion of light, color and depth as he drove the West. The same light, color and depth he had painted, the same light, color and depth that had earned him his reputation, the same light, color and depth he could no longer capture. Sam’s last paintings looked like his previous work, but they didn’t feel right. He had moved from creativity to technical mimicry.

Like all copies, the result was devoid of life and passion.By the time he reached Wyoming, Sam felt the tug, the need for home. He stopped at a favorite restaurant in Afton to devour a midafternoon breakfast featuring Polish sausage on the side. Eight hours later he left the “oil” and turned onto the dirt road that led to his cabin. The front porch light shone, a winking beacon in the distance.

Sam left the accordion and his duffel bag on the porch and walked through the house, bathing himself in the familiar. The action hero had insisted that his wife-a minor Hollywood figure who must have been what the French explorers envisioned when they christened the Grand Tetons-handle the interior decorating. She had chosen an “idea-of-Montana” motif. Indian rugs draped over log railings, stone fireplace, hardwood floors covered with more rugs, the colors green and burgundy, the furniture running to men’s club leather and mission oak. Sam had designed the kitchen, an efficient workspace for someone serious about food.

Taped to the door of the walk-in freezer was a note: “The elk quarter was poached from that pissant Turner’s ranch. Donor prefers to remain anonymous. Expect the Spam Brothers on Sunday. One day at a time. Mel.”

II.

The four men who sat on the porch smoking cigars had lived in Montana long enough to claim a near-native status: They had arrived before Peter Fonda.

The remains of elk sausage with onions and habaneros on baguettes, duck and a smorgasbord of sauces, elk steaks in green peppercorns and assorted pies littered the table. Sam’s culinary debauches had always held a frantic energy, an edge surrounded by reckless laughter and heedless good cheer. Now that edge was missing, replaced by a strange feeling of enforced control.

On his first visit to town, no one had recognized the thin painter inside the fat man until he ran into Jon. Jon, who often encountered various versions of himself in his bathroom mirror instantly recognized him. “Sam, you got fat!”

“That I did,” he had replied, trying not to be annoyed that Jon had just left the building that had once been Sam’s restaurant.

“What happened here?” Sam asked, pointing to the “Free Tibet” and “Respect your fellow creatures, don’t eat them” stickers that covered the window.

“The New Agers happened,” Jon replied. “Welcome to the Holistic Herbal Tea Shoppe Vegetarian Restaurant Crystal and Aromatherapy CO-Op.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am, and they’re actually making a go of it.” Left unsaid was the fact that Sam’s restaurant had not. “I usually buy a multigrain muffin and a tea. Helps keep me regular.”

“It has been a good long time since I could remember a meal that I could remember,” said Leo, exhaling a stream of cigar smoke.

“What’s the last Super Bowl you remember?” Mel asked.

“Bears/Patriots…1985. Chicago had a Refrigerator about the same size as Sam’s.”

Sam’s Super Bowl feasts were famous, culinary tours de force. Leo transformed by money from wino to Oenophile, selected the wines. Money-Hollywood money-had transformed Leo in other ways as well. He was a script doctor, usually brought into shooting sets to reshape constipated films. With movie icons cooling their heels, technicians and crew enjoying the largesse of a stalled production, Leo could charge what he pleased.

The Super Bowl parties lasted into Monday morning, with leftover breakfasts and hair-of-the-dog Bloody Marys. Over the years the cast changed, as Leo, Jon and Mel traded their first wives for newer models.

It was during one of the Buffalo Bills exercises in futility that one of the wives with the hyphenated names suggested that Sam open a restaurant. And so, like many a fool who is cursed twice by a love of food and the ability to prepare it, Sam plunged into the restaurant business. The accumulated weight of its failure and 27 years spent under the same roof with a painter, finally drove Sam’s wife into the clutches of Montana’s most parasitic divorce attorney. Sam willingly stood for the fleecing. As the sun set and the air cooled, silence fell over the four friends.

Finally Leo broke the silence.

“Salmonfly hatch.”

“My God,” Jon moaned, “we’re not going to chase the salmonfly again, are we?”

“No chasing required,” Leo announced. “Irrefutable evidence, confirmed sightings.”

“Then we battle every fly fisherman in America,” Mel complained. “I swear it’s getting worse. Camper caravans follow the hatch; it’s shoulder to shoulder on the river.”

“Not where we’re going,” Leo said.

“Private water, me lads.” Leo then mentioned the name of a Hollywood tyro who had by the age of 26 directed two hyperviolent films that became cult-classic films that translated into a 50,000-acre ranch. Leo had helped him secure financing for his first film.

Sam coughed, then barked a “When?”

“Tomorrow?” Leo queried tentatively.

“Works for me,” Mel said.

“Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Gentlemen,” Leo announced, “the Spam Brothers ride again.”

III.

“Italians don’t fly fish,” Sam’s father had said nearly four decades earlier. “We fish on boats with our cousins or guys named Guido.” The only rod Sam’s father had ever used had jacked tuna over his shoulder onto the deck of a boat. When he had earned enough money, Sam’s father bought his own A boat and left Fisherman’s Wharf as a market fisherman. He would never understand how fishing could be an enjoyable pastime.

Sam began at the casting pool in Golden Gate Park. “The Little Guinea” had eventually become the club’s junior casting champion, the result of years of instruction and daily practice. His father had been indulgent because Sam was the only son who had expressed any interest in fishing at all. While his degree in fine arts certainly gave Sam the credentials for life as a market fisherman, he decided to head east to pursue the bohemian life of a painter. His father, finally realizing that no son would ever stand at the wheel of Nellie, sold the boat and retired after Sam graduated.

Sam did not go east alone. His college sweetheart soon became his wife and for several years they lived an itinerant life: Salt Lake City, Denver, Jackson Hole and then West Yellowstone. Sandwiched between a number of menial jobs, Sam painted Yellowstone Park. He painted Yellowstone Park unlike anyone ever had, capturing both its power and the underlying serenity using a palette of surprising colors that lived in his mind though not in the world. Sam’s paintings swallowed you, bringing you in deep. The publisher of a small press who had seen his work put a winter scene on the cover of a book that improbably became a literary sensation. Sam’s success followed.

Sam slowly collected his gear. He selected a pair of rods and reels, checked fly boxes and vest, packed then discarded, a net. He tried to but failed to squeeze into his neoprene waders; long underwear and the old Red Ball’s would have to suffice. His lantern and stove, their green paint dulled and chipped, were redolent with memories of cruising the West with his wife and the dreams of the young. Sam couldn’t remember every camp the lantern had lit, or every meal he had prepared on the two burner stove, but he could remember enough of them, memory now becoming both burden and mystery.

The next morning Jon arrived in a shiny new Suburban that seemed to go on forever. Sam stowed his gear and took the seat next to Jon. Leo and Mel, reading glasses perched on the tips of noses, attended to gear spread out on the commodious back seat.

“The whiffs of mortality,” Jon said, pointing to the back seat with his thumb, “become stronger.”

“Tell me,” he said, raising his voice, “do you think we’ve descended into some pitiable realm where we seek to recapture our youth through some false sense of bonhomie?”

“No,” Leo said, “we did that by marrying women half our age.”

“I don’t recall relinquishing my youth,” muttered Mel, “but it is deeply disturbing to see my father’s face in the mirror each morning.”

“This is a rather maudlin way to start a trip,” Sam observed.

“We’re just being philosophical,” Jon said.

“Normally reserved for our postprandial under-the-stars discussions.” Sam said. “I can’t recall our wading into conversations of any depth in the morning.”

“Sam has a point,” Mel offered. “Perhaps we should discuss which of us begins this trip a happy fisherman, defined as having the previous evening in connubial bliss.”

“We’re at the age where we’re more likely to compare bowel movements,” said Leo.

“That’s it!” Jon slipped Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits into the CD player, turned the volume up to barely tolerable and drove his own way against the wind.

They stopped once on the way to the ranch. In most small-town grocery stores, four middle-aged men in various states of dishabille cruising the aisle and loading their carts with cholesterol-laden foods might have turned an eye, but not here, where it was simply understood that they were sportsmen. Missing from the shopping cart was the happy clink of scotch and bourbon bottles. “We’re as dry as a conclave of Mormon elders,” Jon said as they items flew past the scanner.

“Remember when we argued about who was going to be the designated driver?” Mel asked.

“Now we’re reduced to Sam as the designated drinker.”

They had made and broken many camps. Each had his tasks and within thirty minutes the tents were up, a table erected and set, stools spread around a campfire, fishing gear staged and ready for use. They had fished together often enough that they had come to predict, understand, and accept each other’s idiosyncrasies. There was no need to rush to the water and begin flailing. The river, the salmonflies, and the trout would all be there after the nap.

The mid-afternoon sun warmed the camp and Sam lay down in the grass for his nap, covering his face with a cap that smelled of sweat, bug dope, sage and smoke. Sam listened to the river’s constant rumble, changing timbre, the rush of water. The ground was warm, the grass thick and soft, and Sam felt himself being pulled deeply into sleep as if by gravity, as if he were draining into the earth.

When he awoke in the late afternoon he smelled the river. The wind was up. Crawling out from under the blankets of a deep sleep, The four men looked like a puffy eyed group of overgrown kindergartners. Middle aged joints gave off middle aged creaks followed by groans and sighs.

Sam put up his five weight, overlining it with a six weight. He tied on a Royal Trude, then struggled into his waders. With his girth he needed neither belt nor suspenders. “Congratulations, Sam,” Mel jibed, “you’re the new super model for Red Ball, the only man in America they actually fit!”

They walked down to the river together, each knowing where they would fish, splitting apart to find solitude in the moving water. Sam began fishing immediately and his friends paused to watch. It had been a year since Sam had held a fly rod in his hands, but deep in his bones was the memory of casting. He stripped line from the reel, looping it between the fingers of his left hand.

He made two false casts and then shot the line upstream, checked, and turned over the Trude so that it fell softly into a slick. The fly had barely settled in the water when it disappeared. Sam set the hook and quickly landed a small rainbow trout. He turned to his friends, still standing on the bank.

“You watching, or you fishing?”

“How does he do it?” said Mel, whose notoriously poor cast was the object of ridicule. “The bastard hasn’t fished in a year and he uncorks a cast like that!” Mel turned, mumbling, and headed upstream.

When Sam was alone he waded to a spot where the water reached his thighs, building a small wall upstream and creating a pocket behind his legs. He felt rocklike anchored to the river’s bottom. He dropped a hand into the cold water, feathering it like an oar. The water was soothing, therapeutic, yet its undercurrent hinted at power. Sam was content to watch the river, eyes slowly covering water. In the shallows of a gravel bar, the sun painted the water with color. Gravel tumbled in the current, blues and greens sparkling. Sam remembered other waters and other colors: the leaden gray of the Madison in May, the skim milk blue-white cast of glacier fed river in Alaska, the greens of a spring creek, the coffee-and-cream brown of the Clark’s Fork swollen with snow melt.

Sam didn’t fish much, and when he did it was half-hearted. He stayed near camp, working the Trude slowly upstream, using longer casts than were necessary to cover the water.

As the afternoon wound down, the air filled with salmonflies, so many that he brushed them away. One flew between his glasses and face, and Sam clawed it out and tossed it in the river. As the salmonfly struggled a large rainbow took it not two feet away.

Sam plucked more salmonflies from his body and seeded the water. They rarely traveled two feet before disappearing into a spreading ring.

The wind died just as suddenly as it had appeared, and the flies went with it. He returned to camp, poured a bourbon and prepared dinner. Sam heard his friends before he saw them, cautious steps in the dusk but their voices excited, with a youthful lilt. After dinner, around the campfire, Mel said “Leo, you’ve outdone yourself. These fish are innocents.”

“Never saw another soul all afternoon,” Jon said. “Just think, on rivers across this glorious state thousands of fishermen are fighting for a few square feet...”

“Synchronized casting,” Leo said.

“Yes, a few square feet,” Jon continued. “Maybe we should feel guilty. We’re sort of a privileged group...”

“Assholes,” Sam offered.

“Not the precise word I was searching for,” Jon said.

“A bit dark, aren’t we Sam?” Leo asked.

“Leo,” Sam replied, “when we were young we used to hate guys like us. The assholes with connections, the rich guys who could buy this kind of privacy.”

“Oh,” Leo said, “a we’ve-become-what-we- once-hated sob story.”

“Not even close. Jon wasn’t too far off the mark this morning. We are so self-absorbed that we’ve refused to acknowledge what we really are.”

“I haven’t knocked the first ash off this cigar,” Mel said, “and we’re already deep into the philosophical.”

“Just remember,” Jon commented, “that the occasional philosophical comment

doesn’t make us philosophers.”

“So what are we, Sam?” Leo asked.

“We’re four grasping middle aged men of relative privilege. Our best days are clearly behind us, and until we accept that, we’re not going to accomplish much with the time we have left.”

“That’s pretty damned pessimistic, Sam, and maybe, just maybe you’re speaking

for yourself.”

“Am I?” Sam asked. “You know, Leo, when I was on that cruise, playing the same songs every night to the blue-hair crowd I came to understand something. Despite our self-absorption we’re really rather insignificant. We’re not even as important to each other as we once were.”

“I’m sensing a little envy here,” Mel offered. “Sam, are you lashing out because you can’t paint anymore?”

“You sound like a talk show host,” Jon said.

“Not envy,” Sam answered, “I don’t envy any of you, or anyone for that matter.”

“Then what?” The voices now came out of the dark, each man just beyond the light cast by the fire. The air beyond the reach of the fire was chilled and damp, the sky a rich canopy of stars. Their words were disembodied, seeming to come from far away, just audible, the rush of moving water.

“I don’t know,” Sam answered. “Fatalism, realism, pragmatism.”

“How about rheumatism?” Leo asked, his momentary anger waving.

“You suddenly realize that you’re not as important as you once thought you were. We’re solipsists, convinced that only we exist, that the world will end with us.”

“It does.”

“That’s just it: it doesn’t.”

"And this is the first night," Mel moaned.

“Scary thought,” Jon said. “Gentlemen, we undertook this adventure to celebrate Pteronarcys, good food, and fellowship. I suggest we leave off this conversation, repair to our tents and get our heads right for tomorrow.”

The night sounds were what you’d expect from men living on the north side of 50. Snores and flatulence were interrupted by the ripping of tent zippers, the gravel crunch of sleep-heavy feet and the rush of different water, the river a low contrabasso underlying these sounds of men.

Even though it was early July, a light patina of frost covered the camp. As usual the first night in camp, Sam had not slept well. The leaden morning light, leaden filled the tent far too soon. He could see his breath. Struggling into nearly all the clothes he owned, he tugged on a knit cap and crawled from the tent.

The others were awake, huddled over cups of coffee and a nascent fire.

“We’ve decided today is the day for Blasphemous Breakfast,” Leo said.

“We have, however, two points of order that the Spam Brothers must resolve,” Mel announced.

“Sam, the bagels are from the Holistic Herbal Tea Shoppe and Vegetarian Co-op,” said Jon. “We’re wondering if that bothers you?” “They’re the best bagels in Montana,” Leo said “They’re the only bagels in Montana,” Jon added quickly.

“It was a good bagel, it was a clean bagel, it was a good, clean bagel,” Leo said. “There in the good place with the good bagel.”

“Not an issue,” Sam said.

“Now that we have resolved that,” Mel continued, “there is the matter of the hats.” From beneath his fleece pullover, Mel produced four Navy blue baseball caps, their crowns emblazoned in gold with SPAM.

“We would like to include in the tradition of preparing and consuming the Blasphemous Breakfast, the wearing of the hat.”

“Where did you find these?” Sam asked, as he replaced his knit cap with the baseball cap.

“Among the changes wrought over this great land during your nautical exile,” said Leo, “has been the emergence of a Spam cult. Naturally, this cult indulges in retail therapy through the purchase of appropriate icons from the Spam catalog.”

“Spam is in, Sam you am,” Mel said.

And so Sam prepared the Blasphemous Breakfast. He emptied two tins of Spam, slicing the blocks into 12 pieces each along the shorter side. Sam placed the slices in a frying pan, then covered the sizzling breakfast meat with the bagels to soak in the grease. Sam then slathered each bagel half with mustard and added a generous squirt of a Chinese hot sauce and the Spam Brothers each devoured a brace of Spam sandwiches.

As the sun filled the sky and the air warmed, layers of clothes were shed and more coffee prepared. At ten o’clock they got ready to fish. Sam wore his Spam cap, and under his vest, a ruffled shirt with multicolored darts.

He walked the riverbank to a dead tree branch where salmonflies clung, lethargic, in the weak morning sun. He tossed a handful into the water and watched as a few disappeared in swirls. He tied on a #2 MacSalmon walked downstream, then he turned and made a cast upstream into the previously salted riffle. He struck too early on the first cast, but the trout, leapt again for the fly as Sam picked up the line. His next few casts drifted unmolested. Sam stripped out another five feet of line and sent a cast behind a slick. A rainbow shot from the water chasing the fly. On the next cast it struck again, a big one. It ran downstream then up, its jumps heavy and distinct.

When Sam landed the fish he was suddenly aware of a truth about himself--not quite an epiphany, yet a truth nonetheless. His fifty-year old rod was nearly as old as he was, yet still held some magic. Sam had done everything right with this fish: placed the cast perfectly, set the hook without tearing it out, found the balance between fighting a large fish and horsing it, and for this his reward was that for a few seconds Sam held perfection.

Hands shaking, he held the thick-bodied rainbow—its deep black eyes, bright silver sides, the red line bisecting the peppered spots. Sam removed the fly without taking the trout from the water. He was surprised to find his hands shaking as they had when, barely removed from boyhood on another Western river, he had landed his first trout.

With one hand he supported the fish’s belly, swollen with salmonflies, while the other hand circling the wrist just above the tail. He moved the fish gently, reviving it, allowing it to gather strength. Sam saw all the colors: the trout, the water, the soaked ruffled shirt cuff and its jade cufflink, of the river bottom, of moss, of grass, the sky, the clouds, the sun, and he saw their colors as only he could see them.

With a burst the fish was gone. It paused for an instant in the current some two feet away, and then where there had once been color and life and perfection, there was now only water and different colors--and perhaps, a different perfection.

Sam realized that he was still kneeling in the river, rod tucked under his arm, hands still in the water, holding nothing. He stood, momentarily light headed. He felt his heart beating. Small explosions of light danced before his eyes. He brought his hand to his face felt the cold water, smelled the river and the trout.

He placed his rod at the river’s edge, then stepped into the moving water, making for a rock near the bank. It was a good place to sit. As the current buffeted his legs, he rummaged in his vest, looking for some paper and a pencil.