In a Pinch, Crawdaditude Picks a Fight

I was visiting my brother in Lake Forest recently. He has a huge aquarium that I spent a long while peering into. There were no fish, just 150 gallons of water where fish used to be. He’d had it stocked with lake fish he’d caught, but some fungus got in there.

The chemicals he’d put in to kill the fungus got a little carried away, and soon his fish were sleeping with the fishes, so to speak. There wasn’t much my brother could do for them, short of buying some buns and giving his bass and bluegill new names, like maybe McFish or Filet O’ Fins Sandwich.

All of this chemical carnage went unnoticed by the crawfish in the tank. They were too busy fighting. You could dress them in tartan kilts and put them in a rocket to Mars with the Kinks and Moe Howard, and they’d be too busy fighting to notice.

A brief history of crawfish: Bored one day, God crossed a lobster with a cockroach. He then found it necessary to create Cajuns so someone would eat the things, because crawfish increase like the national debt, except with pincers.

Sometimes in Louisiana I’ve eaten pretty much my weight in crawfish. Go to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival--where I dearly wish I was this instant--and the ground is practically paved with their carcasses. Go to a crawfish boil out in Eunice, and they scald them by the thousands. You eat the tail, suck the head, eat the tail, suck the head, until you feel like a machine in an assembly line.

An acquaintance of mine, Nancy Covey, runs a company that does music-oriented jaunts to Louisiana and other locales. On her excursions out to the bayous of Cajun country she has sometimes arranged for her tour members to go out in the bogs collecting crawfish.

It’s not that hard for her to arrange: To the locals who own the bogs, it’s like having a bunch of Californians go work in the refinery for them. To Nancy, it’s letting her clients immerse themselves in the local culture. I later went on a trip she organized to the then-Soviet Union and was surprised she didn’t have us toiling in the uranium mines for local color.

Crawfish gathering is sort of like going to the beach, except it’s overcast, so humid you’d think submarines would outsell pickups, and the water is an ominous, murky silt, the surface interlaced with resting mosquitoes. Oh, yes, and when you wade in barefoot, you keep losing your footing because the bog floor you’re walking on is one-third mud and two-thirds crawfish. Amazingly, you don’t get bit that much, though the fish caught in the crawfish traps you pull up are pinched to ribbons.

It’s not an experience that particularly endears the little fellas to you, but even so, I have felt a bit guilty when scarfing them down en masse.

No more. Any sympathies I might have had vanished while watching the 16 or so crustaceans skittering around my brother’s fish tank, waving their out-sized claws, red as Bob Dornan’s face. I would far sooner wind up in an etuffe than have to live such a brutal, horrific little life.

Despite having loads of room, food and plenty of the hole-laden rocks water critters love, the only thing crawfish do all day is fight. They sneak up on each other, have standoffs like they’re in a western, gang up on, pinch and claw one another. Once in a while they mate, but only so they can eat their young. It’s an endless Me Generation for bottom-feeders. I hunkered down watching them, my face inches from the glass, trying to imagine what it would be like to have to be in one of those little heads, eternally looking for weakness in my companions and eternally wary of letting my own weaknesses show, surrounded by like creatures anxious to get a claw in the instant I let my guard drop.

It was a paralyzing feeling, depressing and more than a little familiar.

Suddenly I realized: I am watching “Melrose Place”!

I have a friend who watches the show religiously, so I’ve caught it a couple of times with her. “Melrose Place” is sort of a “Dallas” for Generation Xers. Everyone is healthy, happenin’ and young, and permanently poised to do unto their friends and associates, against whom they connive and scheme all episode long.

In the most recent segment I saw, this doctor gets dumped by the woman he saved from Hodgkin’s disease, since she was just using him and is too busy ruining the woman who replaced her as head of an ad agency, whose boyfriend is seeing an office girl on the side. The doctor had left his wife, who attempted suicide but is now having a friend rig evidence to make it look as if the doctor had poisoned her, but her friend is working a double cross to extort money from both the suicidal wife and the doctor, who in the previous episode hadn’t even called 911 for his dying wife until a friend came over.

There are plenty of other characters, such as the bar owner’s brother who’s putting moves on his bro’s girlfriend. And if they aren’t all busy back-stabbing it’s just because they’ve had to take a number and get in line. Mention to a regular watcher that maybe one guy seems kind of nice, and you’ll hear, “Are you kidding? He crucified his fiancee’s dog last week!”

They all seem expert at the closing-door aside, which goes like this: “I can’t wait to see you again, Mike . . . (door closes) . . . with a fork in your head!” I recommend you practice this with friends. It’s kind of fun, and the way things are going in the world it may just come in handy.

I can’t do anything about the TV show, but I did have a chance to eat the crawfish last week, when my brother moved and he asked whether I wanted the temporarily homeless vermin. I probably should have eaten them, because now they’re just back in the aquarium in their new home, snapping away at each other.

Are all crawfish like that, I wonder? Or is it just a few, whose attitude problems force the others to be that way?

I worry a lot about people. Maybe reincarnation is a fact, and with so many people in the world today there aren’t enough human-grade souls to go around, and there are, instead, “Melrose Place” people among us with insect or crawfish souls.

Usually all we’ve had to confront in the United States are jerks running red lights in their prestige cars, office sharks, a touch of corporate greed and the overplayed but growing threat of street violence. But what of the Middle East and the Balkans? I suspect most people there and everywhere just want to live and raise their children, but when jerks with agendas push things to extremes, everyone gets pulled into it.

What do we do when extremists hold sway here? Do we all become guided by fear and its byproduct--hate? I don’t know any answers, but when a fish tank, fiction and the horrific facts on the news all start to look the same, I really start to worry.