Thick Fish

Daisy’s brother and his two friends named their band Thick Fish.

They got the name by just opening the dictionary up to two random words. Said that’s how all the best bands did it. It was catchy enough, but I think they could have done the whole thing again. Maybe tried to land on something better.

We used to watch Thick Fish play, Daisy and me. We would sit on her brother’s bed, getting our eardrums blasted off by the speakers while they covered a Green Day song. Or sang one of their own. Or tried to learn Radiohead. Daisy’s brother had bangs that covered his eyes when he played guitar. All his friends had that same floppy hair that formed greasy little ropes at the ends. I was grossed out by it but I also wanted to reach out and feel it.

Daisy’s house was always messy. It smelled like their five pets, who ran in and out of the house of their own volition. They’d keep the windows open in the summer, because there was no AC, and the smell of cigarettes would float in from the neighbor's house. We could always hear him yelling about something unimportant.

I liked watching Thick Fish practice because it made me feel like I was in some behind-the-scenes music documentary on VH1. Like I was watching something really special happen. It made me think that, maybe someday, I’d be interviewed about Thick Fish’s early days. And I could say something like “I knew they were going to make it” or “They always had that special something”. I’d be a real Thick Fish expert.

I think it annoyed Daisy that her brother always had his friends over to play such loud music. Since they shared a wall, she said it was hard to watch the TV in her room. She couldn’t play The Sims with the sound on. She couldn’t practice her own keyboard, which she had just gotten last Christmas, and lit up when she pressed different keys. She never watched them practice if I wasn’t over to convince her.

Daisy’s room was messier than the whole rest of the house. I’d never seen it clean. She kept her clothes in piles on the floor and piles on her bed. She scooted the clothing mountains over when it was time to sleep. Sometimes just kicking one a little bit with her leg was enough. She kept plates and cups on her bedside table, like a museum. Ancient artifacts, revealing Daisy only ate buttered noodles and only drank Coca-Cola.

I liked spending weekend nights at Daisy’s house because we could walk to the park across the street and play monkey bars with her next-door neighbors, Heather and Brooke. Heather and Brooke were younger than us and went to a different school. They lived with their dad who always had his shirt off and was the reason Daisy’s house smelled like cigarettes. Their accents were thicker than mine.
Brooke and Heather liked to take the bottom of their tank tops and flip them through the neck of their shirt, pulling the hem down so that the whole shirt looked like a bra and your belly showed. They taught me how to do it and I wore my shirt like that every time we hung from the monkey bars. I figured my belly was going to show, anyway, in that position.

I learned to like cold pizza at Daisy’s house; we’d eat it for breakfast. I learned to like The Red Hot Chili Peppers. And Green Day. Any song that Thick Fish played. I even learned to like Howard Stern, which was what we’d watch late at night and often fall asleep to, cuddled against Daisy’s piles of tank tops, stretched-out from our belly reveals. Daisy never turned her TV off; she only turned the volume down.

“My brother’s home from school for two weeks, he got suspended,” Daisy said to me one night on the swing set at the park. I had my tank top flipped up and was straddling the swing so I could face Daisy, who sat the same way on the other one. “He had weed in his pocket.”

“Woah.” I said it, quietly, just in case. “Are your parents mad?”

“I don’t think so,” Daisy said with a sigh. She dug the heels of her plastic, chunky sandals into the rocks beneath us.
Daisy’s mom was a special education teacher, and her dad did landscaping. He wasn’t around much and the only thing I knew about him was that he had a dulcimer, wedged between some boxes in their computer room. I thought it was such a pretty instrument. I’d play hymns on it, hitting the strings with Daisy and flipping through the sheet music, pretending that we knew what any of it meant. That must be where her brother got it—his musical genius.

Daisy then put her pinky out, confidently, looking for a promise. “Let’s never do drugs.”

This was an easy promise for me to make. I didn’t know anybody who smoked weed. I didn’t even know where you’d find it or what it felt like. I only knew about drugs from Degrassi and the 5th-grade D.A.R.E. program.

“Promise,” I said to Daisy, anyway.

Daisy had a crush on the one boy at school in the drama club and despite this new information, I had a crush on Daisy’s brother. Daisy was allowed to talk about her crush as much as she wanted but I kept mine a secret. We planned out Daisy and her crush’s future children’s names—first and middle. We bought wedding magazines from the grocery store and cut out the white dresses that she liked, and the bridesmaids dresses that I liked. Sometimes we would cut the magazines right in the center of Daisy’s bed and leave the scraps where they fell—pushing them into a pile at our feet when it was time to go to bed.

Daisy’s brother was at home a lot more, since the suspension, and his bandmates weren’t allowed to come over. He kept his bedroom door closed and he played the same riff from Jesus of Suburbia over and over into his amp. I could hear him cuss when he messed up.

Heather and Brooke knocked on the door and asked Daisy and me to go to the park and hang upside down with them.

“Mom!” Daisy yelled to the back of the house. “We’re going to the park!” Daisy’s mom emerged from her bedroom, a room I’d never seen before, and touched Daisy gently on the shoulder.

“Ok,” She sighed. She always seemed exhausted. “Take your brother.”

“Mom, no,” Daisy groaned.

“At least ask him. He needs to get out of the house.”

Daisy rolled her eyes and shuffled her way to her brother's door.

“Hey,” she yelled, instead of knocking, and opened the door before there was even a response.

“What the fuck, Daisy.” His amp rang out as he set his guitar down. Like an alarm.

“We’re going to the park.” She rolled her eyes. “Wanna come?”

Surprisingly, he slipped on his sneakers and followed us out the door.

Clouds hung low in the sky, stretched-out like cotton balls. There was music playing down the street and the air smelled like hot dogs over a barbecue. Now and again a baby would shriek or giggle, both noises sounding pretty much the same.

The park was empty and Heather and Brooke took turns doing round-offs in the grass, their feet coming together in the air for one magical moment before they popped back upright, hands to the sky.  

They showed us a cheer they’d learned from watching the older girls at the football games. “Purple, purple! Gold, gold!” They shouted in thick voices, clapping their hands together in sharp, loud cups.

Daisy’s brother did a pull-up on the monkey bars and hoisted his whole body to the top, until he was perched high above us all. He shook his stringy hair out of his face and gazed in the distance, like his mind was somewhere else. I wanted to sit next to him, but I knew my arms were too weak. I couldn’t do that same maneuver. So, I acted like I didn’t notice him, either.

I thought about saying that I hate cheerleaders, even though I wasn’t sure if that was true. I wanted him to know that Daisy and me didn’t practice tumbling at the park and that I mostly ignored the chants I heard from the bleachers when my parents took me to football games on Friday nights. I wanted him to see me as someone more like him and less like anyone else.

“Stop being weird,” Daisy said, flicking the side of my shoulder. “You’re being so quiet.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, rubbing the spot on my arm.

Daisy’s brother laid back on the top of the monkey bars, with his arms spread out, all Christ-like. Jesus of Suburbia.

I didn’t dare flip my shirt.

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