Fish Story

Neither Bob nor I could tolerate the idea of Mike Breslin getting himself promoted into the V.P. slot.  Mike was one of the most conceited, vain, obnoxious people you’d ever meet.  Although he fancied himself a great ladies’ man, women shunned him, openly.  With little wonder.  His idea of “conversation” with a woman was to corner her somewhere, literally, and bellow into her face a nonstop litany of self-congratulatory crap.  He particularly tried to impress them by regaling them with oft repeated anecdotes about all the famous people he’d supposedly met and whom he knew “personally.”

“And so I says to the governor, Bob, you gotta stop smoking them cigars,” he’d be droning into some unfortunate girl’s face as I’d walk into the kitchen at someone’s Christmas party.  As though the governor, or anyone else really important, would even give Mike second notice.  He was a crashing bore.

Mike Breslin just had to be taken down a peg or two, and Bob and I figured we were just the guys to do it.  The inspiration came to me one day as I sat in Mike’s office, suffering one of his monologues.  Behind him, strategically placed on the wall so that anyone entering the office would immediately spot it, was a large mounted salmon that Mike claimed he had caught on a fishing vacation in Alaska one summer.  The thing had to be fully two feet long.  It even had a little brass plaque affixed to it telling anyone who got close enough to read it that the man who’d landed this whopper was none other than Mike Breslin, scourge of the world’s spawning grounds.

As I sat there, not really listening to a thing Mike was saying, I imagined the fish getting smaller and smaller.  And then I thought, “Why not?”

When I told Bob my idea over lunch at Red Lobster, he grinned.

“I know this taxidermist,” he snickered.  “He’d do it for us.  You gotta get a good set of photos of the fish, along with some measurements.  We’ll take them to Harvey.  It’ll cost us a little money, but it’s worth it.”  We sealed the deal with a handshake.

And the very next day, while Bob detained Mike in the conference room after our morning meeting, I sneaked quickly into Mike’s office with a camera and a tape measure.

Plan “A” was implemented that weekend when Bob delivered the goods to his taxidermist buddy, Harvey.  All that Harvey required was that we deliver the original fish to him, and keep returning the replacement fish as we cycled through them.  That and a hundred and fifty bucks, which Bob and I happily forked over.  The next Tuesday, we had our first surrogate salmon.  It was three quarters of an inch shorter than the original, but otherwise nearly identical.  Harvey had arranged for a little brass plaque that was indistinguishable from the one on Mike’s mounted fish.

Arriving at work early, I hurriedly switched salmon as Bob stood lookout.  We didn’t expect any results from the first few switches.  Mike barely noticed anything until about the fifth or sixth substitution.  Then we caught him one morning standing behind his desk, his back to the door, looking suspiciously at the wall.  He muttered something, shook his head, and sat down.  All that morning he seemed distracted, preoccupied.  Bob popped into his office around ten thirty and asked him a question, and told me later that Mike had just sat there, a dazed look on his face, as though Bob didn’t even exist.

Plan “A” was into its tenth week when Mike showed up one Monday morning, seemingly cured of the blue funk he’d been in for a nearly month.  He’d bought a new car – one of those expensive yuppie models, a status symbol automobile that probably cost double what the new house cost my dad when I was ten years old.  For nearly two weeks, we had to listen to Mike’s incessant bragging about his car, and about what fantastic gas mileage he was getting.  We switched out a couple more salmon on him, and he seemed barely to notice, even though the fish on his wall was now down to about two thirds the length of the original one.  Clearly, we needed a “plan B,” and this time it was Bob who came up with it.  Leaning over the table at Red Lobster after looking nervously around to make sure no one from work was there eavesdropping, he practically whispered it to me.  It was my turn to grin.

The next morning I waited in the parking lot until Mike had swung in, driving his precious car.  I worried that he’d have a locked gas cap, or that he’d lock his car so that I couldn’t get to the switch that opened the little door over the gas cap, but we were in luck.  In no time at all, I had emptied a gallon of gasoline into his tank.

We kept that up every day for a week.  Mike was practically having an orgasm every time he told anybody about his new car, and about how the gas mileage was getting even better.  “Up to forty-five miles to the gallon!” he boasted.  Still, the salmon shrank another half inch, and on the following week, we emptied two gallons of gas into his tank every day.  By now, Mike’s gas mileage had reached almost unheard-of proportions, and his fellow workers all knew he had to be lying.  But he was ecstatic.  He didn’t notice at all when the salmon grew another half inch shorter on Friday.

On Monday, I was there in the parking lot when Mike wheeled in.  This time, I had a hose and an empty gas can.  It had been a long time since I’d siphoned gas from a tank – I’d probably been a sophomore in college, the spring a bunch of us drove to Ft. Lauderdale and tried to keep our expenses under control.  Every day that week, I drew off another gallon from Mike’s tank.  By the third day, he was sullen and morose.  By Friday, he was nearly suicidal.  His gas mileage had ceased to be a topic of conversation altogether.

“How’s the car doin’?” Bob enthused.  Mike sat hunched over at his desk, staring catatonically at the blotter.  “Gotta take it into the shop,” he mumbled.  “Something’s wrong.”  Bob didn’t pursue it.  Instead, he piped up with, “Say, I always meant to ask you about that fish.  You catch that?”  Mike glanced over his shoulder at the now pathetic trophy, shrugged and continued glowering at the papers on his desk.

We didn’t want to risk blowing it at this point, so we held off switching fish on him for another couple of weeks.  In the meantime, we varied the amount of gas we siphoned off every day.  Sometimes a gallon, sometimes, only a half gallon, never more than two gallons.  Just enough to keep him on edge.  His mood grew increasingly worse as the days dragged on.  He stopped holding his morning pep rally.  Upper management must have taken notice by now, because Mike stopped coming into work early and began leaving punctually at five, along with the rest of us grunts.  During the day, he stayed sequestered in his office with the door closed.  Carol, Mike’s secretary, asked me one morning, “What’s gotten into Mike?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he doesn’t chase us girls around anymore.  We actually get work done.  I haven’t heard him bragging about anything.  Is he sick?”

“Probably just overworked,” I offered.

“Can’t be,” she responded.  “He hasn’t done a thing for weeks.  Margrave called him yesterday and I was in his office and could hear Margrave’s voice – you know how loud he is – chewing Mike out.  Told him he better get his act together, and a bunch of stuff like that.”  Edwin Margrave was the CEO.

“Gee,” I said, “sounds serious.  Think he’s going to get Ross’s job when he retires this fall”

Carol just shrugged.

Bob and I celebrated at Red Lobster.  “It’s working,” I told him.  “Carol says that Margrave chewed him out yesterday.”

“Maybe it’s time for the coup de grace,” Bob said.

“You think so?”

“I know so.  Besides, it’s not like Mike hasn’t gotten plenty on the side up til now.  We’ll be doing his wife a favor.”

Plan C required the services of a woman, and I had an ex girl friend, Linda, who said she was willing to do it if Bob and I sprung for tickets to a playoff game that her boyfriend wanted to see.  Bob and I managed to find the tickets somehow and we took Linda to Red Lobster to give her the game plan.

For nearly two weeks, Linda called Mike’s house every evening, about ten or fifteen minutes before he could possibly have arrived home from work.  Breathing heavily and sexily into the phone, she’d ask Mike’s wife, “Is Mike there?  I just have to talk to him.”  And before Betty, Mike’s wife, could hang up, she’d say, “Tell him Linda called.  He has my number.”

Finally, letters started arriving at Mike’s house.  Perfumed letters, addressed to him in a feminine handwriting.  You can guess at the contents.  We mailed five or six, hoping at least one would get intercepted by Betty.

Ross McDonald, the V.P. for operations, retired in October.  Phil Owns got his job.  Mike’s wife left him in November, and Mike had to trade in his flashy new car on less pretentious transportation to be able to afford a lawyer.  In early December, Bob and I came to work one morning to find Carol in Mike’s office, taking his fish off the wall.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Mike’s no longer with the company, Dave.  He asked me to pack up his personal stuff for him.”

At first, Bob and I felt guilty about what we’d done.  Then we read in the paper the following June that Betty had remarried.  Mike ended up in Alaska, running chartered fishing trips for harried executives.  We saw an article about him in Field and Stream magazine.  Seems he’s made a small fortune doing what he loves best.  I got promoted into Ross McDonald’s job, and Bob ended up in Mike’s old office, running our old department.  Carol became Margrave’s executive secretary.  And early last year, I bought one of those sporty Yuppie cars – it was identical to Mike’s – at a car dealership.  The salesman had to have been a rookie.  He told me there’d been a small problem with the vehicle.

“Just wanted you to know,” he said, “that the previous owner reported a lot of problems with fluctuating gas mileage when he brought it in for servicing shortly after he bought it from us.  We checked it out every time, and couldn’t find a damned thing wrong with it.  Frankly, I think the guy was a little nuts.  Anyway, you got yourself an awfully good deal on it.”