Live and Let Fry

I’m beginning to think that my parents eat too much fried catfish.

by Chris Jay

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Donny and Pam Jay, the author’s parents, celebrate their wedding anniversary in 2012.

For Calvin and Alice Trillin.

“You ever eat that canned chicken?,” my dad asked, his nasal voice crackling over a bad rural connection.

“Yessir,” I said. “I use it to make a real trashy chicken salad that Sara thinks is gross, with grapes and stuff.”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with that canned chicken.”

“No sir,” I said. “I don’t have a problem with canned chicken at all.”

We were having this absurd discussion because I’d called to quiz my parents about their diets during the COVID-19 quarantine. Were they only eating fried catfish and baked beans, which we’d eaten twice a day during my last few visits?

“Nah,” my mom scoffed with her customary lack of self-awareness. “One of the freezers is full of deer meat and we live right by the Dollar General. We got food!”

What about vegetables, I wondered? Did they need me to deliver some fresh vegetables, since Dollar General doesn’t carry those?

“No, Chris,” my mom said. “You worry too much, Chris.” 

She uses my name like a boxer uses a soft, exploratory jab. Often delivered in flurries, these little pokes are intended to gauge how jumpy the other pugilist is. They are like emotional radar pulses.

“Chris,” my mom will often say aloud, looking directly at me from just a few feet away. “Chris.”

If I’m in a good place, mentally, I won’t respond right away.

“Chris?,” she’ll continue, with varying intonations. “Chris. Chris.”

Eventually, I’ll snap.

“Mom, I can hear you. I’m right here.”

“Chris, your daddy has never eaten nothing green in his entire life. Not ever.”

In the background, I could hear the dramatic soundtrack of The Rifleman playing on MeTV.

“I never will eat a vegetable, either,” dad called out from his favorite chair. The man has taken the time to cultivate intense disdain for things that normal people never think about at all.

“I’ve never seen a movie about baseball,” he once told me. “I refuse to.”

Pam Jay shows off her catch, a channel cat, at her home on Lake Erling.

Fried catfish is the greatest meal that my father can prepare. If he makes it during your visit, that is a show of respect on par with a state dinner. He fries flathead catfish that he has personally wrenched from the lakebottom, gutted and portioned out using an electric knife that is older than me. He chills big, meaty fillets in an ice bath to firm up the meat, and drags them through Martha White cornmeal seasoned only with salt and pepper. He pinches canned biscuits into little half-moons and fries those, too. He fries frozen okra and hush puppies, corn nuggets and fistfuls of French fries.

When this meal is spread out in front of you, golden brown and still sputtering from the oil, you don’t think about heart disease, hemorrhoids or mercury levels. You just squeeze a wedge of lemon over the fish, spoon several large dollops of tartar sauce onto a paper plate, and eat until everyone enters a dissociative state.

If you are highly favored, my dad may make homemade ice cream with PET Milk once he regains consciousness. During these breathtakingly unhealthy, hours-long meals, the house grows dark and quiet and cool as an opium den.

At least, that’s how it felt prior to COVID-19.

Six months into COVID-19, my parents’ elaborate fish fries have become near-daily occurrences. Since selling their miniature pony farm and moving to the lake, they have filled three deep-freezers with what must be hundreds of pounds of frozen catfish fillets. My father suffers from advanced COPD and my mother is severely diabetic. They live in southwestern Arkansas, where mask-wearing continues to be mocked. My dad is aware that his pulmonary disease means that a trip to the grocery store for a few pounds of hamburger and a package of buns could cost him his life. So, they fry catfish.    

Pam and Donny Jay at the table.

My mom doesn’t see any reason for my concerns. There’s deer meat in the freezer, too, and they have a little victory garden filled with vegetables that they could, theoretically speaking, cook at any time. It could happen, she insists. They could eat those squash.

“You guys can’t just eat fried catfish every day,” I say, taking one last run at my reason for calling.

“Chris, we don’t just eat catfish,” my mom says, exasperation creeping into her voice. “We also eat bream. I forgot how good fried bream tails are, I eat ‘em like chips. And the bream are biting good off the pier! I caught 15 in a hour.”

My mom lost interest in the call and placed my dad on the line. I glanced at the clock: a quarter past the hour. By now, Chuck Connors will have located the stolen horses, but he’ll still be working under the assumption that a band of Native American grifters were responsible for taking them from Valentine Ranch. I’ve got five, maybe seven minutes before Connors unmasks the true culprits and the hot lead starts to fly. I’ll have to work fast.

“You guys have got to eat some vegetables once in a while,” I plead with my dad. “For my sake, just eat some salad out of a bag!”

My dad guffaws.

“We was watching the news this morning and you know what the hell is killing people now?”

He lets the question hang in the air.

“Salad in a bag! Salad in a bag is killing folks left and right, Chris.”

This story was produced independently. If you’d like to support the creation of more stories like this, please consider buying the author a taco or sending him $5 via PayPal. If you’d like to advertise on this site, contact Chris at ChrisJay318@gmail.com.

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