MORE ABOUT FISH

Dear Ian,

I've been playing this game on my spiffy new laptop. It's called Insaniquarium Deluxe™, and it's been teaching me all about your favorite pastime, keeping fish.

The fish are guppies, mostly. They're yellow with orange fins. I have to keep them all fed, and they need to eat every few seconds or so. My eye, these are hungry fish! And I have to keep adding fish to my tank, for various reasons that will become clear as my tale unfolds. Though probably you know all about it already, experienced fish fancier that you are.

Each guppy costs one hundred dollars. My hat, those are some expensive guppies! Probably Kirsten would have divorced you at some point if you kept such expensive guppies.

Or maybe she wouldn't have: the reason these guppies cost so much is…

… they SHIT GOLD.

And silver. I shit you not. And neither do these fish. They don't shit money when you first get them; they're too young or something. When they get to middle size, they start shitting silver. Then when they're full grown, they shit gold. And you collect their excrement and put it in the bank just as fast as your fingers can fumble. Hurray!

Of course, you have to keep feeding them. The food itself costs a hundred dollars, and if you want to upgrade to a better kind of food, it's a hundred bucks each upgrade. My ass, that's some expensive fish food! But hey, if the fish are going to shit gold, you're going to pay through the nose for their food, aren't you? And if you husband your fish carefully, and manage to get a tank full of the full-grown suckers, then you've got a tank full of guppies that shit gold, and you can buy them more food, and they can shit more gold.

I never knew keeping fish could be so lucrative! I worry a little about the laws of thermodynamics, but it seems like the fish couldn't give a shit about the laws of thermodynamics.

Another thing I didn't know about keeping fish is that you need a raygun. And as things progress, you need raygun upgrades. Why? You, an experienced fish fancier, know the answer, I'm sure. It's because of the alien badguys who occasionally invade your tank. At first just a regular raygun will do the job, but the alien badguys get gradually nastier, and eventually, if you've stuck with the dimestore .22 caliber raygun they started you with, it takes maybe fifty shots to defeat one jerkass alien badguy, while he's killing all your fish.

And the fish just stand there, that's the worst part. Well, they don't stand there of course, they're fucking fish, they swim or float or loiter or whatever the hell it is fish do. The thing is, they float or swim or loiter right where the alien badguy (or badguys) is (or are) (that's right, sometimes you got double trouble), and they seem magnificently unconcerned about these alien badguys who are, like, chowing down on them. It's enough to drive a fish fancier completely up a goddam tree. The second or third time all my fish got killed because they just floated there, looking at the alien badguy with the extra sharp teeth – something called a Balrog, though it looks more like a mer-man with orange fur – or it might be this octopus who has, like, hatchets and cheese graters and swords and shit curled up in his tentacles – they got all kinds, really – anyway these fish are just looking at this goombah who's about to teach them the primary use the Universe has for fish of any kind, just looking at him like he was an interesting reality show about predators in the wild, and they all bought it, of course, the dumbshit bastards, and I raised my voice to the effing heavens and cried, "Oh, my God! I have stupid fish!"

So yeah, you need a pretty powerful raygun to keep fish. Raygun upgrades are like a thousand smackers a pop. But believe me, they cost you money because they save you money. A lot of people don't get that. But me, I'm a fiscally-aware fish fancier.

Another thing you have to keep spending money on is the egg. The egg is another thing that gets gradually more expensive the more you do the fish-fancying rigamarole. But it's a nice thing, really. Once you've spent hundreds, or thousands, of dollars getting all the pieces of the egg, and the egg is complete, that's the end of the round, and what hatches out of the egg? A friend! A friend who will help you!

That is nice. Everybody should have a friend.

These are creatures who can live in your tank and do things for you. There's a new one at the end of each round. Some of them I don't think are very helpful. There's this one Undead fish, a skeletal guppy, who continues to swim around and shit gold even though he's clearly no longer among the living. And you don't have to feed him like you do the fleshly, mortal fish. That's nice, a little gold for nothing every now and then, but it's kind of limited, when you think about raygun expenses and the rising cost of egg.

One I like better is a sort of clam, who just sits there most of the time, but every so often – maybe once a minute, but a minute can be like a freaking lifetime when you're keeping fish – this clam opens up his big clam mouth, and what's inside?

A big-ass freaking pearl, that's what!

Provided you can click on it before the freak closes his mouth – provided you aren't too busy, you know, fighting off alien badguys or something – that's three hundred smackeroos in the bank right there. A fine thing. I leaned on old Reuben Clamzo for quite a while there. That's not his actual name, it's just what I call him.

Then there's Prego. Prego is useful, because she shits guppies. Well, it's probably more technically correct as well as more polite to say that she gives birth to them, but what else am I to make of the little farting noise every time a new guppy comes out of her behind? That's great because you've got an endless supply of new fish, one every so often, and you don't have to keep shelling out a hundred dollars each for the little devils. But eventually I came to regard Prego as a crutch, a useful ally for a beginner, but an expert fish fancier should rely on himself, and shit out his own guppies. So to speak.

Then there are some I just don't see the point of. The electric eel, for one. Periodically, he electrifies the tank. Whafuck? So why would I want that, just out of curiosity? Fried fish? I like fried fish as well as the next fellow, but not when they're expensive freaking fish I'm keeping in my role as fish fancier, and not when they're fish that freaking SHIT GOLD. That is a costly supper, my friend. Not cost-effective. The eel was a big goddam loser as far as I was concerned.

There were a whole bunch of others, I won't bore you with the details. Most of them weren't too all- around useful. The thing is, you have access to all of them if you've hatched them out of their eggs, but you can only keep three in your tank at a time, and you're stuck with those three for that round. (The rest stay off in some kind of fish fancier's limbo or something. What am I, a Science Authority, I should know how that works?) Eventually I settled on the three friends I found to be most all-around useful.

First there's Blip. Blip is a porpoise. He uses his sonar to let you know, when the alien badguys are coming, what particular portion of the tank they're going to materialize in. That's useful, because you want to be ready to ambush these crazy bastards. No sensible fish fancier is going to give one of these wiseguy whack jobs any more time to turn his gold-shitting fish into just some visibility-impeding red mist than what he can help. Also Blip lets you know when your fish are getting hungry, by putting little yellow triangles above their heads. That's useful, because otherwise you don't know when they're hungry until they turn green and purple, and then you can lose them if you're not quick with the mouse. A fish can kack with its daily bread floating down toward its empty head in a little spiral through the water. It makes a little noise like someone gargling boiling coffee against his will, and it's an ex-fish. So Blip is a real trouper. He's my intelligence guy. Every fish fancier needs a good consigliere, and he's mine.

Then there's Angie. Angie is an angelfish, with a little halo above her head. Her thing is resurrection. If your fish die, she can bring them back to life. Not if they're already red mist. Then she's got nothing to work with. But if they or you weren't quick enough about food, or if you got an alien badguy who likes to use projectiles instead of his teeth – like that angry-looking robot who shoots a bow-and-arrow, God knows why, or the one-eyed golem who fires telekinesis or microwaves or some shit like that, in a little ball, right at your precious gold-shitting fish – you got little dead-white fish corpses sinking down to the briny bottom. This is where Angie comes into play, God love her. She swims at these loser stiffs, andthere's a little heavenly choir kind of music, and the fish are miraculously returned from beyond the vale. That's useful because fish are expensive, especially fish that – well, you know.

And if all your fish die, YOU LOSE THAT ROUND, and you gotta try again. And that's a pain. Back to the fish store. "Al, all my fish are dead. I need some more." "Whassamatta for you?" says Al. "You think fish grow on trees? You can take my word for it they don't." "It was the alien badguys, Al," you say. "You know what a pain in the ass those guys are. Pretty soon there won't be one place in my own tank where I can hang my hat." "You need a good enforcer," Al says. "I'll send a guy along."

My enforcer hatched out of one of those eggs. He's a shark, called Gash. Well, I call him Jack most of the time, because that constant grin of his puts me in mind of Jack Nicholson. Gash is an okay guy. An alien badguy comes into the tank, I say "Jack! Mio Jack! This scumbag is ganking my fish!" and Gash is ON it. We're on it together, like Bruno Tattaglia and Sollozzo the Turk greasing Luca Brasi. Fact is, Gash is usually waiting with me at the ambush point. Him and me between us, especially if I got a good raygun, can make pretty quick work of most of these pezzonovante cocksuckers. The important thing is to keep them away from the other fish. But there's ways of doing that.

Now the thing about Gash, he's got a dark side to him too. Every so often, he'll EAT ONE OF MY FISH. Yes! Chomp goes Jack and he's gone, this poor fish you raised from a little one. Not real often. He's not greedy. I guess he looks on it as perks. He just wets his beak, and moves on. And I don't think he'd ever eat my last fish, though I've never tested him on that one. But it can wear on you. When a fish fancier has been working hard to protect his fish from the pain-in-the-ass alien badguys, and his own legbreaker turns on him and just fucking EATS one of his darling, gold-shitting fish…it can wound a guy.

Eventually I developed a sense of humor about it, though. Whenever I was buying more fish, I'd say, "Hey, Jack! Buying some more food for you, you back-stabbing motherfucker!" Jack liked that. He thought that was funny. Well, he's a fucking shark, he seems to think everything is funny. But I think there was a little twinkle in his eye on that one. The cocksucker.

You might say Angie and Jack are two sides of the same coin. One the bringer of life, one the bringer of death. Hey, that's a swell metaphor for life, now that I think of it. Or for death. I'll tell you, it was great having Prego and Jack in the same tank, the one or two times that happened. Prego with her little fishy face and her little kerchief on her head, excreting babies, and Jack swimming along behind her, all the time with that grin. A symbiotic relationship, I guess. He protects her babies from the alien badguys, and occasionally eats one. A cartilaginous Rumpelstiltskin.

These capos of mine, they do terrific work, and aside from Jack's little quirk abovementioned, I don't have to feed them from my expensive fish food. I guess Blip and Angie packed a lunch. That's another thing that maybe makes me worry a little about the laws of thermodynamics, but hey, if my fish aren't concerned about the Order of the Universe, why should I be?

Anyway… eventually the egg just gets to be so goddam expensive, you can't really rely on the fish anymore. Or maybe I should say, you always rely on your fish, it's just that the function of the fish changes, just a little.

Hear me out on this.

When each of the three egg segments costs 75k by itself… you are going to be collecting guppy shit for-fucking-ever to make a payment like that. So what you do – this is time-tested fish fancier lore I'm giving you here – what you do is, you buy predators. There's a carnivorous fish you can get, for one grand. Sort of like Jack, but bigger, and not so much of a sense of humor. Make sure you've got a lot of guppies. This guy eats 'em, your precious gold-shitting guppies, and…

… he SHITS BIG BLUE DIAMONDS.

I don't know the breed of this fish, but he's dark brown or purple fading down to a burnt red kind of color, and he's got that big chin you see on carnivorous fish, and on Jack too, for all that he is a shark. I'm not sure how much these blue diamonds are worth. By the time you get to this stage, the tank is a fever of activity, and between making sure your fish don't starve, and making sure your predator doesn't starve – he only eats little, young guppies (unlike Jack, who will eat a fish as big as he is and then swim away grinning that same grin, butter wouldn't melt in his fish-graveyard mouth), so you gotta keep the tank well-stocked with fresh, innocent guppies so as this goddam baby-raper will keep shitting blue diamonds for you –and, on top of that, though that's plenty by itself, you're making wormfood out of any alien badguys that come along, and… well, it's a full fish fancier's working day, and I didn't get a handle on just how much each of these blue diamonds adds to your bankroll. A lot, anyhow.

But wait, my story gets better. For ten grand – we're obviously into the upper stratosphere here, but by the time you get to this stage you should have at least twenty or thirty grand in the bank to play around with – for ten grand, you can get another predator – an ULTRAVORE, he's called. You ever get one of those? They're huge, sort of sick-pale green, with mean glowing eyes, big-ass Nazi-looking fish. They are worth every goddam penny of the 10k, I'm telling you, one fish guy to another. What they do is, they eat the smaller predators. And…

… they SHIT LITTLE TREASURE CHESTS.

I'm not positive about how much these add to your bankroll either, but one time I snuck a peek at the moneymeter as I was scooping up one of these things, and I'd swear it jumped by three grand.

You get a lot of goddam guppies, and….

Funny how, at the beginning of each round, each little guppy is so precious: you mother them and father them and baby them – and occasionally leave Jack in charge – but it's all for the welfare of your little yellow stupid-ass suicidal darlings, and as things progress, the little bambinos you feed so carefully become food themselves, for bigger fish. It's terrible, the things a fish fancier has to do sometimes, to keep the family fish-fancying business going.

But. You get a lot of goddam guppies, enough so you're dropping top-grade food capsules ten at a time like little bombs into the general area of where they are, turning green and purple and with all the little yellow triangles above their heads… and you're splitting your concentration between that, and this: you got three or four Ultravores into the tank, and nine or ten smaller carnivores. And you're picking up blue diamonds and treasure chests just as fast as you can, always remembering to feed the money machine.

When you're into the last round, where each egg segment costs a hundred grand – no shit – that's very good arithmetic.

These modern computer games are really educational. I've learned so much about keeping fish this weekend! Maybe, if you ever decide to set up your tank again, I could try and spend more time in Peekskill and help you out with it. I think it would be a great thing for Gabriel to learn about. You mind if I bring Blip and Angie and Jack along? They won't take up much room.

your paisan,

Gowan

P.S. I blew a whole day on that goddam game. I feel like such a hosebag. G.X