The guy who didn't eat fish.

The Guy Who Didn't Eat Fish.

This poor excuse for a restaurant that we had just walked into was L-shaped and it resembled a high school cafeteria, complete with big metal tables, and no individual seats, just long metal planks. The interior decorating left a little to be desired, which gave you the inkling that the food MUST be good, because the place looks like shit. If the place is brimming with people and the restaurant still looks like Osama could be hiding there, then the food has to be special. The smell of grease, fish, and gluttony immediately set off alarm bells in my head. This was not going to be a pleasant experience for me. I started to regret coming.


Apparently, the placing of your table is very important in Dim Sum restaurants; we had to be close to the kitchen door so that we could catch the waiters on their way out whilst they still had some good dishes. We found a suitable table a few meters away from one of the kitchen doors and sat down. My friend Cain, who I shall dub “the Dim Sum tour guide”, was agitated with our location and suggested multiple times that we should move to a better spot. Belinda and Gareth, a married couple that was with us, disagreed and we eventually plonked ourselves down on the cold, steel metal planks. They had these little hardened ridges on the seat that ran horizontally down the length of the plank, you know the type that leaves permanent indents in your backside. One could fathom that they could only offer grip as they did nothing for the aesthetics of the plank. I bet the previous model without the ridges had people sliding off their seat at any given time throughout their meal. One minute you’re eating a nice pleasant dinner, enjoying the banter of friends, and the next minute your friends are picking your teeth out of the edge of the table, while you're being carried out on a stretcher to intensive care.


I asked Cain, my Dim Sum tour guide, if many of the dishes are seafood. He stopped and grinned at me, knowing full well why I asked.

“Yeah, most of them are. Why do you ask?”


“Because I don’t like seafood” and as I said that out aloud, a quiet had come over the restaurant so that everyone within ear shot heard. A sympathetic hush deafened the large room and Belinda asked,

“You don’t like seafood? Then why did you come to Dim Sum?”

The crowd agreed with Belinda’s obvious line of questioning by continuing their silence, and only after a brief pause did they replace their snouts into the troughs and continued with their hurried eating. The truth is, I was just too naive think that the only food that would be available, would be fish based. I felt stupid, like an embarrassed school child and could only muster a sheepish shrug of the shoulders as my explanation.


Belinda just laughed at me. She was one of those magical people that laughed at whatever I had to say, whether serious or not. My ex laughed as well but that was generally with a completely different tone, Belinda’s tone was natural. I think she laughed a lot because her husband, and one of my very good friends, is completely unfunny. If he cracks a couple of jokes in a row that are funny, that means he won’t be able to induce a laugh from anyone for approximately three to four months. He makes up for not being funny because he is hung like a horse and has the looks of a Greek demigod. I, however, am not blessed with these horse like features. Therefore I have to rely heavily on a sense of humor, that and a female’s poor lack of judgement, and low self esteem.


Dim sum is an interesting beast. Usually a small Asian lady pushes around a cart full of food, much like an air steward burrowing down narrow corridors of people with no mercy for the careless fool that leaves an outstretched leg in the aisle. She then stops at tables, often at gun point, and people get to guess what dishes they might or might not have. There is no menu, nothing. You don’t really have a good idea of what you are eating and worse still, you have even less of an idea what it’s going to cost you once you get to the register. A small middle aged Asian lady with horn rimmed glasses, named Suyin, stopped at our table and Cain, the tour guide, starts asking all these weird questions about food dishes I have never even heard of before. You can get boiled fish brains here! That’s a plus. Who doesn't enjoy a bit of a nibble on boiled fish brains? After Cain has laid down about fifteen plates of food, that all look like they have already passed through the digestive tract of the local kangaroo, he then reluctantly asks Suyin if there are any non seafood dishes. She gives Cain a blank look, who then points at me aggressively, as if I had gotten him into trouble.

“No, we just have seafood” she snorted and she gives me a look of disgust.

I just sat there motionless, head down like a guilty dog that has just pissed on the family’s new Persian rug. Pretty soon there are three Asian ladies, all talking and looking for non seafood dishes amongst their own individual carts. It’s quite a commotion and soon enough, people not even on our table are helping by suggesting seafood free dishes.
I was trying to work out what I did to deserve this cruel treatment? Was it the little audible groan I made when we first entered Dim Sum? Or was it because I screwed my face up like I was eating a lemon when the trolleys rumbled past? In any case, Suyin had taken an instant disliking to me.


You could feel the pity in the air, it wafted quickly from the other tables and soon enough a little girl of about seven walked up with a plate of Pork Buns. You could see her family over her shoulder, beaming face wide smiles, as if she was helping a homeless person. I wanted to stand and run head first out the plain glass window.
I sat and nibbled on these sweet bread products. Cain was in his element. He had food and plates everywhere, nimbly moving his hands backwards and forwards like a ballet dancer, on speed. If only he was as graceful, I think I saw an entire lobster claw fall from the side of his mouth. It was a big claw too, the size that could play a serious game of “Got your nose” with even the most well endowed of nostrils. It returned to normal when Belinda asked me why I didn’t like seafood. This was a long story that required some background information, which was good because at least talking distracted me from watching Cain trying to eat his entire bodyweight in food.


I relished the spotlight and launched into my storytelling with gusto. If given the choice, I started, I would rather have a pineapple inserted into my rectum than eat fish. Strange, I know. Whilst having a pineapple inserted in ones rectum is a stupendously un-nice thing to have happen, unless you are in the British Parliament where it is keenly sought after, it is none the less preferable to eating fish in my opinion. Post traumatic stress disorder is what I suffer from. I am sure of it. When I was around six or seven years old I was deeply, deeply traumatized by the movie jaws. I refused to swim at the beach or even in backyard pools, thinking I was a perfectly chubby size for those pointy biting things called sharks. My bedroom had this deep blue shag pile carpet, which to me at night resembled ocean water. I used to think that my carpet was infested with sharks. I peed my bed while I lay there, because I wouldn’t walk across it for fear of death. In my diminutive mind it made perfect sense to pee my bed instead of being torn limb from limb, by a magnificent imaginary shark. My mother however, failed to see it from my point of view.


Throughout my story I looked around to see that numerous people had started to listen. I inserted more and more pauses for what might have seemed “dramatic effect”, but in reality I was just hoping to catch somebody laughing. It was a good thing Belinda was here because she was the only one that let out an audible giggle. It didn’t occur to me that children were listening and only afterwards did I wish that I was privy to the awkward conversations about pineapples that would no doubt be had on the drive home.


I still remember seeing the movie on TV. I was at my Grandmas' house as my parents had embarked on a selfish attempt to develop a social life. I tell you what, it bloody didn’t work! I still hate fish, and they still don’t have any friends. All I had to do was stay up past Grandmas' bedtime, which was 6pm incidentally, and then I could watch all the grownup programs on TV. I still remember screaming numerous times throughout the film and actually waking Grandma, which was quite a feat considering she is hard of hearing.

I suggest that parents should never, ever leave their kids alone, even for one night if they wanted to avoid this type of sad offspring. I can quite confidently say that as I don’t have any kids, and possibly never will given my disastrous record with the opposite sex and my ever increasing waistband.


I could hear two parents purposefully clearing their throats in a suggestive gesture to me to keep quiet, or to at least steer me away from their possible future of nonexistent social lives. Cain casually choked on something. It was quite possibly the carcass of a blue whale, but it was hard to tell as he had already ingested it. I ignored him and his cry for help and kept going. People were rushing over to get ready to apply the Heimlich, but I knew better as it was the same sad joke he always tries so as to feel the breasts of a helpful lady on his back. That would be the same type of joke my uncles would have tried as young men.


My uncles used to give me a hard time when I was growing up. I wasn’t a smart kid, and they took full advantage of my gullible nature. They would always get me Christmas presents, exquisitely wrapped in beautiful expensive paper. The presents however would unfortunately turn out to be dog turd’s in empty matchboxes. Even the dog expected it, but not me. Every year, they would go on a fishing trip to a place called Dongara, or as it would later be called, the entrance to Hades. They would bring back a wildly vast assortment of fish. The aromas, textures, and aesthetics alone would be enough to fill the mind, and senses of a six year old, and leave me with a morbid fascination of everything oceanic. I thought they were the best fisherman in the world and looked up to them with childlike adoration. The whole family would wait for them at Grandmas' where upon their return we would be regaled by tales of heroism and stories about the one that got away. Of course they would lie through their teeth, but one would come to expect that now, from those of their ilk.


“That submarine was lucky we weren’t using squid for bait corrs I reckon we could have caught him.”


The main thing that scared me was the Jaws music. I didn’t even need to be near water to become frightened once I heard that anthem of terror. If I ever met John Williams I would shake his hand, only to then punch him squarely in the teeth for causing me to sit in puddles of my own urine as a child. So the year after I had been traumatized by the movie jaws and its music, my Uncles decided to play another trick on me. The catch, which resembled some sort of exotic fish grave, was always tastefully displayed on the kitchen table for all to see. Right in the middle was the piece de resistance. A six-foot Blue shark. Straight away I was engrossed by it and its smell. The smell was a deep, pungent ammonia stink that hit you like a kick to the crotch. One of my uncles walked up behind me and gave me a little nudge towards it as I reached out to feel the shark. My finger shot prematurely into its pointy snout and I proceeded to scurry away from the table like an electrified cat. I was crying like a little girl at this point and my whole family was laughing apart from my mum, who was hugging me and enveloping my face with her stomach so I could not breathe. I am sure she was giggling but due to my heaving distress I could not tell. My uncles then started the Jaws anthem.

Dur nup -- Dur nup -- Dur nup.

This was enough to send me into hysterics and I screamed and begged, at the same time, for them to stop. Thus creating a new action called “screagging”, which was just begging at an annoyingly high volume.It is a rich combination of cowardice and fear and is the war cry of a complete sissy. They both picked up the shark, one underneath the fins and the other holding the tail, keeping up the Jaws anthem while slowly getting faster. They chased me around the house for what seemed like eternity, with me wailing like a cat caught in a fan belt. That event has had a profound effect on me, robbing me of any association with fish.


It seemed like the whole restaurant had listened, apart from Cain the tour guide who was still following Suyin around. Belinda and Gareth had long since finished eating and were engrossed in my story. I was like a mini celebrity within this little Dim Sum eatery, or at least that’s what I thought.

“The guy who didn’t eat fish” I probably have a little plaque made up by the owners and stuck somewhere on the walls commemorating my visit. Gareth, Belinda and I went to the register to pay, leaving Cain to try and talk Suyin out of filing a restraining order against him. My bill came to eighty cents and the cashiering lady shot me a strange untrustworthy look.

“Why bill so small? You not eat food?” She said in her broken English.

I said that I didn’t like seafood and she replied with

“You don’t like seafood? Then why you come Dim Sum?”