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slut, and me, I’m a drunken fool. Not to mention old and ugly and gay as all get-out.”
    “How about you guys, Kim?” I asked, saying their shared name rather snidely.
    They answered, almost in unison, “We’re in love.”
    “Then you guys are in the worst shape of anybody,” I commented.
    Jonathon tapped my shoulder. “You see? That was the sort of thing an asshole would say.”
    Jonathon’s remark calmed me, somehow. I took a long sip of the rancid beer and looked around The Willing Mind. “Hope,” I said, more to myself than anybody else, “is one crazy fucking place.”
    “Feeling better now?” asked Jonathon, gingerly laying his long brown fingers (stained yellow here and there with nicotine) on my arm.
    “Just once,” I said, staring into my ale, “just
once
I wish people would let me in on some of the shit going on around here.”
    “Like what, for instance?” asked Jonathon.
    “Well, for starters, I haven’t been to a lot of bars where the guy next to me goes ‘Oh-oh,’ keels over, then climbs back up and calls me an asshole.”
    “Oh, well, that’s easy enough to explain,” said Jonathon. “I had a Vision.”
    “Sure, why not.”
    “He has a lot of them,” Mona put in. “He doesn’t always drop, though, only when it’s a big one.”
    “Sometimes,” said Big Bernie, “Jon-Jon just goes like, ‘
Whoa
!’ and has to have a couple more scootches.”
    “But one time,” recounted Little Bernie, “the Mystic One threw himself right out that window over there.”
    “That was, I presume, a big Vision?”
    Jonathon nodded. “The biggest.”
    “So let me get this straight,” I said to the Indian. “You have these Visions. And in the Vision you just had, you saw that I was an asshole. Is that about right?”
    Jonathon nodded. “It was very strange. I saw this face, painted to look happy, painted with a big red smile and big eyes like a child’s. But the only thing happy about the face was the paint, because the real mouth was sad, and the real eyes were crying. And I saw you. It was because of you the face was crying. You could have stopped the crying, but you didn’t. Then you were gone, and a voice said, ‘Asshole.’ And mind you, the voice sounded like it knew what it was talking about. Then I was awake.”
    I looked at the inhabitants of The Willing Mind. “Doesn’t thatsound like one dumb Vision?”
    Everyone shrugged, even Little Bernie, the enormous belly jerking up and down.
    “Nice meeting all of you,” I said. “Now I’m going after Ol’ Mossback.” I threw two dollars at Mona and left the bar. And as I walked out the door, someone said (probably one of the Bernies), “Keep your dick in your pants!”
    Visions
    Hope, Ontario, 1983
    Wherein our Young Biographer pursues the Art of the Angle, and later has a disturbing Vision of his Own
.
    Gregory Opdycke’s book
Fishing for Ol’ Mossback
has this to say:
    It behooves me at this time to dispel the spurious “myths” concerning Mossback and his “predilication” for leaping out of the Lake in order to bite various “body parts” from unwitting anglers. Although this “myth” may well have its origins in some bit of “history”, the local admonition of “Keep your trouser stays fastened!” is little more than good-natured “frippery”.
    Rest assured, however, that Mossback is most “acrobatic”. I recall once fishing from a “dinghy” in the Lookout, enjoining the company of three “stirpicults”, among them Ashley Hope. Ashley (using as “bait” a live “field-mouse”) took a colossal “pickerelle”.
    It was a glorious struggle (the species’ reputation for “lethargy” notwithstanding) but after many a long moment, Ashley managed to lift the fish from the water. The “pickerelle” was levitated to a height of three or four “feet”, prepatory to dropping it into the vessel, at which moment Mossback struck, emerging from the lake, rising fully intothe air, and tearing the fish