“Subject possessed many idealistic and unrealistic expectations of others causing him to be especially sensitive to their deficiencies, particularly deficiencies and contradictions in the functioning of authority figures. Subject’s logically coherent, hypercritical attitudes toward authority appear to serve as a justification in his mind for aberrant behavior and attitudes of ‘righteous indignation.’”

W. Roy Evans

Clinical Psychologist

Minnesota Department of Corrections, February 7, 1967

 

One of our favorite Earl Fish stories was when he picked up a job hitting a bank. He didn’t like hitting banks. Stores with safes were better, easier. Banks had security systems, silent alarms and, of course, their safes were harder to blow up. But he took it because, as Willie Sutton once said, “That’s where the money is.”

He said that the job was a shitshow from the start. He probably should have worked with professionals, but by the time he figured that out, they were already on the second floor of the bank and he was getting ready to blow the safe. That’s when he heard the sirens, and a few seconds later the sound of police officers charging up the stairs. As he tells it, he looked across the room and out the large window at the front of the building and thought, “There’s no way I’m getting locked up again. They can shoot me if they want.”

With that, he charged across the floor and launched himself, slightly crouched, arms crossed in front of his face to prevent losing an eye to the shards of glass that would be flying and prepared to land with a roll in the middle of the street and then just start running. But, of course, stuff like that only happens in the movies. For Earl, as he admits now he should have figured, the window was both bulletproof and made of Plexiglas. He hit it and bounced straight back onto his ass on the bank’s cold granite floor, was taken into custody and began his second trip into the joint.

 

If you’ve lived properly, then by the time you’re middle-aged, you should know at least one real outlaw well enough to call him a brother. Outlaws aren’t crooks or confidence men. Or, maybe better said, not all crooks or con men are true outlaws. An outlaw is preternaturally badass. He doesn’t aim to hurt people, ever. He breaks rules and fucks with the powers that be, but it’s done out of a sense of rebellion against the boredom of what can be a very conformist world. We’ve known a few outlaws over our years, but none is as solid a soldier against the mundane as our friend Earl Fish.

In the end, an outlaw gets it, too. At some point they age out of the need for the rush and danger of high-risk, low-value propositions like cracking safes or robbing banks. Earl finally figured that out after getting caught for the second time breaking out of lockup and getting more years tagged onto his sentence. Eventually, he did his time like a man, focused his energies, started a prison magazine and when he got out, spent years fighting for prisoners’ rights. Still, he never learned to cotton to foolish rules and the arbitrary bullshit of “authority,” crafting a life back home in Minnesota with the prisoners’ union, as a dean of all things mezcal in Oaxaca, Mexico, and even a couple stints down here in Guatemala bouncing at Café No Sé. But the reality of an existence uncompromising in both love and lust for life, is that living by your own rules often has a really shitty pension plan.

And now Earl needs a bit of help from folks like us, who may not have colored outside the lines with as much grace and beauty as our brother, but dig the hell out of that kind of spirit, nonetheless.

See, Earl, aka Popeye, aka WUOF (Wrinkled-Up, Old Fuck), the man with the map of Oaxaca written in the smiling wrinkles of his mirthful mug, needs some help with mounting medical bills. Earl had his leg amputated in Oaxaca about a month ago, due to blood clots, and though losing one leg will barely keep him down (we’d still have him as primary back-up in a barroom brawl any day of the week), the cost of recovery is threatening to swamp him.

We ask you, with all the sincerity and humility of which we’re capable, to pitch in and help us help a brother out. Ilegal Mezcal, Café No Sé and La Cuadra Magazine have set up a website with T-shirts and bags on sale where all the proceeds will be directed to Earl. We expect that he’ll spend most of it covering the costs of rehab and hospitalization charges, but also fully endorse any choice he might make to redirect some of those funds to the purchase of agave-distilled booze. The shirts and bags are each printed with a photo of Earl, and either a quote from his 1967 Prison Psychiatric Report or the report in its entirety. If you want to read the whole report, see page 29 of this magazine. If you’re the kind of folks we think you are, then you might see a few lines in there that describe you pretty well, too. We saw more there than we’d have originally expected, and more than enough to feel some pride at sharing at least that much spirit with our brother Earl.

Please visit the website and buy something, or just drop some jack in the kitty. We’d hate to see Earl have to turn back to his previous career to handle this situation. Kinda.

JPR / MJT

www.earlthefish.spreadshirt.com

www.gofundme.com/90e3kc

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

About the Author

John Rexer, the founder and editor of La Cuadra Magazine, expatriated himself from Los Estados about 12 years ago because he couldn't stand seeing his city, New York, lobotomized by the metastasizing sameness of WalMart America and didn't have a pillow large enough to Chief Bromden the place out of it's misery. After knocking around Mexico for a while he landed in Antigua, Guatemala - broke but certain about the decision to stay out of the States. Without much of a backup plan he opened Café No Sé (with a rusty credit card) on a residential street, in this sleepy, third-world, colonial town with the intention of creating the best bar in the known universe. For those of you who've been through Antigua, you know he succeeded. Primary mission accomplished, a few years later John started "creatively transporting" mezcal from Oaxaca into Guatemala with the intention of creating a multi-national company that would deliver the finest agave spirits to the citizenry of the world. That company, Ilegal Mezcal, is currently selling its booze around the globe. La Cuadra Magazine, an idea hatched a decade ago in a booze fueled bitch session with current Editor-in-Chief, Mike Tallon, is actually just the first step in larger plan to develop a publishing company that will create a genius literary movement in this new century in much the same way that Ferlinghetti's City Lights project launched the Beat Movement of the 1950s. Writ short, his aspirations are as big as his liver. Or, as Mike has noted on a number of occasions, John Rexer puts the "messy" back in "Messianic."
Read more by