Capitol Aquarium

I was in the backyard as I'd been many times before. The yard was small but it was all ours, one of the nice features of living in my old bosses old house. There in the middle of the yard sat a small five gallon fish tank. I looked as if it had been there for some time but couldn't imagine how I'd missed it previously. Bryna had said just a night or two ago that she wished she had a small fish tank in her room, mostly to serve as a night light.

I cleaned up the tank, filled it with water and headed to the local aquarium shop. I purchased a betta, took it home and after floating the bag in the tank for five minutes, I let the fish out. He dropped to the bottom of the tank and lay there breathing heavily. This was not what was supposed to happen.

I rebagged the little fellow figuring a dead fish was a lousy surprise gift for the girlfriend. I rushed him back to Capitol Aquarium and let the expert's take care of him. I spent an hour asking questions, reading and spending money. Bryna came home to a bubbling undergravel filter, a couple of cory cats and some plants. Within a week an eel like, tiger stripped Cooley loach, a half dozen neons and another betta had been added to the tank.

It wasn't to long before a second tank in my room held a couple of water puppies. When I brought home a batch of feeder fish for the water puppies to dine on Bryna fell in love with a long finned one and asked me to save it. I explained that it would need it's own tank as it couldn't live with her tropical fish. She accepted this and we went to bed, but she kept sneaking in to check if the beautiful gold fish had been eaten. Those bastard water puppies consumed every other fish and let the long finned one be. Bryna finally fell asleep but I did not. A little after midnight I took a peak and that pretty little jerk was still swimming happily around the tank. I put him in a bowel where he'd be safe until morning and we started a third fish tank. A person needs a hobbie and I'd found one.

I was at the aquarium so often a few of the employees assumed I was a new coworker. After helping Lisa catch and bag some salt water fish and giving the customers some instructions on introducing the fish once they got back to their home aquarium I hopped on my bike and made my way home. Lisa called and asked if I'd like a job.

My experience since returning to Sacramento was that filling out job applications was a thing of the past. I joined the staff of Capitol Aquarium. Being around the fish tanks was wonderfully calming and helping people to succeed at a hobby that I loved and seemed to have a knack for was magical. Slow periods were spent feeding the fish or cleaning the tanks.

At home, I had tired of trying to keep our big house stocked in room mates. I got an apartment with a trumpeter named Todd and Bryna moved into the top floor of the house that held the Sub Q seatshop in it's basement. Creepy Dave had recently taken over the floor directly above the shop from the cute but slobbish girls. Bryna and I were doing fine. She felt like having her own place, something she'd never done. We'd kept seperate bedrooms at the house and it seemed like a good idea.

Bryna let me fill her two bedroom aprtment with aquariums: one freshwater plant tank, one goldfish tank, one amphibious tank, a tall tank full of tree frogs, and a saltwater tank holding a charming if pugnacious porcupine puffer named Pabst, a voracious, murderous eel named Julio (after Julio Gallo, maker of not so fine wine) and various other fish for Julio to chase around.

At work I was one of the younger employees my love of characers meant I was handed many of the more difficult customers. I'd chase away the kids that wanted to buy short finned bettas so that they could fight them. I'd help families get started as cheaply as possible while still having some chance of succeeding. Unfortunately I got the feeling that many parents didn't care much for succeeding. The kids would lose interest in this hobby soon they seemed to know and so why invest too much effort. It was these folks that I was happy to trade to one of my coworkers for some obsessed geek who wanted to debate the nutrional needs of African Cichlids.

A man in a suit came through every weekday morning an bought five feeder goldfish. He'd pay the extra money to have us select each fish rather than just scooping up a netfull. His request was that each fish be distinctive from the other foor. I'd find him one white fish with an orange spot on it's head, one bronze colored, on solid orange, one with a white front half and an orange rear and one plain old orange goldfish.

This seemed an odd order to be repeating on a daily basis. If he was feeding these guys to a bigger fish, turtle or other beast why did he want them to be distinctive. Were they presents? Who gave presents every day. He'd run out of friends to give fish to eventually wouldn't he. We all speculated what he was doing, Lisa even suggesting he was into voodoo. but of course no one could take the simple route of just asking him.

Things rolled along and I settled into the routine. The boss was a cool old guy named Grant. He was a bit old school in some of his fish keeping practices, but you got to respect experience. Grant had a bunch of kids including a daughter Laurie who worked at the aquarium with her husband Bob and their prococious boy Grant Jr. Grant had, after having all these children, come to the realization that he was gay. I saw old pictured of him and thought "Hell, I could of told him right from the start." Grant, the silver fox, had always been too pretty to be straight.

There were two biologist (we called them that, I have no idea what kind of degrees they held). One biologist, Fred, played the roll of the old grump. I was leading a group of school kids on a tour of the aquarium and as always one of them asked what the fishes names were. I explalined that we had too many to give them each their own name, so we named them all Fred. The place was then full of "Hi Fred. Hey Fred. Fred is so pretty. Ooooh look at Fred." I decided to share this with all children from then on and Fred's refusal to acknowledge it made me all the more enthusiastic.

The other biologist was Linda and she became my mentor. Linda raised all kind of fish, had succeeded in breeding many different species and had tons of ribbons decorating her fish room at home.

Sedako was my favorite person to work with. A tiny asian woman with a very loud voice, Sedako routinely held the sales record. I watched he to see how she did it. She watched the tank room where the high dollar sales were, but she'd also volunteer to do the express line where the lowest sale were. A bag of live tubifex worms, or some brine shrimp, maybe a bottle of fish food. But these small purchase came through so fast that it added up quick. She was a smart one this Sedako.

One of Grant's boys, Johnny, began taking an interest in the business. It seemed to me that he just kind of walked in a head of Laurie and started running things. Such family business was of course none of mine, and I liked Johnny. He was the straightest gay man I'd ever met, despite his fu-man-chu mustache. I've been called the gayest straight man by many of my friends, so it was nice to meet the ying to my yang.

I was only part time so I took a night job for awhile at an arthouse movie theatre. This lasted only a few months. I wanted something else to keep me busy and help me pay my rent. A perfect opportunity came my way.

Lisa and her husband Phil did maintainence on the aquariums at night. Phil was a gnarled old pirate of a man who opened my eyes to the more radical side of country and folk music; Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Hank Williams. We hit it off and I started coming in and learning how to do the maintainence so that he and Lisa could have a vacation once in awhile. Eventually Phil decided he couldn't keep up with the gig anymore and I took over full time.

I did the aquarium not as an employee but as an independent contractor. I loved it. I'd come in at closing time two nights a week and load up the CD player with six hours of music. Then I'd got about doing water changes, cleaning up algae and wiping the fronts of several hundred fish tanks.

Capitol Aquarium had an aligator. Grant had gotten him before the laws about such thing became more stringent. The Gator was now over six feet long. He moved so little there was a sign on his habitat assuring folks that he was indeed alive. He was a bit more active at night and I kept one eye peeled for him. There was also an electric eel whose tank was to be avoided and several bitey fish who had to be watched as you cleaned their tank.

I'd come home wet and tired but happy. I remember one night just dropping into the swimming pool at our apartment complex with all my cloths on. I climbed out, shook off and had a Coke and some penuts at the bar across the street. Life was good.

I continued working part time durring the days and I had begun volunteering my services to folks who wanted help with their aquariums at home. I felt like I'd found a career. Not that I'd work in this one shop the rest of my life, but there was plenty of money to be made for someone who could successfully set up and maintain and good looking aquarium. I'd found a trade at last.

Johnny was making changes and much of it felt very management training course in nature. We started having saturday pep talk meeting once a month. I felt sleeping in the extra hour would have done more for my pep than hearing Johnny explain how an episode of Seinfeld related to our business.

A most unpopular innovation were the headsets that allowed us to talk to the biologists and the rest of the staff when we had questions rather than having to hunt them down. The problem was the constant chatter in your ear when you were trying to talk to customers. Sedako had the worst time. Before the headsets she'd yell across the store, "KEITH, YOU HAVE A NET?" With the help of the headset she could now look at me from across the story, hit a button, and yell just as loudly, "KEITH, WE ALL OUT OF SALT?" The sound of employees casting their headsets off throughout the store would follow Sedako's blasting our eardrums out.

Some people quit durring this time and it seemed Johnny's strategy to hire young hip types as their replacements. He hired a hippy guy named David who had been a regular customer. David had once offered me free books at The Tower Books where he worked in exchange for free aquarium products. I would have loved some free books so I payed for a bag of feeder fish on his next visit. I never went in for my books. Stealing was thoroughly out of my system. I'd once seen steeling as a way of achieving social justice balance between the classes, or at least a way to get some shit I figured I deserved. Now I saw it as something to stand in the way of feeling good about your role in the world.

I did my best to best to be patient with Johnny's changes at first but I was beginning to resent him as he seemed to spend less time in the store than we did, and yet he didn't ask us about the changes that he thrust upon us. I found this common among the children of business owners. They don't build it, but they expect that they know best how to run it. I'm sure he grew up around the shop but he had managed to learn nothing about how to keep an aquarium so why should we assume he'd learned anything else.

My personal favorite was the meeting where congratulated us all on increased sales. He had a gift for us all. I hoped for a bonus, a gift certificate, hell even lunch would have been great. Instead we were each presented with a big dopey smile and a pen shaped like a fish. I wished I had the seventy three cents this gift had cost instead of the gift. I coud have bought a Coke from the shop next door.

Johnny redeemed himself a week later hippy David and I were bumped up to 32 hours a week. This meant I'd get benefits. I was twenty three years old and for the first time in my life I'd be getting benefits. I called my mom and told her. She was proud. Her job hopping son had made something of himself. I'd been at the same job for over a year and I climbing the ladder, meaning I could now see a real doctor if I got sick instead of getting home remedy advice from the mexican woman at the bagel shop.

I'd also asked for a raise. I was making less than my predecessors, which was fine while I learned the ropes, but reviewing the log of dead fish found in the store clearly showed that I was doing as good of a job, maybe even better.

I worked my 32 hours and waited to hear about the raise I'd requested. Johnny was nitpicking my cleaning, and making accusations about weather or not I'd even changed the water in the tanks. Linda, the biologist, came to my rescue. She tested the conductivity of the tank and it was lower, meaning a lower, more dilluted salt level, than it would have had if I'd not changed it. I felt like Johnny was determined to find a problem one way or another.

After two weeks had passed Johnny called David and I into his office. The new schedules had us both back at twenty hours. Johnny explained that they had to cut back. In the same breath he told us that he wanted us to work together doing the aquarium mainainence. I would be paid less and would have to take David on as an assistant.

"Are you telling me I did the job for a year to make less than I started at?"

"Listen Keith, we feel the job could be done better with two people and our accountant feels that we're paying too much."

"Can I talk to the accountant? I'd like to know what she based this on. Did she compare what other people are getting paid? Because I have. And you're getting me cheap. Don' t get me wrong it's worth it for the credential of saying I maintain these tanks, but it's low and I can't do it for less. You don't work to make less money year after year. Now you guys have been getting this done for cheaper than you were paying before already. What are you going to do, lower it every year?"

Johnny did not like being spoken to in this manner. And who the hell was I to challenge his authority anyway. After all, his daddy owned the place. I just worked there. I told I'd need time to think it over and he told me I had one day.

The more I thought about this deal the more pissed I'd got. It felt awfully strategic that he'd teased us both with benefits and more hours, then yanked them away. This made us feel nice and desperate just in time for him to offer us a shitty deal. I decided to tell him to go screw. Of course I decided to word it nicer. David took over cleaning the tanks, by himself for less than I made. He said he was sorry but he needed the money. I told him it was fine, but I hoped that he would regret being a part of such a seedy move by Johnny.

A few months later, with the Gratefull Dead, or Pato Banton or some other hippie music blasting David absent mindedly thrust his hands into a tank to clean the algae off the glass and got thrown back six feet. He said it felt like he had a hole in his chest. He'd met SMUD the electic eel. A while after that they hired him an assistant and David quit when they refused to fire the guy after David caught him jerking off instead of cleaning aquarium. You'd think a hippy would have been prepared for the sting of bad karma.

I continued working part time as sales staff durring the day. Working the floor gave me lots of lead towards setting up tanks for other folks which had turned into a nice little business which I named Jensen Brother's Creative Aquariums, my goal being grow the business up enough to hire on my kid brother James. James had recently moved up to Sacramento and the two of use were living in Scott's (the sweatshop running body piercer) old place.

I was increasingly busy with my own business and the Saturday pep talks were increasingly pointless. I missed one, then another. Finally I missed one too many. Johnny gave me the axe. I argued with him. I told him it wasn't worth losing a good salesman over the meeting I didn't attend. I was always on time for my shifts. Johnny disagreed and I was let go.

I was in the store a week later getting some supplies for my maintainence businnes when I saw the man in the suit come in for his daily order of five gold fish, each distinctive. I watched as Sedako caught him his five fish, none alike. I had to know.

"Excuse me. I have to ask, what's with the gold fish. Why do you need five distinctive god fish every day."

He smiled and enthusiastically explained. "I work at a law office. We have a large fish tank. I bring these fish in every day after lunch and the other attornies and I each pick one. Then we each put down a five dollar bill and I drop the fish in the tank. The large fish come out and eat the gold fish. Whoever's fish is eaten last takes the pot."

Johnny tired of playing business owner and decided he wanted to be a teacher when he grew up. He quit Capitol Aquarium just months after I left.

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