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John Pellatier worked for a company that shipped packages around the world. He still lived with his parents, dated occasionally, and often went out with a few friends on weekends to get drunk. The only part of the newspaper he read was the sports page, and he may not have known an editorial page existed. He also spent many hours on the computer, checking out pornography and Metallica websites.
One day, he accidentally entered Unlikely Stories. His curiosity was peaked when he saw the name “A Sardine on Vacation.” The article was “The League of Non-Voters.” He understood little about the Sardine was saying. What was he supposed to think? But if the website thought it important enough to publish, he read the past columns to see what he had missed. His favorites were “Inexplicable Things” and “Three Hairpieces”; his favorite character, Joe T., next to the Sardine, of course. Despite the curious asides and self-consciousness, he enjoyed the regular people who hung around bars and said stupid things.
Few if any of Pellatier’s friends had heard of A Sardine on Vacation, and those who thought they knew it, or supposed they had read it, didn’t like it much. He felt they should read the Sardine regularly and give themselves a chance to get involved in the lives of ordinary people. He e-mailed Jonathan Penton requesting to know the Sardine’s real name. Jonathan wouldn’t tell him.
Next, Pellatier tried the magazines where the Sardine said he had works published.
He hadn’t realized that it was an old biography and the sites where he tried to call up the works no longer had them.
What could he do next?
Fortunately, John worked at an air shipping company which allowed him to take flights cross country free, and it was only a slight inconvenience to travel from Chicago to the East Coast, where he had determined the Sardine was hiding. He narrowed his searches to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
Soon, he settled on Philadelphia, among the three, as the best choice, blocked out on a map a five square mile area in the center of the city. Within that area, the bar where Joe. T. and Wal-terr bartended, and the rest of the crew drank, must be located.
John also bought all the newspapers of cities along the Northeast Corridor and checked the Entertainment sections to find a listing for Benny McSelf, or a name close to that, if only to find a scrap of a reality from the column, a real person, who would know the identity of the Sardine.
*
By the time “Social Pets” appeared, Pellatier had followed up all palpable clues to the location of the Sardine, Joe T., and the Attic Tavern. Because the Sardine hadn’t announced the destination of his pending trip, he had little chance to track the little fish in transit.
Benny McSelf, it turned out, was a real entertainer who played a lounge act in an Atlantic City casino. John went to Benny’s booking agent after he had gotten no information from Benny, a near illiterate who wowed audiences with Irish tunes. It was claimed by workers at the casino that Benny wasn’t even Irish. On the list of Benny’s engagements for the last ten years, there was no listing for a bar called The Attic.
As for The Attic, it also existed but in three towns, none of which was Philly. He still visited them but saw nothing familiar. Oddly, one was in Cape May, NJ, a town where Benny played every summer for one month.
The “Frank Weathers” column had added weight to the possibility of a South Jersey venue. Frank owned a custard stand that went bankrupt because it wasn’t near the Boardwalk. Atlantic City, Ocean City, and Wildwood had real boardwalks; Avalon, Sea Isle City, Stone Harbor and Cape May had asphalt promenades. Pellatier being from the Midwest didn’t realize initially that the term “boardwalk” was used irrespective it consisting of wood or asphalt or cement; he couldn’t eliminate “promenade towns” from his investigation.
Meanwhile, he stopped in every bar along the Ocean Drive (and a few beyond it) but didn’t see one blind customer in a toga! The few military personnel he ran into hadn’t heard of General Othello either. Nor did the military guys recall an episode when a General had killed his wife and then committed suicide. The soldiers looked at John strangely asking the whereabouts of a guy who had killed himself.
The many people with hairpieces in the bars never resembled Joe T.’s chia pet growth. Customers thought it strange when he asked them about Joe T. Was that all he knew about the guy? Hair plugs?
More scarce were white-haired gentlemen chain-smoking at the bar while reading a book. There were few people over the age of forty in these bars.
Pellatier was bitterly disappointed.
He had had a nagging sense of something slightly wrong after a few months of searching for the Sardine. At first, it was a numb sensation after having met and spoken to hundreds of people. That is, his consciousness was numb to a realization.
Maybe John was too rapt in his search, took a few more days off from work than his manager and maybe he himself had wanted. Maybe he so strongly believed that the Sardine and his friends had to be somewhere--to the point of convincing himself he had finally found the town that the Sardine hung out and drank.
He had not met one person who had read the Sardine column!
He began to question the importance of finding him, seeing him in person, knowing who the Sardine really was. Maybe the Sardine was not as important as the articles made him seem.
The Sardine's essays, articles, and stories have appeared around the Internet in the last few years at 3 A.M., Facets, Eclectica magazine, Fiction Funhouse, The Fiction Warehouse, 5_trope, and several film journals. Who and what he is probably will be revealed at various points through the articles appearing at this site. The first fifteen installments of his saga can be viewed at the old Unlikely Stories.