The Piranha Pool Party in Hell, Connecticut, by Andre Jute

The Piranha Pool Party in Hell, Connecticut, a short cautionary tale

by André Jute

I forgot to say that I know about piranha too. I ‘m extremely fair-skinned and cannot take much sun. So, when I moved into a house with an indoor pool, I kept piranha in the outside pool, beside the party patio. I flew the piranha in on the company plane, in a small plastic bathtub, all I could find in Manaus, covered by sandwich wrap. I leave to your imagination the scene with some ladies from my art department and me cowering at the back of the plane flying through a storm, fearfully watching this seething tub of piranha wedged in a space where we unbolted a couple of seats, wondering how long the gladwrap would resist the sloshing piranha, shouting to the pilot to keep the bloody plane level.

Eventually my piranha were accused of eating a valuable breeding dog — they never! They nipped only drunks who fell in the pool at parties, but otherwise the servants fed them daily, and once they were fed they were docile creatures unless you had blood on you already. The poor innocent little fish were arrested by the police for being illegal aliens and deported to a Canadian zoo where they were probably put in an unheated pool.

Those goddamn Connecticut fascists also tried to deport my tarantula but couldn’t find them because they were catching a nap in my pockets after saying hello to my guests, and my lawyer arrived soon enough to save the tarantula but not the piranha. We had to go down to the police station to rescue MiniAndre III, my bonobo (a sort of extra-intelligent chimpanzee), who thought it a lark to go for a ride in a police car in his dinner jacket, and by the time we arrived had his hand familiarly on a policewoman’s bottom, and debonairly waved to me with the can of Coke in its other hand as I came in.

That was too much for my girlfriend, an actress, very sensitive, already crying piteously but fetchingly in the crook of my arm from the stress of me losing pets that were like my family for the 61 days a year I stayed in the States (long story, to do with some other fascists in the IRS). She snapped at the bonobo, “You fucking ingrate! Andre risked his life to rescue you from a butcher who was going to sell your meat.” Well, the policewoman wasn’t having her new bum-fondling chum addressed in that manner, and tried to arrest the actress, always a mistake, and the whole affair turned dangerous when, swinging at the actress, the policewoman accidentally hit the lawyer in the jaw and he, reflexively, caught her arm and twisted it up behind her back to stop her committing further stupidities. In a flash we were surrounded by drawn firearms in the hands of hysterically shouting cops whose low brows didn’t inspire confidence in their judgement or restraint. I grabbed my bonobo, crawled between the legs, and took a cab to New York, from where I sent more lawyers to sort out the farce and rescue the first lawyer from a cell. (They let the actress go when they discovered she was the daughter of the Attorney-General; zero chance of making anything stick to her.)

I never went back to Hell, Connecticut, though I put on a lawyer to work full time suing the police department for the loss of my bonobo, which of course they couldn’t find because it was living at the Pierre with me and the tarantula, in mourning for my lost piranha, wearing a black ribbon on the arm of its favorite cream summer linen suit.

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Copyright © 2011 André Jute

Published by CoolMain Press 2011

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http://coolmainpress.com/andrejute.html

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher. 

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The author

 André Jute is a novelist and, through his non-fiction books, a teacher of creative writing, graphic design and engineering. There are about three hundred editions of his books in English and a dozen other languages.