Best Fish Story Ever!!

 I was working at the Waffle House in Tampa on North Dale Mabry in 1972 on the midnight shift. We were next door to the Hawaiian Village hotel and across the street from the 2001 Tampa Odyssey, one of the first strip clubs in Tampa.  I worked with two waitresses who I am going to call Lucy and Ethel, because at least one of them is still alive. At the time, Lucy was in her early forties and Ethel was in her mid-fifties. Lucy finally quit waiting tables at age 90 when the COVID cluster shut everything down in 2020. Like most waitresses working the midnight shift at any Waffle House, they were pretty vocal and opinionated.

Early one Friday morning, around 4:30 AM, we had a couple of truck drivers from Belcher Oil in Tampa come in for breakfast. The Belcher Oil yard was over in the Drew Park area near the restaurant and a lot of their semi tanker drivers stopped at Waffle House for breakfast. There was a shopping strip center next to us where they could park. One of the drivers was nicknamed "Melonbelly" by Lucy. She gave everyone nicknames. Mine was "Gilligan". Today, no one under sixty knows who Gilligan was. But I digress.

So, Lucy was waiting on these two drivers, and they were in the process of eating breakfast when Melonbelly called Lucy over to the table. Lucy's husband William was a truck driver for Florida Steel and knew a lot of the guys at Belcher. Lucy went over to the table and Melonbelly said, "Four of us are going fishing tomorrow. We are going out in the Gulf on Jerry's boat. How about you telling William that he is invited to go with us?" From there the conversation went like this.

Lucy: "William doesn't fish."

Melonbelly: " What do you mean? Doesn't William like to fish?"

Lucy: "William doesn't fish."

Melonbelly: "What do you mean? Does he not know how to fish? Will you not let him go fishing? What is it?"

Lucy "William doesn't fish."

Melonbelly: "Haven't you heard the old saying? If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime."

Lucy: "You are leaving out the last part of that old saying."

Melonbelly: "What are you talking about?"

Lucy: "The whole story goes like this. If you give a man a fish, you feed him for the day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to fuck and he will give up fishing forever. William doesn't fish."

Words cannot describe the look on Melonbelly's face when he heard that. It has been 52 years since that night, and I can still see all of those people's faces when I recount that story. That's still the best fish story that I have ever heard!!