There are several restaurants close to where I live that are known for having good catfish. Several years ago, my family and I went to one of these places to eat. My daughters had one of their friends along. This restaurant has a main room toward the front of the building and a large room right behind that. The visit was during the middle of the week and there weren’t many people there. They sat us in the large back room. The girls sat in a booth near the table where I sat with my wife and son. We were the only people in this room when we arrived so there was no trouble with us sitting at two tables. This restaurant has televisions mounted in the corners of most of the dining areas. In the front room, they usually have on television showing a news network and another showing a kid-friendly channel like Disney or Cartoon Network.
This night, the TV in the back room was showing a channel called The 101 on DIRECTV. At the time, our family had DIRECTV and I was familiar with this channel. I didn’t watch it that often because most of the time, it was running old episodes of shows that had originally run on the premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. The shows were like The Sopranos and Sex in the City, but well after they were the hot shows to watch. One of the few shows that I had ever actually paid a little attention to on this channel was a game show hosted by Meatloaf called Rock & A Hard Place. On this show, they had rock bands competing against each other answering rock and roll trivia questions. The show only lasted for 12 episodes and they would usually show them in a marathon on The 101. It seemed like a non-offensive offering for the back room of the catfish restaurant.
They seated a couple of people in a booth toward the front of the back room. It was an older man and woman and they appeared to be on a date. While we were waiting for our food to arrive, they provided an interesting alternative to the rock and roll game show for watching. They were giggling and holding hands like a couple of teenagers. They were playing hand slapping games. They ordered a salad that they shared. At one point, the woman went to the restroom. As she stood up and walked away from the table, the man was seriously checking out her butt. While she was gone, he quickly ate all the croutons from the salad. It was like he was sneaking them while she was gone. When she returned, she didn’t appear to notice anything about the croutons or say anything, but we were far enough away and the television was loud enough that we couldn’t really hear them.
After we ate our food, we were sitting at our table waiting for the check. Because we were ready to go, we didn’t want to start up any new conversations and ended up paying a little more attention to the TV. The Meatloaf gameshow marathon was over, and some unfamiliar show was on. It looked like a crime drama, but I had no idea what was going on. A scene started with a man in a locker room. He had a towel wrapped around his waist and appeared to be getting in or out of the shower. Another man walked up to him also with a towel around his waist. Soon, the man with his back to the camera dropped his towel revealing his ass on the TV screen. We were not expecting to see a naked man’s ass when we went to eat catfish. I won’t go into detail, but without showing anything graphic, the show suggested that these two characters were engaging in sexual activity. I didn’t go to the restaurant expecting to see soft core gay pornography, but that’s what we were seeing. The scene wasn’t graphic, but it left little doubt as to what was going on. Thankfully, the scene quickly changed. We received our bill and left.
When we arrived at home, I turned on our TV and turned to the on-screen guide to find out the name of the show that had been on at the restaurant. It was a Showtime series called Sleeper Cell. A few days later my wife and I were getting ready to go to bed and I had switched on the TV for a little something to watch. I was going through the on-screen guide and noticed that Sleeper Cell was showing on the 101. I jokingly suggested that we watch it and of course my wife replied no. Just out of curiosity, I clicked on that channel. Amazingly, it was on the same episode we had seen at the catfish restaurant and at the offending point in the show. I quickly turned off the TV.