...in praise of the merman who ate my fist at the now closed first avenue long john silver's in florida city, florida...
I.
Be yourself -- it's the one thing you can do better than anyone else.
-Ethel Merman-
I wasn’t ever supposed to be a pirate. I dropped out of karate school as soon as my mom and dad officialized their break up. Hours spent listening to them hissing at each other ensured I had the highest kicks and the loudest hi-yahs relative to my stature of white-bread-gobbling chubbed-up non-exercising youth-manboy-childman.
Unfortunately I only had a taupe belt and a bowl cut to show for all this sweaty practice
I could grunt and kick four inches past ankle height with the best in my class (his name was Frank and his hair was perfect…), but sensei Sam doubted my commitments to the art. He often passed me large novels with instructions not to return to class until I had footnoted and read its entirety. It is possible he was utilizing me as a PA for his university course on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, but I neatly bowed to his requests and accepted his quirky yet martial artistic personality.
At page 60,245 I gave up.
II.
Piracy is our only option.
-Emma Thompson-
I was the fourth cousin of the second sister of a father who daughtered a scurvy mate aboard the S.W.V.CrudderMcGudderson. While a seafaring past passed along that lineage generally led to exterminator school or hypnosis retreats and not full fledged pirate-dom, I chose to pursue my most crude of ancestral passages. So here I was downloading a board recording from the 1989 Summerfest performance of a semi talented skaband named Dopefheart on a website called Napster circa end of this last century.
”Give me every song they made matey,” I yarled, from “Tonguebath” to “Shoeskin the Deaf Whale”, a rummy ditty about an orca whom stabbed his ears out listening to the very song they sang…yar yar to such metaversions! I tapped handle on my leathered finger flute in time to echoing dub beat of the illegal download.
My ancestors would have been ashamed at me taking simply this bounty but I cared not. For here I was wobbling boardside as one of them, a modern clubby embracing his crows nest, scuttling a future filled of cd-r’s to sell at Uncle Nick’s travelling record fair. I used photoshop to collage a tentacled starfish to a bawdy maid’s bosom, called the mix tape “Cadabra Bong” and hustled to the freeway.
My skinny leg dragged into my affordable convertible, yellow rain boot shaking skulky dust with a bumper kick before I settled into the beaded sheepy seat. The one winged gull watched me from their perch on the stoplight outside of my basement timeshare condo and a hunger took to my gutty spot. Was it a fart or something more sinister? There was no time to plunder and ponder so I set upon the freeway to my closest galley, a kind-of clean and woody Long John Silvers on first avenue.
Some future day these quarters would be a combo port of weenie fingered A+W root beers and mustachioed KFChicken bowling, but in this, my day of “ahoy me hearties”, the Long John was a land loving opportunity for hot fried fish meats served caped in napkin on colored paper card. I ordered a plate of crummy shrimps and blackened whitefin and moved to the back near the fish tanks when I saw him peering through the window.
III.
If you fish and catch nothing, you have still caught a lesson.
-Matshona Dhliwayo-
Tendrils of weedy inked algae tangles dripped across his crusty chin. I thought for sure he was a local christan death loving gothic but his long tail quickly flip slapped fin hard on the window next to my boothside seat. “Ahoy” I thought, shyly avoiding eye contact, while he patiently raised his trident. He scraped then tapped at me, chuckling a mercurial grin with overeager eye contact through the sun setting shade of the grease hued glass I chewed salted breading near. He wore a bedazzled thrift store vest, something someone’s mom had made for a final summer dance recital re-realized as nipple guarding cargo hold. Wet smoked cigars dangled from his chest pocket between a glittering patch of silver sparkles shaped as an open tonguey clam mouth, and a husky pile of redded horse tail curls upon his sea blistered collar bone.
“Feed me”, the fishy man pile breathed in hushed coherence at my napkin stand. I snapped a soggy fry to the back of my gums and gave look to his increasingly orange eyes. There was no way to avoid communique at this point as entrance to Long John Silver’s ensures one engage in the interspecial contract…”WE SPEAK FISH”.
I rested my paper pirate’s hat top the table, but not soon enough that the merman would pay any less mind. A couple ketchup dabs was time enough for the Mermo to sloppily flop his way past store door and malt vinegar perch to the seat straight in front of me. Tail slime made his sit fleeting. He’d hold pose for seconds only to slurp beneath the booth and belly roll to the aisle before repeating the fiasco again. I didn’t let the humor of his failings bring light to my expression, but instead clung to my foamy dread as he finally steadied by stabbing his trident spike tight to the teal checkerboard linoleum and hanging to it like a stumbling drunk calling a taxi from a corner street lantern.
IV.
Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.
-Frank Lloyd Wright-
Do merfolk eat fish? If they do, is it cannibalistic, or because they are half fish and half human, it is ok as long as they only eat half portions? What tastes good in mercuisine? Does all that salt in the water impede the sense of scent thus diminishing any fine dining experience? At a merdinner are the salt and pepper shakers replaced with pepper and pepper shakers? As this blog notes most mermaids would likely have a raw diet unless they could cooked on underwater volcanos, which to its credit, would be quite a michelinesque experience.
I handed over the remains of my potatoes, a pile of shrimp tails, and some mayo stained ketchup. He paused his sneer long enough to ball my value meal remnants into a smorgasbord chew he stuffed through his fanged rows. My gut pain had crested, quieted to focus on the heaving oceanid across my dinner tray. His name was Torpedo Stings and he had spent twenty years union working with a local manatee chapter tending protected mangroves up the coast. He had a falling out with the crew after taking the fighting side of a drunk florida panther at a slushy pub last fall and was looking for long term employ if I was willing to assist.
I explained I was a barely operable pirate to his hungry skeptical grimace, and in no shape to give employment at the current moment, offering instead to buy him a value meal and to train him in the powers of linkedin. Don’t posit the powers of bland social media onto mystical beings, I quickly learned.
V.
Them that die will be the lucky ones!
-Long John Silver-
Torpedo rose from his seat (not without falling to the floor one more sloppy slip) and gave a dolphin’s shriek towards the hanging rectangle lights. Lightning cracked outside between my car and the brown dumpster rats while the teenage manager of the establishment asked politely that we leave as we were intensely scaring the patrons. He mopped Torpedo’s path as we pushed out the door and I inquired if i might order to go from the drive through? He handed me a coupon for free squid rings and said maybe some other time. The efficiency of his managerial instinct enraged Torpedo further.
Tapping his trident loudly with each slithery bounce of his tail, the dolphin scream grew, conjuring flying fish and diving seabird with each dash of thunder and pissed mist. A sweaty wind grew round us and Torpedo insisted we fight. I knew not the laws of man vs. beast he moaned. He did not want a job in project management, or to read fawning thumbs upped blogs about the revenue success of viral video ad campaigns. He wanted human touch and understanding. He wanted to be part of my world.
“Feed Me!” he bubbled, the rain drops soaking my sneakers and filing my car like an aquarium. My swarthy instinct reared and I granted fish wish, winding my shoulder back and sending my clenched paw at the maw of the merman in front of me.
A real pirate might have tossed a rum bottle at the back of his sleeping skull. A real pirate might have sabred his gut after a drunken 20th round of shut-the-box, and made meat cakes of his lower bodice. A real pirate would have stolen his twinkly vest after dyeing it in the blood of the beast and let it dry stinky as both bandana and trophy atop my balding middle aged crown.
But a real pirate I was not…
…yet….
VI.
It is a blessing for a man to have a hand in determining his own fate.
-Blackbeard-
Torpedo bit my hand off. My fist hit his chin, held cold and broke to the moment, and was promptly chomped off like a slice of wet pear. The shock was immediate as joy permeated the satisfied grin of the beast in front of me. His chaos storm dwithered and he applied two hard wet salty holds to my oozing wound as rain settled quietly into the petrichor of a beachy mini-mall sunset. The burn of his touch calmed and cauterized my injury, setlling my bleed, gore and horror. He reached into the fifth of his vest’s cargo pockets and pulled from it a velvet bag with metallic sheen glistening within.
“Thank you for giving me a hand.” he awkwardly punned, and with too proud a sneer he tapped trident three times, yelled a gulpy “Bloop!” and disappeared in a cloud of burnt cuban cigar smoke.
Coughing, I slugged broken and stumpy to my saturated mobile. I slunk and soaked into the drivers seat and opened the faded green velvet sack. A curled golden blade poked center out of a shoelaced leather sleeve. It was just my size. I tied the prosthesis across my forearm proudly savoring the cold metal’s touch to my still cooling burnt wrist. “Yar”, I thought. “Har yar a yar”, I chuckled while awkwardly trying to wrangle the keys from my belt using my brand new merman hook.
The key twisted in my ignition and I hit the road headed off to Uncle Nick’s. One less hand but one step closer to a pirate’s life for me. “Yo Ho, Yo Ho!” I yelled as I drove out of Long John Silver’s parking lot. A woman waiting bus side heard my pirate call and threw a bottle at my eye. The strike was not enough to cost me its service, but someday I dreamed…someday that too shall be missing and patched.
I was one step closer to fulfilling the dreams of my mother’s father’s sister’s fourth cousin and becoming a real pirate. My cd-r stack shined as the freeway sun set on my gurgling indigestion.
Good read. Arrrrrgh.