Unfinished (Pirate) Novel

"Onward to the tapioca dawn!" cried our captain triumphantly from the crow's nest. The crew took a vote, and I had to climb up there and regretfully inform him that today was Wednesday and the dawn would be more oyster-ish, if not completely clam.





I climbed reluctantly up the rigging to the crow's nest, darn near slipping on penguin turds, falling to the deck, landing on one of those things you wrap the rope around to keep it in place, breaking off my xiphisternum and cutting my insides into stroganoff.

I bring up the issue of Inexplicably Flying Penguin control at every Crew Government meeting, but, as I'm the only one to ever climb up here, they just tell me to piss off. There's already enough tension between those who tame them and those who coax the tame ones onto their shoulders and bite off their heads for a tasty snack. Me, I can see both sides of the issue.

The crow's nest, with its portholes, fins, and immaculately polished chrome trim, looked like a tiny dark spot against the sun. As I climbed up the slippery ladder, it grew to a blotch about the size of a '57 Buick. I knocked on the trunk and shouted

"It's me! I bring a message from the crew!"

The captain set down the paperweight he had been brandishing (He throws small objects and shouts "Pirates! Pirates!" at unannounced visitors; that's how we lost the compass.) and opened the passenger-side door.

"Come in! Have a seat!" he said, picking up the empty pizza boxes off the upholstery and throwing them out the window in graceful spinning arcs, narrowly missing a clump of frolicking penguins, "Is my cabin empty and fit for occupancy? Were you sure to fumigate?"

"Regrettably, no." I answered. "The gypsies left on the papal helicopter last month, but we still haven't eaten enough cases of coins to fit your dinette set in."

"Oh, well. Do you want some pizza?" The captain has the second shortest attention span on ship. The rest of us are so accustomed to perpetual boredom by years at sea that we will stand and watch anything even slightly out of the ordinary. Last night we cracked everyone's knuckles, timed how long it took for them to be crackable again, took an average and tattooed it on Randy's Inexplicable Flying Penguin, Rudy.

"No, thanks. I came up to tell you that you were mistaken about the tapioca dawn. It's Wednesday, and, as I'm sure you noticed, the dawn was pretty clam. Do you have pepperoni?"

"Ah. I thought I might have made a mistake in my calculations somewhere. Want a napkin for that?"

"No, thanks. I have to be getting back to the deck now, there's a 70% chance of pirates today, followed by temperatures in the lower-to-middle-60s." I grimaced and pulled hot cheese and skin from the roof of my mouth.

"Have a good time!" shouted the captain gaily as I slid down the jumper cables to the deck, landing wrong and almost fracturing my left calcaneus, I waved goodbye and went to the mess to get some coins, as the pizza had made me hungry.

As I opened the door, Rudy, Randy's Inexplicable Flying Penguin, flew out like a bat out of a tanning salon, connecting squarely with my face. I checked my lacrimals for injury, but they were fine. As my eyes unblurred, I saw Randy stabbing a hairy pirate with a corn holder. I picked up a waffle iron and hit the pirate soundly over the head. From the way his brain was flowing out his ears, I assumed he was dead.

"So," I asked the relieved Randy, "do you think this is an eating pirate or a flinging pirate?"

"Jeez, I dunno," said Randy, scratching his head, catching his breath and clipping his toenails. "He's pretty hairy, be tough to clean. I think he'd be a great flinger, you know, nice and heavy, kinda compact, make a big dent in their deck."

"Yeah," I replied, searching the body for I.D. "And a big dent in morale. Was this his first time over or did he discover the chocolate?"

"I dunno. Pem is still trying to fix the Polaroid so the files aren't as up-to-date as they could be, you know." Randy's massive forehead wrinkled up, making Mary Todd Lincoln dance the Shimmy. One of Randy's distinctive features is a high forehead with a birthmark shaped and colored exactly like Mary Todd Lincoln in the nude. She has a tattooed string bikini on now, though.

Just as the papal helicopter was hovering by the bunt-line, Randy realized that the pontiff probably wouldn't take kindly to a nude First Lady dancing while he addressed the congregation. Randy grabbed a hat and jammed it over his forehead, but he forgot and removed it as Pope John Paul George Ringo XI passed. Everybody was really nice about it, though, and after His Holiness displayed his skill with a needle, he entertained us with card tricks and his impression of Al Jolson singing "Sonny Boy." When he finished there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

He was just about to show us his prison tattoos when a pirate ship hove into view and he was pushed back in the helicopter by a crack squad of nuns. As it flew off into the distance, he threw a bag of Wienermobile whistles at us, killing Max, but nobody liked Max anyway.

Randy and I lifted the pirate onto a gurney and wheeled him down the ramp to the cannon room. I put his stiffening body in a barrel to form an aerodynamicaly efficent cannonball. We save pirates that don't look too tasty and fire them at the pirate ships that follow us around. They think we're filled with gold. Even when we give them a bag or two, they come back a little later and, boy, are they mad! We try to explain we've no real gold, just little foil-wrapped chocolate candy, in everyday and holiday designs, some with nuts, but they just won't listen to reason. I don't think there are any actual mental requirements for pirating, just body hair. They seem to have the average mental strength of squid, and I mean squid whose heads have been diced by outboard motors and healed into new and exciting configurations. I mean a mild aversion to facts.

"Look," I say to the pirates, "We don't have any gold, just these chocolate coins, with and without holiday motifs. Some have nuts. I think some of the Easter coins are bubble gum, but we've only found one box so far and that was eaten by an unreliable source who may have been fibbing. The point is, we only have gold-like sweets. No gold. In fact, we've no food, clothing, or plunder of any other sort than round flat candies in shiny foil, and a good percentage are stale. Maybe you could sell them in a harbor town or use them for poker chips, I don't care, but just quit boarding us, taking some candy without even asking and coming back an hour or two later all grumpy and out-of sorts."

I don't think the pirates listen, though. I rarely get to begin my speech before they push me aside and run for the cases of foil-wrapped chocolate candy. Pem, the cook's boy, takes pictures of the pirates for later identification. Nothing is gained by this, but the cooking staff hasn't much to do around here.

Randy, the cook, was hired when we thought we had food. Now, with a ship full of chocolate, he just loiters until an eating pirate is killed or someone strangles a penguin. Nobody likes to eat dead crewmen, although if we had, probably not as many of us would have died, mostly of accidental ingestion of foil wrappers. It was probably the ink.

We had thought a couple of times about fishing, but a ship-wide poll indicated that 80% of the crew (about 16) found fish "creepy" and "slimy." If we ever manage to capture a pirate ship, the first thing I'm going to do is search the pantry for anything that isn't chocolate.

The odds are against us ever capturing, destroying, or even disabling a ship. We don't have any cannonballs (actually, we did, they were crunchy on the outside, all right, but raspberry cream on the inside). A gunner, Max (nobody liked him), had the idea of making cannonballs out of foil wrappers, but they were too light. He also invented the foil pants made out of many doubled wrappers sewn together. These allow more freedom of movement then Randy's foil pants, which were an average of three inches thick and required that you hop everywhere you went.

This is not the end! The story will continue, unless I get bored.

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Editor's note, 2001: It would seem that I got bored.