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| Rocky |
| november 3, 2007 |
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| Too many meetings with do-gooders (and the do-badders) had put the ecology pirate—self-appointed Defender of the Seas—in a foul mood. There was one last fight as he tried to get out the hatch of his happy ship and away from his wife. She always seemed to be hiding some secrets lately, a special connection to the land and their child that the pirate—home only at sea—would never share. He felt able to understand again why his own and only brother, a soldier in the Special Forces, had never married.
Like most soldiers, his brother was no word wizard. He hadn’t been able to read or write for years after his classmates, and even when the soldier’s disability gained the name dyslexia—pronounced “lysdexia” by the rest of the family—those lines and curves on paper were an enemy to be vanquished with no joy in the victory. The pirate himself was a reading fiend, which lately had as its only outlet the constant stream of terrible news from the environmental front—climate change, droughts, hurricanes, resource depletion and the resulting wars. Every country’s leaders led gallant charges in exactly the wrong direction. His eyes were assaulted by a long report from China and India, where the growing middle class—while still a small minority of both huge countries—was motorizing and meat-eating at an accelerating rate. Four hundred million more cars, driven like in America by one voraciously consuming carnivore each, and it was game over for hominids. The pirate called the human race that to link them with the other creatures suffering and going extinct under their tyrannical rule. Greedy but clever and big-brained bipeds poked their opposable, technological thumbs in the eyes of every living thing that didn’t look like Britney Spears. And they were getting around to her too now that she wasn’t a teenager anymore. The pirate threw down the papers on his thick mattress. It was time for his ritual. He took off his captain’s uniform—first the coat with shoulder braids and gold pin recently awarded by a cooperative government and just as quickly disavowed when the pirate went too far. Off came the leather belt next, and his eyes roamed the hotel room ceiling. He searched for a fixture to wrap it around so he could execute the death sentence against the hominid he knew best. No. Suicide was the easy way out. Torture was better. He must increase the crime to make himself worthy of what was coming. The poor region around him was suffering from the least yearly rainfall in memory, probably caused by logging and deforestation committed by a starving, demoralized population after Japanese occupation during World War II. There was no drought in his four-star hotel room. He turned on the hot water, and steamed the mirrors so he didn’t have to see his aging body. Thinking of the coming agony and ecstasy, he stepped out of his pants and turned on the fashion channel, the closest to pornography he could find in the puritanical country. Thick, fluffy towels placed under the door turned the large rooms into a sauna. “Fashion week!” the idiotic but not dumb TV blared. “Paris,” it cooed. Then in case he missed it the first three times, a bedroom voice repeated again, “Fashion week!” Models with the sneer of the mutant gorgeous strutted down walkways wearing fabrics that revealed only how far Adam and Eve had fallen when they put on fig leaves. Ironic, the pirate thought, that my little matey down below decks and the rest of the world is happier when even the most expensive clothes come off. His crew on long voyages in warm waters seldom wore more than a smile—or a mutinous though vegan, pacifist look of frowning concern when too long in port. An eastern European waif explained from the screen how hard her job was. “Like what people don’t realize is long hours under hot lights is bad for the complexion! So my job is a “Ketch 22” or maybe some other kind of boat.” The pirate laughed more in admiration of her sailing knowledge than literary ignorance. He was also feeling that this was the woman who would free him from his wife. He never—or almost never—masturbated when married until he knew by year seven that his wife wasn’t The One. A day and a half later the fashion channel had raced around the world, from Paris to New York to London to Stockholm to Singapore. The pirate stayed in the exact same place. He had not eaten or drank, and sweat from the still-running taps poured off his naked body. The party wasn’t over yet. “Room service.” The pirate’s life on ship was constant action, patching holes in the hull, then racing from engine room to bridge,. His voice bellowed over loud hailers at the Japanese whalers or Ecuadorian longliners or the Canadian sealers they chased, threatening to ram their stern in “Operation Asshole.” In the hotel room, sadly without enemies to attack, forty hours without movement and his rudder wasn’t answering commands. He fell heavily on the way to answer the door. He kicked aside the towels and opened, steam flowing like a cumulonimbus out into the hall. The room boy was used to eccentric behavior and wheeled a cart full of shiny food containers into the room without expression, barely smiling when the towel dropped from around the pirate’s waist. “Thanks amigo,” he dismissed the boy, closing the door and opening his mouth. Into that cavern went all the food he was never allowed on the strictly vegetarian ship—sirloin steaks, chicken, pork chops, and worst of all for the sea defender, fish, lobsters, shrimp, caviar. He washed it down with rum and cokes, and finished the feast by stuffing an entire chocolate cake down the hatch. He turned off the fashion channel and waited on the bed for the inevitable. It wasn’t too many hours later that he felt the reaction begin down below, where his right big toe used to be. Within minutes there was no flesh and bones, only the most exquisitely sensitive nerve in the whole world. The pain built its intensity until groans and screams muffled by wet towels escaped his throat involuntarily. The man who rode in zodiac rafts atop freezing waters as harpoons fell like rain all around, facing down Presidents and police, had met his match. Gout. The brush of a cotton sheet against the toe was like sticking it in an electric socket. There was no more television, thick mattresses, defenders of the sea and environmental rapists. There was only pain. Two days of insanity raised his uric acid level enough to give him the disease of kings who ate too-rich meals. It would take a week to limp out of the room, and many months of a perfect, and vegan, diet, herbal infusions and lots of cherry juice before the pain went away. It was good that he did this only every seven years since he discovered it by accident, heartbroken over his first marriage’s break-up. Otherwise he was Gandhi of the seas, fighting with great sacrifices and no hatred against bad policies practiced by ignorant men. He knew there were no evil men. Only the evil inside, and that felt drowned by the pain. The pirate thought that this time it was worse than ever before. He could not risk trying it again without crippling himself. The treatment would have to last. |
| Times |
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