Thursday, October 31, 2013

A Pirate For Halloween

When I was a child I – like most youngsters, I presume, at least most of the boys – was heavy, heavy into pirates.  Of course I don’t mean the nerds who bootleg media and software, nor do I mean today’s malnourished, seafaring Somali teenagers with flip-flops and automatic weapons and unruly teeth.  I’m talkin’ ‘bout old-school, buccaneer-style, walk-the-plank motherfuckers, the ones with sabers and parrots and striped sox and plumes in their hats, reeling to accordion music and reeking of rum and tobacco.  Aarrrgh!  God bless those guys.  You gotta love ‘em.  They didn’t fit in, so they flipped civilization the bird and they charted their own courses and they took what they wanted…louis d’or, bitches, and lots of ‘em!  It’s all about the napoleons.  Therefore I was a pirate for Halloween almost every year as a grade schooler.  Pirates were awesome.  Who wouldn’t want to be a pirate?

I was also a bookish kid and so I sought out pirate lore, and it wasn’t long before I read that the worst thing that you can call a pirate is “scurvy dog.”  It’s the sharpest insult there is, like when an Arab throws his shoe at you or when a foppish white guy slaps you in the face with his dandy glove.  You call a pirate a scurvy dog and you best be prepared to throw down cuz that shit don’t play.

Then I read that scurvy was caused by a lack of vitamin C and that successful pirates always stocked lemons on their ships so that they could regularly suck their lemons to prevent scurvy.  So I took to sucking lemons ‘cause I thought that doing so would make me cool like a pirate.

It wasn’t long before I acquired quite a taste for my sour li’l pick-me-ups, and I must’ve sucked a couple thousand lemons before I hit middle school.  That was about the time that I discovered the culture’s biases against lemon-sucking.  To tell someone to go suck a lemon was to tell someone to fuck off and go do something silly or unproductive, such as fly a kite or jump in the lake.  And to say that someone had sucked a lemon was to say that someone had woken up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak, and was being surly or unreasonably disapproving.  When I learned of these slanderous, hateful metaphors, I was devastated.  I suddenly found myself the object of universal scorn, a pariah to be despised and ridiculed.

My shock soon gave way to anger.  Who were these people to judge me?  If they didn’t like juicy, tasty lemons, then fine…but that was no reason to demonize me.  I decided to keep on sucking lemons and to do so with a defiantly conspicuous lack of shame.  I’d suck extra lemons, what the hell…just to spite everyone.  Fuck all y’all!  It’s lemon season, dickheads, so get used to it.

But that didn’t last long.  The peer pressure was too much (kids can be so cruel!), and I soon realized that I couldn’t keep on sucking lemons, at least not openly.  It just wasn’t going to work.  The stigma was too much.  I had enough problems, and I didn’t need to be courting extra trouble.  It just wasn’t politic.

I was caught between Scylla and Charybdis.  Society wouldn’t tolerate me as a brazen lemon-sucker; on the other hand, I was a very social youth and so it was much too inconvenient (not to mention humiliating) for me to always be hiding, sucking my lemons in private.  And so I coped by squeezing lemon juice into all of my foods and beverages.  It was amazing how the same so-called friends who would have savaged me for sucking a lemon would not bat an eye as I squeezed that same lemon’s juice into everything I ate and drank.  Colas, tomato juice, soups, mayonnaise-based salads…you name it, I’d squeeze lemon juice into it.  Indeed, at any given moment one could likely find a couple of lemons in my backpack.  And thirty years later, this is still how I live my life. 

Then the other day I was at the Safeway getting canned soups and lemons.  I had my soups, a chicken-noodles and a beef-barley, and I went to get my lemons.  As I entered the produce section, some phlegm suddenly started tickling my throat and I felt an overwhelming urge to cough.  Yes, mother, I did think to cover my mouth…but I had a can of soup in each hand and my instinct was to not swing a pound of metal-encased soup at my face.  In the next split second, half of my mind tried to suppress the cough and the other half of my mind scrambled for a plan B (such as to cough into my shoulder or arm), but before I could do anything the cough’s spasm overcame me.  It was a mighty expectoration, the kind that wrenches one’s neck muscles and makes one feel as though one’s torso is imploding.  After a brief moment of paralysis, I looked up and caught a glimpse of my discharge mid-arc, a great globule of phlegm shimmering in the fluorescent light.  I tried to follow its trajectory as it landed (I believe) somewhere among the stacked cucumbers.

I quickly regained some modicum of composure, and I went to the cucumbers to try to locate the phlegm.  My plan was to wipe it on my pant leg, or maybe I’d fetch one of those plastic bags (the ones on perforated rolls throughout the produce section) and wipe it on that.  But I couldn’t see anything anywhere…not a gob or a glob or a blob to be found.  I set my soups down on the floor and I started handling the cucumbers.  I figured the phlegm had to be on the side of one of the cucumbers stacked toward the top, or maybe it had slid down from the side of the cucumber and settled onto its underside or maybe onto the top of the next cucumber below.  I began lifting cucumbers, running my palm over shaft after mottled green shaft, feeling each fruit for moisture as I visually inspected the space where that particular cucumber had lain, but to no avail.  Had the phlegm simply kept on sliding on down to the bottom of the pile?  Then I started to get nervous.  I decided to give up.  I looked too weird stroking these cucumbers, and I wasn’t prepared to explain myself if someone were to inquire into my business.

And that’s when I had my epiphany.  It dawned on me that I was a total loser.  I lived an adventureless life, a life devoid of all thrills and derring-do.  I hadn’t swashbuckled in decades, I’d never grabbed fortune by its throat…my life was nothing like a pirate’s life!  And it wasn’t enough to say that I was merely boring; it was worse than that.  I was lower than humdrum.  I didn’t even enjoy the humble dignity of being normal.  I couldn’t even manage to make it out of the goddamn grocery store without grubbing around for my lost ball of snot.  All of my claims to manhood were tenuous at best.  It was time to furl my Jolly Roger and raise my white flag.  I was all washed-up, beached without treasure or pride or sense on a shore where I made even the landlubbers look cool.  I had to face it: I didn’t have what it takes to be like a pirate.

I suppose that my realization that I was a huge loser was enlightening, but I didn’t immediately know what to do with this knowledge, and so I just left.  It wasn’t until I got home that I realized that I’d forgotten the soups and the lemons.

That night was a night of profound soul-searching, and I resolved to not let my demoralizing epiphany rob my life of meaning.  It was too late for me, yes, but I could still help the younger generations hang on to their glorious dreams.  You know what they say: those who can’t do teach.  So I decided that this was to be my destiny.  I was to be a teacher, and my terrible awakening at the supermarket had been my ordainment.  If I couldn’t be cool like a pirate, at least I could redeem myself by helping young people keep hope alive.  And with Halloween coming up so soon, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect!

You see, one of the few foods that I eat without lemon juice is pistachio nuts.  I eat them while I watch TV, and I must go through a couple hundred bags of them each year.  I get ‘em cheap at Trader Joe’s…I always mix a bag of the salted with a bag of the unsalted…lightly salted is the way to go.  Anyway, in every bag of pistachios there are always a few nuts whose shells are completely sealed.  Without a nutcracker, these nuts are virtually uncrackable.  And even if one had a nutcracker handy, one would probably end up smashing up all the pistachio meat while cracking the shell and so it just wouldn’t be worth the effort.  So these nuts are practically useless.  Well, I save these nuts.  All year long, I collect these worthless nuts and then, on Halloween, I give them out to all the little bastards who come around begging for freebies…teach those brats to come bothering me and threatening me just because they like candy and they’ve got some cheap, ill-fitting Spiderman costumes.  Go home and do some homework, you irritating little fuckers!  Who am I, Willy Wonka?  It’s called a liquor store…they sell candy bars there.

So today at lunchtime I’m gonna go to the bank and get some crisp $10 bills.  Then, after work, I’m gonna go to Trader Joe’s and buy some of those giant, footlong Toblerone bars.  When the trick-or-treaters come around tonight, I’ll be ready for them.  Any kid I see who's dressed like a pirate gets a Toblerone bar and a ten-dollar bill.  Everybody else gets to dip a meathook into my salad bowl full of frustrating pistachio nuts.

Imagine all the little faces when little Johnny, the pirate, gets a giant chocolate bar and a sawbuck and everybody else gets a handful of stupid nuts.  Ha!  Pirate school’s in session, kids…Lesson #1 tonight at my house.

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