“Heh, the poet,” there was a long silence as he pondered his empty ale mug. I signaled the inkeep to bring another and laid silver coins on the table, “Tell me poet, how many farmers of former knights have told you tall tales? That they rode on the Horn quest? Or that saw King Khalid fall?” he laughed again and pondered his refilled ale.

“Were you a knight then?” I seemed to fail to hide my sarcasm and the old man’s face burned red and he clenched his fists before sighing and releasing his hand to be filled by his ale cup.

“No… no I was ne’er a knight.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out an amulet emblazoned with the old symbol of the King of Mitereland. “I was merely a boy in the service of the king. A sparing partner from youth for the Prince. That was…. Twenty-five years ago…”

And the old drunk trailed off into his ale, the story quenched with his thirst. “My curiosities got the better of me again. “Tell me, then. Tell me the truth.”

The old drunk laughed, “What is truth?” I started to answer but stopped and simply sipped my ale instead, “No… No, this story is far too long… And you are far too young to understand.”

I looked around the empty inn and through its windows to the still siliently falling snow “I doubt either of us will be going anywhere.”

The old man chewed the beard of his upper lip for a few moments, his eyes fixed on no particular point in the fire which burned beside us. “I have not told this tory… in a very long time…” and with that he eased back into his chair…

Enter the Professor

I awoke slowly with a feeling of transcendence, of being above myself. I clenched my eyes shut, closed off to the world I was waking to, clinging desperately to an image fading into the transparency of my mind. A guttural cal of loss and remorse was suffocated still in my throat. I’d been gagged. More so, my very teeth were confined in something which tasted of burnt rubber and stale death. I opened my eyes only to be blinded by bald lighting which shone from overhead, square upon my face. I flinchingly tried futilely to turn my head away from the overpowering light, but my neck did not respond. Nor did my arms when I tried to shield my sight from the source of the light. I struggled in vain to free myself, seized by anger and desperation, but accomplished little more than exhausting my freshly woken body.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk…” the laughing, mocking whispering of laughter from the shadows softly murmured, its cold breath rank with death, breezed hushed upon my ear, “You’ll need all your energy before the Professor is done… he he ehh….” and laughing slipped into the inaudible distance.

I inhaled deeply through my nose, the faint flavors of pain and fear, mostly of fear impressed themselves upon my nasal palate. I closed my eyes and tried slowly to remember where I was, what had happened to me. Slowly the electric bite marks burning in my side reminded me of- of what? Of a cruel creature with an uneven step? Of tortured cries and twisted moans? I tried to convince myself that it had all been a dream, a nightmare I’d been too long to wake up from- But the cattle prod burns were real and so was the return of the invisible whisper of the shadows-

Or were they? Perhaps the years of accursed darkness had finally worked and warped my mind into madness. Perhaps they were right, in those first days, and it had been madness all along. The ethereal image in transparent black and white drifted before my eyes again, in taunting retribution. My howl of rage and frustration was again suffocated before meeting barbaric satisfaction upon my lips and I renewed my energy to break loose the binds that enslaved me to this torturous fate.

“Ah, good. It’s awake then,” My eyes flew open to again find themselves blinded and I tried more earnestly to turn my head to see what specter of the shadows spoke forth now, “Ah- I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” I took several shallow breaths through my nose since I was still gagged and detected a new scent, something cold and clean but still clinging to death. It smelled like a morgue.

I felt a tapping on my throat, but not on my throat, on something covering my throat. “A rather… ingenious… contraption, if I do say so myself.” for the first time I noticed the slight constriction around my throat. I pulled slightly against it. “The collar,” collar? How dare he-“ has a pin, connected to the table. If the pin were to come out of the collar,” He put a collar on me. I could hear a low growl in the deepest recesses of my throat, the collar vibrating metallically against the table I was strapped to. “Now, now, thats enough of that.” I felt a shock run the course of my body from an unseen origin. “As I was saying, if the pin were pulled from the collar, a thin blade, of pure silver, will pierce your spinal column.” I froze at the mention of silver, “Now, then, since I know what you are, and I believe you trust that I do,” I fought to suppress a growl in my throat and slow the beat of my heart, “perhaps then, we can begin the procedures and dispense with formalities.” I could smell his closeness now and at the risk of blinding myself again in the lights I opened my eyes,, darting my glace quickly in the direction of his voice. At first I saw nothing but the light and the shadows, “I” suddenly he came into view, the form of an indistinct face emerging from the shadows, glasses reflecting light but nothing of the eyes behind them, “am Professor Billington.” The face leaned slowly again out of the light and into the shadows. “And this is my laboratory.”

Another source less shock shook my body. “Let’s start the show.”

Week 2 August 22 – 28: Ch. 5-8

Week 3 August 29 – September 4: Ch. 9-11

Week 4 September 5 – 11 Ch. 12-Finish

Discussion questions will become available at the beginning of each week.

Ordering Information: Amazon, Borders

eBook Download Information: Project Gutenberg Australia , GoodReads, Kindle,

Reading of the book will begin on August 15th and run through the first week of September. A detailed Reading Guide will be posted on August 14th.

To join, email deanlockley@guerrillajournal.com

In December of 1953, an American icon was born with the first publication of Playboy by Hugh Hefner and co-founder Eldon Sellers. And America would never be the same again. Since that first publication, America has watched the genre go from an upscale gentleman’s magazine, to the leading share of the media world that we live in today. It has decided large changes in the way we share images and information from the internet to VHS, to DVDs and eventually replacing them with Blu-ray. But among the plunging standards in the medium that desensitizing has caused, Playboy has always stood above the rest, never wavering from their softer images and their non-graphic displays of the female form and sexuality that looks more like the work of a Renaissance master when compared to contemporary companies like BangBros., Hustler, and yes, Penthouse.

Comparing Playboy and Penthouse, is a bit like comparing the wit of Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin to the comments found on YouTube and MySpace. While Playboy may have strayed slightly from the path once laid out in its articles with pieces by such as Shel Silverstein, John Updike, Michael Crichton, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladmir Nabokov, and interviews of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X (interviewed by the later co-author of his autobiography, Alex Haley), and a little man from Plains, Georgia named Jimmy Carter! Not to mention countless rock stars and celebrities like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I mean, for God’s sake, Fahrenheit 451 was originally published in the pages of Playboy in the spring of 1954. In the meantime, Penthouse’s one claim to literary fame is convincing millions of lonely lecherous men that the letters they publish are real.

But beyond the simple differences of style, there is something more here. Something that leaves an uneasy feeling in the bottom of your stomach. Playboy isn’t simply another corporate brand, a Global Media Marketing Inc., to be bought and sold like a cheap whore. It is an American institution, and for too long now we have let corporate giants take our cherished institutions and squash them, to rob them of their souls. To be ripped out from under the people who built them, that worked for them, who lived for them, and to trade them away cheaply, to turn them into a mockery of what they once were, not just as products, but as institutions.

This is less a matter of corporate mergers and more a matter of personal honor. You waited until the announcement that Mr. Hefner wanted to take his company private, and then you swoop in to try and claim that brand which he created, loved, and nourished for more than half a century out from under his nose. For God’s sake man, his own mother was one of his original investors, do you mean to steal what the man’s mother helped him create? This has less similarity to a Time-Warner merging, and more in common with Michael Jackson buying the rights to The Beatles’ songs from out from under his one time friend Paul McCartney. Do you really wish to be remembered as the Michael Jackson of the business world? I’m not saying that you have sex with little boys, Mr. Bell, but I have little evidence that you don’t.

To the stock holders, I beg you to consider the repercussions of your actions. We live in a world today that is slowly drifting farther and farther towards a bland, tasteless, faceless future. Hugh Hefner is of a dying breed. Let him die in peace, with the company he created, not a shattered, broken, forgotten old man. At what point do we stop the imperialistic conglomeration of all companies, all people, beneath one giant corporate banner? Must all American business, all successful American business eventually go the way of Anheuser-Bush, a foreign front, feigning Patriotism from far away Corporate headquarters while stripping the American worker of their jobs, their retirement packages, even going so far as to cut their support and sponsorship of the American Olympic Team? Is this the world you plan to leave for your children? For your children’s children? An America where anything you make is stripped out from under you by anyone sufficiently spineless enough too slime their way beneath the moral code that upholds the American Dream that so many men have given their lives to create and defend?

Mr. Bell, I pray that this letter finds you in time to prevent your plans for Playboy. Or, may God have mercy on your soul.

The Editor

Perhaps it’s fitting that George Steinbrenner would die the day of the All Star game. Setting my personal opinions aside (as a Red Sox fan), no matter what you think of ‘The Boss’, he was one of the sport’s true All Stars, putting together teams during his reign as owner that would win more games than any other team in baseball (3,364), more division championships (11), and more world series championships (7), than any other team during his nearly thirty seven year tenure. Perhaps it was also fitting that the American League would lose that All Star game, for the first time since 1996.

Though their bodies have passed, their lives and legends live on. In the baseball team which Steinbrenner created, the Stadium he built, the countless New Yorkers who, unknown to most people, he helped, from firefighters and NYPD officers wounded in the service to the city that made him, to the children of those whose fathers were killed in the line of duty. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise, to see ‘The Boss’ up there in Heaven, as much as my Red Sox allegiance pains me to say it. Yes, the ‘Voice of the Yankees’ is fading, to be heard only in the echoes of a recording, his ghost announcing Derek Jeter, his last Hall of Famer, before every at bat before the fans of Jeter and Sheppard, of Steinbrenner and Mantle. God rest ye both, the boss, and the voice.

“Farewell, old Yankee Stadium, farewell / What a wonderful story you can tell / DiMaggio, Mantle, Gehrig and Ruth / A baseball cathedral in truth.”

Bob Sheppard
1910-2010

“They always say, what would you like to be on your tombstone, what would you like people to say? I’d just like them to say: ‘He never stopped trying.’ That would be good enough for me.”

George Steinbrenner
1930-2010

As a non-partisan observer in the entire debacle of your free agency I have a request to make of you. Stay in Cleveland. I doubt you will listen to me, seeing as we’ve never met and I know very little about your situation or what is going through your head but I write to you on behalf of the American consciousness. America needs a hero Mr. James. I’m asking you to step up and act the part you’ve already been cast into.

I don’t have any allegiance to any team, I don’t live in Cleveland, I’ve never even been to Ohio and I couldn’t care less about any of the other teams you’re entertaining plans of joining. Rather, I write to you as a sports fan who has watched player after player drift aimlessly from team to team, desperately seeking something, be it money, fame, a coach they like, or, as in your case, a championship. And I have to say, if you leave, you’ll never earn a championship. To earn a championship, you need to stay in Cleveland. You need to stay with your home team. Otherwise you’ll be gambling with the love and adoration of fans, of small children who will watch you leave Ohio for the last time, kids who have now grown up watching you play for the Cavaliers, for their hometown, and now sit, staring at their televisions asking why? Wondering if their hometown wasn’t good enough for you, if they, as your fans, were not good enough for you.

They need a hero, Mr. James. They need a man who’s willing to stay and fight and be a man. They need you Mr. James, America needs you. Stay and be a hero. Leave and hope that your new team wins, or else you’ll be seen as a fool, a media clown. Win and fans will refuse to give you the credit you so rightly deserve. You deserve that championship. You deserve to win that championship, to earn that championship and Cleveland, deserves it as well.

But, like I said Mr. James, I don’t’ know you, and I don’t know anything about your reasons for leaving Cleveland. If I’m wrong, and you do in fact have completely valid reasons for leaving Cleveland for Miami or wherever else you may end up, then forgive a poor romantic his ravings.

But, if I’m right, if the entire sports entertainment industry is right about your reasons, then I beg of you Mr. James, on behalf of all the children looking for a man to look up to, on behalf of old men who have been waiting for the ray of hope you provide that their home team just might win a championship before they die, and on behalf of those men who have played, learned, sweat and bled along side you- stay in Cleveland.

I, along with the rest of the country, await your response tomorrow.

I can’t help but fear that this letter falls upon deaf ears or, at the very least, falls flat, deafened by the explosive roar and aimless fury of voices, sounds and images that is life in the 21st century. Nonetheless, I feel as if for far too long I have sat silent, watching the mayhem and ignoring the cries of the poor and the hungry as we begin to enter into what economists are dubbing a double dip recession.

And around the country roads are crumbling and highways are crumbling and levies, damns, sewers are crumbling and everything is crumbling but the voice of the Senate which warbles onward and upward in volume and intensity as they shout at shadows of bygone eras, refusing to face the America that we live in today.

And the unemployment rates are rising, the poverty level is rising and the gulf coast is drowning in the black blooded oil of the nation and they find themselves once again fighting to release the strangle hold of the British. And if you look down the Mississippi you can still see the British coming in ghastly black, attacking the shores of a forgotten war, the battle raging on the Gulf where Old Hickory had left them two hundred years ago.

And Americans across the country seek desperately an escape from the rules and regulations that we have imposed upon ourselves because there’s no frontier left to run to. Americans claiming themselves sovereign march blindly into the darkness of the ignorance cult and claim themselves to be patriots.

And as we celebrate the Anniversary of that first truly American fight, and the first joined utterance of truly American sentiment and we watch the pomp and the pageantry of colored fire illuminating the sky there are more Americans jobless and in prison than lived in all of those future states when those words were coined that all men have the right to life, liberty and above all the pursuit of happiness.

Cause that’s what it all boils down to, isn’t it? If we stop and look at it. We all want the right to be happy but we aren’t. Some of us try and drown our problems in alcohol, drugs (both prescription and otherwise), in floods and waves of entertainment that we watch not because we like it or enjoy it but simply because there’s nothing else to do. But we cannot drown our way to happiness but only cause ourselves to be distracted as we slip farther and farther down the slippery slope from freedom to frustration. And we search desperately for a scapegoat either chemical, racial or even federal.

But the simple fact of the matter is that we have no one else to blame but ourselves. This has always been a nation of the people and we the people can’t see that. We wonder why the country drowns in debt to foreign nations and at the same time try desperately to get out of paying our taxes. We blame Jewish bankers, investors and Shylocks but we forget that were it not for Jewish investors (Hyam Salomon) America would never have gotten its feet off the ground.

And as the Star of David shines upon the American Eagle, the dollar finds itself slowly getting weaker, like the bloodline and backbones which modern America was built upon. And I can’t help but wonder if there’s anyone left in the middle and upper classes who would buy bonds anymore, or perhaps they wouldn’t see this as a strong enough investment.

But that is what this country needs. It needs an investment. It needs Americans to stop hiding in twitter languages and to stand up and be Americans. It needs to step back and take a look at the fact that South Africa is now seen as a more racially tolerant country. It needs to take a look at the fact that we never would have left the Great Depression if FDR hadn’t bankrolled the country. If it weren’t for the Federal Government we would still be living in Hoovervilles or under communist rule. We are not because FDR knew that beyond simply providing money for the unemployed the country needed to go to work. Both for the nation as a whole and for the individual. Even Vince Lombardi knew that all men loved hard work. Its in our blood. Its in our bones. Its something we’ve forgotten about because we haven’t seen anything worth working for, worth working towards but I can tell you, America, I see it and if we do not start working together now then I fear there will be nothing worth saving soon.

I pray this letter finds you before it is too late,

The Editor

“All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” 

Thomas Jefferson

And while the New York Times covers kids in KFC in Mississippi, the Senate’s firing up some racial accusations of their own as Sonia Sotomayor prepares for the trials of being the first ever Hispanic Supreme Court Nominee.  But this time the racial charges are on the other foot.  Republican Activists are getting ready to make accusations that Sotomayor is herself a racist citing a 2008 ruling in New Haven Connecticut where  20 firefighters were refused promotions due to the fact that not enough black firefighters scored highly enough to qualify.  Sotomayor, as part of a three judge panel that heard the case’s appeal in 2008 sided with the city and the original decision of the lower court, denying the nineteen white firefighters and one Hispanic firefighter from New Haven their promotions.  The case is scheduled before the Supreme Court later this month.

Meanwhile, in California the California Supreme Court has backed the voter approved proposition to make the marriage of a gay couple illegal.  In the 2008 election, the same election where the first ever Black President was elected, California voters decided the definition of marriage to be between a man and a woman in what was known as Proposition 8.  The court also decided that the 18000 some gay marriages which took place prior to the election were still valid.

And on a hill in San Francisco there’s a stolen car getting ticketed for a parking violation.  And in a apartment in St. Louis a man’s getting a noise violation for beating his wife.  They say that the country’s changing;  that its time for change.  They’ve been saying this for as long as anyone alive now can remember.  I’ll tell you what I remember – a line from a Morgan Freeman movie.

“It’s just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit.”

“Arrr matey’s! And who be these land lovers I see before me?” I leaned in close, my unpatched eye gazing menacingly into the amused face of a thirteen year old boy from Plainsberg, Ohio. “Welcome to Captain John’s Ship O’fun and Sea Food.” I motion behind me to Maria, “Our house wench shall seat you now, the show be starting in ten minutes. Beware if ye be sitting in the first two rows, yeh shall get splashed by the water and may be taken prisoner by the infamous Peg Leg Parsons. Please, no flash photography.”

The nice looking family with the trappings of tourists smiled politely and took a picture of my get up, passing beyond me to follow Maria to their seats. I motioned to one of the other greeters that I was going out back and made my way through the kitchen that stunk of sea food that wasn’t the catch of the day, at least not of that day.

Once I got outside I wriggled my left hand free of the fake hook and pulled the falsely stained teeth out of my mouth. I lit a cigarette. “Fuck.” I muttered under my breath as I shook my head and looked back out to the parking lot, the tops of cars shining above the fence that separated the dumpster in the back from the sight of the road. I took a long drag of the cigarette and watched the smoke float softly and gently for a moment, becoming an illuminated cloud by the twelve foot neon pirate falsely animated to be fishing ontop of the sign before being whipped away by the stale salty sealess breeze. “ I’m getting to old for this shit.”

I took the hat off and tossed ontop of a worn old plastic folding chair as stale and crusty as the wind there behind the dumpster and yanked the wig off. I scratched my head, forcing my fingers deep into my sweaty matted hair, aerating my scalp. I wondered if maybe my hair didn’t need a vacation too. I turned around and looked out toward the dirty piece of swamp land we advertised as our seaside location. I took a drag and watched the smoke whip past me in the direction of the land. “Can’t say I blame you,” I said under my breath as I turned back to the restaurant.

The door opened and Maria smiled at me, asking for a drag of my cigarette. I smiled handing it over to her. She drew it to her lips trying to be seductive. Two year s should’ve taught her by now that it wasn’t going ot work on me, but I guess you can’t blame a gal for trying. “You better get back in character, show’s starting soon.” She blew the smoke out pursing her lips and veiling her eyes slightly. I never should’ve fucked her that first week.

She offered the cigarette back to me as I picked the wig up off the ground where it’d slipped through the whole in the middle of the folding chair, where the plastic material had grown too worn and brittle. I shook my head. “Finish it,” and grabbed my hat and the hook in my hands as I walked back into the door. I stopped at the doorway looking out into the swamp, catching the gleams of the setting sun off its molding waters.

“Oh, and the little girl at table five is having a birthday so don’t forget to get the confetti blaster before the third act.” she said as I paused in moldy reflection.

”I gotta get out of Florida”

===========================================================================

Three hours later and the show’s been over for about an hour now and the last of the night’s customers are finishing up their burnt Sea Bass Escapades. Maria offered me a ride home and I politely refused. Can’t blame a gal for trying. “Alright, well, I’ll see you tomorrow, Captain,” she with a little wink and I watched her go and shook my head, my hand blindly reaching to my keychain and a beaten scratched gold ring that I kept with my keys. I went into what they called the break room backstage. There were rows of beaten lockers, rusting and covered with scratches and graffiti. I hung my hat on the hook with my name above the locker and slipped the wig ontop of the shelf to dry off before tomorrows show and I knew that one day I should take it home and wash it, but, then again, there was something more authentic in it if I didn’t.

I checked behind me to make sure I was alone and reached into my right boot and pulled out my old Grandfather’s silver flask that he had carried with him when he’d gone off to get drunk and shoot at Koreans. I’m pretty sure it was for the war, but, then, again, my Grandfather had had quite the reputation as a rabble rouser when he’d been a kid. I took a long hard swallow and thumbed a dent that he’d always sworn was from a bullet, from the day the flask had saved his life, but my Grandmother said was from when he crashed the motorcycle coming home drunk.

“Ay, Johnny, boss, he wants to see you.” I smiled at Armondo and nodded, offering him a pull from the flask. “Fucking gordito!” he said with a laugh, going back to finish the last of the dishes.

I shrugged and slipped the flask back into my boot, tossing the eye patch blindly into the locker before heading to the manager’s office. I stopped in mid-step to get a better look at some caricature graffiti that’d been tattooed on the one cheap table with rotten wood that along with the lockers made up the break room. It looked like Captain John getting fucked up the ass by a giant marlin. “Huh. A new one.” I whispered to myself. And rounded the corner out the door to the manager’s office, the door open just before the employee exit so that I couldn’t have slipped out if I’d wanted to.

The manager was a short balding man named Jonah Williams who made everyone call him Mr. Williams. He’d been made the manager in 1984 and had been there ever since. I stopped in the doorway to look at him and I couldn’t help but wonder if there was ever a time he’d dreamed of more than managing a third rate sea food restaurant in a fourth rate town in West Florida. If he had, he’d given that dream up sometime no later than ‘95 and instead demanded the respect he thought he’d earned. After all, it was his idea to place the ad that claimed the restaurant had a romantic seaside atmosphere. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and up his skull till it met his hair halfway to the back of his neck, giving it the effect of a polished cue ball, before he noticed me in the doorway.

“You wanted to see me Jonah?” I said stepping through the door and watching with a little amusement as he furrowed his eyebrows, the deep wrinkles traveling his extended forehead as he did whenever I called him by his first name.

“John, I’ve told you before how much I hate when you don’t call me Mr.-” he started to complain.

“Right, sorry Mr. Jonah.” I said, fighting to hold back a grin, though I could feel the right side of my mouth twitch up, barely noticeably, into a slight sneer.

He sighed inaudibly and shook his head before continuing, “Now, you’ve been with us for a long time John-”

“That’s Mr. Nelson.” I interjected to his frustration.

“You’ve been with us for a long time,” he paused, staring intently at the faded varnish on his desk top, “Mr. Nelson,” I smiled politely, “and, as I’m sure you’ve heard, Jerry, has left us to go back to West Florida Heights Community College, so we need a new star actor to play Peg Leg Parsons.” he leaned back in his chair, creaking for want of oil, “You think you’re up to fill his shoes?”

“Shoe.” I corrected.

“Right, well, shoe then?” he didn’t seem to get the joke, or if he did he chose to ignore it. I decided it made the game more fun if he just didn’t get it.

“Well, I don’t know Mr. Jonah. Can I have some time to think about it?” I pulled a beaten pack of cigarettes out of my pocket and offered one to him which he seemingly offended declined.

“Yes, yes of course you can. But I’ll need to know by the end of the week of course.” he seemed to be looking for some piece of paper on his desk.

“Should I wait till Thursday when I work again, or should I try to get you at home?” I backed towards the door slowly. “Does your cell phone get good reception inside that whale?”

“Excuse me?” he looked back up surprised to see me still standing there. “Oh, right, yes we can wait to hear by Thursday, but earlier would be better.” I shook my head and wondered if he’d just heard the joke one to many times to notice it anymore.

“Well thank you for the offer Mr. Jonah, and I’ll get back to you Thursday. Is that all?” I said as I fished through my pocket for the lighter.

“Yes, yes, thanks for stopping by, that’s all John-”

“Mr. Nelson.” I cut in to correct him again.

“Goodnight Mr. Nelson.” he said with a half wave, his eyes already back on the paper on his desk.

I shook my head as I left the back door, actually feeling kind of bad for mocking him. Sometimes, it really is just too easy.

==========================================================================

I got to the bus stop just as the bus pulled up and walked past the boat hands and fishermen sun soaked with sweat and sea water filling the bus with the smell of salt and fish guts, their won t-shirts stained with proof of their occupations. I passed the old men in tattered clothes whose hands still shook from a long time fight with cheap rum and cheaper wine and now they waited in Florida on busses and retirement shelters for the death they are too young to embrace and too old to fight.

Finally I found an empty seat near the end of the bus, across the aisle from a dark skinned Cuban who, even after all these years in Florida I still wanted to call Mexican. Racism’s a tricky thing to change. Behind her were some punks she tried to ignore by turning up her iPod and slowly their leers slipped to heckling whispers and teenage giggling. I shook my head and secured myself into the corner for the half hour ride through the swamplands before we got the tourist’s fisherman’s wharf, where the fish market stands before empty piers in an attempt to seem authentic without letting middle American suburbanites to see the fates of the fish they devour at home.

And so through the cooling night’s breeze still heavy with the day’s humidity the bus sailed silently, the old men and fishermen never wavering their stare from the familiar seat back of the seat in front of them. The windows open and emitting the only light in the darkness of the swamp, we shot through the night. A gust of wind and something moved on my peripheral and so, turning I watched the wind whip delicately, playfully the white skirt of the little Cuban girl across the aisle from me. I only stared for a moment, unable to fight the instinct to take in the form of those tanned, toned legs before my eyes drifted north and caught her repulsed stare and something in those hurt eyes reminded me of my long ago Rita. I blushed and turned away and pulled out a worn old copy of a Conrad collection which I only feigned to read while I felt my cheeks grow hotter and I fought the sudden urge to tear up. I don’t know why Mikey thought moving here would make me forget her. Fucking Mikey.

And Fuck Florida too.

I need to get o9ut of her.

Half an hour later the bus drops me off two blocks from the tourist wharf and I walk the last block through the trappings of a small Florida fishing town. Vacationing fisherman down from New York or Boston carrying seldom used fishing rods and tackle boxes, some shining and unused, others, relics of fallen fathers worn and used over a lifetime’s passion, freshly dusted from their ornamental resting places on a shelf in the garage. The bars were loud, were always loud, from the clashes of insurance adjusters in town with their pals from Connecticut and the former fisherman who take up residence to wait for old age to finish the job the sea and the drink had long ago started.

I reached a white stucco building, the paint brown from the unseen stain of time and walked up the two flights of outdoor stairs that seemed awkwardly attached to the outside of the building. Somewhere in the distance I heard an old man singing “Jimmy Buffet, he don’t live in Key West anymore…” and opened the door to room 302, my apartment.

The place was empty, which was good. I didn’t need to deal with Mikey, or Paul for that matter, right now. I turned on the TV, grabbed a joint and headed in to take a shower.

By the time I got out of the shower the joint was gone and the Daily Show was on. Something about Somali pirates but they made the correspondent, the British one, dress up and sing like some old Gilbert and Sullivan routine. I stopped to watch and laughed before heading into the kitchen. At least the don’t make me sing.

I got a beer, sat down on the couch and, putting my feet up on the piece of driftwood we used as a coffee table, started to relax when the phone rang. It was Mikey, I didn’t answer it. Instead I took a long sip of beer and drifted off into a nap.

I don’t know how long I was asleep but it couldn’t have been long. Mikey came bursting into the apartment, with Paul in tow, and carrying a metal detector, his cargo pockets nearly bursting with change. “Big Jackie!” Mikey said as he threw himself onto the couch next to me. “I got it! We’re gonna be pirates!”

He was drunk.

“Already am Mikey my boy. Got me an eye patch and the whole nine yards.” I reached groggily, still waking up, for my beer.

“No, seriously, there’s tons of pirates now, they’re just in Africa, it was on the news!” Paul came out of the kitchen, tossing Mikey a beer which he opened, sucking the foam out before it spilled onto the floor. Most of it at least.

“In Somalia? No man. No. Fuck that. Somalia? I mean- Somalia? So-mal-ia?” I put my beer down staring at him.

“Yeah, yeah, Africa. That’s in Africa right?” Mikey glanced up to Paul for verification. Paul nodded, grinning.

“You’re drunk Mikey.”

“No I’m- Yeah, okay, maybe a little bit but-” I interrupted.

“Yeh see? And when you get drunk you get all ‘Let’s be pirates!’ or ‘Let’s become big game hunters!’ or ‘Let’s be treasure hunters!’ and then we move thousands of miles to end up working the same crappy, go-nowhere shit jobs we had when we left but in a shittier part of the world. Fuck it man! Fuck Somalia, fuck Florida and fuck pirates Mikey!” I took a long hard swallow of my beer returned my gaze to the television commercial about Neanderthals with hurt feelings. “And fuck cavemen too.”

Mikey and Paul sat there for a moment or too in silence before Mikey sat back with his beer. “So we’ll put you down as a definite maybe, then.”

I laughed.

Fucking Mikey.