The Captain has two little dogs named Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. These animals are not graceful or sublime. In fact, they are fairly disgusting. Both physically and in terms of their personalities. At least in my opinion. Health-wise, Fred Astaire is hanging on by a thread and is subject to seizures which wrack his little body. The rest of the time he spends trembling with anger and yapping uncontrollably at the muddled world around him. I suspect he is insane. I have come to realise a dog that small is able to get away with being crazy because people expect it. Or at least they make allowances for it. Oh, what feisty fellow! What a horrible little dog, they cheerfully comment. Ginger Rodgers is placid enough but she has a terrible hole in the side of her body which I do not want to think about.
I went to school with the real Fred Astaire's great granddaughter. She was what the kids these days refer to as a 'hot mess'. She sat behind me in ninth grade. She had black nail polish and a Black Flag tattoo on her wrist. She took some drugs when we had our annual class excursion to the Museum of Natural Science. She gave me some of these drugs and as a result, I had no idea what was happening for about four hours. It was quite terrifying what with all those dinosaur bones dancing around and the Palaeolithic men and women with their spears creeping up on unsuspecting woolly mammoths. Hands down, the Aztec section was the worst. That was where I nearly lost it. We both got in a lot of trouble for that one. Father Perry took us outside and started shouting at us on the steps near the main entrance. His face kept turning into a cubist painting with his eyes, nostrils and ears in the wrong place. These hallucinatory special effects certainly didn't help matters. As punishment, we had to white-knuckle it through the rest of the afternoon in the back of the school bus, waiting for the others to finish their museum tour. This was when I first kissed Fred Astaire's Great Granddaughter on the lips. Sadly once we were back in class, Fred Astaire's great granddaughter started puncturing the skin on her arms with safety pins and rolling her eyes, feigning boredom at the pain like it was nothing. Eventually, she succumbed to an infection and had to be hospitalised. After that, she didn't return to our school. Rumour had it that her parents shipped her off to some kind of lock-down, tough love boarding school. I think I loved her. It might have been the drugs.
I digress. This is undoubtedly the Captain's influence. The Captain is a master of digression. And something else you should be aware of: The Captain has his bad days and he has good days. Sometimes he can be a complete douche bag. On these bad-douche bag days, I have learned to keep well away from him. All told, I would estimate that about 65% of what comes out of the Captain's mouth is total bullshit. Maybe more. Recently I have become convinced this might be a conservative estimate. This is especially true when the Captain goes off on one of his extended drinking binges, which are hilarious but not always in a funny way. The Captain's drinking antics are the stuff of legend at least down at Pete's, the only bar in this area where they still put up with him.
Remaining consistent with his sham commitment to the nautical world, the Captain doesn't even drink rum. He drinks vodka gimlets. Sometimes he will change things up with a Sea Breeze or a Caipiroska. He had a girlfriend but that situation became untenable because she is basically bonkers. Oh boy, is she a horror show! She is bipolar on top of a few other things. She can change into a completely different person right before your eyes. There have been many dramatic scenes and confrontations. The Captain claims they had two very good years together but then everything went completely haywire. I try not to pass judgment on the captain's problems and opinions but this often proves difficult.
Where do I come into this? Well, the Captain likes to commandeer people into his many projects. I am well aware that I am on a fools' errand with this man but I am young and I have time to make mistakes. I am enacting my plan, which is to find eccentrics, such as the Captain and get sucked into their vortex where hopefully, fingers crossed, I will find the necessary material for my first novel. The way things have been going with the Captain as of late, it might end up being two novel's worth of material. We'll see. The thing is, after three years of attending creative writing classes at a prestigious enough university, I have come to the realisation that I have learnt absolutely nothing. Actually, that is not entirely true. I have learned to undermine what little confidence and originality I once had. Worse than that, I learnt to write skilfully and in an entirely derivative way about....(drum roll) nothing. Do you remember Daniel Hayes? He wrote his memoir. While we were in our final year. Nothing happened to that guy. Nothing! I think he had some food allergies or something. Mild anxiety. He tried to get me to read it. It was terrible. I mean it was well written but what the fuck?
Anyway, the plan is to follow the Captain around for a few months and see where that takes me. See what makes the man tick. I figure you cannot get this....layered and strange without a decent back story of some kind. He is under the correct assumption that I am writing his life story. Impatiently is the straight poop. What he doesn't understand is that my ears and eyes are wide open to his world and I am drinking everything in, making copious notes for a parallel book (the novel I mentioned). Yes, he will get his biography and I will have something worth writing about later on. To this end, he and I have regular consultations in which he recounts the events of his life in exhausting detail. Make no mistake, he has a very sharp mind. It seems that nothing gets past him. Occasionally he will ask me to read passages back to him in order to check on the tone and the factual accuracy. I am constantly reducing and compressing temporarily keep the project down to a reasonable length, to keep his life from turning into my life's work. Each story seems to have a secret compartment or trap door which leads into another story. The Captain insists on elaborating and expanding. No stone is left unturned. It is not unlike sorting through the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle in a dark room. Lately, I have come to realise the extent to which he mixes in events and stories from other people's lives. This has happened because the continuity of the narrative I have managed to beat into submission does not match up at all. The past has become a patchy and uneven road. I shouldn't really care one way or the other right? After all, I am just collecting good stories. The problem is there is just so much damn writing and editing to wade through each night. The scope of it all is just overwhelmeing. The Captain expects Moby Dick whereas I am aiming more for the Old Man and the Sea. Short and concise
Last week The Captain picked me up on the corner of Broadway and Columbus. He was already inebriated and in the mood to talk. We set off, The Captain dialling his big wood panelled Oldsmobile deftly through the back streets of the city, the soft top down even though rain eventually. When The Captain gets on a roll, when he really gets going, he likes to tell his stories in the third person. He claims it helps him think in more detail as if the past were a movie being projected before his eyes. As usual, I was taking notes in one of my steno pads and as I say, he was in full swing, talking on and on about his time working as a concierge in Berlin, turning left and right as we drove around aimlessly when bang! He smashed into the back of another vehicle at a stop sign.
From this point on, I was required to dispose of the two bottles which contained The Captain's pre-mixed gimlets and which were rolling around beneath the front seat. I was told to discretely transfer the bottles from the car into a nearby receptacle on the kerb so as to avoid further complications when the fuzz arrived. Next, after accomplishing this assignment, I was directed to go to the corner store and purchase some gum for The Captain. And while this was happening, The Captain began directing traffic while providing unnecessary medical assistance to the other driver, his real goal being to create as much diversion as possible in order to give himself time to assess the situation. When The Captain suggested that I say I was the driver, this was where I drew the line. Disposing of a few bottles and buying some gum is one thing...taking responsibility for an accident is another. I had just gone over to consulting with the driver of the other vehicle, to make sure she was okay, when the old bastard slipped away. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. So when the police showed up, all I could do was shrug my shoulders and tell the truth: No. Sorry. I had no knowledge of the Captain's whereabouts. Which was true.
The Captain and I travel down into Mexico a week later. If I have learnt one thing about The Captain, it is that his plans are constantly evolving in response to the situations he creates though his luck and lack of judgement. It was during this time that I learned about the charity work. The Captain had been taking small but collectively significant donations from various church group he had infiltrated over the past year. His stated intention was to use this money to build a school in the high desert town of Batopilas, in Chihuahua. Or at least that's what he said. Until that moment, I had no idea of the Captain had a philanthropic streak.
We drove south, taking it easy so as not to draw any unwanted attention from the law. Just a couple of missionaries doing the lord's good work. Then we caught the train from Creel through the Cooper Canyon, the carriage rattling through the middle of the endlessly hot day as we followed the tracks which burrowed through the side of mountains and spanned deep gorges. On our arrival, we immediately had a lengthy consultation with the Mayor. For this point on, I was required to take many digital photographs of the Captain interacting with the local people, shaking their hands, playing with their babies and mugging it up with their women. He became the town's adopted son in under a week. This was established during a town meeting in the chapel one night. We all met beneath a string of bare lightbulbs and the roughly hewn crucifix, Christ's gaunt face and drawn eyes providing a stark contrast to the Captain's booze swollen mug. In was in the chapel that the Captain talked about his life and the things that inspired him. A speech which I had written on the back of an air mail envelope. A speech full of moments which had been heavily embellished through the writing process so that the captain's exploits and my creative collisions had become pretty much indistinguishable. And while I did enjoy seeing my work come to life in the Captain's grotesquely magnified living persona, I did worry about how his engorged ego would change things for the worst. The bolder the Captain became.....the more risks he took.
The drinking persisted. After a string of late nights dovetailing into crushing hangovers, I began to question The Captain's commitment to this building project. We had a few conversations which degenerated into arguments. To alleviate my concerns, we took several trips out to the proposed site for the new school. We took more photographs and one afternoon we had a small groundbreaking ceremony, the snow-capped mountains silent in the far distance. After this, I was instructed to upload the photographs and update charity website I had built for the Captain during our stay. And with each update, interest was renewed and the money kept coming in. A dollar here and a dollar there.
A week after our arrival the captain had another revelation. Or 'vision' as he called it. We (I) would begin shooting raw footage of The Captain in action for a reality television show pilot. Following the travelogue format, we would document The Captain on his heroic philanthropic mission south of the border. The Captain interacting with locals. The Captain whitewater rafting and abseiling. The Captain sampling indigenous cuisine. The Captain winning hearts and minds….etc, etc.
The Captain hammered out this initial concept in a rapid, highly excited voice, as he snapped his fingers in my face, impatiently waiting for me to get everything down on paper. A day later he had found a video camera somewhere and I began following him around, shooting the footage he had specified in my new role as the camera man. And although I claim to be no cinematographer, I was proud of the daily rushes. I was fast learning some of the tricks of the trade. Framing the subject in a complementary way (no worm view, up the nose double chins), not shooting into the sun, alternating angles for variety. It looks like the written word will be replaced by the moving image, said the Captain in a thoughtful way. Although I hate to admit it, the Captain was probably right. Still, this wasn't going to prevent me keeping a copious amount of handwritten notes for my own purposes.
Another week went past. During this time the Captain found himself a girlfriend. A small Indian woman who had lost her husband in a rock slide. The Captain would spend his nights at her house while I slept in the youth hostel with a bunch of backpackers. Every afternoon, after completing work on the website and uploading the latest video footage to the hard drive, I would visit the hot springs which were about three kilometres out of town. I would head down there with Gretchen, a German girl I'd met. Gretchen was a tough-minded individual. We would scramble down a series of steep ravines, small rocks and dirt cascading out fro under our feet. The hot springs ran into a cool water so you could regulate the temperature to your liking. Gretchen did not like the Captain at all. On an impulse, I kissed her one afternoon and for that point on our visits to the springs took on a sexual dimension. And after making love with great vigour in the mineral-rich waters, receiving in the process a head-to-toe body exfoliation, we would sun ourselves on an outcropping of flat rocks. While Gretchen could not be described as a classic beauty, she most certainly made up for this with her towering sexual energy. She was amazonian, dominant to the point that most of the time, I felt like I was merely along for the ride.
The Captain woke me early one morning. The windows in my room were still black and he scared the hell out of me. He whispered in my ear that we needed to leave town immediately. What about the school, I whispered, knowing full well at that point that the school would only be realised in the gullible imaginations of the little old ladies who the Captain was currently fleecing. I crept into Gretchen's room and said goodbye and once again she told me that I was wasting my time follow the Captain around. I didn't bother to counter this by re-explaining the writing project I was engaged in, the collection of information that would eventually lead to having something worth putting down on paper.
We left in the dark. The main square was still empty, a few dogs stirring in the dust, the tourist craft stalls covered with tarpaulins. Five hours later we were standing on the side of a mountain road. While we had been stranded there, the sun getting progressively hotter, I had heard several explanations for our unannounced departure, none of which made any sense. It all had something to do with the Captain's girlfriend who it turned out was the Mayor's favourite niece. Of course, they are all related to each other, laughed the Captain, his shirttails flapping in the wind. Once again I noticed that the Captain's basic sense of clear narrative purpose was becoming more and more disassociated from reality, even fractious, and therefore, far more difficult to keep track of. More often than not, he would come to a point where he would get lost in his own recount and he would have to rely on me to remind him of what he had been talking about as if the suspension bridge connecting one memory to the next was becoming lost in an encroaching fog. He would become confused, saying did I say that? It occurred to me then that he had probably converted to video as his primary method of recording his history because it provided him with a definitive, comparatively objective record. In his mind, there was always the possibility that the written word could be part of a conspiracy, a lie. That I might alter his past through misinterpretation. On the other hand, the moving image did not lie. Was he suffering from the onset of some cloudy, degenerative brain disease? Was the booze catching up with The Captain? I couldn't tell. I knew one thing for sure. He was losing control of the past. Of his past. And that had to be a frightening thing.
In any case, something had gone wrong back in Batipedos. We managed to get a ride in a van full of silent migrant workers along a seemingly endless mountain road lined with switchbacks and hairpin turns. This proved to be slow going. Once we were down on the flatlands again, we got a ride with an American couple who set the Captain off on a fresh drinking binge. This meant there were many pitstops for the Captain to buy more beer and so that he could interact with roadside locals while I scampered around shooting footage. Fast forwards another five hours, the American couple's faces and voices lost in the drunken acceleration of time, it was getting dark and the air was much warmer. We checked into a hotel and the Captain slept off the tequila and beer. The following morning we caught a local bus heading towards the East Coast.
We temporarily based ourselves in Tulum. Crowded around the ankles of the Mayan ruins, there were plenty of tourist amenities and hotels. Over the coming weeks, we visited several sites in this area which the Captain intended to improve through his ongoing philanthropic work. New churches, schools, community outreach and medical facilities, youth centres.....all of which were under the careful consideration of the Captain's stateside architectural team, a group of individuals who used latest environmental technologies and Eco tourism trends etc, ect. Putting all that aside, our immediate plan was to cross over into Belize. The Captain had met a widow who was in the process of turning her late husband's beach front house into an upmarket Eco bed-and-breakfast. The plan was to spend the winter down in Belize, working on the house, getting some free accommodation and wifi out of the deal. See what happened from there.
We were just about to cross the border when the Mexican Federal Police caught up with us. Well, they caught up with the Captain. It turned out that we had not outrun the proliferation of wanted signs which had begun to pop up in our wake, in the cantinas, the police stations and the post offices around the country. And despite the fact that the Captain had changed his appearance several times using hair dyes and allowing his beard to grow, they had nabbed him at the border. The jig was up.
As instructed at the initial arraignment, I contacted all the churches that the Captain was involved in states side. I asked if they could provide a bit extra financial assistance for the Captains unexpected legal entanglements. Typically, the women who answered told me they were through with the Captain and hung up without further explanation. This was also the case with Joyce, the Captain's daughter who lived in Chicago. In jail…..in Mexico? she laughed, well, its about time. Click. Dial tone.
I am now in a little town by the name of Chetumal. A town which seems to have a disproportionately large number of shoe shops. Everywhere you look there are shop windows crammed with shoes. Every couple of days I go and visit the Captain in prison. He complains that the guards and the prisoners treat him poorly. He also tells me his memory is indeed slipping. The mornings he has no idea who he is. I can see how thin he has become. I usually bring Mexican cigarettes and sugary energy drinks for him to barter with. I bring out of date English newspapers from the internet cafe. At his request, I have begun a fundraising page (Free the Captain!) which I update every couple of days with new photographs and details of the Captain's incarceration. Mrs Abigail Friedman from New Mexico mailed us a cheque for $14.00. A drop in the ocean, so to speak, but nevertheless, it all helps.
I am staying in a roach motel near the bus station with an empty swimming pool. Many of the inhabitance are long term residents. How they came to be washed up on these bleak shores is a mystery. There is a man in the room across the corridor who claims to be the 1968 Mexican Olympic ice skating gold winner. He has shown me his metal and several photographs of the day in question. The grainy quality of the images and the deterioration of the photographic paper has blurred his once young face. And faces do change over time. Some more, some less. Anyway, who am I to doubt his story?
I have informed the Captain that I must leave Chetumal soon. I feel sorry for him because he had reached the end. I can't stay here my entire life. You are all I have at this moment, he replies morosely. I nod. I know. I felt incredibly sorry for the old man but I have to leave. In some ways, it will be kinder to stop these visits. He will be bothered by flashes of the past for time to time, but overall he will inhabit a singular moment in a cell.
That night I pack up and the following day, before crossing the border, I mail the latest full steno pad of notes back to my PO box in the States.
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