FRESH YARN presents: Shiny Happy Pirate... by Alex Moody

FRESH YARN presents:

Shiny Happy Pirate
By Alex Moody

Like any eight-year-old living on a boat, when Halloween rolled around I wanted to be a pirate. I had visions of an elaborate Treasure Island-worthy costume; my parents were dismissive of my grandiose plans. We had downsized from a three-bedroom condominium in Alexandria, Virginia, to a thirty-five foot sailboat named Witch Woman, and we were at the beginning of a year-long voyage. There was little room for extra supplies, or dissent.

"We can make you a costume with what we have," they said, in unison, like parents do when faced with mutiny.

So this is what I was wearing as we left a downtown marina and approached a cozy residential neighborhood in Annapolis, Maryland, on Halloween night in 1983: blue jeans (my darkest pair), tennis shoes, a black Member's Only jacket (zipped all the way up), a red bandanna on my head, a dollar store plastic sword tucked into my belt, and, of course, an eye patch -- a circle cut from a piece of gauze and colored black with magic marker. I colored the patch half-heartedly, mumbling about injustice on the high seas, so it looked exactly as you'd expect a piece of gauze colored with marker to look. Almost as much white as black. Streaky. A sad, one-eyed boy's attempt at making his temporary patch slightly less mortifying to the general populace. Yar.

My mother and stepfather skipped the gauze and magic markers -- no costumes for them, aside from what they might later describe as their standard "hobo sailor" outfits: jeans dirty from engine work, sweatshirts washed once a month at best, and well-worn boat shoes. Still, we were a merry band that night, and one of us was hell-bent on pillaging and plundering.

~~~

My stepfather bought Witch Woman when he retired from the U. S. Department of Agriculture. We spent the summer of 1983 preparing for a year-long voyage from Washington, D. C., down the East Coast, over to the Bahamas, and back up to D. C. I named the dinghy, a rowboat that had its own mast and sail, Batteries Not Included.

Naming a dinghy might seem like a small consolation when faced with being removed from school and friends, and it was. At eight, I wasn't old enough to understand how adults viewed our adventure, but I knew that kids my age didn't pick up and leave very often, or if they did it was for a good reason. Tammy's mom got a divorce and moved back home to Tucson. Okay, understood, divorce happens. Kevin transferred to a school where kids beat on drums and wrote poems all day. No problem. Every neighborhood has that family. Alex's parents bought a boat, and they were going to live on it. Better yet, they were spending all summer varnishing canned goods. That's what they would subsist on, and sea water would eat into the containers of bacon, green beans, and corned beef without a layer of sealant. Corned beef and sealant? Those are the pairings that make people start to wonder.

When I saw my friends for the last time, they looked at me like I was an astronaut on launch day. Sure, they wished me well, as eight-year-olds do ("Can I have your G. I. Joes?"). But their furrowed brows indicated they expected to see my shipwrecked corpse splayed on the front page of a major newspaper within five or six weeks. In fact, embarking on a space mission would have made more sense because space and rocketships are always cool, never fall out of being cool, while boats go out to sea and never come back.

More likely, after a few days my friends forgot about the whole thing. I prefer to imagine that they spent more time than that wondering, that maybe they guessed or dreamed that I'd get so tired of canned corned beef hash and green beans that I wouldn't eat them for years afterward, or that Witch Woman almost sank on two occasions, or that a boating accident claimed the life of a girl named Crystal in Beaufort, who I met in South Carolina, and that she'd be a lost friend and remain in my memory only as a name, an energy, a light.

~~~

The mayor of Annapolis had an elaborate set-up at his home that Halloween. I remember fog, a path down the side of the house that featured assorted howling monsters, and a gathering area at the end of the path where parents and children could drink a cup of cider.

For some reason I didn't want to get involved. I don't know if I felt it was beneath me, as a pirate, to mingle with common happy folk, or if I was scared, or if I was more interested in moving from house to house as quickly as possible in a quest for Laffy Taffy. We saw that someone had answered the front door, so I decided to skip the festivities and head straight for the candy bowl nestled in the arms of the mayor's wife.

When I described my costume earlier, I neglected to mention that the clothes on my back were the clothes I wore almost every day. Everything I owned fit in a milk crate. On most days I didn't wear shoes. We had no shower, so when dirt caked in the cleft of my collarbone, and we happened to be docked at a marina, my stepfather and I would shower with vagrants in a public restroom.

I don't remember my collarbone cleft status that Halloween night, but I'm sure I looked a little rough around the edges. My parents may have, too, because I remember them lurking in the shadows around a streetlight as I walked up toward the mayor's front door, and I remember the mayor's wife scanning the front yard warily after she saw me pirating up her front steps.

"Why, uh, hello there!" she said. "And who might you be?"

"I'm a pirate!" I said.

"Well, of course," she said. "A pirate. And where do you live?"

I'm not sure what she expected my response to be. At the time it seemed like a stupid question.

"I live on a boat," I said, which was true no matter how you looked at the situation.

"No, no," she said. "Where do you live?" Her voice, more serious now, dropped an octave.

"I live on a boat," I said, again.

"Oh, you poor dear! You poor dear!" She looked horrified.

I don't remember saying anything. When you're a child you start to sense the presence of Concerned Adults, like grandparents, or neighbors, or maybe just plain mothers -- those folks who take it upon themselves to right wrongs, fix what's broken, and sweep young pirates away before loot can be looted. I'm not saying I had all this in my head in 1983. I just knew that it was probably time to back away, slowly.

"Do you want any bread?" she asked. "Milk? Would you like to come in? What do you have on your boat?" The mayor's wife was going into overdrive. At this point my parents whisked me away with embarrassed smiles. We may have been a ragtag bunch, slightly caked with dirt and tired of living off of canned food, but we didn't need handouts.

~~~

Once we returned to Alexandria, that story became a fixture on the official "That Strange Family Down the Street and Their Crazy Trip" dinner circuit. We had rented out the condominium, so after the tenants left we were officially inserted back into our previous lives. For my parents, the Halloween story told people what we looked like at the beginning of a trip that took us through storms and sinking boats, ocean travel and exploration of deserted islands, friendships and loss. It was funny in a, "Hey, the mayor and his family tried to feed our homeless child!" sort of way, and it was validation. Here is what we did, the story says, and isn't it different and exciting and strange compared to your suburban lives?

"That is so amazing," guests would say, under a mound of photographs from our adventures. "I can't believe it."

And I think, because I told that story, having the words come from my mouth reassured all parties involved that I was happy to be along for the ride. I wasn't a child. I was the third adult and I added the necessary sarcastic bits here and there and overacted the "You poor dear!" line so that everyone got the message: This was a crazy case of mistaken identity. More importantly, no children were harmed in the filming of this production.

~~~

The success of "You poor dear!" led my family on a series of further adventures, and there are similar stories assigned to each escapade. We lived in Saudi Arabia for two years and once vacationed at a resort owned by Osama bin Laden's family. I climbed around in Egyptian tombs, traded with Masai in Kenya, graduated high school in South Korea, and spent postcard-perfect Christmases in Switzerland and Austria. Every trip away from home meant a return to the circuit. I repeated my lines and heard that I was lucky to have such adventures because imagine -- just imagine! -- what children can learn.

That is entirely true. I had amazing adventures, and I wouldn't be who I am today without them. But the anecdotes, and the act of telling them, hide something. What each one means to me, more than anything, is that I was leaving. Every adventure, every uninhabited island in the Bahamas, was just that: Uninhabited. I was alone for most of them. My best friend was an imaginary cat. How would the dinner-party circuit handle that?

"And what did you think of all this, Alex?

"My best friend was an imaginary cat."

"Oh, you poor dear!"

~~~

This is the story I tell now. This is what I say when people ask why I don't seem to have friends, or make friends easily, or trust or confide, or exist in the external world as effortlessly as I do inside my head. This is disorientation and detachment, and I may be ungrateful because God knows eight-year-olds should appreciate their adventures when they can get them, but this is how it is.

When we returned from Saudi Arabia I landed in middle school. By my sophomore year in high school I had reconnected with friends. I played on the baseball team, I called a girl, I got a note from her, and when she came to one of my games and my heart was pounding, I had three hits and I don't know if we won or lost but I remember those hits and her pretending not to watch.

We moved to South Korea in the middle of that year, and on my last day at school before the move a girl named Amanda saw me standing, shell-shocked, in gym class and said, "Smile! You look so sad." That was the thing that year -- Smile! -- and I blame R.E.M. and their song "Shiny Happy People," and a sort of pre-Gulf-War-1 giddiness infecting the country.

I told Amanda, "That's because I am sad."

But this is what I wanted to say: "Okay. Sure. You realize, though, that this is my last day of school, right? That I'm moving and not just moving-moving but moving-to-a-different-country-moving so there's a good chance I'll never see any of you again? I don't even understand why I'm out here, why I got into this stupid gym uniform one last time, and I even told Coach Boone that when he yelled my name, 'Moody! Moody get out here, you're late again,' I told him, 'Coach I'm never coming back here, I'm never going to put on this musty blue t-shirt after today so does it matter, does any of this matter? Do you think today's lesson on learning how to use the weight room equipment is going to sink in? Do you think it will be what I remember about T. C. Williams High School on a day when I'm saying goodbye again to the friends I've had since kindergarten?' And he said, 'Moody, stop yapping and get into the weight room there's a test on this next week.' So, Amanda, I think your name is Amanda, we never really hung out but I always thought you were cute in an extremely pale kind of way...Amanda, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this particular day and that may go a little ways toward explaining my sour disposition. All I see is all of your lives progressing forward along a path that I'll never catch up to again, I'll never see again, and maybe at one point those paths will cross when I'm thirty and back in my old neighborhood roaming the grocery store aisles hoping, just hoping, to run into someone I knew before I left, but maybe not. And that's why I'm sad. People like me get stuck on paths, sometimes we don't move on and create new ones, no, we remember and cherish the old ones, the paths we should have been on and I don't think smiling can change that today, Amanda, I really don't."

I'll have to assume that all made it out in a split-second meaningful glance, although I don't have much confidence that it did. Amanda gave me another, "Smile, silly," and went about her gym class way, and I went about mine, and that was that.

~~~

I'm the kind of writer who works at odd hours -- inspiration always seem to arrive between 1:00 and 5:00 a.m. -- and I can't sleep if it's light out. I spend mornings puttering around my apartment, dazed. By 9:00 a.m. I'm ready to putter somewhere else. I go to Target. There are, on any given morning, seven or eight other souls strolling the aisles. Some favor clothing, clasping and re-clasping knit polos and wrinkle-resistant khakis as they graze the Men's section. "This," I imagine them saying, "this cotton shirt, it is tactile. It is real and stabilizing and when I hold it in my fist I'm connected and grounded and momentarily freed of the horribly irreversible case of suburban angst with which I've been stricken." In reality there is a better chance that, "Got that one," and, "Yep, got that one, too!" is the extent of their internal dialogue.

My turf is Home and Garden. I settle into a puffy chair attached to the featured patio set. The umbrella above me is always broad and welcoming. It shields me from a constant fluorescent sun. I imagine that the other chairs are filled with guests. My guests at Target.

"Try some of our doorknobs," I shout.

"Thanks," the guests scream, "we love what you've done with the juxtaposition of the Kitchenware and Electronics departments!"

"Did you get what I was going for by putting the microwave and crock pot displays side-by-side?" I ask.

"We did," they say, "and we appreciate your commentary on society's quest to both speed up and slow down, to manipulate time and space via appliance-based science."

And as I look around and smile at my friends and raise a glass to one who just got a promotion or a baby or an inheritance, I think that if I close my eyes a little and squint, this looks kind of like the Halloween party at the mayor's house. The place that lived at the end of the path along the side of the house, the patio set I see now, decorated with black and orange crepe paper and spiders. There are adults and children. I can't make out any words, but there is an excited hum. The back yard is illuminated. A woman turns and waves. There are lights strung between the garage and the porch. I see a scarecrow.

That's when I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened. What if I had looked up at the mayor's wife, cocked my head to the side a bit, and stepped into her home. What if I had held her hand and looked back at the street, and waved, and shut the door?