Mary, the leader of the Pirates, with Squirrel Valerie and Invisible Captain Dettbarn
I am now writing every novel as if it will be the last one that I ever write. So it is with my current work-in-progress, When the Captain Came Calling. It is a story that comes before my best novel, Snow Babies, already written and published, but was actually formed in my head and in my libretto long before I began putting Snow Babies down on the page. It is a good novel, but not the best I have ever written. I am very near to completing it.
But, unfortunately, I am also very near to completing my whole life. Pain is a constant reminder that my health is so poor, that each new day could easily literally be my last.
The IRS is trying their best to help me on towards the grave.
While I am currently dealing with the tax burden from 2018, they dug up another unpaid bill from 2017, a late-payment penalty they forgot to tell me about last December. More than $200 dollars worth. I am flatter than broke.
So, I am forced to Uber drive once more. Yesterday and today I picked up fares again for the first time in the last ten months. And I am not really well enough to do it. The curse is heavy.
But this grumpy old man ain’t quite dead yet.
One more novel to finish, and maybe another one after that.’
I followed the naked girl and her pet red panda about a mile
along the beach. She skipped and sang
songs in a language I didn’t recognize, but sounded a lot like the Filipino
language. The panda sported about like a
playful puppy, following her devotedly.
I didn’t think you found red pandas on small Pacific islands like the
one we were on, but it didn’t matter what I thought. I was no scientist or naturalist, so I didn’t
really know. I kept looking worriedly
out to sea. I mean, I did know for a fact that Chinooki the
mermaid could eat people.
“We have been coming to this house, my tahanan,” she said
proudly, showing me a beached submarine from World War Two. It had a large rising sun flag from the
Empire of Japan painted on the conning tower.
“You live in a submarine?”
“It is where Mangkukulan wants me to stay while we wait for
the volcano.”
“Oh. It’s like that,
is it? Well, show me. Do you have any guns aboard? Or swords?
Something to protect us from Chinooki?”
“Oh, silly captain man, Chinooki serves Mangkukulan. She will not be harming me. And she is ordered not
to be hurting you also.”
I was a little worried about the actual intentions of this
coo-coo man. I didn’t think he really
had Malutu’s best interests at heart.
Not if he meant to toss her naked into an erupting volcano. I followed her warily up the side of the
submarine and down into a hatch near the nose.
“My goodness, this is certainly rusty and rather dreary,” I
said as I surveyed the narrow candle-lit corridor in the center of the
submarine. I followed her into the
forward section where I really expected to see a forward torpedo room. I found, however, that it had been hollowed
out, lined with bamboo, and turned into a cozy and rather decent living
space. It had a bed in the center of the
not over-large room. There was a
potbellied stove that had obviously been put there for cooking. The room was also decorated with carved
wooden idols. They were the kind of Tiki
idols that you could buy in Honolulu if you were a tourist who liked kitschy
stuff to decorate your porch back in Iowa with.
Especially one large ugly idol with a man-like body and wearing a
frightful carved mask.
“You have a nice home here.
Didn’t you say something about clothes you could put on?”
“Oh, yes. Or… you
could be getting naked too, Captain.”
“No, no. Put on a
dress please. You need to be decent
around me.”
She pulled out a rather nice red cloth dress with a white
flower pattern on it. It was a Hawaiian
sort of wrap-around affair.
“This okay? Or are
you wanting the kimono?”
“That one is fine.
You are very beautiful like that.”
“Yes, I am being beautiful for you. It is being important that I get you to like
me very, very much.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I am liking you. But
I must be telling Mangkukulan that you are here now. Chinooki has done well.”
“Um, maybe we can hold off a bit on telling the coo-coo
man.”
“Why? I am supposed
to be telling him immediately… faster if it is being possible.”
“Are you sure that coo-coo man has our best interests at
heart? I mean, it seems to me like he
might be trying to hurt us in some way.”
I was imagining being tossed into the volcano along with the girl.
“Oh, no. This he will
not be doing. I will be sending the juju
to tell him you are here.”
She went over to the biggest, ugliest Tiki idol and tapped
his tattoos, once each until she had tapped them all. And she sang;
“Juju do dah goodah… oojie-magoober!” Purple smoke poured out of the top of the
Tiki’s head and filled the room with a smell like burnt sugar.
“Is that a magic spell or something?”
“Yes, it is being something.
We are wanting you to be very comfortable here, Captain mans. Will you not be taking off your clothes?”
“I most certainly will not.”
“Okay. We will be
doing the talking about it. You will
see.”
To my utter shock and horror, the Tiki man began to glow
with an unearthly greenish-blue light.
He moved as if he were alive and trying to shake himself awake.
“It’s alive?”
“Don’t be being silly.
It is made of wood. But,
Oojie-magoober, please be telling Mangkukulan that the Captain is here.”
“Juju doo dah! Yaya!”
said the wooden creature. Then it
scampered out of the room and out of the submarine.
“You are liking Malutu, yes?” she asked me.
“Yes. You are very beautiful.”
“Good-good! Now you will be taking off your clothes, Captain.” And just like that she had me naked. I was as much under her spell as the wooden Tiki man.
The next day Valerie had a chance to hang out with Pidney
and Mary again, so she took it. She road
into town on the school bus after school with Danny Murphy. They didn’t actually talk about anything the
whole way. Anticipation is often better
than the real thing. And it wasn’t often
that Mary and Pid were both off directly after school. Pidney had no football practice that
afternoon, and Mary canceled whatever school meetings she had planned that day
in order to come back to Norwall with him after school. The four Pirates were supposed to meet in the
Library for Pirate business.
“There’s Mary and Pid,” said Danny pointing as he and Val
stepped off Milo’s school bus.
“Yeah, but who is that?” Valerie asked, pointing at a
mysterious cloaked figure standing behind the tree by the Library door. She was instantly reminded of the cloaked man
she had seen the day they got the Tiki idol.
“Hey, Pidney!” Danny shouted, “who is that near you behind
that tree?”
Pidney was holding the door of his step-dad’s old 70’s
Lincoln Mercury to help Mary get out.
Mary carried a tall stack of books.
They had driven home from the high school in Belle City together.
“What man? Where?” The figure moved out of sight behind the
large fluffy pine tree.
“Look behind the tree!” shouted Valerie.
Pid walked around to where he could see behind the
tree. He looked back a Valerie and Danny
and shrugged. “Nobody here that I can
see,” he said.
“You guys need to see what we found in the high school
library,” said Mary waving them to come towards the Library building.
Valerie looked at Danny.
He shrugged. They both walked
toward the Library.
“I found some old high school yearbooks in the library,”
said Mary. “We can use them to get an
idea what Captain Dettbarn used to look like.
He’s kinda hard to describe any other way.”
“And there’s a book about the ship, Mary Celeste. It tells about the old ghost ship, not the
Captain’s ship, but I still think it is important,” said Pidney.
Valerie and Danny walked across the street from the bus stop
to join the two high school kids.
“Here’s the 1962 Belle City Bronco yearbook,” said Mary,
handing the black-bound thin book of pictures to Valerie. “The Captain is in the Junior Class in that
one. He had a beard then, just like the
one he had on his face the last time I saw him.”
Valerie opened to the page of Junior portraits and ran her
finger over the C’s and D’s until she got to Dettbarn. He was kind of a dumpy fat boy even then,
with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a derfy smile that showed his crooked
teeth. He had a rather ratty looking
beard, which was perfect for a rodent-like face, that, while it didn’t look
like a rat, it did look an awful lot like the face of a woodchuck, or some kind
of short-toothed beaver.
“He’s kinda funny looking,” Val said to herself, but loud
enough for all to hear.
“Now, see here! I
take exception to that remark!” said a cloaked and hatted figure stepping out
of the shadow of the evergreen tree by the door.
“Who…?” croaked Mary, leaping away from the figure and
towards Pidney.
“Help me…!” squawked Danny as he awkwardly leaped into
Pidney’s arms, the football muscles catching hold of the smaller boy easily.
“Don’t you get mad at me!” said Valerie hotly. “It is not like I was talking to you… whoever
you are!” She lunged toward the
stranger, grabbing his yachting cap and yanking it off his head.
But where the head was supposed to be… nothing at all there
except a pair of thick bifocal glasses hanging in the air like they were
weightless in outer space.
Valerie looked at the glasses, and then down at the yearbook
picture still in her other hand. Yes, it
was an updated version of the same style of thick glasses.
“Erm… Captain Dettbarn. It’s you!”
“Uncle Noah?” Mary said.
“What happened to your head?”
“Oh, um… it’s still there, Mary dear. Head-hunters didn’t eat it or anything. I am just the victim of a curse. A curse that makes my body completely
invisible.” He removed the cloak to
reveal a free-standing pair of pants, a short-sleeved red-and-white-striped
shirt, and empty neckerchief, and floating white gloves that didn’t seem to be
properly attached to the invisible dumpy body wearing the sailor’s clothes.
“Er, uh… sir?” asked Pidney, “What is all this purple smoke
coming out from behind the pine tree? It
has a funky smell, like burning sugar or something.”
“Well, I hate to say it, but that is an indicator that the
witchdoctor himself is watching us at the moment from somewhere not too far
away. That purple smoke always seems to
come around right before some evil magic happens.”
“Oh, that’s not good.
Maybe we better go inside the library before anything bad can
happen.” Mary was looking around the
street for signs of the evil witchdoctor.
Pidney put Danny on the ground and both boys headed up the
Public Library steps.
“Um, uh… Pretty girl, can I have my hat back. I want to go in the library in disguise. No sense in scaring the librarian.”
Valerie frowned at the invisible man as she handed him back
the hat and the disembodied gloves placed it back on top of his invisible
rodent-like head.
“Let’s go inside the Library,” said Mary. “We have things to talk about and questions
to ask… Lots and lots of questions to ask.”
Most of my novel stories have lived in my head since the 1970’s. I began recording the ideas in a notebook that I called the libretto. I drew illustrations to solidify the characters and some of the plot elements in my mind. But the basic natures of the characters and the style of my artwork grew from these original artistical notations.
I got better at art over time. And the characters benefited from my teaching experience in that I was able to depict numerous characters with nuances and details gained from students and other people I hadn’t met yet when I drew these pictures. Dorin Dobbs, for instance, is based in large part on my eldest son, who wouldn’t be born for another 18 years when I drew these pictures (He’s the yellow-haired boy in both of the first two pictures.)
Francois, the singing sad clown from my book Sing Sad Songs, is based on a student from the 80’s who was actually Spanish speaking and of Mexican-American descent.
I drew this picture of him in 1976.
I taught the boy in 1983.
I wrote and published the book in 2018.
The inter-dimensional traveler, the Man-Cat, is an idea from a story I have not written yet, and probably never will.
Disney-Michael Stewart and his gang of Milk-Lovers is another story I haven’t written yet, and though more likely, is still probably a novel I will never get to.
Invisible Captain Dettbarn and Francois ended up in separate stories from this picture. The other three boys in the picture were babies or not yet born when their stories happen.
So, today was a chance to look at and re-evaluate the past. All of these drawings were done in the 1970’s. All I did was scan them with a good scanner and crop them a little to make them better compositions. And they allow me to keep track of where my mind has already been, that I might successfully chart the future of where it is going.
It seems sometimes, in a Judaeo-Christian society, that we are a constantly being scrutinized by a rather harsh all-knowing God who rewards getting the faith-words accurately correct, to the letter, and the faith-based actions perfect, without a single mistake. And He punishes missteps of word or deed with pain and suffering and the potential of an eternity in Sheol or Hell. And that is a tough God to live with. He is like a teacher who uses his or her God-like powers to reward or punish to lead his students all down an exacting, narrow path to a destination that does not have room for everyone when they arrive.
It doesn’t take long in childhood for a highly intelligent person to realize before childhood is over that this cosmology is actually a load of horse pucky. It didn’t even take long for somebody as semi-stupid as me.
What I like about listening on YouTube to the wisdom of Alan Watts is that he gives us an alternative way of seeing the universe and ourselves. This he can offer through his studies of Eastern and Buddhist philosophies. Everything appealing in John Lennon’s signature song “Imagine” comes from Lennon’s love of listening to the lectures of Alan Watts. He is obviously a wise-guy.
Alan Watts teaches us the pathways that lead to finding yourself, who you truly are, and how you fit into the universe as a whole. When Carl Sagan says that we are all made of star-stuff, he is not only telling us what is literally true, as the elements our bodies were formed from were literally made in the nuclear forges at the centers of stars that later exploded in nova-bursts to scatter the elements across the skies of everywhere. He is also telling us that what Alan Watts says is metaphorically true, that everything in the universe is part of the same thing and we are all one in this way.
There is plenty to worry about in my little life. I could easily drop dead at any time from any one of my six incurable diseases or even the return of the skin cancer I beat in 1983. I suffer from the consequences of disease daily, as I have for many years now. My sins are many. I broke my promise the other day to never show you the horrors of my naked body on this blog. I constantly eat the wrong thing and continue to do things that I know are bad for the environment and the health of my body. I am prejudiced against racists, stupidity, and the actions of dedicated Trump-lovers. In many ways I deserve God’s wrath and brutal correction. I have come to truly believe that climate change is going to end life on Earth. I am horrible.
But I have learned from Alan Watts that all of those concerns mean nothing. I don’t believe in Heaven or an afterlife. But I do not fear death. I am one with the universe. And the universe goes on even if I do not. And I will always be a part of it, even after I am no longer alive. The universe has a mind and is intelligent And I take part in that because one small part of that intelligence is me, and lives in my head.
There is comfort to be found in the words of Alan Watts. And living in pain as I do, I really need that comfort most of the time. That is why I have attempted to share a bit of that comfort with you.
I was all alone on the island for all I knew, so I
immediately got busy on my best Robinson Crusoe plan. And then my headache made me rethink that,
and I went back to sleep for another two hours.
I think it was two hours, estimating by the sun, but I don’t really know
how to estimate time by the sun, and as I decided the first order of business
had to be to locate any useful wreckage from the ship that had washed up on the
shore, my head started hurting again, so I slept again. Now, I know from re-reading this paragraph
that I was probably sleeping way too much… and I didn’t know for sure that
Chinooki wouldn’t come up on the sand to eat me, but, well… having this kind of
horror-story adventure in the South Seas was really tiring.
When I did finally search the beach, I found almost nothing
at all to help me. I needed a knife, or
a hammer, or a gun, or a shovel… but all I found was this log book and a wooden
crate full of Pink Fizz Cherry Soda Pop.
Luckily, I also discovered I still had a pencil in my jeans pocket,
otherwise I might’ve forgotten everything that happened before I could write it
all down. I know my thinking was a
little fuzzy at the time… or possibly Pink Fizzy… but I wrote down everything
as truthfully as I possibly could so that whoever found the book would know
what happened to the Reefer Mary Celeste
and her crew.
Inland on the island was jungle… a rather thick jungle. But I desperately needed food and fresh water. And if I tried walking the beach until I
either found civilization or discovered I was on a deserted island; I might die
of dehydration and thirst before I discovered I was all alone for certain. So, I made a brief foray into the island. If I met headhunters or an evil killer
gorilla, I couldn’t do any more about it than writing a scathing commentary on
why they shouldn’t be eating me raw in this log book. I could write that I hoped to give them a
fatal case of indigestion as long as they ate my writing hand last.
The jungle was very hot and humid, but I found a rainwater
pool a short way into the jungle and was able to slake my thirst. Coconuts and
bananas were growing in abundance near the pool. I also ate.
And it was then that I saw her for the first time. She was a young girl. I admit, at the time, I didn’t really know
how young. But she was lovely. She was Asian-looking with slanted eyes and
caramel-brown skin. She had black hair
and dark brown eyes that twinkled at me as she smiled. And she was standing on the edge of the pool
completely nude. The only thing she wore
was an adolescent red panda sitting on her shoulder and grimacing at me with a
raccoon-like smile.
“Parlez vous Francais?” she said. “Tagalog?
Maybe English?”
“I understand English,” I confessed.
“Ah, so good. I am
liking practicing my English. We don’t
be speaking it on this island. Maligayang
pagdating sa masasamang isla. That means
be welcome to Evil Island.”
I didn’t know whether to be frightened or worried about the
name of the place, or be incredibly embarrassed that I was talking to a
completely naked girl. “I… I’m sorry… I
didn’t mean to spy on you while you were bathing. I will give you some privacy…”
“Huwag pumunta! I
mean… don’t be going away! I be liking
you. I don’t be wearing clothings on
this island, but I am having a kimono back at my bahay… my house. I can be putting it on if hubad is wrongness
for you.”
“Um, well, I…” I
didn’t know what to say. I was seven kinds of flustered and at least three
kinds of embarrassed.
“Please. Gwapong
Lalaki and I are wanting to be talking to you.
It is lonely on the island, waiting for sa galit na bulkan… for the volcano.”
“You… you are waiting for the volcano?” I looked up at the high mountain peak about a
mile inland. Black smoke curled nastily
out of the top of it.
“Yes. I am being the
virgin bride. I am waiting for my
husband to be.”
This of course sounded like some of the worst rumors I had
ever heard about South Seas islanders.
It seemed they intended to throw this beautiful, naked young girl into
the volcano to appease an angry god or some such nonsense.
“We have to get you out of here,” I said as bravely as I
could manage.
“Yes, yes, that is what I am waiting for.”
“Um, you are?”
“Oh, yes, my husband is to be coming and taking me away from
here forever.”
I was determined to rescue the poor girl.
“What is your name, sweetie?”
“I am Malutu… the Red Flower of Matuling Lupa.”
“I don’t have a way off the island at the moment, but I can
build us a boat or something…”
“First you are coming to the house of Malutu and Gwapong
Lalaki. Follow us.”
She padded out of the clearing on bare feet and back towards
the beach. She apparently had a house to
live in while she waited for her evil people to throw her into the
volcano. I followed her, not knowing
what else to do.
“Um, Malutu? You
haven’t seen any mermaids on the beach have you?”
“Mermaids? You are
meaning sirena Chinooki?”
“You actually know about her?”
“Of course, silly man…
She is being the one who brought you to me.”
I start today with nothing in my head to write about. I guess I can say that with regularity most days of the writing week. Sundays in particular are filled with no useful ideas of any kind. But I have a certain talent for spinning. As Rumpelstiltskin had a talent for spinning straw into gold, I take the simple threads of ideas leaking out of my ears and spin them into yarns that become whole stories-full of something to say. And it is not something out of mere nothing. There is magic in spinning wheels. They take something ordinary and incomplete, and turn it into substantial threads useful for further weaving.
Of course the spinning wheel is just a metaphor here for the craft of writing. And it is a craft, requiring definable skills that go well beyond merely knowing some words and how to spell them.
My own original illustration.
The first skill is, of course, idea generation. You have to come up with the central notion to concoct the potion. In this case today, that is, of course, the metaphor of using the writing process as a spinning wheel for turning straw into gold. But once that is wound onto the spindle, you begin to spin yarn only if you follow the correct procedure. Structuring the essay or story is the next critical skill.
Since this is a didactic essay about the writing process I opened it with a strong lead that defined the purpose of the essay and explained the central metaphor. Then I proceeded to break down the basic skills for writing an essay with orderly explanations of them, laced with distracting images to keep you from dying of boredom while reading this, a very real danger that may actually have killed a large number of the students in my writing classes over the years (although they still appeared to be alive on the outside).
My mother’s spinning wheel, used to make threads for use in porcelain doll-making, and as a prop for displaying dolls.
As I proceed through the essay, I am stopping constantly to revise and edit, makeing sure to correct errors and grammar, as well as spending fifteen minutes searching for the picture of my mother’s spinning wheel used directly above. Notice, too, I deliberately left the spelling-error typo of “making” to emphasize the idea that revising and proof-reading are two different things that often occur at the same time, though they are very different skills.
And as I reach the conclusion, it may be obvious that my spinning wheel of thought today spun out some pure gold. Or, more likely, it may have spun out useless and boring drehk. Or boring average stuff. But I used the spinning wheel correctly regardless of your opinion of the sparkle of my gold.
I was spending time with a certain cynical youth who likes to insult me and argue about every one of my faults as a human being, telling me that such treatment is meant to improve me to meet a standard that only he thinks I need to live up to when it occurred to me; Crab Apple has two meanings.
Crab apples (which ominously come up on Wikipedia as genus Malus) are generally mistrusted as eating apples. Alternatively known as “wild apples”, they are often bitter to the taste. Hence, the association with the chronic complainer, the dyspeptic dude, and the hen-pecky female. Crab apples are the fruits of unpleasant people-trees.
So, how does one deal with crab apples? I always tend to fall back on the homily, “When you are given any kind of fruit, make it into pie.” And yes, the links under the pictures will actually yield recipes. I know it is a metaphorical over-simplification. But, if I do not enjoy being critiqued for the hair in my ears and the werewolf hair sprouting under my eyes, or the way I say, “I’m sorry!” too much, I am going to use those fruits to make a pie of surreal comedy in a WordPress post.
I saw a guy on the highway speeding around me at well-over the speed limit, turning around to give me a look at his middle finger, probably trying to predict how many IQ points he will have left when he crashes into whatever is ahead of him that he can’t see because he’s grinning and glaring at me behind him. There’s an apple for this pie.
The impatient clerk in the tax office gives me the “Are you really that stupid” glare and attendant sigh as she suggests that I step to the side and correct the mistakes in my paperwork so she can mistreat the next person in the incredibly long line that she wants me to return to the back of. There’s another apple.
In today’s world, it really doesn’t take long to have enough apples for your pie. In fact, I am looking at a huge pie now with loads and loads of crab apples in it.
We were lost because the Reefer
Mary Celeste no longer had a navigator aboard, and Chinooki had apparently
destroyed the radio and all the other electronic equipment on board as
well. Kooky and I tried to keep her on
the course we had been following, but two of us were simply not enough people
to manage a ship of the size of the Mary. We quickly lost our way in a thick fog and we
were going in an unknown direction at too high a rate of speed. We knew how to use a compass and we might
even have been able to wait for the stars if our minds hadn’t been turned to
Jell-O pudding by the mermaid’s singing.
“She killed all of our crew, didn’t she?” said Kooky.
“She did. You know,
Chuck warned us about her. We should’ve
listened.”
“You are right, Captain.
I realize that now. But at the
time, it was like I was under a spell or something. She had power over me.”
“Yes, she did. Over
all of us, apparently.”
“I am so sorry, Captain.
I’ve caused the death of us all, haven’t I?”
“None of us should ever have let someone else take control
of our lives. We should’ve realized the
danger from the start. You can’t blame
yourself alone.”
It was right after that conversation that Kooky spotted
Chinooki sitting on a distant rock.
“I am going to make her pay, Captain. She is going to regret coming on board the Reefer Mary Celeste.”
Kooky was at the wheel, and he steered the entire ship
directly towards the rock where Chinooki was sitting.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’ll ram her! I will
run her over!”
“Kooky, she’s singing right now. Do you think maybe she wants us to do exactly
what you are doing?”
“Maybe so. Maybe
not. But I have ta!”
And
the strangest thing is that I let him do it.
I let him ram the Mary
bow-first into the rock. It tore through
most of the front end of the ship, separating her at mid-ship into two parts,
both of which sank to the bottom. I
remember swimming in the ocean with shark fins in the water near the
horizon. I remember hearing Kooky call
out and a sudden thrashing, and I wondered if it were the sharks or the mermaid
herself who claimed him. I never saw him
again. I never saw any of them
again. I blacked out, and don’t remember
anything before awakening on the sand of the Evil Island’s shore.
Hurry Up and Worry, Murray!
I am now writing every novel as if it will be the last one that I ever write. So it is with my current work-in-progress, When the Captain Came Calling. It is a story that comes before my best novel, Snow Babies, already written and published, but was actually formed in my head and in my libretto long before I began putting Snow Babies down on the page. It is a good novel, but not the best I have ever written. I am very near to completing it.
But, unfortunately, I am also very near to completing my whole life. Pain is a constant reminder that my health is so poor, that each new day could easily literally be my last.
The IRS is trying their best to help me on towards the grave.
While I am currently dealing with the tax burden from 2018, they dug up another unpaid bill from 2017, a late-payment penalty they forgot to tell me about last December. More than $200 dollars worth. I am flatter than broke.
So, I am forced to Uber drive once more. Yesterday and today I picked up fares again for the first time in the last ten months. And I am not really well enough to do it. The curse is heavy.
But this grumpy old man ain’t quite dead yet.
One more novel to finish, and maybe another one after that.’
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