Canto Fourteen – Log Book of the Reefer Mary Celeste
Valerie opened the book to the page Mary had indicated with the red paper book mark.
“That’s the spot where the story seems to begin,” said Mary. “The part before that ‘s all cargo manifests and navigational data.”
“Okay,” said Valerie, “Then here goes;” She began to read aloud.
We were sailing southwest from the Republic of Palau in Micronesia where we had taken on supplies at the big island of Koror. It was September of 1979. The seas were calm, although the first mate was tracking a big storm that could potentially turn in our way. We were supposed to deliver the refrigerated meat and vegetables in our hold to Pinoy Proud Food Markets of Manila by the beginning of October. There were supposed to be bananas too, but we had made the mistake of putting the bananas in the freezer and frozen bananas become just the right shade of poo-poo color to make them unmarketable. So the crew had been eating a lot of frozen banana pops. Doc Johnson, whom we call Doc because he knows a lot of useful stuff was worried that we might inadvertently cause hyperkalemic death among the crew, which worried me a bit, but since no one else seemed to know what the heck hyperkalemic meant, we were okay with eating that many frozen bananas, but I was later led to wonder if, in fact, the whole hyperkalemic death thing might be the source of hallucinations.
It was a valid worry as it turned out. Because that September, in the early morning on Monday, September 10th, Kooky Smith first saw the mermaid.
“Wow!” said Danny Murphy, “a real mermaid?”
“Well, that’s the debate, isn’t it?” said Mary. “The story starts to get stranger and stranger. And he even says it might be because they ate too many frozen bananas.”
“Does it say what the mermaid looked like?” asked Pidney.
Valerie looked carefully at the block of text ahead written in Captain Dettbarn’s goofy wrong-way-leaning handwritten letters.
“Um, yes, let me read that part.”
Chinooki was a naked woman from the waist upwards, with comely breasts and long pinkish-white hair. Her skin was a kind of fish-belly-looking silver and her dark red eyes looked brown most of the time, but glowed like fire at night.
“Gonga!” said Danny, a word he often used to express both surprise and admiration at the same moment.
Pidney, however, was blushing a cherry red that covered most of his crew-cut head and neck.
“Chinooki?” asked Mary, “What kind of name is that?”
“It sounds kinda fishy,” said Valerie. “Like Chinook salmon.”
“Or maybe Chinese,” suggested Danny.
They all turned and looked at Danny.
“What? They call Chinese people Chinks, right?”
“Polite people don’t,” suggested Mary.
“Read more about what happened,” Pidney asked Valerie.
Kooky said that he saw her the first time off the starboard rail, swimming with her head and shoulders raised out of the water. He thought she was some kind of shipwreck survivor, but when he hailed her to offer help, she waved at him and smiled, then dove and showed him her fish tail.
Of course, no one believed him. Sea stories like that get told all the time, and Kooky liked to drink… sometimes even on duty. We all knew he was quite capable of seeing things that weren’t real.
But the second time she was spotted, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones were also on deck, and when Kooky shouted they immediately came to the rail and saw her too. Now, Bob was like Kooky in a lot of ways, so we woulda thought he was making it up too, or just backing Kooky’s kooky story for yucks and kippers. But Chuck was well known for both sobriety and honesty. He was the man I trusted to keep the ship’s books because I knew he’d never cheat any of us out of a single penny we were due. And he’d sooner cut off his own hand than tell a lie.
“We have ta catch her and bring her aboard,” Kooky said.
“You gonna eat her?” Bob asked.
“Are you daft, man? I don’t want to hurt her,” Kooky said. “She’s beautiful. I want to catch her and keep her.”
“Be wary,” Chuck said. “If she’s not a natural creature, then she’s some kind of unnatural menace sort of thing. Bringing her on board this ship might be the last thing we ever do in this life.”
“Well, I for one, would very much like to see this real mermaid,” I said. I would later come to regret those words more than any I had ever said before in my whole life.
The four young Pirates all looked at each other, and all four of them shivered at once. Valerie could certainly read out loud in a way that would scare you out of your under pants.
Catch a Falling Star 
Being Bankrupt
I am swiftly turning into a detestable human being. I have admitted already on this blog that I have not only known nudists in my lifetime, but I have recently visited a nudist park and become one… for a few hours. Today I am admitting to being a bankrupt individual. I am taking steps to declare a Chapter 13 Bankruptcy.
As with nudism, bankruptcy is really probably not what you think it is. It is embarrassing and stressful to be bankrupt, at least if you are not Donald Trump and able to gleefully rob workers and creditors and investors by manipulating bankruptcy laws. But it is not immoral. In fact, with my Chapter 13 bankruptcy, I will end up paying back everything I owe to credit card companies and especially Bank of America whose lawsuit caused this bankruptcy. It will just be a managed pay-off with no further interest charges, managed by a court-appointed executor over the next five years. It will drop the bottom out of my credit rating initially, but may actually bounce it back up better than it was because my debt-to-income ratio will be dramatically improved. I will not lose my house or my car. I simply will have no more credit cards. That can’t be all bad, can it?
So, filing for a bankruptcy of this type has done a good job of teaching me where I fit in modern society and how the idea that you need to pay back what you owe to those you owe it to applies more to me than it does to rich folks. I will let you in on a big secret. I am not now, nor have I ever been, even remotely defined as rich. I haven’t really been poor before now, either. But I am sinking into that swamp quickly, and the crocodiles smell blood in the water. It is expensive to become poor. You have to pay a lawyer to help you get rid of all your money. You have to plead with them to allow you to continue to buy food and, with luck, necessary medication. But as long as you continue to hemorrhage money into their money-sucking vampire fangs of profit-making, the rich ones who own everything and control everything and make all the laws will allow you to continue to live… unless it becomes more profitable for them in the short term to let you die.
Now that I have driven over the bankruptcy cliff, I will probably try to enjoy the view and the exhilarating rush of air on the way down. Maybe I will do it naked. I could go back to the nudist park for the Labor Day weekend. I would save on clothing budgets. And when I get to the bottom of the cliff, there is a possibility that I will bounce back up. After all, if I don’t the bankers and the lawyers won’t be able to get any more of my money.
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