A Pirate's Life For Me

Here are some things that are said by, and about, alcoholics. Mostly these come from famous men celebrated for their genius and their drunkenness. Others I learned during my years of AA meetings. 1) First you take a drink. Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes you; 2) As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them; 3) Work the program. Hang in. Keep coming. Believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

And here are some things that are said by, and about, pirates. 1) Yo ho, ho and a bottle of rum; 2) Heaven, you fool? Did you ever hear of any pirates going thither? Give me hell, it's a merrier place; 3) We're rascals and scoundrels, we're villains and knaves. We're devils and black sheep, we're really bad eggs.

It goes without saying, therefore, that my life as both a recovering alcoholic and a pirate is both entirely copacetic and, at the same time, incomprehensively incongruous. It has its tensions and internal struggles, to say the least, its good days and bad.

It was three years ago that I became both. A recovering alcoholic – always "recovering," never "recovered" – and a pirate captain, that is. I was rescued, dragged from the pits of despair and self-loathing and ideations of self-harm, by a man who has come to be my dearest friend, closer to me than any member of my often abusive and mostly uncaring family. His name is Don J. I use only his last initial so as to protect his privacy, which he values greatly for reasons that will become clear.

Don J. is no saint, as he will readily admit. He has gotten into more than his fair share of barroom brawls. The two missing teeth – maxillary left lateral incisor and the maxillary left canine - are proof enough of that. He has also spent more than a few nights in the proverbial "drunk tanks" of the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth New York Police Department Precinct stations. In addition, Don J. did a two-year stint at Rikers Island on account of being an accomplice to an armed robbery.

Even so, he is a good man, generally speaking. At least he has been a good man to me. Nobody is perfect, as they say, and I am certainly not one to judge.

We have a lot in common, Don J. and I. We are both fuck ups trying to not fuck up quite as much. We are both chasing that mythical prize: normality, sobriety, a little bit of peace and quiet, enough money to get clean - really clean - and start over, perhaps get out of New York, get a fresh start. Someplace sunny and warm. Florida, maybe.

It was Don J., five-and-a-half months sober at the time, who found me, as he has so recounted, face down, jobless, and on-again-off-again homeless on the corner of West Houston and Sullivan Streets in the SoHo District of Lower Manhattan in a puddle of my own vomit as passersby stepped around and over me, some perhaps wondering whether to call the proper authorities but then deciding against it, some just wanting to avoid getting the half-digested and booze-soaked dregs from my stomach on their fashionable pumps or basketball sneakers.

It was Don J. who shook me awake, poured cold water over my face and hands and hair, and pulled me to my feet, who held my waist as I stumbled like a toddler, who lay me down in the back of a room in a church basement so that I could “sleep it off” on a wooden bench under a soundproof tile ceiling stained yellow from years of recovering alcoholics chain smoking unfiltered American Spirit cigarettes in a room with no windows and, therefore, no meaningful ventilation, moaning and flailing and stinking of bile and sulfur while Don J. attended his AA meeting in a room full of people who had, at some time in their own lives, been in exactly the sad state that I found myself on that day, if not worse. When I came to, I asked Don J. why he had done for me what he had. He told me someone had once shown him kindness. He left it at that, and I didn't press for more.

And it was Don J. who made me a pirate – a passable, if admittedly far homelier, likeness of Captain Jack Sparrow, as portrayed by the Hollywood film star Johnny Depp – plying the streets of Times Square availing myself to tourists who might wish go home with a photographic memento of their time in New York City at the Crossroads of The World for the low price of one U.S. dollar, two for a short video that included a few lines of script or a couple bars of song. Don J. played Spiderman. Or one of many Spidermen, I ought to say, who would show up on any given day. He was good at it, lunging around, his hand and wrist skyward, pinky, pointer, and thumb extended in classic web-shooting posture.

He taught me the trade. How to pick out groups of German and Chinese and Indian and Canadian tourists who appeared amenable to being approached with a jovial “aar, matey,” or a softly menacing “ye' best watch yer words or I’ll have ye’ walkin’ the plank.” He taught me to always smile, even when it was late afternoon and I’d only pulled in twenty or thirty bucks all day long and my back and feet ached and my makeup was rain-soaked and running down my cheeks and I just felt like telling everyone around me – the tourists and the gawkers and the businessmen with their permanently plastered scowls and the amateurish Minnie Mice and Elsas and Buzz Lightyears – to really just please fuck off and leave me alone.

I took pride in my craft. I was a professional. It needed to be done right if it was to be done at all. I learned to apply Captain Jack Sparrow’s iconic mascara and rouge and lipstick. I practiced his spasmodic and manic hand gestures and wild-eyed facial expressions and head jerks in front of a mirror until I had perfected them and could improvise even when being shouted at or berated or mocked.

On my first day as Captain Sparrow, with Don J. coaching me from a modest distance, I went home with eighty dollars. It felt like the first honest money I’d made in a long time. I counted it out and smoothed out the bills and put them in my sock drawer and slept a dreamless, sober sleep. On a Saturday in springtime when the sun was shining and the tourists were just happy to be alive and in the big city, I could go home with two-hundred-fifty bucks, easy. Sometimes three hundred. The money was good, don’t get me wrong. But it wasn’t just about that. I made people happy every now and again. Really made their day. That was good too.

The tourists used to ask me sometimes whether I was looking for treasure. It's a fair question. It’s something pirates do. I had a map for just such occasions tucked into the inside pocket of my vest. A cartoonish island with a solitary palm tree, a dashed line, a big “X.” “Thar’s where me treasure be,” I would say, holding the map aloft. “Gold and rubies and gemstones.” Then I would cock my head and arch my eyebrow and point my costume-bejeweled fingers off toward the distance. I didn't mention the sobriety or Florida or the peace and quiet.

And then in March, the whole thing just like collapsed. The air went out of it. The tourists stopped coming. The streets emptied out. There was a virus, they said. It was all over the news. People were suddenly scared. They didn’t want to get close enough to snap a photo.

On a day when I should have made two hundred bucks, at least, I made thirty-five. Don J. made even less. We told each other it would pass. That things would be back to normal in a week or two. But they weren’t. Back to normal, that is. By the end of the month, we were in a state of panic. Not just me and Don J., although we were. I mean all of the cartoons and superheroes in Times Square. I watched one of the Elmos punch a cop right in the face in the middle of Broadway and West 47^th Street. I’ve seen some wild shit in my day, but that ranks right up near the top. A guy in a big red furry costume attacking an officer of the law, arms and legs flailing wildly before the cop's partner tackled that manic, nothing-left-to-lose, end-of-his-goddamn-rope Elmo to the ground and cuffed him and put him in the back of the cruiser. Eventually, the office buildings shuttered and even the scowl-faced businessmen stopped showing up. The first day of April, I made eight dollars all day. Ten fucking hours. You can do the math.

Here’s some other things that they say: 1) a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do; 2) desperate times call for desperate measures; 3) a broke pirate trying every day to maintain his sobriety while he watches his treasure slip further out of reach is a dangerous thing, indeed.

The last one I just made up. It’s true though.

So Don J. and I came up with a plan. A bit of payback for all those blurred and confused and stumbling and vomiting and screaming and relationship-destroying years of drinking. We are going to rob a liquor store. Got it picked out and everything. "X" marks the spot. Soho, where it all began. Enough treasure in the till to quit this life and start over.

“Are you a pirate, or ain’t you?” Don J. asked me.

I told him that I supposed that I was. “But what about you? Isn’t Spiderman a hero? How does that fit in?”

“I need the money. I ain't going back to the streets. I've worked too goddamned hard. Ain't no sobriety in the streets. Ain't no peace and quiet in the streets. That’s how it fits in.”

Fair enough. And I owe it to him, to Don J. He saved my life.

Work the program. Keep at it. Follow the treasure map. Buy a ticket to Florida. Sobriety. Sanity. Peace and Quiet. Yo ho, ho. A pirate’s life for me.