We Are Pirates by Handler Daniel

Author:Handler, Daniel [Handler, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Literary, Retail, Fiction
ISBN: 9781608196883
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2015-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

CAPTAIN SCROD:

All hands are the wrong hands when they clutch what is not theirs. I learned this from the words of Socrates, and all my life I believed it like my given name, until the day everything was taken from me by the treacherous hands of the crown. So now I swear it, by this drawn cutlass, that on every civilized shore the most feared name will be—

(offstage: cannon fx)

And so on. The drama ran just over an hour, scripted, as with so much of pirate lore, by a variety of hands, passed on mostly via computer to hirelings at a large entertainment company that had nine Pirates! going in port cities across America and Canada, with scarcely any supervision save a week of unpaid rehearsals for the company of nine actors and one stagehand, plus the driver of the Corsair, who took the boat out on the same short loop with a coffee mug in his hand, filled with beer. Performances were at noon, three, five and seven, and tickets were fifty-five dollars for adults and thirty-five for children, because at this point in history everything cost less for children, on the grounds that they didn’t take up as much room. The stage was everywhere people weren’t standing, the lights were the fogged-out sun, and the music was a little prerecorded deckwork piped through speakers on the masts. San Francisco was a new port for Pirates! and despite a rich pirate history the city had not made the show a success. The boat was usually half-empty, the tourists cold in shorts and taking halfhearted pictures of the boys in tights and poor Sophia, about to abandon her theater major at the state university, in a prickly hoop skirt and her own makeup. A poster called it a one-hour ride that would last a lifetime. Even from shore, the only way Gwen had seen it, you could see it sucked, with flouncy boys shouting to be heard over the Corsair’s motor and the cap pistol often as not failing to fire. In the mornings the actors were required to pass out Pirates! flyers in targeted areas where rich people might take children.

The Savoy was the fanciest supermarket, with food shipped ethically from faraway ports. Gwen’s mother had already ordered the food from their catering department for the barbecue with the invitations leaving out Gwen’s name because she was a mistake. Near the entrance was a boy with an arrogant chin passing out flyers for something or other. Gwen’s mother sighed past him and rolled several shopping carts a few inches before choosing one, sighing again, and leading Gwen toward sparkly produce.

“So,” she said finally, “do you have anything to tell me?”

What had Gwen’s mother spotted? “What?” she asked.

“You heard me,” Gwen’s mother said, and took a list out of her pocket. “You’ve been distant.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, I thought so.”

“I was grounded. I couldn’t go anywhere until a little while ago.”

“Let’s put that behind us,” Gwen’s mother said, and put lettuce in a bag.

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