Category: My stories

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Is that all George is? A pirate?
Must we put so much value into our professions?
What else defines us?
Where we come from?
What we want?
What we hope to become?
How we treat others?
George may not have been a very good pirate, but he never cheated at cards.
Nor did he fight dirty. Always a clean, honest fight.
He lost a lot of fights, sure, but he came about it fairly.
“That’s why you’re not a very good pirate,” said the Captain.
George shrugged and smirked.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Every night at 8 bells, the ship’s doctor opened his window in the forecastle and yelled MEDICATION!
Pirates lined up at the window to get two cups… one with their pills, and another with water.
The pirates tossed the pills in their mouths and washed them down.
“They’re just salt pills,” said the doctor. “And I’m not a real doctor.”
Which explained why so many pirates chose to go out of network to use doctors on other ships.
Oh, and those doctors handed out yummy sugar pills.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
When the captain reviewed the ship’s budget, he determined that there was an opportunity to reduce spending on personnel, and he announced layoffs. Everyone assumed that George, being not very good, would be laid off.
But instead, Stinky Pete, Cannons McGee, and Ochrebeard were sent ashore with severance checks.
“Why did you keep me,” said George.
“Because you’re cheap,” said the captain. “And there’s no risk of you mutinying against me.”
George asked the captain for a raise.
The captain said no way.
“Mutiny,” yelled George.
The captain sighed.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
So it was hard finding things for him to do that didn’t put the ship in danger.
Swabbing the deck, working in the galley and acting as the spotter in the crow’s nest were his usual jobs.
He worked the night watch a lot, and he heard that pirates who worked the night got a bonus.
“That’s not true,” said the captain. “Everybody gets paid the same.”
“That’s also not true,” said George’s shipmate, Ralph. “I get a shilling a night.”
George ended up sleeping both day and night.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
In George’s body, though his veins and arteries, chemicals and elements flowed that had flowed through so many other living things over the eons.
Before that, the oceans… the fields… the sky… through space.
Blasted into the universe by dying stars, each atom made more complex and dense.
Generations of supernovas building carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, and gold.
George opened his wooden treasure box, and ran his fingers through the gold.
The stars also made arsenic.
But George was wearing gloves, unlike the pirate who tried to rob him.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
When George wasn’t out on the high seas, he was in the wrestling ring under the name of The Almighty George.
George was as good a wrestler as he was a pirate, so he lost a lot of matches and collected many cuts and bruises.
So George became a heel and patsy, making hero wrestlers look good by beating him.
Doormat George was dragged around so many rings, thrown against every turnbuckle and rope, and pinned to every mat.
George returned to the ship and hung up his mask.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He wrecked the ship for the umpteenth time, finding himself stranded on an island with no food and no fresh water.
He sorted through the wreckage washing ashore, salvaging what he could.
There was some rum, some hardtack.
It kept him going as he assembled the wood and rope into a crude raft.
By the time he finished the raft, another pirate ship was sailing by the island.
George lit the raft on fire and shouted to signal them.
But it was too late. The ship kept sailing on.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He’d been to a lot of cities all across the world, eating exotic foods and meeting strange and mysterious people, and every time he’d buy a fare card for the bus or the subway.
After a while, he had fare cards for dozens of cities, and he couldn’t remember which one was for which place.
So many colors and logos.
Oyster, Q Pass… who knew what these meant? Is this one for Boston? New York? Paris? Rome?
George made a few bucks selling the empty cards to unsuspecting tourists.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
This didn’t matter to the producer of Eyewitness News at 11.
They put an eyepatch on George, but it made it hard for him to read the Teleprompter.
And the false hook they put on his hand made it hard for him to hold the scripts.
“Why do I have scripts if there’s a Teleprompter?” he asked.
George got bored reading scripts to a camera.
He wanted to report from battles and adventures.
So, the producer changed George’s title to field correspondent, but he never sent back any reports.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a good pirate.
But compared to other pirates, he wasn’t half bad looking.
So the publisher of The Pirate Calendar gave George a call and asked if he wanted to be in the next year’s calendar.
George agreed, and got fifty bucks for a two hour photoshoot.
When the calendar finally came out, George was disappointed to see that he was Mister February.
And it wasn’t even a leap year.
Nobody ever recognized him or asked him to sign his photo in the calendar.
And the next year, the calendar publisher didn’t call.