1. We Were Pirates

In the end, there were other women. There were tight fists, bar fights, and lies. There were sunk ships, and fat lips. There were indiscretions, insults and a complete loss of dignity. But once, we were happy. Once, we sailed the high seas, we laughed and loved, and took up each other’s arms. Once, we set foot on all nine continents, made babies and concocted schemes.

Once, we were pirates.


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It all began in the dawning Spring of a couple years past. I had taken to studying in a under-frequented corner of a park near my apartment. Usually, I could sneak to this park-corner from my apartment, spend the day absorbed in the scholarly works of whatever hermit had caught my interest, and sneak back again without running into another person of any sort. I had become so good at inconspicuity, I began to wonder whether or not other people could even actually see me at all (one of the benchmarks of true hermit-hood is that most regular people actually can’t see you. Except for under very certain circumstances, when the light is just so, and they are abstractly thinking just so, and their eyes focus just so. Otherwise, you could be right under their nose and they wouldn’t even realize! It’s quite a funny thing to observe, but the chances of ever making such an observation are few, given hermits’ distaste for peopled environments). At any rate, I got very used to going unnoticed.

On this particular afternoon, I was reading Astro-Physics & the Mating Habits of Noctural Marine Mammals and Mermen by Camilla Buttersworth and Moby Dick (I hope I don’t have to remind you that Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick), when I noticed a guy swagger over to a nearby tree and fall asleep. Now, as you may have intuited by my description of him--“a guy”--I didn’t take much notice and, after an hour or two, forgot that he was there at all. Several hours later, while ruminating on a particularly delightful passage of Moby Dick, my eyes came to rest on this figure. To my great surprise, I realized that, not only had he awoken, but he was staring at me. I started, fidgeted with the book resting in my lap, and stared intently at the pages so as not to provoke further interest from him. But I had become acutely aware of him and, after some minutes, grudgingly looked past the corner of my book to see whether or not he had turned his attention elsewhere. To my horror, not only was he still looking at me, but he had turned onto his belly and, resting his face in his hands, was persistently--obnoxiously!--staring at me. Greatly discomfitted, I turned my back to him, and weakly whistled to Willoughby.

Willoughby, who is my favorite companion, and also a dog, had expected to be at the park for at least another few hours. He was rolling around some distance away in a patch of newly sprouted clovers. He didn’t immediately hear me whistle, but when he did, he looked plaintive and uninterested. “Going now” he looked at me? “But this is graaaaand!” Since you can’t publicly speak to animals, outside of North Carolina, I gave him my best alarmed and “we have to go now!” look. But it was too late. He had no sooner began a slow saunter towards me, than I heard the crunch of leaves and determined footfall at my back.

“Hi” said a voice behind me. I jumped around to face it. And I must have looked pretty scared, because he--the guy who had been napping under the tree, the guy who had persistantly stared at me, and now was intent upon speaking to me--started laughing, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you. Here,” he said, backing up, “I’ll stand a little further away.”

Though I was alarmed, this struck me as comical. He was going to endeavor to talk to me from a distance of four or five feet away, as though we were speaking across an imaginary precipice.

“Do you have a cigarette, by chance?” he asked.

“No, no I don’t”

“Do you know where I might get something to eat around here?”

“No” I lied, “I, uh, don’t eat. Often. Out, I mean”. I’m not usually this conversationally awkward, but, as I said, it had been a long time since I had talked to anyone, let alone unexpectedly, let alone to a boy.

“I’m Winston” He leaned out across the invisible precipice to shake my hand.

“Lima. Lima Bean. I’m sorry for, umm, seeming so alarmed. I was just so absorbed in my book...”

“Lima Bean!” he cut me off, “The Lima Bean?? I’m a terrific fan of your work!”

I looked at him, dumbfounded.

“Err, I’m sorry, you must have me confused with some other Lima Bean”

“Not at all, not at all! I’ve read your reports from the Hermits’ Convention, all of them! Then, I did some investigating, asked some friends, and got ahold of some of your poetry as well. It’s really very good! I might go so far as to say you’re a genius. I’ve wanted to meet you!”

Willoughby trotted up and sniffed the stranger with interest, who immediately leaned down and began scratching him behind the ears as though they had always been friends. And, from the grin on Willoughby’s face, you really would’ve thought that they had. I was, at the least, curious about this fellow; Willoughby was already in love. There’s nothing like a good ear-scratching to sway Willoughby into very deep love.

“I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?”

“Winston. Winston D. B. Oliver Zwinton”

It is hard to recapture the innocence and strangeness of a first meeting with a person you have later known intimately, but I will, at any rate, do my best. He was tall and extraordinarily handsome: well-proportioned, with a mess of black hair, Atlantic-blue eyes, a rosy complexion, deep dimples and strong, well-formed hands. He wore heavy rings in both of his ears, a bandana around his neck, and almost every part of his body that was visible, was tattooed in thick black strips. He was handsome in a rugged, weathered way. Handsome as a bird of prey might be, or a very large coyote. Or, say, a pirate.

“I think I’ve heard of you, too, actually. The terror of the Seven Seas.”

“Ah, my reputation precedes me” he said knowingly, almost bashfully.

I had, at a Hermits’ Convention, heard talk of him. A hermetically-affiliated Don Juan of sorts, who was notorious, not for romancing women, but for breaking their hearts. He would love them, sort of, and sail off abruptly, leaving behind a intercontinental rash of scorned women and fatherless birds.

The hermits’ interest in him was manifold. The child of rather hard circumstances, he had grown up wild, but searingly intelligent. And while they weren’t sure what would become of him, his vagabond ways and emphatic resistence to everything ordinary made him natural kin to the hermits,who looked on, often bemusedly, often alarmedly, as he bumped through his complicated and rocky life.

To be perfectly honest, I had developed a lurid curiosity about him at the Convention and was pleased that he had run himself into me at the park. As I understood it, he was a man of incorrigibly bad behavior, adventures, misadventures and excitement; he was a real life pirate! But, as any stealth journalist, I curbed my enthusiasm.

“How long will you be in town?” I asked

“A few days, I think”

“Would you like to have dinner with Willoughby and me?” I offered. Willoughby looked smilingly up, wagging. Winston nodded.

We cooked and laughed, and slowly warmed. We drank wine and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes on the fire escape. I showed Winston some of my recent writings, and got a few fantastic stories out of him. Like the time he had to scale an impossible cliff, beat a Spanish fencing genius in a duel, wrestle a giant, outwit a Sicilian, and trek through an unsurvivable swamp in order to save a princess.

Just kidding: that’s obviously the Princess Bride. But his stories were--and I make this statement carefully--as good. We fell asleep mid-conversation, side by side, as innocently as children, and when we woke up in the morning, my mind was made up: I begged him to take me with him on his next sailing adventure. As I had recorded the Hermits’ Convention, I wanted to record the Adventures of Winston D.B. Oliver Zwinton. I was bored with being a hermit. I wanted to be a hermit-slash-pirate.


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