The Pirate and the Death Chamber

What follows is a back reference to The Pirate character I wrote about in this story a couple of years ago.

I met the Pirate long after he was a 5-year old kid who on a fateful day decided to be a 'cowboy' in a game of 'Cowboys and Indians'. He was ambushed by the Indians with the result being a crude arrow slammed into his eye, squashed it like a grape and was blind in that eye ever since.

The time met him, I walked into his mom's house and immediately a giant red squirrel comes down the drapes and runs up my leg to rest on my shoulder. Pirate hands him a peanut in a shell. I didn't have time to even blink. It's like having a small cat resting on your shoulder. "Hi I am Pirate, this here on your shoulder is my furry brother. He doesn't have rabies either."

Yet, among other things he is one of the greatest artists you will never know and that doesn't matter either. This isn't about that anyway. You probably wouldn't care.

The Pirate Disguise

During that time in his life he was almost the perfect burglar. The Pirate and a couple of buddies would get in the car around midnight, drive to rural towns in Oklahoma and Southern Kansas, break into drugstores or auto supply stores (preferred) and lift all the shit they could carry of value and sell it on the black market, in a small college town. It was lucrative BUT they got lazy.

Their ultimate demise was that they started burglarizing closer and closer to home. One night a road block snagged them and they landed in jail. During their trial they were told to quit college and join the Army. Otherwise, they would be put on 6 years probation. The Pirate couldn't join because one eye was missing. A fact the judge did not find amusing.

"Why is there a patch over your eye?" the judge quizzed before sentencing. "Are you trying to be funny in this court and insult this court with this pirate patch over one eye?"

The pirate tried to speak but the judge did not allow it. In actual fact the Pirate thought of himself somewhat of a pirate.

"I sentence pirates to jail." the judge continued, "You would have been better advised by your lawyer had he told you to not wear that nonsense in my court room."

The Pirate obeyed but the moment the judge realized his own flawed request, gave the Pirate 6 years probation instead of 10 years in the McCallister Sweathouse; the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. I always knew him as the Pirate.

Moth Man...Butterfly Man

Years later I would visit him in his two room adobe shack in the middle of the Mother Primeval Desert. He lived like a fucking monk and celibate too. He was queer as a football bat but I didn't care. You don't get rid of friends because of that. Hell, I tried for years to get him to let my ex screw him (something she was more than willing to do) but he would have none of it. She would even try to sneak up on him in the middle of the night and give it a pull or two. He'd wake up screaming at her to go away.

Standing at the entrance to his place you could see a handful of furniture: a chair, a bunk bed, a door on a sawhorse (his meager studio), a chair and a tin stove. He cooked all his meals on a disca which is a Northern Chihuahuan wok. That morning we had to work for breakfast. We had to crack 50-60 quail eggs from his quail coop into a bowl just to have two omlettes. You don't want to know what the quail were for but I will tell you anyway.

I was trying to contain a tequila hangover from exploding from the night before by getting the quail eggs cracked, when I look over at the quail coop. The Pirate emerges with a small cage of 4 quail. He reaches in and takes one out. Before I could blink he took the poor creature and slammed it as hard as he could against his adobe shack. Quail guts splatter everywhere.

"Food for my falcons." he said seeing me about to puke. "The desert is a mean place. They don't feel a thing."

Cracking quail eggs for breakfast became a torture. The whole scene was out of whack at that moment...throwing quail against the wall like a baseball to feed falcons and cracking their eggs to feed ourselves seemed surrealistic. Yeah...the desert can make you mean, if you let it. The Pirate started dressing out the quail for 4 falcons. Everyday started out the same "sunshiney day".

"You want fries with that?" seemed like a reasonable thing to say.

The Death Chamber

What fascinated me the most on my trips to visit him that summer was the evening 'entertainment'. He had a small gasoline generator that he rigged up lighting inside the adobe shack and a black light that always sat just outside the door.

The desert for those that have never paid much attention to it, is overflowing with creatures and life. The only problem is that you never see it unless it is night. The black light attracted creatures for miles. The Pirate interest was in the moths. During the day he collected butterflies and in particular Swallowtails but at night the most interesting were the moths.

Each night we'd turn on the black light, sit on the ground and knock back a half quart of some nasty tequila; I didn't want to know how he got it either. Then we'd wait for them to come in and land on the black light. When they did, he'd inspect them, determine if he had that species and if he didn't the poor moth was put into a fruit jar that had cyanide in it and he sealed it shut. He killed on average two a night. Some were big moths and some were very small.

The next morning he'd pin them on Styrofoam boards to dessicate in the desert air. This only took a day. Then he would pin them on boards and entomb them in cases for viewing, studying and painting. His watercolors of butterflies and moths were stunning. Each stroke of his brush was perfect almost too perfect. He painted to perfection each one he killed. Then he placed the paintings on a pile on the floor. Many times I tried to get him to let me sell them for him. He would have none of it.

After a couple of years he moved away from the desert and in with some friends in another part of the state.

Blind Man's Bluff

I lost track of him for a number of years. I too moved away. One night I get a phone call. I knew his voice right away.

"I'm goin' blind" he said.

"You're already blind." I said jokingly. I thought he was kidding me.

One night he was mowing his lawn with an electric mower and had stretched the cord almost out to the end. He decided to unplug it by forcibly unplugging it by jerking the cord out of the socket. He told me it all happened in slow motion and he can recall seeing every inch of the plug flying towards his head. Because his arm was over his head the plug hit his good eye knocking it out of ITS socket. Horrified he somehow stuffed his eyeball back in and a friend drove him to the hospital.

I never talked to him after that. It is hard to imagine him blind.