The Captain

Spalding, UK - Jamie - Friday, April 15th, 2005 : goo

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The Captain was an unusually cryptic fellow. His liquid curls of lifeless brown hair held a pensive air of injustice around him like a bad smell. He spoke almost exclusively in riddles, shrouding himself in an indistinct aura of ambiguity.

My relationship with The Captain began and ended in two thousand and four, whilst running a small fast-food outlet in a bustling shopping precinct. During this course of time I became favorably accustomed to the eclectic nature of humanity. The heterogeneity of its form is a warm amalgam in which I find endless wonderment.

I ultimately concluded that the justification for The Captain’s most peculiar diction, must surely be attributable to some form of brain damage, or conceivably to an extraordinary combination of psychological problems. In either case, his dreadful affliction was undoubtedly linked with whatever appalling misfortune had beset him. The Captain, you see, had a missing hand which was transposed with a rather insincere latex replica set in a brown leather glove. He had also clearly been the victim of extensive burns, both facial and otherwise.

From what I could gather, The Captain’s unusual verbal syntax was a simple consequence of the fact that there were certain words that he couldn’t pronounce. An individual with a severe stammer will battle in vain to express a particular word though ultimately forgo this fruitless toil in favour of another, phonetically simpler word which expresses the same intent.

The Captain’s situation was no doubt similar to this. It was only that his repertoire of expressibity had been so enthusiastically pruned by his bizarre affliction that the articulation of even the most basic notion had become a frustrating if not impossible task. He did not stammer nor stutter, nor was the basis of his vocal ability at all impeded. His choice of wording however, was often irregular to the point of absurdity.

Imagine for a moment, if you will, ordering a cup of tea without saying “tea”

The Captain and I spoke at length on numerous occasions. Many a time would he innocently entice me into the addled inner core of his intricate syntactical labyrinth. This of course afforded me a welcome reprieve from the tedium of my daily schedule. The sum total of what I concluded in disentangling from his meandering syntax could however, be scratched onto the back of a cheap prosthetic appendage.

The Captain told me he once worked on “big jobs”. What exactly he meant by this I do not know. He was never able to articulate any more about his former profession than this. I felt a sense that he may have worked within the bounds some form of heavy industry. Perhaps his misadventure was in some way linked with a hazardous career. He would talk incessantly of being cheated out of what was rightly his. He lived exclusively on disability benefit, and drank a lot of tea.

The Captain told me he had three children. They didn’t visit him anymore. His brother lived in “The bottom bit of Spain; it’s England” which I took to mean Gibraltar. I told him I had visited there as a child. I told him about the monkeys on the rock, and caught a flicker of recognition in his good eye. It occurred to me in that moment what it must mean to him to be understood. How it must feel to achieve successful communication, and how frustrating his day to day life must be.

On one particularly tedious afternoon, The Captain seemed remarkably agitated. He was restless again, and angry about being cheated. He told me he wanted to “go back to the Irish”. He revealed that he planned to accomplish this “Not after the next Christmas, but after the next Christmas after next”. I believe The Captain had lived in Ireland for a time, and I got the impression that that was where his children were. He seemed more perturbed than normal. Attempting polite conversation, I told him that I had lived in Northern Ireland for a short while. He told me that he would show me what had happened to him the next time he came to see me. I assumed that he planned to bring along something in the order of a newspaper clipping.

I can only assume that he forgot or simply changed his mind. The Captain never mentioned his accident again, and out of common courtesy neither did i.

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kobe: that photo is funny. what does it mean?

Grandfather Time: where can i find those gloves at?

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