We Are Pirates: A Novel
FOR MY SISTER
Is it better to be here or there?
—Robinson Crusoe
Contents
I met Phil Needle on Independence Day, two hundred something-something years since America had freed itself from British rule and just a few days after the pirates had returned from the high seas, at a barbecue commemorating that troubled time. I wasn’t invited. The party was out under the cold sky, with a view of the bridge. At the time this story takes place, the bridge was called the Bay Bridge, and it connected San Francisco to points east, where the country was originally founded, except during rush hour, when it just clutched cars in a long, metal standstill. The air was thick and no fun to stand around in. I stood around Phil Needle, who met my eyes only for a moment as he said the thing nobody could believe.
“We are pirates,” he said, and his glance scuttled away. “It’s an American story, really, with an outlaw spirit. Leonard Steed, starting out in his private railway car, riding through someplace, when out the window there’s a cotton gin rusting in a field just outside a tiny black town. He has the train stop. He walks into town and negotiates it, because of ‘Cotton Gin Blues.’ You know that song?” Phil Needle didn’t pause long enough for anyone to answer but himself. “Legend has it the Devil came for Belly’s soul and Belly looked at the cotton gin and wrote ‘Cotton Gin Blues’ right on the spot and won it back. That song changed Leonard Steed’s life when he heard it at Harvard. He rode all the way back to Los Angeles, and you can still see it there in the lobby of his building. Leonard Steed just took that little piece of treasure just like Belly Jefferson took his soul back from the Devil.”
Phil Needle stopped, surrounded by quiet astonishment, and took a sip of beer from the bottle. Nobody had been listening after “We are pirates.” I had to get away, too embarrassed to look at him. The pirates’ voyage had just ended, and caterers require two weeks’ notice to cancel, so they didn’t cancel. Not a big time frame, this story. It had begun, the history said, around Memorial Day. It was over now, and I walked across the courtyard. Phil Needle’s condo was in a shiny building everyone knew now as the home of the pirate. It was on the sixth or eighth floor, with an outdoor courtyard he shared with neighbors, hovering high over the streets to avoid the noise and dirt. It was landscaped with trees and benches and a small waterfalled pond and a brick barbecue with sausages from kindly treated animals. They were Jews, the Needles, but there still wasn’t enough food. Not a single person had declined the printed invitations, and the Needles hadn’t thought to expect all the people like me, who had tagged along just to lay eyes on them, after hearing the extravagant and ridiculous accounts of the pirate exploits.
I went inside. The living room had a huge window showing me the bridge and the water and the wide boulevard of the Embarcadero, a land of roller skates and tourists holding hands. Under a staircase was a grand piano with an orchid on it, sharing a pot with a little flag. It was surprising he could afford a place like this, but at the time this story takes place, most people bought places they couldn’t afford. Just eighteen months earlier, when the building was built, an advertisement was hung out for all the traffic to see: IF YOU LIVED HERE
, YOU’D BE HOME NOW.
They lived here. They were home now.
In the kitchen one last caterer hurried out, sliding shut the door behind her. Behind glass the party was like the sound of the sea. I opened the dishwasher and shut it. A shopping list said they needed three things, and inside the refrigerator everything had been pushed up against the walls, like furniture in a ballroom. On the bottom shelf was a plastic holder of four cupcakes from a bakery. Two were missing, and the other two looked old. I knew there wasn’t going to be a cotton gin, but I kept looking.
I stepped past a bowl of water for the dog and found the room where people had put their coats. A home office with a couch from a long-ago apartment and a desk chair for people with bad backs. On the wall was the silhouette of a window with tree branches shivering in the breeze, but the wrong wall. The answer was on top of an almost empty bookshelf: a tiny projector, squat as a telescope, shining a false window onto the wall of a windowless room. We lived in an era in which we could do anything. Further down the hallway was an unmarked door to the room where Marina did her paintings. I didn’t open it. At the dead end, I entered a bathroom I wasn’t supposed to be in. It was clean, but the towels weren’t nice and hung unfolded and damp from the rack as if someone had cried into them. I pulled back the shower curtain and saw crumbs from where Marina had shaken out a tablecloth, tumbled out in a trail winding to the drain. I ran the tap and sent them to the sea, and then sat on the toilet, pants up, lid down, and saw in the wastebasket a handful of junk mail torn in half. The image of Phil Needle, sitting on the toilet and going through his mail, was so clear and so obvious that I no longer felt in the diaspora of this story. I was invited. I could be in this bathroom. He was no longer a man I didn’t know. I could see him tall in the mirror, a glimpse at his fine sharp gray hair, his body not bad from jogging. Contact lenses, he thought, made him look younger. He worked in radio, and if someone were to ask Phil Needle about the radio business he would have three things to say, but nobody asked him. People sometimes thought badly of him for the things he said—
We are pirates
—but nobody ever took into account all of the things he withheld out of tact or kindness, all the times he pulled over to the side of the road to let the ambulance go roaring by to its emergency. One time, Phil Needle tripped over a small rug as he entered a café, and he
straightened the rug
so no one else would do the same thing. He sometimes walked across the street against a red light, but never when small children could see him and follow his example.
Phil Needle blinked in the bad light of the bathroom, his least favorite one, looking at the towels. Little blue boats on the ripply embroidery of the sea’s surface—Marina must have found them. Phil Needle was a man whose story was always getting away from him. It was Memorial Day, a time to think of soldiers and sacrifice, and in the living room his wife and child were waiting. He had planned to use this time to decide what to say, but instead he had thought about the barbecue some weeks ahead, and skimmed the mail he’d taken off the kitchen counter. It was all junk. He threw it out into the wastebasket, which was empty except for the wrapper from a brand of candy bar he didn’t like. He washed and looked in the mirror. Gwen, his daughter Gwen, was stealing things. And now he had to say something.
It’s so easy to steal things. Octavia was fourteen, just like Gwen, but she was taller and prettier than Gwen. She walked forcefully, in this long, flared coat, almost a cape, with deep, cavernous pockets, and a pair of boots that meant business. Gwen had seen a guy outside the Fillmore, an ancient rock club her dad took her to once with free tickets from work. The jagged gleam of the streetlights shone on a piece of actual metal on the toes of this guy’s boots as he looked at her and sneered a little like she was a kid, licked his lips. The boots Octavia wore could kick that guy in the balls.
Just like Gwen, Octavia was okay for a long time, and not just when she was a kid. Twelve and thirteen she was pretty happy. Or
naive
was the word Octavia thought for it. Then one day boredom just set upon her with a fierceness. There was nothing to do in the condo. She had to get away, but the neighborhood was lame and she wasn’t allowed to take the bus alone. Up and down the Embarcadero, the tourists took joke pictures in front of the ugly statues, flying all the way from Japan or Germany to make the same stupid poses everybody made. The cars moved across the bridge to somewhere fun. Even the ocean seemed to be having a better time, waving and crashing and making cappuccino foam on the pilings. She was mad at the ocean, how stupid was that, jealous of its schedule and its freedom when she couldn’t even get a bus pass. Eventually she was always at the drugstore.
When Octavia was
naive
, the name “drugstore” was wrong, because drugs were just one of the things, way in the back where the people coughed and waited in cheap chairs. But one day she was old enough to get it. The store
was
a drug, with the rush, the dizziness, the spending money to do it again, how it messed up your body and made your mind feel cool and false, all the stuff they warned you about with drugs that she was going to find out for herself the second she was allowed to take the bus alone. Her grandfather once said, running an errand with her, “Only in America are there places like this,” and now she felt patriotic. She loved to go to the drugstore here in America land of the free.
But it wasn’t free the day she had no money. Not a cent. It was Memorial Day, and in this part of America there was a rack of candy bars discounted. It was the land of opportunity, so she took one. It slipped into the deep pocket of her cape and she spun around on the heels of her cool boots and walked right back out. Tourists were laughing. Maybe it was funny in France. She raced home and hid in the ugliest bathroom to eat it like a wolf with a baby animal, smeared all over her teeth before she thought to look at the calories. Gwen would have thrown it up again, but Octavia just threw the wrapper away and flipped her hair a little. Gwen could not stand it when her father tucked her own hair back behind her own ears without asking.
She was careful and got better at it quick. The enemy wore red vests so they were easily spotted, and they were busy stacking cans and ringing people up and some of them were retarded. The chocolate still flickered in her blood when she went back into the drugstore for another adventure. It was still Memorial Day and the aisles were quiet. She was methodical, and her method was taking everything and putting it into her pockets. Lipstick in Savage, Scarlet Fever, and Jealous Rage. Barbecue potato chips and red licorice coiled inside a plastic pouch like rope on a ship. A handful of nail polishes—she had to be quick, couldn’t choose the colors—and then back around the corner for a bottle of remover. Glitter for her face and neck, batteries she hoped were the right kind, thick pleasing markers, soap with flowers, actual flowers, forced into it. She remembered suddenly what it was called—shoplifting—and pictured lifting the whole place, the aisles tilting and tumbling their baubles and trinkety treasures into her pockets. Pink razors for her burnt leg and then a key chain she thought Naomi would like, and when she realized she could steal for other people it was an avalanche, a chew bone for Toby II, more stuff for Naomi, a stuffed bear and a tiny license plate that said NAOMI. Three flasks of perfume, curvy and shapy like internal organs in her pockets, and she was done with Mother’s Day for ages. Her father liked the electronic things, which were behind locked cabinets, but she grabbed a slick stereo magazine and managed to slip it into one of her boots. It would be a way to warm him up for taking the bus by herself. By now she was thirsty and rounded a corner to open a fridge and grab an iced tea in a bottle that felt so good in her hands. It was One Universe Green Tea, which the label said was good for the immune system and for Octavia’s skin. No one had stopped her. No one had spoken to her. It was smooth sailing. All for one and one for all.