I figured we could use a good laugh.
This is the worst documentary I ever made. It’s a lost cause. It can’t be helped. It’s a miracle it even exists (most of it, anyway). When I got asked by the independent Slug Magazine, issued since 1988, to provide video coverage of the 2007(?) Pirate Pub Crawl, I volunteered. I didn’t have much competition.
My friend Alex Woodruff would play the role of The Captain on this forsaken voyage. I’ll provide this anecdote about Alex, to help you put things in perspective: One night, I walked into a house party, and he was standing in the kitchen, with a bleeding open gash on his upper arm. He was heating a large knife over the gas powered stove, until it was red hot, to cauterize the wound. He did this while reciting a lengthy passage from Shakespeare.
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It occurred to me that bringing nice camera equipment for this would be a bad idea, so I opted to use a little pawnshop-grade mini dv camcorder with a maximum resolution of only 280p, with a crappy built-in mic. So, yes, it looks and sounds awful, despite some improvements. There were 6 ports of destination (bars) on the itinerary, but the footage for port 2, at Todd’s Bar and Grill, has been destroyed. When I uploaded it 15+ years ago, a Ramones song was briefly playing on a jukebox in the background. Youtube removed it for copyright reasons, but by then the master tape had been lost to the sands of time.
The reason this document of human folly made it onto the list of restoration projects, is that the last 4 ports had a local band ready to roll, as they waited for the inevitable flood of unruly patrons to come crashing through the door. Regrettably, I don’t have the names of the musicians that got pulled into this situation, other then The Pagan Love Gods, who did a rendition of The Pogues ‘Fairytale Of New York’, downstairs in Monk’s House of Jazz.
If you’re wondering what The Captain is drinking in the opening scene, it’s called a ‘Four Horsemen’. Here’s the recipe:
0.5 oz of Jim Beam bourbon
0.5 oz of Jameson whiskey
0.5 oz of Johnny Walker scotch
0.5 oz of Jack Daniels whiskey (or Jose Cuervo gold tequila)
Then you top it off with 151 proof rum, and set the shot on fire.
I recommend not consuming this at 10am, on an empty stomach.
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Since Port 2 is no longer extant, I’ll include the hazy details I remember: By then, The Captain’s crew had tripled in size. The wiser pirates ate a hardy breakfast. Alex cracked a raw egg into his beer, and pounded it along with a shot of bourbon. He announces that ‘the bicyclists and Jimmy The Tooth’ are on the way, and steps out back for fresh air. Behind the bar was a train yard, and a field full of rusted car bumpers. The Captain surveys the land, before getting chased by a bee.
Meanwhile, the crowd inside has finished eating and are getting rowdy. Without live music, they raided the jukebox, playing every punk song they could find, and began dancing. The bartender joined the fray and climbed on to a table, unaware of the ceiling fan on high, until it clocked him in the head, knocking him sideways.
This port was too far away from the other locations on the pirate map, so for this leg of the journey we had to commandeer some vehicles. I recall some idiocy as we piled into a few cars, and went on our merry way. We had interactions at red lights, with other travelers on the road, clearly confused and wondering what the hell they were missing. The people on bicycles made it to Piper Down before we did.
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That night, after his crew mutinied are had fallen by the wayside, The Captain sat at my kitchen table, still half-clothed in pirate garb. The frills on his shirt were stained, his hair tangled and matted with beer. He looked like he’d been at sea for years. Broken, and disheveled.
We sat there in the dark, a few hours from sunrise, playing a game of chess. His words were not flowing, yet he still managed to win the game.