The Last Pirate on the South End Seas
The Monk was uptown last week making his once a week shopping trip. You live down on the South End, you schedule your trips to town as infrequently as possible unless you’re driving a Prius or you’re one of the new folks who couldn’t tell you WHAT the price of gas is and couldn’t care less. The Monk drives a beat-up Ford 150 pickup that gets about ten miles to a gallon of gasoline, about two gallons to town. It runs, barely, and if he could afford something better on his Social Security, he’d gladly own a hybrid, buy better food and probably become a howling environmentalist.
He was squeezing melons over in the produce section. No, not organic melons. Did I mention he was scraping by on Social Security? The Monk buys what’s on sale. The Monk eats on the cheap. The Monk — I’ll give him this — cooks his meals from scratch. The only Hamburger Helper he’d dream of is himself. He’s not much for boxed anything, he doesn’t care how long the preservatives will keep it edible. He makes his own spaghetti sauce, his own salad dressings, eats mostly fresh. He’s not exactly the poster child for Good Health and Living, but he tries. “You are what you eat,” he tells me. The Monk is about half broccoli.
He was squeezing that melon, I think I mentioned, when this guy comes by him with a parrot on his shoulder. The Monk stops squeezing his melon and holds a hand up to Long John Silver and his bird. The Monk, maybe I haven’t mentioned, is not exactly Live and Let Live. He’s ornery and he’s opinionated and he doesn’t suffer fools with parrots lightly. “What the hell, Bluebeard?” he asks the man with the bird. “That some kind of Service Animal?”
“It’s a parrot,” Sinbad replies, smiling, probably pleased his antics haven’t gone unnoticed. “I KNOW what it is,” the Monk says. “It’s a damn disease carrying bird in my food store. You need it to locate the crackers for Polly here?” Well, one thing led to another, the manager finally came down to the produce section and the Monk demanded this pirate wannabee goofball get that flu-bearing bird away from his chard and his tomatoes. The manager, noticing Cap’n Hook didn’t even have a basket, much less a cart, sided with the Monk and asked if he could leave his bird back in his car. Or his schooner.
“You believe that shit?” the Monk asked me when I dropped by when he was unloading his groceries from the truck. “These are tough times, Monk. Them that died be the lucky ones. The rest of us, well, who’s to judge?”
He gave me a dark look from over the melons. “The Monk, that’s who.”
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Tags: Let Salty Dogs Lie, Service Animals, Service Parrot