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My contact on the Turkish fishing boat Ass Bisquit was the ship's mechanic, Nolan Brubaker, who'd been a sound technician during my brief stint as a sports reporter at WEEI radio in Boston. I'd saved his life twice, once during the running of the bulls in Pamplona and again during an out of control balloon ride over Marth's Vinyard and we'd kept in touch. I'd heard that he'd had a nervous breakdown and was working as a nautical grease monkey and decided to revisit old times with him in the hopes of gaining passage over the Aegean Sea to Turkey. He talked the captain, Abel Langston, known amongst the fishing community as simply The Sea Skunk, into letting me aboard for the trip on the conditions that I sleep abovedeck and let him win at Pictionary. I swallowed my pride and boarded the dilapidated old frigate with a certain amount of genuine trepidation. It wasn't just the rust, or the leaky hull, or the engine that seemed to work intermittently, or the dour faced, tattoo covered crew of Turkish ex-cons, but the smell onboard ship was completely inhuman. I couldn't tell if it came from the smoking, groaning engine or from the dank holds belowdecks but it smelled as if someone had been cooking diarrhea.
That night was one of the worst of my life, comparable only to the infamous evening in 1997 I'd spent covering the Country Music Awards in Nashville when Travis Tritt had pulled a gun on Vince Gill and threatened to "blow his nuts off" as a result of an ongoing feud involving the similarity of their vocal stylings. I tried to get some sleep, rolling myself in a canvas tarp and lashing my ankles to a post, but it was pointless as the weather got exponentially worse by the minute. Sometime after midnight, as the storm reached a demonic, howling peak, the true weirdness began. I had awakened to some confused commotion and through my rain soaked, bleary vision I could see the Captain bending over me, his terrified face aglow in hellish torchlight. He was ranting at me in garbled english and pointing to the aft deck but I could barely understand a syllable through the roar of the storm's fury. Frustrated and frantic he hurried to the rear of the ship and I followed. There he waved and pointed to the sea behind us, angrily shouting unintelligible curses as he desperately tried to make me understand. As I peered through the swirling monsoon I could finally see the source of his manic horror. A short distance back of our wake there was an eerie blue glow just below the surface of the water, the spectral lights of what could only be a submarine, stalking the ship like a monsterous, ghostly shark.
We rushed into the cabin, out of the battering rain, and I demanded to know what was going on. There was dead silence and a pall of dread in the air, but I refused to accept their reticence. "I'm Ken Socrates, goddamnit", I said, leaning forward over the table at them. "Give me the TRUTH." And they did, spilling out all of the sordid details like so many rancid intestines from a disemboweled water buffalo.
They were smugglers.
The Captain and his crew stood in breathless silence, the facts now laid bare for all to see. The artifact they carried, obviously stolen, was to be delivered to an anonymous warehouse in Bodrum where the purchaser, rumored to be the obscenely wealthy daughter of a noble house somewhere in east asia, would acquire it for her own illicit purposes. It was clear to us all, however, that the object would never make it to its destination. The unspoken dread hung in the air around us like a steamy egg-salad fart and we all knew there was only one answer to the question of who it was hunting us in the submarine.
Someone who wanted their Idol back.
Someone who wanted vengeance.
"You are known to us." he said. "You are one of us."
And then nothing. I fell into a slumber so deep and dreamless that it nows seems all too unnatural. I awoke here, in Kalymnos, an island somewhere between Greece and Turkey, in what appears to be a low end whorehouse built to service the local eel fishing community. The prostitutes here are as ugly as deformed wildebeasts but they have good hearts and strong backs and they tell stories that make you soil yourself. This is a problem for me considering the intense burning sensation I have discovered when I urinate but we get along quite well nonetheless and they have been nursing me back to what laughing passes for "health" to this battered old driftwood body of mine. I have yet to attempt to ask how I got here or, more puzzlingly, what happened to my unconscious body in what I have learned has been four days since the incident aboard the Ass Bisquit. I am considering the genuine possibilty that some tales are best left untold.
I will be spending the next few days here, drinking rubbing alchohol, playing parchesi with the whores and trying to rid myself of certain non-lethal but annoyingly transmittable diseases before I continue my travels. As I recline in the languid sunshine of the East Aegean I will certainly reflect on the undeniable fact that, once again, my life has been saved by that legendary endowment I proudly and affectionately refer to, simply, as Mr. Happy One-Eye.
Ken Socrates © Ken Socrates 2006. All rights reserved.
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Eighteen hours from port we saw the first signs of the oncoming storm. As the wind picked up and the first, stinging droplets of rain began to hit we could see the ominous stormclouds boiling on the horizon directly ahead of us and the crew began to seem edgy and nervous. This was a proven, hardened ocean going crew and the fear on their faces put a chill into the marrow of my bones. I cornered crewman Babushka Zolak, a man so tough he's had his left hand deliberately amputated and replaced with a grim, barbed gaffing hook, and tried to get a feel for our situation. He was reluctant to speak with me and would only repeat the words "Bad wind, bad wind." over and over again as he went through what could only be a nervous superstition of binding all of his toes together with electrical tape.
Suddenly, there was ominous thump and a shudder through the entire ship. The hull groaned and the engine screamed as the craft lurched to starboard and we all stumbled about the cabin like legless drunks, crashing and falling to the floor as the lights flickered and died. My head struck something hard and whiteness blazed through my sight, followed just as suddenly by a murk-filled darkness as my mind sank away into unconsciousness. When I awoke there were footsteps all around me in the dark, some the crude staggering of the confused crew but others nearly silent, deft and sure even in the blackness. We had been boarded by inhumanly stealthy agents who, from the sound of the distant, terrified screams I could hear, were quickly and easily eliminating the frigate's crew like they were helpless children. Suddenly, I realized I was not alone. The strange smell of sandalwood and mur were the only hints of the invisible presence mere inches from my prone form. A streak of jagged, violent lightning lit the room for a moment in a blaze of incandescent blue-white and I saw him for a stark instant, a figure wrapped in nebulous cloaks, only his eyes visible through the veil he wore. I will never forget those eyes, cold yet burning, dark yet blazing forth with a fire so intense it seemed to paralyze every nerve ending in my shuddering body. He spoke in a hushed whisper, in an odd accent that could not be placed, and I will always be unsure whether he actually spoke the words aloud or simple placed them in my head with some elusive mind-craft.
