character sketch
Whenever the Captain gets drunk, I'll get drunk. Whenever the Captain uses cocaine, I'll get high too. This is just the way it is. This is the way it's always been, ever since either of us can remember. We're like brothers, and we've gone through everything like brothers. Like twins. I remember when, wrapped in the scabby limbs of a whore, he at last turned in his reluctant virginity. I was there, in the adjacent bed, doing the same. And there he is, in my earliest memory, barely old enough to read, when his father was out of control, breaking the whiskey bottle on his mother's face, slashing her with the jagged shards, watching her bleed to death on the floor of the dim and squalid kitchen, breath gurgling little bubbles out the hole in her neck. I was the one who (per father's orders) helped him drag the corpse to the gutter to be devoured by rats and maggots and eventually rinsed away by the rain. He and I, we wiped up the pools of blood coagulating to black. He just cried and cried, the mama's boy. He loved mommy so much, he developed a real Oedipus thing, wetting the bed well into puberty. He would have murdered his father, I'm sure, had his father not drunk himself to death before my Captain had grown the hair on his balls to do it himself.
He's the Captain, and I'm Lieutenant. I'm not actually a Lieutenant, I'm first mate. It's my name that's Lieutenant. How I got the name Lieutenant, I don't know. I blame my father who, like the Captain, never grew up. Not really. Not emotionally. He's still that petulant little boy, mommy's blood beneath his fingernails, staining all the crevasses in his little rodent hands, the Rat. That's what the crew calls him, the Captain, behind his back: the Rat. Because he looks like a rat. He's short with a gut like a rum-filled beach ball, and a little head with a pointy face, and beady shit-brown eyes, all framed by a mat of mousy hair and a scraggly beard that hangs of his chin in strings, accentuating his face's pointiness, and oversized ears (ears, the crew jokes, that could power the ship should we lose our sails). And when he gets angry his voice gets all high and squeaky like a rat's, like a coked-up, hyperventilating rodent, pacing stubby paces, shuffling his diminutive feet, grinding his molars in a buck-tooth sneer.
