Build a Trebuchet

So, you want to get chicks? Tired of learning selected Italian phrases, and phonetically at that? Maybe you're one of those "hard gainers." It doesn't matter how many push-ups you do, you can't fill out one of those billowing poet shirts. I know the feeling. It can drive you mad. It's what made my friend Marius build a trebuchet.

"First, just the idea of building a trebuchet was enough," he told the cops. The real cops, not just the guys who buy a tin badge and nonchalantly flip open their wallets at every opportunity. "I felt more confident, and it gave me something to talk about at parties, and at the bar. A girl might ask me 'So, what do you do?' and I could tell her 'Well, I'm building a trebuchet,' and her smile would widen and eyebrows quirk up. And we'd start talking. The trick is not to bore the girl with details, which I wasn't able to do anyway, as I barely knew what a trebuchet was. I just saw one on the History Channel and liked the sound of it."
Treb-ooh-shay. It does have a ring to it, and I know from rings.

The cops looked at me. "It was my piano," I said.

          #

Marius did some research on the Internet, but down at Irish Eyes he was always bringing old books about siege weaponry to spread out in front of him, while he doodled designs on napkins and the pages of his journal. "What are you doing?" someone might ask him. He'd look up with a practiced grin and say, "Building a trebuchet." Five hours and three rounds later, a girl would be kicking panties off her left ankle while Marius, only grinning half as wide, would move in.

I play piano instead. It's a classic, and I've been taking lessons since I was eight years old. My mother told me that one day I'd be happy to have a fun skill to show off at parties, and she was right. Lots of Christmas parties, and New Year's events. Me in my tux, just doing standards. It doesn't matter how shiny the seat of my pants get, or if anyone can see the little brown stains splattering my dress shirt; the depths of winter is time for desperate pussy on the hoof. Or was until the pirates came.

"I talked too much about it," Marius said. We were sitting on the floor of my living room, at the far end, away from the hole in the wall where my big bay windows used to be. We could still see the bay down the hill. It was just a little chilly, so we drank our coffee hunched over our cups, legs twisted Indian-style, shoulders stooped. "You have to deliver, ultimately. At least the process. I was seeing this girl, Annie. She wanted the whole show: sawdust in the backyard, muscle tensing under flannel, me and my friends cracking jokes and drinking beers while sitting on the frame of the engine like we were in some ad for jeans or something…"

"I told you that you should have just said you were working on a novel."

"I don't like bookish girls," he said. "Those thick Buddy Holly glasses. When we were kids, nerds wore those."

When we were kids, I wore those, I didn't tell him. Marius didn’t know me then. He was exotic, an immigrant from Barbados with a musical accent and an easy way about him. I was the sort of kid that even I would stuff into a locker. Nothing's nerdier than self-loathing. But we got old and fat and stayed in Port Jameson while most of our class went off to college in Boston or the city and never came back after landing fat jobs and wives with nose jobs or New Jersey bangs.

"I want someone with meat on her bones, but not butch. Curious, but not a know-it-all. You know—" said Marius.

"Someone just like you, but less so, so you can feel superior."

We were good friends, so he could say it to me. ""Someone just like you, but less so, so you can feel superior."

"Be superior." Mostly Marius dated fat Hispanic girls who had never had a real boyfriend before. Annie was an exception. She used to be with Keith the Red, captain of the ship Keelhaul. Keith the Red started the whole pirate craze around here. He was actually from the city, went to private school, then Columbia, then right to Dean Whittier, the whole bit. His father left him a yacht, he had it re-done in a very Disney mode, and he'd been terrorizing the North Shore ever since.

I was playing for tips and drinks at Cosmopolitan when Marius met Annie. Like I said, I know from rings. Too much Maiden and G&R as a kid — mama's little rebel, that was me (plus this girl I had a crush on, Melanie, was big into Satan) — and now I have tinnitus. My ears ring, and my job doesn't help any. But to make up for the lack of sensitivity, my brain turned up the volume. Joey Ramone once called the effect "dog ears." If someone leans over my keyboard to make a request I have to read lips, but a conversation on the other side of the room I hear as clear as day. This was Marius and Annie:

Marius (rubbing his shoulder): Mmm, hello.
Annie: Hi.
Marius (sitting down at the nearby stool): Hi there. Welcome to Port Jameson!
Annie: Thanks. How did you know I was new?
Marius: Small town, you know how it is. A pleasure to see a new face once in a while, like yours.
Annie (hands in the air, fingers twitching to make quote marks): New face or "fresh meat"?
Marius (shrugs, then winces): What can I say…
Annie: What's with your shoulder?
Marius: Oh, I pulled something in it while building my trebuchet.
Annie: Trebuchet you say? (laughs) I was getting ready for some line about how you're training to be a cage fighter.

            #

The next morning, Keelhaul made port. She was ridiculous looking — molded fiberglass, painted and "weathered" to look like planks of wood. A false mast jutted out of the cabin and bowed twenty degrees in either direction in light wind. The sails were black, of course, but made of rigid black mesh so as not to catch any wind by still looking dramatically billowed-out. The inboard motors did all the work. As it approached, the extras poured out of the hold and took to the deck to hoot and cheer and shake their phony scimitars at the folks eating and strolling around the marina. In the parking lot of the Ferry House, a squat family restaurant in a building itself designed to be reminiscent of a paddle wheel riverboat, the aging bikers took up the challenge and started revving their engines.

I was drinking juice and sitting on my couch, in my robe. The girl I took home last night was showering. Last night she'd liked the view, what with the strings of lights stretched over the harbor swaying, and their diffuse reflections in the dark water. Works every time. Now, I just hoped that the pirates and the bikers would end their little chestbumping display before she stepped into the living room. Nothing turns a woman off faster than a big ol' display of manly peacock feathers. I finally drew the shades when I heard the bathroom door open and damp feet smack across tile.

She wanted more music. I felt like a trained seal working a set of squeeze horns, partially because I was naked, and she was one of those girls who like to close their eyes and do clumsy pirouettes to Chopin with a glass of orange juice in one hand. It was a relief when the truck from the lumberyard rumbled up the street and around my house to unload seven thousand dollars worth of wood in Marius's backyard.

"Say, that's the delivery we've been waiting for," I told her. Her name was Leslie or Lynn or something like that. "You're welcome to hang out if you want, have a beer or whatnot. Or you can chill here."

"Maybe I'll take a nap." She was wearing my robe and hugged it to herself with her free hand. I stood up, dipped her (careful to secure the juice with the hand not on her thigh) gave her the sort of deep but cutesy kiss the closed-eye dancing girls like, and went to dress. I had a pre-distressed flannel shirt and jeans, and some Dickies stuff for just such an occasion.

Lynn, Leslie…whatever her name was, did decide to stick around to watch as Marius and I started stacking the wood and clearing space to build the trebuchet. Our other neighbor, Barry, started doing his backyard ninja routine on his side of the courtyard. He has the outfit, those throwing stars, a grappling hook (he grapples up his own house, and it's just a one-story ranch, but Barry is a bit doughy), the whole bit. I have no idea how well it works, but it got Leslie's attention, especially when from the roof of his house he pointed and shouted, "Pirates!"

Then I heard the buzzing grumble. "Motherfuckers have dune buggies," I told Marius, and then in a moment he heard them too. Three spotless dune buggies (they clearly had never even seen a dune), all spilling with pirates and with little cannons on the hoods rushed up the street and past us, then started turning crazy eights in the cul-de-sac. Behind them came Annie in her red Beetle. Marius just grabbed a saw and started cutting wood randomly, desperate for some sheen on his biceps. I shrugged at Lynn (Leslie?) and smiled, but she already had her cell phone in hand and was getting up, pretending to have a call.

On their next orbit through the development, I heard Leslie's (Lynn's?) loud belt of a laugh coming from the lead buggy. The last car even shot its cannon at Barry, who just barely managed to duck the Ziplock baggies full of leftover pasta and moldy casserole for which Keith the Red was famous for preparing in his galleys. Women love home cooking. The drove over Marius's lawn and idled in front of us. "Hey, home depot," one of them called out "building a gazebo?" He had Cheese Doodle powder, nearly radioactive in its orangeness, sprinkled along his beard.

"Yeah," said another, who had whatsername on his lap now, "maybe learn the ukulele, get a straw hat?"

"Bon bons!" shouted another. "Chick love bon bons!" He waved the hook of his left hand at us, though of course he had just tucked his fingers into his sleeve. A throwing star sailed over my head and landed short of the buggies, and the pirates laughed again. The damn thing didn't even stick dramatically out of the grass. Good one, Barry.

Marius stepped forward, "I'm building a trebuchet," he said.

"Ooooh, how Fraunch!" a pirate from the rare buggy called out.

"Oh yeah, because there weren't any French pirates." I said. Annie pulled up at the front of the house and walked around the other side of Marius's house. Barry, still on his rooftop, called out "Hey baby!" and we all turned, not to him, but to her. Annie looked as though she had just walked in on her parents having sex with their Labrador Retriever. The pirates hooted and called her name, some banging their plastic scimitars against the sides of their cars.

"Oh, I can't…" she said, then she turned and flashed Marius a smile. "I'm sorry, am I disturbing anything?" I prayed that Marius wouldn’t say something ridiculous like "No, they were just leaving", meaning the pirates, but of course he did, and of course the drivers just revved their engines and the pirates howled and Lynn or Leslie laughed again and threw her arms around some scrawny guy who had blacked out two of his teeth to look more authentic.

"Friends of yours, aren't they?" I asked Annie. Sometimes I just have to cockblock. It's an irresistible urge.

"Enough playing dress-up, let's build this thing, Charles," Marius said to me, and we got to work. There was a bit more hooting, and Annie stood there helplessly for a moment, and then left without saying goodbye.

Trebuchets are really hard to build, even with two people, and especially with a third person, Barry, jumping on a trampoline and shouting half of a dumb question every time he hit the apex of his leap. "Is that a—" then down, "traction treb—" then down, "or a counterweight—"

Marius told me in a mutter so as not to encourage Barry by engaging him, "It’s a T-wreck." We mostly built the frame that day; we'd have to wait till tomorrow for the 12-ton crane Marius hired to come out and set up the balance for the counterweight.

That night, Irish Eyes and all of downtown Port Jameson was lousy with pirates. "Mead!" one huge guy shouted as he slapped a hamhock hand down on the bar. After the barback gave him a pour, he frowned and dribbled his drink onto his Van Dyke beard. "What is this?" he said, upset.

"It's mead," the bartender told.

"Oh, this is what mead tastes like? I thought it was another word for beer. Gimme a Bud." He left with a girl, a pear-shaped regular named Jami, anyway. There was some animosity between Matt, who has a little diapered squirrel monkey on a leash he carries around everywhere, and a pirate who had a parrot puppet mounted on his shoulder, and the guy would not just stop bothering Maurice (the monkey) with it. "Hey hey, monkey wanna poopie!" and all that. Worst of all, one of them wandered up to me — I swear, the guy was wearing a kilt, do pirates even wear kilts?—put some gold foil-wrapped chocolate coins in my tip jar and asked me to play a fucking sea shanty. As it turns out, I do know "Blow The Man Down" so I did it. He sang "yardarm to yardarm away we did go, give me some time to blow the man down" and the whole bar joined in, though they mostly sang blah blah mm-hmmm, blah doodie doo, blow the man down. Suddenly every song was a sing-along, and they were all "Louie Louie."

Around 11, Keith the Red swaggered in, all chest and floppy hat, to a round of hail-fellow-well-met assholery and backslapping and that really annoying thing that some of the dumber girls go for: the dip and loud smacking smooch. Around 11:02, Marius trailed in, too, looking beat.

"Ho ho," Keith said to Marius, "Me mates said that you're building a siege engine. How's that going for ya? Impress the ladies with its long shaft, did you?" One of the other pirates, this was wearing his grandmother's earrings and her babushka, leaned over and pretended to whisper to Keith. (He really just whispered "rhubarb rhubarb" but nobody else picked up on it.) "Or, should I say, it all fell a little short." And the pirates, as if on cue, laughed. I shifted to a minor key.

Marius ignored Keith, and his crew and went to bar. Keith slapped down some real money and said, "Grog for the miserable little bastard!" The barback looked sympathetically at Marius.

"I never turn down a free drink. Screwdriver," Marius said.

Keith waved and arm and the stool by Marius emptied, then Keith sidled up to him. "Listen boyo," said Keith. "I'm just jerking you around a bit. It's just a thing, you know how it is. Anyway, let me tell you about Annie. She's a great girl, I still carry a torch for her, in fact, but then again, I've got a girl in every port," he said. Then, louder, "And ten in the hold! Ho!" The pirates cheered. Back at Marius's tense shoulder he explained, "She's easily hurt. You be good to her. We'll be watching you."

Then it was "twelve bells" and Keith waved and crew left for Keelhaul, the captain strutting, the rest wobbling or shuffling. Then the real action began. The bartender said, "We have to do something about those pirates." Matt agreed; his monkey chattered in excitement. Cell phones were brought out, calls made, text messages sent, lots of buybacks and a booze luge promised. We had Jeremy, the actor (five episodes of Law & Order, he often faked a British accent when meeting women for the first time); John, who was a contractor but often went by Giancarlo and liked to talk about the time he lived in a houseboat in Italy (for two weeks); Gregg, the creative writing instructor at Norfolk County Community College (he had a short story published in Appomattox Review in 1993, and sold three poems to Hallmark Cards); Gaylord (a most unfortunately named Chinese-American, but he had good abs), and Tommy (one of the guys who pretends to be a cop because some girls like cuffs and guns). We all drank and planned and ranted except for John, who had to operate the crane.

The moon was full and the streets quiet, which was handy as the counterweight was a nine-ton concrete cube brought to town by barge from Queens. (Marius had a trust fund, but women aren't into people who don't do anything with their time or money anymore.) It was dark except for Keelhaul, which was flooded with lights and even a bonfire on the aft deck. It looked like they were roasting a pig.

More men were waiting at Marius's place. Some of them were even married, or attached. Jake and Lou are even gay, and with one another, but they had welding equipment and didn't like the Keelhaul invasion anymore than any of the rest of us did. Giancarlo met us with the crane, the lights on all the houses turning on as it drove up the winding road of the development and into the cul-de-sac. We had to send Tommy out to flash his badge and strike poses for the dress socks-and-sleeveless T-shirt set. They wouldn’t understand, for they were single back when being an insurance agent or having a four-door car (you know, it meant that you were a family man) was enough.

It took all night. Thank God Jake and Lou weren't drunk. The night was lit up in showers of sparks and we were all highly motivated. You know where this is going. By dawn we were done, and as the morning fog melted into summer sun, the black flags of Keelhaul mocked us from down in the harbor. Then we realized that we had nothing to fling, and Marius casually mentioned my piano, so the men took out the front of my house with axes and bats, dragged my wonderful old Steinway outside, lit it up, and flung that. It sailed over town like it had been blown out of a volcano and…fell about forty feet short of Keelhaul, splashing harmlessly into the shallow waters of the harbor. Then two things happened. Keelhaul left anyway, because obviously Port Jameson was fully of crazy motherfuckers, and the cops showed up.

But here's the important thing. Laws were broken, but not any major ones. We even had a permit for the crane, just not for those hours, and not for the trebuchet. Not that there are any laws against building a trebuchet, but there was reckless endangerment and malicious mischief and arson (we got that charge dropped; it was my friggin' piano after all), and even the DA knew what it’s like these days in the dating scene. Why on Earth do you think he was a DA? But we ended up in prison.

And in prison, Marius struck up this penpal relationship with this woman from Oklahoma. As it turned out, she was Raine McInery, the country star. From the 2000s, remember? She also had that commercial? Anyway, between a gold record and a VH-1 Behind The Music special, she was in a bad place, but she got involved with some historical recreation society and fell in love with siege weaponry. And with Marius. (Gregg wrote most of the poetry he sent along with his letters, but Marius did all the dirty talk on the phone.) And now we're all out and they got married. I was the best man. Marius moved down to Oklahoma with Raine, and they have some kids. Yes, Oklahoma is a bit of a Hicksville, and the kids get bugged sometimes by jackass racists, but you know when his son Artemis grows up I bet that café au lait look will work really well for him.

Me? I got this tattoo in prison. The teardrop, yes. No, I never killed anyone. I just paid this guy to do it, and it kept me relatively safe while in stir as well. Plus, it works, if you know what I mean. Chicks dig killers. Annie had a thing for them, as it turns out. Yes, that Annie. I usually have to cover it up when working, so don't tell your mother that I showed it to you, okay?

Keith the Red kept the party going for another couple years, but ultimately the pirate life is self-limiting. Just like the real pirates from the 1700s found out, you can't compete with the state. No private fortune, and Keith was burning through his pretty damn quickly — the pirate gimmick doesn't work if you don't have twenty guys around you who are dressed like, but not quite as well as you are — can compete with Navy money or prestige. After the wars with Iran and Libya and Greece, the only guy any girl wanted was a guy in uniform. Hell, there were more pregnant woman on the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan last year than there were in Port Jameson. Keith was eventually left as a captain without a crew. He turned the ship into a kid's play place, and last I heard was hoping to meet a single mom among his clientele. Kind of skeezy, if you ask me, but we're talking Keith the Red here. Some guys never grow up. Hell, even Barry gave up the martial arts shtick; I think he just turned to the personal ads after a girl who really knew Krav Maga offered to spar with him and broke his nose.

I guess I'm what you call a confirmed bachelor, but not in that gay way. Honestly, it's hardly worth the effort. I found out the hard way that most of the women who fall for ninjas or fake accents or ersatz CIA agents don't really have much to offer in the long-term, and life's too short. In the end, I just met someone while walking my dog. She had one too. Milo and Beezix really got along at first, though it took Sarah a while to warm up to me. I just smiled and was attentive. She asked me out for coffee one cold day. If we get hitched, I'll get the tattoo lazed off, probably. Maybe she'll get one inked under her eye instead though, she can be kooky like that. That's what I like about her.

                            #

You ask, finally, "Mister Segar, are we going to actually practice today?"

"Do you understand what I was trying to say?"

"Build a trebuchet?" you ask.

"No. Well, yes and no. What I'm saying is this: if you don't want to learn to play the piano for the sake of the piano, tell me right now. I'll give your mother a full refund for the lessons for far. You have to love it, not just be trying to get something out of it. Do what you love. So, what do you love?"

You smiled then, and reached into your pocket, pulled out an eyepatch, and slipped it over your left eye. "Arrrrrrr!"