The Polynesian Sailors and the Great White Dick

“Brandon! Get up!” Mike hissed at the end of my bed. Sometimes he liked to sneak into my room. I’m not exactly sure why, but I like to imagine he was pretending that he was back on his island home stalking prey. At first this had scared the shit out of me, but since I had come to know him I had learned to take it as par for the course. As such I had taken up the habit of sleeping fully clothed.”I’m tired Mike. I have school tomorrow,” I murmured into my pillow.

“I have to go out to West Port.” West Port was where the boat he worked on was anchored.

“Why?”

“I have to take some booze to some friends of mine. I’ll give you some if you go along.”

“I’m thirteen, Mike.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell.”

“I just want to go back to bed.”

“You know I get lonely when I have to drive by myself!” I turned, put my face into my pillow so that I wouldn’t wake anyone else, and yelled until I felt that my voice was going to go hoarse. I got up, knowing that there was no way he was going to leave me alone until I went with him. I walked very quickly to my dresser and put on a pair of socks, cursing under my breath.

“Yo Brandon, why are you already dressed, man?” Mike asked, surprised to find me already in a t-shirt and jeans.

“Because my mother is dating a guy that barges into my room at all hours of the god damn night and won’t leave until I got out to god damn West Port in the middle of the god damn…” realizing I had already said that it was the ‘middle of the goddamn night’ I finished with a resounding, “God damn it!” as I put on my last sock. Though I was in no way joking Mike looked at me for a moment, decided to take my words as a joke and laughed a hyena-like laugh.

When we got into the car, Mike put on a Pantera CD and blared it at full volume. He had dropped me off at school earlier that day playing the same CD. I put my head against the window and fell asleep.

Five minutes later I was awoken when Mike used the driver’s control panel to roll down the window, and my head tumbled outside and banged against the door frame. I should also mention that when I am woken suddenly I make several noises, some of which resemble pig oinks. Upon hearing these noises Mike laughed uproariously, and all chance of falling back to sleep was lost.

I looked over at Mike, with his finger still depressing the “window down” button, and rolled my eyes. Such were my experiences with Mike that I didn’t even bother commenting when he said “Yo Brandon, I told you not to go to sleep.”

For the next hour Mike explained to me exactly why Pantera was the greatest musical band ever to exist on the Earth. To drive this point he used his favorite phrase “freaking primo.” We had just gotten to West Port when Mike finished explaining that if Pantera wasn’t “the most freaking primo band” to ever exist, then I had permission to shoot him. If there had been a gun around I might have screamed “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!” and sent him back to the island hell he came from. Unfortunately, I just got out of the car and told Mike to please hurry up.

“Come on Brandon, it’s just to the end of the dock!”

“Mike… can’t I just wait here?”

Like a little toddler begging his mother for candy Mike said “Brandon, come on!”

I kicked the tire of his car, said “god damn it” and followed him, with my arms tucked underneath my armpits. I wondered if any of my classmates were walking on an ice cold pier in the middle of winter, following the islander their mother met at a Karaoke competition, so that he could give some booze to some friends. Not many, I figured.

I tried to wait on the dock, but Mike objected. Apparently he would also get lonely if he was forced to walk alone from the boat deck to the cabin without me. Saying “god damn it” one final time I followed him.

He opened the door to the boat’s cabin, and a great cloud of cigarette smoke came out, wafting me in the face, and causing me to cough for a solid minute before I was able to go inside. When my eyes stopped watering, I opened them and looked around. Seven Polynesian fishermen looked back, with cigarettes slung low in the corners of their mouths.

Mike began to talk to them. He did not speak to them in his native language, as the sailors would not have understood it. He did not attempt to speak to them in their language, as he didn’t speak it. He didn’t even try to speak to them in English. He spoke to them in the only language Mike ever speaks to anyone he meets from an island: he spoke Mikese.

Unfortunately, Mikese cannot be written verbatim. It can only be explained. Mikese is a combination of small English words, whoops, hand gestures, and several bird-like noises usually followed by a second or two of stomping. I don’t know if this actually helps him communicate, but I do know that his audience usually nods when he speaks this language at them.

I coughed at the five minute mark, as Mike handed the booze out to his “friends” who continued to play poker and smoke as he spoke Mikese to them. I coughed again at the ten minute mark. At the fifteen, I tried to exhale one of my lungs through my throat. No luck. Mike wasn’t going to leave until he was ready.

At thirty minutes, as Mike made some crow like sound and pantomimed a running action I finally said “Hey Mike, isn’t it about time to get going?” It was the first time I had spoken. The seven Polynesian sailors looked at me under the dim yellow glow of their single 40W light bulb, like it was the first time they had realized I was there.

“Who that guy, Mike?” the English was broken, but it was good enough that Mike should have felt like an idiot for carrying on in his broken islander Mikese song for half an hour.

Not willing to give up his routine, Mike replied “That just my step-son.”

“He a big kid,” another of the sailor’s replied, suddenly intrigued. They were right. At the age of thirteen, I was already six feet tall.

The conversation was suddenly out of Mike’s hands. “How big your shoe?”

Mike would have interjected, except he didn’t know. “Uh… it’s a size fourteen.”

Apparently, Mike hadn’t known this either because he suddenly blurted out, “Jesus Brandon! How big is your penis?!”

At the age of thirteen, on a school night, wearing a t-shirt and jeans in the cold, in the middle of a group of several slightly intoxicated and possibly high Polynesian sailors, the islander my mother had met at a Karaoke competition had suddenly asked me how big my penis was. I bit my tongue, trying to think of what I was going to say to that kind of question that could properly convey how disgusted I was when the Polynesians suddenly became very excited.

“That true Mike?”

“We see?”

“I always heard white man have big dick!” shouted one of the sailors, who was so distracted by the thought of my giant white penis that he had tipped his cards forward enough for the two men next to him to see. Not that they were looking at his cards. As far as I could tell everyone’s eyes were glued to the front of my pants, trying to examine the exact dimensions of my penis through the denim material obstructing their view.

“Okay, Mike. I’ve had enough. Let’s go home.”

Mike would hear nothing of it. He had recaptured his audience. Picking up his Mikese song once more, he proceeded to pick up several objects with which he could construe to the drunken sailors before him the exact scope and magnificence of his step-son’s penis. At one point he found a sausage link in the kitchen area, placed it between his legs, and walked around using it to show how difficult it was to walk with a penis as enormous as mine.

Blushing, because there’s only so much talk about your own penis you can handle in a group of eight men, especially when one of those men is your step-father and he’s walking around with a sausage leg pinned between his leg, I turned to the door and walked out. The howling laughter of the Polynesian sailors followed me. “Ah ha ha ha ha! Bye bye big penis boy!”

“He he he he he! You make sure you no trip over you big penis, big penis boy!”

When I arrived at the car I found the door locked. I waited an hour for Mike to come back from the boat. When he did he was in tears from laughing so hard. “Jesus Brandon. Why do you have to be such a party pooper?” As if nothing had happened, Mike unlocked the passenger side door and resumed his discussion of Pantera.

The moral of this story? Fuck Polynesian sailors… and fuck Pantera.