Part 1: A book in progress.

I’m nobody’s hero.

The heroic thing to have done would have been peering conspicuously through that plastiscene shimmer and grabbing every stem of polished insecurity beneath all that foundation and blondness, pulling them out with a calm savagery. Look you fake fucking bimbo, if you’re too good for Becca, I’m too good for you. You’re a sorry painted clown excuse for equal opportunity PR, so how’s about you taking your P.O.S and shoving it up the familiar territory of your mascara wand, and me quitting, right now?

There are no self respecting exclamation marks in promotions meetings, only that mechanical, scripted sort of speech that you might expect to drift through the cracks of a sorority meeting with the dean. Think of Times New Roman as an accent, rather than a font. I would say all of this without emotion, dead pan like one of Tarantino’s gunmen. Maybe stop in the doorway and raise a knee like Captain Morgan.

But

I’m nobody’s hero.

I am, like you, a capitalist. I didn’t want to be a capitalist. I didn’t apply for a position of privilege, but one day in D.C., our proud nation’s capitol, I was given one. And a pastel blanket. And my very own number. In so many rows and rows of neonates, the lines at Wal Mart seem logical.

I didn’t apply for this. But I did apply for a promotions gig with “Liquor Concepts” (we’ll call it), the marketing firm for the Liquor Company responsible for nearly every middle shelf booze label. I found their ad on Craigslist: “Hey guys, Got a little Captain in you?” Compensation: $35 an hour.

I could be a marketing genius, but I’m not dead yet. Instead, I drop out of school and dress up like Captain Morgan on the weekends, make an ass out of myself, hand out free shit, go home and wait for New York to cut me a check. Drink responsibly, folks.

The interview was at Starbucks. I won’t call myself a connessieur, or even spell it correctly, but I am somewhat of a coffee aficionado. I have worked at half a dozen local independent coffee shops and not set foot in a Starbucks since I was a punk rocker because it seemed cool and…I was dejected and…in high school.

I knew it was her when she walked in. God doesn’t make hair that blonde. Her nails made clicking noises against the light. The baristas stood in a line waiting to incubate an order I would not be giving them.

I see a friend who picks up promo gigs for a living. Same interview.

“Hey man.”

“Oh shit, hey, how’s it goin’?”

“Good. Good. Captain Morgans?”

“You too, huh?”

“Yeah…you think that’s her?”

“That’s what I was thinkin’.”

He ends every sentence like it’s the punchline to a joke only the audience is supposed to laugh at. We walk past the counter like a coin that a vending machine rejects. No metaphor is perfect.

“Rachelle?”

So that’s it. I go home from the interview, which is not an interview for me so much as it is a formalized posing of the question Will you do this? And of course I can fit it in between my busy schedule of hating capitalism and buying things, and I know you don’t care because, well, you are a capitalist.

Becca is on the floor when I walk in, organizing torn envelopes into financial equations.

“Hey baby, how’d it go?”

I tell her and she smiles and I explain about the Morganettes and their corsets and how they’ll be going to the bars with me and she asks if they’re hiring and they are.

Solve for X.

I’m nobody’s hero.

My first night on the Captain job starts at Rock Falls Tavern, it’s a Southside bar that isn’t quite a dive but definitely walking the plank. No pirate jokes, they remind me.

They had me watch a video about the do’s and don’ts of being a rum icon.

1. Don’t be over the top.

(No speed)

2. Don’t be too mellow.

(No weed)

3. Be flirtatious

Not horny.

4. Make asinine facial expressions.

5. Don’t pretend to be drunk.

Similarly,

6. No drinking for 4 hours prior to your scheduled promotion.

This in mind, I walk in behind my corseted harem, who are blowing whistles and waving as though I am the fabulous consolation prize for being one of five drunks at Rock Falls (which I will later find from a gay foodservice philosopher is un-affectionately called cockballs in many circles.)

I throw down my treasure chest and yell “The Captain is here!”

I’m nobody’s hero.