Pirates and Ghosts: Santa Barbara, Volume I.

So me, Aye Aye, The Knife, and the rest of the gang arrived in Santa Barbara on Thursday afternoon. After a pleasant dinner and an opportunity for both sets of families to meet, our gang decided to hit the town and see what kind of fun Santa Barbara offered. We cabbed over to a hip bar with a live band, forked over twenty bucks to get us into the door, and grabbed a seat on the back porch. For what seemed like an unacceptable amount of time, we watched waitresses completely ignore us as they served everyone else in the bar. Finally, it began to dawn on us that we weren’t being ignored, we actually weren’t being served! Hell! So J.Ro and The Knife headed up to the bar to order drinks for the group, only to be told that there were orders not to serve our group. Apparently, the doorman had warned the others that one of our party was “too drunk.” Who??? Well, turns out it was J.Ro himself. Was he drunk? Sure. Was he “too drunk?” Shit. He politely explained that if they didn’t want to serve us, then fine, but if they’re going to take our money at the door but not serve us, well that’s just bullshit. Suprisingly, logic prevailed, and they served us our drinks. We spent an hour or so bitching about the whole scenario and how this bar sucks and how dare these bastards take our money and so forth and so on, and then realized there was probably no reason to be there, so we left.

We headed to another bar, an Irish Pub, I believe. It was late. Probably thirty minutes or so until last call. There was scattered girls around the bar. And this combo – pretty ladies in a bar at the tail-end of a booze-drenched night, with no time to hit on them – is sort of the self-destructive, creative muse that gets Aye Aye and me inspired for Bar Comedy. And when the muse appears, you can’t deny her. You just can’t. So we decided to introduce Santa Barbara to The Poop Street Players. The Poop Street Players, you see, are an old familiar in the Bar Comedy Chronicles, a drunken traveling performance art troupe that specializes in poop jokes. But not the funny ones.

So Aye Aye would walk up to a group of normals standing around the bar and sheepishy tell them that, “My friend has a joke for you.” Suspicious, these strangers would turn their gaze in the direction that Aye Aye was pointing, to see me standing there, shoulders shrugged, head down. “No, no, that’s ok,” I’d squeek, meekly staring at the floor. Normally, at this point in past scenarios, the strangers would encourage me to tell them the joke. But apparently Santa Barbara is not yet ready for comedy of such caliber, and they just looked at me, growing impatient to get back to their conversation. So Aye Aye would keep waving me over until finally I was ready for my big break.

I looked up at the strangers, loosened my shoulders a bit, exhaled, and said, “I have diarehea.” And then turned around, bent down so my ass was pointing at them, shook my should elbows front and back while waving my ass left and right, and made poop sounds. Diareaha sounds. The kind you might make when you were 3. One-tenth of my current age.

Brilliant comedy like this is hard to describe in paragraph form, so I’ve provided a small script for your assistance.

FADE IN.

INT. IRISH PUB – NIGHT

The night is winding down and the bar is slowly clearing out. Soon it will be last call, the lights will come on, and the place will finally empty out until tommorow. Pockets of revelers gulp down their drinks in a hurried frenzy to order one more before it’s too late. BONES stands off in a corner, looking apprehensive and out of place. AYE AYE walks up to a group of strangers and interrupts their conversation.

AYE AYE
(shy)
My friend has a joke for you.

STRANGERS
…

AYE AYE
Come show them your joke.

BONES
I don’t wanna…

AYE AYE
Come on. Show them your joke.

BONES
Uh, ok.

Bones walks up to the strangers. Closes his eyes. Breathes in and out as he gets into character. Looks up at them, and…

BONES
I have diarehea. PHHHHHHHHHHZZZZZZZZZZZZ……….

STRANGERS
…

BONES
PHHHHZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ….

FADE OUT.

Brilliant? You bet it is. But the humor fell on deaf ears. The strangers looked at Aye Aye and me for a moment, then shook their heads in disgust and turned back to their previous conversation. We headed over to the next group of bar-goers and tried the joke on them. We even gave them the premium stuff:

“I’m Mark McGuire with diarehea!” (pretends to swing bat while making diarehea noises)

They weren’t impressed. We tried it on a few more groups. Not one laugh. Hmmm. Tough crowd. Outside maybe? We headed outside, where Aye Aye would try to stop folks as they walked by, and the ones who did would be treated to a piece of Shakespearian-esque dialogue. “I have diareha. Phwwwwwwwwwww!!!” The laughs never stopped coming. Nor did they start coming. And with that, my fellow thespian and I were introduced to the harsh realities of California – even the most brilliant preformance artists aren’t guaranteed success out west.

California, shame on you. You let the Poop Street Players slip right through your fingers…

…So then it’s about 3am and Aye Aye and I are standing in the hallway outside the hotel room, smoking cigarettes and he’s helping me go over my lines for my wedding toast. See, being that The Knife and I are brothers and trusty companions to Dre, he asked us to both be his best man. And being that The Knife and I really enjoy working together and we wanted to really show our big bro what he meant to us, we decided to make it a dual-toast. And being that I was sitting in front of a laptop as we were formulating the toast over the phone, and being that I’m a fucking loser, the toast was written in pure screenplay format. So Aye Aye is reading The Knife’s lines as I’m spitting out mine from memory, and then we spot two girls down at the end of the hall sitting outside of their room. Hmmm. Interesting. Two girls, two dudes, 3 am… A brief status check was in order…

STATUS CHECK
2 Girls.
Age: 19-23 range
Condition: Poor. Too young

Well, ok. Too young. So that’s that. Nothing left to do about that, I guess.

Except to annoy them, of course.

So, without further adeiu, Aye Aye crouched down and I hopped on his back. As he stood up, I held onto his back like a baby Gorilla would do on it’s mom. What do you call a baby gorilla anyway? Does it have a special name? Is it egg? No, that’s a baby bird. Not important, I guess.

Aye Aye began to trudge down the hall with me on his back and holding the script out in front of his face so he could continue to read his lines. We headed towards the girls in this absurd position, rehearsing our lines, until we reached them. They were sitting in chairs, and there just wasn’t room enough for us to get by. They looked up at us. Not surpised. Not impressed. Just annoyed. One of them was crying.

“Excuse me,” we said, as if we weren’t a dude with another dude on his back reading lines to a wedding toast at 3am.

Frustrated by the interruption, they scooted their chairs over, and Aye Aye carried me past them to the stairs. Laughing our heads off, we hauled ass up the stairs to the next floor, ran down the hallway, down the stairs on the other side, then back to the original hallway to do the same thing. I hopped back on Aye Aye’s back, and we walked up to and then past the girls reading the lines. Again, no response. Hmm. They must really love this joke. Let’s do it again. Back up the stairs, down the hallway, down the stairs, onto the back, and down the hall past the girls. No response.

Again!

And the forth or fifth time by, these girls must have just been completely blown away by our performance art…

“Give it a rest, guys,” they said. Or something equally awe-struck.

Wow! They were really digging it, man! Give it a rest? Shit! They loved us! Maybe Santa Barbara wasn’t such a hard comedic nut to crack! Of course, I hope it was our comedy that they loved, and not just me and Aye Aye in general. Cause, well, when tommorow arrived we’d be leaving this hotel, never to see the young girls again. I’d hate it if we broke these little girls’ hearts, you know?

Now that we knew these girls were fans of The Poop Street Players, we felt that we should maybe turn up the heat a bit. Aye Aye came up with a brilliant plan, and we ducked into our hotel room to set it in action. Moments later we returned to the hallway in costume.

I had covered myself in a white sheet.

A ghost! Fuck!

And Aye Aye had covered himself in a white sheet. But, he was also under my sheet, behind me. Invisible to our anxious audience. I walked down the hall towards the girls, arms outstretched, making ghost noises. Ooooooooohhhhhh…. Ooooooooooohhhh…. As I neared the girls, I stopped. Then the oooohhs turned into sounds of pain. I began to grunt and pant and squeal. As I did so, Aye Aye crawled under my legs from behind me, and slowly began to poke his sheet-covered head out from under my sheet.

It was a ghost giving birth to another ghost!

Holy shit!

The girls looked over at us, completely unimpressed. By now, the sad one had stopped crying. Her post-boyfriend break-up blues replaced by sheer annoyance. And as they watched, Aye Aye continued to crawl out from under my sheet until he was a complete ghost. He pulled himself up to his knees, a mini-ghost, and made high-pitched, childlike “oooohhhh” noises. I continued my adult “oooooohhhh” noises. It was a phantom family symphony! Then he held his hand out into the sky, this new sky, this unfamiliar sky to such a young innocent apparition, and blurted his first words: “Mommy!” I held out my hand and grabbed his. We then turned back from the girls and headed back in the direction of the hotel room, Aye Aye wobbling along on his knees. A mom and son ghost, hand in hand, heading back home after their first successful haunting together.

The girls didn’t say a word.

We stood in front of our hotel door, still drapped in sheets, laughing like maniacs. Oh man, a ghost giving birth to another ghost? Oh that’s good stuff!!! What next? Then I felt a strange presence behind me. I turned around and found myself face to face with the last thing in the world I would have expected.

A pirate.

Yep, a pirate. It was some big dude in a white long-sleeved shirt with fruffly (is that a word?) fabric lining the sides of his open shirt and lining the cuffs of his sleeves. String was laced between the sides of his open V-neck. He had a dark handle-bar mustache and a pony-tail. He was tall. He looked down at us and said, “Ok guys. We’re getting some noise complaints. You need to go inside.” Apparently he worked there. Or, he’d mutiney’d the hotel, but still felt compelled to keep it operational.

And just like that, for the first time in recorded history, two ghosts were scolded by a pirate.

We heeded his advice and headed inside. But we just couldn’t stop there. Aye Aye began to put on a suit. He was going to go down to the front office in full formal apparel and apologize to them for the noise complaints, but explain that we were The Poop Street Players, a traveling performance art group, and this is what we do. But then, we decided that, well, The Knife had booked these rooms under his name, and maybe it wouldn’t be so cool to stick the guy with a hassle of apologizing for all this bullshit in the morning. So we called it quits and called it a night.

Well, it was a stupid night indeed. One day in Santa Barbara, and already we sucked. But, that was going to have to be the end of it. The following morning, The Knife and I would be getting into full Wedding mode, helping out with whatever Dre needed, trying to herd folks from one destination to another, and somewhere in there practice our toast. The idiotic bullshit was over. It was time for the bros to get to work, and to show Dre’s new in-laws that he comes from a trio of brothers that mean the world to each other. And the next couple days were going to be exciting and busy and happy and fun as shit. It was wedding time.

To be continued…