Matilda Hits Rock Bottom
by Michael Paul Gonzalez

  We’re standing hand in hand, Mad Molly and I, watching the wreck of the Matilda slowly bubble its way to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. My first thought, standing shivering and wet on the rocks of Marina del Rey, is that this is not as cool as the movies make it seem. My next thought is, I’m going to have legal troubles very soon. Mad Molly is drenched, expressionless, her left eye dangles from its socket, her mouth is slack. I’m the only thing keeping her upright. I did this to her, made her into a harlot and then, afterwards, tore her, mutilated her, because she wouldn’t…couldn’t, do as I asked.

I look at her, so helpless and frail right now, and I hate her. I pull hard on her wrist and slam her against the rocks. She drops like a wet pillow. For good measure, I stomp her head twice, reveling in the wet squish as her head makes contact with the rocks. My prized possession, the first thing I ever made in my life, Mad Molly the Pirate Puppet Wench, she’s dead. I fling her towards the Matilda's mast - let her go down with the ship, retain some of her seafaring dignity.

It’s relatively early in the morning still, early enough that Stan – excuse me, Blackscarf, The Dread Pirate Captain - is probably drinking his coffee and planning a fine day of faux-piracy as he commutes. His heart will break or explode upon arrival.

I can’t believe nobody else is around to see this.

What am I doing here? There’s usually sculling teams from UCLA, joggers, dogwalkers, but right now it’s just me and the bubbling wreck. I blink hard to clear some of the running mascara from my eyes. Pirates used to be a surly lot, but thanks to Johnny Depp and his shitty movies, we’re all a bunch of half-drunk, flouncing nancyboys with bad hair extensions and scarves. What the hell am I doing here?

That’s my life beneath the green waves. Now six inches, now two feet below those floating Styrofoam cup shards and cigarette butts, that’s two years of mopping and sweeping the decks. Four feet below that in the galley, that’s where I got laid for the first and probably last time in my life. She was drunk. I was not. She left, and somehow (I’d like to think accidentally) unmoored the boat. The wind kicked up last night and the breakers were rough.

The boat hits bottom so hard I feel a slight vibration in my feet, a mere ghost of what I felt when the Matilda hit that first sandbar. Nothing like the vibrating rip as she rubbed on the rock jetties that make this Marina. This was a message from God. “Thou shouldst not have cavorted with thy boss’s drunken wife.” The waves lap against the mast and there’s Molly, her little foam arm snagged around one of the ropes. Her head lolls back and her mouth drops open, that little pink foam tongue hovering just below her single white felt tooth. I throw her voice out over the waves. “J’accuse! J’accuse!” Molly was a French Pirate. When I decided this, I don’t know. Another in a long string of miscalculations on my part.

“Hoooooly Shit!” What happened?” It’s Blackscarf himself, green and on the verge of puking at the sight of the Matilda.

“K-K-K-kuh-kuh-I-I-I-I-,” I say.

“What the fuck did you do?!,” he yelps, still staring at the wreck, moving away from me to get a better look.

Then the words stick and my jaw jackhammers open and closed, no sound escaping. Molly was my voice, my only voice, and she’s dead to me now. She could only speak if someone was watching us, and nobody was watching as the swells came in and threw us around . Nobody on the radio could understand my calls for help. Probably just sounded like static to them. You think Stan would understand – or care – about that?

I’ve spent my time working here as an invisible man. It’s amazing what people will say to you if you never talk. Eventually they forget you’re there, and you get to overhear things about salaries, backstabbers, hirings, firings, affairs, you name it. If you’re one-on-one with someone, you stay silent long enough and they’ll unburden their soul to you. Stan loved to use me as a verbal punching bag. He loved to poke and poke until my face was purple and quivering as the words jammed in my throat. Until last night, my silence has always made me feel shitty. In the case of Mrs. Blackscarf, silence was the ultimate aphrodisiac. She was three sheets to the wind and looking to get revenge on Mr. B for some unknown indiscretion. I know so much about him now. His fears, his insecurities, his micropenis.

All of these things I learned as Mrs. B got drunker and drunker, until eventually she revealed her desire to become “a puppet fucker.” It was strange, grasping her hips with one hand while I used the other to make Molly encourage us, almost a ménage a trios, I suppose. It felt so good at the time, and now I just feel like trash. I need a puppet to talk, to seem interesting, and last night, I discovered I couldn’t even get laid without the aid of a puppet.

“I-I-I,” I say to Stan. “Ju-huuuuuh-J-j-j-.”

“Shut up,” Stan mutters. “God Damn it, God Damn!”

Coast Guard ships are beginning to approach. Stan stomps in small circles around the rocks.

“Did you at least try to call for help? Oh, wait, you couldn’t have c-c-could you?!” He mocks.

“I fucked your wife!” I blurt, my eyes wide at my first complete sentence sans puppet in years.

It took the wreck of the Matilda to shake the words loose. For once, it’s not a stutter keeping me silent, only my mind racing for the next thing to say.