Click Button to Play: Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)--Red Hot Chili Peppers
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This stranger comes to town and he is skulking around the bordellos and the pool halls. He is half Black and a quarter German and part Mexican and part American Indian. He is a sailor, and he comes from the sea.
He was literally born in the sea. There is no verifiable proof of this, but most stories indicate that he was born in the belly of a whale. His parents were both ingested by the whale, but he was spouted from its blowhole onto the deck of a pirate ship, wearing a chest-plate and a cape.
After he killed half of the pirates, including the captain, the surviving members of the crew agreed to give him command of the ship. He was 4 months old.
By the age of one and a half years, he was 6 feet tall. He wore a whale bone on a lanyard around his neck. Carved into the bone was the word "Mama" and the image of a creature with the body of a woman and the head of a sperm whale.
He comes to town and he skulks around the blind alleys and the docks, and kills a longshoreman during a game of craps. He is caught. He goes to prison willingly, because he is interested to see what life on the land is like. He finds that life on land is like living in a cage accompanied by an old drunk with a wooden leg. He picks the lock of his cell with the whale bone, grabs a bull whip from one of the guards, and kicks down the door to outside. He is laughing. He is a manic, endorphin-loaded giant with the brain of a 3 year old.
He gets on his ship and sails off to Japan, where he is bathed by geishas and learns how to cook dumplings. He gets a tattoo of a girl's face on his bicep. The girl has red hair, grey-green eyes, strong cheekbones, white skin with golden freckles.
Four years later, he returns to the town that imprisoned him. He is greeted by all as a figure of almost regal stature. They have erected a statue in his absence, showing his oversized baby face on a multi-tentacled, winged body wielding seven knives and four swords and a shield. The statue stands on a cloud and is covered in fresh flowers.
He walks over to the tavern and finds a table in the corner. The bar is crowded with people singing and dancing wildly. He leans back in his chair and exhales a plume of smoke from nowhere--he hadn't been smoking, but the smoke billows out of his lungs and up to the ceiling. The ceiling fans get caught up in it and slow down.
He feels two beams of jade-green light upon him, and then he sees her face. She is wearing a faded peasant dress with her red hair tied up in black ribbon. She is carrying two very large, whole, poached salmons covered in dill sauce. Her face goes slack as she approaches him and drops the platter on the table. She stays there as he eats. He glances up at her periodically. When he's done, he smashes the table into bits and makes violent love to her. After several hours of this, he leaves.
He sails to Morocco, where he takes over the royal palace with a force of ten men and three wooden spears. When he leaves the country, he installs his cat as the new King. The cat enjoys a successful and properous reign for three years but then gets distracted by an errant shoelace and is run over by a rickshaw.
He travels to Iceland, where he builds gigantic pyramids out of mud bricks transported from the Nile. He walks across Northern Europe, planting man-eating flora and excavating the cave-dwellings of prehistoric man/dinosaur hybrid creatures. He meditates for three years, and becomes unsure of whether he is a man dreaming he is a two-brained, translucent space creature that derives its strength from the electromagnetic field, or a two-brained, translucent space creature that derives its strength from the electromagnetic field dreaming it is a man. When he is finished meditiating, he builds a telescope and sails to Antarctica, where he can better study and name all the seas of the moon.
Around the Cape Horn, his ship catches fire and most of his men are burned alive. He catches fire several times himself, but continues to steer the ship and maintain the sails. The ship, still burning, wrecks on the Hermite Islands. He walks over the 40 dead, charred bodies and begins construction of a small hut from the wreckage and bones. Months later, he is rafting up the Amazon Basin.
On a beach in Peru, he looks up at the moon. Having looked at it so often, it appears to him to have not just one, but many faces. He looks upon the many faces of the moon, the many glowing seas that he's studied and dreamed of. He remembers his names for them, names he invented so that he could know them by heart.
In the moon, her face is white and golden.
