Just How Dense Stupid George Is
June 29
The crew and I had plenty of time to swap stories, there being nothing else to do in our dank little cell. Most popular: Duq's tales of his interrogator days in the Vietnamese prison camps. Flarq had a cool one about missing with a harpoon but still taking out the whale with his fists. Unfortunately, nobody had any decent stories about breaking out of a solid stone cell with a slit of a window a rat couldn't get through (we tried, to settle a wager) and with a thick steel door a rhino couldn't budge. You knew it was getting slow when someone asked Stupid George for a yarn. George claimed that, before a hip injury (which he got somehow on the toilet) forced him to retire, he was a Gaming House star, fighting under the name Rockhead George.
"Rockhead George was a legend," Thesaurus snorted, "No way's you him!"
Flarq also knew of Rockhead George by reputation. "You's either lying," he told George, "or even stupider than we's thought."
I ought to explain Gaming Houses. Caribbean's full of them--really large huts, or tiny arenas, depending how you look it. The two main events: single-stick (two guys stand a few feet apart clonking each other in the helmets with poles, points awarded by a referee) and head butting (like it sounds, contestants butting against one another like rams till somebody falls). These places are spectacles, with bleachers stuffed with fans that make those crazy European soccer freakos look like a church congregation and bets changing hands so fast you'd think the bills got wings. Rockhead George won the Lower Antilles Head Butting crown four years in a row.
"If you're really Rockhead George," said Duq, "let's see you ram your head into the cell door." Sick bastard just wanted to see George's brains splatter.
"He'd have to be an idiot to do that," laughed Moses.
Before everyone could agree, George charged the door and lowered his noggin. And that's how we escaped the cell.
Still, we got three armed guards, a pack of foam-spewing dobermans, and a machine gunner in the watchtower to get past. And even if we do, there's no way we know of to get off the island. Maybe my new favorite crewman George'll come up with something.
P.S. Here's a scrimshaw of Stupid George that Flarq did on a coffee mug (we have obviously got to get some damn whale's teeth soon).
