Ed note: To celebrate the release of his new novel, Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal, author Keith Thomson has provided Keep To The Code with a special exclusive interview.
Following the interview you'll find a review by guests John Baur and Mark Summers of Talk Like A Pirate Day fame as well as Keep To The Code's mini review.
And don't forget--KeepToTheCode.com will be giving away autographed copies of Keith's new book at this link (you must be a registered forum member) between March 13 and 17, in celebration of our first anniversary!
Reprinted from the June 20, 2005 issue of the
CAT FOOD WORKER SEEKS VENGEANCE AGAINST WHALE
by Keith Thomson, Staff Reporter
MONTEGO BAY, JAMAICA--Earlier this summer, Gus Openshaw, a forty-four-year-old Oakland, California cat food cannery worker began keeping an online diary (known as a "web log"--or "blog" for short) to enlist the public's aid in finding the whale he alleged had eaten his wife, infant son and arm. He has chased the whale into the Caribbean. In hope of spreading the word in these waters, he agreed to an interview with the Ahoy on the stern deck of his 180-foot superyacht.
Q: Mr. Openshaw, what is the origin of your conflict with the whale you seek?
A: Don't make me relive the details now. The short of it's the bastard ate my wife, kid and right arm. And he got away. For the time being.
Q: Should you succeed, are you concerned about facing charges of cetaceanicide?
A: That a social disease?
Q: It's the criminal charge for murder of a cetacean, or whale.
A: No, I'm not worried about that. See, there are these Indians in the state of Washington. They have one of those licenses you can get--because of a special religious dispensation or whatever--to kill one whale a year. They let me have theirs.
Q: Did they consult their deities and conclude that your quest was honorable?
A: No, they charged me $515,000.
Q: If you don't mind my asking, that's a lot of money for a cat food cannery worker, isn't it?
A: Yeah. It's literally the worst stinking job you can get. But I'd married way better than I'd deserved. And when she died, I was worth--including everything from the house to my boxer shorts--$515,200. Oddly, the Indian Chief priced the whale-killing license at $515,000, take it or leave it. I took it, gladly. I later learned that my wife's estate lawyer had "coincidentally" done some "legal work" for the very same Indians that very same day, for which he got himself a check in the amount of $51,500.
Q: Did he vault to the top of your vengeance list?
A: By the time I figured it out, I was too busy readying my boat to care about the lawyer. My thoughts were on getting down here to the Caribbean as a particularly fat sperm whale had been sighted near Tortola.
Q: How did you secure travel from Washington, not to mention a brig?
A: I took a bus down south and bought an old wooden cabin cruiser that was being held together only by the termites holding hands.
Q: I see you've upgraded.
A: A few leagues shy of hitting the Equator, I was dozing at the controls of the cabin cruiser I'd gotten in Texas. I'd been sitting there like a statue for three straight days. Suddenly I looked up and realized I was about to broadside a superyacht. I grabbed the wheel and spun for all I was worth. Unfortunately, my damn body keeps forgetting that, thanks to the blubbery bastard, I got no right arm no more. So I wasn't worth much. It was enough though to swerve just in time to miss burrowing into the superyacht's stern.
Q: Didn't she signal you?
A: Not even a honk. No one seemed to be aboard. It was doubtful everyone on a boat that big'd be below deck at one time. None of her lifeboats had been lowered. There was a copter still on the helipad. No swimmers were in the water around her. It seemed she was empty and adrift. Curious as much as anything, I flung a line from the cabin cruiser up to her stern and climbed aboard. My panting from the two-story climb (forgot again that I've only got one damn arm) was the only sound on the whole craft. I nosed around. Most of the staterooms had people's clothes and stuff in them. Nice clothes and crap. Dinner for a dozen or so--three-day-old steak and flat-as-my-fourth-grade-girlfriend champagne--was sitting untouched on the dining table on the foredeck. A bunch of clothes were splayed out on the quarterdeck. Weird as crap, huh?
Q: Can you explain it?
A: What I think is this: There's an old maritime tradition that when you cross the equator on a new brig, everyone--passengers, crew, chef, chihuahuas, whoever--jumps into the sea. My guess was that this champagned-up bunch must've stripped down on the quarterdeck and hopped over the rail without realizing they had no way to re-board. There were no ladders. These sleek superyachts oftentimes don't have them (it'd make them less sleek, I suppose), and the hulls are too sheer to climb up unless you've got suction cups tied up and down your limbs.
Q: So there were no survivors?
A: More than likely, everybody drowned. I'd say poor bastards, but truth is, I always feel a bit better on the few occasions people are stupider or have worse luck than me.
Q: How did you wind up with the yacht?
A: There's another old maritime tradition. It goes something like, "Lost at sea, belongs to me." It basically means if you're enough of an idiot to lose your brig, you don't deserve her, and whoever's the finder is the rightful keeper. I doubt that it'd stand up in court. And if it gets even within a whiff of a court, I'll probably take the rap for the missing passengers and crew. But I've got bigger fish to kill. With that in mind I cut loose the S. S. Piece of Crap (my cabin cruiser), which at that point was only afloat cause the termites were holding hands, and took the helm of my new superyacht. Unlike the cabin cruiser, she'll be able to keep pace with the bastard (sperm whales can do 30 miles an hour). Then turn him into cold cuts.
Q: So you crewed up?
A: I anchored the yacht off St. Kitts. I motored ashore in a lifeboat and pawned a bunch of Rolexes and crap like that I'd found in the state room. Netted $44,500 in cash. I found a couple older guys with harpoon experience. Best I could get otherwise was a couple drug addicts who might well have waited around the rest of their lives without getting another berth. When you go into a fish-stinking seamen's bar on a small island and offer cash for a whaling job of uncertain duration on a boat you won't name, the best and the brightest sailors don't usually line up with their resumes.
(above) The bar where Openshaw hired his crewmen, scrimshawed by one of the harpooners, a West Indian named Flarq. (Scrimshawing is an old whaling art form on whale's teeth). As it's been two years since his last whaling job, Flarq has been forced to scrimshaw on cocktail napkins.
Q: Is the whale by any chance white?
A: No, a lot of folks have been asking that though. I don't get it. Is "white whale" some kind of literature reference? My bastard's about seventy feet long, weighs about sixty tons, which means he'd be pushing the max if they had Big & Tall stores for sperm whales. He's battleship gray and like a prune in texture, with a big fat box-shape head thirty feet long with a blowhole on the top, just like in the cartoon shows.
Q: Do you have a name for him?
A: I been calling him "Dickhead." Everybody always laughs and says that's a witty reference. Hell if I know why.
Q: How have you been tracking him?
A: I've posted wanted posters in lots of ports and stuff, plus the blog, blubberybastard.com, lets folks post sightings and spread the word. One lady tapped into a NASA satellite to help look.
Q: Have you had any luck so far?
A: Only bad. Only good thing that's happened was a crew of pirates tried to kill us.
Q: That was good?!
A: To make a long story short, the lone surviving pirate agreed to serve as first mate.
Q: Why would you give a murderous pirate a job?
A: I reckon that sometime during the voyage, he'll probably try to murder us or worse. He knows these waters real well though, and the rest of the crew's real taken that he owns a brothel, so all in all, he's about as good a first mate as I could've hoped to get.
Q: Is it true that you and your crew were imprisoned in an unrelated incident?
A: Yeah, we were taken to a tiny desolate island and tossed inside a dungeon built four hundred years or so ago by the Spaniards as a place to let prisoners, if they were lucky, get nibbled to death by vermin, but we managed to escape.
Q: How?
A: Listen, I got to go. A shrimper just radioed that they sighted a pod of sperm whales a scant five leagues west with a straggler who's real fat.
Due to Mr. Openshaw's hasty departure, there was no time to take his photograph. His harpooner provided the above scrimshaw done on paper plate. Mr. Openshaw also requested we post the following.
About the reporter: Keith Thomson reports on vengeance against whales for the Daily Ahoy. Earlier this year St. Martin's Press published his first novel, Pirates of Pensacola.
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Gus Openshaw's Whale Killing Journal Review
By John "Ol' Chumbucket" Baur and Mark "Cap'n Slappy" Summers, Founders of International Talk Like a Pirate Day and authors of "Pirattitude!"
Move over Melville! Outta the way, Ahab! In the world of obsessed whalers, Gus Openshaw and his crew of misfits (and that's being kind) are second to none as they chase a rogue whale across the Seven Seas.
Click the cover to order Gus Openshaw's Whale Killing Journal via Amazon.com
"Gus Openshaw's Whale Killing Journal" is Keith Thomson's hilarious follow up to his side-splitting debut novel "Pirates of Pensacola" (published in 2005 by St. Martin's Press.)
The "Journal" is the adventure -- written as a blog -- of a bad-luck captain on a single-minded sea chase after a rogue whale. The whale, dubbed "the Blubbery Bastard," took off Gus's arm and killed his wife and son. Vowing revenge, Gus uses the insurance money to buy the wherewithal and hire a crew for a cross-ocean jaunt with one whale-killing permit to exact revenge.
In point of fact, whale killing is outlawed by various international treaties and frowned on almost everywhere. So Gus knows he's not going to be a hero to anyone when he sets off on his quest. But this is personal.
Before long Gus and his crew are being chased by environmental lawyers, the navies of a couple of countries (eventually a U.S. Navy carrier group is in on the chase), an international arms merchant, and the lovely queen of a whale-worshipping island who may be in love with Gus.
While the book is not a "pirate adventure" in the strictest sense of the term, it's certainly a piratey story, beginning with the fact that Gus, a worker in a cat food factory before the whale came into his life, knows he's breaking the rules in search of vengeance.
The crew also includes one recently retired pirate. In fact, Nelson gave up pirating after his crew attacked Gus' boat and he had his arm cut off in one of the funnier scenes of the story. Really, it's funny. Might not sound funny, but it's hilarious.
Also on board are the aptly named Stupid George, the relentlessly stoned Moses, ship's cook Duq, who in a previous occupation was a torturer, and the harpoonists, Flarq and Thesaurus. In his free time Flarq does scrimshaw on whatever surfaces are available, and his drawings are dotted throughout the book.
Then there's Sybil, the beautiful queen of Conch, a whale-worshipping island in the Caribbean (she's known to her subjects as the Princess of Whales,) the evil Admiral Vurman of the Tortolan navy who has his eye on Sybil and the throne, Dealer Dan, the arms merchant who doesn't take kindly to people giving away his whereabouts, and Mutherford, the lawyer for Bluepeace determined to make Gus pay for killing whales including some he doesn't remember killing.
Through it all, Gus remains fixed on his goal, even though it means putting the simmering Sybil on the back burner. It's one of those stories that leaps from bizarre adventure to unlikely coincidence with abandon, the sign of an author confident enough in his skills to risk taking some crazy leaps, knowing you're going to stay with him to see what happens next.
And the jumps are part of the structure of the story. "Gus Openshaw's Whale Killing Journal" was written not as a novel, but as a blog. As he was awaiting publication of "Pirates of Pensacola," Thomson started the blog as a marketing tool. He wanted to create something that would draw the attention of people who love humorous maritime writing and help convince them to buy the novel. In that it was successful, as "Pirates of Pensacola" had a huge advance order that far exceeded the publisher's expectation.
But a funny thing happened. The story took on a life of its own and took the author places he hadn't expected.
The structure of "Pirates of Pensacola" took as long to develop (about a year) as the actual writing, and the care certainly shows because "Pirates of Pensacola" is as funny a novel as we've ever read.
Author Keith Thomson. Photo courtesy MacAdam/Cage Publishers.
"Gus Openshaw's Whale Killing Journal" grew in the telling. Thomson didn't have a particular storyline or end in mind, he just wrote installments as they came to him, shaped at times by the reader feedback he was receiving. So the plot tends to veer rather wildly from port to port and adventure to adventure.
It's presented as the daily posts of Gus as he chases the Blubbery Bastard and encounters and miraculously overcomes a most unusual array of obstacles.
Blogs have turned the Internet into everyone's open diary, and most are about as interesting as a 15-year-old girl's meanderings about what boy she thinks is cute and feverish discussions of whether Green Day is better than Maroon 5. (Duh! Of course they are!)
The difference between most blogs and Thompson's is that GOWKJ is funny -- wildly, howlingly funny.
And the story does reach a satisfying conclusion for all except those who don't deserve a happy ending. We don't want to give away anything, so we'll just offer the disclaimer, "No actual whales were slain in the making of this book."
Perhaps our favorite conceit in the whole story is that Gus seems totally unaware of Melville's "Moby Dick." When he gets a new ship he writes that he's confused when people ask if he named it the Pequod, or wonder why people compare him to someone named Ahab.
"Gus Openshaw's Whale Killing Journal" beats the classic "Moby Dick" on every count -- it's a lot shorter than Melville's book, has more amazing adventures, is far less likely to be assigned as school reading, and is much, much funnier.
John Baur and Mark Summers are authors of "Pirattitude!" and creators of International Talk Like a Pirate Day. They note that they also have an ongoing story on their blog at www.talklikeapirate.com. While they're not counting on anyone ever publishing it, they wouldn't object if someone wanted to.
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KeepToTheCode.com's View:
Keith Thomson's novel Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal opens with a humorously unlikely premise:
"Don't make me relive the details just now. The short of it: a whale ate my wife, kid and right arm. And he got away. For the time being."
The journey that unfolds over the next 270-plus pages continues in the same vein, resulting in a novel that's equal parts Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Through a series of highly improbable coincidences, Openshaw, assisted by his semi-able-bodied crew, endures prison, romance, a great deal of violence, betrayal, exploding squid and an island populated by whale worshippers, all the while pursuing the "blubbery bastard" he holds responsible for his situation.
The book, which began its life as a series of blog entries, is a quick (most chapters are only a few pages in length) and very entertaining read. While we wouldn't recommend Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal as suitable childrens' bedtime story reading, if you're in the market for an always silly and sometimes laugh-out-loud tale, this may be just the book for you.
Details:
Published by MacAdam/Cage Publishing
Hardcover, US $23
ISBN 1596921722
Release date March 24, 2006
Buy Gus Openshaw's Whale Killing Journal via Amazon.com.
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