CAPTAIN PHINNEAS J.GRAYBEARD was in a proverbial pickle. Cabin wench “Voracious” Velia Vavoom, as always overflowing her bustier, pressed her cutlass to Graybeard’s crotch and sashayed into his face.
“Who be she?” she demanded. “I can smell her all over ye. Who’ve ye been sticking yer belaying pin into, Graybeard, ye corking brute?”
Graybeard was sweating bullets. They plinked along the beech floor of his cabin. “N-Now, Velia,” he stammered, “Ye’ve got me all wrong, ye have. Ye know ye be the only saucy wench fer me.” At which point, a tsunami of condoms suddenly did spontaneously explode from Graybeard’s pea coat for no known reason. Graybeard gulped and winced, awaiting the cold bite of steel to his man-meat…
Graybeard seldom found himself in extreme predicaments like this. In fact, he’d been rather, well, tepid, at least as far as pirates go. His colleague and mentor Edmund Teach, aka Blackbeard, was known to strand his victims on desert islands at his most merciful. But Graybeard always fancied himself more a lover than a fighter. In fact, after a recent raid on a Spanish galleon, Graybeard also marooned her Captain and crew on an island — Maui, where he partied hearty with the Spaniards at a fabulous beach resort, with surprisingly good wi-fi, for a solid week.
Alas, while well-loved by his scurvy crew, Graybeard never had much skill with the ladies fair. Lacking confidence, he would always fall into the perfidious “pirate friend zone.” Problem was, Graybeard’s very manliness — by that we mean his beard, of course — had prematurely turned a blindingly snowy white. His crew pegged the Captain’s age as older than the winds, even though Graybeard was only in his thirties.
Last year, Captains Graybeard and Teach found themselves at the Pirate Captains Conference in Terre Haute, Indiana. Graybeard had recently been rejected by a staggering beauty by the name of Anastasia Buttocktacular, a bitingly smart Russian peasant with perfect, alabaster skin, employed as a Pai Gow poker dealer in Reno. The defeat hit Beardsman hard; he was in gray whale-sized slump. “Dear boy,” Teach laughed roundly, “It’s your f*cking beard.”
“My… beard?” Graybeard caught a glimpse of himself in a reflection, and the reflected white blast from his glacier-like facial hair blinded him momentarily. Graybeard whipped out his handy homemade eclipse visor, which he kept at the ready for just such situations.
Teach indicated his own black-as-roof-tar beardnificence . “Let me show you my magic wand,” Teach intoned, as he handed Graybeard a tube of Blackbeard for Men beard color, its stamped silver foil label fulminating like a beacon in the dark.
And so it was that Blackbeard himself shared with Graybeard his secret weapon. Teach had gone gray himself and found that he wasn’t nearly as intimidating as he once was. Lately when he’d board an enemy vessel, pistols in hand, lit fuses burning in his beard, her crew would send up a cheer, believing Father Christmas had just arrived with prezzies. Thus Teach invented Blackbeard for Men, the instant, no-hassle, brush-on-in-seconds gray beard wiper-outer.
“But I’m allergic to beard dye,” Graybeard moaned. “I break out in hives worse than the time I ate nothing but hardtack and fish piss for two months straight on that stupid cleanse.“ Teach raised an e
yebrow and grinned. “Matey, Blackbeard for Men be not a dye. It be hypoallergenic and irritation-free, arr!,” Teach beamed. Graybeard gazed upon the tube in his hand like a gift from the Savior himself.
Well, wasn’t long, it was, before Graybeard became something of a ladies’ man. Emboldened by his suddenly deep, lustrous beard color, Graybeard’s self-confidence puffed up like a mains’l in a zephyr. With summer’s arrival, he even had his own cabin wench, and a dazzling piece of tail she was (and fer all ye who complain about objectification, here I must point out that she has a 3.9 GPA and is studying political science at Barnard.)
“Wait!,” Graybeard blurted. Feeling the icy metal blade against his sac, Graybeard had no choice but to tell the truth. “Ye be wrong, wench,” he began. “There be no woman I’ve been sallying about with. It’s women, plural. Aye, a right dozen or more in the last two weeks alone.” Velia jumped back just a bit, startled. “Let’s see… there was Mildred at the general store…” Graybeard continued, “Maggie, also at the general store… oh, yes, a Xing Li, the heiress, in the general store as well, but also at the Shantytown Pub… Arr, and then of course there was Flatulencia Munglethorpe — bit of a mistake, that one…”
On and on he went, with Graybeard proudly detailing his conquests to Velia. “Ye see, me lovely cabin wench, far be it from me to deny the women of planet Earth the glory, the majesty, that is my beard.”
Overcome with the resounding logic of Graybeard’s argument, Velia dropped her cutlass to the cabin floor. Next thing Graybeard knew, she’d jumped into his lap — one hand ripping away at her bodice, the other firmly clenching his belaying pin. “Oh, Captain, my Captain,” she purred, as Graybeard got down to business…
…Just as the aforementioned dozen or more strumpets all coincidentally converged at Captain Graybeard’s cabin at the same moment. “Arr!,” Velia vavoomed, “Come ye in, ladies… there be plenty of him to go around — I’m referring to his mighty penis, by the way.” That night, Graybeard’s ship was rocking from something other than the ocean.
