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WHEREIN HANK
INTRODUCES HIS OLD HIGH SCHOOL mens black leather dress boots |
Listen to voice
over artist Tim George
read the
part of Hank Peabody
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www.timgeorgevo.com
Sean Heany, film and music critic for
The Daily Breeze, also known around town
for his pelican act."I'm Martha Stewart dressed as a pelican."
— Sean HeaneyI MET SEAN HEANEY in high school. He was a little person. I think he was technically a dwarf, but I’m no expert and he’s never really said anything to me about it. I just knew he was a huge, determined personality with a penchant for cracking people up or putting them down—depending upon what he thought their needs were.
In our senior year, Sean and I worked for the school paper, “The Horseman,” which at that age, struggling in what we thought was a Podunk high school, might as well have been the Paris Review. We were fleetingly cool.
Sean went on to be a moderately successful local journalist, writing about music and movies for The Daily Breeze, our local rag. Although more than a stringer job, it wasn’t full-time. So in the last couple of years, he had been developing his “pelican act” the same way some people develop a cabaret persona or birthday clown gig—like John Wayne Gacy without the boys in the basement. The difference with the pelican act was that learning to portray a pelican in El Fornio was, in many locals’ eyes, like being groomed as a Geisha.
“I hadn’t realized,” he told me one day over beers. “That it was such an important deal with the Indians. I just started it on a hoot, cause I was small and I liked pelicans. And,” Sean added. “I really hated the pelican mascot North High had going at the time. Weak!” he expounded with his arms out to the side.
To make it really work, Sean always felt the sea bird get-up should be at least “a two or three gig costume.”
The first gig ended up being his bit as the North High School Pelicans mascot. He would show up at football games and trot out on to the field with wings held high. He wasn’t paid much, but he was paid.
For the annual game with the El Fornio High Moors, Sean could be found ruffling his feathers while leading cheers. To some, he was traitor extraordinaire—after all, he had graduated from EFHS—and the sacrilege of cheering for North High was not lost on him.
“It’s a business,” Sean would toss back. “I’m a businessman.”
“Small business? I asked.
“Funny, bald man. But, yeah,” he kicked a foot on a chair, “I’m Martha Stewart dressed as a pelican.”
Eventually, when the Rusty Pelican came calling, Sean was able to add nearly year-round work to his pelican gig. All spring and summer long, tourists would roll into town, from up and down the coast, even Europe, China, Japan, and South America, expecting to be entertained by the Pelican Man.
“I don’t know how many countries must have a picture of me as the pelican standing next to some woman in a veil or visiting Chilean winemaker. I don’t care if they laugh or want to touch the feathers,” he told me once. “As long as they pay me, I can put up.”
And Sean had put a few fools in their place. Usually it was a drunk who wanted to take off the pelican “helmet,” as he called it.
“A complete no-no in my book,” he emphasized. “A complete fricking no-no. You don’t take Pelican Man’s hat off,” nodding. “You just don’t do it.”
In his favor, Sean Heaney garnered a lot of respect in the area. With the Fornay, it was a position of high esteem—a Hew Saxlapush Yan, or Pelican Diviner. Like the Chumash Indians to the south, who had swordfish cults in their history (mainly out on what is now called Santa Cruz island), the Fornay pelican cult were usually all men, a fraternity of believers. While Sean wasn't necesarily a "believer," he thought, why not borrow from it?
"Not that I can pronounce the damn name," he said once. "Huge Plexglass Man er whatever."
Just last year Sean and the owners of the Rusty went ahead and pulled together a nicely placed glass kiosk with a written history of the local pelican cult, including maps, diagrams, photos of cave paintings and take-home pamphlets that helped to pump up the Pelican’s rep.
Sean Heany in full costume in a detail from
John Graham's "The Pelican Talks to Jack."
Next to the paraphernalia in the kiosk was a dilapidated and seemingly ancient pelican robe that the Fornay had allowed to be exhibited as a kind of cultural shingle to the outside world. As if to prove how old it was, silverfish would dart in and out of the skin and feathers throughout the day.
With a few photos of the robe in hand, and about two weeks work from a local seamstress, Sean put his pelican costume in order, using sea gull and chicken feathers. Gradually, it was a living.
“I had to pay for it the first time around,“ he shrugged. “But the next year, I got to do write-offs. Think,” Sean said. “How many people in the country are writing off a pelican costume on their taxes?”
“Only about one,” I replied.
And off he went to another gig, half dressed in his costume, pelican helmet under his arm. In the search for the thief of Junipero Serra’s heart in a jar, Sean would become one of my biggest allies.
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