Cost: $3.00US
Page Count: 328
I love me a good travel narrative. In Search of Captain Zero involves friendship, surfing, a beat up travel vehicle, and a good storyteller. It has all the elements to make up a travel narrative that is worthy of coveted space on the bookshelf.
In Search of Captain Zero is the recounting of the travels by the author throughout central America in search of his friend, Christopher, who has seemingly fallen off the face of the planet. Christopher had always been a free-spirit whom the author suspects has gotten lost on purpose. So, he packs up the beat up van and his surfboards and heads south from the states to find his friend. The stories of his journey are well told, humorous, and pretty vivid. The first few hundred pages of the book are a great read. Weisbecker does quite well in painting verbal pictures that are extremely well done. Then...well, then you get to the end.
There is a spoiler in here, so you have been warned. Anyway, after a long ass time of searching, Allen finds his buddy Chris. Here's where I was completely deflated. Over the course of the narrative, Allen reveals his friend to be a caring, free-spirited, soul-surfer type guy. The first three quarters of the book had me really looking forward to the eventual meeting. Well, do we ever meet Chris. He is, to the relief of the author, still alive. But...but...he's hooked on CRACK! What the fuck? I was so disappointed to know that the guy we had been searching for throughout the entire book was a fucking scumbag crackhead. I was gut-punched. I can only imagine what the author had felt when he discovered this elegant fact about his friend. The ending of this book was such a downer. I like happy endings, not cracky endings. This still pisses me off.
But, overall, I think In Search of Captain Zero is worth a read. It does exactly what a good book should do: elicit an emotion. That it did. That emotion was pissed-offed-ness. I'm pretty sure that's not a real word...but, it should be.
Read the book. Get mad. Fuck Christopher, you crackhead.
