BIG PEN BEN
Missing, or happily doodling away?
BY SAM TOOLE INDEPENDENT INTERN

MICHAEL GALVIN/The Independent Brannigan: "Customers have been tormented, I've been tormented and we want him back!"

While working at The Nantucket Independent as an intern this summer, Sam Toole was given the opportunity to try and unravel a mystery that continues to baffle at least one prominent islander. This is what Sam discovered. Sometime in April a customer gave Sea Grille bartender Richard Brannigan a big pen as a present. He used it for everything, and people even signed checks with it. Soon enough, customers began to specifically ask for the big pen. Even after Brannigan went on vacation in May the pen was still there when he returned, which was unusual because pens are inadvertently taken from restaurants all the time.

But then, on someone else's shift, the pen disappeared. Brannigan and his customers were devastated that their favorite pen was gone. It ended up, however, that a few customers had mistakenly taken the pen all the way back to Texas with them. When they realized what they had done, they FedExed the big pen right back to Nantucket, priority shipping. It seemed as though everything was okay again at the Sea Grille - but it was just the beginning of the real mystery.

A few weeks later the pen disappeared again, but this time it was not an accident - it was a pen-napping. The first correspondence came in the beginning of June. It was a letter with a picture of the pen sitting in a shirt pocket that said the pen was all right and there was nothing to worry about. Afew weeks later another letter came, this time, purportedly, from the pen, Big Pen Ben. He wrote that he was having a grand time with his new friends. Enclosed was a picture of Ben at a pig roast.

It is important to realize that during the disappearance, Rich and his customers had been searching and asking about Big Pen Ben nonstop. But with these new correspondences, investigations were stepped up a notch. An advertisement was taken out for the missing Big Pen Ben with a promise of a reward.

On July 10 a new sort of sinister correspondence arrived - a bloody note with a picture of Big Pen Ben being held at gunpoint and a broken piece of him taped to the note that said that if anyone wanted to see him alive they better bring 27 dollars and six cents in a Budweiser bottle to the Miacomet Golf Course a week later. Rich put up the money, and a week later, went to Miacomet. The kidnappers were not "man" enough to show up, however, so Rich decided to take another step toward saving Ben's life by putting up a reward poster in the Sea Grille.

Soon, another ransom note arrived, threatening Big Pen Ben's life yet again if 28 dollars and 43 cents were not coughed up. With this note there was a picture of him and a small wooden club, obviously an indication of what would happen to Ben if no action was taken. On August 10, however, a different type of note arrived, saying that the two threatening notes were imposters and Big Pen Ben was loving life and hanging loose. Enclosed was a picture of him and a gorilla friend chilling on a porch.

Since then, as the saying goes, that's all she wrote.

"We've had no updates since then," Brannigan said last Friday. He said he's been doing a little undercover work of his own. "I've got a couple of suspects, but they're pleading the fifth."

Customers tried to cheer up Rich a little and gave him a new elite force of big pens. He says these have "helped ease the pain of the missing pen" but are no substitute for the original. He now has Huge Pen, Hugest Pen's Li'l Brother, and four of Big Pen Ben's cousins. He does not leave these pens behind at the restaurant; he takes them with him after each shift. "I carry them with me at all times," he notes.

If anyone has knowledge of the whereabouts of Big Pen Ben, contact the Sea Grille at 325-5700. It has been a difficult summer, prompting Rich to say: "Customers have been tormented, I've been tormented

and we want him back!" I