Ship for Brains (Cruise Confidential 2) Read online

  His huge puppy-dog eyes implored support from his bottle, not me. I let it be, knowing he would eventually explain. But for now, Shawn talked shop.

  “The gay boys are joining us after the show. Backstage is right above us, eh, so they’ll be here any minute. Tomorrow I’m gonna have you finish the auction. From now on, once I reach Goal One all auctions are yours. Bob’s your uncle?”

  “Definitely,” I replied.

  Auctioneers had two sales goals per cruise. The amount of these goals varied radically from ship to ship, based on a billion tangible factors and more than a little Sundance whim. To say the goals were aggressive was an understatement. Once Goal One was reached, an auctioneer could somewhat relax, but reaching Goal Two was the only way to remain employed. Our auction today had been dismal, but afterwards we sold an expensive lithograph from Marc Chagall, mercifully putting us over both goals. We had been very lucky.

  Yet Shawn’s face was creased with worry. His youthful features sagged and his puppy-dog look was all droopy, like a Basset Hound. He fished in his pocket for comically long minutes until pulling out his ubiquitous jar of Tums. He popped two in his mouth and chased them with a slug of Red Stripe.

  “You hit those a lot,” I prodded.

  “Yeah, I have an ulcer. Got it here on the Widow Maker. When I get on vacation back in Canada I’ll have it looked at.”

  “The food?”

  He chuckled, but shook his head sadly. “The stress.”

  “You really do look like hell. Your vacation’s in three weeks, right?”

  He jiggled the plastic bottle in his hand. “Yep.”

  We sat in silence for a while, sipping our beers. Shawn seemed enthralled by his Tums, while I stared out at the awesomeness of the wine-dark sea. I sighed with the beauty of it, and breathed, “Holy Chicken, is that one beauty of a sunset.”

  Slowly Shawn glanced up at me. “What did you just say?”

  “Hmm? Oh, I’m sorry. I learned that in Romania.”

  “I know they believe in vampires and shit, but you’re sayin’ they worship chickens, too?”

  “No, no, it comes from ‘what the chicken,’” I answered, smiling. “In Romanian, the term for ‘what the fuck’ is one letter away from ‘what the chicken,’ so you say that to not be offensive. You know, like saying ‘shoot’ instead of ‘shit’. So it’s a habit now, even in English.”

  “You are a strange man, Brian.”

  “At least I didn’t say Holy Cat.”

  Shawn paused, then let his shoulders drop in defeat. “All right, do tell.”

  “On Carnival, you aren’t allowed to use any language that invokes religion, whether praying or swearing. I thought ‘Holy Cow’ would be safe, but an Indian thought I was mocking him. I finally discovered that Holy Cat only offended my Born-Again roomie, and that was too fun to pass up. Surely it pleased my cat to no end. In fact, that’s why I made the switch to ‘what the chicken’. My cat was already too cocky.”

  “Let’s not talk for a while, eh?”

  “Now you sound like my ex-wife.”

  Time passed, and eventually Shawn broke the silence.

  “Did you meet the owner of Sundance during auctioneer training?”

  “No,” I said regretfully. “There were rumored Frederick sightings, but the way everyone was so scared of him perhaps it was for the best. They act like he’s the messiah.”

  Shawn tilted his head to the side. “So they didn’t show you Frederick’s formula? I’m sure you heard he is a genius scientist. Seriously, he consulted for MIT, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Cat’s sake,” I corrected.

  “He came up with a formula for making a profit from art, which as you probably know is among the highest markups in the world. He’s so confident of his mathematical formula for success that he shows it to everyone. If you can figure out the two dozen variables and shit, you are welcome to use it, he says. So, yeah, he’s got it all worked out.”

  “Why did you ask if I’d seen him?”

  “I wondered if he gave any clues about what’s going on. Sundance is shuffling a lot of people because of you associates. It means more competition for the auctioneers. They used to throw auctioneers to the wolves and, if you survived, you made a fortune and banged a lot of chicks. Now every month there is a new crop of kids coming out, complete with training and verified as beautiful or they couldn’t even get into auctioneer screening.”

  “Don’t feel bad, they still throw us to the wolves.”

  “For sure. But now survival means splitting commissions with associates. For every one auctioneer there’s now two trained and eager associates who want the job. Talk about stress, I can’t even get it on anymore. How am I supposed to do my job while politicking with cruise lines, politicking with international management, politicking with Sundance and politicking with my assistant?”

  “Nah,” I said. “Don’t worry; I’m way too inexperienced to be an auctioneer. My week in Pittsburgh involved little learning and more breaking, you know? I’m here to learn from you, yes, but in it for the long haul. I screw this up and I’ll never get my Bianca with me.”

  “Look man, you’re cool and all, but my ulcers are getting a lot worse with you aboard. This ship was one of the last to get an associate. I know two veteran auctioneers who failed G1 just twice in a row and lost their ships to their associates. Years of experience was immediately replaced by kids straight out of Pittsburgh.”

  “Twice? Holy Chicken!” I replied incredulously.

  “And you’re freaking me out with all that Holy Chicken shit!” he exclaimed.

  “Holy Chicken Shit,” I laughed. “Gotta be someone out there offended by that one.”

  “Laugh it up, mother clucker. God damn it—now you got me doing it!”

  Shaking his head angrily, Shawn continued.

  “Carnival Corporation is thinking about leaving Sundance and doing art auctions in house. We would go from one hundred ships to about thirty. What will they do with all those auctioneers that aren’t in the top tier? Fire them, that’s what. Screw it. I’m so burnt out I don’t care anymore. Screw the stress. Screw the auctions. From now on you can do most of them.”

  “I would love the opportunity,” I replied. “But seriously, Shawn, chill. Your auctioneering manliness has me humbled.”

  “Manliness?” he barked abruptly. “Ha! I’m so goddamn burnt out, I’m impotent!”

  “Whoa, Shawn,” I said leaning back and trying to lower his escalating volume. “I love to talk dirty and all that, but—”

  “Really!” he interrupted with tremendous agitation. “That’s why I need you to finish the auctions. I’ve only got one goddamn Steiner left to bang. Just one, and I can’t get it up anymore. I don’t want to be impotent. Help me out, man!”

  As Shawn shouted the last words, I looked up to see Denny and Jesse standing over us, sweat-glistened from their performance on stage. Blonde Jesse’s handsome features stared at Shawn in open surprise, whereas Denny had a smug look of satisfaction.

  “See?” Denny said to his partner. “I told you he would come around. It must have been Brian’s pretty eyes.”

  3

  At 3 a.m. my phone rang, and Shawn groggily ordered me to meet him at the purser’s office in two hours. At the last minute, credit was denied to the guest who had purchased the Marc Chagall lithograph. Because he was cleared for early debarkation, we knew he would likely be off the ship before 6 a.m. If we did not personally meet him and secure payment, we would lose both our sales goals for the cruise.

  I hung up and pondered the reality of being an art auctioneer. Mere hours earlier Shawn had climbed into bed, perhaps with that elusive Steiner, confident of a payday and a job. In a blink both were in jeopardy. While crew slaved seven days a week for months on end, I realized that auctioneers stressed seven days a week for months on end.

  Shawn was Rookie of the Year by age thirty. He was young, handsome, and monied, but he was also impotent, alcoholic, and ulcerated.
What was it about cruise ships that even the best job was a nightmare? For the first time I fully realized that I would never be in control of my destiny while at sea. Any such feelings of being on top in the past had been woefully incorrect, and now my idealized future promised more of the same. This was not a new insight, of course, but it still stung. Even with Bianca at my side, this type of life was going to be nerve-wracking.

  Fortunately, we found the guest in time and secured payment. All was well.

  Or was it? That day in home port our fleet manager, Mary Elizabeth, stopped by for a surprise visit. Despite my having three plus weeks left of unpaid training, she promoted me to associate. Lest I suffer the delusion this was because of Shawn already praising my abilities, Mary Elizabeth told me point blank it was only because Shawn was being sent to another ship. It was merely underperforming in sales, but to Sundance this was an ‘emergency’ and required the Rookie of the Year, vacation be damned.

  Poor Shawn. After a brutal eleven months of unrelenting pressure, he just wanted to pull back those last few weeks and ease me in. I had been looking forward to learning from the best. But instead his overwhelmingly earned vacation was denied indefinitely. He was leaving in three days.

  4

  There’s a lot of damn chickens in Key West. Not happy farm animals, mind you, but roving packs of thug chickens, ready for some shit. I seem to have a penchant for finding menacing wild animals in the strangest places. I was literally cornered on a rainy mountaintop by a rabid dog in Romania. I was nearly trampled by a wild stallion in the high deserts of Nevada who thought I wanted his fillies. And one dark and stormy night I was nearly killed when an entire horde of suicidal bunny rabbits leapt onto a lonely Nevada highway one hundred miles from nowhere. None of those are jokes or exaggerations, and I survived each incident a bit wiser.

  But really, on my first visit to Key West, to get attacked by a goddamn chicken?

  It was a beautiful, warm day when I finally had a chance to escape Majesty, even if only temporarily, in a port of call. Propelled by the increasing wind, thick clouds were approaching and threatened an afternoon shower. After a solid two hours of wandering, my leg was beginning to hurt. I still had not fully recovered from my knee cracking against the bottom of the pool during survival training. It galled me that I could not run regularly, as it was my preferred manner of keeping mentally sharp and physically trim. The rapid-fire changes of ship life kept me alert, and as for staying trim, I safely relied upon Majesty’s horrid food.

  I sat wearily on a public bench beside a heavyset, heavy-bearded man with more than a passing resemblance to Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. His tie-dyed shirt was still brilliant in the growing gloom of a tropical rain.

  Sudden pain jolted me and I jumped from my seat, blurting, “Ow! What the chicken!”

  A flurry of feathered wings disoriented me and a chicken raced away, flapping and squawking. I watched it rush across the street, past several parked cars, and safely into a parking lot. After a quick examination of the throb emanating from my foot, I concluded that the chicken had mistaken my toe for a worm. I sat down sheepishly, shooting an embarrassed peek at my neighbor. I wish I had yelled out something a bit manlier.

  “Would you look at that?” I asked him. “That’s a wild chicken. Here, in town.”

  The grizzled man just looked at me through his tinted sunglasses.

  “Why did the chicken cross the road?” I prodded, trying to salvage some dignity. He made no motion.

  “To get to the donut shop!”

  No reaction.

  “Look!” I urged, now thoroughly embarrassed. “That’s a donut shop across the street.”

  The man slowly rotated his shaggy head to review where the chicken had fled to.

  “The chicken ran over there? You know, crossing the road? That’s funny,” I defended lamely. He remained silent, however, and I was forced to move on because the humiliation throbbed worse than my toe.

  Key West is a very beautiful place. I loved the lush foliage of the trees and the brilliant, succulent flowers everywhere. Being a restaurateur, there were few things I appreciated more than a patio café surrounded by blossoms dripping from verdant trees above. Key West was loaded with them. I settled upon one such establishment for lunch, to be accompanied by an art catalogue. I sat at a small round table with a mosaic top beside a whitewashed fountain. The table sat crookedly upon the hand-laid bricks, so whenever the wind gusted the ice in my drink clicked and spun.

  This was exactly the kind of patio that Bianca and I enjoyed so much. We would waste hours sitting in a place like this, her with coffee and cigarettes and me with cognac and a cigar. In Romania we took advantage of the exchange rate and indulged in imported luxuries like fine Belgian and German chocolates for our afternoon talks. I missed those days, and not just because of my usual pining for Bianca. I was also pining for funds. There was no pay for the auctioneer screening or my time on Majesty, and I had just bought an entire new wardrobe to fit the job. Fortunately as an American I was blessed with credit cards.

  Ah, for those long afternoon discussions and laughter! Currently our interaction was limited to snippets of love letters sent via email. I had been ecstatic to discover that her ship visited Key West, but alas, our port stops were off by one goddamn day. Talk about frustrating! All I could do was read and reread her every charmingly misspelled word. English was Bianca’s third language and entirely self-taught via movies and music. I loved her misspelled words, but could do without the hip hop lyrics.

  “Look who’s here!” a voice called out from nearby. I looked up from my catalogue to see the dancers Denny and Jesse. Jesse, the head dancer, was short and of medium build, but oh what a build. This man had perfected the balance of being buff yet slender and smooth. His hair was a bit too blonde to be authentic but it matched his bright blue eyes well. He was, in a word, beautiful. Dark-haired Denny was the same height as his blonde companion, but nowhere near the same build. Rather, the outspoken backup dancer had a skinny kid-next-door look.

  “Hello boys!” I greeted. “Care to join me?”

  “Next time,” Denny said regretfully. “We just finished lunch and have a rehearsal.”

  “Oh? Recommend anything? Certainly I need whatever Jesse here is having.”

  “Jesse is having me,” Denny quipped. “Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.”

  “Denny!” Jesse gasped. “Manners!”

  “Oh, he’s gay,” Denny scoffed. “How can he not be with eyes that pretty? It’s just a compliment.”

  “Most men don’t think of it that way,” Jesse replied with an apologetic glance to me. “You’ve met Amor.”

  “Fret not, my dear dancer,” I laughed. “A compliment is a compliment.”

  “Well I don’t recommend the chef’s salad,” Denny continued with an overtly sour expression. “It’s loaded with pounds of ham and cheese, with only a little wilted lettuce. Ugh! There’s nothing I hate worse than limp carrots!”

  After hearing Jesse’s disapproving sniff, he wisely opted to change the subject by asking, “So, Brian, where are you from?”

  “Iowa.”

  Both men stared at me. I waited for the inevitable jokes about corn or, from the badly informed, potatoes. Nor would any references to corn-holing be beneficial at this juncture.

  “We owned a flower shop in Cedar Rapids!”

  “Wha- really? That’s where I’m from! What flower shop?”

  “The Flowerama on Beaver Street.”

  I was so surprised I nearly missed the irony of two gay men working on Beaver Street. Amazingly, that was only a mile from where I lived during my college years! What a small world. Perhaps Shawn’s stereotype was right, gay men really did always have a background in flowers.

  “You doing homework?” Jesse asked, eyeing my art catalogue.

  “Yes. We don’t know what to expect now that Shawn’s leaving, so I thought it would be a good idea to learn all the art in case I have to d
o an auction.”

  “You’ll learn it in no time,” Denny said, as they pulled away. “We’re thinking of becoming auctioneers ourselves, in fact. We can study together sometime.”

  “I’d like that,” I said, bidding them farewell.

  They departed, leaving me with one hundred artists and one thousand works of art. This was not as intimidating as it could have been, thanks to a merciless and rather unkempt professor from the University of Northern Iowa. My final lesson before graduating as an art historian required an insane amount of memorization in only one week. He showed us slides of fifty paintings, and we had to identify the artwork’s name, year, and movement, as well as the artist, his country, his teacher, and, when appropriate, the name of his dog. Yes, really. The professor loved dogs and would frequently highlight masterworks featuring canines, from English hunting hounds to Parisian poodles. Upon reflection, Dogs Playing Poker was conspicuously absent.

  Thus, my great opportunity to work with Rookie of the Year devolved into a college-like cramming before a final.

  Not surprisingly, my thoughts turned to my Bianca. She would memorize this stuff in record time. Bianca was a product of communist Romania, a flower that somehow managed to blossom in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. Her crappy society had required a significantly higher level of education than our United States of America, a point which humiliated me to no end. How funny that Romanians were forced to assemble the tools for bettering their lives but forbidden to use them, whereas in rich America the opposite was true.

  The irony of it all was that my chances of becoming an art auctioneer were slim without Bianca to help. She was the natural salesperson, not me, and smart as a whip. But while I was free to give this a shot, she had to support her extended family back in Romania. If she joined me before things were secured and failed, I would be damning multiple generations of Pops. No, I had to do this alone. Indeed, I felt more alone than ever.

  At sea, friendships were short and intense, then gone. Every cruise meant dozens of different faces from all over the earth. But Majesty was new to me because I interacted with only a handful of people. Now the one I was closest to, with whom I had the greatest expectations of learning my craft, he, too was being torn away.