Ship for Brains (Cruise Confidential 2)

by Brian David Bruns

  The chief officer regarded Bill in silence and the tension in the room chilled it until I nearly shivered. It was blatantly obvious that Bill had no intention of letting this man’s authority affect him in any way. No doubt the chief officer was deciding whether to back up his words with action.

  Amazingly, Bill took the initiative away from the chief.

  “We had only an hour to get the proper attire for my new associate,” Bill said gruffly. “You think I can continue to net almost half a million dollars a month with an assistant not wearing a proper suit? I generate more money than any other crew member on this ship, including the cruise director, and cost Carnival only the price of a cabin. The least you could do for me is not bother me when I am a mere hour late on a national holiday… my national holiday… all while knowing the ship isn’t leaving for hours.”

  The chief’s smooth, handsome face was the very study of an opposite of Bill’s blunt and pockmarked features, and his continued silence gave no indication of what was going on in his mind. Both men were undoubtedly superb poker players. I, on the other hand, was nearly wetting myself.

  “Besides, it’s not like we were on Bourbon Street at a strip club,” Bill finished tartly. “We had business to do.”

  Another long minute of icy silence gelled around us. I was completely motionless, but my wide eyes hopped back and forth between the two men as if watching a tennis match. They met each others’ eyes and refused to blink. To my astonishment, it was the chief officer who backed down.

  “In light of your… unique… position on board,” he began softly, “I will allow this transgression. In ordinary circumstances you would both receive a strike on your permanent record. I will let it pass.”

  I nearly deflated into a puddle right there.

  “Do understand,” the chief continued. “Should there be any further misbehavior, you may not receive the benefit of three strikes before being ejected.”

  “That’s fine,” Bill replied, and was instantly out the door. I was clumsily left behind, and sheepishly nodded to the chief before hurrying after Bill.

  As soon as we were off the bridge deck, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. “That was close!”

  Bill shook his head. “That wasn’t close. That wasn’t anything. I make so much goddamn money on this ship I can do what I want. There are only two departments on board that bring in as much money as I do, and they both have dozens and dozens of employees. He can’t touch me and he knows it.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “I do,” Bill scoffed. Suddenly he barked a laugh. “Ha! Not getting the benefit of three strikes, my ass! If it’s not on our record, we are clean. What you saw was pure bluster. Don’t let it get to you, unless you are as much of a pussy as I already think you are.”

  As we walked to our cabins, I stared at the back of William Shatner in wonder. I was in awe of this man, who had humbled the chief officer despite being completely and utterly in the wrong. There was no doubt about it: I was embarking on a fundamentally different aspect of ship life. Bill led me down the guest hallway on Riviera deck towards the bow.

  “You got any good suits?” he asked, eyes still straight ahead.

  “I have one nice suit,” I replied.

  “Designer?”

  “Yeah, it’s Pronto Uomo.”

  “Where in the hell did a farm boy from Iowa get a Pronto Uomo?”

  “In Iowa.”

  “Get more.”

  “They cost a lot, you know. I haven’t been paid in a long time. Why else wouldn’t I be handing out dollars at Rick’s Cabaret?”

  “‘cause you’re a pussy,” he answered. “But don’t worry about money. I’ll cover you until you get paid. We need good suits for you. New Orleans will have something. Our ports are Montego Bay, Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Cozumel, Mexico. I don’t think those are good options for you.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Bill replied without even a hint of a smile. “We’re here. This is your cabin.”

  Bill swiped the electronic key and pushed open the door of guest cabin 1202. He marched in, then handed me the key. Wide eyed, I followed.

  “This is my cabin?” I asked incredulously. I stepped inside and gazed about the huge awesomeness. There was about a ten foot walk from the two beds to the three full-sized closets. Yes, I had to walk over there. In crew cabins you merely turned around to get to the closet, or took two steps to enter the bathroom, which frequently had the toilet in the shower. More exciting than the sheer size of the room, however, was that it was actually decorated with warmth. Neutral and hotel room boring, to be sure, but it was a far cry from the cold white metal of a crew cabin. It even boasted a mini bar and a refrigerator. Now this, without a doubt, was the mother of all cabins.

  I strode over to peek into the bathroom, which was obviously designed for a couple. It gleamed with mirrors and polished brass. Surely there was a catch.

  “I thought I didn’t have to share a cabin,” I prompted. “Doug did sign off, right?”

  “He did. This is all yours.”

  “The two beds…?”

  “Oh, that’s Doug. That fat cow from the Spa was big enough to put his dick into, but too big to share a bed with, I guess. Whatever. He had the beds pushed apart.”

  “This is a huge cabin. I can’t believe it’s all for the associate.”

  “We’re important,” he said, shrugging. “Actually, Carnival tried to screw the associate in the past with a staff cabin, but after I sold a shitload of artwork one cruise I had Sundance bully them into giving me two guest cabins instead of one. Payback’s a bitch.”

  I noted my luggage in the corner. “Well, I can unpack whenever. We already saw the strip club, so what’s next? What’s our schedule like?”

  “I have to do the embarkation talk tonight at eight and ten o’clock,” Bill answered. “I’ll drop you off in the art gallery at six and you can hang out there until I pick you up at ten. Then comes the important part.”

  “At ten? Surely there’s not an auction at that hour?”

  “Of course not,” Bill answered irritably. “At ten we hit the crew bar.”

  3

  The art gallery intrigued me to no end, and I was anxious to see what it was all about, and where. When I had worked Conquest before, there had not been one. Bill led me through the ship to the main deck, midship. To my surprise, we were heading towards the Renoir Dining room. I had figured the gallery would be on Promenade deck with all the shops. He gestured to the small bronze lettering by the door.

  “The Picasso Art Gallery,” he said.

  “Pissarro,” I corrected.

  Bill paused before unlocking the glass fronted French doors. “What?”

  “It says the Pissarro Art Gallery,” I answered, indicating the sign before us.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” he said in wonder. “All this time I thought it said Picasso. Who the hell is Pissarro?”

  “A French Impressionist,” I explained. “Everything about Conquest is decorated with an Impressionist theme, no doubt because the home port is the French Quarter of New Orleans. Conquest has the Degas Lounge, the Monet Dining Room, etc.”

  “Where’s the Deg-ahh Lounge?” Bill asked, struggling to pronounce it correctly.

  “It’s the big lounge. You heard the cruise director pronounce the ‘s’, like in Vegas. It’s French, though, so it’s supposed to be silent.”

  “You really are gay, aren’t you?” Bill asked. “The only French a real man should know is ménage à troi and French tickler.”

  “Anyway,” I continued stubbornly. “If you look at the wallpaper in the lobby you’ll see a montage of all sorts of famous Impressionist works, including Georges Seurat and my personal favorite, Toulouse-Lautrec. You’d like him because he lived in brothels.”

  Bill just stared at me blankly, his hand still on the key. “Do we sell any of these guys?”

  “In Pit
tsburgh,” I replied. “But probably not on the ships, no.”

  “Then I don’t give a crap.”

  The elaborate glass and wood doors opened into a modestly sized room jam-packed with artwork of excellent caliber. The Sundance collection on Conquest put that of Majesty to shame. A series of easels in the center divided the room in two, and deep stacks of canvases leaned against every wall. In the far corner was a wooden desk above which was a shelf burdened with books. Should Conquest hit a rough wave I would no doubt be crushed beneath an avalanche of heavy art tomes. There were worse ways to go.

  “This is where you will be every sea day from five until ten,” Bill said. “Also after embarkation. You can sell to wanderers and do the paperwork here. If an important client is coming, I’ll be here, but otherwise it’s all you. You can handle that, can’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good, because it’s boring as hell. We have an art locker, too, and I’ll show you that tomorrow. Here is where all the expensive and nice artwork is located. All the Jean-Claude Picot crap is in the locker.”

  Bill fiddled with paperwork while I wandered the gallery and got to know the artwork. The lighting was soft, but sufficient, and at one spot punctuated by a portable light box set up to illuminate one particular painting. This was an original Tomasz Rut; a gorgeous and lusty painting of a naked woman washing herself by squatting over a tiny washtub. This was about as close as Bill would ever get to Playmate Seducing the Auctioneer.

  One whole wall of easels had a series of the gaudiest patriotic art I had ever seen. All six easels featured iconic American imagery, such as the Stars and Stripes or the Statue of Liberty, but the colors were so neon intense they burned my retinas. Each work was a 3 x 4 foot poster-sized print. In fact, they were posters, of obviously poor quality, but with gobs of intense reds, whites, and blues slathered on top.

  “These are the ugliest things I’ve ever seen!” I gasped incredulously. “They are posters with paint on em’. Who would buy that?”

  Bill wandered over to my side, chuckling.

  “What, you’re not a patriot?” he asked. “Oh, that’s right: you’re poking that Russian ho, aren’t you? You Commie bastard.”

  “The only ho I’m poking is your mother,” I snapped. “She asked me to remind you to put your coat on before you go out and play. My girlfriend is Romanian.”

  “OK, OK,” Bill apologized. “These are Peter Max 9/11 series mixed media. These are my bread and butter, man. Didn’t they have those on your last ship?”

  “They did not,” I answered, marveling over the audacious in-your-face imagery. “So these are from the great Peter Max. I’ve heard of him.”

  “These go for the mid 4000s,” Bill said. “So if someone is interested, make sure you let me know. If I sell one, I usually can sell two.”

  My eyes widened. “Four grand for a poster? Don’t try to bullshit me that this is a painting, because less than half of the poster is painted on.”

  “It’s not a poster, chump,” Bill said. “It’s a paint-over. Some dealers will say they are paintings, but that’s just stupid. Well, what’s stupid is people buying them believing they are paintings.”

  “Are you serious? Someone would pay four grand for this, thinking it was an actual painting? These are obviously mixed media.”

  “Trust me, in this business people fool themselves a lot more than we fool them. Most people have already made up their mind before they even come into an auction whether the work is authentic or not. I can’t tell you how many people have listened to me lecture about Peter Max for twenty minutes, then turn and buy a Thomas Kinkade print, only to later bitch that I lied to them about what they bought. I never talk about Kinkade at all.”

  “Now that I can believe,” I agreed.

  “People are stupid,” Bill said in very much the same tone that Lucifer had in Pittsburgh. “Most people call anything a painting: just like everyone still calls an album a record, even though nobody makes records anymore. But the name sticks, and some auctioneers don’t bother correcting people when they are wrong.”

  “This is not cool,” I commented. “Please tell me you aren’t one of those lying auctioneers I keep hearing about.”

  “I don’t lie,” Bill said simply. “I don’t need to. If I catch you lying to a customer you can bet your ass will be out the door in a minute. This gig is too good to lose for something like that.”

  “Unfortunately I am honest to a fault,” I admitted. “My life would be a lot easier if wasn’t. Nobody really believes Boy Scouts exist.”

  Bill continued, “Yes, some auctioneers lie. It’s funny what some people will believe. I knew an auctioneer who promised whoever bought a Max 9/11 would get to have lunch with Peter Max. Can you believe that? So he sold like twenty of them in one auction alone, and everyone lined up to provide their phone numbers so world-renowned Peter Max would personally call to set up lunch. See? People are stupid.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  “Listen and pay attention,” Bill ordered. “This is about the only training I’m going to give you. You don’t need to lie to people. The art is what it is. Just a year ago I was selling these paint-overs for two grand. Now they are four and a half. Max just keeps cranking them out, and people keep buying them. The demand isn’t that they are rare. The demand is that Peter Max himself is putting a personal touch on his already famous posters. It’s not some flunky doing it. See that signature?”

  He gestured to the unique artist signature on the bottom: a swirl of four different colors artfully twirled into a semblance of the name MAX.

  “That’s what he’s famous for. You’re not buying the poster, you’re buying that signature. It’s worth a lot more than just a pencil autograph.”

  “What do you mean, ‘he just keeps cranking them out?’”

  “These aren’t limited editions, so don’t sell them that way. They are unique mixed media, meaning something in between a poster and a painting. Actual paintings from Peter Max at this size cost over thirty thousand dollars… and that’s just his iconic images that he paints over and over and over. The business model is simple: you don’t have to be rich to have a personal Peter Max in your house. Will the value go up? Absolutely. Should you buy it for that reason? No. Buy it because you like it.”

  “So mostly Americans buy them, then?”

  “Not at all,” Bill explained. “Lots of foreigners like what America stands for. Before all this Iraq shit, anyway. But everybody likes the Statue of Liberty. Peter Max was instrumental in the refurbishing of the Statue of Liberty in the 80s. His artwork is in over one hundred museums around the world, including dozens of U.S. Embassies. It is estimated that two billion people saw his painting of a soccer player doing a scissor kick into the stars for the World Cup poster of 1994. He’s a living legend and anyone can have an original mixed media of his in their house. End of story.”

  I mused over the artwork again.

  Bill chuckled. “Can you believe someone stole one of these from my auction last month?”

  “What?”I asked, shocked. “How do you hide these? They’re so bright you can see them from orbit!”

  “Tell me about it. It wasn’t even one of these, but a full-sized Statue of Liberty that’s six goddamn feet tall. In the middle of the auction, with a crowd of about a hundred and fifty, this ballsy bastard just picks it off an easel and casually walks out of the lounge with it. I guess he figured it was so ballsy that no one would ever dream he was a thief. We searched the ship, but only found the discarded frame.”

  “I had always wondered about such things. I guess you can roll up a canvas in your luggage, eh? Damn, I wish I was the insurance broker for Sundance. Now that’s where the money is.”

  But Bill was ignoring me, lost in his thoughts and muttering, “Serious balls, man. More than you’ve got. Way more than Doug had.”

  “Bill? It’s bad enough you keep talking about my cock. Can we leave my balls out this?”

/>   “Anyone steals anything like that when you’re on watch,” Bill said. “And I’ll feed your goddamn balls to the fish!”

  He added with a mischievous grin, “Or worse; I’ll make Doug’s cow the official mistress of the Conquest associate.”

  Chapter 12. Ghosts and Echoes

  1

  After Bill departed, I wandered the art gallery. The art was fascinating, but of more potency were the memories the room evoked. For this room was once part of the Renoir Dining Room. There were two such rooms in the old days, this one starboard and the port-side Cassatt Room. It was there, less than a year ago, that I had been caught tasting a dish by my nemesis Gunnar. Seeing an opportunity to force me to quit, Gunnar had literally denied me food for a month by ensuring I worked through every meal time, and had numerous spies to enforce my compliance. Of course there was a moral to the story: only by starving can one be thin. I hated life, but I looked damn good.

  I stepped before the main entrance of the Renoir and nearly swooned as the memories flooded over me; of countless hours protecting my silverware from prowling gangs of waiters; of mind-numbing fatigue from endless months without a day off; of irate and irrational guests devouring troughs of food without any pretense of manners whatsoever. I had consoled dozens of crying colleagues in those days, including my assistant having an actual emotional breakdown in the corner pantry of this very dining room. Oh, what a nightmare that had been! The memory of her slender body wracked with sobs still haunts me.

  At the Renoir’s podium was a tall and superbly built man in a tuxedo, with blonde hair in a designer tussle. His handsome face looked bored and he fiddled with a pen on a map of the seating assignments. I knew him, and eagerly marched right up.

  “Well I’ll be damned!” I called. “Would that be Leo, the Other Sexy Bitch?”

  “Brian!” he cried, shaking my hand vigorously. “The Sexy Bitch! As always, I give preference to your greater age.”

  He noted I wore a suit rather than a uniform and asked, “You taking a cruise?”