I simply couldn’t believe that my cousin had committed suicide. Upon reading the words, I could no longer picture his face. Instead all I saw was my uncle. I knew how much my uncle loved his soldier son, how proud he was of him. My uncle was a joyful man, and it was easy to imagine his excitement when arriving at their Texas lake house for a planned visit with his son. Oh, the anguish he must have suffered when not seeing his boy, but a note and a missing rifle. I had nearly choked when I read that he finally found my cousin on the other side of the lake. How long had he searched the woods for his only son, how much pain did he endure?
Though not the soldier my cousin had been, I was a fighter. How awful that it took something so terrible, so final, to remind me of who I was. But my awakening was nothing so clean and inspiring as a light bulb brightening over my head. Oh, no. It took the form of burning anger, of violence.
In a daze I returned to the dining room for the lunch shift. Waiters rushed around everywhere, but to me everything moved in slow motion. Time seemed to have changed. Time was precious, I suddenly realized, and I was wasting it working like a slave and not getting any closer to my Bianca. Our plan to come together had failed, and I wasn’t doing anything about it. I was trapped, and approached the toil by selfishly complaining and hating the universe. I should instead be trying to find a solution. My smoldering anger flared brighter. I was furious at my cousin for his selfish act, for his not trying to find a solution.
I looked at the clock and realized that over half of my set-up time had elapsed. Whether I liked it or not, I had another mind-numbing lunch to plod through. My partner had not yet checked in—again. He had been late too many times, frequently arriving after even the guests had, and was worthless even after he finally arrived.
I marched over to the assistant maitre d’ and forcefully demanded a new partner. He blew me off. As if on queue, my partner, a skinny Jamaican named Roy, sauntered in smugly. Like always, he knew I would do all the set-up in his absence just to make my own life easier. To the manager, Roy absurdly protested that he was never tardy, and even called me a liar.
“Eh, rasclat!” Roy called, “Why you give me hard time? You lie!”
Despite my aversion to confrontation, I found myself poking my finger into his chest and yelling, “You shut the hell up!”
I stormed off towards our station. Roy followed, shouting insults at my back.
“Why you make drama with boss? I never late, mon! You always late! You the trash!”
I was almost shaking with emotion, my disappointment and rage at the world overcoming me. I didn’t want it to win. Everyone else had already foreseen the outcome of my internal war: the balcony above filled with spectators and a circle formed around me and Roy.
“You blood clot!” Roy screamed. “I could kick your ass right now!”
I don’t actually remember pushing Roy over the table. I will always remember him tumbling across the broad circular surface, flailing legs knocking aside glasses and plates. He dropped off the far end in a cascade of falling silverware.
Cheers and jeers exploded throughout the dining room. Roy struggled to his feet and rushed back to reengage with me, but I was ready. I grabbed a handful of his vest and brought my arm back to hit him in the face. Suddenly a huge man leapt into the fray and pulled us apart.
“Stop it!” a Croatian waiter shouted, getting between us.
“You want some, eh mon?” Roy screamed. “I give it!”
“Shut up!” the Croatian boomed. “Look at his face, man! For Christ’s sake, he’s gonna kill you!”
So it was over before it started. Roy backed down, then limped away, shaking his head. Still seeing all through a red haze, I stared at the waiter whose table we had destroyed. He also happened to be Jamaican, and cowered as he rushed to fix his station. He quivered, wide-eyed and terrified. He was scared of me, I realized. What kind of animal had I become? What was it about working the sea that made people so vastly different?
The assistant maitre d’, of course, just reminded everybody that lunch was in five minutes.
Ship life.
It was the lowest, most awful moment of the lowest, most awful time in my life. Only then did I understand how men could be so cruel to each other, how we could be conditioned to do anything.
Bianca led me back to reality, back to sanity. She may have shrugged off my help when she was down, but when I was lost, her love and hope guided me through it all. She was amazing. Her next email, sent before my blowout, finally reminded me of who I was:
“Thank you for offering to send me your ear, my artist, but no Van Gogh sensibilities for me! You know by now, I hate creepy stuff, so you should better have some absinthe and, if you can’t find Gauguin, pick up another artist to channel. Me lovesick over you, and I took the masochistical risk of looking at our pictures of Egypt. My mother developed them and sent them to the ship. I stared ten times at them and I haven’t had enough. So, don’t you worry, my love, I’ll make love to you with the same passion even when we’ll be two disgusting mummies talking Hungarian. Check how me adapt to your creepiness.”
Bianca’s letter was nothing dramatic, but merely a response, a snippet of our dialogue. But this was not the dialogue of a monster, of a man engulfed in violence and cursing the world. Our dialogue became my lifeline, pulling me out of the pit. Her emails vacillated between commiseration and encouragement. They were reminders that some annoyances were universal and to stop granting them significance greater than they deserved. Mostly, though, they were documentation of the reasons I needed to find a better path for us:
“Another day on ships! I got bingo the first sitting. The sons of a bitch, 16 of them, conquered my station, with mucho fricking kids, who were drawing on my table cloths with butter, dressings, ketchup and other semiliquid items, shouting and moving similar worms. Bamboclat, papa, I swear I'll never have kids, God forgive me! But when I saw those caring sick mothers smiling with patience and comprehension watching the bug's flic-flacs I felt like throwing all overboard.”
“My guests are fat bitches. Today they shot my brain with their incomparable stupidness. They came late and asked everything from that sick menu. I had to take their horrible pictures with 4 cameras, then they asked extra appetizers, then dressing for Caesar salad (1000 island dressing!), then 2 lobsters each. One of them was sick so she asked me bring sea sick pills, for being able to eat mucho more.”
“Luckily, the 4 cows never showed up again, I won't get any money for the 2 days they scrounged my brain, but better like this than driving me nuts. A day before yesterday I got kicked by the revolving door, so half of my plates were on the floor, making the noise of the century. Dan was there, but he didn't say anything, because just few min ago my guests were telling him how I was the best waitress they've ever had. But the next day he was about to break my neck, because he caught me washing the soup spoons in the hand wash sink. Meow!”
“Of course my garbage guests were unhappy with everything: why the iced tea is so strong, why the steak is so hard, why the dessert is not good, why they didn't have the water, iced tea and bread in time. Next day, I spent two hours extra in the dining room, to make sure everything is prepared. Things went perfect until main course time, when we got short of ice and iced tea, and we couldn't find anywhere, all waiters were running similar headless quails. And for everything to be well done, my babaloo assistant, switches the trays in the galley and she brings me 8 lobsters instead of 8 prime ribs. Upside down, papa! I had just 10 min to set up the tables for the second sitting. I run with the show plates to the dish wash, when I come back, my silver rack was gone. Somebody stole it. I had to steal somebody else's butter knives, and I had no silver for main course, so I left the appetizer silverware for the whole dinner.”
“There are so many couples on this ship, most of them married, and they seem so happy and complete. Most of them met on ships and got married, and share everything. I didn't use to care about couples until now, but now, when I have you and
I need you so much, I see them otherwise. Christmas is coming, and I make deal with you. You celebrate with me Christmas and put M&Ms under my tree, and I promise to dress every Halloween as the sexiest vampire you've ever seen. But don't scare me too bad with your creepy stuff.”
3
I have always believed the definition of luck is when opportunity meets preparation. So it was with my fateful meeting with Daniel. He was the hotel director of Legend—second only to the captain himself and arguably more important. But Daniel was one of only four Americans onboard, and the only one in management fleet-wide. Though numerous levels above my station, he befriended me out of sheer loneliness. Most importantly, however, Daniel helped me abandon the dead-end of restaurants and apply as an art auctioneer on ships.
The auctioneer hiring process made Carnival’s methods look porous, and to get into the seven-day auctioneer screening of Sundance at Sea, I had to go Romanian-style. Thus, while slaving literally 100 hours a week on Carnival Legend, I lied, cheated, stole, and bribed my way into Sundance’s good graces. After a gift of a duty-free $100 bottle of cognac, my resumé passed from Legend’s auctioneer up to his fleet manager. She reviewed it and granted me five minutes on her next visit, which was weeks away. After schmoozing her successfully, which did not involve shagging her ship-style as I had been advised, she recommended me for a phone interview with her boss.
All was set for me to leave Legend and become an art auctioneer, but for one horrible, heart-rending catch: my contract had to naturally expire. No resigning. No quitting. No firing. Sundance did not want to ‘poach’ employees from Carnival. I would be stuck as a whipping-boy for many, many more months. I honestly did not think I could make it without walking away from it all.
Then a miracle happened.
Out of the sheer, blue sky the maitre d’ asked if any waiters wished to sign off early. Amazingly, Carnival had too many crew members in Miami queued for a ship, and would void anyone’s contract if they would just leave immediately—as in a couple of days. There were only a few spots available and, upon hearing the announcement, ran to the restaurant’s balcony and cried at the top of my lungs that if anyone got in my way they would be utterly destroyed.
So in a couple of days, I stepped off Legend as a free man in Port Everglades, Florida.
In fact, the miracles were just beginning.
Bianca’s ship, Carnival Miracle was scheduled to arrive from its maiden transatlantic crossing in Jacksonville, Florida that very night!
I was in a rental car in a flash, and fretted the entire 350 miles up the Atlantic coast. The weather fought me tooth and nail, but after surviving the last thirteen months at sea, I’d be damned if I let a tropical storm stop me.
Port security did, though.
I waited hours in a cold, driving rain well after dark, about two hundred yards from the ship. There was no way to communicate with Miracle, for the port itself hosted brand-new features that did not yet include telephone or even radio. Even worse, as had happened in Conquest’s maiden crossing, the new ship’s internet was not functional. I didn’t even know if Bianca received my emails stating I’d be waiting outside. I resolved to wait all night, to not leave that spot until either she left Miracle or Miracle left port.
Then I saw a flicker of movement far in the distance. Someone was walking down the empty road, passing into each globe of light, only to drop back into darkness. After several painstaking minutes I finally recognized in the backlight a waitress in uniform.
Bianca ran the last hundred feet through the icy drizzle. We crashed into each other and embraced for a long, long time. I could hardly breathe, though from the crushing hug or the emotion I didn’t know. I didn’t care. Sometimes even Hollywood ain’t got nuthin’ on real life.
4
My driver refilled his Styrofoam cup of red wine again, only this time also enjoying a slug straight from the bottle before nesting it near the parking brake. Music from Barry White, the paragon of booty music, crooned from a cassette to romance us. Minutes crawled into hours in the stifling Bahamian night. Wine was downed and yawns were stifled. Duncan, the taxi driver, finally set aside his Playboy magazine and inquired once more about my strange quest.
“When’s this woman of yours getting off?” he asked.
“Probably a little after midnight,” I answered tiredly.
“Heh, getting off,” he repeated crassly, like a teenager happily discovering his own crude joke. All in one he chuckled and sipped and chortled until it turned to a gasp. Apparently his latest dousing of wine had gone down the wrong way.
“You aren’t worried about cops or anything?” I asked him.
“What, you another uptight American scared of everything?” he asked, dismissively. “Ain’t gonna drive off no cliff, mon. We at sea level. Lighten up, yeah?”
“I’m light, I’m light!”
“So, you flew to another country for four hours with this babe?” he continued skeptically. “She’s not free ‘til after midnight, and back on board working at five thirty in the morning? Are you crazy or just stupid?”
“A question for the ages,” I sighed. “But really, what’s an extra few hundred miles when you’ve fought to close a gap of several thousand? And last night? Well....”
“She’s that good in bed?”
“Romance, Duncan,” I chided with a sigh into the wet night. “Romance! After months of being apart we had one glorious tryst. Imagine it, a cold night with bitter rain and thrashing wind. A lonely road cuts through the forest, lit only by misty globes of light in the dark. From opposite ends we ran to each other for our first kiss in a thousand miles. It was the single most romantic moment of my life.”
“She must hump like a champion,” he slurred knowingly.
I glanced up at the massive beast silently rising into the night beside us. Towering fourteen stories high, Carnival Miracle blocked out the stars that drunkenly wavered above. Her white flanks glowed brilliantly, courtesy of powerful flood lamps that also revealed insects the size of baseballs. They blazed by as little meteors, swirling and spinning as if inebriated by the air.
The stars looked drunk, the bugs looked drunk, and then there was my taxi driver. Ship life.
Duncan was a middle-aged Bahamian, skinny as a rail yet mature and strong in appearance. Gray crawled behind his ears, up towards the flat top he hacked into place. I opted for Duncan’s van out of the long line of competitors because he appeared the most fun-loving and flexible, and I knew I had a long wait. I got far more than I bargained for.
I noticed the stack of Playboy magazines in the front passenger seat were all from the 1970s. Had they not been so dog-eared, I idly wondered if they were worth some good money, like an attic full of baseball cards sold on eBay. While of course I greatly appreciated good pornography, even I would have shied away from placing it so openly on the front seat while trying to capture a fare.
“Ah, romance,” Duncan continued blissfully. “I love romance. I romanced myself five children, so I understand. Yeah, like Barry White’s 1970 song ‘Walking in the Rain with the One I Love’.”
Before embarking on a whole new, crazy scheme to stay afloat by going to auctioneer training, I was able to steal one more night with Bianca. Last night Miracle had overnighted in Jacksonville, and tonight it was overnighting in Freeport, Bahamas. I had already driven seven hours to see her for four, so why not hop a plane to the neighboring nation for a few more? We had to communicate our plans, synchronize our schedules, and, well, other stuff.
“Yeah,” Duncan reflected. “So last night you two banged all night, and you wanted one more go around before you leave for Idaho, eh mon? ‘I Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe’. 1974.”
“Iowa,” I corrected. “I’m from Iowa.”
“‘I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Baby’,” Duncan continued. “1973.”
“I guess that’s one way of putting it.”
“I can think of lots of ways to put it, mon, if you know what I
mean,” he sniggered into his wine. “Sounds like she can, too.”
“You have a noble soul,” I commented drily to Duncan. “Yes, we had last night together, but it wasn’t all like that. I mean, we hadn’t seen each other for almost half a year. We didn’t want to go straight to the hotel, but the only bar nearby was doing karaoke. After all I had gone through, I couldn’t bear to hear a drunken redneck crooning Meatloaf’s ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’. So we bought a bottle of vodka and took it to the hotel.”
His voice dropped low, switching into Love Doctor baritone. “‘It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me’, 1977. So then you got naked and gave her your love potato.”
“I don’t even know what my love potato is,” I answered. “I’m from Iowa. Idaho has potatoes. Iowa grows corn.”
“So you corn-holed her?”
“We talked, among other things.”
“Talked?” he asked, incredulous.
“Yes, we talked. We conversed as two intelligent human beings. What, are we mere animals?”
“I’d like to go animal-style on a European chick hot enough to fly to another country for. I love white chicks.”
“She does have a brain, you know. That’s what first turned me on to her,” I added with pride. “We were walking together, talking about science when I mistakenly dismissed krypton as not being an element, but merely fiction from Superman. To refute me she listed, from memory, all the noble gases in descending order on the Periodic Chart of the Elements. I mean, that’s hot, don’t you think?”
Duncan looked at me blearily, unsure if I was serious. “With sweet talk like that, I bet the bitches line up at your door.”
Unsinkable Mister Brown (Cruise Confidential 3) Page 19