My thoughts drifted off to Bianca and our previous night in Jacksonville. So long had passed since last seeing each other, we both took it slow. We had to get used to one another all over again, to rediscover each other. I sat on the balcony, sipped vodka, and watched her laze on the bed. She frolicked and rolled happily, smoking a cigarette and shooting vodka. Long months of separation began to melt away as we got more and more into each other, as we always did. We teased ourselves, letting our vibes slowly entwine. When we could no longer contain our desires, the world spun in a heady mix of euphoria, fate, fatigue, and vodka. I actually shuddered with emotion as I recalled the tears in her eyes when we first started kissing.
“So she likes butt stuff, then?” Duncan mused aloud, breaking my thoughts.
Suddenly a lone, statuesque figure appeared in the gangway, mercifully taking the conversation away from the direction it was going. Bianca wore a tight blue dress that hugged her curves and split high to reveal long, strong legs. Her round face was nearly hidden beneath a tussle of jet-black hair that snapped in the ocean’s breeze. Bright red lips smirked devilishly as she descended the gangway towards us. Duncan whistled in admiration.
“Whoo boy, she can talk ‘bout gas all night!”
Bianca hopped perkily into the taxi beside me with a grin.
“‘I’ll Do for You Anything You Want Me To’,” Duncan boomed before I could say anything.
“Huh?” Bianca said, her attention pulled away.
“1975,” he clarified.
“Meet Duncan,” I offered wryly. “After all my trouble in getting here, I get upstaged by the taxi driver! If he had a bowl cut, I’d be doomed.”
5
Duncan careened across the dark, empty island towards Freeport. Bianca and I hugged in the back of the van, not from affection but fear for our lives. The drive from the port to the city was less than ten miles, but I began to doubt we would make it. Eventually we calmed and sat quietly holding hands. Duncan paid far more attention to the action behind him than to the road in front. His brows rose with each kiss we snuck, illuminated by the dashboard lights and reflected in the rearview mirror.
“Go!” Duncan boomed to Bianca as she began kissing my neck. She stopped and glared at him.
“Excuse me?”
“So!” he lamely amended, “You were a passenger and looking for some below decks good times, or what?”
“We met in an Old West ghost town,” she answered, still annoyed.
For the first time, Duncan was taken aback. “Really? This I gotta hear.”
Suddenly he reached into the back and began groping blindly. The van rocked back and forth as we careened from lane to lane. Huge mangrove trees jumped out at us, glowing monstrously in the headlights, but the van swerved to safety at the last moment. I felt our luck running out as he continued to fish for something in the back. Surely he wasn’t trying to cop a feel of Bianca—right?
“What is it you want?” Bianca snapped.
“Coconut milk!” he called hastily as he wrenched the steering wheel with both hands to jerk us into the wrong lane. A huge lizard rushed back into the trees, happy to get off the road. Bianca opened the cooler hiding in the dark and retrieved a dripping bottle half-full of a watery, cloudy liquid. Duncan produced a flask of gin from beneath his Playboys and topped off the bottle with it, even as the van bounded high into the air after striking a huge crack in the pavement. The thought of a gin/coconut milk cocktail after red wine in Styrofoam, churned aggressively by the van, made my stomach roil.
“Ce pui mei!” Bianca muttered exasperatedly in Romanian.
“Bianca!” I cried, surprised. “Did you just say ‘who fucked my chicken’?”
“What? Oh, no, no. Well, close. You use a verb for the nastiest word in the language, we use a noun. So instead of ‘what the F’ we say ‘what my dick.’ ‘Ce pula mea’.”
“Oh. Wow. I’m sorry: I thought you said chicken.”
“I did. Instead of saying pula, sometimes we say pui. It’s like you saying shoot instead of shit.”
“Wait wait wait,” I cried, holding up a hand. “Are you telling me that in Romanian, the word for penis is pula... which is a feminine noun? No wonder the guys are all so macho: they’re compensating!”
“‘Don’t Make Me Wait Too Long’,” Duncan said, interrupting. “1974’s The Very Best of Barry White album. With the Love Orchestra, of course.”
“Huh?”
“Oh,” I interrupted, “Didn’t I welcome you to the Barry White Omnibus?”
“This a van, mon!” Duncan protested. “Now, tell me how you met and how sweet it was.”
“Well,” Bianca began, “I was visiting my friend in Reno, Nevada.”
“‘Let Me In, and Let’s Begin With Love’,” Duncan interrupted. “1981.”
“Will you shut the hell up?”
“‘Relax to the Max’, babe,” he defended. “The stage is yours.”
“Thank you.”
“1981.”
After a final glare, Bianca squeezed my hand and began her narration anew. “My girlfriend from home lives in the States now, and I was visiting her after a contract with Carnival. She worked for Brian’s computer company back then. I was only there for a couple days, and they coincided with a big music festival they bought tickets for months before. She knew I didn’t like soul music, but didn’t want to give up the concert. So she brought Brian to entertain me.”
“Soul music?” Duncan interrupted yet again. “Who?”
Bianca couldn’t recall and looked to me for an answer. I slid deeper in my seat, frightened to launch a whole new line of love talk.
“James Ingram,” I peeped.
“What?” Duncan exploded. “James Ingram? Love that American soul, baby! ‘It’s Your Night’. 1983. Great stuff.”
“Whatever,” Bianca snipped, refusing to relinquish the direction of conversation. “We didn’t listen anyway. It was a huge outdoor show on a golf course, and we walked around the whole thing twice as the sun set over the desert. It was beautiful. We talked and talked, and next day Brian gave me personal tour of a ghost town he wrote a book about. It was like a movie with that actor, what’s his name? The American who shoots everybody.”
“That ain’t all of them?” Duncan asked, confused.
“Clint Eastwood,” I supplied painfully.
“Yeah, that one,” Bianca agreed with approval. “A Clint movie, like those ones from Italy. This was high on a mountain with super steep sides that were nightmare to be in high heels. I saw a tumble weed! Anyway, Brian was so funny. He kept saying how old it all was. The buildings were, like, only one hundred and fifty years old!”
“That ain’t old?”
“My hometown has no beginning: it’s always been there. Anyway, we shot whiskey in a saloon, toured haunted hotels, saw silver mines, and even took a train ride through the desert. I saw rattlesnake! He narrated the whole time about history and the ghost hunts he did for his book,” she boasted. “That’s when I started to like him. He’s so smart.”
“Uh, sure,” Duncan agreed dubiously. “He got a brain, you know. He talks ‘bout comic book gas.”
“She left to see Vegas for a few days,” I supplied. “But after only one day came back to Reno to see me instead. Did we ever even go to sleep before 4 a.m.? I don’t think so. Anyway, when she flew back to Romania, she called me while waiting for her connecting flight. That’s when it clicked in me, that I needed to see more of this woman.”
“Damn right,” Duncan agreed. “‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’. 1967.”
“Hey,” I protested. “That’s not a Barry White song. That’s Isaac Hayes!”
“How did you know that?” Duncan asked, flabbergasted.
“Would you believe I saw him in concert once? Upon reflection, I believe we were the only white people there.”
“It’s official: you are ‘The Man’!” Duncan celebrated. “Barry White. 1978.”
6
Bianca and
I walked hand in hand through the silent, dark lanes of the International Bazaar of Freeport. The uneven bricks beneath our feet, pooling water from earlier rains, proved a formidable barrier to Bianca’s high heels. She clung tightly to me for stability, but my head was swimming with joy and we stumbled together, laughing the whole time.
“So,” I said as we passed the faux Roman section lined with columns peeling white paint. “I will be back at sea soon. I have a week’s training in Pittsburgh to learn the job of art auctioneer, and then I will be an auctioneer’s associate. It will take time to get my own ship. Perhaps my next ship, when I’m an art auctioneer’s associate, we will meet up with Miracle.”
“Oh, I hope so! These meetings are so wonderful, but they really need to happen more often. I miss you so much.”
“Me too.”
The Roman section soon morphed into a Moroccan theme, splendid with the intricate geometry of Islamic art. Ads for duty-free alcohol were everywhere, a stark reminder that we were far indeed from North Africa, as if the ivy creepers hugging the walls weren’t reminder enough. I could only imagine how a conservative Muslim would handle the poster yelling, “Go Mount Gay!” It referred to my favorite Barbados rum, Mount Gay, but I sensed a tasteless joke was hiding in there somewhere.
“It’s not guaranteed that I will be an associate, of course,” I continued. “But I will make it happen. After a few months as associate I should have my own ship as auctioneer. Then you can come on board as my assistant. Imagine: we can finally get you free of the cabins below the waterline—and have a real bed! Auctioneers live in guest rooms, eat guest food, and live the dream of cruising every day. You won’t slave 80 hours a week at hard labor anymore, and we’ll be together.”
“Oh, make it happen!” she begged. “I can’t wait.”
We moved from Morocco to France. The streets were particularly dark here and many corners were black. A closed restaurant, Café Michel, offered us a table to relax. We could almost hear the echo of the Parisian hand-accordion as we sat by the café-style awning hanging over the cobbled streets. Toulouse-Lautrec posters advertised the wild bordellos of the French night scene. Altogether the sights, sounds, and sensations of the Caribbean were raw and powerful. There was something electric about the tropical night air that I had never found anywhere else in my travels. As the beat of a nearby dance club thumped, Bianca smoked a cigarette and we discussed our situation, our hopes, dreams, and plans.
“Until you become an auctioneer,” Bianca said quietly, getting serious, “we must focus on our jobs. No promises but that we’ll be together. Me too seasoned, me know ships. We are not ready to be together yet.”
Parting and planning for the next effort at togetherness, again!
“All right,” I agreed. “Look, working as a waitress pays for your family’s retirement, and allows you several months a year to see them. I get it, and will never jeopardize that. It will take me months before I can safely pay you the same, but I will make it happen. So when I start this thing, I gotta focus. It’s got to be just me and my career. No work breaks or anything. No distractions. We communicate better through email anyway!”
“Why you say that? We communicate fine in person,” Bianca said, sliding her hand across the table. Instead of taking my hand, she began to play with my beaded bracelet. She spun it around my wrist and teased it with her fingers. A chill tingled across my body as I suddenly recalled her touches past.
“We’ve fought for over a year now,” I finalized. “So what’s another few months while I get my ducks in a row?”
“Why you have ducks?”
“No, no, it’s an expression. I need to get my affairs in order.”
“Affairs?” she gasped with alarm.
7
Auctioneer screening felt like an extension of Legend, though the brutality was entirely mental and emotional. I endured a strangely focused enmity from the trainer, the self-proclaimed Lucifer, who made half the trainees cry and the other half quit. Had I not just been through hell on the high seas, I would have thought his verbal abuse completely and utterly contemptible. Well, it was completely and utterly contemptible, but at least I understood his reasons. And, honestly, his creativity with insults was pretty impressive.
Despite such tribulations, I did reasonably well. This was less from my being talented than my being aged. Most of the competition for the highly sought and highly lucrative position were barely out of high school. By the end of the week I had secured a post to train under the recent Rookie of the Year. The ship was Majesty of the Seas or, as auctioneers knew it: the Widow Maker.
That’s when things got interesting.
If I had thought Carnival’s approach to human rights was cold, then Sundance at Sea treated its auctioneers with the icy breath of Death. After only two weeks on the Widow Maker, the recently young and vibrant Rookie of the Year—now ulcerated, impotent, and alcoholic—got screwed by Sundance and denied his desperately needed vacation and sent to another ship in need. In order to squeeze more life out of the poor bastard, I was promoted by default to associate and they brought in a new auctioneering couple.
He was a Brit, she was a Turk. Charles and Tatli were both likable, but again alcoholic and dysfunctional. We missed our sales goals with an alarming frequency, while they seriously discussed either quitting Sundance or divorce: which came first they soon stopped caring. Yet I was miraculously promoted again, making me the first of our trainee class to gain a big ship—a return to Carnival Conquest, no less! But such was the domain of Bill Shatner, the strangest auctioneer yet, who gleefully added perversion to his alcoholism.
Those were some weeks!
I focused on the job, but our huge success rested on Bill’s shoulders, not mine. I resolved to watch and learn as much as I could from Bill, when he wasn’t dragging me to the crew bar or another Mexican brothel. It was a rather unusual manner of training, to be sure, and not nearly as interesting as I would have thought when I was a teenager. I could refrain from such extracurricular activities easily enough—I’ve never been a big ‘let’s go bang a prostitute’ kinda guy—but what proved more troubling was avoiding the advances of the crew.
Auctioneers enjoyed immense privileges onboard, thusly adding even more to the promise of a Green Card. Oscar Wilde said it best when observing that “by persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.” Indeed, for a while, I thought surely I was going to be kidnapped by the dance captain. Tina was beautiful, of course, but had the IQ of an ice cube. The whole situation was so outrageous that I never took it seriously.
But one outrageous factor I had to take seriously: ships are lonely places.
It had been many, many months since I had felt a warm touch. Everybody seemed to be sleeping with everybody—ship-style—but what was really lacking was simply human contact. Why was there no middle ground? The bonfire of temptation flared ever higher and hotter, exotic and enticing. I didn’t want to burn in the fire, but I didn’t want to remain in the cold, either. There were times when I thought I should just ‘do what I gotta do’ and get it over with. I didn’t want that and knew it wouldn’t ease my loneliness. Bianca’s words of experience rang in my head the whole time, ‘No promises but that we’ll be together.’
Bill finally went on vacation to Thailand. The promise of cheap hedonism was too much to bear, and he never returned. I took over as auctioneer. Sundance allowed me one cruise to prove my mettle, though under the direct observation of Lucifer himself! I had thought his abuse was unwarranted on land, and now I was going to get a full, personalized dose on international waters!
Lucifer lived up to his name. As soon as he arrived, he disappeared into the crowd. I had no idea where he would be or when, but he was watching, waiting for a mistake. When I didn’t provide one fast enough, he actually resorted to sabotage. I was fighting for my career, for the fate of my lover, and yet my very own trainer was inciting a riot at my art auction! The stakes were high, but with the
assistance of a lecherous fireman named Greg Gregg—quite a story there—I secured my place as an art auctioneer.2
What a whirlwind life had become since meeting Bianca!
Our initial discovery of each other had been a bolt from a clear blue sky, and despite our passionate wishes and tremendous efforts to come together, fitting me into her established ship routine had failed. As a couple we regrouped, slowed down, and began our lettered courtship. During my tumultuous demotion on Legend, her love had screamed off the page. She hopped from Glory to Miracle, Carnival’s latest and greatest, whereas I dropped from Carnival entirely. But within weeks of that I was back at sea on Majesty of the Seas, ready to make a new go of it all.
The roller coaster ride of the art world resulted in my being the first of my class to become an associate, the first to be assigned a big ship, and first to be offered my own ship. Because my fight was alone, it felt like it lasted years. It had actually been about six months. While I fought the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Bianca sank back into her ship habit long since established. Her emails grew not distant, but less intent. She was more or less content with her lot. I was not. Every time Sundance stresses threatened to derail me—a weekly occurrence—I remembered her bleaching menus at midnight, dreading the breakfast shift. We were coming together, oh so slowly, but were closing the gap.
Finally, after two years of ups and downs, I had found a way to bring us together. I was given my own ship, Sensation, and could bring her aboard as my assistant. I sent Bianca the necessary art books to get her up to speed. She was a born saleswoman and smart as whip. Now, at long last we would work together, for a common goal, side-by-side.
Together we would rock the fleet!
Ship Happens
“There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.”
—Joseph Conrad
Unsinkable Mister Brown (Cruise Confidential 3) Page 20