Unsinkable Mister Brown (Cruise Confidential 3)

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Unsinkable Mister Brown (Cruise Confidential 3) Page 22

by Brian David Bruns


  And the art auctions? Who would risk vomiting for that? Too many Jean-Claude Picot prints already induced gagging. As the cruise rocked and rolled ever onward, my emotions were as turbulent as the angry sea upon which we pitched. I recalled a former colleague of mine, Charles, who had once said that having a bad auction tears you up inside. I understood all too well.

  My first auction could have been considered a success. If I spun it really hard. And didn’t look at any numbers. Or told Sundance about any of it. And jumped overboard.

  Still, this was my first-ever auction on my own with all-new crew, and we worked together smooth as silk. My art movers were the Filipino cover band, and they were brilliant. They even worked my check-out line, because Sensation was one of the last ships without an associate. So the few people that trickled in, barf-bags in hand, were dazzled by a robust performance. The numbers, however, were anemic.

  I had expected to reach half my goal with the first auction. Hubris, no doubt. But it was not a particularly high goal, by Sundance standards. By day three of five, I still only hovered at around half that. I sold only one lousy CP—the designation for a high-caliber work. Worse, it was by Jean-Claude Picot. Insult to injury.

  My disappointment was acute, painful. If I failed on this cruise, I jeopardized everything I had worked so long and so hard for. Even optimists sometimes hit a wall, and I felt in my gut things weren’t going to improve this cruise. I had learned long ago to trust my gut, because even if it led to mistakes, the path was always right for me. But I sensed disaster looming ahead. Was I really so weak that the first time my name was on the line I panicked? But it wasn’t the first time I was in charge. That had been on Ecstasy, and I passed with flying colors.

  What was missing?

  The answer, of course, was Bianca. I saw no end of ways she could help make a killing. She was the star salesman, not me. When she joined me on Sensation, everything would be easier. Therein lay the next trouble.

  The very first email I received from Bianca after signing on was bad news. She had discovered some transfer paperwork details not yet completed. I expounded my frustrations in reply. I fancy myself as a great communicator, though that is not nearly as good a thing as I think it is. There’s room to argue that unloading your burden onto others is selfish. But we all need to vent every now and then, and that is what understanding friends and family are for, right? Is it not a privilege to help someone in need? Alas, I’m an idealist, and this ain’t no ideal world. The moment I hit ‘send’, regret blossomed. I could have at least waited until the first cruise was over before whining!

  To punish myself, I undertook the odious task of defrosting the refrigerator in my cabin. Though it was only a small dorm-style fridge, Robin had ignored it until two solid inches of frost coated the insides. Hours ticked by in my nasty, smelly little world. I watched gelid fish pills drop in soggy, misshapen plops. Self-flagellation would have been preferable.

  Perhaps I had been spending too much time with Stefan and his sudden bursts of iambic pentameter, because that night I quoted Hamlet in my diary: There is nothing good or bad, but thinking make it so. It was as close to optimism as I could muster. Looking at the words made me feel better.

  It didn’t matter. Unbeknownst to me, on Sensation I had already made the most naive mistake of my life.

  Chapter 13. Barf Bags

  1

  By morning on the last day of the cruise, I had given up all hope of reaching my sales goal. I wasn’t even close. No angel investors promised to swoop in and buy a Picasso. Only in the final hours of those hateful first five days did Sensation’s brutal gyrations ease. We had reached the continental shelf near the Mississippi delta.

  It was over.

  I had failed.

  Strangely, I felt calm about my failure. In the last two years I had learned how to read guests, and knew this was a damned odd cruise. Indeed, not a single department made their ship’s goals—not even the bar, which was simply unheard of. Sundance would not care, of course, but I had done all that was to be done. It just didn’t work. Further, I had reviewed the numbers that Robin and Vanessa had pulled in, and noted they averaged only a handful of CPs a cruise. That was a terribly disheartening fact that, ironically, gave me hope. Next cruise I would succeed where Robin had not, and this awful cruise would be forgotten.

  Marc had become a good friend already. He, too, was judged on sales, though how that worked was curious because he didn’t sell anything. According to some sort of arcane algebraic function, he, too, had missed goal. As usual, he was unperturbed. I didn’t think anything could crack that man’s cool. Then again, he was not under threat of firing, failure, and heartbreak. I was.

  “You realize, of course,” Marc said, “the cure to your problem is a cheeseburger.”

  “You are a man of wisdom, my dear doctor,” I agreed. We hit the pool deck to fill his sensible prescription.

  As Sensation eased up the Mississippi, the view from the pool deck revealed a misty sun settling over the swampy woodlands. Oil refineries, ablaze with orange lights, punctured the lush canopy. Their thick smoke pushed and swirled into the dark blue sky like milk added to a bath.

  “You know,” I began slowly, directing Marc’s attention to the tattoo artist with a nudge. “I think Stefan’s a little... overzealous... in his work.”

  Stefan laughed and laughed with a trio of skinny teenage girls in bikinis. They were bubbling excitedly and pointing to various places on their bodies they thought a tattoo would be cute, or, of greater importance, look adult. Stefan eagerly joined in, observing nooks and crannies that he had no business whatsoever in acknowledging on fifteen-year-old girls.

  “Yes,” Marc agreed with his usual gravitas. “He’s rather creepy, isn’t he?”

  Stefan motioned for us to wait, so we watched him apply his fake tattoos. Dropping to a knee before a girl, he proceeded to spray her slim thigh with a solution from a water bottle. She wiggled with the chill, bringing giggles from her friends. With great ceremony and great wads of paper towels, Stefan patted her thigh. Long after she was dry, he kept his hand pressed to her prepared skin. Eventually he looked up and gave her what he no doubt thought was a reassuring smile. I was distinctly reminded of the Big Bad Wolf regarding Little Red Riding Hood. Fortunately, Stefan managed to avoid drooling and licking his chops.

  Finally he brought out the airbrush, which in fact looked much like a modern tattoo gun. Now he focused upon his work with care and pride, and soon enough the girls bounced away, all but squealing over a blue dolphin jumping over a kneecap.

  Stefan packed up and joined us. Wiping excess paint off his hands, he confided, “I love my job!”

  “Perhaps a bit too much,” I observed.

  “Can one desire too much of a good thing?” Stefan scoffed via Shakespeare. Suddenly, almost comically, we all paused as a colleague sauntered towards us. Boys will be boys.

  “Now that,” Marc commented with surprising warmth, “is far from harmless. She’s downright lethal.”

  “A goddess, I say!” Stefan agreed. “Her name is Oana. I don’t know what she does onboard because she won’t talk to me. I think she has a desk up on the Promenade. Alas, she does not love that does not show her love.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Marc calmly.

  I marveled how he was unintimidated even by Stefan’s overwhelming speech. When this Bulgarian spoke, I felt the need to cite my Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate.

  “Oh, how this love of spring resembleth the uncertain glory of an April day,” he answered. “Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, and by and by a cloud takes all away.”

  “In English, please,” I said.

  He looked sideways at me and said, “That is English.”

  Stefan began wringing his hands in dismay over the whole thing, and finally answered, “She is Romanian, and God forbid she lower herself to talk to a Bulgarian. Romanians are frequently like that. Bulgaria is the only country
in Europe that makes them look good, so they turn their noses up. I tried to impress her with the fact that my mother is English, but it didn’t help.”

  He held open his palms and looked ruefully down at the spattered paint. “Guess I look like a peasant working the fields.”

  “Is that so?” I murmured. Oana was a petite brunette—which summed up most Romanian women—and cute as a button. She moved with a perkiness that was refreshing, for I was all too used to seeing Romanians tired and worn from life in difficult circumstances.

  Tired of being verbally upstaged by Stefan, I decided it was time to dazzle my new friends with my unstoppable charm. When Oana stepped into line behind us, I said to her in Romanian, “Hello, beautiful.”

  Oana gave me a surprised look. I thought she would be pleased to hear her native tongue. I was sorely mistaken. With each following question, her adorable countenance stiffened further and further. Had I been a wise man, I would have learned from Stefan’s stage mess and bowed out while I was behind. But I kept trying, asking a few more simple questions and exhausting my limited Romanian.

  “And good evening to you, sir,” she replied with a pronounced emphasis on her choice to speak English. With a coolness reminiscent of that other Oana, the Romanian judge, she eyed each of us up and down. When she finally reached Stefan, she ever-so-slightly sniffed. She then assiduously ignored us.

  “Perhaps you should increase dosage to a double cheeseburger,” Marc suggested thoughtfully.

  “American girls are easy,” Stefan agreed. “I’m stickin’ to them.”

  Chuckling at my own humiliation, I quickly changed the subject. “I’m glad we don’t have to pay for the burgers, because after this cruise I’m broke.”

  “I heard that, brother,” Marc agreed.

  “I’ve made a killing!” Stefan gloated. “What you guys lack is passion for your work.”

  “I’d suggest you tone down your love of duty,” Marc commented drily.

  “This morning my auction brought in only a thousand dollars,” I lamented. “Why, yesterday I had a sidewalk sale that had just two people. Two! One guy literally debated with his wife for thirty minutes before grudgingly buying a $50 print. I barely reach 50% of my lowest goal. One more cruise like this and I’ll be fired. Seriously. Is this cruise discounted, or what?”

  Marc gave me a funny look, and asked, “You mean you didn’t know?”

  “Know what?” I said, suddenly nervous.

  “This was a discounted cruise—highly discounted. One of Sensation’s stabilizers is broken. We’re gonna rock like this every cruise until dry dock, good weather or bad. The cruises are all but given away so they can at least get some onboard revenue.”

  Suddenly it became clear what Robin and Vanessa had been arguing about. He didn’t want to tell me what I was up against! You can always count on Sundance culture for colleagues to leave you flapping in the wind.

  2

  The next cruise, only four days long, set out into seas worse than the previous. I seriously began to entertain the idea that we had found some sort of rip in spacetime and were now sailing below the 66th parallel into the Antarctic Circle.

  Like most experienced seafarers, I could handle the rocking and rolling of heavy swells. What was intolerable was the banging and jerking that literally ripped the art displays off the walls.

  Setting up the first auction was stressful enough under the specter of self-doubt, but worse was also having to deal with the Filipino band fighting over the barf bags. As they squabbled, my art carts rolled across the deck like loose cannons, threatening untold thousands of dollars in damage to art that I was liable for.

  In the middle of that headache, I was ordered by security to drop everything and go gather each and every art display from all over the ship. Though guests were denied the open deck, that didn’t stop a continuous stream from curiously poking their heads out the door. Invariably the wind ripped the door from their hands to blast through the interior of the ship, brutalizing furniture and shredding displays. A dozen frames were scratched beyond repair and four works of art—totaling some $10,000—were destroyed.

  Yet hope blossomed when people actually showed up at the auction. Why, there was a whole crowd of ‘em!

  Alas, to say these folks were not art buyers was a gross understatement. I did not sell a single work of art. My God-awful $600 in revenue came merely from shipping costs for the free giveaways. Auctioneers raffle off artwork as an incentive to boost attendance, but guests must ship it home. The logic, of course, was that once an art tube was already opened and paid for, up to six works fit inside. Those on the fence may be more inclined to fill it. But nobody was on the fence. Nobody was even near the property! Filling empty invoices for $30 in shipping costs was a staggering waste of time with no reward. Indeed, I paid for all those ‘free’ works of art out of my own pocket!

  Venting in my diary, I accused the world, blamed fate. I was poetic. I was crass. Above all, I was honest:

  November 21, 2004

  This is a new cruise after a sickening first cruise. I had an auction today and sold… 600 bucks. I am so disgusted I can vomit. They all came for the free art only. I am tearing apart inside realizing that this perfect situation could go so terribly wrong. I am so worried about losing this job, I can hardly sleep. Last cruise was awful… but nothing was as bad as this! I still have 3 days to make it happen, and I will do everything I can… but I already am doing it right. I know I am.

  If I lose my ability to have Bianca in my life because of this goddamn ship and these goddamn people… I am sick at the thought. I think of her every moment of every day, and I can’t handle the thought of not having her. Screw my ambitions for a career, I need her. Why else am I doing this? And I may not get her if this keeps up. Obviously she is not interested in me for the money, but how else can we live together? How? How else can we have the funds and the flexibility to live in two countries at once? She’ll never abandon her family and come to America. I must make this work! It’s blowing outside, and I am spending the whole night locked in my cabin, stewing miserably. I just ordered room service, three roast beef and bries on baguette. I have a tumbler of Mount Gay Eclipse on ice, and I’m going to gorge myself and get drunk. I don’t care. I have all day tomorrow to make tomorrow night work. Getting this weather with these people on this broken ship on my first cruises is proof that life is not fair.

  November 23, 2004

  Yesterday’s auction was a failure. I woke up this morning at 5AM, due to stress. I feel it in my every pore, so this is what it’s like! My hands are so shaking that I can hardly type. I feel the tight, bunched and tense muscles in my shoulders, and my stomach is trembling. This perfect, perfect, perfect opportunity is slipping away through my very fingers! It’s been two years, and now more than ever I can’t live without my Bianca. I owe her so much for opening my eyes to life and love, but cannot ask her to take any undue risk with me. If I can’t provide what I promised and what she needs (read: comparable money), I’ll have to call everything off on Sensation. I hate letting money influence my life. Romanians say that ‘money can’t buy happiness, but helps with everything else’. What am I doing wrong? I follow every guideline for success… some auctioneers just tank on certain ships… we all know that.

  I smoked a nice cigar on the open deck, a beautiful morning with the sun rising with splendor out of pink clouds off the steamy coast of the Yucatan. I felt myself growing sick with worry, though, and had to shakily make my way to the cabin. I sat and tried to release the stress through tears, but none would come. I shivered in turmoil while I listened to the song that I always associate with Bianca… ‘Lamour toujour’. The words, music, memories, and all associations with bliss made it impossible to cry. There is just too much happiness to live and work for. I feel like I am in the darkest place in my life, but that’s just drama. It was so much worse just 9 months ago when I was broke and working like a donkey as a waiter for nothing but disrespect and disdain.

/>   Love is a frightening thing as much as a blissful one. I have never felt fear before in my life, never, until the thought of not having her. This self-imposed torture cannot be rationalized, like I always, always try to do. I am such an unemotional man, everything that I have used in the past to help me through tough times is crumbling at the thought of a trembling touch of her hand. Her laugh is a balm, but more than anything I just want to hold her! How does someone else fill a gap that is in me, and so personal? Am I half a man? How can I grow old without her?

  The only failure I can imagine in my life would be to lose her. I could be fired, forced off the ships to live a life of cubicles and mediocrity, and I would be fine if I had her. Life cannot be mediocre with her in it. I wish I were a poet. I am a wordsmith, yet utterly incapable of expressing my feelings for her, my needs, wants, desires, passions, hopes.

  One stalwart person had attended the second art auction. Me. That’s right, even my art movers had succumbed to sea sickness.

  Four days. Three auctions. Two gone. One left. Zero sales.

  3

  If I didn’t do something fun, I was going to die of stress before the last auction.

  Costa Maya was a modern port of call, a cluster of Carnival-sponsored shops and restaurants on the rugged eastern coast of the Yucatan peninsula, south of the touristic heavyweights of Cancun and Cozumel. The shore was blocked by a length of rocky shoals stretching to the horizon, behind which spread untold miles of low jungle. Out there, the Mayan civilization had flourished.

  Walking the length of the pier, I stared down at the shoals that had kept this coast rustic since time immemorial. Atlantic surges exploded upon the three-dimensional labyrinth of sharp, black rocks, shattering and spraying into the air. The wind whipped the foam and mist away before I got wet, leaving only the sting of salt for my nose and eyes. Yes, this was indeed how I felt!

 

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