“I’m sure it was only a matter of scheduling,” Cocoa said to me reassuringly, patting me on the arm. John’s gaze followed Cocoa’s movement. When she stopped, his focus returned to her ample cleavage.
“Dusty said that happens sometimes,” she continued.
John snorted derisively and said, “With the big dogs, schedules don’t matter.”
“That’s right,” Lucifer agreed. “You don’t hear the big dogs whining about such things, do you?”
“He wasn’t whining,” Cocoa protested.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said lightly. Then, intentionally ignoring the two men, I asked, “So, tell me Cocoa, weren’t you originally planning on being a permanent associate?”
“I was,” she agreed. “But Dusty—you do remember him, don’t you, the auctioneer you handed over to on Conquest? Dusty pushed me to step up and try for my own ship.”
“That’s a rather altruistic move for an auctioneer,” I observed.
“Yes,” Lucifer barked. “Dusty is a relic. He won’t last much longer. The new system has associates on every big ship now, and if he keeps that crap up, he’ll be replaced himself.”
“He’s a nice man,” Cocoa defended lightly.
“Sure he’s nice,” Lucifer snapped, “If you got a body made for Playboy.”
Abruptly he shouted to the restaurant in general, “Where’s my beer?”
“I know Dusty,” John added. “He was good for his time. Invented a lot of good gimmicks that made me a fortune. You handed Conquest over to him, Buzz?”
“I was associate for William Shatner,” I replied.
“Well don’t worry about his schedule,” Lucifer commented. “He never made it back from vacation in Thailand. With all those cheap whores, we’ll never see him again.”
“What about Charles and Tatli on the Majesty of the Seas?” I asked Lucifer, regarding the couple I worked with as a tadpole. “Have you heard anything about them?”
“They were having lots of problems, all right,” Lucifer said. “I was sent to Majesty to teach them what they were doing wrong. They’re OK now.”
Fortunately the food arrived to occupy our attention. While conversation was mercifully stopped, Lucifer’s vulgar eating habits were equally unpleasant. He used his fingers to messily dunk slices of a sushi roll into the soy sauce. The black liquid gushed over the sides of the dish and stained the table cloth. He gobbled each portion down grotesquely, chewing with his mouth open and smacking soy-stained lips.
“Did I mention I made over three hundred thousand last contract?” John asked Cocoa as he reached across the table and helped himself to her wasabi.
“Yes,” she answered with a fake smile. “Twice.”
“Are we going to be performing in advanced training, or what?” I asked Lucifer, trying to overlook his revolting etiquette. “I was told we would be judged anew, yet I fail to see how. We’re not scheduled to auction.”
“Fail, yes,” Lucifer agreed. He answered with his mouth full, revealing mutilated bits of food caught in his uneven teeth. “You should be used to that. On day six I’ll pair the auctioneers with new kids. They’ll present what you write. You’ll be judged on their performance.”
Cocoa dropped her chopsticks with a clack.
“You’re judging us by someone else’s performance?” she asked, aghast.
“Yes,” Lucifer chortled into his beer. “So you better suck up now. I’m in Room 324.”
Cocoa didn’t take the bait, but only snorted, “You wish.”
Lucifer then looked to me, and added with heavy insinuation, “Better suck up or I’ll pair you with some git too stupid to know he’s already on his way out.”
Desperate to recover some lost ground, I asked him, “Did you ever actually tell Frederick that I’m the Frog Prince? That was the deal when I proved you wrong on Ecstasy.”
Both Cocoa and John stopped eating to better observe Lucifer’s response.
“I did,” Lucifer said, inadvertently spitting a sesame seed on the table. “But don’t gloat yet, little man. Being in Frederick’s sights is a double-edged sword. You think he can’t keep track of all one hundred auctioneers and eighty associates? MIT consulted him, for Christ’s sake. He’s the one who pulled you from Sensation, not me. He sees a zero even once and he’ll pull an auctioneer, no matter what. Even John here got pulled from a ship once.”
John was so surprised at Lucifer’s admission he momentarily altered his gaze, which of course had once again found Cocoa’s cleavage. After he harrumphed, he quickly returned to his ocular duties.
“Proving me wrong is sufficiently difficult,” Lucifer offered, “that I gladly held up my end of the bargain and told Frederick you’re the Frog Prince. But I think you got lucky on Ecstasy. You losing Sensation proved me right. Tomorrow you’ll have your one and only chance to show me you shouldn’t be demoted to Tadpole Twenty-three.”
4
That night I received an email from Bianca. It was short, and I was glad for it. Rather than sending me well wishes, she demanded to know why I hadn’t written to her with news of my having successfully secured a new ship. She ordered me to be a man and demand a ship immediately. She always used that word, ‘demand’. At first I suffered a flush of anger, but soon swallowed it in favor of sadness. She simply had no clue what my world was like. I secretly wished to see how she would handle all the arrogance and verbal abuse.
Ultimately, however, there was little I could say to her. How could I tell her my career—and thusly our very relationship—was to be determined not by my own performance, but that of some kid I didn’t even know?
5
The morning of day six, the auctioneers met for breakfast. Uncle Sam and Lucifer gathered us around a large table laden with pastries and coffee pots.
“As most of you know,” Gene began, “I like to pull aside the experienced ones to ask their opinions of the trainees. Sometimes classmates see things trainers do not. I’m not talking about only class behavior, but also what you’ve seen after hours. If someone can’t handle their alcohol here, for example, they will never survive a ship. Now, we’re not rating anyone yet, but I would like a simple yes or no for each trainee: would you want them as your associate or not? So let’s start with, er, Tadpole One.”
A chorus of nods indicated general approval of the black youth.
“I quite agree,” Gene said. “He’s a promising young man. And Tadpole Two?”
“Which one’s that?” Jim Nabors asked.
“The tall one.”
“With the red hair?” asked Hot Cocoa.
“No, that’s Tadpole Five,” Lucifer corrected. “Tadpole Two is the big, dumb one.”
“But he’s got the freckles, right?” asked John Goodman.
“No, that’s Tadpole Twelve,” Lucifer corrected again, with lessening patience. “Tadpole Two is the big dumb one who should stick to rugby. Has a broken nose.”
A chorus of negatives arose.
“And Tadpole Three?” Gene asked.
“Is that the Scot?”
“No, the Scot’s the really bad one,” Kurt Russell said. “The worst.”
“Yeah, the Scot sucks,” agreed John. “I think he’s Twenty or something. But Three’s OK.”
“The Scot is Tadpole Twenty-two,” Lucifer seethed. “Honestly, you people make a fortune and can’t tell apart a couple dozen stupid kids?”
He was answered by a circle of shrugs.
“I just made an executive decision,” Gene announced. “Next month we’re going back to the name game.”
Lucifer gave Gene his boss a sour look, but Gene just smiled back.
“Now,” Gene continued. “Everyone remembers Tadpole Four. She’s the one that looks like Jennifer Aniston. Who wants her on their ship?”
All hands shot up around the circle, but one. Cocoa merely crossed her arms beneath her generous bosom, and glared.
6
“Tube worms!” Lucifer boomed, “Today we’re doing gr
oupings.”
Lucifer was actually addressing a classroom jam-packed with both trainees and auctioneers, but the latter knew that the barbs were not meant for them. Well, most of us, anyway.
“Grouping is a technique enabling you to sell an expensive work by first building up to it with smaller, unrelated works. You can use a crappy Jean-Claude Picot landscape to sell a Picasso. It works because you educate the audience without lecturing them.
“Rembrandt is a good example. Most of the audience knows shite about him, except his name and that he did paintings. They don’t know he was the world’s greatest copperplate etcher, and did more of those than paintings. So when you show them what looks like a fat, black postage stamp and ask for $3,000, they blow you off. They assume his paintings are worth untold millions, and anything less is a fake. You can’t waste ten minutes lecturing them about what they’re looking at because they’ll fall asleep. They’re drinking free champagne, for Christ’s sake. So how do you educate them?
“The secret to grouping is to offer a different artist’s work that can also teach the audience about Rembrandt. He was famous for his chiaroscuro, of course. So find a painting with a strong sense of chiaroscuro and use that to educate the audience about chiaroscuro. It doesn’t matter if you sell it or not, because you just prepped your audience to buy what you want them to. Do that with a few different works, and when you finally bring up that big Rembrandt, the audience can now properly appreciate what they’re looking at.”
Lucifer sat upon a stool, self-satisfied, and asked, “Any questions?”
“What’s chiaroscuro?” a hesitant voice asked anonymously.
Lucifer bristled, and the room fell silent.
The hyena-like smile returned quickly, and he said, “Ooh, you maggots make this too easy! The idiot who asked that want to identify himself, so I can fire him?”
“Let’s get to the fun part, shall we?” Gene interrupted. “Each trainee will be assigned an auctioneer, who will teach you how to group for the work we assign you. Together you will select two works, each from a different artist, to group with your assigned work. Trainees, after lunch you will present for the class your grouping.”
The tadpoles looked about, edgy over who and what they would be assigned. All knew their futures were at stake. Most auctioneers yawned, but not me. I truly did feel like Tadpole Twenty-three. While we waited for Gene and Lucifer to finalize their list, I met the worried gaze of Hot Cocoa. So I wasn’t the only terrified auctioneer. I gave her a reassuring smile.
Finally Lucifer announced the pairings, starting from Tadpole One and moving up numerically. The list seemed endless. At long last two trainees were assigned to Cocoa: Tadpoles Nineteen and Twenty-one—Twenty having since dropped out. They were tasked with grouping for a Picasso etching. Cocoa wiggled happily in her seat, delighted to have an undisputed master artist who had excelled in every aspect of art, ever. They would have an easy day.
That left only one trainee yet to be assigned, and only one auctioneer yet to teach him.
“Tadpole Twenty-two,” Lucifer called out, trying not to gloat. “Buzz Lightyear.”
A bulky, almost brutish youth with red-blonde hair moved over towards me, tipping over a few chairs in the process. His hip nearly ejected Scarlet Johansson from her chair. Upon reaching my side, he gave me a shy smile that belied his physical attributes. He fidgeted mightily, desperate to hear which artist he would be assigned. I was no less anxious.
“The final artwork you are assigned to sell,” Lucifer said slowly, teasingly, “the last of the class, is a color lithograph from Norman Rockwell.”
A chorus of rueful groans rose from the class. Mine was among them. The lumbering tadpole looked at me with huge, terror-filled eyes, and stammered in a thick, Scottish brogue, complete with rolling R’s.
“A dinna kin! Who the bloody hell is Nor-r-r-man R-r-rockwell?”
Chapter 18. That’s Americana
1
Ordinarily, having an entire morning to create a block of groupings would be more than enough time. But Norman Rockwell was not your average artist.
And Tadpole Twenty-two was not your average trainee.
“A hae nae thochtie aboot yer R-r-rockwell. A’m fre Scotland!” the brutish man protested in what I suspected may, in fact, have been English. I could understand Romanian better! “Can ye gie’s a haund?”
Seeing my confusion, Tadpole Twenty-two forcibly calmed himself, then repeated slowly, “I have nae idea aboot Nor-r-r-man R-r-rockwell. He is American, aye? Can you help me?”
“Of course I can help you,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. Now, what’s your name? I don’t want to keep calling you Tadpole Twenty-two.”
“Ma name is Hamish.”
“Why of course it is.”
The thick youth stared in befuddlement at a printed copy of the artwork he needed to present. He shook his head sadly, red-blonde mane shivering in disgust.
“A dinna kin...” he began, but paused. Once again he forced the words out slowly. “I don’t understand this Norman Rockwell picture. What’s on the minda this fat old copper here, bringin’ a wee girlie to a pub? D’ya like ice cream, little girl? B-r-r-r, I think it’s creepy.”
Such was the state of the world, when the illustration of a friendly small town policeman at an ice cream parlor laughing with a little girl immediately conjured fears of pedophilia.
“Stay chill, brother,” I said. I had caught onto Marc’s catchphrase, but my own lack of excitability was less from confidence and more from despondency. “That’s a classic image of his. This was fifty, sixty years ago. It was a simpler time, OK? It’s supposed to be sweet, and you act like it’s one of Dalí’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno.”
“I’ve heard o Dalí!” Hamish said excitedly. “We can yuse him!”
“I don’t see how,” I commented, moodily. “The only thing melting in this picture is the girl’s ice cream.”
We sat beside each other, staring silently at the image.
“Maybe we be goin’ at this wrong,” Hamish said after a while. “What’s the best work ye ever sold?”
“Hmm? Oh, I sold a Picasso etching once, for about $60,000. But I wouldn’t consider that the best work I’ve ever sold.”
“Really?” he asked, intrigued. “What was, then?”
“Before I worked for Sundance, I sold an exceptionally unique watercolor from 1937. It was the original design painting for the Dwarf cottage in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”
“Another bloody landscape,” Hamish groaned to himself. “Nae help there. A’m shagged.”
Suddenly an idea popped into my head. I couldn’t believe it. Could the grouping really be that simple? With a huge grin I clapped Hamish on the back and asked, “How’s your embarrassment gene?”
Hamish leaned back, unsure, as if I was in a cop outfit offering him ice cream.
“We weren’t there when you trainees did the test,” I explained. “You know, to see if you get embarrassed in front of groups. I hope you don’t, my friend, because if you can handle it, you’re gonna knock ‘em dead.”
Hamish regarded me skeptically.
I pulled him close and said, “Your accent is part of the plan, but make sure you actually speak English and not Scottish, OK? Now, here’s what you’re going to do...”
2
The afternoon was excruciating. I sat beside Cocoa, and together we watched tadpole after tadpole rise reluctantly to the front of the class and stiffly regurgitate a list of focus-points. Because the order was in tadpole enumeration, the entire afternoon had to pass, snail-like, before the time came for Cocoa’s team to present. About halfway through, I had to remind her to breathe. But Tadpoles Nineteen and Twenty-one had the most self-evident material of the day, and Cocoa had properly led them in the right direction. The two presenters took turns elaborating on stylistic details or influences, as appropriate, and ultimately received a complimentary applause.
“Last one for
the day,” Lucifer called. “Next up is Norman Rockwell. Look, I’m tired, so don’t stall by padding your lame presentation with an imitation auction. I’ve heard enough fake ‘sold!’s to last a lifetime. If you little barnacles sold even one-tenth of the works you pretended to today, you’d be up here teaching and not me. Just keep it to your presentation of each work.”
A few scattered whispers and random coughs filled the room as Hamish rose. His thick frame bumped into several people as he wormed his way through the crowded tables, prompting apologies along the way.
“Ho ye! Sairy! Sairy!”
At long last, Hamish stood at the front of the class, towering over a portable podium that held a sales computer. The projected screen behind him remained blank, and Hamish gave me a nervous, almost pleading glance. I smiled and nodded encouragingly.
“Before a show this first work,” Hamish said. “Can anyone tell me what is the one and only art form originally and totally American? That’s right, tis only one, but it’s changed the world.”
Hamish paused for dramatic effect, searching the crowd for an answer. No one had it, so he brought up his first image. Laughter rose from the crowd as they beheld the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff.
“Animation!” Hamish presented with a flourish. “That’s right! Most historians agree that American Winsor McCay brought animation tae life in 1914 wi’ Gertie the Dinosaur. Certainly the whole world agrees that Walt Disney made animation an art form worthy o the ages. And what’s behind that American magic?”
Hamish pointed at the screen behind him and cried, “This!”
“An original production cel o Wile E. Coyote. Every second the Coyote chased the Roadrunner took twenty-four o these cels: all painted by hand. They were photographed in sequence tae make a short film—we all know how it works. What we dinna all know is that in the old days, the tools tae creating these animation marvels were considered just that: tools. Once used, cels like this one were thrown away by the thousands—and now their rarity makes them worth thousands!
Unsinkable Mister Brown (Cruise Confidential 3) Page 30