by Captain Lee
The line went dead.
It was a waste of money, but they had plenty of money. It was a waste of time, but we had some time to waste, so I sent a stew to buy a bagel sampler. Plain, sesame, poppy seed, cinnamon raisin, salt, onion, everything, all the bagels. And in six hours, once that collection had hardened to the point that we could use them as skeet targets, I’d throw them all out and send the same stew to do the same errand. The client gets what the client wants, even if, truthfully, what the client really wanted was to yell at someone to make herself feel big and powerful.
Mission accomplished.
Part of being a captain is knowing that there’s always another problem behind that first problem.
A few hours later, Patty took half my crew onto her boat. Not sure why. Her boat might have had a few of their regular people out from sickness, or it could be that she’d just fired a bunch of people and then needed to borrow from my boat to make up the difference. That was certainly possible. They’d fire people all the time, for any possible offense. A stew was smiling too much, so she seemed unprofessional, get rid of her. A stew wasn’t smiling enough and seemed mean, get rid of her. The dinners are being served too hot, get rid of the cook. The dinners are being served too cold, get a new cook. They really loved to flex their muscles and show people who had the power. Just something they got off on. It was a real problem, for a number of reasons.
Most qualified crew were provided by a management agency that specialized in employment for people working on boats. But the company didn’t get their fee unless the person they staffed was able to last in the job at least ninety days. Problem was, Patty fired people so often, or drove them off the boat in tears, that nobody could last very long. This presented lots of headaches, in part because it meant that nobody on her boat was ever very experienced. They didn’t know the boat, and they didn’t know their crewmates, because they were being constantly replaced. Another problem was that the employment agency never got its money because nobody ever lasted three entire months.
Consequently, the agency stopped sending people to staff Patty’s boats. This was less of a problem for me because my people didn’t quit every five minutes. But it meant that Patty was forced to hire her crew from craigslist, literally, where the only thing they would have in terms of qualifications was “a loyal viewer of The Love Boat.” A consequence of these pretty questionable hiring practices, in this case, was that Patty wanted to go on a cruise, and didn’t have enough people, so she took from my crew.
Okay, fine. I wasn’t planning on taking the boat out.
Until her son showed up.
Brad was Pete’s son from his first marriage, in his early twenties, and Patty didn’t like him one bit. Patty treated him like a proverbial redheaded stepchild, just couldn’t stand that this was a living reminder that Pete was once married to someone else. You’d think that that might automatically create some kind of bond between Brad and me, that he would see how Patty treated everyone who worked for her and feel some kind of sympathy, some kind of shared traumatic experience that would make him view me, and all the crew, as like-minded allies, all in this together.
Nope.
Brad was spoiled. Like a lot of kids of the super-rich, he had learned that for parents with pretty much limitless resources, it was easier for them to just give him whatever he wanted rather than to ever instill discipline. It didn’t have to be that way. Warren Buffett, the financial wizard who became known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” once described how he planned on giving most of his billions to philanthropic efforts rather than to his children. He wanted to give his kids just enough so that they had “enough money so they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.” Brad had decided to take all the money in the world and become . . . a rapper.
Though Brad received almost no love from his stepmother, Patty’s biological child, Sue, seemed to fare just slightly better. Sue was only sixteen and seemed like a pretty good kid, all things considered. Still, that genetic bond didn’t guarantee Sue any more substantial access to good parenting. She was dating a guy at least a decade older than her, and her parents didn’t seem to find anything to object to in their union. In my book, a guy who’s in his late twenties dating a teenager isn’t just a creep—he’s a pedophile. Where does a guy like that even meet a teenager?
This didn’t mean that Sue was ignored or forgotten. The Monarchs wanted to make sure that their daughter received plenty of attention. When she turned sixteen, they bought her a Lamborghini previously owned by Jaden Smith. Because if there’s one thing a teenager needs to get her to movies, dates, and parties, it’s a $300,000 car. While the time and attention her parents gave Sue were pretty minimal, they made sure that they spared no expense for other people to spend time with her. Their personal assistant told me, in what was either a brag or a confession, that Sue’s parents would pay A-list celebrities to talk to her, to the tune of $25,000 per hour. Come grab a pizza with my kid and I’ll give you a cool 50K. Nice work if you can get it.
It was the kind of attention that her half brother Brad never received. Maybe that’s why he was so unpleasant. Or it could have been merely his exposure to additional years of his parents.
“Captain Lee, I want to take the boat out,” Brad said. “My friends are coming by in half an hour or so, so have everything ready to go by then.”
For a variety of reasons, this did not exactly get my toe tapping. Not only did I not have enough crew to take out the boat, but Brad wasn’t always the easiest boss to work for. He’d done this in the past, where he would get $500 in sushi from the local market, then he and his friends would eat it while taking breaks to have sex with each other all over the boat. Since it was his family’s boat, he didn’t see the need to be discreet, and would use the public spaces like they would the most private of bedrooms. It’s true that it was his parents’ boat, but it was also a workplace, and it was not his personal fucking party palace. While a bit shocking, the personality behind the display shouldn’t have been all that surprising—this was a person who thought the rest of the world should either satisfy his needs or remain invisible.
“Sorry, Brad, I just can’t do it,” I said.
“Excuse me?” he asked. He didn’t have a hearing problem—just an attitude problem.
“I don’t have the crew I need. Your mother—”
“Stepmother,” he corrected.
“Right, your stepmother took my first mate and my engineer, among others. The insurance company requires that we operate the boat with a full crew. Without those people, we could get in an accident, and if we did, the insurance would probably refuse to pay for it—”
“I don’t care about that stuff. I want to take the boat out, so make it happen.”
“Well, I do care about that stuff. I’m the captain. I’m not going to put my crew, or you and your friends, in harm’s way just because you don’t think it will be that hard.” What did he know about operating a mega-yacht? From Brad’s perspective, we just pushed a big, red button marked “Go” on a giant console on the bridge at the beginning of a cruise, and then a second button marked “Dock” at the end of it, and that’s how it all worked. Plus, someone brought him his food. A two-person operation at the most.
“I’m going to tell my mom,” he threatened.
“Stepmom,” I corrected. Before steam shot out of his ears, I continued. “You can call her up, but I just can’t risk getting in an accident with half a crew. If you want someone to do that, you’ll have to find another captain.”
“Maybe we will,” he said, and stalked off.
It wasn’t long before the phone rang.
“You get over here. As in right now,” Patty told me.
I knew it was going to happen. Brad hadn’t been raised to develop any kind of social skills, so when told that he wouldn’t be permitted to do something he wanted to do, his only choices were to 1) whine about it, or 2) tell Mommy and Daddy. So, after exhausting the first strate
gy without adequate remedy, he’d bravely embarked on the second as a last resort.
Even though Patty had taken half my crew hours ago, they were still tied to the dock. When you have a volatile temper but marginal organizational skills, you end up with lots of hurry-up-and-wait. I guess it was just good news that I wouldn’t have to take a dingy all the way to Alcatraz to catch up with them.
As I walked from my boat to the Sea Hag III, I looked toward the apartment that Patty and Pete owned. I knew from visits to the apartment in the past that Pete liked to keep a high-powered telescope trained on his boats when he was there. It was kind of creepy. Here was a guy with billions of dollars, where you’d think that his time would be incredibly valuable, and he was spending hours every day just spying on his own boats.
Why? It couldn’t have given him much of a voyeuristic thrill, since there wasn’t a ton he was going to be able to see, other than crew polishing the brass or the occasional sunbather getting a tan. It couldn’t have been as a security measure, since nobody was going to be stealing the boats. One theory I had was that Pete was determined to identify any visible crew, because they had a rule in their San Diego home that the help should not be seen by the guests. Crew could not be outside of the boat, on deck, or aft of the wheelhouse. They had to stand where they couldn’t be seen by any of the guests or anybody in the house. Maybe Pete was keeping an eye on the boats to make sure that the hired hands stayed below or else would face a severe reckoning. It would certainly be consistent with their philosophy that their employees shouldn’t even breathe the same air as the masters of the house.
Though it could have been something else. Maybe he was just the kind of guy who loved looking at his own expensive possessions? Or maybe he got some kind of perverse thrill thinking he was looking at us when we didn’t know it. And it was precisely for that reason that I would always give a little wave to the apartment when I’d be visible to that lens, just a little I know where you are, and I know what you’re doing to throw a little cold water on his god complex.
At the same time, it was preferable to be experiencing Pete’s attentions from hundreds of yards away instead of face-to-face. When he was on-site for one of his marathon parties, the crew would run and hide from him like he had Ebola. If he found someone who wasn’t already engaged, which from his perspective meant someone who wasn’t performing a quadruple bypass (but which would include the patient undergoing the procedure), Pete would just talk his ear off. And I don’t mean to say that he would have a long conversation with them. There was absolutely no back-and-forth going on between Pete and anyone who was stuck listening to him. It was just a volcano of verbiage from Pete. He was wound up like an eight-day clock.
“Did you see the Raiders game the other night? Great game! Well, not that great. I mean, Hostetler is no Ken Stabler, right? And Tim Brown was an amazing receiver. Just otherworldly. Like a super man. Superman was a great movie. Christopher Reeve played Superman. And George Reeves played Superman in the TV show from the fifties! Reeves and Reeve! Coincidence? I doubt it! There are no coincidences. I think that Einstein said that. Great scientist. A German, too. Which Hitler wasn’t. Everyone thinks that because he was the head of Germany that Hitler was German, but he was born in Austria, and a lot of people don’t know that. But I know that, because I read a lot of books, like this one I read the other day . . .”
And that was just Pete’s opening salvo. He would go on like that for literally an hour. It would be impossible for a member of the crew to disengage from it because they didn’t want to be rude and they didn’t want to be fired. Rather than figure out how to pull a Houdini-like escape from one of Pete’s yarns, the crew would just try to run away when they saw him coming, scattering like roaches. There was just no stopping the guy. He wasn’t always that wired, but when he was partying, I have to imagine that he had some kind of pharmaceutical assistance, a little booger sugar to help keep the lights on during one of his seventy-two-hour boogie sessions.
Patty, on the other hand, had a different method of communication.
“What’s this I hear about you telling Brad that he’s not allowed to use the boat?”
“I didn’t tell Brad that he couldn’t use the boat. I told him that nobody could use the boat.”
“Are you saying my son is nobody?”
It was hilarious that Patty chose this moment to emphasize her relationship with Brad, even though most of the time, she took every opportunity to remind the guy that he was trash. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, I suppose.
“I just told him that—”
“No! You don’t tell him ANYTHING! You’re the help—you do as you’re told. Understand?”
“I’d be happy to take him for a cruise, if you’d just let my engineer and first mate come back to my boat.”
“They’re not your fucking crew—they’re mine. And it’s not your boat—it’s fucking MINE! You take our damn orders and drive the boat. You’re a water chauffeur, got it?”
“Oh, I understand.”
“If you fucking understood, then you wouldn’t be saying no to my son. We pay you to follow our orders. No is not I word I ever want to hear from your piece-of-shit mouth. I want to make sure that something like this will never happen again.”
“Trust me,” I said, “this will never, ever happen again.”
Patty nodded, very pleased with herself, turned her head, and started drinking from her vodka and cranberry and vodka. She seemed to have heard “Yes, ma’am.” I don’t think she really heard what I was saying, which was “Take this job and shove it.”
When I returned to the boat, Marcy, one of the stews, ran up to me in a bit of a state.
“What’s wrong, Marcy?” I asked.
“It’s, um, about one of the passengers,” she said.
“Is everyone all right?”
“I think so. It’s just, it’s Irving.”
“Is he finally up? Damn, I guess this means we need to send a runner to get some fresher bagels for him.”
“Already done. But the thing is, when I went to his room to clean it, he’d left something that I’m not used to cleaning.”
“Did he get sick?” I asked. Guys that age shouldn’t burn the candles at both ends like he did—the body just wouldn’t stand for it.
“He pooped in his shower.”
“What?”
“Yeah, just left a giant, uh, dump in the shower, and I don’t quite know how to handle it.”
Jesus H. Christ—who takes a shit in the shower?! Either he couldn’t control himself and just pinched one off while he was freshening up, or he knew exactly what he was doing and, I don’t know . . . thought it was funny? Either way, he knew what he did, knew it was disgusting, and he still just left it for someone else to clean up.
“Marcy, don’t worry about it. It’s not your problem.”
“I can clean it up, but I just . . . did I do something wrong that he’s trying to send a message? Is this some kind of punishment?”
“No, not at all. How long have you been working this boat?”
“Just finished my first month.”
“Hey, way to go. It’s probably something you haven’t seen a lot. I’ve been here two and a half months, and it’s something you just get used to. But damn—you sure as hell shouldn’t have to.”
“It was kind of a shock.”
“I’ll bet it was. Marcy, just don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”
She was grateful, and I went to investigate the offense. Just as she had described, Irving had left a huge dump in the shower. He was just waiting for someone to literally clean up his shit. I guess Marcy should have been glad that he didn’t insist she wipe his ass, to boot. I took out my phone and took a picture, then sent it to Pete and Patty.
“Really?” I said. It may not have been professional, but it was the perfect way for me to let them know how the guests looked at the crew, and how we looked at the owners.
I wasn’t going to take Brad’s
orders.
I wasn’t going to clean up someone else’s shit.
At least Patty got her way, in a sense.
Me saying no was never going to happen again, because I was gone.
At sea, there are storms one minute, then clear skies and glasslike water the next. You can be in the engine room, wrestling with a latch that won’t budge, but when you add just a fraction of an ounce more pressure, it gives way, never a problem again. And it can be that way with owners as well—you can go from a disaster to a real dream like lightning. I’ve had insecure bosses, ignorant bosses, drunk bosses, and bosses that stiffed me, but I’ve also worked for plenty of people who were smart, hardworking, and tremendously generous. You meet all kinds in this world, and it’s not a surprise that the ones you’d work for would be pretty diverse as well. You hope for the best, and when you find a situation that doesn’t measure up, you move on to one that might be better.
It didn’t get much better than Angelo.
There’s a laundry list of reasons why Angelo was such a great boss, but one of the biggest contributing factors may have been that he’d earned his money at sea. Before becoming a billionaire, he was a captain himself. He’d worked hard, showed a lot of ambition, made smart moves with his money, and he eventually became fabulously wealthy.
With that kind of background, perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that Angelo would be extremely grateful for what he had and appreciative of those who did the jobs he used to do. He didn’t bark orders and jump down people’s throats and swear up and down as part of some kind of profane incantation that he hoped would get the job done. For Angelo, it was always a request.
“If it’s not too much trouble . . .”
“If it wouldn’t be a lot of work . . .”
“If you have the time . . .”
Angelo had hired his captain and crew for a reason—because we knew how to do our jobs. We wanted to perform well and safely, and he never forgot that. As a result, he knew that if he were to make a request, we’d do whatever was in our power to make that happen. If, for some reason, we envisioned trouble, he knew we’d be able to provide a good reason. He wasn’t a doormat—everyone respected what he’d done and where he’d been. But not every action had to be some kind of contest of wills. Some owners needed to scream at their crew so they’d feel powerful, but Angelo knew he was powerful and successful. He didn’t need to perform some kind of verbal assault kabuki to drive that point home.