Ship for Brains (Cruise Confidential 2)

by Brian David Bruns

  He paused and peered more closely at the circle. “Who here has ship experience?”

  Perhaps half a dozen hands rose. Beside me Shatner raised high his double Jack Daniels. The Brazilian babe beside me, whom I dubbed Hot Cocoa, did not.

  “This job is incredibly difficult, but also incredibly rewarding! Work seven days a week for many months in a row, on call at all hours, especially as associates. You will be in a different foreign country every week and have to organize and transport art for shipping through ports with alien names and people. You will have to find employees from the crew, which represents people from all over the earth. Then there’s boat drill! You’ll find out all about that soon enough.

  “So tonight is informal. Classes begin tomorrow and we will meet every morning at 8 a.m. to shuttle you to the gallery. If you are late, you are out. We break for an hour’s working lunch, and then leave the gallery about six or seven or so. Save your receipts from lunch and any dinners because we’ll cover it. We’ll pay for a drink or two, but we won’t cover the restaurant sharing the hotel’s parking lot. The funny-looking modern one with no name on it? That’s one of the ten most expensive restaurants in the Unites States. Literally. We won’t cover that one.”

  Gene looked us all over intently. “Seriously, folks, you will not all make it. I cannot stress that enough. Even if you make it through our training, there is a real chance the ships will devour you. I have seen the best student of a class fail horribly at sea.”

  He paused to let the words sink in. Having worked at sea, I was aware of and unfazed by the horrible truth of ship life. Around the circle, most of the kids just grinned stupidly, not really listening. They were in for a world of hurt. In truth, just a year ago I was the same. After those thirteen months slaving for Carnival, however, my soul was thin and nearly broken.

  “But!” Gene continued, “Some of the worst students proved to be fantastic auctioneers out at sea. You’ll be alone out there, no one to help you... or hinder you. Isn’t that right, returning auctioneers?”

  “Thank God for that!” Shatner slurred with emphasis.

  “The auctioneers will come and go for their advanced training, so new guys: don’t count on their help. At the end of the week, if you survive it, the new guys will conduct an auction to be supervised by all auctioneers and trainers.”

  The circle shivered in anticipation and dread. Gene grinned wolfishly.

  “Every day everyone should dress in auction attire. That means gavels. Who has the gavel I asked you to bring?”

  About half the hands rose around the circle. I frowned at that. We had been specifically instructed to bring gavels with us and I had busted my butt to find one. One doesn’t just hop down to K-mart for an auctioneer’s gavel, after all, and I had to order one from a woodcutter in northern Minnesota, for cryin’ out loud. How could all these kids ignore instructions before they even arrived? Did they think six-figure incomes, without a prerequisite education no less, were a dime a dozen?

  “Auction attire also means suits and ties,” Gene continued. “We want to see you all pretty.”

  “What, no American flags?” someone asked.

  “Absolutely not!” A voice suddenly interjected. “I’m English!”

  All eyes turned to see the approaching speaker. He was distinctly unimpressive in appearance, despite walking with a swagger to humble John Wayne. His height was a bit less than average, his waistline a bit more, and his clothing a sloppy, untucked mess. Sandy brown hair was delicately thinning and combed straight back to curl behind ears that jutted out to the sides. His smile was also unkempt, vaguely snaggletoothed and decidedly predatory.

  “Aha!” Gene said. “Everyone, meet your trainer for the week. While I am in charge, I get one hundred emails a day, so this man will be leading most of it. Everyone, this is—”

  “Lucifer,” he interrupted again. “I assure you, by the end of the week you will all call me that, one way or the other.”

  “Which reminds me,” Gene continued smoothly. “We might as well get started with the names. You’re all in a circle, because we are going to play a game.”

  Groans rose around the room, my own heartily included. I hated name games. During Carnival’s training I had been forced to remember people from some sixty nationalities. Strangely, I found it easier to remember names like Biljana, Egle, Yhasmina, and Rasa more so than Jims, Bobs, and most definitely Jim Bobs.

  “No, not the usual name game,” Gene consoled. “We will go around and find out what famous person you look like. For example, can anyone guess who I look the most like?”

  “Colonel Sanders!” someone answered, bringing a sour look from Gene.

  “Uncle Sam, obviously,” a voice answered.

  “Yes!” he agreed. “Most of you already know me as Gene, and that’s fine. You already know Lucifer here.”

  “That’s Lord Lucifer, to all you new kids,” the Brit added smugly.

  “You will have enough to remember this week, so I don’t care if you know people’s names or not. You can learn names on your own time. If you look like J. Edgar Hoover, then we will all learn you as J. Edgar Hoover. It’s that simple.”

  “Who?” asked someone. Gene tried not to grimace.

  “So, we’ll start on my left.” Gene eyed the tall, slender blonde man at his side. “You are a no brainer, Mr. Stewart, but I wonder… where’s Harvey?”

  The young man frowned in confusion and the circle was silent.

  “Jimmy Stewart?”

  “My name is Thomas.”

  “No, no, you look like him. You know, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?”

  “Smith? Will Smith is black!”

  “No, you look like Jimmy Stewart,” Gene pressed. “You’ve never been told that? I was only joking about Harvey.”

  “Who’s Harvey?”

  “An invisible six foot rabbit.”

  The boy stared at him in silence, then finally demanded, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You look like the actor Jimmy Stewart,” Gene explained, equally exasperated. “He did a movie in 1950 wherein his companion was an invisible six foot rabbit.”

  “Jeez,” the kid bristled. “What kind of screwed up movies did you guys watch in those days?”

  Obviously Gene was not prepared for the generational gap between himself and this group. Defeated, Gene glanced to Lucifer for support, muttering, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “Hey,” Lucifer replied, “This was your idea. I wanted to label them pond scum one through twenty.”

  “But my last name is Stewart,” the blonde defended. “That’s why I was so confused.”

  “Oh,” Gene amended lamely. “Fine, so the first one didn’t work. We’ll move on.”

  We continued to the next lady who bore a stunning resemblance to the actress Rebecca de Mornay. She was the spitting image, in fact, and had turned everyone’s head upon entering the room. We moved back and forth, rather than down the line, taking the easy ones first. There was Jim Nabors and his wife Scarlett Johansen, Antonio Banderas, and William Shatner. No one knew any Brazilian celebrities that looked like the beauty to my left, so I suggested Hot Cocoa. Luckily she was flattered by the name and Gene surprisingly consented. My turn came.

  “Oh, everyone, this guy already has a leg up on all of you. On the phone he offered me an autographed copy of his book about ghosts. He’s already figured out an important component of ship life: bribery. It works. So, who do people say you look like?”

  “For some reason that I cannot fathom, some people say I look like David Hasselhoff.”

  “Maybe,” Gene grudgingly accepted. “You have the big hair and the big jaw, but not really the look.”

  “Bruce Campbell,” I offered, swallowing my delusions of Ben Affleck. “From The Evil Dead movies. I hear that all the time, actually.”

  Murmurs of assent sounded, but Gene was still not satisfied. “I love movies, but I don’t know him.”

  A voic
e called out, “He did Xena: Warrior Princess, too! With Lucy Lawless.”

  I frowned. “Wasn’t that the porn star from Deepthroat?”

  “That’s Linda Lovelace,” Bill Shatner smirked knowingly. “I’m proud of you.”

  “I know!” Gene suddenly burst in. “I know who you remind me of. From Toy Story! You’re Buzz Lightyear!”

  3

  The Sundance Gallery of Fine Art was huge, modern, and simply brilliant in execution. It was the largest privately owned art gallery in the world. The neoclassical façade marched ever onward in boldly contrasting angles to allow dozens of art nooks, all stately presenting original works from such as Albrecht Dürer, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Marc Chagall. As large as the main gallery and gallerias were, however, the back-offices were equally impressive in scale and cutting-edge security. Here entire banks of employees worked the phones, supplying the latest artwork to avid fans all over earth. It was here, as well, that the overwhelming logistical nightmare of supplying 100 ships with millions of dollars in art was undertaken.

  Once inside, the trainees gathered in the lower level of the gallery. This was a warren of little gallerias focusing on current impressionists, animators, and splatter-painters. Every direction held another series of rooms extending into the distance. Though I was grounded with a strong direction sense and had navigated 2000-year old streets in Romania with nary a misstep, even I nearly got lost in the labyrinth.

  Lucifer allowed us no time to absorb the surroundings or, for that matter, breathe. He marched through galleria after galleria until we were in a far back corner of the building. We halted in a room barely large enough for the twenty-six new trainees, and were nearly blinded by the jumbled colors of dots and rough slashes on canvases all around.

  As Lucifer reviewed us with dissatisfaction, I reciprocated. Today he had dressed in a very English manner. His suit was medium blue with a tight pattern of pin stripes, and beneath it he wore a shirt of baby blue with a second pattern of pinstripes. His extremely wide tie was orange with yet a third pattern of stripes, this time diagonal. His sleeves were white and French-cuffed.

  “You are all pond scum,” Lucifer began. His voice was not loud, but it sure was sharp. “You aspire to be more, this I know. Some of you may… may… achieve this. By the end of the week a few of you may actually evolve into tadpoles. It is my duty to help you crawl out of the primordial soup and become something greater. Once on a ship, those tadpoles who survive may someday become frogs. And please, nobody give me any crap about you being the Frog Prince. You’re not.

  “To be an auctioneer is not easy. You’ve all seen them on TV talking a mile a minute. We don’t do that: we aren’t selling cattle. We are selling art. So that means in one short week I have to teach you how to advertise for an auction, organize an auction, run an auction, close sales during the auction, finalize paperwork after the auction, and finally how to transport the sold art from ship to shore… in multiple nations. I won’t even begin to discuss how every ship on every cruise line has an entirely different set of criteria for how to bill, pay taxes, bills of lading, port clearances, and so on.”

  Lucifer leered at us, letting the magnitude of our training sink in. The group shivered as one even before he dropped the bomb. “And that’s not even talking about the art!

  “We have hundreds of artists from all over the earth,” Lucifer continued. “You won’t just learn about Picasso, but all the modern masters as well. You will learn who they are, where they live or when they died, what they are known for, their style, their medium, all of it. If you are not yet scared, you should be. Gene was being nice when he said this will be the hardest week of your life for some of you. That’s crap. It will be the hardest week of your life for all of you. I am here to ensure that.”

  So Lucifer now officially had the role of bad cop.

  “So, little sea urchin-wannabes,” Lucifer said. “This morning I am going to teach you the very, very basics of selling artwork. To begin, let’s see who knows anything about art. Hands?”

  My hand rose, as did a few others.

  “Anyone here work for an art gallery before, or have art education?”

  Only two hands remained up, mine and Rebecca de Mornay’s.

  “You, then!” Lucifer declared, pointing at me. “Buzz Lightyear, you are to be my bitch. Come to the front. What is your background, little man?” He seemed unaware of the irony of his insult, considering I was four inches taller and thirty pounds stronger than he.

  “I have a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and worked as an art historian for a gallery with locations in Reno, L.A., and London.”

  “So you think you’re smart, then?”

  “Oh, no,” I demurred. “My ex-wife and my cat shattered those delusions long ago.”

  “Good. Had they not done so before, I would have now. So, genius, sell me this art.”

  “What, this one here?”

  “No, the one on the floor beneath your feet,” he snapped. “Come on, make me want to buy it. I’m a tough sell, so do your worst.”

  “I don’t know who this is, or what it is,” I protested, looking up at the trite image before me. “Obviously it’s one of those ubiquitous French street-café scenes, a knockoff of a Van Gogh but with Day-Glo colors. But that’s all I know, I’m sorry.”

  “You should be sorry,” he needled, “You failed miserably. See? Your knowledge is useless! You may return to the back of the class where you belong. Now, listen to me, you little people. You don’t need to know about art to sell art! You just need to know about what’s in front of you. Selling art can be ephemeral or it can be tangible. Until you idiots learn about our artists and some art history, we are going to teach you the tangibles.”

  Lucifer pointed to a corner of the canvas. Hidden among the jumbles of color were a signature and a number.

  “This reveals it as a limited edition,” he instructed. “Number 25 of 200, signed by the artist. This is from a Frenchman named Picot. I hate Picot. I mean, come on, he’s French! But he has made a name for himself and Sundance would not carry his work if he hadn’t. This is all you need to know to sell.”

  “How so?” Cindy Lou Who asked.

  “Think of the rarity!” Lucifer exclaimed, gesturing broadly.

  “But there are 200 of them!”

  “Oh, and that is a lot?” Lucifer jibed. “McDonald’s has sold billions of hamburgers, but you Americans lap them up as if they are going out of business. You are telling me that 200 sounds like a lot? People are stupid. They think there is only one original. That’s crap. Do you know how many versions and copies Michelangelo did of the Sistine ceiling? One original my ass!”

  “Now wait a minute,” she retorted, shifting her stance into a solid, yet curvy, model of obstinacy. “Original means one of a kind. Like a painting.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Lucifer retorted. “Non-artists get that in their heads from somewhere. I presume Americans are taught that in school or something, because you all say the same thing and no one else in the world knows why. Original is anything made by hand by the artist. If you found a drawing by Picasso of one of his ‘original’ paintings, would you throw it away as a mere copy? Get this into your pointy little heads now, people. If something is handmade by the original master artist, it’s not a copy. A copy is a Xerox or a poster.”

  He pointed to all the works surrounding him. “You think we sell posters? Posters are done by machine lithography and have no artist contact at all. They can crank them out in the millions. These are handmade, printed painstakingly by the artist and the atelier in concert. This is the way fine art has been done for centuries, people. Centuries!

  “Why does the average, uneducated American think he knows more than Rembrandt, for example, who was a master printmaker? He was the greatest etcher in history! Apparently you get taught in your schools that only paintings are worth anything, but I beg to differ. Pablo Picasso produced more artwork than any other artist in history; he worked te
n hours a day, seven days a week into his nineties. If he didn’t have a woman on his johnson he had a brush in his hand. You think his handmade prints are cheap copies? Hell no!

  “And here, in the tradition of such greats as Rembrandt and Picasso, we have Picot and his iconic Parisian street cafés. Only 200 ever made, each and every one by hand, signed by this internationally renowned artist. How do we know he’s nationally renowned, you might ask? We’re not in France are we?

  “This was just released a few months ago and is available for X dollars. Now, that’s the opening price, folks. But think about it: Sundance at Sea is the largest arm of the largest fine art gallery in the world! We are on 100 ships having over 200 auctions a week. How long do you think this will remain available? Not long! Once half of them are gone, and with the demand higher than ever, the price will only go up. How could it not? Within one short month these 200 handmade prints will seem like an awfully small number. Within two months this price will double or more, due to overwhelming demand and tiny availability. A lithograph a mere copy? Hah!”

  Suddenly I realized what he reminded me of: a hyena. He was far more intelligent than people gave him credit for, as well as far more predatory. Most mistook him as a lowly scavenger because of his unimpressive features: his smile was toothy and crooked, his body misshapen, and his ears jutted out all funny. Unlike a hyena he never laughed, but his mannerisms were just as unpredictable and creepy.

  “What’s a lithograph?” someone asked.

  For the first time, Lucifer was speechless. He gazed over the crowd of big, frightened eyes, but could not identify who asked the question.

  “What? Did one of you really just ask me what a lithograph is? What the hell? I was horrified last night when some of you morons admitted you didn’t have gavels. So how many of you losers don’t have the books I put on the list?”