"Even so, the gap between ten thousand and two million is still too fantastic."
"You got to look at da economics of da yacht-makin business. Dose tings are built for people who got too much money an' don't know what else to do wit it. Did you know dat half da production cost of one of dose big babies goes into teak wood decking an' cherry cabinet work on da insides? You're talkin a coupla hundred bucks a board foot for some of dat stuff! Now, you don't own no teak in your office or your car or your house, so why should you want any on your boat?"
"Okay, so we keep it sensible and Spartan, but you're still a long way from saving two million bucks."
"You got to look at deir sales expenses too, boss. All dose fancy showrooms. All dose magazines wit all dose slick photos, an' all dose good-lookin girls in dose string bikinis, or dose better-lookin girls not in dose string bikinis. I've heard dat da total weight of all da books an' magazines about yachting produced each year outweighs da actual boats produced each year by a factor of more den tree to one."
"That's hard to believe. But anyway, say we get our best people involved in building this boat. Why, a hundred footer will absolutely fill the big assembly bay. If a customer walks in and sees it, he'll know that we don't have any serious work under way, and he'll drive the price down to the point where we couldn't make a profit, knowing how hard up we are. And when we do get a real job in, what do we do with the half finished boat? Scrap it?"
"Not to worry. I got dat all figured out. We rent da warehouse across da alley from da shop. It's been empty for a year an should oughta come cheap. Den if a customer comes over unexpected, you or Shirley holds him up in da front office for a few minutes while da rest of us runs back to da shop and looks busy. An' when we get real work in, we just leave da boat sittin dere until we hit another slow spot. I figure dat just having it dere will make da guys an' girls feel a lot more secure."
"Okay, say we do this thing. Just what am I going to do with a yacht once we get it done? I haven't had time to work out with my Karate master for months. I haven't had time for a vacation in eight years!"
"So dat's da udder beauty of my plan, boss. Once we get it done, when we hit a slow spot like now, we all go for a boat ride! Wit a boat dat big, we got room for all our people an' deir wives an' kids an' husbands. Or, if da season's wrong, from what I hear, dere's always more work you can do on a boat. Like dey say, `a boat is a hole in da water dat you pours your money into.' Or in our case, our man-hours."
"I doubt if they say it quite the way you do, but okay, okay. You've sold me to the extent that I'll seriously explore the idea with you."
"I figured dat you'd come around." Adam turned to the open door past which our accountant-secretary-receptionist sat. "Hey, Shirley! It's a go!"
"Dammit! I didn't say that!"
"Yeah, but you will."
Shirley brought in a roll of drawings, smiled and left. I gritted my teeth. Among my best people, I believe in running a loose ship, but I also believe in getting a little respect now and then, too.
"So this is something you've designed, Adam?"
"Nah, da Coast Guard dey wouldn't let me do it. Seems dat you got to be a la-ti-da Naval Architect before you can draw a rowboat, an' us lowly Professional Engineers just ain't good enough. Dis is a standard plan, wit maybe a dozen built like it in da last ten years or so. I got maybe forty or fifty little changes I want to make in it, but I figure I can sell da brass on 'em okay."
What he showed me were the plans for a huge sloop, with a single mast reaching to a hundred and forty feet above the water line. Her beam was twenty- eight feet. Drawing eighteen feet, she displaced over a hundred tons of water. The ballast alone weighed almost forty-five tons, and she carried over five thousand square feet of Dacron in her two sails.
"Big."
"Look, boss, we gotta have room for forty people. If da guys an' girls tought dat dey was buildin dis ting just for you, well, deir hearts wouldn't be in it and dey'd start tinkin dat gettin back into da machinery business somewheres else wasn't such a bad idea. Even like it is, dere ain't much spare space. Half da people will be sleeping in a bunk room, and da married couples only get an enclosed half of a queen- sized bunk bed. You, however, get a spacious owner's cabin in da stern."
"It doesn't look very spacious. What's more, it's right above the engines. It'll be as noisy as hell in there."
"It won't be dat bad, boss. Lots of soundproofin. Anyway, we won't be using da engines except when we're going in or out of port, or in an emergency, and you'd want to be on deck dose times anyway."
"Grumble. I take it that you plan on getting this big cabin in the front of the boat for yourself?"
"And give myself a bigger stateroom dan my boss's? Never would I be so crass! No, dat's for nobody in particular. It's just sort of a social room. I mean, you know, sometimes a guy has to spend a little time alone wit his girl, an' I figure dat if we don't give 'em someplace to do it, dey'll be sneakin around an' messin up da sail locker all da time."
"Oh. Here you had me thinking that you'd finally found the right woman to settle down with. I still say you ought to try married life. I mean, we all joke about it, and a bachelor like you only hears about the down side of marriage, when your friends are in the doghouse, but use your couch instead. But I can testify that a wife and maybe someday kids are what really makes life worth while."
"Yeah? Well, if your home life is so great, why don't you spend more of your life in your home? As often as you get dere, I'm surprised dat your wife remembers who you are. I saw you sleep in your office for a week straight, when we was late gettin dat Chevy Tonawanda job out."
"A necessary temporary expedient. Find yourself a good woman, Adam."
"Lookit, boss. I got restaurants to do my cookin, customers to bitch at me, and a government to take away all my money. What da hell do I need wit a wife?"
"If you say so," I sighed. "Another thing. These are damn big sails. Putting them up and taking them down will be a hell of a job."
"You're way behind da times, boss. We got hydraulic roller reefin' on bote da sails, and hydraulic winches on everyting else. Dere's an onboard computer dat can keep her on course no matter what, an' a satellite navigation an' guidance system dat knows where it is to witin ten meters, anywheres on Eart. Dis baby can be sailed by one person alone, an' even den you only got to check on tings every so ofen."
"We both know just how unreliable automatic machines can be. Murphy's Law rules the universe."
"Right. An' when tings do get screwed up, like you know dey will, we'll have plenty of manpower on board to set tings right."
"This boat's going to be fast, huh?"
"Fast enough. It won't win no races, but where's da sense in buildin a superfast boat? You want to get somewheres in a hurry, you book a flight on a jet. Dis boat's for gettin dere wit style!"
"Uh-huh. You are sure that all our best people will go along with this plan?"
"Natch. I've already talked it over wit each one of dem, sort of on da sly, you know?"
My thought was, What the hell. It will probably keep most of my key people happy, and it just might turn out to be fun.
"Okay, let's do it. But if I hear one single joke about boat anchors, the whole deal is off." In the Special Machinery business, a boat anchor is a machine that never did work properly.
As he got up to leave, I said, "Say, have you given any further thought to that offer I made you the other day? You know, about being a partner here."
"Nope. Don't have to tink about it. Da answer's da same as it was last week an' last munt an' last year. I don't want nuttin to do wit da headaches o' being a boss. Da way it is now, I do what I like to do an' I got nuttin to worry about. An' I still figure dat in da long run, I make more money gettin a paycheck den you do gettin to keep whatever's left over after da bills is paid."
"Well, perhaps true, but there are some great benefits to running your own show."
"Bennies? What do I need wit more bennies? I got
a big new company car, a company parkin spot wit my name on it, an' a company expense account in case I feel like takin a cab to work. Shit, now I'm even gonna get a company yacht!"
FOUR
I got home almost early that night and took my wife, Helen, out to dinner. We ate out often, since cooking was one of the things she didn't like to do, and she wasn't much good at it when she did do it. She made up for it in other ways. Even now, after a messy divorce, I still think that she is one of the most beautiful women I've ever met.
She was tall, or at least taller than I was, with a slender set of geometrically perfect curves that she carried with an inborn, aristocratic poise. She had long, straight blond hair that framed a face that was almost too perfect to be real. I don't think that I ever looked at her without being amazed anew that such a vision of loveliness could be mine.
We'd gone to high school together, where she had been a rhythmic gymnast, a cheerleader, and the homecoming queen. Not that I was the homecoming king, far from it. And my only sport was karate, which in my neighborhood was more a matter of survival than something you did for fun. Actually, we didn't have much to do with each other back then. I just admired from afar, knowing that I would never get a chance to get any closer to her. I doubt if she noticed me at all.
I went off to college, graduated, and went to work in the machinery business. All told, I've been fairly successful.
Helen spent a summer in charm school, something she didn't need, and then went on to Michigan State University. Washing out in her freshman year, she came home and married her high-school sweetheart. A big fellow, he had been the quarterback of the our high-school football team, and was as handsome as she was beautiful.
His only big problems were that he was a thief, an alcoholic, and a worthless bum. The marriage broke up, and someone told me that for a time, Helen worked in Detroit as a topless dancer. I've tried not to find out much about that.
I met her again just after I'd started up my own company here in our home town. I was on a winning streak, and Helen seemed to be a part of all the good things that were happening to me.
Now, I was by then a long way from being a starry-eyed pup in high school. Yes, I noticed the small signs of drug addiction, just as I guessed that she was early in the second trimester of pregnancy. But I also knew that she was the loveliest woman I'd ever seen, and that one such as I was lucky to get her any way I could. With enough tender, loving care, we could work her through her problems.
Maybe, if I'd had a father to advise me . . . But I hadn't seen my parents for fifteen years. And anyway, for the first few years after we were married, things worked out pretty well for Helen and me. If there really had been a drug problem, she licked it. Well, in later years she got to drinking a bit much, but that's something else, entirely. In the same way, her stomach bulge disappeared, and she was no longer sick in the morning.
Yes, I was making a lot of money, and yes, she liked having lots of money. Well, I liked money, too. Hell, who doesn't? I tell you that for a lot of years, being married to Helen was good.
By the time we started working on the boat, our marriage was starting to get less good. Quickly.
* * *
Inside of a week, the old warehouse had been leased, our big plotter had turned out full-scale drawings of the ribs, and our plumbers and electricians were bending three-inch black iron pipe into the flowing curves that would form the hull. More pipe and re-rod went into framing out the bulkheads, which were then wrapped with hundreds of yards of chicken wire and plasterer's lath. Then it was all sewn tightly together with steel wire to form a dense mat, and by the third week these bulkheads were being welded to the massive I beam that formed her keel and stem.
Twenty layers of chicken wire and lath were stretched over the ribs and bulkheads, followed by three more layers of re-rod, and then even more chicken wire and lath. All this was stitched together by pairs of people with pliers, passing steel wire through the hull to pull it all together.
When this dense steel fabric was completed—hull, deck, and bulkheads—Adam handed out big rubber mallets to all and sundry, and we spent three days `fairing' the hull, making it as smooth and hydrodynamic as chicken wire and lath can get. My wife Helen even showed up one day and actually did over an hour's worth of manual labor.
We stood back and admired.
She was huge. Even though she was belly up and not yet infused with concrete, she was a thing of beauty.
Directing the work was Adam's job, since I had to spend most of my time on the road, trying to find some real work for my young company. Still, it made my sales job easier, being able to show to potential customers a full crew working back at the shop.
Three times during the construction of the hull, we had VIPs over. Shirley would press a button on the underside of her desk that connected to an alarm bell in our boat shop, and then flutter about with charming, feigned inefficiency, getting the customer a coffee that he really didn't want.
Meanwhile, Adam would be yelling "SHOWTIME!" and hustling our crew back across the alley to our special machinery factory. They'd turn on the machines, pick up the tools they kept laid out, and look as industrious as hell, while the customer was still getting past Shirley's smile. I don't think that any of our guests ever caught on to what we were pulling. Or if they did, they had class enough to not mention it.
While we were involved with boat construction, there was an ongoing debate as to what we should name her. Dozens of names were batted about and discarded. For a while there, it looked as though the consensus would settle on calling her The Wind-Lass, and the auxiliary boat The Wench, but in the end she became The Brick Royal, and the tender was The Concrete Canoe. I don't know who thought up the names, but I liked them.
* * *
With the metal frames and mesh reinforcement completed, it was time to plaster on the concrete. Adam divided our people up into three shifts, since he insisted that the plastering be done in one continuous "pour." Apparently, wet cement does not stick all that well to cured concrete, and he meant our hull to be perfect. Adam called it a "carbon-alloy reinforced composite ceramic monolith", one time when he was really tired. Cement mixers and plastering machines that squirted the mixture through long hoses were rented, two of each so that in case of a breakdown, our work could continue uninterrupted.
Adam himself carefully measured out all of the ingredients beforehand. The hydraulic grade cement, the sifted sand with its carefully measured moisture content, the pozzolana and other arcane chemicals, and a precisely measured amount of water. And God help the poor soul who dared add a single spittle's worth of moisture over what Adam had allowed.
Work started at the bow, and in a continuous helical strip a few inches wide, the crew forced the cement mixture into the matted steel wire, rod and pipe, always careful to leave not the tiniest void in the material. Inside and out, with vibrators and trowels, every bit of hull, deck and bulkheads was plastered such that the new concrete never went against previously laid concrete that was more than a half an hour old.
Following closely behind them was a crew whose task was to trowel the wet cement to smooth perfection. At the end of each shift, the sections completed were carefully covered with plastic sheeting, so that the concrete would cure slowly and not dry out.
We were three days completing the task, and I don't think Adam slept once during the whole process. I'm glad that it didn't take longer than that because just after we started plastering, we got a rush job in from Saginaw Steering Gear.
Adam flatly refused to start on the new work himself, or to let anyone else leave off working on the boat until the task at hand was completed. I shouted and ranted and screamed for half an hour, but to no avail. Not one of my workers would obey me! Adam had the whole damn crew brainwashed! As I was swearing, shaking my head, and leaving, one of my Bridgeport operators came to me and said that they were sorry, but that the best they could do was to punch out and work for free until the hull was done. And then the
y all went and did just that!
I actually had to hire a dozen minimum-wage types from Kelly Services to sit at the computers in engineering and look professional, just so the GM rep would think that we were working at his job! I mean, wasn't this what the whole exercise was intended to prevent? But Adam had everybody so hyped up that they would have quit the company before they let that hull be ruined. I couldn't fire them all, so I did what I had to do, trying to keep my customer satisfied.
Just don't let anybody tell you that being the boss is all roses!
* * *
Business was good for the next year. The hull just sat there, but that was okay. The longer concrete has to cure unmolested, the better and stronger it gets.
Then I saw another dry spell coming, and I figured that it was time to get working on the boat again. I hadn't been in the warehouse since we had wrapped her in plastic, and when I checked on her one Sunday around noon I was surprised to see that major changes had taken place.
The Brick Royal was now sitting upright in a huge wooden cradle. The rudder, prop shaft, and propeller had been installed. Nearby was a huge cast-iron keel, resting upright on its horizontal wings. She had been beautifully painted in red and blue, and while her design was completely modern, there was a lot of antique gold-covered scrollwork at both the bow and the stern. It looked like it was heavily embossed in the concrete, and must have been painstakingly sculpted in when the hull was being "poured."
Adam's head stuck up from inside the boat. "I tought I heard somebody out here."
"Hi. What are you doing here? It's Sunday morning. Why aren't you in church?" Another of Adam's strange quirks was that he was a staunch Catholic, something I'd given up on when I was twelve.
"I went to da early mass."
It's never wise to discuss religion with anybody who actually believes in the stuff. That wasn't what I wanted to bitch about anyway. "Adam, all this fancy scrollwork pisses me off! It's formed right into the hull! That means that while I was paying the Kelly Services people to do nothing, and sweating blood for fear that the GM rep would find out about it, you and your people were out here farting around with nonessentials! I'm about ready to kill somebody!"
The Fata Morgana Page 2
