Tricky Business

by Dave Barry

  Frank looked over at Tark, at the helm. Tark, who always seemed to sense when Frank was looking at him, looked back and grinned, clearly loving how much Frank was clearly hating this.

  “Are we on time?” said Frank, trying to sound businesslike, in control, unafraid.

  “We’re good,” said Tark. “Timewise, anyway. You don’t look so good, though.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Frank.

  “Who said I was worried?” said Tark.

  “I appreciate your concern,” said Frank.

  “Some people just can’t get used to it, the rough water,” said Tark. “Me, I love it. Rougher the better, far as I’m concerned.”

  Frank said nothing.

  “Probably gonna get a lot rougher,” said Tark. “Storms like this, I’ve seen ’em capsize bigger boats’n this.”

  “Shut up,” said Frank.

  “You’re the one started this conversation,” said Tark.

  Frank looked at his watch, saw it was time to check on Juan. Bracing himself against the motion of the boat, he moved toward the ladderway. Just before he reached it, the boat lurched violently. Frank almost fell, caught a railing with his non-gun hand, hung on. He looked back at Tark, who was spinning the wheel, grinning.

  “Better watch yourself,” Tark said. “You could get hurt.”

  “Next time that happens,” Frank said, “I shoot you in the knee, you got that? Hurts like a bitch, and you’ll never walk right again. But you can still drive the boat, unless you want me to shoot the other knee.”

  “Hey,” said Tark, “you can’t blame me for what the ocean does.”

  Frank aimed his Glock at Tark’s left eye, so Tark could see right down the barrel, which Frank had always found to be a strong attention-getter. He said, “You can’t blame me for what my gun does.”

  Tark tried to keep his grin up, but it faded just a hair, enough to make Frank feel momentarily better as he turned and headed down the ladder. He immediately felt worse when he got into the cabin, which stank of large, unhygienic bodies radiating their odors into stale, humid air. Tark’s three friends—Kaz, Rebar, Holman—were still sitting at the table, staring at Juan, who was still facing them, his back to the counter, gun in hand. He didn’t look good. His eyes were glazed, his face slick with sweat.

  “You OK?” Frank said.

  Juan responded by handing Frank his gun—Juan never let go of his gun—then whirling to the sink and vomiting copiously. Frank jumped back, trying to avoid the splatter. At the table, Kaz, the one on the left, with the big arms, said “Oh shit” and started to rise.

  “Don’t move,” said Frank.

  “Come on, man,” said Kaz, sitting back down. “You can’t keep us in here with that.”

  “I said don’t move.”

  The acrid stench of puke was hitting Frank now, and he knew his stomach was close to open revolt. Juan, between heaves, looked up from the sink and said, “Ag sagg manng”—Frank took this to mean I’m sorry, man—then went back to retching. Frank fought to regain control of the snakes writhing in his gut so he could figure out how to play this.

  Rebar, the fat guy next to Kaz, said, “I’m gonna puke.”

  Kaz said, “Oh man, no DON’T . . .” but this is not one of those areas where people take directions, and even as Kaz spoke, Rebar blurted onto the table what had at one time been an abundant seafood lunch, now transformed by Rebar’s digestive system into a rancid sloshing horror. At that instant, the boat hit a wave trough and pitched violently forward, dumping Rebar’s spewage into the lap of Holman, who responded milliseconds later by launching his own lunch in a gush that shot across the table and splashed onto the floor. Kaz was now scrambling sideways, away from his two puking cohorts, trying to stand up but getting only partway to his feet before the chain reaction reached him and BLARRRGGHH, he, too, released a mighty river of ralph.

  Frank was now in a small enclosed space with four men who were actively regurgitating, their stomach contents mingling on the pitching, heaving floor, forming a reeking gumbo from hell. The stench was unbearable, and at that moment, Frank, normally the ultimate professional, did not care about making the rendezvous or keeping an eye on Tark or anything else except getting out of there right now. He lunged toward the cabin door, but as he did, the boat lurched again, and he stepped on some unspeakable, slippery thing and lost his footing. With a gun in each hand, he was unable to grab for support, and so he went down, backward, cracking his head against the counter, landing on his butt, which continued to slide out from under him until he was lying on his back, momentarily blacked out, regaining consciousness to feel wetness on his back and . . . Oh no . . . Oh God no, it’s in my hair . . .

  And then Frank lost it, too, joining the chunk-blowing chorus, the barf brigade, five men in a tossing boat who might have reasons to kill each other, but who, for the moment, could think about nothing except when the next retch would come, and what it would bring up.

  “IS EVERYBODY HAVING A GOOD TIME?” SAID Wally. “Is everybody ready to party?”

  Wally surveyed the dance floor on the third deck of the Extravaganza of the Seas. This did not take him long, as there was nobody actually on the dance floor. There were a dozen or so passengers on the deck, but most of them were at the far end of the room, buying drinks at the bar or picking warily through the buffet.

  The buffet was included in the Extravaganza’s $8.95 admission price ($5.95 for seniors). It was advertised as the Sumptuous All You Can Eat Gourmet Buffet, but nobody ever ate much of it. Experienced Extravaganza passengers did not even approach it.

  The Sumptuous All You Can Eat Gourmet Buffet consisted of a row of dented industrial chafing dishes, each containing an unidentifiable entrée, generally random lumps of something that could have, at one time, been part of a living thing, but not a healthy thing—medallions of weasel, perhaps—soaking in semi-coagulated gravylike liquid, generally a yellowish-brown in color, sometimes with a tinge of gray or green.

  The buffet was tended by a hatchet-faced, hostile-looking man wearing a chef’s uniform with large permanent stains. This man never spoke. The band called him “Emeril.” Emeril did not appear to actually cook anything. At the start of the night, he produced the chafing dishes and lit the burners. During the cruise, he sat behind the counter on a stool, arms folded, glaring into the distance, refusing to answer customers’ questions (the most common question being, “What is this?”). At the end of the night, he removed the chafing dishes.

  It was Ted who had proposed the theory that Emeril was setting out the same food, night after night.

  “Why not?” Ted said. “Hardly anybody eats it. It could last for months.”

  “I think some of it is actually getting larger,” said Johnny. “On its own.”

  Ted had decided to test his theory that Emeril was recycling the food. He’d gone through the buffet, pretending to be selecting his dinner, and slipped a baseball card—Cliff Floyd, long-ball-hitting outfielder formerly of the Florida Marlins—under one of the weasel medallions. The next night, plate in hand, he’d searched the buffet, dish by dish, poking through the mystery lumps. He thrust his fork triumphantly into the air when, in the fourth dish, he uncovered the gravy-soaked but still-smiling face of the Marlins slugger.

  This discovery led to the creation of a betting pool among the band members, five bucks a man to see who could predict how long Emeril could keep the Cliff Floyd dish alive in the Sumptuous All You Can Eat Gourmet Buffet. Each night, Ted had gone through the buffet; each night, sooner or later, he’d turned up the baseball card.

  Tonight was critical. It was exactly seven days from the initial card placement, and the only two bandmates still in the pool were Johnny, who’d bet on six days, and Ted, who’d put his money on an even week. Thus there was considerable tension in the room, or at least in the band, when Ted, his bandmates watching closely, went down the row of chafing dishes. There were eight of them, and as of the seventh one, Ted had found nothing. Pa
instakingly, he began poking through the eighth, and . . .

  “YES!” he shouted, reaching into the chafing dish, pulling out the dripping card, holding it aloft.

  “Shit,” said Johnny.

  “Emeril,” said Ted, “you da MAN!”

  Emeril, from his stool, continued glaring into the distance.

  “What do you think,” Ted asked the band, “you want to start another pool?”

  “I don’t know, man,” said Wally. “Maybe we should warn somebody about this. I mean, what if somebody eats this? They could die.”

  “The way I see it,” said Johnny, “anybody who eats this wants to die.”

  “That’s a point,” said Wally.

  So Ted slid the Cliff Floyd card back into whatever it was in the chafing dish, and the band started a new pool, with Jock taking two more days, Wally three, Johnny six, and Ted betting on another full week.

  “I have faith in Emeril,” he said. “The man is loyal to this food.”

  With that settled, they set up their equipment and tuned up. A few minutes before departure time, they went up on the deserted top deck and huddled out of the wind and rain against a stack of rubber lifeboats for one last pre-gig joint. Then they went down and got some beers. Thus prepared for the grim evening ahead, they returned to their instruments and launched into their traditional first number of the evening, a blues instrumental in the key of whoever started playing first.

  This was a little game the band played. Jock, a purely self-taught idiot savant of rhythm, would start off on the drums with a hypersyncopated introduction whose structure was deeply obscure, sometimes even to Jock. Wally and Ted would listen hard, competing to see who could discern the tempo first; the winner would jump in, playing in the key of his choice. If Wally started, he’d usually go with A or E, easy guitar-player keys, where you can mess around with open strings. If Ted jumped in first, he’d pick something more convenient for a keyboardist, but worse for a guitarist, like F. If, as sometimes happened, Wally and Ted started simultaneously, they’d play musical chicken, each trying to force the other to yield. Johnny would usually end the Battle of the Keys by coming in with his bass on one side or the other, unless he felt like playing in a third key, in which case the band would usually be laughing too hard to keep going.

  Tonight, Ted had cleanly won the faceoff, picking B-flat, and they’d jammed for ten minutes, getting into it, taking their solos, trading fours for a while, not caring that nobody was listening to them, because they were listening to one another. This was Wally’s favorite thing about being in the band—the time when they’d just started playing, had just soared free, for the moment, from the swamp of failure and rejection they were usually mired in, and they were tuned up good and had a little buzz on, and they were doing the one thing they really knew how to do, and damned if it didn’t sound all right. That’s what always struck Wally when they started a gig: We sound pretty good. Not great, but pretty damned good. Wally figured they were as good at making music as most businessmen were at whatever business thing they did. The difference, of course, was that even semicompetent businessmen could make money, whereas even very good musicians could go their entire lives without owning a decent car. But still, this part was fun, just the playing.

  It usually became a lot less fun when they had to stop making music and start trying to entertain. Wally, as he had been since the days at Bougainvillea High, was the front man. Reluctantly, he turned from his bandmates, toward the microphone.

  “We’d like to welcome you all to the party deck of the fabulous Extravaganza of the Seas,” he said. “You look like a great crowd out there!”

  At the moment, the crowd consisted of those few people poking through the buffet and buying drinks at the bar, and three dudes, each holding a Bud Light and wearing a ball cap turned around backward, standing at the edge of the dance floor, watching the band with expressions that said: Don’t even think about entertaining us.

  “We’re Johnny and the Contusions, and we’ll be playing for you all night long,” said Wally. “We want you to have a good time, so if you have any requests, let us know, OK?”

  “Play quieter!” shouted one of the Bud Light dudes, and the other two cracked up.

  “Ha ha, good one!” said Wally. “We never heard that one before.” He looked around at the band. “Have we?”

  “Never,” said Ted.

  The shouter dude frowned, not sure how to take this.

  “Anyway,” said Wally, “we want to remind everybody that the world-famous Extravaganza of the Seas all-you-can-eat buffet is open, with some unforgettable classic dishes prepared by our award-winning chef; ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the culinary genius we call . . . Emeril!”

  Jock hit a rim shot. There was no other reaction in the room.

  “Thank you,” said Wally. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are a beautiful crowd, and we’d like to kick things off for you with a party song, because it’s a party ship, and a party kind of night, and . . . the tiki bar is OPEN!”

  Wally went straight from there into chopping out the minor chords for the John Hiatt song “Tiki Bar.” The other guys smiled, because this was a song they never did; this was pure self-indulgence on the part of Wally. But they jumped right in, Johnny walking the bass line, Jock pounding on the two and the four, Ted doubling Jock on the keyboard. Wally growled the lyrics, Hiatt-style, and all three bandmates joined him to shout out the chorus:Thank God the tiki bar is open

  Thank God the tiki torch still shines . . .

  They had one dancer for this song: a tall, cadaverously skinny man who bore a startling resemblance to Strom Thurmond and who, to judge by the way he weaved over from the bar, had been drinking nonstop since roughly 1967. He stood in the middle of the dance floor and, looking down at his feet, concentrating hard, did a slow but determined version of the Funky Chicken.

  Wally sang two verses of “Tiki Bar” and then took a solo, keeping it short but getting some nice riffs in there, grabbing a beer bottle and playing slide guitar for the last two bars. The band finished the song with a perfectly synchronized stop, then a nice little reprise ending, strong and tight, as if they’d practiced it for years. They were rewarded with: nothing. Strom Thurmond kept dancing, apparently unaware that the band had stopped playing. Across the room, a few bold buffet pioneers continued their search for edible food. The Bud Light dude who’d told them to play quieter stuck out his fist and, when he caught Wally’s eye, made a thumbs-down gesture. This cracked the other two dudes up.

  “Thank you!” said Wally. “Thank you very much.”

  Strom Thurmond, just now realizing the music had stopped, weaved over to Wally.

  “Hey,” he said, emitting a cloud of whiskey fumes that made Wally’s head jerk back. “Play that song.”

  “Which song would that be?” said Wally.

  “You know that song,” said the man. “About the thing. With the car.”

  Wally looked over at Ted.

  “Ted,” he said. “Do you know that song about the thing? With the car?”

  “Sure,” said Ted. “We’ll get to that in the next set.”

  “OK,” said Strom Thurmond, who made the OK sign with his hand, then fell down. This was not totally his fault; the ship had moved discernibly. Usually it was very steady, but tonight, in the storm, it had a definite rolling feeling. Slowly, with great concentration, Strom Thurmond struggled back up on his feet. Once he was fully erect, he made the OK sign again, almost losing his balance a second time, but making a nice save.

  Wally leaned into the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “right now for your continued enjoyment, we’re gonna let Mr. Ted Brailey on the keyboards here do a little Van Morrison for you.”

  Johnny counted “two, three, four” and they were into “Moondance,” that staple of a zillion bar mitzvahs and wedding receptions, a song that the Contusions, like most bands, could play in a coma. Strom Thurmond resumed the Funky Chicken. A few more people were in the
room now, passengers wandering around the ship, waiting for it to get to the three-mile limit. The veterans went straight to the bar; the newcomers headed for the buffet, from which they recoiled in various stages of horror.

  The band, having had its musical fun, was now on autopilot. From “Moondance,” it would go into a set of similarly mellow, easy-listening, low-stress tunes, to which, on most nights, hardly anybody would listen—the band members themselves would basically tune out—and nobody would dance. Once the casino opened below, there would rarely be any passengers in the room at all. This is the way it was every night on the Extravaganza of the Seas.

  But tonight something different happened. Midway through “Moondance,” a group of giggling women emerged from the stairway and flowed onto the dance floor, eight of them, young and attractive, especially for Extravaganza passengers. Wally guessed that they were a bachelorette party; they’d obviously been partying hard for a while. They began dancing directly in front of the band, which responded by finishing “Moondance” early and going straight into the Commodores’ “Brick House,” a song that, in the band’s experience, was a lot of fun to watch women wearing tight, low-cut tops dance to. They responded nicely and, when the song ended, applauded.

  “So,” said Wally, into his microphone. “Is somebody celebrating a special occasion tonight?”

  “Yes!” said several, pointing to a petite woman with short blonde hair. “Connie!”

  “And is the lovely Connie getting married?” asked Wally.

  “Nope,” said Connie. “Divorced!”

  “Congratulations!” said Wally. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “An asshole,” said Connie. This set off a round of whoops and high-fives among the women. One of them high-fived Strom Thurmond, who went back down like a sack of grain. As some women helped him back up, Wally asked Connie: “Is there anything special you’d like the band to play?”

  “Yes,” said Connie.

  “What?” said Wally.

  Connie pointed at Jock and said, “I’d like him to play doctor with me.”