Unsinkable Mister Brown by Brian David Bruns

Author:Brian David Bruns [Bruns, Brian David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cruise ships, Romania, vacation
Amazon: B007QTHMWW
Publisher: World Waters
Published: 2014-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

7

Auctioneer screening felt like an extension of Legend, though the brutality was entirely mental and emotional. I endured a strangely focused enmity from the trainer, the self-proclaimed Lucifer, who made half the trainees cry and the other half quit. Had I not just been through hell on the high seas, I would have thought his verbal abuse completely and utterly contemptible. Well, it was completely and utterly contemptible, but at least I understood his reasons. And, honestly, his creativity with insults was pretty impressive.

Despite such tribulations, I did reasonably well. This was less from my being talented than my being aged. Most of the competition for the highly sought and highly lucrative position were barely out of high school. By the end of the week I had secured a post to train under the recent Rookie of the Year. The ship was Majesty of the Seas or, as auctioneers knew it: the Widow Maker.

That’s when things got interesting.

If I had thought Carnival’s approach to human rights was cold, then Sundance at Sea treated its auctioneers with the icy breath of Death. After only two weeks on the Widow Maker, the recently young and vibrant Rookie of the Year—now ulcerated, impotent, and alcoholic—got screwed by Sundance and denied his desperately needed vacation and sent to another ship in need. In order to squeeze more life out of the poor bastard, I was promoted by default to associate and they brought in a new auctioneering couple.

He was a Brit, she was a Turk. Charles and Tatli were both likable, but again alcoholic and dysfunctional. We missed our sales goals with an alarming frequency, while they seriously discussed either quitting Sundance or divorce: which came first they soon stopped caring. Yet I was miraculously promoted again, making me the first of our trainee class to gain a big ship—a return to Carnival Conquest, no less! But such was the domain of Bill Shatner, the strangest auctioneer yet, who gleefully added perversion to his alcoholism.

Those were some weeks!

I focused on the job, but our huge success rested on Bill’s shoulders, not mine. I resolved to watch and learn as much as I could from Bill, when he wasn’t dragging me to the crew bar or another Mexican brothel. It was a rather unusual manner of training, to be sure, and not nearly as interesting as I would have thought when I was a teenager. I could refrain from such extracurricular activities easily enough—I’ve never been a big ‘let’s go bang a prostitute’ kinda guy—but what proved more troubling was avoiding the advances of the crew.

Auctioneers enjoyed immense privileges onboard, thusly adding even more to the promise of a Green Card. Oscar Wilde said it best when observing that “by persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.” Indeed, for a while, I thought surely I was going to be kidnapped by the dance captain. Tina was beautiful, of course, but had the IQ of an ice cube. The whole situation was so outrageous that I never took it seriously.

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