Ride the Titanic! (3 page)

As an Imagineering intern during my junior year at college, I busted my butt to make an impression on my dad and Geena’s dad by working night and day on the show’s programmable logic controller system – the device that lets stunt people trigger their special effects when
they
want them, not when the computer says.

My labors paid off when Indy and Marian barely – but safely – cleared the billowing explosions from fire cannons and white-hot fizzing titanium fragments, while the crowd cheered in amazement. In that moment, deep down my soul, I became a legitimate player in the hot, noisy, fabulous world of live theater. Gone was my dream of building bridges, from now on I would figure out ways to jump off them instead.

‘No way!’ Fiona says, thumb-texting furiously.

Geena says, ‘Adam?’

‘Missed the bus. Again.’

‘How many times this week?’

‘Twice – no three times. Could we. . .’

Geena grabs her car keys. ‘Tell Romeo we’ll pick him up. But from now on he takes the bus or walks.’

Outside on the deck our cocker spaniel, ‘Lady’ (
and the Tramp
. . . get it?) gives a muffled, gentle bark which means she’s sighted intruders but isn’t planning on biting them. Moments later, a tap on the front door, and my father-in-law Joe Corelli’s voice booms,
‘Buon giorno, tutti. Siamo qui!’
followed by his wife Marianna, her voice as comforting as a warm calzone;

‘
Dove i bimbi?’

‘In cucina, mamma,’
Geena calls.

Her parents EXPLODE into the kitchen like a happy thunderstorm. Kisses, hugs, ‘How are you, how are the boys, have some coffee, have to go, come on Fiona we’ll be late, mamma, the boys just ate, Pop, don’t clean the pool, it’s fine, bye honey, good luck with your interview,’ and Geena and Fiona are gone, followed seconds later by Marianna, dancing into the living room, cradling ‘my little gorgeous Angela and handsome Arturo’ in her arms, crooning an Italian song and bouncing them like two risen pizza doughs ready for the oven.

Joe and I stare at each other for a long moment. The sudden peace and quiet is a comfort.

‘Coffee?’ I finally say.

‘
Piacere
. With
grappa
if you got some.’

‘For you, always.’

Joe sits there, a fireplug of a man; broad neck and shoulders of a common laborer like his Sicilian ancestors, thick, blunt fingers drumming the table, black hair on his forearms curly and dense. But during the past year the hair on his head started turning white. I swear it began the day he retired. I never use the ‘R’ word around him, because as far as Joe’s concerned, Disney shoved him out the door.

But please, after forty-plus years of devoted service as a concept artist, they gave Joe a fat pension, a lifetime golden pass to visit ‘The Shop’ any time he wants, to reminisce to his heart’s content as a valued, former employee. Sure, he isn’t working there anymore, but Disney takes care of its own. That being the case, it’s also a for-profit company, and companies need to grow. It’s their nature. People grow old. It’s our nature. The two don’t mix.

Joe doesn’t see it that way.

Sure, he had farewell parties, honors from management, all the way up to the CEO, but the door to his future closed nonetheless, and now he sits trapped in my kitchen, sipping his
grappa
-laced coffee and drumming his fingers, with nothing to do but clean our pool which doesn’t need cleaning, and what’s more, the poor guy can’t even swim.

I sip my coffee. The heat of the
grappa
adds to the feverish heat in my brain. ‘Got a second?’

‘Got a million. Fire torpedoes.’ Joe served four years in the Navy, mostly on subs. Says stuff like this all the time.

I gulp down my coffee, take a deep breath and say,
‘Ride the Titanic.’

Joe’s weathered face could fit on Mount Rushmore for all the reaction I get. He blows on his coffee to cool it down before saying, ‘
Paisan
, if you want to humor an old man like me, talk about his ‘good old days,’ not your bad ones.’

‘Forget the past, I’m talking right now, today. I want to build the ride in Vegas and I need your help.’

‘What are you talking?’

Down SLAMS the coffee cup.

‘A man feeds his family with food, not dreams.’

‘I refuse to spend the rest of my life designing air conditioning ducts.’

‘Bullshit. You did HVAC stuff twelve hours a day on
It’s Tough to be a Bug.’

‘That ride was two months behind schedule and they needed a hand, besides, it is. . .well, you know what I mean. It was Disney.’

‘Yeah, I do.’ Joe’s face softens into a smile as he adds more
grappa
to his coffee. ‘You got that part right.’

A peal of laughter from the living room and the squeal of happy babies as Marianna plies her
nonna
magic. I start my pitch, but Joe silences me with a stubby, cautionary finger. He stands, goes over to the kitchen door leading to the living room and closes it, muting the baby play and gives us some privacy.

He settles himself, takes a sip and says, ‘I had a good run,
paisan
. Yours was way too short. But either way, we both got a chance to do something we loved and got paid for it. But that time is over for both of us.
Capisce
?’

He leans forward, his burly arms still strong enough to do fifty pushups every morning. ‘Tell me about this construction company. You like their offer? Think you can advance?’

‘Who says it has to end?’

‘Disney said it to me. Your ride company said it to you – what was its name again?’

‘
Gravity Sucks
.’

He makes a face. ‘What a name. Walt would turn over in his grave if he heard it. I will too, one of these days. Sooner than everybody thinks.’

Something inside of me comes unglued. I open the kitchen door and shout, ‘Mamma, we’ll be down in my office if you need us.’

‘Hope you get that job,
Michele
!’

I grab the
grappa
bottle and clump downstairs to the basement. Joe follows, mumbling about how my indoor-outdoor carpeting needed vacuuming, and how the lighting is so dim.

‘Jesus, you’re turning into an old man. Next thing I know you’ll be painting the rocks around my house red, white and green.’

‘So what? Italy’s got a beautiful flag, and
sta zit
with the wise cracks. I know something about a paint brush, remember. Hand me that goddamn bottle.’

We wind our way around stacks of luggage, racks of cool weather clothing never used in Florida, a table-and-chair set Geena refuses to let me toss out because we had it in our first apartment, and arrive at what looks like a coffin resting on a pair of sawhorses.

Joe whispers, ‘Jesus, I thought you got rid of that damn thing.’

‘Scooter helped me build it. How could I?’

Instead of lifting the lid, Dracula-style, I undo a series of latches around the base, find the power cord and plug it into the wall.

‘Stand over there.’

Joe does as he’s told. I turn off the overhead lights and allow the silence to build in the darkness before I begin.

‘It’s Sunday, April 14, 1912, eleven thirty-nine at night. Two thousand, two hundred twenty-four people are sixty-seconds away from disaster. Only you’d never know it by looking at this.’

I lift off the cover, flip the power switch and my eight-foot long model of the
R.M.S. Titanic
comes to life in all its miniature glory. Built with exacting realism to attract potential investors, golden light streams from thirteen-hundred tiny portholes dotting her inky-black hull. Four buff-colored, black-tipped stacks point finger-straight; as proud as the
Harland and Wolff
shipbuilders were the day their ocean-going masterpiece slid stern-first down the ways into the Belfast waters, free of the land, unaware of their creation’s unexpected, disastrous destiny.

We stand there in the dark, relieved only by the haunting image of the
Titanic
floating in space like some sort of dream. No longer are we in a basement in Orlando, Florida; we’re off the coast of Newfoundland, racing through the night, while music plays and death waits.

Joe says softly, ‘Hell of a thing to happen. All those people.’

‘What if you had a chance to be one of them?’

‘You mean the ride? Blue-sky is all it ever was. Like
Mickey’s Moonwalk
.’

‘It’s so much better than that crappy ride and you know it. Besides, mine would have worked.’

I flick on the basement lights and the illusion vanishes, just like all ‘dark’ rides do when you turn on the lights. Take a trip on Universal Studio’s
Amazing Adventures of Spiderman
in ‘maintenance mode,’ with the 4D screens and nitrogen gas jets turned off and the fluorescents on, and if you’re an average rider, it’s about as thrilling as walking through a warehouse filled with junk. As a Disney brat I hated it, but as a ride designer, that’s when it’s at its best. You get to see how they pull the rabbit out of the hat, and what’s more, you start thinking how you can pull it out even better.

‘Remember my
Ride Rooms
?’ I say, as I fold down the side of the hull to reveal a series of pressurized chambers arranged sausage-link-style, with their interiors done up as First Class Staterooms, Steerage, the Men’s smoker, the Gymnasium and other familiar
Titanic
locales that, when filled with high-paying ‘Platinum-Riders,’ would have filled up with water and simulated the sinking ship, even as my real ship actually sank in the waters off the Florida coast. It was beyond 4-D, beyond virtual reality, it was reality-reality.

‘Such a cockamamie idea,’ Joe says. ‘You couldn’t pay me to get in one of those rooms and go down with the ship.’

‘Market research proved otherwise, remember? We would have turned a profit in less than two years.’

‘Maybe so, but how were you going to feed your family until then?’

I finger the delicate brass railings on the Promenade Deck and for some reason almost weep. This is worse than remembering my first love. Tempestuous, demanding, I was Icarus and she the sun, and nothing could stop me from flapping my wings too close to her destructive heat.

This feels just as painful. I smooth my hand over one of the
Titanic’s
buff colored smokestacks. Lost loves and lost dreams are terrible things. Even though they’re gone, you keep looking for them, hoping they’ll miraculously turn up again someday. But they never do.

Joe says, ‘Maybe you can sell this thing. It’s still a nice model.’

My hand freezes. ‘The hell with that. We’re going to re-invent it.’

‘We?’

I yank hard on the ride room chamber labeled
Men’s Smoker
. It comes loose in an explosion of broken plastic and wooden bits.

‘Want to help me feed my family the right way, or do you want to clean my pool and paint rocks until you drop dead, while I fiddle around with sheet metal and Freon compressors and die of boredom?’

One by one I rip out the ride rooms until there’s nothing left but a yawning cavity of dangling wires and broken stairways. The guts of my long-ago ride lays at my feet like a crumpled Icarus. I kick at the junk, skittering it across the floor.

Joe says, ‘You’re nuts, you know that?’

‘No more than you,
paisan
.’

‘Drop anchor, kid, and shut up. Take a deep breath, put your dreams on the shelf and make that phone call. I’ll clean up the mess. I’m good at shit like this.’

‘Later.’

In an odd way, what remains of the miniature interior lights of the gutted model reminds me of the maintenance lights on a dark ride, and the vision comes to me. Yes, I said vision. Saints aren’t the only ones who have them. Sinners do too.

‘First of all, this thing’s never going to sea, so we don’t need any of this crap.’

I rip out the diesel propulsion system, crew compartments and fuel tanks. Tearing out the rest of the interior proves harder, and when I finish I have broken fingernails, cut fingers and panting from the effort.

Joe says, ‘You remind me of that guy going nuts in
Close Encounters
, building a mountain out of dirt. What the hell was his name?’

‘Richard Drefuss, and that was a movie. This is going to be the real thing.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Joe picks up a handful of scale passengers and holds them like the giant in
Jack and the Beanstalk.
‘So what are you going to do to make it worth their while? Lots better rides at Universal, or Disney, or ever Six Flags. Cheaper too, I’ll lay odds.’

‘I told you it’s going to be in Las Vegas. There’s nothing out there but crazy.’

A slow, cunning smile spreads across his peasant-like face. ‘You’d fit in there real good.’

‘So would you.’

He shakes his head, place the little people in one of the model lifeboats on the basement floor and says somberly, ‘Make that phone call. I gotta’ go clean your pool.’

Furious, I snatch up a lifeboat and jam it back inside the ship’s empty cavity. I find two more lifeboats, line them up single file, and the ride sequence comes to me in a flash, as though it’s been waiting ten years for me to open my big fat mouth and start talking.

So I do.

‘I’m figuring a Mobius-strip kind of ride, like how Universal’s
Transformers
doubles up on itself and reverses twice. At least two stories, starting mid-ships, going forward, rising, going aft, descending and ending up here, right where the
Carpathia
will pick up the survivors.’

‘You got riders floating around in boats?’ Joe says. ‘What are you doing? Something like
It’s a Small World
but with ice and death instead of puppets?’

I ignore his sarcasm. ‘They’ll be EMV’s.’

‘Like Indy’s ride?’

‘Better. And by the time they reach the end, the riders will have experienced EXACTLY what it is like to have been on the
Titanic
on that fateful night when the world ended and the legend began.’

Joe grins. ‘You doing the voice track too?’

‘Audio is the least of my worries right now.’

Marianna’s faraway voice calls, ‘Giuseppe, you got a minute?’

We exchange a long look. Joe lifts his shoulders in a slow shrug, the way peasants do when surrendering to the call of their
padrones
. He turns and trudges over to the stairs. So much for selling a dream to a retired man who paints rocks for fun. But to my surprise, instead of abandoning ship, Joe cups his hands to his mouth and shouts, ‘I’m busy,
carissima
.’