Ride the Titanic! (4 page)

‘Quanto tempo?’

He whispers to me, ‘How long you figure this bullshit dream of yours will take?’

‘Two years.’

‘A while,’ he yells.

Time doesn’t fly when you’re having fun, it vanishes when you’re doing something you love, especially with someone who’s just as excited as you are. As proof, the next time I look at my watch it’s almost noon. In the interim Joe and I have transformed the
Titanic
from a ship model into what looks like a ride designed by Dr. Frankenstein, but then again, mockups have no manners.

We re-packed the innards of the hull with lengths of cardboard, red Solo cups connected with string to simulate the EMV (Enhanced Motion Ride) vehicles, and then filled them with tiny figures of people Joe borrowed from my model train layout in the other room, where he is at the moment, gathering lengths of flex track to use as guide rails for the prototype ride.

‘Any day, Joe.’

‘Coming.’

‘You’ve been in there forever.’

The sound of running trains wafts through the still basement air, laced with the delicate, slightly scorching smell of ozone.

‘Still can’t believe how real your stuff looks,’ he hollers.

I leave my work to pry him loose, but when I get there I have to stop and look at my trains. Some men have wine cellars. I’ve got trains. It gives me comfort knowing it’s there the way a wine collector smiles as he contemplates his precious bottles of
Chateau Mouton-Rothschild
gathering dust in the cool darkness – with one difference; my bottles move.

‘Where’s the damn track?’ I say.

Joe holds up a fistful of flex track in one hand and the train controller in the other. He twists the knob and my scale model passenger train slows to a perfect stop in front of the station.

‘All aboard!’ Joe announces. ‘Time to
Ride the Titanic.
’

He turns and grins, and the years melt away, and he is a happy little boy again with a wonderful secret. ‘We’re crazy sons-of-a-bitches, you know that? Sinking ships, running trains in circles. . .like a couple a kids.’

‘My dad used to say it beats working for a living.’

‘Still does.’ He frowns. ‘Too bad you couldn’t stay on at Disney with us. No telling what would have come out of that fat head of yours.’

‘One Sullivan was enough, I guess.’

‘You’re the spitting image of Ed, you know that? Tall, big across the chest like a goddamned Irish potato farmer.’

‘Flattery gets you nowhere.’

‘Thing is, dames flew to him like bees to honey. Your mother, God rest her soul, had all she could do to keep them away. Me? I’m a good-looking guy but never got a rise from the gals in the shop.’

‘Until Marianna came along.’

He smiles but says nothing.

‘I know you miss being there, Pop.’

His frown vanishes in the sunrise of a wistful smile.

‘There ain’t a day I didn’t wake up happy, thinking about working with the guys – and gals too. Everybody pitching in, crazy ideas, wonderful laughs, like Walt was still with us, you know, even though he wasn’t. Not in body, I mean, but you could almost feel him leaning over your shoulder, saying, ‘That’s great, but what about maybe trying this?’ And you tried it and it worked! It was like. . .like. . .’ He looks at one of my little people and his smile fades. ‘Well, anyhow, nowadays I just wake up, and BOOM. Marianna’s snoring, I’m twiddling my thumbs and staring at the ceiling, thinking, ‘Now what?’’

I nod toward the other room.

‘Now this.’

‘You busy?’ I say into the phone an hour later.

Crunching, crackling sounds came from the other end. Not a bad connection. It’s food. My friend Lewis is always eating but never gains an ounce.

‘Get that dream job?’ Lewis says, just above a whisper. He rarely raises his voice.

‘Looks like it. Final meet-and-greet tomorrow. On site.’

‘Construction, right?’

I take a deep breath. ‘Right.’

After a hurried lunch and making excuses to Marianna for our extended basement stay, I made the dreaded phone call like I promised Geena, acted like I was interested, and their HR person made the official offer. I told them I’d get back to them, but went right back to work on the
Titanic
with Joe, like we were having an illicit love affair. In a way we were; he was supposed to be twiddling his thumbs while I brushed up on my CAD skills.

A long silence on the phone, then Lewis says morosely, ‘I’m still looking for work.’

‘Something’ll turn up. Always does. Remember?’

A long sigh. Lewis is a moody guy. Actually, just one mood when you get down to it: 24/7 Blues. His engineering specialty is show controls and he is brilliant at it. Like a symphony conductor managing the output of a hundred-person orchestra with a single baton, Lewis designs elegant yet simple control systems that trigger multiple event ride sequences at the speed of light, and with the precision of laser retina surgery. Ride vehicles go where they are supposed to, stop where planned, turn when ordered just as their pyro goes off left and right, and stuntmen do back flips JUST as the doors open to let them escape.

That said, his social skills leave a bit to be desired. The life of the party he is not. But if you want a party to turn itself inside out, sprout a dragon’s head and tail, have a nitrogen cannon blast confetti over the crowd and a thousand balloons drop as stuntmen swing from the foyer chandelier JUST as the fake piano explodes, then Lewis is the guy to figure out the electronics that’ll trigger those effects, and when it’s done he’ll be morose and stare at the veggie dip and act like he lives on the dark side of the moon.

‘Listen, Joe and I are working on a little something and we need your help.’

‘Hammers and me don’t agree.’

‘Just bring your brain.’

‘What’s left of it.’

‘And your swim suit.’

‘Can’t swim.’

‘Neither can Joe. See you when you get here.’

I hate water too, but I can swim the hell out of it. During college I spent summers as a lifeguard. Spent hours staring at people splashing in the water, all the time looking for that one desperate person in a thousand who wasn’t splashing but drowning.

Happened to me just once. Public pool in Orlando. A skinny ten year-old boy, pipe-stem arms and legs, sixty pounds tops, gets in trouble. Instead of staying on the deck and using my shepherd’s crook like I was taught, I jump in, convinced I’ll just grab the kid’s arm and heave him out like a fish. I mean, the water’s only five feet deep, right? Done this plenty of times before.

Ho-hum.

So confident am I that instead of focusing on the rescue, I keep thinking about the hot date I’ve got that evening, and I wonder if I’ll get laid, and five seconds later I’m fighting for my life, because the kid scissor-locks my legs, I lose my footing and under we go like a pair of rocks. Five feet of water and suddenly I’m drowning. To this day I can’t remember what water-wrestling move I use to get free, but it worked, and what I learned is that if you don’t live in the present and act on what’s staring you in the face, then you deserve whatever happens.

My ‘present’ at the moment is in the shallow end of our backyard pool, ordering Joe to hold up the bow of the
Titanic,
and for Lewis to brace its stern to keep the model from sinking. My mother-in-law stands on the deck with the twins, looking down on us like we’re a trio of madmen, which we are at this point because each of us has an opinion on the best way for a ship to sink into the Las Vegas desert but still do it with water everywhere.

I have to strain to hear Lewis’s half-whisper. ‘You got to hinge the stern so that it can swing up and stay straight in the air.’

‘Too many moving parts,’ I say. ‘The hinge mechanism would be a beast to build, let alone install. And the weight? Forget it.’

‘But people need to see the stern sticking up. It’s your fourth act curtain.’

Joe shoves the bow down slightly to simulate the sinking. ‘At Disney we always said, ‘If you can imagine it, you can build it’.’

‘I can imagine building a ladder to the moon, but some things don’t work no matter how hard you try.’

In that instant, I hate James Cameron for burning his
Titanic
mythic images into the retinas of tens of millions of people worldwide. But I want to kiss him, too, because without his billion-dollar Hollywood blockbuster movie sweeping across the world stage like a cultural tsunami, my ride wouldn’t stand a chance.

Even so, right now that’s all it is; a chance. So much to figure out, to re-jigger, to redesign and refine, plus it has to work for real over and over again, generate income, fit a business model – not just caffeine-fueled conversations with Joe as he runs my trains, or with Lewis over breakfast, looking at want ads online.

I take a deep breath and remember my dad’s voice. ‘When stuck going forward, move sideways until you can go forward again, but never ever stop.’

I re-run my parameters: the
Titanic
has to sink in
real
water. None of that shimmering, fake, special effect shit. The Atlantic Ocean was the villain in the real story and it needs to be the same in my ride; ice cold water roaring in through iceberg-split hull plates, rising up through steerage, then up to the A Deck stairway, relentless, pitiless. The very element people crave in the Nevada desert must become the very thing they fear as the
Titanic
slips into the depths, while they watch horrified from their bobbing lifeboats, adrift on a frigid Nevada sea.

But since you can’t have an ocean in the desert, and Nevada counts every drop of water because of the drought, we need to create a ‘ride basin’ about two acres across with has a trench in the middle deep enough to accept a fully submerged, five hundred-foot long ‘Ride Vessel,’ which is what we’re calling it now. The real
Titanic
was over eight-hundred feet long, but three-hundred extra feet on the ride version would cost half-a-million dollars–per-foot, and besides, when you look at photos of the real ship you’re almost always seeing it at an angle, which allows us to selectively compress the dimensions to save money but not diminish the effect of the towering presence of a
White Star Lines
ocean liner nosing its pitch-black, bow out onto Las Vegas Boulevard before plunging into the deep.

‘Daddy, do you mind?’ Fiona arrives poolside, her maroon, one-piece school swim team bathing suit in stark contrast to her boyfriend Adam’s wildly-colored, red and white board shorts.

‘Hello, sir,’ his voice cracks. ‘What’s up with the cool ship?’

‘Making it sink. Lend a hand.’

Romeo and Juliet splash into the pool to join us. On cue, Joe shoves down on the bow while Lewis raises up the stern as we try to jam the eight-foot model underwater.

I shout, ‘Okay, let the stern come up some more.’

But when we do that, the bow bumps on the bottom. Lewis is right. No way can the entire ship go down in in one piece in the space I’ve imagined.

‘See what I mean?’ Lewis says. ‘You need that fourth act moment with the stern in the air.’

‘Thank you, Mr. Lewis.’

‘Don’t thank me. Cameron’s the genius.’

Lewis is right, of course. We are duty-bound to deliver the mythic images already pre-existing in customers’ heads, not new ones. Cameron’s
Titanic
put the icing on the cake when it comes to set pieces;
The Wireless Room. . . .The Bridge. . . .The Grand Staircase. . . .The Engine Room. . . “A” Deck . . . Steerage. . .First Class Dining Room,
like pearls on a necklace, which is how my ride will work too; one interactive, ‘augmented reality’ tableau after another as the riders race to get off the ship in time. That part is relatively doable. But how in hell can a five hundred-foot-long ship sink in the desert without a trace in such a confined space?

I spot Fiona’s surfboard hanging on the pool fence.

‘Carbon fiber!’

Lewis permits himself a tight smile of approval, immediately grasping the implication of my words. Minutes later, saw in hand, I sever the stern section of the model, just aft of the rear cargo hatch. Five minutes later, with fish line threaded through drilled holes to simulate hinges, we reattach the stern and float the model back out into the middle of the pool again.

On the real ride this entire section will be made of lightweight, carbon fiber composite instead of ‘ride steel.’ With such a small weight penalty, it can easily be hinged to swing up and expose the
Titanic’s
tall narrow rudder and dripping bronze propellers for that final desperate moment before it sinks beneath the waves.

‘Adam, you and I hold the pivot point, Lewis and Fiona, you rotate the stern. Got it?’

‘Roger, wilco,’ Adam says crisply.

His dad flies for Delta Airlines, which is the boy’s dream too. I figure if your twelve year-old daughter HAS to have a boyfriend, then a slightly nerdy, straight-shooting, no-nonsense junior airline captain-in-the-works who says ‘wilco,’ is the type of kid you want hanging around the house, even though in my case he can empty a refrigerator at the speed of light.

‘Let’s go!’

Joe shoves down on the bow while humming,
Nearer My God to Thee
. Lewis and Fiona stabilize the stern section, while Adam and I patiently wait for our cue. By now the bow is completely underwater, its black hull about twenty degrees down-angle, smokestacks leaning forward ominously.