Ride the Titanic! (7 page)

‘Try me.’

‘Better yet, a picture’s worth a thousand words.’

He swings his phone around and brings into view the oval-shaped bow of the oddest-looking vessel I’ve ever seen; curvaceous, snow-white, riding low in the water, looks like the top of a whale.

‘You on Moby Dick?’

‘Behold, my dear Ahab, the first fully submersible, ocean-going yacht in maritime history. Designed by yours truly.’

‘A ship that goes under water.’

‘And comes back again.’ A malicious grin. ‘Sound familiar?’

I feel a tingle of excitement. ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’

‘Especially when the tree grows in the garden of a beautiful woman named Xia Zhu. Worth billions, or at least her daddy is.’ Robin checks his watch. ‘As of this moment, she’s the twelfth richest woman in China.’

‘Never heard of her.’

‘Me either, until she rang me up with this mad idea of hers. Wanted a place to get away from it all. And I do mean ‘all.’’

I half-listen, envious, while Robin extolls the details of his wealthy client. He has a right to brag about his customers, but when he gets to the part about Xia Zhu’s managing the project development side of her father’s hotel business, bells go off my head and I interrupt.

‘Her family builds hotels?’

‘Among other things, yes. Southern China, Central Asia, Australia, and they’re moving into the American market. At least that’s what Xia told me. She’s hard to pay attention to, being a most beautiful woman, and myself being an attractive, slightly older, but still stunningly handsome man. In fact. . .’

‘Robbie, maybe you can help me – help us, that is. We need it.’

His playful look disappears under the weight of craggy eyebrows that lower into a frown of concern. ‘Geena okay?’

‘Couldn’t be better, I. . .’

‘Fiona?’

‘She’s fine, so are the twins.’

‘Twins? My God, you have been busy while I’ve been underwater.’

‘Everybody’s fine – providing I pull the ride of the century out of my ass – with your help.’

‘A rather painful process I should think. And on the messy side.’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On your buying my pitch. Want to hear it?’

A dry laugh. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’

Back in the 30s Walt Disney jumped through hoops to sell his stories to his animators. He practically did back flips to get them fired up for
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. With that in mind, I channel Walt’s spirit, and three feverish, back-flipping minutes later, face red, eyes wide, breathing hard, I finish describing the reboot of
Ride the Titanic.

‘Quite a bit different than before,’ Robin says.

‘Geena’s words exactly.’

‘Lovely woman. Perceptive too.’

‘I agree, so when can you set up a meeting with me and this billionaire.’

‘Don’t see the connection.’

‘That’s because you’re a gifted naval architect, not a mad, mechanical engineer like me, who wants to build a ship that sinks in the desert.’

He chuckles. ‘I do confess I am attracted to the concept. Not only remarkable but also a design challenge of the highest caliber. A fully submersible, waterproof system containing an amusement park ride, you say?’

‘Can you work on it with us?’

‘For the right price.’

‘Set up that meeting, let me sell it to Xia, and you can name your price.’

‘But her family builds hotels, old salt.’

‘You mentioned Macau. And what do people do there? Gamble their brains out in the hotel casinos. And what do they do in Vegas? Same thing. Only in our case it’ll be inside an iceberg-shaped hotel that happens to have an ocean liner out front that sinks twice a night.’

‘Point taken.’ Robin swings the camera around to show me the sleek lines of the exotic-looking yacht again. ‘When can you come down here?’

‘Need at least two more weeks to get our act together.’ I glance over to Joe. ‘That sound about right?’

He lifts his charcoal stick in assent.

‘Won’t work,’ Robin says, ‘Xia shows up a week from today to inspect her new yacht. And she’s only staying the night.’

‘A week!’

He shrugs. ‘Like God Almighty, she’s a busy woman creating worlds. But if you can get down here, I daresay I can ply her with my irresistible charms and land you a fifteen-minute meeting – thirty max if her schedule permits.’

My mind is so full of variables I find it better to ignore them and say, ‘Set the meeting. I’ll be there.’

After I hang up Joe says, ‘
We’ll
be there, you mean.’

‘Thanks all the same, but I’m okay on my own.’

‘How you getting down there?’

‘Um. . . flying I guess.’

‘Got enough money for a ticket?’

I consider my overextended credit card. ‘Sort of.’

‘I’m buying and I’m coming.’

Fresh from the golf course, wearing a lime green golf shirt and white pants, seventy-five year-old Herbie Gottschalk lights up like a happy Hollywood searchlight when I finish pitching our project.

‘I love this idea!’ he says. ‘Love, love, LOVE it! It’s got everything going for it and nothing against – except maybe drowning – kidding, I’m KIDDING!’

The retired Disney Imagineer waves his arms as he speaks and his hat skews to one side, so excited is he to bring his forty-plus years of hotel and resort design expertise to bear on our dream project. I feel like kissing Herbie, after I first bow down and adore him for the master he is. Over the years, his creative hotel interiors have enchanted hundreds of thousands of guests with various Disney themes, from Polynesian paradise to futuristic fantasy.

Eyes closed, Herbie sweeps his hands back and forth like a symphony conductor. ‘‘Fabric can sell interiors like nothing else. I see rich red damask, dark purple, watered silk, gilded age appointments, plush and lush at every turn, with plenty of polished brass – and I mean polished, not lacquered – you getting all this, Joey?’

‘Shut up for a second, will you? I’m still working on the lobby entrance.’ Joe’s charcoal pencil rapidly sketches the beginnings of what will eventually become Herbie’s vision of the
Titanic’s
A Deck reconstructed inside the iceberg-shaped, four thousand-plus room hotel officially called the
White Star Grand Hotel
.

‘I’ll need fabric swatches,’ he continues. ‘And paint chips. Clients love touchy-feely.’

‘Where do we get them?’ I say, feeling completely out of my depth with such non-mechanical matters.

Herbie waves away my concern. ‘Got a basement full of the crap.’ He steeples his arthritic fingers. ‘Showcasing a stateroom done up like the Guggenheims’ is the way to go for your presentation to this Chinese dame in Freeport in – how many days you said?’

‘Six.’

He sniffs. ‘I’ve spec’d whole hotels in half the time, like my
Contemporary Resort.
’

Joe pokes him with the back of one of his brushes. ‘You never stop talking about that one, do you?’

‘Never will. My triumph, and not ashamed to say so.’

‘That’s a double-wide compared to what my son-in-law genius here has in mind. Am I right,
paisan
?’

I try to answer but Herbie snaps, ‘The
Contemporary
may be old, but it’s still got everything going for it, including modular rooms, which by the way, is how you’re going to build this iceberg hotel of yours to get it done on time and on budget.’

I finally understand what he’s suggesting. ‘You mean pre-fab the rooms and plug them in? The way Becket did with yours?’

‘Eggs-ACTLY.’

He spends the next five minutes telling us how to create our hotel using modular staterooms that resemble stacked shoeboxes, placed sideways and end-on. As each story rises higher and higher, the workers will attach the exterior sheathing of ‘ice’ to the staterooms, creating the illusion of a massive, towering iceberg growing from the surface of the sea.

And while the outside shape of the hotel looks like a blue-white mountain of menacing ice, the main entrance at the bottom will open up into an exact replica of the Titanic’s
Boat Deck
, upon whose teak planks the guests will make their way to the main reception area – according to Herbie – a splendor of carved mahogany the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the turn of the century.

‘And I know exactly where I can get real wood,’ he adds proudly. ‘Not that cheap resin crap they use nowadays.’

‘But it looks so real,’ I say, ‘And no weight penalty.’

He makes a face. ‘Won’t feel real. People have fingers. They like to touch the worlds I create, and see them and smell them too.’

‘What kind of money are we talking here?’ I say, trying to establish a modicum of fiscal control.

‘A place in Malaysia. Two fellows run a shop that never stops. I can get it for a song, because they owe me. And if they don’t pan out, there’s always Rio.’

‘As in ‘de Janeiro?’’

‘Of course.’ He makes a face and raises his hands helplessly to Joe. ‘Engineers. Am I right? Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.’

‘Tell me about it.’

And so our dream presentation continues to grow. But that’s all it is, pretty much; just a dream floating around in our heads, having a certain shape and feel, safely tucked in between our ears. But the baby must come out eventually; first from Joe’s charcoal sketches and secondly from my CAD drawings of ship elevations and three-dimensional representations of the Guggenheims’ stateroom. All of this, and more, is done to the strains of
Äida
, because with surprisingly little persuasion, I manage to land master model-maker Scooter Ripley in our net of happy Disney-Imagineer-Has-Beens.

Scooter’s slender, slightly palsied fingers manipulate the miniature deckchairs on the Boat deck, and I can’t resist. ‘You’re creating the greatest punch line in the world.’

He chuckles. ‘You mean re-arranging the deck chairs?’’

‘How do you make them look so delicate and real? Brass etchings?’

His thin lips disappear in a smile. ‘Trade secret, young man.’

I watch him work in silence, while in the background Äida sings of her conflicted love for her father, her country and her lover.

‘What’s your favorite opera?’ I say.

‘All of them.’

‘I remember my dad telling me how you built the original presentation models for
Mike Fink’s Keelboat
ride back in the fifties? That true?’

‘Nineteen fifty-five. Still got one of them back home – hang on, gotta’ make some noise.’

Scooter turns on an air compressor and airbrushes the riveted plates that cover the section of the hull that pivots upward when the ship sinks. He sweeps the airbrush back and forth in an easy rhythm, his face a study in placid attention.

By now, Joe has almost finished his first full-color rendering of the
Titanic,
as it will appear on the strip in Vegas. Amazing how with simple, abstract splotches of paint he’s created the kind of blurry excitement of the lights and music of the ‘Vegas Experience’ at two in the morning, when you’re on your fifth drink, life is good, and you’re walking along and then suddenly, BOOM, you look up and spot the ebony black bow of an ocean liner majestically looming above you in the warm night air, beckoning you to
Ride the Titanic
.

‘Can you add more street crowds down here?’ I indicate an area in the foreground where the city sidewalk borders the proposed site.

‘I can add a million little customers if you want,’ Joe says casually. ‘It’s a dream, remember?’

‘It’s got to resemble reality a little bit, don’t you think?’

‘Not my job.’ Joe swirls his brush on his palette, picking up traces of white and vermillion. ‘Concept art is all about seducing a lover. Making it happen for real is like getting married, raising kids, and taking out the trash on Wednesdays, know what I mean? But this. . . .’

With seemingly small, casual motions of his paintbrush, a couple hundred more gawking bystanders magically appear on the sidewalk. The more people who watch it sink at night, the more will return during the day when it’s in our ‘ride-only’ mode; which means they’ll experience the scenes inside the ship and then exit through retail. Only twice a night will
Ride the Titanic
end with the physical sinking of the entire vessel into the ‘Ride Basin,’ our water-filled lagoon designed to hold the complicated CAD design of the ship slowly coming to life on my computer screen.