King of the World
Perception, reality, and the painting of the magic X
WTF
Every few days, a massive Disney cruise ship pulled into port and parked just off the end of our little landing barge project. These arrivals were heralded by a flurry of JAX Port personnel rushing onto our site to chastise us for crimes such as welding, hammering, or driving forklifts on our little fenced-off slice of waterfront. Sparks, noise, and four-wheeled vehicles apparently made the cruise captains uncomfortable and they would sit just off the pier radioing their disapproval to the harried ground crews. Their reticence was so strong that we often stopped all work, stood still, and held our breath while they docked.
During these lulls, I wondered about the type of people who became cruise ship captains. I imagined them as skittish souls that had chosen a solitary life on the high seas because every person they’d ever loved ultimately betrayed them by walking into a room unannounced or sneezing unexpectedly during a quiet moment. Perhaps they were not people at all, but giant pandas which also require perfect conditions to dock a different kind of vessel.
During this delicate ballet, the passengers about to disembark gathered on the bow of the ship and stared down at us. Sated with salty food, sodden with sugary drinks, dazzled by a week of shining seas they peered at us from the depths of a nauseous fugue. Their glazed eyes squinted, their ruddy faces contorted, and over the short distance from their bow to ours, their singular question reached our ears:
“What the fuck is that?”
At that point, the barge didn’t look like much more than, well, a barge. Our own contract welders and painters hardly believed we were building something that would go to sea and catch a rocket, but the paychecks kept showing up so they did too. Truth be told, even we engineers didn’t know what would happen whenever the time came for mission — we just hoped the result would be interesting. So while none of us begrudged the cruising commentariat1 their opinions, truth be told having all our hard work just mercilessly by people who chose to spend seven days on a boat with other Disney adults all singing along to the Frozen soundtrack2 stung more than just a little.
A particular low point came the day I overhead a dad conversing loudly with his son. We were busy pulling massive bundles of power cables down the length of the barge. Each bundle was about six inches in diameter and a few hundred feet long. The entire team lined the deck and pulled the cable down the length of the barge. We looked like we were losing a game of tug-o-war against the weight of the copper and the friction of the insulation on the deck. Adding to the pain, that deck, freshly painted black, measured over 120 degrees in the sun. We’d pull a length as far as we could, drop it, then hustle back to the other end to grab another handful and pull again. It was grueling work and I sweat through my shirt, my baseball cap, and my jeans in a matter of minutes.
“See those guys working down there in the heat, son?” I heard the dad ask, “That’s why you have to go to college and get a degree.”
I looked up at him in his ill fitting striped pique polo and visor that screamed “golf accountant.”3 I caught his comment in the small interval between dropping a bundle of wire before jogging back for the next. I yelled back, “I have two.”
The embarrassed expression on his face said he heard me, but he otherwise carried on as if nothing had happened. Still, the message was clear: the people were not impressed with our barge covered in wire nor our labors upon it.
The Power of Paint
But then a funny thing happened. Overnight all the talk changed, and instead of slandering our work and maligning our professions, everyone started taking photos instead. What was this one weird trick?
We painted an ‘X’ on the deck.
I still sweat through my jeans, conducted in-depth technical discussions with welders that consisted of little more than invective laced with pejoratives, and did Home Depot runs to keep the crew busy. But suddenly, in the eyes of the public, I did so for a grand cause because now this barge was officially associated with the effort to land a rocket.
I found this about-face even more odd than the original condescension. At least the former had made some kind of sense. Upper-middle-class-white-collar-knowledge-workers have long picked on the trades as some kind of lessor work, perhaps out of jealousy of the practical nature of the work, insecurity about their own ability to make money in a changing world, or just good old fashioned ignorance.4
Truth be told, the fawning actually got under my skin more than the slander ever could, because it was a reminder that ego was what had brought me to Jacksonville to work on that project in the first place. The desire to make history and in the process become someone I saw as worthwhile lured me in. The flattery of everyone surrounding the project — from our crane vendors buying us lunch, to delivery drivers snapping photos, to the hotel staff we entertained over beers every evening at the bar in the lobby — kept that part of the ego fed. Of course, if that was all there was to the story there wouldn’t be any issue.
But the reality outside those stories I worked hard to tell was something else entirely.
From that perspective, I lived out of a suitcase in a budget hotel near the airport at the crossroads of two interstates surrounded by a sea of asphalt studded with little islands of fast food. Coffee from the urn in the hotel lobby for breakfast, fast food for lunch, and minimum twelve hour days in the sun spent in pitched battle with everyone from our own engineers, to the Coast Guard, to Mother Nature herself. Most evenings, I had dinner delivered to the hotel bar from one of the chains in the area, washed it down with a few beers, exchanged tall tales with coworkers doing double duty as friends to keep the egos fed, and then caught four or five hours of sleep before doing it all again. I exercised about as often as I took a day off, which was never because I had nowhere to go and no one to see. Every couple weeks I threw out my clothes and bought new ones at Walmart. I told myself it was because they’d been soaked through with sweat and hydraulic oil too many times to be saved, but really they just didn’t fit anymore. When I wasn’t doing that, I was on mission working hundreds of miles out at sea. Everyone claimed they wanted to go on mission, few could actually handle it.
But I was protected from that version of reality. I, too, had a magic X that had been painted on my shirt and which both kept me in adulation and too damn busy to think hard about much else. So, I kept cranking away. Equal parts of me wanting to know what would happen, not knowing what else to do, and reveling in the slow unwinding of self over the many months. In all I bounced between Louisiana and Florida (with side quests to the Bahamas and Belgium5), for about a year. Whenever the doubt got too loud, I’d go shoot pool in the lobby with the boys, have a few beers, and we’d all tell each other how we were making history, if the bartender and other patrons weren’t up to the task themselves.
Another Disney cruise ship pulled into port. A crowd of people got off, and yet more new ones boarded. As always, they gathered on the bow and took their pictures. We used to pose, but after the novelty wore off we just kept our heads down and kept working. A kid stood in the V of the prow, cast their arms wide, and screamed, “I’m king of the world!”
Yeah kid, me too.
The quarterdeck quarterbacks? I couldn’t decide which one to go with.
I have no idea what happens on a Disney cruise, if that wasn’t apparent.
Even though I’m not sure that’s a thing, it seems like it has to be. There was nothing else he could be.
They need the six hyphens to make sure they are fully separated into the proper taxonomy. Often the ego is constructed only from these artificial bounds. There’s a classic Frasier episode about this where he goes toe to toe with his plumber only to find the guy has a better car, nicer second home, etc. but it’s only accelerated in the years since. I am telling my kids to get a liberal arts education and to learn a trade.
Chapters in the book; wild ones, too.