The Fata Morgana

THREE

I sat alone in my office wondering what I would do next, after I fired everybody, when the room darkened and I noticed that my chief engineer was filling the doorway into my office.

Adam Kulczyinski is the biggest man I’ve ever met, standing six foot five, and so wide that from a distance, he looks squat. He’s powerful, not like a bodybuilder, but like a big time wrestler who’s going to seed. He has thick legs, thicker arms, and a big, hanging gut. When you add thinning, unruly hair, bushy eyebrows, and a huge beak of a nose, you have a remarkable looking individual.

He walked in with a yellow legal pad filled with numbers and sketches, sat down in the chair across from me, and put his feet up on my desk. His shoes were very expensive Italian jobs, since with what I had to pay to keep him, he could afford anything he wanted. But the soles were worn through because he never got enough time off work to either have them fixed or buy a new pair.

His suit was crumpled, of course, since his suit was always crumpled. On business trips, I’ve seen Adam put on a good suit fresh from the cleaners, and watched it crumple as he stood there. It was just one of his many magical talents.

Another of his peculiarities was that he always wore both a belt and suspenders. I’d asked him about that, and he’d said, "A good engineer, he don’t take no chances."

Now, most people would get fired for putting heel marks on their boss’s desk, but I’ll put up with a lot from a man who really knows what he’s doing.

Hell, once I went into engineering to find Adam winning a farting contest with a Japanese customer. Three detailers were acting as judges, holding up scorecard numbers for volume, odor, and tonal quality. When I mentioned his conduct to him later, all he would allow was that, "Yeah, well, it probably woudda shown more class if I’d ’a let da customer win. I just got carried away wit da spirit of da competition, is all."

Adam was one of the few people left in the world who still spoke with a Hamtramck (pronounced hamTRAMik) accent. Hamtramck is a small city that is completely surrounded by the city of Detroit, like a tough little amoeba that a bigger amoeba could swallow but couldn’t quite digest. Any place else in the world, the larger city would simply have absorbed the smaller one, but here, for fairly good reasons, the city fathers involved were just plain scared to try it.

You see, early in the century, Hamtramck had been populated by Poles who had abandoned Europe in favor of the American car factories. For many years, it was actually the largest Polish-speaking city on earth. Thus, those who ‘came over on the boat’ never had to learn English at all, and the second generation developed something that was almost a Creole of English and Polish. It involved substituting a "T" sound for an unvoiced "TH", and a "D" for the one that was voiced. The word order used was half way between the two parent languages, and its other unwritten rules were beyond my understanding. Furthermore, while I have never been able to get Adam to admit it, I am positive that he has a lot of fun making his statements as deliberately ambiguous as possible, and just filled with internal contradictions.

In writing this history, I have found that I am completely unable to do justice (or rather to do proper injustice) to his strange accent. Nothing that I am capable of putting on paper sounds exactly like whatever it is that Adam actually does. I regret to say that even when I am quoting him, you must take it for granted that what I am actually doing is paraphrasing his statements into something closer to a civilized tongue.

Yet while Adam’s accent was probably authentic, to the extent that it really was what he grew up with, it was more than a little bit phony as well. I say this because sometimes, when he was tired or distracted, he would sometimes start speaking pure, Midwest Standard English, the language of Walter Cronkite, until he caught himself and went back to his Hamtramck accent.

His constant use of an illiterate Creole convinced some people that he was a "regular" sort of guy, and others, who didn’t know him well, that he was a fool. He liked people thinking both of those things. Very few of his associates realized that he had graduated summa cum laude from Michigan Tech, an engineering school that is second only to Cal Tech and MIT. He never mentioned it. In fact, I’ve heard him denying that he’d even graduated from high school. The only reasons I knew about his education was because I’d seen his resume when I’d hired him, and because I went to the same school that he had. Oh, he’d been a senior when I was a freshman, and we’d never actually met during that year, but it was not easy to miss a man as big as Adam in a crowd.

Even then, I’d phoned his old school, not so much to verify his technical skills, but to see if he’d actually passed an English course. He had. Indeed, he’d minored in English Literature, and pulled straight A’s doing it.

But whether it was because of or in spite of his various peculiarities, when Adam designed a machine, the machine performed flawlessly. What’s more, it generally worked perfectly the first time it was turned on.

Therefore, if Adam wanted to talk with his feet on my desk, I was willing to listen with my feet on the rug.

"I take it that that’s not your resume," I said, pointing to his pad of yellow notes.

"Nah, I do dose on one of da draftin plotters, on dat nice cotton bond what I had you pay for."

"I wondered why you wanted that stuff."

"Well, if you woudda axed me, I woudda told youse."

"Maybe I just didn’t want to know. So what’s your idea?"

"So sales has screwed up again, and we’re looking at some serious layoffs."

From Adam, this was a remarkably tactful statement, seeing as how I did most of the actual sales work myself. Not out of choice, you understand, but because I have yet to find a sales engineer who was both good at his job and willing to work for somebody else once he’d learned the ropes. You have to be a good engineer to be able to talk to other engineers, and once you have the sales contacts besides, the temptation to "buy your own cannon," and run a company the way one ought to be run is just too strong.

I’m very familiar with the process, since that’s how I got my company started twelve years ago, and that’s how I lost my first (and last) four sales engineers. And so although I suppose that it represents a monumental case of hypocrisy on my part, well, let’s just say that I’d gotten tired of training my own future competitors a long ways back.

"Look, I’ve gotten solid promises for two big lines in a couple of months. Most of the guys and girls have been working sixty, seventy hours a week for over a year now. By the time they come back from a long, deserved, company paid vacation, there will be plenty of work for them to do," I said.

"Nah, you know better den dat. Dees guys, dey been pulling down twice deir regular wages for so long dat dey tink forty hours’ pay is like bein’ on welfare. Dere’s udder outfits around wit plenty of work dat’ud snap up our best people in a hurry. But me, I figure dat if we could give dem sometin fun to do, we could keep our best ones, anyway. Say ten from engineering and maybe a dozen from da shop. Da other tirty-five, well, dey’re not so bad, but we could live without ‘em, and anyway, dey’re the ones dat will still be dere without a job when we need ‘em back again."

"There’s money in the bank to pay for it, but what’s your plan?"

"I figure dat you’ve always wanted a yacht." He pronounced it with the "ch" sound left in. "You never said nuttin about it, but everybody else wants one, and you always looked pretty normal. So. Did you know dat you can buy da materials for da hull of a one hundred foot long yacht for around ten tousand dollars, if you build it out of ferocrete?"

"Now wait a minute. A hundred footer, new, has to go for something like a couple of million bucks, at least, and the hull has to be the major expense item of any ship. There has to be a catch, somewhere!"

"Dere is! Ferocrete is pretty labor intensive to make, but keeping people busy is exactly what you want to do just now."

"Even so, the gap between ten thousand and two million is still too fantastic."

"You got to look at da economics of da yacht makin business. Dose tings are built for people who got too much money an’ don’t know what else to do wit it. Did you know dat half da production cost of one of dose big babies goes into teak wood decking an’ cherry cabinet work on da insides? You’re talkin a coupla hundred bucks a board foot for some of dat stuff! Now, you don’t own no teak in your office or your car or your house, so why should you want any on your boat?"

"Okay, so we keep it sensible and Spartan, but you’re still a long way from saving two million bucks."

"You got to look at deir sales expenses too, boss. All dose fancy showrooms. All dose magazines wit all dose slick photos, an’ all dose good lookin girls in dose string bikinis, or dose better lookin girls not in dose string bikinis. I’ve heard dat da total weight of all da books an’ magazines about yachting produced each year outweighs da actual boats produced each year by a factor of more den tree to one."

"That’s hard to believe. But anyway, say we get our best people involved in building this boat. Why, a hundred footer will absolutely fill the big assembly bay. If a customer walks in and sees it, he’ll know that we don’t have any serious work under way, and he’ll drive the price down to the point where we couldn’t make a profit, knowing how hard up we are. And when we do get a real job in, what do we do with the half finished boat? Scrap it?"

"Not to worry. I got dat all figured out. We rent da warehouse across da alley from da shop. It’s been empty for a year an should oughta come cheap. Den if a customer comes over unexpected, you or Shirley holds him up in da front office for a few minutes while da rest of us runs back to da shop and looks busy. An’ when we get real work in, we just leave da boat sittin dere until we hit another slow spot. I figure dat just having it dere will make da guys an’ girls feel a lot more secure."

"Okay, say we do this thing. Just what am I going to do with a yacht once we get it done. I haven’t had time to work out with my Karate master for months. I haven’t had time for a vacation in eight years!"

"So dat’s da udder beauty of my plan, boss. Once we get it done, when we hit a slow spot like now, we all go for a boat ride! Wit a boat dat big, we got room for all our people an’ deir wives an’ kids an’ husbands. Or, if da season’s wrong, from what I hear, dere’s always more work you can do on a boat. Like dey say, ‘a boat is a hole in da water dat you pours your money into.’ Or in our case, our man hours."

"I doubt if they say it quite the way you do, but okay, okay. You’ve sold me to the extent that I’ll seriously explore the idea with you."

"I figured dat you’d come around." Adam turned to the open door past which our accountant-secretary-receptionist sat. "Hey, Shirley! It’s a go!"

"Dammit! I didn’t say that!"

"Yeah, but you will."

Shirley brought in a roll of drawings, smiled and left. I gritted my teeth. Among my best people, I believe in running a loose ship, but I also believe in getting a little respect now and then, too.

"So this is something you’ve designed, Adam?"

"Nah, da Coast Guard dey wouldn’t let me do it. Seems dat you got to be a la-ti-da Naval Architect before you can draw a rowboat, an’ us lowly Professional Engineers just ain’t good enough. Dis is a standard plan, wit maybe a dozen built like it in da last ten years or so. I got maybe forty or fifty little changes I want to make in it, but I figure I can sell da brass on ‘em okay."

What he showed me were the plans for a huge sloop, with a single mast reaching to a hundred and forty feet above the water line. Her beam was twenty eight feet. Drawing eighteen feet, she displaced over a hundred tons of water. The ballast alone weighed almost forty five tons, and she carried over five thousand square feet of Dacron in her two sails.

"Big."

"Look, boss, we gotta have room for forty people. If da guys an’ girls tought dat dey was buildin dis ting just for you, well, deir hearts wouldn’t be in it and dey’d start tinkin dat gettin back into da machinery business somewheres else wasn’t such a bad idea. Even like it is, dere ain’t much spare space. Half da people will be sleeping in a bunk room, and da married couples only get an enclosed half of a queen sized bunk bed. You, however, get a spacious owner’s cabin in da stern."

"It doesn’t look very spacious. What’s more, it’s right above the engines. It’ll be as noisy as hell in there."

"It won’t be dat bad, boss. Lots of soundproofin. Anyway, we won’t be using da engines except when we’re going in or out of port, or in an emergency, and you’d want to be on deck dose times anyway."

"Grumble. I take it that you plan on getting this big cabin in the front of the boat for yourself?"

"And give myself a bigger stateroom dan my boss’s? Never would I be so crass! No, dat’s for nobody in particular. It’s just sort of a social room. I mean, you know, sometimes a guy has to spend a little time alone wit his girl, an’ I figure dat if we don’t give ‘em someplace to do it, dey’ll be sneakin around an’ messin up da sail locker all da time."

"Oh. Here you had me thinking that you’d finally found the right woman to settle down with. I still say you ought to try married life. I mean, we all joke about it, and a bachelor like you only hears about the down side of marriage, when your friends are in the dog house, but use your couch instead. But I can testify that a wife and maybe someday kids are what really makes life worth while."

"Yeah? Well, if your home life is so great, why don’t you spend more of your life in your home? As often as you get dere, I’m surprised dat your wife remembers who you are. I saw you sleep in your office for a week straight, when we was late gettin dat Chevy Tonawanda job out."

"A necessary temporary expedient. Find yourself a good woman, Adam."

"Lookit, boss. I got restaurants to do my cookin, customers to bitch at me, and a government to take away all my money. What da hell do I need wit a wife?"

"If you say so," I sighed. "Another thing. These are damn big sails. Putting them up and taking them down will be a hell of a job."

"You’re way behind da times, boss. We got hydraulic roller reefin’ on bote da sails, and hydraulic winches on everyting else. Dere’s an on board computer dat can keep her on course no matter what, an’ a satellite navigation an’ guidance system dat knows where it is to witin ten meters, anywheres on Eart. Dis baby can be sailed by one person alone, an’ even den you only got to check on tings every so ofen."

"We both know just how unreliable automatic machines can be. Murphy’s Law rules the universe."

"Right. An’ when tings do get screwed up, like you know dey will, we’ll have plenty of manpower on board to set tings right."

"This boat’s going to be fast, huh?"

"Fast enough. It won’t win no races, but where’s da sense in buildin a super fast boat? You want to get somewheres in a hurry, you book a flight on a jet. Dis boat’s for gettin dere wit style!"

"Uh-huh. You are sure that all our best people will go along with this plan?"

"Natch. I’ve already talked it over wit each one of dem, sort of on da sly, you know?"

My thought was, What the hell. It will probably keep most of my key people happy, and it just might turn out to be fun.

"Okay, let’s do it. But if I hear one single joke about boat anchors, the whole deal is off." In the Special Machinery business, a boat anchor is a machine that never did work properly.

As he got up to leave, I said, "Say, have you given any further thought to that offer I made you the other day? You know, about being a partner here."

"Nope. Don’t have to tink about it. Da answer’s da same as it was last week an’ last munt an’ last year. I don’t want nuttin to do wit da headaches o’ being a boss. Da way it is now, I do what I like to do an’ I got nuttin to worry about. An’ I still figure dat in da long run, I make more money gettin a paycheck den you do gettin to keep whatever’s left over after da bills is paid."

"Well, perhaps true, but there are some great benefits to running your own show."

"Bennies? What do I need wit more bennies? I got a big new company car, a company parkin spot wit my name on it, an’ a company expense account in case I feel like takin a cab to work. Shit, now I’m even gonna get a company yacht!"