i dunno, but read it assholes

Chapter 1: Confusion


I walked onto a rolling vice dream. It was simmering with the misinformed, the uneducated and the lethargic. I stepped out of my cocooned existence of TS Eliot and Philip Roth and into a throng of these devious miscreants, all pushing through lines and yelling unintelligible missives. It was a drunken red-bellied vacation. There were jean shorts of every color, barbed-wire tattoos, crushed Miller Lite cans littering the dock at every shuffled step. Barely controlled madness. I stumbled out of sleep into this cluttered milieu not out of choice. Hanging loosely around my neck was a press pass to cover a cruise sponsored by VH1. It promised bands of which I had never heard, 3 Doors Down, Shinedown, and Lifehouse among them. It boasted free booze, a 24-hour casino and other nefarious opportunities. It was a floating fly trap for college students, and I suspected that had something to do with the assignment, but my office worked in mysterious ways then. There was never an indication that anything you did was for any purpose other than the strange, indulgent flight of fancy of the editors. We were the puppet-men. I left Manhattan the day before when my editor left me a slip scrawled simply with, “Cayman cruise, embark Tampa noon tomorrow, check desk for cash.” As I looked over the note, which had been written in some kind of hurried jittery chicken scratch, I slipped open my desk drawer. I looked over the newsroom and my editor’s door was closed, the lights off. There was a wad of rolled up 100’s in my top drawer with a brochure for the event and another note attached with a paperclip: “will advise further. Take cell phone. Good luck there will be a photog, name Thomas, number enclosed, will advise.”

My editor was a man named Garmon, a wiry fellow with a nervous disposition and a tendency to call his reporters gumshoes. “Alright gumshoe,” he’d said to me on my first day, “time to make some news.” He had started a weekly newspaper in uptown Manhattan to cater to the Columbia and Harlem crowd (a group, he so eloquently thought, was “underrepresented and over-repressed by the goddamn yuppies down in the Village”) over 30 years ago and watched as a local crime syndicate burned its reputation to the ground when Garmon revealed 2/3’s of the Gatto crime family’s identity following a number of off-the-record conversations with a few of their talkative wives over some extravagant steak dinners in Newark hot spots frequented by the people he so desperately tried to avoid. He was impulsive, unreasonable and generally aloof, unfortunate traits when your constituents deal in broken kneecaps. A few high-placed policemen made sure there failed to be any arrests, of course, as they were indebted to the same family, so Garmon tried – quite fruitlessly – to start his business back up for several years. The Gattos kept close tabs on Garmon, though, and at each turn his endeavor predictably failed. The man was cursed. The experience made him extremely jumpy, and he eventually landed on the desk at my failing paper where nobody gave a damn. The assignments followed suit. Garmon was rarely in the office, often out chasing “stories” when really he was drinking at the local bar, then showing up hours later to drunkenly edit stories and wax about the possibility of starting up a new paper in Brooklyn against all odds. "Dammit Thompson," he would say to me, his eyes glazed with Jack Daniels and idealism as he pounded his fist on his desk, "there's opportunity out there. It's a frontier! They know news!" The fact that it was a short ferry-ride away and already choked with failing newspapers did not seem to be an appropriate point to dredge up. As a low-man on the totem poll, I was usually the one tasked with listening, though I hardly did that. This meant Garmon liked me. Or should I say, this meant Garmon didn’t send me to zoos to cover the birth of the new Panda.

I bought a plane ticket at work and left that afternoon with two days clothes, a laptop and a cell phone. Nobody spoke to me on my way out the door, though Sallardie, the sports editor, shot me a wink and a wry smile as I walked past his desk. He'd hated Garmon for years but lacked the gumption - or sense - to leave the office. I presumed this wink was sarcastic at the time. Now I know how right he was.

Tampa was swarmed with Spring Break, the beaches choked with it. I arrived mid-afternoon the day before I was to depart and the heat was a terrible thing and stuck to your back. I still wasn't entirely sure of my assignment, but I called my photographer.

"Yeah?" rasped a husky male voice, confusingly amid what sounded like heavy machinery.
"Is this Thomas? This is Thompson, from the Times-Journal, we're covering this cruise together I think."
"Wha-- yeah, this is... wh... wrong number." Click.

Bleary eyed and confused I hailed a cab and told the cabbie to drive me to the biggest pier in town, figuring to find the ship there, and stumbled into what I figured was some sort of beach bar. I drank with abandon, for the moment forgetting whatever hell I’d soon be stepping into. At this point the latter contention was uncertain, but Garmon had talked about doing some travel pieces for months. This seemed to be the genesis of his hatching and scheming, a rare outcome for him. The money had never been there - making the fat wad of 100's in my bag feel suspiciously as if it had been thumbed through by the meaty fingers of a mob lackey just days before - and things hadn’t been good with the paper. Garmon had put in for Chapter 11 only a few months before and the banks still owned everything down to the filaments in his teeth, but he continued to find the money. There had been speculation amongst the old-timers (those who lasted at the Times-Journal for more than a year, worthy of a sort of badge of honor) that in return for allowing him to keep his paper open, his erstwhile mob enemies forced him into a sort of indentured servitude, from which he collected blood money to pump back into his news endeavor. It had the feel of a strange story that would end very badly and most certainly crash down around me somehow.

The frantic scene around me pulled me back to reality. The pumping beat of techno filled the bar and a half-naked coed was being flung from a mechanical bull the obese doorman affectionately called ‘Josie.’ The name of the coed I did not catch. My liner was moored just outside and I could see its hulking husk tottering gently in the Gulf’s waves. It was called the Inspiration, no false tag either. The moon glinted off the silvery placid water and threw its shadows and shapes back up on this floating behemoth, which was being worked over by its diligent crew and marveled at by the gawking masses. On its own it was awe inspiring. Pistons the size of houses churning at ungodly speeds, a staff that could have stormed and requisitioned a small country, the smell of fresh varnish and soapy decks carrying on the sea breeze… how this ended up being my hell was, at present, beyond my comprehension. It was a bucolic scene, and my alcohol-induced state made it seem even more so. I realized just then that it was nearing midnight and if my editor’s note was to be trusted, this thing left at noon. Passing by the aptly-named Josie with the utmost care, I stumbled onto the beach under a wayward palm and fell into a dreamless idyll.

When I awoke, it was to ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ crackling through tinny Caribbean speakers as the sun made its ascent over the horizon. My eyes stung and sand stuck to my face. I had sweat through my clothes the night before but didn’t want to waste my store just yet, so I avowed myself to whatever showers the ship had to offer. I checked my watch and I still had a few hours yet. I picked up my small duffel and shuffled down the beach squinting at this scene playing out on the 400-foot dock leading to the Inspiration. It was a madhouse.

cool story bro

Spoiler: show

seriously, sticking with the "write what you know" credo makes me giddy for this one. You've got the mob, spring break, and the Baha Men. So far, off to a great start.
good intro, sufficient back story, can't think of any negative comments right now. keep going.