Did You Hear About The Jankowskis?

The Jankowskis had never considered themselves “cruise people.” Wife Shirley had an inner ear problem that made her wobbly even on dry land and husband Craig hadn’t set foot on a boat since he left the Navy in 1974. But Stellar Cruises was no normal cruise line, and when a brochure with the company’s summer itineraries landed in the Jankowskis’ Fresno mailbox, Shirley was struck with the overwhelming sense that she was looking directly into her future.

The cover featured a glossy color photo of a husband and wife, cheek to cheek, leaning on the balcony of their stateroom. Beneath them, a blue-green ocean stretched to the horizon.

“Oh my,” Shirley said out loud to no one.

After forty-nine years, her marriage to Craig was not marked by loving gazes and slow sunsets. The two of them kept a safe distance from each other, largely because Craig’s work at the water treatment plant left him with a repellent chemical smell that no amount of showering seemed to eradicate, and also because they increasingly had little to discuss even when they were in close proximity to each other. Separate bathrooms led to separate bedrooms which led to separate lives.

With their fiftieth wedding anniversary on the horizon, Shirley concluded that a lavish vacation might be the thing that resuscitates their love. They were overdue for a fancy trip, frankly, in so much as they had never been on one. And while they couldn’t technically afford a Stellar Cruise, if Shirley cut back on their food budget and Craig worked a few more overtime shifts, they could put the trip on a credit card and probably have it all paid off by Christmas.

Shirley held her nose and entered Craig’s bedroom. She handed him the brochure and watched silently as he leafed through it. He paused for a long time on the room schematics, tapping his index finger on the jacuzzi tub that came standard with all upper-level staterooms. “This is no Navy destroyer,” he concluded.

Shirley booked a seven-day cruise before he could change his mind. To her delight, Craig only grew more excited. He started to watch YouTube walk-through videos of the vessel and read online reviews about the best restaurants and entrees. Multiple times a day Shirley would hear Craig’s bedroom door crack open and, from inside, her husband would call out his latest finding like a seaman sharing an announcement from the bridge. “They serve fresh baked chocolate chip cookies every day at 3pm sharp! Guaranteed!”

Six weeks later they were on the dock in Fort Lauderdale staring up at the 45,000 ton vessel. It was so bright and white that, even through sunglasses, Craig still had to squint. Painted in swooping eight-foot blue letters near the bow was its mystical name: “Aroma of the Seas.” High above, seven decks of balconies stretched left and right. A small stream of white smoke drifted from the smokestack and dissipated into the blue Florida sky. “What a beautiful boat,” Shirley said.

“Technically it’s a ship,” Craig corrected.

Once on board, they were handed champagne and confetti poppers and directed to the Dreamaway deck. Lining up next to other septuagenarians, they cheered and waved to the indifferent dock workers down below as the Aroma pulled away from its moorings and its four diesel-electric engines powered the Jankowskis into the Atlantic Ocean.

After their 3pm cookies, they went to their stateroom for a nap before getting gussied up for the early seating at dinner. Shirley had requested a table for two, near a window. The ocean breeze carried Craig’s smell off to parts unknown and together they had a romantic swordfish dinner with red wine from New Zealand and a vanilla bean crème brûlée their waiter charred right in front of them.

Once they reached international waters, the casino opened and Shirley watched with pride as Craig turned $40 into $80 at the blackjack table. The ship swayed gently from left to right but Shirley was wearing complimentary seasick wristbands and barely even noticed. When the two of them retired to bed just before eleven, they did so with satisfied smiles on their faces, excited to do it all again the next day.

Their restful sleep was interrupted shortly after midnight by a sound outside their state room. Shirley nudged Craig who put in his hearing aids and sat up for a better listen.

SCCCREEEEEEECH--THUD.

SCCCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH--THUD.

Shirley looked to her resident seaman. “What is that?”

“Something’s hitting the hull,” Craig concluded. He wiggled out of bed and shuffled past the screen door to the balcony. SCCCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH--THUD. “Yep. Somewhere near the bow!”

Craig offered to close the sliding door but Shirley needed the draft because of her husband’s miasma. “It’s okay,” Shirley said.“I’m sure it will stop soon enough.”

But the noise didn’t stop. Every twenty-two seconds it arrived like clockwork.

SCCCREEEEEEECH--THUD.

SCCCREEEEEEECH--THUD.

By the morning, Shirley was a wreck. She managed to join Craig on the Sunshine deck for coffee and pastries, but she did so with her disheveled face hidden under an Aroma of the Seas visor.

“And how was your first night on the ship?” a server asked as he topped off her coffee.

Shirley didn’t like to complain, but they had spent good money on this vacation and the fear she might not sleep for an entire week was weighing on her. “Actually, I was up all night because of… the noise.”

She called it “the noise” because she didn’t know what it was but also because she assumed everyone else heard it too and the crew was already busy fixing it.

“What noise?” the server said, straightening up.

Within ten minutes, an officer in white pants and crisp white shirt with epaulets on the shoulder was at their breakfast table. First Officer Korsika was Greek. Tan. Chiseled. At his request, Shirley recreated the noise in detail, amplifying it as loudly as she could without disturbing other guests’ breakfasts.

Officer Korsika shook his head. “My deepest apologies, Mrs. Jankowski. My best guess is that what you heard was simply the sound of waves hitting the hull. It was a bit rocky last night.”

Craig was not about to be patronized by a cruise ship “officer” wearing a puka shell necklace. “No no no. Waves is water on metal. This was metal on metal.” Shirley nodded, grateful for her husband’s support.

A few minutes later the three of them were crowded onto the Jankowskis’ balcony, listening. They couldn’t hear a thing over the sound of The Goldfingers, a 70s cover band running a sound check in the Stargazer Lounge. Officer Korsika pinched his radio and spoke to a nameless officer in Greek. A few seconds later, the music stopped. Once it did, clear as day they heard:

SCCCREEEEEEECH--THUD!

Officer Korsika didn’t need to hear it a second time to know: “No one stowed the anchor when we left port.” With that, he yelled something in Greek over the radio and made a beeline for the door.

“Like I said,” Craig said to Shirley as they watched him speedwalk down the hall. “Metal on metal.”

At dinner that night, Shirley and Craig were surprised with a free bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and a handwritten letter from Officer Korsika himself, thanking them for alerting him to the anchor issue. Folded up in the envelope was a Stellar Cruise Line credit for $2000.

“Two thousand dollars?” Craig exclaimed. He was so happy he stood up out of his chair, leaned across the table, and kissed his wife on the cheek.

Shirley blushed and shrugged her shoulders. “I guess sometimes it’s good to complain,” she said.

“Damn right it is! Now keep your eyes peeled, Shirley. If you spot anything else out of whack, we might get enough credit to pay for a second cruise!”

Craig said it as a joke. But the warmth of her husband’s words and the thrill of his affection stayed with her throughout the day, and she found herself secretly hoping something terrible might befall her that would net them the extra money they needed to do this all again.

It happened on day five. Shirley had just left the spa after making use of the free sauna, fluffy towels, and cucumber water when she stepped off the cedar flooring and back onto tile, only to have her sweat-covered foot slip out from under her.

“JESUS, MARY, AND JOSEPH!” she yelped, her arms flapping in the air like an ostrich who couldn’t get off the ground. She grabbed the door frame and steadied herself, seconds before a fall that would have likely cracked a hip.

A bubbly young spa worker in black shorts and white sneakers appeared around the corner. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

Catching her breath and re-securing her towel, Shirley explained what almost happened. She painted a gruesome picture, goosing the story along with frightful thoughts of internal bleeding, psychological trauma, and an emergency Air-Lift to a third-world medical facility that would have undoubtedly left her with a limp.

The spa worker put out a rubber mat and filed an incident report. That night at dinner, the wine was even fancier and the amount of Stellar Cruise Line credit in the envelope put them over the top for a 10-day trip to Alaska.

They booked the trip for August, just seven weeks later. Here they didn’t think they were cruise people and now they had been on two of them in the same summer. With the extra money from Stellar, the Jankowskis made use of the various add-on experiences (aka “Stellar Moments”) they hadn’t even considered on their maiden voyage. They walked on a glacier. They took a seaplane to a lodge for line-caught wild salmon. Craig even splurged for a professional massage. His masseuse tested various oils on his body until she found one that expunged his natural sulfur odor, and, for the first time since 1993, Craig Jankowski didn’t smell like wastewater.

“Well that settles it,” Shirley said after taking a whiff of her husband. “We’re never going home.” She laughed as she said it but Craig knew she wasn’t joking. He was feeling the same call to action that she was. When the clock struck 3pm, they grabbed a hot stack of chocolate chip cookies and a corner table to work up a plan.

Craig estimated they would have to bring in half a million dollars of Stellar Cruise Line credit a year to hop seamlessly from one ship to the next. It was a daunting number, but less so if they broke it down to merely collecting $10,000 a week.

“We’ll have to be vigilant,” Shirley said. “It’s not every day we’re gonna step on a wine glass or find a Band-Aid in our pasta.”

Craig was hopeful. Up to this point it had only been Shirley looking for dangerous ship conditions. But he would be bringing his own critical eye as a Navy veteran. “You’d be surprised how many ways there are to die on a ship,” Craig boasted.

When they reached port in Juneau, the Jankowskis skipped the totem pole museum and stayed onboard looking for danger. Together, they scoured the ship. Craig noted a rusty deck railing on the port side near the shuffleboard court. Shirley discovered the lunch menu was serving sushi without noting the danger of consuming raw fish. Craig inspected the life jackets and found a half dozen were missing their safety whistles. Shirley uncovered some “black mold” inside the drain of their jacuzzi tub.

The experience was thrilling. Taking full advantage of Stellar Cruise Lines was the couple’s first shared interest in almost a half century. Not that Shirley and Craig saw themselves as taking advantage of anything. From their perspective, they were providing a valuable service. Whatever pittance Stellar Cruise Line paid them in credit was a drop in the bucket compared to what the company might lose in a lawsuit if an innocent passenger slipped or choked or drowned. They were heroes, if you looked at it the right way.

They delivered their exhaustive list to the Guest Relations Officer then retreated to their stateroom. An hour later, the captain himself was knocking on their door. He was in late 50s, bearded, with a healthy belly. He spoke with a European accent they couldn’t place given their limited international travel. Asking if he could come in, he pulled out the small desk chair and sat while Shirley and Craig shared a seat on their bed.

One by one he went through the list, apologizing, promising that the people in charge would be held accountable, and explaining how each issue would be remedied within twenty-four hours. “In addition, Stellar Cruise Lines would like to offer you a complimentary voyage on a cruise of your choice. Would that be satisfactory?”

Shirley and Craig shared a knowing look. “Plus maybe some spa vouchers?” Craig added.

The Jankowskis went to the Mediterranean next. Then down the Mexican Riviera. And then up the East Coast to see the fall leaves. Shirley was craving something “spiritual” so they did a Holy Land cruise after that, followed by a trip to the South of France. With Craig’s smell well controlled by regular massages, they ditched their two-person table by the window in exchange for eight-seaters with a revolving group of strangers.

The fact this humble couple from Central California had strung together eleven straight cruises and counting made the Jankowskis the envy of their new friends. Their fellow dinner guests couldn’t believe Stellar was happy to reward them over and over again. It felt like a bug in the system. “Not at all!” Shirley explained. “They want to know these things.”

Spurred by the Jankowskis’ success, the other couples began to follow suit. On any given cruise, old men could be seen eyeing the service dates on the elevators or sneaking down to the lower decks to check the temperature gauges on the ship’s deep freezers. Wives, on the other hand, spent their free time seeing if they could get their thighs stuck between the slats of chaise lounges or have an allergic reaction to the hair spray in the beauty salon. For all the investment that Stellar Cruise Line put into shipboard entertainment, the most popular activity for people in their 70s turned out to be nitpicking.

By spring, Stellar had given out so much credit to the Jankowskis and all their entitled friends that it began to affect the company’s bottom line. At the current trajectory, there would not be enough profit at the end of the fiscal year to give out bonuses to employees and crew. They might even have to do a round of layoffs before the holidays.

The CEO, Melinda Stokeburn, a tense woman in need of a good massage of her own, was incensed. “What do you mean, ‘it can all be traced back to one couple’?” A month earlier, her Chief Financial Officer had hired a forensic accountant to unravel the growing mess, which led directly back to Shirley and Craig Jankowski, now thirty-four weeks into their string of complimentary cruises.

Melinda called the legal department to weigh her options. She could ban the Jankowskis from Stellar, but given the countless relationships they had made, that could turn a whole army of senior citizens against the cruise line. She could also direct all officers to stop giving out credit altogether, but legal pointed out that that was the company’s only pressure valve against legitimate complaints.

Melinda hung up and stared out the window at the brown hills of Santa Clarita. She had to get this one right: it was the kind of decision that could cement her reputation as the best cruise line CEO in the business.

A half hour later, she emerged from her office. “I’ve got it,” she said.

The next morning, Stellar’s top executives joined her around the board room table to hear her plan. “For over eight months,” she began, “one couple has been sucking Stellar Cruise Lines dry with their impossibly high standards. Even worse, they are teaching other couples how to follow in their footsteps. It is obvious that they have no intention of stopping. And if we let them, they will continue to take advantage of us until there is nothing left. But we are not going to let that happen... because the Jankowskis’ entire scam hinges on one thing: our making mistakes. Which means there is one way we can derail their entire gravy train.” Melinda stood up and put her fists on the table. “We are going to give the Jankowskis the perfect cruise.”

In theory, the task was simple. By not giving Shirley and Craig anything to complain about, they would run out of cruise credit and have to finally zip up their suitcases and return home. And with the head of the snake cut off, the other grifters would fade away with them. But pulling this off would be no small undertaking.

On Melinda’s order, Stellar tripled their crew for the Jankowskis’ upcoming 7-day trip to Portugal and Spain. A dedicated cleaning crew was assigned to their state room. Two rotating staff members would be waiting outside Shirley and Craig’s door twenty-four hours a day. Six other staff members were assigned to shadow Shirley and Craig wherever they walked on the ship, telling the couple it was part of a new “Platinum Experience” they were only giving to the highest tier passengers. As for meals, a Michelin Star chef was hired to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the Jankowskis’ table, to their exact specifications. Whenever onshore, Shirley and Craig would be provided a team of armed security and five thousand dollars in per diem spending “just because.” To top it all off, Melinda herself would be traveling onboard, ready to authorize any additional expenses as she saw fit. In total, Stellar Cruise Line was spending an extra $10 million dollars on the cruise, but if they pulled it off, everyone at the company would still have a job come the new year.

Shirley and Craig arrived at the pier in Lisbon excited to once again be sailing on the Aroma of the Seas. After so many months of milking the system, they fell into their traditional roles without even thinking about it. Shirley tried to see if she could slip walking up the gangway. Craig ran his hands along the railing hoping for a splinter. They came up empty.

Once on board, they were thrilled about the new Platinum Experience until it became clear they were not allowed to do anything without their servants doing it for them. “I can open my own deck umbrella,” Craig said, hoping to pinch his finger in it and draw some blood. “Heavens no, Mr. Jankowski. You’re just here to relax.” The personal chef arrived at their private table with a detailed list of the Jankowskis’ food allergies, both the real ones and the ones they had made up over the last nine months, and only served dishes the couple had eaten and enjoyed on previous voyages. The cleaning crew changed the sheets in their bedroom three times a day. The towels were swapped out every ninety minutes. A new shower curtain arrived every night. Every morning the drain in their sink was snaked. When weather reports showed rain in the forecast, the captain charted a course two hundred nautical miles to the south to guarantee sunny skies all the way to Barcelona.

With just one day left in the cruise, the Jankowskis were sitting at $0 in future credit and beginning to get desperate. Shirley removed her seasick bands and tried on multiple occasions to fall and hit her head on the dance floor but every time she swooned, a crew member was there to catch her and turn it into a Ginger Rogers-like dip to the applause of fellow passengers. Craig pretended to have a heart attack to distract the crew members in the hopes they would miss their guaranteed 3pm chocolate chip cookie rollout, but an emergency room doctor who had been tailing the Jankowskis all week deemed him perfectly fine and the cookies were on their platters by 2:59.

“They’re onto us, Shirley,” Craig said, eating a cookie but not enjoying it one bit.

“I know,” she answered. From across the table, she got a faint whiff of sulfur.

Late the next morning, the Aroma of the Seas approached its port in Spain. Shirley and Craig stood on their balcony and looked across the blue-green ocean. This was the moment Shirley had foreseen when she first saw the Stellar Cruise Line brochure. But unlike that happy couple, she and Craig weren’t happy at all. The thought of life back on land seemed so pedestrian. Routine. Loveless.

Up on the ship’s bridge, Melinda Stokeburn and the crew celebrated with mimosas. Their quarterly numbers were going to come in below expectation, but Stellar Cruises would rally, and in another year, no one would remember this dip or the greedy couple who caused it.

Down on the balcony of their state room, Shirley Jankowski began to cry. “I can’t go back to Fresno,” she said.

“Me neither,” said Craig.

As the ship slowed and the engine quieted, the sound of the waves hitting the hull drew Shirley’s attention. Shirley watched the whitecaps crash and swirl.

“We don’t have to go home, Craig.” Her husband of fifty years followed her gaze, a hundred feet down to the Mediterranean.

“No, we don’t,” he said.

Shirley slipped out of her flats and climbed the first rung of the railing. Craig joined her. But as they stood there, precarious, the moment was interrupted by a loud scraping noise from under the water.

“What is that?” Shirley asked.

Craig listened as it grew louder. “It’s not water on metal,” Craig said. “But it’s also not metal on metal.”

“What else is there?”

“Rock on metal.”

In its final push to shore, with its captain and crew distracted by their premature celebration on the bridge, the Aroma of the Seas had run aground.

Seven short alarms sounded followed by one long blast. Then came a call from the captain over the ship’s P.A. system. “All passengers report to your muster stations. Abandon ship. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

Shirley and Craig stepped off the railing and back onto flat ground. They looked at each other in joyful amazement. The cruise liner was sinking. It was the ultimate failure. And they knew what it meant. Free trips. Unlimited excursions. All the massages they wanted.

Shirley leaned in and gave her husband the most passionate kiss they had shared in as long as either of them could remember. It was better than the brochure. But as their lips clung to each other in marital bliss, the hull beneath them split open and the Aroma of the Seas listed twenty degrees, sending Shirley and Craig Jankowski spiraling over their balcony and into the Mediterranean Sea.

Nine months ago, they could have swum long enough to be rescued. But after thirty-five weeks of steak and lobster tail and all the chocolate chip cookies they could eat, they were too stuffed to move. The best they could do was tread water just long enough to look up one last time at the massive cruise liner. Fourteen stories tall and gleaming white.

“It really is a beautiful boat,” Shirley said.

Craig would have corrected her, but he had already sunk beneath the waves.

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