Mr. Peabody and the Cinemax Club

The news that we were getting a Corporate audit was met with groans and muttered curses. An audit was 4-6 weeks of bean-counters crawling through your paperwork and comparing it the rules. Their job was to find mistakes; our job was to avoid any such findings.

It was a battle of wits and time. One popular approach was Information Overload. They’d ask for something specific and we’d cagily place it in somewhere in three pendaflex folders bursting with blueprints, change orders, field notes, and other paperwork.

Day one… “kickoff day”… was when the audit team was introduced and vice versa. The audit team typically included people from several different locations. On this kickoff day, a short guy with horn-rimmed glasses stood up. “Ayuh,” he said. “Ethan Jones, Burlington, Vermont.” He sat down, pushed his glasses up and looked at his notes. Heaven help whoever gets this guy.

As it turned out, he was assigned to me. And to say Ethan Jones was reticent would be an understatement.

Ethan exemplified the taciturn New Englander. He moved into an empty desk in my office and every attempt to engage him in time-killing conversation had met in abject failure. This was disappointing; usually, you could waste a whole day this way. But every attempt on my part—How do you like the area… do you need any help setting up…want me to show you around the site—was answered with either a polite “Nope” or “Ayuh.”

Ethan wanted to get right down to it on day one. He flipped the latches on his attaché case and handed me a typewritten list of documents he wanted to see. Dang. As I went to the copier to start the battle, I passed the offices of some other engineers. They were all yucking it up with their auditors and getting ready to head to the cafeteria for coffee. Great. They had a free half-day and I was already getting down to brass tacks with Mr. Peabody.

The first week was a disaster. I tried Information Overload and Ethan looked at me through his coke-bottle glasses and asked me tonelessly to dig through my pendaflex folders and produce the one or two documents he requested. He sat silently, while I sweated and flipped through all the paperwork HE was supposed to waste three hours looking through. I stalled as long as I could, then finally handed it to him. He scrutinized it for five minutes.

“What about this?” he asked, pointing to something. “What?” I asked. “Ayuh,” he responded. “Corporate Facilities Practice 102 requires the lead engineah to initial every field mod. I don’t see your initials heah.” I looked. Dang. I remembered. That day, sweating in the field with a hard hat, I had gotten the verbal OK from my manager to approve it; I meant to follow up with an email but got busy and forgot about it. I put on my tap dance shoes and gave it my best but in the end, he just looked at me impassively. 

“Ayuh,” he said. “This will be owa first finding.” Finding was a euphemism for “violation” and as he wrote, he looked faintly satisfied.

The rest of the week was like that. He refused to fall for any of the time-honored stall tactics and while everybody else was just settling into “real audit mode” at mid week, I already had three findings, offset to some degree by one “highlight,” something I had done well.

Friday afternoon rolled around and my engineer friends were looking to ingratiate themselves with the auditors by taking them out for a few cold ones. I’d had enough of Mr. Peabody and made an excuse not to go.

However, that first weekend was transformative.

Monday morning rolled around. I sat and waited for Ethan. 9:00 am became 10:00 am and finally at 11:30 he rolled in. Uncharacteristically, his tie was loosely knotted, his hair was sticking up, and he seemed a million miles away. He excused himself to use the bathroom, and was gone 30 minutes. He came back with a big cup of coffee.

The day progressed without him asking for a single document. We just shot the breeze…what the fudge?

I caught up with the guys at the snack machines. Apparently, taking the auditors out for a few cold ones ended up with them at the Cheetah III, a “gentleman’s club” in a seedy section of Pompano Beach. I’d gone there for my bachelor party and remembered…sort of…the atmosphere. I’d also been up to Burlington, VT, and knew they rolled up the sidewalks at 9:00 pm. They had nothing like the Cheetah III.

My buddies snickered as they told me in hushed tones what had happened. Ethan had walked in and practically fainted. He ordered drink after drink and the dancers, seeing his tightly knotted tie and thick glasses, had laid it on thick. They practically had to carry him to the car. He was drunkenly begging for “one more dance.”

The only conversation Ethan and I had that afternoon was about “the Cinemax Club” as he kept calling it. When he learned I had gone there for my bachelor party, he pumped me for information. I made up wild tales as I watched the clock over his shoulder go from 2:00 to 3:00 to 4:00.

Ethan, on an expense account, became a beloved regular at the Cheetah III for the next month. Every invite by me to go to a local pub, to come over to my house for dinner, to meet my family, was met by a polite turndown. “Ayuh, I’ve already got plans.” Uh huh.

“Findings” dropped off a cliff as Ethan’s start and end times lengthened and shortened dramatically. The other engineers would walk by at 10:30 am with their auditors, silently mouthing “where IS he?” with me shrugging. But they knew. Word had gotten around.

Things really got bizarre when Ethan started dating one of the dancers. Impressed by the expense account tips, she took him to her favorite suits-optional beach in Miami. If Ethan wasn’t besotted enough before, this pushed him over the edge. Days went by with no Ethan. When he did show up, his tan was impressive. On Fridays, the auditors all convened to discuss findings and highlights. I can only imagine what Ethan had to report after spending…at best…a day with me. 

The final audit wind-up began to approach. Ethan and I compressed a month’s worth of questions into a report in a single afternoon.

At the final close-out meeting with the site General Manager, a very tanned and visibly changed Ethan reported on me. Aside from a few little things here and there, it was “Ayuh, Darryl is running a tight ship,” with my numerous highlights described in glowing terms. The site GM caught my eye and nodded in approval; my fellow engineers rolled their eyes. I passed the audit with flying colors.

Ethan went back to the bleak, cold austerity of Burlington, VT, with a heavy heart. He called me weekly on the company long-distance system for months, asking what the weather was like, how was the suits-optional beach, what was going on at the Cinemax Club. I made up stuff, thinking of him up there in that dreary place. He asked if I could please keep my ear to the ground, he had requested a transfer to Boca.

Apparently, no openings were ever available; because I heard had gotten divorced, left the company and moved to the US Virgin Islands…Saint Croix, I think.

That was thirty years ago. Sometimes at the beach, I gaze at the horizon and think back to that weird six-week period, the changes that affected one guy’s life, how his world was completely capsized one fateful Friday night.

I got the word last week on our retiree FB page that Ethan had passed recently. His obit mentioned him as “having a love for sailing” and the hours he spent aboard his ketch, the Cheetah III.

I hope Mr. Peabody’s dream was all he envisioned…and if it was all worth it.