That’s how I felt after five days of it.
It’s a sort of Lord-of-the-Flies experiment, except that not only do we volunteer for it, we pay to have it done to us.
Mr. Fernández had decreed a cruise—I called up a perfectly nice guy in Chicago and gave him numbers. We efficiently received a booklet by email a day later. We counted the days until we were off.
The day came. Mr. Fernández was eager to board the ship.
Well, if size counts, it’s impressive. There are 12 floors—the first is underwater, and is assigned to the staff. Who work, by the way, six months without a day off, and then get two and a half months of vacation.
“Hah!” cried Alberto, our tablemate. “Find me the Puerto Rican who would accept that! You’d have a huelga in twenty minutes!”
Huelga—a strike, and yes, Alberto is Puerto Rican. For we are six Puerto Ricans at the table—five and a half, really, considering my late start—and thus we are merrily trashing our compatriots.
“There was this pick up game on the basketball courts, and it turned into the gringos versus the boricuas. Well, they played more like football than basketball—just killed us. And then one of the Puerto Ricans gets all upset and wants to start a fight. And I’m going ‘hey, tranquilo, it’s just a game….’”
We are sitting with four people whom we would not—under any other circumstance—be likely to sit with. A couple in their forties. Another couple in their young thirties. We’re speaking Spanish because none of them—barring Raf and me—can speak English.
That’s particularly sad because Carlos, age 32, seems bright, honest, and ambitious. He works the night shift in a hospital emergency room, but is also a musician—he sings what he calls música sacra, which for a moment I took to be Palestrina and the like.
Christian rock!
Well, it’s better than hanging with the boys and drinking beer, I guess. He’s gone to Perú to promote his music—but what about the States? He shrugged when I asked him.
There are—as you can imagine—two principal activities on a cruise ship. The first is eating, the second shopping.
I’m only fair at both….
I’m way behind, in fact, in how much I can ingest, to say nothing of digest. Others are far better, and have figured out how to attain an almost constant stream of sugar. The lemonade taste of high fructose corn syrup. The cruise sells you a special glass, which will hold all the Coca-Cola you can drink. There is a dispenser of soft ice cream—vanilla and chocolate!—if you prefer a colder sucrose delivery system.
I, of course, am trying to wean myself off the stuff. So I hit the gym, on the third day. And was startled to find that you have to work like crazy just to burn off 150 calories.
Which is probably half a glass of Coke.
OK—shopping. I managed to spend perhaps 150 dollars. Four bottles of Scotch, a t-shirt, a silly but nice collar as a birthday gift. That’s it.
But it’s taken seriously. There’s a channel on TV about where to buy what on all the islands. There’s also a seminar every day, and a shopping specialist who can tell you where to get free stuff. On the last cruise, a tablemate discussed endlessly with her companion where she might find a special gold bracelet to match a ring she had bought on the cruise before.
None of this, of course, makes any sense to me. I try to put stuff on me that will give no offense to anyone, and that will raise no eyebrows. Beyond that, I couldn’t care less.
The cruise ship sails up to the pier at seven in the morning. At 8:30 you can be on an excursion, which we did—twice. We peered at a Hindu temple through a cyclone fence in Martinique. The tour guide told us that you had to fast and abstain from sexual relations for two days before entering the temple. Oh, and that they practice ritual sacrifice of goats.
Right—nice to know!
In Antigua, we learned that Lord Nelson, at the age of 26, was sent to enforce the navigation acts—wildly unpopular at the time. We were invited to sample a lethal rum punch. Faithful to my readers, this blogger forced cup to lip. And slept all the way back to the cruise ship….
Then there’s the organized silliness. We attended—of course!—the world’s sexiest man contest. I was invited—I mention this with no pride, the organizer was desperate—to participate, but declined. The contest came down to a draw between a very nice gringo from Oklahoma and a Puerto Rican. The audience was asked to decide.
Guess who won!
“I pretty much saw that coming,” said Eric, when I condoled with him.
There are shows, as well, which I hated. There was a black guy who did imitations of Sammy Davis and Motown and Stevie Martin and god-knows-who-all. He took the time to do a parody of classical music. Oh, after mentioning that his sister had sung Bess in Porgy and Bess at the Met.
‘Fuck this,’ I thought, and left to go to the bathroom, where I met a young German paraplegic, who was busy trying to open the door.
He must have been recently paraplegicked, because he hadn’t really learned the tricks yet. And so I found myself on my knees, emptying urine from the bag strapped around his leg, rinsing the urinal that I put back in a bag in a basket at the back of his wheelchair.
“Once a nurse, always a nurse,” said old Val Prock—that loveable lesbian who ruled the nursing department for all those years. (Ooops—sorry! Don’t know whether she actually was, though she had lived with the same woman for thirty years….)
Well, it’s true.
“It must be hard,” I said to him, the following day, when he couldn’t make his room card work.
“It’s very hard,” he said.
It was the realest moment of the trip.
