Cruise Story Category—Gold Winner: Heroes of the Caribbean
1. Go
For a long time I scorned the idea of a Love Boat-style cruise. From what I understood heard, all you did was eat. Well, occasionally you called at ports, but only to explore the crooks and grannies of duty-free shopping malls. Then you hurried back on board for more meals, digesting them to evening floorshows by the Can’t-Stop-Smiling Dancers.
But then, it was 1994, and I figured I’d done enough real travel. I’d explored three continents. I’d slept under bridges, in brothels, and in a concrete tube in Czech construction site. So what was wrong with two weeks of adventure-free travel? Besides, what else are you going to do with your seventy-something parents?
2. Escalation
At the modern passenger terminal in San Juan Harbor, I set a bad example by carrying my own bags up the escalator. The elderly couple behind also refused porters, and the husband tangled with his suitcases and toppled backwards. He was wedged on the escalator, so that the steps, while not carrying him up, rolled on, shredding the papery skin of his right arm and leg with their toothy edges. I got down the steps and lifted him. His arm, his shirt, and the glass sidings of the escalator were streaked with blood.
His wife said to me, “You were so brave.”
With spots of blood on my t-shirt, and feeling not unlike a hero, I stepped aboard the Cunard Countess.
3. Suspicions On the Demographic Make-Up of Passengers
An hour later, exploring the ship’s library, a corridor with a few shelves, I met an Aussie. “Apparently,” he told me, “Some old Yank fell down the stairs and broke his leg.” He made no mention of anyone being brave.
There was something off about that Australian, and it wasn’t his story; it was his age. He was just fifty. Next my parents (sorry), and the other passengers I’d seen slow-footing along the promenade, this bloke was a spring wallaby.
4. Fruit Caps
My friend and cabin-mate, dragged along to satisfy the pesky dual occupancy stipulation, was Bilby. He and I were the only men under forty sharing a cabin on a ship of 800 passengers. On our first stop, the island of Antigua, we bought cheap sun-protection: a pair of matching rainbow caps. We did not know how queer we looked till we got back to the ship and found a mirror. We stopped saying we were from San Francisco.
5. Other Misconceptions
So we had gay hats and weren’t gay. We also thought we would have all the time in the world to do all sorts of things; we were wrong. Every evening the Daily Programme was slipped mysteriously under our door. The Programme reminded me that sprawled in a deck chaise I’d miss “Informal Meeting of Masonic Brethren” or “Creative Writing with Alma.” Moreover, there were films in the cinema, glittery productions every night in the Showtime Lounge, and a band in the Indoor/Outdoor Center. There were shops, exercise rooms, a swimming pool, sauna, library, casino, hairdressing salon, golfing cage, bars, a very mini tennis court, people who demanded watching, and meals, meals, meals.
And then there were the islands. You had to figure out what to do with them.
6. Figuring Out What to Do With Islands
Official shore excursions were for the weak of body and strong of wallet. However, for roughly $60, two parents and two guys in gay hats could create their own enchanting excursion with a local guide. Our guides’ had names like Cyril, Nehemiah, Henry, or Penguin, and they knew all the best places. On Barbados Penguin showed us the Prime Minister’s home. We sat there in the van, with the engine chugging and peered through an iron gate at a medium-sized home.
“Now can you show us where the Secretary of the Treasury lives?” I asked.
7. Food Group 1: Guinness
The effect of a creamy Guinness after a day of governmental home-watching is heavenly, especially when you’re wearing your formal dinner outfit, feeling the slight pitch of the boat in the cool of a dim lounge. I liked the Starlight Lounge best. Never crowded, it was a swanky night-club/casino at the fore of the boat. I sat at the blackjack tables every night, drinking Guinness from foot-tall glasses and trying to make twenty dollars last hours. The dealers were all British, all in their twenties, all female, all large.
8. Casino Girls
Casino girls? Yes, and by the second week of the cruise, they’d opened to Bilby and me, upping our relationship beyond the dealer/gambler level to something like annoyed familiarity.
My favorites were Grinder and Cynthia.
Cynthia was Anglo-Indian, biggish, but well-proportioned. She had the soft features that make Indian girls so pretty: mellow brown eyes and smoothly curved nose. She liked us because she liked banter, and it didn’t matter how hollow or absurd.
Bilby: “Cynthia, I have a question about the rules. What would happen if all the cards caught fire simultaneously?”
Me: “Cynthia, I’m going to put this empty coin bucket on my head now, and I’ll tip you two dollars if you say I look like an organ grinder’s monkey.”
And Grinder. She was not an object of great beauty, or any beauty, especially when tucked into the floral yellow culottes the dealers wore on informal nights. She was from Bristol, fiercely working class, a sneerer, and probably a barroom brawler. But I trusted her brutish sincerity. She was the first and only dealer I’ve encountered, anywhere, who refused me a seat—for my benefit. The cards were cold. She did it right in front of the other players, not a bit concerned how they might feel about this favoritism. And it was not advice. It was an order, frosted with an accusation of stupidity: “Go to the bar and drink,” she said. “Go on. Sod off.”
10. Food Group #2: Menu Fare
Menus at the Meridian Dining Room were thrilling. Try an appetizer of mango slices and shredded coconut, followed by clam chowder, salade niçoise, half a lobster with scalloped potatoes and sweet carrots, all topped off by baked Alaska. In actuality, this mass-produced fair was fine, not better. But crusie passengers are sold on the menus, the candlelit tables, the obsequious wine stewards, the waiters in white coats and gloves. They come on a cruise for the semblance of luxury, as upstart sybarites. They step aboard a discount Victorian Age into a cozy corner of imperialism. They journey into a system of ethnic stratification that the world no longer officially tolerates: capable British officers guide the boat; Filipinos carry drinks and change bedding; black islanders vacuum the floors; and Latinos feed you with old-world servitude.
The veneer didn’t impress me, but the competence did. On the Countess, everyone did his job. The boat was meticulously clean and the crew kind and helpful (even on those occasions when I was especially funny, or tispsy, or both). Day after day, port after port, this 536-foot, 18,000-ton chunk of steel did its thing without sinking.
Even my dealer girlfriends—by far the least responsible workers on the boat—slid the gaming cards with expert hands; and, in addition, at times I found them to be nearly useful sources of information.
Befriending Guinness in the casino, I asked Grinder for tips on the next day’s port, Guadeloupe.
“The pisshole of the Caribbean.”
Surprisingly, she did not mention…
11. The Fast Fan of Guadeloupe
True, Pointe-à-Pitre is big and crowded, dirty and baking. With its balconies and wrought-iron junkiness, it has the feel of a burnt New Orleans. Still, it was a pleasant change of pace from Antigua and Barbados. We could walk around unmolested by touts and pitchmen. The central market, right next to the dock, functions for locals not tourists. Fish and fruits are cast onto tables or blankets on the pavement. Women in madras cloth and with callused feet twist roots into miniature bundles. Someone screams at a customer in French—a banana deal gone sour. Your nose is perplexed by a stew of smells: curry, mace, body odor, fish, wet dog, leafy greens.
Here, on Guadeloupe, I learned that even on a cruise, it’s possible to experience real travel—discovery. Beyond the Place de la Victoire and up toward hills matted with greenery, corrugated roofs, and rainbows of hanging laundry, Bilby and I explored. Without guidebook, map, or sense, we found it.
An electric fan.
There it whirled in an unadorned food shop at No. 16 Rue de Faubourg, its frenzied blades in a bird-cage-thing mounted atop a six-foot pole. It wagged back and forth at junked-up super-animated velocity. The cage bounced, shook, wagged and wailed at a speed no fan had gone before, a speed no fan could possibly need.
We returned to the boat, ate lunch, considered a nap, a drink, a swim. Then I said, “Let’s go back and look at the fan.” And that is just what we did.
And so I liked this butterfly-shaped French island, in spite of the contumely I would later hear from voices on the Countess. That evening, at the casino, I was playing poker alongside a British throwback with perfect posture and a colonel’s mustache. He was telling Grinder that Guadeloupe was ghastly and that the French were daft.
“History,” he said. “Imagine. The French trade their entire share of Canada to Britain for Guadeloupe and Martinique.”
“I think…” I said.
“Don’t be stupid,” Grinder warned.
“I think it was a good trade in the long run,” I went on. “Canada is Canadian now. But Guadeloupe and Martinique are still French.”
12. Time and other Dangers
For a week I’d lived an ideal if reckless life. I was working out in the gym. I was exploring islands. I was drinking till the early morning hours and getting in with the crew. I had my parents, living and breathing, in a cabin next door to me. I realized that I was in love with my life on this boat and that I didn’t want to leave.
The ghastly thing was that seven days of our two-week cruise were gone. From this point on, there would always be less time ahead of us than behind. I was aware of the changing fractions stacking against me with each passing day—halfway through the cruise, four-sevenths, two-thirds—and that awareness strangled my enjoyment.
A cruise—or any journey of defined duration—will always collapse upon itself, and your fellow passengers onto you. Their true personalities leak out. You start to avoid some folk, actively seek out others. Mr. and Mrs. Escalator Accident are old friends. You love the braggart nerd who has seen every episode of American Bandstand and who says the rowing machine can’t keep up with him. You wonder which dancers are gay. You get close to the casino girls; Grinder really begins to level with you:
“Give me your chips. You’re cashing in. We’re not keeping the casino open just for you. Go on, off with yuhs before someone else comes in.”
13. Closer Still
In the Indoor/Outdoor bar, on the penultimate night, we met Cynthia, our Anglo-Indian dealer. First night off in almost three months, she declared. She wore her black formal dress, shoulders bare. Bilby and I wore tuxes. We sat in a booth, and Cynthia got drunk on Chardonnay and treated us with her 75 percent discount. She asked us if we were gay. “It’s just…” she said. “San Francisco. The hats and all.”
No we weren’t gay, and she was quite pretty, but she talked too much. She knew it too. She said she drove everyone crazy. Her boyfriend—a boyish Brit who worked in the engine room—corroborated. His name was Mike, and he answered my questions about the boat politely, but his main interest was getting Cynthia to his cabin.
We had more drinks. We heard which of the dancers was sleeping with whom. We heard about the mysterious casino piano player. It was generally assumed by the crew that he was gay, except that, just this week, he’d kissed a Casino Girl, or tried to.
It was 3:00 a.m., and all the passengers had gone off to bed. It was just crew, Bilby, and I. And, at another table, a forty-ish Italian woman, and man with a hand at the hem of her dress. He had a filthy-deep, reddish tan, his tie loosened at the collar, shirt undone two buttons down. This was, we were told, the ship’s bread maker, Dieter. He was Swiss always on the make.
I asked Mike if there was a rule against crew scoring with passengers, and he found this a very funny question.
Around 2:30 came the soft-looking, doughy, mystery piano player, Douglas. Cynthia was drunk now, which was remarkable since she rarely stopped talking long enough to take a swallow of wine. Douglas moved next to her, and ran his fingers over her bare arm, right in front of the engineer boyfriend who paid no attention. I reflected that this action did not seem very gay on Douglas’s part. Cynthia moved over to Bilby. She slouched on him good. She wanted to work in America.
“But the only way to work there is get a green card or marry an American. Do you know anyone that would marry an English girl?” she asked Bilby. “Of course not,” she answered herself. “What would a thirty-six-year-old American man want with a twenty-two-year-old English girl?”
But before she could find the gap in that logic, the engineer scooped her up. Goodbye. Gone.
It was just Bilby and I and the sexually indefinable pianist.
What the heck? Far too late for sensible decisions.
Which might explain the blurry half an hour with a bottle of vodka in Douglas’s cabin, a triangular nook in the bow. He didn’t want to offend, he just wanted to know if we were gay. No? Well, he wasn’t either. Then he told us that there were some crazy bars in the Caribbean, and on a certain beach huge black men sit naked in coconut trees and wave their enormous…
Fifteen minutes later—but nearing four a.m.—Bilby and I headed down the green-carpeted deck to our cabin. The ship throbbed with emptiness. Then, down on at the end of the hall, we caught a glimpse of Dieter, the Swiss bread maker. He had the Italian woman pinned to the wall, half behind a fern. They were kissing hard.
Bilby said, “I have a feeling the bread’s not going to be very good tomorrow.”
14. Degradation
On the last morning, I went to the cardiovascular room to get in one final heart-wrenching session, to sweat out the accumulation of fourteen days poison. There were a couple old British ladies on the stairsteppers. They were finishing their first week, and had another to go. I told them I envied them.
Gallantly, I worked the treadmill—full speed, full grade. Then I moved to a stationary bike. One of the ladies took over the treadmill. I had forgotten to reset the controls, and the stop button was worn to invisibility. The lady let out a squeal of alarm. She clung to the rail while the treadmill threw her legs in the air, like a bad dancer doing a reverse can-can. I dashed over, clutched her oldness, and turned the machine off.
She did not act as though I had done anything to help her. Which may have been justified. But two weeks earlier I had been called brave for doing almost nothing. And I’d liked it.
That’s the problem with real endings. They fizzle or wither or peter out. Events just don’t seem concerned with how to bring an inkling of shape to two weeks of motion.
The ghastly truth was, I was very sad. But that wasn’t all. I felt helpless. I was exhausted, demoralized, poisoned from late nights and drinking. But hell, despite all that, the only thing I wanted was to…
15. Stay
I could have stayed for weeks, months without boredom. I could have adjusted to sea life. I could have cleaned up my act.
I ran into Mike, Cynthia’s no-nonsense engineer, as I was debarking. I asked him where I could find the personnel department.
“I’m going to apply for a job,” I said. “Captain. Stand on the bridge and go, ‘Watch out for that whale!’ ‘There’s an island.’ ‘Hard astern.’ I could do that.”
“It’s not that easy,” Mike said, no humor, all business.
“Well,” I said, “How about bread maker?”
“You could probably do that.”
Kenvin McCaughey is a writer who lives in Saratoga, California.
