Seven days at sea

2005 REWIND - THE YEAR IN DRINKING

NOVEMBER / DECEMBER - ROYAL CARIBBEAN CRUISE


DAY ONE - 11.27 - AT SEA

I depart from Port Canaveral, Florida, on a seven-day cruise with five friends. Before we even set sail I hear a Caribbean instrumental version of "My Heart Will Go On," the theme song from a blockbuster about the most famous shipwreck of all time. This does not kill my mood, and neither does the mandatory safety drill, where we all don bright orange life preservers and sit in the dining room. In the event of an actual emergency, we'll get to die while fine china flys all fucking around us.

Once the ship sets sail, I get a few drinks in me, sing karaoke in the Lotus Lounge and win $120 from the ship's casino. Talk with the casino bartender, who's from Jamaica and claims not to mind the cruise ship's marathon work schedule - fourteen hour days, seven days a week, for six months straight. I eat pizza and mini subs from the all-night cafe, then order room service a half-hour later. I try ordering more room service a half hour after that, at four in the morning, but have the phone hung up on me by an irritated Chinese woman. I head back down to Deck 5 for a second round of mini-subs at 4:30.


DAY TWO - 11.28 - COCO CAY, BAHAMAS

I awake to a hangover and heartburn at 9:30 and immediately suck down four room temperature waters from the bathroom sink in a hurricane glass that reeks of Amstel Light and wet dog. Wait a half hour to get off the ship and ride a tender boat to Coco Cay, an island owned by Royal Caribbean. For some reason, chicken and roosters roam the island, and we're under strict orders not to feed them.

I spend the afternoon lying in a hammock between two palm trees, staring into the cloudless sky. I walk the white sand beach, wade into the ocean and ride a forty-foot inflatable waterslide. It's me, a couple middle-aged Britons and a half-dozen nine-year-old American girls sharing the waterslide, and the Royal Caribbean attendant enforces zero rules regarding summersaults and backflips. I do neither, though I do chuckle at the prominent disclaimer, "Use of good common sense is strongly recommended while using this product."

While I'm bouncing my fat ass down the blowup waterslide, my roommate Jason is a hundred yards away on the shoreline, proposing to his girlfriend Melinda. She accepts, and a veteran married couple spontaneously takes an entire roll of photos of the blessed event.


DAY THREE - 11.29 - AT SEA

Jason and my friend Emma compete in the slot machine tournament, which involves them and a dozen elderly folk tapping the "Spin Reels" button several times per second, even though this does nothing to speed up the slot machine and in fact only speeds up the onset of arthritis in both their right hands.

Before the cruise's first formal dinner, we drink complimentary champagne, and I spend fifteen minutes talking to last night's headliner, Vegas comedian Rick Starr. We discuss the difference between a written comic performance (i.e. the kind of shit I do) and a stage performance (i.e. his kind of shit), and what types of humor work in what situations. Starr isn't much of a fan of mean humor, though, as evidenced when a little old lady shuffles by and I say, "She looks great. She's even pushing her formal walker tonight, with the velvet tennis balls."

Later, Emma reveals the ultimate cruise coup - she's figured out how to get free drinks from the bartenders. It's as simple as befriending the drink server first, tipping cash and just not pulling out your SeaPass card when it comes time to pay. If the bartender wants to charge you, he'll ask for the card. If not, your drink's on Royal Caribbean. I test this theory and earn myself a couple dozen free drinks on the five remaining nights of the trip.

My platonic-friend roommate Jenna gets even more out of one of the bartenders - when I return to the room, c. 3:00 in the morning, there's a sock on the door. Universal language for, Don't come in. Fucking in progress. I resolve to put a sock on our bathroom door from now on when I'm masturbating in the shower.


DAY FOUR - 11.30 - ST. THOMAS, VIRGIN ISLANDS

My five friends and I charter a "private yacht," which turns out to be a beat-up sailboat inhabited by a salty Scandanavian named Captain Karl and his American first mate Tim. Every female friend I have wants to fuck Tim by the end of the afternoon, while Tim seems more concerned with finding the gang member who stole his cell phone. ("I had over 2,000 numbers in there, from people all over the world.") We snorkel through a shipwreck and shallow coral reef, talking a petrified Emma into the water by promising there are absolutely no fish in the ocean.

On the way back, we take advantage of the "Unlimited Rum Punch" promised in the brochure - we each consume five Solo cups' worth, while Captain Karl muses that it's funny the fruit juice in the punch costs twice as much as the rum. Indeed, the booze is dirt cheap down here - I buy two liters of Finlandia Vodka for seven bucks apiece, then transfer them to empty water bottles and walk them right back onto the ship. Sobriety doesn't stand a chance for the duration of the cruise.


DAY FIVE - 12.01 - ST. MAARTEN

We spend the day at an island that's half French territory, half-Dutch and completely lacking in traffic laws. Six bucks a person buys a thirty-minute van ride through ghettos - who knew so many people in tropical climates lived in old railroad cars? - and boarded-up industrial areas.

Our destination: an absolutely gorgeous beach, where clothing is entirely optional. No one under the age of fifty seems willing to walk around naked, and after a couple hours I start to think that even if Adam and Eve hadn't gotten themselves booted from the garden, humanity could have benefited from a little healthy modesty and shame.

I'm offered hashish twice ("best on the island, mon!") but am too paranoid to bite; instead, I drink two-dollar Red Stripes at a beach bar and smuggle more duty-free liquor on the cruise ship. A party in my room ensues, and if we don't set a Room Service record for most orders of orange juice and buckets of ice, we get pretty darn close. I crash immediately after dinner, spending fifteen consecutive primetime vacation hours unconscious and semiconscious in a three-foot-wide bed.


DAY SIX - 12.02 - AT SEA

I encounter an author named Will Rhame. He wrote a nonfiction book called Business Golf, he said, promoted the hell out of it and moved a sizeable number of copies. Then his publishing company went under and he saw next to nothing. Heartening news for a wannabe writer like myself. I can't even get into the ship's "Karaoke Idol" contest - I almost qualify then got knocked out by a Scotsman in a kilt who sings Elvis.

The Mariner of the Seas is such a mammoth ship, fifteen decks in all, that it has its own ice rink and professional ice show. The guest star, Olga from Canada, has me and my suddenly bisexual roommate Jenna drooling. We both vow to put a sock on the door for Olga before trip's end.

Later on, Jenna's bartender friend comes back up to our room and the sock goes on the door again. I'm left to wander the ship with a water bottle full of Finlandia. I entertain a group of strangers in the hot tub with absolutely filthy humor involving our sexy cruise director asking a guy to poop on her chest, "and do it with a smile!" Then wander out to the main pool area and get shot down by a pair of barely legal hotties. ("Um, yeah, whatever, we've already got two guys on the way up here, so you need to go.") Then black out for an indeterminate amount of time and misplace the remains of my duty-free Finlandia. Probably eat some mini-subs on Deck 5.


DAY SEVEN - 12.03 - AT SEA

I sleep off a wicked hangover in the Solarium, a large, sundrenched, mostly enclosed room with a pool, two hot tubs and a bar. I notice five or six different people attempting to read thick books - it's the last day of vacation, and none of them appear to have made it past Page 60. All our shit has to be packed and out of the room before dinner, at which we present our waiter with envelopes containing his tips for the week. Jenna writes a personal note on hers ("Room 1341: Bring your own sock").

We spend our last night at Ellington's, the bar on Deck 14, where the auditorium song-and-dance performers are putting on some kind of jazz revue. The bar's crowded with off-duty entertainers, mostly flamingly gay, who drink Chambord martinis. They call them Chamtinis. The show ends, the bar clears out, my friends all go to bed, and I sit with the bartender, a fun-loving but austere Jamaican who's kept us entertained all week.

I sip Red Stripes as he closes the bar far more thoroughly than I ever would have expected - a Coast Guard health inspection could happen at any time, and the standards are rigid. Our backgrounds are nothing alike, me and this guy, but he's certainly a part of the My Kind Of People club. They're everywhere; all I have to do is stop and look. A cruise has its decadent side, sure, but it does a world of good in erasing geographic boundaries.