8
We stood out there by the rail and talked and watched the night fall on the blue water, first making it purple, then black. The wash of it against the side of the ship was hypnotic, and once we got past our initial sensation of feeling like mice trapped in a tin can, we began to relax.
We finally went back to our room to wash up and brush our teeth and shave. It was just something to do. We were finishing up this when there was a singsong whistle on our cabin’s intercom. It was followed by a voice telling us all to meet on the deck to find out which was our lifeboat and to learn what to do in case the ship sank, other than drown.
We went out on the deck for our words of wisdom. Essentially, the wisdom was, the big boat started sinking, in an orderly fashion, you got in a smaller boat that was supposed to be lowered over the side of the larger sinking boat. That was about it.
A little later, back in our room, the whistle sounded again, this time with an invitation to all passengers to have dinner, and it ended with the words: “Bon appetit.”
We wandered outside and saw the cattle call moving in the direction of the dining room. According to our information, there were two dining rooms. One that served more formally, and presumably better food, and another that was a kind of buffet.
The menu that came with our cabin information said the meal in the main dining room was lobster this night, and we both wanted that.
When we got to the dining room, a fellow in a white coat, white pants, white shirt, and a black bow tie was kind enough to tell us we couldn’t come in without coats.
“Why not?” Leonard said.
The door usher, or whatever his title was, was a tall man with dark skin and dark hair with a bald spot at the crown. He looked about thirty and wore his uniform with all the grace of James Bond in a tux. He said, “It’s required.”
“What’s it required for?” Leonard said. “Are we gonna spread it on the ground and eat off of it?”
“Leonard,” I said, “let’s just go back to the room and get coats. It’s easy to solve.”
“You’ll need a tie as well,” said Mr. White Coat. Then, after a moment’s reflection: “There’s no use coming back without a tie.”
“What if I borrow yours?” Leonard said.
“We have security on board,” said the man, finally showing a bit of nervousness.
“It’s all right,” I said. “We’ll put on a coat and tie.”
I took Leonard by the elbow and turned him around. We started down the corridor, back to the cabin.
“Let’s eat in the buffet area,” I said. “They don’t require anything but that you don’t go naked.”
“You sayin’ we’re not good enough to eat in there?”
“No. They’re saying that. Leonard, everything is not personal. Them’s the rules. You’re one goes on about rules all the time, and those are the rules.”
“Yeah, but those are stupid rules. And since when am I one for the rules?”
“All that Republican shit,” I said.
“I just don’t think I ought to be made to wear a coat for a meal I paid for.”
“I paid for it.”
“Whatever. But it’s paid for. It didn’t say anything about a coat and tie in the brochure.”
“It said evening wear is suggested.”
“Ah ha! Suggested.”
We were back at the cabin. I unlocked the door and we went inside and sat on our beds across from one another.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “I want to eat. Where are we going to eat?”
“I want my lobster.”
“Then let’s put on coats and ties.”
“I didn’t bring a tie.”
“Now that you mention it, neither did I.”
We put on sports coats and went back. Leonard had the brochure with him. White Coat stopped us at the door. “I see you have coats, but you still need ties.”
“No, we don’t need them,” Leonard said.
White Coat said, “Those are the rules, sir. I did not make them up.”
Leonard showed him the brochure. A line was forming behind us. The man looked at the brochure. He said, “Yes.”
“It says coats and ties are suggested,” Leonard said. “You can suggest it, I can choose not to do it.”
“And you can choose to go to the buffet.”
“I paid – he paid – for us to go on this cruise. Let us in.”
A Filipino fellow in white shirt, black pants, and black bow tie came over. He asked what the problem was. White Coat told him.
“It’s suggested, Phileep, not required.”
White Coat grew red-faced.
“Thanks,” Leonard said, walked past White Coat and I followed. Leonard said to White Coat, “Dick cheese.”
I told the Filipino who was showing us to our table, “We’re not trying to be a pain-”
“No problem,” he cut in, leaning close to me. “He’s an officious little fuck. All the staff wishes he’d fall off the boat and get eaten by sharks.”
We wound our way between tables of mostly elderly people and were placed at a table with four other diners. Wine was served and menus were brought.
The Filipino was headwaiter on the cruise. His name was Ernesto. He was a short solid-looking guy with black hair well combed except for a sprig that was determined to hang down on his forehead.
Ernesto stood at the table and smiled and talked to us all about what specials were being offered. It was kind of cool really. They didn’t do that at Burger King. He leaned down and spoke to Leonard and Leonard, smiling big, talked back to him in a whisper. I caught the words “Thank you” in there somewhere.
Ernesto went away and our actual waiter came and took our choices and left. Ernesto showed up again three or four times. Talked to us all, talked to Leonard a little more. Just chitchat stuff. I finally got a line on it. He was gay and somehow knew Leonard was. What was it? A secret handshake? A mark in the middle of the forehead only gays could see?
When Ernesto finally went away and the food came, I leaned over to Leonard, said, “What would John think?”
“We’re just talking. He’s friendly.”
“Is he gay?”
“I think so.”
“You look pretty happy.”
“We queers just love to make contact. We have secret messages about the nature of the universe that we only pass along to one another. Sorry, Hap.”
We ate. The food was not as good as I had hoped, and the lobster was downright awful. I thought it might be a big boiled cockroach.
We chatted with our table partners. One of the men was wearing neither coat nor proper tie. He was a big white-haired Texas guy with a Western shirt and bolo tie. Fit the stereotype. So did his wife, who was about fifty, maybe ten or fifteen years younger than he was. She wore a kind of Western-cut dress, which didn’t look bad on her. She was attractive in a plastic surgery kind of way. Her hair looked like a beehive wrapped in a bleached blond sweater. They looked rich. Their names were Bill – he went by Big Bill – and Wilamena. Right out of Central Casting, both of them. I liked them immediately, even if he was a little loud. I asked him how he had gotten past the coat-and-tie Nazi.
“I gave him five dollars. I figured it wasn’t worth five dollars to walk back to the room.”
“They haven’t got the right to keep you out anyway,” Leonard said.
“Yeah, but five dollars keeps him happy, me happy, and no animosity.”
“This here is our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary,” Wilamena said, “and we ain’t gonna let no suit-and-tie monkey throw it, ain’t that right, Big Bill?”
“That’s right, honey.”
A plump matronly looking lady with glasses said, “The ship has Argentine papers, so they’re allowed to sail in Cuban waters. We’re going to go right by Cuba. Won’t that be interesting?”
We agreed it would. Bill said, “We can buy Cuban cigars too, in Mexico and Jamaica, but we got to smoke ’em on board.”
�
�Frankly,” Leonard said, “I ain’t buyin’ nothing from them commies.”
Things went quiet for a moment, then Big Bill, who obviously wanted to defend Cuban cigars but didn’t want to be thought a commie or mess up a wedding anniversary, said to me: “Pass that wine bottle, will you, son?”
After dinner, on the way out the door, Leonard leaned over to White Coat, said, “You work cheap. Five dollars is no kind of money. I think you ought to go up to six-fifty, and give a blow job with it.”
White Coat did not respond. He just looked as if he had eaten a persimmon and it was caught tight in his bowels.
Down the hall on the way to our room, I said, “Commies?”
“Did I sound like Joe McCarthy?”
“A little.”
“Well, you know what, Cuba is a communist country. They haven’t ever given us anything but the back of their hand. Fuck them and their goddamn cigars.”
We went back to the room. It had been made up in that short time. The TV was on the floor.
“Why’s that?” Leonard said.
“Guess he dusted and forgot to put it back.”
I put it back and we watched The Postman for a while. It put Leonard to sleep. I got up and took off his shoes and covered him, turned off that Flying Dutchman of a movie, undressed, and went to bed.
I lay there for a while and looked at the ceiling and thought about Brett. I thought about other women in my past, two of them dead. I certainly had the touch.
About midnight the ship began to pitch and I realized why the TV had been placed on the floor.
9
Leonard and I were up at the same time. I flicked on the light.
Leonard said, “Oh God,” and dashed for the toilet. I heard him in there upchucking, which prompted me to do the same. I let fly into a trash can all my bad lobster, wine, and culinary accoutrements. It wasn’t all that good going in, but it certainly had smelled better than it did now, and it had looked better too.
The ship leaned way port and I felt as if it would never right itself. I let out with an involuntary cry. I heard Leonard yell in the bathroom, then I heard him upchucking again.
The ship came up high and went starboard and it was all I could do to hold the trash can so the contents didn’t slop out.
A little later the commode flushed and Leonard came out and lay on his bed and moaned.
He said, “Oh, God, kill me. Kill me now.”
“Fuck the seasickness,” I said. “I’m scared to death.”
I managed to set the TV on the floor, and by bouncing off the wall, I made it to the bathroom where I poured the glorious contents of the trash can into the commode and flushed it. I sat the trash can in the little shower stall, but it rolled out and I hit the wall and banged the back of my knee against the commode.
I lodged the trash can between the wall and the commode and tried to make it back to my bed. I understood what was meant by sea legs now. I didn’t have some. In fact, I’d have given anything for us to have run up on a spit of land, a reef, any damn thing solid.
I just knew we were going to flop so far to one side we’d never right ourselves. I kept thinking about that movie The Poseidon Adventure, where the ship turned over and trapped people underwater.
I swear, at times it felt as if that damn ship were actually lying completely on its side, then it would fling itself upright and go the other way. You could hear the ocean banging on the sides of the ship. It made you realize how fragile, what a paper cup the thing was, and it made you realize even more how fragile you were as a collection of blood and bone. All I could think about, after that realization, was just how dark and deep the goddamn ocean was.
I managed to wobble, fall, and crawl over to the closet, reach in a side pocket of my suitcase, and pull out Dramamine tablets. I punched a couple out of the aluminum side and gave Leonard one. I took the other. No less than two minutes later Leonard said, “Hell, give me another one of them sonsabitches.”
I did. I took another. It wasn’t easy swallowing them dry, but now that I had found my bed again, and was clinging to it like a raft, I couldn’t bring myself to let go and make for the bathroom.
Frank truth of it was, I was scared blind, shitless, and paralyzed. No argument. When it comes to the baddest sonofabitch on the block, nature wins hands down every time. Well, nature and that eighteen-year-old guy I had fought.
It wasn’t until early morning that the ship ceased to pitch. I had felt horrible all night, slept fitfully, even whimpered a bit. Leonard had whimpered too, so I felt better about it. My manhood was still intact, because he wouldn’t tell if I didn’t.
Leonard slept while I washed up, brushed my teeth, and started for the deck. On the way up, I discovered a middle-aged woman and two children sleeping on the landing near the hatch door that led outside. The woman sat up from the pallet she had made and looked at me as I reached the door.
“We nearly sank last night,” she said. “I thought it would be better if we were close to the lifeboats.”
“It was scary,” I said, “but not that bad.” I was braver, now that it was all over.
“Oh, yes it was,” she said.
One of the children, a little girl, lifted up on an elbow. A teddy bear tumbled out of her covers. She looked about nine. She said, “Mama said fuck.”
“Dear,” the woman said. “Ssshhhhh.”
“I said it several times last night myself,” I said. “Some other things too.”
The woman gave me a nervous grin. The little girl smiled. The other kid, girl or boy, I couldn’t tell way the kid was wrapped up in the covers, didn’t wake up. I went out on deck.
It was clear now. The water was bright blue and so was the sky and the sun was a great fat wafer of burning gold. The shadow of the ship lay on the clear water like an organized coat of oil. It fled with us as we pushed onward, probably running about twenty-two knots.
There were others on the deck, leaning against the rail like me, and there were some in lawn chairs against the wall of the deck, and there was a young couple with chairs close together, kissing, looking as if at any moment they might strip and go for broke. No one looked as if anything had been out of the ordinary last night. And truthfully, it probably had not. For a landlubber like me, a big wave seen at a distance is frightening enough, let alone knocking and swinging about a ship I’m in. For all I knew, the crew might well have found it relaxing, like a rocking chair.
While I was standing there, looking out at the water, Big Bill came up and lit a cigar. “That was some night,” he said.
I turned and smiled at him. He was dressed in blue jeans, a cowboy shirt with the sleeves rolled, and house shoes. His gray hair coiled and rumpled in the wind like some invisible hand wadding up stringy cotton.
“I’ll say it was some night. I lost my lobster.”
“Not much of a loss. Sort of ruined the honeymoon atmosphere in our cabin, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. We were just down to business when all that started. Pretty soon were just two naked bodies rolling around on the floor clutching at each other saying shit.”
“Worse ways to go,” I said.
“I suppose that’s true. I got upset, got dressed, came out for a look, like it would do me good to know. Waves were washing all along the deck here. Scary. I went back in and up front and outside. Waves were jumping over the deck, way up there. It was one spooky experience, I guarantee. Cigar?”
“No thanks.”
Leonard came on deck then. He greeted Bill, who offered him a cigar.
“Is it Cuban?” Leonard asked.
“Nope. Not this one.”
Leonard took it and lit it. He said, “You know there’s a woman behind the door there, on the stair landing with two kids?”
“Saw her when I came out,” I said.
“Me too,” said Bill. “She was there last night when I came out for a look. I was surprised they hadn’t locked the doors. Safety seems a little scant to me.”
“Her little g
irl informed me Mama had said fuck,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “she told me the same thing.”
“Me too,” Big Bill said. “You know, this cruise stuff sucks. I’m excited for when we get to Mexico and dock. I want to get some land under my feet and an enchilada in my mouth, wash it down with some tequila. Me and Mama might like to dance too. You know, I was out here early to smoke, and they were pushing a covered body along the deck in a wheelchair, took it through that door over there.”
“No shit?” Leonard asked.
“No shit. I asked one of the crew what happened. He said an old guy died last night. Apparently the old fella had taken this cruise several times, thought he’d like to do it one last time, and last time it was.”
“I can’t believe anybody does this on purpose twice,” Leonard said.
“He croaked in all that high seas business,” Bill said. “My guess is it scared him to death. They got him in a meat locker or something down below.”
“I can see it now,” Leonard said. “A sheet-covered corpse in a wheelchair in the food freezer with our dinner lobster and a bag of green peas in his lap.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the rough seas killed him,” I said. “Maybe it was the food.”
On that note, we went to eat breakfast in the buffet dining area.
Later in the day we shot skeet off the back of the ship. If there’s one thing I can do it’s hit a target with almost any kind of long gun. Leonard did fair, but I was really on, and me and Leonard got to betting with Big Bill and this other guy, a Yankee named Dave who looked to be about sixty and turned out to be my and Leonard’s age, late forties.
I made about ten dollars off the deal, and Leonard made five. We used our gains to buy drinks for all of us in the bar. I was the only one not drinking liquor. We sat and drank and talked for a while. It wasn’t anything special, just talk. Bill and the Yankee were all right if you didn’t have to see them on a daily basis. Then again, there’s days I feel that way about all Yankees, but I promise I’m trying to get over it.
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