I went on a cruise with my parents and older brother a few years ago. My brother had just graduated from medical school and I was going to be shipping out to China in a month, so my parents decided that we should all spend 7 days on a floating hotel sailing down the coast of Baja, Mexico. I had never been on a cruise and I wasn't looking forward to breaking that cherry with my parents in tow. The idea of being trapped in a giant metal boat with room service and closed circuit television for a week didn't sound like an ideal way to spend a week. But sometimes you have to close your eyes and take a leap of faith for the sake of the group. So I went.
The only thing I was looking forward to was the possibility of having an open bar on every deck. I understood that everything charged to my room key in magical ship-bucks would eventually show up on my credit card statement, but I was determined to treat the week like a mini-spring break. My parents would enjoy all the historical lectures and ballroom dancing, my brother would gamble in the casino, and I would lie by the pool all day and prowl the disco all night ordering drinks by color rather than name.
The stereotypes people have about cruises are true. It's only old people and hormone frenzied 19 year-olds you have to choose from for companionship. This was distressingly apparent on the first night in the cleverly-name Neptune disco, where all the 19 year-old boys in new white sneakers and saggy cargo shorts huddled on one side of the dance floor and all the sun-burned girls in mini skirts and flip flops nervously danced to the Backstreet Boys on the other side. It was like being stuck in a giant awkward silence between two factions who were clearly ogling each other.
Amidst the hesitant groundwork being laid for awkward 19 year-old rabbit sex, I found a cute blonde woman who seemed more appropriate for my demographic (I had just turned 25). She had just graduated from USC and was on a celebratory excursion with her parents. She was at the disco with her mother, a frisky-looking fifty year-old with a graying bob. I started to talking to the daughter (I can't even remember her name anymore), and we hit things off well enough. She was coy and aloof. She kept her body perpendicular to mine, but her eyes would linger over me a little longer than necessary when we spoke.
I was feeling particularly saucy so I asked her and her mother to come out and dance with me. They offered faux-protests while they walked to the dance floor and soon we were gyrating in a sea of 19 year-olds. We had a fun night, dancing and trading rounds of drinks, but nothing else happened. Around 1AM they retired back to their room so that Dad/Husband wouldn't get too worried. For the remainder of the cruise, I kept bumping into the daughter and her mother. They were always traveling in tandem. We would see each other at the formal dinners, wandering around the outer deck, poking through the library, at the disco.
I was attracted to the daughter, but I didn't know how to separate her from her mother. I thought she was attracted to me, but she didn't go out of her way to extricate herself from her mother's company. I felt awkward about pressing too hard for a more formal "date," if such a thing can be had on a cruise. So our interactions remained hygienically fun and photogenic. We must have looked like that perpetually smiling clump of cruise-goers happily reveling in a brochure.
As the cruise wore on, I became more and more restless. The claustrophobia began to set in, as well as a lurking dissatisfaction that the only things I was doing were eating, drinking, and whiling away afternoon hangovers on the pool deck reading John Fante books. I started to feel like I was in an R-rated hamster cage. I remember one morning, after an athletic night of drinking and dancing in the Neptune: before my eyes opened I was aware of a nauseating sway on all sides. Then the distressingly fuzzy hangover ache settled over me, my Hooksexups shot from a night of alcohol-induced adrenaline flow, my brain cramping, my mouth dry and scratchy. Suddenly the blankets felt heavy and too hot. I opened my eyes and everything was pitch dark. There was no beside clock and no light creeping in from anywhere. I had no idea where I was.
I sat up and put my hand out against the far wall. I could hear my brother's sleep-breathing a few feet away. I followed my hand down the wall to the bathroom door. For whatever reason I didn't want to turn on the light and instead felt my way to the toilet lid. I lifted it and started pissing. I felt dizzy, my head started to tingle with the sudden blood rush from standing up. The boat swayed. I felt my knees buckle, and a grayish white flashed behind my eyes. Then somehow I was on the floor, in total darkness, my pants around my ankles, everything around me swaying. I had no idea what time of day it was. If there is a hell somewhere in the universe, surely it must be something like this.
From that moment forward I realized I needed to get off the boat. And there was no way off.
On the last night of the cruise I saw the daughter and her mother in the casino in the early evening. We stopped and talked for a few minutes. I asked the daughter if she wanted to meet me alone in one of the bars later. She hesitated, made some vague excuses. She said she liked me, but she couldn't leave her mom since it was the last night on-board. I had no idea what she was trying to say, but it frustrated me that we had spent a whole week chatting, dancing, and goofing off, and now she was pulling back.
That night at the disco I ignored the daughter completely. I spoke only to the mother. A ballad came on and I asked the mother to dance. I was on my way to being very drunk. I nestled my chin against the mother's shoulder as we danced. I whispered into her ear, "You're so beautiful." I felt her body react, not a shudder, but a simultaneous loosening and tensing. "Stop it," she said.
I nuzzled my nose against her ear, and started to nibble on the lobs softly. She inhaled through her nose and leaned her head into mine. I let the tip of my tongue run along the lower edge of her ear, then bit down on it. I looked back to the table where the daughter sat by herself, sipping a drink and watching. I kissed the mother's cheek, and dappled little kisses all the way back to her mouth. "Let's go out on the deck," I said.
"No, I can't," she said. She was worried about her husband, who was alone in the room, three decks below. I pulled back and saw her pale blue eyes, set against loose, weathered skin. I imagined her naked for a moment, the papery skin, the calluses, the sunspots, the veins. "What the hell am I doing," I thought to myself. I was trying to seduce a 55 year-old to spite her daughter because she didn't seem to like me as much a I liked her.
Looking back on it now, I still have no idea why I did any of it. It gives me chills, like someone's stuck a metal pole through the center of my spine. I wish I could erase the whole week from the ledger of my life, like meeting notes being swept from a whiteboard.
Instead, I'll just bad mouth cruises every chance I get and, hopefully, will never set sail on one again.
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