I'm On a Boat

I’m on a boat. One week on a cruise ship, the fourth of fifth time I’ve taken such a trip. Friends are sometimes surprised at how much I love the cruise life since everything about it runs contrary to my personality: it’s social, involves group activities, standing in line, tropical drinks, and the beach. Were you to ask me my least favorite things, the above list would be fairly comprehensive.

And yet, I love these floating brownfields.

I love them so much that I wrote about them a few years ago. for the New York Times as a rebuttal to David Foster’s Wallace novella-length, condescending jeremiad towards the nautical life. His piece was obviously much-better written but, to my credit, mine was much shorter.

I’m on this particular boat because my pal, the professional poker player Brad Owen, is sponsored by a company called World Poker Tour, who have taken over the Virgin-owned Valiant Lady. As we’ve established, I love cruises, and I love poker more. I reached out to Brad and said, “Who can I get in touch with to get myself hired to perform on this boat?”

Brad put me in touch with a lady, and voila.

Here I am, typing poolside on Deck 15 beside Martha, Jimmy Cliff playing on the radio. It's not yet noon but the drinking has already begun, with the pool bar doing a brisk morning trade in Pina Coladas and Bloody Marys. A quartet of soccer ball dribblers is in front of me.

One of the dudes has maybe the best body I have ever seen on a man, and it’s upsetting. In fact, as I was typing this, I heard a dude behind me comment on this guy’s physique: “That’s unbelievable,” he just said, with the same sad note of resignation in his voice my fingers feel tapping out these words.

Above: a boat.

Last night, I had my first show. I performed with two other comics in a big, mostly empty theater. Poker players, in general, aren’t the biggest comedy fans because they’re ignorant of all pop culture that don’t involve gambling. Is that an excuse for “eating a dick” last night as one of my fellow comics, correctly, told me I had done? No. But it’s also not not an excuse.

That being said, although my set went badly, the other two comics with whom I performed did much better. I suspect my style of rambling stories and quiet jokes isn’t conducive to the type of entertainment I provide. The problem, as so often the case, is me.

I will not let it ruin my sunny mood, however, because we have six more days of floating before us. Perhaps it’s the floating aspect of cruising I find so appealing. Here in international waters, we mighty seamen (seapeople?) find ourselves in a liminal space, a serene purgatorial existence between one world and the next. We are simply afloat.

One minute you’re in Miami, the next you’re out here somewhere between Florida and Cuba with no agenda, no obligations, and a diminished sense of self-consciousness about wearing a Coors Light onesie in public, as one fellow I saw was sporting last night. We are nowhere and we are no longer ourselves.

In purgatory, everything smells like coconut.

It’s not heaven here, nor would I want it to be. Heaven is a place of perfection. Those who have ever been aboard a cruise ship knows this no such place. Any vessel of this size and complexity will naturally have problems. Our air-conditioning is garbage, for example, and the lines to play cards were so long last night that I eventually gave up, instead heading to Agave Nectar on Deck 4 to watch an excellent dueling pianos act.

Not to take anything from them because they really were very good, but if purgatory has a soundtrack, I imagine it’s dueling pianos.

I would tell you our ports of call, but who cares? The destinations are basically irrelevant, since they will all feature the same annoying beachy activities and duty-free watch stores, neither of which interest me very much.

What does interest me is unstructured time, napping in salty breezes, and endless taco bars. What interests me is the casual and unpressured camaraderie that quickly forms among passengers, most of whom want nothing more to pass their week in a boozy, happy stupor among others in a similar condition. Again, that’s not normally my scene but out there, I am not me.

Out here, I am somebody who unbuttons the top two buttons of his shirt. Out there, I am somebody who enjoys reggaeton and trivia nights and towels folded into animal shapes. Out there, my taste flattens into mush. I am more inclined to do the Electric Slide than I would be in any other situation by a factor of 100.

Aboard the Valiant Lady, I am disappeared and replaced with Bizzaro Universe Michael. For one week, I let my vanilla flag fly. For that one week, I am lulled into a somnambulistic sameness with my fellow seapeople, all of us slurping up sun and rum, all of us trading our workaday lives for a week of thumping beats and mountains of mediocre food .We are neither in the Good Place nor the Bad Place. We’re just afloat. We’re just here, in place. Maybe it’s the Happy Place?