I confess. I've been cruising. I was always a bit curious, a bit turned on by the promise of a packed seafood lunch. I've fantasised about rough trade on the ocean and tropical island romance, so I started in the obvious place (Durban harbour) with a spring in my slouch. Like a fool, I didn't even stop to consider the effects that spending a week with burly seamen would have on my life.
Or my relationship with my fiancé. (She came with me, broad minded lass that she is.) No, recklessly, I leapt at the chance to do a few Stand-up and Improv gigs on a Greek passenger liner for fun and jig and a free sail on the briny. I ended up ensnared in the sleazy underbelly of the tourist trade, witnessing at close range old codgers spend their retirement packages. And, God help me, I'm so ashamed, I fucking enjoyed it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We boarded the ship in the afternoon and, before we'd even cleared the breakwater, Village People music was blaring, the cruise director and his fun-Gestapo assistants had a conga line going as we all celebrated... something. I couldn't figure out what the hell was making everybody so excited unless it was the fact that the captain didn't ram anything on the way out of his parking space. By the way, I did say Village People. "YMCA" was a perennial favourite on board. There's no getting away from it, poephol piracy still flourishes on the high seas. The hospitality staff have heard the tune many, many times before. To paraphrase Rod Stewart, their ad lib lines are well rehearsed, but they clap out of time to the music while staring blankly into space like the cast of a German porn movie.
But thoughts of porn must give way to death as we have our first life boat drill. Mercifully, no Celine Dion soundtrack to this, but plenty of passenger confusion. Okay, one passenger, me, panicking off my tits. I freaked out a bit when the general emergency signal went off and I tried to look up my muster station on the poster behind the cabin door. It's extremely clearly spelled out, but unfortunately I don't read much Greek. FUUUCK! No, hang on, the cool under firewater fiancé finds the English translation. It was there all the time, but I'm too busy crushing Styrofoam cups and wadding them under my arms to try to add to my buoyancy. I'm discovering that seasick tablets, tequila and recreational pharmaceuticals are a potent mixture... Right, got the directions, we're off. Within seconds we're also lost in a landscape of stairways designed by Escher. By some miracle we stumble into a crew member and ask him for help.
'Just go straight to the bottom,' he replies.
The bottom!?! I thought the whole point of these drills was to avoid that!
Luckily the fiancé loses her patience and bitch-slaps me like I'm the hysterical chick in the "Airport" movies. She has a way of doing it that's more than a little arousing.
"I think he meant down there," she explains and points to the bottom of the corridor where all the other lemmings are waiting patiently to drown.
We don lifejackets. Anyone who hasn't done this should imagine shoving your head between a really fat woman's thighs. (Insert your own 'going down' joke here.) The thing has a long strap for winding around your waist and then clipping to secure the sponge to your chest. I tripped over it twice, falling on my face and solving the problem of whether or not I'd be conscious to hear myself scream all the way to the sea floor. Every lifejacket also has a shrill whistle attached. Every single one. Even those doled out to the ten year old children. It's at the point when they figure out how to work them that the Birkenhead drill of "women and noisy, little larvae first" becomes understandable.
As we sit in our lifejackets, looking like a whiplash victims' support group, the captain conducts his inspection. He almost pulls it off too, but the too tight shirt with three buttons undone and the "mucho eye contact-o with the women-o" way in which he greets his menopausal herd exposes the fact that we're not sailing with the Royal Navy. Other fleets may have gold bars on the sleeve as indications of rank, but this one seems to have gold chains around the neck. This guy would only be outranked by Mr. T. I have a feeling that rum, sodomy and the lash aren't aspects of discipline aboard this ship so much as part of the activities planned for this evening.
Wrong again! It seems my set is planned for a late show, so I perform my first ever stand-up comedy gig in international waters. Or maybe I don't. I can't really remember, because the sea air and the rocking motion of the ship hits everyone in the face like a truck full of sleeping pills and it becomes a big snore-athon. Perhaps it's just that the combined age of the audience would put a young whippersnapper like God to shame. Then again, I was still self-medicating, so I could have been crap.
And so, to bed. This voyage had only begun and already all was very "bon". There's much more to tell, but you've got work to do and I... Well, I have a second instalment to write that I'll post within the next few days. If you'd like me to include your email address on my notification list, let me know and I'll send you a heads-up every time I update this page. I don't share this information with anyone, so you're safe from all spam except mine. Till then, be safe and well.
Al
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