Underbelly of a cruise ship, part 3: Dancing on the moon

March 20, 7:40 AMNY Underground Travel ExaminerDJ Hazard

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 “Dancing on the moon, with you in my arms.”

These are the opening words of a 1935 Max Fleischer Musical Cartoon that I used to see now and then when I was a kid. A parade of animals, one male and one female of each species, go through a chapel and get hitched. They then all continue in a bee line for a rocket ship that’s going to take them on a honeymoon on the moon.

One of the couples, some kind of mice or cats or rats or something, get separated from each other. He makes it up the gang plank, she doesn’t and the ship takes off. The rest of the cartoon is all about the happy couples on the moon and our miserable lonely groom.    

That pretty much sums up my emotional state during the two years I worked on cruise ships. I wasn’t really a crew member and I wasn’t really a passenger. Some comedians have it down to a science. They have their PG13 material, they bring their golf clubs and they just spend the whole year on the ships, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.

Some bring their significant others now and then. They have to pay to fly them down and they have to be able to not kill each other living in a eight by twelve room which is, as I mentioned before, under the 24/7 crew gymnasium. I tried many different approaches to stay sane, despite the fact that 200 lb barbells were being dropped on my ceiling all night long. I was allowed free reign up and about the passenger areas. I only ate at the big buffet/dining room and I was allowed to go to the passenger health club, both way nicer than their crew equivalents.

When you first sign on to be a guest entertainer on cruise ships, you have to sign a pile of contracts that is the thickness of a small town phone book. One of the rules you have to abide to is not to ‘socialize’ with the passengers. I was encouraged to walk around, greet people, get recognized, get my picture taken with them- but I think we know what ‘socialize’ means here.

One of the older performers told me never to enter a lady’s cabin. If she suddenly started screaming rape as soon as you crossed the threshold, the cruise line would never take my side. He said there’s people who go on cruises who look for any angle to sue. Another elder statesman also told me that call girls also take frequent ‘business trips’ on the ships. Yikes! Don't wanna catch no scurvy.

In early 2006, being on the ‘inside’, I caught wind of a news story about an American getting killed in St. Thomas when his hotel room was broken into in the middle of the night.  Of course, that kind of stuff is bad for tourism, so it didn’t make all the papers.

A few months later, I got off a ship in St. Thomas and was supposed to fly to Miami for a day or two before getting on the next ship. The counter lady at the airport was in awe of my stupidity.

“Don’t you watch CNN?” she said.

“Wha?” I countered.

“Hurricane Ernesto. All flights to Miami are cancelled.”

Wow, it would have been nice if the travel lady, the ship, anybody told me this before I got abandoned. I started calling the cruise ship travel department but, being that the travel department was in Miami, it was closed. They had an emergency 800 number on their outgoing voice message. Now, 800 numbers don’t always work in other places, you know? That particular 800 number, in St. Thomas, was the St. Thomas Maytag repairman. I kid you not.

Somehow, just to spare you the torturous hours at the airport, I learned that the Port Agent of St. Thomas could put me up in a hotel and charge it to the cruise company. Her name was Beverly. She said that she couldn’t do that because she can’t get a hold of the cruise company. I told her I’m stranded because the cruise company office is closed.

I swear this is the exchange that followed:

Beverly: You’re just going to have to find a hotel.

Me: Which hotel?

Beverly: Oh, just go to any hotel. There’s a lot of hotels.

Me: I don’t know my way around here. I don’t want to pick a bad hotel.

Beverly: They’re all the same.

Me: No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to end up in the wrong place and get killed or something.

Beverly: What, people don’t get killed in the states? You can get killed anywhere. You can get killed right there at the airport.

At this point I bit my tongue and recalled a decent hotel that was up the road from the airport. I asked about that hotel and I did get her to call them to set up a corporate rate, but I really don’t think she would have done anything had I not pressed the issue.

The first opportunity I got, I emailed that exchange to both the travel office and all I got back from her was a ‘sorry you had such a hard time’.        

Thanks, Travel Lady, now get back to work booking my next flight from JFK to LaGuardia via the North Pole.

You get to watch special crew channels on the telly when you stay in the crew section. There’s a lot of message board channels. These have a lot of morale building messages, photos of crew member of the week and photos of crew parties. There’s also an endless loop of safety videos. I seriously appreciate the extreme importance of safety on a ship, but every time the very dour captain at large looked into the camera and yelled, “This is exactly what happened on the Titanic!” I spit my drink through my nose.

One thing good about the crew section is that there were vending machines for really economical phone cards that apparently only work on the ship phones. You're at sea or your in another country all week. Your cell phone either doesn’t work or you’re going to get massacred with international roaming rates. I could never get the internet in the crew section to work and, when I could, I felt like I was hogging up somebody’s only chance to email their family on the other side of the world. The passenger internet access, by the way, costs thirty dollars an hour.

When you first come on board in mid-week, nobody knows who you are, which is great. After your Saturday night Farewell Show everybody knows who you are, so breakfast the next morning is a bit tricky. You literally can’t get a fork up to your mouth without somebody coming up to you and shaking your hand or patting you on the back, so I would eat Sunday breakfast real early. The passengers slept in as late as possible, having partied their last hurrah the night before and were now busily packing up and getting ready to leave. After I ate breakfast, I would then actually wander around and thank people for coming to the show.

Okay, here was a stupid and nerve racking every Sunday exercise. I was staying for another three or four days, but I had to get off the ship, go through customs and get back on the ship. There was another three thousand people in the terminal waiting to get on. This was where the pursers were supposed to come in. The pursers are the hotel staff of the ship, the front desk people. They also hated the comedians.

A purser was supposed to escort guest entertainers down the gang plank, through customs and then through some secret door where I could get right back on the ship. Unless I latched onto one of the bigger entertainers on board that week, I was always sent down a wrong hallway, ending up outside and behind the three thousand people waiting to get on.    
 

That night, the new bunch of passengers would be slowly settling in and, of course, they would all come to the Welcome Aboard show. Whether I have a great set or not, these people would all know who I was for the next four days.

I tried not succumbing to the hedonistic cornucopia of food. I would work out at the passenger gym for an hour before each meal. I ate only vegetables, fruit, protein, fish, chicken and oatmeal but, by the end of the week, I still felt like hell. The last nights of a run, usually the Tuesday and Wednesday after being on the ships for two or three weeks, were spent in my room in a  fetal position, with mountains of giant chocolate chip cookies.

The big buffet/dining room, while being a feeding frenzy during daylight, classes it up a notch in the evening with ambient lighting, waiters and wine stewards. That is, of course, unless you walk in by yourself. Then you only get the ambient lighting. Again, I can't say I was being ignored because I was the comedian. In their defense, they might just insult and avoid any person who's sitting alone. They practically lean across your table to dotingly fall over a couple who came in after you. One waiter actually stuck his behind between my face and fork while bending over to stroke the couple at the next table for a big tip. Again, I kid you not.

I tried convincing myself that I was being a lump on a log and that I should get out and take part in all the ports of call. I hate shopping and I’m not a bring-back-souvenir kind of guy, which is all that walking distance from the pier pretty much provides. “Okay,” I told myself, “You like the beach. Go check out all the beaches out there, dummy!”

Well, all the beaches within walking distance of the ship are usually rocky little dumps in the shadow of the ships (they dock in herds), lapped with rainbow colored water, swirling with ship fuel. The good beaches are all on the other side of wherever you are, and they cost money to get there.

Okay, I still wasn’t going to be a grump. I shelled out sixty, maybe seventy bucks for a trip to the beach the next morning. We were all supposed to meet on the pier the next morning, and we all did- some thirty couples and me. Then the tour guy told us to make a double line, so I looked even dumber standing halfway down this two by two queue without a playmate. I was going to stick it out, though.

A light rain began to fall as we stood in our ridiculous line, waiting for the bus. We were assured that a light rain falls every morning on that side of the island. The other side, where we were going, was fine. However, he said, if anybody wanted a refund, no problem.

“Check, please!”
    
I was not about to go dancing on the moon.