By The Campfire

June 25, 2008

I am sitting on the deck surrounded by people I don’t know. We are heading for Cozumel. The sun is aching to escape a bank of pumpkin colored clouds that brush across the western sky and turn the Gulf of Mexico into a peach soup with metallic shadows undulating for hundreds of miles.

The poolside band is playing the reggae version of “Red, Red Wine” again. I know it by heart after hearing it a dozen times in 5 days. People surrounding me are cooked and pouring hundreds of gallons of frozen $6 drinks down their throats. They talk loudly to overcome the intense wind raking across the top of the vessel, whistling through rails and snapping the flags like whips.

A deeply leathered woman with a thick Brooklyn accent is Joan Rivers-ing her way through an exhortation about a recent news story involving a man tossing his new wife over the rail of a ship somewhere.

“No way. No way,” she says. “I my husband tried that with me, I’d have a hold of somethin he didn’t wanna lose as he tried to hoist me overboard. Nevaa happen.”

Her husband is a muscled, tattooed, goateed, shaved-headed Southerner with a beer-fueled drawl as long as a good run by an Ol’ Miss fullback.

“Oh maaaammma,” he laughs. “Hell, she’d throw my ass off this boat if I tried to slide her over the rail, guaranteed. I ain’t stuuupid.”

The group uncorks a 100 proof laugh. A man dressed in lime green golf pants and a matching shirt weighs in through a well-mannered New England, Ivy-walled lilt.

“I estimate she would be able to throw us all off this boat with little more effort than her tremendous verbal ability,” he says. “Her tongue would fling us like Frisbees into the Gulf below.”

I looked up. Other people turn in his direction. The group stopped and stared at him like he’s dropped a hundred on the windy deck. This guy was a complete doofus. He just smiled and looked into the sunset. They order more drinks and quiet down, noticing me writing.

A man with ebony skin is flat on his back in a deck chair across from me. He has a towel draped over his face. Now and then, he says to no one in particular, “No more, dammit. No more.”

I have no idea what he means but I know the feeling.

The day timers and the night timers cross in the dusk as the shift changes like a factory. Some people on a cruise sleep at night and play all day. Some sleep all day and play all night. Usually, liquor is involved in either shift. They meet at breakfast and dusk going in opposite directions. I am a day timer. Have you seen the movie “Blade” with Wesley Snipes? Sometimes the night timers lose their place and end up as daywalkers. Watch the movie, it will all make sense.

As we enter open water and night falls, the waves turn nasty and the wind feels like when you stick your head out of your car window at 70 mph. The ships dips and rolls and aches in the heavy pitch. It’s hard to walk or stand in one place. The swells are now big enough to swallow houses. White caps spray like confetti in the gale. The water is greenish foam. Just as I think this is cool, my head feels like I had a concussion. A nauseating dizziness soaks through me. It is hard to focus. Seasickness.

I go back to the top deck and sit in the wind in the dark.

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