The Boat

"He touched the butt."

-- Finding Nemo

--

We won't get our schedule until we get on the boat, in our rooms, where (we are told) our bags will be waiting. They take no chances, these uppity cruise crews. They say people board as passengers and leave as cargo. As in, escargot, caviar, calimari.

I will surely tan and bloat, like some kind of tropical frog when it spends too much time in the sunshine. I will also see Mayan ruins and Bahaman beaches. I will kill Caribbean mosquitoes with my tiny pale American hands.

Sitting in this cheap motel lobby, I get this mental image of a pristine white ship waiting at the docks, a commercial, eight-floor swan, as full of promise as a new car. Then the rest of the prophecy is a jumble of snapshots, many stolen from the movie Titanic and TV commercials. I start imagining conversations with rich loungers, looks from dark strangers, drinks with exquisite women. I will see whales (do they have them in the Gulf?) and moonlight broken into reflections on an obsidian sea, palm fronds, skittish crabs. I will haggle with a native over the price of a new-age pair of shorts, and it will end in victory.

Right now, I'm somewhere in east Texas. I drove from midnight, Nebraska, to 8am, Oklahoma, with some pirated music, a cheeseburger from a McDonald's southwest of Topeka, and a small coffee that I got free with a coupon. We ate pancakes at IHOP and steaks at Applebee's. I swam in the motel pool and lamented the size of my gut. Incidentally, dinner tonight is on the boat.

Cell phones work within five miles of the American shore, and wireless internet rates are like Michigan taxes.