Prelude to Rio

My opinion of the United States of America has changed a good deal since I started this contract, which is now at its midpoint. I’ve been working for a mostly English company and going in and out of European ports, except for that three-week run to the Caribbean for Christmas and New Years. We made it into New York after the long haul across the Atlantic, had some hassles getting off the ship because of Coast Guard drills and immigration clearances. But it wasn’t until we were in Lauderdale, where we were frisked at the gangway like criminals and where a Cubano rent-a-cop layed some goofy interpretation of immigration law on all the Filipinos, that I realized that the USA really is the best country on the planet. 

The reason is we have problems here like any other country, but we set about solving them, which is something I don’t think any other country can do as quickly or as flexibly. 

The English pay just about twice what we pay for the necessities of life in the states, with the exception of gasoline, which they pay $10 an gallon for. Their VAT is just the latest in a long line of taxes without representation, and Her Majesty’s Tax Office had decided to hide a lot of the taxes within sale prices. 

Go to a cheaper country, like Spain or Portugal for example, and you’re likely run into rampant corruption. And you’ll have to put up with the whole country putting on their pajamas in the middle of the day. The EU has untangled some of that knot, but there’s a certain boring sameness about the counties of the EU, whose countries seem to have gone through a cultural mixmaster to produce a purée. The cheaper countries are catching up with the more expensive ones because of the common currency. (One thing though--that currency has both one Euro and two Euro coins, which seem to work pretty well, although I have a whole pocketful of them and nowhere to spend them in my immediate future.)

The new bandmaster, Brad Black, arrived in New York. He’s just taken delivery on a Monet trumpet, to the tune of NINE GRAND in US dollars. His name is inscribed on the bell, but trumpeters beware: He’s still spending three hours of long tones making the adjustment to the new horn. Brad’s managerial skills were almost instantly revealed when Siân went to him with a problem. She had been playing every embarkation for two and a half months, and she wanted to have some port time, especially in Sydney. Instead, Brad decided to relieve her in Fort Lauderdale, move a keyboard down to the embarkation, and let Frankie handle it. 

So we started out, the three of us, Siân, Archie (aka Richard the Canadian piano player), and me, off to Starbucks for a little coffee and, for me anyway, a lot of wi-fi. Siân was afraid of the trucks, which are lots bigger in the States than they are in Wales, so we had to reassure her through several pedestrian crossings. After they finished their coffee, they headed off to a mall, but I decided to buy a day pass in the Starbucks wi-fi. Turns out that a new Apple Store had opened at that mall. 

The Gig Update 

The replacement for Pedro, another guy named Richard (there are now three of us in the Queens Room band, fully half the band is named Richard), is as solid as can be. No virtuosic flourishes, just four solid notes to the bar, like all the great bass players. The band has responded very well to this reversal of our fortunes, locking in solid with him, and losing a boatload of hostility in the process. 

As if that wasn’t enough of an improvement, we have a new singer, the same one that was going to join in Southampton, Neville Skelley. A native of Liverpool, he just stands there and sings the notes, nothing fancy. At his tender age he’s got a lot of learning to do, but he’s willing to learn.

My cabinmate has changed for the better as well. Junior Williams plays drums in the Caribbean band. He’s an emergency hire from Barbados, replacing Juan, who had to go back to San Lucia. He’s a heavy sleeper and a congenial guy. He’ll be on until Valparaiso. 

Nobody’s asked me, but I think they need to rethink the repertoire in the Queens Room. I think the time to act is now, when the company is promoting the idea of the Queens Room in their print advertising. With that ad in the New Yorker last week, we have an opportunity to treat the Queens Room as a foreground issue, one that the company’s fortunes rise and fall on.

In the shifting demographic mix that we see in the Queens Room night after night, there are of course die hard advocates and practitioners of the English take on ballroom dance, which is called Strict Tempo. Regardless of false dichotomy, which makes Basie less desirable than some of the stiff British dance bands, they form the backbone of our audience. Now that there are more Americans onboard, we’re getting a more tolerant group, but there is still that central issue of the age group, which, with some exceptions, is 70+.

The only way a good thing like the Queens Room is going to survive--on the QM2, QV, and the ships on the drawing board--is if a way is found to draw from a younger demographic. I believe that a good approach would be what we’ve done with the ORB. The origins of the Original Recipe Band were my experience with Duck Soup, a band whose owner made a lot more money than he deserved. Their tune list was a mix of Motown, rock, and Sinatra. The problem was there were no charts, so everyone who joined the band had a period of adjustment where they played like idiots for weeks at a time. When we started ORB I decided to write everything down, so nobody had to go through the idiot period. Make the book the star was my goal. That’s not the way the three Queens Rooms now operate. 

About half the charts we play are from Princess, xeroxed endlessly so that they are nearly impossible to read. The rest are these English charts which are designed to be played by any number of horns from two to infinity, Some are useful, most are crap. I’m not certain of this, but I suspect that the libraries of the Queens Room bands are quite a bit different from ship to ship, depending on the taste who was leading the band at crucial moments.

This whole dance band scheme in the Queens Room is supported by ten, count-em, ten Gentlemen Hosts. I want to see the spreadsheet where THOSE cabins are justified. The have to share, but still . . .

There’s an entertainer on board who plays clarinet like Benny Goodman as his main thing. He’s pretty good, pretty English, and he’s cooking up a deal for New York where he’s going to try to get Warren the Cruise Director to hire enough musicians to make a full big band. I can’t see that happening, though. The purse strings are just too tight. You’d think this cruise line was going out of business the way they complain about their budgets. We have two trumpets, two bones, three saxes and a couple rhythm sections on board, and to augment them into a full band, you’re talking two more each of trumpets and bones, another alto and a baritone player. It’s not just money. You have to get guys who’ll pass the medical, have valid passports, and on and on. Mazel tov.

The Russian dancers, who don’t think their exhaust products stink, are not working except for a single show and are leaving in Sydney. Oh man are these guys snotty. They walk around with their noses in the air all the time and are unintentionally hysterical. There are also aboard three Ukrainian girls who play classical music--violin, cello, and piano--who have the same disorder. They have Viktor, the alto player in the other band, in tow. Viktor seems to use a lot of hair-care products, and the girls seem to have no relaxing clothes. It’s a lot of work, being them, though, so there is little enough time for relaxing.

Crossing the Equator

January 22, 2008

We have crossed the Equator. Last night we had Neptune’s Ball, which was a somewhat droll and adolescent way for us to repackage the music we always play, but Michelle was having pretty funny running the show, although the dance mixer games that she comes up with are so complicated that they tend to take twenty minutes each. The Queens Room for the occasion was done up in plastic seaweed by the two decorators on board, who seem to win the award for working the fewest clock hours on the ship.

This afternoon we’re playing the Neptune ceremony, which is apparently a long and noble tradition when “crossing the line.” People who haven’t been across the Equator are subjected to various indignities, all in good fun, with us musicians playing the processional, fanfares, and second-line recessional. It’s going to be the three horns from the Queens Room, Jim, and Stevie from the other band playing the old banjo. It does appear to be raining at 10 am, so whether it will happen seems in question. They might move it inside, but the ceremony involves fish guts, so we’ll have to modify that part of the proceedings. 

I really don’t know what to expect, but so far everything the crew staff has undertaken to make the passengers happy during sea days has been pretty dumb. My guess is that if you polled the passengers (“guests” is often used), most would want more Bingo games and otherwise to be left alone.

While most of the passengers are English, we have lots more Americans since we started the World Cruise. Two American passengers worthy of mention are Pete from Arlington, Virginia and Winston from southern California. Pete’s done the World Cruise before, but our horn section knocked him out when he heard us, and he’s been back every day since. Winston and his wife spent years visiting Disneyland so they could dance to Basie, Woody, Harry James and the rest of the big band who used to play there in the summer. How well I remember paying $8 for a night ticket and hearing four sets of the Basie band in the Carnation plaza or whatever it was called! Winston and his wife are dancers, but more the type that has that rhythmic impulse shooting through them. They know the music too, and we’re happy to provide it, making space among the quicksteps and waltz medleys for Moten Swing, In a Mellow Tone, and I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good. At last we have fans.

I’m off to see if we’re having the Cross the Line ceremony in this weather.

Well, that was totally weird. The British have these quaint customs which are at their roots class versus class, and this was no exception. The idea is to round up everyone on the ship--passengers and crew--who have never crossed the equator and memorialize the event with someone dressed up as King Neptune who acts as a judge in a trial against these “polliwogs.” They are all found guilty of these offenses and their punishment is the humiliation of having fish, fish parts, and food poured over their heads and inserted into their nostrils.

When I got back in the cabin last night, I noticed that the carpet was beginning to get a little wet. This ship, with its ancient pipes (originally PLASTIC) are held together with joints that crack every once in a while. Like they told me to do, like I was trained to do, I went up to the crew office as soon as it opened in the morning and signed the first position on today’s clipboard, describing the leak and the swamp it was starting to accumulate. Sure enough, no plumber called and I was out of the cabin most of the day. Then when the room steward arrived I told him what happened. By then we had a nice little swamp in the hallway going to the porthole. 

The steward’s supervisor really took the situation by the horns, so we’re now in a passenger cabin until the thing’s fixed. I might use this as an opportunity to contrast and compare some of the features of a passenger cabin and my cabin, which was once a passenger cabin but no more.

Here goes:

The mattresses are a lot thicker. The decor is kind of 1969 deluxe, with a bizarre mixed-media piece hanging on the entry wall. Looks to be a little smaller in gross square feet than mine, no porthole of course. There’s a ventilator howling in the passenger cabin, but I suppose you get used to it or go mad trying. Much of the furnishings are the same, although the desk and most of the other things have been updated and reupholstered. 

Biggest difference is the bathroom. My bathroom has a fiberglas shower that’s been patched a few too many times. This may be what’s leaking. The passenger bathroom is all stainless steel, with a beautiful glass shower enclosure. The passenger cabin has less space, though, and the porthole is a deal breaker. We slept until noon because the passenger cabin was so dark. 

When we did finally get up, we were in Salvador do Bahia, my first South American port. I’m afraid that I was disappointed. The city is a real dump, even though at one point it was one of the richest places on the planet because they grew coffee and sugar from the colonial days. After four sea days any place ought to look good, but this place is pretty picked over. From the moment we got down the gangway we were tripping over the cobbles which looked like they dated back to colonial days. While the people were vibrant and poor all at once, the place felt more dangerous than soulful. I went walking with Jr. and he’s convinced that a guy that bumped him was trying to lift his wallet. 

Now we have a single sea day, followed by Rio, which I am prepared to enjoy, followed by two sea days, followed by two days in Montevideo. That’s as far ahead as I’m willing to look.

The mess in the mess

We have to eat in either the crew mess or the staff mess. which has a cute-ass English name I can’t remember, but which is also sometimes called the Concessionaire’s mess. Both these messes are a step below their counterparts on Princess ships, and in addition on Princess we musicians and most of the crew who wear suits can eat in the Horizon Court buffet in all but the busiest times. Additional options for dining on Princess include the Italian and steak restaurants for a modest cover charge. 

None of these options exists here. The guys who have been around longer than anyone else--Stevie at 29 years and Trevor at 15--remember a time when dining options were available, but say that some people overstepped and the privileges were revoked. That’s a typical response to complex issues on ships, but usually you get the privileges reinstated after a short period of hand wringing. This does not seem to be the case here. Privileges lost are seldom regained.

There must have been a change in chefs right around Christmas. The menu became blander and less varied. As so often happens on ships, they had the serving staff obsess on cleanliness issues to take them off the taste duties. 

And things went downhill from there in a hurry. They brought out lunch meats that had been frozen and thawed. When nobody went for it because of the texture, they brought them out again the following day, folded differently, and still there were no takers. The entrées went from average to institutional, as in frozen peas and carrots with pasta in a cream sauce. It was obvious that somebody just didn’t give a shit.

For me, the line was crossed when I took a bite from a bran muffin at breakfast and tasted the overwhelming alkaline taste of baking powder. Sitting across from Stevie, I couldn’t help but ask him if anybody around here knows how to cook.

In what might be the final indignity before the pendulum swings, we had our allocation of milk thrown in our face. I don’t go out of my way to drink milk, but when I’m up for breakfast I do put milk on some oats and nuts cereal. One day last week, at the end of breakfast service, when the musicians are still straggling out to make cereal and Nescafe, the milk ran out. Rather than go get another half gallon, the two servers told us that we were allocated one half gallon and once that ran out, we were out of luck. 

Allocation? Is this a cruise ship? (OK, is it a liner?) I’ve never heard of an allocation for anything on a ship! Even for crew, there are no limits on something as fundamental as milk. One of the wags in the mess commented that this was starting to more resemble a prison ship.

Other irritations: the cereal is padlocked in a cabinet when breakfast is over. On most other ships you can grab a box of cereal most any time of the day or night. Everything is locked up, in fact, except for hot water and tea bags, and even then just generic tea. 

The hours could use some work. The adjacent crew mess is closed from 12:45 to 1:00, at which time it reopens. The staff mess doesn’t open for dinner until 6:30, even though a lot of us have a to be at work at seven. 

These are things that the passengers are unaware of, of course. And as for the head office in California, they must receive the menus of each day’s offerings, or else why would they make up all the fancy French names for each main dish?

Another way of looking at this is the White Star Service program, which is the linear descendent of the CRUISE program at Princess. It’s basically a way to institutionalize common sense, although in this babel of cultures and languages common sense is a little hard to come by. One of the points made by White Star (and is it odd that the program is named after the company whose hard-driving policies drove the Titanic into the sea?) is that we are internal customers, and when a crew member serves an internal customer, the person being served is entitled to the same level of service as a passenger paying full fare. Well, they’re falling down in that department, just like the plumbers who, when informed of the leak in my cabin, chose not to check it out. If I did the equivalent and decided not to play music for a day or so, I’d be sacked. And I’d deserve it. 

As I write this it’s now the day at between Bahia and Rio. My cabin is 83.3 degrees F. and there is a drying fan at work, since yesterday, on the carpet. Paulina, the housekeeping supervisor, just checked in on things. She’d going to call the AC guys to get that thing going so some of the stink will be carried off. 

I’m hoping Rio will be a little more congenial than Bahia was.

On the sea day separating Bahia from Rio all the Americans who work on the ship are called in to the Crew Office and informed that their payrolling mechanism, in fact their definition as employees, has been changed, effective the first of the year. We are no longer employees of a shell company which files payroll taxes in the US, but are rather contractors working for P&O out of England. Needless to say, we are a little miffed. We had a nice little system of direct deposit going to our US banks and credit unions. Now our pay has to be wired from the ship and the deposit will be a good deal later in the month.

The thing that makes me furious about all this is that the paymaster on this ship is an ignoramus who can’t answer our questions about what’s happened and seems incapable of rational thought in general. How do these folks get and hold their jobs? He’s very good at posturing, but just try to ask him a fundamental question about what’s happened to your money and you can’t get a straight answer. Jan calms me down over the phone and explains that this maroon did not make the policy which went into effect without informing us, he was just the guy who should have told us that the change had been made when it was made. Some of the Americans are a good deal hotter under the collar because they have an automatic debt repayment schedule and they’re going to have to contact each of their creditors to rearrange their payments. We’re told about this change on Friday afternoon, so these guys are not very happy.

I don’t believe that such a fundamental change should be made when we’re working under a valid contract. One of my comrades told me, he won’t be able to work for Cunard again, because it’s going to put him into a 35 percent tax bracket with him doing all the contributions to SSI and Medicare. Better to work for Princess, which he’ll do, at least until this latest wrinkle at Cunard is either proven (they show a decrease in their expenses) or not (they lose all the Americans, who are mostly musicians. All Russian show bands are possible.)

They handled this all wrong. They were ham-handed. We still haven’t received the notification from the head office which will actually explain the change, which the fool on the ship is incapable of doing. I’m thinking we won’t get that letter until the end of this month.

Of course this is all a corporate shell game designed to save expenses. If there’s a lawyer out there who is willing to challenge the breaking of everyone’s contract, the conversion of our status to independent contractors even though we can’t turn down individual projects, well, I’ll bet that lawyer is in Fort Lauderdale next to the call center, where the rights of the Filipinos to get paid their overtime wages while at sea were won. Then there was the time a couple years ago when an insurance deduction suddenly appeared. That one never made it to court. 

It turns out that there is, incredibly, an allotment system for milk in the staff and crew mess. I thought that it was just a rumor, but when Jim went to get milk for his coffee and came back black with an explanation by the mess staff my fears were confirmed. 

They are trying to balance the books on a rounding error. Both on the American paychecks and the milk in the mess. I know that this ship burns a gallon of fuel for every six inches it moves. But there are surcharges. You could cut back passenger services, but these folks will make a big stink of they are deprived of even the slightest thing.

Rio was great, although I didn’t feel like I was really there until I came back to the ship and heard and saw a local samba show. Up until that point in my visit, it might have been any other port city with a downtown and a beach. The enormous swings from poverty to the rich were there, though not as visible as in Bahia. 

But, as I said above, I didn’t feel that I was really in Rio until the Samba show blew through the Grand Lounge at the same time that we were to play. Here’s how that worked: We arrive at the Queens Room for our 9:45 set, and nobody except for a couple gentlemen hosts is there. That’s because the samba show, complete with lavishly undressed Brazilians of both sexes, and a band led by a ukulele player and drummers. According to Stevie, the ship used to dock for two or even three nights during carnival, and passengers and crew used to join in the festivities. For the last pass through these parts, the company in its wisdom chose to arrive a week before carnival and--wait for it--leave that same night. 

The Main Event: World Cruise Begins

January 7, 2008

I love these 25-hour days, and that’s all we’ll be getting until we run up against the North American continent. From there we edge southward to the very tip of South America. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Last night was an eventful night. Musically, it was the first night of Pete’s return on trumpet. Our section is reunited after three weeks of the hysterical but not particularly musical Frederick from Montreal. Predictably we had all of the blend and phrasing intact from the moment we sat down together for the 7:45 set. Pete’s switched to a Martin trumpet from the mid-fifties, the same model that Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown, Miles, and Chet Baker played. There was much horsing around over this, from Stew mostly, who said, “Dude, you’re IN now!”

Anyway, I told Pete how nice it was to play with a trumpet player who didn’t have to shake his trumpet to make a vibrato. But there’s more to it than that. We’ve been through a struggle and made each of us the decision to subsume our individuality for the greater good of the section. There’s only one musical organ, and that’s the ear.

The singer who was supposed to have arrived to take Doug Murray’s place had some last-minute problems arise, like we all don’t have last-minute problems, and blew us off. We’ll struggle on regardless, of course. In this part of the business, unless someone lives pretty close to the docks, you can’t ask “Who lives close.”

Tonight around three in the morning Pedro went berserk because a party was spilling out from the cabins below where the restaurant servers make their cramped homes. I was asleep, despite the muffled noise from the party-goers and the rolling of the ship as we entered the North Atlantic, until Pedro had enough and pounded on the walls of our cabin. Jeez, aside from his musical shortcomings I’m not going to miss him at all when he leaves for Madrid on Monday in New York. 

 January 8, 2008

We continue to drag across the Atlantic at about half speed so this new ship, the one launched by Camilla Parker-Bowles, the one where the meeting of the champagne and the hull resulted in not a single drop of liquid or a shard of glass, tries to get up up to speed. Not that it will ever approach our top speed of 30+ knots. She’s designed to go 19, tops. But we’re going 17 so she can keep up with us. It’s always a dangerous thing to turn matters over to the marketing department, which I fear is what has been done with this crossing. There must be some helicopter somewhere with a photographer inside getting ready for a money shot.

Unfortunately, there is also a ship full of buffs who want to know why we’re going so damnably slow. 

The band sounds great without a singer, and that is bothering a few people in authority, people who think that a band had better have a singer. This will take its toll on things I feel certain. We’ll have the male production singer who is more a yodeler than a singer thrust upon us and that will be the end of the good news coming from the Queens Room.

January 9, 2008

As predicted in this space just yesterday, we had a young production singer foisted upon us, and it makes me want to cry sometimes how things have changed in musical education. Not only is this guy making a lot more money than I am with my years of checkered experience, he gets his own cabin. He’s living testimony to youth being wasted on the young, too. He came onto the bandstand with two charts, including one of Sway based on Michael Bublée’s chart, but which inexplicably went into the key of G flat at the end, thus derailing our rhythm section’s best efforts. The good news is, with the lack of charts (the singer who left in Southampton did 14 charts in two sets) we concentrated this young feller into 4 tunes (2 charts, 2 fakes) in the second set.

January 10, 2008

There are several ways of looking at this Tandem Crossing, as the marketing geniuses call it. We have the Queen Victoria on our starboard side, setting the pace with its slower design. 

We--the QE2--are an ocean liner, remember, and the last of the breed at that. 

They more resemble a Holiday Inn than an ocean liner. They are designed for gentle itineraries in sheltered waters, for passengers with a vacation goal of shopping, beaches, and monumental architecture. 

The QE2 was designed to haul ass. There’s no way to put it politely. This is a performance vehicle, like a Ferrari. But we are traveling in tandem with a Winnebago. 

That’s I call it the Doppelganger crossing. 

If it weren’t for this ill-advised photo opportunity, we’d be a lot closer to New York on this, the fourth day of the voyage. There was a brief moment yesterday when a rumor circulated that because of a breakdown in the Vic’s #4 engine, we would have to leave her and press pedal to metal, or we would never get to New York on time. But here we are, still going about 20 knots. We were going 16, though, but we could go 29 if we felt like it, and that is a tremendous speed differential. The QE2 generally crosses in 4.5 days, and we’re scheduled for 6.

Still, the sunsets are gorgeous here on the 42nd parallel. We’ve avoided storms since the second day, although it can get mighty cold and windy. 

This afternoon, when Captain MacNaught came on the PA with his navigational pitch, you could hear the gritting in his teeth as he explained that we’d be in New York by now if we weren’t in tandem. And so we get to enjoy 2 days at sea.

Things are no better on the Vic, which is still in its shakedown. The celebrities they invite on these adventures are in a state of rebellion, according to Sian, whose fiancée, Gareth, is improbably on the Vic (which he booked before they had met) in cabin 5009, which is Siân’s cabin number as well. There are lines of complaint in the Purser’s office and the Cruise Director’s. Cabin size is a common complaint, with only 2 drawers for a tandem. One thing I’ve observed from here is the nose of the ship tends to dive in waves, even the most moderate ones. That can’t be very comfortable.

For Captain MacNaught I offer a couple suggestions. One is to use our oft-mentioned by not often used capacity to run at 20 knots in reverse and go that way the rest of the way to New York. The other, less drastic, suggestion is to circle the Queen Victoria in lazy eights between here and the Statue of Liberty. 

We’re back in the same time zone as Nuuk, Greenland, two long time zones from EST. But the sunset was nice up in the overstuffed chairs in the corridor next to the Queens Room. 

Celebrities on this cruise are. so far, Robbie Coltrane, English comedian and actor who adopted the surname, and, of all people, Chris Riddle, the son of Nelson Riddle, who is now leading a band bearing his father’s name, working mostly in England. Most folks wouldn’t give his celebrity a nod, but I noticed.

January 11, 2008

Word is out that we have given the slow, troubled Victoria the slip. I haven’t checked the speed on the television yet because of the slumbering Pedro, but it certainly feels like we gained speed in the night. We are finally in Canadian time, somewhere on the Grand Banks I imagine. Just one more time zone to go, then immigration and a Coast Guard drill and I meet up with Lou and Liz, who are coming down with their daughter from the Hudson valley for a day in the City. 

Lou DeFeo and I were cab drivers in New York together back in 1977. I had talked with him a couple times at “shape up,” as they called the often 3 hour wait for our cabs to come in from the day shift. Then one day Lou came in with an alto, fresh from a lesson with Lee Konitz. Just one of those coincidences I guess. We drove Checkers for Hudson garage, at night, back when you could make maybe $10 an hour, including tips and an occasional trip off the meter. Those were less than good times for me. I’d come to New York expecting something to break for me, and it didn’t. I surely didn’t come to New York to drive a CAB. For that I owe thanks to former UCSC grad student Brian Vermeersh, who got there first and told me the arcane mechanics of hacking. 

If I hadn’t been driving a cab up to Stryker’s on 86th one night to drive the cats from the Dave Matthews Big Band downtown, I’d have not picked up Laigh Langley for just one more paying fare. Things would have turned out a lot differently then.

Lou moved out of the city since then, married Liz, they adopted a daughter who was born in Austin . . . 

Sharon Wong, who gave me a place to live way beyond my station when I was driving a cab (Jim Baum was a beneficiary too, although he’s off the radar lately) lives in LA and is married to a fabulous guy who edits movies (as she does too) and has almost raised a large brood of children. 

Some of the guys I picked up in my cab are gone now: Remo Palmier, Michael Brecker . . . A lot of them are still slogging it out in New York: Art Baron, half of the Mingus Big Band, Gary Anderson. Meeting Laigh was a real turning point. 

My life would have been a lot different if I hadn’t driven those Checkers. (Like Nixon, I guess.) At the time it seemed like the world was ending. I’d been one of the top dogs in Santa Cruz, which matters very little, it turns out. 

Enough nostalgia! Onward!

January 12, 2008

We’re drawing closer to New York, and soon, at 6:00 pm local time, we’re going to give the Victoria the slip and heading off on our own so we can make the arrival time. They will be late. Our captain is having a lot of fun at their expense over there on the Queen Vic. He loves telling us where we’d be right now if we weren’t encumbered with her presence. In about an hour he’ll have his wish. 

My suggestions were that we either:

Go backwards. We can make a greater speed backwards than the Vic can go forwards, or

Run lazy eights around the Vic in the open north Atlantic. Good practice for the bridge crew!

Of course there was much amusement in the Crew Mess at these suggestions, but they came to naught, which is the Captain’s name after all, Ian MacNaught. 

The word from Siân’s fiancée is that the Vic sustained a pod injury when hit by a wave going out from Britain. (Who knew there were waves?) Repairs will have to be made in Hamburg.

One thing for certain: Our arrival in NYC will involve clearing 1000 crew members and passing a Coast Guard drill. I figure a four-hour window tops. With luck, I’ll get to see Lou and his family for a couple hours. This is just the way things are. Maybe we can do something a little more comprehensive when we come back to NYC in April. 

Getting off the ship proved to be almost impossible. The Coast Guard drill dragged on until 12:45, with us shivering on the deck. By the time I was excused, got out of my vest and went to the front of the ship to get off at the gangway, there was a line of several hundred of my closest associates and the forces of Security were having a meltdown because no order for shore leave had been explicitly ordered. The chief Purser, whose job it wasn’t, yelled at them to get us moving off the ship so he could get on with his business. The tall, blond Englishman with all the stripes got on the radio to the bridge and got the Nepalese security to wilt. We were free, but it was 1:20. 

I was emotionally drained from the experience. The crew members waiting in line at the crew gangway were jostling in a cheerful way, but we had been on this ship for a week without seeing land, and there, in the near field distance, was New York City. With another two sea days to look forward to when we were to have left in just a few hours, every minute wasted in line to get off the ship was wasted, especially with with our fate in the hands of the indifferent Security staff.

I soon met and spent the rest of the afternoon with Lou and Jemma, his daughter. We took a cab up in Columbus Circle and ducked into a Starbucks. We spent a lot of time at the Whole Foods store in the Time Warner shopping center across the street. It’s a little bit of Austin imperialism. Judging by the crowds, the store is doing very well indeed. I got a couple jars of salsa and a bag of chips, an Arrogant Bastard ale, and a box of Odwalla bars to take back to the ship. At the store I ate Indian: a couple pieces of chicken, some korma and paneer. Then we stopped at a news stand and I walked away with a New Yorker and the Sunday Times. We piled into another cab and they dropped me off on their way back to their car.

It’s hard to believe that this is the same city I lived in back in the late seventies. Everything is clean, there are virtually no street people or homeless people. The buildings are scrubbed clean, and there isn’t any graffiti. What happened here? Was there a fascist takeover? Was it worth it? 

Got back on the ship with time to spare, in time for another drill, this one a passenger drill for the 600 new forks who got on in New York. 

The Queen Vic was parked next to us. The Queen Mary, too long to park in the Manhattan docks, was parked at the new cruise terminal in Brooklyn. All three ships were scheduled for a marketing photo op that called for them to converge at the Statue of Liberty for a fireworks display. (We had a similar event when we left Southampton with the Vic last week.) Unfortunately we had a 7:45 band set scheduled, which meant we’d have no audience, because by the time the ships were positioned just so the time was 8:00. We rehearsed a couple of my charts for a bunch of empty chairs and Jim had the good sense to pull the plug on the set. We watched the fireworks through the large windows in the Queens Room while I talked to Jan on my cel phone until the battery ran out. 

January 15, 2008

We’re on the second sea day since leaving New York. It’s morning off South Carolina and the Vic can be seen through the cabin’s porthole. At 11:15 we have a meeting of the entertainment department, reportedly a White Star service exercise, in other words more marketing crap, this time pointing inward at the crew. (Remember, White Star was the line that had a ship called the Titanic, some time after which Cunard bought their assets.) White Star service is one of our foundations here at Cunard.

It’s marketing turned inward, though. They spent millions on the launch of the Vic, and they’re advertising like mad, but yesterday a trial started of a reputed serial killer in England who turns out to have been a waiter on the QE2. Let’s see them put a positive spin on that one!

There’s actually an ad for Cunard in the latest New Yorker that has a wildly stylized version of the Queens Room, complete with the band. “We” are standing (we sit when we play) in the background, in silhouette, striking odd poses which no good musician would strike if a photographer hadn’t told him or her to. In the foreground, the Folks are dancing in formal wear, looking well-fed and elegant. There is a lot of snappy prose, written by an army of skilled propagandists, in the words of Stevie. It’s a full page, 4/c (actually it looks like a duotone, for you hame gamers) bleed ad on page 6 of the world’s greatest magazine. The headline is: MIDNIGHT FINDS YOU HAVING THE MOST INTIMATE OF MOMENTS IN THE GRANDEST OF BALLROOMS. Well, I don’t know about the 2 other ships, but we at the QE2 QUIT at midnight and head for the buffet and the only 20 minute period in the whole day when we don’t have to eat in the mess. If you come around the Queens Room at midnight to have an intimate moment, you might be disappointed to find a couple bar staff folks cleaning up the room. (Update: the shot was taken in the Queens Room of the Queen Mary 2 and the guys in the band are identifiable. Our new Bandmaster identified them to me, but all I remember was that the singer’s name was Paul.)

I guess the important thing is we are part of the marketing campaign. I wonder, though, how much longer the Ballroom Dance people are going to be able to walk up the gangway for embarkation. Why nobody hasn’t figured out a way to incorporate R&B and other Boomer music into the Queens Room is a mystery to me. Just last night a fantastically ride passenger came waltzing by and asked us to play “Johnny B. Good.” Sure we can do it, but there’s no guitar up on this stage. You, as a musical dolt, would notice that we don’t sound like the record, and the reason is that Chuck Berry is nowhere near and there sure as hell is no guitar in the Queens Room, I told him. Or something to that effect. What I should have said is go upstairs to the Yacht Club bar, where the Caribbean band is playing. They can do that tune surely.

I don’t mean replace the Queens Room dance band with a rock cover band. Far from it. But with the resources we now have and a rewrite of the book we can at least branch into a few areas that we now don’t do. And we might need a guitar player. And a baritone saxophone, king of instruments.

Sounds like a band I know.

The day drags on here. The Vic still looms large in my porthole. I’m going upstairs to the rehearsal in the Grand Lounge. 

Heavier Weather

All at Sea

We are on the first day of three sea days, after stopping yesterday in Ponto Dalgado in the Azores. These sea days are enough to make you nuts if you’re not careful. There’s plenty to do if you’re a passenger, but if you’re in the crew it boils down to the Crew Welfare throwing a party with free booze. If you’re like me, you end up reading and writing and catching up on your sleep, though with my current cabin mate, even that’s tough. Being Spanish, he assumes that everyone has the right to an afternoon siesta, and when his is through, he’s got the right to turn on the lights. Enough. Less said about him, the better. 

Next cruise with him going back to Spain and the usual shuffling around in the cabins, I look to get Trevor as my cabin mate, which can’t happen too soon, I think. Trevor is English, although he’s lived in Wales most of his life, and he has a place in Orlando. He’s been doing this ship for about fifteen years now--not nearly as long as Stevie, but long enough to know the ropes. And, as it turns out, long enough to give a shit about how this ship is in her waning days.

I bought a Kenton album in Ponto Delgado called Kenton plays Chicago (an iTunes music store purchase). I joined the band six months after this album was recorded, and many of the cats I know are on it. Tony Campise for one sounds great on this album. I’m pretty proud we’ve worked together in Austin, because he left the band when I joined. 

In any event, there I played all the charts on this album when I was up there in the big show, twenty-four years old. All of them are somehow related to Blood, Sweat, and Tears or the band Chicago. No wonder this album was destined for big band obscurity. (Although the even more obscure Fire, Fury and Fun, recorded a couple months before I joined, features a cut where Tony, the best jazz flute player I know, grunts like a pig.)

So now it’s 8:00 pm in a time zone so small it has ONE city in the Apple time zone list--Grytviken, South Georgia. Tomorrow we move to another, GFT, whatever that means. but we’ll be closer to land in Antigua on Sunday. (Nice going, guys. Take us out to sea and land us when all the shops are closed.) We island hop through the Windwards at that point, take our holiday cheer at sea, then it’s back to Southampton on the sixth  of January after several sea days.

Then the Main Event starts, as we leave late that afternoon for New York and the World Cruise. I’m looking forward to Chipotle, Starbucks, and maybe even a trip to WalMart from Fort Lauderdale. 

The Ventilation

As we get in more temperate climes, I can’t help but notice that the cabin, once freezing, has now warmed considerably. The current temperature is 79.7 degrees F. and there is some danger of it becoming an alternative to the sauna on seven deck. 

Then again, what can be expected of a ship built in 1967? Remember what the air conditioners were like back then? Gas may have cost a tenth (or less) of what they run now, but I remember that the clocks used to stop working when the car was driven off the lot, and the air conditioner wasn’t far behind.

The old queen has a lot of ventilation problems, and I don’t imagine they will be doing any sort of upgrading in the rest of its days on the sea. I guess I’ll just have to learn to live with it. 

The Mix

The figures are in, and on this cruise we have 16 USA passengers, and over 1600 from the UK. And there are more real winners in this department, like the guy who paid Sian the backhanded compliment at the end of tea time by saying, “I liked your playing, what there was of it.” As usual, we get the nicest folks in the Queens Room, but even they seem to have short fuses about the tempos some times. Maybe they just need something to complain about. 

I’ve been wondering who came up with this idea of Strict Tempo dancing. Seems like a false dichotomy to me--you’re either running the tempo out of a metronome or you’re not. I don’t believe that the Basie band ever adhered to this either/or situation

The Gig

First of all, we are a British dance orchestra, or descended therefrom. As the line in “Young Man with a Horn” goes, “This is a dance orchestra. No blues or low-down jive.” We exist for the pleasure of some rather old, cranky, and opinionated people, who have paid a buttload of money to sail on this ship. Most of them are returning from many sailings over the last 40 years, and they remember the good old days and aren’t shy about flaunting them in front of you. 

The first band to make its mark on this ship was the Joe Loss Orchestra, which worked here in the seventies. The band had passenger privileges, fancy cabins--with bathtubs reportedly--on deck 2. The band had fifteen pieces and was as square as a packing crate. But they set the pattern for all who followed, which is, today:

Swing

Waltz

Quickstep

Cha Cha

Foxtrot

Samba

Waltz

Ballad

Rhumba

Foxtrot

Tango

Quickstep (or Waltz if it’s the last set)

The band comes on the stand with a set list that slots tunes into these spaces accordingly. At least one previous bandleader ground out the same three sets every night, without deviation. There may have been many more.

It’s come to this because of the Carnival Corporation’s desire to keep down costs, which almost bankrupted  Cunard Lines when they bought it. No more deck 2 cabins, down with the rest of the crew, eating only in the crew mess, and once, ingloriously, turning the whole staffing issue over to an agency in Montreal, Canada. The band shrunk down to one tenor player who typically had a problem with alcohol, who could play jazz only to the point where the dancers are effected, a rhythm section and a singer. 

Stevie tells great tragically hysterical tale about those days, when he was leading the Queens Room as the bandleader and had little or no influence on the personnel he was given. There was a singer from Montreal, foisted upon the ship by that agent in her home town, who thought jazz was art and that was that. She had a degree in jazz from McGill University, allegedly wrote her own charts, which were in fact lead sheets. She was married to the bandmaster, who played trumpet in the show band. The tenor player spent lots more time and energy on the crew bar than he did on the gig. He was the sole horn player, but as Stevie tells it he spent a lot of time unscrewing the neck on his saxophone and inspecting the joint. The drummer was an apostle of Elvin Jones, another fabulous mismatch courtesy of the folks in Montreal, who apparently never brought this guy to a dance gig as part of the audition. Then there was Pedro, the bassist from Madrid, who sought only to further his musical excellence, which meant that everything, every musical moment, was potential for a bass solo. These are the leading characters in Stevie’s saga, and they made for a rollicking time on the Queens Room dance floor. They also made it so Stevie, who had no control whatsoever of his personnel, all decisions having been made in Montreal, ended up throwing his hands up in despair and helplessness and was reassigned to the show band in the Grand Lounge. 

As for the band, it was reconstituted with four horns (same line-up as the show band in the Grand Lounge), then it shrunk back to its current line-up of one saxophone (alto and tenor, trumpet, trombone, a singer and three rhythm).

The lesson is an instructive one. Decision making needs to take place close to the ground. Leaders need to lead, with all the power to change the line-up made on the stage based not on the reputation of the player (which can, and often is, a total fabrication) but on the ability to play the gig. The gig’s all that counts. You get the folks on the dance floor moving their feet and keep them moving their feet, resisting the temptation to derail them with some melodic quote from Archie Schepp or some other jazz hero.

Understand, I am a jazz musician through and through. But I also want to work, so I make adjustments to the way I play, honoring the dancers who pay the freight. The gig’s not about me. But I can play as much Johnny Hodges-style alto as I can stand, not to mention tenor like Sam Butera and clarinet and flute as well. You’ve got to play the gig. 

Yet--would you believe it?--we struggle endlessly with our bass player to keep him on the rails and prevent his virtuosic flourishes, which I have seen dancers trip to. And if you guessed that the bass player in question was the artistic Madrid resident who was in the problem band led by Stevie, you’d be absolutely right. If it were my band, I’d have let him go the first time he showed up 2 minutes before down beat. I’ve shared a cabin with him since he got here at the end of October, and his effete surliness is insufferable, almost French. How he ever got rehired is a deep mystery to not just me. 

Ken Ragsdale would feel right at home on the Queens Room dance floor. Some of the charts we play are not strangers to dance band musicians everywhere. There are Dan Higgins charts, copied until every quarter note has become a half note. And the famous Pop pad is there in profusion. These were British charts which turn up everywhere, designed to be played by any combination of horns from thirteen to 3. We explore that lower limit.

After three sea days . . .

We are, at long last, anchored off Antigua. Despite the loftiness of our lineage, there are 8 other cruise ships here today, most of them moored at the wharf, steps from downtown. Our tenders are full of passengers, and crew leave has not been granted. We’re going to have a grumpy crew if this keeps up. I suspect that’s why we’ve had a lot of parties with free booze on this trip. You don’t want the crew to have a sober moment to consider that it’s Christmas time and we’re in lockdown on the most famous liner in the world. 

Still on board . . . 

Christmas Eve, and we’re in St. Kitts, which has no harbor sufficient for us to land properly, so we’re once again anchored off coast and tendering. This has apparently become a source of friction among the passengers, many of whom are pointing out that the brochures say that there will only be one tender port and now that we get here there are four. That’s fine unless you’ve got problems moving around, which describes about half the passengers. They seem to be having a better time of it than they did yesterday, when they borrowed two tender vessels from the Emerald Princess in Antigua. Friends who were working as escorts on shore were waiting 2 hours for the passengers on their tours to arrive. Then the rain started.

Some lady in a walker was down on the pontoon yesterday really laying it on the international hostess about her coming on this cruise specifically because there was just one tender port listed in the brochure.

I chose to stay on the ship today and spent my afternoon watching “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Really, I’m not kidding. I need it to counteract my well-known aversion to Christmas music, which is playing everywhere, including in the mess. 

Christmas Day

I didn’t know there was a rite of inversion on Christmas day. The officers come down to the mess, which they never otherwise do, and serve the crew lunch. This included the captain actually pouring wine for a table of musicians, me included. It was all very pleasant, including the food, which was way above the usual rubber chicken fare. Christmas dinner was even better, although we had to serve ourselves.

But, getting back to lunch, we had an open bar and a lot of the musicians took advantage of that fact, including Jim, the bandleader and drummer, and Richard, the piano player who recently came over from Princess. They were both harmlessly tipsy at the end of lunch but both ended up napping away the afternoon in their cabins.

At the gig, there was an altercation between Pedro and Jim. At the end of our 7:45 set, Jim wanted Pedro, who wears earplugs, to turn up his amplifier so we could hear him better on the stage. Pedro accused Jim of being drunk, which he was not (though he might have been at 6 hours earlier) and ignored him. Jim, who also lives in Madrid, let him have it with mile-a-minute Spanish, and Pedro turned tail and walked off the stage. 

We were warned about Pedro. He had a short contract a few years ago where he caused a lot of trouble, to the extent that some people couldn’t believe he’d been rehired when he came back on board in October. 

Jim caught up with him in the Lido and made it clear who the boss of the band was. Pedro's got all the talent in the world, but none of the interpersonal skills required to present it. He will not play the gig, which requires simplicity and more than a little teamwork. He’d rather make virtuosic flourishes, never playing a single tango rhythm throughout a tango medley. Richard and I agree that, had this been a Princess ship with Paolo as bandmaster and all other things being equal, Pedro would have lasted long enough for his attitude to merely emerge before he’d been fired.

So Pedro went crying to David, our musical director, explained the situation from his point of view, and told David that if things wouldn’t change he’d have no choice but to resign. That was his big mistake. When you resign, the responsibility for getting home is yours alone, and in the Windward Islands that means flying to Miami and getting a flight to Spain at the height of holiday travel season. Jim then tracked down David, and that’s where we stand now, the next morning. I’m sure Pedro was backing David into a corner with his resignation, which is a gambit he used on his last contract. This time it may backfire. 

Boxing Day we’re in Dominica, the first place we have a wharf in the Caribbean, a week since the Azores. Poorest island in the Caribbean. This morning we drill, but I’m walking off to sniff the wind.

Maybe by then this whole ugly mess will have been straightened out. 

Later that week . . .

It’s New Years Eve here on the QE2. Pedro, when told his options for breaking a contract, elected to ride it out until New York, when the gods of irony have arranged a flight to Madrid for both him and Jim. His only real option would have been arranging his own transportation, which would have been plenty expensive from the tiny islands we were hopping around. 

Dave Pitchfork, who gave Pedro the options, came down with tonsillitis and was out for almost a week. 

We burned though the remaining islands, the last being Barbados. I wonder why there are so many British people interested in seeing their country’s former colonies. As for me, I felt too self-conscious to go ashore in Grenada, although it was a tender port as well. I managed to walk around Barbados, though. 

But Dominica was a real dump. Bums sleeping it off on the street corners, lots of rap everywhere, and a whole lot of poverty. Who stole the wealth here? I walked with Trevor and Jim looking for an open restaurant, finally hiding from the midday heat in the Garraway Hotel. We had done a full circle of the town by then and were directly in front of the ship. I elected to have lunch in the mess, as usual. The drummers ordered the local chicken delicacy at the hotel bar.

In Bridgetown, Barbados, the English left a lot of legacy behind. Stodgy Methodist churches and stone Royal Banks of this and that coexist with the Rasta culture in Barbados better than anywhere I’ve seen. There is seemingly no contradiction between the two to the inhabitants of this island. 

So, here is a summary of this cruise’s days. The first week we made for the Caribbean, stopping in the Azores, which was pretty nice. There was heavy weather, though, to go through from England. Leaving the Azores, we dodged some heavy weather for 3 sea days of relative calm. We reached Antigua, which has nothing to do with the woodwind company in San Antonio, but we in the crew were unable to go ashore. (I later learned that over 300 crew members just got on the tenders anyway, to the humiliation of the security folks.)  Then we did St. Kitts (also tender, with more measures to keep crew off the boats) on Christmas Eve, then a sea day, Dominica which unfortunately COULD accommodate us on December 26, Boxing Day. Then St. Vincent, Grenada, and Barbados, which was almost a normal port. Then, two weeks into this trip, we high-tailed it for England (by way of Madiera, which I’m looking forward to) for 4 sea days of smooth sailing 

A “Typical” Port Day

This is the third of January. I wake up in a new time zone, because we’ve been going east for the last 4 days, since leaving Barbados. We’ve lost an hour of sleep every night, making our days a disorienting 23 hours long. Now we’re actually on London time--GMT, or Zulu, or Universal time--so we’re at about 9:15 when I wake up to the ship’s engines being still. The silence is deafening, since we’ve had four days of cruising at around 25 knots. We’ve covered more than 3,000 miles at that speed, and down here in Crewville the roar of the engines two decks below us has been a constant since we left Barbados. 

I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. Pedro is still asleep. I am careful not to wake him, because he is a light sleeper and can be a grouch, because in Spain he gets 24 hours and apparently sleeps though most of them. 

Walking to the porthole, I quietly crack open a new 1.5 liter bottle of San Benedetto water and take a swig. I can still taste the toothpaste, but I am thirsty. the ship’s ventilation system runs dry to kill the legionella virus, although that’s the least of the concerns about outbreaks. Gastroenteritis, which has our sister ship, the Queen Victoria, in its clutches, is more of a concern. The dryness of the air adds all kinds of fun to the respiratory health, and the crew doctor recommends we drink 3 liters of water every day, 2 bottles, which is great news for the hard-working people at San Benedetto, but at $2 a day a little pricy for us in the rank and file. I buy a half dozen bottles every week or so, and sometimes resort to filling an empty bottle in from the juice machine in the mess. 

Around nine, the ship is starting to come to life. We’ve had 4 days without a garbage pick-up, so I can hear the workers starting to bring the bundles of glass to the rear doors on the starboard side.

Suddenly, without a warning, the officer of the watch comes on the PA speaker, advising us that we’ve been cleared by “Customs and Formalities” and welcoming us to Funchal. Most of the time, the announcements don’t reach the crew cabins and are harmlessly dissipated in the passageway, allowing us another couple hours sleep. Nice weather is anticipated, with a high in the sixties. 

This is an unusual day because we have a day off today. It’s the first total day off since I got on in October. Pedro is still asleep, and that’ll go into the afternoon I believe. I sneak in the back, with the lights still off, and get dressed. I put on my sweat pants, the t-shirt that we were presented with at Christmas, and slip on my Crocs, load my wallet and computer into the backpack we got for Christmas, and head out the door. 

I head down the gangway, and get on a shuttle bus to town. 

And what a town it is. The island is a volcanic speck in the Atlantic, a province of Portugal since the days of Henry the Navigator. The bus left me off by MacDonalds, which was right next to Pizza Hut. Don’t get the idea from this that there is nothing exotic or unique or foreign about Funchal. There’s a lot exotic, unique, and foreign about Funchal, which I stomped though for a couple hours. It was wonderful, reminding me of the was Laguna used to be back in the sixties, only everybody was talking Portuguese. Most of the connection was the sea and the bougainvillea that was running down the drainage ditch in the center of town, or the canal, or whatever they call it. Anyway, a gigantic bougainvillea swept down from the mountain, while a gondola--like a ski lift--climbed up the mountain, from sea level to whatever the top of the mountain is.

A little tired from my efforts, I returned to the ship at the stroke of 12 to have my lunch in the concessionaire’s mess, and what a mess it is! Every once in a great while we get lucky and obtain some lunch item that was received less than enthusiastically by the passengers, and those are the lucky days for us. The rest of the time the mess is a dreary and dull place to eat. I visited with my fellow musicians there and returned to my cabin at 1:00 to find Pedro still asleep. I laid down and took a 10 minute nap, then I got up and went back to town to try to find some free wi-fi, which Funchal has a lot of. Unfortunately, there were to British crew (musicians) and a Russian (dancer) who beat me to it.

I came back to the ship around 3, went to the cabin, and as Pedro walked out for a trip to town, I read a long chapter of Infinite Loop, which I checked out of the QE2 Library. It’s a book that takes the history of Apple Computer up to the last mistake they made during the era between Jobs I and Amelio. The library has been a source of endless reading for me, and there’s no end is sight with the World Cruise on the short horizon.

I then went and saw a movie called Invasion, which was a bit of a turkey. When that was over, it was back to the mess for the second round of facing the food today. Ghastly. 

Shaken but undeterred, I went upstairs to face the music and watch the dancers dance. The occasion was their main show, Appasionata, which was really a series of folk dance moves in tuxedoes and gowns. Damned uninteresting, except for the fact that the weather had taken a turn for the worst and we were swaying like mad. I was sitting way back of the room by the sound booth when a whole section of old folks (look who’s talkin’) who were seated on the dance floor used for New Years Eve, and so freshly waxed, suddenly all slid in unison a good two feet to the right. The dancers were similarly effected, but it didn’t stop them from beaming their Russian dancer smiles. Oh well.

I returned to my room at about 10:30. The ship was absolutely heaving, the room wasn’t made up, and Pedro was nowhere to be found. I put 2+2 together and figured that Pedro was most likely in the hospital for one reason or another. I figured he either took a spill or had a Norwalk attack, the bane of every crew member, which involves massive leakage from both ends. That was correct.

And so ended this atypical port day, our day off. I’d normally have gone up to the midnight buffet, where we can graze for the last 20 minutes on higher-quality food made for passengers. But with the ship twisting and turning I decided not to, and laid down, trying to sleep through the maelstrom.