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.