by Chris Stuck
Two months earlier, my employers had made the colossal blunder of firing me. I’d been tasked by the party to mastermind the reelection of Tennessee governor Ronnie Givens, vacuous retired quarterback and well-known sex freak; i.e., a white guy. Despite all that, I engineered, quite deftly, I might add, the Givens image, sweeping under the rug a nasty string of extramarital affairs complete with YouTube footage. We were well on our way to defeating an up-and-coming Black Democrat when everyone abruptly severed ties with me. Some said it was my skin condition. Before it had even taken hold, people could barely look my way. Others said it was my dirty tactics. I may have manufactured an old gangbanger past to illustrate—the press said sully—the character of our opponent, but that’s neither here nor there.
Bottom line, I was let go, the coup de grâce a bouquet of lilies sent by the governor to my home, as though someone had died. The small card read,
Mel,
From one creep to another, I hope you understand.
Ronnie.
And the weird thing was a degree of understanding did come over me. I, Melvin, who’d once fired a woman because she had a rather bulbous, hairy mole on her forehead. I, Melvin, who’d fired a man because he tended to have saloon door boogers constantly lurking in his nostrils. Oh. The irony. Unfortunately for me, the degree of understanding I had over my own dismissal wasn’t high enough to keep me from calling Givens for a few weeks straight to detail the various ways I would exact my revenge, many of which may have involved a pair of dildos and a blowtorch. Was it stress? Maybe. A fault of character? Perhaps. Whatever the case, it should be noted that I corrected my behavior days, weeks, in fact, before Givens and his new advisers actually pressed charges.
No one, not even the judge, seemed to remember that.
* * *
On the day of departure, a Saturday, I waited inside Terminal 21 at Port Everglades, standing ass to elbow with my fellow passengers. I saw my suspicions were correct, as they usually are. “Unseen souls” was just a liberal’s way of saying the afflicted, of which I was apparently a card-carrying member. I was an otherwise healthy individual. I didn’t smoke. I barely drank. I’d never done a single drug. Yet here I was, about to ascend a gangway with the hobbling and limbless, the misshapen and genetically unfortunate, four thousand of them. I took in the terminal’s DMV-on-crack ambiance, inhaled the fusty air-conditioning, and suddenly found myself getting a bit miffed. Neblitt, I thought, you Rastafarian fruitcake. What the hell did your New Age ass get me into? Not only had she somehow convinced me, in her own passive-aggressive way, to go on this eight-day voyage, she’d also arranged, of all things, a chaperone for me. Another one of her clients, a veteran of this particular cruise, was also in attendance, and ostensibly we were supposed to chum it up for the entire week, which to me sounded about as appealing as eating at a fast-food restaurant.
Whatever. I tried to forget about it as I wound my way through the passport-check line. In front of me was a balding muscle-bound man with no legs, much less a torso, who sort of scooted himself along by way of his veiny bodybuilder arms. In front of him was a man with a hump on his back so large that even the hump had a hump. I glanced around, adjusting to my surroundings, and I slowly realized very few of these people covered their conditions. There were people with eyes missing, jaws missing, ears, noses, half of their heads. And those without any visible situations had a generally broken comportment that suggested there was something under their clothes that wasn’t good.
Other than me, the only person I saw who truly hid herself was a woman a few yards ahead. She was wearing a large veiled hat and a long dress, both of which made her look as though she should’ve been running through a field, chasing butterflies with a net.
“Ah,” someone said. “Scoping out the ladies already, huh?”
I looked around and then down and found the man with no legs smiling up at me. “No, I’m just assessing.” I looked away for a moment. “This is my first cruise.”
I looked back, and he was nodding slyly, not believing a word. “Sure. Incognito. I see what you’re doing.” Before I could respond, he said, “You wait. There’s gonna be all kinds of tail on this boat.”
“Tail,” I said.
“Yeah, man. Booty, ass, cushion for the pushin’. You should’ve seen it last year. Girls galore. I made out like a bandit.” He nodded and smiled, recalling it all.
I looked away again, trying to avoid his gaze. When I looked back, I found him still regarding me, as though he knew all my secrets. I leaned over to get a better look at him, and he pulled my ticket from the front pocket of my blazer. He examined it for a moment before I snatched it back.
“Don’t freak out,” he said. “It just looks like we’re gonna be deck twins, bro.”
He showed me his pass, and it appeared our cabins were right next to each other. I wondered if I should say something enthusiastic about this turn of events, but, alas, I drew a blank.
“I knew I had a feeling about you.”
I gave him a funny look.
“No, not that kind of feeling.” He looked around and then beckoned me close. “I could already tell, you and me, we’re gonna be like this.” He intertwined the middle and index fingers of his right hand and smiled again.
I focused on his perfectly clipped nails, his thick digits, and I couldn’t help but wonder which finger was supposed to be him and which was supposed to be me. It was then that I finally looked at Neblitt’s note describing her other client. It said, “Double amputee with muscles! Tommy Defarillo, but just call him Tommy D.” And I thought, Wonderful. This crass, legless little Italian gigolo was going to be my traveling partner.
* * *
Evidently, as a cruise novice, I’d been operating under the false assumption that cruise liners were just a means of transport, schlepping cruise goers from one poor Caribbean island to another. It turned out the onboard activities were as much an attraction as the ports of call. The ship contained twenty decks, ten lounges, six casinos, fourteen restaurants, seven bars, fifty shops, four comedy clubs, six movie theaters, ten fitness centers, an amusement park, a nine-hole golf course, a driving range, a shooting range, and four Olympic-size swimming pools, not to mention the hundreds and hundreds of cabins. The vessel was Vegas and the Mall of America but with a rudder and lifeboats. And I kept wondering how the behemoth didn’t sink.
It had been christened the Ocean Wanderer, which to me didn’t sound as though it would instill much confidence in its passengers. It might as well have been called the Ocean Nomad or the Ocean Vagrant. We could end up anywhere and not at all on time. Before this trip, I did my usual googling, being the fact-whore that I am. I found out the ship was brand new, the first of what was called “mammoth ships,” one step up from the long line of megaships that were now considered small potatoes. I told all this to Tommy, my new short friend, who seemed genuinely enthralled.
“Wow, man,” he said. “You really are a Republican.”
He was a former welder from the Bronx and a Democrat, but I thought it’d be unkind to hold those facts against him so early in our relationship.
After we found our cabins, I went through my six-times-a-day ritual of reapplying my makeup where it always seemed to rub off around my neck and ears. Ten minutes later, Tommy pawed past my cracked cabin door, rotten with cologne, and now in a red Hawaiian shirt, the bottom of which was knotted under his torso. With his massive arms and nothing else, he looked like a man waist deep in quicksand. “So, are you ready to get some booty? Or are you ready to get some booty?” He stood there on his hands looking up at me, waiting. “C’mon, you’re supposed to say you’re ready to get some booty.”
“Please, God,” I said. “Tell me there’s a third option.”
He palmed into my cabin, all arms like a gorilla, and paced back and forth in front of my closet mirror. He checked his teeth and his hair, of which there wasn’t much remaining. “Man, I’m gonna tell you right now,” he said. “We can’t hang together if
you’re gonna be a downer.”
“Hang together? Hey, I don’t know what Neblitt told you, but I plan on spending my time on this cruise entirely unfettered. I’m a bit of a dick like that.”
A fidgety little bastard, he turned around, smoothing what used to be his hair. “Yeah, she said you were a dick. But that’s cool. We can still have a good time. Most of my friends are dicks.” He pulled out my desk chair and leapt up onto it like a frog. He labored himself back around to face me. “So, what’s your story anyhow? You don’t look like there’s anything wrong with you. Are you a mental or something?”
“A mental?” I said. “No, I see everything quite clearly. I’m a—”
“Republican,” he said. “Yeah, we determined that.” He jumped off the chair as easily as he’d jumped up and came scooting past me. “Politics aside, you’re not used to this at all, are you? You haven’t been one of us for very long.”
“Less than a year.” I felt compelled to unbutton my collar and show him my chest, where I hadn’t applied any of my makeup. It was the first time I’d shown anyone other than a doctor.
“Gotcha,” he said. “You’re all splotchy and—pink!”
“A skin condition,” I said. “A pretty rare one.”
He nodded more as he studied me. His amazement grew. Of course, then it just went away. “Well, you don’t see that every day. A Black Republican with skin the color of bubblegum. Amazing.” He contemplated it for a moment. Then he turned and pawed coolly toward the door. “So? Are you coming or not?”
“Coming where?” I said. “To do—what?”
“Everything.” He stopped and looked back at me. “That’s kind of what you do on a cruise. Time to hit the fun button, my friend. Follow me.”
* * *
For some reason, call it old-fashioned conservative courtesy, I let him talk me into going to one of the ship’s watering holes, the Bar Ye Matey. We sat at a cocktail table under the shadow of a large blow-up pirate, drinking mai tais out of glass boots. The Ocean Wanderer had just departed, like a giant white slug, and inched out to sea. That slightly unmoored feeling of being on a large ocean vessel was actually quite apparent in my shorts. I could feel it and the almost imperceptibly low rumble of the engine as I watched passengers stream into the bar.
Bored already, I said, “Did you know—cruise ships like this one have often been called ‘floating cities’?”
Tommy was watching the crowd expectantly, as though waiting for someone. “Nope,” he said. “Did not know that.”
“Yeah, the volume of waste they produce is unimaginable. Sewage, wastewater from sinks, showers, and galleys, otherwise known as gray water, hazardous waste, solid waste, oily bilge water, ballast water.” I then segued into the air pollution issue and global warming and the questionable liberal agenda concerning the two. But as expected, it all went over his head, literally. He sat there stirring his drink and scanning the other patrons, not paying me any attention.
“Who exactly are you looking for?”
“Who do you think?” he said. “A lady.”
I nodded. “One you know from the last cruise, I gather.”
“Not necessarily. Just one who wouldn’t mind a pickle tickle, if you know what I mean.”
He went back on the hunt, and I looked down the bar. The woman I’d seen in the passport line had come in, the veiled hat lady. Mary Poppins. I wondered if she was British. She was sitting at the far end of the bar annihilating a book of crosswords. Every now and then, when she got stuck, which wasn’t often, she’d press her pen to her lips. Her veil would move, and I could see a vague outline of her face. I turned back to Tommy, who was lost in thought, staring at a buxom middle-aged woman with no arms.
“What do you think?” he said. “She’s hot, right?” The woman was sitting alone at a table by the door, half a martini sweating in front of her. Armless and big-boobed, she wore a tight T-shirt that said MAIN ATTRACTIONS across the front. So, there was that. But she was also barefoot and in bell-bottoms, her left leg crossed over the right in the male manner. As I got a better look at her, wondering how she was actually drinking that martini—it didn’t have a straw—she smoothly lifted her left foot, pinched the glass by its stem between her big and second toe, and brought the glass to her mouth. She even swirled it like a snifter, which, all afflictions aside, was impressive.
“Hot,” Tommy said. “Am I right?” He kept eying her, mentally tapping one of his phantom feet. “Bro, I’m gonna talk to her.”
“Suit yourself,” I said. “But you’ll probably just embarrass yourself.”
He dismounted his stool and whinnied. “You kidding? I embarrass myself all the time. Maybe you should give it a try. You look like you haven’t had your silver polished in, like, forever.”
Outside the bar entrance, as she was leaving, he said something to her, something I hoped was crude enough to elicit a slap across his face with her foot. Remarkably, though, she blushed. They conversed for a moment and then walked away with each other, but not before he gave me a sly thumbs-up and mimed his index finger pumping in and out of his fist. I turned back to my mai tai, glad the runt had scooted away.
Aside from Neblitt, the last few months of my life had been unmarred by people. I happily spent days on end inside my Central Park West apartment, ordering in food and groceries, streaming films in my pajamas, dusting. I still put on my makeup, but I didn’t need to see anyone. It was glorious. Neblitt foolishly thought I was becoming a hermit, but I’d always enjoyed my own company inside my own apartment, oblivious to the world. Admittedly, before I started wearing makeup, children did wail at my appearance, say, on the street or on an elevator. That could turn anyone into a hermit. But children were usually afraid of me, even before I’d gotten my disease.
This may have been percolating in me as I bellied up to the bar for another drink. To my right, veiled hat lady, whatever, the butterfly hunter, was perched on a bar stool, blasting through a crossword puzzle in two minutes easy.
I watched her finish one and then move on to another without missing a beat. When she finished that one, I leaned in and said, “You must be a pro.”
“A pro what?” She didn’t look up.
“I don’t know,” I said. “A professional crossword puzzle—person. I don’t know what you call them.”
“Solvers,” she said, her voice low and slow, every syllable precisely pronounced. I gave her a quick look-see and could tell she was obviously bookish but then again obviously not. There was something else there, a variety of roughness I couldn’t place. Perhaps she was a reformed thug with a knack for words. Whatever it was, it made her interesting. She was tall, possibly well proportioned if you squinted a little. There was a certain dignity in the way she could disregard people, even me. She was diligent. Her pen kept moving a mile a minute and then she flipped to the next puzzle.
I plucked a toothpick from the dispenser on the bar and unsheathed it from its wrapper. “Anyway,” I said, “you’re fast, and you’re using a pen!”
“I am,” she said, “and you’re bothering me.”
She went back to her puzzle, and I tried to remember why I thought it was a good idea to talk to her in the first place. I scanned the packed bar, trying to get the bartender’s attention, and for some reason a little Caucasian man off in a corner caught my eye. He was making out with a little Asian woman in a dimly lit booth, both of them slobbering all over each other like teenagers. That was exactly when my surroundings came into focus, and I realized an interesting fact: I was standing in the middle of an orgy. Over the speakers, Marvin Gaye was singing “Let’s Get It On,” and all I saw were sloppy kisses and dirty gropes being traded in the bar. My fellow passengers were profoundly horny, probably the horniest people on earth. With reason. Starved for attention and now among their own, they were virtually acting out a scene from Caligula. And this woman wanted no part of it.
I turned back around. “I’m Melvin, by the way.”
She’d finished
yet another puzzle and now glanced up at me, as if to say, “You’re still here?” Through the veil, I could see her face was long and sharp featured, serious, but the right side, the side away from me, which she appeared to hide, seemed to droop in an odd way.
“Your name?” I said.
She hesitated as though she had a stutter. “Zz— Zarrella.”
I asked if the name was a South American derivation. Peruvian? Chilean?
“Neither.” She hesitated again. “My mother made it up. I’m from Cleveland.”
I offered my condolences about being from Cleveland, but I said I liked her name. I repeated it a few times even, playing with the r’s and the l’s a little bit till she said, “Really. That’s enough.”
I thought I’d broken through one of her layers so I offered my hand. I wasn’t sure she saw it, though. I held it out there for quite a while before she extended hers. It was long fingered and short nailed, wiry and ringless. I beheld it. Then I took it in mine. As soon as I did that, I could tell she didn’t like it very much. I could feel an almost undetectable tug in her direction. But her skin, it was strangely textured. It had the appearance of melted wax, swirly in spots yet wrinkled as a raisin in others, the result of serious burns. Curious, I tested the surface of her skin with my thumb. Two quick rubs, and she immediately snatched her hand back and slid off her stool.
“Oh, great,” I said. “You’re leaving? Why?”
“Because,” she said. “You are a stranger. And I prefer strangers to remain strange.” With that, she shrugged, as if to say, “Tough shit,” and walked out of the bar grumpily, like one of my ex-wives.
Fed up with the whole experience, I left, too, and wandered into one of the ship’s internet cafés. Homesick for my usual routine, I found solace in my daily dinking around on the RNC site, the obligatory glance at TMZ. When I checked my email, my comfort level fell. A message from Neblitt glowed in my inbox, the subject line simply, “Havin’ Fun Yet?” Apparently, the hippie couldn’t leave me alone for even a week. Suddenly peeved, I clicked Reply and found myself typing out an assessment of her skills, detailing, perhaps viciously, every instance of her incompetence, including convincing me to go on this idiotic cruise. When I was done, after I’d perused my work, I had to admit it was a long, and possibly baggy, appraisal. Around paragraph eight or nine, I may have even accused her of terrorism. I stopped.