Moby Deck

you can call him ishmael. or you can call him lew. but when he's cruising on the biggest tub afloat, just don't call him late to dinner

Everybody asks about the food. It's like a universal free-association test. Say the word cruise and 92 percent of the planet's population replies, "How was the food?"

So I'll tell you how was the food: fabulously not bad. I mean, this was not the epicurean delight of a lifetime, but I must have enjoyed it, because I averaged six and a half meals a day.

It was easy. You could breakfast in your stateroom any time of morning. You could do it again at your assigned table in the dining room and again at late risers' breakfast in a café. You could lunch in the dining room and then outdoors. You could take afternoon tea (which included sandwiches, cookies and cake) in a café. You could dine in the dining room. You could gorge at the midnight buffet. After one A.M., you could snack in the night club. And you could always get a sandwich from room service.

I did.

Everyone did. That's what you're there for, right? You mailed your check (for $2350, if you were me) before you sailed, so now it's all free!

And they're always shoving it at your face. Your waiter (not to mention your bus boy, your headwaiter, your sommelier and your bar waiter) hovers, pathetically eager to please. Your entree OK? Want to try another instead? Can't decide between key-lime pie and cherries jubilee? Here, have both. Have some swan Chantilly, too. À la mode, of course. Hey, you can diet next week.

Oh, have I mentioned that I inhabited the world's newest, sleekest, most passengerful ship, the Homerically hyped Sovereign of the Seas herself? Sorry, I might have omitted a few tangential details, engrossed as I was in the vital matter of nourishment.

Sovereign of the Seas—how's that for a pretentious name? I mean, who's the admiral of this majestic vessel? Alexander the Great? Zeus? Obviously, the christening department at Royal Caribbean Cruise Line wasn't going to futz around with the standard Scandinavian Duchess stuff this time. Not when launching the hottest new package in the hottest new old industry in travel, "Cruising Back from Oblivion, Bigger than ever!" That's what Time and Travel in Legions and TV and all the newspaper travel supplements say. "The Big Ships are Back and Sovereign's Biggest!"

Well, the Sov is, in fact (you should pardon the expression), titanic. As the pearly protuberance loomed in my cab window, visible far from her Miami mooring, I could only blurt, "Holy Ahab! It's too big and white to be anything but a symbol!"

What a tub. The milky monstrosity weighs 74,000 tons, she's twice as high as the Sphinx, three football fields long, holds 2690 passengers and 779 crew members and can generate enough of these bigness stats to fill a billion press releases. No less a personage than Rosalyn Carter christened her, then boarded with Jimmy and the entire clan for the maiden voyage, a week before mine. (Carter luck held true: The ship got stuck in San Juan harbor for a day when a freighter ran aground, blocking exit.) Staggered by her scale, I wandered around the exquisite enormousness in awe. It was hard to remember that this was a ship. The balconied Follies lounge ("largest showroom afloat") is as big as some main rooms in Vegas. There are two movie theaters. Two huge dining rooms. A shopping mall with eight boutiques. My God, there's an atrium! It is five decks high and has glass elevators like those in a Hyatt lobby. It's all brass and marble, mirrored ceilings and circular stairways, fountains and foliage. On the bottom deck, a quartet plays schmaltz on strings and a white baby grand.

Gaga passengers stood on various levels, sucking up the grandeur. Some wore orange life jackets, as a lifeboat drill was scheduled just before sailing. This weird juxtaposition of emergency gear and festive opulence brought on the sensation that I was an extra in the opening scenes of a TV disaster movie and would soon be trapped in an upside-down elevator with the water rising, Shelley Winters screaming in terror and Charlton Heston in a wet suit and scuba tanks heroically trying to torch his way to us through the battered hull. I forcibly expunged this negative vision, because I had decided to be buoyantly happy for a week on the fabulous Sovereign of the Seas, and nothing, nothing would stop me, not catastrophe, not even calories.

I ascended endlessly toward the Viking Crown lounge, a giant glass Frisbee perched 14 unlikely decks above any sensible height, ordered a piña colada and watched as the immaculate immensity beneath me detached herself from land and ordered the city of Miami out of our lives. Miami complied. Its skyline tossed off a flashy-pink twilight effect and slid away to sulk.

I chatted with Neil and Carol, a good-looking thirtysomething couple from Montreal, over drinks and peanuts. It was happening. I was starting to feel the major happiness I knew I could. Why? Because I started grasping an all-important truth.

The truth was that ships are no longer a form of transport and cruising has nothing to do with travel. Cruising has to do with country-and-western night, Bingorama, grandmother meetings, shuffleboard, whirlpool, trivia contests (did you know that yak's milk is pink, by the way?), fun fitness, yoga, cabaret shows, wine-appreciation hour, water-balloon toss, Teenie Weenie Bikini Contests, pool games, ping-pong, saunas, aquadynamics, jewelry seminars, aerobics classes, dance classes, napkin-folding classes, tanning, shopping, swimming, jogging, overeating and shmoosing in the Viking Crown lounge over a piña colada, watching Miami fade to black.

In other words, the ship is the destination. Once you accept that fact, relax and rid yourself of quaint travelthink such as wanting to understand the people of foreign lands, everything is peachy.

Take the Sovereign's first port of call, Not Haiti. Taking no chances on reality, Royal Caribbean bought its own private peninsula separated from actual Haiti by high, furry green mountains. Not Haiti was paradise. The bleached behemoth anchored prettily in a cove of Caribbean perfection and two big tenders started ferrying greased passengers ashore, where they were met by a token delegation of singing, strumming and dancing natives. Here (continued on page 104)Moby Deck(continued from page 98) we swam, sunned, snacked, snoozed, snorkeled and snapshot among birds, beaches, butterflies and balmy breezes—without a hint that we were in the most miserable, wretched, screwed-up nation in the Western Hemisphere.

A few hours later, we were contentedly ferried back to the snowy stupendousness, watched Not Haiti recede into our past, had more eats and made for the casino, lounge, disco or movie of our choice without a ripple in the seamless purr of our existence.

An entire country had been transformed into just another pleasant entertainment provided by our friendly cruise director, no different from a shipboard activity like, say, skeet shooting.

I'd always wanted to try skeet shooting, the one sport (except maybe playing slot machines) in which you get to yell "Pull!" I nailed two of the little suckers and didn't feel a bit sorry. (You wonder, though, Isn't there a pollution problem here? How many billions of blasted skeet have fallen over the aeons to the Caribbean floor? Will underwater skeet mountains flabbergast future archaeologists?) Shooting skeet was noisy but fun. Shooting passengers would have been more fun, but, OK, I can see where there'd be legal problems.

Passengers—now, there was a trial. The cruisie crowd. Out of 2081 people, you'd think there would be five or six you could talk to beyond the "Hi, where you from?" stage. I tried. I worked my way through 12,000 or 13,000 one morning and found all the people I had long ago left my home town to avoid. They ranged from the ancient to the dull to the dead.

Dullest of all was the captain, who resembled an Ingmar Bergman character without subtitles. Every so often, the P.A. would chime and the captain would announce the time, our location, our speed, how deep was the ocean and how blue was the sky. Twice he came back on to say he'd got the time wrong, which started me wondering, with such confusion, whether the ivory imperiousness might not stray from her proper course and bump a Caribbean iceberg (rare but theoretically possible) or wander into range of Cuban naval gunnery practice, and next thing you know, we'd all be in a network-news update, Shelley screaming hysterically and Chuck rescuing her first because she's a star.

Still, one attribute of the captain was formidable. On the evening of his Gala Cocktail Party (a modest bash for 2000 tossed in two rooms and two seatings), he stood resplendent in formal white at the door of the Gigi dining room to personally greet the guests, many betuxed and begowned (myself beblazered) for the glamorous affair. The ship's photographer was poised to commemorate this occasion at the moment of handshake.

Next day, the photos were displayed in a lobby. (You could buy yours for five dollars.) Hundreds upon hundreds of them lined the walls, and here was the extraordinary part: Our skipper was dead-on perfect in every single one! No blinks, no cheesy fading grins. Nothing but full-face, wide-eyed, smiling sea captain with major tooth display. Can you possibly appreciate the endurance, the character required for such mastery? This was no ordinary man. This was a public-relations giant.

The only eccentrics I spotted on board were a Karl Marx double from Texas and France who was on his umpteenth cruise and floated about with a video camera permanently attached to his face, and a jovial band of gays dressed in homemade naval-officer uniforms who held a perpetual happy hour in their cabin. They had music, balloons, coconuts, a blender and a well-stocked bar, and they kept mixing piña coladas and handing them to anyone who came along until the party spilled way down the corridor.

They represented an unacceptably small percentage of amusing individuals.

But I was undismayed by substandard passenger quality, because it was obvious that you don't need people to be happy aboard Moby Deck. I had a library with leather furniture and the latest best sellers. I had blackjack in the Casino Royale. I had exotic teas fetched by exotic little Filipinos in slit skirts at the charming French café. I had a nightly chocolate on my pillow and a constantly replenished bowl of fruit, courtesy of George, my ever-smiling cabin steward. I had Puerto Rico and St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, delivered outside my stateroom window.

St. Thomas had taxi drivers with such colorful names as Cobra and Godfather and bars called Wet Willie's and Fat Man's. As a cruisie, however, you instinctively avoid the interesting. In St. Thomas, you shun the entire town of Charlotte Amalie—except for one street, a long seaside avenue jammed with stores, all of them selling expensive bargains. All cruisies immediately head for shop street. It oozes with them. But walk literally one block away and you will see not a single white face. As the stunned locals spot you, jaws drop and brains strain to comprehend what form of life this is.

On my Puerto Rico tour, I learned that the thriving metropolis of San Juan comprises two parts: Historic Old San Juan, with its colorful old shopping street, and the Bacardi factory, with its colorful old vats of rum. In H.O.S.J., I found myself standing before a historic old shrine: the house where, in 1963 (so the plaque said), Don Ramon Portas Mingot invented the piña colada, the same rummy little milk shake I had so merrily been knocking back all week. A chill ran through my liver as I realized I was experiencing one of life's peak moments.

Returning to ship, an odd thing occurred: reality. Our tour bus was stopped for a red light when a gang of teenagers burst out of the shadows and grabbed a purse from a woman in a car next to us. Everyone but me was quite shocked and disconcerted. Being from New York, I felt right at home. But I suppose when Royal Carib reads this, it'll yank San Juan and send the lily leviathan to some secure bastion such as Grenada.

Safely back in my tiny but adorable stateroom, I once again gazed fondly upon its many modern comforts, such as a telephone, air conditioning, an "interactive" TV set (which interacted with me one morning by turning itself on at six o'clock, blasting me awake with "easy listening" music) and a vacuum toilet that, when flushed, generated a crescendo of terrifying implosions that rarely failed to send me fleeing into the corridor clutching my life jacket and shouting, "Torpedo! Abandon ship!"

Toilets that come with extensive instructions always make me a little tense: To flush toilet, close lid and pull button. Please do not throw bulky objects in toilet disposal of items other than toilet paper in the bowl may damage the operating system.

My suspicions were confirmed at the faux naval officers' happy hour; the campy fellows had taped on a wall a U.P.I. clipping about some poor old woman on a cruise ship who had neglected to rise and close lid before pulling button and, as a result, had suddenly lost possession of her intestines, no doubt damaging her operating system. After that, I could only think of my high-tech potty as the Sovereign of the Seize.

But, of course, my fears were absurd and again receded before my steely determination to be a Happy Guy. After all, (concluded on page 171)Moby Deck(continued from page 104) the pale preposterousness had to be the safest hydrohotel ever built. Even her lifeboats had lifeboats. Why, the thing was so big, it wasn't even subject to ocean motion.

Or so I thought my first five days aboard. On the sixth, the sea snickered and went into blender mode, vividly dispelling the illusion that Godzilla was too grand to rock-and-roll. Neither sonar nor stabilizers, bow thrusters nor variable-pitch propellers, Dramamines nor little patches behind the ear could keep queasy cruisies from racing to their suckomatics to return their daily six and a half in the most ancient ritual of the sea. I, thank Neptune, was saved by the sheer force of unbendable will not to spend one second suffering aboard the whopping whitefish.

Too soon did my porthole pan across Miami, activating ingenious people-mover technology that, within a few hours, belched all 2081 used passengers onto the dock and replaced them with a fresh cast ready to rerun the cruisereel. I was packed up and shipped out.

So, you ask, sadly sensing that the end of this saga is near, which was the greatest pleasure of my week with the chalky colossus of the Carib?

Perhaps it was the gala midnight buffet, with its exquisite ice carvings and surrealistic butter sculptures. ("The doors open early for those who bring cameras to take advantage of this photo opportunity.")

Or the magnificent atrium, with its soaring this and cascading that.

Or the flaming babalus (whatever they are) arriving on the heads of dancing waiters on Caribbean night.

Or my color-photo souvenir of the Carter family, suitable for framing.

Or the glum woman with her arm in a cast who, when asked how she had become impaired, replied, "At the slot machines."

Nope. Grand as those were, the best of all was just climbing to a high deck, leaning on a rail and watching the humongous honkie glide through the calm aquamarine, with the breeze in my hair, the sun warm on my skin and, up above, the vast, bright blue southern sky.

Wish I had a little of that right now. You can have the rest.

"Shooting skeet was fun. Shooting passengers would have been more fun, but there'd be legal problems."