I promised jockstrap I'd sit in the front row of his show, which I knew wouldn't be a tough feat given that the ships passengers would probably break their neck bones if they had to look up. I arrived late hoping to have missed at least one of the numbers only to find the show still hadn't started. The front row was empty except for the guy my cougar tried to set me up with.
“Hi Zack!” He squealed.
“Oh, hi– I heard you made it to the finals of the karaoke competition.”
“I didn't think I'd see you, you missed all of the other shows. And all of the karaoke nights. And you didn't come to the teen dance party as per my invite.”
“I did so want to attend the teen dance party. And hear a bunch of show queens performing christmas musical comedy.”
“So you don't like the theater?” He looked at me like I had just killed his puppy, Santa Claus and Celine Dion.
“This is theater in it's most vulgar diseased form. I adore the theater, but as soon as theater boards a cruise ship it becomes infected with norovirus, AIDS, syphilis, anthrax and mono and has all of it's limbs chopped off and what actually makes it to stage is the mutant projectile vomit of the mutilated diseased theater. Cruise ships are to theater what locusts were to biblical times.”
“You could have just said no.”
“Look, the bald guy I was talking to at the pool today–”
“Is he gay?”
“No he just puts cocks in his mouth for fun.”
“I see.”
“Well that little knob gobbler is going to meet me after the show and he's going to buy me a drink, and then he's going to show me is stateroom, then I'm going to bend him like a stretch armstrong. That is the only reason I'm sitting through this crappy disco-themed show.”
“I think disco is fun.”
“I think you're going to make Richard Simmons very happy one day.”
“Who's that?”
The truth is there is some inextricable link between cruise ships and disco. The DJ that works in the night club, in his contract, seems required to play at least 33.3 percent disco music to keep young people off (or maybe on) the dance floor. I also noticed that he'd dug deep into the archive to surface a Will Smith album, which baffles most millennials as most of his career happened before they were born.
Disco and cruise ships seemed to have a lot in common. They shared a sense of gaudy design, sparkly things, so-so entertainment value, and encouraged people to wear silly outfits. Maybe disco had never died, it simply decided to spend decades in retirement aboard a cruise ship. After several nights of hits from before BCE i approached the DJ stand and told him to play some David Guetta for the love of god or anything that people can actually dance to.
But this Disco show seemed to confirm that the ship was lost in the bermuda triangle of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and after six long days of groovy I was ready for at least one night of Boogie. When the show started I could tell Jocktrap was singing to me and maybe going off choreography by grabbing his crotch a little too much. It might have been the glitter, it may have been the sparkly polyester outfits, or it could have been his rendition of Blame it on the Boogie, but I had never been turned on less is my life.
I was ready for our post show drink. I needed it to get back in the mood.
I waited at Crooners, the martini bar, for my Jockstrapping lad to arrive. And when he did he was not alone. He had brought with him not only a third wheel and epic cock block but a starry eyed twenty something from New York whose claim to fame was playing piano for the off broadway debut of Mary Poppins. This twinkie dink sat right in between us at the bar.
Jock strap told me about how earlier when he was working out in the ship's fitness center he was approached by the mother of a young Broadway hopeful that desperately wanted to meet him after he saw Jock's rousing rendition of “I'll be home for Christmas.” He agreed to meet him briefly after the show, but apparently this brief meeting wasn't enough for Mr. Briefs over here so he brought him along. I threw my drink back and got up.
“Where are you going, we just got here.”
“Look jock itch, I don't ride a tricycle. You should have just told me you wanted cream puff for dessert and I would have left you with that teeny bopper.”
“We were just going to have a drink and talk I still wanted to hang out with you.”
“That's cute and all but I didn't really want to get to know you. You're a cruise performer I thought we'd fool around and never see each other again.”
“What kind of a guy do you think I am?”
I looked over at Mary Pops-in sitting behind him.
“The kind of guy that wants something low in calories,” and with that I stormed off, if only to give him a taste of what real theatricality is.
The next morning at breakfast I relayed the story to my mother, pausing at the end for emphasis.
“So what have we learned from this experience?” I asked her, “When you don't work out everyone suffers. So from now on I'm going to need you to spend every waking and some sleeping moments in the gym cruising men for me while I lie out in the sun.”
“Sweetie, the kind of guy that would go for that kind of guy, isn't your kind of guy.”
“This trip was a total bust.”
“That's not true, you bought a carton of cigarettes for twenty-five dollars.”
“But I didn't find a husband.”
She just raised her eyebrows. She was right maybe I came on this trip looking for a husband but found something else. Life is, after all, what happens when you're making other wedding plans. I wanted a husband, or at least a fling, and I got what I truly needed: something to blog about. It was exactly like the song, don't blame it on the sunshine, don't blame it on the moonlight, don't blame it on the good times, blame it on the boogie.
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