How to Survive at Sea – The Sex is Like College

Welcome to part eight of my series, How to Survive at Sea: A Stage Crew’s Guide. Click here to see last week’s post, or click here to jump to the first in the series.

The Sex is Like College

Remember when you were in college, and life was an endless rotating panorama of wild drunken parties and sleeping with strangers? Or, if you’re me, reading a lot of books and not having sex with anyone. Anyway, the point is, cruise ships are an alcohol-fueled party punctuated by eighteen hours of exhausting work. And like everything else on a cruiseship, the attitude towards alcohol is confusing and contradictory.

The crew bar is open every night from sometime around I think eight p.m. until sometime around I think three a.m. (I was very rarely there at either opening or closing; I was also one of the only ones who wasn’t). It serves alcohol for the staggering high high price of $2 for a beer, $1 for a shot, or $3 for a highball. Oh and you don’t need to bring cash – all you have to do is write down your employee number and sign a piece of paper. The money is automatically deducted from your next paycheque (which is how all purchases on ship are done). As you can imagine, most people spent every second of their leisure time plastered out of their head. There was a drummer on one of the ships who spent his entire monthly paycheque on alcohol. And we were paid well. I can only assume he was a superhero who had been hit by gamma rays and required alcohol to live. That or he was buying rounds for every pretty dancer, and since we did dance shows there was a constant rotating stream of gorgeous dancers.

So, okay. A booze cruise isn’t that surprising. What is surprising?

Being drunk was a fireable offense.

And people actually got fired for it. There were lots of rules on the ship, and one of the hardest parts was figuring out which ones to follow, which ones to ignore, and which ones to pretend to follow but secretly everyone was breaking them and no one cared. Drinking too much fell into the weird fourth category: everyone was doing it and no one cared unless you got caught in a way they couldn’t ignore, and then they fired you. Staggering through the halls at 2 a.m.? You’ll get a smile and wave from the security guards. Hanging over the ship’s rail singing love songs into the wind? You’ll probably be breathalyzed. Someone I knew got so drunk he slept through a mandatory security drill. He was put off the boat the next morning. (At port. Relax, there were no keel-haulings!) But another friend of mine was friends with the security guards, so when he got caught making out with a passenger, the guard just begged him to go back to his cabin or he would have to report him.

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing. Everyone was having sex with everyone unless they were a passenger, and then you could be fired for staring lovingly into their eyes. Okay, that’s probably an exaggeration, but there were very strict rules about contact with passengers. Don’t have contact with passengers. Unless of course you’re a member of a Caribbean soul band, in which case you’re pretty much a high-class prostitute. (For real. There was a group of five musicians on the ship I was on. All of them were married, and all of them slept with passengers all the time. They were encouraged to “mingle” in the evenings, and considering how well-known it was that they were sleeping around, I find it hard to believe their boss didn’t know. But that was part of the ‘experience,’ so everyone looked the other way.)

The people who seemed to be having the most fun having college style sex were the gay men. I remember my Filipino coworkers explaining to me in painstaking detail that in their culture it was normal for guys to hold hands, so if I saw them doing that I shouldn’t assume they were gay because they weren’t and they needed to make that very clear. Then they quickly added that of course being gay was ‘ok here.’ There were a lot of guys from really traditional (ie homophobic) countries who got onboard and were confronted with basically Western value-sets, and the freedom that brought was pretty incredible. My coworker pretty much cleaned up (though he does have dimples and is blond, so he probably cleans up in Canada too) (is it just me, or is cleans up a really weird euphemism for having a lot of sex?), and one of my best memories is grinding with one of the male dancers at a gay club in San Francisco while the guys who worked in the kitchen avoided eye contact with shipmates and danced with the locals.

One day a coworker of mine got really, really drunk and made out on the dance floor with another girl. A week or so later the two of us were hanging out (also drinking… see a theme?), and we kissed. She asked how I knew she was gay and I said, um, because you made out with that girl last week? She didn’t remember doing it (now that is DRUNK), but mused that she supposed she didn’t have to hide it here the way she did at home. It was the first time in her life she had ever been open about her sexuality.

Not that the cruise ship was a magical wonderland of tolerance and acceptance. You still had the same old shit – my boss warned me that my new roommate was bisexual so I should “watch out for her,” and the male dancers mocked one of the girls for getting a ‘lesbian’ hair cut (I told her that my ex had the same cut but she was bi, and she thought that was the greatest thing ever; she rocked her bisexual haircut so proudly everyone stopped teasing her); but overall, and considering how bad the sexism and racism were – it was pretty damn cool.

Join me next week to learn about what it’s like living in an ‘apartment’ the size of your cubicle at work.