The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (27 page)

“Why stop there?” Jamie said eagerly. “Let’s get a pizza, too. And I’m going in for the antipasto cart. I want it all.
We are owed.
”

As we ordered, even our waiter seemed astounded at our degree of gluttony as we rattled off each selection and continued to elevate our debauchery with each additional demand.

“And bring us a bottle of wine!” Jamie said delightfully as she concluded.

But after the third course, we began to slow down, and when our second entrée arrived, we were nearing exhaustion.

“I never thought I’d say this,” I said in wonderment to my best friend, “but I’m tired of chewing! My teeth are going to be so sore tomorrow. It’s like they tried to jog.”

“I know!” Jamie agreed. “How smart was it to order flan and mousse for dessert! All we have to do is swallow. Oh no! Don’t look now, but here comes payback. I forgot all about the fifteen-cheese pizza with the meat-stuffed crust!”

We tried to act excited as the waiter brought it to our table and put a slice on each of our plates.

“That looks so good,” I said, bravely trying to smile. “Look at all of that cheese. It’s like a cheese blanket. There’s enough cheese on that pizza to strangle someone. If you stretched all of that cheese out, I bet it would measure a length as long as my intestines.”

“Mangia,”
the waiter replied disgustedly and with a bit of a sneer before he turned and walked away.

We both stared at the slices before us as if they were roadkill and we were at the Clampetts’ for dinner.

“Get this away from me,” I finally said as I pulled my napkin off my lap and placed it over the pizza. “I can’t stand to look at it. I wish we could give it to another table or abandon it at the buffet, where another family could take it as their own.”

Suddenly, Jamie’s eyes lit up.

“I have an idea,” she whispered as she leaned in closer to me.

Fifteen minutes later, we were walking back to our cabin, the square box in Jamie’s hands holding a three-pound meaty crust pizza within it.

“You are a genius,” I said to Jamie as we both beamed, because there, at the end of the hall, were James and Ardhi, busy making their nighttime rounds.

“We’ve brought you something,” Jamie said as we got closer to them, then handed them the box.

“Pizza?” James asked excitedly. “You brought us pizza?”

Jamie and I nodded.

“Thank you!” Ardhi added. “But we can’t take it here, we’ll get in trouble if anyone sees. Put it in your cabin and we’ll eat it when we turn down your beds.”

Remembering the image of sad James and Ardhi faces being left behind at the next port of call, I wasn’t about to argue about their rights to hunger and sustenance, or the fact that when that layer of cheese began to solidify, it was going to take a blowtorch to get it pliable again. It frankly wasn’t my problem. We had tried to do a nice thing, and I knew we should simply leave it at that.

So we went to our cabin and attempted to digest for a while until the boys showed up with big, wide smiles of anticipation. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the pizza had hardened like an old lava flow, but regardless, it was most likely better than anything they were going to get out of a vending machine down on their deck.

So Jamie and I left them to their pizza and wandered about on deck for a while until we passed the Sea-Saw Lounge.

“Maybe we should get a drink,” I suggested, and Jamie was game, so we went in.

Suddenly, Jamie gasped when she saw an easel with a sign proclaiming that evening’s entertainment.

“Can you believe it?” she cried. “Can you believe our luck?”

I shook my head and smiled. “A talent show!” I said, almost clapping my hands.

“Not just any talent show,” Jamie added. “It’s the
passenger
talent show! Oh, goody, goody, goody!”

We grabbed a table right near the stage and had been sitting there for approximately three seconds when a waiter asked for our order. It had been a rough day, we agreed, so maybe a twelve-dollar cocktail was in order, especially since the glasses were neon pink plastic and held about a liter. The waiter had taken only two steps away from our table when another waiter popped up and asked for our order, then another, and another. There was more staff in that bar than I had seen anywhere else on the ship, and their aggression rivaled that of the Dolphin Man and his camera pimp. I almost felt dirty; it was as if we had somehow entered a red-light district in Thailand and they were peddling virgins, attacking from every direction and trying to coerce every potential john with a cruise ID card to pick
their virgin.
And it didn’t stop once our drinks came; in fact, one waitress told us to order several drinks at once to save on the time it would take her to walk back and forth to the bar. But at twelve dollars a piña colada, I wasn’t about to waste my money. I didn’t want to seem windowless, but I had approximately twenty thousand calories and four courses in my belly that my digestive system had to process and file before it could even begin attending to the alcohol, and to be honest, I’ve never let go of the college drunk in me. If I’m going to spend thirty-six bucks on booze, it had better be shooting out my nose by the night’s end, and I’d better have some good bruises to show for it the next day, but at my age, when that happens you don’t have a good story to tell the next day, you just end up sitting in a circle and spilling your guts to a collection of alcoholics (including at least one C-list celebrity) in a rehab center somewhere in Florida, so that’s the end of that.

The talent show, however, was another matter. It was full steam ahead. Frankly, I think the world would be shocked to know just how many middle-aged, balding men would haul an electric guitar and an amp onto a cruise ship and stow it in a cabin the size of a McDonald’s bathroom stall, because on our boat alone, there were four of them. This means that the number of Eddie Van Halens running around come Halloween are at epidemic proportions, and that sadly, an infinite amount of unrealized Angus Young fantasies are just waiting to spread their wings, shake out their ponytails, and fly aboard a Carnival cruise ship on talent night. Ain’t we got fun.

Not that any of them had a chance of winning, not once
she
showed up, because as preposterous as it was to bring an ax and loudspeaker on vacation with you, it was even more insane to pack a pair of Rollerblades, a mini boombox, a flowing costume, and the recorded score for your “routine” and actually plan on using them.

I mean, honestly, I don’t know where the Roller Queen imagined she was going to hone her craft, being that the walkways on the decks were more often than not merely several feet wide and all it would have taken would have been an errant crouton or a smear of butter to send those wheels flying overboard, past the balconies and Ardhi’s and James’s deck to the frothy surf below, only to become a small, forgettable segment on
48 Hours Mystery
about the looming dangers of cruising, inline skating, and wayward salad-bar fixings.

And that was too bad, too, because a little practice would have done her a world of good. The second the new-age harp and electric-piano music began, she was off to a strong start as she launched herself across the small stage in her chiffon and spandex ethereal finery, floating in an arabesque just like Michelle Kwan, except you would have to add three decades, 30 to 40 percent body fat, a divorce or two, a need for an extra-strength hair conditioner and a not-so-closeted gay boyfriend whom I suspect doubled as her costume designer and who snapped pictures from his seat on the other side of the stage. She completed the glide, and it was looking hopeful as she skated across the floor, waving her arms in the spirit of liturgical dance, all aflutter, and as the intensity of the routine music grew, it was obvious that she was going to make her first big move and astound us all. I couldn’t wait. Then, in a maneuver worthy of a superhero, she threw both arms and one leg up as she caught air, her transparent fairy sleeves whipping around, and she spun, spun, spun in an axel jump and had almost rotated halfway until her orbit was grounded by gravity and the 40 percent body fat and she hit the hardwood floor of the stage with an echoing, resounding
thud.
She seemed stunned for a moment, and from several feet away her boyfriend/costume designer furrowed his brow and mouthed, “Get up! Get up!,” his fists gripped tight, pounding against the air. She fumbled for a second, planted her hands on the floor, and raised her hind end, which was wrapped in a bounty of shiny black reflective spandex, made even more luminous by the rays of the spotlight that was directed at it and reflected off of it. It glowed like the moon—maybe even the sun—as she tried to get back up on her feet, but her tools of talent became her biggest obstacle. With every attempt, her feet shot out from beneath her like billiard balls, again and again, her ass raised high in the air, her shirt flipped over it onto her back, the moon glowing, glorious, and bouncing along the horizon with each attempt. Her boyfriend looked ready to burst into tears. But she didn’t. Determined, she finally rolled around on the floor and then grabbed a column close by, and on the third or fourth try, was able to hoist herself up after being floor-bound for a good four and a half sips of my drink.

I was mesmerized, my eyes glued to her, unable to avert them for a second. She skated around the stage area again, waving her arms, extending them, flapping them like wings, running her fingers over her face. When she started gaining speed I knew she was going to go in again for another spin, and when she raised her arms for the jump, even I clenched my fists and furrowed my brow, entirely uncertain as to what I was hoping for.
Thud!
She spun out on the hardwood again, and this time she looked angry, as if the floor had reached up and grabbed her in mid-flight and pulled her back down to earth. This time she rolled over adeptly, grabbed the seat of an empty chair, and popped back up, and then skated around in a circle like a lost pigeon until the music stopped.

It was the best talent routine I had ever seen—part Isadora Duncan, part Jerry Lewis telethon—and I guess I would have felt some sympathy for her if she hadn’t skated right back to the stage after the talent contest was over and she had bitterly lost to a red-haired lady who, it was obvious, owned a karaoke machine and a Mr. Microphone at home as she belted out an office-party-worthy version of “Cabaret.” The Roller Queen picked up precisely where she last fell down, skating around and around as she forced her poor, supportive boyfriend to take picture after picture of her in defining poses, going back and checking the image for herself after each and every shot, for a good twenty minutes afterward, with no shame whatsoever. It was almost like an encore, and Jamie and I were so thrilled with the delights we had witnessed that we could barely walk back to the cabin we were laughing so hard.

“Spandex was a bad decision for her,” I commented. “About as good an idea as mixing booze and tranquilizers.”

It was when I opened the door that I immediately saw it sitting on the bed, looking up at me with little blue paper dots for eyes.

“Holy Christ,” I said as I recoiled. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Oh, look,” Jamie said. “That’s so cute. Look! The boys made a walrus out of a towel for us!”

And yes, in a certain light, you could say that it might have been a walrus, as the towel was shaped in an arching upside-down U shape, with its “tusks” represented by a bold swath that protruded from the very center of the upside-down U. But in the available light, I didn’t see a walrus, per se. I saw a cookie, plain and simple. Not the kind of cookie that comes out of the oven, but the kind of cookie that falls out of your body and into the dirt in Africa that you try to pick up with an even dirtier stick during a stress-induced nightmare.

“That’s a cookie,” I informed Jamie.

“That is not a cookie,” she replied. “It’s a walrus.”

“It’s not a walrus, it’s a cooter,” I corrected her.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied. “You’re drunk.”

“Hardly,” I answered. “I had one drink.”

“You had
four
drinks,” she informed me. “You didn’t even notice as they took away one piña colada and gave you another. You just kept sipping.”

“I’m drunk?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she answered with a definite nod. “I am drunk, too.”

“That rocks,” I decided. “Then I’m taking pictures of the coochie.”

Now, honestly, as I took photos of the terrycloth genitalia from all sorts of angles and under different light sources, I wasn’t sure what sort of message Ardhi and James were trying to send us. Was it to say, “Thank you for the pizza and we would like to repay you in this manner, should you be interested,” or was it to say, “Have a good night you old lesbians, and here’s a little something to get you started”?

I still haven’t figured it out. But then again, I don’t think it matters. They got a sort of semi-decent meal and I have forty pictures of a towel that remarkably resembles a giant walrus vagina.

“Will you stop that?” Jamie finally insisted as she took the camera out of my hand. “You’ve taken so many pictures already that you’d think it was Jenna Jameson on that bed.”

“Shame on me,” I said, shaking my head in disgust. “This is pathetic. I haven’t been this drunk in years and all I can manage to do is take pictures of towel porn. God. What’s happened to me? I haven’t even fallen down yet or had my Drunken Meal of Frenzy. What time is it? Is it like four in the morning? Do you think there are Taco Bell tacos at the buffet? Hey! Let’s go back to the lounge. Maybe if I trip a waitress we can get thrown out or I can provoke an angry verbal exchange with a Republican about foreign policy or funding for Head Start!”

Jamie sighed. “It’s a quarter to ten,” she said tiredly. “I’m taking an Advil and a Benadryl to fend off a hangover because we’re getting up early to hike the Chilkoot Trail in Skagway. If you were wise, you would join me.”

I gasped loudly. “What? And waste this buzz?” I replied. “Oh my god! Let’s get this party started! I just remembered I have a Percocet floating around at the bottom of my purse from my last oral surgery. It’s a little dirty, and it might be expired by now, but do you wanna split it?”