Cruises Gone Wild by Andrew Gurevich
“it was like trying to push a pancake through a chain link fence”
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This story ends with me looking through a glass door while a naked dentist sexually punched the woman of my dreams in the ass while two guys from a porn film crew filmed it. Then I smoked a joint at the top of a rock wall and thought about the chasm between fantasy and reality. But this is not that story. This is what came before that.
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"It's OK," she said. "This happens sometimes."
I zip up my pants and stare through the round window above the bed, trying to distinguish blue from blue. "Not to me, it doesn't."
Donna sits upright and pulls a pillow between her legs into a bear hug. "Let's just relax, get a drink, and try again later, K?"
I trace the curve of exposed skin from her foot to her hip, from right to left, like I'm reading the Torah. Her words are soothing, but still hit me in a weird place. She sounds like a guidance counselor, or a physical therapist, not like a woman on the verge of erotic bliss. How has this gone SO wrong SO quickly?
I step through sliding glass doors onto the balcony, light a joint, and consider my options. In the distance, I hear a fog horn blow several times. Then, what remains of dry land starts to fade into a rim of brown crust on the horizon. The worst first date in history, all six days and five nights of it, is off to a shaky start.
I consider jumping off the balcony. No note. No fanfare. Just over the rail and into not here. I wonder if they would even turn the boat around to retrieve my bloated corpse? I picture Matt Lauer talking about me on the Today Show, after the weather but before the segment on healthy recipes for single moms. Jesus, this weed is good. I take another hit and play back the last several hours, looking for a clue to what went wrong.
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We had boarded the ship, the Princess Brad, and gone straight to our cabin. We tossed the luggage on the floor and went right at it. I remember looking over the curves of her body. A landscape I had imagined since I was 13 years old. Forbidden, sacred territory. Curly brown hair pulled to one side, exposing freckles that splashed across her shoulders in tiny constellations. Donna. Even saying her name out loud would send bolts of lightning through my head and arms and into my pants. The light filtered through the patio window and made crisscross patterns across her skin. I wanted to paint her. To capture this moment before what happened next.
The thing is, I don't know how to paint. So I dropped my pants instead. But for some reason, my cock was MIA. No matter what I did…Nada. I tried… deep breath…relax, focus. “This is what you always wanted,” I told myself. Still nothing. I could not conjure a single provocative thought. Probably because I was actually in the scenario I usually imagined when I couldn't get hard. But at the moment, it was like trying to push a pancake through a chain link fence. Here was the girl of my dreams, right in front of me: fragile and on fire. And I couldn't bring myself to even touch her.
I wondered if it was possible to want something so much and for so long that the wanting itself became the focus. My head started to buzz and I couldn't get anything into perspective. With a full head and a limp dick, time stopped for a moment. I realized that I had built my entire association with sex, with attraction, on the bedrock idea that this girl was unattainable. That she would Never. Want. Me.
But now here she was. Here we were. Nothing between us but 15 years of wanting. 15 years of hoping I could one day enter her and leave myself. And I couldn’t do it. Outside the window, I heard the ocean song, reminding me of how memory is sometimes like water.
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This whole thing started a month before. Donna called out of nowhere and asked me to go on a cruise with her. “Who goes on a cruise?” I thought. I had seen the reports of botulism and drunk captains running aground. Shuffle Board and shitty buffets. The thought of being trapped on some rusty tin can with a bunch of horny Baby Boomers floating aimlessly across the Gulf of California was not that appealing to be honest. I had never been on a cruise before. They seemed like places for swingers and Russian immigrants. Or people with miserable lives who worked in accounting or HR and had Chlamydia; looking to get away from themselves and drown their bad choices in cheap booze and revenge fucking. All I really knew about cruise ships I learned watching the Love Boat. And Titanic. But still, I would be out of my element to say the least.
More importantly, where was this invitation coming from? Donna and I had hardly spoken over the last several years. Something about it felt wrong, but I had to accept. This was the girl I’d loved since Jr. High but had never so much as even kissed. The chance to have her all to myself for a week, even if it was on one of those awful floating death traps, was just too much to pass up.
And now here we were, me on the balcony, her in the bed, realizing that we had just departed on a week-long first date that we knew 30 seconds in was a mistake. The reality of the situation was settling into us like the news of your parents’ divorce, or a presidential assassination: the kind of shared experience that ironically makes you feel more alone.
So the sex so far: sad and awkward. Like watching a drunk clown try to ride a mechanical bull for the first time. But love is messy. If that’s what this even was. I was chasing a dragon down the black hole of my own childhood fantasy, and now that it was becoming a reality, nothing seemed right.
Sometimes memory is a liar. Sometimes we make choices simply out of a desperate need to connect.
This was the most embarrassing experience of my life and yet, part of me was proud of myself for at least trying. The longing we feel to belong is not shameful. It is not something to dismiss. We go on cruise ships and take our dicks out. We sip neon-colored drinks with umbrellas in them and dance awkwardly to 80s music in makeshift ballrooms that drift across the ocean because we are looking for something. Looking for someone to touch the parts behind our skin. Looking for a part of ourselves that we lost along the way.
Standing on this balcony, the open ocean in front of me, the love story of my youth behind me, I stare straight ahead and wish I could become the blue. And for a moment, I remember that the only thing I have lost is something that was never mine to begin with.
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If you like this piece, the you might also enjoy "Sweet Potato Girl" by Rob Hart, here.
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Professor Andrew Gurevich lives with his wife and two children in Portland, Oregon where he teaches writing, religion, literature and philosophy at Mt. Hood Community College. His work has appeared in Popular Archaeology, Anthropology of Consciousness, The Ecologist, The Voice, Reality Sandwich, as well as in the books The Afterlife Survey, Mother Earth Book, Tribal Indonesia and Voices of the Sacred Feminine - Conversations to ReShape Our World.
He is a regular speaker at academic conferences, community lectures and on radio programs such as Dr. Karen Tate’s “Voices of the Sacred Feminine,” and Dr. Christopher Ryan’s “Tangentially Speaking.”