Naked at Lunch (34 page)

I sipped my coffee and watched my wife spoon globs of sambal, an intensely spicy Indonesian chili paste, onto her scrambled eggs. She likes her food spicy and it’s not unusual to see her mix two or three different salsas together to try to find some tongue-shredding sweet spot of harmony between the hot and the really hot. As I stuck a spoonful of oatmeal in my mouth, I overheard two of the ship’s musicians talking at the next table. One of them, a muscular drummer, said, “I can’t concentrate. I don’t know where to look. This is the weirdest cruise I’ve ever been on.”

The other musician, a singer-pianist, laughed and said that he found it inspiring. “I think I’m a nudist at heart. I wish I could come out and play with nothing on.” Which was something he couldn’t do because the cruise line had rules in place preventing employees from joining in and celebrating the “carefree environment.” Which makes sense to me. I’d want the kitchen staff to have clothes on. For their own protection if nothing else. But the musicians could drop trou for all I cared. Everyone else was doing it.

That I had gotten my wife to join in, after her initial “no fucking way” reaction to going au naturel,
is a testament to her courage and, perhaps, her yoga-toned physique. I assured her that even if everyone else was going to be naked, she didn’t have to be naked unless she wanted to—and I bought her a couple of sarongs just in case—so why not bounce around the Caribbean on a luxury cruise ship?

She thought about it for a week or two and then finally decided to come along. She claimed that she felt obligated to go because I’d been required to purchase a double-occupancy stateroom.

“You paid for two people and I’d feel bad if we let it go to waste,” she said.

I was happy she came. For starters, she is friendlier and more outgoing than I am. She genuinely likes people and they like her back. Perhaps it’s because she’s originally from Texas.

Like myself, Mrs. Smith
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isn’t a nudist. Which is not to say she’s prudish; she just wasn’t interested in seeing, or being seen naked by, other naked human beings. I think she convinced herself that wearing a sarong would be tolerable, even necessary, because she would be working undercover as my research assistant.
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By the time we boarded the Big Nude Boat, I had been to a number of nudist resorts and thought I had a pretty good idea of what we might encounter on this trip, but I neglected to prepare my research assistant for the exuberant level of genitalia flashing that turned out to be commonplace on the cruise. It was a riot of penises of all shapes and sizes, a parade of low-hanging testicles, and a flash mob of shaved vulvas. As we strolled around the ship, she observed all of this and said, “Wow. Just. Wow.”

And then she laughed.

Our itinerary would take us on a seven-day loop around the Caribbean, embarking and disembarking in Fort Lauderdale, with ports of call in the Bahamas, Jamaica, Grand Cayman Island, and a tiny island off the coast of Honduras called Roatán.

The ship was the
Nieuw Amsterdam
, built in 2010 by Italian shipbuilders Fincantieri–Cantieri Navali Italiani S.p.A., and registered in the Netherlands. It is a relatively fresh-faced seagoing vessel and is considered one of the flagships of Holland America Line. You can see why. The boat is impressive.

There are eleven decks and alcoholic beverages are available on each one. There’s also a movie theater, a concert hall, a casino, a library, a spa, a gym, a culinary arts center, a shopping mall, jewelry stores, a couple of swimming pools, a basketball court, and an art gallery that featured the work of the late Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed “Painter of Light.”
™

Perhaps most important for people trapped on a boat for a week, the unlimited food was good, although they could have done with a serious sommelier as the wine list was by-the-numbers. There were multiple restaurants ranging from a massive buffet on the lido deck to a pizza-by-the-slice kiosk, a sushi bar, a two-tiered dining room, a burger bar, an Italian restaurant, and a satellite of Le Cirque.
********

The
Nieuw Amsterdam
isn’t super big; at 936 feet in length it’s considered a midsize cruise ship. It has a draft of 26 feet and the bow thrust is described as “3 units, 3400 bhp.”
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In addition to the two thousands guests the boat holds, there are 929 crew members. If only our public schools offered that kind of student-teacher ratio.

The first thing we noticed about our fellow cruisers, aside from the fact that they weren’t wearing clothes, was that they were cruisers. We were one of the few couples who hadn’t been on a cruise before, and the standard icebreaker seemed to be “What was your last cruise?” or “What’s your next cruise?” or “How does this ship compare with other ships you’ve been on?” Surprisingly a lot of the people on the boat went on what they called “textile cruises” as frequently as they went on nude cruises. It was the cruising that mattered. And they were totally into it; they read cruise blogs, online cruiser forums, and cruising magazines. You can see why it could be addicting. It’s a floating luxury hotel with twenty-four-hour room service and almost every kind of entertainment you could want. As my research assistant observed, “Where else can you unpack your stuff and your room follows you for the entire trip?”

Some of the more experienced cruisers decorated their stateroom doors with pictures, message boards, and balloons, not unlike the kind of decorations you might see in a freshman dorm. I’m not sure if this level of bedazzling is a personal statement—a declaration of their unique personality in a standardized corridor—or just a way to help them find their rooms after an afternoon spent downing Caribbean coolers and pineapple daiquiris.

Both Bare Necessities, the charter company, and Holland America offered a dense schedule of programmed entertainment and enrichment activities. A typical day might begin with a nude photography workshop or an abs class, a pastry-making lesson or something called a “Yellow Emerald Seminar,” before making way for spa seminars, card player meetings, basketball games, ice-carving workshops, couples tantric massage classes, yoga, Ping-Pong tournaments, lectures by guest artists,
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body painting, wine tastings, cocktail mixology demonstrations, and a course on how to maximize the effectiveness of Windows 8.

At the orientation tour of the boat, our guide suggested that we fold up the activity schedule and keep it in our pocket. An older woman in the back quipped, “What pocket?”

The nudists broke out into laughter and spontaneous cheering while the tour guide looked at his shoes and his face flushed crimson. Maybe he felt he’d committed some kind of textile faux pas, or maybe he was embarrassed by the fact that many of the classes and programs he was touting were thinly disguised sales pitches. I found this depressing, although I did enjoy peeking into “The Digital Workshop Powered by Microsoft Windows” lab to see the “techspert” hawking Microsoft products to a roomful of naked people sitting on towels. The corporate synergy is so pervasive that you can’t even walk off the boat into a foreign port of call without first passing through a gift shop, a duty-free shop, and some kind of jewelry store, followed by another gift shop, ad nauseam
.
Which was weird because the boat itself was a floating corporate shill show with boutiques, clothing stores, jewelry stores, art galleries, photo galleries, knickknack emporiums, all throbbing to the unrelenting drumbeat of consumerism. I’ll admit, it affected me. I found myself driven to consume massive quantities of alcohol. I would’ve broken down and purchased some jewelry if it would’ve made it stop, but then, that just encourages them.

In the evenings there were live theater shows and a variety of musical performers scattered at various bars and lounges around the ship. Depending on your interest, you could hear a piano and violin duo play classical music, listen to a female folksinger strum her acoustic guitar, watch a DJ nod his head to the beat as he looked at a laptop, or dance to a lounge band that bleated out hits from “The Way You Look Tonight” to whatever vapid filler is on the radio these days. Probably something by Robin Thicke. And, not surprisingly, there were men in Hawaiian shirts and shoes, pantslessly jitterbugging with their wives on the dance floor.

There were the theme night parties with names like “Heroes and Villains” and “Famous Lovers.” While I have to admit that a number of the costumed and body-painted who paraded at these parties were inventive and impressive and fun—I’d like to give a special shout-out to the couple who dressed as Rocky and Bullwinkle—the theme nights really seemed to be an opportunity for guests to strut around in fetish gear. Watching a retiree in a see-through French maid’s costume maneuver across the dance floor aided by her walker is, I have to say, an awesome sight and a raised middle finger to anyone who thinks senior citizens can’t get freaky. That lady is my personal hero. But did the guy who looked like Kip from
Napoleon Dynamite
really need to wear a leather thong with a cutout so his penis dangled in the open?

…

The first port of call was a little spit of sand in the Bahamas called Half Moon Cay. The boat anchored just offshore and we took a tender, a small ferryboat, to the dock. We were required to wear clothes to and from the ship, and most of the cruisers dressed in shorts and T-shirts, things they could easily remove when they got to the beach.

Even though it was only 9:30
A.M.
the man sitting in front of us was completely shitfaced. How he managed to get drunk
and
trim his beard into precise lines that stretched from ear to ear, making him look like some kind of riverboat gambler, revealed an impressive level of expertise. His beach excursion outfit consisted of black shorts and a bathrobe from the ship. This effortless resort look was crowned by a dented and dusty black leather cowboy hat. He boarded the tender and stood leaning insouciantly against the railings, looking every inch like an alcohol-blasted sophisticate on vacation. When the tender disengaged from the ship, he lost his balance and pinballed between the rail and the rows of benches, his arms flailing as he tried to grab something to hold on to. His wife looked at him and scowled. “Al! Sit down!”

He collapsed into a seat and proceeded to pull out an electronic cigarette. He took a puff and groaned. It was one of those outhouse groans that began deep in his boozy core and reverberated through the boat.

I’m guessing the level of nicotine was insufficient, because he pulled two more e-cigarettes out of his pocket and stuck all three in his mouth at once, sucking deeply.

His wife glared at him.

As the engines roared and the tender started to move, his head fell back and he looked up at the sky. He seemed lost in thought, perhaps musing on some existential question, before he proclaimed, “Ah, fuck it,” and took another drag of his e-cigarette trio.

The Caribbean has some fantastic scenery, but there’s a quality to the Bahamas that is hard to quantify, maybe because it looks like an idealized version of a tropical island, maybe because the area is just really fucking beautiful. The sand is white and soft, the water is aquamarine and clear, the breezes are balmy, even the sunlight looks unnaturally purified.

And yet, despite the physical beauty surrounding me, as the tender pulled into the harbor I began to feel vaguely unsettled. Was it the Holland America corporate flag that was flying from a flagpole on the island? Did my skin start to crawl when I realized the entire island is owned by Carnival Corporation, the parent company of Holland America, or was it when I saw the faux shipwrecked galleon planted on the middle of the beach and called Captain Morgan on the Rocks Bar? Will you be surprised when I tell you that they served cocktails featuring Captain Morgan spiced rum? Nothing says tropical paradise like a giant fucking billboard in the shape of product placement.

The subtleties of the corporate control at work were lost on the drunk. He began to shout at his wife, “It’s so beautiful! I want to live here! I want to live here! I want to live here!”

She turned to him and said, “Shut up, Al.”

Her attentions only seemed to encourage him, and he continued his drunken incantation until the boat docked and everyone began to file off, leaving him on the tender muttering about moving to the island. And, really, who am I to judge? Maybe living in an advertisement come to life would be really awesome.

From the nudist-on-a-cruise perspective, corporate ownership of the island meant that guests were free to cavort naked anywhere they wanted, and Half Moon Cay exploded in a riot of flesh tones as people shucked off their clothes.

Before we left the ship my research assistant had applied several layers of sunblock and sunscreen to her body because she is terrified of getting sunburned. It was a good thing she did because the early birds had claimed all the available umbrellas and mini-cabanas on the beach, so we decided to take a stroll down the glorified service road that had been designated a “nature trail,” presumably so they could say they had one.

Although almost everyone else on the island was naked, we kept our clothes on as we trudged down a dusty path under the blistering tropical sun. I’m sure I’m making it sound more fun than it actually was to follow the trail as it looped through shrubby island flora too short to provide shade. We had gone only about a mile when the trail suddenly dead-ended at the beach, not far from where the majority of nudists were frolicking. We found two beach chairs shaded by a stand of Caribbean pine trees and sat down.