THENASTYBITS (15 page)

"We'll be trapped like rats," protested Nancy, my wife, when I told her where we were going.

"The rich are more boring than you and me," she said. "You want to be penned up in a floating prison with a bunch of mummies in cruise-wear? Are you insane? I am
not
playing shuffleboard. I am not going to see Red Buttons or Kathie Lee. And I am
not
contracting the Norwalk virus so you can write some stupid story. And I am
not
going to be your comedic device again." She was right in the middle of reading Mark Twain's
Innocents Abroad,
about a luxury cruise with similarly grandiose claims, a book I now regretted giving her.

"This ain't the
Love Boat,
sweetheart," I protested. There are no organized dinner seatings. No limbo contests on the Lido deck. Gopher and Julie are nowhere to be found. "It'll be great, honey! And it's free! The magazine'll pay for it! C'mon! Think of it like . . . like Gilligan's Island. Only it'll be a five-day cruise, not three hours, and with what they charge, you can be assured we won't end up trying to build a desalinization plant out of coconuts. You know how much money you gotta have to take a trip on this thing? C'mon! Let's live large!"

Residents of
The World,
I hastened to point out, do not sleep in anything remotely resembling a "cabin." Residential apartments (and we'd be staying in one) range in size from 1,106 to an astonishing 3,242 square feet, each with "state-of-the-art kitchens," two to six bedrooms, living and dining areas, and a veranda. Four full-service restaurants, a gourmet market and deli, shops, numerous bars, a nightclub, casino, library, business center, theater, health spa, swimming pool, putting greens—and, believe it or not, a tennis court—awaited our attention should we care to make use of it.

"C'mon! We'll pretend we're a retired South American dictator's idiot son and wife! Let's live a little! Work on our suntans!"

The idea, I explained, was for me, loudmouth professional utility chef and obnoxious memoir author—and wife—to board this magnificent sea-beast at Curacao and spend five nights between there and Costa Rica, fending for ourselves: buying food at Fredy's Deli,
The World's
on-board market and provisioned and cooking in our "state-of-the-art" kitchen. We'd rough it—as much as one
can
rough it in a multimillion-dollar apartment with twice-a-day maid service—buying groceries and then preparing our meals from scratch, and I'd report on the experience in the kind of sober, dispassionate, objective terms for which I am well known.

"If I see a limbo contest shaping up, I'm going over the side," said Nancy. "And if you come down with some ship-borne gastrointestinal complaint, I'm gonna be the first one to say 'I told you so.'"

Who, you might ask, would actually live on such a vessel? I think it's fair to say you have to be very, very rich to own a home on board
The World.
How rich? Apartments run from 2.5 to 7.5 million dollars each, with residents having to pony up an additional 5 percent of purchase price per year to pay for fuel and operating costs. Imagine owning a Fifth-A venue apartment—only this one moves—making leisurely ports of call in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, South Pacific, Asia, South America, and Africa, scheduling itself so as not to miss significant events like the Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Prix at Monaco, and the British Open in Saint Andrews. I was enthusiastic. My only reservation was that I didn't think I owned the clothes for this venture. I couldn't turn to Nancy and say, "Honey? Could you lay out my deck shoes, my blue blazer, my khakis, and my cabana wear?" I didn't own any of those things. I thought I might have once owned a Greek fisherman's cap, but I hadn't seen it since I spilled bong water on it back in college.

I cheerfully signed on, and a few weeks before we were scheduled to join the ship, two sleek leather and woven-linen document cases arrived in the mail along with some briefing material.

"See, Nancy? See?" I said, waving the objects in front of her nose. "Class."

On the date of departure, we flew to Curacao, were met by a ResidenSea representative at the airport, and soon got our first look at
The World,
an impressively big, newer, sleeker, more dramatically sharp looking version of the floating cities you see disgorging day-trippers all over the Caribbean. After being photographed and X-rayed, we were issued ID cards and escorted to our quarters.

There was a bottle of Piper on ice waiting in our spacious two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment when we arrived, and, exhausted from the plane, we gratefully sucked it down before passing out in the master bedroom. The next morning, after a room-service breakfast of fresh-squeezed orange juice and still-warm-from-the-oven croissants and pastries, I went out to explore.

Perhaps you remember the sixties television series
The Prisoner}
In it, Patrick McGoohan, a secret agent (only and forever referred to as "Number Six"), wakes up to find himself incarcerated in a kooky, futuristic, Utopian/totalitarian—yet very comfortable—community-cum-prison called "The Village." The similarities kept coming to mind as I wandered the mostly deserted halls, vast lobbies, lounges, and grand but empty spaces of
The World.
Though there were seventy-six passengers currently in residence, along with a something less than bare-bones complement of 260 plus crew, it didn't feel like anywhere near that many. Passengers apparently kept to themselves, and crew, when passed in the common areas, gave brief, cheerful greetings, much like the "Be seeing you" and "Have a nice day" of
The Prisoner.
Like "the Village" on the series,
The World
publishes its own daily paper. As in "the Village," no currency is exchanged. One's room number (as on the series) serves as credit reference enough, and one's photo ID card serves as room key. As in "the Village," there is a general store, Fredy's Deli, its shelves stocked with pretty much what you'd expect to find in a small Upper East Side gourmet shop/deli, with a friendly and obliging shopkeeper who is happy to provision you from the ship's stores. There even
is
a village on the ship: a small cluster of shops and facilities along and above a wide walkway referred to as "The Street" where you can buy clothes or jewelry, smoke a

Cuban cigar, check your e-mail. There are maps—as in "the Village"—showing only the immediate community surrounded by water; and, like McGoohan's apartment,
The World's
apartments are impeccably, perfectly cleaned and maintained, modern and comfortable (as is everything on the ship). In fact, one thing I never fully understood about the prisoner on the show was why he wanted to escape so badly. He seemed to have it pretty good.

As the plan was for me to cook, I would not be dining at Portraits,
The World's
"contemporary French Fusion" restaurant (jacket and tie or formal wear required), nor at The Marina, where "seafood, steak, and rotisserie specials" are the thing. And while I might give myself a break for lunch with "Mediterranean cuisine with a Northern Italian flair" at The Tides, I would certainly not be venturing the "oriental delights at East restaurant and sushi bar." As I was soon to have confirmed during a tour of the ship's antiseptically clean kitchens and storerooms,
The World
may be a floating enclave of very rich people who expect and demand the very best, but in this case, the rich eat a lot of frozen food. Until I saw a sushi chef hanging a fishing line off the far end of the putting green, I was staying away from the sushi bar, thank you very much. Ironically, considering they are surrounded by water, ships—even luxury ships—are seldom good places to enjoy fresh seafood. At sea fo days at a time, they are provisioned at ports with varyin concepts of refrigeration and resupply. The bacalao and sal fish of earlier times has been replaced by frozen fish on large vessels. It may not be "the very best," but it's safe.

When Nancy and I were summoned to meet with the safe officer, in the ship's cinema/theater, and told him that I'd 1 doing a lot of cooking in the apartment, he explained—amor other useful things, like how to inflate our life vests—that at & first signs of smoke, our kitchen would automatically seal itse up Bond-villain-like behind sliding fire doors that would emer from tasteful concealment in the walls. Overhead sprinkle would discharge, and an alarm would notify the bridge.

instantly made a mental note to avoid making any dish requiring deglazing, or likely to create a lot of smoke. The safety officer seemed like a nice man. But I did not want to see him again in his pajamas wielding a fire extinguisher, an "I told you so" look on his face, in the middle of the night while holding a scorched pan or a burned bagel. That would be embarrassing.

This consideration, and the fact that all the ranges were electric (there was, of course, no gas on board) were major factors in determining my menu and provision list. I'm a gas guy all the way, having worked exclusively with direct, immediately responsive flame my whole professional life. Because my only experience with electric stoves before my kitchen on
The World
had been in college—one of those hideous slide-out range tops with ancient coils that stank of old food and burning circuitry as it slowly, slowly came up to heat—I had nothing but bad memories and low expectations now. So I figured: Assume the worst. Start slow and keep it simple. Steak and potatoes. Pan-seared entrecote, perhaps, with a baked potato.

I needn't have worried. Our kitchen was larger and better equipped than most New York City apartment kitchens. The four-burner Schott range heated up very nicely, the burner glowing fiercely deep beneath sexy-looking black ceramic, and was surprisingly responsive to every twiddle of the dial. Though the chef had kindly offered to "thaw out anything" from a vast walk-in freezer containing every conceivable cut of meat, poultry, fish, and game, my entrecotes were in fact faux-filets (sirloin), but I wasn't bothered. They were nicely marbled and of good quality (if recently frozen) and seared up nicely in one of the thoughtfully provided nonstick pans, forming a lovely crust studded with brown sea salt and crushed black pepper. Any worries about smoke faded with the efficient whirring of the overhead stovetop range hood. I handled the gentle, slow-motion cantering of my kitchen floor well, I thought, for a landlubber, and when the time came, the steaks joined the potatoes in the reassuringly named Competence B-300 oven until medium rare. Soon, Nancy and I, in fluffy white ResidenSea bathrobes, were sitting at our dining room table, a towering floral arrangement dead-center, eating perfectly respectable Black Angus steaks and crispy-skinned potatoes, accompanied by an astonishingly affordable bottle of Brouilly.

Emboldened by this early success, I rose early the next morning and confidently made omelettes aux fines herbes, chopping the fresh herb and parsley with the delightfully sharp knives provided. I'd seen a pretty impressive selection of stinky French cheeses at Fredy's and had over-optimistically ordered an Epoisse and an Alsatian Muenster. But when I went to fold a slice of the Muenster into my omelette, it became clear that this particular cheese had seen better days. My omelette tasted like a dead man's feet, with a dreadful ammonia aftertaste, and ended up in the food disposal (which worked like a charm). Nancy, however, was very pleased with her cheese-free omelette, happily poring over the day's
Times.