Phutatorius

Travel Journal, Postscript:

For those of you who missed me (no postcards for anyone, so don't feel slighted), here's a day-by-day recap of our cruise itinerary, with concurrent mention of each day's dinner sorbet on the ship:

November 4 — Bridgetown, Barbados, "Refreshing Piña Colada"
November 5 — Scarborough, Tobago, "Refreshing Passion Fruit and Champagne"
November 6 — Cruising the Caribbean Sea, "Refreshing Ouzo"
November 7 — Devil's Island, French Guiana, "Refreshing Red Wine"
November 8 — Cruising the Atlantic Ocean, "Refreshing Peach Daiquri"
November 9 — Belém, Brazil, "Refreshing Cherry Maraschino"
November 10 — Belém, Brazil, "Refreshing Melon Portwine"
November 11 — Cruising the Amazon River's Breves Narrows, "Refreshing Lemon Liquor"
November 12 — Santarem, Brazil, "Refreshing Vodka Lime"
November 13 — Alter do Chao, Brazil, "Refreshing Peach Sour Cream"
November 14 — Parintins, Brazil, "Refreshing Banana Coconut"
November 15 — Cruising the Amazon River, "Refreshing Kir Royal"
November 16 — Anavilhanas Archipelago, Brazil, "Refreshing Sour Cream-Strawberry"
November 17 — Manaus, Brazil, "Carrot-Black Pepper and Lemon"

You should note that November 17's offering — rumored to be a last-minute substitute for the planned "Corned Beef and Kelp" palate-cleanser — was not listed on the menu as "refreshing."

For a course-by-course breakdown on what I ate, write me directly.

Travel Journal, Day Eleven:

I am at the end of my rope. I have had Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good" ringing in my head for six straight hours now, and I know that my period of suffering is only beginning. Another week's battery of The World's Second Most Recognized Tune (so sez Chuck himself, anyway) lies ahead of me, and over that time I expect to be pushed to the brink of self-immolation a half dozen times or more.

The song comes from nowhere. I don't even have to hear it to get it started: in fact, in this case, I don't believe it was played anywhere within earshot. One minute I'm sunbathing, and the next I'm humming that catchy and delicious melody, round and round, over and again . . . to the point of madness. The swift, inexplicable onset of symptoms has me convinced that the disease is systemic — that I am able to beat it back into latency for long stretches of time while it gathers its strength. Then it plunges headlong into my psychic defenses once more and overruns my consciousness. Acute chronic Mangionitis, you might call it — the flareups come once or twice a year after prolonged sun exposure or when I've eaten rich foods.

My susceptibility to relapse is, I suspect, a result of early and frequent exposure to the pathogen: "Feels So Good" played steadily over the restroom PA in my family's restaurant since 1979, so often in fact that my uncle does not pay licensing fees to ASCAP for the restaurant's Muzak. He instead sends monthly checks directly to Chuck himself. Restaurateurs of the Midwest, you have so much to answer for . . .

Back on the ship now, I've mobilized the 6,000 songs on my iPod against the disease. But I fear it still won't be enough: armed with only a trumpet and a wimp-ass jazz backing band, Chuck stands fast in the citadel of my consciousness. He fends off all comers, as Bruce Lee serially dispatches his archenemy's generic henchmen: first the reggae backbeaters in the English Beat ("Mirror in the Bathroom" catchy, but not nearly enough), now Black Sabbath and its world class axman — "Iron Man" sent packing. Talking Heads is next on the block: This ain't no party. This ain't no disco. This ain't no foolin' around. One strategy is to send something decidely uncatchy after it: nine minutes of "Get Out of My Face" by Cabaret Voltaire bear down on Chuck from behind. No dice — Richard Kirk, well-armored in guitar feedback, nonetheless stumbles off like Saint Sebastian, his chest peppered with staccato trumpet bleats, instead of the arrows of early Christian iconography.

Pity me, good readers, as it appears I am in this for the duration. I suppose I should go now and have the Wife tie me to the bed before I do something drastic. Bummer that this should happen on a once-in-a-lifetime cruise, but if I don't go into lockdown straightaway, you'll be hearing about how your Phutatorius leaped overboard into the Amazon River somewhere between Santarem and Parintins, crying The trumpets! The trumpets! as the piranhas devoured him.

Wish me luck.

Travel Journal, Day Eight:

Some set-up here is appropriate. The Wife and I are quite possibly the youngest passengers on our ship, probably thirty-plus years below the mean. It intimidates the crap out of us — probably unfairly, as most people we've encountered are affable enough. The program of interaction is by now predictable: we tell the other guests what we do for a living, and they tell us what their children do for a living. Then we talk about the food.

Nonetheless, seven days into our cruise we're still a bit leery about dining with other people. It is the custom of the ship's maitre d' to ask on arrival whether we would prefer to eat alone or with other passengers. It was a big step two nights ago when we finally relented to the latter course and passed a pleasant Chinese dinner with a couple who have retired to Hawaii to take up vanilla bean farming (sometimes I don't make this stuff up).

Tonight, however, was a different story. Buoyed by Saturday night's success, the Wife and I took charge with the maitre d' and demanded to sit with another couple. I believe the Wife's exact words were "Um — er — whatever you want. Put us wherever you want." Through this I kept quiet and shifted awkwardly in my dress shoes.

We were seated at an empty table for four in the center of the dining room, positioned prominently to receive our table-match for the evening. From that location we gaped in horror and humiliation as a husband and wife were led toward our table, froze in their tracks, and after an eternity of whispered negotiations between the old man and the maitre d', were settled at a table for two in front of us. I told the Wife (who looked smashing) that the old lady was intimidated by her good looks and wanted her husband sequestered. She smiled and looked twice as smashing. Then I resolved out loud to find out where these people were staying so I could knock over their mailbox.

The mailboxes aren't mailboxes per se. They are elegant clips set by the doors to the state rooms where the Travel Desk leaves tickets for shore excursions. Nothing you can take out with a Louisville Slugger or back into with your Dodge Ram (sponsors, note the product placements) — but you can bet your wounded and vindictive Phutatorius will be unscrewing that mail clip sometime in the dead of night. My on-again/off-again relationship with the French authorities is well-documented in other posts; if necessary, I will not shrink from a confrontation with the Ship Steward.

An interesting (well, you be the judge) post-script: the maitre d' approached us midway through dinner, apparently to explain why none of the other guests ever did sit down at our table with us. He's a nice guy; he's Italian: he's my people. "I don't understand," Mario said. "There were twenty more people signed up to eat at this sitting, but they don't come. I had to turn away other guests, and now these people don't come. It upsets me. I must make changes." The Wife and I expressed our sympathies, and I offered to eat the orphaned entrees. He smiled and walked away, shaking his head, and the two of us lapsed into a thoughtful silence. We were both thinking the same thing: word got out that the next guests seated upstairs for the Indian dinner would get stuck with the "Young Couple." Starvation appeared to be a better alternative.

That should be all, as I write from a public Internet facility on board the ship, there are people standing in line to use the terminals, quite possibly reading over my shoulder, and I am beginning to feel a bit like Harriet the Spy. Expect more substantive posts soon about my postcolonial tourist angst. Actually, just imagine that I wrote them: I tend to lose the bulk of my days in the lunch buffet at the "Terrace Cafe."

Travel Journal, Day Four:

I blog now via satellite, from a remote location in the Atlantic Ocean, some one hundred miles north of the coast of Suriname in South America. The cruise ship continues to plunge ahead through the deep toward our next port of call,

Devil's Island, French Guiana.

I never thought I would see the penal colony again — though it was eighty years ago, I remember my last glimpse of the "green hell" like it was yesterday — the island's margin fading into a darkening sky as my raft swirled around it in a loosening orbit. My stock of marinated steak tips and bloodied veal, swiped from the prison foreman's personal pantries, running thin; the slack in my homemade slingshot stretched beyond its elastic limit, and with it my ability to draw away the sharks from the raft with catapulted meats severely compromised. The guards on Penitentiary Island took several shots at me when I pushed off. They hit both shoulders — and worse, my canteen of fresh water.

But somehow I persevered, squirreled away some of the raw meat for the expected week-long period of drift, resisted the urge to salt it in the water, for fear of drawing back those sharks, empty-eyed with the terrified faces. The sight of them gave me hope: I was not the one who was damned. It was they whom some cruel divinity had cursed to haunt these waters, insatiable in their hunger: vampires without opposable thumbs or charming accents. Somehow, through wind and rain, after a pitched moonlight battle with that manta ray — oh how I cursed the gods when that hellish skate, porcupined with driftwood harpoons, renewed its runs at my raft! — I made the Guatemalan coast. Free at last, one might say.

Now it is my privilege to revisit the penal colony, now disused, on a luxury cruise ship. Once again I will peer inside the Isolation Cells, this time under the supervision of a tour guide, lazily intoning the horrors that once lay within these sweltering, airless honeycombs, with no prison guard to shove me inside with the butt end of his bayonet. And I wonder, when I stand at the gates of Cell 14, where I lost sixteen months of my life to blackouts and madness, will the same wild, self-destructive thoughts find their way out of the crabby corners of my mind? Will the old voices that sounded in that cramped cubicle speak to me again? Will they sound eighty years older?

I write all this tonight because I cannot sleep. I know what awaits me tomorrow morning. Well, I know and I don't know. They say there is a gift shop on the Island. Postcards for sale reading "GREETINGS FROM BEAUTIFUL FRENCH GUIANA." Might the kind lady at the cash register consider selling me back ten years of my life? What would that cost me in euros?

My psychiatrist tells me that this visit — seeing the old penal colony of my nightmares, out of order and overgrown with weeds — will finally afford me a sense of "closure." But in my one hundred fifteen years of life I have had my fill of closures; it is openendedness that I am after now: the horizon after the horizon, the release from freedom. Perhaps your Phutatorius will not take the boat ashore with the other guests. Maybe, just maybe, he will stay on the ship instead; there is a Water Aerobics class slated for three in the afternoon.

Travel Journal, Day One:

We arrive in Barbados two days before embarcation to find only one of our four bags making its appointed rounds on the claim conveyor. This leaves me with but one change of clothes on the cusp of our Amazon adventure: 1 pair white tube socks, 1 pair boxer shorts, 1 twelve-year-old Smiths T-shirt, 1 red sweatshirt, 1 pair cargo pants. As I wear the same cargo pants pretty much every day anyhow, I can't gripe about losing the other pair. That said, lacking spare underwear for hygiene, a bathing suit for swimming, running shoes for running, hiking boots for hiking, dress clothes for dinner on the ship, short pants for lounging, sandals for sandaling, and my blunderbuss for hunting anaconda, I might as well be confined to quarters for the duration.

The Wife is, of course, well-appointed (the surviving bag is hers). As I down consecutive duty-free Cadbury chocolate bars — for strength — in the Bereft of Baggage line, she makes great charitable gestures of offering me loaner clothes. Phutatorius' drag fashion show proceeds in full force in the hotel room the following morning, as he tries to decide which items will earn the most raucous applause from other guests at the Fairmont Royal Pavilion.

A bathing suit is purchased from the hotel gift shop at considerable cost. The Wife doesn't like the fit: she insists on asking the clerk if they carry XL. This might be fine — even flattering — if we were talking about a Speedo cut. But we're not, and the gloves are off: I fall into a squat and distend my abdomen, declaring myself bound and determined to burst the top button off her Eddie Bauer shorts.

O Great and Spiteful Old Testament God, make it Your will to liberate my paunch from this alien and constraining pant-fastener . . .

USAirways tells me now that the bags will find their way to the hotel by nightfall. I can regard this as just another empty assurance — like their promise to deliver up my luggage in the ordinary course of business — or I can take them at their word. Because I am a man who gets by on hope, I must do the latter.