disney cruise 657
where dreams are forgotten

Everyone was dying on the boat. 

Some faster than others, some suffering more. Some of that agony allowed others to live a little longer than they should have or wanted to, that’s how it went on Disney Cruise 657 as its swollen steel skid marked toward the Bahamas for some carefree fun in the sun. I never saw myself floating into the abyss with the dehydrated cast of Fantasia, but here I was standing next to Mickey at the urinal smelling the absensce of water or happiness in his urine. The urinal cakes in turn belched the same perfume the princesses on the boat wore into the stale bathroom air, I breathed it in and thought about my impotence.

My wife had threatened to leave me unless I did something, so I bought Groupon tickets for the Disney Cruise and the minimum wage employees were now responsible for saving a failing marriage on top of other duties like slathering sunscreen on the liver spotted backs of malnourished parents and kids or killing the mini horse that played Bullseye who got rabies at our stop in the British Isles.

When I told her I knew just the thing to save our marriage, this wasn’t what she had in mind. She stayed in the room chain smoking bootleg cigarettes and watching Hamilton. I took to the deck with plans to drink myself into oblivion and vomit in the jacuzzi. The sea air stung my dry skin but it was preferable to the pore clogging Vaseline air below deck. I stared out at everyone populating the ships many crevices, each one protruded like a skin tag on the ass of the hulking bastard, demanding drinks and laughing deleriously at varying characters that wandered aimlessly in sweat drenched costumes. 

That’s when I sensed death. Not anything momentous or exciting, but rather an unceremonious descent into the grave after a forgettable existence filled with regret. The characters moved with distinguishable uncertainty, as though their feet were seeking the refuge of disappearing memories that had abandoned them long ago. It was the gate of every resident in my grandpa’s nursing home as they probed their way to the kitchen to ask about a friend who had died several years earlier and were sent away with an alumnium tin of tapioca pudding. Left to eat the rice based treat and wonder why they hadn’t seen their friend in so long or if that person ever existed at all.

I saw a man dressed as Goofy collapse, his head rolling into the piss filled pool. A crowd of people gathered around to snap pictures and laugh, assuming it was part of an act, or maybe they knew too and found the prospect even more comical. Allowing themselves to forget about their own inevitable death in favor of a cheap laugh at a confused mascot. The failing livers, the massive coronary, the type two diabetes, the mesothelioma were all healed by the sadness of the floundering employee and his pathetic life on this ship. They could live another day because at some point they would leave the ship, use it like a glory hole and abandon it when they’d finished.

I walked down to the scene and helped the guy up, leaving his mascot head in the pool. Everyone else left, ripe with distineterst, they sought the next act of humiliation for documentation and distribution to their social media. I ordered two idiotic themed cocktails from a nearby pock marked employee and when they came, I handed him one. 

We drank and I asked him how long he had been on the boat and he didn’t know. I asked him how much he was paid and he didn’t know. All he knew was that every morning he woke up and put on his costume. I asked him why and he told me because there was nothing else to do. In some ways I understood, we weren’t all that different. Both vaguely existing, propelled by fossil fuels across a lifeless retention pond to a supposed paradise where nothing would be any different. I tilted the glass toward him and asked if he wanted another and he declined, saying that the best part of his day was sleep. He knew sleep. He walked away and disappeared into the anonymity of the ship. I retreated to my room as well to find my wife already asleep. 

I plugged in my CPAP and laid on the stupid Little Mermaid themed water bed, hoping for a dreamless night. I thought about how many other characters endured the same reality and wondered about the legality of it all. 

The next morning I woke to find a soiled Donald Duck costume in my room, rubbing my eyes, I put the suit on and stumbled onto the deck to the sound of directionless laughter and the nausea that accompanied a life of exploitation.