Chapter Two
You don’t quite realize how imponderably vast the Pacific is until you are upon it, rolling in a ten-foot swell, legs splayed, accompanied only by the occasional porpoise or Wandering Albatross, the air redolent of ocean spray, the fumes of a diesel engine, and the faint odor of a landlubber’s vomit. Out here, the smell is vaguely metallic, like blood, and there is not a hint of the continental world anywhere, except possibly in the dormitory sink, where one of your half-dozen cabin mates has expelled lunch. Turn your gaze to starboard and it is exactly like the vista offered from the portside railings of your vessel, a million shades of blue extending toward an infinite horizon, a heaving panorama where waves are singular and entrancing, pulsating bursts of energy that only hint at mysterious forces and faraway storms. Standing on the deck you feel like a remora, a furtive stowaway, as if you shouldn’t really be here at all.
But this was exactly where I wanted to be. Ever since I was a kid, my life has been marked by the sweet incongruity of travel. One moment I’m in some East Coast metropolis, grinding out days, the white noise of contemporary American life enveloping my world like an encroaching dome—a cacophony of grim economic stats and dismal politics with an occasional Kardashian popping up like a bobble-headed gopher in an arcade game—and suddenly I’m on a boat in the marble-blue South Seas. I picked up my phone, pleased to see that I had precisely zero bars, and then saw an albatross fly low. There is a topography to the ocean, and as I watched the bird disappear in an ever-shifting seascape of peaks and valleys, I felt pleasantly stunned by the change in my environment. Not forty-eight hours previous, I was nursing a café mocha in the departure lounge at LAX, quietly tapping out the last e-mails, utterly uncertain where I’d be a week hence, and now here I was, acquiring my sea legs on a flat-bottomed boat plying the great expanse of the South Pacific. Some say it’s all about the journey, that the wonders of travel should be revealed layer by layer, like the peeling of an onion. I do not subscribe to this. Give me the adrenaline shot, the caffeinated jolt, the pleasure buzz that takes me from A to Z in the shortest time possible. I’ll concede right here at the top that my wiring might be a little defunct.
I’d set out, as much as possible, to replicate Stevenson’s journey through the great sweep of the Pacific, sailing with the tide from San Francisco Bay and tumbling down the arc of the planet until we crossed the equator with a great huzzah and found a steady current to the Marquesas. From there, I would make my way to Tahiti and the emerald lagoons of the Tuamotus and then fall off the map in the Gilberts before emerging in Samoa, where I’d make my pilgrimage to the great man’s grave on the summit of Mount Vaea. But immediately I encountered obstacles. Stevenson, of course, had chartered a well-appointed ninety-foot schooner to sail the great distance between California and Polynesia. He did this because, if only for a spell, he was loaded. A New York City newspaper publisher backed up the money wagon at Stevenson’s front door and said, Go, write what you see, send us a letter from time to time. When I read that I’d wept a little as I thought of newspapers today, which barely cover the cost of a pastry at Cinnabon during a layover in Denver. Then I got over it and got all practical-like.
It was January, cyclone season in the South Pacific. There were no sailboats departing California for the islands at this time of year, at least none with a sane captain. I’d briefly considered tracking down one such Ahab, determined to impose his will over nature, and offer to crew for him, but then rejected it out of hand when I recalled the cyclones I experienced in Vanuatu—the felled trees, the crumpled homes, the dozens of sunken boats in the harbor, their masts peaking above the surface like forlorn tombstones. What would it be like to endure such a tempest at sea? I didn’t really want to know. Death, I figured, is like a coiled snake. It’ll get you in the end. Why provoke it?
Nor was it possible to hitch a ride to Nuku Hiva, Stevenson’s first landfall, on a commercial ship. There are thousands of container vessels plying the waters between the Americas and Asia, but not one calls on the Marquesas, not even to pick up some bananas. I know this because I checked ship manifests from Canada to Chile. This swath of the Pacific—a wet cosmos so remote and underpopulated that the only thing you’re likely to see afloat is an occasional exhausted seabird or a weathered flip-flop—is the last corner of the world to remain immune from the trade flows of globalization. It is lonely out here.
It wasn’t always thus, of course. Back in Stevenson’s day, in the 1880s, when the tales and exploits of Captain Cook, the drama on board the Bounty, and the lurid romanticism of De Bougainville’s prose were just freshly mythologized, thousands set forth for the sun-speckled islands of the South Pacific. Oceania was brimming with vessels carrying whalers, traders, explorers, missionaries, and blackbirders—slavers that descended on the islands to ferry laborers to Peruvian mines and Australian sugar and cotton plantations. Others came for breadfruit, sandalwood, and bêche-de-mer, turd-like reef-cleaners prized as a delicacy in China. They came for the guano, dried bird dung, found on the most isolated islands and noted for its excellent qualities as a fertilizer and as an ingredient in gunpowder. Many came for the sperm whales and hunted them to within a whisker of extinction. Planters, like those romanticized in James Michener’s South Pacific, converted immense swaths of ancestral lands into coconut factories, supplying the world with its need for copra. Hundreds of emissaries were dispatched to the islands to proclaim them protectorates and colonies and that henceforth they would be ruled from Paris, London, Berlin, or Washington. It was for their own good, the locals were told.
Ships to the South Pacific there were aplenty, ferrying dreamers to the islands, lured by the promise of wealth, empire, or everlasting life in the hereafter. If there is such a thing as a sea-highway, this was it. In our imagination—or at least mine—Robinson Crusoe typified the South Seas dream, the solitary explorer, marooned, living in an uncharted world, unencumbered by the weight of history. But even in Stevenson’s day, Defoe’s tale was one hundred and seventy years old. Many islands remained unmapped, and yet already they carried the whiff of possibility, the promise of exploration and conquest. Of course, one man’s dream inevitably becomes another man’s curse. Bring a ship full of rats, pigs, and unwashed men from the Midlands, or Brittany, or Prussia, or New Bedford, and anchor it off an island in the South Seas that’d spent the previous millennia or so in utter isolation from the world beyond the reef, and the result is biological mayhem. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, plague, smallpox, elephantitis, syphilis, and a host of other ailments decimated the indigenous population of the South Pacific. On many islands, a 90 percent mortality rate was common. When the first Russian to circumnavigate the globe, Admiral Adam Johann von Krusenstern, visited the Marquesas in 1804, he estimated a population of 100,000 people. By 1926, there were but a mere 1,500 Marquesans left.
Seeking to explain this desultory state, Stevenson framed the problem thus: “Where there have been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there the race survives. Where there have been the most, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there it perishes.” Insightful, no? And yet not even Stevenson could have envisioned what would befall the islands in the years ahead.
By the 1930s, the Japanese decided that, come to think of it, they’d like to have an empire too, and we all know what happened next. The Imperial Army deployed troops throughout a huge swath of the Pacific, building fortifications in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Micronesia, the Marshalls, and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, ensuring that any approach to Japan would have to be fought one sandbar at a time. The subsequent fighting was among the most brutal the world has ever known. Accounts of that era, however—riveting and appalling as they are—rarely mention what, precisely, the locals may have experienced during the war, and as a result you sort of assume that they were in the bleachers, mere spectators. This wasn’t true at all, but perhaps this lack of attention to the islanders’ experience was a kind of foreshadowing, because after 1945 it was as if a dream had ended. For more than a hundred years, the South Pacific had fired the imagination of imperialists and romanticists, and then, suddenly, the flame died, and the islands faded into the obscurity from whence they came. True, from time to time, some great power—the United States, Great Britain, France—would nuke an atoll just to make sure things were still hunky-dory with their nuclear arsenal, and dreamers still roamed the islands with visions of eco-resorts and coffee plantations, but mostly the South Pacific reverted to what it’d always been, a sleepy backwater on the far side of the world.
This, ultimately, was what drew me to the more remote corners of Oceania. It is difficult to disappear on earth today, but if you are so inclined, few places can match the isolation offered by the islands of the South Seas. Here, I’d thought, I’d find Stevenson’s idealized world, the places with the fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful. Of course, not so long ago, many of these isles were nearly extinct of people and more than a few were bombed to the edge of oblivion, but leave something alone for long enough, and it will return to its natural state, like a seedling on the slopes of Mount St. Helens or a colony of cranes in the DMZ. People, I’d thought, would thrive in unexpected ways in lands unreached by iPhones and container ships. Of course, such places are few and far between, and to find them requires hacking through the jungles of Amazonia or dogsledding across the frozen Arctic tundra or climbing the precipitous slopes of the Himalayas or . . .
. . . or you could fly to Tahiti on the red-eye from LAX.
Which is what I’d done. For a brief moment, as I accepted the flowered garland on board Air Tahiti Nui and settled in to a double feature starring Juliette Binoche while perusing Paris Match—and particularly as I tried to refrain from making googly eyes at a short-skirted Tahitian flight attendant named Hotette—I thought, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson would have disapproved, and that I should have constructed a raft like the Kon-Tiki to take me to Polynesia. Somewhere down there, I’d thought, as we crossed the ocean, Robert Louis Stevenson endured mountainous seas while subsiding on cabin biscuits, whereas I’m up here being served tea by Hotette, she of the gravity-defying curves and melodic voice, and then I figured that being attended to by a beautiful Tahitian woman with a resonant name was in itself a kind of old-school South Seas anthropological experience, and so it was good, and acceptable, and a kind of immersion experience all its own.
I’d flown to Papeete, the administrative capital of French Polynesia, because it was the only place I’d find a boat to the Marquesas. And it was there that I found the Aranui III, a 360-foot cargo ship and the only vessel to carry passengers to the more remote islands among France’s far-flung possessions in the Pacific. The Aranui, as I soon learned from a guesthouse owner, was scheduled to depart the following day, and as I rushed to the harbor to book passage, it didn’t take long until I felt strangely elevated at the prospect of leaving Papeete so soon. This puts me in good company, of course. Stevenson despised Papeete; Gauguin fled from it, and writers ever since have been tripping over themselves to figure out new ways to describe the many ways in which Papeete disappoints. This always struck me as unfair. It wasn’t as if the Tahitians themselves had decided to one day abandon a charming seaside village of wood and thatch and replace it with chintzy office towers, traffic circles, oven-like churches, filthy sidewalks, and, near the port, cylindrical fuel storage depots that looked like unhatched eggs shading French naval vessels that exuded nothing but malice, and a megacruise ship that merely looked ridiculous, like a Viennese wedding cake melting in the jungle. This was a town built by my kind, travelers who had arrived with hearts full of romance or bile, often both, and found that what they really wanted was a place that offered a decent baguette, a café that served a cup of coffee, a dozen taverns and discos, a brothel, an ATM, a store where you can buy those snowflake thingys, perhaps with a maiden in a coconut bra wiggling the hula, and a few ornate administrative buildings to make it all seem classy.
I’d be back, I knew, and I’d traveled enough to know that first impressions often belie something far stranger or wondrous, but I felt that no journey following in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson should begin here. I’d wanted to experience the splendor that he’d felt upon reaching his first landfall in Nuku Hiva after a forty-five-day sail, and so I’d picked up my pace as I wandered through the incessant cacophony of traffic, passing offices, cafés, at least two McDonalds franchises, a Peugeot dealership, and shops selling crap to herds of cruise ship passengers, stopping only to have a gander at the war memorials that the French sprinkle among their possessions like a dog marking its territory. AUX ENFANTS DE LA POLYNÉSIE FRANÇAISE—MORTS AUX CHAMPS D’HONNEUR read one placard listing those lost in Korea, Indochina, Madagascar, and North Africa. Another memorialized all the Polynesians killed in World War I—MORTS POUR LA FRANCE. Throw in a harbor slick with pollution, add copious amounts of spray paint, soak it all in shirt-drenching humidity, and the result, aesthetically speaking, is the very sort of urban hellhole that one flees for the islands. Were it not for the serrated peaks of Moorea, a bewitching sight, looming in the near distance, you’d think you were still a long distance yet from the mythical South Pacific. And so it was with undisguised glee that I’d learned that it was still possible to find a berth on board the Aranui, which reared above a wharf in the industrial harbor, its crane steadily loading cargo into its hold.
“Bon,” I said to the Tahitian clerk inside the ship’s HQ, a squat office building surrounded by warehouses, after he’d assured me there was ample room on board. “Et c’est combien?” I was feeling a jet-lagged giddiness, the kind of euphoria that occurs when a plan starts to come together. I’d arrived in the Marquesas by ship, just as Robert Louis Stevenson had, and while it wouldn’t be in a ninety-foot schooner with a velvet and brass stateroom, it would do. The clerk tapped at a calculator. When he was done, he flipped it around so I could see. I had only a passing acquaintance with the Polynesian franc and the number displayed meant nothing to me. It was, however, immense, the sort of sum astronomers bandy about when describing earth’s distance to faraway galaxies, and for a brief moment I felt a pang of worry. I asked if he happened to have the day’s exchange rates handy and when he finished with his arithmetic, converting the sum into US dollars, he again thrust the calculator toward me.
“Are you shitting me?” I said after a long, considered pause.
“Pardon, monsieur?”
The number was hideous to behold. I’d turned to look out the window, where a crane was loading bags of cement into the Aranui’s cavernous hold. It’s a freighter, I thought, not the Queen Mary. There was, as far as I could see, no casino on board. Nor an Olympic-size swimming pool. Or a spa. Or shops that sell Thomas Kinkade prints. Or anything else that I imagined would be standard on a ship with such a lofty price tag. I’ve owned cars that cost less than what they were asking. Now that I think about it, the birth of my children cost less than a voyage on the Aranui. Forgo this trip, and I could have two more, three if they’re delivered in Fiji.
“C’est trop cher pour moi,” I finally said and asked, if it wasn’t too much trouble, if could I just sleep outdoors, under the stars like the Polynesians of yore, and in exchange I’d swab decks and peel pommes de terres and otherwise strive to make myself useful.
The clerk looked upon me sadly, pursed his lips, and suggested that perhaps monsieur would prefer a berth in the ship’s dormitory. It was, he noted, a third of the price of a regular cabin and probably more suitable for someone of my disposition. Actually, my disposition was inclined to inquire whether he was aware that there was a global recession going on, and did he not think that these prices were a trifle high? And didn’t he think it ridiculous that the croissant I’d had that morning cost ten bucks? And come to think of it, didn’t he think it weird that we were speaking French, and even stranger that we were at this very moment actually in France? Was he not aware that nearly every colony in the world achieved independence, I don’t know, sixty years ago, and yet Tahiti remained as French as Bordeaux? Did he listen to Johnny Hallyday? Did he think Jerry Lewis was funny? But I let it go. “The great affair is to move,” Stevenson wrote. Exactly so. I was on the move, and if it meant enduring snoring, sleepwalking, and seeing strangers in their underpants, so be it.
And so it came to be that I found myself steaming toward the Marquesas in the company of six strangers, which was fine, except perhaps on that first day, given the prodigious amount of vomiting. Humanity, I believe, is divided between those who get seasick and those who don’t. I am, evidently, not particularly blessed genetically, but this I know: I don’t puke at sea. Alas, the same could not be said of my new roommates, a young female air force officer from Nantes and a family of cheerful gnomes from Lyon.
“Ça va bien, Maarten?” Edgar had said after we made introductions, as he would every time we encountered each other, whether in the dining hall or outside the shower stall. He was seventy-five years old, the patriarch, and his hair tumbled below his neck, Dungeons and Dragons style. I suspected 1974 was a very fine year for Edgar, and he had seen no need to move on. He spoke with a raspy, phlegmatic voice that suggested a pretty serious nicotine habit back in the day. In clogs, he stood approximately four foot ten.
“Oui. Ça va très bien. Et vous?”
“Merveilleux,” he said, and then as the ship rolled in the swell he lurched toward a sink and hurled the remnants of lunch. When he was done, he wiped the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief and explained that it had long been his dream to sail to the Marquesas. Dreams, he said, while pale and smelling of regurgitated chicken, do sometimes come true and this, he concluded, was how we endure the tragedy, the comedy, of life, and for a moment I was reminded of why I love the French—not even blowing chunks will ruin la grande romance of it all.
Our doorless room had a stench that would make even a hungry hyena whimper and so I left Edgar and his elven kinfolk and stepped outside, leaned against the railing, and took in the splendor of the ocean. We had sailed early that morning, leaving the sheltered lagoon of Tahiti and the hillside sprawl of Papeete and, under a blazing sun, made our way to the northeast, near the equator, beginning a fourteen-day roundtrip journey to the Marquesas, where we would unload the ship of its cargo of food, water, beer, and building materials and carry back fruit, copra, cars repossessed by the banks, and a whole lot of seawater to fill the ballast. I nodded my greetings to the extravagantly tattooed Marquesan crew—their quarters were next to ours on the lowest deck—and spent a long while gazing out to sea. Most of the ship was off limits and I spent a few minutes trying to ascertain where, precisely, the other passengers were standing. Many, I suspected, were inside their cabins, suffering and moaning as the ship pitched and rolled in a heavy swell, but a few braved the upper decks. I know this because from time to time I could hear someone above me retch and for the briefest moment a blob of vomit would cascade over the side until it exploded like a cluster bomb in the wind. I empathized with their suffering, but frankly, nothing could diminish the bliss I felt as the lofty, verdant peaks of Tahiti and Moorea disappeared over the horizon. I have never tired of the sensation of seeing land recede from my vision. Something elemental takes over, a kind of universal awareness of the beauty and fragility of life. It induced no fear in me. As we crested a large roller, I felt as if I could feel the pulse—the thump, thump—of earth’s rhythm. This, I thought, gazing around my world, my eyes attuned to the waves, searching for those really big ones, the ones that come pitching and howling, those huge bastards that elicit awestruck wonder, and as they pass leave you with a really stupid grin plastered to your face, was perfect.
And yet, something felt wrong. I detected a disturbance in the Force. It was as if, despite the gasp-inducing beauty, there remained some dark undercurrent, a malevolent, unseen predator hovering just below the surface, seeking a victim. My senses were suddenly in overdrive. I could feel a clammy sweat on my hands. This sweeping panorama, the endless blue seascape, dissipated, replaced by the narrowest tunnel vision. My heart thumped and my mind churned, considering possibilities. I felt an overwhelming need, my entire being thrummed with desire. What I wanted, more than anything, more than life itself, was a fucking drink.
This happened from time to time. One moment I’m a happy, healthy, productive member of society, paying bills, cooking tasty and nutritious meals for my family, playing catch with my boys, watching The Daily Show with my wife, and then, all of a sudden, my brain sends a message that says, Hey, might be a good idea to tuck a pint of vodka into your sock and head out to an alley and drink yourself into oblivion. It’s the oddest thing. And it never ceased to surprise me. I’d always thought quitting drinking would be a fairly straightforward endeavor. There comes a day when you just can’t take it anymore—feeling constantly miserable, the habitual seeking of relief through drink, discovering, again, that it doesn’t work anymore, drinking more just to make sure, rinse, repeat, the beginning of consequences, followed by capital-C Consequences, vows to never drink again, drinking, feeling miserable and so on and so forth—until that moment arrives when you just give up, when you step out of the boxing ring, because that’s what it feels like at this point, going toe to toe with a bottle, determined to emerge as some kind of victor, bruised yet triumphant, and every night of course, it is your own personal ass that is whupped, and finally you say No mas. This, I had thought, would be followed by a few weeks of unpleasantness, and then, Boom, you’re done and you move on with life. And then, again and again, you discover why they call alcoholism cunning, baffling, and powerful. Your brain, it turns out, is your mortal enemy.
This, for me, was unsettling. Up to this point, I’d had a long, fruitful relationship with my brain and felt no reason to question its dictates. Eat this, my neurotransmitters would say when confronted with a heaping platter of barbecued frog in Shanghai. Good idea, I’d say, and smack my lips in delight. Why don’t you . . . go to college? Gee willikers, that sounded like a great idea. My skull was full of helpful tips: Scratch your knee. Duck, or you’ll be hit in the head with a baseball. Write a love letter to your wife. Move to the end of the world. We had heaps of fun, my brain and I, and so when it started to tell me to go ahead, open up that third bottle of wine, I blithely followed along. When objections were raised about this sudden spike in my alcohol consumption, my noggin had a ready solution: Hide some vodka in the office closet. Excellent idea, I’d thought.
Standing on the deck, I tried to let the moment pass, to step back and let the desire dissipate like froth on a wave. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Intellect over emotion. I’m an alcoholic, therefore I can’t drink. Play the tape forward. If I drink—best-case scenario—I emerge ten years later, a decade-long blackout. Where? I don’t know. Thailand? Nairobi? A trailer in East Texas? Folsom State Prison? Certainly not at home. I’d pull out of it with a throbbing cranium and think, briefly, What the fuck just happened? and then catch sight of myself in the mirror and note with some surprise that somewhere along the way I acquired gray hair and a Mike Tyson tribal face tattoo. And then it would be off to some boot-camp rehab, followed by a lengthy stay in an ass-kicking halfway house, and years of unreturned phone calls: This time will be different. I promise. Worst-case scenario? I have a beer and a few hours later tumble over the banister, my last words a slurry Vive la France, as I end my days as shark chum.
But my brain was unrelenting:
You’ve been doing this sobriety thing for eleven months. Good for you. Why don’t you take a little break. You deserve it. You can be sober again tomorrow.
Think of how good it would be. A frothy beer or two on the deck as the sun goes down in tropical grandeur. Wine with dinner. Perhaps a nice red from the Médoc. Good company. Easy conversation. You know your French is better after you’ve had a few. Drinks at the bar. Johnnie Walker with a few perfect ice cubes. You know you want to.
It wasn’t so bad. Think of all the good times you had while drinking. These spirit-sucking fun-haters are trying to take it away from you. You’re a bon vivant!
No one will ever know.
On and on it went. It’s tiresome doing battle with your head. You’d like to just walk away, but of course you can’t. There’s no hiding. I tried staring off into the distance, forcing my eyes to search for a last glimpse of Moorea, but I saw nothing but the beads of condensation dripping down a bottle of Hinano, the Tahitian brew. It’s probably shit beer, I thought, but still I imagined taking a long pull.
It suddenly occurred to me that this might be a mistake. It had been months since I had felt a craving of such intensity. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for this. Should I have waited longer before setting off to traipse around the South Pacific? They—the proverbial they—tell alkies not to do anything at all for at least a year or two once the last bottle has been emptied. Don’t move. Don’t change jobs. Don’t divorce, the assumption being you have some kind of choice in the matter. Needless to say, hooking up with the really hot heroin addict from Wednesday’s step meeting is also a no-no. Two sickees don’t make a wellee, they say. They are full of such pithy aphorisms. Take it one day at a time. Let go and let God. Do the next right thing. Live life on life’s terms. Easy does it. My brain was turning into a bumper sticker and every time I thought, no, this is not my life, I’d think of the moment when I first started to fill empty water bottles with vodka and I’d go to another meeting. I picked up chips—thirty days, sixty days, six months, nine months—and reclaimed my life as a husband and father. “If you ever drink again,” my wife had said, “I’ll turn you into a eunuch.”
This snapped me awake. There was much to lose. My eyes regained their focus as I saw my friend the albatross swoop low for another pass. I took a deep breath and tried not to think of the bar three decks above. What exactly was transpiring here? A craving, sure. A bad one, no doubt. But why now? Was it the impending approach of five o’clock, a rooster’s crow for lushes everywhere? Not likely, I thought. Happy hour had long ago lost its frisson. Christopher Hitchens once said that he drinks “because it makes other people less boring.” I’d read a lot of Hitchens when I was trying to justify my drinking. If he could write like that, I reckoned, while getting blotto every day, well then, everything must be just peachy with me. Of course, when I finally did stop drinking I discovered the other side of that equation: When you’re sober, drinkers are curiously boring. For a long while I could only walk by a bar at dusk with finger-gnawing longing. I’d hear the laughter and the clink of glasses—or even catch a waft of stale beer and Lysol—and I’d have to quicken my pace. I’ll never have fun again, I’d think, as I hurried home to my steaming cup of herbal tea. But after a few months, when I finally felt confident that I was unlikely to start pounding shots of Jägermeister, I’d occasionally meet friends at a pub. As I sipped a club soda, I’d immediately scope out those who belonged to my tribe—the solitary drinkers hunched over their phones, the anxious woman with the shaky hands waiting for her pinot grigio, the two college students on their third pitcher, the bartender sneaking shots—and I’d feel a special camaraderie. It’s like gaydar for alcoholics. And then, as the alcohol started to take its toll and people began repeating the same stories and their eyes got glassy and their coordination started to wither, and there in the corner, the woman who just slipped off her barstool, I’d think, no, I don’t really miss this and I’d think of myself as cured. Done. Finished. No worries.
But still the cravings came. Not often, but enough to scare the shit out of me. On the one hand, I could be a great father, a loving husband, a successful something, or, on the other, I could have a drink, and there’d be moments when the choice was paralyzing. Think logically, I told myself as I gripped the handrail. What’s causing this? Was it the prospect of spending a couple of weeks confined on a ship full of French people? Not likely, I thought. I like the French. They live life as if every moment was consequential. Spend enough time with them, and you’ll eat tastier food, you’ll dress better, and your conversation will be elevated, although you’ll acquire this strange tic wherein you start using your face as a punctuation mark. The French do, however, drink like every alcoholic wishes he could drink—moderately, daily, with great ceremony, which is irritating. If they could just drink like Russians, that would be fine. There’s nothing like seeing others get shitfaced to help keep you sober.
But I had reconciled myself to the fact that there are in fact normal drinkers. Freak, I used to think whenever I saw someone leave a half-empty wineglass. No longer. Perhaps they’re allergic to peanuts. I happen to be allergic to alcohol. C’est la vie. And yet, I couldn’t pretend that everything was fine, that I’d reconciled my condition with my situation. Three flights of stairs above me there was a bar. I wanted—really, really wanted—to climb those stairs.
Finally it dawned on me why I was feeling so squirrely. I had boarded the ship at seven thirty that morning, having huffed my backpack the two miles it took to get from my guesthouse to the wharf, and when I climbed the gangplank I was handed a plastic cup of juice. Great, I thought. I’m thirsty. I brought the cup to my lips and then smelled something odd, like it was mixed with turpentine.
“C’est quoi ça?” I asked.
Rum punch.
Who the fuck drinks rum at seven thirty in the morning? What was this? A booze cruise? A convention of active alcoholics? Maybe I should have read the brochure. You’ve heard of Leaving Las Vegas. Come experience Leaving Papeete. The only people I know who’ve turned to Captain Morgan for a pick-me-up in the early A.M. are late-stage alcoholics who pour it into their coffee mugs to stave off the shakes, the palpitating anxiety, the early onset of delirium tremens, seeking to forestall impending death and/or hospitalization. And now here I was, with a cup of rum punch in my hands, handed to me with a nod and a wink. Good times, bro. Time to get your buzz on. And it got worse . . . well, depending on your perspective. There was free wine at lunch. Entire bottles. Red and white. Now, I’m sure many, right at this very moment, have left the page to book their vacations, but for those still reading, let me say that setting down a couple of opened bottles of wine right in front of a newly recovered alcoholic, the kind of alcoholic who once thought of himself as a bit of a connoisseur, is like handing a pipe to a crackhead. I read the labels, a white Bourgogne and a Rhône red, and then read them again. That alcoholic voice inside my brain, usually a devilish whisper, was now pounding the drums, doing the rumba, putting on a party hat and shimmying on the dance floor. Come on, it said. Drink it.
So it had been that kind of day. Challenging. It wasn’t simply that there was alcohol on board, but rather a kind of electricity that encouraged me to drink alcoholically. Rum with breakfast. A couple of bottles of wine with lunch. My body is wired for that. What to do? I steadied myself as the boat pitched over a wave and then headed inside to the stairs. Up or down. Up or down. Choices. Choices.
I headed down, into the bowels of the ship, unsure of what I was looking for. There was the laundry room. Did I have any laundry that needed to be done? I could do laundry. Wash. Fold clothes. Some kind of mindless Zen-like task. The machines were complicated European models. I studied the instructions. But I didn’t really have much that needed washing and so I moved on. Another door. I opened it. A gym. Hello.
It was tiny. There were some free weights, a couple of StairMasters, and a treadmill. I crab-walked inside and flicked on the lights. I was at water level and could see the waves smashing and foaming against the porthole windows. I unlatched the weights from where they’d been secured, grabbed what I needed, and sat on the bench press and started lifting, all the while gazing at the treadmill. Could I run on a machine in a pitching sea? I was aching for a run. Ever since rehab, it’s what I’d done. A couple of miles at first. Then four, seven, ten, fourteen, eighteen, even twenty-mile runs when the mood hit. I’d lost thirty pounds in two months and felt more physically fit than I had in years. Of course, I shredded my Achilles tendons—I could even hear them snapping (pop, pop)—but they healed, more or less, and I kept running. I’d never jogged on a treadmill, however, regarding them as expensive contraptions for dilettantes. I’d become a purist, pounding trails and pavement in wilting heat and bone-shivering cold. Someone once told me that I was simply replacing one addiction for another and that I wasn’t quite getting the program. I ignored him and started adding hills to my runs. All I craved was a run, and here at least was an urge I could satisfy.
I took off my flip-flops and decided to run barefoot. I flipped the machine on, let it gather speed, began to jog, and was pitched off by the next wave. I got back on and tried again. The same thing happened. But soon I found a rhythm. I got a sense of the waves and how they’d impact the boat. It was like running among the hills of San Francisco after you’ve had way too much to drink, the upper body lurching in one direction, pinballing through the air, carried by an indefinable momentum, and the legs scooting and halting and twisting to keep from having the whole edifice come crashing down. This, I discovered, was right up my skill set. The kilometers—it was a French model—ticked by—three, four, seven—and soon I felt that happy, calming surge of endorphins, my brain and body aglow in a sense of well-being. Suddenly, finally, I felt good.
But you know what would be really good right now?
This would be my brain talking again. What? I answered wearily.
A cigarette.
And this, alas, I found irresistible.