Friends and neighbors I have just returned from, if not hell, then limbo. At the very least it was the boat upon the river Styx.
A week or two ago my mother had gotten wind that I was going to be taking a vacation day. As it turned out, it was going to be on one of the days that my mom dad and uncle were going to go on one of those 'free' gambling cruises. My mother raved about the last couple of ones she went on. She pestered me a little until I agreed to go on this little outing. You would think I would learn form my mistakes.
For those of you not familiar with these floating casinos, they are basically a cruise ship with no cabins. They are instead stocked with endless rows of slot machines and gambling tables. The entire boat floats out to international waters for a few hours where gambling and marrying sheep is not covered by US laws. After a while it turns around and comes in.
Did I mention it was free? It's free to get on the boat. You just show them your license and you are on. There is free 'food', which I will get to shortly, as well as free drinks. In a way.
So what does all this FREE stuff attract on a cold Monday morning? Old people. Lots of old people. I am pretty darn sure that out of all the people that filed on that ship (It was not crowded, BTW) I was the youngest person on there. The rest of the people ranged from retirees to what appeared to be freshly dug up corpses.
Maneuvering on a gently swaying ship filled with old people is an experience in itself. There are several classes of obstructions. There is the simply slow and old, there is the cane-users who are trying to adjust to the gentle dips and bobs of the boat, there is the confused, who stand around gaping in that way that only elderly people can do, looking for a lost husband or wondering what deck they had suddenly found themselves upon, and then there are the real whacked out ones who have just returned form a brief brain trip to 1972 and are wondering where the hell they are.
The main entertainment on these cruises is of course gambling. Slot machines line most available spaces. I am not a gambler. Games of chance are, in my mind, for suckers. Casinos get rich because people lose money. Sure, once in a blue moon some lucky sap will hit the jackpot. But it won't be me. That is a lot I have accepted in life. So, for me, dropping a couple of quarters into a machine, hitting a button to watch the pretty things spin, and then kissing my quarters goodbye has zero appeal to me. I probably get more game satisfaction out of dropping a quarter into the tank of stagnant blue water at the local Taco Bell in hopes of wining a free burrito than I do with slot machines.
When I had left my house that morning I had grabbed a handful of quarters out of my change jar. About 15-20 bucks worth. I sat and fed them into a slot machine, trying to milk some sort of fun out of it. Fifteen minutes later my stash of quarters was empty and I was bored to death.
I wandered down to check out the Buffet. There were two of them. I know this because every twenty minutes or so I would run into my mother who would screech "DID YOU GET SOMETHING TO EAT? THERE'S TWO BUFFETS YOU KNOW!'. In all honesty the buffet was not too bad. There was nothing there you could call a meal, but there was snacking food. Chips and pretzels and crackers and cheese squares and bits of fresh veggies. There were also 'sandwiches' white bread rolls with a single slice of bologna between them. And a huge pile of hard-boiled eggs. I filled up a plate with cheese and other rubbish and made my meal out of it.
Within an hour of departing I was bored out of my skull. I could go outside to the ocean and read my book (which I thank the heavens I brought) but it was pretty cold and windy out there. On top of that, every square inch of the boat is covered in elevator music. Some of it was live, broadcasted by a single performer off in a corner and piped out to an entire deck.
After a while, I decided to drink. Drinks are supposed to be 'free' if you are perched in front of a slot machine, but the reality is that the waitress would only make her way over to you every thirty or forty minutes. There were several bars. Drink prices were about what you would expect downtown on a Saturday night.
I am not a morning drinker. For me drinking usually does not commence until the sun has gone down. Or I have gotten off of work. Whichever was sooner. But busting out the vodka at 11 in the morning has no appeal to me. Nonetheless once noon rolled around and I was sick to death of wandering aimlessly on a boat full of wizened geezers, I wanted to get drunk. I wanted them to become a blur. Oddly enough, I could not achieve it. I had a bloody marry, followed by at least three rums and cokes, and then a couple of long island ice teas. For whatever reason, I could not even catch a buzz. I do not know if their drinks were weak, or if it was all the old people sucking the vibrant force of youth out of me, but the drinks had no effect. All I got was a little sleepy.
I finally crawled into a corner and quietly snoozed off. I wanted to snooze the rest of the trip, but my mother ended up jabbing me awake less than an hour later to ask if I had gotten anything to eat, and did I know there were TWO buffets? Today is the day that I realized my folks have passed middle age and are officially old people.
I ended up having to move around a bit. If you stay in one place for long, eventually an old person will sidle up to you and try to start talking to you. It's what they do. Whenever I saw a creaking sidle taking place, I would whisk out of my chair and zip up or down to a different level. There were both escalators and stairs there. The stairs were my exclusive domain because no old person uses stairs when there's an escalator.
Finally I jammed myself into a quiet corner and tried to spend the rest of the trip reading my book. This only lasted for a while because the snug lounge I was in suddenly became alive with the shuffling bodies of old people as they came in to watch the 'show' which consisted of a fifty-ish woman in a poodle skirt (is there a sadder sight?) singing songs with a small band. It was hell. Some of you may think I am overreacting, however I posted a little video clip that you can watch on youtube. You decide.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAJTFIqQz0U
Eventually it all ended and I got to come home. I was annoyed because when I asked my mother how long it was, and she said four hours, I thought it would only take up half the day. However I did not end up getting home until around six at night.
So, that was how I spent one of my few precious vacation days. You would have to drag me back on a free casino cruise at gunpoint.
2026 Update
Dialing the time machine to a cold Monday in November 2006, when Ed boarded a floating bingo hall and paid twenty bucks to be bored senseless.
Behold, a world where ‘free’ meant a boat full of slot machines and two buffets of cheese squares, and the biggest entertainment crisis was a poodle skirt singer. Look at everything that has curdled since. Back then, Ed carried a handful of physical quarters and had to press his own buttons; now the casino lives in his phone and the house still wins, except the waitress never comes at all. He filmed his misery on a little video camera and uploaded it to a baby YouTube; now every soul on that boat would be live-streaming their grievances straight into the void. The old folks shuffling around without staring into glowing rectangles? Unimaginable. The ‘free’ food that was actually just sad white bread and bologna? We have rebuilt that same disappointment into a thousand monthly subscriptions, each promising a buffet and delivering a hard-boiled egg. Ed snoozed in a corner to escape his mother and the two buffets. Today he would simply doomscroll until the boat docked, still annoyed, still uncaffeinated, still being texted photos of the second buffet.
“2006 Ed, did you truly believe posting that YouTube clip of the poodle-skirt singer would win the argument, or were you just hoping your mother would somehow see it and finally stop mentioning the second buffet?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you got me there. I think I knew deep down that posting that clip of some old poodle-skirt singer wasn't gonna win any arguments. It was more like throwing a live cat onto the table in hopes everybody forgets the original fight. I mean, my mother has the memory of a steel trap when it comes to buffets, so no YouTube clip was ever going to erase the second one. But there was a tiny part of me that thought, hey, if she sees some old-timey gal warbling about milkshakes, maybe she'll pause, get wistful about her own youth, and then forget to squeak "DID YOU GET SOMETHING TO EAT?" for a solid five minutes. Spoiler: it didn't work. She just squinted at the screen, said "That's nice, dear," and then asked if I knew there were TWO buffets. Egads. You can't beat that with a stick.
