Incompetent Abroad: The Departure

So there we were, barreling up the New Jersey Turnpike toward Brooklyn Harbor in a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car and reaching speeds that left ripples in the paint jobs of the cars we blew past.  Roger and David dozed shoulder to shoulder in the back seat like bobble-head dolls, while I rode “shotgun,” my knees drawn up to my chest and my removable teeth clenched in terror at the prospect of colliding with another vehicle and being shattered into atoms.  Our destination was the Queen Mary 2, on which we three brothers and University of Charleston alums had booked passage to Southampton, England. If we were not there at the precise time designated, Roger warned us, we would be left standing on the dock, a bitter disappointment to the family and friends who had earlier bade us farewell with such obvious signs of relief.

Guided by a GPS device that appeared to have been calibrated in Mogadishu, our driver, Calvin, steered us into several dead-ends and at least two ethnic street festivals before we spotted the mammoth vessel moored just beyond a long row of sheds and warehouses.  Viewed from that perspective, the QM2 looked like a condo with portholes. We wheezed our thanks to Calvin in lieu of a tip, scrambled from the Lincoln and hurled our suitcases to the uniformed attendants. 

Inside the aptly named terminal, we were confronted by a scene so chilling my goose bumps took up permanent residence.  There before us milled a throng of creatures as old, infirm and generally confused as we were. For a moment, I wondered if America had rounded up its entire Medicare population and was shipping it en masse to England’s more charitable shores.  So much for my dreams of a shipboard romance.

Over the next hour, we ancient mariners trudged in a serpentine line from station to station, displaying our sweat-soaked passports, filling out medical forms that relieved our host of all conceivable liabilities and squeezing through machines that calculated our net worth and the approximate number of hours on board it would take to deplete it.  All that done, we stepped onto an escalator and ascended to the main deck of the fabled craft.   

Barely had we settled into our cabin and started unpacking when an authoritative voice boomed out over the ship’s loudspeaker summoning all passengers on deck for lifeboat instructions.  In my haste to comply, I inadvertently snatched a child’s life preserver from the closet and ran upstairs dragging it behind me. As I struggled unsuccessfully to strap on the tiny, orange-colored contraption, it appeared that I was being garroted by an enraged lobster.  Let me just say at this point that I bear no ill will toward the shipmates who roared with laughter at my discomfort, but if fate should someday afflict them all with painful boils, I will not be inconsolable.