Foreboding Ashore

Back?

Good. I left the service of QE2 on March 30, 2008, at the Port of Los Angeles, underneath the Vincent Thomas Bridge, a few hundred feet from where my career as a cruise ship musician was started in the early eighties. That doesn't mean to imply that getting off the ship was easy. Due to the incredible incompetence of one shipmate in particular in the crew office, the guys in the Princess entertainment office did not receive my request for an early out when we were as close to LA as Osaka.

I had to refile the form and more or less walk it through the stations of the cross. While I never served in the military, this is the kind of situation I thought only a branch of the armed services could botch this badly. One of the things I had to do in order to get this thing off the dime was to actually appear before this individual in the Crew Office. He was argumentative and defensive, aside from the general propensity toward advanced ignorance. And, he had a pronounced speech impediment, which caused him in his fury to ask, when I told him I had a plane ticket for Austin and would be leaving whether they had a replacement for me or not, "Are you fretening me?" Indeed I was not. I was just informing him, in the interest of advancing the cause. Fretening was the furthest thing from my mind.

No matter. Once the Princess office had the paperwork in hand it was a small matter to plug in a replacement for me. Los Angeles is a city noted for its out-of-work saxophonists and its international airport, so either bringing in someone local or flying someone in so from faraway places with strange sounding names is not trivial, but easy.



When we were in Hawaii, I was within range of my Sprint phone for the first time, so I arranged to have 2 parties pick me up: Steve, my trombonist buddy who I've been playing with since junior high or whatever it's called nowadays, and the family of my sister Cindy--Joe, her husband, a native of the recently-visited Kingdom of Tonga, and their son, Evan, who had been signed to play football for Southern Methodist University while I was gone. My thinking in the matter was that if I had two cars coming to collect me and bring me up to LAX, one would certainly show. (As it turned out, both vehicles showed up at very much the same time.)

The formalities for getting off the ship took two hours. My goodbye collection of photographs was taken entirely in the Staff Mess, where we tended to congregate whenever there were great waits in time to be tolerated. Of course, we had just cleared customs four days before in Hawaii. but no matter. We're fighting terrorism, and that means plenty of waiting around when it comes to cruise ships.

Finally we loaded up and headed out. Steve showed up in his early seventies Porsche 911, and my sister's family, not to be outdone, rolled in in a very fancy Mercedes Benz.

From the time we were in Singapore I was coughing. It was really nothing new, as the QE2 has a 40-year-old ventilation system. We all tended to pick up upper respiratory infections, a common ailment among the musicians on any ship, more so on the venerable QE2.

Thinking nothing of it, and not wanting to complicate my exit, I chose not to trouble the ship's doctor, but rather thought I'd be better off bringing my cough to my doctor in Austin. Trouble was, I had just a couple days in in Austin before heading to Atlantic City for a three-week gig at Harrah's, in the big showroom, playing the English ratpack show.

Jan and I only had a day and a half together before she jetted off to look after her folks in Alabama, who are in their nineties. The folks desperately need Jan to show up and do what she does best: organize.

As soon as she left, I started feeling bad. Sleep became difficult. But what could I do? I had to catch a plane the next day for Philadelphia, and then a limo--A LIMO--to Atlantic City. Three weeks work was nothing to sneeze at, and that was the deal I made with myself: the reason I left QE2 early was that I had booked these three weeks, to compensate for the lost wages.

My health, well, I'd take care of that when I got back to Austin. In the middle of the three weeks in Jersey, Jan flew out for a visit. I was short-winded, unable to sleep through the night, but I was really digging the gig. The headliners were American, the MD a very swinging Brit, and the remainder of the band was cats from New York City. I was playing alto, doing my best to do an authentic 1950's Marshal Royal lead sound. The trouble was getting from the bus to the venue was a bit of a struggle.

What I did not know was that my heart and lungs were filling with fluid, a process that must have started aboard QE2 with my presumptive upper respiratory infection. I was unable to walk distances or to sleep through the night because I was on the verge of Congestive Heart Failure.

And So I Went to Sea

I sought cruise ship work because there were fewer gigs going on, because my day gig had fallen apart, and because, not being a fool, I like the idea of knowing where my next meal was coming from, and the one after that. The kids had moved out of our house--two of them for Jan and two for me. I don't drive cars when I'm on ships. I don't see my wife usually, or our dogs either. 

Anyway, I started to get itchy for living in a closet-sized room, connected with the music office at Princess Cruises, and off I went to the Caribbean (briefly), through the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific Coast to Alaska, where I spent the summer of 2005, one of the hottest on record in the town I live in, Austin, Texas.

I worked 4 months on the Dawn Princess, treading the waters between Vancouver, a wonderful city with more to do than I had imagined, and Whittier, Alaska, a town with two bars and that's it. In between we called at Ketchican, Juneau, and Skagway, and then into the frigid waters of Glacier National Park and College Fjord. The gig was mostly easy. We backed the acts. Four horns, three rhythm. The quality of the acts and of their charts was enormously variable, but we were getting good money to play music in one of the more beautiful settings on the planet. If I complained, I don't remember it.

Well, there were little inconveniences, like the guards who frisked us in Whittier, like we were going to blow the ship up or something. But that was minor, the usual Security post -9/11 theatre crapola.

I did my four months, came back and decided to do some more as soon as I could. So they sent me off to the Caribbean and the Baltic and the Caribbean again. I loved the Baltic, tolerated the merely tolerated the Caribbean.  The bands were, well, interesting. There was usually a young tenor player who thought that life began with John Coltrane, not always though. Attitude means everything, just like it did when I was on the road with bands, living on buses. The pressure cooker nature of the gig, and having to face the same personalities and faces every day, just make it impossible for someone with a less than positive way of viewing the surroundings was just asking for it, and the cohesion of the band suffered in the process. 

The hardest part of leaving home is leaving home, of course. My kids were out on their own and doing pretty well. That left my spouse and the dogs to fend for themselves. Jan and the dogs gave me special permission to see what it was like out there. 

I had worked on cruise ships twenty years before, when I lived in Los Angeles. Cruise ships were relatively new then, and the cruise line I worked on was a real corker. The Azure Seas was the ship, and she went from LA Harbor all the way to Ensenada, twice a week. If it sounds like a grind, it was. Back then, in the early eighties, the only way that middle-class folks could gamble was to drive to Las Vegas, or to book a 3-day or 4-day cruise on the Azure Seas. We'd clear the Vincent Thomas Bridge and, after about an hour and a half, the casino would open. 

I liked the gig, and I found enough to do on the ship to keep away from the usual temptations musicians fall prey to. (Unfortunately, my cabinmate was not so lucky. After I had left, he fell hard for one of the dancers, who didn't reciprocate, and in one final effort to change her mind, immolated himself on her suburban front lawn.)

That's why, after a I'd taken 9 months off (there's something you can't do in most jobs) I emailed the guy who booked me at Princess Cruises. He emailed me back several options on Princess' ships, but the thing that caught my eye was the historic last cruises of the venerable Queen Elizabeth 2. It was an unusual offer in several ways. On Princess, all my work was done as a showband musician, an all-purpose category that involves backing the acts, playing dance sets, and occasional forays into the Atrium, the territory of the solo pianists and guitarists. The work involves flyshit reading, a lot of doubling and a knowledge of musical styles that date back some years. On QE2, I would be the only saxophone player in a dance orchestra in the Queens Room (no hyphens please), whose bandstand served the largest dance floor at sea.

Even though they needed the spot filled in 2 short weeks, I went for it, and for the first time agreed to a contract of longer than 4 months. I'd be on QE2 for 6 months so I could do the last World Cruise. But I had a major hurdle to get across. I had to obtain a Norwegian Seamans Medical Certificate. The Cunard folks in England gave me no option but to go through a doctor in Houston, a hundred fifty miles from my house. The physical exam was extensive, and included a clean EKG. I was already taking beta blockers for marginally high blood pressure, which popped up when I was performing miracles for my last employer. 

I have another blog, written while I was on QE2, that chronicles in reverse order most of that voyage. It's at this link that the narrative starts:

Click Here

By the narrowest of margins I got all my documentation together, tidied up my gig situation and kissed my wife goodbye at the Austin airport for a thrilling hop to Chicago Midway, followed by an even more thrilling ride to Heathrow, perhaps the two most insane airports on the face of the earth. In the process, I managed to lose my medical certificate and my joining papers. But I got my ass there.

It all started . . .

This blog is being written so that I can have one more chance of figuring out how it came to this. How I suffered a heart attach of the sort that kills three out of four men of a certain age. How cardiology has advanced since 1967, when my father died. How I lived, and, with the addition of an Implanted Cardiac Device, I'll probably keep on going for a decade or two, as long as I don't step in the path of an oncoming bus.  

Genetic presdisposition is the #1 cardiac risk factor. If you're like me and one near relative--in my case, my father, died of sudden cardiac arrest at the age of 40, you ought to watch for the other factors and not let them into your life. 

That means smoking (no problem there, as I always looked at the tobacco companies as being responsible for my father's early exit), a sedentary life (guilty, after a certain point anyway), corpulence (again, guilty), and generally leading a stressful life, which I am guilty of only sometimes. 

So here's my story.