What’s behind all those “crew only” doors?

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Last night I was walking down the A1A, the navy blue river of buzzing crew business that runs aft to stern on deck four. Carrying my swimsuit in my tote under the bright florescence, avoiding eye contact with housekeeping and tired food service staff amidst a sea of conversation in Tagalog, Afrikaans and Croatian.

It’s the entertainment department spa night and I don’t want to rub it in. After finishing my first double show, I’m looking forward to getting into this sacred space after midnight with all the dancers and acrobats to sweat out the stress of moving day in the sauna and freeze away the aching pain in my lower back in the cold plunge.

My show partner TJ and I finally moved into our crew cabins. It was a long day of hauling around suitcases and tracking down someone to unlock our doors but we made it. There is a whole city down here and having the safety of your own room is absolutely key to peace of mind.

This hidden city includes a crew office, medical center, mess hall, laundry room, dressing rooms, gyms, bars, smoking room, garbage room, a botanical closet for the horticulturalist and even a weapons closet. Not to mention all the food storage rooms and freezers, the engine control room, the ballast tanks, water desalination center and all the other places I have never set foot in my life (I did get invited to a couple secret parties in the engineer’s workshop a couple times but you didn’t hear that from me).

Amidst all this, my cabin is my sanctuary. I decorate it the second I get inside. For me decorating means using magnets to cover all of the hospitalesque white walls with huge colorful scarves creating a kind of bohemian wall paper. I have a large room (relatively speaking), a full sized bed, two portholes, closets, a desk and my very own bathroom. This sounds luxurious (and for ship life, it really is) but don’t get it twisted, we’re talking about a room that the Kardashians would consider the size of a very small walk in closet.

My most valuable perk are the portholes. Living by the movement of the sun and waking to natural light is essential for my mental health and for it I am grateful. Few crew have them.

All operational crew areas are clean and sterile with uniform blue floors and shiny white walls. These arteries of the ship run absolutely everywhere, behind every wall, next to every staircase. It’s overwhelming and confusing at first, but you learn your way around quickly. Discovering the little shortcuts and hidden doors is an important hack to survival. Knowing how to slip through sailor areas because you aren’t wearing the right kind of shoes for the A1A or cutting across that crew stairwell to get to the accessible bathroom in the balcony of the nightclub can save a lot of time and energy. It helps to follow around a seasoned seafarer for your first few weeks to learn the ropes.

Your peers are the lifeblood of your survival, without them you might as well be adrift at sea screaming for Wilson like Tom Hanks. I could do a whole post about social life below decks, and maybe I will, but for now here’s a brief overview.

Let me start by saying that I am an anomaly. I’m 40, which makes me an outlier within entertainment where most of the performers are fresh out of college. They like to hang out in big groups and go together to beach clubs and restaurants on land and in gaggles to crew bar on emo night. People plan movie nights and watch parties and dance classes.

There are so many group chats.

Having friends and a social support network is important for morale. I participate in this lifestyle sparingly. I tend to collect 2-3 very close friends who are my ride or dies. These are the people I spend time with when I am not sleeping late or reading quietly on deck 7.

Crew members usually form bonds with those they can relate easiest to, those from the same country or who work in the same department. Smokers end up being friends with smokers, dancers with dancers and drinkers… get fired. Romantic bonds build quickly and intensely and blow up just as fast. More on that later.

The biggest side effect working on a ship has had on my life and the hardest to explain to those who don’t do it is the unbreakable change in my perception of time. I told myself I would do one contract. “One and Done” she said. And somehow three years have gone by and I’m still here.

My friend Megs, a ship general manager and career seafarer explained it to me once. She said “Just wait, before you know it we’ll be sitting right back here eating pizza in my cabin and it will feel like we never left”. She was right, it’s like that every time.

I go home and I relearn how to live like a normal person, I buy my own groceries and cook my own meals, I snuggle my cat and hustle for gigs, I trudge up and down the subway steps in the snow and feel superior for having lived in NYC for my entire adult life.

Then BOOP suddenly I’m back in my crew cabin staring at the gold Paloma Picasso scarf I use to cover my TV and wonder which port is just outside my window. I’m stuck on this merry-go-round now and I don’t know how to get off. I’ve started longing for it when I’m home, the quiet moments to write and read and lift weights for free while exploring places like New Zealand, Namibia, Montenegro and Martinique.

While the Sailors sit by the pool getting hammered on piña coladas and achieving their perfect 2nd degree sunburns, thousands of people are below them shuffling up and down hallways pushing carts full of wet towels and cold ice and hot pappardelle ragu.

While Susan and Derek are getting that sunset selfie in the window of the steakhouse, Althea and Gabriel are washing dishes and shoving dry waste into the incinerator.

Since mom and dad left the kids at home, they’re fucking on the balcony for an audience of fishes while the contortionist just pulled a muscle in his scapula and the entertainment director has to cancel the 10pm show.

It’s two worlds on top of each other. Stranger Things has nothing on us.

I recently went to visit a friend on their ship contract and I spent nine days as a sailor in my own cabin on deck nine. I will never do it again. I did not enjoy the experience of being on a ship without being crew. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was supposed to be working, that I was part of the upside down instead of one of the rubes. I was constantly annoyed that I couldn’t access the crew spaces I’m used to being able to hide away inside. The crew lifestyle has become normalized for me and I don’t want to be onboard unless I’m being paid to be there.

I’ve tricked you all into thinking this is going to be a blog about working on a cruise ship, this post in particular was the amuse bouche. I hope I’ve lured you into a false sense of security because really soon I’m going to hit you with the heart wrenching existential crisis of it all. See you soon.

*my company refers to passengers as “sailors”