FRESH YARN presents: Destination Nowhere ... by Jason Kordelos

FRESH YARN presents:

Destination Nowhere
By Jason Kordelos

I always fantasized about going on an exotic sea cruise to Puerto Rico or San Tropez or the Greek Islands. A gorgeous ship filled with gorgeous people drinking gorgeous champagne, and me, in the middle of it all, being adored and caressed by salt water-scented sunshine.

This, however, was not that cruise.

On September 11th my best friend Marian lost her firefighter husband, Dave Fontana. When I learned that Dave had gone to the World Trade Center I ran fifteen blocks from my place to Marian's in a frantically thrown together outfit that I feared would be my last (the United States was under attack, after all). The result: sweats, winter coat, running shoes and ski hat. It was nearly 80 degrees that day. In my trembling, sweaty hands I clutched my cell phone, my ATM card and my worn Reach toothbrush.

From Marian's tiny brownstone apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, we watched the television as the second tower buckled and collapsed, crushing beneath it her high school sweetheart, and the future she'd been building with him. Like so many others, Marian was left alone to raise a young child, a five-year-old dynamo named by his Irish firefighter dad -- Aidan. The Gallic translation: "Little Fire."

Oh, yes, and the day, September 11th, also happened to be Marian and Dave's eighth wedding anniversary.

A week later I quit my job, a hideous waiter position that was supposed to support my acting career, but had only succeeded in supporting my hatred for all people who dine out. I decided to take care of Marian and Aidan. She said it was unnecessary. I said, "It's what anyone would do." She said no, it wasn't. I said, "Well, then, it's what Susan Sarandon would do." She laughed and it was agreed.

What I didn't tell Marian was what her hippie neighbor Dorothy said to me on September 12th. When she dropped off a pot of squash and lavender soup, she recognized my name. "Jason," she said, "you know just last month Dave told me the darndest thing. He said he felt good knowing that if anything bad happened to him, that you would be there for Marian." And in a whirl of patchouli oil and hand-dyed chenille scarves she was gone, leaving me stunned that, among other things, anyone still used the word "darndest."

While once just Marian's "Gay Best Friend," now she spoke about me to all the people in her life -- to the firefighters, the widows and the cousins -- as her new "Gay Husband." "Like Liza and David Gest," I'd say. And despite the tragic circumstances, our makeshift family worked. I felt a satisfaction in caring for Marian and Aidan like I had never experienced. Sure there's the revival of Oklahoma! and Barney's Warehouse Sale, but neither one of those ever hugged me at the end of story time.

And then came this cruise. Immediately after the 11th, donations of every kind poured into Marian's life: money, poems, food, letters, prayers and trips all over the world. When Royal Caribbean generously offered a private cruise to all the 343 firefighter families who lost loved ones, Marian asked me if I was interested in going with her and Aidan. As the Gay Husband, I envisioned a kind of gay family vacation -- sort of Will and Grace meets Love Boat meets Six Feet Under. I declared, "Absolutely!" I even agreed to make all the arrangements.

The next day, I called Royal Caribbean and spoke to a surly woman, a Ms. Shapiro. By the sound of her voice, I was confident she had chain-smoked menthol 100's since Kindergarten.

"Where's the ship going?" I asked.

"Nowhere," she said, hacking.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean nowhere," she hacked again.

"Well, it must go to Puerto Rico or Acapulco or somewhere."

"No," she said, "it goes nowhere."

"What, does the ship just stay in port?"

"No it goes out to sea," she said, then hacked once more.

"Where?" I asked.

"Nowhere."

This woman sounded as if she was reciting lines from an Ionesco play, poorly and with stage four lung cancer.

"I'm sorry," I said, "I'm just not getting this -- the ship has got to have a destination."

"Well, yeah," she answered, "it leaves New York harbor, it floats out to sea and then it floats back. Two nights. We're calling it a 'Cruise To Nowhere'."

I paused and waited for Rod Sterling to begin his voiceover. She hacked. "So let me get this right," I continued, "you're sending a ship full of widows and their grief-stricken, terrorized families onto something called a 'Cruise To Nowhere'?!"

"Yup."

Wonderful. I should have known then that this cruise had the potential to sink me.

Cruise day arrived as did Marian, Aidan and I at Manhattan's Pier 58. It was a splendid day for a sea outing with 343 widows: 35 degrees, windy and sleeting. The ship, called "The Adventure of the Sea," was so enormous it seemed like a joke. (Had we learned nothing from Leo and Kate's ill-fated nautical romance?) Eight blocks long and fourteen stories tall, there was no doubt that the ship was visible from space.

The Adventure of the Sea boasted, among other things, three pools, seven dining rooms, a rock climbing wall, three theatres, a casino, a shopping mall and its very own ice skating rink. It employed all of South America and most of Queens. Also in line to board were 5,000 other people. Apparently the trip had been offered to the entire New York Fire Department and they all seemed to have accepted, which was a wonderful thing for them. Not me. Widows I can handle. Macho, emotionally fragile firefighters in Jacuzzis, not so much.

Still, I, the Gay Husband, waited in line with the other men for three excruciating hours, cursed with low blood sugar and chapped lips. There is little worse for a gay man than chapped lips except, of course, for being in line with thousands of men who use the word "fag" like cheap toilet paper.

Finally, with boarding passes between my cracked lips, I dragged our four stuffed suitcases up the six-story ramp. It was at this point, I believe, that I was knocked over by a pack of squealing men in spandex. In a cloud of designer cologne, the all-male Ice Capades dance team trampled me. I was left splayed like gay roadkill. As I rose to my feet, from the pockets of my brand new Dolce and Gabbana puffy white ski jacket fell Aidan's Star Wars action figures. Screaming, he ran up to me and accidentally squirted me with his Verry Berry Juice box. All over my brand new Dolce and Gabbana puffy white ski jacket. Tears of frustration welled up as I tried desperately to keep it all together: my emotions, my hair, my outfit. Aidan then hit me because "Queen Amidala got all messed up!!" "Not the only queen," I thought.

At last we boarded the ship. The glorious ship! The interior looked as though it had exploded out from the asses of Siegfried and Roy: murals of swirling jungles and glittery galaxies, teams of bouncing European acrobats, barber shop quartets, two-story chandeliers, and neon, and jazz hands, and American flags everywhere, and metallic everything, and kids screaming, and widows crying and firefighters guzzling beer. My very tasteful gay male aesthetic began to have a sort of panic attack amidst this heterosexual theme park. So I just chanted the mantra I had chanted since the beginning of all of this, "This is about Marian, not me. This is about Marian, not me."

I took a deep, calming breath and we set sail. To nowhere. And if you're wondering just how long it takes to sail to nowhere, the answer is about 18 hours. Which is distressing because it's taken me over 35 years.

Devastated by the fact that there was no tan to be had on the November seas of the Atlantic, I rallied for Marian as best as I could. She introduced me to the firefighters as her Gay Husband. I curtsied politely. But no one got it. No one got me. No one got that I hadn't been around another gay man for three months because I'd been putting Aidan to bed, because I'd been cooking and cleaning, because I'd been giving Marian foot massages like her husband used to, because I'd been providing her with support, sympathy and sleeping pills. And I looked around and saw that I was the only Gay Husband on board. I was the only gay anything. And what began to come into focus was that, surprisingly, there wasn't a high demand for a Gay Husband in the world of a wife of a firefighter. Which is odd because, with all due respect to the wives of firefighters, these women could really benefit from our help. Really. Just that first night I offered my services to a chubby widow, a Catherine Herrera of Staten Island. We were chatting over Red Bull Mai Tais when I suggested, "You know, Cathy, you're really much too pretty to be wearing THAT much lip liner. Just soften it. It looks like you've been giving head to a car exhaust."

Well, I could tell by the tears that she didn't care for my humor. Back in Brooklyn I made sense in Marian's life but on this ship I was as useful as roller skates on a quadriplegic.

The second night started off even worse. Marian and I left Aidan with another mom and dined in the Grand Ballroom. Admittedly, it was nice to see that Barbie's interior decorator was still working; glass elevators and bubbles always bring a space together. During our crab bisque the orchestra played Marian and Dave's wedding song, "At Last," and like a house of cards, Marian's face fell. We decided to take a stroll on the deck. The cold air outside was playful and distracting. I gave Marian my jacket. We rested our elbows on the rail and gazed at the winter moon glowing over the black waters. The romance of the setting was embarrassingly obvious and I saw that Marian was about to cry again. I had now learned to gauge her emotional moods like a seismologist reads a Richter scale. So I searched for something funny to say. "It's like our gay honeymoon." She forced a giggle and then went away in her mind to a place even I couldn't get to. I stared ahead into our destination, nowhere. And for the first time I began to miss my old life, my old self-obsessed, narcissistic, no room-for-anyone-else-but-me kind of life filled with my own depressing issues of self-hate, loneliness and tanorexia. Clearly we should have both been there having that moment, but with different people. Her with her husband, Dave, and me with -- I don't know, the all-male Ice Capades dance team. And I started to wonder, and maybe it was selfish, but I wondered whether this was all that my life was going to be now? Was I just a gay man married to this wonderful yet kind of high-maintenance woman? Was this what it's like for Star Jones and Al Reynolds?

And then, like a gift from the gods, Marian heard this beat, a disco beat. Directly above us was a disco and, it sounds so queer, but Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer's "Enough is Enough" started playing. The 70's anthem infected Marian. She squealed, "Let's dance."

"I don't really," I said.

She grabbed my tie and we were off.

The disco was called "Jesters" and it was booming, filled with medieval "artifacts": stone walls, gargoyles, stained glass windows, axes, dripping candles and dry ice. Nothing says disco quite like the Crusades. Marian immediately began dancing while I went at it with a pouty, half-assed Jewish wedding dance step, uncomfortable in this disco filled with heterosexuals, draft beer and Christian instruments of torture. I was about to flee when I heard the pitter-patter of Patti Labelle's "Lady Marmalade" begin. This was my song. This was the song that was playing when I came out to my best girlfriend, Natasha, 20 years ago. I fell into its gay disco trance, a trance that transformed those Staten Island widows into drag queens, and Jesters into the Roxy. I was powerless to Patti and took to the dance floor like Helen Keller to a plate of cake. Across from Marian I grooved and gyrated and twirled as months of despair and sadness dripped off us -- in the middle of this dance floor in the middle of this ship in the middle of fucking nowhere. And suddenly it no longer mattered where we were or what kind of cruise it was because my best friend Marian and I were dancing, we were having a good time, we were laughing and she was smiling and sweating and we were mouthing those immortal lyrics, "Gitchy-gitchy-ya-ay da-da!!" And for a moment it felt like nothing had changed, that in the words of Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive."

And then who should spill out onto the dance floor but the entire all male Ice Capades Dance team. Nine men in make-up and sparkly costumes. I was stunned because I hadn't spoken to another homosexual for three months. I observed them curiously; so intrigued by their movement and pageantry. I was in conflict -- I wanted to dance with the Ice Capades dancers, but I was dancing with Marian. Ice Capades, Marian, Ice Capades, Marian. The music was blaring and she saw my longing and motioned to me with her hands as if to say "Go Jason. Go. Be with your people." And so I did. I introduced myself to the skaters as a Gay Husband and one of them, wearing a silver headdress, said to me "Like Liza and David!" And we all laughed and I felt fantastic until I looked over my shoulder and saw Marian alone at the bar, sipping a watery Cosmo and wiping her watery eyes with a tattered cocktail napkin. I began to walk over when this fire captain -- this handsome fire captain -- approached her with a fresh drink. She blushed. And that blush punched my gut. "Of course," I realized, "Of course, eventually I'm going to be replaced."

There was a high-pitched "hoot" behind me because a Cher song had come on and recharged the Ice Capades dancers. And the one with the silver headdress asked me if I wanted to dance. I looked at him and then I looked at Marian. I looked at him; I looked up at his headdress. I mean, come on, he was wearing a silver headdress. So I said, "Sure."