Forebodings 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.