The scene at the dockside the next morning was predictably strange, but not quite what the Daily News would have led one to imagine. Not that Sean or Andrea or anyone else in their party could focus on it terribly well. They had managed to spend the entire night going from apartment to apartment-John's, Andrea's, Joanna's-concocting or falling into orgies, mini or maxi, at each location, and furthermore rendering themselves ineffective by means of smoking approximately twenty joints and sixteen pipefuls of assorted varieties of marijuana: ineffective and moreover hungry; and also thirsty; and generally spacey. Now, having stopped their two-cab caravan at Nathan's in Times Square to pick up hot dogs, orange juice, beer and jelly doughnuts for breakfast, they arrived at Pier 52.
"That's it!" Virginia cried, pointing to an immaculate white cruise-ship with Walt Disney balloons and bunches of bananas festooning the rigging. It was seven-thirty and embarkation was well underway.
"No kidding," Sean sighed, a little bit weary with Virginia's enthusiastic obviousness. "Is that why it has the words 'True Enlightenment' painted in day-glo psychedelic letters on the bow?"
"Gee, it's pretty big," Andrea observed. "How long would you say it was?"
"Lots bigger than a row boat and lots smaller than the Queen Elizabeth. How the hell should I know? Three-fifty? Four hundred? Four-fifty? Inches? Feet? Pounds? Decibels? Fuck, I can't even see any more, let alone think. Look at this goddamned pandemonium." Their cab eased to a halt at a crowded curb. Sean continued to mumble. "Pandemonium! Assengers pariving, bonis hlairing, sheople pouting, dorters propping luggage all over the place. We'll be fucky if we let get alone."
Andrea swung the cab door open.
"Excuse me, Miss!" A camera flash exploded in her face.
"Fameras clashing, wots of lierdoes…" Sean got out the other side and went to the trunk for their luggage.
A half dozen reporters descended on Andrea like vultures after a hot piece of carrion, pencils wiggling eagerly above efficient little pads, jaws greased up. "Is it true that the Guru led a procession down to a Village club where you were singing last night and offered you a fabulous sum of money to replace Lawrence Welk as his entertainer?"
Andrea blinked at them. "You call three grand fabulous? You do and you got the story right."
"Three thousand dollars? Was that the figure? Total?"
"No. There wasn't any figure. The figure was an illusion. That was the money. Three thousand. Yes." Andrea didn't know whether Sean had been talking like the Guru and she was talking like him talking like the Guru, or whether she was just talking like the Guru directly, or whether Sean was talking like her talking like the Guru only he'd started it, or…
She saw the reporters scribbling "$3,000" down on their pads in big block letters. The older ones underlined it twice and the younger ones three or four times.
"And you are Andrea Bentham, correct?"
"A-n-d-r-e-a B-e-n-t-h-a-m. Correct, last I looked. You will notice the subtleties of its pronunciation. If your could pronounce it correctly you would gain true enlightenment."
"I'll try to avoid it," one of the young ones promised, casting a doubtful eye on the ship. Suddenly Andrea was deluged with questions.
"How old are you, Miss Bentham?"
"Where are you from?"
"How long have you been performing?"
"Have you cut any records?"
"Is it true that all the Guru's followers you saw last night were indecently exposed young ladies?"
"Have you ever done strip-tease?"
"Do you believe in free love?"
Andrea frowned reprovingly at them. "Now how can I possibly answer when you all just keep talking?"
Joe Lee came up beside her. "They don't need answers. They just write up each others' questions. Don't you know anything about reporters?"
The jabbering ceased. Andrea took a deep breath. "I'm twenty-six, I'm from Madison, Wisconsin, I've been performing for two years, I haven't cut any records yet, not as I would define indecent, no, and I've never paid for love in my life. Any more questions?"
"Does your mother know you're going?"
"For all I know my mother's going."
Andrea bit her lip. That had been a stupid thing to say.
Sean had got their luggage into the hands of a porter and was standing at the bottom of the loading ramp waving to her to come. But the reporters didn't give her a chance.
"Do you mean your mother would go on a cruise like this?"
"Who is your mother?"
"Where does she live?"
"Does she believe in free love?"
"What was your childhood like?"
Andrea could see it now. Juicy headlines like "26 Year Old Singer Goes on Sex Cruise With Mother" were running through the reporters' heads and sure as hell they'd go through the Benthams in the Madison phone directory and get hold of her mother to check it out. She thought for a second. "I'll take these in reverse order. As a child I was miserably over-protected by excessively permissive parents, my mother never paid for love in her life either, she lives in a soap opera in Canarsie, she's the heroin, and she'd go on a cruise like this because she's going. She's over there." She pointed to a fat lady of fifty or so getting out of a cab ass-first who presented the world with a beautiful picture of what happens when you get your garters crossed. "Any more questions?"
"No!"
The throng raced off to besiege the poor lady. Andrea grabbed Joe and they got lost in the crowd pushing its way up the ramp onto the ship. Sean fought toward them from a few feet away.
They didn't know what to do or where to go so they wandered around for a while picking up a feel for the passengers and overhearing scattered bits of conversation. Two dapper young executive types in searsucker suits:
"I should have sold that damned Allied Chemical. I know it's going to drop twenty points while we're away."
"Yeah. Soil your blood pressure. Forget it, will you? Check out some of the ass around here."
"Not bad. I guess you were right. Better than trying to pick up chicks in the Museum of Modern Art."
"Some of them belong in the Museum of Modern Art. Look at that one with the body paint… "
Two masculine-looking middle-aged ladies, one in a leather vest, the other in a denim Jacket:
"You think that sounds right?"
"What the hell's it matter? Well just tell them, that's all. "We're two middle-aged lesbians from Hoboken, and if you don't like it well bust your banana.'"
"And the first one who asks us if we live close to the ferry… "
A college-age boy, clean-shaven, freckled, with red hair down to his waist, in a blue smoking jacket-to himself:
"The hustle and bustle of the docks in the early morning; the countless people swarming on their aimless ways… I'd better get that down." He took out a leather-bound notebook. "Not bad. Sounds like Walt Whitman."
A portly businessman in a three-piece suit with watch fob and his sagging-faced bleach-blonde varicose-veined wife:
"See here, Grace… "
"If I can't see here I can't see anywhere."
"Oh for Godsake-I should have let you go on this idiotic odyssey by yourself."
"See here, Harold-you're catching on."
After a while Sean caught sight of the oriental chaperone-type who'd been with the Guru at Folk City the night before. She was down in front of the bridge at the edge of a swimming pool looking up and waving.
They hurried over. As they joined her they copped a gander at what she was waving at. It was the Guru himself, framed in the window of the wheel house, his hands resting on the spokes of the wooden wheel. He had a captain's hat on, only it was dyed purple and had an ostrich feather sticking a foot and a half up out of the band. He had a patch over his right eye, a red bandana around his neck, a monkey on his shoulder, and a caricature yo-ho-ho on his lips. The oriental woman was nodding approval and giving him the high sign, which undoubtedly was a perfect indication of his condition. She turned as they came up. "Hello! Glad to see you made it." She waved to the Guru again. "Now. Let's see. Last things first. Your cabin. By the way, the others-your friends-they fell overboard. No, that's not right. They're up in the cabin already. Virginia and the Princess took them."
She led them into a side door below the bridge, down a hall, and up a flight of stairs.
The rails were mahogany, the floors teak, there were fabulous tile murals on the walls, there were fountains with live plants and mirrors behind them on the landings… all in all it was quite an opulent setup. "My name is Mei Ling," she told them. "I am functioning… " She giggled. "That's a lie already. Anyhow, I am the cruise director. I'll be setting up your singing schedules, making sure you've got everything you need, and so on. The Guru's decided to have a blind stargazing tonight on the deck with beer and body-paint finishing up with a Boston Pee Party at the rail at midnight. So you won't be singing. You'll start tomorrow." She fished a set of keys out of her pocket and unlocked a door that led off a landing three stories from the main deck. "This section's the staff, crew, and assorted freaks and friends. We're going to keep it sealed off from the passengers, so take these keys." She handed them around and proceeded a few steps down a long hallway to another door that was standing open. "Here you are."
"Hey!" John and Joanna cried in unison from inside. "This is quite a… "
Mei Ling took Andrea aside as Sean went in. "Just a few things. I've put some stuff in the suite that you might not have had time to think of. Extra guitar strings-all gauges-some picks, a bunch of song books in case you get requests for things you don't know… stuff like that. If you look around in there you'll find a few bottles of champagne on ice, hors d'houvres, half a pound of pot with pipes and papers, couple of sheets of blotter, an urn full of peyote buttons… well, there's no use taking the whole inventory. Also copies of the. Guru's books of poems, "How To, Why To, and Fuck You," "A Guide to Cleaning Martian Coffee Pots," "Eulogy on the Death of the Number One," and so on. You might try setting some of them to music. Oh! I forgot. You might have… well, what you'd call a "back-up band" for some of your gigs. A little group the Guru's got together. Rod and the Staff. Made up of the kitchen help-or maybe the kitchen hindrance-and the engineers, the shoe-shine boy, and so on, just playing what they've got lying around. The Guru plays the Thin Air Drum. Never makes a mistake."
There was a humungous blast on the ship's horn and the engines started up.
"Oh! We're leaving! Look-I've got to see the departure of the shore. So weird to see New York City just floating away like that. Blows my boobs every time." She looked down at her chest. "That's why they're so small." She turned to go. "Don't pop any of those peyote buttons without cleaning them. Give you a nasty tummy-ache." She skipped away down the hall.
"What did she have to say?" Sean asked as Andrea entered a poshly decorated twenty-by-forty-foot living room to the sound of popping champagne corks.
"Just a lot of stuff about some stuff that was stuff and a lot of stuff about some stuff that wasn't." John handed her a glass. "Let's go out on deck and blow our boobs watching New York City float away."
"Right."
Andrea took a quick glance around the suite as they gathered themselves together. A dining room with an enormous glass-topped table opened off the living, room to one side through an arch with carved wooden doors. Beyond it lay a bedroom with what looked to be two king-sized water beds. Off the living room in the other direction were two more bedrooms.
"We're in the one off the dining room," Sean told her as they made their way to the highest deck.
"I can't get over that suite," John said as they found a break in the crowd at the rail. "The carpets-you could drown in those things. All the furniture's solid wood, some of it antique; every bedroom has a sunken tub that amounts to a small swimming pool; would you believe there are separate stereos and, get this, strobe lights in every room?"
"I think I'd believe anything," Andrea murmured. She looked down to where the hawsers were being cast off. The crowd that was seeing off the passengers of the True Enlightenment was small but the crowd of reporters who'd dragged themselves out of bed early to record this historical event for posteriority made up for it. There were two TV cameras on dollys panning up and down the ship's rigging and zooming into the wheel house with their football-game lenses.
"I'm not sure I believe I'm doing this," Joanna burbled into her champagne glass. She was really stoned and really tired. She was swaying back and forth. "Look at that." She hung her head over the rail and peered downward as the ship, pulled by tugboats from the other side, eased gently away from the dock. "We're splitting. We're just splitting." She swayed some more and waxed semi consciously poetic. "Just think. That little distance between the ship and the dock… four feet, four and a half, five… that's just going to keep getting bigger and bigger. Until it's a hundred miles and then a thousand, and then two thousand or something… we're going to be out on the high seas with that maniac at the helm!"
John put his arm around her. After a few minutes, as the True Enlightenment slipped out into the condom-ridden ebb-tide of the racing Hudson and to the amazement of the entire world sailed off in the correct direction, upstream-no! that wasn't right! it made a U-turn. It was widely recognized that Joanna had fallen asleep over the rail. John carried her downstairs and Sean and Andrea lingered for over an hour beholding the miracle of their ship missing the Staten Island Ferry, the Statue of Liberty, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, Sandy Hook, the Ambrose Light Ship, and the 7th Avenue IRT all on the same morning. By the time they went downstairs to sleep the True Enlightenment was drawing cute little curliques with its wake in the waving swells of the open ocean. There was a gray-blue guarantee of land off to the starboard but they agreed the Guru would have to try hard to hit it.