"A guy in a bathrobe walks around a family cruise ship" sounds like the setup to a really bad joke and, in a way, I suppose it is — if you're ready to join me on my epic quest to fisk the most unintentionally hysterical article The Atlantic has published in a long time.
Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas is the world's largest cruise ship with a crew of 2,350 and room for up to 7,600 passengers. This ship displaces more weight than two Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and sports a set of six water slides that look like a tangled mass of giant twisty straws.
It also has one misplaced Atlantic writer named Gary Shteyngart.
His first glimpse of the Icon brought "on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress," that forced him to "shut my eyes in defense." That's when readers knew they were going to be taken on a very special trip with the man who has "been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage."
I'm guessing that's because Shteyngart lost an office bet, based on his self-assessment: "I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, 'This too shall pass.'"
You get the feeling that Shteyngart once had a real dachshund, the first dog to commit suicide.
Before leaving port, he got himself good and loaded:
I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.
Frilly drinks? That's a rookie move, particularly for a world traveler.
Even full of what was probably cheap rum, "The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson," Shteyngart whined. A lefty too depressed to get a thrill from his "passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida" is in need of therapy — but I repeat myself.
Lest Atlantic readers fear that Shteyngart might not be snobby enough to do a proper job of sneering at his cruise mates, he comforts them that he "may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers." To prepare himself (and Atlantic readers) for the unwanted but "friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards," Shteyngart decided on an unusual attire.
I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY'S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.
Grown men buying DADDY'S LITTLE MEATBALL t-shirts in adult sizes probably automatically go on some kind of watchlist, but that's a topic for another day.
Entering a crowded area wearing his new purchase, Shteyngart seemed disappointed that nobody gave a damn that he was doing his best to offend them and/or get them to engage him with banalities he could later mock them for.
I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers.
In case you didn't get it yet, Shteyngart wants his readers to know that people who enjoy cruises are probably also homophobic and unfamiliar with even the mere sight of a Jew. How disappointed he was with himself for failing to elicit any gay or antisemitic slurs. Maybe next time he could dress up as Rip Taylor and sport a yarmulke.
One hangover and several semi-successful attempts at making acquaintances later, Shteyngart got his groove back with another unusual wardrobe choice:
Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life!"
I've been to many resorts. I do not recall seeing many — any? — bored-looking lefties wandering around in a bathrobe and drinking frilly drinks. Maybe I need to travel more.
On Day Three he realized, "This whole thing is a cult." Much of Shteyngart's "Ennui Guide to Family Cruises" concerns the pricy upgrades and upsells, which he finds cultlike — so I won't bore you with that. If you're into cruises, you know. If you aren't, you don't care. What fascinates me is what an unpleasant passenger Shteyngart is, and how entertaining he expects readers to find his self-inflicted misery.
Even his attempts at finding a silver lining fell flat:
There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia, and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT'S THE MELANIN FOR ME. I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality.
Damn those stupid happy children and their stupid happy songs.
On the other hand, Shteyngart did kinda-sorta enjoy the ice show:
I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent.
Bless his heart. I guess our world traveler doesn't know that Kim Jong Un can afford anything he wants and that it's the people of North Korea who can barely even imagine the bounty of a Western cruise ship. But people, I'm sure Shteyngart and his readers agree, are the worst.
On Day Five, he found a kindred spirit.
Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”
People like souvenirs and will pay more for hard-to-get ones, film at 11.
But it isn't like Shteyngart is without any empathy at all:
For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.
$7,200 for a family of four and... where's the subsidy? By now, Shteyngart reads like he wrote a prefabricated list of complaints and is just pasting them in anywhere to up his word count and justify his solo $19,000 package full of all those cultish upgrades and upsells.
At the end of his eight-day voyage, Shteyngart lamented that the Titanic "at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise," because drowning in the icy North Atlantic is of course preferable to one last frilly drink, provided you prepare to dismembark with the proper mindset.
His report ended with this odd passage:
A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along.
The glorious ocean... still somehow surrounding that nausea-inducing cruise ship with all its happy, stupid children.
Fear not, Gary Shteyngart — for this too shall pass.
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