In Search of America on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

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Hi.

Hi.

It's Hannah.

Hi, Hannah.

How are you?

Good.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

This is Radio Atlantic.

It's cloudy here.

It is.

In a good way, like in a way that makes your hair look full and

fetch.

It does add fullness to my hair, which is always a good thing at this point.

You know, I think spring has finally sprung, and

I teach in the spring semester, and I'm like, I just want this to be over.

I just want to go out and and play.

You teach fiction?

Yeah, I can't teach

rock as a science.

I was thinking.

Cruising technology.

This is writer Gary Steingart.

This is just a Russian stereotype of my.

Yeah, you could teach astronomy or physics.

I don't know.

Chess.

Chess, exactly.

Gary grew up in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S.

when he was seven.

He's written several award-winning novels, and he was a literary consultant on Succession, the HBO show.

Mostly he's known for his satire, which can range from gentle to deadly.

So who better to write an article about the inaugural voyage of the largest cruise ship ever built?

This whole thing came about because I was on Twitter and I saw a tweet that just showed the may I use salty language here?

Yes.

The ass of the ship.

is how I describe it.

I don't know any of these terms, but

with all the water parks and crap on it.

And so I reposted the tweet and I said,

somebody wants to send me on this cruise.

Please specify the level of sarcasm desired.

Yeah.

And then like within God bless the Atlantic, you know, within seconds, I had an assignment.

That ass belongs to the icon of the seas, a ship that can hold more than 7,000 passengers and 2,000 crew.

It has 20 decks, seven swimming pools, and six water slides.

The ship itself is about five times bigger than the Titanic.

And I'm pretty sure the Titanic did not have a swim-up bar, much less the world's largest swim-up bar.

In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Gary describes it this way.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally.

It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space.

It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots.

This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

To prepare for that voyage, Gary wore a meatball t-shirt he found in a store in Little Italy.

More specifically, the shirt read,

Daddy's Little Meatball.

You know, I grew up in Queens and being a spicy meat-a-ball, I thought was funny.

A lot of cruisers were angry.

They thought I was sort of being sexual or sexualizing.

It's very interesting.

You know, I thought that t-shirt was like the bond between a child and his daddy or her daddy.

I thought it would just be a conversation.

I thought it would be a conversation.

You know, if they had like a mommy's little meatball t-shirt, that would have been preferable.

I feel much more of mommy's little meatball, but they only have daddy.

I actually thought my expectations are low, but I bet I'm gonna run into awesome people and I love to drink and chat and this is like I guess that's what you do in a cruise ship.

So I knew I was gonna have a suite so I was like, yeah, maybe I'll throw a suite party and invite some people over.

On land, I really am quite sociable.

I remember I was just leaving a Columbia, I teach at Columbia, and I was leaving a Columbia party and somebody was saying, well, there goes 75% of the party.

Oh,

that's a compliment.

It's a compliment.

I'm kind of a party animal.

So I was

super...

I thought, you know, look, 5,000 people, I'm going to find a soulmate or two.

Great writers before Gary have deluded themselves in this way before.

Most notably, David Foster Wallace, who ended up spending much of his cruise adventure alone in his cabin.

They venture out looking to swim with some real Americans.

And instead, they are quickly confronted by the close-up details.

Like the nightly entertainment.

There was a kind of packaged weirdness in the shows.

God damn,

the ice skating tribute to the periodic table.

What the hell was that?

The food did not have the consistency of steak.

It was like some kind of pleathery, weird,

like this poor cow had been slapped around before it died.

And the physical touch of an actual real American.

He'd throw his arms around them drunkenly and they'd be like, eh.

First of all, I just want to say Royal Caribbean, the people that run it are geniuses.

The CEO's name is, I'm not making this up, Jason Liberty.

His name is Liberty.

I mean, I don't know.

What the hell?

Like, exactly.

Like, if I was to write a novel character with, you know, Jason Liberty, people would be like, oh, he's being pretentious.

But no, that's his actual name.

Yeah.

I think they know the tastes of their clientele so well and are able to mirror it back to them, but also to give them this feeling that they're awesome for doing something like this.

One of my favorite slogans, you get all this literature, this isn't a vacation day spent, it's bragging rights earned.

Like it's a velvet ropey, like you're doing.

It's a velvet ropey situation.

You are an adventurer.

You've earned this.

You have bragging rights.

But when you enter the ship, you're in a mall.

And the mall is large and multi-leveled.

And you can buy

a Rolex at three times what it would cost on land and all this other crap.

And then there's all these neighborhoods and you can do whatever the hell you want.

You can get trashed or have sex, which, you know, whatever, I mean, with your spouse, although there were some swingers on board, but you could do whatever you want in a way that you can't on land in a way, I think, because so many of these people are just working their asses off.

That was a topic of conversation that came up.

People are like, yeah, I work like 90 hours a week, and this is my chance to just be blotto.

So you're hinting at this.

Part of being on a ship is being inducted into the language and the levels of the ship.

And can you walk us through that?

Like you mentioned, for example, you walk in, you're in a mall, but I bet eventually you start to see more.

Like, what are the neighborhoods?

Like, you said the word neighborhoods.

What does that even mean?

And what are the distinctions?

Right.

So I think this ship and other Royal Caribbean ships of this size, although this is the biggest, try to create this idea, I think, of a city.

Like, you're in a city that happens to be at sea.

So one of the funniest neighborhoods is called Central Park, which is literally another mall, but with a couple of shrubs growing out here and there.

I thought that was really funny, also using a New York City landmark in one of the least New Yorkiest

milieus in the world.

I guess it just has to be terms, you know, a word people recognize, and people vaguely recognize.

They don't need to know about Olmsted or live in Brooklyn.

No, they just like vaguely recognize.

No, it was Central Park.

It'd be funny if I asked a boy, would I get a lot of like if I came up to a cruise and be like, I don't think this really matches Olmsted's vision for Central Park.

I don't know.

Meatball, Meatball, not happy.

Maybe I should have used like a Russian accent, like, hello, I am meatball.

Not happy.

Meatball, not happy with Olmsted.

Yeah.

So there's that, there's Surfside, which is a very funny kind of like Disneyland for kids with a lot of people.

And are you walking?

Like, I still don't get it.

So you go in, and how big is a neighborhood?

And then how do you get to the next neighborhood?

Right.

So everything's on decks.

So you take these elevators.

I think I spent half the cruise on elevators just going from one place to another.

But the neighborhood that I thought I would be in the Sweets neighborhood.

So because this whole thing, and Royal Caribbean is also brilliant at this, these people really, a Nobel Prize in economics, it's a constant scramble.

You constantly want a higher status, especially if you've been cruising forever.

You want to reach pinnacle status, which you have to do after 700 days or nights rather on the ship, which is two years, right?

Almost.

Wow.

And so what does that get?

So the pinnacles have their own, I mean, there's some priority things they get.

Like, I was not allowed to go into one dining room at one point because, and the guy, I didn't know what Pinnacle was, so I thought the guy was saying it's just Pandejo dining.

He had a thick accent, and I was like, I'm wearing a meatball t-shirt.

I am the essence of Pendejo.

And he was like, no, no, Pandejo's only.

But he was trying to say Pinnacles, I guess.

So that kind of stuff, they have their own little lounge, which I wasn't allowed into.

And some of the other cruisers who are not Pinnacles, but have somehow gotten into the lounge, they're very angry about being denied.

And they're like, there's nothing in there.

There's just a coffee machine in there.

But the other thing is the suite status, which I had because by the time the Atlantic commissioned this piece, almost all the cabins were sold out.

Everybody wanted to be on this ship.

And all that was left was a $19,000, Jesus Christ, $19,000 suite that didn't even look out on the sea.

It looked out on the mall or whatever.

But it looked like the Marriott in a way.

Which, and I like Marriott's, I'm just saying.

So it's just a plane, it's like a hotel room.

It was like a hotel room.

And I had two bathrooms for yourself.

Just for myself.

I know.

Well, I think the idea of these suites is that more than one person goes on them, right?

So,

but there's this, the Royal Bling, the Royal Bling is the jewelry store, such as it is, on board.

And they introduced this thing called the

something chalice.

It's a $100,000 chalice, and it entitles you to drink for free on a Royal Caribbean once you bought it.

So this thing is hilarious.

Just the concept of it is insane.

Everyone's like trying to figure out, like, should I buy this?

What's up with this?

You know, should I get it for my 28-year-old kid?

Like, will it earn out?

How much does he drink?

How much can I drink?

So I talked to the wonderful sort of Serbian sales lady.

Everyone's country of origin, if you're on the crew, is listed on their tag.

Really?

And yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you're like, oh, it's a mirror from Pakistan or whatever.

So weird.

Yeah.

And she was, I don't know, something Olga from Serbia.

And she was amazing.

They're all amazing.

Every crew member is excellent.

And she was like, well, she was trying to sell me the $100,000 challenge.

I said, it's really gold.

And she's like, no, it's gold plated.

We couldn't afford, you know,

she said, if it was really gold, it it would be like a million dollars.

I'm like, okay.

And then it has diamonds.

And she's like, well, they're actually cubic zirconia again, because it would cost like 10 million if they were diamonds.

I'm like, all right, this thing is sounding worse and worse.

And then she said, but you know, if you already have everything,

this is one more thing you can have.

And I thought that was like a, almost like a Zen haiku, but about the American condition.

If you already have everything, this is one more thing you can have.

So the ship has neighborhoods and levels and status in a very explicit way.

And cruisers care about that.

They care about it in a very deep, almost spiritual way that Gary didn't quite appreciate until after he'd written the story.

One of the funniest things, somebody was telling me to look at this up.

There's on, I guess, Reddit,

there's a

huge cruising community.

I think like half a million people are on that thing.

And

boy, were they pissed.

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During his time on the Icon of the Seas, Gary Steingart met a few memorable characters.

There was a younger couple he called Mr.

and Mrs.

Ayn Rand, who he drank with a few times.

And the couple's couple friends, he described as, quote, bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.

And then there was Duck Necklace.

He's fascinating.

So he was drunk all the time and he was like being arrested.

There is a security force for photo bombing.

I wonder if the laws are different on the ship.

Oh, I wonder if you're not.

You know, like photo bombing is a felony.

It's a felony, right?

No, I would love to do like law and order icon of the seas.

That would be amazing.

But then he went on this long, drunken, I don't know, very elegiac thing about, well, I'm 62, and if I fall off the ship, I'm fine with that.

I just don't want a shark to eat me.

And I believe in God, and the Mayans have a prophecy.

He just went on and on.

Right.

And then I looked him up, and he's, when not drunk and getting arrested on a ship, he's like the pillar of his community in North Chicago.

There's so much more to this guy.

So he was my favorite, I think.

So maybe the ship creates a space where if you're grinding and working every day and being a pillar of the community, the ship is like your space to contemplate and be philosophical or be an idiot or whatever it is you can't be elsewhere.

Yeah, and I think you're right.

And I think a couple of people, especially older people, I mean, 62 isn't that old, but a couple of the older people were sort of trying to summarize their lives through their cruising experiences, including for one woman, realizing that she wanted to divorce her husband.

All these things happened on cruises.

It's like the cruise is the time when they're, you know, the way people say, you know, when you're off.

land, it's the rules of the sea.

You're in international waters, you can do whatever you want.

I think for some people, the cruise affords them some kind of weird way to look back on their lives

and to make large decisions or to celebrate either happy moments or

sometimes almost kind of elegiic moments.

Like there were all these people who looked like they were about to die, you know, on

literally about to die, you know, clearly coming off of chemo or on an oxygen tank, or, you know, they had t-shirts celebrating like a good cancer remission.

So definitely there's, and I hope this article, despite its kind of, you know, very satirical tone, led in some of that poignancy because, yeah, I mean, people are people and this is the kind of stuff that they want to do at either to make an important moment in their lives or not, or to think on the things that have happened to them.

But I think that's one of the reasons people were so butthurt on that Reddit, to use a term of art, because I wasn't just going after like a hobby or something.

I was going after something that is so key to their identity.

That's interesting that people perceived it so badly.

It's not you both appreciated the earnestness of it and

made fun of it at the same time.

I mean, it was satirical, but also present.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: I don't know.

I think people really wanted a quote-unquote journalist to give an honest review of the ship.

But look, I mean, I got this assignment by saying, what level of sarcasm do you want?

But I didn't deliver 11 on the sarcasm scale.

I think it was like six or seven.

You know, I realized, I mean, the...

The humor part of this, and this is what I sort of talk about in my humor class, the human comedy is that no one understands quite who they are.

So I may go around thinking I am a giraffe and I keep talking about, oh, I'm so tall and I eat leaves off of tall trees.

But in reality, I'm an aardvark.

I'm like a small furry creature burrowing in the bush, you know.

And that to me felt like a lot of what people were saying on the ship.

People would say, you know, I feel like I'm on an adventure.

And I'm like, yes, but we're in a mall as you say this

that's slowly steaming to all these islands.

But many of the passengers wouldn't even get off on these islands.

They loved the ship so much they wouldn't leave.

And I'll say this also, like one of the most important things that happened to me, I was in Charlotte, Amelie, which I guess is the capital of the U.S.

Virgin Islands or St.

Thomas.

And I'd wandered off the beaten path and this elderly Rastafarian gentleman looked at me and with the most,

I've never been talked to like this, but with this sneer beyond anything, he said,

redneck.

And I guess I did have a redneck at this point, and I was wearing this vibrant cap with the icon of the seas, Royal Caribbean logo.

But I realized also that people hate these cruisers.

They hate what they do to their islands, their environment, everything.

I mean, there's just so much more happening here than just a bunch of drunken Americans on a ship.

And this also goes to the fact that obviously there's all these people, mostly from the global south, working below decks.

They work non-stop.

And it's interesting because a lot of the passengers, they would say, wow, these people work so hard with a kind of like, oh, you know, I wish everybody back home would work so hard or something like that.

You know, but at the same time, I was listening to a comedy act and the comedian was making fun of quote-unquote shithole countries.

So there's definitely a kind of, even though cruisers keep talking about how much they love the people on the ship.

It doesn't translate.

It doesn't translate into politics.

Okay, I'm turning it back on you, your story.

You came into the boat with the story that Gary is a party guy and Gary's going to have parties in Gary's suite.

So what did you realize along the way?

Yeah, it was like being an immigrant all over again.

And I re you know, for me, assimilation into America was a very, very long process.

So

the meatball or the lack of success of the meatball kind of really reminded me of that too.

You know, like I'm always a step behind.

And this did feel like, oh, I was always a step behind.

People would have like casual conversations in the elevators just shooting the shit.

And I would try to banter with them, you know.

But I think I would always get it a little bit wrong.

Like, and I would realize it too.

Like, there was a lot of wind one day, and I was like, ooh,

the frost is really on the pumpkin

But I realize that that's probably said in in the fall right before Thanksgiving is that right the pumpkin is you know so immigrant Gary comes roaring back in those moments like you want to be like you want to be like sophisticated Yeah, writer Gary absolutely so I was always sweating bullets like how I want to get into the conversation and this was a big thing because there was a big contest several contests the semifinals or something quarterfinals I don't know between the big teams And I had no idea what the hell was going on, but everybody was talking about it.

And everybody was wearing paraphernalia.

That's the other thing.

Paraphernalia.

Paraphernalia.

You're referring to team t-shirts.

Team, but also everything.

You know, I don't know, name it, hats, t-shirts,

all kinds of crap.

And I had nothing.

I had meatball.

So

look, the preparation for this article should have, I should have bought t-shirts with sports.

And then

I should have talked to people about all the rules of football.

Maybe there's a documentary that I can watch, something like that, and then maybe that would have been it.

Okay, so I'm reading this essay about this cruise ship, which has a little bit of politics, a little bit of cult, a little bit of status obsession.

What am I understanding about America?

Well, I think we are, in some ways, a country that

has been losing religion for a while.

I know this is a strange approach to it, but people are looking for something to to fill the void,

especially among the hardworking middle class.

I think is where you feel it quite a bit.

And I think

because Americans are never satisfied with everyone's always looking for what's my ancestry, where do I come from?

Somehow just the term American is not enough to fulfill people's expectations of what life is.

And I think as an immigrant,

what they belong to, what they're rooted in.

And I think, and for me, this is an easier question because I actually just want to be an American.

I'm an immigrant who just wants to be be an American, right?

So I think on this ship, what I was seeing was people desperately trying to belong to some kind of idea.

And I feel like the cruising life, because these people are so obsessed with the cruises that they wear these, you know, like half the people or more were wearing t-shirts somehow commemorating this voyage and the first day of the cruise.

So I think I really offended a religion.

I insulted not just

a strange hobby that people engage in, but a way of life.

And I I think that's the future.

Trying to understand America today is to try to understand people desperately grasping for something in the absence of more traditional ideas of what it means to an American, right?

And this is one strange manifestation of that, but it was, for me, an ultimately unfulfilling one.

You know, God bless David Foster Wallace for being brilliant enough to start this genre, although there were a couple of pieces before him, but, you know, the modern incarnation of this.

Let's stop this and let's...

I did not solve the question of what America is.

None of that got solved.

So what are we RIPing?

We're not just RIPing the cruise ship piece.

What are we?

I just want to end the episode this way.

RIP what?

RIP?

You know, no, no, no, no.

I don't have that kind of cultural mic.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Janae West.

It was edited by Claudina Bade, fact-checked by Isabel Christo, and engineered by Rob Smersiak.

Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Thank you for listening.

But was there a monkey on the show?

No,

the monkey was on St.

Kids.

No, no, no.

I remembered that wrong.

Okay.

Royal Caribbean did not spring for a monkey.

They had a golden retriever.

They wore like a cap or something.

But see, so everybody was going gaggo.

And I'm like, you've never seen a golden freaking retriever?

What the f?

What kind of lives do you live on the land?

Right, right.

But it's an icon golden retriever.

So it's, it's an icon golden retriever.

Yeah.

He's like, I guess, an emotional support dog for these people.