Shy
Part 70 (20)
We walked aft to the dining room entrance and waited for a few minutes for
the doors to open. Finally, the crowd surged forward. Inside the entrance
I stooped to a hitherto unimaginable act—I stopped and asked directions. I
could see the pride on Kris’s face.
A young man in an elaborate uniform topped by a pill box hat took my new table-assignment
card and then said something that will forever remain a mystery. When he turned
and started walking, we followed—just on a hunch that it was the appropriate
thing to do. He led us down the stairs to the lower level, turned, and indicated
a table immediately adjacent to the landing and next to a waiter’s station.
The table was set for ten, but sat no one at the moment.
A smiling man in waiter’s garb rushed up when it became apparent that we intended
to sit. “Hello, everyone. Are you sitting at my table?”
“Yes, we switched from another table—actually, the two of us know we’re supposed
to be here, but our mothers actually don’t know if they got reassigned with
us—I asked that all four of us be moved together.”
“These are your mothers?” said the waiter with mock incredulity. “No way!
I think they are your daughters! You brought your little girls on the cruise.
They are so cute.”
The waiter sang a little ditty that I did not recognize and carried on without
inhibition. I remember thinking, “Well, this guy’s not shy.”
When the waiter finished his performance, he addressed us. “It is no problem—you
can sit here. Welcome to my home. What are your names, please?”
I ran through the introductions as we were being seated. Kris and I sat on
the ends with the mothers in the protected position between us—in case we
were seated with a bunch of brutes, I suppose.
“Okey dokey, Kris, Pat, Laura and Chester. My name is Shy.”
I didn’t think I’d heard him correctly. “Pardon? Your name is…”
He leaned over so I could see his nametag. “I am Shyyyyyy…” he said, spanning
two or three octaves with his singsong voice. “My name is Shy. I am a very
shy guy! Okey dokey!”
“That’s preposterous,” said my mother through her laughter. “You’re a nut!”
For a moment I thought she might have offended him, but my wise mother had
caught on to our waiter’s act immediately. “Oh yes—I’m a crAzy shy guy, Laura.
You know it…”
“Well, it’s a great pleasure to make your acquaintance, Shy.” They shook hands
vigorously.
Shy kept us entertained as we waited to see who, if anyone, would be joining
us. In a few minutes, two women who looked like sisters approached the table
and were seated next to Kris. From a distance, I learned that one was named
Mary, and the other was named—Mary. Neither seemed to know exactly what to
make of Shy.
Next, a couple, perhaps as young as I was ten years ago, sat next to me. They
looked familiar, somehow. I introduced myself to Jim and Darcy.
“Oh, you’re the guy with the nametag on the door. We’re you neighbors—two
cabins down,” said Darcy.
It hit me then—we’d encountered each other in the hallway the previous night.
The ship was rocking pretty well, and we laughed as we tried to time our staggers
so as to avoid collision. It was close…
“I put the nametag on the door so our mothers would know when they were in
the right place,” I said.
The final two seats were occupied by Kara and Buck. Kara “knew” me from the
online forum, and it turned out that she and Buck were practically neighbors
of Jim and Darcy back in Minnesota. None of our tablemates had cruised before,
and all remained a little uncertain about the experience—I can certainly remember
being a little overwhelmed on the first one. Everyone was new to the table,
refugees from their initial, unsatisfactory (for various reasons) seating
assignments.
Most of my conversation this evening was with Jim, who sat immediately to
my right. Turns out that Jim is an executive with American Public Media, content
producer for public radio and parent company of Minnesota Public Radio, which
is the home of APHC.
“Hey, maybe you can help me then,” I said after explaining my pending status
as a book author. “I really want to go to Garrison’s writing seminar, but
there must be 300 people ahead of me on the signup list.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Jim promised. “Don’t worry about it—you’ll get in.”
We swapped stories around the table. Shy actually had difficulty penetrating
the lively conversation to attend to business, but we did manage to eat. I
have no idea what we had, but it went down fine. At one point Kris collected
the wine corks from the table, explaining that our Parrot (Q) likes to chew
them into little bits and make an incredible mess. What fun…
Dinnertime flew by, and when it was over everyone went their separate ways.
“Well, that was fun,” I said.
“What an interesting group,” said Pat.
“It’s always fun to sit at a big table,” said Kris. “Now we have to mix it
up every night so that everyone gets to talk to different people.”
I suggested we try out the Piano Bar, where Butch Thompson was scheduled to
play. Butch was a member of the band on APHC for many years, and is now a
frequent guest on the show. He is a well known jazz pianist, performing around
the world.
“Is he funny?” asked my mother.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why?”
“After the show, Shy and all that food, I can’t laugh anymore—it hurts too
much,” she answered.
The bar was packed when we got there. People crowded around the genuine piano/bar
located in the central section, and the tables in two “wing” rooms were all
full. We stood in the entryway and listened for a few minutes, and then by
some miracle, a table opened up. I hesitated for a moment, waiting to see
if anyone who had been standing for longer than we had would claim the spot.
No one made a move, so we sat.
The table was at the head of the room, separated from the end of the piano
bar by a passageway about a dozen feet wide. I scanned the room, which held
about ten tables. Something seemed strange, but it took a few minutes for
it to hit me. Everyone in the room was sitting up perfectly straight, hands
folded in their laps and feet flat on the floor, eyes fixed straight ahead
and faces expressionless. This was odd enough, but it was made more so by
the fact that due to the layout of the club, no one could see anything but
the backs of the patrons seated at the piano bar.
“Look,” I whispered to Kris. “They’re all in a trance.”
“It’s like church,” she said. “And nobody has a drink.”
I hadn’t noticed that, but another survey confirmed it. There were a few empty
glasses, but not a single person had so much as an ice cube in front of them.
“Strange,” I said.
Kris looked at the drink menu, and shared it with the mothers. It was a long
while before a waiter appeared. He seemed surprised when we waved him over
and placed an order. When he left us, he circled the room collecting the few
empty glasses. No one else placed an order.
“He must be bored,” I whispered. The waiter returned quickly with our drinks.
Meanwhile, Butch Thompson was playing ragtime (one of his passions), taking
requests and answering questions from the audience. He played all of the classics
as well as a number of unusual pieces from his personal archive. In an amazing
narrated segment, he took individual pieces and played segments of them in
the style of several different ragtime artists—the same musical phrases rendered
in completely different ways. For some tunes, he mimicked five or six artists,
and then played his own jazz interpretation of the same piece.
At one point during the performance, a man walked into the bar and stood in
the passageway directly in front of Pat. In a startlingly loud voice that
made me jump, Pat said, “I CAN’T SEE!”
I thought that fact was pretty well established for all of us, and to emphasize
the point, I lifted a drink menu in front of my face—hiding everything.
“Mom! Shhhhhhh,” said Kris in a loud whisper.
“BUT I CAN’T SEE. THAT MAN IS STANDING RIGHT IN THE WAY.”
“It’s OK,” whispered Kris, “he’ll move in a minute.”
I peeked around the drink menu to see how much attention we were attracting,
but everyone else in the room continued to do their statue imitations. The
man moved moments later, pretending to do so of his own volition. He quietly
exited the club…
We listened for a while longer, but near midnight, when my ice cubes were
gone, everyone agreed that it was time for bed. As we rounded the corner from
the Piano Bar, we stumbled onto a string quartet playing for a small audience.
The mothers opted to stay and listen for a while.
Kris and I went back to the cabin. We were both exhausted—it was hours past
Kris’s usual bedtime, and I was operating on very little sleep. Nevertheless,
I wanted to post a journal entry on the APHC forum, so I took the laptop and
headed for the library. I’m sure Kris was asleep before I got there.
The library was deserted, and an hour later I made my post and returned to
the cabin. At 1:15, I crawled into bed, fired up the iPod, selected something
soothing and turned out the light. Oh how good it would feel to sleep…
As I lay there trying to shut down my circuits, I became aware of a strange
burning sensation in my nose. I tried to convince myself that I was imagining
it, but then my eye started to water. Suddenly, as though activated by a switch
marked “torture,” a searing bolt of pain shot into the left side of my head
and stayed there. I sat bolt upright, tearing the headphones from my ears.
This couldn’t be happening again.
I squinted at the clock, which was on the opposite side of the bed. It read
1:35 a.m. In a moment, I realized that this was exactly 24 hours
after the last episode. The pain drove me to my knees. I crawled to the bathroom
and swallowed four ibuprofen tablets. Then I turned on the shower, got in
and sat with my head under the rushing water—waiting for something to happen…
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