The Ross Story

In what seemed like an amazing confluence of extraordinary circumstances, I once found an ad online for a sail around Tahiti and Bora Bora. The ad said there were three other couples: one was recently married, another was engaged, and one couple had just started dating.  Since we were married with a young child, the cruise would be an interesting exploration in the cycle of love.

I don’t know if I talked my wife into sailing with strangers or if she talked me into her dream of a reduced-rate overwater bungalow, but we left our daughter with her grandmother and hopped a 14-hour flight.

Our Captain was a woman about our age named Kaz – a four-foot nine-inch bundle of sailing brilliance – and her brand new husband Mike. Cynthia was a Philadelphia attorney at a big firm and her almost-boyfriend, Ted, was a UPS driver who delivered her packages – if you know what I mean.

And of course, there was Ross and his fiancé. Well, actually there was a bit of a hiccup on the way to Tahiti. 

Ross had full beard as a result of losing a game of pool where the loser couldn’t shave for a year and had a generous number of tattoos.  By far the most distinctive was a band around his collar that said in beautiful colonial calligraphy, “FUCKOFF”. 

The first thing I said to my wife when I met Ross was, you gotta take our picture together. She asked me why and I said because no one is going to believe this story.

Ross was an animator at Pixar in San Francisco.  He had just wrapped work on the film Ratatouie.  He was turning 30 on the boat.  His dad had recently died and his fiancé wasn’t going to be on the trip (we learned) because she broke off the engagement two weeks before the trip. Safe to say, Ross was working through some shit.

In light of all this, Ross did what any reasonable person would do under the circumstances.  He found a 19-year-old stripper to go with him on a sailing trip half a world away from every single one of his sizable problems.

Excuse me.  I say, stripper.  That’s rude.  Chastity was an interpretative dance major at a Bay Area community college who was dancing just to pay the bills until she got her Associate's Degree.

Meals are served family-style on a boat like this.  Each couple takes turns cooking and cleaning.  You go to the grocery store at the beginning of the trip and pick all the provisions you will need when it comes your time to cook.

At the package store, Ross told me he didn’t know food wasn’t included in the trip and could I lend him some $75 so he and Chastity would have food for the week.  I said yes, and Ross bought a handle of Jack Daniels. In case you were wondering, in Tahiti a handle of Jack cost almost exactly $75. Groceries are expensive on an island paradise. All they had to eat for the week was Jack and Coke … if they could just bum a can of coke from me too.

The first night aboard, we anchored in a Motu between Raiatea and Taaha.  We pulled into our spot for the night, we headed into the wind preparing to drop anchor as Ross and Chastity had sex on the netting at the front of the boat facing the sunset.  We had to step around them as we made sure to let out enough chain and make sure the anchor was set in deep sand.  They didn’t mind.

I can’t recall if Chastity even brought a bathing suit.  She spent days relaxing mostly naked in the sun and the nights detoxing from meth.  Ross stayed up all night – every night – fishing, drinking, and working through his issues.  He was right above our cabin and each tiny step he took thumped on our ceiling like we were trying to sleep inside a drum.

One night, as I was trying to go to sleep, I heard a huge slash.  I jumped out of bed and ran up to see what was happening.  Ross was trying to climb the ladder back onto the back of the boat with his rod and reel in one hand and a 3-inch-long fish in the other.  I tried to pull him back onto the boat and in his drunken rage, he started slapping me with the fish.

The next morning, I was putting Neosporin on a cut on my finger.  Ross, making conversation, asked me how I had hurt myself. I told him he had fallen in the water catching a 4 oz fish and I had pulled him out.  But that I got a cut on my finger trying to fend Ross off from beating me with his catch.  Ross got really serious, “You mean…I caught a fish?!?!”

I spent most of my time trying to keep Ross away from my wife because she failed to see the poetry of Ross’ Hemmingway-Esque old-man-and-the-sea downward life spiral.  She would sit in the back and read and I would take Ross up to the front and loan him a beer.  He would go to the back and fish and my wife would go to the front and sunbathe on the trampoline netting. Over time Ross and I bonded.

One of the last nights of the trip, was spent at anchor in a remote cove off the island of Huahine. Ross had finally passed out and everyone else on the boat was fast asleep.  My wife grabbed a fresh set of sheets from the pantry and we went to the front to lay on the netting and look at the stars.  One thing led to another and eventually, we found ourselves doing what people in love do – unless, of course, you’re married. 

Under a canopy of a million stars with a school of stingrays swimming below us, we made sweet beautiful love to each other.  It was like something out of a Disney movie.  If Disney made softcore pornography. 

Like The Naughty Little Mermaid … or Grinding Nemo … or Butt Pirates of The Caribbean … or Beauty and the Fist …. or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves…

Sorry I got off on a tangent there.

We thought we got away with it, but there are no secrets on a boat.  The next morning, Captain Kaz pulled my wife aside and told her “Those weren’t your sheets…!”  Through our profound embarrassment, we offered to have them cleaned.  We were too mortified to think thru the logistics of what we had offered to do to remedy the situation.  It's not like Gilligan and Mary Ann had a nearby laundry mat powered by a bamboo bicycle.

When we got to Bora Bora, I walked all over the island and found a hotel laundry that ran a load of wash with our sheets.  I think she knew there was shame involved in this transaction because she charged me $14 to wash the sheets – and I said nothing.

I don’t think of myself as cheap, or the type of person who considers the cost of everything and the price of nothing, but a $14 laundry cycle seemed like a lot to pay for 7 minutes in heaven. Especially since there was no way it was more than 2 and a half minutes if we're being honest. 

As I walked back to the boat, carrying clean sheets (in the rain) I started counting up my loses. I added up the $75 I gave Ross … the cost of the boat … the cost of the flight … and all the other vast sums of money I didn’t have to go on this amazing trip and came to the conclusion that – with the exception of my wedding night – this night was the single most expensive act of sexual congress in my entire life.

We got on a seaplane the next morning and as I looked out the window we flew over our sailboat.  I could see Ross standing on the side waving goodbye with his entire arm like he just saw Lt. Dan.  I said to my wife, I’m going to miss that guy.  She asked me if I had lost my fucking mind.

There is a short little postscript to this story:

About a month after we got back, we were driving with our very rambunctious 2-year-old daughter on a three-hour road trip.  About 10 minutes into the trip, my wife told me she wanted to have a conversation about expanding our family. 

As a note to anyone who wants to have a true discussion with your other about having a baby, don’t do it at the start of a 3-hour car ride with an agitated 2-year-old in the back seat.

I think my comment was, “If we are going to have another baby, I want to start trying immediately.  I don’t want to be a day older than I have to when that kid burns down the neighbor’s yard, crashes my car, flunks out of college, or accidentally gets some girl knocked up.”

My wife took an extended, pregnant pause and said, “OK … So, I have some really good news for you. Remember that night on the boat in Huahine...”

(Turns out Huahine in the Tahitian language means “Woman’s Sex.” Put another way, it means pregnant woman. It is so named because ancient sailors Mount Tavaiura, which makes up the island of Huahine, looks like a pregnant woman lying down. What the hell did I THINK was going to happen!?!?)

We spent the rest of the drive in total silence – except for the furious two-year-old — as I calculated the cost of another mouth to feed, another teenage car to crash, and an extra four years of college tuition.

So yeah, as I said, these vacations can be really expensive.  And also, totally worth it.