Man Aboat Town

In a romantic moment around twelve years ago I put ink to a deckhand’s contract with Entertainment Cruises, a pleasure fleet then owned by J. B. and Tony Pritzker, of the Chicago Pritzkers. The corporate armada’s Midwest squadron, sailing out of Navy Pier, consisted of four vessels: in ascending order of prestige, the scow-adjacent Mystic Blue; the purportedly haunted Spirit of Chicago; the 1,600-ton flagship, Odyssey; and the small, significantly more upscale Elite—more of a charter yacht than a booze cruise—on which I only served once, owing to aesthetic incompatibility. My primary duties consisted of general swabbing; tying and untying the heavy, grit-sodden mooring lines; preventing people from having sex in the bathrooms (“heads,” in naval parlance); and notifying embarkees that they were not permitted to take their own food aboard—typically, Dippin’ Dots they had just purchased at the adjacent Dippin’ Dots kiosk. Thanks to a decade of memory’s gauzy filter, I now have nothing but purest affection for those tired youthful days on the sweet waters of Lake…