Armchair Anonymous: Cruise Ship

0:00Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Anonymous. I'm Dax Shepard and this is Monica Padman. Hi. Hello. Today is cruise ships. Oof. Didn't make me want to go on a cruise, I'll tell you that. I know. We should have almost called Laura Lebeau as an antidote because she just went on a Viking cruise. And she loved it. At the time of her life. Oh, good. My parents have gone on a couple and they love it. She said she's not going to do any other cruise line, though, after this experience. She said the food was absolutely outrageously good. Yeah, this one, this one you can listen to, I think. You can listen to this one.

0:37Oh, no. Yeah, there's stuff. Chemical categorization. Oh. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But no, no, well, whatever. Well, there's fluids. Fuck it, I don't know. There's fluids. Yeah. All right, please enjoy Cruise Ship Stories.

1:02But but one thing you gotta know, I'm gonna keep on shining. Hello, Hal. Hello, it's nice to meet you. Is that your lover's blouse behind you or yours? Is it birds or flowers on the sleeves? It is my wife's. We are in my daughter's closet. You guys did the impossible. You got my daughter to clean up her closet. Oh, wow. Just so I can talk to you. Well, you're welcome, I guess, because that's an impossible task. It is an impossible task, as you probably know. that. Yes. How old is your daughter? I have two, just like you. I've got a ninth grader and a seventh grader, so I'm a couple of years ahead of you.

1:38Oh, yeah. Things are getting real busy. They are. Where are you at, Hal? I am in Lloyd Harbor, New York. It's on Long Island. Oh, how far from the city? About 40 miles or so. If you want to go to like Montauk, how long of a trip is that for you? I'm on the North Shore of Long Island. Montauk's on the south and all the way out east, so it's a good hour and a half, two hours from here. That's not bad, though. You're two hours from paradise. Exactly. Although I'd say where we are is pretty Edenic as well. Edenic? I like that. Wow, that's a takeoff on Eden? Yeah. Did you know it, Monica? I don't think I've heard it.

2:14Edenic. That's a good vocab word. That's going in my arsenal. Okay, so you have a crazy cruise ship story. I do. Can I set the stage a little bit first, please? Oh, you can set the fuck out of the stage, Hal. All right. This is about 2002. to I'm a couple years younger than you, Dex, but basically the same age. I was in law school. It's our second year. And if you know anything about how law school works after your first year, which is super intense, you try and get an internship in the fall of that year for the following summer. And so my friends and I, we all got our internships. So this was spring break of our second year of law school.

2:49And we're feeling pretty good. We're less stressed. We want to blow it out. So we book a cruise and it's for spring break. So it's on a party cruise line. For me, this is a big deal. I didn't get to go on many vacations growing up. I was on loans. And really quick, if you're on a budget, cruise is nice. Could you get the drink pass at that point? There was no drink pass. That hurt a lot. I didn't realize that was going to be a thing until the end of the cruise when you get that bill. I get really sick the week before. It's a couple days before we're supposed to leave and I don't think I can go.

3:21I've got fever. I can't swallow. I've got congestion. I'm just horrible. My buddy describes it. He came over to drop off a sandwich for me so I could eat. And he said he opened the door and it smelled and felt like death. So it was basically that kind of situation. He immediately drops the sandwich and basically runs out. He goes and calls my other friend. And you know when you have that friend who's kind of like the party guy, the motivator, the guy who's going to get you to go and do something? He was that guy. And he called me up and just gave me some tough love. He's like, you're going. There's no chance you're not.

3:54Fix yourself. So I go, I grab some antibiotic and it kicks in about a day and a half later. I'm feeling a little bit better. If you take antibiotic, those labels on it tell you no sun, no alcohol, no cruises, basically. Cruises, maybe not the best choice, right? But I'm good to go. I'm going. We get to the cruise. You get on the first day. And if you've taken a cruise, you're going to go up to the top and you're going to watch it disembark. Can I quickly ask, where is it taking off from? and where will you be going? We're taking off out of Miami and we're going down to the Caribbean. So we're going to hit like St.

4:28Thomas and St. Croix. Classic cruise. On the Carnival Cruise Line. So the classic cruise line as well. So we're up on the top and we're watching it leave. And we've already got our first boat drinks in our hands. But remember, I'm not supposed to be in the sun. Yeah. And I'm not supposed to have alcohol. And first day, I'm out on the deck drinking alcohol and in the sun. I didn't realize this, but you don't feel the sun on the cruise, right? Because you get all that wind from how fast you're going. So it feels pretty cool even when it's hot. But you see my pigmentation here. I am not somebody who tans easily.

5:04I burn almost immediately, which started to happen. But I realized, I said, all right, I better put some sunblock on. And at this point, I'm in that phase where I've had enough drinks where I think I'm pretty good at everything. So I start putting my sunblock on. I think I've got good coverage. But the next day I wake up and clearly I had just smeared sunblock kind of down the center of my chest. And now I've got the worst sunburn I've ever had. And I think Wabi Wabi has a picture. Let's take a gander at this sunburn. To say you're a lobster is just as spot on as it gets. And it's a really flattering picture, too.

5:43It's everything you want. We'll get to where that picture takes place because that's two or three days later. Oh, wow. Okay. I've got a beer in hand again. And at this point, you know that, first of all, my friends are giving me so much shit. I'm also the guy on the cruise who has this ridiculous sunburn. And so everybody's starting to know me as that guy with the sunburn. It also hurts, right? So I have to kind of shield myself from sun wherever I can. I'm in the shade. But two days later, I'm okay. I'm going out. It hadn't blistered yet. It hadn't started peeling yet because that happened later.

6:15But we get to the beach on, I think it was St. Croix at this point. And we're feeling good. We're on the beach drinking a beer. You know, we start chatting up this group of women. We go into the water. This is all going super well. I'm feeling good. I'm in the water. I'm out of the sun, right? It's not hurting anymore. My antibiotic is taking care of everything it needs to take care of. And I'm talking to this pretty woman. This was long before my wife. And I stubbed my toe. In the water? In the water. Oh. Well, a shell. Maybe it's a shell. Maybe it's a piece of coral, something, right? I stubbed my toe.

6:47and it hurts but I try not to think anything of it and I just keep chatting up this woman and it starts to hurt some more what is this this really hurts now I'm like kind of walking away from her and my buddy's chatting her up and I pick my foot up out of the water kind of trying to see if there's anything there holding my toe and my friend looks at me says what's all that black stuff on the bottom of your foot and I say I don't know and then at that point pain sets in like I've never felt before. I am writhing around. I'm screaming. Now I'm also scared because I have no idea what this is. So I started trying to get out of the water.

7:21Is it a burning pain or like an impact pain? It's a stinging, searing pain. Okay. So I go hopping out of the water. And if you've ever tried to get out of the ocean on one foot, it's actually really hard. So now I'm like army crawling up the beach. My buddy tells me later that one of the girls I was talking to says, oh, does your friend always cry this much? Oh, wow. I get up onto the beach. I'm holding my foot. I'm still kind of screaming about it. And a guy walks by and he looks down at my foot. He said, oh, yeah, you stepped on a sea urchin. So I had kicked a sea urchin and it was extremely painful.

8:01I don't know if you've ever done that or I've heard of anybody. Did you just do it? Funny enough, I just in Hawaii got five quills in my heel. They're still there. Just this morning, I'm like, when are these coming out? Yeah. So you found out that you kind of just let them dissolve. Well, my daughters thought you're going to get poisoned and die. And I'm like, no, there's no way they're letting a snorkel in front of the hotel. I'm not saying they're poisonous. They ran it to the scuba guy. And then he came and gave me vinegar and said, soak your foot in vinegar. That'll help it dissolve. I did that.

8:30They didn't dissolve. Anyway, sorry. No, no. So I'm with my buddy. He's that overachiever. He's a doctor and a lawyer. And he was the ER trained. So he says, I'll go back with you to the cruise ship and see what they'll do for it. Because the guy that walked by said, I have to get them taken out, which, as you know, is incorrect. Yeah, yeah. So I'm waiting in the taxi. He's also the person who's going to give you the most shit about anything and loves to tell stories. So he's telling everybody on the beach what happened to me. And then we go to the cruise. They told me I don't take any of them out.

8:56So then I just limped around for the next few hours. So that's sort of the end of sea urchin part. Oh, God. Now there's a third part to this. So I think I'm in the clear. I'm starting to feel good later on. And I'm like, all right, no more mistakes. Nothing's going to happen anymore. I'm sitting at a table in a bar. Another one of my friends comes over with a couple of girls and they sit down and we're just chit-chatting away. And I lean over to say something to her and I put my hand behind her chair. And now I feel something in my hand. What? And so I pull my hand out and it's covered in splinters and it's bleeding.

9:33It's everywhere. But now I am at a point in this cruise where I can't show any pain. I can't do anything that's going to bring any more attraction. So I kind of just hide it away. But it wasn't fast enough because my friend saw it. And he then goes, jumps up and goes and grabs all my other friends to come and look at me. What you've done this time. So that they can then have another laugh at my expense for the rest of the time. Wow. This was a deck chair that just was scraggly on the back? Yeah, it was just beat up on the back. And I didn't know it. And just bad luck. I hate to be disparaging about Carnival, but let's get those deck chairs oiled and sanded.

10:09Yikes. They probably have over the last 25 years. Yeah. This is like, you don't really like my Ziggy reference because you didn't grow up reading Ziggy. I don't know Ziggy. But do you remember Ziggy, Hale? Of course. He was the cutest cartoon in everything that could go wrong that Ziggy did. This is really like Ziggy went on a cruise in a lot of ways. It was tough. Thankfully, nothing else really happened on the rest of the cruise that was bad, but it was enough that I took shit for the rest of the time. We repeated the cruise the next year. Thankfully, nothing happened. Well, I'm impressed you went again.

10:40Yeah, back on that horse. I would be like, fuck that. Let's just go to one of these islands that we want to be at and just be there. Were there any gals on the boat that really took pity on you? I was going to say, any nurses? Nurses would have been a great meet-cube. No. I'm not that slick. Maybe I could have played it better and played it up a little bit, but I didn't play the pity card very well. Oh, wow. Wow. Wow, that's a real shit cruise. And you didn't make out with anyone. Oh, let's not say that. Oh, okay, great. Okay. Okay, you still came out on top. Okay. It was still a fun cruise, and it was still a spring break.

11:11You know, things happen. Great, great, great, great. So net win, maybe. Net win, and I'm talking to you guys. That's a definite positive. And actually, Dax, I thought we weren't going to hear from you guys on this story. And then I heard from Emma, I was in White Lake, Michigan. No. It's the first time I've been to Michigan in maybe 16 years or so. What on earth were you doing in White Lake? So I grew up in Highland right next door, bordering White Lake. I didn't know that, but one of my good friends from growing up lives there. We see each other fairly often, but I had not visited him there. Emma reached out when I was actually visiting him for the first time in 16 years.

11:46Does he live on the lake? He does not. His in-laws do them. Okay. Well, Hale, delightful meeting you. God, did you give your buddies a gift? Truly. There's no better gift than like when one of your buddies can take the beating on everyone else's behalf. Totally. I think if it happened now, I would kind of take it like you do, Dax, and say, oh, this is going to be a story one day. At 24 years old, I wasn't taking it that way. I took it pretty hard during the trip. So if you don't mind, my family's waiting right out there. My older daughter was the one who encouraged me to submit for the prom. So they'd love to get on and meet you guys.

12:16Absolutely. Bring them in. Hi. Hi. Are you the owner of this closet? Yeah. And the computer. It's on. I'm Layla. Hi, Layla. We heard you cleaned just for us. Yeah, that is not something that happens often. Well, it looks great. I mean, it's ready for a photo shoot. Thanks. I just want to say, I'm so excited to meet you guys. When I saw this prompt, I was actually outside and I was re-listening to the beach stories where the guy stepped on the sea urchin. And I was thinking, oh, dad's story would be great to go on Armchair Anonymous. And then I looked right then and there was a cruise ship story.

12:54Whoa. And so I ran inside. Sim, sim, sim. Very simmy. real quick my aunt asked me to get a shout out so she's my mom's twin oh oh identical or fraternal identical so love you my Tracy do you feel like you have two moms it's weird because I have three cousins from my mom's twin we look pretty similar and we always joke that we're half siblings yeah yes yes double first cousins half siblings whoa I wish your mom had married an identical twin then Then your cousins would really be your siblings. Yeah, that would be a very interesting experiment. Well, it's very nice meeting you. Really good luck with ninth grade.

13:34Tell your seventh grade sister, good luck with seventh grade. Good luck with seventh grade. My favorite year of my life. And say hi to mom. Hi, mom. Well, nice meeting you guys. Nice to meet you guys. Take care. Bye. Oh, my God. A whole family. That was cute. We love identical twins. Because they're so rare. They're limited edition. I guess everyone loves identical twins probably. Well. We're probably not unique in that, right? Okay, comment if you don't like identical twins. Okay, yeah. I could see people being scared by them. Especially if you don't really believe in science and God makes babies kind of a situation.

14:11They think they're demons. Yeah, maybe like, how do you explain that? Well, science. If you don't believe in a, right, if you don't believe in that. That is indeed the explanation. In the absence of that explanation, what would you possibly guess? demon or this one was so good that god had to make two really good spin

14:48hi hi luke hi that's right can you guys hear me oh wonderful it's like It's like you're about to land an airplane. That's what I'm going for. Yes, it's working. Tell me why you have this headset. Are you a gamer? I am a gamer and I am recording this from a job site. I just didn't want to rely on my laptop's audio. We appreciate that greatly. You're going by a pseudonym. Are we allowed to know what state you're in? Yeah, that's totally fine. I'm in Bozeman, Montana. Oh, okay. Wonderful. That's a beautiful place to be. It's gorgeous. We had a blizzard yesterday. Mountains are still full of snow.

15:21A blizzard. Full on blizzard driving home last night. Wow. Do you like that? I don't love the snow, but I don't hate it. When it's unexpected is when it's the worst. Right, which I imagine yesterday was unexpected. Absolutely. Do you guys have the same thing we had in Michigan where it's like you have a fake spring and you get excited and then all of a sudden it just fucking turns to winter in May and you're like, fuck this place. That's exactly what yesterday was. Yeah, it was like 75, 80 degrees over the weekend. Oh my God. Hard snow yesterday. Accidents on my drive home. It was pretty rough.

15:52Those climates, they're backstabbers. Yeah, they're tricky. Yeah, they'll fool you. Did you grow up in Montana? I actually grew up in the Seattle area. Oh, okay. So you have a cruise story. That's right. This was for my wife and I's honeymoon. And shortly before the cruise, as newlyweds tend to do, we fooled around a lot. During some of this fooling around, I ended up with a little bit of chafing on my dick. Okay. Just saying. And that's what it was. Don't need to sugarcoat it. Yeah, yeah. He was about to say penis. And he's like, no, I'm already talking about chafing. It's a dick chafing. That's the way the story's going to go.

16:32So fast forward, we're like on day two of the cruise. Can I pause you, Luke? I just want to regale for a second. That brings me back to my youth. Your fecundity rate was so high that you would actually damage the skin. I mean, that's for the youthful. Absolutely. Happy that those days are long gone for me, for sure. So we're on the cruise. It's day two. It's a day at sea, so there's really not a lot going on. Where's the cruise going to? Is it a Caribbean cruise? We're going to Alaska. Oh, okay. I go to take a shower. And if you've ever been on a cruise before, the bathrooms are tiny. I mean, you stand in the middle and you can touch all four walls just reaching out.

17:07So as you can imagine, the shower is equally tiny. And in the shower, they give you a wand to get to those hard to reach places. Oh, my God. Like you can pull it off the wall. Oh, I see. Right. A shower wand. Well, I'm going to shower and I'm thinking I want to get myself as clean as possible. I want this wound to heal up as quickly as it can because, you know, I've got to perform on my honeymoon. Yeah, you got to get back to it. Back in the saddle. I'm cleaning myself up and I have this great idea I'm going to clean that area specifically. So I pull myself a little tight down there and I spray the wand on it.

17:45the water pressure from the wand hits right on this rug burn spot and immediately starts gushing blood. Oh, my God. You've opened up the wound. Yeah, and it's right on a vein. I'm not talking a little bit of blood. I'm talking imagine you're peeing, but it is solid red. I mean, it is just a pressurized bead of red coming out of my dick. It like punctured the vein. Punctured. What? Wow. God, these penises are so fragile. They can take a beating, but you push them too hard, they will give. Wow. They will give, yes. And I am aghast. I don't know what to do. Honestly, my first thought, embarrassingly, is my wife doesn't need to know about this.

18:35She already knows I'm wounded down there, so if I can just get the bleeding to stop, she doesn't need to know about this. We'll just move on with life. Okay. This is where we're different. We were in line so far, but now I would be so excited to call her in like, holy shit, look at this, you know. And it gets there. Okay. So I go grab a massive wad of toilet paper. I mean, I'm talking 30 sheets at least. And I go to stick it under there. It turns into a mushy mess of nothing in seconds. Oh my God. This is scary. You're losing some considerable blood here. Exactly. And so now I'm panicked. So now it's time to call the wife in and tell her I'm having an emergency.

19:13I'm having an emergency. I call her in. She walks in and it looks like a war zone. I mean, there's blood all over the walls. It's everywhere. She handles it well. She goes and she calls the cruise site nurse team. So she calls the nurse team down and this little nurse comes in and same thing. She opens the door. She looks at me and she just has this look of horror when she looks into this bathroom. She gives me a one-inch thick stack of that heavy-duty gauze that's designed to stop bleeding. She says, put this on there, apply pressure. I'll be right back. I'm going to go get a wheelchair, some more supplies.

19:50We'll wheel you down to the infirmary. She's gone maybe just a few minutes. By the time she has come back, I have bled through this stack of gauze. There's literally blood dripping out the bottom of this stack of gauze. Luke, at any moment, are you considering a tourniquet? Based off the area of the injury, I am trying to avoid that as much as I can. And so she has me throw that away. She hands me a new stack of gauze, tells me to apply pressure again. I've put a shirt on. I'm on the wheelchair. And they're wheeling me down to the infirmary. Any pants? Surprisingly, basically no pain. Oh. No, no, no.

20:24No pants. Pants. Oh, pants. No pants. Just a towel covering my leg. Oh, OK. But you are covered at least with a towel. But it is awkward. You're going through the halls of this cruise ship. And there's all these people looking at you. At first glance, they really have no idea what's wrong, but I'm sitting there just freaking the hell out. And you bear like, there's nothing I would want to see more than that. A man in his t-shirt and no pants on with a towel over his groin. It's a scene. I wish the story ended there. So she wheels me down to the infirmary. And luckily by this point, I've got about three quarters of the way through this second thing of gauze and the bleeding has stopped.

21:01The doctor on site is taking a look at this injury. Of course, it's a girl doctor too, but I've got no shame. What am I going to do at this point? But she looks at it and she says, we've got to close this. It could reopen at any point. You're going to be right in the same situation. And so she says, well, I'd like to just use a stitch, but on this part of your body, it's very prone to expansion and contraction. So we don't want to use a stitch. So what we're going to use is a chemical cauterization. Oh, glue. Not exactly. chemical cauterization is they apply two inert chemicals to your body chemical a doesn't do anything by itself chemical b doesn't do anything by itself but when they come in contact with each other it melts your skin back together oh and like cauterizes it's like a chemical cauterizing that's what he said literally he said that oh that's the exact phrase oh my god i'm sorry i missed the no you're good she lays me back on the table there's no anesthetic and she gives me a rubber stick to bite onto oh my and i would be wondering is this a disposable or many people bitten down on this rubber stick yeah i was kind of under the impression that many people have bitten down on this rubber stick before

22:20it was definitely like in the top shelf of the supplies you know like oh we need this every day and so she does that has me grab my wife's hand and i'm telling you guys i bet my screams are still reverberating through that crucia i can't begin to describe the amount of pain that having your dick skin burned back together feels like oh my god oh i wish this on no one oh i know and also i want to see video of this entire thing from beginning to cauterization I wish it existed. Once it's cauterized, does she say to you, like, don't use this thing for a while? More or less, yeah. She said no sexual activity for a couple of weeks.

23:04Obviously, it's going to kind of expand on its own every once in a while. There's not a lot you can do about that. Try not to look at any pretty ladies. Yeah, and you're on a cruise. Tell your new wife to keep her clothes on. Luckily, the cruise to Alaska, not a lot of women in bikinis, but still something to concern yourself with. Those bald eagles, though, they can get things moving. Oh, they get you excited, don't they? What a sight to see. I thought you were making a euphemism for vagina. Oh, that could also, yeah. I like that euphemism. It healed well. I had no lingering injuries, a little bit of scarring, but you'd have to know what you were looking for.

23:38Wow. You reversed the wife who's had a baby. That's what I was thinking when she had to hold his hand. More just like wife has a baby and then there's a window where wife can't have sex. Oh. But in this case, they're like married and then he had an issue and then they're now waiting and they're newlyweds. They're very horny. A hundred percent. Oh, that's great. What a memorable honeymoon. Yeah. And that's what I always tell people. I've told this story to people over the years. And, you know, if it wasn't exciting, you wouldn't remember it. Oh, Luke, that's fantastic. What a great story. I'm glad you enjoyed it.