Perpetual Motion: Day 0

This is a six-part series about my time aboard CrimeWave at Sea 2025. If you want to join us on CrimeWave at Sea 2027, book your cabin now at crimewaveatsea.com/sinister or use SINISTER at checkout.

MY BAD MOUTH

“Never say never.” -Justin Bieber

At a fortieth birthday party with a group of my law school friends, I am asked by my friend, Pam, “So, how was the cruise?”

“Despite what all I said before, I loved it, actually,” I reply.

“Oh yeah, you did bad mouth cruises before,” Pam says.

“Pretty publicly,” I laugh.

I’m not sure bad mouthing is exactly accurate, but I did call cruises “the wild west of the seas” during a couple of episodes of the podcast I co-host, Sinisterhood.

We covered the disappearance of Amy Bradley in episodes 272 and 273. While on vacation with her mom, dad, and brother in 1998, Amy went missing from Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas. Her family believes she was lured or forced off the ship, perhaps trafficked. Royal Caribbean insists she fell or jumped overboard. She has not yet been found. The FBI is still accepting tips.

“Things just weren’t the same on a cruise ship as they are now… It was just a much looser environment [in 1998],” Christie said on our episode. She’s right. Railings were lower. There were way fewer cameras, and less capable technology to analyze what the cameras caught.

Throughout the episodes, we discussed the regulation of the cruise industry, or lack thereof, likening it both to the airline and securities industries in terms of companies’ willingness to comply with regulations. Congress passes a law. A rulemaking body like the Coast Guard, the Federal Aviation Administration, or the Securities Exchange Commission is tasked with making rules to apply that law. The rules are made. Companies subjected to those rules follow each mandatory rule, only to the extent that they have to, and nothing more.

“They’re not particularly evil,” I said in part two. “It’s just any giant corporation that seeks to make money is looking out for itself — Royal Caribbean is looking out for Royal Caribbean.” Particularly being the operative word.

At the end our coverage, I concluded, “If you like to cruise, go cruise. Do it with your eyes wide open.”

So, it was with eyes wide open I went on my first cruise.

WHAT THE OCEAN SEES

To open my eyes a little wider, I read David Foster Wallace’s essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” before we left. Written for Harper’s Magazine in 1996, DFW called it a “ship to shore… experiential post card” that he got paid to write while taking a seven-day luxury cruise aboard Celebrity Cruise Lines. Nobody is paying me to write this, but I gave myself that same assignment: to write an experiential post card. That way, I’d have an all-encompassing answer to the question “And how was that?” after people ask, “What have you been up to?” and I say, “my best friend Christie and I just co-headlined the inaugural sailing of the first true crime festival on a cruise ship called CrimeWave at Sea.”

To catch all my thoughts along the way, I bought several Five Star spiral notebooks and blank 3×5 Moleskine journals. I wanted to see the ship. I wanted to feel the sea under me. I wanted to travel through employee corridors and passageways. I wanted to see and assess the balcony heights and walk the elevator landings and hear how loud a slamming cabin door can be. And I wanted to write it all down. Understanding our ship was roughly two-times the size of the one Amy disappeared from, I still wanted to know the space in person.

All the usual hurdles that would keep me from planning a cruise of my own were eliminated by CrimeWave. I didn’t have to choose a date, pick an itinerary, or plan anything. Full disclosure, I got paid to perform (obviously – IRL takes care of its talent!). But the real bonus, something no other cruise was going to offer: being surrounded by 550+ people who were just as curious about the darker side of cruising as I am.

Now, having waxed poetic only from solid ground, I was ready to board and see for myself.  

CONNECTION THROUGH CONCRETE

Sunday, Nov. 2, 2025 – American Airlines Flight 1373 – DFW to Ft. Lauderdale, FL (FLL) 

We departed from the gate at 12:51, but we had to wait on the runway while the plane was “being inspected,” whatever that meant. We’ll be arriving about 20 minutes later than scheduled, so 5:00 PM. After landing, we’re headed to the hotel in Ft. Lauderdale.

Having read DFW’s essay, I am anxious to compare a 2025 cruise to a 1995 cruise. Hey, look at that timing – right at thirty years later. Shout out to Winston, the ping pong pro DFW met on his cruise and described in the piece. I wonder if that guy actually went to school and studied “multimediated production” as planned. He described that field of study as relating to CD-Roms, interactive virtual reality, and other tech advances that seemed untouchably far away five years before the new millennium. DFW riffed about it then – it sounded so futuristic at the time – but look how close we are now. Are there stay-at-home VR cruises yet? Don’t worry, even if they’re not here yet, Meta will make sure we have them soon.

I looked up our assigned cabin online before we left. It wasn’t hard to find. Lots of cruisers post room tours online, for all the cruise lines from Carnival to Princess to Royal Caribbean. Do you say CUH-rib-ee-ann or care-UH-be-in? Does your answer change if you’re preceding it with Royal – or Pirates of the – ? However you say it, RC calls their ships [Something] of the Seas, which frequent cruisers then abbreviate online to [_]OTS. We’ll be boarding Liberty of the Seas, so I guess ours is LOTS. LOTS of fun, I hope. Applying this same principal means Amy Bradley disappeared from ROTS.

Careful with those first initials.

I have looked at the RC app a bit. Probably should’ve completed the online check-in, but I didn’t know when we’d be getting there. So far, aside from our CrimeWave activities, my only calendared event is a dinner with the CEO of IRL Events, Brett, the Last Podcast gang, Christie, and our spouses on Wednesday. Saying that on Sunday makes it seem far away, but it’ll be here before we know it. Time probably flies when you’re spending it together in beautiful surroundings. What a lucky life we get to lead. Makes a gal grateful.

Last night, Christie and I looked up the dimensions of the LOTS. It’s about twice as long and wide as the Maersk Alabama, the subject of our on-board show. LOTS is 1,112 feet long and 185 feet wide. It’s like three and a half city blocks long. LOTS holds about 3,798 passengers and 1,360 crew. Of those pax, our merry band of CrimeWavers is about 550, a chunk of whom came specifically to see Christie and me. And based on the creator lineup, I know it’ll be a fun crowd.

Reviewing the Wikipedia page for LOTS, Christie and I scrolled down to section titled “Incidents.” There was the story of a COVID outbreak in April 2020, and separately, the jumping death of a 20-year-old man named Levion Parker in April 2024. Passenger Bryan Sims told the New York Post that Parker’s dad confronted Levion and his 18-year-old brother, Seth, after they’d gotten out of the ship’s hot tub. The ship was 57 miles off the coast of Great Inagua, the southernmost island of the Bahamas.

Passengers spoke to reporters afterward, explaining that the dad, was “fussing” at the young man for being drunk. In response, the boy (for that’s really what he was) said something to the effect of, “I’ll fix this right now” and leapt “out the window,” according to a witness.

The kid who hit the water from a Disney ship in June 2024 went through a porthole. In that case, initial reports were marred by rumors that her dad – the man who JUMPED IN THE WHOLE OCEAN TO SAVE HER – had initially dropped her in.

Imagine you fucking LEAP into the ABYSS from a super-high height on a massive moving ship, and the internet is like “Yeah cool, but he put her up on the railing.” No real evidence; just parroting comments they’d seen before. It turns out, per the incident report, the mother pointed to the porthole railing and the daughter climbed on the railing and sat down, then lost her balance and fell backward off the railing into the ocean. the mother had assumed the porthole had a window. It did not, and the kid fell out.

Unlike the Disney kid, young Levion who leapt from LOTS last April was unfortunately never found. His father, brother, and a fellow passenger watched him disappear into the infinite blackness, absorbed by the churn. Helpless, all of them. I don’t know whether, from a distance that high, with wind and noises and people, you’d even hear a splash. To their credit, the crew members acted fast. Even so, the dark ocean after 4AM is an inimitable foe. Black water swallowing you whole in the LOTS’s wake. Levion’s dad chucked several life preservers over the side, but to no avail. The distraught father yelled a prayer over the water and told one news outlet he still believes his son is alive.

When logging onto the app and connecting my reservation, I was made to hold my passport before my phone camera. The data was captured in less than a second by the RC app. I then had to take a clear-faced selfie – no glasses, no hats. When I uploaded it, I was required to click a button that meant I agreed to the selfie being used for photography identification and for “biometrics.” Per the RC privacy policy, that means tracking where you are and what you did and what you wore and who you were with “for safety and security purposes such as to find missing persons.”

This means to me that they put you in a cruiser database and have your photo connected to your SeaPass. No surprise. That’s not the only time my face was scanned in my travels. At TSA Precheck on the way here from DFW, they scanned our faces on a little iPad thing. I’m sure that’s totally secure and only being used for legitimate government purposes. The federal government fully respects all our civil liberties, especially privacy.

Creepy, but also precisely the type of surveillance I myself called for in our Amy Bradley episodes. Careful what you wish for, kids. When I said folks should board a cruise with eyes wide open, I didn’t envision my wide-open eyes staring into a biometric data collection matrix. Yet here we are.

The call of the ocean is strong.

But it was not merely the ocean.

I yearn for novel experiences – trains, new cities, boat rides, and now, very big boat rides. I previously predicted that I would not enjoy a cruise. Then again, nobody mentioned it would be a cruise full of fellow true crime fans. This changes the equation. Will I enjoy it or feel trapped? Who knows, but I am open to fun! I seek it out. My kind of fun is primarily found wandering around new places, watching people, talking to them, asking questions, and writing down the answers. I bet I can make that happen this week.

Sitting at my regular breakfast place in my hometown of Mesquite, Texas the week before I left, I ran into one of my oldest friends. Whilst reading DFW and eating my garden scramble, a man sidled up to me at the bar, in my peripheral vision. When I turned, it was my hometown buddy, Jeff, who I’ve known since third grade. He was there having breakfast with a former colleague, a guy I’d never met.

Turned out the former colleague was a frequent cruiser and loaded me with advice. First and foremost, don’t put upside-down pineapples on your cabin door because that is a signal to swingers. His other tips were (1) Get a Starbucks gift card and buy all onboard Starbucks with that to avoid the 18% automatic gratuity. I didn’t know LOTS had a Starbucks, and I actually don’t go to Starbucks anymore, but I thanked him for the tip to avoid tips.

The former colleague, a fellow runner, also told me never to look at the ocean in motion while running laps on deck. He advised I take the stairs to save time on elevators and work off the extra buffet calories. He suggested I bring stretch pants as he gained eleven pounds on his last cruise.

The usual Bacchanalian nature of cruises for most folks is tempered for me by my dietary restrictions, but I feel like a gluten free pescatarian shouldn’t be too outrageous. We’re on the ocean, after all. If you run out of fish, reach over and get me some more. That’s how it works, right?

He also said if I planned on going ashore, do NOT bring any flowers or fruit one way or the other on the “gang plank.” This made me excited to see a gang plank. He did advise that, were I planning on snorkeling, I should pocket a box of Corn Flakes from the buffet, take it off the gang plank, then dump it in the water to have the best snorkeling sesh of my life.

I did not plan on snorkeling, but I did yearn for some of the amenities I read about in DFW’s piece. First and foremost, there was skeet shooting on his ship! In 1995, a cruise ship employee handed DFW a gun and a shell and let him load it into the gun and SHOOT THE GUN at a clay disk over the water and wtfffffff. I want to do that! But, best I can tell from message board posts, they stopped offering that after 9/11.

I don’t know how effective a skeet shooting gun loaded only with a single shell would be at taking over a full fuckin’ cruise ship, but I guess with liability and what not, a company can never be too careful. Are there guns on this ship at all? I don’t think that is something I can ask an employee without getting my face flagged in the biometric database.

Certainly some things to keep in mind.

I saw on the ship map that our room is near the library, so I am stoked about that. Time to nap and rest my eyes a bit.

2:46PM CT – In Flight

I hope there is an orthopedic doctor at the gate in Ft. Lauderdale to look at Paris’s kneecap, which I about wrenched loose from the joint as we rocketed through the air at 400 miles per hour, going side to side, jumping up and rocketing downward. It felt like driving down a real rocky dirty road in the back of a pickup truck except at 35,000 feet. Turbulence was so bad I said, “Get me to Florida.”

Sunday, 5:06 PM – Tarmac – Ft. Lauderdale International Airport

The entire plane ride had had a solemn feeling to it, and the most sullen faces were wearing the orange and green of University of Miami. I had no idea that my law school alma mater, SMU, had narrowly beaten the better ranked South Florida school this weekend. We were all aboard a death march home for the U of Miami diehards.

When we emerged from the jetway in Florida into the low-ceilinged terminal, the number of bodies packed in felt stifling. Flights had not yet been cancelled due to the government shutdown; it was just a Sunday in Ft. Lauderdale. No airport should serve as a stand-in for its city, but it’s all we had at the time.

“So many flip flops,” Christie said.

The humidity made my skin itch beneath my clothes. The low ceilings, the march of angry bodies and bags, the Gogolian fluorescent lighting and bare walls, all seemed made to juxtapose themselves, both in discomfort and unsightliness, with our purpose for being there – a cruise to the beautiful Bahamas.

We gathered our bags and made our way to the ride share pickup area. On the way, we got to meet a listener named Allie who had flown in for the cruise from Tucson via DFW Airport on our same flight.

The rideshare app said a man called Norge would pick us up in his black Ford Expedition, and, less than a half-hour later, he did. As he tried delivering us to our hotel, we became ensnared in traffic caused by two words every service worker thereafter repeated to explain the crowded conditions: Boat Show.

Under huge black and gray clouds that I’ve come to recognize as a familiar aspect of a Florida afternoon, Norge inched us forward in the Boat Show traffic. We passed cigar superstores, plentiful so folks could stock up on stogies before setting sail. Bathed in red brake lights, we passed the time with a touchscreen backseat entertainment system. On the iPad mounted to the back of the passenger seat headrest, we played various trivia, matching, and other games.

Christie was our representative, sitting directly in front of it. She pressed the answers on the screen to questions like, “What film depicts rapper Eminem’s on-screen debut?” It wasn’t option B, The Green Mile, though we all agreed we’d like to have watched the scene where his last meal request is mom’s spaghetti.

We were stopped long enough at the foot of a raised bridge that Christie’s fast fingers earned us a spot on the high score list. As she tried selecting three letters to claim our glory at the top of the list, the tablet glitched out. We are forever immortalized in Norge’s backseat not as CMW (her initials) or even ASS (hehe) but as ICM, which I guess could stand for “I can’t mash [any buttons due to a frozen screen]?”

The app also offered mindfulness exercises. I looked ahead to the bridge that had been trapping as the tablet reminded me via a smiling cartoon cactus, “You are at peace.”

I assessed myself. Am I at peace?

I couldn’t decide before the cactus piped up again: “You are in control.”

I looked at the locked car door. The water below the bridge. The pavement moving in inches beneath us. Norge’s eyes in the rearview. I was dubious.

“You can handle this,” the cactus urged. How? Handle who? Norge was silent in the front seat. The rideshare app buzzed my watch. It noticed how long we’d been still on the bridge.

“Are you in danger?” it asked, urging me to click a button to notify police.

“Bridge maybe broken,” Norge said. “It’s been a long time.”

“This won’t be a problem in 40 years,” Tommy said regarding the bridge traffic. “The whole place will be underwater.” After some groans and “good lords,” he offered, “Blame Heather.” A reference to the climate change book The Parrot and the Igloo by Dave Lipsky I’d given him a prior Christmas.

The Octopus Backseat Entertainment System drew us back. Our cactus reminded us, “Focus on the present.”

“It’s the little things that mean the most,” it advised. “There’s more beauty on the outside of your comfort zone.”

THIS TIME TOMORROW

We made it to the hotel and unloaded our bags. I was bummed to see our hotel bar was closed by the time we arrived. I don’t drink much at all, but a plaque on the door commemorated that it was the filming location for the mermaid scene in the film Analyze This with Billy Crystal and Robert DeNiro. On Saturdays, the mermaids perform topless. I was dejected to realize it was Sunday and our flight left the following Friday.

Once we dropped our bags, we walked five minutes next door to the Marriot’s Sea Level restaurant. The wind straight off the ocean, still whipping in jolts left over from Hurricane Melissa, had the palm trees leaning sideways like they were trying to walk indoors without bumping their heads.

We ended up seated outside near the bar, a few tables away from the beach. By then, the sky was completely dark. The horizon met it somewhere out way beyond our line of sight. All we could make out from land were the ships lit up against the black, bits of light leaking through nips on a curtain. We wondered aloud what they were doing out there, stationary. Waiting, probably cleaning and prepping until boarding the next day.

This time tomorrow, I’ll be stuck out in the depths, I thought.

I plunged my spoon back into my pineapple creme brulé. We paid and took off for a late-night beach walk. The Marriott controls beach access at that area, but their gate was unlocked. Should private companies get to “own” a beach? I think no, so we wandered through their area, pushed around by the wind but staying upright on the sand-smashing mesh mats that made for walkways.

“Brown Eyed Girl” greeted us back in the Marriott lobby, strummed out by a live musician and swayed to by a room of half-drunk tourists doing exactly what I believe you are supposed to do in South Florida.

Back at our hotel, we watched Captain Phillips on Netflix in Christie and Tommy’s room. Our on-board show will cover the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama and Phillips’ harrowing rescue.

One thing I keep thinking about – in the book and the film and real life, the lead pirate, Abduwali Muse, and his crew of 3 never said they wanted to be sea pirates. They wanted what everyone wants – to revel in the pleasures of life. And if they would have had different options, I would wager they would not choose to be sea pirates. Especially not the youngest guy, the kid. Pirates are vicious and wrong, sure they are, but the idea that people who have been ravaged by circumstance aren’t then completely perfect in their choices is idiotic.

Not to be a pirate apologist, though it should come as no surprise since I went through a whole phase in high school where I wanted to be a pirate. I was attracted more so to the aesthetic and the vibe, rather than the pillaging and what not. Nowadays, I’m only onboard with piracy based on who I am pillaging. Or Our Flag Means Death.

Having now read his memoir and watched the movie, I can say Captain Phillips wasn’t a hero, He was an incredible survivor. He definitely did fuck up by not hiding in the safe area with the crew, but he said that himself in his own book. I don’t know if Maersk would have paid the bounty for everyone hiding down there or if the pirates would’ve found them and killed them all. Probably would’ve made for a much darker, shorter Tom Hanks movie.

Stay tuned for Day 1

Learn more and join us at CrimeWave 2.0

***

If you liked what you read, share this work with a friend and/or fuel my next writing piece by Venmo’ing me a cup of coffee (@heathervstheworld) or via the handy form below. Thanks for reading!