Ask, and Wayno Draino will happily show you his teeth, a fair portion of which appear to be made of stainless steel.

The teeth, both real and metallic, are, says Wayno Draino, a large part of the reason he is in this vast building in Cape Liberty Cruise Port in Bayonne, N.J., known to its intimates as The Octagon.

From outside The Octagon you get a great view of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. But Wayno has little time to check the views. He is one of perhaps 50 or so hustling porters whose job it is to transport the amassed luggage of some of the 3,000 or so ex-cruisers coming off the megaship named The Explorer of The Seas, from where the trucks deposited it to the tent where it can be loaded onto waiting cars and buses.

"I was a surfer for 20 years," says Wayno, pushing his luggage cart that looks similar to, but is twice the size of, the carts that carry lumber and other heavy items at The Home Depot. "Then one day I got hit square in the mouth with a surfboard and it took 'em out," he says, again proudly displaying his ironwork. "I only do this one day a week for the benefits. It's paying for my new teeth."

As Wayno speaks, he is trotting behind the empty cart heading to one of the carefully organized luggage drop points where confused-looking ex-cruisers wander like lost dogs looking for missing bones.

The post-cruise luggage pickup building is a wild scene. Try as the ship's managers might to organize the luggage by color tags and to

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release passengers a few at a time so the luggage pickup area won't become a sea of madness, the luggage pickup point is a sea of madness. Making things worse this day is thick fog in Upper New York Bay that delays the ship's docking by an hour. The ex-cruisers are antsy — frantic to get to their homebound rides. They pace the rows and rows and rows of bags: zippered bags, backpacks and giant suitcases with wheels and extendable handles, sealed boxes of Caribbean rum (not on wheels), seeking their own particular combination of impedimenta.

There is shouting. "Monty, I see our bags! I see them! Get over there!" Since many of the ex-cruisers' bags look quite a bit alike, Monty picks up the wrong bag, dragging it to the place where his other bags are, only to be informed of his error by an annoyed wife. Monty drops the wrong bag on the spot, thus separating it from its natural family of bags and thus bringing great consternation to its rightful owners, who are at that very moment telling the over-stressed attendant their bag is hopelessly lost. Imagine all this to the 10th power.

Wayno Draino (real name: Wayne Novelli. Age: perhaps 35) is what you would call a talker. In the time it takes to cover the 400 yards or so to and from the B-1 (blue tags) luggage pickup zone and back (five minutes, max), he gives the ex-cruiser the salient points of his life to date.

"I like your shirt," Wayno Draino tells the ex-cruiser, trotting alongside him toward the B-1 luggage pickup zone. "I used to be an illustrator at Mad magazine. Now I do my stuff on the Internet. My partner is a very famous illustrator. My wife runs three big magazines in New York. Hey, you want a sticker?"

Before the ex-cruiser has a chance to answer, Wayno reaches into the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt to produce a square, trading card-sized cartoon of a pot-bellied creature: green with donkey ears and a tail like a lightning bolt that is throwing up. The animal rides a skateboard labeled "Draino." The graffiti-like yellow lettering above the creature is the word "Pukachu." Below, the trademarked words "Psycho Slimy Skaters" are outlined in red and black.

You might think that what with all the shouting and confusion over the luggage in The Octagon, Wayno's abridged oral autobiography might be enough to put you over the edge. But, no. Amid the mass confusion there is something calming about Wayno's machine-gun stream of personal factoids. It's as if he is in some separate universe far away from all the craziness.

When you look up Wayno Draino's Web site, there is a picture of him standing amid some of his cartoon characters. He's smiling and holding what looks like a couple of champagne bottles.

Wayno deposits the ex-cruiser's bags at the pickup site and wheels the cart around. "Remember, he calls back, "it's waynodraino@yahoo.com." In a flash Wayno Draino is off for another load of bags and another chance to tell his story to another confused ex-cruiser.

Readers can contact Charles Walsh by e-mail at cwalsh@ctpost.com.