A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

1

RIGHT NOW IT’S Saturday 18 March, and I’m sitting in the extremely full coffee shop of the Fort Lauderdale Airport, killing the four hours between when I had to be off the cruise ship and when my flight to Chicago leaves by trying to summon up a kind of hypnotic sensuous collage of all the stuff I’ve seen and heard and done as a result of the journalistic assignment just ended.

I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced and a tropical moon that looked more like a sort of obscenely large and dangling lemon than like the good old stony U.S. moon I’m used to.

I have (very briefly) joined a Conga Line.

I’ve got to say I feel like there’s been a kind of Peter Principle in effect on this assignment. A certain swanky East-Coast magazine approved of the results of sending me to a plain old simple State Fair last year to do a directionless essayish thing. So now I get offered this tropical plum assignment w/ the exact same paucity of direction or angle. But this time there’s this new feeling of pressure: total expenses for the State Fair were $27.00 excluding games of chance. This time Harper’s has shelled out over $3000 U.S. before seeing pithy sensuous description one. They keep saying—on the phone, Ship-to-Shore, very patiently—not to fret about it. They are sort of disingenuous, I believe, these magazine people. They say all they want is a sort of really big experiential postcard—go, plow the Caribbean in style, come back, say what you’ve seen.

I have seen a lot of really big white ships. I have seen schools of little fish with fins that glow. I have seen a toupee on a thirteen-year-old boy. (The glowing fish liked to swarm between our hull and the cement of the pier whenever we docked.) I have seen the north coast of Jamaica. I have seen and smelled all 145 cats inside the Ernest Hemingway Residence in Key West FL. I now know the difference between straight Bingo and Prize-O, and what it is when a Bingo jackpot “snowballs.” I have seen camcorders that practically required a dolly; I’ve seen fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses and fluorescent pince-nez and over twenty different makes of rubber thong. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lamé projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator. I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the 2:4 beat of the exact same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977.

I have learned that there are actually intensities of blue beyond very, very bright blue. I have eaten more and classier food than I’ve ever eaten, and eaten this food during a week when I’ve also learned the difference between “rolling” in heavy seas and “pitching” in heavy seas. I have heard a professional comedian tell folks, without irony, “But seriously.” I have seen fuchsia pantsuits and menstrual-pink sportcoats and maroon-and-purple warm-ups and white loafers worn without socks. I have seen professional blackjack dealers so lovely they make you want to run over to their table and spend every last nickel you’ve got playing blackjack. I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the skeetshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is. I now know the precise mixological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a Fuzzy Navel. I know what a Coco Loco is. I have in one week been the object of over 1500 professional smiles. I have burned and peeled twice. I have shot skeet at sea. Is this enough? At the time it didn’t seem like enough. I have felt the full clothy weight of a subtropical sky. I have jumped a dozen times at the shattering, flatulence-of-the-gods sound of a cruise ship’s horn. I have absorbed the basics of mah-jongg, seen part of a two-day rubber of contract bridge, learned how to secure a life jacket over a tuxedo, and lost at chess to a nine-year-old girl.

(Actually it was more like I shot at skeet at sea.)

I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I now know every conceivable rationale and excuse for somebody spending over $3000 to go on a Caribbean cruise. I have bitten my lip and declined Jamaican pot from an actual Jamaican.

I have seen, one time, from an upper deck’s rail, way below and off the right rear hull, what I believe to have been a hammerhead shark’s distinctive fin, addled by the starboard turbine’s Niagaracal wake.

I have now heard—and am powerless to describe—reggae elevator music. I have learned what it is to become afraid of one’s own toilet. I have acquired “sea legs” and would like now to lose them. I have tasted caviar and concurred with the little kid sitting next to me that it is: blucky.

I now understand the term “Duty Free.”

I now know the maximum cruising speed of a cruise ship in knots.1 I have had escargot, duck, Baked Alaska, salmon w/ fennel, a marzipan pelican, and an omelette made with what were alleged to be trace amounts of Etruscan truffle. I have heard people in deck chairs say in all earnestness that it’s the humidity rather than the heat. I have been—thoroughly, professionally, and as promised beforehand—pampered. I have, in dark moods, viewed and logged every type of erythema, keratinosis, pre-melanomic lesion, liver spot, eczema, wart, papular cyst, potbelly, femoral cellulite, varicosity, collagen and silicone enhancement, bad tint, hair transplants that have not taken—i.e. I have seen nearly naked a lot of people I would prefer not to have seen nearly naked. I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me. I have acquired and nurtured a potentially lifelong grudge against the ship’s Hotel Manager—whose name was Mr. Dermatis and whom I now and henceforth christen Mr. Dermatitis²—an almost reverent respect for my waiter, and a searing crush on the cabin steward for my part of Deck 10’s port hallway, Petra, she of the dimples and broad candid brow, who always wore a nurse’s starched and rustling whites and smelled of the cedary Norwegian disinfectant she swabbed bathrooms down with, and who cleaned my cabin within a cm of its life at least ten times a day but could never be caught in the actual act of cleaning—a figure of magical and abiding charm, and well worth a postcard all her own.

2

More specifically: From 11 to 18 March 1995 I, voluntarily and for pay, underwent a 7-Night Caribbean (7NC) Cruise on board the m.v. Zenith,3 a 47,255-ton ship owned by Celebrity Cruises Inc., one of the over twenty cruise lines that currently operate out of south Florida.⁴ The vessel and facilities were, from what I now understand of the industry’s standards, absolutely top-hole. The food was superb, the service impeccable, the shore excursions and shipboard activities organized for maximal stimulation down to the tiniest detail. The ship was so clean and so white it looked boiled. The Western Caribbean’s blue varied between baby-blanket and fluorescent; likewise the sky. Temperatures were uterine. The very sun itself seemed preset for our comfort. The crew-to-passenger ratio was 1.2 to 2. It was a Luxury Cruise.

With a few minor niche-adaptive variations, the 7NC Luxury Cruise is essentially generic. All of the Megalines offer the same basic product. This product is not a service or a set of services. It’s not even so much a good time (though it quickly becomes clear that one of the big jobs of the Cruise Director and his staff is to keep reassuring everybody that everybody’s having a good time). It’s more like a feeling. But it’s also still a bona fide product—it’s supposed to be produced in you, this feeling: a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism, that special mix of servility and condescension that’s marketed under configurations of the verb “to pamper.” This verb positively studs the Megalines’ various brochures: “… as you’ve never been pampered before,” “… to pamper yourself in our Jacuzzis and saunas,” “Let us pamper you,” “Pamper yourself in the warm zephyrs of the Bahamas.”

The fact that contemporary adult Americans also tend to associate the word “pamper” with a certain other consumer product is not an accident, I don’t think, and the connotation is not lost on the mass-market Megalines and their advertisers. And there’s good reason for them to iterate the word, and stress it.

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This one incident made the Chicago news. Some weeks before I underwent my own Luxury Cruise, a sixteen-year-old male did a Brody off the upper deck of a Megaship—I think a Carnival or Crystal ship—a suicide. The news version was that it had been an unhappy adolescent love thing, a shipboard romance gone bad, etc. I think part of it was something else, something there’s no way a real news story could cover.

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir—especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased—I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture—a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

I predict this’ll get cut by the editor, but I need to cover some background. I, who had never before this cruise actually been on the ocean, have always associated the ocean with dread and death. As a little kid I used to memorize shark-fatality data. Not just attacks. Fatalities. The Albert Kogler fatality off Baker’s Beach CA in 1959 (Great White). The U.S.S. Indianapolis smorgasbord off the Philippines in 1945 (many varieties, authorities think mostly Tigers and Blues)5; the most-fatalities-attributed-to-a-single-shark series of incidents around Matawan/Spring Lake NJ in 1916 (Great White again; this time they caught a carcharias in Raritan Bay NJ and found human parts in gastro (I know which parts, and whose)). In school I ended up writing three different papers on “The Castaway” section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane’s horrific “The Open Boat,” and I get bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I’ve always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls. Anyway, hence the atavistic shark fetish, which I need to admit came back with a long-repressed vengeance on this Luxury Cruise,⁶ and that I made such a fuss about the one (possible) dorsal fin I saw off starboard that my companions at supper’s Table 64 finally had to tell me, with all possible tact, to shut up about the fin already.

I don’t think it’s an accident that 7NC Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age-50+ people, for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself (which I found to be salty as hell, like sore-throat-soothing-gargle-grade salty, its spray so corrosive that one temple-hinge of my glasses is probably going to have to be replaced) turns out to be basically one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed—rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with barnacles and kelp-clumps and a vague ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate. We saw some real horrors in port, local boats that looked dipped in a mixture of acid and shit, scabbed with rust and goo, ravaged by what they float in.

Not so the Megalines’ ships. It’s not an accident they’re all so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea. The Nadir seemed to have a whole battalion of wiry little Third World guys who went around the ship in navy-blue jumpsuits scanning for decay to overcome. Writer Frank Conroy, who has an odd little essaymercial in the front of Celebrity Cruises’ 7NC brochure, talks about how “It became a private challenge for me to try to find a piece of dull bright-work, a chipped rail, a stain in the deck, a slack cable or anything that wasn’t perfectly shipshape. Eventually, toward the end of the trip, I found a capstan7 with a half-dollar-sized patch of rust on the side facing the sea. My delight in this tiny flaw was interrupted by the arrival, even as I stood there, of a crewman with a roller and a bucket of white paint. I watched as he gave the entire capstan a fresh coat of paint and walked away with a nod.”

Here’s the thing. A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that Americans’ ultimate fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial engine of death and decay. But on a 7NC Luxury Cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to “triumph” is via the rigors of self-improvement; and the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep of the Nadir is an unsubtle analogue to personal titivation: diet, exercise, megavitamin supplements, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest time-management seminars, etc.

There’s another way out, too, w/r/t death. Not titivation but titillation. Not hard work but hard play. The 7NC’s constant activities, parties, festivities, gaiety and song; the adrenaline, the excitement, the stimulation. It makes you feel vibrant, alive. It makes your existence seem noncontingent.8 The hard-play option promises not a transcendence of death-dread so much as just drowning it out: “Sharing a laugh with your friends⁹ in the lounge after dinner, you glance at your watch and mention that it’s almost showtime.… When the curtain comes down after a standing ovation, the talk among your companions¹⁰ turns to, ‘What next?’ Perhaps a visit to the casino or a little dancing in the disco? Maybe a quiet drink in the piano bar or a starlit stroll around the deck? After discussing all your options, everyone agrees: ‘Let’s do it all!’ ”

Dante this isn’t, but Celebrity Cruises’ 7NC brochure is nevertheless an extremely powerful and ingenious piece of advertising. The brochure is magazine-size, heavy and glossy, beautifully laid out, its text offset by art-quality photos of upscale couples’¹¹ tanned faces locked in a kind of rictus of pleasure. All the Megalines put out brochures, and they’re essentially interchangeable. The middle part of the brochures detail the different packages and routes. Basic 7NC’s go to the Western Caribbean (Jamaica, Grand Cayman, Cozumel) or the Eastern Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Virgins), or something called the Deep Carribean (Martinique, Barbados, Mayreau). There are also 10- and 11-Night Ultimate Caribbean packages that hit pretty much every exotic coastline between Miami and the Panama Canal. The brochures’ final sections’ boilerplate always details costs,¹² passport stuff, Customs regulations, caveats.

But it’s the first section of these brochures that really grabs you, the photos and italicized blurbs from Fodor’s Cruises and Berlitz, the dreamy mise en scènes and breathless prose. Celebrity’s brochure, in particular, is a real two-napkin drooler. It has little hypertextish offsets, boxed in gold, that say stuff like INDULGENCE BECOMES EASY and RELAXATION BECOMES SECOND NATURE and STRESS BECOMES A FAINT MEMORY. And these promises point to the third kind of death-and-dread-transcendence the Nadir offers, one that requires neither work nor play, the enticement that is a 7NC’s real carrot and stick.

4

“Just standing at the ship’s rail looking out to sea has a profoundly soothing effect. As you drift along like a cloud on water, the weight of everyday life is magically lifted away, and you seem to be floating on a sea of smiles. Not just among your fellow guests but on the faces of the ship’s staff as well. As a steward cheerfully delivers your drinks, you mention all of the smiles among the crew. He explains that every Celebrity staff member takes pleasure in making your cruise a completely carefree experience and treating you as an honored guest.13 Besides, he adds, there’s no place they’d rather be. Looking back out to sea, you couldn’t agree more.”

Celebrity’s 7NC brochure uses the 2nd-person pronoun throughout. This is extremely appropriate. Because in the brochure’s scenarios the 7NC experience is being not described but evoked. The brochure’s real seduction is not an invitation to fantasize but rather a construction of the fantasy itself. This is advertising, but with a queerly authoritarian twist. In regular adult-market ads, attractive people are shown having a near-illegally good time in some scenario surrounding a product, and you are meant to fantasize that you can project yourself into the ad’s perfect world via purchase of that product. In regular advertising, where your adult agency and freedom of choice have to be flattered, the purchase is prerequisite to the fantasy; it’s the fantasy that’s being sold, not any literal projection into the ad’s world. There’s no sense of any real kind of actual promise being made. This is what makes conventional adult advertisements fundamentally coy.

Contrast this coyness with the force of the 7NC brochure’s ads: the near-imperative use of the second person, the specificity of detail that extends even to what you will say (you will say “I couldn’t agree more” and “Let’s do it all!”). In the cruise brochure’s ads, you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don’t flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it—they supplant it.

And this authoritarian—near-parental—type of advertising makes a very special sort of promise, a diabolically seductive promise that’s actually kind of honest, because it’s a promise that the Luxury Cruise itself is all about honoring. The promise is not that you can experience great pleasure, but that you will. That they’ll make certain of it. That they’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. The ads promise that you will be able—finally, for once—truly to relax and have a good time, because you will have no choice but to have a good time.14

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

Not so on the lush and spotless m.v. Nadir. On a 7NC Luxury Cruise, I pay for the privilege of handing over to trained professionals responsibility not just for my experience but for my interpretation of that experience—i.e. my pleasure. My pleasure is for 7 nights and 6.5 days wisely and efficiently managed… just as promised in the cruise line’s advertising—nay, just as somehow already accomplished in the ads, with their 2nd-person imperatives, which make them not promises but predictions. Aboard the Nadir, just as ringingly foretold in the brochure’s climactic p. 23, I get to do (in gold): “… something you haven’t done in a long, long time: Absolutely Nothing.”

How long has it been since you did Absolutely Nothing? I know exactly how long it’s been for me. I know how long it’s been since I had every need met choicelessly from someplace outside me, without my having to ask or even acknowledge that I needed. And that time I was floating, too, and the fluid was salty, and warm but not too-, and if I was conscious at all I’m sure I felt dreadless, and was having a really good time, and would have sent postcards to everyone wishing they were here.

5

A 7NC’s pampering is a little uneven at first, but it starts at the airport, where you don’t have to go to Baggage Claim because people from the Megaline get your suitcases for you and take them right to the ship.

A bunch of other Megalines besides Celebrity Cruises operate out of Fort Lauderdale,15 and the flight down from O’Hare is full of festive-looking people dressed for cruising. It turns out the folks sitting next to me on the plane are booked on the Nadir. They’re a retired couple from Chicago and this is their fourth Luxury Cruise in as many years. It is they who tell me about the news reports of the kid jumping overboard, and also about a legendarily nasty outbreak of salmonella or E. coli or something on a Megaship in the late ’70s that gave rise to the C.D.C.’s Vessel Sanitation program of inspections, plus about a supposed outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease vectored by the jacuzzi on a 7NC Megaship two years ago—it was possibly one of Celebrity’s three cruise ships, the lady (kind of the spokesman for the couple) isn’t sure; it turns out she sort of likes to toss off a horrific detail and then get all vague and blasé when a horrified listener tries to pump her for details. The husband wears a fishing cap with a long bill and a T-shirt that says BIG DADDY.

7NC Luxury Cruises always start and finish on Saturday. Right now it’s Saturday 11 March, 1020h., and we are deplaning. Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today. Over near the back wall, a number of brisk-looking older ladies in vaguely naval outfits hold up printed signs—HLND, CELEB, CUND CRN. What you’re supposed to do (the Chicago lady from the plane is kind of talking me through it as BIG DADDY shoulders us a path through the fray) what you’re supposed to do is find your particular Megaline’s brisk lady and sort of all coalesce around her as she walks with printed sign held high to attract still more cruisers and leads the growing ectoplasm of Nadirites all out to buses that ferry us to the Piers and what we quixotically believe will be immediate and hassle-free boarding.

Apparently Ft. Laud. Airport is always just your average sleepy midsize airport six days a week and then every Saturday resembles the fall of Saigon. Half the terminal’s mob consists of luggage-bearing people now flying home from 7NCs. They are Syrianly tan, and a lot of them have eccentric and vaguely hairy-looking souvenirs of various sizes and functions, and they all have a glazed spacey look about them that the Chicago lady avers is the telltale look of post-7NC Inner Peace. We pre-7NCs, on the other hand, all look pasty and stressed and somehow combat-unready.

Outside, we of the Nadir are directed to deectoplasmize ourselves and all line up along some sort of tall curb to await the Nadir’s special chartered buses. We are exchanging awkward don’t-know-whether-to-smile-and-wave-or-not glances with a Holland America herd that’s lining up on a grassy median parallel to us, and both groups are looking a little narrow-eyed at a Princess-bound herd whose buses are already pulling up. The Ft. Laud. Airport’s porters and cabbies and white-bandoliered traffic cops and bus drivers are all Cuban. The retired Chicago couple, clearly wily veterans about lines by their fourth Luxury Cruise, has butted into place way up. A second Celebrity crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler’s List.

Where I am in the line: I’m between a squat and chain-smoking black man in an NBC Sports cap and several corporately dressed people wearing badges identifying them as with something called the Engler Corporation.16 Way up ahead, the retired Chicago couple has spread a sort of parasol. There’s a bumpy false ceiling of mackerel clouds moving in from the southwest, but overhead it’s just wispy cirrus, and it’s seriously hot standing and waiting in the sun, even without luggage or luggage-angst, and through a lack of foresight I’m wearing my undertakerish black wool suitcoat and an inadequate hat. But it feels good to perspire. Chicago at dawn was 18° and its sun the sort of wan and impotent March sun you can look right at. It is good to feel serious sun and see trees all frothy with green. We wait rather a long time, and the Nadir line starts to recoalesce into clumps as people’s conversations have time to progress past the waiting-in-line small-talk stage. Either there was a mixup getting enough buses for people in on A.M. flights, or (my theory) the same Celebrity Cruises brain trust responsible for the wildly seductive brochure has decided to make certain elements of pre-embarkation as difficult and unpleasant as possible in order to sharpen the favorable contrast between real life and the 7NC experience.

Now we’re riding to the Piers in a column of eight chartered Greyhounds. Our convoy’s rate of speed and the odd deference other traffic shows gives the whole procession a kind of funereal quality. Ft. Laud. proper looks like one extremely large golf course, but the cruise lines’ Piers are in something called Port Everglades, an industrial area, pretty clearly, zoned for Blight, with warehouses and transformer parks and stacked boxcars and vacant lots full of muscular and evil-looking Florida-type weeds. We pass a huge field of those hammer-shaped automatic oil derricks all bobbing fellatially, and on the horizon past them is a little fingernail clipping of shiny gray that I’m thinking must be the sea. Several different languages are in use on my bus. Whenever we go over bumps or train tracks, there’s a tremendous mass clicking sound in here from all the cameras around everybody’s neck. I haven’t brought any sort of camera and feel a perverse pride about this.

The Nadir’s traditional berth is Pier 21. “Pier,” though it had conjured for me images of wharfs and cleats and lapping water, turns out to denote something like what airport denotes, viz. a zone and not a thing. There is no real water in sight, no docks, no fishy smell or sodium tang to the air; but there are, as we enter the Pier zone, a lot of really big white ships that blot out most of the sky.

Now I’m writing this sitting in an orange plastic chair at the end of one of Pier 21’s countless bolted rows of orange plastic chairs. We have debused and been herded via megaphone through 21’s big glass doors, whereupon two more completely humorless naval ladies handed us each a little plastic card with a number on it. My card’s number is 7. A few people sitting nearby ask me “what I am,” and I figure out I’m to respond “a 7.” The cards are by no means brand new, and mine has the vestigial whorls of a chocolate thumbprint in one corner.

From inside, Pier 21 seems kind of like a blimpless blimp hangar, high-ceilinged and very echoey. It has walls of unclean windows on three sides, at least 2500 orange chairs in rows of 25, a kind of desultory Snack Bar, and restrooms with very long lines. The acoustics are brutal and it’s tremendously loud. Outside, rain starts coming down even though the sun’s still shining. Some of the people in the rows of chairs appear to have been here for days: they have that glazed encamped look of people at airports in blizzards.

It’s now 1132h., and boarding will not commence one second before 1400 sharp; a PA announcement politely but firmly declares Celebrity’s seriousness about this.17 The PA lady’s voice is what you imagine a British supermodel would sound like. Everyone’s clutching his numbered card like the cards are identity papers at Checkpoint Charley. There’s an Ellis Island/pre-Auschwitz aspect to the massed and anxious waiting, but I’m uncomfortable trying to extend the analogy. A lot of the people waiting—Caribbeanish clothing notwithstanding—look Jewish to me, and I’m ashamed to catch myself thinking that I can determine Jewishness from people’s appearance.18 Maybe two-thirds of the total people in here are actually sitting in orange chairs. Pier 21’s pre-boarding blimp hangar’s not as bad as, say, Grand Central at 1715h. on Friday, but it bears little resemblance to any of the stressless pamper-venues detailed in the Celebrity brochure, which brochure I am not the only person in here thumbing through and looking at wistfully. A lot of people are also reading the Fort Lauderdale Sentinel and staring with subwayish blankness at other people. A kid whose T-shirt says SANDY DUNCAN’S EYE is carving something in the plastic of his chair. There are quite a few old people all travelling with really desperately old people who are pretty clearly the old people’s parents. A couple different guys in different rows are field-stripping their camcorders with military-looking expertise. There’s a fair share of WASP-looking passengers, as well. A lot of the WASPs are couples in their twenties and thirties, with a honeymoonish aspect to the way their heads rest on each other’s shoulders. Men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts, I’ve decided; their legs are hairless in a way that’s creepy; the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for hair, particularly on the calves. It’s just about the only body-area where you actually want more hair on older men. Is this fibular hairlessness a result of years of chafing in pants and socks? The significance of the numbered cards turns out to be that you’re supposed to wait here in Pier 21’s blimp hangar until your number is called, then you board in “Lots.”¹⁹ So your number doesn’t stand for you, but rather for the subherd of cruisers you’re part of. Some 7NC-veterans nearby tell me that 7 is not a great Lot-number and advise me to get comfortable. Somewhere past the big gray doors behind the restrooms’ roiling lines is an umbilical passage leading to what I assume is the actual Nadir, which outside the south wall’s windows presents as a tall wall of total white. In the approximate center of the hangar is a long table where creamy-complected women in nursish white from Steiner of London Inc. are doing free little makeup and complexion consultations with women waiting to board, priming the economic pump.²⁰ The Chicago lady and BIG DADDY are in the hangar’s southeasternmost row of chairs playing Uno with another couple, who turn out to be friends they’d made on a Princess Alaska Cruise in ’93.

Now I’m writing this sort of squatting with my bottom braced up against the hangar’s west wall, which wall is white-painted cinderblocks, like a budget motel’s wall, and also oddly clammy. By this time I’m down to slacks and T-shirt and tie, and the tie looks like it’s been washed and hand-wrung. Perspiring has already lost its novelty. Part of what Celebrity Cruises is reminding us we’re leaving behind is massed public waiting areas with no AC and indifferent ventilation. Now it’s 1255h. Though the brochure says the Nadir sails at 1630h. EST and that you can board anytime from 1400 to then, all 1374 Nadir passengers look already to be massed here, plus what must be a fair number of relatives and well-wishers, etc.21

A major advantage to writing some sort of article about an experience is that at grim junctures like this pre-embarkation blimp hangar you can distract yourself from what the experience feels like by focusing on what look like items of possible interest for the article. This is the occasion I first see the thirteen-year-old kid with the toupee. He’s slumped pre-adolescently in his chair with his feet up on some kind of rattan hamper while what I’ll bet is his mom talks at him nonstop; he is staring into whatever special distance people in areas of mass public stasis stare into. His toupee isn’t one of those horrible black shiny incongruous Howard Cosell toupees, but it’s not great either; it’s an unlikely orange-brown, and its texture is like one of those local-TV-anchorman toupees where if you tousled the hair it would get broken instead of mussed. A lot of the people from the Engler Corporation are massed in some kind of round informal conference or meeting over near the Pier’s glass doors, looking from the distance rather like a rugby scrum. I’ve decided the perfect description of the orange of the hangar’s chairs is waiting-room orange. Several driven-looking corporate guys are talking into cellular phones while their wives look stoic. Close to a dozen confirmed sightings of J. Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy. The acoustics in here have the nightmarishly echoey quality of some of the Beatles’ more conceptual stuff. At the Snack Bar, a plain old candy bar is $1.50, and soda-pop’s even more. The line for the men’s room extends NW almost to the Steiner of London table. Several Pier personnel with clipboards are running around w/o any discernible agenda. The crowd has a smattering of college-age kids, all with complex haircuts and already wearing poolside thongs. A little kid right near me is wearing the exact same kind of hat I am, which I might as well admit right now is a full-color Spiderman cap.22

I count over a dozen makes of camera just in the little block of orange chairs within camera-make-discernment range. That’s not counting camcorders.

The dress code in here ranges from corporate-informal to tourist-tropical. I am the sweatiest and most disheveled person in view, I’m afraid.²³ There is nothing even remotely nautical about the smell of Pier 21. Two male Engler executives excluded from the corporate scrum are sitting together at the end of the nearest row, right leg over left knee and joggling their loafers in perfect unconscious sync. Every infant within earshot has a promising future in professional opera, it sounds like. Also, every infant being carried or held is being carried or held by its female parent. Over 50% of the purses and handbags are wicker/rattan. The women all somehow give the impression of being on magazine diets. The median age here is at least 45.

A Pier person runs by with an enormous roll of crepe. Some sort of fire alarm’s been going for the last fifteen minutes, nerve-janglingly, ignored by everyone because the British bombshell at the PA and the Celebrity people with clipboards also appear to be ignoring it. Also now comes what sounds at first like a sort of tuba from hell, two five-second blasts that ripple shirt-fronts and contort everyone’s faces. It turns out it’s Holland America’s S.S. Westerdam’s ship’s horn outside, announcing All-Ashore-That’s-Going because departure is imminent.

Every so often I remove the hat, towel off, and sort of orbit the blimp hangar, eavesdropping, making small-talk. Over half the passengers I chat up turn out to be from right around here in south Florida. Nonchalant eavesdropping provides the most fun and profit, though: an enormous number of small-talk-type conversations are going on all over the hangar. And a major percentage of this overheard chitchat consists of passengers explaining to other passengers why they signed up for this 7NC Cruise. It’s like the universal subject of discussion in here, like chitchatting in the dayroom of a mental ward: “So, why are you here?” And the striking constant in all the answers is that not once does somebody say they’re going on this 7NC Luxury Cruise just to go on a 7NC Luxury Cruise. Nor does anybody refer to stuff about travel being broadening or a mad desire to parasail. Nobody even mentions being mesmerized by Celebrity’s fantasy-slash-promise of pampering in uterine stasis—in fact the word “pamper,” so ubiquitous in the Celebrity 7NC brochure, is not once in my hearing uttered. The word that gets used over and over in the explanatory small-talk is: relax. Everybody characterizes the upcoming week as either a long-put-off reward or as a last-ditch effort to salvage sanity and self from some inconceivable crockpot of pressure, or both.24 A lot of the explanatory narratives are long and involved, and some are sort of lurid. Two different conversations involve people who’ve just finally buried a relative they’d been nursing at home for months as the relative lingered hideously. A floral wholesaler in an aqua MARLINS shirt talks about how he’s managed to drag the battered remnants of his soul through the Xmas-to-Valentine rush only by dangling in front of himself the carrot of this week of total relaxation and renewal. A trio of Newark cops all just retired and had promised themselves a Luxury Cruise if they survived their 20. A couple from Fort Lauderdale sketch a scenario in which they’ve sort of been shamed by friends into 7NC Luxury Cruising, as if they were native New Yorkers and the Nadir the Statue of Liberty.

By the way, I have now empirically verified that I am the only ticketed adult here without some kind of camera equipment.

At some point, unnoticed, Holland’s Westerdam’s snout has withdrawn from the west window: the window is clear, and a brutal sun is shining through a patchy steam of evaporated rain. The blimp hangar’s emptier by half now, and quiet. BIG DADDY and spouse are long gone. They have called Lots 5 through 7 all in a sort of bunch, and I and pretty much the whole massed Engler Corporation contingent are now moving in a kind of columnar herd toward Passport Checks and the Deck 3²⁵ gangway beyond. And now we are getting greeted (each of us) by not one but two Aryan-looking hostesses from the Hospitality staff, and now moving over plush plum carpet to the interior of what one presumes is the actual Nadir, washed now in high-oxygen AC that seems subtly balsam-scented, pausing for a second, if we wish, to have our pre-Cruise photo taken by the ship’s photographer,26 apparently for some kind of Before/After souvenir ensemble they’ll try to sell us at week’s end; and I start seeing the first of more WATCH YOUR STEP signs this coming week than anyone could count, because a Megaship’s architecture’s flooring is totally jerryrigged-looking and uneven and everywhere there are sudden little six-inch steplets up and down; and there’s the delicious feel of sweat drying and the first nip of AC chill, and I suddenly can’t even remember what the squall of a prickly-heated infant sounds like anymore, not in the plushly cushioned little corridors I’m walked through. One of the two Hospitality hostesses seems to have an orthopedic right shoe, and she walks with a very slight limp, and somehow this detail seems terribly moving.

And as Inga and Geli of Hospitality walk me on and in (and it’s an endless walk—up, fore, aft, serpentine through bulkheads and steel-railed corridors with mollified jazz out of little round speakers in a beige enamel ceiling I could reach an elbow up and touch), the whole three-hour pre-cruise gestalt of shame and explanation and Why Are You Here is transposed utterly, because at intervals on every wall are elaborate cross-sectioned maps and diagrams, each with a big and reassuringly jolly red dot with YOU ARE HERE, which assertion preempts all inquiry and signals that explanations and doubt and guilt are now left back there with all else we’re leaving behind, handing over to pros.

And the elevator’s made of glass and is noiseless, and the hostesses smile slightly and gaze at nothing as all together we ascend, and it’s a very close race which of these two hostesses smells better in the enclosed chill.

And now we’re passing little teak-lined shipboard shops with Gucci, Waterford and Wedgwood, Rolex and Raymond Weil, and there’s a crackle in the jazz and an announcement in three languages about Welcome and Willkommen and how there’ll be a Compulsory Lifeboat Drill an hour after sailing.

At 1515h. I am installed in Nadir Cabin 1009 and immediately eat almost a whole basket of free fruit and lie on a really nice bed and drum my fingers on my swollen tummy.

6

Departure at 1630h. turns out to be a not untasteful affair of crepe and horns. Each deck’s got walkways outside, with railings made of some kind of really good wood. It’s now overcast, and the ocean way below is dull-colored and frothy, etc. It smells less fishy or oceany than just salty. Our horn is even more planet-shattering than the Westerdam’s horn. Most of the people exchanging waves with us are cruisers along the rails of the decks of other 7NC Megaships, also just leaving, so it’s a surreal little scene—it’s hard not to imagine all of us cruising the whole Western Caribbean in a parallel pack, all waving at one another the entire time. Docking and leaving are the two times a Megacruiser’s Captain is actually steering the ship; and m.v. Nadir Captain G. Panagiotakis has wheeled us around and pointed our snout at the open sea, and we, large and white and clean, are under sail.

7

The whole first two days and nights are bad weather, with high-pitched winds and heaving seas, spume27 lashing the porthole’s glass, etc. For 40+ hours it’s more like a Luxury North Sea Cruise, and the Celebrity staff goes around looking regretful but not apologetic,28 and in all fairness it’s hard to find a way to blame Celebrity Cruises Inc. for the weather.²⁹

On gale-force days like the first two, passengers are advised to enjoy the view from the railings on the lee side of the Nadir. The one other guy who ever joins me in trying out the non-lee side has his glasses blown off by the wind, and he does not appreciate my remarking to him that round-the-ear cable arms are better for high-wind view-enjoying. I keep waiting to see somebody from the crew wearing the traditional yellow slicker, but no luck. The railing I do most of my contemplative gazing from is on Deck 10, so the sea is way below, and the sounds of it slopping and heaving around are far-away and surflike, and visually it’s a little like looking down into a flushing toilet. No fins in view.

In heavy seas, hypochondriacs are kept busy taking their gastric pulse every couple seconds and wondering whether what they’re feeling is maybe the onset of seasickness and/or gauging the exact level of seasickness they’re feeling. Seasickness-wise, though, it turns out that heavy seas are sort of like battle: there’s no way to know ahead of time how you’ll react. A test of the deep and involuntary stuff of a man. I myself turn out not to get seasick. An apparent immunity, deep and unchosen, and slightly miraculous, given that I have every other kind of motion sickness listed in the PDR and cannot take anything for it.³⁰ For the whole first rough-sea day I puzzle about the fact that every other passenger on the m.v. Nadir looks to have received identical little weird shaving cuts below their left ear—which in the case of female passengers seems especially strange—until I learn that the little round Band-Aidish things on everybody’s neck are these special new nuclear-powered transdermal motion sickness patches, which apparently now nobody with any kind of clue about 7NC Luxury Cruising leaves home without.

Patches notwithstanding, a lot of the passengers get seasick anyway, these first two howling days. It turns out that a seasick person really does look green, though it’s an odd, ghostly green, pasty and toadish, and more than a little corpselike when the seasick person is dressed in formal dinnerwear.

For the first two nights, who’s feeling seasick and who’s not and who’s not now but was a little while ago or isn’t feeling it yet but thinks it’s maybe coming on, etc., is a big topic of conversation at good old Table 64 in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant.31 Common suffering and fear of suffering turn out to be a terrific icebreaker, and ice-breaking is important, because on a 7NC you eat at the same designated table with the same companions all seven nights.³² Discussing nausea and vomiting while eating intricately prepared and heavy gourmet foods doesn’t seem to bother anybody.

Even in heavy seas, 7NC Megaships don’t yaw or throw you around or send bowls of soup sliding across tables. Only a certain subtle unreality to your footing lets you know you’re not on land. At sea, a room’s floor feels somehow 3-D, and your footing demands a slight attention good old planar static land never needs. You don’t ever quite hear the ship’s big engines, but when your feet are planted you can feel them, a kind of spinal throb—it’s oddly soothing.

Walking is a little dreamy also. There are constant slight shifts in torque from the waves’ action. When heavy waves come straight at a Megaship’s snout, the ship goes up and down along its long axis—this is called pitching. It produces a disorienting deal where you feel like you’re walking on a very slight downhill grade and then level and then on a very slight uphill grade. Some evolutionary retrograde reptile-brain part of the CNS is apparently reawakened, though, and manages all this so automatically that it requires a good deal of attention to notice anything more than that walking feels a little dreamy.

Rolling, on the other hand, is when waves hit the ship from the side and make it go up and down along its crosswise axis.33 When the m.v. Nadir rolls, what you feel is a very slight increase in the demands placed on the muscles of your left leg, then a strange absence of all demand, then demands on the right leg. The demands shift at the rate of a very long thing swinging, and again the action is usually so subtle that it’s almost a meditative exercise to stay conscious of what’s going on.

We never pitch badly, but every once in a while some really big Poseidon Adventure–grade single wave must come and hit the Nadir’s side, because every once in a while the asymmetric leg-demands won’t stop or reverse and you keep having to put more and more weight on one leg until you’re exquisitely close to tipping over and have to grab something.³⁴ It happens very quickly and never twice in a row. The cruise’s first night features some really big waves from starboard, and in the casino after supper it’s hard to tell who’s had too much of the ’71 Richebourg and who’s just doing a roll-related stagger. Add in the fact that most of the women are wearing high heels, and you can imagine some of the vertiginous staggering/flailing/clutching that goes on. Almost everyone on the Nadir has come on in couples, and when they walk during heavy seas they tend to hang on each other like freshman steadies. You can tell they like it—the women have this trick of sort of folding themselves into the men and snuggling as they walk, and the men’s postures improve and their faces firm up and you can tell they feel unusually solid and protective. A 7NC Luxury Cruise is full of these odd little unexpected romantic nuggets like trying to help each other walk when the ship rolls—you can sort of tell why older couples like to cruise.

Heavy seas are also great for sleep, it turns out. The first two mornings, there’s hardly anybody at Early Seating Breakfast. Everybody sleeps in. People with insomnia of years’ standing report uninterrupted sleep of nine hours, ten hours. Their eyes are wide and childlike with wonder as they report this. Everybody looks younger when they’ve had a lot of sleep. There’s rampant daytime napping, too. By week’s end, when we’d had all manner of weather, I finally saw what it was about heavy seas and marvelous rest: in heavy seas you feel rocked to sleep, with the windows’ spume a gentle shushing, the engines’ throb a mother’s pulse.

8

Did I mention that famous writer and Iowa Writers’ Workshop Chairperson Frank Conroy has his own experiential essay about cruising right there in Celebrity’s 7NC brochure? Well he does, and the thing starts out on the Pier 21 gangway that first Saturday with his family:35

With that single, easy step, we entered a new world, a sort of alternate reality to the one on shore. Smiles, handshakes, and we were whisked away to our cabin by a friendly young woman from Guest Relations.

Then they’re outside along the rail for the Nadir’s sailing:

… We became aware that the ship was pulling away. We had felt no warning, no trembling of the deck, throbbing of the engines or the like. It was as if the land were magically receding, like some ever-so-slow reverse zoom in the movies.

This is pretty much what Conroy’s whole “My Celebrity Cruise, or ‘All This and a Tan, Too’ ” is like. Its full implications didn’t hit me until I reread it supine on Deck 12 the first sunny day. Conroy’s essay is graceful and lapidary and attractive and assuasive. I submit that it is also completely sinister and despair-producing and bad. Its badness does not consist so much in its constant and mesmeric references to fantasy and alternate realities and the palliative powers of pro pampering—

I’d come on board after two months of intense and moderately stressful work, but now it seemed a distant memory.

I realized it had been a week since I’d washed a dish, cooked a meal, gone to the market, done an errand or, in fact, anything at all requiring a minimum of thought and effort. My toughest decisions had been whether to catch the afternoon showing of Mrs. Doubtfire or play bingo.

—nor in the surfeit of happy adjectives, nor so much in the tone of breathless approval throughout—

For all of us, our fantasies and expectations were to be exceeded, to say the least.

When it comes to service, Celebrity Cruises seems ready and able to deal with anything.

Bright sun, warm still air, the brilliant blue-green of the Caribbean under the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky.…

The training must be rigorous, indeed, because the truth is, the service was impeccable, and impeccable in every aspect from the cabin steward to the sommelier, from the on-deck waiter to the Guest Relations manager, from the ordinary seaman who goes out of his way to get your deck chair to the third mate who shows you the way to the library. It is hard to imagine a more professional, polished operation, and I doubt that many in the world can equal it.

Rather, part of the essay’s real badness can be found in the way it reveals once again the Megaline’s sale-to-sail agenda of micromanaging not only one’s perceptions of a 7NC Luxury Cruise but even one’s own interpretation and articulation of those perceptions. In other words, Celebrity’s PR people go and get one of the U.S.A.’s most respected writers to pre-articulate and -endorse the 7NC experience, and to do it with a professional eloquence and authority that few lay perceivers and articulators could hope to equal.36

But the really major badness is that the project and placement of “My Celebrity Cruise…” are sneaky and duplicitous and far beyond whatever eroded pales still exist in terms of literary ethics. Conroy’s “essay” appears as an insert, on skinnier pages and with different margins from the rest of the brochure, creating the impression that it has been excerpted from some large and objective thing Conroy wrote. But it hasn’t been. The truth is that Celebrity Cruises paid Frank Conroy upfront to write it,³⁷ even though nowhere in or around the essay is there anything acknowledging that it’s a paid endorsement, not even one of the little “So-and-so has been compensated for his services” that flashes at your TV screen’s lower right during celebrity-hosted infomercials. Instead, inset on this weird essaymercial’s first page is an author-photoish shot of Conroy brooding in a black turtleneck, and below the photo is an author-bio with a list of Conroy’s books that includes the 1967 classic Stop-Time, which is arguably the best literary memoir of the twentieth century and is one of the books that first made poor old yours truly want to try to be a writer.

In other words, Celebrity Cruises is presenting Conroy’s review of his 7NC Cruise as an essay and not a commercial. This is extremely bad. Here is the argument for why it’s bad. Whether it honors them well or not, an essay’s fundamental obligations are supposed to be to the reader. The reader, on however unconscious a level, understands this, and thus tends to approach an essay with a relatively high level of openness and credulity. But a commercial is a very different animal. Advertisements have certain formal, legal obligations to truthfulness, but these are broad enough to allow for a great deal of rhetorical maneuvering in the fulfillment of an advertisement’s primary obligation, which is to serve the financial interests of its sponsor. Whatever attempts an advertisement makes to interest and appeal to its readers are not, finally, for the reader’s benefit. And the reader of an ad knows all this, too—that an ad’s appeal is by its very nature calculated—and this is part of why our state of receptivity is different, more guarded, when we get ready to read an ad.38

In the case of Frank Conroy’s “essay,” Celebrity Cruises³⁹ is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we properly reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.40

At any rate, for this particular 7NC consumer, Conroy’s ad-as-essay ends up having a truthfulness about it that I’m quite sure is unintentional. As my week on the Nadir wore on, I began to see this essaymercial as a perfect ironic reflection of the mass-market-Cruise experience itself. The essay is polished, powerful, impressive, clearly the best that money can buy. It presents itself as for my benefit. It manages my experiences and my interpretation of those experiences and takes care of them in advance for me. It seems to care about me. But it doesn’t, not really, because first and foremost it wants something from me. So does the Cruise itself. The pretty setting and glittering ship and dashing staff and sedulous servants and solicitous fun-managers all want something from me, and it’s not just the price of my ticket—they’ve already got that. Just what it is that they want is hard to pin down, but by early in the week I can feel it, and building: it circles the ship like a fin.

9

Celebrity’s fiendish brochure does not lie or exaggerate, however, in the luxury department. I now confront the journalistic problem of not being sure how many examples I need to list in order to communicate the atmosphere of sybaritic and nearly insanity-producing pampering on board the m.v. Nadir.

How about for just one example Saturday 11 March, right after sailing but before the North Sea weather hits, when I want to go out to Deck 10’s port rail for some introductory vista-gazing and thus decide I need some zinc oxide for my peel-prone nose. My zinc oxide’s still in my big duffel bag, which at that point is piled with all Deck 10’s other luggage in the little area between the 10-Fore elevator and the 10-Fore staircase while little men in cadet-blue Celebrity jumpsuits, porters—entirely Lebanese, this squad seemed to be—are cross-checking the luggage tags with the Nadir’s passenger list Lot #s and organizing the luggage and taking it all up the Port and Starboard halls to people’s cabins.

And but so I come out and spot my duffel among the luggage, and I start to grab and haul it out of the towering pile of leather and nylon, with the idea that I can just whisk the bag back to 1009 myself and root through it and find my good old ZnO;41 and one of the porters sees me starting to grab the bag, and he dumps all four of the massive pieces of luggage he’s staggering with and leaps to intercept me. At first I’m afraid he thinks I’m some kind of baggage thief and wants to see my claim-check or something. But it turns out that what he wants is my duffel: he wants to carry it to 1009 for me. And I, who am about half again this poor herniated little guy’s size (as is the duffel bag itself), protest politely, trying to be considerate, saying Don’t Fret, Not a Big Deal, Just Need My Good Old ZnO. I indicate to the porter that I can see they have some sort of incredibly organized ordinal luggage-dispersal system under way here and that I don’t mean to disrupt it or make him carry a Lot #7 bag before a Lot #2 bag or anything, and no I’ll just get the big old heavy weather stained sucker out of here myself and give the little guy that much less work to do.

And then now a very strange argument indeed ensues, me v. the Lebanese porter, because it turns out I am putting this guy, who barely speaks English, in a terrible kind of sedulous-service double-bind, a paradox of pampering: viz. the The-Passenger’s-Always-Right-versus-Never-Let-A-Passenger-Carry-His-Own-Bag paradox. Clueless at the time about what this poor little Lebanese man is going through, I wave off both his high-pitched protests and his agonized expression as mere servile courtesy, and I extract the duffel and lug it up the hall to 1009 and slather the old beak with ZnO and go outside to watch the coast of Florida recede cinematically à la F. Conroy.

Only later did I understand what I’d done. Only later did I learn that that little Lebanese Deck 10 porter had his head just about chewed off by the (also Lebanese) Deck 10 Head Porter, who’d had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward, who’d received confirmed reports that a Deck 10 passenger had been seen carrying his own luggage up the Port hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded rolling Lebanese heads for this clear indication of porterly dereliction, and had reported (the Austrian Chief Steward did) the incident (as is apparently SOP) to an officer in the Guest Relations Dept., a Greek officer with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and officerial epaulets so complex I never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009 after Saturday’s supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag. And even though this Greek officer’s English was in lots of ways better than mine, it took me no less than ten minutes to express my own horror and to claim responsibility and to detail the double-bind I’d put the porter in—brandishing at relevant moments the actual tube of ZnO that had caused the whole snafu—ten or more minutes before I could get enough of a promise from the Greek officer that various chewed-off heads would be reattached and employee records unbesmirched to feel comfortable enough to allow the officer to leave;42 and the whole incident was incredibly frazzling and angst-fraught and filled almost a whole Mead notebook and is here recounted in only its barest psychoskeletal outline.

It is everywhere on the Nadir you look: evidence of a steely determination to indulge the passenger in ways that go far beyond any halfway-sane passenger’s own expectations.43 Some wholly random examples: My cabin bathroom has plenty of thick fluffy towels, but when I go up to lie in the sun⁴⁴ I don’t have to take any of my cabin’s towels, because the two upper decks’ sun areas have big carts loaded with even thicker and fluffier towels. These carts are stationed at convenient intervals along endless rows of gymnastically adjustable deck chairs that are themselves phenomenally fine deck chairs, sturdy enough for even the portliest sunbather but also narcoleptically comfortable, with heavy-alloy skeletons over which is stretched some exotic material that combines canvas’s quick-drying durability with cotton’s absorbency and comfort—the material’s precise composition is mysterious, but it’s a welcome step up from public pools’ deck chairs’ surface of Kmartish plastic that sticks and produces farty suction-noises whenever you shift your sweaty weight on it—and the Nadir’s chairs’ material is not striated or cross-hatched in some web but is a solid expanse stretched drum-tight over the frame, so that you don’t get those weird pink chair-stripes on the side you’re lying on. Oh, and each upper deck’s carts are manned by a special squad of full-time Towel Guys, so that, when you’re well-done on both sides and ready to quit and spring easily out of the deck chair, you don’t have to pick up your towel and take it with you or even bus it into the cart’s Used Towel slot, because a Towel Guy materializes the minute your fanny leaves the chair and removes your towel for you and deposits it in the slot. (Actually the Towel Guys are such overachievers about removing used towels that even if you just get up for a second to reapply ZnO or gaze contemplatively out over the railing, often when you turn back around your towel’s gone, and your deck chair’s refolded to the uniform 45° at-rest angle, and you have to readjust your chair all over again and go to the cart to get a fresh fluffy towel, of which there’s admittedly not a short supply.)

Down in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant, the waiter⁴⁵ will not only bring you, e.g., lobster—as well as seconds and even thirds on lobster46—with methamphetaminic speed, but he’ll also incline over you⁴⁷ with gleaming claw-cracker and surgical fork and dismantle the lobster for you, saving you the green goopy work that’s the only remotely rigorous thing about lobster.

At the Windsurf Cafe, up on Deck 11 by the pools, where there’s always an informal buffet lunch, there’s never that bovine line that makes most cafeterias such a downer, and there are about 73 varieties of entrée alone, and incredibly good coffee; and if you’re carrying a bunch of notebooks or even just have too many things on your tray, a waiter will materialize as you peel away from the buffet and will carry your tray—i.e. even though it’s a cafeteria there’re all these waiters standing around, all with Nehruesque jackets and white towels draped over left arms that are always held in the position of broken or withered arms, watching you, the waiters, not quite making eye-contact but scanning for any little way to be of service, plus plum-jacketed sommeliers walking around to see if you need a non-buffet libation… plus a whole other crew of maître d’s and supervisors watching the waiters and sommeliers and tall-hatted buffet-servers to make sure they’re not even thinking of letting you do something for yourself that they could be doing for you.⁴⁸

Every public surface on the m.v. Nadir that isn’t stainless steel or glass or varnished parquet or dense and good-smelling sauna-type wood is plush blue carpet that never naps and never has a chance to accumulate even one flecklet of lint because jumpsuited Third World guys are always at it with Siemens A.G. high-suction vacuums. The elevators are Euroglass and yellow steel and stainless steel and a kind of wood-grain material that looks too shiny to be real wood but makes a sound when you thump it that’s an awful lot like real wood.⁴⁹ The elevators and stairways between decks50 seem to be the particular objects of the anal retention of a whole special Elevator-and-Staircase custodial crew.^{51, 52}

And let’s don’t forget Room Service, which on a 7NC Luxury Cruise is called Cabin Service. Cabin Service is in addition to the eleven scheduled daily opportunities for public eating, and it’s available 24/7, and it’s free: all you have to do is hit x72 on the bedside phone, and ten or fifteen minutes later a guy who wouldn’t even dream of hitting you up for a gratuity appears with this… this tray: “Thinly Sliced Ham and Swiss Cheese on White Bread with Dijon Mustard,” “The Combo: Cajun Chicken with Pasta Salad, and Spicy Salsa,” on and on, a whole page of sandwiches and platters in the Services Directory—and the stuff deserves to be capitalized, believe me. As a kind of semi-agoraphobe who spends massive amounts of time in my cabin, I come to have a really complex dependency/shame relationship with Cabin Service. Since finally getting around to reading the Services Directory and finding out about it Monday night, I’ve ended up availing myself of Cabin Service every night—more like twice a night, to be honest—even though I find it extremely embarrassing to be calling up x72 asking to have even more rich food brought to me when there’ve already been eleven gourmet eating-ops that day.53 Usually what I do is spread out my notebooks and Fielding’s Guide to Worldwide Cruising 1995 and pens and various materials all over the bed, so when the Cabin Service guy appears at the door he’ll see all this belletristic material and figure I’m working really hard on something belletristic right here in the cabin and have doubtless been too busy to have hit all the public meals and am thus legitimately entitled to the indulgence of Cabin Service.⁵⁴

But it’s my experience with the cabin cleaning that’s maybe the ultimate example of stress from a pampering so extravagant that it messes with your head. Searing crush or no, the fact of the matter is I rarely even see 1009’s cabin steward, the diaphanous and epicanthically doe-eyed Petra. But I have good reason to believe she sees me. Because every time I leave 1009 for more than like half an hour, when I get back it’s totally cleaned and dusted down again and the towels replaced and the bathroom agleam. Don’t get me wrong: in a way it’s great. I am kind of a slob, and I’m in Cabin 1009 a lot, and I also come and go a lot,⁵⁵ and when I’m in here in 1009 I sit in bed and write in bed while eating fruit and generally mess up the bed. But then whenever I dart out and then come back, the bed is freshly made up and hospital-cornered and there’s another mint-centered chocolate on the pillow.⁵⁶

I fully grant that mysterious invisible room-cleaning is in a way great, every true slob’s fantasy, somebody materializing and deslobbing your room and then dematerializing—like having a mom without the guilt. But there is also, I think, a creeping guilt here, a deep accretive uneasiness, a discomfort that presents—at least in my own case—as a weird kind of pampering-paranoia.

Because after a couple days of this fabulous invisible room-cleaning, I start to wonder how exactly Petra knows when I’m in 1009 and when I’m not. It’s now that it occurs to me how rarely I ever see her. For a while I try experiments like all of a sudden darting out into the 10-Port hallway to see if I can see Petra hunched somewhere keeping track of who is decabining, and I scour the whole hallway-and-ceiling area for evidence of some kind of camera or monitor tracking movements outside the cabin doors—zilch on both fronts. But then I realize that the mystery’s even more complex and unsettling than I’d first thought, because my cabin gets cleaned always and only during intervals where I’m gone more than half an hour. When I go out, how can Petra or her supervisors possibly know how long I’m going to be gone? I try leaving 1009 a couple times and then dashing back after 10 or 15 minutes to see whether I can catch Petra in delicto, but she’s never there. I try making a truly unholy mess in 1009 and then leaving and hiding somewhere on a lower deck and then dashing back after exactly 29 minutes—and again when I come bursting through the door there’s no Petra and no cleaning. Then I leave the cabin with exactly the same expression and appurtenances as before and this time stay hidden for 31 minutes and then haul ass back—and this time again no sighting of Petra, but now 1009 is sterilized and gleaming and there’s a mint on the pillow’s fresh new case. Know that I carefully scrutinize every inch of every surface I pass as I circle the deck during these little experiments—no cameras or motion sensors or anything in evidence anywhere that would explain how They know.57 So now for a while I theorize that somehow a special crewman is assigned to each passenger and follows that passenger at all times, using extremely sophisticated techniques of personal surveillance and reporting the passenger’s movements and activities and projected time of cabin-return back to Steward HQ or something, and so for about a day I try taking extreme evasive actions—whirling suddenly to check behind me, popping around corners, darting in and out of Gift Shops via different doors, etc.—never one sign of anybody engaged in surveillance. I never develop even a plausible theory about how They do it. By the time I quit trying, I’m feeling half-crazed, and my counter-surveillance measures are drawing frightened looks and even some temple-tapping from 10-Port’s other guests.

I submit that there’s something deeply mind-fucking about the Type-A-personality service and pampering on the Nadir, and that the manic invisible cabin-cleaning provides the clearest example of what’s creepy about it. Because, deep down, it’s not really like having a mom. Pace the guilt and nagging, etc., a mom cleans up after you largely because she loves you—you are the point, the object of the cleaning somehow. On the Nadir, though, once the novelty and convenience have worn off, I begin to see that the phenomenal cleaning really has nothing to do with me. (It’s been particularly traumatic for me to realize that Petra is cleaning Cabin 1009 so phenomenally well simply because she’s under orders to do so, and thus (obviously) that she’s not doing it for me or because she likes me or thinks I’m No Problem or A Funny Thing—in fact she’d clean my cabin just as phenomenally well even if I were a dork—and maybe conceivably behind the smile does consider me a dork, in which case what if in fact I really am a dork?—I mean, if pampering and radical kindness don’t seem motivated by strong affection and thus don’t somehow affirm one or help assure one that one is not, finally, a dork, of what final and significant value is all this indulgence and cleaning?)

The feeling’s not all that dissimilar to the experience of being a guest in the home of somebody who does things like sneak in in the A.M. and make your guest bed up for you while you’re in the shower and fold your dirty clothes or even launder them without being asked to, or who empties your ashtray after each cigarette you smoke, etc. For a while, with a host like this, it seems great, and you feel cared about and prized and affirmed and worthwhile, etc. But then after a while you begin to intuit that the host isn’t acting out of regard or affection for you so much as simply going around obeying the imperatives of some personal neurosis having to do with domestic cleanliness and order… which means that, since the ultimate point and object of the cleaning isn’t you but rather cleanliness and order, it’s going to be a relief for her when you leave. Meaning her hygienic pampering of you is actually evidence that she doesn’t want you around. The Nadir doesn’t have the Scotchguarded carpet or plastic-wrapped furniture of a true anal-type host like this, but the psychic aura’s the same, and so’s the projected relief of getting out.

10

I don’t know how well a claustrophobe would do, but for the agoraphobe a 7NC Luxury Megacruiser presents a whole array of attractively enclosing options. The agoraphobe can choose not to leave the ship,58 or can restrict herself only to certain decks, or can decline to leave the particular deck her cabin is on, or can eschew the view-conducive open-air railings on either side of that certain deck and keep exclusively to the deck’s interior enclosed part. Or the agoraphobe can simply not leave her cabin at all.

I—who am not a true, can’t-even-go-to-the-supermarket-type agoraphobe, but am what might be called a “borderline-” or “semi-agoraphobe”—come nevertheless to love very deeply Cabin 1009, Exterior Port.⁵⁹ It is made of a fawn-colored enamelish polymer and its walls are extremely thick and solid: I can drum annoyingly on the wall above my bed for up to five minutes before my aft neighbors pound (very faintly) back in annoyance. The cabin is thirteen size-11 Keds long by twelve Keds wide, with a little peninsular vestibule protruding out toward a cabin door that’s got three separate locking technologies and trilingual lifeboat instructions bolted to its inside and a whole deck of DO NOT DISTURB cards hanging from the inside knob.⁶⁰ The vestibule is one-and-one-half times as wide as I. The cabin’s bathroom is off one side of the vestibule, and off the other side is the Wondercloset, a complicated honeycomb of shelves and drawers and hangers and cubbyholes and Personal Fireproof Safe. The Wondercloset is so intricate in its utilization of every available cubic cm that all I can say is it must have been designed by a very organized person indeed.

All the way across the cabin, there’s a deep enamel ledge running along the port wall under a window that I think is called my porthole.⁶¹ As are the portholes in ships on TV, this porthole is indeed round, but it is not small, and in terms of its importance to the room’s mood and raison it resembles a cathedral’s rose window. It’s made of that kind of very thick glass that Drive-Up bank tellers stand behind. In the corner of the porthole’s glass is this:

You can thump the glass with your fist w/o give or vibration. It’s really good glass. Every morning at exactly 0834h. a Filipino guy in a blue jumpsuit stands on one of the lifeboats that hang in rows between Decks 9 and 10 and sprays my porthole with a hose, to get the salt off, which is fun to watch.

Cabin 1009’s dimensions are just barely on the good side of the line between very very snug and cramped. Packed into its near-square are a big good bed and two bedside tables w/ lamps and an 18" TV with five At-Sea Cable® options, two of which show continuous loops of the Simpson trial.62 There’s also a white enamel desk that doubles as a vanity, and a round glass table on which is a basket that’s alternately filled with fresh fruit and with husks and rinds of same. I don’t know whether it’s SOP or a subtle journalistic perq, but every time I leave the cabin for more than the requisite half-hour I come back to find a new basket of fruit, covered in snug blue-tinted Saran, on the glass table. It’s good fresh fruit and it’s always there. I’ve never eaten so much fruit in my life.

Cabin 1009’s bathroom deserves extravagant praise. I’ve seen more than my share of bathrooms, and this is one bitchingly nice bathroom. It is five-and-a-half Keds to the edge of the shower’s step up and sign to Watch Your Step. The room’s done in white enamel and gleaming brushed and stainless steel. Its overhead lighting is luxury lighting, some kind of blue-intensive Eurofluorescence that’s run through a diffusion filter so it’s diagnostically acute without being brutal.63 Right by the light switch is an Alisco Sirocco-brand hairdryer that’s brazed right onto the wall and comes on automatically when you take it out of the mount; the Sirocco’s High setting just about takes your head off. Next to the hairdryer there’s both 115v and 230v sockets, plus a grounded 110v for razors.

The sink is huge and its bowl deep without seeming precipitous or ungentle of grade. Good C.C. Jensen plate mirror covers the whole wall over the sink. The steel soap dish is striated to let sog-water out and minimize that annoying underside-of-the-bar slime. The ingenious consideration of the anti-slime soap dish is particularly affecting.

Keep in mind that 1009 is a mid-price single cabin. The mind positively reels at what a luxury-penthouse-type cabin’s bathroom must be like.⁶⁴

And so but simply enter 1009’s bathroom and hit the overhead lights and on comes an automatic exhaust fan whose force and aerodynamism give steam or your more offensive-type odors just no quarter at all.⁶⁵ The fan’s suction is such that if you stand right underneath its louvered vent it makes your hair stand straight up on your head, which together with the concussive and abundantly rippling action of the Sirocco hairdryer makes for hours of fun in the lavishly lit mirror.

The shower itself overachieves in a big way. The Hot setting’s water is exfoliatingly hot, but it takes only one preset manipulation of the shower-knob to get perfect 98.6° water. My own personal home should have such water pressure: the showerhead’s force pins you helplessly to the stall’s opposite wall, and at 98.6° the head’s MASSAGE setting makes your eyes roll up and your sphincter just about give.66 The showerhead and its flexible steel line are also detachable, so you can hold the head and direct its punishing stream just at e.g. your particularly dirty right knee or something.⁶⁷

Toiletry-wise, flanking the sink’s mirror are broad shallow bolted steel minibaskets with all sorts of free stuff in them. There’s Caswell-Massey Conditioning Shampoo in a convenient airplane-liquor-size bottle. There’s Caswell-Massey Almond and Aloe Hand and Body Emulsion With Silk. There’s a sturdy plastic shoehorn and a chamois mitt for either eyeglasses or light shoeshining—both these items are the navy-blue-on-searing-white that are Celebrity’s colors.⁶⁸ There’s not one but two fresh showercaps at all times. There’s good old unpretentious unswishy Safeguard soap. There’s washcloths w/o nubble or nap, and of course towels you want to propose to.

In the vestibule’s Wondercloset are extra chamois blankets and hypoallergenic pillows and plastic CELEBRITY CRUISES–emblazoned bags of all different sizes and configurations for your laundry and optional dry cleaning, etc.⁶⁹

But all this is still small potatoes compared to 1009’s fascinating and potentially malevolent toilet. A harmonious concordance of elegant form and vigorous function, flanked by rolls of tissue so soft as to be without the usual perforates for tearing, my toilet has above it this sign:

THIS TOILET IS CONNECTED TO A VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM. PLEASE DO NOT THROW INTO THE TOILET ANYTHING THAN ORDINARY TOILET WASTE AND TOILET PAPER⁷⁰

Yes that’s right a vacuum toilet. And, as with the exhaust fan above, not a lightweight or unambitious vacuum. The toilet’s flush produces a brief but traumatizing sound, a kind of held high-B gargle, as of some gastric disturbance on a cosmic scale. Along with this sound comes a concussive suction so awesomely powerful that it’s both scary and strangely comforting—your waste seems less removed than hurled from you, and hurled with a velocity that lets you feel as though the waste is going to end up someplace so far away from you that it will have become an abstraction… a kind of existential-level sewage treatment.71^{, 72}

11

Traveling at sea for the first time is a chance to realize that the ocean is not one ocean. The water changes. The Atlantic that seethes off the eastern U.S. is glaucous and lightless and looks mean. Around Jamaica, though, it’s more like a milky aquamarine, and translucent. Off the Cayman Islands it’s an electric blue, and off Cozumel it’s almost purple. Same sort of deal with the beaches. You can tell right away that south Florida’s sand is descended from rocks: it hurts your bare feet and has that sort of minerally glitter to it. But Ocho Rios’s beach is more like dirty sugar, and Cozumel’s is like clean sugar, and at places along the coast of Grand Cayman the sand’s texture is more like flour, silicate, its white as dreamy and vaporous as clouds’ white. The only real constant to the nautical topography of the m.v. Nadir’s Caribbean is something about its unreal and almost retouched-looking prettiness73—it’s impossible to describe quite right, but the closest I can come is to say that it all looks: expensive.

12

Mornings in port are a special time for the semi-agoraphobe, because just about everybody else gets off the ship and goes ashore for Organized Shore Excursions or for unstructured peripatetic tourist stuff, and the m.v. Nadir’s upper decks have the eerily delicious deserted quality of your folks’ house when you’re home sick as a kid and everybody else is off at work and school, etc. Right now it’s 0930h. on 15 March (Ides Wednesday) and we’re docked off Cozumel, Mexico. I’m on Deck 12. A couple guys in software-company T-shirts jog fragrantly by every couple minutes,⁷⁴ but other than that it’s just me and the ZnO and hat and about a thousand empty and identically folded high-quality deck chairs. The 12-Aft Towel Guy has almost nobody to exercise his zeal on, and by 1000h. I’m on my fifth new towel.

Here the semi-agoraphobe can stand alone at the ship’s highest port rail and gaze pensively out to sea. The sea off Cozumel is a kind of watery indigo through which you can see the powder-white of the bottom. In the middle distance, underwater coral formations are big cloud-shapes of deep purple. You can see why people say of calm seas that they’re “glassy”: at 1000h. the sun assumes a kind of Brewster’s Angle w/r/t the surface and the harbor lights up as far as the eye can see: the water moves a million little ways at once, and each move makes a sparkle. Out past the coral, the water gets progressively darker in orderly baconish stripes—I think this phenomenon has to do with perspective. It’s all extremely pretty and peaceful. Besides me and the T.G. and the orbiting joggers, there’s only a supine older lady reading Codependent No More and a man standing way up at the fore part of the starboard rail videotaping the sea. This sad and cadaverous guy, who by the second day I’d christened Captain Video, has tall hard gray hair and Birkenstocks and very thin hairless calves, and he is one of the cruise’s more prominent eccentrics.75 Pretty much everybody on the Nadir qualifies as camera-crazy, but Captain Video camcords absolutely everything, including meals, empty hallways, endless games of geriatric bridge—even leaping onto Deck 11’s raised stage during Pool Party to get the crowd from the musicians’ angle. You can tell that the magnetic record of Captain Video’s Megacruise experience is going to be this Warholianly dull thing that is exactly as long as the Cruise itself. Captain Video’s the only passenger besides me who I know for a fact is cruising without a relative or companion, and certain additional similarities between C.V. and me (the semi-agoraphobic reluctance to leave the ship in port, for one thing) tend to make me uncomfortable, and I try to avoid him as much as possible.

The semi-agoraphobe can also stand at Deck 12’s starboard rail and look way down at the army of Nadir passengers being disgorged by the Deck 3 egress. They keep pouring out the door and down the narrow gangway. As each person’s sandal hits the pier, a sociolinguistic transformation from cruiser to tourist is effected. At this very moment, 1300+ upscale tourists with currency to unload and experiences to experience and record compose a serpentine line stretching all the way down the Cozumel pier, which pier is poured cement and a good quarter-mile long and leads to the TOURISM CENTER,76 a kind of mega-Quonset structure where Organized Shore Excursions⁷⁷ and cabs or mopeds into San Miguel are available. The word around good old Table 64 last night was that in primitive and incredibly poor Cozumel the U.S. dollar is treated like a UFO: “They worship it when it lands.”

Locals along the Cozumel pier are offering Nadirites a chance to have their picture taken holding a very large iguana. Yesterday, on the Grand Cayman pier, locals had offered them the chance to have their picture taken with a guy wearing a peg-leg and hook, while off the Nadir’s port bow a fake pirate ship plowed back and forth across the bay all morning, firing blank broadsides and getting on everybody’s nerves.

The Nadir’s crowds move in couples and quartets and groups and packs; the line undulates complexly. Everybody’s shirt is some kind of pastel and is festooned with the cases of recording equipment, and 85% of the females have white visors and wicker purses. And everybody down below has on sunglasses with this year’s fashionable accessory, a padded fluorescent cord that attaches to the glasses’ arms so the glasses can hang around your neck and you can put them on and take them off a lot.⁷⁸

Off to my right (southeast), now, another Megacruiser is moving in for docking someplace that must be pretty close to us, judging by its approach-vector. It moves like a force of nature and resists the idea that so much mass is being steered by anything like a hand on a tiller. I can’t imagine what trying to maneuver one of these puppies into the pier is like. Parallel parking a semi into a spot the same size as the semi with a blindfold on and four tabs of LSD in you might come close. There’s no empirical way to know: they won’t even let me near the ship’s Bridge, not after the au-jus snafu. Our docking this morning at sunrise involved an antlike frenzy of crewmen and shore personnel and an anchor79 that spilled from the ship’s navel and upward of a dozen ropes complexly knotted onto what look like giant railroad ties studding the pier. The crew insist on calling the ropes “lines” even though each one is at least the same diameter as a tourist’s head.

I cannot convey to you the sheer and surreal scale of everything: the towering ship, the ropes, the ties, the anchor, the pier, the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky. The Caribbean is, as ever, odorless. The floor of Deck 12 is tight-fitted planks of the same kind of corky and good-smelling wood you see in saunas.

Looking down from a great height at your countrymen waddling in expensive sandals into poverty-stricken ports is not one of the funner moments of a 7NC Luxury Cruise, however. There is something inescapably bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity about them. Us, rather. In port we automatically become Peregrinator americanus, Die Lumpenamerikaner. The Ugly Ones. For me, boviscopophobia⁸⁰ is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port. It’s in port that I feel most implicated, guilty by perceived association. I’ve barely been out of the U.S.A. before, and never as part of a high-income herd, and in port—even up here above it all on Deck 12, just watching—I’m newly and unpleasantly conscious of being an American, the same way I’m always suddenly conscious of being white every time I’m around a lot of nonwhite people. I cannot help imagining us as we appear to them, the impassive Jamaicans and Mexicans,81 or especially to the non-Aryan preterite crew of the Nadir. All week I’ve found myself doing everything I can to distance myself in the crew’s eyes from the bovine herd I’m part of, to somehow unimplicate myself: I eschew cameras and sunglasses and pastel Caribbeanwear; I make a big deal of carrying my own cafeteria tray and am effusive in my thanks for the slightest service. Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor.

At 1035h. there are just one or two small clouds in a sky so blue here it hurts. Every dawn so far in port has been overcast. Then the ascending sun gathers force and disperses the clouds somehow, and for an hour or so the sky looks shredded. Then by 0800h. an endless blue opens up like an eye and stays that way all A.M., one or two clouds always in the distance, as if for scale.

There are massed formicatory maneuvers among pier workers with ropes and walkie-talkies down there now as this other bright-white Megaship moves slowly in toward the pier from the right.

And then in the late A.M. the isolate clouds overhead start moving toward one another, and in the early P.M. they begin very slowly interlocking like jigsaw pieces, and by evening the puzzle will be solved and the sky will be the color of old dimes.⁸²

But of course all this ostensibly unimplicating behavior on my part is itself motivated by a self-conscious and somewhat condescending concern about how I appear to others that is (this concern) 100% upscale American. Part of the overall despair of this Luxury Cruise is that no matter what I do I cannot escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness. This despair reaches its peak in port, at the rail, looking down at what I can’t help being one of. Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, ashamed, despairing, and greedy: the world’s only known species of bovine carnivore.

Here, as in the other ports, Jet Skis buzz the Nadir all morning. There’s about half a dozen this time. Jet Skis are the mosquitoes of Caribbean ports, annoying and irrelevant and apparently always there. Their noise is a cross between a gargle and a chain saw. I am tired of Jet Skis already and have never even been on a Jet Ski. I remember reading somewhere that Jet Skis are incredibly dangerous and accident-prone, and I take a certain unkind comfort in this as I watch blond guys with washboard stomachs and sunglasses on fluorescent cords buzz around making hieroglyphs of foam.

Instead of fake pirate ships, in Cozumel there are glass-bottom boats working the waters around the coral shadows. They move sluggishly because they’re terribly overloaded with cruisers on an Organized Shore Excursion. What’s neat about the sight is that everybody on the boats is looking straight down, a good 100+ people per boat—it looks prayerful somehow, and sets off the boat’s driver, a local who stares dully ahead at the same nothing all drivers of all kinds of mass transport stare at.83

A red and orange parasail hangs dead still on the port horizon, a stick-figure dangling.

The 12-Aft Towel Guy, a spectral Czech with eyes so inset they’re black from brow-shadow, stands very straight and expressionless by his cart, playing what looks like Rock-Paper-Scissors with himself. I’ve learned that the 12-Aft Towel Guy is immune to chatty journalistic probing—he gives me a look of what I can only call withering neutrality whenever I go get another towel. I am reapplying ZnO. Captain Video isn’t filming now but is looking at the harbor through a square he’s made of his hands. He’s the type where you can tell without even looking closely that he’s talking to himself. This other Megacruise ship is now docking right next to us, a procedure which apparently demands a lot of coded blasts on its world-ending horn. But maybe the single best A.M. visual in the harbor is another big organized 7NC-tourist thing: A group of Nadirites is learning to snorkel in the lagoonish waters just offshore; off the port bow I can see a good 150 solid citizens floating on their stomachs, motionless, the classic Dead Man’s Float, looking like the massed and floating victims of some hideous mishap—from this height a macabre and riveting sight. I have given up looking for dorsal fins in port. It turns out that sharks, apparently being short on aesthetic sense, are never seen in pretty Caribbean ports, though a couple Jamaicans had lurid if dubious stories of barracudas that could take off a limb in one surgical drive-by. Nor in Caribbean ports is there ever any evident kelp, glasswort, algaeic scuz, or any of the sapropel the regular ocean’s supposed to have. Probably sharks like murkier and scuzzier waters; potential victims could see them coming too easily down here.

Speaking of carnivores, Carnival Cruises Inc.’s good ships Ecstasy and Tropicale are both anchored all the way across the harbor. In port, Carnival Megaships tend to stay sort of at a distance from other cruise ships, and my sense is that the other ships think this is just as well. The Carnival ships have masses of 20ish-looking people hanging off the rails and seem at this distance to throb slightly, like a hi-fi’s woofer. The rumors about Carnival 7NC’s are legion, one such rumor being that their Cruises are kind of like floating meat-market bars and that their ships bob with a conspicuous carnal squeakatasqueakata at night. There’s none of this kind of concupiscent behavior aboard the Nadir, I’m happy to say. By now I’ve become a kind of 7NC snob, and when Carnival or Princess is mentioned in my presence I feel my face automatically assume Trudy and Esther’s expression of classy distaste.

But so there they are, the Ecstasy and Tropicale; and now right up alongside the Nadir on the other side of the pier is finally docked and secured the m.v. Dreamward, with the peach-on-white color scheme that I think means it’s owned by Norwegian Cruise Line. Its Deck 3 gangway protrudes and almost touches our Deck 3 gangway—sort of obscenely—and the Dreamward’s passengers, identical in all important respects to the Nadir’s passengers, are now streaming down the gangway and massing and moving down the pier in a kind of canyon of shadow formed by the tall walls of our two ships’ hulls. The hulls hem them in and force a near-defile that stretches endlessly. A lot of the Dreamward’s passengers turn and crane to marvel at the size of what’s just disgorged them. Captain Video, now inclined way over the starboard rail so that only the toes of his sandals are still touching deck, is filming them as they look up at us, and more than a few of the Dreamwardites way below lift their own camcorders and point them up our way in a kind of almost defensive or retaliatory gesture, and for just a moment they and C.V. compose a tableau that looks almost classically postmodern.

Because the Dreamward is lined up right next to us, almost porthole to porthole, with its Deck 12’s port rail right up flush84 against our Deck 12’s starboard rail, the Dreamward’s semi-agoraphobic shore-shunners and I can stand at the rails and sort of check each other out in the sideways way of two muscle cars lined up at a stoplight. We can sort of see how we stack up against each other. I can see the Dreamward’s rail-leaners looking the Nadir up and down. Their faces are shiny with high-SPF sunblock. The Dreamward is blindingly white, white to a degree that seems somehow aggressive and makes the Nadir’s own white look more like buff or cream. The Dreamward’s snout is a little more tapered and aerodynamic-looking than our snout, and its trim is a kind of fluorescent peach, and the beach umbrellas around its Deck 11 pools⁸⁵ are also peach—our beach umbrellas are light orange, which has always seemed odd given the white-and-navy motif of the Nadir, and now seems to me ad hoc and shabby. The Dreamward has more pools on Deck 11 than we do, plus what looks like a whole other additional pool behind glass on Deck 6; and their pools’ blue is that distinctive chlorine-blue—the Nadir’s two small pools are both seawater and kind of icky, even though the pools in the Celebrity brochure had sneakily had that electric-blue look of good old chlorine.

On all its decks, all the way down, the Dreamward’s cabins have little white balconies for private open-air sea-gazing. Its Deck 12 has a full-court basketball setup with color-coordinated nets and backboards as white as communion wafers. I notice that each of the myriad towel carts on the Dreamward’s Deck 12 is manned by its very own Towel Guy, and that their Towel Guys are ruddily Nordic and nonspectral and have nothing resembling withering neutrality or boredom about their mien.

The point is that, standing here next to Captain Video, looking, I start to feel a covetous and almost prurient envy of the Dreamward. I imagine its interior to be cleaner than ours, larger, more lavishly appointed. I imagine the Dreamward’s food being even more varied and punctiliously prepared, the ship’s Gift Shop less expensive and its casino less depressing and its stage entertainment less cheesy and its pillow mints bigger. The little private balconies outside the Dreamward’s cabins, in particular, seem just way superior to a porthole of bank-teller glass, and suddenly private balconies seem absolutely crucial to the whole 7NC Megaexperience I’m expected to try to convey.

I spend several minutes fantasizing about what the bathrooms might be like on the good old Dreamward. I imagine its crew quarters being open for anybody at all to come down and moss out and shoot the shit, and the Dreamward’s crew being open and genuinely friendly, with M.A.s in English and whole leatherbound and neatly printed diaries full of nautical lore and wry engaging 7NC observations. I imagine the Dreamward’s Hotel Manager to be an avuncular Norwegian with a rag sweater and a soothing odor of Borkum Rif about him, a guy w/o sunglasses or hauteur who throws open the pressurized doors to the Dreamward’s Bridge and galley and Vacuum Sewage System and personally takes me through, offering pithy and quotable answers to questions before I’ve even asked them. I experience a sudden rush of grievance against Harper’s magazine for booking me on the m.v. Nadir instead of the Dreamward. I calculate by eye the breadth of the gap I’d have to jump or rappel to switch to the Dreamward, and I mentally sketch out the paragraphs that would detail such a bold and William T. Vollmannish bit of journalistic derring-do as literally jumping from one 7NC Megaship to another.

This saturnine line of thinking proceeds as the clouds overhead start to coalesce and the sky takes on its regular clothy P.M. weight. I am suffering here from a delusion, and I know it’s a delusion, this envy of another ship, and still it’s painful. It’s also representative of a psychological syndrome that I notice has gotten steadily worse as the Cruise wears on, a mental list of dissatisfactions and grievances that started picayune but has quickly become nearly despair-grade. I know that the syndrome’s cause is not simply the contempt bred of a week’s familiarity with the poor old Nadir, and that the source of all the dissatisfactions isn’t the Nadir at all but rather plain old humanly conscious me, or, more precisely, that ur-American part of me that craves and responds to pampering and passive pleasure: the Dissatisfied Infant part of me, the part that always and indiscriminately WANTS. Hence this syndrome by which, for example, just four days ago I experienced such embarrassment over the perceived self-indulgence of ordering even more gratis food from Cabin Service that I littered the bed with fake evidence of hard work and missed meals, whereas by last night I find myself looking at my watch in real annoyance after fifteen minutes and wondering where the fuck is that Cabin Service guy with the tray already. And by now I notice how the tray’s sandwiches are kind of small, and how the wedge of dill pickle86 always soaks into the starboard crust of the bread, and how the damn Port hallway is too narrow to really let me put the used Cabin Service tray outside 1009’s door at night when I’m done eating, so that the tray sits in the cabin all night and in the A.M. adulterates the olfactory sterility of 1009 with a smell of rancid horseradish, and how this seems, by the Luxury Cruise’s fifth day, deeply dissatisfying.

Death and Conroy notwithstanding, we’re maybe now in a position to appreciate the lie at the dark heart of Celebrity’s brochure. For this—the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS—is the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn’t that this promise will be kept, but that such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie.⁸⁷ And of course I want to believe it—fuck the Buddha—I want to believe that maybe this Ultimate Fantasy Vacation will be enough pampering, that this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered that my Infantile part will be sated.⁸⁸

But the Infantile part of me is insatiable—in fact its whole essence or dasein or whatever lies in its a priori insatiability. In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction. And sure enough, on the Nadir itself, after a few days of delight and then adjustment, the Pamper-swaddled part of me that WANTS is now back, and with a vengeance. By Ides Wednesday I’m acutely conscious of the fact that the AC vent in my cabin hisses (loudly), and that though I can turn off the reggae Muzak coming out of the speaker in the cabin I cannot turn off the even louder ceiling-speaker out in the 10-Port hall. By now I notice that when Table 64’s towering busboy uses his crumb-scoop to clear crumbs off the tablecloth between courses he never seems to get quite all the crumbs. By now the nighttime rattle of my Wondercloset’s one off-plumb drawer sounds like a jackhammer. Mavourneen of the high seas or no, when Petra makes my bed not all the hospital corners are at exactly the same angle. My desk/vanity has a small but uncannily labial-looking hairline crack in the bevel of its top’s right side, which crack I’ve come to hate because I can’t help looking right at it when I open my eyes in bed in the morning. Most of the nightly Celebrity Showtime live entertainment in the Celebrity Show Lounge is so bad it’s embarrassing, and there’s a repellent hotel-art-type seascape on the aft wall of 1009 that’s bolted to the wall and can’t be removed or turned around, and Caswell-Massey Conditioning Shampoo turns out to be harder to rinse all the way out than most other shampoos, and the ice sculptures at the Midnight Buffet sometimes look hurriedly carved, and the vegetable that comes with my entrée is continually overcooked, and it’s impossible to get really numbingly cold water out of 1009’s bathroom tap.

I’m standing here on Deck 12 looking at a Dreamward that I bet has cold water that’d turn your knuckles blue, and, like Frank Conroy, part of me realizes that I haven’t washed a dish or tapped my foot in line behind somebody with multiple coupons at a supermarket checkout in a week; and yet instead of feeling refreshed and renewed I’m anticipating just how totally stressful and demanding and unpleasurable regular landlocked adult life is going to be now that even just the premature removal of a towel by a sepulchral crewman seems like an assault on my basic rights, and plus now the sluggishness of the Aft elevator is an outrage, and the absence of 22.5-lb dumbbells in the Olympic Health Club’s dumbbell rack is a personal affront. And now as I’m getting ready to go down to lunch I’m mentally drafting a really mordant footnote on my single biggest peeve about the Nadir: soda-pop is not free, not even at dinner: you have to order a Mr. Pibb from the 5C.R.’s maddeningly E.S.L.-hampered cocktail waitress just like it was a fucking Slippery Nipple, and then you have to sign for it right there at the table, and they charge you—and they don’t even have Mr. Pibb; they foist Dr Pepper on you with a maddeningly unapologetic shrug when any fool knows Dr Pepper is no substitute for Mr. Pibb, and it’s an absolute goddamned travesty, or at any rate extremely dissatisfying indeed.89

13

Every night, the 10-Port cabin steward, Petra, when she turns down your bed, leaves on your pillow—along with the day’s last mint and Celebrity’s printed card wishing you sweet dreams in six languages—the next day’s Nadir Daily, a phatic little four-page ersatz newspaper printed on white vellum in a navy-blue font. The ND has historical nuggets on upcoming ports, pitches for Organized Shore Excursions and specials in the Gift Shop, and stern stuff in boxes with malaprop-headlines like QUARANTINES ON TRANSIT OF FOOD and MISUSE OF DRUG ACTS 1972.90

Right now it’s Thursday 16 March, 0710h., and I’m alone at the 5C.R.’s Early Seating Breakfast, Table 64’s waiter and towering busboy hovering nearby.⁹¹ We’ve rounded the final turn and are on our return trajectory toward Key West, and today is one of the week’s two “At-Sea” days when shipboard activities are at their densest and most organized; and this is the day I’ve picked to use the Nadir Daily as a Baedeker as I leave Cabin 1009 for a period well in excess of half an hour and plunge headfirst into the recreational fray and keep a precise and detailed log of some really representative experiences as together now we go In Quest of Managed Fun. So everything that follows from here on out is from this day’s p.&d. experiential log:

0645h.: A triple ding from the speakers in cabin and halls and then a cool female voice says Good Morning, the date, the weather, etc. She says it in a gentle accented English, repeats it in an Alsatian-sounding French, then again in German. She can make even German sound lush and postcoital. Hers is not the same PA voice as at Pier 21, but it’s got the exact same quality of sounding the way expensive perfume smells.

0650–0705h.: Shower, play with Alisco Sirocco hairdryer & exhaust fan & hair in bathroom mirror, read from Daily Meditations for the Semiphobically Challenged, go over Nadir Daily with yellow HiLiter pen.

0708–0730h.: E.S. Breakfast at Table 64 in 5C.R. Last night everybody announced intentions to sleep through breakfast and grab some scones or something at the Windsurf Cafe later. So I’m alone at Table 64, which is large and round and right up next to a starboard window.

Table 64’s waiter’s name is, as mentioned before, Tibor. Mentally I refer to him as “The Tibster,” but never out loud. Tibor has dismantled my artichokes and my lobsters and taught me that extra-well-done is not the only way meat can be palatable. We have sort of bonded, I feel. He is 35 and about 5′4" and plump, and his movements have the birdlike economy characteristic of small plump graceful men. Menu-wise, Tibor advises and recommends, but without the hauteur that’s always made me hate the gastropedantic waiters in classy restaurants. Tibor is omnipresent without being unctuous or oppressive; he is kind and warm and fun. I sort of love him. His hometown is Budapest and he has a postgraduate degree in Restaurant Management from an unpronounceable Hungarian college. His wife back home is expecting their first child. He is the Head Waiter for Tables 64–67 at all three meals. He can carry three trays w/o precarity and never looks harried or on-the-edge the way most multitable waiters look. He seems like he cares. His face is at once round and pointy, and rosy. His tux never wrinkles. His hands are soft and pink, and his thumb-joint’s skin is unwrinkled, like the thumb-joint of a small child.

Tibor’s cuteness has been compared by the women at Table 64 to that of a button. But I have learned not to let his cuteness fool me. Tibor is a pro. His commitment to personally instantiating the Nadir’s fanatical commitment to excellence is the one thing about which he shows no sense of humor. If you fuck with him in this area he will feel pain and will make no effort to conceal it. See for example the second night, Sunday, at supper: Tibor was circling the table and asking each of us how our entrée was, and we all regarded this as just one of those perfunctory waiter-questions and all perfunctorily smiled and cleared our mouths and said Fine, Fine—and Tibor finally stopped and looked down at us all with a pained expression and changed his timbre slightly so it was clear he was addressing the whole table: “Please. I ask each: is excellent? Please. If excellent, you say, and I am happy. If not excellent, please: do not say excellent. Let me fix. Please.” There was no hauteur or pedantry as he addressed us. He just meant what he said. His expression was babe-naked, and we heard him, and nothing was perfunctory again.

Good old Wojtek, the towering bespectacled Pole, age 22 and at least 6′8", Table 64’s busboy—in charge of water, bread supply, crumb-removal, and using a big tower of a mill to put pepper on pretty much anything you don’t lean forward and cover with your upper body—good old Wojtek works exclusively with Tibor, and they have an involved minuet of service that’s choreographed down to the last pivot, and they speak quietly to each other in a Slavicized German pidgin you can tell they’ve evolved through countless quiet professional exchanges; and you can tell Wojtek reveres Tibor as much as the rest of us do.

This morning The Tibster wears a red bow tie and smells faintly of sandalwood. Early Seating Breakfast is the best time to be around him, because he’s not very busy and can be initiated into chitchat without looking pained at neglecting his duties. He doesn’t know I’m on the Nadir as a pseudojournalist. I’m not sure why I haven’t told him—somehow I think it might make things hard for him. During E.S.B. chitchat I never ask him anything about Celebrity Cruises or the Nadir,92 not out of deference to Mr. Dermatitis’s pissy injunctions but because I feel like I’d just about die if Tibor got into trouble on my account.

Tibor’s ambition is someday to return to Budapest⁹³ for good and with his Nadir-savings open a sort of newspaper-and-beret-type sidewalk cafe that specializes in something called Cherry Soup. With this in mind, two days from now in Ft. Lauderdale I’m going to tip The Tibster way, way more than the suggested $3.00 U.S./diem,⁹⁴ balancing out total expenses by radically undertipping both the liplessly sinister maître d’ and our sommelier, an unctuously creepy Ceylonese guy the whole table has christened The Velvet Vulture.

0815h.: Catholic Mass is celebrated with Father DeSandre, Location: Rainbow Room, Deck 8.95

There’s no chapel per se on the Nadir. The Father sets up a kind of folding credence table in the Rainbow Room, the most aftward of the Fantasy Deck lounges, done in salmon and sere yellow with dados of polished bronze. Genuflecting at sea turns out to be a tricky business. There are about a dozen people here. The Father’s backlit by a big port window, and his homily is mercifully free of nautical puns or references to life being a voyage. The communal beverage is a choice of either wine or Welch’s-brand unsweetened grape juice. Even the Nadir’s daily mass’s communion wafers are unusually yummy, biscuitier than your normal host and with a sweet tinge to the pulp it becomes in your teeth.⁹⁶ Cynical observations about how appropriate it is that a 7NC Luxury Cruise’s daily worship is held in an overdecorated bar seem too easy to take up space on. Just how a diocesan priest gets a 7NC Megacruiser as a parish—whether Celebrity maybe has clerics on retainer, sort of like the army, and they get assigned to different ships in rotation, and whether the R.C. Church gets paid just like the other vendors who provide service and entertainment personnel, etc.—will I’m afraid be forever unclear: Father DeSandre explains he has no time after the recessional for professional queries, because of

0900h.: Wedding Vow Renewal with Father DeSandre. Same venue, same porta-altar setup. No married couples show up to renew their wedding vows, though. There’s me and Captain Video and maybe a dozen other Nadirites sitting around in salmon chairs, and a beverage waitress makes a couple circuits with her visor and pad, and Father DeS. stands patiently in his cassock and white cope till 0920, but no older-type couples appear or step forward to renew. A few of the people in the R.R. sit in proximities and attitudes that show they’re couples, but they sort of apologetically tell the Father they’re not even married; the surprisingly cool and laid back Father DeS.’s invitation to make use of the setup and twin candles and priest w/ sacramentary Book of Rites opened to just the right page produces some shy laughter from the couples, but no takers. I don’t know what to make of the W.V.R.’s no-shows in terms of death/despair/pampering/insatiability issues.

0930h.: The Library is open for check-out of games, cards, and books, Location: Library,97 Deck 7.

The Nadir’s Library is a little glassed-in salon set obliquely off Deck 7’s Rendez-Vous Lounge. The Library’s all good wood and leather and three-way lamping, an extremely pleasant place, but it’s open only at weird and inconvenient times. Only one wall is even shelved, and most of the books are the sorts of books you see on the coffeetables of older people who live in condominiums near unchallenging golf courses: folio-sized, color-plated, with titles like Great Villas of Italy and Famous Tea Sets of the Modern World, etc. But it’s a great place to just hang around and moss out, the Library. Plus this is where the chess sets are. This week also features an unbelievably large and involved jigsaw puzzle that sits about half-done on an oak table in the corner, which all sorts of different old people come in and work on in shifts. There’s also a seemingly endless game of contract bridge always going on in the Card Room right next door, and the bridge players’ motionless silhouettes are always there through the frosted glass between Library and C.R. when I’m mossing out and playing with the chess sets.

The Nadir’s Library’s got cheapo Parker Brothers chess sets with hollow plastic pieces, which any good chess player has got to like.⁹⁸ I’m not nearly as good at chess as I am at Ping-Pong, but I’m pretty good. Most of the time on the Nadir I play chess with myself (not as dull as it may sound), for I have determined that—no offense—the sorts of people who go on 7NC Megacruises tend not to be very good chess players.

Today, however, is the day I am mated in 23 moves by a nine-year-old girl. Let’s not spend a lot of time on this. The girl’s name is Deirdre. She’s one of very few little kids on board not tucked out of sight in Deck 4’s Daycare Grotto.⁹⁹ Deirdre’s mom never leaves her in the Grotto but also never leaves her side, and has the lipless and flinty-eyed look of a parent whose kid is preternaturally good at something.

I probably should have seen this and certain other signs of impending humiliation as the kid first comes over as I’m sitting there trying a scenario where both sides of the board deploy a Queen’s Indian and tugs on my sleeve and asks if I’d maybe like to play. She really does tug on my sleeve, and calls me Mister, and her eyes are roughly the size of sandwich plates. In retrospect it occurs to me that this girl was a little tall for nine, and worn-looking, slump-shouldered, the way usually only much older girls get—a kind of poor psychic posture. However good she may be at chess, this is not a happy little girl. I don’t suppose that’s germane.

Deirdre pulls up a chair and says she usually likes to be black and informs me that in lots of cultures black isn’t thanatotic or morbid but is the spiritual equivalent of what white is in the U.S. and that in these other cultures it’s white that’s morbid. I tell her I already know all that. We start. I push some pawns and Deirdre develops a knight. Deirdre’s mom watches the whole game from a standing position behind the kid’s seat,100 motionless except for her eyes. I know within seconds that I despise this mom. She’s like some kind of stage-mother of chess. Deirdre seems like an OK type, though—I’ve played precocious kids before, and at least Deirdre doesn’t hoot or smirk. If anything, she seems a little sad that I don’t turn out to be more of a stretch for her.

My first inkling of trouble is on the fourth move, when I fianchetto and Deirdre knows what I’m doing is fianchettoing and uses the term correctly, again calling me Mister. The second ominous clue is the way her little hand keeps flailing out to the side of the board after she moves, a sign that she’s used to a speed clock. She swoops in with her developed QK and forks my queen on the twelfth move and after that it’s only a matter of time. It doesn’t really matter. I didn’t even start playing chess until my late twenties. On move 17 three desperately old and related-looking people at the jigsaw puzzle table kind of totter over and watch as I hang my rook and the serious carnage starts. It doesn’t really matter. Neither Deirdre nor the hideous mom smiles when it’s over; I smile enough for everybody. None of us says anything about maybe playing again tomorrow.

0945–1000h.: Back briefly for psychic recharging in good old 1009E.P., I eat four pieces of some type of fruit that’s like a tiny oversweetened tangerine and watch, for the fifth time this week, the Velociraptors-stalk-precocious-children-in-gleaming-institutional-kitchen part of Jurassic Park, noting an unprecedented sympathy for the Velociraptors this time around.

1000–1100h.: Three simultaneous venues of Managed Fun, all aft on Deck 9: Darts Tournament, take aim and hit the bull’s-eye!; Shuffleboard Shuffle, join your fellow guests for a morning game; Ping Pong Tournament, meet the Cruise Staff at the tables, Prizes to the Winners!

Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread. Everything about it suggests infirm senescence and death: it’s like it’s a game played on the skin of a void and the rasp of the sliding puck is the sound of that skin getting abraded away bit by bit. I also have a morbid but wholly justified fear of darts, stemming from a childhood trauma too involved and hair-raising to discuss here, and as an adult I avoid darts like cholera.

What I’m here for is the Ping-Pong. I am an exceptionally good Ping-Pong player. The ND’s use of “Tournament” is euphemistic, though, because there are never any draw sheets or trophies in sight, and no other Nadirites are ever playing. The constant high winds on 9-Aft may account for Ping-Pong’s light turnout. Today three tables are set up (well off to the side of the Darts Tournament, which given the level of darts-play over there seems judicious), and the m.v. Nadir’s very own Ping-Pong Pro (or “3P,” as he calls himself) stands cockily by the center table, amusing himself by bouncing a ball off the paddle between his legs and behind his back. He turns when I crack my knuckles. I’ve come to Ping-Pong three different times already this week, and nobody’s ever here except the good old 3P, whose real first name is Winston. He and I are now at the point where we greet each other with the curt nods of old and mutually respected foes.

Below the center table is an enormous box of fresh Ping-Pong balls, and apparently several more of these boxes are in the storage locker behind the Golf-Drive Net, which again seems judicious given the number of balls in each game that get smashed or blown out to sea.101 They also have a big peg-studded board on the bulkhead’s wall with over a dozen different paddles, both the plain-wooden-grip-and-head-with-thin-skin-of-cheap-pebbly-rubber kind and the fancy-wrapped-grip-and-head-with-thick-mushy-skin-of-unpebbled-rubber kind, all in Celebrity’s snazzy white/navy motif.102

I am, as I believe I may already have stated, an extraordinarily fine Ping-Pong player,¹⁰³ and it turns out that I am an even finer Ping-Pong player outdoors in tricky tropical winds; and, although Winston is certainly a good enough player to qualify as a 3P on a ship where interest in Ping-Pong is shall we say less than keen, my record against him thus far is eight wins and only one loss, with that one loss being not only a very close loss but also consequent to a number of freakish gusts and a net that Winston himself admitted later may not have been regulation I.T.T.F. height and tension. Winston is under the curious (and false) impression that we’ve got some kind of tacit wager going on whereby if the 3P ever beats me three games out of five he gets my full-color Spiderman hat, which hat he covets and which hat I wouldn’t dream ever of playing serious Ping-Pong without.

Winston only moonlights as a 3P. His primary duty on the Nadir is serving as Official Cruise Deejay in Deck 8’s Scorpio Disco, where every night he stands behind an incredible array of equipment wearing hornrim sunglasses and working both the CD player and the strobes frantically till well after 0200h., which may account for a sluggish and slightly dazed quality to his A.M. Ping-Pong. He is 26 years old and, like much of the Nadir’s Cruise and Guest Relations staff, is good-looking in the vaguely unreal way soap opera actors and models in Sears catalogues are good-looking. He has big brown Help-Me eyes and a black fade that’s styled into the exact shape of a nineteenth-century blacksmith’s anvil, and he plays Ping-Pong with his thick-skinned paddle’s head down in the chopsticky way of people who’ve received professional instruction.

Outside and aft, the Nadir’s engines’ throb is loud and always sounds weirdly lopsided. 3P Winston and I have both reached that level of almost Zen-like Ping-Pong mastery where the game kind of plays us—the lunges and pirouettes and smashes and recoveries are automatic outer instantiations of a kind of intuitive harmony between hand and eye and primal Urge To Kill—in a way that leaves our forebrains unoccupied and capable of idle chitchat as we play:

“Wicked hat. I want that hat. Boss hat.”

“Can’t have it.”

“Wicked motherfucking hat. Spiderman be dope.”104

“Sentimental value. Long story behind this hat.”

Insipidness notwithstanding, I’ve probably exchanged more total words with 3P Winston on this 7NC Luxury Cruise than I have with anybody else.¹⁰⁵ As with good old Tibor, I don’t probe Winston in any serious journalistic way, although in this case it’s not so much because I fear getting the 3P in trouble as because (nothing against good old Winston personally) he’s not exactly the brightest bulb in the ship’s intellectual chandelier, if you get my drift. E.g. Winston’s favorite witticism when deejaying in the Scorpio Disco is to muff or spoonerize some simple expression and then laugh and slap himself in the head and go “Easy for me to say!” According to Mona and Alice, he’s also unpopular with the younger crowd at the Scorpio Disco because he always wants to play Top-40ish homogenized rap instead of real vintage disco.¹⁰⁶

It’s also not necessary to ask Winston much of anything at all, because he’s an incredible chatterbox when he’s losing. He’s been a student at the U. of South Florida for a rather mysterious seven years, and has taken this year off to “get fucking paid for a change for a while” on the Nadir. He claims to have seen all manner of sharks in these waters, but his descriptions don’t inspire much real confidence or dread. We’re in the middle of our second game and on our fifth ball. Winston says he’s had the chance to do some serious ocean-gazing and soul-searching during his off hours these last few months and has decided to return to U.S.F. in Fall ’95 and start college more or less all over, this time majoring not in Business Administration but in something he claims is called “Multimediated Production.”

“They have a department in that?”

“It’s this interdisciplinarian thing. It’s going to be fucking phat, Homes. You know. CD-ROM and shit. Smart chips. Digital film and shit.”

I’m up 18–12. “Sport of the future.”

Winston agrees. “It’s where it’s all going to be at. The Highway. Interactive TV and shit. Virtual Reality. Interactive Virtual Reality.”

“I can see it now,” I say. The game’s almost over. “The Cruise of the Future. The Home Cruise. The Caribbean Luxury Cruise you don’t have to leave home for. Strap on the old goggles and electrodes and off you go.”

“Word up.”

“No passports. No seasickness. No wind or sunburn or insipid Cruise staff.107 Total Virtual Motionless Stay-At-Home Simulated Pampering.”

“Word.”

1105h.: Navigation Lecture—Join Captain Nico and learn about the ship’s Engine Room, the Bridge, and the basic “nuts ’n bolts” of the ship’s operation!

The m.v. Nadir can carry 460,000 gallons of nautical-grade diesel fuel. It burns between 40 and 70 tons of this fuel a day, depending on how hard it’s traveling. The ship has two turbine engines on each side, one big “Papa” and one (comparatively) little “Son.”¹⁰⁸ Each engine has a propeller that’s 17 feet in diameter and is adjustable through a lateral rotation of 23.5° for maximum torque. It takes the Nadir 0.9 nautical miles to come to a complete stop from its standard speed of 18 knots. The ship can go slightly faster in certain kinds of rough seas than it can go in calm seas—this is for technical reasons that won’t fit on the napkin I’m taking notes on. The ship has a rudder, and the rudder has two complex alloy “flaps” that somehow interconfigure to allow a 90° turn. Captain Nico’s¹⁰⁹ English is not going to win any elocution ribbons, but he is a veritable blowhole of hard data. He’s about my age and height but is just ridiculously good-looking,¹¹⁰ like an extremely fit and tan Paul Auster. The venue here is Deck 11’s Fleet Bar,111 all blue and white and trimmed in stainless steel, and so abundantly fenestrated that the sunlight makes Captain Nico’s illustrative slides look ghostly and vague. Captain Nico wears Ray-Bans but w/o a fluorescent cord. Thursday 16 March is also the day my paranoia about Mr. Dermatitis’s contriving somehow to jettison me from the Nadir via Cabin 1009’s vacuum toilet is at its emotional zenith, and I’ve decided in advance to keep a real low journalistic profile at this event. I ask a total of just one little innocuous question, right at the start, and Captain Nico responds with a witticism—

“How do we start engines? Not with the key of ignition, I can tell you!”

—that gets a large and rather unkind laugh from the crowd.

It turns out that the long-mysterious “m.v.” in “m.v. Nadir” stands for “motorized vessel.” The m.v. Nadir cost $250,310,000 U.S. to build. It was christened in Papenburg FRG in 10/92 with a bottle of ouzo instead of champagne. The Nadir’s three onboard generators produce 9.9 megawatts of power. The ship’s Bridge turns out to be what lies behind the very intriguing triple-locked bulkhead near the aft towel cart on Deck 11. The Bridge is “where the equipments are—radars, indication of weathers and all these things.”

Two years of sedulous postgraduate study is required of officer-wannabes just to get a handle on the navigational math involved; “also there is much learning for the computers.”

Of the 40 or so Nadirites at this lecture, the total number of women is: 0. Captain Video is here, of course, Celebrating the Moment from a camcorded crouch on the Fleet Bar’s steel bartop; he’s wearing a nylon warm-up suit of fluorescent maroon and purple that makes him look like a huge macaw, and his knees crackle whenever he shifts position and rehunches. By this time Captain Video’s really getting on my nerves.

A deeply sunburned man next to me is taking notes with a Mont Blanc pen in a leatherbound notebook with ENGLER embossed on it.112 Just one moment of foresight on the way from Ping-Pong to Fleet Bar would have prevented my sitting here trying to take notes on paper napkins with a big felt-tip HiLiter. The Nadir’s officers have their quarters, mess, and a private bar on Deck 3, it turns out. “In the Bridge also we have different compass to see where we are going.” The ship’s four patro-filial turbines cannot ever be turned off except in drydock. What they do to deactivate an engine is simply disengage its propeller. It turns out that parallel parking a semi on LSD doesn’t even come close to what Captain G. Panagiotakis experiences when he docks the m.v. Nadir. The Engler man next to me is drinking a $5.50 Slippery Nipple, which comes with not one but two umbrellas in it. The rest of the Nadir’s crew’s quarters are on Deck 2, which also houses the ship’s laundry and “the areas of processing of garbage and wastes.” Like all Megacruisers, the Nadir needs no tugboat in port; this is because it’s got “the sternal thrusters and bow thrusters.”¹¹³

The lecture’s audience consists of bald solid thick-wristed men over 50 who all look like the kind of guy who rises to CEO a company out of that company’s engineering dept. instead of some fancy MBA program.¹¹⁴ A number of them are clearly Navy veterans or yachtsmen or something. They all compose a very knowledgeable audience and ask involved questions about the bore and stroke of the engines, the management of multiradial torque, the precise distinctions between a C-Class Captain and a B-Class Captain. My attempts at technical notes are bleeding out into the paper napkins until the yellow letters are all ballooned and goofy like subway graffiti. The male 7NC cruisers all want to know stuff about the hydrodynamics of midship stabilizers. They’re all the kind of men who look like they’re smoking cigars even when they’re not smoking cigars. Everybody’s complexion is hectic from sun and salt spray and a surfeit of Slippery Nipples. 21.4 knots is a 7NC Megaship’s maximum possible cruising speed. There’s no way I’m going to raise my hand in this kind of crowd and ask what a knot is.

Several unreproducible questions concern the ship’s system of satellite navigation. Captain Nico explains that the Nadir subscribes to something called GPS: “This Global Positioning System is using the satellites above to know the position at all times, which gives this data to the computer.” It emerges that when we’re not negotiating ports and piers, a kind of computerized Autocaptain pilots the ship.115 There’s no actual “tiller” or “con” anymore, is the sense I get; there’s certainly no protrusive-spoked wooden captain’s wheel like these that line the walls of the jaunty Fleet Bar, each captain’s wheel centered with thole pins that hold up a small and verdant fern.

1150h.: There’s never a chance to feel actual physical hunger on a Luxury Cruise, but when you’ve gotten accustomed to feeding seven or eight times a day, a certain foamy emptiness in the gut always lets you know when it’s time to feed again.

Among the Nadirites, only the radically old and formalphiliacal hit Luncheon at the 5C.R., where you can’t wear swim trunks or a floppy hat. The really happening place for lunch is the buffet at the Windsurf Cafe off the pools and plasticene grotto on Deck 11. Just inside both sets of the Windsurf’s automatic doors, in two big bins whose sides are decorated to look like coconut skin, are cornucopiae of fresh fruit116 presided over by ice sculptures of a madonna and a whale. The crowds’ flow is skillfully directed along several different vectors so that delays are minimal, and the experience of waiting to feed in the Windsurf Cafe is not as bovine as lots of other 7NC experiences.

Eating in the Windsurf Cafe, where things are out in the open and not brought in from behind a mysterious swinging door, makes it even clearer that everything ingestible on the Nadir is designed to be absolutely top-of-the-line: the tea isn’t Lipton but Sir Thomas Lipton in a classy individual vacuum packet of buff-colored foil; the lunch meat is the really good fat- and gristle-free kind that gentiles usually have to crash kosher delis to get; the mustard is something even fancier-tasting than Grey Poupon that I keep forgetting to write down the brand of. And the Windsurf Cafe’s coffee—which burbles merrily from spigots in big brushed-steel dispensers—the coffee is, quite simply, the kind of coffee you marry somebody for being able to make. I normally have a firm and neurologically imperative one-cup limit on coffee, but the Windsurf’s coffee is so good,¹¹⁷ and the job of deciphering the big yellow Rorschachian blobs of my Navigation Lecture notes so taxing, that on this day I exceed my limit, by rather a lot, which may help explain why the next few hours of this log get kind of kaleidoscopic and unfocused.

1240h.: I seem to be out on 9-Aft hitting golf balls off an Astroturf square into a dense-mesh nylon net that balloons impressively out toward the sea when a golf ball hits it. Thanatotic shuffleboard continues over to starboard; no sign of 3P or any Ping-Pong players or any paddles left behind; ominous little holes in deck, bulkhead, railing, and even the Astroturf square testify to my wisdom in having steered way clear of the A.M. Darts Tourney.

1314h.: I am now seated back in Deck 8’s Rainbow Room watching “Ernst,” the Nadir’s mysterious and ubiquitous Art Auctioneer,¹¹⁸ mediate spirited bidding for a signed Leroy Neiman print. Let me iterate this. Bidding is spirited and fast approaching four figures for a signed Leroy Neiman print—not a signed Leroy Neiman, a signed Leroy Neiman print.

1330h.: Poolside Shenanigans! Join Cruise Director Scott Peterson and Staff for some crazy antics and the Men’s Best Legs Contest judged by all the ladies at poolside!

Starting to feel the first unpleasant symptoms of caffeine toxicity, hair tucked at staff suggestion into a complimentary Celebrity Cruises swimcap, I take full and active part in the prenominate Shenanigans, which consist mostly of a tourney-style contest where gals in the Gal division and then guys in the Guy division have to slide out on a plastic telephone pole slathered with Vaseline119 and face off against another gal/guy and try to knock each other off the pole and into the pool’s nauseous brine by hitting each other with pillowcases filled with balloons. I make it through two rounds and then am knocked off by a hulking and hairy-shouldered Milwaukee newlywed who actually hits me with his fist—which as people start to lose their balance and compensate by leaning far forward¹²⁰ can happen—knocking my swimcap almost clear off my head and toppling me over hard to starboard into a pool that’s not only got a really high Na-content but is also now covered with a shiny and full-spectrum scum of Vaseline, and I emerge so icky and befouled and cross-eyed from the guy’s right hook that I blow what should have been a very legitimate shot at the title in the Men’s Best Legs Contest, in which I end up placing third but am told later I would have won the whole thing except for the scowl, swollen and strabismic left eye, and askew swimcap that formed a contextual backdrop too downright goofy to let the full force of my gams’ shapeliness come through to the judges.

1410h.: I seem now to be at the daily Arts & Crafts seminar in some sort of back room of the Windsurf Cafe, and aside from noting that I seem to be the only male here under 70 and that the project under construction on the table before me involves Popsicle sticks and crepe and a type of glue too runny and instant-adhesive to get my trembling overcaffeinated hands anywhere near, I have absolutely no fucking idea what’s going on. 1415h.: In the public loo off the elevators on Deck 11-Fore, which has four urinals and three commodes, all Vacuum-Suction, which if activated one after the other in rapid succession produce a cumulative sound that is exactly like the climactic D^b-G^# melisma at the end of the 1983 Vienna Boys Choir’s seminal recording of the medievally lugubrious Tenebrae Factae Sunt. 1420h.: And now I’m in Deck 12’s Olympic Health Club, in the back area, the part that’s owned by Steiner of London,121 where the same creamy-faced French women who’d worked 3/11’s crowd at Pier 21 now all hang out, and I’m asking to be allowed to watch one of the “Phytomer/Ionithermie Combination Treatment De-Toxifying Inch Loss Treatments”¹²² that some of the heftier ladies on board have been raving about, and I am being told that it’s not really a spectator-type thing, that there’s nakedness involved, and that if I want to see a P./I.C.T.D.-T.I.L.T. it’s going to have to be as the subject of one; and between the quoted price of the treatment and the sensuous recall of the smell of my own singed nostril-hair in Chem. 205 in 1983, I opt to forfeit this bit of managed pampering. If you back off from something really big, the creamy ladies then try to sell you on a facial, which they say “a great large number” of male Nadirites have pampered themselves with this week, but I also decline the facial, figuring that at this point in the week the procedure for me would consist mostly in exfoliating half-peeled skin. 1425h.: Now I’m in the small public loo of the Olympic Health Club, a one-holer notable only because O. Newton-John’s “Let’s Get Physical” plays on an apparently unending loop out of the overhead speaker. I’ll go ahead and admit that I have, this week, come in a couple times between UV bombardments and pumped a little iron here in the Nadir’s Olympic Health Club. Except in the O.H.C. it’s more like pumping ultrarefined titanium alloy: all the weights are polished stainless steel, and the place is one of these clubs with mirrors on all four walls that force you into displays of public self-scrutiny that are as excruciating as they are irresistible, and there are huge and insectile-looking pieces of machinery that mimic the aerobic demands of staircases and rowboats and racing bikes and improperly waxed cross-country skis, etc., complete with heart-monitor electrodes and radio headphones; and on these machines there are people in spandex whom you really want to take aside and advise in the most tactful and loving way not to wear spandex.

1430h.: We’re back down in the good old Rainbow Room for Behind the Scenes—Meet your Cruise Director Scott Peterson and find out what it’s really like to work on a Cruise Ship!

Scott Peterson is a deeply tan 39-year-old male with tall rigid hair, a constant high-watt smile, an escargot mustache, and a gleaming Rolex—basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste. He is also one of my least favorite Celebrity Cruises employees, though with Scott Peterson it’s a case of mildly enjoyable annoyance rather than the terrified loathing I feel for Mr. Dermatitis.

The very best way to describe Scott Peterson’s demeanor is that it looks like he’s constantly posing for a photograph nobody is taking.123 He mounts the Rainbow Room’s low brass dais and reverses his chair and sits like a cabaret singer and begins to hold forth. There are maybe 50 people attending, and I have to admit that some of them seem to like Scott Peterson a lot, and really do enjoy his talk, a talk that, not surprisingly, turns out to be more about what it’s like to be Scott Peterson than what it’s like to work on the good old Nadir. Topics covered include where and under what circumstances Scott Peterson grew up, how Scott Peterson got interested in cruise ships, how Scott Peterson and his college roommate got their first jobs together on a cruise ship, some hilarious booboos in Scott Peterson’s first months on the job, every celebrity Scott Peterson has personally met and shaken the hand of, how much Scott Peterson loves the people he gets to meet working on a cruise ship, how much Scott Peterson loves just working on a cruise ship in general, how Scott Peterson met the future Mrs. Scott Peterson working on a cruise ship, and how Mrs. Scott Peterson now works on a different cruise ship and how challenging it is to sustain an intimate relation as warm and in all respects wonderful as that of Mr. and Mrs. Scott Peterson when you (i.e., Mr. and Mrs. Scott Peterson) work on different cruise ships and lay eyes on each other only about every sixth week, except how but now Scott Peterson’s tickled to be able to announce that Mrs. Scott Peterson happens to be on a well-earned vacation and is as a rare treat here this week cruising on the m.v. Nadir with him, Scott Peterson, and is as a matter of fact right here with us in the audience today, and wouldn’t Mrs. S.P. like to stand up and take a bow.

I swear I am not exaggerating: this occasion is a real two-handed head-clutcher, awesome in its ickiness. But now, just as I need to leave in order not to be late for 1500h.’s much-anticipated skeetshooting, Scott Peterson starts to relate an anecdote that engages my various onboard dreads and fascinations enough for me to stay and try to write down. Scott Peterson tells us how his wife, Mrs. Scott Peterson, was in the shower in the Mr. and Mrs. Scott Peterson Suite on Deck 3 of the Nadir the other night when—one hand goes up in the gesture of someone searching for just the right delicate term—when nature called. So Mrs. Scott Peterson apparently gets out of the shower still wet and sits down on Scott Peterson’s stateroom’s bathroom’s commode. Scott Peterson, in a narrative aside, says how perhaps we’ve all noticed that the commodes on the m.v. Nadir are linked to a state-of-the-art Vacuum Sewage System that happens to generate not a weak or incidental flush-suction. Other Nadirites besides just me must fear their toilet, because this gets a big jagged tension-related laugh. Mrs. Scott Peterson124 is sinking lower and lower in her salmon-colored chair. Scott Peterson says but so Mrs. Scott Peterson sits down on the commode, still naked and wet from the shower, and attends to nature’s summons, and when she’s done she reaches over and hits the commode’s Flush mechanism, and Scott Peterson says that, in Mrs. Scott Peterson’s wet slick condition, the incredible suction of the Nadir’s state-of-the-art V.S.S. starts actually pulling her down through the seat’s central hole,¹²⁵ and apparently Mrs. Scott Peterson is just a bit too broad abeam to get sucked down all the way and hurled into some abstract excremental void but rather sticks, wedged, halfway down in the seat’s hole, and can’t get out, and is of course stark naked, and starts screeching for help (by now the live Mrs. Scott Peterson seems very interested in something going on down underneath her table, and mostly only her left shoulder—leather-brown and stippled with freckles—is visible from where I’m sitting); and Scott Peterson tells us that he, Scott Peterson, hears her and comes rushing into the bathroom from the stateroom where he’d been practicing his Professional Smile in the bedside table’s enormous vanity mirror,126 comes rushing in and sees what’s happened to Mrs. Scott Peterson and tries to pull her out—her feet kicking pathetically and buttocks and popliteals purpling from the seat’s adhesive pressure—but he can’t pull her out, she’s been wedged in too tight by the horrific V.S.S. suction, and so thanks to some quick thinking Scott Peterson gets on the phone and calls one of the Nadir’s Staff Plumbers, and the Staff Plumber says Yes Sir Mr. Scott Peterson Sir I’m on my way, and Scott Peterson runs back into the bathroom and reports to Mrs. Scott Peterson that professional help is on the way, at which point it only then occurs to Mrs. Scott Peterson that she’s starkers, and that not only are her ectomorphic breasts exposed to full Eurofluorescent view but a portion of her own personal pudendum is clearly visible above the rim of the occlusive seat that holds her fast,¹²⁷ and she screeches Britishly at Scott Peterson to for the bloody love of Christ do something to cover her legally betrothed nethers against the swart blue-collar gaze of the impending Staff Plumber, and so Scott Peterson goes and gets Mrs. Scott Peterson’s favorite sun hat, a huge sombrero, in fact the very same huge sombrero Scott Peterson’s beloved wife is wearing right… umm, just a couple seconds ago was wearing right here in this very Rainbow Room; and but so via the quick and resourceful thinking of Scott Peterson the sombrero is brought from the stateroom into the bathroom and placed over Mrs. Scott Peterson’s inbent concave naked thorax, to cover her private parts. And the Nadir’s Staff Plumber knocks and comes in all overlarge and machine-oil-redolent, w/ tool-belt ajingle, and badly out of breath, and sure enough swart, and he comes into the bathroom and appraises the situation and takes certain complex measurements and performs some calculations and finally tells Mr. Scott Peterson that he thinks he (the Staff Plumber) can get indeed get Mrs. Scott Peterson out of the toilet seat, but that extracting that there Mexican fellow in there with Mrs. S.P. is going to be a whole nother story.

1305h.: I’ve darted just for a second into Deck 7’s Celebrity Show Lounge to catch some of the rehearsals for tomorrow night’s climactic Passenger Talent Show. Two crew-cut and badly burned U. Texas guys are doing a minimally choreographed dance number to a recording of “Shake Your Groove Thing.” Asst. Cruise Director “Dave the Bingo Boy” is coordinating activities from a canvas director’s chair at stage left. A septuagenarian from Halifax VA tells four ethnic jokes and sings “One Day at a Time (Sweet Jesus).” A retired Century 21 Realtor from Idaho does a long drum solo to “Caravan.” The climactic Passenger Talent Show is apparently a 7NC tradition, as was Tuesday night’s Special Costume Party.128 Some of the Nadirites are deeply into this stuff and have brought their own costumes, music, props. A lithe Canadian couple does a tango complete w/ pointy black shoes and an interdental rose. Then the finale of the P.T.S. is apparently going to be four consecutive stand-up comedy routines delivered by very old men. These men totter on one after the other. One has one of those three-footed canes, another a necktie that looks uncannily like a Denver omelette, another an excruciating stutter. What follow are four successive interchangeable routines where the manner and humor are like exhumed time capsules of the 1950s: jokes about how impossible it is to understand women, about how very much men want to play golf and how their wives try to keep them from playing golf, etc. The routines have the same kind of flamboyant unhipness that makes my own grandparents objects of my pity, awe, and embarrassment all at once. One of the senescent quartet refers to his appearance tomorrow night as a “gig.” The one with the tridential cane stops suddenly in the middle of a long joke about skipping his wife’s funeral to play golf and, pointing the cane’s tips at Dave the Bingo Boy, demands an immediate and accurate estimate of what the attendance will be for tomorrow night’s Passenger Talent Show. Dave the Bingo Boy sort of shrugs and looks at his emery board and says that it’s hard to say, that it like varies week to week, whereupon the old guy kind of brandishes his cane and says well it better be substantial because he goddamn well hates playing to an empty house.

1320h.: The ND neglects to mention that the skeetshooting is a competitive Organized Activity. The charge is $1.00 a shot, but you have to purchase your shots in sets of 10, and there’s a large and vaguely gun-shaped plaque for the best X/10 score. I arrive at 8-Aft late; a male Nadirite is already shooting skeet, and several other men have formed a line and are waiting to shoot skeet. The Nadir’s wake is a big fizzy V way below the aft rail. Two sullen Greek NCOs run the show, and between their English and their earmuffs and the background noise of shotguns—plus the fact that I’ve never touched any kind of gun before and have only the vaguest idea of which end even to point—negotiations over my late entry and the forwarding of the skeetshooting bill to Harper’s are lengthy and involved.

I am seventh and last in line. The other contestants in line refer to the skeet as “traps” or “pigeons,” but what they really look like is tiny discuses painted the Day-Glo orange of high-cost huntingwear. The orange, I posit, is for ease of visual tracking, and the color must really help, because the trim bearded guy in aviator glasses currently shooting is perpetrating absolute skeetocide in the air over the ship.

I assume you already know the basic skeetshooting conventions from movies and TV: the lackey at the weird little catapultish device, the bracing and pointing and order to Pull, the combination thud and kertwang of the catapult, the brisk crack of the weapon, and the midair disintegration of the luckless skeet. Everybody in line with me is male, though there are a number of females in the crowd that’s watching the competition from the 9-Aft balcony above and behind us.

From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) skeetshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who’s replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these fluorescent skeet away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir’s wake; (c) a flying skeet,129 when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia—erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a distinctive corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Striking thing (b) turns out to be an illusion, one not unlike the illusion I’d had about the comparative easiness of golf from watching golf on TV before I’d actually ever tried to play golf. The shooters who precede me do all seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and they all get 8/10 or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are insufferable East-Coast retro-Yuppie brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their “Papa” in southern Canada, and the last has not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own skeetshooting range in his backyard130 in North Carolina. When it’s finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else’s ear-oil on them and don’t fit my head. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I’m told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two Yuppie brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek non-coms seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to “be bracing a hip” against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against no not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm—my initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.

OK, let’s not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own skeetshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants’ scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating shooting skeet from the rolling stern of a 7NC Megaship, and then we’ll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone in the vicinity who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips passed down from Papa. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to “lead” the launched skeet, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun’s barrel should move across the sky with the skeet or should instead lie in a sort of static ambush along some point in the skeet’s projected path. (3) TV skeetshooting is not totally unrealistic in that you really are supposed to say “Pull” and the weird little catapultish thing really does produce a kertwanging thud. (4) Whatever a “hair trigger” is, a shotgun does not have one. (5) If you’ve never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (6) The well-known “kick” of a fired shotgun is no misnomer: it does indeed feel like being kicked, and hurts, and sends you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which, when you’re holding a gun, results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above.

Finally, (7), know that an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like—i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left—and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.

1600h.–1700h.: Lacuna.

1700h.–1815h.: Shower, personal grooming, third viewing of the heart-tweaking last act of Andre, attempted shower-steam-rehabilitation of wool slacks and funereal sportcoat for tonight’s 5C.R. supper, which in the ND is designated sartorially “Formal.”131

1815h.: The cast and general atmospherics of the 5C.R.’s T64 have already been covered. Tonight’s supper is exceptional only in its tension. The hideous Mona has, recall, opted to represent today as her birthday to Tibor and the maître d’, resulting tonight in bunting and a tall cake and a chair-balloon, plus in Wojtek leading a squad of Slavic busboys in a ceremonial happy-birthday mazurka around Table 64, and in an overall smug glow of satisfaction from Mona (who when The Tibster sets her cake down before her claps her hands once before her face like a small depraved child) and in an expression of blank tolerance from Mona’s grandparents that’s impossible to read or figure.

Additionally, Trudy’s daughter Alice—whose birthday, recall, really is today—has in silent protest against Mona’s fraud said nothing all week to Tibor about it—i.e. her own birthday—and sits tonight across from Mona wearing just the sort of face you would expect from one privileged child watching another privileged child receive natal treats and attentions that are by all rights her own.

The result of all this is that stony-faced Alice and I132 have tonight established a deep and high-voltage bond across the table, united in our total disapproval and hatred of Mona, and are engaging in a veritable ballet of coded little stab-, strangle-, and slap-Mona pantomimes for each other’s amusement, Alice and I are, which I’ve got to say is for me a fun and therapeutic anger-outlet after the day’s tribulations.

But the supper’s tensest development is that Alice’s mother and my own new friend Trudy—whose purslane-and-endive salad, rice pilaf, and Tender Medallions of Braised Veal are simply too perfect tonight to engage any of her critical attention, and who I should mention has, all week, made little secret of the fact that she’s not exactly crazy about Alice’s Serious Boyfriend Patrick, or about his and Alice’s Serious Relationship¹³³—that Trudy notices and misconstrues my and Alice’s coded gestures and stifled giggles as signs of some kind of burgeoning romantic connection between us, and Trudy begins yet once again extracting and spreading out her purse’s 4×5s of Alice, and relating little tales of Alice’s childhood designed to make Alice appear adorable, and talking Patrick down, and in general I have to say acting like a procuress… and this would be bad enough, tension-wise (especially when Esther gets into the act), but now poor Alice—who, even though deeply preoccupied with birthday-deprivation and Mona-hatred, is by no means dim or unperceptive—quickly sees what Trudy’s doing, and, apparently terrified that I might possibly share her mother’s misperception of my connection with her as anything more than an anti-Mona alliance, begins directing my way a kind of Ophelia-type mad monologue of unconnected Patrick-references and Patrick-anecdotes, all of which causes Trudy to start making her weird dentally asymmetric grimace at the same time she begins cutting at her Tender Medallions of Braised Veal so hard that the sound of her knife against the 5C.R.’s bone china gives everybody at the table tooth-shivers; and the mounting tension causes fresh sweatstains to appear in the underarms of my funereal sportcoat and spread nearly to the perimeter of the faded salty remains of Pier 21’s original sweatstains; and when Tibor makes his customary post-entrée circuit of the table and asks How Is All Of Everything, I am for the first time since the educational second night unable to say anything other than: Fine.

2045h.

CELEBRITY SHOWTIME

Celebrity Cruises Proudly Presents

HYPNOTIST

NIGEL ELLERY

Hosted by your Cruise Director Scott Peterson

PLEASE NOTE: Video and audio taping of all shows is strictly prohibited.

Children, please remain seated with your parents during shows.

No children in the front row.

CELEBRITY SHOW LOUNGE

Other Celebrity Showtime headline entertainments this week have included a Vietnamese comedian who juggles chain saws, a husband-and-wife team that specializes in Broadway love medleys, and, most notably, a singing impressionist named Paul Tanner, who made simply an enormous impression on Table 64’s Trudy and Esther, and whose impressions of Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, and particularly Perry Como were apparently so stirring that a second Popular Demand Encore Performance by Paul Tanner has been hastily scheduled to follow tomorrow night’s climactic Passenger Talent Show.134

Stage-hypnotist Nigel Ellery is British¹³⁵ and looks uncannily like 1950s B-movie villain Kevin McCarthy. Introducing him, Cruise Director Scott Peterson informs us that Nigel Ellery “has had the honor of hypnotizing both Queen Elizabeth II and the Dalai Lama.”¹³⁶ Nigel Ellery’s act combines hypnotic highjinks with a lot of rather standard Borscht Belt patter and audience abuse. And it ends up being such a ridiculously apposite symbolic microcosm of the week’s whole 7NC Luxury Cruise experience that it’s almost like a setup, some weird form of journalistic pampering.

First off, we learn that not everyone is susceptible to serious hypnosis—Nigel Ellery puts the C.S.L.’s whole 300+ crowd through some simple in-your-seat tests¹³⁷ to determine who in the C.S.L.’s crowd is “suggestibly gifted” enough to participate in the “fun” to come.

Second, when the six most suitable subjects—all still locked in complex contortions from the in-your-seat tests—are assembled onstage, Nigel Ellery spends a long time reassuring them and us that absolutely nothing will happen that they do not wish to have happen and voluntarily submit to. He then persuades a young lady from Akron that a loud male Hispanic voice is issuing from the left cup of her brassiere. Another lady is induced to smell a horrific odor coming off the man in the chair next to her, a man who himself believes that the seat of his chair periodically heats to 100°C. The other three subjects respectively flamenco, believe they are not just nude but woefully ill-endowed, and are made to shout “Mommy, I want a wee-wee!” whenever Nigel Ellery utters a certain word. The audience laughs very hard at all the right times. And there is something genuinely funny (not to mention symbolically microcosmic) about watching these well-dressed adult cruisers behave strangely for no reason they understand. It is as if the hypnosis enables them to construct fantasies so vivid that the subjects do not even know they are fantasies. As if their heads were no longer their own. Which is of course funny.

Maybe the single most strikingly comprehensive 7NC symbol, though, is Nigel Ellery himself. The hypnotist’s boredom and hostility are not only undisguised, they are incorporated kind of ingeniously into the entertainment itself: Ellery’s boredom gives him the same air of weary expertise that makes us trust doctors and policemen, and his hostility—via the same kind of phenomenon that makes Don Rickles a big star in Las Vegas, I guess—is what gets the biggest roars of laughter from the lounge’s crowd. The guy’s stage persona is extremely hostile and mean. He does unkind imitations of people’s U.S. accents. He ridicules questions from both the subjects and the audience. He makes his eyes burn Rasputinishly and tells people they’re going to wet the bed at exactly 3:00 A.M. or drop trou at the office in exactly two weeks. The spectators—mostly middle-aged, it looks like—rock back and forth with mirth and slap their knee and dab at their eyes with hankies. Each moment of naked ill will from Ellery is followed by an enormous circumoral constriction and a palms-out assurance that he’s just kidding and that he loves us and that we are a simply marvelous bunch of human beings who are clearly having a very good time indeed.

For me, at the end of a full day of Managed Fun, Nigel Ellery’s act is not particularly astounding or side-splitting or entertaining—but neither is it depressing or offensive or despair-fraught. What it is is weird. It’s the same sort of weird feeling that having an elusive word on the tip of your tongue evokes. There’s something crucially key about Luxury Cruises in evidence here: being entertained by someone who clearly dislikes you, and feeling that you deserve the dislike at the same time that you resent it. All six subjects are now lined up doing syncopated Rockette kicks, and the show is approaching its climax, Nigel Ellery at the microphone getting us ready for something that will apparently involve furiously flapping arms and the astounding mesmeric illusion of flight. Because my own dangerous susceptibility makes it important that I not follow Ellery’s hypnotic suggestions too closely or get too deeply involved, I find myself, in my comfortable navy-blue seat, going farther and farther away inside my head, sort of Creatively Visualizing a kind of epiphanic Frank Conroy–type moment of my own, pulling mentally back, seeing the hypnotist and subjects and audience and Celebrity Show Lounge and deck and then whole motorized vessel itself with the eyes of someone not aboard, visualizing the m.v. Nadir at night, right at this moment, steaming north at 21.4 knots, with a strong warm west wind pulling the moon backwards through a skein of clouds, hearing muffled laughter and music and Papas’ throb and the hiss of receding wake and seeing, from the perspective of this nighttime sea, the good old Nadir complexly aglow, angelically white, lit up from within, festive, imperial, palatial… yes, this: like a palace: it would look like a kind of floating palace, majestic and terrible, to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, a man overboard, treading water, out of sight of all land. This deep and creative visual trance—N. Ellery’s true and accidental gift to me—lasted all through the next day and night, which period I spent entirely in Cabin 1009, in bed, mostly looking out the spotless porthole, with trays and various rinds all around me, feeling maybe a little bit glassy-eyed but mostly good—good to be on the Nadir and good soon to be off, good that I had survived (in a way) being pampered to death (in a way)—and so I stayed in bed. And even though the tranced stasis caused me to miss the final night’s climactic P.T.S. and the Farewell Midnight Buffet and then Saturday’s docking and a chance to have my After photo taken with Captain G. Panagiotakis, subsequent reentry into the adult demands of landlocked real-world life wasn’t nearly as bad as a week of Absolutely Nothing had led me to fear.

1995