A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (61 page)

The
cabin itself, on the other hand, after it’s been cleaned, has no odor. None. Not in the carpets, the bedding, the insides
of the desk’s drawers, the wood of the Wondercloset’s doors: nothing. One of the very few totally odorless places I’ve ever
been in. This, too, eventually starts giving me the creeps.

⁶⁶
Perhaps designed with this in mind, the shower’s floor has a 10° grade from all sides to the center’s drain, which drain
is the size of a lunch plate and has audibly aggressive suction.

⁶⁷
This detachable and concussive showerhead can allegedly also be employed for non-hygienic and even prurient purposes, apparently.
I overheard guys from a small U. of Texas spring-break contingent (the only college-age group on the whole
Nadir
) regale each other about their ingenuity with the showerhead. One guy in particular was fixated on the idea that somehow
the shower’s technology could be rigged to administer fellatio if he could just get access to a “metric ratchet set”—your
guess here is as good as mine.

⁶⁸
The
Nadir
itself is navy trim on a white field, and all the Megalines have their own trademark color schemes—lime-green on white,
aqua on white, robin’s-egg on white, barn-red on white (white apparently being a constant).

⁶⁹
You can apparently get “Butler Service” and automatic-send-out dry cleaning and shoeshining, all at prices that I’m told
are not out of line, but the forms you have to fill out and hang on your door for all this are wildly complex, and I’m scared
of setting in motion mechanisms of service that seem potentially overwhelming.

⁷⁰
The missing predicative preposition here is
sic
—ditto what looks to be an implied image of thrown excrement—but the mistakes seem somehow endearing, humanizing, and
this toilet needed all the humanizing it could get.

⁷¹
It’s pretty hard not to see connections between the exhaust fan and the toilet’s vacuums—an almost Final Solution—like
eradication of animal wastes and odors (wastes and odors that are by all rights a natural consequence of Henry VIII—like meals
and unlimited free Cabin Service and fruit baskets)—and the death-denial/-transcendence fantasies that the 7NC Luxury Megacruise
is trying to enable.

⁷²
The
Nadir
’s VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM begins after a while to hold such a fascination for me that I end up going hat in hand back to Hotel
Manager Dermatitis to ask once again for access to the ship’s nether parts, and once again I pull a boner with Dermatitis:
I innocently mention my specific fascination with the ship’s VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM—which boner is consequent to another and
prior boner by which I’d failed to discover in my pre-boarding researches that there’d been, just a few months before this,
a tremendous scandal in which the I think
QE2
Megaship had been discovered dumping waste over the side in mid-voyage, in violation of numerous national and maritime codes,
and had been videotaped doing this by a couple of passengers who subsequently apparently sold the videotape to some network
newsmagazine, and so the whole Megacruise industry was in a state of almost Nixonian paranoia about unscrupulous journalists
trying to manufacture scandals about Megaships’ handling of waste. Even behind his mirrored sunglasses I can tell that Mr.
Dermatitis is severely upset about my interest in sewage, and he denies my request to eyeball the V.S.S. with a complex defensiveness
that I couldn’t even begin to chart out here. It is only later that night (Wednesday 3/15), at supper, at good old Table 64
in the 5
C.R., that my cruise-savvy tablemates fill me in on the
QE2
waste-scandal, and they scream
^72a
with mirth at the clay-footed naïveté with which I’d gone to Dermatitis with what was in fact an innocent if puerile fascination
with hermetically-evacuated waste; and such is my own embarrassment and hatred of Mr. Dermatitis by this time that I begin
to feel like if the Hotel Manager really
does
think I’m some kind of investigative journalist with a hard-on for shark dangers and sewage scandals then he might think
it would be worth the risk to have me harmed in some way; and through a set of neurotic connections I won’t even try to defend,
I, for about a day and a half, begin to fear that the
Nadir
’s Greek episcopate will somehow contrive to use the incredibly potent and forceful 1009 toilet itself for the assassination
—I don’t know, that they’ll like somehow lubricate the bowl and up the suction to where not just my waste but I myself will
be sucked down through the seat’s opening and hurled into some kind of abstract septic holding-tank.

^72a
(literally)

⁷³
It is not “beautiful”; it is “pretty.” There’s a difference.

⁷⁴
Seven times around Deck 12 is a mile, and I’m one of very few
Nadir
ites under about 70 who doesn’t jog like a fiend up here now that the weather’s nice. Early
a.m.
is the annular rush-hour of Deck 12 jogging. I’ve already seen a couple of juicy and Keystone-quality jogging collisions.

⁷⁵
Other eccentrics on this 7NC include: the thirteen-year-old kid with the toupee, who wears his big orange life jacket all
week and sits on the wood floor of the upper decks reading Jose Philip Farmer paperbacks with three different boxes of Kleenex
around him at all times; the bloated and dead-eyed guy who sits in the same chair at the same 21 table in the Mayfair Casino
every day from 1200h. to 0300h., drinking Long Island Iced Tea and playing 21 at a narcotized underwater pace. There’s The
Guy Who Sleeps By The Pool, who does just what his name suggests, except he does it all the time, even in the rain, a hairy-stomached
guy of maybe 50, a copy of
Megatrends
open on his chest, sleeping w/o sunglasses or sunblock, w/o moving, for hours and hours, in full and high-watt sun, and never
in my sight burns or wakes up (I suspect that at night they move him down to his room on a gurney). There’s also the two unbelievably
old and cloudy-eyed couples who sit in a quartet in upright chairs just inside the clear plastic walls that enclose the area
of Deck 11 that has the pools and Windward Cafe, facing out, i.e. out through the plastic sheeting, watching the ocean and
ports like they’re something on TV, and also never once visibly moving.

It seems relevant that most of the
Nadir
’s eccentrics are eccentric in
stasis
: what distinguishes them is their doing the same thing hour after hour and day after day without moving. (Captain Video is
an active exception. People are surprisingly tolerant of Captain Video until the second-to-last night’s Midnight Caribbean
Blow-Out by the pools, when he keeps breaking into the Conga Line and trying to shift its course so that it can be recorded
at better advantage; then there is a kind of bloodless but unpleasant uprising against Captain Video, and he lays low for
the rest of the Cruise, possibly organizing and editing his tapes.)

⁷⁶
(its sign’s in English, significantly)

⁷⁷
In Ocho Rios on Monday the big tourist-draw was apparently some sort of waterfall a whole group of
Nadir
ites could walk up inside with a guide and umbrellas to protect their cameras. In Grand Cayman yesterday the big thing was
Duty-Free rum and something called Bernard Passman Black Coral Art. Here in Cozumel it’s supposedly silver jewelry hawked
by hard-dickering peddlers, and more Duty-Free liquor, and a fabled bar in San Miguel called Carlos and Charlie’s where they
allegedly give you shots of something that’s mostly lighter fluid.

⁷⁸
Apparently it’s no longer in fashion to push the frames of the sunglasses up to where they ride just above the crown of your
skull, which is what I used to see upscale sunglasses-wearers do a lot; the habit has now gone the way of tying your white
Lacoste tennis sweater’s arms across your chest and wearing it like a cape.

⁷⁹
The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and—delightfully—it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape
as anchors in tattoos.

⁸⁰
( = the morbid fear of being seen as bovine)

⁸¹
And in my head I go around and around about whether my fellow
Nadir
ites suffer the same steep self-disgust. From a height, watching them, I usually imagine that the other passengers are oblivious
to the impassively contemptuous gaze of the local merchants, service people, photo-op-with-lizard vendors, etc. I usually
imagine that my fellow tourists are too bovinely self-absorbed to even notice how we’re looked at. At other times, though,
it occurs to me that the other Americans on board quite possibly feel the same vague discomfort about their bovine-American
role in port that I do, but that they refuse to let their boviscopophobia rule them: they’ve paid good money to have fun and
be pampered and record some foreign experiences, and they’ll be goddamned if they’re going to let some self-indulgent twinge
of neurotic projection about how their Americanness appears to malnourished locals detract from the 7NC Luxury Cruise they’ve
worked and saved for and decided they deserve.

⁸²
This dawn-and-dusk cloudiness was a pattern. In all, three of the week’s days could be called substantially cloudy, and it
rained a bunch of times, including all Friday in port in Key West. Again, I can see no way to blame the
Nadir
or Celebrity Cruises Inc. for this happenstance.

⁸³
A further self-esteem-lowerer is how bored all the locals look when they’re dealing with U.S. tourists. We bore them. Boring
somebody seems way worse than offending or disgusting him.

⁸⁴
(which on scale of these ships means something around 100 m)

⁸⁵
On all 7NC Megaships, Deck 12 forms a kind of mezzanineish ellipse over Deck 11, which is always about half open-air (11
is) and always has pools surrounded by plastic/Plexiglass walls.

⁸⁶
(I hate dill pickles, and C.S. churlishly refuses to substitute gherkins or butter chips)

⁸⁷
It may well be
the
Big One, come to think of it.

⁸⁸
The fantasy they’re selling is the whole reason why all the subjects in all the brochures’ photos have facial expressions
that are at once orgasmic and oddly slack: these expressions are the facial equivalent of going “
Aaaahhhhh
,” and the sound is not just that of somebody’s Infantile part exulting in finally getting the total pampering it’s always
wanted but also that of the relief all the other parts of that person feel when the Infantile part finally
shuts up
.

⁸⁹
This right here is not the mordant footnote projected
supra
, but the soda-pop issue bears directly on what was for me one of the true mysteries of this Cruise, viz. how Celebrity makes
a profit on Luxury 7NCs. If you accept
Fielding’s Worldwide Cruises
1995’s per diem on the
Nadir
of about $275.00 a head, then you consider that the m.v.
Nadir
itself cost Celebrity Cruises $250 million to build in 1992, and that it’s got 600 employees of whom at least the upper echelons
have got to be making serious money (the whole Greek contingent had the unmistakable set of mouth that goes with salaries
in six figures), plus simply hellacious fuel costs—plus port taxes and insurance and safety equipment and space-age navigational
and communications gear and a computerized tiller and state-of-the-art maritime sewage—and then start factoring in the luxury
stuff, the top-shelf decor and brass ceiling-tile, chandeliers, a good three dozen people aboard as nothing more than twice-a-week
stage entertainers, plus then the professional Head Chef and the lobster and Etruscan truffles and the cornucopic fresh fruit
and the imported pillow mints… then, even playing it very conservative, you cannot get the math to add up. There doesn’t look
to be any way Celebrity can be coming out ahead financially. And yet the sheer number of different Megalines offering 7NCs
constitutes reliable evidence that Luxury Cruises must be very profitable indeed. Again, Celebrity’s PR lady Ms. Wiessen was
—notwithstanding a phone-voice that was a total pleasure to listen to—not particularly helpful with this mystery:

The
answer to their affordability, how they offer such a great product, is really based on their management. They really are in
touch with all the details of what’s important to the public, and they pay a lot of attention to those details.