A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (63 page)

¹²⁰
This is what I did, leaned too far forward and into the guy’s fist that was clutching the hem of his pillowcase, which is
why I didn’t cry Foul, even though the vision in my right eye still drifts in and out of focus even back here on land a week
later.

¹²¹
(also in the
ND
known as Steiner Salons and Spas at Sea)

¹²²
So you can see why nobody with a nervous system would want to miss watching one of these, some hard data from the Steiner
brochure:

IONITHERMIE—HOW DOES IT WORK?
Firstly you will be measured in selected areas. The skin is marked and the readings are recorded on your program. Different
creams, gels and ampoules are applied. These contain extracts effective in breaking down and emulsifying fat. Electrodes using
faradism and galvanism are placed in position and a warm blue clay covers the full area. We are now ready to start your treatment.
The galvanism accelerates the products into your skin, and the faradism exercises your muscles.
^122a
The cellulite or ‘lumpy fat,’ which is so common amongst women, is emulsified by the treatment, making it easier to drain
the toxins from the body and disperse them, giving your skin a smoother appearance.

^122a
And, as somebody who once brushed up against a college chemistry lab’s live induction coil and had subsequently to be pried
off the thing with a wooden mop handle, I can personally vouch for the convulsive-exercise benefit of faradic current.

¹²³
He’s also a bit like those small-town politicians and police chiefs who go to shameless lengths to get mentioned in the local
newspaper. Scott Peterson’s name appears in each day’s
Nadir Daily
over a dozen times:
“Backgammon Tournament with your Cruise Director Scott Peterson”; “‘The World Goes Round’ with Jane McDonald, Michael Mullane,
and the Matrix Dancers, and your host, Cruise Director Scott Peterson”; “Ft. Lauderdale Disembarkation Talk—Your Cruise
Director Scott Peterson explains everything you need to know about your transfer from the ship in Ft. Lauderdale”;
etc., ad naus.

¹²⁴
Mrs. S.P. is an ectomorphic and sort of leather-complected British lady in a big-brimmed sombrero, which sombrero I observe
her now taking off and stowing under her brass table as she loses altitude in the chair.

¹²⁵
At this point in the anecdote I’m absolutely rigid with interest and empathie terror, which will help explain why it’s such
a huge letdown when this whole anecdote turns out to be nothing but a cheesy Catskills-type joke, one that Scott Peterson
has clearly been telling once a week for eons (although maybe not with poor Mrs. Scott Peterson actually sitting right there
in the audience, and I find myself hopefully imagining all sorts of nuptial vengeance being wreaked on Scott Peterson for
embarrassing Mrs. Scott Peterson like that), the dweeb.

¹²⁶
[authorial postulate]

¹²⁷
[Again an authorial postulate, but it’s the only way to make sense of the remedy she’s about to resort to (at this point
I still don’t know this is all just a corny joke—I’m rigid and bug-eyed with empathie horror for both the intra- and extranarrative
Mrs. S.P.).]

¹²⁸
It was this kind of stuff that combined with the micromanagement of activities to make the
Nadir
weirdly reminiscent of the summer camp I attended for three straight Julys in early childhood, another venue where the food
was great and everyone was sunburned and I spent as much time as possible in my cabin avoiding micromanaged activities.

¹²⁹
(these skeet made, I posit, from some kind of extra-brittle clay for maximum frag)

¹³⁰
!

¹³¹
Look, I’m not going to spend a lot of your time or my emotional energy on this, but if you are male and you ever do decide
to undertake a 7NC Luxury Cruise, be smart and take a piece of advice I did not take:
bring Formalwear
. And I do not mean just a coat and tie. A coat and tie are appropriate for the two 7NC suppers designated “Informal” (which
term apparently comprises some purgatorial category between “Casual” and “Formal”), but for Formal supper you’re supposed
to wear either a tuxedo or something called a “dinner jacket” that as far as I can see is basically the same as a tuxedo.
I, dickhead that I am, decided in advance that the idea of Formalwear on a tropical vacation was absurd, and I steadfastly
refused to buy or rent a tux and go through the hassle of trying to figure out how even to pack it. I was both right and wrong:
yes, the Formalwear thing is absurd, but since every
Nadir
ite except me went ahead and dressed up in absurd Formalwear on Formal nights,
I
—having, of course, ironically enough spurned a tux precisely because of absurdity-considerations—was the one who ends
up looking absurd at Formal 5
C.R. suppers—painfully absurd in the tuxedo-motif T-shirt I wore on the first Formal night, and then even more painfully
absurd on Thursday in the funereal sportcoat and slacks I’d gotten all sweaty and rumpled on the plane and at Pier 21. No
one at Table 64 said anything about the absurd informality of my Formal-supper dress, but it was the sort of deeply tense
absence of comment which attends only the grossest and most absurd breaches of social convention, and which after the Elegant
Tea Time debacle pushed me right to the very edge of ship-jumping.

Please, let my dickheadedness and humiliation have
served some purpose: take my advice and
bring Formalwear
, no matter how absurd it seems, if you go.

¹³²
(an I who, recall, am reeling from the triple whammy of first ballistic humiliation and then Elegant Tea Time disgrace and
now being the only person anywhere in sight in a sweat-crusted wool sportcoat instead of a glossy tux, and am having to order
and chug three Dr Peppers in a row to void my mouth of the intransigent aftertaste of Beluga caviar)

¹³³
( which S.R. apparently includes living together on Alice’s $$ and “co-owning” Alice’s 1992 Saab)

¹³⁴
At least guaranteeing the old
Nadir
ite comedian w/ cane a full house, I guess.

¹³⁵
His accent indicates origins in London’s East End.

¹³⁶
(Not, one would presume, at the same time.)

¹³⁷
One is: Lace your fingers together and put them in front of your face and then unlace just your index fingers and have them
sort of face each other and imagine an irresistible magnetic force drawing them together and see whether the two fingers do
indeed as if by magic move slowly and inexorably together until they’re pressed together whorl to whorl. From a really scary
and unpleasant experience in seventh grade,
^137a
I already know I’m excessively suggestible, and I skip all the little tests, since no force on earth could ever get me up
on a hypnotist’s stage in front of over 300 entertainment-hungry strangers.

^137a
(viz. when at a school assembly a local psychologist put us all under a supposedly light state of hypnosis for some “Creative
Visualization,” and ten minutes later everybody in the auditorium came out of the hypnosis except unfortunately yours truly,
and I ended up spending four irreversibly entranced and pupil-dilated hours in the school nurse’s office, with the increasingly
panicked shrink trying more and more drastic devices for bringing me out of it, and my parents very nearly litigated over
the whole episode, and I calmly and matter-of-factly decided to steer well clear of all hypnosis thereafter)