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

^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.

Libation revenues provide part of the real answer, it turns out. It’s a little bit like the microeconomics of movie theaters. When you hear how much of the gate they have to kick back to films’ distributors, you can’t figure out how theaters stay in business. But of course you can’t go just by ticket revenues, because where movie theaters really make their money is at the concession stand.

The
Nadir
sells a shitload of drinks. Full-time beverage waitresses in khaki shorts and Celebrity visors are unobtrusively everywhere —poolside, on Deck 12, at meals, entertainments, Bingo. Soda-pop is $2.00 for a very skinny glass (you don’t pay cash right there; you sign for it and then they sock you with a printed Statement of Charges on the final night), and exotic cocktails like Wallbangers and Fuzzy Navels go as high as $5.50. The
Nadir
doesn’t do tacky stuff like oversalt the soup or put bowls of pretzels all over the place, but a 7NC Luxury Cruise’s crafted atmosphere of indulgence and endless partying—“Go on, You Deserve It”—more than conduces to freeflowing wine. (Let’s not forget the cost of a fine wine w/supper, the ever-present sommeliers). Of the different passengers I asked, more than half estimated their party’s total beverage tab at over $500. And if you know even a little about the beverage markups in any restaurant/bar operation, you know a lot of that $500’s going to end up as net profit. Other keys to profitability: a lot of the ship’s service staff’s income isn’t figured into the price of the Cruise ticket: you have to tip them at week’s end or they’re screwed (another peeve is that the Celebrity brochure neglects to mention this). And it turns out that a lot of the paid entertainment on the
Nadir
is “vended out”—agencies contract with Celebrity Cruises to supply teams like the Matrix Dancers for all the stage shows, the Electric Slide lessons, etc.

Another contracted vendor is Deck 8’s Mayfair Casino, whose corporate proprietor pays a flat weekly rate plus an unspecified percentage to the
Nadir
for the privilege of sending their gorgeous dealers and four-deck shoes against passengers who’ve learned the rules of 21 and Caribbean Stud Poker from an “Educational Video” that plays continuously on one of the At-Sea TV’s channels. I didn’t spend all that much time in the Mayfair Casino—the eyes of 74-year-old Cleveland grandmothers pumping quarters into the slots of twittering machines are not much fun to spend time looking at—but I was in there long enough to see that if the
Nadir
gets even a 10% vig on the Mayfair’s weekly net, then Celebrity is making a killing.

⁹⁰
Snippet of latter item: “All persons entering each island [?] are warned that it is a CRIMINAL OFFENSE to import or have possession of narcotics and other Controlled Drugs, including marijuana. Penalties for drug offenders are severe.” Half of the Port Lecture before we hit Jamaica consisted of advice about stuff like two-timing street dealers who’ll sell you a quarter-oz. of crummy pot and then trot down to a constable and collect a bounty for fingering you. Conditions in the local jails are described just enough to engage the grimmer parts of the imagination.

Celebrity Cruises’ own onboard drug policy remains obscure. Although there are always a half-dozen humorless Security guys standing burlily around the
Nadir
’s gangway in port, you never get searched when you reboard. I never saw or smelled evidence of drug use on the
Nadir
—as with concupiscence, it just doesn’t seem like that kind of crowd. But there must be colorful incidents in the
Nadir
’s past, because the Cruise staff became almost operatic in their cautions to us as we headed back to Fort Lauderdale on Friday, though every warning was preceded by an acknowledgment that the exhortation to flush/toss anything Controlled
surely
couldn’t apply to anyone on this particular cruise. Apparently Fort Lauderdale’s Customs guys regard homebound 7NC passengers sort of the way small-town cops regard out-of-state speeders in Saab Turbos. An old veteran of many 7NCLCs told one of the U. Texas kids ahead of me in the Customs line the last day “Kiddo, if one of those dogs stops at your bag, you better hope he lifts his leg.”

⁹¹
It’s a total mystery when these waiters sleep. They serve at the Midnight Buffet every night, and then help clean up after, and then they appear in the 5
C.R. in clean tuxes all over again at 0630h. the next day, always so fresh and alert they look slapped.