A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (49 page)

The
Nadir
’s Library’s got cheapo Parker Brothers chess sets with hollow plastic pieces, which any good chess player has got to like.
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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.
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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 maybe 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,
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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 – l000h.: 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
Nadir
ites 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.
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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.
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I am, as I believe I may already have stated, an extraordinarily fine Ping-Pong player,
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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.”
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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 travelling. The ship has two turbine engines on each side, one big “Papa” and one (comparatively) little “Son.”
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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’s
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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,
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like an extremely fit and tan Paul Auster. The venue here is Deck 11’s Fleet Bar,
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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
Nadir
ites 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.
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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.”
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