A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (51 page)

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
Nadir
ites 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
Nadir
ite 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 “Pa
pa
” 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 backyard
¹³⁰
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 Pa
pa
. (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 5
C.R. supper, which in the
ND
is designated sartorially “Formal.”
¹³¹

1815h.: The cast and general atmospherics of the 5
CR.’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 I
¹³²
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 Relationship
¹³³
—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 5
C.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.