A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (58 page)

⁶²
Who himself has the blond bland good looks of a professional golfer, and is reputed to be the single dullest man on the ATP
Tour and possibly in the whole world, a man whose hobby is purported to be “staring at walls” and whose quietness is not the
quietness of restraint but of blankness, the verbal equivalent of a dead channel.

⁶³
(Just as Enqvist now appears to be Edberg’s heir… Swedish tennis tends to be like monarchic succession: they tend to have
only one really great player at a time, and this player is always male, and he almost always ends up #1 in the world for a
while. This is one reason marketers and endorsement-consultants are circling Enqvist like makos all through the summer.)

⁶⁴
Nerves and choking are a huge issue in a precision-and- timing sport like tennis, and a “bad head” washes more juniors out
of the competitive life than any sort of deficit in talent or drive.

¹
(though I never did get clear on just what a knot is)

²
Somewhere he’d gotten the impression I was an investigative journalist and wouldn’t let me see the galley, Bridge, staff
decks,
anything
, or interview any of the crew or staff in an on-the-record way, and he wore sunglasses inside, and epaulets, and kept talking
on the phone for long stretches of time in Greek when I was in his office after I’d skipped the karaoki semifinals in the
Rendez-Vous Lounge to make a special appointment to see him; I wish him ill.

³
No wag could possibly resist mentally rechristening the ship the m.v.
Nadir
the instant he saw the
Zenith
’s silly name in the Celebrity brochure, so indulge me on this, but the rechristening’s nothing particular against the ship
itself.

⁴
There’s also Windstar and Silversea, Tall Ship Adventures and Windjammer Barefoot Cruises, but these Caribbean Cruises are
wildly upscale and smaller. The 20+ cruise lines I’m talking run the “Megaships,” the floating wedding cakes with occupancies
in four figures and engine-propellers the size of branch banks. Of the Megalines out of South FL there’s Commodore, Costa,
Majesty, Regal, Dolphin, Princess, Royal Caribbean, good old Celebrity. There’s Renaissance, Royal Cruise Line, Holland, Holland
America, Cunard, Cunard Crown, Cunard Royal Viking. There’s Norwegian Cruise Line, there’s Crystal, there’s Regency Cruises.
There’s the Wal-Mart of the cruise industry, Carnival, which the other lines refer to sometimes as “Carnivore.” I don’t recall
which line
The Love Boat’s Pacific Princess
was supposed to be with (I guess they were probably more like a CA-to-Hawaii-circuit ship, though I seem to recall them going
all over the place), but now Princess Cruises has bought the name and uses poor old Gavin MacLeod in full regalia in their
TV ads.

The 7NC Megaship cruiser is a type, a genre of ship all its own, like the destroyer. All the Megalines have more
than one ship. The industry descends from those old patrician trans-Atlantic deals where the opulence combined with actually
getting someplace—e.g. the
Titanic, Normandie
, etc. The present Caribbean Cruise market’s various niches—Singles, Old People, Theme, Special Interest, Corporate, Party,
Family, Mass-Market, Luxury, Absurd Luxury, Grotesque Luxury—have now all pretty much been carved and staked out and are
competed for viciously (I heard off-the-record stuff about Carnival v. Princess that’d singe your brows). Megaships tend to
be designed in America, built in Germany, registered out of Liberia or Monrovia; and they are both captained and owned, for
the most part, by Scandinavians and Greeks, which is kind of interesting, since these are the same peoples who’ve dominated
sea travel pretty much forever. Celebrity Cruises is owned by the Chandris Group; the X on their three ships’ smokestacks
turns out not to be an X but a Greek chi, for Chandris, a Greek shipping family so ancient and powerful they apparently regarded
Onassis as a punk.

⁵
I’m doing this from memory. I don’t need a book. I can still name every documented
Indianapolis
fatality, including some serial numbers and hometowns. (Hundreds of men lost, 80 classed as Shark, 7–10 August ’45; the
Indianapolis
had just delivered Little Boy to the island of Tinian for delivery to Hiroshima, so ironists take note. Robert Shaw as Quint
reprised the whole incident in 1975’s
Jaws
, a film that, as you can imagine, was like fetish-porn to me at age thirteen.)

⁶
And I’ll admit that on the very first night of the 7NCI asked the staff of the
Nadir
’s Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant whether I could maybe have a spare bucket of
au jus
drippings from supper so I could try chumming for sharks off the back rail of the top deck, and that this request struck
everybody from the maître d’ on down as disturbing and maybe even disturbed, and that it turned out to be a serious journalistic
faux pas, because I’m almost positive the maître d’ passed this disturbing tidbit on to Mr. Dermatitis and that it was a big
reason why I was denied access to stuff like the ship’s galley, thereby impoverishing the sensuous scope of this article.
(Plus it also revealed how little I understood the
Nadir
’s sheer size: twelve decks and 150 feet up, the
au jus
drippings would have dispersed into a vague red cologne by the time they hit the water, with concentrations of blood inadequate
to attract or excite a serious shark, whose fin would have probably looked like a pushpin from that height, anyway.)

⁷
(apparently a type of nautical hoist, like a pulley on steroids)

⁸
The
Nadir
’s got literally hundreds of cross-sectional maps of the ship on every deck, at every elevator and junction, each with a red
dot and a YOU ARE HERE—and it doesn’t take long to figure out that these are less for orientation than for some weird kind
of reassurance.

⁹
Always constant references to “friends” in the brochures’ text; part of this promise of escape from death-dread is that no
cruiser is ever alone.

¹⁰
See?

¹¹
Always couples in this brochure, and even in group shots it’s always groups of couples. I never did get hold of a brochure
for an actual Singles Cruise, but the mind reels. There was a “Singles Get Together” (sic) on the
Nadir
that first Saturday night, held in Deck 8’s Scorpio Disco, which after an hour of self-hypnosis and controlled breathing
I steeled myself to go to, but even the Get Together was 75% established couples, and the few of us Singles under like 70
all looked grim and self-hypnotized, and the whole affair seemed like a true wrist-slitter, and I beat a retreat after half
an hour because
Jurassic Park
was scheduled to run on the TV that night, and I hadn’t yet looked at the whole schedule and seen that
Jurassic Park
would play several dozen times over the coming week.

¹²
From $2500 to about $4000 for mass-market Megaships like the
Nadir
, unless you want a Presidential Suite with a skylight, wet bar, automatic palm-fronds, etc., in which case double that.

¹³
In response to some dogged journalistic querying, Celebrity’s PR firm’s Press Liaison (the charming and Debra Winger-voiced
Ms. Wiessen) had this explanation for the cheery service: “The people on board—the staff—are really part of one big family
—you probably noticed this when you were on the ship. They really love what they’re doing and love serving people, and they
pay attention to what everybody wants and needs.”

This was not what I myself observed. What I myself observed was that
the
Nadir
was one very tight ship, run by an elite cadre of very hard-ass Greek officers and supervisors, and that the preterite staff
lived in mortal terror of these Greek bosses who watched them with enormous beadiness at all times, and that the crew worked
almost Dickensianly hard, too hard to feel truly cheery about it. My sense was that Cheeriness was up there with Celerity
and Servility on the clipboarded evaluation sheets the Greek bosses were constantly filling out on them: when they didn’t
know any guests were looking, a lot of the workers had the kind of pinched weariness about them that one associates with low-paid
service employees in general, plus fear. My sense was that a crewman could get fired for a pretty small lapse, and that getting
fired by these Greek officers might well involve a spotlessly shined shoe in the ass and then a really long swim.

What
I observed was that the preterite workers did have a sort of affection for the passengers, but that it was a
comparative
affection—even the most absurdly demanding passenger seemed kind and understanding compared to the martinetism of the Greeks,
and the crew seemed genuinely grateful for this, sort of the way we find even very basic human decency moving if we encounter
it in NYC or Boston.

¹⁴
“YOUR PLEASURE,” several Megalines’ slogans go, “IS OUR BUSINESS.” What in a regular ad would be a double entendre is here
a triple entendre, and the tertiary connotation—viz. “MIND YOUR OWN BLOODY BUSINESS AND LET US PROFESSIONALS WORRY ABOUT
YOUR PLEASURE, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE”—is far from incidental.

¹⁵
Celebrity, Cunard, Princess, and Holland America all use it as a hub. Carnival and Dolphin use Miami; others use Port Canaveral,
Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, all over.

¹⁶
I was never in countless tries able to determine just what the Engler Corporation did or made or was about, but they’d apparently
sent a quorum of their execs on this 7NC junket together as a weird kind of working vacation or intracompany convention or
something.

¹⁷
The reason for the delay won’t become apparent until next Saturday, when it takes until l000h. to get everybody off the m.v.
Nadir
and vectored to appropriate transportation, and then from 1000 to 1400h. several battalions of jumpsuited Third World custodial
guys will join the stewards in obliterating all evidence of us before the next 1374 passengers come on.

¹⁸
For me, public places on the U.S. East Coast are full of these nasty little moments of racist observation and then internal
P.C. backlash.

¹⁹
This term belongs to an eight-cruise veteran, a 50ish guy with blond bangs and a big ginger beard and what looks weirdly
like a T-square sticking out of his carry-on, who’s also the first person who offers me an unsolicited narrative on why he
had basically no emotional choice right now but to come on a 7NC Luxury Cruise.

²⁰
Steiner of London’ll be on the
Nadir
, it turns out, selling herbal wraps and cellulite-intensive delipidizing massages and facials and assorted aesthetic pampering
—they have a whole little wing in the top deck’s Olympic Health Club, and it seems like they all but own the Beauty Salon
on Deck 5.

²¹
Going on a 7NC Luxury Cruise is like going to the hospital or college in this respect: it seems to be SOP for a mass of relatives
and well-wishers to accompany you right up to the jumping-off point and then have to finally leave, w/ lots of requisite hugs
and tears.

²²
Long story, not worth it.

²³
Another odd demographic truth is that whatever sorts of people are neurologically disposed to go on 7NC Luxury Cruises are
also neurologically disposed not to sweat—the one venue of exception on board the
Nadir
was the Mayfair Casino.

²⁴
I’m pretty sure I know what this syndrome is and how it’s related to the brochure’s seductive promise of total self-indulgence.
What’s in play here, I think, is the subtle universal shame that accompanies self-indulgence, the need to explain to just
about anybody why the self-indulgence isn’t in fact really self-indulgence. Like: I never go get a massage just to get a massage,
I go because this old sports-related back injury’s killing me and more or less
forcing
me to get a massage; or like: I never just “want” a cigarette, I always “
need
” a cigarette.

²⁵
Like all Megaships, the
Nadir
designates each deck with some 7NC-related name, and on the Cruise it got confusing because they never referred to decks
by numbers and you could never remember whether e.g. the Fantasy Deck was Deck 7 or 8. Deck 12 is called the Sun Deck, 11
is the Marina Deck, 101 forget, 9’s the Bahamas Deck, 8 Fantasy and 7 Galaxy (or vice versa), 61 never did get straight. 5
is the Europa Deck and comprises kind of the
Nadir
’s corporate nerve center and is one huge high-ceilinged bank-looking lobby with everything done in lemon and salmon with
brass plating around the Guest Relations Desk and Purser’s Desk and Hotel Manager’s Desk, and plants, and massive pillars
with water running down them with a sound that all but drives you to the nearest urinal. 4 is all cabins and is called I think
the Florida Deck. Everything below 4 is all business and unnamed and off-limits w/ the exception of the smidgeon of 3 that
has the gangway. I’m henceforth going to refer to the Decks by number, since that’s what I had to know in order to take the
elevator anywhere. Decks 7 and 8 are where the serious eating and casinoing and discos and entertainment are; 11 has the pools
and café; 12 is on top and laid out for serious heliophilia.

²⁶
(a thoroughly silly and superfluous job if ever there was one, on this 7N photocopia)