A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (42 page)

Not so the Megalines’ ships. It’s not an accident they’re all so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea. The
Nadir
seemed to have a whole battalion of wiry little Third World guys who went around the ship in navy-blue jumpsuits scanning for decay to overcome. Writer Frank Conroy, who has an odd little essaymercial in the front of Celebrity Cruises’ 7NC brochure, talks about how “It became a private challenge for me to try to find a piece of dull bright-work, a chipped rail, a stain in the deck, a slack cable or anything that wasn’t perfectly shipshape. Eventually, toward the end of the trip, I found a capstan
⁷
with a half-dollar-sized patch of rust on the side facing the sea. My delight in this tiny flaw was interrupted by the arrival, even as I stood there, of a crewman with a roller and a bucket of white paint. I watched as he gave the entire capstan a fresh coat of paint and walked away with a nod.”

Here’s the thing. A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that Americans’ ultimate fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial engine of death and decay. But on a 7NC Luxury Cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to “triumph” is via the rigors of self-improvement; and the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep of the
Nadir
is an unsubtle analogue to personal titivation: diet, exercise, megavitamin supplements, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest time-management seminars, etc.

There’s another way out, too, w/r/t death. Not titivation but titillation. Not hard work but hard play. The 7NC’s constant activities, parties, festivities, gaiety and song; the adrenaline, the excitement, the stimulation. It makes you feel vibrant, alive. It makes your existence seem noncontingent.
⁸
The hard-play option promises not a transcendence of death-dread so much as just drowning it out: “Sharing a laugh with your friends
⁹
in the lounge after dinner, you glance at your watch and mention that it’s almost showtime…. When the curtain comes down after a standing ovation, the talk among your companions
¹⁰
turns to, ‘What next?’ Perhaps a visit to the casino or a little dancing in the disco? Maybe a quiet drink in the piano bar or a starlit stroll around the deck? After discussing all your options, everyone agrees:
‘Let’s do it all!’”

Dante this isn’t, but Celebrity Cruises’ 7NC brochure is nevertheless an extremely powerful and ingenious piece of advertising. The brochure is magazine-size, heavy and glossy, beautifully laid out, its text offset by art-quality photos of upscale couples’
¹¹
tanned faces locked in a kind of rictus of pleasure. All the Megalines put out brochures, and they’re essentially interchangeable. The middle part of the brochures detail the different packages and routes. Basic 7NC’s go to the Western Caribbean (Jamaica, Grand Cayman, Cozumel) or the Eastern Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Virgins), or something called the Deep Carribean (Martinique, Barbados, Mayreau). There are also 10- and 11-Night Ultimate Caribbean packages that hit pretty much every exotic coastline between Miami and the Panama Canal. The brochures’ final sections’ boilerplate always details costs,
¹²
passport stuff, Customs regulations, caveats.

But it’s the first section of these brochures that really grabs you, the photos and italicized blurbs from
Fodor’s Cruises
and
Berlitz
, the dreamy
mise en scènes
and breathless prose. Celebrity’s brochure, in particular, is a real two-napkin drooler. It has little hypertextish offsets, boxed in gold, that say stuff like INDULGENCE BECOMES EASY and RELAXATION BECOMES SECOND NATURE and STRESS BECOMES A FAINT MEMORY. And these promises point to the third kind of death-and-dread-transcendence the
Nadir
offers, one that requires neither work nor play, the enticement that is a 7NC’s real carrot and stick.

4

“Just standing at the ship’s rail looking out to sea has a profoundly soothing effect. As you drift along like a cloud on water, the weight of everyday life is magically lifted away, and you seem to be floating on a sea of smiles. Not just among your fellow guests but on the faces of the ship’s staff as well. As a steward cheerfully delivers your drinks, you mention all of the smiles among the crew. He explains that every Celebrity staff member takes pleasure in making your cruise a completely carefree experience and treating you as an honored guest.
¹³
Besides, he adds, there’s no place they’d rather be. Looking back out to sea, you couldn’t agree more.”

Celebrity’s 7NC brochure uses the 2nd-person pronoun throughout. This is extremely appropriate. Because in the brochure’s scenarios the 7NC experience is being not described but
evoked
. The brochure’s real seduction is not an invitation to fantasize but rather a construction of the fantasy itself. This is advertising, but with a queerly authoritarian twist. In regular adult-market ads, attractive people are shown having a near-illegally good time in some scenario surrounding a product, and you are meant to fantasize that you can project yourself into the ad’s perfect world via purchase of that product. In regular advertising, where your adult agency and freedom of choice have to be flattered, the purchase is prerequisite to the fantasy; it’s the fantasy that’s being sold, not any literal projection into the ad’s world. There’s no sense of any real kind of actual promise being made. This is what makes conventional adult advertisements fundamentally coy.

Contrast this coyness with the force of the 7NC brochure’s ads: the near-imperative use of the second person, the specificity of detail that extends even to what you will say (
you will say
“I couldn’t agree more” and “Let’s do it all!”). In the cruise brochure’s ads, you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don’t flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it—they supplant it.

And this authoritarian—near-parental—type of advertising makes a very special sort of promise, a diabolically seductive promise that’s actually kind of honest, because it’s a promise that the Luxury Cruise itself is all about honoring. The promise is not that you can experience great pleasure, but that you
will
. That they’ll make certain of it. That they’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. The ads promise that you will be able—finally, for once—truly to relax and have a good time, because you will
have no choice
but to have a good time.
¹⁴

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

Not so on the lush and spotless m.v.
Nadir
. On a 7NC Luxury Cruise, I pay for the privilege of handing over to trained professionals responsibility not just for my experience but for my
interpretation
of that experience—i.e. my pleasure. My pleasure is for 7 nights and 6.5 days wisely and efficiently managed… just as promised in the cruise line’s advertising—nay, just as somehow already
accomplished
in the ads, with their 2nd-person imperatives, which make them not promises but predictions. Aboard the
Nadir
, just as ringingly foretold in the brochure’s climactic p. 23, I get to do (in gold): “… something you haven’t done in a long, long time:
Absolutely Nothing
.”

How long has it been since you did Absolutely Nothing? I know exactly how long it’s been for me. I know how long it’s been since I had every need met choicelessly from someplace outside me, without my having to ask or even acknowledge that I needed. And that time I was floating, too, and the fluid was salty, and warm but not too-, and if I was conscious at all I’m sure I felt dreadless, and was having a really good time, and would have sent postcards to everyone wishing they were here.

5

A 7NC’s pampering is a little uneven at first, but it starts at the airport, where you don’t have to go to Baggage Claim because people from the Megaline get your suitcases for you and take them right to the ship.

A bunch of other Megalines besides Celebrity Cruises operate out of Fort Lauderdale,
¹⁵
and the flight down from O’Hare is full of festive-looking people dressed for cruising. It turns out the folks sitting next to me on the plane are booked on the
Nadir
. They’re a retired couple from Chicago and this is their fourth Luxury Cruise in as many years. It is they who tell me about the news reports of the kid jumping overboard, and also about a legendarily nasty outbreak of salmonella or
E. coli
or something on a Megaship in the late ’70s that gave rise to the C.D.C.’s Vessel Sanitation program of inspections, plus about a supposed outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease vectored by the jacuzzi on a 7NC Megaship two years ago—it was possibly one of Celebrity’s three cruise ships, the lady (kind of the spokesman for the couple) isn’t sure; it turns out she sort of likes to toss off a horrific detail and then get all vague and blasé when a horrified listener tries to pump her for details. The husband wears a fishing cap with a long bill and a T-shirt that says BIG DADDY.

7NC Luxury Cruises always start and finish on Saturday. Right now it’s Saturday 11 March, 1020h., and we are deplaning. Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today. Over near the back wall, a number of brisk-looking older ladies in vaguely naval outfits hold up printed signs—HLND, CELEB, CUND CRN. What you’re supposed to do (the Chicago lady from the plane is kind of talking me through it as BIG DADDY shoulders us a path through the fray) what you’re supposed to do is find your particular Megaline’s brisk lady and sort of all coalesce around her as she walks with printed sign held high to attract still more cruisers and leads the growing ectoplasm of
Nadir
ites all out to buses that ferry us to the Piers and what we quixotically believe will be immediate and hassle-free boarding.

Apparently Ft. Laud. Airport is always just your average sleepy midsize airport six days a week and then every Saturday resembles the fall of Saigon. Half the terminal’s mob consists of luggage-bearing people now flying home from 7NCs. They are Syrianly tan, and a lot of them have eccentric and vaguely hairy-looking souvenirs of various sizes and functions, and they all have a glazed spacey look about them that the Chicago lady avers is the telltale look of post-7NC Inner Peace. We pre-7NCs, on the other hand, all look pasty and stressed and somehow combat-unready.

Outside, we of the
Nadir
are directed to deectoplasmize ourselves and all line up along some sort of tall curb to await the
Nadir
’s special chartered buses. We are exchanging awkward don’t-know-whether-to-smile-and-wave-or-not glances with a Holland America herd that’s lining up on a grassy median parallel to us, and both groups are looking a little narrow-eyed at a Princess-bound herd whose buses are already pulling up. The Ft. Laud. Airport’s porters and cabbies and white-bandoliered traffic cops and bus drivers are all Cuban. The retired Chicago couple, clearly wily veterans about lines by their fourth Luxury Cruise, has butted into place way up. A second Celebrity crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in
Schindler’s List
.

Where I am in the line: I’m between a squat and chain-smoking black man in an NBC Sports cap and several corporately dressed people wearing badges identifying them as with something called the Engler Corporation.
¹⁶
Way up ahead, the retired Chicago couple has spread a sort of parasol. There’s a bumpy false ceiling of mackerel clouds moving in from the southwest, but overhead it’s just wispy cirrus, and it’s seriously hot standing and waiting in the sun, even without luggage or luggage-angst, and through a lack of foresight I’m wearing my undertakerish black wool suitcoat and an inadequate hat. But it feels good to perspire. Chicago at dawn was 18° and its sun the sort of wan and impotent March sun you can look right at. It is good to feel serious sun and see trees all frothy with green. We wait rather a long time, and the
Nadir
line starts to recoalesce into clumps as people’s conversations have time to progress past the waiting-in-line small-talk stage. Either there was a mixup getting enough buses for people in on
A.M
. flights, or (my theory) the same Celebrity Cruises brain trust responsible for the wildly seductive brochure has decided to make certain elements of pre-embarkation as difficult and unpleasant as possible in order to sharpen the favorable contrast between real life and the 7NC experience.