A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (45 page)

In the case of Frank Conroy’s “essay,” Celebrity Cruises
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is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we properly reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.
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At any rate, for this particular 7NC consumer, Conroy’s ad-as-essay ends up having a truthfulness about it that I’m quite sure is unintentional. As my week on the
Nadir
wore on, I began to see this essaymercial as a perfect ironic reflection of the mass-market-Cruise experience itself. The essay is polished, powerful, impressive, clearly the best that money can buy. It presents itself as for my benefit. It manages my experiences and my interpretation of those experiences and takes care of them in advance for me. It seems to care about me. But it doesn’t, not really, because first and foremost it wants something from me. So does the Cruise itself. The pretty setting and glittering ship and dashing staff and sedulous servants and solicitous fun-managers all want something from me, and it’s not just the price of my ticket—they’ve already got that. Just what it is that they want is hard to pin down, but by early in the week I can feel it, and building: it circles the ship like a fin.

9

Celebrity’s fiendish brochure does not lie or exaggerate, however, in the luxury department. I now confront the journalistic problem of not being sure how many examples I need to list in order to communicate the atmosphere of sybaritic and nearly insanity-producing pampering on board the m.v.
Nadir
.

How about for just one example Saturday 11 March, right after sailing but before the North Sea weather hits, when I want to go out to Deck 10’s port rail for some introductory vista-gazing and thus decide I need some zinc oxide for my peel-prone nose. My zinc oxide’s still in my big duffel bag, which at that point is piled with all Deck 10’s other luggage in the little area between the 10-Fore elevator and the 10-Fore staircase while little men in cadet-blue Celebrity jumpsuits, porters—entirely Lebanese, this squad seemed to be—are cross-checking the luggage tags with the
Nadir
’s passenger list Lot #s and organizing the luggage and taking it all up the Port and Starboard halls to people’s cabins.

And but so I come out and spot my duffel among the luggage, and I start to grab and haul it out of the towering pile of leather and nylon, with the idea that I can just whisk the bag back to 1009 myself and root through it and find my good old ZnO;
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and one of the porters sees me starting to grab the bag, and he dumps all four of the massive pieces of luggage he’s staggering with and leaps to intercept me. At first I’m afraid he thinks I’m some kind of baggage thief and wants to see my claim-check or something. But it turns out that what he wants is my duffel: he wants to carry it to 1009 for me. And I, who am about half again this poor herniated little guy’s size (as is the duffel bag itself), protest politely, trying to be considerate, saying Don’t Fret, Not a Big Deal, Just Need My Good Old ZnO. I indicate to the porter that I can see they have some sort of incredibly organized ordinal luggage-dispersal system under way here and that I don’t mean to disrupt it or make him carry a Lot #7 bag before a Lot #2 bag or anything, and no I’ll just get the big old heavy weather stained sucker out of here myself and give the little guy that much less work to do.

And then now a very strange argument indeed ensues, me v. the Lebanese porter, because it turns out I am putting this guy, who barely speaks English, in a terrible kind of sedulous-service double-bind, a paradox of pampering: viz. the The-Passenger’s-Always-Right-versus-Never-Let-A-Passenger-Carry-His-Own-Bag paradox. Clueless at the time about what this poor little Lebanese man is going through, I wave off both his high-pitched protests and his agonized expression as mere servile courtesy, and I extract the duffel and lug it up the hall to 1009 and slather the old beak with ZnO and go outside to watch the coast of Florida recede cinematically à la F. Conroy.

Only later did I understand what I’d done. Only later did I learn that that little Lebanese Deck 10 porter had his head just about chewed off by the (also Lebanese) Deck 10 Head Porter, who’d had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward, who’d received confirmed reports that a Deck 10 passenger had been seen carrying his own luggage up the Port hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded rolling Lebanese heads for this clear indication of porterly dereliction, and had reported (the Austrian Chief Steward did) the incident (as is apparently SOP) to an officer in the Guest Relations Dept., a Greek officer with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and officerial epaulets so complex I never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009 after Saturday’s supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag. And even though this Greek officer’s English was in lots of ways better than mine, it took me no less than ten minutes to express my own horror and to claim responsibility and to detail the double-bind I’d put the porter in—brandishing at relevant moments the actual tube of ZnO that had caused the whole snafu—ten or more minutes before I could get enough of a promise from the Greek officer that various chewed-off heads would be reattached and employee records unbesmirched to feel comfortable enough to allow the officer to leave;
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and the whole incident was incredibly frazzling and angst-fraught and filled almost a whole Mead notebook and is here recounted in only its barest psychoskeletal outline.

It is everywhere on the
Nadir
you look: evidence of a steely determination to indulge the passenger in ways that go far beyond any halfway-sane passenger’s own expectations.
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Some wholly random examples: My cabin bathroom has plenty of thick fluffy towels, but when I go up to lie in the sun
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I don’t have to take any of my cabin’s towels, because the two upper decks’ sun areas have big carts loaded with even thicker and fluffier towels. These carts are stationed at convenient intervals along endless rows of gymnastically adjustable deck chairs that are themselves phenomenally fine deck chairs, sturdy enough for even the portliest sunbather but also narcoleptically comfortable, with heavy-alloy skeletons over which is stretched some exotic material that combines canvas’s quick-drying durability with cotton’s absorbency and comfort—the material’s precise composition is mysterious, but it’s a welcome step up from public pools’ deck chairs’ surface of Kmartish plastic that sticks and produces farty suction-noises whenever you shift your sweaty weight on it—and the
Nadir
’s chairs’ material is not striated or cross-hatched in some web but is a solid expanse stretched drum-tight over the frame, so that you don’t get those weird pink chair-stripes on the side you’re lying on. Oh, and each upper deck’s carts are manned by a special squad of full-time Towel Guys, so that, when you’re well-done on both sides and ready to quit and spring easily out of the deck chair, you don’t have to pick up your towel and take it with you or even bus it into the cart’s Used Towel slot, because a Towel Guy materializes the minute your fanny leaves the chair and removes your towel for you and deposits it in the slot. (Actually the Towel Guys are such overachievers about removing used towels that even if you just get up for a second to reapply ZnO or gaze contemplatively out over the railing, often when you turn back around your towel’s gone, and your deck chair’s refolded to the uniform 45° at-rest angle, and you have to readjust your chair all over again and go to the cart to get a fresh fluffy towel, of which there’s admittedly not a short supply.)

Down in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant, the waiter
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will not only bring you, e.g., lobster—as well as seconds and even thirds on lobster
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—with methamphetaminic speed, but he’ll also incline over you
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with gleaming claw-cracker and surgical fork and dismantle the lobster for you, saving you the green goopy work that’s the only remotely rigorous thing about lobster.

At the Windsurf Cafe, up on Deck 11 by the pools, where there’s always an informal buffet lunch, there’s never that bovine line that makes most cafeterias such a downer, and there are about 73 varieties of entrée alone, and incredibly good coffee; and if you’re carrying a bunch of notebooks or even just have too many things on your tray, a waiter will materialize as you peel away from the buffet and will carry your tray—i.e. even though it’s a cafeteria there’re all these waiters standing around, all with Nehruesque jackets and white towels draped over left arms that are always held in the position of broken or withered arms, watching you, the waiters, not quite making eye-contact but scanning for any little way to be of service, plus plum-jacketed sommeliers walking around to see if you need a non-buffet libation… plus a whole other crew of maître d’s and supervisors watching the waiters and sommeliers and tall-hatted buffet-servers to make sure they’re not even thinking of letting you do something for yourself that they could be doing for you.
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Every public surface on the m.v.
Nadir
that isn’t stainless steel or glass or varnished parquet or dense and good-smelling sauna-type wood is plush blue carpet that never naps and never has a chance to accumulate even one flecklet of lint because jumpsuited Third World guys are always at it with Siemens A.G. high-suction vacuums. The elevators are Euroglass and yellow steel and stainless steel and a kind of wood-grain material that looks too shiny to be real wood but makes a sound when you thump it that’s an awful lot like real wood.
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The elevators and stairways between decks
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seem to be the particular objects of the anal retention of a whole special Elevator-and-Staircase custodial crew.
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,
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And let’s don’t forget Room Service, which on a 7NC Luxury Cruise is called Cabin Service. Cabin Service is in addition to the eleven scheduled daily opportunities for public eating, and it’s available 24/7, and it’s free: all you have to do is hit x72 on the bedside phone, and ten or fifteen minutes later a guy who wouldn’t even
dream
of hitting you up for a gratuity appears with this… this
tray
: “Thinly Sliced Ham and Swiss Cheese on White Bread with Dijon Mustard,” “The Combo: Cajun Chicken with Pasta Salad, and Spicy Salsa,” on and on, a whole page of sandwiches and platters in the Services Directory—and the stuff deserves to be capitalized, believe me. As a kind of semi-agoraphobe who spends massive amounts of time in my cabin, I come to have a really complex dependency/shame relationship with Cabin Service. Since finally getting around to reading the Services Directory and finding out about it Monday night, I’ve ended up availing myself of Cabin Service every night—more like twice a night, to be honest—even though I find it extremely embarrassing to be calling up ×72 asking to have even
more
rich food brought to me when there’ve already been eleven gourmet eating-ops that day.
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Usually what I do is spread out my notebooks and
Fielding’s Guide to Worldwide Cruising 1995
and pens and various materials all over the bed, so when the Cabin Service guy appears at the door he’ll see all this belletristic material and figure I’m working really hard on something belletristic right here in the cabin and have doubtless been too busy to have hit all the public meals and am thus legitimately entitled to the indulgence of Cabin Service.
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But it’s my experience with the cabin cleaning that’s maybe the ultimate example of stress from a pampering so extravagant that it messes with your head. Searing crush or no, the fact of the matter is I rarely even see 1009’s cabin steward, the diaphanous and epicanthically doe-eyed Petra. But I have good reason to believe she sees me. Because every time I leave 1009 for more than like half an hour, when I get back it’s totally cleaned and dusted down again and the towels replaced and the bathroom agleam. Don’t get me wrong: in a way it’s great. I am kind of a slob, and I’m in Cabin 1009 a lot, and I also come and go a lot,
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and when I’m in here in 1009 I sit in bed and write in bed while eating fruit and generally mess up the bed. But then whenever I dart out and then come back, the bed is freshly made up and hospital-cornered and there’s another mint-centered chocolate on the pillow.
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