A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (62 page)

⁵⁰
Two broad staircases, Fore and Aft, both of which reverse their zag-angle at each landing, and the landings themselves have mirrored walls, which is wickedly great because via the mirrors you can check out female bottoms in cocktail dresses ascending one flight above you without appearing to be one of those icky types who check out female bottoms on staircases.

⁵¹
During the first two days of rough seas, when people vomited a lot (especially after supper and apparently
extra
-especially on the elevators and stairways), these puddles of vomit inspired a veritable feeding frenzy of Wet/Dry Vacs and spot-remover and all-trace-of-odor-eradicator chemicals applied by this Elite Special Forces-type crew.

⁵²
By the way, the ethnic makeup of the
Nadir
’s crew is a melting-pot mélange on the order of like a Benetton commercial, and it’s a constant challenge to trace the racio-geographical makeup of the employees’ various hierarchies. All the big-time officers are Greek, but then it’s a Greek-owned ship so what do you expect. Them aside, it at first seems like there’s some basic Eurocentric caste system in force: waiters, bus-boys, beverage waitresses, sommeliers, casino dealers, entertainers, and stewards seem mostly to be Aryans, while the porters and custodians and swabbies tend to be your swarthier types—Arabs and Filipinos, Cubans, West Indian blacks. But it turns out to be more complex than that, because the Chief Stewards and Chief Sommeliers and maître d’s who so beadily oversee the Aryan servants are
themselves
swarthy and non-Aryan—e.g. our maître d’ at the 5
C.R. is Portuguese, with the bull neck and heavy-lidded grin of a Teamsters official, and gives the impression of needing only some very subtle prearranged signal to have a $10000-an-hour prostitute or unimaginable substances delivered to your cabin; and our whole T64 totally loathes him for no single pinpointable reason, and we’ve all agreed in advance to fuck him royally on the tip at week’s end.

⁵³
This is counting the Midnight Buffet, which tends to be a kind of lamely lavish Theme-slash-Costume-Partyish thing, w/ Theme-related foods—Oriental, Caribbean, Tex-Mex—and which I plan in this essay to mostly skip except to say that Tex-Mex Night out by the pools featured what must have been a seven-foot-high ice sculpture of Pancho Villa that spent the whole party dripping steadily onto the mammoth sombrero of Tibor, Table 64’s beloved and extremely cool Hungarian waiter, whose contract forces him on Tex-Mex Night to wear a serape and a straw sombrero with a 17" radius
^53a
and to dispense Four Alarm chili from a steam table placed right underneath an ice sculpture, and whose pink and birdlike face on occasions like this expressed a combination of mortification and dignity that seem somehow to sum up the whole plight of postwar Eastern Europe.

^53a
(He let me measure it when the reptilian maître d’ wasn’t looking.)

⁵⁴
(I know, like I’m sure this guy even cares.)

⁵⁵
This was primarily because of the semi-agoraphobia—I’d have to sort of psych myself up to leave the cabin and go accumulate experiences, and then pretty quickly out there in the general population my will would break and I’d find some sort of excuse to scuttle back to 1009. This happened quite a few times a day.

⁵⁶
(This FN right here’s being written almost a week after the Cruise ended, and I’m still living mainly on these hoarded mint-centered chocolates.)

⁵⁷
The answer to why I don’t just ask Petra how she does it is that Petra’s English is extremely limited and primitive, and in sad fact I’m afraid my whole deep feeling of attraction and connection to Petra the Slavanian steward has been erected on the flimsy foundation of the only two English clauses she seems to know, one or the other of which clauses she uses in response to every statement, question, joke, or protestation of undying devotion: “Is no problem” and “You are a funny thing.”

⁵⁸
(At sea this is small agorapotatoes, but in port, once the doors open and the gangway extends, it represents a true choice and is thus agoraphobically valid.)

⁵⁹
“1009” indicates that it’s on Deck 10, and “Port” refers to the side of the ship it’s on, and “Exterior” means that I have a window. There are also, of course, “Interior” cabins off the inner sides of the decks’ halls, but I hereby advise any prospective 7NC passenger with claustrophobic tendencies to make sure and specify “Exterior” when making cabin-reservations.

⁶⁰
The non-U.S. agoraphobe will be heartened to know that this deck includes “BITTE NICHT STÖREN,” “PRIÈRE DE NE PAS DÉRANGER,” “SI PREGA NON DISTURBARE,” and (my personal favorite) “FAVOR DE NO MOLESTAR.”

⁶¹
If you’re either a little kid or an anorectic you can probably sit on this ledge to do your dreamy contemplative sea-gazing, but a raised and buttock-hostile lip at the ledge’s outer border makes this impractical for a full-size adult.

⁶²
There are also continual showings of about a dozen second-run movies, via what I get the sense is a VCR somewhere right here on board, because certain irregularities in tracking show up in certain films over and over. The movies run 24/7, and I end up watching several of them so many times that I can now do their dialogue verbatim. These movies include
It Could Happen to You
(the
It’s a Wonderful Life
-w/-lottery twist thing),
Jurassic Park
(which does not stand up well: its essential plotlessness doesn’t emerge until the third viewing, but after that the semi-agoraphobe treats it like a porno flic, twiddling his thumbs until the T. Rex and Velociraptor parts (which do stand up well)),
Wolf
(stupid),
The Little Rascals
(nauseous),
Andre
(kind of
Old Yeller
with a seal),
The Client
(with another incredibly good child actor—where do they
get
all these Olivier-grade children?), and
Renaissance Man
(w/ Danny DeVito, a movie that tugs at your sentiments like a dog at a pantcuff, except it’s hard not to like any movie that has an academic as the hero).

⁶³
What it is is lighting for upscale and appearance-conscious adults who want a clear picture of whatever might be aesthetically problematic that day but also want to be reassured that the overall aesthetic situation is pretty darn good.

⁶⁴
Attempts to get to see a luxury cabin’s loo were consistently misconstrued and rebuffed by upscale penthouse-type
Nadir
ites—there are disadvantages to Luxury Cruising as a civilian and not identifiable Press.

⁶⁵
1009’s bathroom always smells of a strange but not unnice Norwegian disinfectant whose scent resembles what it would smell like if someone who knew the exact organochemical composition of a lemon but had never in fact smelled a lemon tried to synthesize the scent of a lemon. Kind of the same relation to a real lemon as a Bayer’s Children’s Aspirin to a real orange.

The cabin itself, on the other hand, after it’s been cleaned, has no odor. None. Not in the carpets, the bedding, the insides of the desk’s drawers, the wood of the Wondercloset’s doors: nothing. One of the very few totally odorless places I’ve ever been in. This, too, eventually starts giving me the creeps.

⁶⁶
Perhaps designed with this in mind, the shower’s floor has a 10° grade from all sides to the center’s drain, which drain is the size of a lunch plate and has audibly aggressive suction.

⁶⁷
This detachable and concussive showerhead can allegedly also be employed for non-hygienic and even prurient purposes, apparently. I overheard guys from a small U. of Texas spring-break contingent (the only college-age group on the whole
Nadir
) regale each other about their ingenuity with the showerhead. One guy in particular was fixated on the idea that somehow the shower’s technology could be rigged to administer fellatio if he could just get access to a “metric ratchet set”—your guess here is as good as mine.

⁶⁸
The
Nadir
itself is navy trim on a white field, and all the Megalines have their own trademark color schemes—lime-green on white, aqua on white, robin’s-egg on white, barn-red on white (white apparently being a constant).

⁶⁹
You can apparently get “Butler Service” and automatic-send-out dry cleaning and shoeshining, all at prices that I’m told are not out of line, but the forms you have to fill out and hang on your door for all this are wildly complex, and I’m scared of setting in motion mechanisms of service that seem potentially overwhelming.

⁷⁰
The missing predicative preposition here is
sic
—ditto what looks to be an implied image of thrown excrement—but the mistakes seem somehow endearing, humanizing, and this toilet needed all the humanizing it could get.

⁷¹
It’s pretty hard not to see connections between the exhaust fan and the toilet’s vacuums—an almost Final Solution—like eradication of animal wastes and odors (wastes and odors that are by all rights a natural consequence of Henry VIII—like meals and unlimited free Cabin Service and fruit baskets)—and the death-denial/-transcendence fantasies that the 7NC Luxury Megacruise is trying to enable.

⁷²
The
Nadir
’s VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM begins after a while to hold such a fascination for me that I end up going hat in hand back to Hotel Manager Dermatitis to ask once again for access to the ship’s nether parts, and once again I pull a boner with Dermatitis: I innocently mention my specific fascination with the ship’s VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM—which boner is consequent to another and prior boner by which I’d failed to discover in my pre-boarding researches that there’d been, just a few months before this, a tremendous scandal in which the I think
QE2
Megaship had been discovered dumping waste over the side in mid-voyage, in violation of numerous national and maritime codes, and had been videotaped doing this by a couple of passengers who subsequently apparently sold the videotape to some network newsmagazine, and so the whole Megacruise industry was in a state of almost Nixonian paranoia about unscrupulous journalists trying to manufacture scandals about Megaships’ handling of waste. Even behind his mirrored sunglasses I can tell that Mr. Dermatitis is severely upset about my interest in sewage, and he denies my request to eyeball the V.S.S. with a complex defensiveness that I couldn’t even begin to chart out here. It is only later that night (Wednesday 3/15), at supper, at good old Table 64 in the 5
C.R., that my cruise-savvy tablemates fill me in on the
QE2
waste-scandal, and they scream
^72a
with mirth at the clay-footed naïveté with which I’d gone to Dermatitis with what was in fact an innocent if puerile fascination with hermetically-evacuated waste; and such is my own embarrassment and hatred of Mr. Dermatitis by this time that I begin to feel like if the Hotel Manager really
does
think I’m some kind of investigative journalist with a hard-on for shark dangers and sewage scandals then he might think it would be worth the risk to have me harmed in some way; and through a set of neurotic connections I won’t even try to defend, I, for about a day and a half, begin to fear that the
Nadir
’s Greek episcopate will somehow contrive to use the incredibly potent and forceful 1009 toilet itself for the assassination —I don’t know, that they’ll like somehow lubricate the bowl and up the suction to where not just my waste but I myself will be sucked down through the seat’s opening and hurled into some kind of abstract septic holding-tank.