A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (64 page)

⁹²
(except for precise descriptions of whatever dorsal fins he’s seen)

⁹³
(he pronounces the “-pest” part of this “-persht”)

⁹⁴
The last night’s
ND
breaks the news about tipping and gives tactful “suggestions” on going rates.

⁹⁵
All boldface stuff is verbatim and
sic
from today’s
Nadir Daily
.

⁹⁶
If Pepperidge Farm made communion wafers, these would be them.

⁹⁷
Duh.

⁹⁸
Heavy expensive art-carved sets are for dorks.

⁹⁹
This is something else Mr. Dermatitis declined to let me see, but by all reports the daycare on these Megaships is phenomenal, w/squads of nurturing and hyperkinetic young daycare ladies keeping the kids manically stimulated for up to ten-hour stretches via an endless number of incredibly well-structured activities, so tuckering the kids out that they collapse mutely into bed at 2000h. and leave their parents free to plunge into the ship’s nightlife and Do It All.

¹⁰⁰
The only chairs in the Library are leather wing chairs with low seats, so only Deirdre’s eyes and nose clear the board’s table as she sits across from me, adding a Kilroyishly surreal quality to the humiliation.

¹⁰¹
I imagine it would be pretty interesting to trail a Megaship through a 7NC Cruise and just catalogue the trail of stuff that bobs in its wake.

¹⁰²
Only the fear of an impromptu Fort Lauderdale Customs search and discovery keeps me from stealing one of these paddles. I confess that I did end up stealing the chamois eyeglass-cleaners from 1009’s bathroom, though maybe you’re meant to take those home anyway—I couldn’t tell whether they fell into the Kleenex category or the towel category.

¹⁰³
I’ve sure never lost to any prepubescent females in fucking
Ping-Pong
, I can tell you.

¹⁰⁴
Winston also sometimes seemed to suffer from the verbal delusion that he was an urban black male; I have no idea what the story is on this or what conclusions to draw from it.

¹⁰⁵
This is not counting my interfaces with Petra, which though lengthy and verbose tended of course to be one-sided except for “You are a funny thing, you.”

¹⁰⁶
The single most confounding thing about the young and hip cruisers on the
Nadir
is that they seem truly to love the exact same cheesy disco music that we who were young and hip in the late ’70s loathed and made fun of, boycotting Prom when Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park” was chosen Official Prom Theme, etc.

¹⁰⁷
Interfacing with Winston could be kind of depressing in that the urge to make cruel sport of him was always irresistible, and he never acted offended or even indicated he knew he was being made sport of, and you went away afterward feeling like you’d just stolen coins from a blind man’s cup or something.

¹⁰⁸
Choosing from among 2
⁴
options, they can run on all four, or one Papa and one Son, or two Sons, etc. My sense is that running on Sons instead of Papas is kind of like switching from warp drive to impulse power.

¹⁰⁹
The
Nadir
has a Captain, a Staff Captain, and four Chief Officers. Captain Nico is actually one of these Chief Officers; I do not know why he’s called Captain Nico.

¹¹⁰
Something else I’ve learned on this Luxury Cruise is that no man can ever look any better than he looks in the white full-dress uniform of a naval officer. Women of all ages and estrogen-levels swooned, sighed, wobbled, lash-batted, growled, and hubba’d when one of these navally resplendent Greek officers went by, a phenomenon that I don’t imagine helped the Greeks’ humility one bit.

¹¹¹
The Fleet Bar was also the site of
Elegant Tea Time
later that same day, where elderly female passengers wore long white stripper-gloves and pinkies protruded from cups, and where among my breaches of
Elegant Tea Time
etiquette apparently were: (a) imagining people would be amused by the tuxedo-design T-shirt I wore because I hadn’t taken seriously the Celebrity brochure’s instruction to bring a real tux on the Cruise; (b) imagining the elderly ladies at my table would be charmed by the off-color Rorschach jokes I made about the rather obscene shapes the linen napkins at each place were origami-folded into; (c) imagining these same ladies might be interested to learn what sorts of things have to be done to a goose over its lifetime in order to produce pâté-grade liver; (d) putting a 3-ounce mass of what looked like glossy black buckshot on a big white cracker and then putting the whole cracker in my mouth; (e) assuming one second thereafter a facial expression I’m told was, under even the most charitable interpretation, inelegant; (f) trying to respond with a full mouth when an elderly lady across the table with a pince-nez and buff-colored gloves and lipstick on her right incisor told me this was Beluga caviar, resulting in (f(l)) the expulsion of several crumbs and what appeared to be a large black bubble and (f(2)) the distorted production of a word that I was told sounded to the entire table like a genital expletive; (g) trying to spit the whole indescribable nauseous glob into a flimsy
paper
napkin instead of one of the plentiful and sturdier
linen
napkins, with results I’d prefer not to describe in any more detail than as
unfortunate
; and (h) concurring, when the little kid (in a bow tie and [no kidding]
tuxedo-shorts
) seated next to me pronounced Beluga caviar “blucky,” with a spontaneous and unconsidered expression that was, indeed and unmistakably, a genital expletive.

Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of that particular bit of Managed Fun. This will, at any rate, explain the 1600h. – 1700h. lacuna in today’s p.&d. log.

¹¹²
All week the Englerites have been a fascinating subcultural study in their own right—moving only in herds and having their own special Organized Shore Excursions and constantly reserving big party-rooms with velveteen ropes and burly guys standing by them with their arms crossed checking credentials—but there hasn’t been room in this essay to go into any serious Englerology.

¹¹³
(not—mercifully—“bowal thrusters”)

¹¹⁴
In other words, the self-made brass-balled no-bullshit type of older U.S. male whom you least want the dad to turn out to be when you go over to a girl’s house to take her to a movie or something with dishonorable intentions rattling around in the back of your mind—an ur-authority figure.

¹¹⁵
This helps explain why Captain G. Panagiotakis usually seems so phenomenally unbusy, why his real job seems to be to stand in various parts of the
Nadir
and try to look vaguely presidential, which he would (look presidential) except for the business of wearing sunglasses inside,
^115a
which makes him look more like a Third World strongman.

^115a
All the ship’s officers wore sunglasses inside, it turned out, and always stood off to the side of everything with their hands behind their backs, usually in groups of three, conferring hieratically in technical Greek.

¹¹⁶
As God is my witness no more fruit ever again in my whole life.

¹¹⁷
And it’s just coffee qua coffee—it’s not Blue Mountain Hazlenut Half-Caf or Sudanese Vanilla With Special Chicory Enzymes or any of that bushwa. The
Nadir
’s is a level-headed approach to coffee that I hereby salute.

¹¹⁸
One of very few human beings I’ve ever seen who is both blond and murine-looking, Ernst today is wearing white loafers, green slacks, and a flared sportcoat whose pink I swear can be described only as menstrual.

¹¹⁹
(the pole)

¹²⁰
This is what I did, leaned too far forward and into the guy’s fist that was clutching the hem of his pillowcase, which is why I didn’t cry Foul, even though the vision in my right eye still drifts in and out of focus even back here on land a week later.

¹²¹
(also in the
ND
known as Steiner Salons and Spas at Sea)

¹²²
So you can see why nobody with a nervous system would want to miss watching one of these, some hard data from the Steiner brochure:

IONITHERMIE—HOW DOES IT WORK?
Firstly you will be measured in selected areas. The skin is marked and the readings are recorded on your program. Different creams, gels and ampoules are applied. These contain extracts effective in breaking down and emulsifying fat. Electrodes using faradism and galvanism are placed in position and a warm blue clay covers the full area. We are now ready to start your treatment. The galvanism accelerates the products into your skin, and the faradism exercises your muscles.
^122a
The cellulite or ‘lumpy fat,’ which is so common amongst women, is emulsified by the treatment, making it easier to drain the toxins from the body and disperse them, giving your skin a smoother appearance.

^122a
And, as somebody who once brushed up against a college chemistry lab’s live induction coil and had subsequently to be pried off the thing with a wooden mop handle, I can personally vouch for the convulsive-exercise benefit of faradic current.

¹²³
He’s also a bit like those small-town politicians and police chiefs who go to shameless lengths to get mentioned in the local newspaper. Scott Peterson’s name appears in each day’s
Nadir Daily
over a dozen times:
“Backgammon Tournament with your Cruise Director Scott Peterson”; “‘The World Goes Round’ with Jane McDonald, Michael Mullane, and the Matrix Dancers, and your host, Cruise Director Scott Peterson”; “Ft. Lauderdale Disembarkation Talk—Your Cruise Director Scott Peterson explains everything you need to know about your transfer from the ship in Ft. Lauderdale”;
etc., ad naus.

¹²⁴
Mrs. S.P. is an ectomorphic and sort of leather-complected British lady in a big-brimmed sombrero, which sombrero I observe her now taking off and stowing under her brass table as she loses altitude in the chair.

¹²⁵
At this point in the anecdote I’m absolutely rigid with interest and empathie terror, which will help explain why it’s such a huge letdown when this whole anecdote turns out to be nothing but a cheesy Catskills-type joke, one that Scott Peterson has clearly been telling once a week for eons (although maybe not with poor Mrs. Scott Peterson actually sitting right there in the audience, and I find myself hopefully imagining all sorts of nuptial vengeance being wreaked on Scott Peterson for embarrassing Mrs. Scott Peterson like that), the dweeb.

¹²⁶
[authorial postulate]

¹²⁷
[Again an authorial postulate, but it’s the only way to make sense of the remedy she’s about to resort to (at this point I still don’t know this is all just a corny joke—I’m rigid and bug-eyed with empathie horror for both the intra- and extranarrative Mrs. S.P.).]

¹²⁸
It was this kind of stuff that combined with the micromanagement of activities to make the
Nadir
weirdly reminiscent of the summer camp I attended for three straight Julys in early childhood, another venue where the food was great and everyone was sunburned and I spent as much time as possible in my cabin avoiding micromanaged activities.