David Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

The Nadir ’s traditional berth is Pier 21. “Pier,” though it had conjured for me images of wharfs and cleats and lapping water, turns out to denote something like what airport denotes, viz. a zone and not a thing. There is no real water in sight, no docks, no fishy smell or sodium tang to the air; but there are, as we enter the Pier zone, a lot of really big white ships that blot out most of the sky.

Now I’m writing this sitting in an orange plastic chair at the end of one of Pier 21’s countless bolted rows of orange plastic chairs. We have debused and been herded via megaphone through 21’s big glass doors, whereupon two more completely humorless naval ladies handed us each a little plastic card with a number on it. My card’s number is 7. A few people sitting nearby ask me “what I am,” and I figure out I’m to respond “a 7.” The cards are by no means brand new, and mine has the vestigial whorls of a chocolate thumbprint in one corner.

From inside, Pier 21 seems kind of like a blimpless blimp hangar, high-ceilinged and very echoey. It has walls of unclean windows on three sides, at least 2500 orange chairs in rows of 25, a kind of desultory Snack Bar, and restrooms with very long lines. The acoustics are brutal and it’s tremendously loud. Outside, rain starts coming down even though the sun’s still shining. Some of the people in the rows of chairs appear to have been here for days: they have that glazed encamped look of people at airports in blizzards.

It’s now 1132h., and boarding will not commence one second before 1400 sharp; a PA announcement politely but firmly declares Celebrity’s seriousness about this. 17The PA lady’s voice is what you imagine a British supermodel would sound like. Everyone’s clutching his numbered card like the cards are identity papers at Checkpoint Charley. There’s an Ellis Island/pre-Auschwitz aspect to the massed and anxious waiting, but I’m uncomfortable trying to extend the analogy. A lot of the people waiting — Caribbeanish clothing notwithstanding — look Jewish to me, and I’m ashamed to catch myself thinking that I can determine Jewishness from people’s appearance. 18Maybe two-thirds of the total people in here are actually sitting in orange chairs. Pier 21’s pre-boarding blimp hangar’s not as bad as, say, Grand Central at 1715h. on Friday, but it bears little resemblance to any of the stressless pamper-venues detailed in the Celebrity brochure, which brochure I am not the only person in here thumbing through and looking at wistfully. A lot of people are also reading the Fort Lauderdale Sentinel and staring with subwayish blankness at other people. A kid whose T-shirt says SANDY DUNCAN’S EYE is carving something in the plastic of his chair. There are quite a few old people all travelling with really desperately old people who are pretty clearly the old people’s parents. A couple different guys in different rows are field-stripping their camcorders with military-looking expertise. There’s a fair share of WASP-looking passengers, as well. A lot of the WASPs are couples in their twenties and thirties, with a honeymoonish aspect to the way their heads rest on each other’s shoulders. Men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts, I’ve decided; their legs are hairless in a way that’s creepy; the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for hair, particularly on the calves. It’s just about the only body-area where you actually want more hair on older men. Is this fibular hairlessness a result of years of chafing in pants and socks? The significance of the numbered cards turns out to be that you’re supposed to wait here in Pier 21’s blimp hangar until your number is called, then you board in “Lots.” 19So your number doesn’t stand for you, but rather for the subherd of cruisers you’re part of. Some 7NC-veterans nearby tell me that 7 is not a great Lot-number and advise me to get comfortable. Somewhere past the big gray doors behind the restrooms’ roiling lines is an umbilical passage leading to what I assume is the actual Nadir , which outside the south wall’s windows presents as a tall wall of total white. In the approximate center of the hangar is a long table where creamy-complected women in nursish white from Steiner of London Inc. are doing free little makeup and complexion consultations with women waiting to board, priming the economic pump. 20The Chicago lady and BIG DADDY are in the hangar’s southeasternmost row of chairs playing Uno with another couple, who turn out to be friends they’d made on a Princess Alaska Cruise in ’93.

Now I’m writing this sort of squatting with my bottom braced up against the hangar’s west wall, which wall is white-painted cinderblocks, like a budget motel’s wall, and also oddly clammy. By this time I’m down to slacks and T-shirt and tie, and the tie looks like it’s been washed and hand-wrung. Perspiring has already lost its novelty. Part of what Celebrity Cruises is reminding us we’re leaving behind is massed public waiting areas with no AC and indifferent ventilation. Now it’s 1255h. Though the brochure says the Nadir sails at 1630h. EST and that you can board anytime from 1400 to then, all 1374 Nadir passengers look already to be massed here, plus what must be a fair number of relatives and well-wishers, etc. 21

A major advantage to writing some sort of article about an experience is that at grim junctures like this pre-embarkation blimp hangar you can distract yourself from what the experience feels like by focusing on what look like items of possible interest for the article. This is the occasion I first see the thirteen-year-old kid with the toupee. He’s slumped pre-adolescently in his chair with his feet up on some kind of rattan hamper while what I’ll bet is his mom talks at him nonstop; he is staring into whatever special distance people in areas of mass public stasis stare into. His toupee isn’t one of those horrible black shiny incongruous Howard Cosell toupees, but it’s not great either; it’s an unlikely orange-brown, and its texture is like one of those local-TV-anchorman toupees where if you tousled the hair it would get broken instead of mussed. A lot of the people from the Engler Corporation are massed in some kind of round informal conference or meeting over near the Pier’s glass doors, looking from the distance rather like a rugby scrum. I’ve decided the perfect description of the orange of the hangar’s chairs is waiting-room orange. Several driven-looking corporate guys are talking into cellular phones while their wives look stoic. Close to a dozen confirmed sightings of J. Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy . The acoustics in here have the nightmarishly echoey quality of some of the Beatles’ more conceptual stuff. At the Snack Bar, a plain old candy bar is $1.50, and soda-pop’s even more. The line for the men’s room extends NW almost to the Steiner of London table. Several Pier personnel with clipboards are running around w/o any discernible agenda. The crowd has a smattering of college-age kids, all with complex haircuts and already wearing poolside thongs. A little kid right near me is wearing the exact same kind of hat I am, which I might as well admit right now is a full-color Spiderman cap. 22

I count over a dozen makes of camera just in the little block of orange chairs within camera-make-discernment range. That’s not counting camcorders.

The dress code in here ranges from corporate-informal to tourist-tropical. I am the sweatiest and most disheveled person in view, I’m afraid. 23There is nothing even remotely nautical about the smell of Pier 21. Two male Engler executives excluded from the corporate scrum are sitting together at the end of the nearest row, right leg over left knee and joggling their loafers in perfect unconscious sync. Every infant within earshot has a promising future in professional opera, it sounds like. Also, every infant being carried or held is being carried or held by its female parent. Over 50 % of the purses and handbags are wicker/rattan. The women all somehow give the impression of being on magazine diets. The median age here is at least 45.