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

Death and Conroy notwithstanding, we’re maybe now in a position to appreciate the lie at the dark heart of Celebrity’s brochure. For this — the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS — is the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn’t that this promise will be kept, but that such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie. 87And of course I want to believe it — fuck the Buddha — I want to believe that maybe this Ultimate Fantasy Vacation will be enough pampering, that this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered that my Infantile part will be sated. 88

But the Infantile part of me is insatiable — in fact its whole essence or dasein or whatever lies in its a priori insatiability. In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction. And sure enough, on the Nadir itself, after a few days of delight and then adjustment, the Pamper-swaddled part of me that WANTS is now back, and with a vengeance. By Ides Wednesday I’m acutely conscious of the fact that the AC vent in my cabin hisses ( loudly ), and that though I can turn off the reggae Muzak coming out of the speaker in the cabin I cannot turn off the even louder ceiling-speaker out in the 10-Port hall. By now I notice that when Table 64’s towering busboy uses his crumb-scoop to clear crumbs off the tablecloth between courses he never seems to get quite all the crumbs. By now the nighttime rattle of my Wondercloset’s one off-plumb drawer sounds like a jackhammer. Mavourneen of the high seas or no, when Petra makes my bed not all the hospital corners are at exactly the same angle. My desk/vanity has a small but uncannily labial-looking hairline crack in the bevel of its top’s right side, which crack I’ve come to hate because I can’t help looking right at it when I open my eyes in bed in the morning. Most of the nightly Celebrity Showtime live entertainment in the Celebrity Show Lounge is so bad it’s embarrassing, and there’s a repellent hotel-art-type seascape on the aft wall of 1009 that’s bolted to the wall and can’t be removed or turned around, and Caswell-Massey Conditioning Shampoo turns out to be harder to rinse all the way out than most other shampoos, and the ice sculptures at the Midnight Buffet sometimes look hurriedly carved, and the vegetable that comes with my entrée is continually overcooked, and it’s impossible to get really numbingly cold water out of 1009’s bathroom tap.

I’m standing here on Deck 12 looking at a Dreamward that I bet has cold water that’d turn your knuckles blue, and, like Frank Conroy, part of me realizes that I haven’t washed a dish or tapped my foot in line behind somebody with multiple coupons at a supermarket checkout in a week; and yet instead of feeling refreshed and renewed I’m anticipating just how totally stressful and demanding and unpleasurable regular landlocked adult life is going to be now that even just the premature removal of a towel by a sepulchral crewman seems like an assault on my basic rights, and plus now the sluggishness of the Aft elevator is an outrage, and the absence of 22.5-lb dumbbells in the Olympic Health Club’s dumbbell rack is a personal affront. And now as I’m getting ready to go down to lunch I’m mentally drafting a really mordant footnote on my single biggest peeve about the Nadir: soda-pop is not free , not even at dinner: you have to order a Mr. Pibb from the 5 C.R.’s maddeningly E.S.L.-hampered cocktail waitress just like it was a fucking Slippery Nipple, and then you have to sign for it right there at the table, and they charge you — and they don’t even have Mr. Pibb; they foist Dr Pepper on you with a maddeningly unapologetic shrug when any fool knows Dr Pepper is no substitute for Mr. Pibb, and it’s an absolute goddamned travesty, or at any rate extremely dissatisfying indeed. 89

13

Every night, the 10-Port cabin steward, Petra, when she turns down your bed, leaves on your pillow — along with the day’s last mint and Celebrity’s printed card wishing you sweet dreams in six languages — the next day’s Nadir Daily , a phatic little four-page ersatz newspaper printed on white vellum in a navy-blue font. The ND has historical nuggets on upcoming ports, pitches for Organized Shore Excursions and specials in the Gift Shop, and stern stuff in boxes with malaprop-headlines like QUARANTINES ON TRANSIT OF FOOD and MISUSE OF DRUG ACTS 1972. 90

Right now it’s Thursday 16 March, 0710h., and I’m alone at the 5 C.R.’s Early Seating Breakfast, Table 64’s waiter and towering busboy hovering nearby. 91We’ve rounded the final turn and are on our return trajectory toward Key West, and today is one of the week’s two “At-Sea” days when shipboard activities are at their densest and most organized; and this is the day I’ve picked to use the Nadir Daily as a Baedeker as I leave Cabin 1009 for a period well in excess of half an hour and plunge headfirst into the recreational fray and keep a precise and detailed log of some really representative experiences as together now we go In Quest of Managed Fun. So everything that follows from here on out is from this day’s p.&d. experiential log:

0645h.: A triple ding from the speakers in cabin and halls and then a cool female voice says Good Morning, the date, the weather, etc. She says it in a gentle accented English, repeats it in an Alsatian-sounding French, then again in German. She can make even German sound lush and postcoital. Hers is not the same PA voice as at Pier 21, but it’s got the exact same quality of sounding the way expensive perfume smells.

0650–0705h.: Shower, play with Alisco Sirocco hairdryer & exhaust fan & hair in bathroom mirror, read from Daily Meditations for the Semiphobically Challenged , go over Nadir Daily with yellow HiLiter pen.

0708–0730h.: E.S. Breakfast at Table 64 in 5 C.R. Last night everybody announced intentions to sleep through breakfast and grab some scones or something at the Windsurf Cafe later. So I’m alone at Table 64, which is large and round and right up next to a starboard window.

Table 64’s waiter’s name is, as mentioned before, Tibor. Mentally I refer to him as “The Tibster,” but never out loud. Tibor has dismantled my artichokes and my lobsters and taught me that extra-well-done is not the only way meat can be palatable. We have sort of bonded, I feel. He is 35 and about 5′4″ and plump, and his movements have the birdlike economy characteristic of small plump graceful men. Menu-wise, Tibor advises and recommends, but without the hauteur that’s always made me hate the gastropedantic waiters in classy restaurants. Tibor is omnipresent without being unctuous or oppressive; he is kind and warm and fun. I sort of love him. His hometown is Budapest and he has a postgraduate degree in Restaurant Management from an unpronounceable Hungarian college. His wife back home is expecting their first child. He is the Head Waiter for Tables 64–67 at all three meals. He can carry three trays w/o precarity and never looks harried or on-the-edge the way most multitable waiters look. He seems like he cares. His face is at once round and pointy, and rosy. His tux never wrinkles. His hands are soft and pink, and his thumb-joint’s skin is unwrinkled, like the thumb-joint of a small child.