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

“They have a department in that?”

“It’s this interdisciplinarian thing. It’s going to be fucking phat , Homes. You know. CD-ROM and shit. Smart chips. Digital film and shit.”

I’m up 18–12. “Sport of the future.”

Winston agrees. “It’s where it’s all going to be at. The Highway. Interactive TV and shit. Virtual Reality. Interactive Virtual Reality.”

“I can see it now,” I say. The game’s almost over. “The Cruise of the Future. The Home Cruise . The Caribbean Luxury Cruise you don’t have to leave home for. Strap on the old goggles and electrodes and off you go.”

“Word up.”

“No passports. No seasickness. No wind or sunburn or insipid Cruise staff. 107Total Virtual Motionless Stay-At-Home Simulated Pampering.”

“Word.”

1105h.: Navigation Lecture — Join Captain Nico and learn about the ship’s Engine Room, the Bridge, and the basic “nuts ’n bolts” of the ship’s operation!

The m.v. Nadir can carry 460,000 gallons of nautical-grade diesel fuel. It burns between 40 and 70 tons of this fuel a day, depending on how hard it’s travelling. The ship has two turbine engines on each side, one big “Papa” and one (comparatively) little “Son.” 108Each engine has a propeller that’s 17 feet in diameter and is adjustable through a lateral rotation of 23.5° for maximum torque. It takes the Nadir 0.9 nautical miles to come to a complete stop from its standard speed of 18 knots. The ship can go slightly faster in certain kinds of rough seas than it can go in calm seas — this is for technical reasons that won’t fit on the napkin I’m taking notes on. The ship has a rudder, and the rudder has two complex alloy “flaps” that somehow interconfigure to allow a 90° turn. Captain Nico’s 109English is not going to win any elocution ribbons, but he is a veritable blowhole of hard data. He’s about my age and height but is just ridiculously good-looking, 110like an extremely fit and tan Paul Auster. The venue here is Deck 11’s Fleet Bar, 111all blue and white and trimmed in stainless steel, and so abundantly fenestrated that the sunlight makes Captain Nico’s illustrative slides look ghostly and vague. Captain Nico wears Ray-Bans but w/o a fluorescent cord. Thursday 16 March is also the day my paranoia about Mr. Dermatitis’s contriving somehow to jettison me from the Nadir via Cabin 1009’s vacuum toilet is at its emotional zenith, and I’ve decided in advance to keep a real low journalistic profile at this event. I ask a total of just one little innocuous question, right at the start, and Captain Nico responds with a witticism—

“How do we start engines? Not with the key of ignition, I can tell you!”

— that gets a large and rather unkind laugh from the crowd.

It turns out that the long-mysterious “m.v.” in “m.v. Nadir ” stands for “motorized vessel.” The m.v. Nadir cost $250,310,000 U.S. to build. It was christened in Papenburg FRG in 10/92 with a bottle of ouzo instead of champagne. The Nadir ’s three onboard generators produce 9.9 megawatts of power. The ship’s Bridge turns out to be what lies behind the very intriguing triple-locked bulkhead near the aft towel cart on Deck 11. The Bridge is “where the equipments are — radars, indication of weathers and all these things.”

Two years of sedulous postgraduate study is required of officer-wannabes just to get a handle on the navigational math involved; “also there is much learning for the computers.”

Of the 40 or so Nadir ites at this lecture, the total number of women is: 0. Captain Video is here, of course, Celebrating the Moment from a camcorded crouch on the Fleet Bar’s steel bartop; he’s wearing a nylon warm-up suit of fluorescent maroon and purple that makes him look like a huge macaw, and his knees crackle whenever he shifts position and rehunches. By this time Captain Video’s really getting on my nerves.

A deeply sunburned man next to me is taking notes with a Mont Blanc pen in a leatherbound notebook with ENGLER embossed on it. 112Just one moment of foresight on the way from Ping-Pong to Fleet Bar would have prevented my sitting here trying to take notes on paper napkins with a big felt-tip HiLiter. The Nadir ’s officers have their quarters, mess, and a private bar on Deck 3, it turns out. “In the Bridge also we have different compass to see where we are going.” The ship’s four patro-filial turbines cannot ever be turned off except in drydock. What they do to deactivate an engine is simply disengage its propeller. It turns out that parallel parking a semi on LSD doesn’t even come close to what Captain G. Panagiotakis experiences when he docks the m.v. Nadir . The Engler man next to me is drinking a $5.50 Slippery Nipple, which comes with not one but two umbrellas in it. The rest of the Nadir ’s crew’s quarters are on Deck 2, which also houses the ship’s laundry and “the areas of processing of garbage and wastes.” Like all Megacruisers, the Nadir needs no tugboat in port; this is because it’s got “the sternal thrusters and bow thrusters.” 113

The lecture’s audience consists of bald solid thick-wristed men over 50 who all look like the kind of guy who rises to CEO a company out of that company’s engineering dept. instead of some fancy MBA program. 114A number of them are clearly Navy veterans or yachtsmen or something. They all compose a very knowledgeable audience and ask involved questions about the bore and stroke of the engines, the management of multiradial torque, the precise distinctions between a C–Class Captain and a B-Class Captain. My attempts at technical notes are bleeding out into the paper napkins until the yellow letters are all ballooned and goofy like subway graffiti. The male 7NC cruisers all want to know stuff about the hydrodynamics of midship stabilizers. They’re all the kind of men who look like they’re smoking cigars even when they’re not smoking cigars. Everybody’s complexion is hectic from sun and salt spray and a surfeit of Slippery Nipples. 21.4 knots is a 7NC Megaship’s maximum possible cruising speed. There’s no way I’m going to raise my hand in this kind of crowd and ask what a knot is.

Several unreproducible questions concern the ship’s system of satellite navigation. Captain Nico explains that the Nadir subscribes to something called GPS: “This Global Positioning System is using the satellites above to know the position at all times, which gives this data to the computer.” It emerges that when we’re not negotiating ports and piers, a kind of computerized Autocaptain pilots the ship. 115There’s no actual “tiller” or “con” anymore, is the sense I get; there’s certainly no protrusive-spoked wooden captain’s wheel like these that line the walls of the jaunty Fleet Bar, each captain’s wheel centered with thole pins that hold up a small and verdant fern.

1150h.: There’s never a chance to feel actual physical hunger on a Luxury Cruise, but when you’ve gotten accustomed to feeding seven or eight times a day, a certain foamy emptiness in the gut always lets you know when it’s time to feed again.

Among the Nadir ites, only the radically old and formalphiliacal hit Luncheon at the 5 C.R., where you can’t wear swim trunks or a floppy hat. The really happening place for lunch is the buffet at the Windsurf Cafe off the pools and plasticene grotto on Deck 11. Just inside both sets of the Windsurf’s automatic doors, in two big bins whose sides are decorated to look like coconut skin, are cornucopiae of fresh fruit 116presided over by ice sculptures of a madonna and a whale. The crowds’ flow is skillfully directed along several different vectors so that delays are minimal, and the experience of waiting to feed in the Windsurf Cafe is not as bovine as lots of other 7NC experiences.