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

I swear I am not exaggerating: this occasion is a real two-handed head-clutcher, awesome in its ickiness. But now, just as I need to leave in order not to be late for 1500h.’s much-anticipated skeetshooting, Scott Peterson starts to relate an anecdote that engages my various onboard dreads and fascinations enough for me to stay and try to write down. Scott Peterson tells us how his wife, Mrs. Scott Peterson, was in the shower in the Mr. and Mrs. Scott Peterson Suite on Deck 3 of the Nadir the other night when — one hand goes up in the gesture of someone searching for just the right delicate term — when nature called. So Mrs. Scott Peterson apparently gets out of the shower still wet and sits down on Scott Peterson’s stateroom’s bathroom’s commode. Scott Peterson, in a narrative aside, says how perhaps we’ve all noticed that the commodes on the m.v. Nadir are linked to a state-of-the-art Vacuum Sewage System that happens to generate not a weak or incidental flush-suction. Other Nadir ites besides just me must fear their toilet, because this gets a big jagged tension-related laugh. Mrs. Scott Peterson 124is sinking lower and lower in her salmon-colored chair. Scott Peterson says but so Mrs. Scott Peterson sits down on the commode, still naked and wet from the shower, and attends to nature’s summons, and when she’s done she reaches over and hits the commode’s Flush mechanism, and Scott Peterson says that, in Mrs. Scott Peterson’s wet slick condition, the incredible suction of the Nadir ’s state-of-the-art V.S.S. starts actually pulling her down through the seat’s central hole , 125and apparently Mrs. Scott Peterson is just a bit too broad abeam to get sucked down all the way and hurled into some abstract excremental void but rather sticks , wedged, halfway down in the seat’s hole, and can’t get out, and is of course stark naked, and starts screeching for help (by now the live Mrs. Scott Peterson seems very interested in something going on down underneath her table, and mostly only her left shoulder — leather-brown and stippled with freckles — is visible from where I’m sitting); and Scott Peterson tells us that he, Scott Peterson, hears her and comes rushing into the bathroom from the stateroom where he’d been practicing his Professional Smile in the bedside table’s enormous vanity mirror, 126comes rushing in and sees what’s happened to Mrs. Scott Peterson and tries to pull her out — her feet kicking pathetically and buttocks and popliteals purpling from the seat’s adhesive pressure — but he can’t pull her out, she’s been wedged in too tight by the horrific V.S.S. suction, and so thanks to some quick thinking Scott Peterson gets on the phone and calls one of the Nadir ’s Staff Plumbers, and the Staff Plumber says Yes Sir Mr. Scott Peterson Sir I’m on my way, and Scott Peterson runs back into the bathroom and reports to Mrs. Scott Peterson that professional help is on the way, at which point it only then occurs to Mrs. Scott Peterson that she’s starkers, and that not only are her ectomorphic breasts exposed to full Eurofluorescent view but a portion of her own personal pudendum is clearly visible above the rim of the occlusive seat that holds her fast, 127and she screeches Britishly at Scott Peterson to for the bloody love of Christ do something to cover her legally betrothed nethers against the swart blue-collar gaze of the impending Staff Plumber, and so Scott Peterson goes and gets Mrs. Scott Peterson’s favorite sun hat, a huge sombrero, in fact the very same huge sombrero Scott Peterson’s beloved wife is wearing right… umm, just a couple seconds ago was wearing right here in this very Rainbow Room; and but so via the quick and resourceful thinking of Scott Peterson the sombrero is brought from the stateroom into the bathroom and placed over Mrs. Scott Peterson’s inbent concave naked thorax, to cover her private parts. And the Nadir ’s Staff Plumber knocks and comes in all overlarge and machine-oil-redolent, w/ tool-belt ajingle, and badly out of breath, and sure enough swart, and he comes into the bathroom and appraises the situation and takes certain complex measurements and performs some calculations and finally tells Mr. Scott Peterson that he thinks he (the Staff Plumber) can get indeed get Mrs. Scott Peterson out of the toilet seat, but that extracting that there Mexican fellow in there with Mrs. S.P. is going to be a whole nother story.

1305h.: I’ve darted just for a second into Deck 7’s Celebrity Show Lounge to catch some of the rehearsals for tomorrow night’s climactic Passenger Talent Show. Two crew-cut and badly burned U. Texas guys are doing a minimally choreographed dance number to a recording of “Shake Your Groove Thing.” Asst. Cruise Director “Dave the Bingo Boy” is coordinating activities from a canvas director’s chair at stage left. A septuagenarian from Halifax VA tells four ethnic jokes and sings “One Day at a Time (Sweet Jesus).” A retired Century 21 Realtor from Idaho does a long drum solo to “Caravan.” The climactic Passenger Talent Show is apparently a 7NC tradition, as was Tuesday night’s Special Costume Party. 128Some of the Nadir ites are deeply into this stuff and have brought their own costumes, music, props. A lithe Canadian couple does a tango complete w/ pointy black shoes and an interdental rose. Then the finale of the P.T.S. is apparently going to be four consecutive stand-up comedy routines delivered by very old men. These men totter on one after the other. One has one of those three-footed canes, another a necktie that looks uncannily like a Denver omelette, another an excruciating stutter. What follow are four successive interchangeable routines where the manner and humor are like exhumed time capsules of the 1950s: jokes about how impossible it is to understand women, about how very much men want to play golf and how their wives try to keep them from playing golf, etc. The routines have the same kind of flamboyant unhipness that makes my own grandparents objects of my pity, awe, and embarrassment all at once. One of the senescent quartet refers to his appearance tomorrow night as a “gig.” The one with the tridential cane stops suddenly in the middle of a long joke about skipping his wife’s funeral to play golf and, pointing the cane’s tips at Dave the Bingo Boy, demands an immediate and accurate estimate of what the attendance will be for tomorrow night’s Passenger Talent Show. Dave the Bingo Boy sort of shrugs and looks at his emery board and says that it’s hard to say, that it like varies week to week, whereupon the old guy kind of brandishes his cane and says well it better be substantial because he goddamn well hates playing to an empty house.

1320h.: The ND neglects to mention that the skeetshooting is a competitive Organized Activity. The charge is $1.00 a shot, but you have to purchase your shots in sets of 10, and there’s a large and vaguely gun-shaped plaque for the best X/10 score. I arrive at 8-Aft late; a male Nadir ite is already shooting skeet, and several other men have formed a line and are waiting to shoot skeet. The Nadir ’s wake is a big fizzy V way below the aft rail. Two sullen Greek NCOs run the show, and between their English and their earmuffs and the background noise of shotguns — plus the fact that I’ve never touched any kind of gun before and have only the vaguest idea of which end even to point — negotiations over my late entry and the forwarding of the skeetshooting bill to Harper ’s are lengthy and involved.

I am seventh and last in line. The other contestants in line refer to the skeet as “traps” or “pigeons,” but what they really look like is tiny discuses painted the Day-Glo orange of high-cost huntingwear. The orange, I posit, is for ease of visual tracking, and the color must really help, because the trim bearded guy in aviator glasses currently shooting is perpetrating absolute skeetocide in the air over the ship.