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

14“YOUR PLEASURE,” several Megalines’ slogans go, “IS OUR BUSINESS.” What in a regular ad would be a double entendre is here a triple entendre, and the tertiary connotation — viz. “MIND YOUR OWN BLOODY BUSINESS AND LET US PROFESSIONALS WORRY ABOUT YOUR PLEASURE, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE”—is far from incidental.

15Celebrity, Cunard, Princess, and Holland America all use it as a hub. Carnival and Dolphin use Miami; others use Port Canaveral, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, all over.

16I was never in countless tries able to determine just what the Engler Corporation did or made or was about, but they’d apparently sent a quorum of their execs on this 7NC junket together as a weird kind of working vacation or intracompany convention or something.

17The reason for the delay won’t become apparent until next Saturday, when it takes until l000h. to get everybody off the m.v. Nadir and vectored to appropriate transportation, and then from 1000 to 1400h. several battalions of jumpsuited Third World custodial guys will join the stewards in obliterating all evidence of us before the next 1374 passengers come on.

18For me, public places on the U.S. East Coast are full of these nasty little moments of racist observation and then internal P.C. backlash.

19This term belongs to an eight-cruise veteran, a 50ish guy with blond bangs and a big ginger beard and what looks weirdly like a T-square sticking out of his carry-on, who’s also the first person who offers me an unsolicited narrative on why he had basically no emotional choice right now but to come on a 7NC Luxury Cruise.

20Steiner of London’ll be on the Nadir , it turns out, selling herbal wraps and cellulite-intensive delipidizing massages and facials and assorted aesthetic pampering — they have a whole little wing in the top deck’s Olympic Health Club, and it seems like they all but own the Beauty Salon on Deck 5.

21Going on a 7NC Luxury Cruise is like going to the hospital or college in this respect: it seems to be SOP for a mass of relatives and well-wishers to accompany you right up to the jumping-off point and then have to finally leave, w/ lots of requisite hugs and tears.

22Long story, not worth it.

23Another odd demographic truth is that whatever sorts of people are neurologically disposed to go on 7NC Luxury Cruises are also neurologically disposed not to sweat — the one venue of exception on board the Nadir was the Mayfair Casino.

24I’m pretty sure I know what this syndrome is and how it’s related to the brochure’s seductive promise of total self-indulgence. What’s in play here, I think, is the subtle universal shame that accompanies self-indulgence, the need to explain to just about anybody why the self-indulgence isn’t in fact really self-indulgence. Like: I never go get a massage just to get a massage, I go because this old sports-related back injury’s killing me and more or less forcing me to get a massage; or like: I never just “want” a cigarette, I always “ need ” a cigarette.

25Like all Megaships, the Nadir designates each deck with some 7NC-related name, and on the Cruise it got confusing because they never referred to decks by numbers and you could never remember whether e.g. the Fantasy Deck was Deck 7 or 8. Deck 12 is called the Sun Deck, 11 is the Marina Deck, 101 forget, 9’s the Bahamas Deck, 8 Fantasy and 7 Galaxy (or vice versa), 61 never did get straight. 5 is the Europa Deck and comprises kind of the Nadir ’s corporate nerve center and is one huge high-ceilinged bank-looking lobby with everything done in lemon and salmon with brass plating around the Guest Relations Desk and Purser’s Desk and Hotel Manager’s Desk, and plants, and massive pillars with water running down them with a sound that all but drives you to the nearest urinal. 4 is all cabins and is called I think the Florida Deck. Everything below 4 is all business and unnamed and off-limits w/ the exception of the smidgeon of 3 that has the gangway. I’m henceforth going to refer to the Decks by number, since that’s what I had to know in order to take the elevator anywhere. Decks 7 and 8 are where the serious eating and casinoing and discos and entertainment are; 11 has the pools and café; 12 is on top and laid out for serious heliophilia.

26(a thoroughly silly and superfluous job if ever there was one, on this 7N photocopia)

27The single best new vocab word from this week: spume (second-best was scheisser , which one German retiree called another German retiree who kept beating him at darts).

28(this expression resembling a kind of facial shoulder-shrug, as at fate)

29(Though I can’t help noting that the weather in the Celebrity 7NC brochure was substantially nicer.)

30I have a deep and involuntary reaction to Dramamine whereby it sends me pitching forward to lie prone and twitching wherever I am when the drug kicks in, so I’m sailing the Nadir cold turkey.

31This is on Deck 7, the serious dining room, and it’s never called just the “Caravelle Restaurant” (and never just “the Restaurant”) — it’s always “The Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant.”

32There were seven other people with me at good old Table 64, all from south Florida — Miami, Tamarac, Fort Lauderdale itself. Four of the people knew each other in private landlocked life and had requested to be at the same table. The other three people were an old couple and their granddaughter, whose name was Mona.

I was the only first-time Luxury Cruiser at Table 64, and also the only person who referred to the evening meal as “supper,” a childhood habit I could not seem to be teased out of.

With the conspicuous exception of Mona, I liked all my tablemates a lot, and I want to get a description of supper out of the way in a fast footnote and avoid saying much about them for fear of hurting their feelings by noting any weirdnesses or features that might seem potentially mean. There were some pretty weird aspects to the Table 64 ensemble, though. For one thing, they all had thick and unmistakable NYC accents, and yet they swore up and down that they’d all been born and raised in south Florida (although it did turn out that all the T64 adults’ own parents had been New Yorkers, which when you think about it is compelling evidence of the durability of a good thick NYC accent). Besides me there were five women and two men, and both men were completely silent except on the subjects of golf, business, transdermal motion sickness prophylaxis, and the legalities of getting stuff through Customs. The women carried Table 64’s conversational ball. One of the reasons I liked all these women (except Mona) so much was because they laughed really hard at my jokes, even lame or very obscure jokes; although they all had this curious way of laughing where they sort of screamed before they laughed, I mean really and discernibly screamed, so that for one excruciating second you could never tell whether they were getting ready to laugh or whether they were seeing something hideous and screamworthy over your shoulder across the 5 C.R., and this was disconcerting all week. Also, like many other 7NC Luxury Cruise passengers I observed, they all seemed to be uniformly stellar at anecdotes and stories and extended-set-up jokes, employing both hands and faces to maximum dramatic effect, knowing when to pause and when to go run-on, how to double-take and how to set up a straight man.

My favorite tablemate was Trudy, whose husband was back home in Tamarac managing some sudden crisis at the couple’s cellular phone business and had given his ticket to Alice, their heavy and very well-dressed daughter, who was on spring break from Miami U, and who was for some reason extremely anxious to communicate to me that she had a Serious Boyfriend, the name of which boyfriend was Patrick. Alice’s part of most of our interfaces consisted of remarks like: “You hate fennel? What a coincidence: my boyfriend Patrick absolutely detests fennel”; “You’re from Illinois? What a coincidence: my boyfriend Patrick has an aunt whose first husband was from Indiana, which is right near Illinois”; “You have four limbs? What a coincidence:…,” and so on. Alice’s continual assertion of her relationship-status may have been a defensive tactic against Trudy, who kept pulling professionally retouched 4 × 5 glossies of Alice out of her purse and showing them to me with Alice sitting right there, and who, every time Alice mentioned Patrick, suffered some sort of weird facial tic or grimace where one side’s canine tooth showed and the other side’s didn’t. Trudy was 56, the same age as my own dear personal Mom, and looked — Trudy did, and I mean this in the nicest possible way — like Jackie Gleason in drag, and had a particularly loud pre-laugh scream that was a real arrhythmia-producer, and was the one who coerced me into Wednesday night’s Conga Line, and got me strung out on Snowball Jackpot Bingo, and also was an incredible lay authority on 7NC Luxury Cruises, this being her sixth in a decade — she and her friend Esther (thin-faced, subtly ravaged-looking, the distaff part of the couple from Miami) had tales to tell about Carnival, Princess, Crystal, and Cunard too fraught with libel-potential to reproduce here, and one long review of what was apparently the worst cruise line in 7NC history — one “American Family Cruises,” which folded after just sixteen months — involving outrages too literally incredible to be believed from any duo less knowledgeable and discerning than Trudy and Esther.