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

Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?

And yet the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker’s scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.

41(Which by the way trust me, I used to lifeguard part-time, and fuck this SPF hooha: good old ZnO will keep your nose looking like a newborn’s.)

42In further retrospect, I think the only thing I really persuaded the Greek officer of was that I was very weird, and possibly unstable, which impression I’m sure was shared with Mr. Dermatitis and combined with that same first night’s au-jus -as-shark-bait request to destroy my credibility with Dermatitis before I even got in to see him.

43One of Celebrity Cruises’ slogans asserts that they Look Forward To Exceeding Your Expectations — they say it a lot, and they are sincere, though they are either disingenuous about or innocent of this Excess’s psychic consequences.

44(to either Deck 11’s pools or Deck 12’s Temple of Ra)

45Table 64’s waiter is Tibor, a Hungarian and a truly exceptional person, about whom if there’s any editorial justice you will learn a lot more someplace below.

46Not until Tuesday’s lobster night at the 5 C.R. did I really emphatically understand the Roman phenomenon of the vomitorium.

47(not invasively or obtrusively or condescendingly)

48Again, you never have to bus your tray after eating at the Windsurf, because the waiters leap to take them, and again the zeal can be a hassle, because if you get up just to go get another peach or something and still have a cup of coffee and some yummy sandwich crusts you’ve been saving for last a lot of times you come back and the tray and the crusts are gone, and I personally start to attribute this oversedulous busing to the reign of Hellenic terror the waiters labor under.

49The many things on the Nadir that were wood-grain but not real wood were such marvelous and painstaking imitations of wood that a lot of times it seemed like it would have been simpler and less expensive simply to have used real wood.

50Two broad staircases, Fore and Aft, both of which reverse their zag-angle at each landing, and the landings themselves have mirrored walls, which is wickedly great because via the mirrors you can check out female bottoms in cocktail dresses ascending one flight above you without appearing to be one of those icky types who check out female bottoms on staircases.

51During the first two days of rough seas, when people vomited a lot (especially after supper and apparently extra -especially on the elevators and stairways), these puddles of vomit inspired a veritable feeding frenzy of Wet/Dry Vacs and spot-remover and all-trace-of-odor-eradicator chemicals applied by this Elite Special Forces-type crew.

52By the way, the ethnic makeup of the Nadir ’s crew is a melting-pot mélange on the order of like a Benetton commercial, and it’s a constant challenge to trace the racio-geographical makeup of the employees’ various hierarchies. All the big-time officers are Greek, but then it’s a Greek-owned ship so what do you expect. Them aside, it at first seems like there’s some basic Eurocentric caste system in force: waiters, bus-boys, beverage waitresses, sommeliers, casino dealers, entertainers, and stewards seem mostly to be Aryans, while the porters and custodians and swabbies tend to be your swarthier types — Arabs and Filipinos, Cubans, West Indian blacks. But it turns out to be more complex than that, because the Chief Stewards and Chief Sommeliers and maître d’s who so beadily oversee the Aryan servants are themselves swarthy and non-Aryan — e.g. our maître d’ at the 5 C.R. is Portuguese, with the bull neck and heavy-lidded grin of a Teamsters official, and gives the impression of needing only some very subtle prearranged signal to have a $10000-an-hour prostitute or unimaginable substances delivered to your cabin; and our whole T64 totally loathes him for no single pinpointable reason, and we’ve all agreed in advance to fuck him royally on the tip at week’s end.

53This is counting the Midnight Buffet, which tends to be a kind of lamely lavish Theme-slash-Costume-Partyish thing, w/ Theme-related foods — Oriental, Caribbean, Tex-Mex — and which I plan in this essay to mostly skip except to say that Tex-Mex Night out by the pools featured what must have been a seven-foot-high ice sculpture of Pancho Villa that spent the whole party dripping steadily onto the mammoth sombrero of Tibor, Table 64’s beloved and extremely cool Hungarian waiter, whose contract forces him on Tex-Mex Night to wear a serape and a straw sombrero with a 17" radius 53aand to dispense Four Alarm chili from a steam table placed right underneath an ice sculpture, and whose pink and birdlike face on occasions like this expressed a combination of mortification and dignity that seem somehow to sum up the whole plight of postwar Eastern Europe.

53a(He let me measure it when the reptilian maître d’ wasn’t looking.)

54(I know, like I’m sure this guy even cares.)

55This was primarily because of the semi-agoraphobia — I’d have to sort of psych myself up to leave the cabin and go accumulate experiences, and then pretty quickly out there in the general population my will would break and I’d find some sort of excuse to scuttle back to 1009. This happened quite a few times a day.

56(This FN right here’s being written almost a week after the Cruise ended, and I’m still living mainly on these hoarded mint-centered chocolates.)

57The answer to why I don’t just ask Petra how she does it is that Petra’s English is extremely limited and primitive, and in sad fact I’m afraid my whole deep feeling of attraction and connection to Petra the Slavanian steward has been erected on the flimsy foundation of the only two English clauses she seems to know, one or the other of which clauses she uses in response to every statement, question, joke, or protestation of undying devotion: “Is no problem” and “You are a funny thing.”

58(At sea this is small agorapotatoes, but in port, once the doors open and the gangway extends, it represents a true choice and is thus agoraphobically valid.)

59“1009” indicates that it’s on Deck 10, and “Port” refers to the side of the ship it’s on, and “Exterior” means that I have a window. There are also, of course, “Interior” cabins off the inner sides of the decks’ halls, but I hereby advise any prospective 7NC passenger with claustrophobic tendencies to make sure and specify “Exterior” when making cabin-reservations.

60The non-U.S. agoraphobe will be heartened to know that this deck includes “BITTE NICHT STÖREN,” “PRIÈRE DE NE PAS DÉRANGER,” “SI PREGA NON DISTURBARE,” and (my personal favorite) “FAVOR DE NO MOLESTAR.”

61If you’re either a little kid or an anorectic you can probably sit on this ledge to do your dreamy contemplative sea-gazing, but a raised and buttock-hostile lip at the ledge’s outer border makes this impractical for a full-size adult.