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

62There are also continual showings of about a dozen second-run movies, via what I get the sense is a VCR somewhere right here on board, because certain irregularities in tracking show up in certain films over and over. The movies run 24/7, and I end up watching several of them so many times that I can now do their dialogue verbatim. These movies include It Could Happen to You (the It’s a Wonderful Life -w/-lottery twist thing), Jurassic Park (which does not stand up well: its essential plotlessness doesn’t emerge until the third viewing, but after that the semi-agoraphobe treats it like a porno flic, twiddling his thumbs until the T. Rex and Velociraptor parts (which do stand up well)), Wolf (stupid), The Little Rascals (nauseous), Andre (kind of Old Yeller with a seal), The Client (with another incredibly good child actor — where do they get all these Olivier-grade children?), and Renaissance Man (w/ Danny DeVito, a movie that tugs at your sentiments like a dog at a pantcuff, except it’s hard not to like any movie that has an academic as the hero).

63What it is is lighting for upscale and appearance-conscious adults who want a clear picture of whatever might be aesthetically problematic that day but also want to be reassured that the overall aesthetic situation is pretty darn good.

64Attempts to get to see a luxury cabin’s loo were consistently misconstrued and rebuffed by upscale penthouse-type Nadir ites — there are disadvantages to Luxury Cruising as a civilian and not identifiable Press.

651009’s bathroom always smells of a strange but not unnice Norwegian disinfectant whose scent resembles what it would smell like if someone who knew the exact organochemical composition of a lemon but had never in fact smelled a lemon tried to synthesize the scent of a lemon. Kind of the same relation to a real lemon as a Bayer’s Children’s Aspirin to a real orange.

The cabin itself, on the other hand, after it’s been cleaned, has no odor. None. Not in the carpets, the bedding, the insides of the desk’s drawers, the wood of the Wondercloset’s doors: nothing. One of the very few totally odorless places I’ve ever been in. This, too, eventually starts giving me the creeps.

66Perhaps designed with this in mind, the shower’s floor has a 10° grade from all sides to the center’s drain, which drain is the size of a lunch plate and has audibly aggressive suction.

67This detachable and concussive showerhead can allegedly also be employed for non-hygienic and even prurient purposes, apparently. I overheard guys from a small U. of Texas spring-break contingent (the only college-age group on the whole Nadir ) regale each other about their ingenuity with the showerhead. One guy in particular was fixated on the idea that somehow the shower’s technology could be rigged to administer fellatio if he could just get access to a “metric ratchet set”—your guess here is as good as mine.

68The Nadir itself is navy trim on a white field, and all the Megalines have their own trademark color schemes — lime-green on white, aqua on white, robin’s-egg on white, barn-red on white (white apparently being a constant).

69You can apparently get “Butler Service” and automatic-send-out dry cleaning and shoeshining, all at prices that I’m told are not out of line, but the forms you have to fill out and hang on your door for all this are wildly complex, and I’m scared of setting in motion mechanisms of service that seem potentially overwhelming.

70The missing predicative preposition here is sic —ditto what looks to be an implied image of thrown excrement — but the mistakes seem somehow endearing, humanizing, and this toilet needed all the humanizing it could get.

71It’s pretty hard not to see connections between the exhaust fan and the toilet’s vacuums — an almost Final Solution — like eradication of animal wastes and odors (wastes and odors that are by all rights a natural consequence of Henry VIII — like meals and unlimited free Cabin Service and fruit baskets) — and the death-denial/-transcendence fantasies that the 7NC Luxury Megacruise is trying to enable.

72The Nadir ’s VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM begins after a while to hold such a fascination for me that I end up going hat in hand back to Hotel Manager Dermatitis to ask once again for access to the ship’s nether parts, and once again I pull a boner with Dermatitis: I innocently mention my specific fascination with the ship’s VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM — which boner is consequent to another and prior boner by which I’d failed to discover in my pre-boarding researches that there’d been, just a few months before this, a tremendous scandal in which the I think QE2 Megaship had been discovered dumping waste over the side in mid-voyage, in violation of numerous national and maritime codes, and had been videotaped doing this by a couple of passengers who subsequently apparently sold the videotape to some network newsmagazine, and so the whole Megacruise industry was in a state of almost Nixonian paranoia about unscrupulous journalists trying to manufacture scandals about Megaships’ handling of waste. Even behind his mirrored sunglasses I can tell that Mr. Dermatitis is severely upset about my interest in sewage, and he denies my request to eyeball the V.S.S. with a complex defensiveness that I couldn’t even begin to chart out here. It is only later that night (Wednesday 3/15), at supper, at good old Table 64 in the 5 C.R., that my cruise-savvy tablemates fill me in on the QE2 waste-scandal, and they scream 72awith mirth at the clay-footed naïveté with which I’d gone to Dermatitis with what was in fact an innocent if puerile fascination with hermetically-evacuated waste; and such is my own embarrassment and hatred of Mr. Dermatitis by this time that I begin to feel like if the Hotel Manager really does think I’m some kind of investigative journalist with a hard-on for shark dangers and sewage scandals then he might think it would be worth the risk to have me harmed in some way; and through a set of neurotic connections I won’t even try to defend, I, for about a day and a half, begin to fear that the Nadir ’s Greek episcopate will somehow contrive to use the incredibly potent and forceful 1009 toilet itself for the assassination — I don’t know, that they’ll like somehow lubricate the bowl and up the suction to where not just my waste but I myself will be sucked down through the seat’s opening and hurled into some kind of abstract septic holding-tank.

72a(literally)

73It is not “beautiful”; it is “pretty.” There’s a difference.

74Seven times around Deck 12 is a mile, and I’m one of very few Nadir ites under about 70 who doesn’t jog like a fiend up here now that the weather’s nice. Early a.m. is the annular rush-hour of Deck 12 jogging. I’ve already seen a couple of juicy and Keystone-quality jogging collisions.

75Other eccentrics on this 7NC include: the thirteen-year-old kid with the toupee, who wears his big orange life jacket all week and sits on the wood floor of the upper decks reading Jose Philip Farmer paperbacks with three different boxes of Kleenex around him at all times; the bloated and dead-eyed guy who sits in the same chair at the same 21 table in the Mayfair Casino every day from 1200h. to 0300h., drinking Long Island Iced Tea and playing 21 at a narcotized underwater pace. There’s The Guy Who Sleeps By The Pool, who does just what his name suggests, except he does it all the time, even in the rain, a hairy-stomached guy of maybe 50, a copy of Megatrends open on his chest, sleeping w/o sunglasses or sunblock, w/o moving, for hours and hours, in full and high-watt sun, and never in my sight burns or wakes up (I suspect that at night they move him down to his room on a gurney). There’s also the two unbelievably old and cloudy-eyed couples who sit in a quartet in upright chairs just inside the clear plastic walls that enclose the area of Deck 11 that has the pools and Windward Cafe, facing out, i.e. out through the plastic sheeting, watching the ocean and ports like they’re something on TV, and also never once visibly moving.