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

It seems relevant that most of the Nadir ’s eccentrics are eccentric in stasis : what distinguishes them is their doing the same thing hour after hour and day after day without moving. (Captain Video is an active exception. People are surprisingly tolerant of Captain Video until the second-to-last night’s Midnight Caribbean Blow-Out by the pools, when he keeps breaking into the Conga Line and trying to shift its course so that it can be recorded at better advantage; then there is a kind of bloodless but unpleasant uprising against Captain Video, and he lays low for the rest of the Cruise, possibly organizing and editing his tapes.)

76(its sign’s in English, significantly)

77In Ocho Rios on Monday the big tourist-draw was apparently some sort of waterfall a whole group of Nadir ites could walk up inside with a guide and umbrellas to protect their cameras. In Grand Cayman yesterday the big thing was Duty-Free rum and something called Bernard Passman Black Coral Art. Here in Cozumel it’s supposedly silver jewelry hawked by hard-dickering peddlers, and more Duty-Free liquor, and a fabled bar in San Miguel called Carlos and Charlie’s where they allegedly give you shots of something that’s mostly lighter fluid.

78Apparently it’s no longer in fashion to push the frames of the sunglasses up to where they ride just above the crown of your skull, which is what I used to see upscale sunglasses-wearers do a lot; the habit has now gone the way of tying your white Lacoste tennis sweater’s arms across your chest and wearing it like a cape.

79The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and — delightfully — it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.

80(= the morbid fear of being seen as bovine)

81And in my head I go around and around about whether my fellow Nadir ites suffer the same steep self-disgust. From a height, watching them, I usually imagine that the other passengers are oblivious to the impassively contemptuous gaze of the local merchants, service people, photo-op-with-lizard vendors, etc. I usually imagine that my fellow tourists are too bovinely self-absorbed to even notice how we’re looked at. At other times, though, it occurs to me that the other Americans on board quite possibly feel the same vague discomfort about their bovine-American role in port that I do, but that they refuse to let their boviscopophobia rule them: they’ve paid good money to have fun and be pampered and record some foreign experiences, and they’ll be goddamned if they’re going to let some self-indulgent twinge of neurotic projection about how their Americanness appears to malnourished locals detract from the 7NC Luxury Cruise they’ve worked and saved for and decided they deserve.

82This dawn-and-dusk cloudiness was a pattern. In all, three of the week’s days could be called substantially cloudy, and it rained a bunch of times, including all Friday in port in Key West. Again, I can see no way to blame the Nadir or Celebrity Cruises Inc. for this happenstance.

83A further self-esteem-lowerer is how bored all the locals look when they’re dealing with U.S. tourists. We bore them. Boring somebody seems way worse than offending or disgusting him.

84(which on scale of these ships means something around 100 m)

85On all 7NC Megaships, Deck 12 forms a kind of mezzanineish ellipse over Deck 11, which is always about half open-air (11 is) and always has pools surrounded by plastic/Plexiglass walls.

86(I hate dill pickles, and C.S. churlishly refuses to substitute gherkins or butter chips)

87It may well be the Big One, come to think of it.

88The fantasy they’re selling is the whole reason why all the subjects in all the brochures’ photos have facial expressions that are at once orgasmic and oddly slack: these expressions are the facial equivalent of going “ Aaaahhhhh ,” and the sound is not just that of somebody’s Infantile part exulting in finally getting the total pampering it’s always wanted but also that of the relief all the other parts of that person feel when the Infantile part finally shuts up .

89This right here is not the mordant footnote projected supra , but the soda-pop issue bears directly on what was for me one of the true mysteries of this Cruise, viz. how Celebrity makes a profit on Luxury 7NCs. If you accept Fielding’s Worldwide Cruises 1995’s per diem on the Nadir of about $275.00 a head, then you consider that the m.v. Nadir itself cost Celebrity Cruises $250 million to build in 1992, and that it’s got 600 employees of whom at least the upper echelons have got to be making serious money (the whole Greek contingent had the unmistakable set of mouth that goes with salaries in six figures), plus simply hellacious fuel costs — plus port taxes and insurance and safety equipment and space-age navigational and communications gear and a computerized tiller and state-of-the-art maritime sewage — and then start factoring in the luxury stuff, the top-shelf decor and brass ceiling-tile, chandeliers, a good three dozen people aboard as nothing more than twice-a-week stage entertainers, plus then the professional Head Chef and the lobster and Etruscan truffles and the cornucopic fresh fruit and the imported pillow mints… then, even playing it very conservative, you cannot get the math to add up. There doesn’t look to be any way Celebrity can be coming out ahead financially. And yet the sheer number of different Megalines offering 7NCs constitutes reliable evidence that Luxury Cruises must be very profitable indeed. Again, Celebrity’s PR lady Ms. Wiessen was — notwithstanding a phone-voice that was a total pleasure to listen to — not particularly helpful with this mystery:

The answer to their affordability, how they offer such a great product, is really based on their management. They really are in touch with all the details of what’s important to the public, and they pay a lot of attention to those details.

Libation revenues provide part of the real answer, it turns out. It’s a little bit like the microeconomics of movie theaters. When you hear how much of the gate they have to kick back to films’ distributors, you can’t figure out how theaters stay in business. But of course you can’t go just by ticket revenues, because where movie theaters really make their money is at the concession stand.

The Nadir sells a shitload of drinks. Full-time beverage waitresses in khaki shorts and Celebrity visors are unobtrusively everywhere — poolside, on Deck 12, at meals, entertainments, Bingo. Soda-pop is $2.00 for a very skinny glass (you don’t pay cash right there; you sign for it and then they sock you with a printed Statement of Charges on the final night), and exotic cocktails like Wallbangers and Fuzzy Navels go as high as $5.50. The Nadir doesn’t do tacky stuff like oversalt the soup or put bowls of pretzels all over the place, but a 7NC Luxury Cruise’s crafted atmosphere of indulgence and endless partying—“Go on, You Deserve It”—more than conduces to freeflowing wine. (Let’s not forget the cost of a fine wine w/supper, the ever-present sommeliers). Of the different passengers I asked, more than half estimated their party’s total beverage tab at over $500. And if you know even a little about the beverage markups in any restaurant/bar operation, you know a lot of that $500’s going to end up as net profit. Other keys to profitability: a lot of the ship’s service staff’s income isn’t figured into the price of the Cruise ticket: you have to tip them at week’s end or they’re screwed (another peeve is that the Celebrity brochure neglects to mention this). And it turns out that a lot of the paid entertainment on the Nadir is “vended out”—agencies contract with Celebrity Cruises to supply teams like the Matrix Dancers for all the stage shows, the Electric Slide lessons, etc.