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

Another contracted vendor is Deck 8’s Mayfair Casino, whose corporate proprietor pays a flat weekly rate plus an unspecified percentage to the Nadir for the privilege of sending their gorgeous dealers and four-deck shoes against passengers who’ve learned the rules of 21 and Caribbean Stud Poker from an “Educational Video” that plays continuously on one of the At-Sea TV’s channels. I didn’t spend all that much time in the Mayfair Casino — the eyes of 74-year-old Cleveland grandmothers pumping quarters into the slots of twittering machines are not much fun to spend time looking at — but I was in there long enough to see that if the Nadir gets even a 10 % vig on the Mayfair’s weekly net, then Celebrity is making a killing.

90Snippet of latter item: “All persons entering each island [?] are warned that it is a CRIMINAL OFFENSE to import or have possession of narcotics and other Controlled Drugs, including marijuana. Penalties for drug offenders are severe.” Half of the Port Lecture before we hit Jamaica consisted of advice about stuff like two-timing street dealers who’ll sell you a quarter-oz. of crummy pot and then trot down to a constable and collect a bounty for fingering you. Conditions in the local jails are described just enough to engage the grimmer parts of the imagination.

Celebrity Cruises’ own onboard drug policy remains obscure. Although there are always a half-dozen humorless Security guys standing burlily around the Nadir ’s gangway in port, you never get searched when you reboard. I never saw or smelled evidence of drug use on the Nadir —as with concupiscence, it just doesn’t seem like that kind of crowd. But there must be colorful incidents in the Nadir ’s past, because the Cruise staff became almost operatic in their cautions to us as we headed back to Fort Lauderdale on Friday, though every warning was preceded by an acknowledgment that the exhortation to flush/toss anything Controlled surely couldn’t apply to anyone on this particular cruise. Apparently Fort Lauderdale’s Customs guys regard homebound 7NC passengers sort of the way small-town cops regard out-of-state speeders in Saab Turbos. An old veteran of many 7NCLCs told one of the U. Texas kids ahead of me in the Customs line the last day “Kiddo, if one of those dogs stops at your bag, you better hope he lifts his leg.”

91It’s a total mystery when these waiters sleep. They serve at the Midnight Buffet every night, and then help clean up after, and then they appear in the 5 C.R. in clean tuxes all over again at 0630h. the next day, always so fresh and alert they look slapped.

92(except for precise descriptions of whatever dorsal fins he’s seen)

93(he pronounces the “-pest” part of this “-persht”)

94The last night’s ND breaks the news about tipping and gives tactful “suggestions” on going rates.

95All boldface stuff is verbatim and sic from today’s Nadir Daily .

96If Pepperidge Farm made communion wafers, these would be them.

97Duh.

98Heavy expensive art-carved sets are for dorks.

99This is something else Mr. Dermatitis declined to let me see, but by all reports the daycare on these Megaships is phenomenal, w/squads of nurturing and hyperkinetic young daycare ladies keeping the kids manically stimulated for up to ten-hour stretches via an endless number of incredibly well-structured activities, so tuckering the kids out that they collapse mutely into bed at 2000h. and leave their parents free to plunge into the ship’s nightlife and Do It All.

100The only chairs in the Library are leather wing chairs with low seats, so only Deirdre’s eyes and nose clear the board’s table as she sits across from me, adding a Kilroyishly surreal quality to the humiliation.

101I imagine it would be pretty interesting to trail a Megaship through a 7NC Cruise and just catalogue the trail of stuff that bobs in its wake.

102Only the fear of an impromptu Fort Lauderdale Customs search and discovery keeps me from stealing one of these paddles. I confess that I did end up stealing the chamois eyeglass-cleaners from 1009’s bathroom, though maybe you’re meant to take those home anyway — I couldn’t tell whether they fell into the Kleenex category or the towel category.

103I’ve sure never lost to any prepubescent females in fucking Ping-Pong , I can tell you.

104Winston also sometimes seemed to suffer from the verbal delusion that he was an urban black male; I have no idea what the story is on this or what conclusions to draw from it.

105This is not counting my interfaces with Petra, which though lengthy and verbose tended of course to be one-sided except for “You are a funny thing, you.”

106The single most confounding thing about the young and hip cruisers on the Nadir is that they seem truly to love the exact same cheesy disco music that we who were young and hip in the late ’70s loathed and made fun of, boycotting Prom when Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park” was chosen Official Prom Theme, etc.

107Interfacing with Winston could be kind of depressing in that the urge to make cruel sport of him was always irresistible, and he never acted offended or even indicated he knew he was being made sport of, and you went away afterward feeling like you’d just stolen coins from a blind man’s cup or something.

108Choosing from among 2 4options, they can run on all four, or one Papa and one Son, or two Sons, etc. My sense is that running on Sons instead of Papas is kind of like switching from warp drive to impulse power.

109The Nadir has a Captain, a Staff Captain, and four Chief Officers. Captain Nico is actually one of these Chief Officers; I do not know why he’s called Captain Nico.

110Something else I’ve learned on this Luxury Cruise is that no man can ever look any better than he looks in the white full-dress uniform of a naval officer. Women of all ages and estrogen-levels swooned, sighed, wobbled, lash-batted, growled, and hubba’d when one of these navally resplendent Greek officers went by, a phenomenon that I don’t imagine helped the Greeks’ humility one bit.

111The Fleet Bar was also the site of Elegant Tea Timelater that same day, where elderly female passengers wore long white stripper-gloves and pinkies protruded from cups, and where among my breaches of Elegant Tea Timeetiquette apparently were: (a) imagining people would be amused by the tuxedo-design T-shirt I wore because I hadn’t taken seriously the Celebrity brochure’s instruction to bring a real tux on the Cruise; (b) imagining the elderly ladies at my table would be charmed by the off-color Rorschach jokes I made about the rather obscene shapes the linen napkins at each place were origami-folded into; (c) imagining these same ladies might be interested to learn what sorts of things have to be done to a goose over its lifetime in order to produce pâté-grade liver; (d) putting a 3-ounce mass of what looked like glossy black buckshot on a big white cracker and then putting the whole cracker in my mouth; (e) assuming one second thereafter a facial expression I’m told was, under even the most charitable interpretation, inelegant; (f) trying to respond with a full mouth when an elderly lady across the table with a pince-nez and buff-colored gloves and lipstick on her right incisor told me this was Beluga caviar, resulting in (f(l)) the expulsion of several crumbs and what appeared to be a large black bubble and (f(2)) the distorted production of a word that I was told sounded to the entire table like a genital expletive; (g) trying to spit the whole indescribable nauseous glob into a flimsy paper napkin instead of one of the plentiful and sturdier linen napkins, with results I’d prefer not to describe in any more detail than as unfortunate ; and (h) concurring, when the little kid (in a bow tie and [no kidding] tuxedo-shorts ) seated next to me pronounced Beluga caviar “blucky,” with a spontaneous and unconsidered expression that was, indeed and unmistakably, a genital expletive.