Let's Find Out - "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" by David Foster Wallace (reading)

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

Alright, so in an effort to redeem myself somewhat from my pretty amateur take on David Foster Wallace and the increasingly self-aware consumer culture of most First World Nations America in particular the other day, this is an essay that appeared in the 1996, I guess, edition of Harper's Magazine that he wrote and later put in a book entitled Things supposedly fun things I'll never do again In this edition it's called shipping out on the parentheses nearly lethal comforts of a luxury cruise by David Foster Wallace and this isn't fiction this is nonfiction he actually was paid to go

on a cruise and document the four color brochure part one I've now seen sucrose beaches in water of very bright blue I've seen an all red leisure suit with flared lapels smelled suntan lotion spread over 2100 pounds of hot flesh I've been addressed as mon in three different nations I've seen 500 upscale Americans dance the electric slide. I've seen sunsets that look computer enhanced. I have very briefly joined a conga line. I've seen a lot of really big white ships. I've seen schools of little fish with fins that glow. I've seen and smelled all 145 cats inside Ernest Hemingsway's residence in Key West, Florida. I now know the difference between straight bingo and prizo.

I've seen fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses and fluorescent Prince Nez and over 20 different makes of rubber thong. I've heard steel drums and eaten cong fritters and watched a woman in silver lame projectile vomit inside a glass elevator. I pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-four beat of the same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling too. in 1977. I've learned that there are actually intensities of blue beyond a very bright blue. I've eaten more and classier food than I've ever eaten and done this during a week when I've also learned the difference between rolling in heavy seas and, quote, pitching in heavy seas. I've heard a professional cruise ship comedian tell folks without irony, but seriously, I have seen the fuchsia pantsuit and pink sport.

coats and maroon and purple warmups and white loafers worn without socks. I've seen professional blackjack dealers so lovely they make you want to clutch your chest. I've heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ships and guest relations desk, whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the trap shooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the midnight buffet is. I now know the precise, mixological difference between a slippery nipple and a fuzzy navel. I have in one week been the object of over 1,500 professional smiles and have burnt and peeled twice. I've met crew staff with the moniker as Moho Mike, Coco Puff, and Dave the Bingo Boy.

I felt the full, clothy weight of a subtropical sky. I've jumped a dozen times at the shattering flatulence of the gods-like sound of a crew's ship's horn. I've absorbed the basics of Majong and learned how to secure a life jacket over a tuxedo. I've dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I've learned what it is like to become afraid of one's own cabin toilet. I have now heard and powerless to describe reggae elevator music. I now know the maximum cruising speed of a cruise ship in knots, though I never did get clear on just what a knot is.

I've heard people in deck chairs say in all earnestness that it's the humidity rather than the heat. I've seen every type of erythema, pre-melanomic lesion, liver spot, eczema, wart, papular cyst, pot belly, femoral cellulite, varicosity, collagen, and silicone in hair, bad tint hair transplants that have not taken i.e. I've seen nearly naked a lot of people I would prefer not to have seen nearly naked. I've acquired and nurtured a potentially lifelong grudge

against the ship's hotel manager whose name was Mr. Dermatis and whom I now and henceforth christened Mr. Dermatitis. Footnote 1. Somewhere he'd gotten the impression that I was an investigative journalist and wouldn't let me see the galley, the galley bridge or staff decks, or interview any of the crew in an on-the-record way. And he wore sunglasses indoors and epaulets, epaulets, and kept on talking on the phone for long stretches of time in Greek when I was in his office after I'd skipped the karaoke semifinals in the rendezvous lounge to make a special appointment to see him, and I wish him ill. Henceforth, Chris and him, Mr. Dermatitis,

an almost reverent respect for my table's waiter, and a searing crush on my cabin steward Petra, she of the dimples and broad-canted brow, who always wore nurses starched and rustling whites, and smell of cedary Norwegian disinfectant, she swapped the bathrooms down with, and who cleaned Mike Abbott within a centimeter of its life at least

10 times a day but could never be caught in the act in the actual act of cleaning a figure of magical and abiding charm and well worth a postcard all her own I now know every conceivable rationale for somebody spending more than $3,000

in 1996 money maybe like $4,000 today to go on a Caribbean cruise To be specific, voluntarily, and for pay, I went on a seven-night Caribbean, Prince Seventh NC cruise on board the M.V. Zenith, which no wag could resist immediately rechristening the NV. Nadir. A 47,000-ton ship owned by Celebrity Cruises, Inc., one of the 20-odgrues lines that operate out of South Florida and specialize in, quote, mega ships. The floating wedding cakes with occupancies and four figures and engines the size of branch banks.

Footnote 2. Of the megalines out of South Florida, there's also Commodore cost of majesty, the long footnote. The vessel and facilities were, from what I now understand, of the industry's standard absolutely top hole. The food was beyond belief in the service unimpeachable. The shoe, the shore excursions and shipboard activities organized for maximal stimulation down to the tiniest detail. The ship was so clean and white it looked boiled. The western Caribbean's blue vary between baby blanket and fluorescent. Likewise the sky.

Temperatures were uterine. The very sun itself seemed pre-set for our country. comfort. The crew to passenger ratio was 1.2 to 2. It was a luxury cruise. All of the megalines offer the same basic product, not a service or a set of services, but more like a feeling, a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism. That special mix of servility and condescension that's marketed under configurations of the verb, to pamper. This verb positively studs the Megalines' various brochures,

quote, as you've never been pampered before. Or to pamper yourself in a jacuzis, in jacuzzis and saunas, let us pamper you, pamper yourself in the warm zephyrs of the Bahamas. The fact that adult Americans tend to associate the word pamper with a certain other consumer product is not an accident. I think And the connotation is not lost On the mass market

Megalines And their advertisers Pampere to Death Part 1 I believe these are The introductory pages here Are set up To be like

brochures Some weeks before I underwent My own luxury cruise A 16-year-old male Did a half-gainer off the upper deck Of a mega ship The news version of the suicide was that it had been an unhappy

adolescent love thing, a shipboard romance gone bad. But I think part of it was something no news story could cover. There's something about a mass market luxury cruise that's unbearably sad. Like the most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex

in its causes, yet simple in its effect. On board the deer, especially at night, when all the ships structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased, I felt despair. The word despair is overused and banalized now, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. It's close to what people call dread or angst, but it's not these things quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape an unbearable sadness of knowing I'm small and weak and selfish, and going without doubt to die.

It's wanting to jump overboard. I, who had never before this cruise, actually been on the ocean, have for some reason always associated the ocean with dread and death. As a little kid, I used to memorize shark fatality data, not just attacks. The Albert Cogler fatality off Baker's Beach, California in 1963, a great white. The USS, Indianapolis, a smorgasbord off of, Tinian in 1945.

Many varieties, authorities think mostly makos and black tip. Footnote 3. Robert Shaw's Quint reprised the role. The whole incident in 1975, Jaws. A film, as you can imagine, that was like fetish-porn to me at age 13. The most fatality is attributed to a single shark series of incidents around Matawan Spring Lake, New Jersey in 1926. a great white again. This time they netted the fish in Raritan Bay and found human parts in gastro. I know which parts and whose. In school I ended up writing three different papers

on the castaway section of Moby Dick, the chapter in which a cabin boy falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Stefan Crane's horrific the open boat, and I get bent out of shape when the kids think the story's dull or just want a jaunty adventure. I want them to suffer the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt. The intuition of the sea is primordial nata, bottomless depths inhabited by tooth-studded things rising angelically toward you. This fixation came back, with a long repressed vengeance on my luxury cruise. And I made such a fuss about the one possible dorsal fin I saw off starboard that my dinner companions at table 64

finally had to tell me with all possible tact to shut up about the fin already. And there was another footnote that looked like it might have been worth reading. after the long repressed vengeance on my luxury cruise he says I'll admit that on the first the very first night of 7 and C I asked the staff of the Nadeer's five-star caraville restaurant whether I could maybe I have a spare bucket of azou drippings

from supper so I could try chumming off the back of the bow on the back rail of the top deck for sharks and that this request struck everybody from the matri d on down as disturbing and maybe even disturbed, that it turned out to be a serious journalistic fo'pah because I'm almost positive that the matrody passed this disturbing tidbit onto Mr. Dermatitis

and that it was a big reason why I was denied access to places like the ship's galley, thereby impoverishing the sensuous scope of this article. It also revealed how little I understood the nadir's sheer size 12 decks up is 150 feet the a juie drippings would have dispersed into a vague red cologne by the time they hit the water with concentrations of blood inadequate to attract or excite a serious shark whose fin would probably look like a pushpin from that height anyway i don't think it's an accident that the seven and sea luxury cruises appeal mostly to older people I don't mean decrepidly old, but like 50-ish people, for whom their own mortality is something more than abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies, to be seen all over the daytime nadir, were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself turns out to be one enormous engine of decay.

Seawater corrods vessels with an amazing speed. It rusts them, like exfoliates paints, strips varnish dulls shine coats ships holes with barnacles and kelp in a vague and ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate

we saw some real horrors in port local boats that looked as if they'd been dipped in a mixture of acid and shit scabbed with rust and goo ravaged by what they float in not so the megalines ship it's no accident they're so white and clean, for they're clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and

industry over the primal decay action of the sea. The Nadir seemed to have a whole battalion of wiry little third-world guys who went around the ship in navy blue jumpsuits, scanning for decay to overcome. Writer Frank Conroy, who has an odd little essay, Mercial, essay, commercial, in the front of Celebrity Cruises 7NC brochure. Talks about how it became a private challenge for me to try to avoid to find a piece of dull, bright work, a chipped rail, a stain in the deck, a slack cable, or anything that wasn't perfectly ship-shape.

Eventually, toward the end of the trip, I found the captain a capstan, a type of nautical hoist like a pulley on steroids. with a half-dollar-sized patch of rust on the side facing the sea. My delight in this tiny flaw was interrupted by the arrival, even as I stood there, of a crewman with a roller and a bucket of white paint. I watched as he gave the entire caps in a fresh coat of... A fresh coat and walked away with a nod.

Here's the thing. Messing up that scroll. A vacation is a respite from a... pleasantness. And since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay. But on a 7NC luxury cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to triumph is via the rigors of self-improvement, diet and exercise, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest, time management seminars,

to which the cruise amphetamineic, amphetamine, upkeep of the nadir is an unstable analog. But there is another way out to, not titivation, but titillation, not hard work but hard play. see in this regard the seven and sees constant activities festivities gaiety song the adrenaline the stimulation it makes you feel vibrant alive it makes you exist makes your existence seem non-contingent the hard play option promises a non-transcendence of death dread so much as drowning it out quote sharing a laugh with your friends in the lounge after dinner you glance at your watch and mention it's almost showtime when the curtain comes down after a standing ovation the talk among your companions turns to what next perhaps a visit to the casino or a little dancing in the disco maybe a quiet drink in the piano bar or starlit stroll around the deck

after discussing all your options everyone agrees let's do it all end quote Dante this isn't but Celebrity Cruise's brochure is an extremely powerful and ingenious piece of advertising

luxury megalines brochures are always magazine size heavy and glossy beautifully laid out their text offset by art quality photos of upscale couples tan faces and a kind of rictus of pleasure. Celebrity's brochure in particular is a real two napkin drooler. It has little hypertextish offsets boxed in gold

with bites like indulgence. Indulgence becomes easy and relaxation becomes second nature. And my favorite, stress becomes a faint memory. The text itself is positively prosaation. Just stand at the ship's rail, Quote, just stand at the ship's rail, looking out to sea has a profoundly soothing effect. Standing at the ship's rail. As you drift along like a cloud on water, the weight of everyday life is magically lifted away,

and you seem to be on floating on a sea of smiles, not just among your fellow guests, but on the faces of the ship's staff as well. A steward cheerfully delivers your drinks. you mention all of the smiles among the crew. He explains that every celebrity staff member takes pleasure in making your crews a completely carefree experience and treating you as an honored guest. Besides, he adds, there's no place else they'd rather be.

Looking back out to see, you couldn't agree more. End quote. This is advertising, i.e. fantasy enablement. but with a queerly authoritarian twist. And just briefly, he might end up saying it in here, but the other day I listened to a interview from David Foster Wallace. And he described looking at billboards as things that fuse your life infuse you with a sense of anxiety that can only be assuaged by the purchase of the product they're advertising.

He probably said it better than that, but it was a funny observation or astute, funny, sad observation. But with a queerly authoritarian twist, this is advertising. Note the imperative use of the second person in a specificity out of detail that extends even to what you will say. Parentheses, you will say, I couldn't agree more. and quote, let's do it all, in parentheses. You are here, you are here, excused from even the work of constructing the fantasy, because the ads do it for you. And this near parental type of advertising makes a very special promise,

a diabolically seductive promise. That's actually kind of honest, because it's a promise that the luxury cruise itself is all about honoring. The promise is not that you can experience great pleasure, but that you will. You will. They'll make certain of it. They'll micromanage every iota, every pleasure option, so that not even the dreadful, corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency can, in dread, can fuck up your fun. your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation.

You will be able finally and for once to relax the ads promise because you will have no choice. Your pleasure will for seven days and six and a half nights, seven nights and six and a half days, be wisely and efficiently managed aboard the Ndir. and here as is ringingly foretold in the brochure you will get to do quote something you haven't done in a long long time absolutely nothing end quote how long has it been since you did absolutely nothing i know exactly how long it's been for me i know how long it's been since i had every need met choicelessly from the same from some place outside me without having to ask and that I was floating too and the fluid was warm and salty and if I was in any way conscious I'm sure I was dreadless and was having a really good time and would have

sent postcards to everyone wishing they were here let's see if any of the footnotes are worth going into right this one's pretty good um footnote 8 the press liaison for celebrities PR firm, the charming Debra Wigner winger, voiced Miss Weisson. In this bold explanation for the cheery service, quote, the people on board, the staff are really part of one big family. You probably notice this when you're on the ship. They really love what they're doing and love serving people and they pay attention to what everybody wants and needs, end quote.

This was not what I observed. What I observed was that the Indier was one very tight ship run by an elite cadre of very hard-assed Greek officers and supervisors, that the staff lived in mortal terror of these bosses who watched them with enormous beadiness all the time, that the crew worked almost Dickensingly hard, too hard to feel truly cheery about it. My sense was that the cheeriness was up there with a celebrity and servility on the clipboarded, evaluation sheets that the Greek bosses were constantly filling out on the crew. My sense was that a crewman could get fired for a pretty small lapse and that getting fired by these Greek officers might well have involved a spotlessly shined shoe in the ass and then a really long swim.

Next section is boarding. A seven in seas pampering is maybe even a little uneven at first. But it starts right at the airport where you don't have to go to baggage claim because people from the Megaline get your suitcases for you and take them straight to the ship. A bunch of other Megalines besides Celebrity Cruises operate out of Fort Lauderdale. In the flight down from O'Hare is full of festive-looking people dressed for cruising, it turns out that the retired couple sitting next to me on the plane is booked on the intertier. This is their fourth luxury cruise in as many years.

It's they who tell me about the news reports of the kid jumping overboard. The husband wears a fishing cap with a very long bill and a t-shirt that says, Big Daddy. Seven and C luxury cruises always start and finish on a Saturday. Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down, if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable looking and dressed in the Caribbean pastels and you'll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport Terminal looks like today. Near the back wall, a number of brisk-looking older ladies and vaguely naval outfits

hold up printed signs, clend, celeb, gond, chiron. You're supposed to find your particular megalines brisk lady. and coalesce around her, as she heard, a growing ectoplasm of nidirites, out of out to buses they'll ferry you to the piers, and what you quixotically believe will be immediate and hassle-free boarding. Apparently, the airport is just your average sleepy mid-sized airport six days a week, and then every Saturday resembles the fall of Saigon. Now we're riding to the piers in a column of eight chartes,

chartered greyhounds, our convoy's rate of speed, and the odd deference shown by other traffic gives the whole process procession a vaguely funeral quality. Fort Lauderdale proper looks like one extremely large golf course, but the Megalines piers are in something called Port Everglades, an industrialized area zoned for blight, with warehouses and transformer parks, stacked box cars, and vacant lots. We pass a huge field of those hammer-shaped automatic oil derricks, all bobbing fallacially and on the horizon past them, is a fingernail clipping of shiny sea. Whenever we go over bumps or train tracks, there's a huge mass-clicking sound from all

the cameras around everybody's necks. I haven't bought any sort of camera and feel a perverse pride about this. The Nadeer's traditional birth is Pier 21. Quote, Pier, although it conjures from me images of wharfs and cleats and lapping water, turns out here to denote something like what airport denotes, vis-a-vis a zone and not a thing. There's no real view of the ocean, no docks, no briny smell to the air, but as we enter the Pier Zone, there are a lot of really big white ships that blot out most of the sky. From inside, Pier 1, Pier 21 seems kind of like a blimpless blimp hanger, high ceilings, and echoy.

It has walls of unclean windows on three sides, at least 2,500 orange chairs in rows of 25, a kind of desultory snack bar, and restrooms with very long lines. The acoustics are brutal and it's tremendously loud. some of the people in the rows of chairs appear to have been here for days. They have the glazed and camped look of people at airports and blizzards. It's now 1132 a.m. In boarding, now starting with subway-ish blankness at other people. A kid whose t-shirt says Sandy Duncan's eye. Journalistic follow-up has revealed that this is the name of a band

that I feel confident betting is punk is carving something in plastic on his chair in the plastic of his chair there are quite a few semi-old people traveling with really desperately

old people who are clearly their parents men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts I've decided the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for air particularly on the calves

It's just about the only body area Where you can actually want more hair on Ultraman A couple of these glabrous calabrous calves guys Are field stripping their camcorders With military expertise There's also a fair number of couples in the 20s and 30s With a honeymoonish aspect to their way And the way their heads rest on each other's shoulders

Somewhere past the big great doors behind the restrooms, roiling lines, is a kind of umbilical passage, leading to what I assume is the actual nadir, which outside the hangar's windows presents as a tall wall of total white metal. The Chicago lady and Big Daddy are playing Uno with each other,

who turn out to be friends they'd made on... are playing Uno... Oh, with another couple, sorry. Who turn out to be friends they'd made on a Princess Alaska cruise in 93, three years ago at the time. By this time, I'm down the slacks in a T-shirt. And a T-shirt and tie. And the tie looks like it's been washed and hand-wrung.

Her aspiring has lost its novelty. Celebrity cruises seems to be reminding us that the real world we're leaving behind, includes crowded public waiting areas with no AC, and indifferent ventilation. Now it's 12.55 p.m. Although the brochure says the Nadir sails at 4.30 and you can board any time from two until then, it looks as if all 1,374 passengers are already here,

plus a fair number of relatives and well-wishers. Every so often I sort of orbit the blimp hanger, eavesdropping, making small talk, the universal topic of discussion is why are you here nobody uses the word pamper or luxury the word that gets overused is relax everybody characterizes the up the upcoming week is either a long put-off reward or a last-ditch effort to salvage sanity and self from some inconceivable crackpot of pressure or both a lot of the explanatory explanatory narrative are long and involved and some are sort of lurid including a couple of people who finally buried a terminal a terminal hideously lingering relative they'd been nursing at home for months finally were called for boarding and moved in a columnar heard toward the passport check and deck three it's the gangway beyond we are greeted each of us and escorted to our cabins by not one but two

Aryan-looking hostesses from the hospitality staff. We are led over plush, plum, carpet to the interior of what one presumes is the actual Nadir, watched now in high-oxygen AC that seems subtly balsam-scented, pausing if we wish to have our pre-cruise photo taken by the ship's photographer, apparently for some before and after souvenir ensemble, celebrity cruises, will try to sell us at the end of the week. My hostesses are Inga and Geli And they carry my bookbag in suit coat

Respectively I start seeing the first of more watcher step signs Than anyone could count It turns out that a megaships flooring is totally uneven And everywhere there are sudden little steplets up and down Is an endless walk up four aft serpentine through bulkheads And steel railed corridors with mollified jazz coming out of in little rounds,

coming out of little round speakers in a beige enamel ceiling. In intervals, at intervals on every wall are the previously mentioned cross-sectioned maps and diagrams. The megaships that Nadir has given each deck some 7NC related name rather than a number. And already I'm forgetting whether the fantasy deck is deck 7 or 8. deck 12 is called the sun deck 11 the marina deck and has the pool and cafe 10 i forget nine is the Bahama deck eight is fantasy seven is galaxy or vice versa and they contain all the venues

for serious eating and dancing below four is business and off-limits so so so the elevator is made of glass and is noiseless and Ingun geli smile slightly engaged at nothing as together we ascend. And it's a very close race as to which of the two smells better in the enclosed chill. Soon we're passing little teak-lined shipboard shops with Gucci,

Waterford Wedgwood Rolex, and there's a crackle in the jazz and an announcement in three languages about welcome and welcome in and how there will be a compulsory lifeboat drill an hour after sailing.

By 315, I'm installed in the deer cabin 1009 and immediately eat almost a whole basket of free fruit and lie on a really nice bed and drum my fingers on my swollen tummy. Next section is called Under Sail. Our horn is genuinely planet shattering. Departure at 430 turns out to be a not untasteful affair of crape and horns. Each deck has walkways outside with railings made of really good wood. It's now overcast in the ocean way below, way below, is dull and frothy. Docking and undocking are the two times the ship's mega cruiser's captain actually steers the ship. Captain G. Penagiotakis, Panagiotakis, is now wheeled us around and

pointed out, pointed out our sun out at the open sea. And we, large, and white and clean, are under sail. The whole first two days and nights are bad weather with high-pitched winds, heaving seas, spume-lashing, and portholes glass. The portholes glass. For 40-plus hours, it's more like a North Sea cruise. And the celebrity staff goes around looking regretfully, but not apologetic. and in all fairness it's hard to find a way to blame celebrity cruises for the weather. A staff keeps urging us to enjoy the view from the railings on the lee side of the Nadeer.

The one other guy who joins me in trying out the non-lea side as his glass is blown off by the gale. I keep waiting to see somebody from the crew wearing the traditional yellow slicker but no luck. The railing I do most of my contemplating contemplative gazing from is on deck 10 So the sea is way below slopping and heaving around So it's a little like looking down into a briskly flushing toilet No fiends in view No fins in heavy seas

I Hypochondriacs are kept busy taking their gastric pulse every couple of seconds and wondering whether what they're feeling is maybe the onset of seasickness. Seasickness-wise, though, it turns out that bad weather is sort of like the battle. Sort of the battle. There's no way to know ahead of time how you'll react. A test of deep and involuntary stuff of man. I myself turn out not to get seasick.

For the whole first rough sea day, I puzzled over the fact that every other past. passenger on the M.V. Nadir looks to have received identical little weird shaving cuts below his or her left ear, which in the case of female passengers is especially strange. Until they learn that these little round band-aid-ish things, everybody's neck seems to be clothed in our special new sun-superpowered transdermal motion sickness patches, which apparently nobody with any kind of clue about that. 7 and sea luxury cruising now leaves home without. A lot of the passengers get seasick anyway.

These first two howling days, it turns out, anyway, these first two howling days, turns out that a seasick person really does look green, although it's an odd and ghostly green, pasty, and toadish, more than a little corpse-like when the seasick person is dressed in formal dinnerware. For the first two nights, who's feeling seasick and who's not and who's not now, but was a little while ago, or isn't feeling it yet, but thinks it may be coming on, etc. There's a big topic, a big topic of conversation at table 64 in the five-star Caravelle restaurant.

Footnote 11, this 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. Discussing nausea and vomiting while eating intricately prepared gourmet foods doesn't seem to bother anybody. Common suffering and fear of suffering turn out to be a terrific icebreaker. And icebreaking is pretty important

because on this 7NC you eat at the same designated table with the same companions all week. There are seven other people with me at Good Old Table 64, all from South Florida. Four know one another in private, landlocked life and have requested to be at the same table. The other three are an old couple and their granddaughter, whose name is Mona. I am the only first-time luxury cruiser at the table 64. with the conspicuous exception of Mona. I like all my tablemates a lot,

and I want to get a description of supper out of the way as fast, and avoid saying much out of the way fast, and avoid saying much about them for fear of hurting their feelings, by noting any character defects or eccentricities that might seem potentially mean. Besides me, there are five women and two men, and both men are completely silent, except on the subjects of golf, business, transdermal motion sickness prophylaxis, and the legalities of getting stuff through customs.

The women carry Table 64's conversational ball. One of the reasons I like all these women, except Mona, so much is that they often laughed really hard at my jokes. Even lame or very obscure jokes, although they all have this curious way of laughing where they sort of scream before they laugh, so that for one excruciating second, you can't tell whether they're getting ready to laugh

or whether they're seeing something hideous and scream-worthy over your shoulder. My favorite tablemate is Trudy, whose husband is back home managing some sudden crisis at the couple's cellular phone business and has given his ticket to Alice, their heavy and extremely well-dressed daughter, who was on a spring break from Miami,

you, and who is for some reason very anxious to communicate to me that she has a serious boyfriend, whose name is apparently Patrick. Alice's continual assertion of her relationship status may be a defensive tactic against Trudy, who keeps pulling professionally retouched four by five glossies of Alice out of her purse and showing them to me and with Alice sitting right there.

And who every time Alice mentions Patrick suffers some sort of weird fanatical tick or grimace where the canine tooth on one side of her face shows but the other sides doesn't? Trudy is 56 and looks, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, rather like Jackie Gleason and Drag, and has a particularly loud pre-lapse scream. It's a really arrhythmia producer. a real arrhythmia producer. It is the one who coerces me into Wednesday night's conga line

and gets me strung out on snowball jackpot bingo. Trudy is also an incredibly lay authority on 7 and C luxury cruises. This being her sixth in a decade, she and her best friend Esther, thin face, subtly ravaged looking and the distaff part of the couple from Miami have tales to tell about carnival, princess, crystal, and cunner, too. Too fraught with libel potential to reproduce here.

By midweek, it starts to strike me that I have never before seen or been party to such a minute and exacting analysis of the food and service of a meal I am just at that moment eating. nothing escapes the attention of tea and the the symmetry of the parsley sprigs atop the boiled baby carrots the consistency of the bread and the flavor and mastication friendliness of various cuts of meat the celebrity and flambé technique of the various pastry guys

and tall white hats who appear table-side when items have to be set on fire parentheses a major percentage of the desserts and the five-star caraville restaurant or not have to be set on fire, and so on. The waiter and busboy keeps circling the table, going finish, finish? While Esther and Trudy have exchanges like, Honey, you don't look happy with the potatoes, what's the problem?

I'm fine, it's fine, everything's fine, don't lie. Honey, what's that face with that face? Who could lie? Frank, am I right? This is a person with a face incapable of lying. There's nothing wrong as their darling, I swear. You're not happy with the conk? All right, I've got a problem with the conk. Did I tell you, Frank?

Did I tell her? Frank silently probes his ear with his pinky. Was I right? Trudy? I could tell just by looking at you. You weren't happy. I'm fine with the potatoes. It's the conk.

Did I tell you about the sensational fish? The seasonal fish on ships? What did I tell you? The potatoes are good. It is 18. Our grandparents have been taking her on a luxury cruise every spring since she was five. Mona always sleeps through both breakfast and lunch and spends all night at the Scorpio Disco and in the Mayor Fair Casino playing the slots.

She is 6'2 if she's an inch. She's going to attend Penn State next fall because the agreement is that she'll receive a four-wheel drive truck if she goes someplace where there might be snow. she is unabashed in recounting this college selection criterion she's incredibly demanding passenger and diner but her complaints about slight aesthetic and gustatory imperfections at table lack trudy in esther's discernment and come off as simply churlish mona is also a kind of strange-looking girl

a body like bridget nielsen or some centerfold on steroids and above it framed in resplendent blonde hair, the tiny unhappy face of a kind of corrupt doll. Her grandparents, who retire every night and right after supper, always make a small ceremony after dessert of handing Mona $100 to, quote, go have some fun with. This $100 bill is always in one of those little ceremonial bank envelopes that has Franklin's face staring out of the porthole like window.

in the front. And written on the envelope and red magic marker is always, we love you, honey. Mona never once says thank you. She just rolls her eyes at just about everything her grandparents say. A habit that very quickly drives me up the wall. Mona's special customary gig on 7NC luxury cruises is to lie to the waiter and the matri-D and say that Thursday is her birthday so that the The formal supper on Thursday, she gets bunting in a heart-shaped helium balloon tied to her chair and her own cake. And pretty much the whole restaurant staff comes out and forms a circle around her and sings to her. Her real birthday, she informs me on Monday, is July 29th. And when I quietly observe that July 29th is also the birthday of Benito Mussolini,

Mona's grandmother shoots me a kind of death look. Although Mona herself is excited at the... coincidence, apparently confusing the names Mussolini and Maserati. The weather in no way comprised the refinement of meals at Table 64. Even in heavy seas, 7NC megaships don't ya or throw you around or send bowls of soup sliding across tables. Only a certain slight unreality to your footing lets you know that you're not on land. at sea a room's floor feels somehow 3D

and your footing demands a slight attention that you that good old static land never needs you don't ever quite hear the ship's big engines but when your feet are planted you can feel them a kind of spinal throb oddly soothing walking is a little dreamy also there are constant slight shifts in torque from the wave action and when heavy seas, heavy waves come straight out of mega-ship's snout,

the ship goes up and down along its axis. This is called pitching. It produces this disorienting sensation that you're walking on a very slight downhill grade, and then level, and then on a very slight uphill grade. Some evolutionarily retrograde reptilian brain part of the central nervous system is apparently reawakened though and manages all this so automatically

that it requires a good deal of attention to notice anything more than that walking feels a little dreamy rolling on the other hand is when waves they hit the ship from the side and make it go up and down along its crosswise axis the deer rolls what you feel is a very slight increase

in the demands placed on the muscles of your left leg then a strange absence of all demand, then extra demands on the right leg. We never pitch badly, but every once in a while some really big beside an adventure-grade wave must have come and hit them to your side because the asymmetric leg demands sometimes won't stop or reverse, and you keep having to put more and more weight on one leg until you're exquisitely close to tipping over. the cruise's first night steaming southeast for jamaica features some really big waves from starboard starboard is the right side of the boat

and in the casino after supper it's hard to tell who's had too much of the 71 richembourg and who's just doing a role-related stagger bad in the fact that most of the women are wearing high heels and you can imagine some of the vertiginous staggering, flailing clutching that goes on. Almost everyone on the Nadir has come in couples, and when they walk during heavy seas,

they tend to hang on each other like freshmen steadies. You can tell they like it. The women have this trick of sort of folding themselves into the men and snuggling as they walk, and the men's postures improve, and their faces firm up, and they seem to feel unusually solid and protective. It's easy to see why older couples like to cruise. Heavy seas are also great for sleep, it turns out.

The first two mornings there's hardly anybody at early seating breakfast. Everybody sleeps in. People with insomnia of years. Standing report uninterrupted sleep of 9, 10, even 11 hours. Their eyes are childlike with wild wonder as they report this. everyone looks younger and they've had a lot of sleep there's a rampant daytime napping too by the end of the week we've when we've had all manner of weather i finally see what it is about heavy seas and marvelous rest in heavy seas you feel rocked to sleep the windows spew a gentle slushing shushing engines throb a mother's pulse the four-color brochure part two did i mention that famous writer and iowa writers workshop chairperson frank conroy

has his own experiential essay about cruising right there in celebrities seven nc brochure well he does and the thing starts out on the pier 21 gangway that first saturday day with his family. Let's see, footnote 12. Conroy took the same celebrity cruises eye, the seven-night Western Caribbean on the good old Nadir in May 94, two years before. He and his family cruised for free. I know details like this because Conroy talked to me on the phone and answered nosy questions. It was frank and forthcoming and in general just totally decent about the whole thing. He says, with that single easy step, we entered a new world, a sort of alternative, alternate reality to the one on shore. Smiles, handshakes, and we were whisked away to our cabin

by a friendly young woman from guest relations. Then they're outside along the rail, for then the deer's sailing. He continues, we became aware that the ship was pulling away. We had felt no warning, no trembling of the deck throbbing of the engines or the like it was as if the land were magically receding the sum ever so slow reverse zoom in the movies this is pretty much what conroy's whole my celebrity cruise or all this in a tan too essay is like it's full of implications it's full implications don't hit me until i reread it soup it's super it's on deck 12 i guess that means laying down on deck 12 the first sunny day conroy's assy is graceful and lapidary and persuasive i submit that it's also completely insidious and bad its badness does not consist so much in its constant and mesmeric references to fantasy and alternate realities and the palliative powers of professional pampering quote i'd come on board after two months of

intense and moderately stressful work, but now it seems a distant memory. I realized it had been a week since I'd washed a dish, cooked a meal, gone to the market, done an errand, or in fact anything at all requiring a minimum of thought and effort. My toughest decisions had been whether to play catch the afternoon showing, whether to catch the afternoon showing of Mrs. Delfire or play bingo, nor in the surfeit of happy adjectives in the tone of breathless approval throughout. Monroyd continues, bright sun, warm still air,

the brilliant blue-green of the Caribbean under the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky. For all of us, our fantasies and expectations were to be exceeded. To say the least, when it comes to service, celebrity cruises seems ready and able to deal with anything. Rather, part of the essay's real badness

can be found in the way it reveals. Once again, the megal lines, sale to sale, pun on the word, sale isn't buying and sale is in boat. Agenda of micromanaging not only one's perceptions of 7 and C, but even one's own interpretations

and articulation about those perceptions. In other words, Let the celebrities PR people go and get a respected writer to pre-articulate and endorse the experience. And to do it with a professional eloquence and authority that few lay perceivers and articulators could hope to equal. E.G. in his footnote 13, after reading Conroy's essay on board, whenever I'd look up at the sky, it wouldn't be the sky I was seeing. It was now the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky. But the really major badness is that the project and placement of My Celebrity Cruises

crews are sneaky and duplicitous and well beyond whatever eroded pales still exist in terms of the literary ethics. Conroy's essay appears as an inset on skinnier pages and with different margins than the rest of the brochure, creating the impression that it has been an excerpt from some large and over. objective thing, Conroy wrote. But it hasn't been. The truth is that Celebrity Cruises paid Conroy up front to write it. Even though nowhere in or around the essay, is there anything acknowledging that it's a paid endorsement? Not even one of the little so-and-so has been compensated for services that flash at your TV screens lower right during a celebrity-hosted

infomercial. Instead, in set on this, weird essay Mershal's first page is a photo of Conroy brooding in a black turtleneck and below the photo and author bio with a list of Conroy's books that includes the 67 classic Stop Time which is arguably the best literary memoir of the 20th century and is one of the books that first made poor old humble yours truly want to be a writer in the case of Frank Conroy's essay, Celebrity Cruises, is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay for something that is art or that is at least trying to be art. An ad that pretends to be like art is at absolute best

like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest because what's insidious in the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us, since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping the defenses, even in cases of genuine smiles in real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair. with note 15 looks promising this is related to the phenomenon of professional of the professional smile a pandemic interesting choice of words in the service industry and no place in my experience have i been on the receiving end of an as many professional smiles as i was on the nadir matri d's chef steward's hotel managers minions cruise director their p sq

all come professional smiles all come on like switches at my approach but also back on land at banks restaurants airline ticket counters and on and on you know the smile the one that doesn't quite reach the smileers eyes and signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smile's own interests by pretending to like the smilee why do employers and supervisors who are employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the professional smile. Am I the only one who's sure that the growing number of cases in which the normal looking people open up with automatic weapons and shopping malls and insurance fires, insurance offices, and medical complexes is somehow casually related to the fact that these venues

are well-known dissemination loci, loci, of the professional smile? But for this particular 7NC consumer, Conroy's ad as essay ends up having a truthfulness about it that I'm sure is unintentional. As my week on the Nadir wears on, I begin to see this A-Say-Mershal. I keep thinking it's asymmetrical. As a perfectly ironic reflection of the mass market cruise experience itself, the essay is polished, powerful, impressive, clearly the best thing that money can buy. It presents itself as being for my benefit. It manages my experiences and my interpretation of those experiences.

It takes care of them for me in advance. It seems to care about me. But it doesn't. Not really. Because first and foremost, it wants something from me. So does the cruise itself. The pretty setting and glittering ship and sedulous staff and solicitous fund managers all want something from me.

And it's not just the price of the ticket, they've already got that. Just what it is they want is hard to pin down. It's hard to pin down. But by early in the week I can feel it building. It circles the ship like a fin. The next section is pampered to death, part two. Celebrity's brochure does not lie or exaggerate, However, in the luxury department, and I now confront the journalistic problem of not being sure how many examples I need to list in order to communicate the atmosphere of cyberritic and nearly insanity-producing pampering on board the nadir.

Take as one example of the moment right after sailing when I want to go out to Dek10's port rail for some introductory vista gazing, and thus decide I need some zinc oxide from my first. my peel-prone nose. My zinc oxide's still in my big duffel bag, which at this point, at that point is piled with all of Deck 10's other luggage in the little area between 10-4s elevator and the 10-4 elevator and the 10-4 staircase, while little guys in Cadet Blue celebrity jumpsuits, porters entirely Lebanese, it seems, are cross. checking the luggage tags with the Nadeer's passenger list and luggage everything to people's cabins. So I come out and spot my duffel bag among the luggage and I start to grab and haul it out of

the towering pile of leather and nylon thinking I'll just whisk the bag back to cabin 1009 myself and root through it and find my zinc oxide. One of the porters sees me attempting the grab and he dumps all for the massive pieces of luggage he's staggering with and leaps to intercept me. At first I'm afraid he thinks I'm some kind of baggage thief and wants to see my claim check or something. But it turns out what he wants is my duffel. He wants to carry it to 1009 for me. And I, whom about half again this poor little herniated guy's size, as is the duffel bag itself,

protest, protest, politely, trying to be considerate saying, don't fret, don't fret, not a big deal, just need my good old zinc oxide, I'll just get the big old heavy weather-stained sucker out of here myself. And now a very strange argument ensues, me versus the Lebanese porter,

because I now understand, I am putting this guy who barely speaks English in a terrible kind of sedulous service double bind A paradox of pampering The passenger is always right Versus never let a passenger carry his own bag Clueless at the time about What this poor man is going through

I wave off both his high-pitched protests And his agonized expression as mere servile courtesy And I extract the duffel bag and lug it up To my room 1009 And slather the old beak With zinc oxide go outside and watch Florida recede cinematically a la f. Conroy.

Only later do I understand what I've done. Only later do I learn that this little Lebanese deck ten porter had his head just about chewed off by the also Lebanese deck ten head porter who had his own head chewed off by the Austrian chief steward who received confirmed reports that a passenger had been seen carrying his own bag up the port hallway of deck ten and now demanded a rolling Lebanese head for his clear indication of porterly dereliction and the Austrian chief steward

had reported the incident to a chief's officer the ship's officer in the guest relations department a Greek guy with revos shades rivo shades and a walkie-talkie that epaulets so-co complex, I never did figure out what his rank was. Oh, epaulets. Epolets. Epolets? And this high-ranking Greek officer actually came around to 1009 after Saturday's supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandra's shipping line. And to assure me that the ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors

in a peculiar and piacular recompense, recompense for having had to carry my own bag. And even though this Greek officer's English was in lots of ways better than mine, it took me no less than ten minutes to detail the double blind I'd put the porter in. Brandishing at relevant moments, the actual tube of zinc oxide had,

that had caused the whole snafu, 10 or more minutes before I could get enough of a promise from the Greek officer at various chewed-off heads would be reattached and employee records unbesmirched to feel comfortable enough to allow the officer to leave. Footnote 16, and further retrospect, I think the only thing I really persuaded this 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 Aju shark bait request to destroy my credibility with dermatitis before I even got in to see him. And the whole incident was incredibly frazzling and despair fraught. It filled almost half a spiral notebook and here his recounted only in its barest psychoskeletal outline. This grim determination to indulge the passenger in ways that go far beyond any halfway sane passenger's own expectations and everywhere on the nadir.

Some wholly random examples. My cabin bathroom has plenty of thick, fluffy towels. But when I go up to lie in the sun, I don't have to take any of my cabin's towels because the two upper decks sun areas have big carts loaded with even thicker and even fluffier towels. These carts are stationed at convenient intervals along endless, rows of gymnasticsly adjustable deck chairs that are themselves phenomenally fine deck chairs, sturdy enough for even the portliest sunbather, but also narcoleptically comfortable,

with heavy alloy frames over which is stretched some mysterious material that combines canvas's quick-drying durability with cotton's absorbency and comfort. Certainly a welcome setup. A welcome step up from public pool's deck chair. material of Kmartish plastic that sticks to your skin and produces farty sections of sucky suction noises whenever you shift your sweaty weight on it. And each of the sun decks is manned by a special squad of full-time towel guys so that when you're well done on both sides and ready to quit and you spring easily out of the deck chairs, you don't have to pick up your towel and take it with you or even

busted into the car's used towel slot because a towel guy materializes the minute your fanning leaves the chair and removes your towel for you and deposits it in the slot. Actually the towel guy

their guys are such overachievers that even if you get up for just a second to reapply the zinc oxide or gaze contemplatively over the railing at the sea when you turn your back around the towels often gone and your deck chair has been refolded to its uniform 45 degree at rest angle and you have to readjust your chair all over again and go to the cart to get a fresh fluffy towel down in the

five-star caraville restaurant the waiter table 64's waiters tibor a hungarian and a truly exceptional person about whom if there's any editorial justice you will learn a lot more someplace below. The waiter will not only bring you a lobster as well as a second and even a third lobster. Footnote 18, not until Tuesday's lobster night at the 5CR, did I really emphatically understand the Roman phenomena of the vomatorium? With methamphetametic speed, he'll retrieve the lobsters, but will also incline over you with gleaming. claw cracker and surgical fork and dismantle it for you, sparing you the green, goopy work. That's the only remotely rigorous thing about the lobster.

And at the windsurf cafe, up on deck 11 by the pools, where there's always an informal buffet lunch, there's never that bovine line that makes most cafeteria such a downer. And there are about 73 varieties of entree alone. and the sort of coffee you Marty you marry someone for being able to make and if you have too many things on your tray a waiter will materialize as you peel away from the buffet and will carry your tray

even though it's a cafeteria and there are all these waiters standing around with Neru jackets and white towels draped over left arms watching you not quite making eye contact but scanning for any little way to be of service plus plum jacket Somoliers walking around to see if you need a non-buffet libation plus a whole crew of matriads and supervisors watching the waiters and Somalias

and tall-headed buffet servers to make sure you don't do something for yourself that could be done for you every public surface on the nadir that isn't stainless steel or glass or varnished paquette parquette or dense and good-smelling sauna-type wood is plush blue carpet that never has a chance to accumulate even one flecklet of lint because jumps suited third world guise are always at it with the seaman's AG vacuums the elevators are uroglass and yellow steel and stainless steel and a kind of woodgrain material that looks too shiny to be real wood but makes a sound when you thump it, that's an awful lot like real wood. The elevators and stairways between decks seem to be

the particular objects of the anal retention of a whole special elevator and staircase custodial crew. During 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 vax and spot remover and all trace of odor eradicator chemicals applied by this elite special forces type crew. Let me forget about room service, which on a 7 and C luxury cruise is called, quote, cabin service. Cabin service is in addition to the elevator the 11 scheduled daily opportunities for public eating, and it's available 24 hours a day and is free. All you have to do is hit X-7-2 on the bedside phone.

And 10 or 15 minutes later, a guy who wouldn't even dream of hitting you up for a gratuity appears with, quote, thinly-sized sliced ham and cheese on white bread with Dijon mustard. The combo, Cajun chicken with pie. pasta salad and spicy salsa, or a whole page of other sandwiches and bladders from the services directory. And this stuff deserves to be capitalized, believe me. That's a kind of semi-agoraphore who spends massive amounts of time in my cabin. I've come to have a really

complex dependency, shame relationship with my cabin service. Since finally finding out about it Monday, I've ended up availing myself of cabin service every night, more like twice a night, to be honest. Even though I find it extremely embarrassing to be calling up X-7-2, asking to have even more rich food brought up to me when there have already been 11 gourmet eating ops that day, usually what I do is spread my notebooks in Fielding's Guide to Worldwide Cruises in 1995. and pens and various materials all out over the bed so that when the cabin service guy arrives and appears at the door he'll see all this bellaristic material and figure i'm working really hard on something bellaristic bellatristic excuse me right here in the cabin have doubtless been too busy to have hit all the public meals and thus am legitimately entitled to the indulgence of even more rich food. My experience with the cabin cleaning though is perhaps the ultimate example of pampering stress. The fact of the matter is that I rarely even see 1009's cabin steward Petra, which is why on the occasion when I do see her, I practically hold her prisoner and yammer at her like an idiot. I've had good reason to believe she sees me because every time I leave 1009 for more than like

a half an hour. When I get back, it's cleaned and dusted again. And the towels replaced in the bathroom a gleam. Don't get me wrong in a way it's great. I am in 1009 a lot and I also come here and come in and go a lot. And when I'm in here, I sit in bed and write in bed while eating fruit and generally mess up the bed. But whenever I dart out and then come back, the bed is freshly made up in a hospital cornered and there's another mint-centered chocolate on the pillow. I grant that mysterious invisible room cleaning is every slob's fantasy like having a mom without the guilt. But there's also a creepy uneasiness about it that presents, at least in my own case, a kind of paranoia because after a couple of days of this fabulous invisible room cleaning, I start to wonder how exactly

Petra knows when I'm in. in 1009 and when I'm not. It's now that it occurs to me that I hardly ever see her. For a while I try experiments like all of a sudden darting out into the 10 port hallway to see if I can catch Petro somewhere, keeping track of who is decadventing, and I scour the whole hallway and ceiling area for evidence of some kind of camera monitoring movements outside the cabin.

every surface I pass out the cabin doors is zilch on both fronts but when I see that mysteries that the mystery is even more complex and unsettling than I first thought because my cabin gets cleaned always and only during intervals when I'm gone for more than half an hour

when I go out how can Petra and or her supervisors possibly know how long I've been gone I try leaving 1009 a couple of times and then dashing back after 10, 15 minutes to see whether I can catch her in the Deleitee, but she's never there. I try making an ungodly mess and then leaving and hiding somewhere on lower deck and dashing back after exactly 29 minutes. Again, when I come bursting through the door, there is no Petra and no cleaning. Then I leave the cabin with exactly the same expression in a purport. pertinences as before and this time stay hidden for 31 minutes and then haul ass back again no sighting of

petra but now 1009 is sterilized and gleaming and there's a mint on the new pillows case i scrutinize every inch every surface i pass as i circle the deck during these little experiments no cameras or motion sensors or anything in evidence anywhere that would explain how they know. So for a while I theorize that somehow a special crewman is assigned to each passenger and follows that passenger at all times using extremely sophisticated personal surveillance techniques. And reporting back to the steward H.Q. My movements and activities and projected time of cabin return. For about a day I tried taking evasive actions, whirling to check behind me, popping around corners, darting in and out of gift shops via different doors, etc.

But I never see one flaming sign of anybody engaged in surveillance. By the time I quit trying, I'm feeling half crazed and my counter surveillance measures are drawing frightening looks and even some temple tapping from ten ports, other guests. Next section is called my cabin. I, who am not a true agoraphob but am what might be called a borderline agoraphob or semi-agoraphob, become therefore understandably to love very deeply, Cabin 1009 exterior port. It's made of a fond-colored enamelish polymer and its walls are extremely thick and solid. I can drum annoyingly on the wall above my bed for up to five minutes before my half neighbors pound very faintly back my cabin is 13 size 11 keds long by 12 keds

wide the cabin door has three separate locking technologies in trilingual lifeboat and jacket instructions bolted to its walls and a whole deck of multilingual do not disturb cards hanging from the inside knob right by the door is the wonder closet a complicated honeycomb of shelves and drawers and hangers and cubby holes and a personal fireproof safe. The Wonder Clause is so intricate in its utilization of every available cubic centimeter that all I can say is it must have been designed by a very organized person indeed. Inside her extra chamoischammy blankets and hypoallergenic pillows and plastic celebrity cruise bags of all different sizes. and configurations for your laundry,

optional dry cleaning, etc. The cabin's portal is indeed round, but it's not small in terms of its importance to the room's mood and raison. It resembles a cathedral's rose window. It's made of that kind of very thick glass that tellers at drive-up bank stand behind. You can thump the glass with your fist,

and it won't even vibrate. Every morning in exactly 8.34, a Filipino guy in a blue jumpsuit stands on one of the lifeboats that hang and rows between decks 9 and 10 and sprays my porthole with a hose to get the salt off, which is always fun to watch. Gavin 1009's dimensions are just barely on the good side of the line between the very, very snug and cramped. Packed into its near square are a big good bed and two bedside tables with lamps. and an 18-inch TV with five at-see cable options. There's also a wide enamel desk that doubles as a vanity in a round glass table on which sits a basket that alternately,

that's alternately filled with fresh fruit and husks and rinds of the same. Every time I leave the cabin for one for more than the requisite half hour, I come back to find a new basket of fruit covered in snug blue-tinted plastic rapsed, and sitting on the glass table. It's good, fresh fruit, and it's always there. I've never eaten so much fruit in my life. My bathroom. My bathroom.

Cabin 109's 1009's bathroom deserves an extravagant praise. I've seen more than my share of bathrooms, and this one is bitchingly nice bathroom. It's five and a half kids to the edge of the showers step up, and sign to watch your step. The room is done in white enamel and gleamingly, gleaming stylized, brushed and stainless steel. Its overhead lighting is some kind of blue intensive urofluorescence. That's run through a different fusion filter so that it's diagnostically acute without being brutal. Next to the light switch is an Alisco-Sciroco hair dryer.

that's brazed and right onto the wall and comes on automatically when you take it out of the mount. This giroko is a high setting just about takes your head off. The sink is huge and its bowl is deep without seeming precipitous or ungentle of grade. The good plate mirror covers the whole wall over the sink. The steel soap dish is striated to let sog water out and minimize that annoying underside of the bar, slime. The ingenious consideration of the anti-slime soap dish is particularly affecting. Keep in mind that 1009 is a mid-price, single cabin. Positively, the mind positively reels at what a luxury penthouse cabin's bathroom must be like. Merely enter 1009's bathroom

and they hit the overhead lights and on comes an automatic exhaust van. whose force and aerodynamics gives steam or offensive odor is just no quarter at all. The fan's suction is such that you stand right underneath its alluvred event, and it actually makes your hair stand up straight on your head, which altogether are with the abundantly rippling action of the Skroko hairdriver hairdriver makes for hours of fun in the lavishly lit mirror. The shower itself overachieves in a very big way. The hot settings water is exfoliatingly hot,

but it takes only one preset manipulation of the shower knob to get the perfect 98.6 degree water. My own personal home should have such water pressure. The showerhead's force pins you helplessly to the stall's opposite wall in the head's massage setting, makes your eyes roll up, and your sphincture just about give. This detachable and concussive showerhead can allegedly also be employed for non-hygenic and uneven

and even prudent purposes. What the hell is that word? Having our encouraging excessive interest in sexual matters. I've heard guys from a small University of Texas vacation contingent. The only college age group on the whole Nadir regale one another with tales of 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 the metric ratchet set. Your guess here is as good as mine.

But all this is still small potatoes when compared with 1009's fascinating and potentially malevolent toilet. are a harmonious concordance of elegant form and vigorous function flanked by rolls of tissue so soft as to be without perforates for tearing my toilet paper has above this above it this sign this toilet is connected to a vacuum sewage system please do not throw into the toilet anything than ordinary toilet paper toilet waste and paper. A twilet's flush produces a brief but traumatizing sound, a kind of held-high bee gargle of some gastric disturbance on a cosmic scale. Along with this sound comes a suction so awesomely powerful that it's both scary and strangely comforting.

Your waist seems less removed and hurled away from you with a velocity that lets you feel as though the waste is going to end up someplace so far away, it will have become an abstraction, a kind of existential sewage treatment system. The ocean. Traveling at sea for the first time is a chance to realize that the ocean is not one ocean. The water changes. The Atlantic that seethes off the eastern United States is glaucus and lightless and looks mean. Around Jamaica, though, It's more like a milky aquamarine. Off the Cayman Islands, it's in electric blue and off Cosmel.

It's almost purple. The light changes. Same deal with the beaches. You can tell right away that South Florida's beach sand comes from rocks. It hurts your bare feet and has that sort of mineralish glitter to it. But Ocho Rios in Jamaica is more like dirty sugar. Cozumel is like clean sugar. sugar. In at places along the coast of Grand Cayman, the sand's texture is more like flower,

silicate, its white is dreamy and vaporous as clouds white. The only real constant to the nautical topography of Nadir's cat Caribbean is its unreal and almost retouched looking prettiness. It's impossible to describe right. The closest I can come is to say that it all looks expensive. Table 64's waiter Our waiter's name is as previously mentioned Tibor Mentally I referred him as the tipster But never out loud

Tibber Tibor Tibor Has dismantled my artichokes and my lobsters And taught me that extra well done Is not the only way meat Can be palatable We've sort of bonded I feel

He's 35 and about 5'4 and plump and his movements have the bird-like economy characteristic of small plump, graceful men. His face is at once round and pointy and rosy. His tucks never wrinkles. His hands are soft and pink. Menu-wise, Tibor advises and recommends, but without the hotter than always made me hate the gastropodantic waiters and classy restaurants.

He's omnipresent without being unctuous or oppressive. He's kind and warm and fun. He's the head waiter for table 64 through 67 at all meals. He can carry three trays without precariousness and never looks harried or on the edge the way most multi-table waiters look. He seems like he cares. Tibor's cuteness has been compared by the women at table 64 to that of a button. But I've learned not to let his cuteness fool me.

Tuber is a pro. His commitment to personally instantiating the Nidier's fanatical commitment to excellence is one thing about which he shows no sense of humor. If you fuck with him in this area, he will feel pain and will make no effort to conceal it. On the second night at supper, for example, Tibor was circling the table and asking each of us how our entree was,

and we all regarded this as just one of those perfunctory waiter questions and perfunctorily smiled back and said fine fine and terbor finally stopped he looked down at us all with a pained expression and changed his timber slightly so that it was clear he was addressing the whole table please i ask each is excellent please if excellent you say i am happy if not excellent please please do not say excellent

Let me fix, please. There is no houcher or pedantry or even anger as he addressed us. He just meant what he said. His expression was babe naked, and we heard him, and nothing was perfunctory again. Mornings the tipster wears a red bowtie and smiles grandly and smells faintly of sandalwood. Early seating breakfast is the best time to be with Tibor. Because he's not very busy and he can be initiated into chit-chat without looking pained at neglecting his duties. He doesn't know I'm on the nadir as a pseudo-journalist.

I'm not sure why I haven't told him. Somehow I think it might be make things hard for him. During ESB chit-chat, I never ask him anything about the nadir except for precise descriptions of whatever dorsal fins he's seen. not out of deference to Mr. Darmatitis injunctions, but because I'd just about die of Tabor gotten any trouble about giving away privileged information on my account. Tibur's ambition is someday to return to his native Budapest for good

and with his nadir savings open a sort of newspaper and Barrett-type sidewalk cafe that specializes in something called Cherry Soup, With this in mind, two days from now in Lauderdale, I'm going to tip the tipster way more than the suggested $3 per U.S. per diem, balancing out my total expenses by radically under-tipping both the liplessly sinister matriety and our Somalié, an unctuously creepy salinese guy, the whole table is christened at the velvet vulture, the velvet vulture Port call

Mornings in port are a special time for the semi-agoraphob Because just about everybody else Gets off the ship and goes ashore for organized shore excursions Or for unstructured parapetetics Tour stuff

In the MV Nadeer's upper decks Have been eerily Delicious deserted quality Had the eerily delicious deserted quality of your folks' house when you're home sick as a kid and everybody else has gone. We're docked off Cozumel in Mexico. I'm on Doc 12. I'm on deck 12.

A couple of guys in software company T-shirts jog frantically by every couple of minutes. But other than that, it's just me in the zinc oxide and the hat in about a thousand empty and identically folding deck chairs. The 12 aft towel guy has almost nobody to exercise his zeal. on, and by 10 a.m., I'm on my fifth, Newtow. Here the semi-agorphobe can stand alone at the ship's highest port rail and look pensively out to sea, which off Cozumel is kind of a watery indigo, through which you can see the powdery white of the bottom.

In the middle and distance, underwater coral formations are big cloud shapes of deeper purple. Out past the coral, the water gets progressively darker, in orderly stripes, a phenomenon, I think, has to do with perspective. It's all extremely pretty and peaceful. Besides me, the tau guy and the orbiting joggers, there's only a supine, older lady, reading codependent no more, a man standing up at the fore part of the starboard rail, videotaping the sea. This sad and cadaverous guy who, by the second day I'd christened Captain Video, has tall, hard gray hair and birkenstocks and very thin hairless calves.

He's one of the cruises more prominent eccentrics. Other eccentric include the bloated and dead-eyed guy who sits in the same chair at the same 21 table in the casino every day from noon till 3 a.m., drinking Long Island iced tea and playing 20s. at a narcotized, narcotized, underwater pace. The hairy stomach guy of maybe 50 who sleeps by the pool every minute, even in the rain, a copy of Megatrends open his desk, open on his chest, and the two old couples who sit upright in chairs just inside the clear plastic walls that enclose deck 11. They're moving, watching the ocean in ports, like there's something on TV.

Pretty much everybody on the Nadir qualifies as camera crazy, but Captain Video camcords absolutely everything, including meals, empty hallways, endless games of geriatric bridge, even leaping on the Decc 11's raised stage during Tuesday's pool party to get the crowd from the musician's angle. He's the only passenger besides me,

who I know for a fact is cruising without a relative or a companion and certain additional similarities between him and me tend to make me uncomfortable and I try to avoid him. From deck 12's starboard rail you can look down at the army of Nadir passengers being disgorged by the deck three gangway. They keep pouring out of the door and down the narrow gangway. As each person's sandal hits the pier, a sociolinguistic transformation from cruiser to tourist is affected. A serpentine line of 1300 plus upscale tourists with currency to unload and experiences to experience, stretches all the way down the Cozumel pier, which leads to a kind of meganquas, mega-quonset structure,

where organized shore excursions OSEs and t-shirts and cabs or mopeds in San Miguel into San Miguel are available. The word around good old Table 64 last night was that primitive and increasingly incredibly poor Cozumel, the U.S. dollars, treated like a UFO. They worship it when it lands. Locals alongside the Cozumel Pier are offering Nadi Riots a chance to have their picture taken holding a very large iguana. Yesterday on the Grand Cayman Pier, locals had offered them the chance to have their picture taken with a guy wearing a peg leg and a hook, while off the Nadeer's port bow, a fake pirate ship plowed back and forth across the bay all morning, firing blank broadsides and getting on everybody's nerves. Off to the southeast now another mega cruiser is moving in to dock.

It moves like a force of nature and resists the idea that so much mass is being steered by anything like a hand on a tiller. I can't imagine what trying to maneuver one of these puppies is like into the pier. Parallel parking a semi into a spot the same size as a size, semi with a blindfold on and four tabs of LSD and you might come close. Our docking this morning at sunrise involved an ant-like frenzy of crewmen and shore personnel and an anchor that spilled from the ship's naval and upward of a dozen ropes,

which the crew insists on calling lines. Even though each one is at least the same diameter as a tourist said, I can't convey to you the sheer and surreal scale of everything The towering ship the ropes the anchor the pier The bass lapis lazuli dome of the sky Looking down from a great height At your countryman waddling into poverty-stricken ports In expensive sandals is not one of the funer moments of a 7NC luxury cruise

However There's something inescapably bovine About a herd of American tourists in motion, a certain greedy placidity. I feel guilty by perceived association. I've barely been out of the USA before and never as part of a high income herd in import, even up here above it all on deck 12 watching. I'm newly and unpleasantly conscious of being an American.

The same way I'm always suddenly conscious of being white every time I'm a a lot of non-white people. I can't help imagine us as we appear to them. The board Jamaicans and Mexicans, especially to the non-airian and hard-driven crew of the Nadir. All week I've found myself doing everything I can to distance myself in the crew's eyes from the bovine herd I'm part of. I shoe cameras, I sunglasses and pastel Caribbean wear. I make a big deal. of carrying my own luggage and my own cafeteria tray, and them effusive in my thanks for the slightest service. Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of a special pride to speak extra quietly to the crewmen whose English is poor.

But of course, part of the overall despair of this luxury cruise is that whatever I do, I cannot escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness. Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist, and thus ex-officio, large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, greedy, ashamed, despairing. Up on 12 aft, Captain Video isn't filming now, but he is looking at the harbor, through a square he's made of his hands. He's the type of guy

where you can tell without even looking closely that he's talking to himself. This other white crew ship is docking right next to us, a procedure that apparently demands a lot of coated blasts on its world-ending horn. But maybe the single best visual in the harbor is the group of Naderites, learning to snorkel in the lagoonish waters

just offshore. Off the port bow, left side. I can see a good 150 solid citizens floating face down, motionless, looking like the masked and bloated victims of some hideous mishap. From this height it's a macabre and riveting sight. I've given up looking for dorsal fins in port. It turns out the sharks are never seen in pretty Caribbean ports, though a couple of Jamaicans had lurid, if dubious, stories about,

barracudas that could take off a limb in one surgical drive-by. Now right alongside the Nadir on the other side of the pier is finally docked the cure, the secured MV Dreamword with the peach on white color scheme that I think means it's owned by Norwegian cruise line. 27, the Nadir itself is navy trim on a white furrow. field all the megalines have their own trademark color schemes lime green on white aqua on white robin's egg on white barns red on white white being an invariable constant in deck three dream words deck three now protrudes and almost touches out deck three gangway sort of

obscenely and the dream words passengers identical in all important respects to the to the nadeers passengers are now streaming down the gangway, enassing and moving down the pier, in a kind of canyon of shadows made by the tall walls of the two ships' holes. A lot of the dream words passengers turn and crane to marvel at the size of what's just disgorged them. Captain Video inclined now way over the starboard rail so that only the toes of his sandals are still touching the deck. He's filming them as they look at us. And more than a few of the Dreamwordites, way below, lift their own camp quarters and point them up our way in a kind of retaliatory gesture. And for just a moment, they and Captain Video compose a tab below that looks almost classically postmodern.

Because the Dreamword is lined up right next to us, almost porthole at porthole with its Deck 12's port rail, right up flush against Ardeck 12 starboard rail. The Dreamwords sure shunners and I can stand at the rails and check each other out, like muzzle cars lined up at a stoplight. I can see the Dreamwords rail leaners looking the Nadir up and down. Their face is shiny with high SPF sunblock. The Dreamword is blindingly white, white to a degree that seems somehow aggressive and makes the Nadeers...

It makes the nadeer's white look more like buff or cream. Its snout is a little more tapered and aerodynamic looking than our snout. Its trim is a kind of fluorescent peach, and the beach umbrellas around its deck 11 pools are also peach. Whereas our beach umbrellas are salmon, which has always seemed on given the white and navy motif of the nadir. And now it seems to me ad hoc and shabby. The Dreamward has more pools on Deck 11 than we do, and what looks like a whole another additional pool behind clear glass on Tech 6.

And its pools blue is that distinctive chlorine blue, whereas the Nadir's two small pools are both seawater and kind of icky. On all of its decks all the way down, the Dreamward's cabins have little white balconies for private open-air sea-gazing. its deck 12 has a full court basketball setup with peach-colored nets in backboards as white as communion waivers. I notice that each of the little towel carts on the Dreamwords Deck 12 is manned by its very own towel guy and that their towel guys are rudely Nordic and wear neither sunglasses nor look of Dickensian oppression.

The point is that standing here next to Captain Video looking, I start to feel as, I start to feel an almost prurient envy of the dream word. Okay, I gotta look that up again. Sexual matters, okay, there we go again, purr. I imagine its interior to be cleaner than ours, larger, more lavishly appointed. I imagine the dream word's food being even more varied and punctiliously prepared. Its casinos less depressing, its stage entertainment less cheesy, its toilets. Less menacing.

It's pillow mints, bigger. The little private balcony is outside the dream words. Cabins, in particular, seem far superior to a porthole of bank teller glass, which now seems suddenly chintzy and sad to me. I'm suffering here from a delusion. And I know it's a delusion, this envy of another ship, but still it's painful. Painful. It's also representative of a psychological syndrome that I notice has gotten steadily worse as my luxury cruise wears on. A mental list of dissatisfactions.

That started off picayune, but has quickly become despair grade. I know that the syndrome's cause is not simply the contempt bred of a weak's familiarity with the poor old Nadir, and that the source of all the dissatisfactions isn't than the deer at all, but rather that er-American part of me that craves pampering and passive pleasure, the dissatisfied infant part of me, the part that always and indiscriminately wants. All caps right there. Hence this syndrome by which, for example, just four days ago,

I experienced such embarrassment over the perceived self-reveillance, indulgence of ordering even more gratis food from cabin service that I littered the bed with fake evidence, fake evidence of hard work and missed meals, whereas by last night I found myself looking at my watch in real annoyance after 15 minutes and wondering where the fuck is the cabin service guy with that tray already. And now I notice how the tray's sandwiches are kind of small and how the wedge of dill pickle always soaks into the starboard crust of the bread, and how the port hallway is too narrow to really let me put the used cabin service tray outside 1009's door at night when I'm done eating, so that the tray sits in the cabin all night

and in the morning adulterates the olfactory sterility of 1009 with a smell of rancid horse radish, and how this seems by the luxury cruises fifth day deeply dissatisfying. Death and Conroy notwithstanding were maybe now in a position to appreciate the falsehood of the dark card of celebrities' brochure. For this, the promise to sate the part of me that always and only once is the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy, here isn't that this promise will be kept but that such a promise is capable at all this is a big one this lie 28 footnote 28 says it might as well be quote the big one come to think of it i guess i don't get there where i was thinking he was talking about death but uh did it up and it brings up big apple

pizza that's funny and of course i want to believe it i want to believe that maybe this ultimate to see vacation will be enough pampering and at this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered that my infantile part will be sated at last but the infantile part of me is by its very nature in essence insatiable in fact its whole raison consists of its instability Insatiability, but probably instability works too. In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the insatiable infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction.

And sure enough, after a few days of delight and then adjustment on the Nadir, the pamper swaddled part of me once, that once is now back with a vengeance, might I add. By Wednesday, I'm acutely conscious of the fact that the AC vent and my cabin hisses loudly. In that although I can turn off the reggae music, coming out of the speaker in the cabin, I cannot turn off even the even louder ceiling speaker out in the 10 port hall. Now I notice that when Table 64's towering busboy uses his crumb scoop to clear off the tablecloth between courses,

he never seems to get quite all the crumbs. When Petra makes my bed, not all the hospital corners are exactly the same angle. Most of the nightly stage entertainment and the celebrity show lounge is so bad, it's embarrassing. And in the ice sculptures at the midnight buffet often look hurriedly carved. And the vegetable that comes with my entree

is continuously overcooked and it's impossible to get really numbingly cold water out of 1009's bathroom tap. I'm standing here on deck 12 looking at the dream word, which I bet has cold water that turn your knuckles blue.

Like the Frank Conroy, part of me realizes that I haven't washed a dish or tap my foot in line behind some with multiple coupons at a supermarket checkout in a week. And yet instead of feeling refreshed and renewed, I'm anticipating how totally stressful and demanding and unpleasurable a return to regular landlocked adult life is going to be, especially now that even just the premature removal of a towel by a sepulchral

crewman seems like an assault on my piece, on my basic rights. And the sluggishness of the aft elevator is an outrage. And as I'm getting ready to go down to lunch, I'm mentally drafting a really, really mordant footnote on my single biggest peeve about the Nadir. They don't even have Mr. Pibb. They foist Dr. Pepper on you with a maddeningly unapologetic shrug

when a fool knows that Dr. Pepper is no substitute. for Mr. Pibb, and it's an absolute goddamn travesty, or at best, extremely dissatisfying. Indeed. Next section is Some Organized Fun. Every night, Cabin's steward Petra, when she turns down the bed, leaves on your pillow, along with the day's last mint, and celebrity printed card wishing you sweet dreams in six languages, The next day's Nadir Daily, a little four-page Airsatz newspaper printed on white in a royal blue font. The ND has historical nuggets of upcoming ports, pitches for organized short excursions, and specials in the gift shop,

and stern stuff in boxes with malaprop headlines like quarantines on transit of food and misuse of drug acts 1972. We've rounded the final turn and are steaming on our next return vector from Cozumel toward Key West. And today is one of the weeks two at-sea days when shipboard activities are at their densest and most organized. This is the day I've picked to use the ND as a bediker as I leave cabin 1009 for a period well in excess of a half an hour. publisher of travel guidebooks he's remembered chiefly for the series of guidebooks to which he gave his name and are still published so i'm using the idea as i leave cabin 1009 for a period well in excess of half an hour and plunge headfirst into the experiential fray and keep a precise and detailed log of some really representative activities 10 a.m.

3 simultaneous venues of managed fun All aft on deck 9 Darts tournament Take aim and hit the bullseye Shuffleboard shuffle Join your fellow guests for a morning game Ping pong tournament Meet the crew staff at the tables

Prize to the winners Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread Everything about it suggests infirm synestances and death. It's a game played on the skin of a void and the rasp of the sliding puck is the sound of that skin getting

uprated away bit by bit. I also have a morbid but wholly justified fear of darts stemming from a childhood drama to hair raising to discuss here. I play ping pong for an hour. 11 a.m. Navigation

Lecturer. Join Captain Nico and learn about the ship's engine room, the bridge, and the basic nuts and bolts of the ship's operation. I'm there. The MV Nadir can carry 460,000 gallons of nautical grade diesel fuel. It burns between 40 and 70 tons of this fuel a day, depending on how hard it's traveling. The ship has two turbine engines, one on each side, one big pop-a, and one comparatively little sun. Each engine has a propeller that is 17 feet in diameter and is adjustable through a lateral rotation of 23.5 degrees for a maximum torque. It takes thunder deer 0.9 nautical miles to come to a complete stop from a speed of 18 knots.

Then the deer can go slightly faster in certain kinds of rough seas than it can in calm seas. This for technical reasons that won't fit on the napkin I'm taking notes on. Captain Nico's English is not going to win any elucution ribbons, but he is a veritable blowhole of hard data. He's about my age and height and is just ridiculously good-looking. Footnote 29, something else I've heard or have learned on this, luxury cruises 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 side wobbled lash-batted

growled and hubbard when one of these navally resplendent greek officers went by a phenomenon that i don't imagine helped the greek's humility one bit captain nico wears raybans, but without a touristic fluorescent cord. This is also the day of that my paranoia about Mr. Dermatitis contriving somehow to jettison me from the Nader via Gavin 1009's vacuum suction toilet is at its emotional zenith. And I've decided in advance to keep a real low journalistic profile at this event.

I ask a total of one little innocuous question right at the start, and Captain Nico responds with a witticism. Quote, how we start engines? And not with the key of ignition, I can tell you. That gets a large and rather unkind laugh from the crowd. It turns out that the long, mysterious MV in the M.V. Nadir stands for motorized vessel. The M.V. Nadir cost $250,310,000 U.S. dollars to build. It was christened in Pappenburg, West Germany in 1992 with a bottle of Uzo instead of champagne.

Uzo. That's had that black-lickerish vodka. The Nadeer's Greek, uh, Greek, the Nadeer's three on-board generators produce nine megawatts of power. The ship's bridge turns out to be what lies behind the very intriguing triple-locked bulkhead near the aft towel cart on deck 10 the bridges quote and where the equipments are radars indication of weather and all these things two years of postgraduate study is required of an officer of officer one-a-bees just to get a handle on the navigational math involved and also quote there was much learning for the computers quote captain nico explains that the nadir that the nadeer's

drives to something called GPS, the global positioning system is using satellites above to know the position at all times, which gives this data to the computer. End quote. It emerges that when we're not negotiating ports and peers, a kind of computerized auto captain pilots the ship. Footnote 30, this helps explain why Nadir Captain G. Penigiotakis, penagio, takis, used. seems so phenomenally unbusy, why his real job seems to stand in front of various parts of the Nadeer and try to look vaguely presidential, which he would accept for his habit of wearing, which he would except for his habit of wearing sunglasses inside, which makes him look more like a third world, strong man. The all-male audience here consists of bald, solid, thick-risted, 50-ish men who all look like the kind of guy.

who rises to CEO of a company out of its engineering department instead of some MBA program. A number of them are clearly Navy veterans or yachtsmen or something. They compose a very knowledgeable audience and ask involved questions

about the bore and stroke of the engines, the management of multiradial torque, and the hydrodynamics of mid-ship stabilizers. They're all kinds of men who look like they're smoking cigars, even when they're not. Everybody's complexion is hectic from sun and salt spray and a surfeit of slippery nipples.

A 7NC's mega ship, maximum possible cruising speed is 21.4 knots. No way I'm going to raise my hand in this kind of crowd and ask what a knot is. okay we're only at 1240 p.m. of his first day at sea full of activities of organized um oses what were they organized short excursions there we go I guess not quite short excursions 1240 where are we at 1240 p.m. I seem to be out on nine aft hitting golf balls off an astroturf square into a dense mesh nylon net that balloons impressibly towards the sea when a golf ball hits it. Then a topic shuffleboard continues over the starburn. ominous little holes on the deck, bulkhead and railing, and even my little astroturf square testify to my wisdom and having steered clear of any AM darts tourney.

2 p.m. Now I'm in deck 12's Olympic. health club in the back area in the part that's owned by Steiner of London, a kind of floating spa. And I'm asking to be allowed to watch one of the phytomer ionothermy combination treatment detoxifying inch loss treatments that some of the heftier ladies on board have been raving about. And I'm being told that it's not really a spectator type thing, that there's nakedness involved in that if I have to see it, if I want to see it, I'm going to have to be the subject of one. Between the quoted price of the treatment and some pretty troubling references in the Steiner

of London brochure to electrodes using ferretism and galvanism, I opt to forfeit this bit of managed pampering. If you back off from something really big, the creamy face staffers then try to sell you on a facial, which they say a number of male nadirides have pampered themselves. with this week. But I declined this as well, figuring that at this point in the week, the procedure would consist mostly of exfoliating half-peeled skin. To 30 p.m. Now I'm down in decades' rainbow room for, quote, behind the scenes.

Meet your cruise director, Scott Peterson, and find out what it's really like to work on a cruise ship. Scott Peterson is a tan guy with tall, rigid, hair, a high watt smile, an escargo mustache, and a gleaming Rolex, basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers in a mint green golf shirt. And he's one of my very least favorite celebrity cruise employees, though with Scott Peterson's case, it's one of my least favorite celebrity cruise employees. Though with Scott Peterson, it's a mildly enjoyable annoyance rather than the terrified loathing I feel for Mr. Dermatitis. The very best way to describe Scott Peterson's demeanor is that it looks like he's constantly

posing for a photograph nobody is taking. He mounts the rainbow room's low brass days, reverses his chair, sits like a cabaret singer, and holds forth. There may be 50 people attending and I have to admit that some of them seem like Scott Peterson a lot, and to enjoy his talk. And talk that, not surprisingly, turns out to be more about what it's like to be Scott Peterson than what it's like to work on board the good old knit year. Topics covered include where and under what circumstances Scott Peterson grew up, how Scott Peterson got interested in cruise ships,

how Scott Peterson and his college roommate got their first jobs together on a cruise. ship, some hilarious boo-boos in Scott Peterson's first months on the job. Every celebrity Scott Peterson has personally met and shaken the hand of. How much Scott Peterson loves the people he gets to meet while working on cruise ships. How much Scott Peterson loves just working on a cruise ship in general. How Scott Peterson met the future, Mrs. Scott Peterson working on a cruise ship and how Mrs. Scott Peterson now works on a different cruise ship, how challenging it is, to sustain an intimate relationship as warm and in all respects

wonderful as that of Mr. and Mrs. Scott Peterson when you work on a different cruise ship and lay eyes on each other only about once every sixth week, except that now Scott Peterson's grateful to be able to announce that Mrs. Scott Peterson happens to be on a well-earned vacation and is a rare treat here this week cruising on the M.V. Nadir with him and is, as a matter of fact, right here with us in the audience today. And wouldn't Mrs. Scott Peterson like to stand up and take a bow? That might be the climax of the article right there. 305 p.m. I've darted for a minute into Deck 7's Celebrity Show Lounge to catch some of the rehearsals for tonight's climactic passenger talent show.

Two crew cuts and badly, two crew cut and badly burned you of Texas guys are doing a minimally choreographed dance number to a recording of Shake Your Groove thing. Assistant Cruise director Dave the Bingo Boy is coordinating activities from a canvas director's chair at stage left. A septuagenarian, meaning 70-year-old,

I only know that because that's what Joe Biden and Donald Trump are. I think Clinton and Bush as well. A septuagenarian from Halifax, Virginia, tells six jokes and sings one day at a time. Sweet Jesus. A retired Century 21 realtor from Idaho does a long drum solo to caravan. The climactic passenger talent show is apparently at 7NC tradition. a 7-N-Z tradition, as was Tuesday's special costume party. Some of the Nigerites are deeply into this stuff and have brought their own costumes and props.

A lithe Canadian couple does a tango complete with pointy black shoes and a rose in teeth. The finale is apparently going to be four consecutive stand-up comedy routines delivered by very, very old men. these men totter on one after the other one has a three-footed cane another a necktie that looks uncannily like a din for omelet another an excruciating stutter i guess i'll leave that one in what follower four successive interchangeable routines where the manner and humor are like exhumed at time capsules of the 1950s jokes about how impossible it is to understand women, about how very much men want to play golf, and how their wives try to keep them from playing golf, etc. The routines have the same kind of flamboyant unhipness that makes my own grandparents object of my pity, my pity and awe and embarrassment all at the same time.

One of the senescent quartet refers, one of the things. the senescent quartet refers to his appearance or night as a gig. 3.20 p.m. The ND neglects to mention that the trap shooting is a competitive organized activity. The charge is $1 shot, but you have to purchase your shots in sets of 10. There's a large and vaguely gun-shaped plaque for the best score. I arrive at Aed aft late. A male Nadeirite is already shooting, and several other males, several other males have formed a line and are waiting to shoot.

The Nadeer's wake is a big fizzy V, way below Aft, meaning back. Two sullen Greek enceos and earmuffs run the show. I am seventh and last in line. The other guys refer to the targets as pigeons, but what they really look like is little discus is painted the dayglow orange of expensive huntingware. The orange, I posit, is for ease of visual tracking, and the color must really help because the trim bearded guy in aviator glasses currently shooting is wreaking absolute devastation in the air over the stern.

I assume you already know the basic trap shooting conventions from move, TV, the lackey at the weird little catapultish device, the bracing and pointing in the order to pull, the combination thud and the quatwang of the catapult, the brisk crack of the weapon and the mid-air disintegration of the luckless pigeon. Everybody in line is male, though there are a number of females in the crowd that's watching the competition from the nine-aft balcony above and behind. us. From the line watching, three things are striking. A. What on TV is a brisk crack? Is here a wooing roar? That apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like. B. Trap shooting looks comparatively easy because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other.

so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the deer's wake. C, a clay pigeon when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking mid-flight parapetia, peripataya, erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way, that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster. All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that of these six guys, three have military combat backgrounds.

Another two are LL Bean model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various factors. flying species with their Papa in southern Canada. And the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed velvet line case, but also his own trap shooting range in his backyard in North Carolina. Footnote 31 says literally just one singular exclamation point. That's funny.

Meagely enough, I've actually been to someone. one's private clay shooting range on their North Carolina. Yards are pretty big up there, especially in the mountainous regions. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs, they give me, have somebody else's ear oil on them, and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small, pubic spirals of which are still exiting from the bare. barrel of the Carrera vet, or Korea vet, who preceded me, and it's tied for first with

10 for 10. The two brothers are the only entrance, even near my age. Both got scores of 9 out of 10, and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep school slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek Encio seem extremely bored. I'm handed the heavy gun and told to be bracing a hip against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against no not the shoulder of my hold the gun arm but the shoulder of my pull the trigger arm

my initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop and roll Let's not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that yes, my own trap shooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrance scores. Then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating trap shooting from an NC mega ship. And then we'll move on. One, a certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone who knows anything about firearms. to converge on you, all at the same time with the cautions and advice and handy tips.

Number two, a lot of the advice in one boils down to exhortations to lead. Lead the launched pigeon, lead it, but nobody explains whether this means that the guns barrel should move across the sky with the pigeon, or should instead sort of lie in a static ambush along some point in the pigeon's projected path. Three, whatever a hair trigger is, is a shotgun does not have one. Four, if you've never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. Five, the well-known kick of a fired shotgun is no misnomer.

It knocks you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which when you're holding a still loaded gun results in mass screaming and ducking, and then on the next shot, a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the nine-aft gallery above. Finally, six, know that an unshot discus movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean sky is sunlike. i.e. orange and parabolic, and right to left, and that its disappearance into the sea is edge first and splashless and sad. The next section is the headline entertainment. Other celebrity Showtime Headline Entertainment this week

have included a Vietnamese comedian who juggles chainsawls, a husband-and-wife team that specializes in Broadway love melodies, and most notably a singing impressionist named Paul Tanner who made simply an enormous impression on Table 64's, Trudy, and Esther, and his impressions of Inglebert, Humpardick, Tom Chones, and Perry Como were apparently so stirring that a special popular demand encore performance

by Paul Tanner has been hastily scheduled to follow tomorrow night's climactic passenger talent show. For tonight, though, the Nadir Daily announces, Celebrity Showtime, Celebrity Cruises proudly presents hypnotist Nigel Ellery. Hypnotist Nigel Ellery is British and looks uncannily like a 1950s B-movie villain. Introducing him, Cruise director Scott Peterson, informs us that Nigel Ellery has had the honor of hypnotizing both Queen Elizabeth II and the Dalai Lama. footnote 32 not one would presume at the same time

Nigel Ellery's act combines hypnotic hijinks with rather standard boarshot belt patter and audience abuse it ends up being such an absurdly suitable microcosm of the week's whole 7 and see luxury cruise experience that it's almost like a setup some weird form of pseudo-journalistic pampering first off we learned that not everyone is susceptible to serious hypnosis. Nigel Ellery puts the celebrity show lounge's whole 300 plus crowd through some simple in-your-seat tests to determine who is suggestively gifted enough to participate in the quote fun to come.

Footnote 33 says, I, who know from heart experience that I am hypnotizable, think about sports, statistics, and deliberately flunk a couple of tests to avoid getting up there. Second, when the six most suitable subjects all still locked in their complex contortions from the in-your-seat tests are assembled on stage, Nigel Ellery spends a very long time reassuring them and us that absolutely nothing will happen that they do not wish to have happen. He then persuades a young lady from Akron That a loud Hispanic voice is issuing from the left cup of her bresir Another lady is induced to smell something ghastly Coming off the man in the chair next to her

A man who himself believes the seat of his chair is periodically Heating to 100 degrees Celsius The other three subjects respectively flamenco Believe they're not just nude but we woefully ill endowed and made to shout, Mommy, I want to weewee, when Nigel Ellery tells them, good night. The audience laughs very hard at all the right times. And there is something genuinely funny,

not to mention symbolic about watching these well-dressed U.S. adult cruisers behave strangely for no reason they understand. It is as if the hypnosis enables them to construct fantasy so vivid, that the subjects do not even know their fantasies, which makes it, of course, funny. Maybe the single most strikingly comprehensive seven-nancy symbol, though, is Nigel Ellery himself. The hypnotist's boredom and hostility are not only undisguised, but incorporated kind of ingeniously into the entertainment itself.

Ellery's boredom gives him the same air of weary expertise that makes us trust doctors and police and his hostile stage persona is what gets the biggest roars of approval and laughter from the crowd. He does unkind imitations of people's U.S. accents. He ridicules questions from the subjects and audience. He makes his eyes burn reputinishly and tells people they're going to wet the bed at exactly 3 a.m. Each moment of naked ill will is followed by a palms out assurance that he's just, just kidding, and that he loves us and that we are simply a marvelous audience. The spectators mostly middle-aged, it looks like, rock back and forth with mirth and

slap their knees and dab at their eyes with their hankies. For me, at the end of a full day of managed fun, Nigel Ellery's act is not particularly astounding or side-splitting or entertaining. What it is is weird. There's something crucially key about luxury cruises and evidence here, being entertained by someone who clearly dislikes you, and feeling that you deserve that dislike at the same time you resented. The show's climax has the six subjects all lined up doing syncopated rocket kicks because my own dangerous mesmeric susceptibility makes it important that I not follow Ellery's hypnotic suggestions too closely. or get too deeply involved, I find myself in my plush seat going further and further away, sort of creatively visualizing an epiphanic crank Conroy type moment of my own,

trying to see the hypnotist and the subjects and audience and ship itself with the eyes of someone not aboard imagining the envying a dear right at this moment all lit up and streaming north in the dark at night with a strong west wind pulling the moon backward through a skein of clouds the nadir's a constellation complexly aglow angelically white festival imperial yes this it would look like a floating palace to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night alone in a dinghy or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, treading water out of sight of land. This deep dissonance, dissociative trance, Nigel Ellery's true unconscious gift to me.

Lasted all through the next day and night. This period I spent entirely in Cabin 1009 in my bed, mostly looking out the spotless portal with trays and rinds all around me. feeling a little bit dulled, but mostly good. Good to be on the nadir, and good to know that soon I would get off the ship, that I had survived in a way, being pampered to death in a way, and so I stayed in bed. And even though the trance made me miss the final night's talent show

and midnight farewell buffet and Saturdays docking, at which there was apparently even more crape and waving an explosive goodwill, and a chance to have my after photo taken with Captain G. Panagia-Tacus, re-entry into the stresses and demands of quotidian landlocked real-world life wasn't nearly as bad as a week of absolutely nothing had led me to fear. Shipping out on the nearly lethal comforts of a luxury cruise by David Foster Wallace. Thanks for watching or listening. And thanks for the continued support guys on the, whether on YouTube in the comments, on Patreon, or in many other ways you guys always show me love and support.

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