A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (46 page)

You can thump the glass with your fist w/o give or vibration. It’s really good glass. Every morning at exactly 0834h. a Filipino guy in a blue jumpsuit stands on one of the lifeboats that hang in rows between Decks 9 and 10 and sprays my porthole with a hose, to get the salt off, which is fun to watch.

Cabin 1009’s dimensions are just barely on the good side of the line between very very snug and cramped. Packed into its near-square are a big good bed and two bedside tables w/ lamps and an 18" TV with five At-Sea Cable
^®
options, two of which show continuous loops of the Simpson trial.
⁶²
There’s also a white enamel desk that doubles as a vanity, and a round glass table on which is a basket that’s alternately filled with fresh fruit and with husks and rinds of same. I don’t know whether it’s SOP or a subtle journalistic perq, but every time I leave the cabin for more than the requisite half-hour I come back to find a new basket of fruit, covered in snug blue-tinted Saran, on the glass table. It’s good fresh fruit and it’s always there. I’ve never eaten so much fruit in my life.

Cabin 1009’s bathroom deserves extravagant praise. I’ve seen more than my share of bathrooms, and this is one bitchingly nice bathroom. It is five-and-a-half Keds to the edge of the shower’s step up and sign to Watch Your Step. The room’s done in white enamel and gleaming brushed and stainless steel. Its overhead lighting is luxury lighting, some kind of blue-intensive Eurofluorescence that’s run through a diffusion filter so it’s diagnostically acute without being brutal.
⁶³
Right by the light switch is an Alisco Sirocco-brand hairdryer that’s brazed right onto the wall and comes on automatically when you take it out of the mount; the Sirocco’s
High
setting just about takes your head off. Next to the hairdryer there’s both 115v and 230v sockets, plus a grounded 110v for razors.

The sink is huge and its bowl deep without seeming precipitous or ungentle of grade. Good C.C. Jensen 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. The mind positively reels at what a luxury-penthouse-type cabin’s bathroom must be like.
⁶⁴

And so but simply enter 1009’s bathroom and hit the overhead lights and on comes an automatic exhaust fan whose force and aerodynamism give steam or your more offensive-type odors just no quarter at all.
⁶⁵
The fan’s suction is such that if you stand right underneath its louvered vent it makes your hair stand straight up on your head, which together with the concussive and abundantly rippling action of the Sirocco hairdryer makes for hours of fun in the lavishly lit mirror.

The shower itself overachieves in a big way. The Hot setting’s water is exfoliatingly hot, but it takes only one preset manipulation of the shower-knob to get perfect 98.6° water. My own personal home should have such water pressure: the showerhead’s force pins you helplessly to the stall’s opposite wall, and at 98.6° the head’s MASSAGE setting makes your eyes roll up and your sphincter just about give.
⁶⁶
The showerhead and its flexible steel line are also detachable, so you can hold the head and direct its punishing stream just at e.g. your particularly dirty right knee or something.
⁶⁷

Toiletry-wise, flanking the sink’s mirror are broad shallow bolted steel minibaskets with all sorts of free stuff in them. There’s Caswell-Massey Conditioning Shampoo in a convenient airplane-liquor-size bottle. There’s Caswell-Massey Almond and Aloe Hand and Body Emulsion With Silk. There’s a sturdy plastic shoehorn and a chamois mitt for either eyeglasses or light shoeshining—both these items are the navy-blue-on-searing-white that are Celebrity’s colors.
⁶⁸
There’s not one but
two
fresh showercaps at all times. There’s good old unpretentious unswishy Safeguard soap. There’s washcloths w/o nubble or nap, and of course towels you want to propose to.

In the vestibule’s Wondercloset are extra chamois blankets and hypoallergenic pillows and plastic CELEBRITY CRUISES—emblazoned bags of all different sizes and configurations for your laundry and optional dry cleaning, etc.
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But all this is still small potatoes compared to 1009’s fascinating and potentially malevolent toilet. A harmonious concordance of elegant form and vigorous function, flanked by rolls of tissue so soft as to be without the usual perforates for tearing, my toilet has above it this sign:

THIS TOILET IS CONNECTED TO A
VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM.
PLEASE DO NOT THROW INTO THE TOILET ANYTHING THAN ORDINARY TOILET WASTE AND TOILET PAPER
⁷⁰

Yes that’s right a
vacuum toilet
. And, as with the exhaust fan above, not a lightweight or unambitious vacuum. The toilet’s flush produces a brief but traumatizing sound, a kind of held high-B gargle, as of some gastric disturbance on a cosmic scale. Along with this sound comes a concussive suction so awesomely powerful that it’s both scary and strangely comforting—your waste seems less removed than
hurled
from you, and hurled with a velocity that lets you feel as though the waste is going to end up someplace so far away from you that it will have become an abstraction… a kind of existential-level sewage treatment.
⁷¹
,
⁷²

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 U.S. is glaucous and lightless and looks mean. Around Jamaica, though, it’s more like a milky aquamarine, and translucent. Off the Cayman Islands it’s an electric blue, and off Cozumel it’s almost purple. Same sort of deal with the beaches. You can tell right away that south Florida’s sand is descended from rocks: it hurts your bare feet and has that sort of minerally glitter to it. But Ocho Rios’s beach is more like dirty sugar, and Cozumel’s is like clean sugar, and at places along the coast of Grand Cayman the sand’s texture is more like flour, silicate, its white as dreamy and vaporous as clouds’ white. The only real constant to the nautical topography of the m.v.
Nadir
’s Caribbean is something about its unreal and almost retouched-looking prettiness
⁷³
—it’s impossible to describe quite right, but the closest I can come is to say that it all looks:
expensive
.

Mornings in port are a special time for the semi-agoraphobe, because just about everybody else gets off the ship and goes ashore for Organized Shore Excursions or for unstructured peripatetic tourist stuff, and the m.v.
Nadir
’s upper decks have the eerily delicious deserted quality of your folks’ house when you’re home sick as a kid and everybody else is off at work and school, etc. Right now it’s 0930h. on 15 March (Ides Wednesday) and we’re docked off Cozumel, Mexico. I’m on Deck 12. A couple guys in software-company T-shirts jog fragrantly by every couple minutes,
⁷⁴
but other than that it’s just me and the ZnO and hat and about a thousand empty and identically folded high-quality deck chairs. The 12-Aft Towel Guy has almost nobody to exercise his zeal on, and by l000h. I’m on my fifth new towel.

Here the semi-agoraphobe can stand alone at the ship’s highest port rail and gaze pensively out to sea. The sea off Cozumel is a kind of watery indigo through which you can see the powder-white of the bottom. In the middle distance, underwater coral formations are big cloud-shapes of deep purple. You can see why people say of calm seas that they’re “glassy”: at l000h. the sun assumes a kind of Brewster’s Angle w/r/t the surface and the harbor lights up as far as the eye can see: the water moves a million little ways at once, and each move makes a sparkle. Out past the coral, the water gets progressively darker in orderly baconish stripes—I think this phenomenon has to do with perspective. It’s all extremely pretty and peaceful. Besides me and the T.G. and the orbiting joggers, there’s only a supine older lady reading
Codependent No More
and a man standing way 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, and he is one of the cruise’s more prominent eccentrics.
⁷⁵
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 onto Deck 11’s raised stage during Pool Party to get the crowd from the musicians’ angle. You can tell that the magnetic record of Captain Video’s Megacruise experience is going to be this Warholianly dull thing that is exactly as long as the Cruise itself. Captain Video’s the only passenger besides me who I know for a fact is cruising without a relative or companion, and certain additional similarities between C.V. and me (the semi-agoraphobic reluctance to leave the ship in port, for one thing) tend to make me uncomfortable, and I try to avoid him as much as possible.

The semi-agoraphobe can also stand at Deck 12’s starboard rail and look way down at the army of
Nadir
passengers being disgorged by the Deck 3 egress. They keep pouring out the door and down the narrow gangway. As each person’s sandal hits the pier, a sociolinguistic transformation from
cruiser
to
tourist
is effected. At this very moment, 1300+ upscale tourists with currency to unload and experiences to experience and record compose a serpentine line stretching all the way down the Cozumel pier, which pier is poured cement and a good quarter-mile long and leads to the TOURISM CENTER,
⁷⁶
a kind of mega-Quonset structure where Organized Shore Excursions
⁷⁷
and cabs or mopeds into San Miguel are available. The word around good old Table 64 last night was that in primitive and incredibly poor Cozumel the U.S. dollar is treated like a UFO: “They worship it when it lands.”

Locals along the Cozumel pier are offering
Nadir
ites 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 hook, while off the
Nadir
’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.

The
Nadir
’s crowds move in couples and quartets and groups and packs; the line undulates complexly. Everybody’s shirt is some kind of pastel and is festooned with the cases of recording equipment, and 85% of the females have white visors and wicker purses. And everybody down below has on sunglasses with this year’s fashionable accessory, a padded fluorescent cord that attaches to the glasses’ arms so the glasses can hang around your neck and you can put them on and take them off a lot.
⁷⁸

Off to my right (southeast), now, another Megacruiser is moving in for docking someplace that must be pretty close to us, judging by its approach-vector. 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 into the pier is like. Parallel parking a semi into a spot the same size as the semi with a blindfold on and four tabs of LSD in you might come close. There’s no empirical way to know: they won’t even let me near the ship’s Bridge, not after the
au-jus
snafu. Our docking this morning at sunrise involved an antlike frenzy of crewmen and shore personnel and an anchor
⁷⁹
that spilled from the ship’s navel and upward of a dozen ropes complexly knotted onto what look like giant railroad ties studding the pier. The crew insist on calling the ropes “lines” even though each one is at least the same diameter as a tourist’s head.

I cannot convey to you the sheer and surreal scale of everything: the towering ship, the ropes, the ties, the anchor, the pier, the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky. The Caribbean is, as ever, odorless. The floor of Deck 12 is tight-fitted planks of the same kind of corky and good-smelling wood you see in saunas.

Looking down from a great height at your countrymen waddling in expensive sandals into poverty-stricken ports is not one of the funner moments of a 7NC Luxury Cruise, however. There is something inescapably
bovine
about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity about them. Us, rather. In port we automatically become
Peregrinator americanus, Die Lumpenamerikaner
. The Ugly Ones. For me, boviscopophobia
⁸⁰
is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port. It’s in port that I feel most implicated, guilty by perceived association. I’ve barely been out of the U.S.A. before, and never as part of a high-income herd, and in port—even up here above it all on Deck 12, just 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 around a lot of nonwhite people. I cannot help imagining us as we appear to them, the impassive Jamaicans and Mexicans,
⁸¹
or especially to the non-Aryan preterite 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, to somehow unimplicate myself: I eschew cameras and sunglasses and pastel Caribbeanwear; I make a big deal of carrying my own cafeteria tray and am effusive in my thanks for the slightest service. Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor.