A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (60 page)

(2) From Frank Conroy (with
the small sigh that precedes a certain kind of weary candor): “I prostituted myself.”

³⁸
This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad ( of which there are a lot) can never be any kind
of real art: an ad has no status as gift, i.e. it’s never really
for
the person it’s directed at.

³⁹
(with the active complicity of Professor Conroy, I’m afraid)

⁴⁰
This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry; and noplace in
my experience have I been on the receiving end of as many Professional Smiles as I am on the
Nadir
, maître d’s, Chief Stewards, Hotel Managers’ minions, Cruise Director—their P.S.’s all come on like switches at my approach.
But also back on land at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, on and on. You know this smile—the strenuous contraction
of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement—the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies
nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers
and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high
doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking
people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses
is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?

Who
do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?

And yet the Professional Smile’s absence now
also
causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE
at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect
of a service worker’s scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional
Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting
not the counterman’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of
professionalism
in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.

⁴¹
(Which by the way trust me, I used to lifeguard part-time, and fuck this SPF hooha: good old ZnO will keep your nose looking
like a newborn’s.)

⁴²
In further retrospect, I think the only thing I really persuaded the 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
au-jus
-as-shark-bait request to destroy my credibility with Dermatitis before I even got in to see him.

⁴³
One of Celebrity Cruises’ slogans asserts that they Look Forward To Exceeding Your Expectations—they say it a lot, and
they are sincere, though they are either disingenuous about or innocent of this Excess’s psychic consequences.

⁴⁴
(to either Deck 11’s pools or Deck 12’s Temple of Ra)

⁴⁵
Table 64’s waiter is Tibor, a Hungarian and a truly exceptional person, about whom if there’s any editorial justice you will
learn a lot more someplace below.

⁴⁶
Not until Tuesday’s lobster night at the 5
C.R. did I really emphatically understand the Roman phenomenon of the vomitorium.

⁴⁷
(not invasively or obtrusively or condescendingly)

⁴⁸
Again, you never have to bus your tray after eating at the Windsurf, because the waiters leap to take them, and again the
zeal can be a hassle, because if you get up just to go get another peach or something and still have a cup of coffee and some
yummy sandwich crusts you’ve been saving for last a lot of times you come back and the tray and the crusts are gone, and I
personally start to attribute this oversedulous busing to the reign of Hellenic terror the waiters labor under.

⁴⁹
The many things on the
Nadir
that were wood-grain but not real wood were such marvelous and painstaking imitations of wood that a lot of times it seemed
like it would have been simpler and less expensive simply to have used real wood.

⁵⁰
Two broad staircases, Fore and Aft, both of which reverse their zag-angle at each landing, and the landings themselves have
mirrored walls, which is wickedly great because via the mirrors you can check out female bottoms in cocktail dresses ascending
one flight above you without appearing to be one of those icky types who check out female bottoms on staircases.

⁵¹
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 Vacs and
spot-remover and all-trace-of-odor-eradicator chemicals applied by this Elite Special Forces-type crew.

⁵²
By the way, the ethnic makeup of the
Nadir
’s crew is a melting-pot mélange on the order of like a Benetton commercial, and it’s a constant challenge to trace the racio-geographical
makeup of the employees’ various hierarchies. All the big-time officers are Greek, but then it’s a Greek-owned ship so what
do you expect. Them aside, it at first seems like there’s some basic Eurocentric caste system in force: waiters, bus-boys,
beverage waitresses, sommeliers, casino dealers, entertainers, and stewards seem mostly to be Aryans, while the porters and
custodians and swabbies tend to be your swarthier types—Arabs and Filipinos, Cubans, West Indian blacks. But it turns out
to be more complex than that, because the Chief Stewards and Chief Sommeliers and maître d’s who so beadily oversee the Aryan
servants are
themselves
swarthy and non-Aryan—e.g. our maître d’ at the 5
C.R. is Portuguese, with the bull neck and heavy-lidded grin of a Teamsters official, and gives the impression of needing
only some very subtle prearranged signal to have a $10000-an-hour prostitute or unimaginable substances delivered to your
cabin; and our whole T64 totally loathes him for no single pinpointable reason, and we’ve all agreed in advance to fuck him
royally on the tip at week’s end.

⁵³
This is counting the Midnight Buffet, which tends to be a kind of lamely lavish Theme-slash-Costume-Partyish thing, w/ Theme-related
foods—Oriental, Caribbean, Tex-Mex—and which I plan in this essay to mostly skip except to say that Tex-Mex Night out
by the pools featured what must have been a seven-foot-high ice sculpture of Pancho Villa that spent the whole party dripping
steadily onto the mammoth sombrero of Tibor, Table 64’s beloved and extremely cool Hungarian waiter, whose contract forces
him on Tex-Mex Night to wear a serape and a straw sombrero with a 17" radius
^53a
and to dispense Four Alarm chili from a steam table placed right underneath an ice sculpture, and whose pink and birdlike
face on occasions like this expressed a combination of mortification and dignity that seem somehow to sum up the whole plight
of postwar Eastern Europe.

^53a
(He let me measure it when the reptilian maître d’ wasn’t looking.)

⁵⁴
(I know, like I’m sure this guy even cares.)

⁵⁵
This was primarily because of the semi-agoraphobia—I’d have to sort of psych myself up to leave the cabin and go accumulate
experiences, and then pretty quickly out there in the general population my will would break and I’d find some sort of excuse
to scuttle back to 1009. This happened quite a few times a day.

⁵⁶
(This FN right here’s being written almost a week after the Cruise ended, and I’m still living mainly on these hoarded mint-centered
chocolates.)

⁵⁷
The answer to why I don’t just ask Petra how she does it is that Petra’s English is extremely limited and primitive, and
in sad fact I’m afraid my whole deep feeling of attraction and connection to Petra the Slavanian steward has been erected
on the flimsy foundation of the only two English clauses she seems to know, one or the other of which clauses she uses in
response to every statement, question, joke, or protestation of undying devotion: “Is no problem” and “You are a funny thing.”

⁵⁸
(At sea this is small agorapotatoes, but in port, once the doors open and the gangway extends, it represents a true choice
and is thus agoraphobically valid.)

⁵⁹
“1009” indicates that it’s on Deck 10, and “Port” refers to the side of the ship it’s on, and “Exterior” means that I have
a window. There are also, of course, “Interior” cabins off the inner sides of the decks’ halls, but I hereby advise any prospective
7NC passenger with claustrophobic tendencies to make sure and specify “Exterior” when making cabin-reservations.

⁶⁰
The non-U.S. agoraphobe will be heartened to know that this deck includes “BITTE NICHT STÖREN,” “PRIÈRE DE NE PAS DÉRANGER,”
“SI PREGA NON DISTURBARE,” and (my personal favorite) “FAVOR DE NO MOLESTAR.”

⁶¹
If you’re either a little kid or an anorectic you can probably sit on this ledge to do your dreamy contemplative sea-gazing,
but a raised and buttock-hostile lip at the ledge’s outer border makes this impractical for a full-size adult.

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

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

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

⁶⁵
1009’s bathroom always smells of a strange but not unnice Norwegian disinfectant whose scent resembles what it would smell
like if someone who knew the exact organochemical composition of a lemon but had never in fact smelled a lemon tried to synthesize
the scent of a lemon. Kind of the same relation to a real lemon as a Bayer’s Children’s Aspirin to a real orange.