A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (62 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁹⁷
Duh.

⁹⁸
Heavy expensive art-carved sets are for dorks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of that particular bit of Managed
Fun. This will, at any rate, explain the 1600h. – 1700h. lacuna in today’s p.&d. log.

¹¹²
All week the Englerites have been a fascinating subcultural study in their own right—moving only in herds and having their
own special Organized Shore Excursions and constantly reserving big party-rooms with velveteen ropes and burly guys standing
by them with their arms crossed checking credentials—but there hasn’t been room in this essay to go into any serious Englerology.

¹¹³
(not—mercifully—“bowal thrusters”)

¹¹⁴
In other words, the self-made brass-balled no-bullshit type of older U.S. male whom you least want the dad to turn out to
be when you go over to a girl’s house to take her to a movie or something with dishonorable intentions rattling around in
the back of your mind—an ur-authority figure.

¹¹⁵
This helps explain why Captain G. Panagiotakis usually seems so phenomenally unbusy, why his real job seems to be to stand
in various parts of the
Nadir
and try to look vaguely presidential, which he would (look presidential) except for the business of wearing sunglasses inside,
^115a
which makes him look more like a Third World strongman.

^115a
All the ship’s officers wore sunglasses inside, it turned out, and always stood off to the side of everything with their
hands behind their backs, usually in groups of three, conferring hieratically in technical Greek.

¹¹⁶
As God is my witness no more fruit ever again in my whole life.

¹¹⁷
And it’s just coffee qua coffee—it’s not Blue Mountain Hazlenut Half-Caf or Sudanese Vanilla With Special Chicory Enzymes
or any of that bushwa. The
Nadir
’s is a level-headed approach to coffee that I hereby salute.

¹¹⁸
One of very few human beings I’ve ever seen who is both blond and murine-looking, Ernst today is wearing white loafers, green
slacks, and a flared sportcoat whose pink I swear can be described only as menstrual.

¹¹⁹
(the pole)