A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (44 page)

And the elevator’s made of glass and is noiseless, and the hostesses smile slightly and gaze at nothing as all together we ascend, and it’s a very close race which of these two hostesses smells better in the enclosed chill.

And now we’re passing little teak-lined shipboard shops with Gucci, Waterford and Wedgwood, Rolex and Raymond Weil, and there’s a crackle in the jazz and an announcement in three languages about Welcome and
Willkommen
and how there’ll be a Compulsory Lifeboat Drill an hour after sailing.

At 1515h. I am installed in
Nadir
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.

6

Departure at 1630h. turns out to be a not untasteful affair of crepe and horns. Each deck’s got walkways outside, with railings made of some kind of really good wood. It’s now overcast, and the ocean way below is dull-colored and frothy, etc. It smells less fishy or oceany than just salty. Our horn is even more planet-shattering than the
Westerdam
’s horn. Most of the people exchanging waves with us are cruisers along the rails of the decks of other 7NC Megaships, also just leaving, so it’s a surreal little scene—it’s hard not to imagine all of us cruising the whole Western Caribbean in a parallel pack, all waving at one another the entire time. Docking and leaving are the two times a Megacruiser’s Captain is actually steering the ship; and m.v.
Nadir
Captain G. Panagiotakis has wheeled us around and pointed our snout at the open sea, and we, large and white and clean, are under sail.

7

The whole first two days and nights are bad weather, with high-pitched winds and heaving seas, spume
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lashing the porthole’s glass, etc. For 40+ hours it’s more like a Luxury North Sea Cruise, and the Celebrity staff goes around looking regretful but not apologetic,
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and in all fairness it’s hard to find a way to blame Celebrity Cruises Inc. for the weather.
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On gale-force days like the first two, passengers are advised to enjoy the view from the railings on the lee side of the
Nadir
. The one other guy who ever joins me in trying out the non-lee side has his glasses blown off by the wind, and he does not appreciate my remarking to him that round-the-ear cable arms are better for high-wind view-enjoying. I keep waiting to see somebody from the crew wearing the traditional yellow slicker, but no luck. The railing I do most of my contemplative gazing from is on Deck 10, so the sea is way below, and the sounds of it slopping and heaving around are far-away and surflike, and visually it’s a little like looking down into a flushing toilet. No fins in view.

In heavy seas, hypochondriacs are kept busy taking their gastric pulse every couple seconds and wondering whether what they’re feeling is maybe the onset of seasickness and/or gauging the exact level of seasickness they’re feeling. Seasickness-wise, though, it turns out that heavy seas are sort of like battle: there’s no way to know ahead of time how you’ll react. A test of the deep and involuntary stuff of a man. I myself turn out not to get seasick. An apparent immunity, deep and unchosen, and slightly miraculous, given that I have every other kind of motion sickness listed in the
PDR
and cannot take anything for it.
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For the whole first rough-sea day I puzzle about the fact that every other passenger on the m.v.
Nadir
looks to have received identical little weird shaving cuts below their left ear—which in the case of female passengers seems especially strange—until I learn that the little round Band-Aidish things on everybody’s neck are these special new nuclear-powered transdermal motion sickness
patches
, which apparently now nobody with any kind of clue about 7NC Luxury Cruising leaves home without.

Patches notwithstanding, a lot of the passengers get seasick anyway, these first two howling days. It turns out that a seasick person really does look green, though it’s an odd, ghostly green, pasty and toadish, and more than a little corpselike when the seasick person is dressed in formal dinnerwear.

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’s maybe coming on, etc., is a big topic of conversation at good old Table 64 in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant.
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Common suffering and fear of suffering turn out to be a terrific icebreaker, and ice-breaking is important, because on a 7NC you eat at the same designated table with the same companions all seven nights.
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Discussing nausea and vomiting while eating intricately prepared and heavy gourmet foods doesn’t seem to bother anybody.

Even in heavy seas, 7NC Megaships don’t yaw or throw you around or send bowls of soup sliding across tables. Only a certain subtle unreality to your footing lets you know you’re not on land. At sea, a room’s floor feels somehow 3-D, and your footing demands a slight attention good old planar 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—it’s oddly soothing.

Walking is a little dreamy also. There are constant slight shifts in torque from the waves’ action. When heavy waves come straight at a Megaship’s snout, the ship goes up and down along its long axis—this is called
pitching
. It produces a disorienting deal where you feel like you’re walking on a very slight downhill grade and then level and then on a very slight uphill grade. Some evolutionary retrograde reptile-brain part of the CNS 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 hit the ship from the side and make it go up and down along its crosswise axis.
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When the m.v.
Nadir
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 demands on the right leg. The demands shift at the rate of a very long thing swinging, and again the action is usually so subtle that it’s almost a meditative exercise to stay conscious of what’s going on.

We never pitch badly, but every once in a while some really big
Poseidon Adventure
—grade single wave must come and hit the
Nadir
’s side, because every once in a while the asymmetric leg-demands 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 and have to grab something.
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It happens very quickly and never twice in a row. The cruise’s first night features some really big waves from starboard, and in the casino after supper it’s hard to tell who’s had too much of the ’71 Richebourg and who’s just doing a roll-related stagger. Add 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 on in couples, and when they walk during heavy seas they tend to hang on each other like freshman 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 you can tell they feel unusually solid and protective. A 7NC Luxury Cruise is full of these odd little unexpected romantic nuggets like trying to help each other walk when the ship rolls—you can sort of tell 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 nine hours, ten hours. Their eyes are wide and childlike with wonder as they report this. Everybody looks younger when they’ve had a lot of sleep. There’s rampant daytime napping, too. By week’s end, when we’d had all manner of weather, I finally saw what it was about heavy seas and marvelous rest: in heavy seas you feel rocked to sleep, with the windows’ spume a gentle shushing, the engines’ throb a mother’s pulse.

8

Did I mention that famous writer and Iowa Writers Workshop Chairperson Frank Conroy has his own experiential essay about cruising right there in Celebrity’s 7NC brochure? Well he does, and the thing starts out on the Pier 21 gangway that first Saturday with his family:
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With that single, easy step, we entered a new world, a sort of 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 the
Nadir
’s sailing:

… 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, like some ever-so-slow reverse zoom in the movies.

This is pretty much what Conroy’s whole “My Celebrity Cruise, or ‘
All This and a Tan, Too
’” is like. Its full implications didn’t hit me until I reread it supine on Deck 12 the first sunny day. Conroy’s essay is graceful and lapidary and attractive and assuasive. I submit that it is also completely sinister and despair-producing 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 pro pampering—

I’d come on board after two months of intense and moderately stressful work, but now it seemed 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 catch the afternoon showing of
Mrs. Doubtfire
or play bingo.

—nor in the surfeit of happy adjectives, nor so much in the tone of breathless approval throughout—

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.

Bright sun, warm still air, the brilliant blue-green of the Caribbean under the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky….

The training must be rigorous, indeed, because the truth is, the service was impeccable, and impeccable in every aspect from the cabin steward to the sommelier, from the on-deck waiter to the Guest Relations manager, from the ordinary seaman who goes out of his way to get your deck chair to the third mate who shows you the way to the library. It is hard to imagine a more professional, polished operation, and I doubt that many in the world can equal it.

Rather, part of the essay’s real badness can be found in the way it reveals once again the Megaline’s sale-to-sail agenda of micromanaging not only one’s perceptions of a 7NC Luxury Cruise but even one’s own interpretation and articulation of those perceptions. In other words, Celebrity’s PR people go and get one of the U.S.A.’s most respected writers to pre-articulate and -endorse the 7NC experience, and to do it with a professional eloquence and authority that few lay perceivers and articulators could hope to equal.
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But the really major badness is that the project and placement of “My Celebrity Cruise…” are sneaky and duplicitous and far beyond whatever eroded pales still exist in terms of literary ethics. Conroy’s “essay” appears as an insert, on skinnier pages and with different margins from the rest of the brochure, creating the impression that it has been excerpted from some large and objective thing Conroy wrote. But it hasn’t been. The truth is that Celebrity Cruises paid Frank Conroy upfront to write it,
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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 his services” that flashes at your TV screen’s lower right during celebrity-hosted infomercials. Instead, inset on this weird essaymercial’s first page is an author-photoish shot of Conroy brooding in a black turtleneck, and below the photo is an author-bio with a list of Conroy’s books that includes the 1967 classic
Stop-Time
, which is arguably the best literary memoir of the twentieth century and is one of the books that first made poor old yours truly want to try to be a writer.

In other words, Celebrity Cruises is presenting Conroy’s review of his 7NC Cruise as an essay and not a commercial. This is extremely bad. Here is the argument for why it’s bad. Whether it honors them well or not, an essay’s fundamental obligations are supposed to be to the reader. The reader, on however unconscious a level, understands this, and thus tends to approach an essay with a relatively high level of openness and credulity. But a commercial is a very different animal. Advertisements have certain formal, legal obligations to truthfulness, but these are broad enough to allow for a great deal of rhetorical maneuvering in the fulfillment of an advertisement’s primary obligation, which is to serve the financial interests of its sponsor. Whatever attempts an advertisement makes to interest and appeal to its readers are not, finally, for the reader’s benefit. And the reader of an ad knows all this, too—that an ad’s appeal is by its very nature
calculated
—and this is part of why our state of receptivity is different, more guarded, when we get ready to read an ad.
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