A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (65 page)

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(these skeet made, I posit, from some kind of extra-brittle clay for maximum frag)

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!

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Look, I’m not going to spend a lot of your time or my emotional energy on this, but if you are male and you ever do decide to undertake a 7NC Luxury Cruise, be smart and take a piece of advice I did not take:
bring Formalwear
. And I do not mean just a coat and tie. A coat and tie are appropriate for the two 7NC suppers designated “Informal” (which term apparently comprises some purgatorial category between “Casual” and “Formal”), but for Formal supper you’re supposed to wear either a tuxedo or something called a “dinner jacket” that as far as I can see is basically the same as a tuxedo. I, dickhead that I am, decided in advance that the idea of Formalwear on a tropical vacation was absurd, and I steadfastly refused to buy or rent a tux and go through the hassle of trying to figure out how even to pack it. I was both right and wrong: yes, the Formalwear thing is absurd, but since every
Nadir
ite except me went ahead and dressed up in absurd Formalwear on Formal nights,
I
—having, of course, ironically enough spurned a tux precisely because of absurdity-considerations—was the one who ends up looking absurd at Formal 5
C.R. suppers—painfully absurd in the tuxedo-motif T-shirt I wore on the first Formal night, and then even more painfully absurd on Thursday in the funereal sportcoat and slacks I’d gotten all sweaty and rumpled on the plane and at Pier 21. No one at Table 64 said anything about the absurd informality of my Formal-supper dress, but it was the sort of deeply tense absence of comment which attends only the grossest and most absurd breaches of social convention, and which after the Elegant Tea Time debacle pushed me right to the very edge of ship-jumping.

Please, let my dickheadedness and humiliation have served some purpose: take my advice and
bring Formalwear
, no matter how absurd it seems, if you go.

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(an I who, recall, am reeling from the triple whammy of first ballistic humiliation and then Elegant Tea Time disgrace and now being the only person anywhere in sight in a sweat-crusted wool sportcoat instead of a glossy tux, and am having to order and chug three Dr Peppers in a row to void my mouth of the intransigent aftertaste of Beluga caviar)

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( which S.R. apparently includes living together on Alice’s $$ and “co-owning” Alice’s 1992 Saab)

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At least guaranteeing the old
Nadir
ite comedian w/ cane a full house, I guess.

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His accent indicates origins in London’s East End.

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(Not, one would presume, at the same time.)

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One is: Lace your fingers together and put them in front of your face and then unlace just your index fingers and have them sort of face each other and imagine an irresistible magnetic force drawing them together and see whether the two fingers do indeed as if by magic move slowly and inexorably together until they’re pressed together whorl to whorl. From a really scary and unpleasant experience in seventh grade,
^137a
I already know I’m excessively suggestible, and I skip all the little tests, since no force on earth could ever get me up on a hypnotist’s stage in front of over 300 entertainment-hungry strangers.

^137a
(viz. when at a school assembly a local psychologist put us all under a supposedly light state of hypnosis for some “Creative Visualization,” and ten minutes later everybody in the auditorium came out of the hypnosis except unfortunately yours truly, and I ended up spending four irreversibly entranced and pupil-dilated hours in the school nurse’s office, with the increasingly panicked shrink trying more and more drastic devices for bringing me out of it, and my parents very nearly litigated over the whole episode, and I calmly and matter-of-factly decided to steer well clear of all hypnosis thereafter)