A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

  It’s also not necessary to ask Winston much of anything at all, because he’s an incredible chatterbox when he’s losing. He’s been a student at the U. of South Florida for a rather mysterious seven years, and has taken this year off to “get fucking paid for a change for a while” on the Nadir. He claims to have seen all manner of sharks in these waters, but his descriptions don’t inspire much real confidence or dread. We’re in the middle of our second game and on our fifth ball. Winston says he’s had the chance to do some serious ocean-gazing and soul-searching during his off hours these last few months and has decided to return to U.S.F. in Fall ’95 and start college more or less all over, this time majoring not in Business Administration but in something he claims is called “Multimediated Production.”

  “They have a department in that?”

  “It’s this interdisciplinarian thing. It’s going to be fucking phat, Homes. You know. CD-ROM and shit. Smart chips. Digital film and shit.”

  I’m up 18–12. “Sport of the future.”

  Winston agrees. “It’s where it’s all going to be at. The Highway. Interactive TV and shit. Virtual Reality. Interactive Virtual Reality.”

  “I can see it now,” I say. The game’s almost over. “The Cruise of the Future. The Home Cruise. The Caribbean Luxury Cruise you don’t have to leave home for. Strap on the old goggles and electrodes and off you go.”

  “Word up.”

  “No passports. No seasickness. No wind or sunburn or insipid Cruise staff. 107 Total Virtual Motionless Stay-At-Home Simulated Pampering.”

  “Word.”

  1105h.: Navigation Lecture—Join Captain Nico and learn about the ship’s Engine Room, the Bridge, and the basic “nuts ’n bolts” of the ship’s operation!

  The m.v. Nadir can carry 460,000 gallons of nautical-grade diesel fuel. It burns between 40 and 70 tons of this fuel a day, depending on how hard it’s travelling. The ship has two turbine engines on each side, one big “Papa” and one (comparatively) little “Son.” 108 Each engine has a propeller that’s 17 feet in diameter and is adjustable through a lateral rotation of 23.5° for maximum torque. It takes the Nadir 0.9 nautical miles to come to a complete stop from its standard speed of 18 knots. The ship can go slightly faster in certain kinds of rough seas than it can go in calm seas—this is for technical reasons that won’t fit on the napkin I’m taking notes on. The ship has a rudder, and the rudder has two complex alloy “flaps” that somehow interconfigure to allow a 90° turn. Captain Nico’s 109 English is not going to win any elocution ribbons, but he is a veritable blowhole of hard data. He’s about my age and height but is just ridiculously good-looking, 110 like an extremely fit and tan Paul Auster. The venue here is Deck 11’s Fleet Bar, 111 all blue and white and trimmed in stainless steel, and so abundantly fenestrated that the sunlight makes Captain Nico’s illustrative slides look ghostly and vague. Captain Nico wears Ray-Bans but w/o a fluorescent cord. Thursday 16 March is also the day my paranoia about Mr. Dermatitis’s contriving somehow to jettison me from the Nadir via Cabin 1009’s vacuum toilet is at its emotional zenith, and I’ve decided in advance to keep a real low journalistic profile at this event. I ask a total of just one little innocuous question, right at the start, and Captain Nico responds with a witticism—

  “How do we start engines? Not with the key of ignition, I can tell you!”

  —that gets a large and rather unkind laugh from the crowd.

  It turns out that the long-mysterious “m.v.” in “m.v. Nadir” stands for “motorized vessel.” The m.v. Nadir cost $250,310,000 U.S. to build. It was christened in Papenburg FRG in 10/92 with a bottle of ouzo instead of champagne. The Nadir’s three onboard generators produce 9.9 megawatts of power. The ship’s Bridge turns out to be what lies behind the very intriguing triple-locked bulkhead near the aft towel cart on Deck 11. The Bridge is “where the equipments are—radars, indication of weathers and all these things.”

  Two years of sedulous postgraduate study is required of officer-wannabes just to get a handle on the navigational math involved; “also there is much learning for the computers.”

  Of the 40 or so Nadirites at this lecture, the total number of women is: 0. Captain Video is here, of course, Celebrating the Moment from a camcorded crouch on the Fleet Bar’s steel bartop; he’s wearing a nylon warm-up suit of fluorescent maroon and purple that makes him look like a huge macaw, and his knees crackle whenever he shifts position and rehunches. By this time Captain Video’s really getting on my nerves.

  A deeply sunburned man next to me is taking notes with a Mont Blanc pen in a leatherbound notebook with ENGLER embossed on it. 112 Just one moment of foresight on the way from Ping-Pong to Fleet Bar would have prevented my sitting here trying to take notes on paper napkins with a big felt-tip HiLiter. The Nadir’s officers have their quarters, mess, and a private bar on Deck 3, it turns out. “In the Bridge also we have different compass to see where we are going.” The ship’s four patro-filial turbines cannot ever be turned off except in drydock. What they do to deactivate an engine is simply disengage its propeller. It turns out that parallel parking a semi on LSD doesn’t even come close to what Captain G. Panagiotakis experiences when he docks the m.v. Nadir. The Engler man next to me is drinking a $5.50 Slippery Nipple, which comes with not one but two umbrellas in it. The rest of the Nadir’s crew’s quarters are on Deck 2, which also houses the ship’s laundry and “the areas of processing of garbage and wastes.” Like all Megacruisers, the Nadir needs no tugboat in port; this is because it’s got “the sternal thrusters and bow thrusters.” 113

  The lecture’s audience consists of bald solid thick-wristed men over 50 who all look like the kind of guy who rises to CEO a company out of that company’s engineering dept. instead of some fancy MBA program. 114 A number of them are clearly Navy veterans or yachtsmen or something. They all compose a very knowledgeable audience and ask involved questions about the bore and stroke of the engines, the management of multiradial torque, the precise distinctions between a C-Class Captain and a B-Class Captain. My attempts at technical notes are bleeding out into the paper napkins until the yellow letters are all ballooned and goofy like subway graffiti. The male 7NC cruisers all want to know stuff about the hydrodynamics of midship stabilizers. They’re all the kind of men who look like they’re smoking cigars even when they’re not smoking cigars. Everybody’s complexion is hectic from sun and salt spray and a surfeit of Slippery Nipples. 21.4 knots is a 7NC Megaship’s maximum possible cruising speed. There’s no way I’m going to raise my hand in this kind of crowd and ask what a knot is.

  Several unreproducible questions concern the ship’s system of satellite navigation. Captain Nico explains that the Nadir subscribes to something called GPS: “This Global Positioning System is using the satellites above to know the position at all times, which gives this data to the computer.” It emerges that when we’re not negotiating ports and piers, a kind of computerized Autocaptain pilots the ship. 115 There’s no actual “tiller” or “con” anymore, is the sense I get; there’s certainly no protrusive-spoked wooden captain’s wheel like these that line the walls of the jaunty Fleet Bar, each captain’s wheel centered with thole pins that hold up a small and verdant fern.

  1150h.: There’s never a chance to feel actual physical hunger on a Luxury Cruise, but when you’ve gotten accustomed to feeding seven or eight times a day, a certain foamy emptiness in the gut always lets you know when it’s time to feed again.

  Among the Nadirites, only the radically old and formalphiliacal hit Luncheon at the 5C.R., where you can’t wear swim trunks or a floppy hat. The really happening place for lunch is the buffet at the Windsurf Cafe off the pools and plasticene grotto on Deck 11. Just inside both sets of the Windsurf’s automatic doors, in two big bins whose sides are decorated to look like coconut skin, are cornucopiae of fresh fruit 116 presided over by ice sculptures of a madonna and a whale. The crowds’ flow is skillfully directed along several different vectors so that delays are minimal, and th
e experience of waiting to feed in the Windsurf Cafe is not as bovine as lots of other 7NC experiences.

  Eating in the Windsurf Cafe, where things are out in the open and not brought in from behind a mysterious swinging door, makes it even clearer that everything ingestible on the Nadir is designed to be absolutely top-of-the-line: the tea isn’t Lipton but Sir Thomas Lipton in a classy individual vacuum packet of buff-colored foil; the lunch meat is the really good fat- and gristle-free kind that gentiles usually have to crash kosher delis to get; the mustard is something even fancier-tasting than Grey Poupon that I keep forgetting to write down the brand of. And the Windsurf Cafe’s coffee—which burbles merrily from spigots in big brushed—steel dispensers—the coffee is, quite simply, the kind of coffee you marry somebody for being able to make. I normally have a firm and neurologically imperative one-cup limit on coffee, but the Windsurf’s coffee is so good, 117 and the job of deciphering the big yellow Rorschachian blobs of my Navigation Lecture notes so taxing, that on this day I exceed my limit, by rather a lot, which may help explain why the next few hours of this log get kind of kaleidoscopic and unfocused.

  1240h.: I seem to be out on 9-Aft hitting golf balls off an Astroturf square into a dense-mesh nylon net that balloons impressively out toward the sea when a golf ball hits it. Thanatotic shuffleboard continues over to starboard; no sign of 3P or any Ping-Pong players or any paddles left behind; ominous little holes in deck, bulkhead, railing, and even the Astroturf square testify to my wisdom in having steered way clear of the A.M. Darts Tourney.

  1314h.: I am now seated back in Deck 8’s Rainbow Room watching “Ernst,” the Nadir’s mysterious and ubiquitous Art Auctioneer, 118 mediate spirited bidding for a signed Leroy Neiman print. Let me iterate this. Bidding is spirited and fast approaching four figures for a signed Leroy Neiman print—not a signed Leroy Neiman, a signed Leroy Neiman print.

  1330h.: Poolside Shenanigans! Join Cruise Director Scott Peterson and Staff for some crazy antics and the Men’s Best Legs Contest judged by all the ladies at poolside!

  Starting to feel the first unpleasant symptoms of caffeine toxicity, hair tucked at staff suggestion into a complimentary Celebrity Cruises swimcap, I take full and active part in the prenominate Shenanigans, which consist mostly of a tourney-style contest where gals in the Gal division and then guys in the Guy division have to slide out on a plastic telephone pole slathered with Vaseline 119 and face off against another gal/guy and try to knock each other off the pole and into the pool’s nauseous brine by hitting each other with pillowcases filled with balloons. I make it through two rounds and then am knocked off by a hulking and hairy-shouldered Milwaukee newlywed who actually hits me with his fist—which as people start to lose their balance and compensate by leaning far forward 120 can happen—knocking my swimcap almost clear off my head and toppling me over hard to starboard into a pool that’s not only got a really high Na-content but is also now covered with a shiny and full-spectrum scum of Vaseline, and I emerge so icky and befouled and cross-eyed from the guy’s right hook that I blow what should have been a very legitimate shot at the title in the Men’s Best Legs Contest, in which I end up placing third but am told later I would have won the whole thing except for the scowl, swollen and strabismic left eye, and askew swimcap that formed a contextual backdrop too downright goofy to let the full force of my gams’ shapeliness come through to the judges.

  1410h.: I seem now to be at the daily Arts & Crafts seminar in some sort of back room of the Windsurf Cafe, and aside from noting that I seem to be the only male here under 70 and that the project under construction on the table before me involves Popsicle sticks and crepe and a type of glue too runny and instant-adhesive to get my trembling overcaffeinated hands anywhere near, I have absolutely no fucking idea what’s going on. 1415h.: In the public loo off the elevators on Deck 11-Fore, which has four urinals and three commodes, all Vacuum-Suction, which if activated one after the other in rapid succession produce a cumulative sound that is exactly like the climactic Db-G# melisma at the end of the 1983 Vienna Boys Choir’s seminal recording of the medievally lugubrious Tenebrae Factae Sunt. 1420h.: And now I’m in Deck 12’s Olympic Health Club, in the back area, the part that’s owned by Steiner of London, 121 where the same creamy-faced French women who’d worked 3/11’s crowd at Pier 21 now all hang out, and I’m asking to be allowed to watch one of the “Phytomer/Ionithermie Combination Treatment De-Toxifying Inch Loss Treatments” 122 that some of the heftier ladies on board have been raving about, and I am being told that it’s not really a spectator-type thing, that there’s nakedness involved, and that if I want to see a P./LC.T.D.-T.I.L.T. it’s going to have to be as the subject of one; and between the quoted price of the treatment and the sensuous recall of the smell of my own singed nostril-hair in Chem. 205 in 1983, I opt to forfeit this bit of managed pampering. If you back off from something really big, the creamy ladies then try to sell you on a facial, which they say “a great large number” of male Nadirites have pampered themselves with this week, but I also decline the facial, figuring that at this point in the week the procedure for me would consist mostly in exfoliating half-peeled skin. 1425h.: Now I’m in the small public loo of the Olympic Health Club, a one-holer notable only because O. Newton-John’s “Let’s Get Physical” plays on an apparently unending loop out of the overhead speaker. I’ll go ahead and admit that I have, this week, come in a couple times between UV bombardments and pumped a little iron here in the Nadir’s Olympic Health Club. Except in the O.H.C. it’s more like pumping ultrarefined titanium alloy: all the weights are polished stainless steel, and the place is one of these clubs with mirrors on all four walls that force you into displays of public self-scrutiny that are as excruciating as they are irresistible, and there are huge and insectile-looking pieces of machinery that mimic the aerobic demands of staircases and rowboats and racing bikes and improperly waxed cross-country skis, etc., complete with heart-monitor electrodes and radio headphones; and on these machines there are people in spandex whom you really want to take aside and advise in the most tactful and loving way not to wear spandex.

  1430h.: We’re back down in the good old Rainbow Room for Behind the Scenes—Meet your Cruise Director Scott Peterson and find out what it’s really like to work on a Cruise Ship!

  Scott Peterson is a deeply tan 39-year-old male with tall rigid hair, a constant high-watt smile, an escargot mustache, and a gleaming Rolex—basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste. He is also one of my least favorite Celebrity Cruises employees, though with Scott Peterson it’s a case of mildly enjoyable annoyance rather than the terrified loathing I feel for Mr. Dermatitis.

  The very best way to describe Scott Peterson’s demeanor is that it looks like he’s constantly posing for a photograph nobody is taking. 123 He mounts the Rainbow Room’s low brass dais and reverses his chair and sits like a cabaret singer and begins to hold forth. There are maybe 50 people attending, and I have to admit that some of them seem to like Scott Peterson a lot, and really do enjoy his talk, a talk that, not surprisingly, turns out to be more about what it’s like to be Scott Peterson than what it’s like to work on the good old Nadir. Topics covered include where and under what circumstances Scott Peterson grew up, how Scott Peterson got interested in cruise ships, how Scott Peterson and his college roommate got their first jobs together on a cruise ship, some hilarious booboos in Scott Peterson’s first months on the job, every celebrity Scott Peterson has personally met and shaken the hand of, how much Scott Peterson loves the people he gets to meet working on a cruise ship, how much Scott Peterson loves just working on a cruise ship in general, how Scott Peterson met the future Mrs. Scott Peterson working on a cruise ship, and how Mrs. Scott Peterson now works on a different cruise ship and how challenging it is to sustain an intimate relation as warm and in all respects wonderful as that of Mr. and Mrs. Scott Peterson when you (i.e., Mr. and Mrs. Scott Peterson) work on different cruise
ships and lay eyes on each other only about every sixth week, except how but now Scott Peterson’s tickled to be able to announce that Mrs. Scott Peterson happens to be on a well-earned vacation and is as a rare treat here this week cruising on the m.v. Nadir with him, Scott Peterson, and is as a matter of fact right here with us in the audience today, and wouldn’t Mrs. S.P. like to stand up and take a bow.

  I swear I am not exaggerating: this occasion is a real two-handed head-clutcher, awesome in its ickiness. But now, just as I need to leave in order not to be late for 1500h.’s much-anticipated skeetshooting, Scott Peterson starts to relate an anecdote that engages my various onboard dreads and fascinations enough for me to stay and try to write down. Scott Peterson tells us how his wife, Mrs. Scott Peterson, was in the shower in the Mr. and Mrs. Scott Peterson Suite on Deck 3 of the Nadir the other night when—one hand goes up in the gesture of someone searching for just the right delicate term—when nature called. So Mrs. Scott Peterson apparently gets out of the shower still wet and sits down on Scott Peterson’s stateroom’s bathroom’s commode. Scott Peterson, in a narrative aside, says how perhaps we’ve all noticed that the commodes on the m.v. Nadir are linked to a state-of-the-art Vacuum Sewage System that happens to generate not a weak or incidental flush-suction. Other Nadirites besides just me must fear their toilet, because this gets a big jagged tension-related laugh. Mrs. Scott Peterson 124 is sinking lower and lower in her salmon-colored chair. Scott Peterson says but so Mrs. Scott Peterson sits down on the commode, still naked and wet from the shower, and attends to nature’s summons, and when she’s done she reaches over and hits the commode’s Flush mechanism, and Scott Peterson says that, in Mrs. Scott Peterson’s wet slick condition, the incredible suction of the Nadir’s state-of-the-art V.S.S. starts actually pulling her down through the seat’s central hole, 125 and apparently Mrs. Scott Peterson is just a bit too broad abeam to get sucked down all the way and hurled into some abstract excremental void but rather sticks, wedged, halfway down in the seat’s hole, and can’t get out, and is of course stark naked, and starts screeching for help (by now the live Mrs. Scott Peterson seems very interested in something going on down underneath her table, and mostly only her left shoulder—leather-brown and stippled with freckles—is visible from where I’m sitting); and Scott Peterson tells us that he, Scott Peterson, hears her and comes rushing into the bathroom from the stateroom where he’d been practicing his Professional Smile in the bedside table’s enormous vanity mirror, 126 comes rushing in and sees what’s happened to Mrs. Scott Peterson and tries to pull her out—her feet kicking pathetically and buttocks and popliteals purpling from the seat’s adhesive pressure—but he can’t pull her out, she’s been wedged in too tight by the horrific V.S.S. suction, and so thanks to some quick thinking Scott Peterson gets on the phone and calls one of the Nadir’s Staff Plumbers, and the Staff Plumber says Yes Sir Mr. Scott Peterson Sir I’m on my way, and Scott Peterson runs back into the bathroom and reports to Mrs. Scott Peterson that professional help is on the way, at which point it only then occurs to Mrs. Scott Peterson that she’s starkers, and that not only are her ectomorphic breasts exposed to full Eurofluorescent view but a portion of her own personal pudendum is clearly visible above the rim of the occlusive seat that holds her fast, 127 and she screeches Britishly at Scott Peterson to for the bloody love of Christ do something to cover her legally betrothed nethers against the swart blue-collar gaze of the impending Staff Plumber, and so Scott Peterson goes and gets Mrs. Scott Peterson’s favorite sun hat, a huge sombrero, in fact the very same huge sombrero Scott Peterson’s beloved wife is wearing right… umm, just a couple seconds ago was wearing right here in this very Rainbow Room; and but so via the quick and resourceful thinking of Scott Peterson the sombrero is brought from the stateroom into the bathroom and placed over Mrs. Scott Peterson’s inbent concave naked thorax, to cover her private parts. And the Nadir’s Staff Plumber knocks and comes in all overlarge and machine-oil-redolent, w/ tool-belt ajingle, and badly out of breath, and sure enough swart, and he comes into the bathroom and appraises the situation and takes certain complex measurements and performs some calculations and finally tells Mr. Scott Peterson that he thinks he (the Staff Plumber) can get indeed get Mrs. Scott Peterson out of the toilet seat, but that extracting that there Mexican fellow in there with Mrs. S.P. is going to be a whole nother story.