50 Hlasek lost in the first round of the main draw Tuesday morning to obscure American Jonathan Stark, who then lost to Sampras in the second round on Wednesday in front of a capacity Stadium crowd.
51 This is in the Stadium and Grandstand, where the big names play, this ceremonial hush. Lesser players on the outlying courts have to live with spectators talking during points, people moving around so that whole rickety sets of bleachers rumble and clank, food service attendants crashing carts around on the paths just outside the windscreen or giggling and flirting in the food-prep tents just on the other side of several minor courts’ fences.
52 This is Canada’s version of the U.S.T.A., and its logo—which obtrudes into your visual field as often as is possible here at the du Maurier Omnium—consists of the good old Canadian maple leaf with a tennis racquet for a stem. It’s stuff like Tennis Canada’s logo you want to point to when Canadians protest that they don’t understand why Americans make fun of them.
53 (though best of luck getting fudge home in this heat…)
54 “Le Média” has its own facilities, though they’re up in the Press Box, about five flights of rickety and crowded stairs up through the Stadium’s interior and then exterior and then interior, with the last flight being that dense striated iron of like a fire escape and very steep and frankly dangerous, so that when one has to “aller au pissoir” it’s always a hard decision between the massed horror of the public rest rooms and the Sisyphean horror of the Press bathroom, and I learn by the second day to go very easy on the Evian water and coffee as I’m wandering around.
55 (a recent and rather ingenious marketing move by the ATP—I buy several just for the names)
56 It’s not at all clear what N.V.G.B.’s have to do with the Omnium, and no free samples are available.
57 Du Maurier cigarettes are like Australian Sterlings or French Gauloise—full-bodied, pungent, crackly when inhaled, sweet and yeasty when exhaled, and so strong that you can feel your scalp seem to leave your skull for a moment and ride the cloud of smoke. Du Maurier-intoxication may be one reason why the Canadian Open crowds seem so generally cheery and expansive and well-behaved.
58 (=“Give me your mouth”—not subtle at all)
59 These are usually luxury cars provided by some local distributorship in return for promotional consideration. The Canadian Open’s courtesy cars are BMWs, all so new they smell like glove compartments and so expensive and high-tech that their dashboards look like the control panels of nuclear reactors. The people driving the courtesy cars are usually local civilians who take a week off from work and drive a numbingly dull route back and forth between hotel and courts—their compensation consists of free tickets to certain Stadium matches and a chance to rub elbows with professional tennis players, or at least with their luggage.
60 He will lose badly to Michael Stich in the round of 16, the same Stich whom Michael Joyce beat at the Lipton Championships in Key Biscayne four months before; and in fact Joyce will himself beat Courier in straight sets next week at the Infiniti Open in Los Angeles, in front of Joyce’s family and friends, for one of the biggest wins of his career so far.
61 Chang’s mother is here—one of the most infamous of the dreaded Tennis Parents of the men’s and women’s Tours, a woman who’s reliably rumored to have done things like reach down her child’s tennis shorts in public to check his underwear—and her attendance (she’s seated hierophantically in the player-guest boxes courtside) may have something to do with the staggering woe of Chang’s mien and play. Thomas Enqvist ends up beating him soundly in the quarterfinals on Wednesday night. (Enqvist, by the way, looks eerily like a young Richard Chamberlain, the Richard Chamberlain of The Towering Inferno, say, with this narrow, sort of rodentially patrician quality. The best thing about Enqvist is his girlfriend, who wears glasses and when she applauds a good point sort of hops up and down in her seat with refreshing uncoolness.)
62 Who himself has the blond bland good looks of a professional golfer, and is reputed to be the single dullest man on the ATP Tour and possibly in the whole world, a man whose hobby is purported to be “staring at walls” and whose quietness is not the quietness of restraint but of blankness, the verbal equivalent of a dead channel.
63 (Just as Enqvist now appears to be Edberg’s heir… Swedish tennis tends to be like monarchic succession: they tend to have only one really great player at a time, and this player is always male, and he almost always ends up #1 in the world for a while. This is one reason marketers and endorsement-consultants are circling Enqvist like makos all through the summer.)
64 Nerves and choking are a huge issue in a precision-and- timing sport like tennis, and a “bad head” washes more juniors out of the competitive life than any sort of deficit in talent or drive.
1 (though I never did get clear on just what a knot is)
2 Somewhere he’d gotten the impression I was an investigative journalist and wouldn’t let me see the galley, Bridge, staff decks, anything, or interview any of the crew or staff in an on-the-record way, and he wore sunglasses inside, and epaulets, and kept talking on the phone for long stretches of time in Greek when I was in his office after I’d skipped the karaoki semifinals in the Rendez-Vous Lounge to make a special appointment to see him; I wish him ill.
3 No wag could possibly resist mentally rechristening the ship the m.v. Nadir the instant he saw the Zenith’s silly name in the Celebrity brochure, so indulge me on this, but the rechristening’s nothing particular against the ship itself.
4 There’s also Windstar and Silversea, Tall Ship Adventures and Windjammer Barefoot Cruises, but these Caribbean Cruises are wildly upscale and smaller. The 20+ cruise lines I’m talking run the “Megaships,” the floating wedding cakes with occupancies in four figures and engine-propellers the size of branch banks. Of the Megalines out of South FL there’s Commodore, Costa, Majesty, Regal, Dolphin, Princess, Royal Caribbean, good old Celebrity. There’s Renaissance, Royal Cruise Line, Holland, Holland America, Cunard, Cunard Crown, Cunard Royal Viking. There’s Norwegian Cruise Line, there’s Crystal, there’s Regency Cruises. There’s the Wal-Mart of the cruise industry, Carnival, which the other lines refer to sometimes as “Carnivore.” I don’t recall which line The Love Boat’s Pacific Princess was supposed to be with (I guess they were probably more like a CA-to-Hawaii-circuit ship, though I seem to recall them going all over the place), but now Princess Cruises has bought the name and uses poor old Gavin MacLeod in full regalia in their TV ads.
The 7NC Megaship cruiser is a type, a genre of ship all its own, like the destroyer. All the Megalines have more than one ship. The industry descends from those old patrician trans-Atlantic deals where the opulence combined with actually getting someplace—e.g. the Titanic, Normandie, etc. The present Caribbean Cruise market’s various niches—Singles, Old People, Theme, Special Interest, Corporate, Party, Family, Mass-Market, Luxury, Absurd Luxury, Grotesque Luxury—have now all pretty much been carved and staked out and are competed for viciously (I heard off-the-record stuff about Carnival v. Princess that’d singe your brows). Megaships tend to be designed in America, built in Germany, registered out of Liberia or Monrovia; and they are both captained and owned, for the most part, by Scandinavians and Greeks, which is kind of interesting, since these are the same peoples who’ve dominated sea travel pretty much forever. Celebrity Cruises is owned by the Chandris Group; the X on their three ships’ smokestacks turns out not to be an X but a Greek chi, for Chandris, a Greek shipping family so ancient and powerful they apparently regarded Onassis as a punk.
5 I’m doing this from memory. I don’t need a book. I can still name every documented Indianapolis fatality, including some serial numbers and hometowns. (Hundreds of men lost, 80 classed as Shark, 7–10 August ’45; the Indianapolis had just delivered Little Boy to the island of Tinian for delivery to Hiroshima, so ironists take note. Robert Shaw as Quint reprised the whole incident in 1975’s Jaws, a film that, as you can imagine, was like fetish-porn to me
at age thirteen.)
6 And I’ll admit that on the very first night of the 7NCI asked the staff of the Nadir’s Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant whether I could maybe have a spare bucket of au jus drippings from supper so I could try chumming for sharks off the back rail of the top deck, and that this request struck everybody from the maître d’ on down as disturbing and maybe even disturbed, and that it turned out to be a serious journalistic faux pas, because I’m almost positive the maître d’ passed this disturbing tidbit on to Mr. Dermatitis and that it was a big reason why I was denied access to stuff like the ship’s galley, thereby impoverishing the sensuous scope of this article. (Plus it also revealed how little I understood the Nadir’s sheer size: twelve decks and 150 feet up, the au jus drippings would have dispersed into a vague red cologne by the time they hit the water, with concentrations of blood inadequate to attract or excite a serious shark, whose fin would have probably looked like a pushpin from that height, anyway.)
7 (apparently a type of nautical hoist, like a pulley on steroids)
8 The Nadir’s got literally hundreds of cross-sectional maps of the ship on every deck, at every elevator and junction, each with a red dot and a YOU ARE HERE—and it doesn’t take long to figure out that these are less for orientation than for some weird kind of reassurance.
9 Always constant references to “friends” in the brochures’ text; part of this promise of escape from death-dread is that no cruiser is ever alone.
10 See?
11 Always couples in this brochure, and even in group shots it’s always groups of couples. I never did get hold of a brochure for an actual Singles Cruise, but the mind reels. There was a “Singles Get Together” (sic) on the Nadir that first Saturday night, held in Deck 8’s Scorpio Disco, which after an hour of self-hypnosis and controlled breathing I steeled myself to go to, but even the Get Together was 75% established couples, and the few of us Singles under like 70 all looked grim and self-hypnotized, and the whole affair seemed like a true wrist-slitter, and I beat a retreat after half an hour because Jurassic Park was scheduled to run on the TV that night, and I hadn’t yet looked at the whole schedule and seen that Jurassic Park would play several dozen times over the coming week.
12 From $2500 to about $4000 for mass-market Megaships like the Nadir, unless you want a Presidential Suite with a skylight, wet bar, automatic palm-fronds, etc., in which case double that.
13 In response to some dogged journalistic querying, Celebrity’s PR firm’s Press Liaison (the charming and Debra Winger-voiced Ms. Wiessen) had this explanation for the cheery service: “The people on board—the staff—are really part of one big family —you probably noticed this when you were on the ship. They really love what they’re doing and love serving people, and they pay attention to what everybody wants and needs.”
This was not what I myself observed. What I myself observed was that the Nadir was one very tight ship, run by an elite cadre of very hard-ass Greek officers and supervisors, and that the preterite staff lived in mortal terror of these Greek bosses who watched them with enormous beadiness at all times, and that the crew worked almost Dickensianly hard, too hard to feel truly cheery about it. My sense was that Cheeriness was up there with Celerity and Servility on the clipboarded evaluation sheets the Greek bosses were constantly filling out on them: when they didn’t know any guests were looking, a lot of the workers had the kind of pinched weariness about them that one associates with low-paid service employees in general, plus fear. My sense was that a crewman could get fired for a pretty small lapse, and that getting fired by these Greek officers might well involve a spotlessly shined shoe in the ass and then a really long swim.
What I observed was that the preterite workers did have a sort of affection for the passengers, but that it was a comparative affection—even the most absurdly demanding passenger seemed kind and understanding compared to the martinetism of the Greeks, and the crew seemed genuinely grateful for this, sort of the way we find even very basic human decency moving if we encounter it in NYC or Boston.
14 “YOUR PLEASURE,” several Megalines’ slogans go, “IS OUR BUSINESS.” What in a regular ad would be a double entendre is here a triple entendre, and the tertiary connotation—viz. “MIND YOUR OWN BLOODY BUSINESS AND LET US PROFESSIONALS WORRY ABOUT YOUR PLEASURE, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE”—is far from incidental.
15 Celebrity, Cunard, Princess, and Holland America all use it as a hub. Carnival and Dolphin use Miami; others use Port Canaveral, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, all over.
16 I was never in countless tries able to determine just what the Engler Corporation did or made or was about, but they’d apparently sent a quorum of their execs on this 7NC junket together as a weird kind of working vacation or intracompany convention or something.
17 The reason for the delay won’t become apparent until next Saturday, when it takes until l000h. to get everybody off the m.v. Nadir and vectored to appropriate transportation, and then from 1000 to 1400h. several battalions of jumpsuited Third World custodial guys will join the stewards in obliterating all evidence of us before the next 1374 passengers come on.
18 For me, public places on the U.S. East Coast are full of these nasty little moments of racist observation and then internal P.C. backlash.
19 This term belongs to an eight-cruise veteran, a 50ish guy with blond bangs and a big ginger beard and what looks weirdly like a T-square sticking out of his carry-on, who’s also the first person who offers me an unsolicited narrative on why he had basically no emotional choice right now but to come on a 7NC Luxury Cruise.
20 Steiner of London’ll be on the Nadir, it turns out, selling herbal wraps and cellulite-intensive delipidizing massages and facials and assorted aesthetic pampering —they have a whole little wing in the top deck’s Olympic Health Club, and it seems like they all but own the Beauty Salon on Deck 5.
21 Going on a 7NC Luxury Cruise is like going to the hospital or college in this respect: it seems to be SOP for a mass of relatives and well-wishers to accompany you right up to the jumping-off point and then have to finally leave, w/ lots of requisite hugs and tears.
22 Long story, not worth it.
23 Another odd demographic truth is that whatever sorts of people are neurologically disposed to go on 7NC Luxury Cruises are also neurologically disposed not to sweat—the one venue of exception on board the Nadir was the Mayfair Casino.
24 I’m pretty sure I know what this syndrome is and how it’s related to the brochure’s seductive promise of total self-indulgence. What’s in play here, I think, is the subtle universal shame that accompanies self-indulgence, the need to explain to just about anybody why the self-indulgence isn’t in fact really self-indulgence. Like: I never go get a massage just to get a massage, I go because this old sports-related back injury’s killing me and more or less forcing me to get a massage; or like: I never just “want” a cigarette, I always “need” a cigarette.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Page 44