Apparently Mona’s special customary little gig on 7NC Luxury Cruises is to lie to the waiter and maître d’ and say that Thursday is her birthday, so that at the Formal supper on Thursday she gets bunting and a heart-shaped helium balloon tied to her chair and her own cake and pretty much the whole restaurant staff comes out and forms a circle around her and sings to her. Her real birthday, she informs me on Monday, is 29 July, and when I observe that 29 July is also the birthday of Benito Mussolini, Mona’s grandmother shoots me kind of a death-look, though Mona herself is excited at the coincidence, apparently confusing the names Mussolini and Maserati. Because it just so happens that Thursday 16 March really is the birthday of Trudy’s daughter Alice, and because Mona declines to forfeit her fake birthday claim and instead counterclaims that her and Alice’s sharing bunting and natal attentions at 3/16’s Formal supper promises to be “radical,” Alice has decided that she wishes Mona all kinds of ill, and by Tuesday 14 March Alice and I have established a kind of anti-Mona alliance, and we amuse each other across Table 64 by making subtly disguised little strangling and stabbing motions whenever Mona says anything, a set of disguised motions Alice told me she learned at various excruciating public suppers in Miami with her Serious Boyfriend Patrick, who apparently hates almost everyone he eats with.
33 (Which, again, w/ a Megaship like this is subtle—even at its worst, the rolling never made chandeliers tinkle or anything fall off surfaces, though it did keep a slightly unplumb drawer in Cabin 1009’s complex Wondercloset rattling madly in its track even after several insertions of Kleenex at strategic points.)
34 This on-the-edge moment’s exquisiteness is something like the couple seconds between knowing you’re going to sneeze and actually sneezing, some kind of marvelous distended moment of transferring control to large automatic forces. (The sneeze-analogy thing might sound freaky, but it’s true, and Trudy’s said she’ll back me up.)
35 Conroy took the same Luxury Cruise as I, the Seven-Night Western Caribbean on the good old Nadir, in May ’94. He and his family cruised for free. I know details like this because Conroy talked to me on the phone, and answered nosy questions, and was frank and forthcoming and in general just totally decent-seeming about the whole thing.
36 E.g. after reading Conroy’s essay on board, whenever I’d look up at the sky it wouldn’t be the sky I was seeing, it was the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky.
37 Pier 21 having seasoned me as a recipient of explanatory/justificatory narratives, I was able to make some serious journalistic phone inquiries about how Professor Conroy’s essaymercial came to be, yielding two separate narratives:
(1) From Celebrity Cruises’ PR liaison Ms. Wiessen (after a two-day silence that I’ve come to understand as the PR-equivalent of covering the microphone with your hand and leaning over to confer w/ counsel): “Celebrity saw an article he wrote in Travel and Leisure magazine, and they were really impressed with how he could create these mental postcards, so they went to ask him to write about his Cruise experience for people who’d never been on a Cruise before, and they did pay him to write the article, and they really took a gamble, really, because he’d never been on a Cruise before, and they had to pay him whether he liked it or not, and whether they liked the article or not, but… [dry little chuckle] obviously they liked the article, and he did a good job, so that’s the Mr. Conroy story, and those are his perspectives on his experience.”
(2) From Frank Conroy (with the small sigh that precedes a certain kind of weary candor): “I prostituted myself.”
38 This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift, i.e. it’s never really for the person it’s directed at.
39 (with the active complicity of Professor Conroy, I’m afraid)
40 This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry; and noplace in my experience have I been on the receiving end of as many Professional Smiles as I am on the Nadir, maître d’s, Chief Stewards, Hotel Managers’ minions, Cruise Director—their P.S.’s all come on like switches at my approach. But also back on land at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, on and on. You know this smile—the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement—the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?
Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?
And yet the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker’s scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.
41 (Which by the way trust me, I used to lifeguard part-time, and fuck this SPF hooha: good old ZnO will keep your nose looking like a newborn’s.)
42 In further retrospect, I think the only thing I really persuaded the Greek officer of was that I was very weird, and possibly unstable, which impression I’m sure was shared with Mr. Dermatitis and combined with that same first night’s au-jus-as-shark-bait request to destroy my credibility with Dermatitis before I even got in to see him.
43 One of Celebrity Cruises’ slogans asserts that they Look Forward To Exceeding Your Expectations—they say it a lot, and they are sincere, though they are either disingenuous about or innocent of this Excess’s psychic consequences.
44 (to either Deck 11’s pools or Deck 12’s Temple of Ra)
45 Table 64’s waiter is Tibor, a Hungarian and a truly exceptional person, about whom if there’s any editorial justice you will learn a lot more someplace below.
46 Not until Tuesday’s lobster night at the 5C.R. did I really emphatically understand the Roman phenomenon of the vomitorium.
47 (not invasively or obtrusively or condescendingly)
48 Again, you never have to bus your tray after eating at the Windsurf, because the waiters leap to take them, and again the zeal can be a hassle, because if you get up just to go get another peach or something and still have a cup of coffee and some yummy sandwich crusts you’ve been saving for last a lot of times you come back and the tray and the crusts are gone, and I personally start to attribute this oversedulous busing to the reign of Hellenic terror the waiters labor under.
49 The many things on the Nadir that were wood-grain but not real wood were such marvelous and painstaking imitations of wood that a lot of times it seemed like it would have been simpler and less expensive simply to have used real wood.
50 Two broad staircases, Fore and Aft, both of which reverse their zag-angle at each landing, and the landings themselves have mirrored walls, which is wickedly great because via the mirrors you can check out female bottoms in cocktail dresses ascending one flight above you without appearing to be one of those icky types who check out female bottoms on staircases.
51 During the first two days of rough seas, when people vomited a lot (especially after supper and apparently extra-especially on the elevators and stairways), these p
uddles of vomit inspired a veritable feeding frenzy of Wet/Dry Vacs and spot-remover and all-trace-of-odor-eradicator chemicals applied by this Elite Special Forces-type crew.
52 By the way, the ethnic makeup of the Nadir’s crew is a melting-pot mélange on the order of like a Benetton commercial, and it’s a constant challenge to trace the racio-geographical makeup of the employees’ various hierarchies. All the big-time officers are Greek, but then it’s a Greek-owned ship so what do you expect. Them aside, it at first seems like there’s some basic Eurocentric caste system in force: waiters, busboys, beverage waitresses, sommeliers, casino dealers, entertainers, and stewards seem mostly to be Aryans, while the porters and custodians and swabbies tend to be your swarthier types—Arabs and Filipinos, Cubans, West Indian blacks. But it turns out to be more complex than that, because the Chief Stewards and Chief Sommeliers and maître d’s who so beadily oversee the Aryan servants are themselves swarthy and non-Aryan—e.g. our maître d’ at the 5C.R. is Portuguese, with the bull neck and heavy-lidded grin of a Teamsters official, and gives the impression of needing only some very subtle prearranged signal to have a $10000-an-hour prostitute or unimaginable substances delivered to your cabin; and our whole T64 totally loathes him for no single pinpointable reason, and we’ve all agreed in advance to fuck him royally on the tip at week’s end.
53 This is counting the Midnight Buffet, which tends to be a kind of lamely lavish Theme-slash-Costume-Partyish thing, w/ Theme-related foods—Oriental, Caribbean, Tex-Mex—and which I plan in this essay to mostly skip except to say that Tex-Mex Night out by the pools featured what must have been a seven-foot-high ice sculpture of Pancho Villa that spent the whole party dripping steadily onto the mammoth sombrero of Tibor, Table 64’s beloved and extremely cool Hungarian waiter, whose contract forces him on Tex-Mex Night to wear a serape and a straw sombrero with a 17" radius53a and to dispense Four Alarm chili from a steam table placed right underneath an ice sculpture, and whose pink and birdlike face on occasions like this expressed a combination of mortification and dignity that seem somehow to sum up the whole plight of postwar Eastern Europe.
53a (He let me measure it when the reptilian maître d’ wasn’t looking.)
54 (I know, like I’m sure this guy even cares.)
55 This was primarily because of the semi-agoraphobia—I’d have to sort of psych myself up to leave the cabin and go accumulate experiences, and then pretty quickly out there in the general population my will would break and I’d find some sort of excuse to scuttle back to 1009. This happened quite a few times a day.
56 (This FN right here’s being written almost a week after the Cruise ended, and I’m still living mainly on these hoarded mint-centered chocolates.)
57 The answer to why I don’t just ask Petra how she does it is that Petra’s English is extremely limited and primitive, and in sad fact I’m afraid my whole deep feeling of attraction and connection to Petra the Slavanian steward has been erected on the flimsy foundation of the only two English clauses she seems to know, one or the other of which clauses she uses in response to every statement, question, joke, or protestation of undying devotion: “Is no problem” and “You are a funny thing.”
58 (At sea this is small agorapotatoes, but in port, once the doors open and the gangway extends, it represents a true choice and is thus agoraphobically valid.)
59 “1009” indicates that it’s on Deck 10, and “Port” refers to the side of the ship it’s on, and “Exterior” means that I have a window. There are also, of course, “Interior” cabins off the inner sides of the decks’ halls, but I hereby advise any prospective 7NC passenger with claustrophobic tendencies to make sure and specify “Exterior” when making cabin-reservations.
60 The non-U.S. agoraphobe will be heartened to know that this deck includes “BITTE NICHT STÖREN,” “PRIÈRE DE NE PAS DÉRANGER,” “SI PREGA NON DISTURBARE,” and (my personal favorite) “FAVOR DE NO MOLESTAR.”
61 If you’re either a little kid or an anorectic you can probably sit on this ledge to do your dreamy contemplative sea-gazing, but a raised and buttock-hostile lip at the ledge’s outer border makes this impractical for a full-size adult.
62 There are also continual showings of about a dozen second-run movies, via what I get the sense is a VCR somewhere right here on board, because certain irregularities in tracking show up in certain films over and over. The movies run 24/7, and I end up watching several of them so many times that I can now do their dialogue verbatim. These movies include It Could Happen to You (the It’s a Wonderful Life-w/-lottery-twist thing), Jurassic Park (which does not stand up well: its essential plotlessness doesn’t emerge until the third viewing, but after that the semi-agoraphobe treats it like a porno flic, twiddling his thumbs until the T. Rex and Velociraptor parts (which do stand up well)), Wolf (stupid), The Little Rascals (nauseous), Andre (kind of Old Yeller with a seal), The Client (with another incredibly good child actor—where do they get all these Olivier-grade children?), and Renaissance Man (w/ Danny DeVito, a movie that tugs at your sentiments like a dog at a pantcuff, except it’s hard not to like any movie that has an academic as the hero).
63 What it is is lighting for upscale and appearance-conscious adults who want a clear picture of whatever might be aesthetically problematic that day but also want to be reassured that the overall aesthetic situation is pretty darn good.
64 Attempts to get to see a luxury cabin’s loo were consistently misconstrued and rebuffed by upscale penthouse-type Nadirites—there are disadvantages to Luxury Cruising as a civilian and not identifiable Press.
65 1009’s bathroom always smells of a strange but not unnice Norwegian disinfectant whose scent resembles what it would smell like if someone who knew the exact organochemical composition of a lemon but had never in fact smelled a lemon tried to synthesize the scent of a lemon. Kind of the same relation to a real lemon as a Bayer’s Children’s Aspirin to a real orange.
The cabin itself, on the other hand, after it’s been cleaned, has no odor. None. Not in the carpets, the bedding, the insides of the desk’s drawers, the wood of the Wondercloset’s doors: nothing. One of the very few totally odorless places I’ve ever been in. This, too, eventually starts giving me the creeps.
66 Perhaps designed with this in mind, the shower’s floor has a 10° grade from all sides to the center’s drain, which drain is the size of a lunch plate and has audibly aggressive suction.
67 This detachable and concussive showerhead can allegedly also be employed for non-hygienic and even prurient purposes, apparently. I overheard guys from a small U. of Texas spring-break contingent (the only college-age group on the whole Nadir) regale each other about their ingenuity with the showerhead. One guy in particular was fixated on the idea that somehow the shower’s technology could be rigged to administer fellatio if he could just get access to a “metric ratchet set”—your guess here is as good as mine.
68 The Nadir itself is navy trim on a white field, and all the Megalines have their own trademark color schemes—lime-green on white, aqua on white, robin’s-egg on white, barn-red on white (white apparently being a constant).
69 You can apparently get “Butler Service” and automatic-send-out dry cleaning and shoeshining, all at prices that I’m told are not out of line, but the forms you have to fill out and hang on your door for all this are wildly complex, and I’m scared of setting in motion mechanisms of service that seem potentially overwhelming.
70 The missing predicative preposition here is sic—ditto what looks to be an implied image of thrown excrement—but the mistakes seem somehow endearing, humanizing, and this toilet needed all the humanizing it could get.
71 It’s pretty hard not to see connections between the exhaust fan and the toilet’s vacuums—an almost Final Solution–like eradication of animal wastes and odors (wastes and odors that are by all rights a natural consequence of Henry VIII–like meals and unlimited free Cabin Service and fruit baskets)—and the death-denial/-transcendence fantasies that th
e 7NC Luxury Megacruise is trying to enable.
72 The Nadir’s VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM begins after a while to hold such a fascination for me that I end up going hat in hand back to Hotel Manager Dermatitis to ask once again for access to the ship’s nether parts, and once again I pull a boner with Dermatitis: I innocently mention my specific fascination with the ship’s VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM—which boner is consequent to another and prior boner by which I’d failed to discover in my pre-boarding researches that there’d been, just a few months before this, a tremendous scandal in which the I think QE2 Megaship had been discovered dumping waste over the side in mid-voyage, in violation of numerous national and maritime codes, and had been videotaped doing this by a couple of passengers who subsequently apparently sold the videotape to some network newsmagazine, and so the whole Megacruise industry was in a state of almost Nixonian paranoia about unscrupulous journalists trying to manufacture scandals about Megaships’ handling of waste. Even behind his mirrored sunglasses I can tell that Mr. Dermatitis is severely upset about my interest in sewage, and he denies my request to eyeball the V.S.S. with a complex defensiveness that I couldn’t even begin to chart out here. It is only later that night (Wednesday 3/15), at supper, at good old Table 64 in the 5C.R., that my cruise-savvy tablemates fill me in on the QE2 waste-scandal, and they scream72a with mirth at the clay-footed naïveté with which I’d gone to Dermatitis with what was in fact an innocent if puerile fascination with hermetically-evacuated waste; and such is my own embarrassment and hatred of Mr. Dermatitis by this time that I begin to feel like if the Hotel Manager really does think I’m some kind of investigative journalist with a hard-on for shark dangers and sewage scandals then he might think it would be worth the risk to have me harmed in some way; and through a set of neurotic connections I won’t even try to defend, I, for about a day and a half, begin to fear that the Nadir’s Greek episcopate will somehow contrive to use the incredibly potent and forceful 1009 toilet itself for the assassination—I don’t know, that they’ll like somehow lubricate the bowl and up the suction to where not just my waste but I myself will be sucked down through the seat’s opening and hurled into some kind of abstract septic holding-tank.
The David Foster Wallace Reader Page 123