A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
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Locals along the Cozumel pier are offering Nadirites a chance to have their picture taken holding a very large iguana. Yesterday, on the Grand Cayman pier, locals had offered them the chance to have their picture taken with a guy wearing a peg-leg and hook, while off the Nadir’s port bow a fake pirate ship plowed back and forth across the bay all morning, firing blank broadsides and getting on everybody’s nerves.
The Nadir’s crowds move in couples and quartets and groups and packs; the line undulates complexly. Everybody’s shirt is some kind of pastel and is festooned with the cases of recording equipment, and 85% of the females have white visors and wicker purses. And everybody down below has on sunglasses with this year’s fashionable accessory, a padded fluorescent cord that attaches to the glasses’ arms so the glasses can hang around your neck and you can put them on and take them off a lot. 78
Off to my right (southeast), now, another Megacruiser is moving in for docking someplace that must be pretty close to us, judging by its approach-vector. It moves like a force of nature and resists the idea that so much mass is being steered by anything like a hand on a tiller. I can’t imagine what trying to maneuver one of these puppies into the pier is like. Parallel parking a semi into a spot the same size as the semi with a blindfold on and four tabs of LSD in you might come close. There’s no empirical way to know: they won’t even let me near the ship’s Bridge, not after the au-jus snafu. Our docking this morning at sunrise involved an antlike frenzy of crewmen and shore personnel and an anchor 79 that spilled from the ship’s navel and upward of a dozen ropes complexly knotted onto what look like giant railroad ties studding the pier. The crew insist on calling the ropes “lines” even though each one is at least the same diameter as a tourist’s head.
I cannot convey to you the sheer and surreal scale of everything: the towering ship, the ropes, the ties, the anchor, the pier, the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky. The Caribbean is, as ever, odorless. The floor of Deck 12 is tight-fitted planks of the same kind of corky and good-smelling wood you see in saunas.
Looking down from a great height at your countrymen waddling in expensive sandals into poverty-stricken ports is not one of the funner moments of a 7NC Luxury Cruise, however. There is something inescapably bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity about them. Us, rather. In port we automatically become Peregrinator americanus, Die Lumpenamerikaner. The Ugly Ones. For me, boviscopophobia 80 is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port. It’s in port that I feel most implicated, guilty by perceived association. I’ve barely been out of the U.S.A. before, and never as part of a high-income herd, and in port—even up here above it all on Deck 12, just watching—I’m newly and unpleasantly conscious of being an American, the same way I’m always suddenly conscious of being white every time I’m around a lot of nonwhite people. I cannot help imagining us as we appear to them, the impassive Jamaicans and Mexicans, 81 or especially to the non-Aryan preterite crew of the Nadir. All week I’ve found myself doing everything I can to distance myself in the crew’s eyes from the bovine herd I’m part of, to somehow unimplicate myself: I eschew cameras and sunglasses and pastel Caribbeanwear; I make a big deal of carrying my own cafeteria tray and am effusive in my thanks for the slightest service. Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor.
At 1035h. there are just one or two small clouds in a sky so blue here it hurts. Every dawn so far in port has been overcast. Then the ascending sun gathers force and disperses the clouds somehow, and for an hour or so the sky looks shredded. Then by 0800h. an endless blue opens up like an eye and stays that way all A.M., one or two clouds always in the distance, as if for scale.
There are massed formicatory maneuvers among pier workers with ropes and walkie-talkies down there now as this other bright-white Megaship moves slowly in toward the pier from the right.
And then in the late A.M. the isolate clouds overhead start moving toward one another, and in the early P.M. they begin very slowly interlocking like jigsaw pieces, and by evening the puzzle will be solved and the sky will be the color of old dimes. 82
But of course all this ostensibly unimplicating behavior on my part is itself motivated by a self-conscious and somewhat condescending concern about how I appear to others that is (this concern) 100% upscale American. Part of the overall despair of this Luxury Cruise is that no matter what I do I cannot escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness. This despair reaches its peak in port, at the rail, looking down at what I can’t help being one of. Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, ashamed, despairing, and greedy: the world’s only known species of bovine carnivore.
Here, as in the other ports, Jet Skis buzz the Nadir all morning. There’s about half a dozen this time. Jet Skis are the mosquitoes of Caribbean ports, annoying and irrelevant and apparently always there. Their noise is a cross between a gargle and a chain saw. I am tired of Jet Skis already and have never even been on a Jet Ski. I remember reading somewhere that Jet Skis are incredibly dangerous and accident-prone, and I take a certain unkind comfort in this as I watch blond guys with washboard stomachs and sunglasses on fluorescent cords buzz around making hieroglyphs of foam.
Instead of fake pirate ships, in Cozumel there are glass-bottom boats working the waters around the coral shadows. They move sluggishly because they’re terribly overloaded with cruisers on an Organized Shore Excursion. What’s neat about the sight is that everybody on the boats is looking straight down, a good 100+ people per boat—it looks prayerful somehow, and sets off the boat’s driver, a local who stares dully ahead at the same nothing all drivers of all kinds of mass transport stare at. 83
A red and orange parasail hangs dead still on the port horizon, a stick-figure dangling.
The 12-Aft Towel Guy, a spectral Czech with eyes so inset they’re black from brow-shadow, stands very straight and expressionless by his cart, playing what looks like Rock-Paper-Scissors with himself. I’ve learned that the 12-Aft Towel Guy is immune to chatty journalistic probing—he gives me a look of what I can only call withering neutrality whenever I go get another towel. I am reapplying ZnO. Captain Video isn’t filming now but is looking at the harbor through a square he’s made of his hands. He’s the type where you can tell without even looking closely that he’s talking to himself. This other Megacruise ship is now docking right next to us, a procedure which apparently demands a lot of coded blasts on its world-ending horn. But maybe the single best A.M. visual in the harbor is another big organized 7NC-tourist thing: A group of Nadirites is learning to snorkel in the lagoonish waters just offshore; off the port bow I can see a good 150 solid citizens floating on their stomachs, motionless, the classic Dead Man’s Float, looking like the massed and floating victims of some hideous mishap—from this height a macabre and riveting sight. I have given up looking for dorsal fins in port. It turns out that sharks, apparently being short on aesthetic sense, are never seen in pretty Caribbean ports, though a couple Jamaicans had lurid if dubious stories of barracudas that could take off a limb in one surgical drive-by. Nor in Caribbean ports is there ever any evident kelp, glasswort, algaeic scuz, or any of the sapropel the regular ocean’s supposed to have. Probably sharks like murkier and scuzzier waters; potential victims could see them coming too easily down here.
Speaking of carnivores, Carnival Cruises Inc.’s good ships Ecstasy and Tropicale are both anchored all the way across the harbor. In port, Carnival Megaships tend to stay sort of at a distance from other cruise ships, and my sense is that the other ships think this is just as well. The Carnival ships have masses of 20ish-looking people hanging off the rails and seem at this distance to throb slightly, like a hi-fi’s woofer. The rumors about Carnival 7NC’s are legion, one such rumor being that their Cruises are
kind of like floating meat-market bars and that their ships bob with a conspicuous carnal squeakatasqueakata at night. There’s none of this kind of concupiscent behavior aboard the Nadir, I’m happy to say. By now I’ve become a kind of 7NC snob, and when Carnival or Princess is mentioned in my presence I feel my face automatically assume Trudy and Esther’s expression of classy distaste.
But so there they are, the Ecstasy and Tropicale; and now right up alongside the Nadir on the other side of the pier is finally docked and secured the m.v. Dreamward, with the peach-on-white color scheme that I think means it’s owned by Norwegian Cruise Line. Its Deck 3 gangway protrudes and almost touches our Deck 3 gangway—sort of obscenely—and the Dreamward’s passengers, identical in all important respects to the Nadir’s passengers, are now streaming down the gangway and massing and moving down the pier in a kind of canyon of shadow formed by the tall walls of our two ships’ hulls. The hulls hem them in and force a near-defile that stretches endlessly. A lot of the Dreamward’s passengers turn and crane to marvel at the size of what’s just disgorged them. Captain Video, now inclined way over the starboard rail so that only the toes of his sandals are still touching deck, is filming them as they look up at us, and more than a few of the Dreamwardites way below lift their own camcorders and point them up our way in a kind of almost defensive or retaliatory gesture, and for just a moment they and C.V. compose a tableau that looks almost classically postmodern.
Because the Dreamward is lined up right next to us, almost porthole to porthole, with its Deck 12’s port rail right up flush 84 against our Deck 12’s starboard rail, the Dreamward’s semi-agoraphobic shore-shunners and I can stand at the rails and sort of check each other out in the sideways way of two muscle cars lined up at a stoplight. We can sort of see how we stack up against each other. I can see the Dreamward’s rail-leaners looking the Nadir up and down. Their faces are shiny with high-SPF sunblock. The Dreamward is blindingly white, white to a degree that seems somehow aggressive and makes the Nadir’s own white look more like buff or cream. The Dreamward’s snout is a little more tapered and aerodynamic-looking than our snout, and its trim is a kind of fluorescent peach, and the beach umbrellas around its Deck 11 pools 85 are also peach—our beach umbrellas are light orange, which has always seemed odd given the white-and-navy motif of the Nadir, and now seems to me ad hoc and shabby. The Dreamward has more pools on Deck 11 than we do, plus what looks like a whole other additional pool behind glass on Deck 6; and their pools’ blue is that distinctive chlorine-blue—the Nadir’s two small pools are both seawater and kind of icky, even though the pools in the Celebrity brochure had sneakily had that electric-blue look of good old chlorine.
On all its decks, all the way down, the Dreamward’s cabins have little white balconies for private open-air sea-gazing. Its Deck 12 has a full-court basketball setup with color-coordinated nets and backboards as white as communion wafers. I notice that each of the myriad towel carts on the Dreamward’s Deck 12 is manned by its very own Towel Guy, and that their Towel Guys are ruddily Nordic and nonspectral and have nothing resembling withering neutrality or boredom about their mien.
The point is that, standing here next to Captain Video, looking, I start to feel a covetous and almost prurient envy of the Dreamward. I imagine its interior to be cleaner than ours, larger, more lavishly appointed. I imagine the Dreatnward’s food being even more varied and punctiliously prepared, the ship’s Gift Shop less expensive and its casino less depressing and its stage entertainment less cheesy and its pillow mints bigger. The little private balconies outside the Dreamward’s cabins, in particular, seem just way superior to a porthole of bank-teller glass, and suddenly private balconies seem absolutely crucial to the whole 7NC Megaexperience I’m expected to try to convey.
I spend several minutes fantasizing about what the bathrooms might be like on the good old Dreamward. I imagine its crew quarters being open for anybody at all to come down and moss out and shoot the shit, and the Dreamward’s crew being open and genuinely friendly, with M.A.s in English and whole leatherbound and neatly printed diaries full of nautical lore and wry engaging 7NC observations. I imagine the Dreamward’s Hotel Manager to be an avuncular Norwegian with a rag sweater and a soothing odor of Borkum Rif about him, a guy w/o sunglasses or hauteur who throws open the pressurized doors to the Dreamward’s Bridge and galley and Vacuum Sewage System and personally takes me through, offering pithy and quotable answers to questions before I’ve even asked them. I experience a sudden rush of grievance against Harper’s magazine for booking me on the m.v. Nadir instead of the Dreamward. I calculate by eye the breadth of the gap I’d have to jump or rappel to switch to the Dreamward, and I mentally sketch out the paragraphs that would detail such a bold and William T. Vollmannish bit of journalistic derring-do as literally jumping from one 7NC Megaship to another.
This saturnine line of thinking proceeds as the clouds overhead start to coalesce and the sky takes on its regular clothy P.M. weight. I am suffering here from a delusion, and I know it’s a delusion, this envy of another ship, and still it’s painful. It’s also representative of a psychological syndrome that I notice has gotten steadily worse as the Cruise wears on, a mental list of dissatisfactions and grievances that started picayune but has quickly become nearly despair-grade. I know that the syndrome’s cause is not simply the contempt bred of a week’s familiarity with the poor old Nadir, and that the source of all the dissatisfactions isn’t the Nadir at all but rather plain old humanly conscious me, or, more precisely, that ur-American part of me that craves and responds to pampering and passive pleasure: the Dissatisfied Infant part of me, the part that always and indiscriminately WANTS. Hence this syndrome by which, for example, just four days ago I experienced such embarrassment over the perceived self-indulgence of ordering even more gratis food from Cabin Service that I littered the bed with fake evidence of hard work and missed meals, whereas by last night I find myself looking at my watch in real annoyance after fifteen minutes and wondering where the fuck is that Cabin Service guy with the tray already. And by now I notice how the tray’s sandwiches are kind of small, and how the wedge of dill pickle 86 always soaks into the starboard crust of the bread, and how the damn Port hallway is too narrow to really let me put the used Cabin Service tray outside 1009’s door at night when I’m done eating, so that the tray sits in the cabin all night and in the A.M. adulterates the olfactory sterility of 1009 with a smell of rancid horseradish, and how this seems, by the Luxury Cruise’s fifth day, deeply dissatisfying.
Death and Conroy notwithstanding, we’re maybe now in a position to appreciate the lie at the dark heart of Celebrity’s brochure. For this—the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS—is the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn’t that this promise will be kept, but that such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie. 87 And of course I want to believe it—fuck the Buddha—I want to believe that maybe this Ultimate Fantasy Vacation will be enough pampering, that this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered that my Infantile part will be sated. 88
But the Infantile part of me is insatiable—in fact its whole essence or dasein or whatever lies in its a priori insatiability. In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction. And sure enough, on the Nadir itself, after a few days of delight and then adjustment, the Pamper-swaddled part of me that WANTS is now back, and with a vengeance. By Ides Wednesday I’m acutely conscious of the fact that the AC vent in my cabin hisses (loudly), and that though I can turn off the reggae Muzak coming out of the speaker in the cabin I cannot turn off the even louder ceiling-speaker out in the 10-Port hall. By now I notice that when Table 64’s towering busboy uses his crumb-scoop to clear crumbs off the tablecloth between courses he never seems to get qui
te all the crumbs. By now the nighttime rattle of my Wondercloset’s one off-plumb drawer sounds like a jackhammer. Mavourneen of the high seas or no, when Petra makes my bed not all the hospital corners are at exactly the same angle. My desk/vanity has a small but uncannily labial-looking hairline crack in the bevel of its top’s right side, which crack I’ve come to hate because I can’t help looking right at it when I open my eyes in bed in the morning. Most of the nightly Celebrity Showtime live entertainment in the Celebrity Show Lounge is so bad it’s embarrassing, and there’s a repellent hotel-art-type seascape on the aft wall of 1009 that’s bolted to the wall and can’t be removed or turned around, and Caswell-Massey Conditioning Shampoo turns out to be harder to rinse all the way out than most other shampoos, and the ice sculptures at the Midnight Buffet sometimes look hurriedly carved, and the vegetable that comes with my entrée is continually overcooked, and it’s impossible to get really numbingly cold water out of 1009’s bathroom tap.
I’m standing here on Deck 12 looking at a Dreamward that I bet has cold water that’d turn your knuckles blue, and, like Frank Conroy, part of me realizes that I haven’t washed a dish or tapped my foot in line behind somebody with multiple coupons at a supermarket checkout in a week; and yet instead of feeling refreshed and renewed I’m anticipating just how totally stressful and demanding and unpleasurable regular landlocked adult life is going to be now that even just the premature removal of a towel by a sepulchral crewman seems like an assault on my basic rights, and plus now the sluggishness of the Aft elevator is an outrage, and the absence of 22.5-lb dumbbells in the Olympic Health Club’s dumbbell rack is a personal affront. And now as I’m getting ready to go down to lunch I’m mentally drafting a really mordant footnote on my single biggest peeve about the Nadir: soda-pop is not free, not even at dinner: you have to order a Mr. Pibb from the 5C.R.’s maddeningly E.S.L.-hampered cocktail waitress just like it was a fucking Slippery Nipple, and then you have to sign for it right there at the table, and they charge you—and they don’t even have Mr. Pibb; they foist Dr Pepper on you with a maddeningly unapologetic shrug when any fool knows Dr Pepper is no substitute for Mr. Pibb, and it’s an absolute goddamned travesty, or at any rate extremely dissatisfying indeed. 89