A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

  25 Like all Megaships, the Nadir designates each deck with some 7NC-related name, and on the Cruise it got confusing because they never referred to decks by numbers and you could never remember whether e.g. the Fantasy Deck was Deck 7 or 8. Deck 12 is called the Sun Deck, 11 is the Marina Deck, 101 forget, 9’s the Bahamas Deck, 8 Fantasy and 7 Galaxy (or vice versa), 61 never did get straight. 5 is the Europa Deck and comprises kind of the Nadir’s corporate nerve center and is one huge high-ceilinged bank-looking lobby with everything done in lemon and salmon with brass plating around the Guest Relations Desk and Purser’s Desk and Hotel Manager’s Desk, and plants, and massive pillars with water running down them with a sound that all but drives you to the nearest urinal. 4 is all cabins and is called I think the Florida Deck. Everything below 4 is all business and unnamed and off-limits w/ the exception of the smidgeon of 3 that has the gangway. I’m henceforth going to refer to the Decks by number, since that’s what I had to know in order to take the elevator anywhere. Decks 7 and 8 are where the serious eating and casinoing and discos and entertainment are; 11 has the pools and café; 12 is on top and laid out for serious heliophilia.

  26 (a thoroughly silly and superfluous job if ever there was one, on this 7N photocopia)

  27 The single best new vocab word from this week: spume (second-best was scheisser, which one German retiree called another German retiree who kept beating him at darts).

  28 (this expression resembling a kind of facial shoulder-shrug, as at fate)

  29 (Though I can’t help noting that the weather in the Celebrity 7NC brochure was substantially nicer.)

  30 I have a deep and involuntary reaction to Dramamine whereby it sends me pitching forward to lie prone and twitching wherever I am when the drug kicks in, so I’m sailing the Nadir cold turkey.

  31 This is on Deck 7, the serious dining room, and it’s never called just the “Caravelle Restaurant” (and never just “the Restaurant”)—it’s always “The Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant.”

  32 There were seven other people with me at good old Table 64, all from south Florida—Miami, Tamarac, Fort Lauderdale itself. Four of the people knew each other in private landlocked life and had requested to be at the same table. The other three people were an old couple and their granddaughter, whose name was Mona.

  I was the only first-time Luxury Cruiser at Table 64, and also the only person who referred to the evening meal as “supper,” a childhood habit I could not seem to be teased out of.

  With the conspicuous exception of Mona, I liked all my tablemates a lot, and I want to get a description of supper out of the way in a fast footnote and avoid saying much about them for fear of hurting their feelings by noting any weirdnesses or features that might seem potentially mean. There were some pretty weird aspects to the Table 64 ensemble, though. For one thing, they all had thick and unmistakable NYC accents, and yet they swore up and down that they’d all been born and raised in south Florida (although it did turn out that all the T64 adults’ own parents had been New Yorkers, which when you think about it is compelling evidence of the durability of a good thick NYC accent). Besides me there were five women and two men, and both men were completely silent except on the subjects of golf, business, transdermal motion sickness prophylaxis, and the legalities of getting stuff through Customs. The women carried Table 64’s conversational ball. One of the reasons I liked all these women (except Mona) so much was because they laughed really hard at my jokes, even lame or very obscure jokes; although they all had this curious way of laughing where they sort of screamed before they laughed, I mean really and discernibly screamed, so that for one excruciating second you could never tell whether they were getting ready to laugh or whether they were seeing something hideous and screamworthy over your shoulder across the 5C.R., and this was disconcerting all week. Also, like many other 7NC Luxury Cruise passengers I observed, they all seemed to be uniformly stellar at anecdotes and stories and extended-set-up jokes, employing both hands and faces to maximum dramatic effect, knowing when to pause and when to go run-on, how to double-take and how to set up a straight man.

  My favorite tablemate was Trudy, whose husband was back home in Tamarac managing some sudden crisis at the couple’s cellular phone business and had given his ticket to Alice, their heavy and very well-dressed daughter, who was on spring break from Miami U, and who was for some reason extremely anxious to communicate to me that she had a Serious Boyfriend, the name of which boyfriend was Patrick. Alice’s part of most of our interfaces consisted of remarks like: “You hate fennel? What a coincidence: my boyfriend Patrick absolutely detests fennel”; “You’re from Illinois? What a coincidence: my boyfriend Patrick has an aunt whose first husband was from Indiana, which is right near Illinois”; “You have four limbs? What a coincidence:…,” and so on. Alice’s continual assertion of her relationship-status may have been a defensive tactic against Trudy, who kept pulling professionally retouched 4 × 5 glossies of Alice out of her purse and showing them to me with Alice sitting right there, and who, every time Alice mentioned Patrick, suffered some sort of weird facial tic or grimace where one side’s canine tooth showed and the other side’s didn’t. Trudy was 56, the same age as my own dear personal Mom, and looked—Trudy did, and I mean this in the nicest possible way—like Jackie Gleason in drag, and had a particularly loud pre-laugh scream that was a real arrhythmia-producer, and was the one who coerced me into Wednesday night’s Conga Line, and got me strung out on Snowball Jackpot Bingo, and also was an incredible lay authority on 7NC Luxury Cruises, this being her sixth in a decade—she and her friend Esther (thin-faced, subtly ravaged-looking, the distaff part of the couple from Miami) had tales to tell about Carnival, Princess, Crystal, and Cunard too fraught with libel-potential to reproduce here, and one long review of what was apparently the worst cruise line in 7NC history—one “American Family Cruises,” which folded after just sixteen months—involving outrages too literally incredible to be believed from any duo less knowledgeable and discerning than Trudy and Esther.

  Plus it started to strike me that I had never before been party to such a minute and exacting analysis of the food and service of a meal I was just at that moment eating. Nothing escaped the attention of T and E—the symmetry of the parsley sprigs atop the boiled baby carrots, the consistency of the bread, the flavor and mastication-friendliness of various cuts of meat, the celerity and flambé technique of the various pastry guys in tall white hats who appeared tableside when items had to be set on fire (a major percentage of the desserts in the 5C.R. had to be set on fire), and so on. The waiter and busboy kept circling the table, going “Finish? Finish?” while Esther and Trudy had exchanges like:

  “Honey you don’t look happy with the conch, what’s the problem.”

  “I’m fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “Don’t lie. Honey with that face who could lie. Frank am I right? This is a person with a face incapable of lying. Is it the potatoes or the conch? Is it the conch?”

  “There’s nothing wrong Esther darling I swear it.”

  “You’re not happy with the conch.”

  “All right. I’ve got a problem with the conch.”

  “Did I tell you? Frank did I tell her?”

  [Frank silently probes own ear with pinkie.]

  “Was I right? I could tell just by looking you weren’t happy.”

  “I’m fine with the potatoes. It’s the conch.”

  “Did I tell you about seasonal fish on ships? What did I tell you?”

  “The potatoes are good.”

  Mona is eighteen. Her grandparents have been taking her on a Luxury Cruise every spring since she was five. Mona always sleeps through both breakfast and lunch and spends all night at the Scorpio Disco and in the Mayfair Casino playing the slots. She’s 6' 2" if she’s an inch. She’s going to attend Penn State next fall because the agreement was that she’d receive a 4-Wheel-Drive vehicle if she went someplace where there might be snow. She was unabashed in recounting this co
llege-selection criterion. She was an incredibly demanding passenger and diner, but her complaints about slight aesthetic and gustatory imperfections at table lacked Trudy and Esther’s discernment and integrity and came off as simply churlish. Mona was also kind of strange-looking: a body like Brigitte Nielsen or some centerfold on steroids, and above it, framed in resplendent and frizzless blond hair, the tiny delicate pale unhappy face of a kind of corrupt doll. Her grandparents, who retired every night right after supper, always made a small ceremony after dessert of handing Mona $100 to “go have some fun” with. This $100 bill was always in one of those little ceremonial bank envelopes that has B. Franklin’s face staring out of a porthole-like window in the front, and written on the envelope in red Magic Marker was always “We Love You, Honey.” Mona never once said thank you for the money. She also rolled her eyes at just about everything her grandparents said, a habit that quickly drove me up the wall.

  I find I’m not as worried about saying potentially mean stuff about Mona as I am about Trudy and Alice and Esther and Esther’s mute smiling husband Frank.

  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’s PR liaison Ms. Wiessen (after a two-day silence that Tve 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 the
m, 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 puddles 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.