The answer to their affordability, how they offer such a great product, is really based on their management. They really are in touch with all the details of what’s important to the public, and they pay a lot of attention to those details.
Libation revenues provide part of the real answer, it turns out. It’s a little bit like the microeconomics of movie theaters. When you hear how much of the gate they have to kick back to films’ distributors, you can’t figure out how theaters stay in business. But of course you can’t go just by ticket revenues, because where movie theaters really make their money is at the concession stand.
The Nadir sells a shitload of drinks. Full-time beverage waitresses in khaki shorts and Celebrity visors are unobtrusively everywhere —poolside, on Deck 12, at meals, entertainments, Bingo. Soda-pop is $2.00 for a very skinny glass (you don’t pay cash right there; you sign for it and then they sock you with a printed Statement of Charges on the final night), and exotic cocktails like Wallbangers and Fuzzy Navels go as high as $5.50. The Nadir doesn’t do tacky stuff like oversalt the soup or put bowls of pretzels all over the place, but a 7NC Luxury Cruise’s crafted atmosphere of indulgence and endless partying—“Go on, You Deserve It”—more than conduces to freeflowing wine. (Let’s not forget the cost of a fine wine w/supper, the ever-present sommeliers). Of the different passengers I asked, more than half estimated their party’s total beverage tab at over $500. And if you know even a little about the beverage markups in any restaurant/bar operation, you know a lot of that $500’s going to end up as net profit. Other keys to profitability: a lot of the ship’s service staff’s income isn’t figured into the price of the Cruise ticket: you have to tip them at week’s end or they’re screwed (another peeve is that the Celebrity brochure neglects to mention this). And it turns out that a lot of the paid entertainment on the Nadir is “vended out”—agencies contract with Celebrity Cruises to supply teams like the Matrix Dancers for all the stage shows, the Electric Slide lessons, etc.
Another contracted vendor is Deck 8’s Mayfair Casino, whose corporate proprietor pays a flat weekly rate plus an unspecified percentage to the Nadir for the privilege of sending their gorgeous dealers and four-deck shoes against passengers who’ve learned the rules of 21 and Caribbean Stud Poker from an “Educational Video” that plays continuously on one of the At-Sea TV’s channels. I didn’t spend all that much time in the Mayfair Casino—the eyes of 74-year-old Cleveland grandmothers pumping quarters into the slots of twittering machines are not much fun to spend time looking at—but I was in there long enough to see that if the Nadir gets even a 10% vig on the Mayfair’s weekly net, then Celebrity is making a killing.
90 Snippet of latter item: “All persons entering each island [?] are warned that it is a CRIMINAL OFFENSE to import or have possession of narcotics and other Controlled Drugs, including marijuana. Penalties for drug offenders are severe.” Half of the Port Lecture before we hit Jamaica consisted of advice about stuff like two-timing street dealers who’ll sell you a quarter-oz. of crummy pot and then trot down to a constable and collect a bounty for fingering you. Conditions in the local jails are described just enough to engage the grimmer parts of the imagination.
Celebrity Cruises’ own onboard drug policy remains obscure. Although there are always a half-dozen humorless Security guys standing burlily around the Nadir’s gangway in port, you never get searched when you reboard. I never saw or smelled evidence of drug use on the Nadir—as with concupiscence, it just doesn’t seem like that kind of crowd. But there must be colorful incidents in the Nadir’s past, because the Cruise staff became almost operatic in their cautions to us as we headed back to Fort Lauderdale on Friday, though every warning was preceded by an acknowledgment that the exhortation to flush/toss anything Controlled surely couldn’t apply to anyone on this particular cruise. Apparently Fort Lauderdale’s Customs guys regard homebound 7NC passengers sort of the way small-town cops regard out-of-state speeders in Saab Turbos. An old veteran of many 7NCLCs told one of the U. Texas kids ahead of me in the Customs line the last day “Kiddo, if one of those dogs stops at your bag, you better hope he lifts his leg.”
91 It’s a total mystery when these waiters sleep. They serve at the Midnight Buffet every night, and then help clean up after, and then they appear in the 5C.R. in clean tuxes all over again at 0630h. the next day, always so fresh and alert they look slapped.
92 (except for precise descriptions of whatever dorsal fins he’s seen)
93 (he pronounces the “-pest” part of this “-persht”)
94 The last night’s ND breaks the news about tipping and gives tactful “suggestions” on going rates.
95 All boldface stuff is verbatim and sic from today’s Nadir Daily.
96 If Pepperidge Farm made communion wafers, these would be them.
97 Duh.
98 Heavy expensive art-carved sets are for dorks.
99 This is something else Mr. Dermatitis declined to let me see, but by all reports the daycare on these Megaships is phenomenal, w/squads of nurturing and hyperkinetic young daycare ladies keeping the kids manically stimulated for up to ten-hour stretches via an endless number of incredibly well-structured activities, so tuckering the kids out that they collapse mutely into bed at 2000h. and leave their parents free to plunge into the ship’s nightlife and Do It All.
100 The only chairs in the Library are leather wing chairs with low seats, so only Deirdre’s eyes and nose clear the board’s table as she sits across from me, adding a Kilroyishly surreal quality to the humiliation.
101 I imagine it would be pretty interesting to trail a Megaship through a 7NC Cruise and just catalogue the trail of stuff that bobs in its wake.
102 Only the fear of an impromptu Fort Lauderdale Customs search and discovery keeps me from stealing one of these paddles. I confess that I did end up stealing the chamois eyeglass-cleaners from 1009’s bathroom, though maybe you’re meant to take those home anyway—I couldn’t tell whether they fell into the Kleenex category or the towel category.
103 I’ve sure never lost to any prepubescent females in fucking Ping-Pong, I can tell you.
104 Winston also sometimes seemed to suffer from the verbal delusion that he was an urban black male; I have no idea what the story is on this or what conclusions to draw from it.
105 This is not counting my interfaces with Petra, which though lengthy and verbose tended of course to be one-sided except for “You are a funny thing, you.”
106 The single most confounding thing about the young and hip cruisers on the Nadir is that they seem truly to love the exact same cheesy disco music that we who were young and hip in the late ’70s loathed and made fun of, boycotting Prom when Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park” was chosen Official Prom Theme, etc.
107 Interfacing with Winston could be kind of depressing in that the urge to make cruel sport of him was always irresistible, and he never acted offended or even indicated he knew he was being made sport of, and you went away afterward feeling like you’d just stolen coins from a blind man’s cup or something.
108 Choosing from among 24 options, they can run on all four, or one Papa and one Son, or two Sons, etc. My sense is that running on Sons instead of Papas is kind of like switching from warp drive to impulse power.
109 The Nadir has a Captain, a Staff Captain, and four Chief Officers. Captain Nico is actually one of these Chief Officers; I do not know why he’s called Captain Nico.
110 Something else I’ve learned on this Luxury Cruise is that no man can ever look any better than he looks in the white full-dress uniform of a naval officer. Women of all ages and estrogen-levels swooned, sighed, wobbled, lash-batted, growled, and hubba’d when one of these navally resplendent Greek officers went by, a phenomenon that I don’t imagine helped the Greeks’ humility one bit.
111 The Fleet Bar was also the site of Elegant Tea Time later that same day, where elderly female passengers wore long white stripper-gloves and pinkies protruded from cups, and where among my
breaches of Elegant Tea Time etiquette apparently were: (a) imagining people would be amused by the tuxedo-design T-shirt I wore because I hadn’t taken seriously the Celebrity brochure’s instruction to bring a real tux on the Cruise; (b) imagining the elderly ladies at my table would be charmed by the off-color Rorschach jokes I made about the rather obscene shapes the linen napkins at each place were origami-folded into; (c) imagining these same ladies might be interested to learn what sorts of things have to be done to a goose over its lifetime in order to produce pâté-grade liver; (d) putting a 3-ounce mass of what looked like glossy black buckshot on a big white cracker and then putting the whole cracker in my mouth; (e) assuming one second thereafter a facial expression I’m told was, under even the most charitable interpretation, inelegant; (f) trying to respond with a full mouth when an elderly lady across the table with a pince-nez and buff-colored gloves and lipstick on her right incisor told me this was Beluga caviar, resulting in (f(l)) the expulsion of several crumbs and what appeared to be a large black bubble and (f(2)) the distorted production of a word that I was told sounded to the entire table like a genital expletive; (g) trying to spit the whole indescribable nauseous glob into a flimsy paper napkin instead of one of the plentiful and sturdier linen napkins, with results I’d prefer not to describe in any more detail than as unfortunate; and (h) concurring, when the little kid (in a bow tie and [no kidding] tuxedo-shorts) seated next to me pronounced Beluga caviar “blucky,” with a spontaneous and unconsidered expression that was, indeed and unmistakably, a genital expletive.
Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of that particular bit of Managed Fun. This will, at any rate, explain the 1600h. – 1700h. lacuna in today’s p.&d. log.
112 All week the Englerites have been a fascinating subcultural study in their own right—moving only in herds and having their own special Organized Shore Excursions and constantly reserving big party-rooms with velveteen ropes and burly guys standing by them with their arms crossed checking credentials—but there hasn’t been room in this essay to go into any serious Englerology.
113 (not—mercifully—“bowal thrusters”)
114 In other words, the self-made brass-balled no-bullshit type of older U.S. male whom you least want the dad to turn out to be when you go over to a girl’s house to take her to a movie or something with dishonorable intentions rattling around in the back of your mind—an ur-authority figure.
115 This helps explain why Captain G. Panagiotakis usually seems so phenomenally unbusy, why his real job seems to be to stand in various parts of the Nadir and try to look vaguely presidential, which he would (look presidential) except for the business of wearing sunglasses inside,115a which makes him look more like a Third World strongman.
115a All the ship’s officers wore sunglasses inside, it turned out, and always stood off to the side of everything with their hands behind their backs, usually in groups of three, conferring hieratically in technical Greek.
116 As God is my witness no more fruit ever again in my whole life.
117 And it’s just coffee qua coffee—it’s not Blue Mountain Hazlenut Half-Caf or Sudanese Vanilla With Special Chicory Enzymes or any of that bushwa. The Nadir’s is a level-headed approach to coffee that I hereby salute.
118 One of very few human beings I’ve ever seen who is both blond and murine-looking, Ernst today is wearing white loafers, green slacks, and a flared sportcoat whose pink I swear can be described only as menstrual.
119(the pole)
120 This is what I did, leaned too far forward and into the guy’s fist that was clutching the hem of his pillowcase, which is why I didn’t cry Foul, even though the vision in my right eye still drifts in and out of focus even back here on land a week later.
121(also in the ND known as Steiner Salons and Spas at Sea)
122 So you can see why nobody with a nervous system would want to miss watching one of these, some hard data from the Steiner brochure:
IONITHERMIE—HOW DOES IT WORK? Firstly you will be measured in selected areas. The skin is marked and the readings are recorded on your program. Different creams, gels and ampoules are applied. These contain extracts effective in breaking down and emulsifying fat. Electrodes using faradism and galvanism are placed in position and a warm blue clay covers the full area. We are now ready to start your treatment. The galvanism accelerates the products into your skin, and the faradism exercises your muscles.122a The cellulite or ‘lumpy fat,’ which is so common amongst women, is emulsified by the treatment, making it easier to drain the toxins from the body and disperse them, giving your skin a smoother appearance.
122a And, as somebody who once brushed up against a college chemistry lab’s live induction coil and had subsequently to be pried off the thing with a wooden mop handle, I can personally vouch for the convulsive-exercise benefit of faradic current.
123 He’s also a bit like those small-town politicians and police chiefs who go to shameless lengths to get mentioned in the local newspaper. Scott Peterson’s name appears in each day’s Nadir Daily over a dozen times: “Backgammon Tournament with your Cruise Director Scott Peterson”; “‘The World Goes Round’ with Jane McDonald, Michael Mullane, and the Matrix Dancers, and your host, Cruise Director Scott Peterson”; “Ft. Lauderdale Disembarkation Talk—Your Cruise Director Scott Peterson explains everything you need to know about your transfer from the ship in Ft. Lauderdale”; etc., ad naus.
124 Mrs. S.P. is an ectomorphic and sort of leather-complected British lady in a big-brimmed sombrero, which sombrero I observe her now taking off and stowing under her brass table as she loses altitude in the chair.
125 At this point in the anecdote I’m absolutely rigid with interest and empathie terror, which will help explain why it’s such a huge letdown when this whole anecdote turns out to be nothing but a cheesy Catskills-type joke, one that Scott Peterson has clearly been telling once a week for eons (although maybe not with poor Mrs. Scott Peterson actually sitting right there in the audience, and I find myself hopefully imagining all sorts of nuptial vengeance being wreaked on Scott Peterson for embarrassing Mrs. Scott Peterson like that), the dweeb.
126 [authorial postulate]
127 [Again an authorial postulate, but it’s the only way to make sense of the remedy she’s about to resort to (at this point I still don’t know this is all just a corny joke—I’m rigid and bug-eyed with empathie horror for both the intra- and extranarrative Mrs. S.P.).]
128 It was this kind of stuff that combined with the micromanagement of activities to make the Nadir weirdly reminiscent of the summer camp I attended for three straight Julys in early childhood, another venue where the food was great and everyone was sunburned and I spent as much time as possible in my cabin avoiding micromanaged activities.
129 (these skeet made, I posit, from some kind of extra-brittle clay for maximum frag)
130 !
131 Look, I’m not going to spend a lot of your time or my emotional energy on this, but if you are male and you ever do decide to undertake a 7NC Luxury Cruise, be smart and take a piece of advice I did not take: bring Formalwear. And I do not mean just a coat and tie. A coat and tie are appropriate for the two 7NC suppers designated “Informal” (which term apparently comprises some purgatorial category between “Casual” and “Formal”), but for Formal supper you’re supposed to wear either a tuxedo or something called a “dinner jacket” that as far as I can see is basically the same as a tuxedo. I, dickhead that I am, decided in advance that the idea of Formalwear on a tropical vacation was absurd, and I steadfastly refused to buy or rent a tux and go through the hassle of trying to figure out how even to pack it. I was both right and wrong: yes, the Formalwear thing is absurd, but since every Nadirite except me went ahead and dressed up in absurd Formalwear on Formal nights, I—having, of course, ironically enough spurned a tux precisely because of absurdity-considerations—was the one who ends up looking absurd at Formal 5C.R. suppers—painfully absurd in the tuxedo-motif T-shirt I wore on the fi
rst Formal night, and then even more painfully absurd on Thursday in the funereal sportcoat and slacks I’d gotten all sweaty and rumpled on the plane and at Pier 21. No one at Table 64 said anything about the absurd informality of my Formal-supper dress, but it was the sort of deeply tense absence of comment which attends only the grossest and most absurd breaches of social convention, and which after the Elegant Tea Time debacle pushed me right to the very edge of ship-jumping.
Please, let my dickheadedness and humiliation have served some purpose: take my advice and bring Formalwear, no matter how absurd it seems, if you go.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Page 47
