The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  Now we’re riding to the Piers in a column of eight chartered Greyhounds. Our convoy’s rate of speed and the odd deference other traffic shows gives the whole procession a kind of funereal quality. Ft. Laud. proper looks like one extremely large golf course, but the cruise lines’ Piers are in something called Port Everglades, an industrial area, pretty clearly, zoned for Blight, with warehouses and transformer parks and stacked boxcars and vacant lots full of muscular and evil-looking Florida-type weeds. We pass a huge field of those hammer-shaped automatic oil derricks all bobbing fellatially, and on the horizon past them is a little fingernail clipping of shiny gray that I’m thinking must be the sea. Several different languages are in use on my bus. Whenever we go over bumps or train tracks, there’s a tremendous mass clicking sound in here from all the cameras around everybody’s neck. I haven’t brought any sort of camera and feel a perverse pride about this.

  The Nadir’s traditional berth is Pier 21. “Pier,” though it had conjured for me images of wharfs and cleats and lapping water, turns out to denote something like what airport denotes, viz. a zone and not a thing. There is no real water in sight, no docks, no fishy smell or sodium tang to the air; but there are, as we enter the Pier zone, a lot of really big white ships that blot out most of the sky.

  Now I’m writing this sitting in an orange plastic chair at the end of one of Pier 21’s countless bolted rows of orange plastic chairs. We have debused and been herded via megaphone through 21’s big glass doors, whereupon two more completely humorless naval ladies handed us each a little plastic card with a number on it. My card’s number is 7. A few people sitting nearby ask me “what I am,” and I figure out I’m to respond “a 7.” The cards are by no means brand new, and mine has the vestigial whorls of a chocolate thumbprint in one corner.

  From inside, Pier 21 seems kind of like a blimpless blimp hangar, high-ceilinged and very echoey. It has walls of unclean windows on three sides, at least 2500 orange chairs in rows of 25, a kind of desultory Snack Bar, and restrooms with very long lines. The acoustics are brutal and it’s tremendously loud. Outside, rain starts coming down even though the sun’s still shining. Some of the people in the rows of chairs appear to have been here for days: they have that glazed encamped look of people at airports in blizzards.

  It’s now 1132h., and boarding will not commence one second before 1400 sharp; a PA announcement politely but firmly declares Celebrity’s seriousness about this.17 The PA lady’s voice is what you imagine a British supermodel would sound like. Everyone’s clutching his numbered card like the cards are identity papers at Checkpoint Charley. There’s an Ellis Island/pre-Auschwitz aspect to the massed and anxious waiting, but I’m uncomfortable trying to extend the analogy. A lot of the people waiting—Caribbeanish clothing notwithstanding—look Jewish to me, and I’m ashamed to catch myself thinking that I can determine Jewishness from people’s appearance.18 Maybe two-thirds of the total people in here are actually sitting in orange chairs. Pier 21’s pre-boarding blimp hangar’s not as bad as, say, Grand Central at 1715h. on Friday, but it bears little resemblance to any of the stressless pamper-venues detailed in the Celebrity brochure, which brochure I am not the only person in here thumbing through and looking at wistfully. A lot of people are also reading the Fort Lauderdale Sentinel and staring with subwayish blankness at other people. A kid whose T-shirt says SANDY DUNCAN’S EYE is carving something in the plastic of his chair. There are quite a few old people all travelling with really desperately old people who are pretty clearly the old people’s parents. A couple different guys in different rows are field-stripping their camcorders with military-looking expertise. There’s a fair share of WASP-looking passengers, as well. A lot of the WASPs are couples in their twenties and thirties, with a honeymoonish aspect to the way their heads rest on each other’s shoulders. Men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts, I’ve decided; their legs are hairless in a way that’s creepy; the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for hair, particularly on the calves. It’s just about the only body-area where you actually want more hair on older men. Is this fibular hairlessness a result of years of chafing in pants and socks? The significance of the numbered cards turns out to be that you’re supposed to wait here in Pier 21’s blimp hangar until your number is called, then you board in “Lots.”19 So your number doesn’t stand for you, but rather for the subherd of cruisers you’re part of. Some 7NC-veterans nearby tell me that 7 is not a great Lot-number and advise me to get comfortable. Somewhere past the big gray doors behind the restrooms’ roiling lines is an umbilical passage leading to what I assume is the actual Nadir, which outside the south wall’s windows presents as a tall wall of total white. In the approximate center of the hangar is a long table where creamy-complected women in nursish white from Steiner of London Inc. are doing free little makeup and complexion consultations with women waiting to board, priming the economic pump.20 The Chicago lady and BIG DADDY are in the hangar’s southeasternmost row of chairs playing Uno with another couple, who turn out to be friends they’d made on a Princess Alaska Cruise in ’93.

  Now I’m writing this sort of squatting with my bottom braced up against the hangar’s west wall, which wall is white-painted cinderblocks, like a budget motel’s wall, and also oddly clammy. By this time I’m down to slacks and T-shirt and tie, and the tie looks like it’s been washed and hand-wrung. Perspiring has already lost its novelty. Part of what Celebrity Cruises is reminding us we’re leaving behind is massed public waiting areas with no AC and indifferent ventilation. Now it’s 1255h. Though the brochure says the Nadir sails at 1630h. EST and that you can board anytime from 1400 to then, all 1374 Nadir passengers look already to be massed here, plus what must be a fair number of relatives and well-wishers, etc.21

  A major advantage to writing some sort of article about an experience is that at grim junctures like this pre-embarkation blimp hangar you can distract yourself from what the experience feels like by focusing on what look like items of possible interest for the article. This is the occasion I first see the thirteen-year-old kid with the toupee. He’s slumped pre-adolescently in his chair with his feet up on some kind of rattan hamper while what I’ll bet is his mom talks at him nonstop; he is staring into whatever special distance people in areas of mass public stasis stare into. His toupee isn’t one of those horrible black shiny incongruous Howard Cosell toupees, but it’s not great either; it’s an unlikely orange-brown, and its texture is like one of those local-TV-anchorman toupees where if you tousled the hair it would get broken instead of mussed. A lot of the people from the Engler Corporation are massed in some kind of round informal conference or meeting over near the Pier’s glass doors, looking from the distance rather like a rugby scrum. I’ve decided the perfect description of the orange of the hangar’s chairs is waiting-room orange. Several driven-looking corporate guys are talking into cellular phones while their wives look stoic. Close to a dozen confirmed sightings of J. Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy. The acoustics in here have the nightmarishly echoey quality of some of the Beatles’ more conceptual stuff. At the Snack Bar, a plain old candy bar is $1.50, and soda-pop’s even more. The line for the men’s room extends NW almost to the Steiner of London table. Several Pier personnel with clipboards are running around w/o any discernible agenda. The crowd has a smattering of college-age kids, all with complex haircuts and already wearing poolside thongs. A little kid right near me is wearing the exact same kind of hat I am, which I might as well admit right now is a full-color Spiderman cap.22

  I count over a dozen makes of camera just in the little block of orange chairs within camera-make-discernment range. That’s not counting camcorders.

  The dress code in here ranges from corporate-informal to tourist-tropical. I am the sweatiest and most disheveled person in view, I’m afraid.23 There is nothing even remotely nautical about the smell of Pier 21. Two male Engler executives excluded from the corporate scrum are sitting together at the end of the nearest row, right leg over left k
nee and joggling their loafers in perfect unconscious sync. Every infant within earshot has a promising future in professional opera, it sounds like. Also, every infant being carried or held is being carried or held by its female parent. Over 50% of the purses and handbags are wicker/rattan. The women all somehow give the impression of being on magazine diets. The median age here is at least 45.

  A Pier person runs by with an enormous roll of crepe. Some sort of fire alarm’s been going for the last fifteen minutes, nerve-janglingly, ignored by everyone because the British bombshell at the PA and the Celebrity people with clipboards also appear to be ignoring it. Also now comes what sounds at first like a sort of tuba from hell, two five-second blasts that ripple shirt-fronts and contort everyone’s faces. It turns out it’s Holland America’s S.S. Westerdam’s ship’s horn outside, announcing All-Ashore-That’s-Going because departure is imminent.

  Every so often I remove the hat, towel off, and sort of orbit the blimp hangar, eavesdropping, making small-talk. Over half the passengers I chat up turn out to be from right around here in south Florida. Nonchalant eavesdropping provides the most fun and profit, though: an enormous number of small-talk-type conversations are going on all over the hangar. And a major percentage of this overheard chitchat consists of passengers explaining to other passengers why they signed up for this 7NC Cruise. It’s like the universal subject of discussion in here, like chitchatting in the dayroom of a mental ward: “So, why are you here?” And the striking constant in all the answers is that not once does somebody say they’re going on this 7NC Luxury Cruise just to go on a 7NC Luxury Cruise. Nor does anybody refer to stuff about travel being broadening or a mad desire to parasail. Nobody even mentions being mesmerized by Celebrity’s fantasy-slash-promise of pampering in uterine stasis—in fact the word “pamper,” so ubiquitous in the Celebrity 7NC brochure, is not once in my hearing uttered. The word that gets used over and over in the explanatory small-talk is: relax. Everybody characterizes the upcoming week as either a long-put-off reward or as a last-ditch effort to salvage sanity and self from some inconceivable crockpot of pressure, or both.24 A lot of the explanatory narratives are long and involved, and some are sort of lurid. Two different conversations involve people who’ve just finally buried a relative they’d been nursing at home for months as the relative lingered hideously. A floral wholesaler in an aqua MARLINS shirt talks about how he’s managed to drag the battered remnants of his soul through the Xmas-to-Valentine rush only by dangling in front of himself the carrot of this week of total relaxation and renewal. A trio of Newark cops all just retired and had promised themselves a Luxury Cruise if they survived their 20. A couple from Fort Lauderdale sketch a scenario in which they’ve sort of been shamed by friends into 7NC Luxury Cruising, as if they were native New Yorkers and the Nadir the Statue of Liberty.

  By the way, I have now empirically verified that I am the only ticketed adult here without some kind of camera equipment.

  At some point, unnoticed, Holland’s Westerdam’s snout has withdrawn from the west window: the window is clear, and a brutal sun is shining through a patchy steam of evaporated rain. The blimp hangar’s emptier by half now, and quiet. BIG DADDY and spouse are long gone. They have called Lots 5 through 7 all in a sort of bunch, and I and pretty much the whole massed Engler Corporation contingent are now moving in a kind of columnar herd toward Passport Checks and the Deck 325 gangway beyond. And now we are getting greeted (each of us) by not one but two Aryan-looking hostesses from the Hospitality staff, and now moving over plush plum carpet to the interior of what one presumes is the actual Nadir, washed now in high-oxygen AC that seems subtly balsam-scented, pausing for a second, if we wish, to have our pre-Cruise photo taken by the ship’s photographer,26 apparently for some kind of Before/After souvenir ensemble they’ll try to sell us at week’s end; and I start seeing the first of more WATCH YOUR STEP signs this coming week than anyone could count, because a Megaship’s architecture’s flooring is totally jerryrigged-looking and uneven and everywhere there are sudden little six-inch steplets up and down; and there’s the delicious feel of sweat drying and the first nip of AC chill, and I suddenly can’t even remember what the squall of a prickly-heated infant sounds like anymore, not in the plushly cushioned little corridors I’m walked through. One of the two Hospitality hostesses seems to have an orthopedic right shoe, and she walks with a very slight limp, and somehow this detail seems terribly moving.

  And as Inga and Geli of Hospitality walk me on and in (and it’s an endless walk—up, fore, aft, serpentine through bulkheads and steel-railed corridors with mollified jazz out of little round speakers in a beige enamel ceiling I could reach an elbow up and touch), the whole three-hour pre-cruise gestalt of shame and explanation and Why Are You Here is transposed utterly, because at intervals on every wall are elaborate cross-sectioned maps and diagrams, each with a big and reassuringly jolly red dot with YOU ARE HERE, which assertion preempts all inquiry and signals that explanations and doubt and guilt are now left back there with all else we’re leaving behind, handing over to pros.

  And the elevator’s made of glass and is noiseless, and the hostesses smile slightly and gaze at nothing as all together we ascend, and it’s a very close race which of these two hostesses smells better in the enclosed chill.

  And now we’re passing little teak-lined shipboard shops with Gucci, Waterford and Wedgwood, Rolex and Raymond Weil, and there’s a crackle in the jazz and an announcement in three languages about Welcome and Willkommen and how there’ll be a Compulsory Lifeboat Drill an hour after sailing.

  At 1515h. I am installed in Nadir Cabin 1009 and immediately eat almost a whole basket of free fruit and lie on a really nice bed and drum my fingers on my swollen tummy.

  6

  Departure at 1630h. turns out to be a not untasteful affair of crepe and horns. Each deck’s got walkways outside, with railings made of some kind of really good wood. It’s now overcast, and the ocean way below is dull-colored and frothy, etc. It smells less fishy or oceany than just salty. Our horn is even more planet-shattering than the Westerdam’s horn. Most of the people exchanging waves with us are cruisers along the rails of the decks of other 7NC Megaships, also just leaving, so it’s a surreal little scene—it’s hard not to imagine all of us cruising the whole Western Caribbean in a parallel pack, all waving at one another the entire time. Docking and leaving are the two times a Megacruiser’s Captain is actually steering the ship; and m.v. Nadir Captain G. Panagiotakis has wheeled us around and pointed our snout at the open sea, and we, large and white and clean, are under sail.

  7

  The whole first two days and nights are bad weather, with high-pitched winds and heaving seas, spume27 lashing the porthole’s glass, etc. For 40+ hours it’s more like a Luxury North Sea Cruise, and the Celebrity staff goes around looking regretful but not apologetic,28 and in all fairness it’s hard to find a way to blame Celebrity Cruises Inc. for the weather.29

  On gale-force days like the first two, passengers are advised to enjoy the view from the railings on the lee side of the Nadir. The one other guy who ever joins me in trying out the non-lee side has his glasses blown off by the wind, and he does not appreciate my remarking to him that round-the-ear cable arms are better for high-wind view-enjoying. I keep waiting to see somebody from the crew wearing the traditional yellow slicker, but no luck. The railing I do most of my contemplative gazing from is on Deck 10, so the sea is way below, and the sounds of it slopping and heaving around are far-away and surflike, and visually it’s a little like looking down into a flushing toilet. No fins in view.

  In heavy seas, hypochondriacs are kept busy taking their gastric pulse every couple seconds and wondering whether what they’re feeling is maybe the onset of seasickness and/or gauging the exact level of seasickness they’re feeling. Seasickness-wise, though, it turns out that heavy seas are sort of like battle: there’s no way to know ahead of time how you’ll react. A test of the deep and involuntary stuff of a man. I myself tur
n out not to get seasick. An apparent immunity, deep and unchosen, and slightly miraculous, given that I have every other kind of motion sickness listed in the PDR and cannot take anything for it.30 For the whole first rough-sea day I puzzle about the fact that every other passenger on the m.v. Nadir looks to have received identical little weird shaving cuts below their left ear—which in the case of female passengers seems especially strange—until I learn that the little round Band-Aidish things on everybody’s neck are these special new nuclear-powered transdermal motion sickness patches, which apparently now nobody with any kind of clue about 7NC Luxury Cruising leaves home without.