The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  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

  13

  Every night, the 10-Port cabin steward, Petra, when she turns down your bed, leaves on your pillow—along with the day’s last mint and Celebrity’s printed card wishing you sweet dreams in six languages—the next day’s Nadir Daily, a phatic little four-page ersatz newspaper printed on white vellum in a navy-blue font. The ND has historical nuggets on upcoming ports, pitches for Organized Shore Excursions and specials in the Gift Shop, and stern stuff in boxes with malaprop-headlines like QUARANTINES ON TRANSIT OF FOOD and MISUSE OF DRUG ACTS 1972.90

  Right now it’s Thursday 16 March, 0710h., and I’m alone at the 5C.R.’s Early Seating Breakfast, Table 64’s waiter and towering busboy hovering nearby.91 We’ve rounded the final turn and are on our return trajectory toward Key West, and today is one of the week’s two “At-Sea” days when shipboard activities are at their densest and most organized; and this is the day I’ve picked to use the Nadir Daily as a Baedeker as I leave Cabin 1009 for a period well in excess of half an hour and plunge headfirst into the recreational fray and keep a precise and detailed log of some really representative experiences as together now we go In Quest of Managed Fun. So everything that follows from here on out is from this day’s p.&d. experiential log:

  0645h.: A triple ding from the speakers in cabin and halls and then a cool female voice says Good Morning, the date, the weather, etc. She says it in a gentle accented English, repeats it in an Alsatian-sounding French, then again in German. She can make even German sound lush and postcoital. Hers is not the same PA voice as at Pier 21, but it’s got the exact same quality of sounding the way expensive perfume smells.

  0650–0705h.: Shower, play with Alisco Sirocco hairdryer & exhaust fan & hair in bathroom mirror, read from Daily Meditations for the Semiphobically Challenged, go over Nadir Daily with yellow HiLiter pen.

  0708–0730h.: E.S. Breakfast at Table 64 in 5C.R. Last night everybody announced intentions to sleep through breakfast and grab some scones or something at the Windsurf Cafe later. So I’m alone at Table 64, which is large and round and right up next to a starboard window.

  Table 64’s waiter’s name is, as mentioned before, Tibor. Mentally I refer to him as “The Tibster,” but never out loud. Tibor has dismantled my artichokes and my lobsters and taught me that extra-well-done is not the only way meat can be palatable. We have sort of bonded, I feel. He is 35 and about 5′4" and plump, and his movements have the birdlike economy characteristic of small plump graceful men. Menu-wise, Tibor advises and recommends, but without the hauteur that’s always made me hate the gastropedantic waiters in classy restaurants. Tibor is omnipresent without being unctuous or oppressive; he is kind and warm and fun. I sort of love him. His hometown is Budapest and he has a postgraduate degree in Restaurant Management from an unpronounceable Hungarian college. His wife back home is expecting their first child. He is the Head Waiter for Tables 64–67 at all three meals. He can carry three trays w/o precarity and never looks harried or on-the-edge the way most multitable waiters look. He seems like he cares. His face is at once round and pointy, and rosy. His tux never wrinkles. His hands are soft and pink, and his thumb-joint’s skin is unwrinkled, like the thumb-joint of a small child.

  Tibor’s cuteness has been compared by the women at Table 64 to that of a button. But I have learned not to let his cuteness fool me. Tibor is a pro. His commitment to personally instantiating the Nadir’s fanatical commitment to excellence is the one thing about which he shows no sense of humor. If you fuck with him in this area he will feel pain and will make no effort to conceal it. See for example the second night, Sunday, at supper: Tibor was circling the table and asking each of us how our entrée was, and we all regarded this as just one of those perfunctory waiter-questions and all perfunctorily smiled and cleared our mouths and said Fine, Fine—and Tibor finally stopped and looked down at us all with a pained expression and changed his timbre slightly so it was clear he was addressing the whole table: “Please. I ask each: is excellent? Please. If excellent, you say, and I am happy. If not excellent, please: do not say excellent. Let me fix. Please.” There was no hauteur or pedantry as he addressed us. He just meant what he said. His expression was babe-naked, and we heard him, and nothing was perfunctory again.

  Good old Wojtek, the towering bespectacled Pole, age 22 and at least 6′8", Table 64’s busboy—in charge of water, bread supply, crumb-removal, and using a big tower of a mill to put pepper on pretty much anything you don’t lean forward and cover with your upper body—good old Wojtek works exclusively with Tibor, and they have an involved minuet of service that’s choreographed down to the last pivot, and they speak quietly to each other in a Slavicized German pidgin you can tell they’ve evolved through countless quiet professional exchanges; and you can tell Wojtek reveres Tibor as much as the rest of us do.

  This morning The Tibster wears a red bow tie and smells faintly of sandalwood. Early Seating Breakfast is the best time to be around him, because he’s not very busy and can be initiated into chitchat without looking pained at neglecting his duties. He doesn’t know I’m on the Nadir as a pseudojournalist. I’m not sure why I haven’t told him—somehow I think it might make things hard for him. During E.S.B. chitchat I never ask him anything about Celebrity Cruises or the Nadir,92 not out of deference to Mr. Dermatitis’s pissy injunctions but because I feel like I’d just about die if Tibor got into trouble on my account.

  Tibor’s ambition is someday to return to Budapest93 for good and with his Nadir-savings open a sort of newspaper-and-beret-type sidewalk cafe that specializes in something called Cherry Soup. With this in mind, two days from now in Ft. Lauderdale I’m going to tip The Tibster way, way more than the suggested $3.00 U.S./diem,94 balancing out total expenses by radically undertipping both the liplessly sinister maître d’ and our sommelier, an unctuously creepy Ceylonese guy the whole table has christened The Velvet Vulture.

  0815h.: Catholic Mass is celebrated with Father DeSandre, Location: Rainbow Room, Deck 8.95

  There’s no chapel per se on the Nadir. The Father sets up a kind of folding credence table in the Rainbow Room, the most aftward of the Fantasy Deck lounges, done in salmon and sere yellow with dados of polished bronze. Genuflecting at sea turns out to be a tricky business. There are about a dozen people here. The Father’s backlit by a big port window, and his homily is mercifully free of nautical puns or references to life being a voyage. The communal beverage is a choice of either wine or Welch’s-brand unsweetened grape juice. Even the Nadir’s daily mass’s communion wafers are unusually yummy, biscuitier than your normal host and with a sweet tinge to the pulp it becomes in your teeth.96 Cynical observations about how appropriate it is that a 7NC Luxury Cruise’s daily worship is held in an overdeco
rated bar seem too easy to take up space on. Just how a diocesan priest gets a 7NC Megacruiser as a parish—whether Celebrity maybe has clerics on retainer, sort of like the army, and they get assigned to different ships in rotation, and whether the R.C. Church gets paid just like the other vendors who provide service and entertainment personnel, etc.—will I’m afraid be forever unclear: Father DeSandre explains he has no time after the recessional for professional queries, because of

  0900h.: Wedding Vow Renewal with Father DeSandre. Same venue, same porta-altar setup. No married couples show up to renew their wedding vows, though. There’s me and Captain Video and maybe a dozen other Nadirites sitting around in salmon chairs, and a beverage waitress makes a couple circuits with her visor and pad, and Father DeS. stands patiently in his cassock and white cope till 0920, but no older-type couples appear or step forward to renew. A few of the people in the R.R. sit in proximities and attitudes that show they’re couples, but they sort of apologetically tell the Father they’re not even married; the surprisingly cool and laid back Father DeS.’s invitation to make use of the setup and twin candles and priest w/ sacramentary Book of Rites opened to just the right page produces some shy laughter from the couples, but no takers. I don’t know what to make of the W.V.R.’s no-shows in terms of death/despair/pampering/insatiability issues.

  0930h.: The Library is open for check-out of games, cards, and books, Location: Library,97 Deck 7.

  The Nadir’s Library is a little glassed-in salon set obliquely off Deck 7’s Rendez-Vous Lounge. The Library’s all good wood and leather and three-way lamping, an extremely pleasant place, but it’s open only at weird and inconvenient times. Only one wall is even shelved, and most of the books are the sorts of books you see on the coffeetables of older people who live in condominiums near unchallenging golf courses: folio-sized, color-plated, with titles like Great Villas of Italy and Famous Tea Sets of the Modern World, etc. But it’s a great place to just hang around and moss out, the Library. Plus this is where the chess sets are. This week also features an unbelievably large and involved jigsaw puzzle that sits about half-done on an oak table in the corner, which all sorts of different old people come in and work on in shifts. There’s also a seemingly endless game of contract bridge always going on in the Card Room right next door, and the bridge players’ motionless silhouettes are always there through the frosted glass between Library and C.R. when I’m mossing out and playing with the chess sets.

  The Nadir’s Library’s got cheapo Parker Brothers chess sets with hollow plastic pieces, which any good chess player has got to like.98 I’m not nearly as good at chess as I am at Ping-Pong, but I’m pretty good. Most of the time on the Nadir I play chess with myself (not as dull as it may sound), for I have determined that—no offense—the sorts of people who go on 7NC Megacruises tend not to be very good chess players.

  Today, however, is the day I am mated in 23 moves by a nine-year-old girl. Let’s not spend a lot of time on this. The girl’s name is Deirdre. She’s one of very few little kids on board not tucked out of sight in Deck 4’s Daycare Grotto.99 Deirdre’s mom never leaves her in the Grotto but also never leaves her side, and has the lipless and flinty-eyed look of a parent whose kid is preternaturally good at something.

  I probably should have seen this and certain other signs of impending humiliation as the kid first comes over as I’m sitting there trying a scenario where both sides of the board deploy a Queen’s Indian and tugs on my sleeve and asks if I’d maybe like to play. She really does tug on my sleeve, and calls me Mister, and her eyes are roughly the size of sandwich plates. In retrospect it occurs to me that this girl was a little tall for nine, and worn-looking, slump-shouldered, the way usually only much older girls get—a kind of poor psychic posture. However good she may be at chess, this is not a happy little girl. I don’t suppose that’s germane.

  Deirdre pulls up a chair and says she usually likes to be black and informs me that in lots of cultures black isn’t thanatotic or morbid but is the spiritual equivalent of what white is in the U.S. and that in these other cultures it’s white that’s morbid. I tell her I already know all that. We start. I push some pawns and Deirdre develops a knight. Deirdre’s mom watches the whole game from a standing position behind the kid’s seat,100 motionless except for her eyes. I know within seconds that I despise this mom. She’s like some kind of stage-mother of chess. Deirdre seems like an OK type, though—I’ve played precocious kids before, and at least Deirdre doesn’t hoot or smirk. If anything, she seems a little sad that I don’t turn out to be more of a stretch for her.

  My first inkling of trouble is on the fourth move, when I fianchetto and Deirdre knows what I’m doing is fianchettoing and uses the term correctly, again calling me Mister. The second ominous clue is the way her little hand keeps flailing out to the side of the board after she moves, a sign that she’s used to a speed clock. She swoops in with her developed QK and forks my queen on the twelfth move and after that it’s only a matter of time. It doesn’t really matter. I didn’t even start playing chess until my late twenties. On move 17 three desperately old and related-looking people at the jigsaw puzzle table kind of totter over and watch as I hang my rook and the serious carnage starts. It doesn’t really matter. Neither Deirdre nor the hideous mom smiles when it’s over; I smile enough for everybody. None of us says anything about maybe playing again tomorrow.

  0945–1000h.: Back briefly for psychic recharging in good old 1009E.P., I eat four pieces of some type of fruit that’s like a tiny oversweetened tangerine and watch, for the fifth time this week, the Velociraptors-stalk-precocious-children-in-gleaming-institutional-kitchen part of Jurassic Park, noting an unprecedented sympathy for the Velociraptors this time around.

  1000–1100h.: Three simultaneous venues of Managed Fun, all aft on Deck 9: Darts Tournament, take aim and hit the bull’s-eye!; Shuffleboard Shuffle, join your fellow guests for a morning game; Ping Pong Tournament, meet the Cruise Staff at the tables, Prizes to the Winners!

  Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread. Everything about it suggests infirm senescence and death: it’s like it’s a game played on the skin of a void and the rasp of the sliding puck is the sound of that skin getting abraded away bit by bit. I also have a morbid but wholly justified fear of darts, stemming from a childhood trauma too involved and hair-raising to discuss here, and as an adult I avoid darts like cholera.

  What I’m here for is the Ping-Pong. I am an exceptionally good Ping-Pong player. The ND’s use of “Tournament” is euphemistic, though, because there are never any draw sheets or trophies in sight, and no other Nadirites are ever playing. The constant high winds on 9-Aft may account for Ping-Pong’s light turnout. Today three tables are set up (well off to the side of the Darts Tournament, which given the level of darts-play over there seems judicious), and the m.v. Nadir’s very own Ping-Pong Pro (or “3P,” as he calls himself) stands cockily by the center table, amusing himself by bouncing a ball off the paddle between his legs and behind his back. He turns when I crack my knuckles. I’ve come to Ping-Pong three different times already this week, and nobody’s ever here except the good old 3P, whose real first name is Winston. He and I are now at the point where we greet each other with the curt nods of old and mutually respected foes.

  Below the center table is an enormous box of fresh Ping-Pong balls, and apparently several more of these boxes are in the storage locker behind the Golf-Drive Net, which again seems judicious given the number of balls in each game that get smashed or blown out to sea.101 They also have a big peg-studded board on the bulkhead’s wall with over a dozen different paddles, both the plain-wooden-grip-and-head-with-thin-skin-of-cheap-pebbly-rubber kind and the fancy-wrapped-grip-and-head-with-thick-mushy-skin-of-unpebbled-rubber kind, all in Celebrity’s snazzy white/navy motif.102

  I am, as I believe I may already have stated, an extraordinarily fine Ping-Pong player,103 and it turns out that I am an even finer Ping-Pong player outdoors in tricky tropical winds; and, al
though Winston is certainly a good enough player to qualify as a 3P on a ship where interest in Ping-Pong is shall we say less than keen, my record against him thus far is eight wins and only one loss, with that one loss being not only a very close loss but also consequent to a number of freakish gusts and a net that Winston himself admitted later may not have been regulation I.T.T.F. height and tension. Winston is under the curious (and false) impression that we’ve got some kind of tacit wager going on whereby if the 3P ever beats me three games out of five he gets my full-color Spiderman hat, which hat he covets and which hat I wouldn’t dream ever of playing serious Ping-Pong without.