The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  The 7NC Megaship cruiser is a type, a genre of ship all its own, like the destroyer. All the Megalines have more than one ship. The industry descends from those old patrician trans-Atlantic deals where the opulence combined with actually getting someplace—e.g. the Titanic, Normandie, etc. The present Caribbean Cruise market’s various niches—Singles, Old People, Theme, Special Interest, Corporate, Party, Family, Mass-Market, Luxury, Absurd Luxury, Grotesque Luxury—have now all pretty much been carved and staked out and are competed for viciously (I heard off-the-record stuff about Carnival v. Princess that’d singe your brows). Megaships tend to be designed in America, built in Germany, registered out of Liberia or Monrovia; and they are both captained and owned, for the most part, by Scandinavians and Greeks, which is kind of interesting, since these are the same peoples who’ve dominated sea travel pretty much forever. Celebrity Cruises is owned by the Chandris Group; the X on their three ships’ smokestacks turns out not to be an X but a Greek chi, for Chandris, a Greek shipping family so ancient and powerful they apparently regarded Onassis as a punk.

  5 I’m doing this from memory. I don’t need a book. I can still name every documented Indianapolis fatality, including some serial numbers and hometowns. (Hundreds of men lost, 80 classed as Shark, 7–10 August ’45; the Indianapolis had just delivered Little Boy to the island of Tinian for delivery to Hiroshima, so ironists take note. Robert Shaw as Quint reprised the whole incident in 1975’s Jaws, a film that, as you can imagine, was like fetish-porn to me at age thirteen.)

  6 And I’ll admit that on the very first night of the 7NC I asked the staff of the Nadir’s Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant whether I could maybe have a spare bucket of au jus drippings from supper so I could try chumming for sharks off the back rail of the top deck, and that this request struck everybody from the maître d’ on down as disturbing and maybe even disturbed, and that it turned out to be a serious journalistic faux pas, because I’m almost positive the maître d’ passed this disturbing tidbit on to Mr. Dermatitis and that it was a big reason why I was denied access to stuff like the ship’s galley, thereby impoverishing the sensuous scope of this article. (Plus it also revealed how little I understood the Nadir’s sheer size: twelve decks and 150 feet up, the au jus drippings would have dispersed into a vague red cologne by the time they hit the water, with concentrations of blood inadequate to attract or excite a serious shark, whose fin would have probably looked like a pushpin from that height, anyway.)

  7 (apparently a type of nautical hoist, like a pulley on steroids)

  8 The Nadir’s got literally hundreds of cross-sectional maps of the ship on every deck, at every elevator and junction, each with a red dot and a YOU ARE HERE—and it doesn’t take long to figure out that these are less for orientation than for some weird kind of reassurance.

  9 Always constant references to “friends” in the brochures’ text; part of this promise of escape from death-dread is that no cruiser is ever alone.

  10 See?

  11 Always couples in this brochure, and even in group shots it’s always groups of couples. I never did get hold of a brochure for an actual Singles Cruise, but the mind reels. There was a “Singles Get Together” (sic) on the Nadir that first Saturday night, held in Deck 8’s Scorpio Disco, which after an hour of self-hypnosis and controlled breathing I steeled myself to go to, but even the Get Together was 75% established couples, and the few of us Singles under like 70 all looked grim and self-hypnotized, and the whole affair seemed like a true wrist-slitter, and I beat a retreat after half an hour because Jurassic Park was scheduled to run on the TV that night, and I hadn’t yet looked at the whole schedule and seen that Jurassic Park would play several dozen times over the coming week.

  12 From $2500 to about $4000 for mass-market Megaships like the Nadir, unless you want a Presidential Suite with a skylight, wet bar, automatic palm-fronds, etc., in which case double that.

  13 In response to some dogged journalistic querying, Celebrity’s PR firm’s Press Liaison (the charming and Debra Winger–voiced Ms. Wiessen) had this explanation for the cheery service: “The people on board—the staff—are really part of one big family—you probably noticed this when you were on the ship. They really love what they’re doing and love serving people, and they pay attention to what everybody wants and needs.”

  This was not what I myself observed. What I myself observed was that the Nadir was one very tight ship, run by an elite cadre of very hard-ass Greek officers and supervisors, and that the preterite staff lived in mortal terror of these Greek bosses who watched them with enormous beadiness at all times, and that the crew worked almost Dickensianly hard, too hard to feel truly cheery about it. My sense was that Cheeriness was up there with Celerity and Servility on the clipboarded evaluation sheets the Greek bosses were constantly filling out on them: when they didn’t know any guests were looking, a lot of the workers had the kind of pinched weariness about them that one associates with low-paid service employees in general, plus fear. My sense was that a crewman could get fired for a pretty small lapse, and that getting fired by these Greek officers might well involve a spotlessly shined shoe in the ass and then a really long swim.

  What I observed was that the preterite workers did have a sort of affection for the passengers, but that it was a comparative affection—even the most absurdly demanding passenger seemed kind and understanding compared to the martinetism of the Greeks, and the crew seemed genuinely grateful for this, sort of the way we find even very basic human decency moving if we encounter it in NYC or Boston.

  14 “YOUR PLEASURE,” several Megalines’ slogans go, “IS OUR BUSINESS.” What in a regular ad would be a double entendre is here a triple entendre, and the tertiary connotation—viz. “MIND YOUR OWN BLOODY BUSINESS AND LET US PROFESSIONALS WORRY ABOUT YOUR PLEASURE, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE”—is far from incidental.

  15 Celebrity, Cunard, Princess, and Holland America all use it as a hub. Carnival and Dolphin use Miami; others use Port Canaveral, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, all over.

  16 I was never in countless tries able to determine just what the Engler Corporation did or made or was about, but they’d apparently sent a quorum of their execs on this 7NC junket together as a weird kind of working vacation or intracompany convention or something.

  17 The reason for the delay won’t become apparent until next Saturday, when it takes until 1000h. to get everybody off the m.v. Nadir and vectored to appropriate transportation, and then from 1000 to 1400h. several battalions of jumpsuited Third World custodial guys will join the stewards in obliterating all evidence of us before the next 1374 passengers come on.

  18 For me, public places on the U.S. East Coast are full of these nasty little moments of racist observation and then internal P.C. backlash.

  19 This term belongs to an eight-cruise veteran, a 50ish guy with blond bangs and a big ginger beard and what looks weirdly like a T-square sticking out of his carry-on, who’s also the first person who offers me an unsolicited narrative on why he had basically no emotional choice right now but to come on a 7NC Luxury Cruise.

  20 Steiner of London’ll be on the Nadir, it turns out, selling herbal wraps and cellulite-intensive delipidizing massages and facials and assorted aesthetic pampering—they have a whole little wing in the top deck’s Olympic Health Club, and it seems like they all but own the Beauty Salon on Deck 5.

  21 Going on a 7NC Luxury Cruise is like going to the hospital or college in this respect: it seems to be SOP for a mass of relatives and well-wishers to accompany you right up to the jumping-off point and then have to finally leave, w/ lots of requisite hugs and tears.

  22 Long story, not worth it.

  23 Another odd demographic truth is that whatever sorts of people are neurologically disposed to go on 7NC Luxury Cruises are also neurologically disposed not to sweat—the one venue of exception on board the Nadir was the Mayfair Casino.

  24 I’m pretty sure I know what this syndrome is and how it’s related to the brochure’s seductive pro
mise of total self-indulgence. What’s in play here, I think, is the subtle universal shame that accompanies self-indulgence, the need to explain to just about anybody why the self-indulgence isn’t in fact really self-indulgence. Like: I never go get a massage just to get a massage, I go because this old sports-related back injury’s killing me and more or less forcing me to get a massage; or like: I never just “want” a cigarette, I always “need” a cigarette.

  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, 10 I forget, 9’s the Bahamas Deck, 8 Fantasy and 7 Galaxy (or vice versa), 6 I 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 sappeared 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 college-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.