The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  72a (literally)

  73 It is not “beautiful”; it is “pretty.” There’s a difference.

  74 Seven times around Deck 12 is a mile, and I’m one of very few Nadirites under about 70 who doesn’t jog like a fiend up here now that the weather’s nice. Early A.M. is the annular rush-hour of Deck 12 jogging. I’ve already seen a couple of juicy and Keystone-quality jogging collisions.

  75 Other eccentrics on this 7NC include: the thirteen-year-old kid with the toupee, who wears his big orange life jacket all week and sits on the wood floor of the upper decks reading Jose Philip Farmer paperbacks with three different boxes of Kleenex around him at all times; the bloated and dead-eyed guy who sits in the same chair at the same 21 table in the Mayfair Casino every day from 1200h. to 0300h., drinking Long Island Iced Tea and playing 21 at a narcotized underwater pace. There’s The Guy Who Sleeps By The Pool, who does just what his name suggests, except he does it all the time, even in the rain, a hairy-stomached guy of maybe 50, a copy of Megatrends open on his chest, sleeping w/o sunglasses or sunblock, w/o moving, for hours and hours, in full and high-watt sun, and never in my sight burns or wakes up (I suspect that at night they move him down to his room on a gurney). There’s also the two unbelievably old and cloudy-eyed couples who sit in a quartet in upright chairs just inside the clear plastic walls that enclose the area of Deck 11 that has the pools and Windward Cafe, facing out, i.e. out through the plastic sheeting, watching the ocean and ports like they’re something on TV, and also never once visibly moving.

  It seems relevant that most of the Nadir’s eccentrics are eccentric in stasis: what distinguishes them is their doing the same thing hour after hour and day after day without moving. (Captain Video is an active exception. People are surprisingly tolerant of Captain Video until the second-to-last night’s Midnight Caribbean Blow-Out by the pools, when he keeps breaking into the Conga Line and trying to shift its course so that it can be recorded at better advantage; then there is a kind of bloodless but unpleasant uprising against Captain Video, and he lays low for the rest of the Cruise, possibly organizing and editing his tapes.)

  76 (its sign’s in English, significantly)

  77 In Ocho Rios on Monday the big tourist-draw was apparently some sort of waterfall a whole group of Nadirites could walk up inside with a guide and umbrellas to protect their cameras. In Grand Cayman yesterday the big thing was Duty-Free rum and something called Bernard Passman Black Coral Art. Here in Cozumel it’s supposedly silver jewelry hawked by hard-dickering peddlers, and more Duty-Free liquor, and a fabled bar in San Miguel called Carlos and Charlie’s where they allegedly give you shots of something that’s mostly lighter fluid.

  78 Apparently it’s no longer in fashion to push the frames of the sunglasses up to where they ride just above the crown of your skull, which is what I used to see upscale sunglasses-wearers do a lot; the habit has now gone the way of tying your white Lacoste tennis sweater’s arms across your chest and wearing it like a cape.

  79 The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and—delightfully—it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.

  80 ( = the morbid fear of being seen as bovine)

  81 And in my head I go around and around about whether my fellow Nadirites suffer the same steep self-disgust. From a height, watching them, I usually imagine that the other passengers are oblivious to the impassively contemptuous gaze of the local merchants, service people, photo-op-with-lizard vendors, etc. I usually imagine that my fellow tourists are too bovinely self-absorbed to even notice how we’re looked at. At other times, though, it occurs to me that the other Americans on board quite possibly feel the same vague discomfort about their bovine-American role in port that I do, but that they refuse to let their boviscopophobia rule them: they’ve paid good money to have fun and be pampered and record some foreign experiences, and they’ll be goddamned if they’re going to let some self-indulgent twinge of neurotic projection about how their Americanness appears to malnourished locals detract from the 7NC Luxury Cruise they’ve worked and saved for and decided they deserve.

  82 This dawn-and-dusk cloudiness was a pattern. In all, three of the week’s days could be called substantially cloudy, and it rained a bunch of times, including all Friday in port in Key West. Again, I can see no way to blame the Nadir or Celebrity Cruises Inc. for this happenstance.

  83 A further self-esteem-lowerer is how bored all the locals look when they’re dealing with U.S. tourists. We bore them. Boring somebody seems way worse than offending or disgusting him.

  84 (which on scale of these ships means something around 100 m)

  85 On all 7NC Megaships, Deck 12 forms a kind of mezzanineish ellipse over Deck 11, which is always about half open-air (11 is) and always has pools surrounded by plastic/Plexiglas walls.

  86 (I hate dill pickles, and C.S. churlishly refuses to substitute gherkins or butter chips)

  87 It may well be the Big One, come to think of it.

  88 The fantasy they’re selling is the whole reason why all the subjects in all the brochures’ photos have facial expressions that are at once orgasmic and oddly slack: these expressions are the facial equivalent of going “Aaaahhhhh,” and the sound is not just that of somebody’s Infantile part exulting in finally getting the total pampering it’s always wanted but also that of the relief all the other parts of that person feel when the Infantile part finally shuts up.

  89 This right here is not the mordant footnote projected supra, but the soda-pop issue bears directly on what was for me one of the true mysteries of this Cruise, viz. how Celebrity makes a profit on Luxury 7NCs. If you accept Fielding’s Worldwide Cruises 1995’s per diem on the Nadir of about $275.00 a head, then you consider that the m.v. Nadir itself cost Celebrity Cruises $250 million to build in 1992, and that it’s got 600 employees of whom at least the upper echelons have got to be making serious money (the whole Greek contingent had the unmistakable set of mouth that goes with salaries in six figures), plus simply hellacious fuel costs—plus port taxes and insurance and safety equipment and space-age navigational and communications gear and a computerized tiller and state-of-the-art maritime sewage—and then start factoring in the luxury stuff, the top-shelf decor and brass ceiling-tile, chandeliers, a good three dozen people aboard as nothing more than twice-a-week stage entertainers, plus then the professional Head Chef and the lobster and Etruscan truffles and the cornucopic fresh fruit and the imported pillow mints… then, even playing it very conservative, you cannot get the math to add up. There doesn’t look to be any way Celebrity can be coming out ahead financially. And yet the sheer number of different Megalines offering 7NCs constitutes reliable evidence that Luxury Cruises must be very profitable indeed. Again, Celebrity’s PR lady Ms. Wiessen was—notwithstanding a phone-voice that was a total pleasure to listen to—not particularly helpful with this mystery:

  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 L
uxury 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.