A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Notes

¹ This, and thus part of this essay’s title, is from a marvelous toss-off in Michael Sorkin’s “Faking It,” published in Todd Gitlin, ed., Watching Television, Random House/Pantheon, 1987.

² Quoted by Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness, Harvard U. Press, 1981; subsequent Emerson quotes ibid.

³ Bernard Nossiter, “The F.C.C.’s Big Giveaway Show,” Nation, 10/26/85, p. 402.

⁴ Janet Maslin, “It’s Tough for Movies to Get Real,” New York Times Arts & Leisure Section, 8/05/90, p. 9.

⁵ Stephen Holden, “Strike The Pose: When Music Is Skin-Deep,” ibid., p. 1.

⁶ Sorkin in Gitlin, p. 163.

⁷ Daniel Hallin, “We Keep America On Top of the World,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 16.

⁸ Barbara Tuchman, “The Decline of Quality,” New York Times Magazine, 11/02/80.

⁹ M. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vintage, 1945 edition, pp. 57 and 73.

¹⁰ I didn’t get this definition from any sort of authoritative source, but it seems pretty modest and commonsensical.

¹¹ Don DeLillo, White Noise, Viking, 1985, p. 72.

¹² Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, Harvard U. Press, 1974, pp. 103–118.

¹³ This professor was the sort of guy who used “which” when the appropriate relative pronoun was the less fancy “that” to give you an idea.

¹⁴ If you want to see a typical salvo in this generation war, look at William Gass’s “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense” in the 10/11/87 New York Times Book Review.

¹⁵ In Bill Knott’s Love Poems to Myself, Book One, Barn Dream Press, 1974.

¹⁶ In Stephen Dobyns’s Heat Death, McLelland and Stewart, 1980.

¹⁷ In Bill Knott’s Becos, Vintage, 1983.

¹⁸White Noise, pp. 12–13.

¹⁹ Martone, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, Indiana U. Press, 1990, p. ix.

²⁰ Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Harmony/Crown, 1990, p. 82.

²¹ Mark Crispin Miller, “Deride and Conquer,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 193.

²² At Foote, Cone and Belding, quoted by Miller — so the guy said it in the mid-’80s.

²³ A similar point is made about Miami Vice in “We Build Excitement” Todd Gitlin’s own essay in his anthology.

²⁴ Miller in Gitlin, p. 194.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 187.

²⁶ Miller’s “Deride…” has a similar analysis of sitcoms, but Miller ends up arguing that the crux is some weird Freudio-patricidal element in how TV comedy views The Father.

²⁷ Lewis Hyde, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” American Poetry Review, reprinted in the Pushcart Prize anthology for 1987.

²⁸ Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review #146, Summer 1984, pp. 60–66.

²⁹ Pat Auferhode, “The Look of the Sound,” in good old Gitlin’s anthology, p. 113.

³⁰ Miller in Gitlin, p. 199.

³¹ Greil Marcus, Mystery Train, Dutton, 1976.

³² Hyde, op. cit.

³³White Noise, p. 13.

³⁴ A term Gitlin uses in “We Build Excitement.”

¹ (I haven’t yet been able to track down clips of the N.B.C.C. spots, but the mind reels at the possibilities implicit in the conjunction of D. Lynch and radical mastectomy….)

² “M.o.L,” only snippets of which are on BV’s soundtrack, has acquired an underground reputation as one of the great make-out tunes of all time — well worth checking out.

³ (’92 having been a year of simply manic creative activity for Lynch, apparently)

⁴ Dentistry seems to be a new passion for Lynch, by the way — the photo on the title page of Lost Highway’s script, which is of a guy with half his face normal and half unbelievably distended and ventricose and gross, was apparently culled from a textbook on extreme dental emergencies. There’s great enthusiasm for this photo around Asymmetrical Productions, and they’re looking into the legalities of using it in Lost Highway’s ads and posters, which if I was the guy in the photo I’d want a truly astronomical permission fee.

⁵ (And Dune really is visually awesome, especially the desert planet’s giant worm-monsters, who with their tripartitely phallic snouts bear a weird resemblance to the mysterious worm Henry Spencer keeps in the mysterious thrumming cabinet in Eraserhead.)

⁶ Anybody who wants to see how the Process and its inducements destroy what’s cool and alive in a director should consider the recent trajectory of Richard Rodriguez, from the plasma-financed vitality of El Mariachi to the gory pretension of Desperado to the empty and embarrassing From Dusk to Dawn. Very sad.

⁷ (using MacLachlan perfectly this time — since the role of Jeffrey actually calls for potato-faced nerdiness — plus Eraserhead’s Jack Nance and Dune’s Dean Stockwell and Brad Dourif, none of whom has ever been creepier, plus using Dallas’s Priscilla Pointer and everything’s Hope Lange as scary moms…)

⁸ TIDBIT: HOW LYNCH AND HIS CINEMATOGRAPHER FOR BV FILMED THAT HELLACIOUS FORCED “JOYRIDE” IN FRANK BOOTH’S CAR, THE SCENE WHERE FRANK AND JACK NANCE AND BRAD DOURIF HAVE KIDNAPPED JEFFREY BEAUMONT AND ARE MENACING HIM INSIDE THE CAR WHILE THEY’RE GOING WHAT LOOKS LIKE 100+ DOWN A DISMAL RURAL TWO-LANER: The reason it looks like the car’s going so fast is that lights outside the car are going by so fast. In fact the car wasn’t even moving. A burly grip was bouncing madly up and down on the back bumper to make the car jiggle and roll, and other crewpeople with hand-held lamps were sprinting back and forth outside the car to make it look like the car was whizzing past streetlights. The whole scene’s got a claustrophobia-in-motion feel that they never could have gotten if the car’d actually been moving (the production’s insurance wouldn’t have allowed that kind of speed in a real take), and the whole thing was done for about $8.95.

⁹ (sex scenes that are creepy in part because they’re exactly what the viewer himself imagines having sex with Patricia Arquette would be like)

¹⁰ (a stilted, tranced quality that renders the sex scenes both sexually “hot” and aesthetically “cold,” a sort of meta-erotic effect you could see Gus Van Sant trying to emulate when he had the sex scenes in My Own Private Idaho rendered as series of complexly postured stills, which instead of giving them Lynch’s creepy tranced quality made them look more like illustrations from the Kama-Sutra)

¹¹ (And as an aside, but a true aside, I’ll add that I have had since 1986 a personal rule w/r/t dating, which is that any date where I go to a female’s residence to pick her up and have any kind of conversation with parents or roommates that’s an even remotely Lynchian conversation is automatically the only date I ever have with that female, regardless of her appeal in other areas. And that this rule, developed after seeing Blue Velvet, has served me remarkably well and kept me out of all kinds of hair-raising entanglements and jams, and that friends to whom Tve promulgated the rule but who have willfully ignored it and have continued dating females with clear elements of Lynchianism in their characters or associations have done so to their regret.)

¹² Lynch’s influence extends into mainstream Hollywood movies, too, by the way. The surfeit of dark dense machinery, sudden gouts of vented steam, ambient industrial sounds, etc., in Lynch’s early stuff has clearly affected James Cameron and Terry Gilliam, and Gilliam has taken to the limit Lynch’s preoccupation with blatantly Freudian fantasies (Brazil) and interpenetrations of ancient myth and modern psychoses (The Fisher King).

And across the spectrum, in the world of caviar-for-the-general art films, one has only to look at Atom Egoyan or Guy Maddin’s abstruse, mood-lit, slow-moving angst-fests, or at the Frenchman Arnaud DesPlechin’s 1992 La Sentinelle (which the director describes as “a brooding, intuitive study in split consciousness” and which is actually about a disassociated med-student’s relationship with a severed head), or actually at just about anything recent that’s directed by a French male under 35, to see Lynch’s sensibility stamped like an exergue on art cinema’s hot young Turks, too.

¹³ (This isn’t counting Dune, which was in the dreadful position of looking like it wanted to have one but not in fact having one.)

¹⁴ I know I’m not putting this well; it seems too complicated to be put well. It has something to do with the fact that some movies are too scary or intense for younger viewers: a little kid, whose psychic defenses aren’t yet developed, can be terribly frightened by a horror movie that you or I would regard as cheesy and dumb.

¹⁵ The way Lost Highway makes the idea of head-entry literal is not an accident.

¹⁶(Premiere magazine puts its writers in extremely snazzy hotels, by the way. I strongly doubt all hotels in LA are like this.)

¹⁷ I know things like this sound like a cheap gag, but I swear I’m serious. The incongruous realism of cheap gags is what made the whole thing Lynchian.

¹⁸ Mary Sweeney is one of Lost Highway’s three producers. Her main responsibilities seem to be the daily rushes and the rough cut and its storage and organization. She was Lynch’s editor on Fire Walk with Me.

¹⁹ (One Lost Highway crewperson described Scott Cameron as “the Mozart of stress,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.)

²⁰ (not “Third Assistant,” for some firmly established reason)

²¹ (= Robert Loggia)

²² (= Balthazar Getty, about whom the less said the better, probably, except maybe to say that he looks sort of like Tom Hanks and John Cusack and Charlie Sheen all mashed together and then emptied of some vital essence. He’s not particularly tall, but he looks tall in Lost Highway’s footage because he has extremely poor posture and David Lynch has for some reason instructed him to exaggerate the poor posture. As a Hot Young Male Actor, Balthazar Getty is to Leonardo DiCaprio roughly what a Ford Escort is to a Lexus. His breakthrough role was as Ralph in the latest Lord of the Flies, in which he was bland and essenceless but not terrible. He was miscast and misdirected as a homeless kid in Where the Day Takes You (like how does a homeless kid manage to have fresh mousse in his hair every day?) and really good in a surly bit part in Mr. Holland’s Opus.

To be frank, it’s almost impossible for me to separate predictions about how good Balthazar Getty’s going to be in Lost Highway from my impressions of him as a human being around the set, which latter impressions were so uniformly negative that it’s probably better not to say too much about it. For just one thing, he’d annoy hell out of everybody between takes by running around trying to borrow everybody’s cellular phone for an “emergency.” I’ll confess that I eavesdropped on some of his emergency cellular phone conversations, and in one of them he said to somebody “But what did she say about me?” three times in a row. For another thing, he was a heavy smoker but never had his own cigarettes and was always bumming cigarettes from crewpeople who you could tell were making about 1 % of what he was making on this movie. I admit that none of these are exactly capital offenses, but they added up. Getty also suffered from comparison with his stand-in, who was apparently his friend and who always stood right near him, wearing an identical auto-shop jumpsuit with “Pete” sewn in cursive on the breast and an identically gruesome ersatz carbuncle on his forehead, and who was laid back and cool and very funny — e.g. when I expressed surprise that so much time on a movie set was spent standing around waiting with nothing to do, Balthazar Getty’s stand-in was the one who said “We actually work for free; it’s the waiting around we get paid for,” which maybe you had to be there but in the context of the mind-shattering boredom of standing around the set all day seemed incredibly funny.

OK, fuck it: the single most annoying thing about Balthazar Getty was that whenever David Lynch was around Getty would be very unctuous and over-respectful and asskissy, but when Lynch wasn’t around Getty would make fun of him and do an unkind imitation of his distinctive speaking voice (w/r/t which see below) that wasn’t a very good imitation but was clearly intended to be disrespectful and mean.)

²³ Eleven trailers, actually, most of them from Foothill Studio Equipment Rentals of Glendale and Transcord Mobile Studios of Burbank. All the trailers are detached and up on blocks. The Honeywagon is the fourth trailer in the line. There are trailers for Lights, Props, ‘F/X, Wardrobe, Grippish stuff, and some for the bigger stars in the cast, though the stars’ trailers don’t have their names or a gold star on the door or anything. The F/X trailer flies a Jolly Roger. Hard grunge issues from the Lighting trailer, and outside a couple other trailers tough-looking crewpeople sit in canvas chairs reading Car Action and Guns and Ammo. Some portion of the movie’s crew spends just about all their time in Base Camp doing various stuff in trailers, though it’s hard to figure out just what they’re doing, because these crewpeople have the kind of carny-esque vibe about them of people who spend a lot of time with their trailers and regard the trailers as their special territory and aren’t particularly keen on having you climb up in there and see what they’re doing. But a lot of it is highly technical. The area closest to daylight in the back of the Lighting and/or Camera-Related trailer, for example, has tripods and lightpoles and attachments of all lengths and sizes lined up very precisely, like ordnance. Shelves near the tripods have labeled sections for “2 X MIGHTY,” “2 X 8 JUNIOR,” “2 X MICKEY MOLES,” “2 X BABY BJs,” on and on. Boxes of lenses in rows have labels like

LONG PRIMES

A FILTS/4 X 5/DIOPS

WIDEPRIMES

50mm “E” T2 4’

SPC 200- 108A

30mm “C” T3 4’

75mm “E” T2 4’

B FILTS 4X5

40mm “E” T2 3.5’

100mm “E” T2 4’

²⁴ LAFD inspectors were all over the set, glaring at you if you lit a cigarette, and nicotinic conditions were pretty rugged because Scott Cameron decreed that people could smoke only if they were standing near the sand-filled butt can, of which there was apparently only one, and David Lynch, a devoted smoker of American Spirit All-Natural cigarettes, tended to commandeer the butt can, and people who wanted to smoke and were not near Lynch pretty much had to chew their knuckle and wait for him to turn his back so they could steal the can.

²⁵ After absorbing so much about it from the media, actually visiting Los Angeles in person produces a curious feeling of relief at finding a place that actually confirms your stereotyped preconceptions instead of confounding them and making you loathe your own ignorance and susceptibility to media stereotype: viz. stuff like cellular phones, rampant pulchritude, the odd ambient blend of New Age gooeyness and right-wing financial acumen. (E.g., one of the two prenominate people named Balloon, a guy who wore Birkenstocks and looked like he subsisted entirely on cellulose, had worked out an involved formula for describing statistical relationships between margin-calls on certain kinds of commodity futures and the market value of certain types of real estate, and had somehow gotten the impression that I and/or Premiere magazine ought to be interested in describing the formula in this article in such a way as to allow Balloon to start up a kind of pricey newsletter-type thing where people would for some reason pay large amounts of money for access to this formula, and for the better part of an afternoon he was absolutely unshakable, his obtuseness almost Zen — like a Lynchian bus-station wacko with an advanced degree from the L.S.E. — and the only way to peel him off me was to promise on my honor to find some way to work him and his formula into this article, an honor-obligation I’ve now fulfilled, though if Premiere wants to take the old editorial machete to it there’s not really any way I can be held responsible.

(By the way, in case you think I’m lying or exaggerating about having met two unconnected persons named Balloon on this visit, the other Balloon was part of a rather unaccomplished banjo-and-maraca street duo on the median strip just outside the lavish deserted mall across the street from the gorgeous balcony that was too narrow and hazardously fenced to step onto, and the reason I approached this Balloon was that I wanted to know whether the wicked welts on his face-and-neck-area were by any chance from errant quarters or half-dollars thrown at him from speeding cars, which they turned out not to be.))

²⁶ (looks like a blank canvas or stunted sail, helps concentrate light where they want it)

²⁷ It’s unclear whether this is her first name or her last name or a diminutive or what. Chesney is dressed in standard grunge flannel and dirty sneakers, has about 8 feet of sun-colored hair piled high on her head and held (tenuously) in place with sunglasses, and can handle an anamorphic lens like nobody’s business.

²⁸ (There’s one young guy on the crew whose entire function seems to be going around with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels and Windexing every glass surface blindingly clean.)

²⁹ (₌ “Computer-Generated Images,” as in Jumanji)

³⁰ I.e. “Electronic Press Kit,” a bite-intensive interview that Lost Highway’s publicists can then send off to Entertainment Tonight, local TV stations that want Pullman-bites, etc. If the movie’s a huge hit, the E.P.K.’s can then apparently be woven together into one of those Behind the Scenes at the Making of Thus-and-Such documentaries that HBO seems to be so fond of. Apparently all name stars have to do an E.P.K. for every movie they make; it’s in their contract or something. I watched everybody’s E.P.K. except Balthazar Getty’s.

³¹ (Pullman’s turn as the jilted con man in The Last Seduction had some edge to it, but Pullman seems to have done such a good acting job in that one that few people realized it was him.)

³²Premiere magazine’s industrial juice or no, I wasn’t allowed to watch footage of the porn videos both her characters frolic in, so I can’t evaluate the harder-core parts of her performance in Lost Highway. It’ll be interesting to see how much of the porn videos survives the final cut and the M.P.A.A.’s humorless review. If much of what the videos are rumored to contain appears in the final Lost Highway, Arquette may win a whole new kind of following.

³³ R. Blake, born 1933 as Michael James Gubitosi in Nutley, New Jersey, was one of the child stars of Our Gang, was unforgettable as one of the killers in In Cold Blood, etc.

³⁴ Dennis Hopper’s last powerful role before Blue Velvet had been the 1977 Apocalypse Now, and he’d become a kind of Hollywood embarrassment. DaFoe had been sort of typecast as Christ after Platoon and Last Temptation, though it’s true that his sensualist’s lips had whispered menace even on the cross.

³⁵ And Richard Pryor’s in the movie as Richard-Pryor-the-celebrity-who’s-now-neurologically-damaged, not as a black person.

³⁶ Dean Stockwell’s Ben in Blue Velvet was probably technically gay, but what was relevant about Ben was his creepy effeminacy, which Frank called Ben’s “suaveness.” The only homoerotic subcurrent in Blue Velvet is between Jeffrey and Frank, and neither of them are what you’d call gay.

³⁷ (There were also, come to think of it, those two black hardware store employees (both named Ed) in Blue Velvety but, again, their blackness was incidental to the comic-symbolic issue of one Ed’s blindness and the other Ed’s dependence on the blind Ed’s perfect memory for hardware-prices. I’m talking about characters who are, like, centrally minorityish in Lynch’s movies.)

³⁸ (Wholly random examples:) Think of the way Parker’s Mississippi Burning fumbled at our consciences like a freshman at a coed’s brassiere, or of Dances with Wolves’ crude, smug reversal of old westerns’ “White=Good & Indian=Bad” equation. Or think of movies like Fatal Attraction and Unlawful Entry and Die Hard I–III and Copycat, etc., where we’re so relentlessly set up to approve the villains’ bloody punishment in the climax that we might as well be wearing togas. (The formulaic inexorability of these villains’ defeat does give the climaxes an oddly soothing, ritualistic quality, and it makes the villains martyrs in a way, sacrifices to our desire for black-and-white morality and comfortable judgment … I think it was during the original Die Hard that I first rooted consciously for the villain.)

³⁹ (solipsism being not exactly the cheery crackling hearth of psychophilosophical orientations)

⁴⁰ For somebody whose productions are supposed to be top-secret, Lynch and Asymmetrical seem awfully tolerant about having functionless interns and weird silent young people hanging around the Lost Highway set. Isabella Rossellini’s cousin is here, “Alesandro,” a 25ish guy ostensibly taking photos of the production for an Italian magazine but in fact mostly just walking around with his girlfriend in a leather miniskirt (the girlfriend) and grooming his crewcut and smoking nowhere near the butt can. Plus there’s also “Rolande” (pronounced as an iamb: “Rolande”; my one interchange with Rolande consisted mostly of Rolande emphasizing this point). Rolande is an incredibly creepy French kid with a forehead about three feet high who somehow charmed Lynch into taking him on as an intern and lurks on the set constantly and does nothing but stand around with a little spiral notebook taking notes in a dense crabbed psychotically neat hand. Pretty much the whole crew and staff agrees that Rolande’s creepy and unpleasant to be around and that God only knows what the tiny precise notes really concern, but Lynch apparently actually likes the kid, and claps him avuncularly on the shoulder whenever the kid’s within reach, at which the kid smiles very widely and then afterward walks away rubbing his shoulder and muttering darkly.

⁴¹ Lynch’s best-known painting, entitled Oww, God, Mom, the Dog He Bited Me, is described by Lynch in his Time cover-story this way: “There’s a clump of Band-Aids in the bottom corner. A dark background. A stick figure whose head is a blur of blood. Then a very small dog made out of glue. There is a house, a little black bump. It’s pretty crude, pretty primitive and minimal. I like it.” The painting itself, which is oddly absent from the book Images but has been published as a postcard, looks like the sort of diagnostic House-Tree-Person drawing that gets a patient institutionalized in a hurry.

⁴² (not even the Lynch-crazy French film pundits who’ve made his movies the subject of more than two dozen essays in Cahiers du Cinéma—the French apparently regard Lynch as God, though the fact that they also regard Jerry Lewis as God might salt the compliment a bit …)

⁴³ (q.v. Baron Harkonen’s “cardiac rape” of the servant boy in Dune’s first act)

⁴⁴ Here’s one reason why Lynch’s characters have this weird opacity about them, a narcotized over-earnestness that’s reminiscent of lead-poisoned kids in Midwestern trailer parks. The truth is that Lynch needs his characters stolid to the point of retardation; otherwise they’d be doing all this ironic eyebrow-raising and finger-steepling about the overt symbolism of what’s going on, which is the very last thing he wants his characters doing.

⁴⁵ Lynch did a one-and-a-half-gainer into this pitfall in Wild at Heart, which is one reason the movie comes off so pomo-cute, another being the ironic intertextual self-consciousness (q.v. Wizard of Oz, Fugitive Kind) that Lynch’s better Expressionist movies have mostly avoided.

⁴⁶ (= Master of Fine Arts Program, which is usually a two-year thing for graduate students who want to write fiction or poetry professionally)

⁴⁷ (I’m hoping now in retrospect this wasn’t something Lynch’s ex-wife did …)

⁴⁸ (e.g.: Kathleen Murphy, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson, Laurent Vachaud)

⁴⁹ This critical two-step, a blend of New Criticism and pop psychology, might be termed the Unintentional Fallacy.

⁵⁰ (i.e. “in-spired,” = “affected, guided, aroused by divine influence” from the Latin inspirare, “breathed into”)

⁵¹ It’s possible to decode Lynch’s fetish for floating/flying entities — witches on broomsticks, sprites and fairies and Good Witches, angels dangling overhead — along these lines. Likewise his use of robins=Light in Wand owl=Darkness in TP: the whole point of these animals is that they’re mobile.

⁵² (with the exception of Dune, in which the good and bad guys practically wear color-coded hats — but Dune wasn’t really Lynch’s film anyway)

⁵³ This sort of interpretation informed most of the positive reviews of both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.

⁵⁴ (which most admiring critics did — the quotation is from a 1/90 piece on Lynch in the New York Times Magazine)

⁵⁵ (Not to mention ignoring the fact that Frances Bay, as Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara, standing right next to Jeffrey and Sandy at the window and making an icky-face at the robin and saying “Who could eat a bug?” then — as far as I can tell, and I’ve seen the movie like eight times — proceeds to PUT A BUG IN HER MOUTH. Or at least if it’s not a bug she puts in her mouth it’s a tidbit sufficiently buggy-looking to let you be sure Lynch means something by having her do it right after she’s criticized the robin for its diet. (Friends I’ve surveyed are evenly split on whether Aunt Barbara eats a bug in this scene — have a look for yourself.))

⁵⁶ As, to be honest, is a part of us, the audience. Excited, I mean. And Lynch clearly sets the rape scene up to be both horrifying and exciting. This is why the colors are so lush and the mise en scène so detailed and sensual, why the camera lingers on the rape, fetishizes it: not because Lynch is sickly or naively excited by the scene but because he — like us — is humanly, complexly excited by the scene. The camera’s ogling is designed to implicate Frank and Jeffrey and the director and the audience all at the same time.

⁵⁷ (prematurely!)

⁵⁸ I don’t think it’s an accident that of the grad-school friends I first saw Blue Velvet with in 1986, the two who were most disturbed by the movie — the two who said they felt like either the movie was really sick or they were really sick or both they and the movie were really sick, the two who acknowledged the movie’s artistic power but declared that as God was their witness you’d never catch them sitting through that particular sickness-fest again — were both male, nor that both singled out Frank’s smiling slowly while pinching Dorothy’s nipple and looking out past Wall 4 and saying “ You re like me” as possibly the creepiest and least pleasant moment in their personal moviegoing history.

⁵⁹ Worse, actually. Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and not a thematic device, Lynch is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up. And the series’ second season showed that he was aware of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode, the show had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up. Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks’s second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV).

⁶⁰ This is inarguable, axiomatic. In fact what’s striking about most U.S. mystery and suspense and crime and horror films isn’t these films’ escalating violence but their enduring and fanatical allegiance to moral verities that come right out of the nursery: the virtuous heroine will not be serial-killed; the honest cop, who will not know his partner is corrupt until it’s too late to keep the partner from getting the drop on him, will nevertheless somehow turn the tables and kill the partner in a wrenching confrontation; the predator stalking the hero/hero’s family will, no matter how rational and ingenious he’s been in his stalking tactics throughout the film, nevertheless turn into a raging lunatic at the end and will mount a suicidal frontal assault; etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. The truth is that a major component of the felt suspense in contemporary U.S. suspense movies concerns how the filmmaker is going to manipulate various plot and character elements in order to engineer the required massage of our moral certainties. This is why the discomfort we feel at “suspense” movies is perceived as a pleasant discomfort. And this is why, when a filmmaker fails to wrap his product up in the appropriate verity-confirming fashion, we feel not confusion or even offense but anger, a sense of betrayal — we feel that an unspoken but very important covenant has been violated.

⁶¹ (not to mention for being (from various reviews) “overwrought,” “incoherent,” “too much”)

¹ Comprising Washington, Montreal, LA, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, New Haven, and Long Island, this is possibly the most grueling part of the Association of Tennis Professionals’ yearly tour, with three-digit temperatures and the cement courts shimmering like Moroccan horizons and everyone wearing a hat and even the spectators carrying sweat towels.

² Joyce lost that final to Thomas Enqvist, now ranked in the ATP’s top twenty and a potential superstar and in high-profile attendance here at Montreal.

³ Tarango, 27, who completed three years at Stanford, is regarded as something of a scholar by Joyce and the other young Americans on tour. His little bio in the 1995 ATP Player Guide lists his interests as including “philosophy, creative writing, and bridge,” and his slight build and receding hairline do in fact make him look more like an academic or a tax attorney than a world-class tennis player. Also a native Californian, Tarango’s a friend and something of a mentor to Michael Joyce, whom he practices with regularly and addresses as “Grasshopper.” Joyce — who seems to like pretty much everybody — likes Jeff Tarango and won’t comment on his on-court explosion at Wimbledon except to say that Tarango is “a very intense guy, very intellectual, that gets kind of paranoid sometimes.”

⁴ Title sponsors are as important to ATP tournaments as they are to collegiate bowl games. This year the Canadian Open is officially called the “du Maurier Omnium Ltée.” But everybody still refers to it as the Canadian Open. There are all types and levels of sponsors for big tennis tournaments — the levels of giving and of commensurate reward are somewhat similar to PBS fundraising telethons. Names of sponsors are all over the Canadian Open’s site (with variations in size and placement corresponding to levels of fiscal importance to the tournament), from the big FedEx signs over the practice courts to the RADO trademark on the serve-speed radar display on the show courts. On the scarlet tarp and the box seats all around the Stadium and Grandstand Courts are the names of other corporate sponsors: TANDEM COMPUTERS/APG INC., BELL SYGMA, BANQUE LAURENTIENNE, IMASCO LIMITÉE, EVANS TECHNOLOGIES INC., MOBILIA, BELL CANADA, ARGO STEEL, etc.

⁵ Another way to be a sponsor: supply free stuff to the tournament and put your name on it in really big letters. All the courts’ tall umpire-chairs have a sign that says they’re supplied by TROPICANA; all the bins for fresh and unfresh towels say WAMSUTTA; the drink coolers at courtside (the size of trash barrels, with clear plastic lids) say TROPICANA and EVIAN. The players who don’t individually endorse a certain brand of drink tend as a rule to drink Evian, orange juice being a bit heavy for on-court rehydration.

⁶ Most of the girlfriends have something indefinable about them that suggests extremely wealthy parents whom the girls are trying to piss off by hooking up with an obscure professional tennis player.

⁷ The term “seeding” comes from British horticulture and is pretty straightforward. A player seeded First is expected statistically to win, Second to reach the finals, Third and Fourth the semis, etc. A player who reaches the round his seed designates is said to have “justified his seed,” a term that seems far more rich in implications and entendres. Serious tennis is full of these multisemiotic terms—“love,” “hold” and “break,” “fault,” “let” as a noun, “heat,” “moon,” “spank,” “coming in,” “playing unconscious,” and so on.

⁸ Except for the four Grand Slams, no tournament draws all the top players, although every tournament would obviously like to, since the more top players are entered, the better the paid attendance and the more media exposure the tournament gets for itself and its sponsors. Players ranked in the world’s top twenty or so, though, tend to play a comparatively light schedule of tournaments, taking time off not only for rest and training but to compete in wildly lucrative exhibitions that don’t affect ATP ranking. (We’re talking wildly lucrative, like millions of dollars per annum for the top stars.) Given the sharp divergence of interests between tournaments and players, it’s not surprising that there are Kafkanly complex rules for how many ATP tournaments a player must enter each year to avoid financial or ranking-related penalties, and commensurately complex and crafty ways players have for getting around these rules and doing pretty much what they want. These will be passed over. The thing to realize is that players of Michael Joyce’s station tend to take way less time off; they try to play just about every tournament they can squeeze in unless they’re forced by injury or exhaustion to sit out a couple weeks. They play so much because they need to, not just financially but because the ATP’s (very complex) set of algorithms for determining ranking tends to reward players for entering as many tournaments as they can.

And so even though several of the North American hard-court circuit’s tournaments are Super 9’s, a fair number of top players skip them, especially European clay-court players, who hate Deco Turf and tend to stick to their own summer clay-court circuit, which is European and comprises smaller and less lucrative tournaments (like the Dutch Open, which is concurrent with the Canadian and has four of the world’s top twenty entered this year). The clay-courters tend to pay the price for this at the U.S. Open, which is played on hard sizzling Deco Turf courts.

⁹ There is here no qualifying tournament for the Qualies itself, though some particularly huge tournaments have meta-Qualies. The Qualies also have tons of wild-card berths, most of whom here are given to Canadian players, e.g. the collegian that Michael Joyce is beating up on right now in the first round.

¹⁰ These slots are usually placed right near the top seeds, which is the reason why in the televised first rounds of major tournaments you often see Agassi or Sampras smearing some totally obscure guy — that guy’s usually a qualifier. It’s also part of why it’s so hard for somebody low-ranked enough to have to play the Qualies of tournaments to move up in the rankings enough so that he doesn’t have to play Qualies anymore — he usually meets a high-ranked player in the very first round and gets smeared.

¹¹ Which is another reason why qualifiers usually get smeared by the top players they face in the early rounds — the qualifier is playing his fourth or fifth match in three days, while the top players usually have had a couple days with their masseur and creative-visualization consultant to get ready for the first round. If asked, Michael Joyce will detail all these asymmetries and stacked odds the same way a farmer will speak of poor weather, with an absence of emotion that seems deep instead of blank.

¹² (pronounced KRY-chek)

¹³ At a certain point this summer his ranking will be as high as 62.

¹⁴ It turns out that a portion of the talent required to survive in the trenches of the ATP Tour is emotional: Joyce is able to keep from getting upset about stuff that struck me as hard not to get upset about. When he points out that there’s “no point” getting exercised about unfairnesses you can’t control, I think what he’s really saying is that you either learn how not to get upset about it or you disappear from the Tour. The temperamental behavior of many of the game’s top players — which gives the public the distorted idea that most pro players are oversensitive brats — is on a qualifier’s view easily explainable: top players are temperamental because they can afford to be.

¹⁵ The really top players not only have their expenses comped but often get paid outright for agreeing to enter a tournament. These fees are called “guarantees” and are technically advances against prize money: in effect, an Agassi/Sampras/Becker will receive a “guarantee” of the champion’s prize money (usually a couple hundred thousand) just for competing, whether he wins the tournament or not. This means that if top seed Agassi wins the Canadian Open, he wins $254,000 U.S., but if he loses, he gets the money anyway. (This is another reason why tournaments tend to hate upsets, and, some qualifiers complain, why all sorts of intangibles from match scheduling to close line-calls tend to go the stars’ way.) Not all tournaments have guarantees — the Grand Slams don’t, because the top players will show up for Wimbledon and the French, Australian, and U.S. Opens on their own incentive — but most have them, and the less established and prestigious a tournament, the more it needs to guarantee money to get the top players to come and attract spectators and media (which is what the tournament’s title sponsor wants, very much).

Guarantees used to be against ATP rules and were under the table; they’ve been legal since the early ’90s. There’s great debate among tennis pundits about whether legal guarantees have helped the game by making the finances less shady or have hurt the game by widening the psychological gap between the stars and all the other players and by upping the pressure on tournaments to make it as likely as possible that the stars don’t get upset by an unknown. It is impossible to get Michael Joyce to give a straight answer on whether he thinks guarantees are good or bad — it’s not like Joyce is muddled or Nixonianly evasive about it, but rather that he can’t afford to think in good/bad terms, to nurture resentment or bitterness or frustration. My guess is that he avoids these feelings because they make it even harder to play against Agassi and the rest, and he cares less about what’s “right” in the grand scheme than he does about maximizing his own psychological chances against other players. This seems totally understandable, though I’m kind of awed by Joyce’s evident ability to shut down lines of thinking that aren’t to his advantage.

¹⁶ (pronounced YAkob hLAsick)

¹⁷ It took forever to get there from the hotel because I didn’t yet know that press can, with some wangling, get rides in the courtesy cars with the players, if there’s room. Tennis journalism is apparently its own special world, and it takes a little while to learn the ins and outs of how media can finagle access to some of the services the tournament provides: courtesy cars, VIP treatment in terms of restaurant reservations, even free laundry service at the hotel. Most of this stuff I learned about just as I was getting ready to come home.

¹⁸ Joyce is even more impressive, but I hadn’t seen Joyce yet. And Enqvist is even more impressive than Joyce, and Agassi live is even more impressive than Enqvist. After the week was over, I truly understand why Charlton Heston looks gray and ravaged on his descent from Sinai: past a certain point, impressiveness is corrosive to the psyche.

¹⁹ During his two daily one-hour practice sessions he wears the hat backwards, and also wears boxy plaid shorts that look for all the world like swimtrunks. His favorite practice T-shirt has FEAR: THE ENEMY OF DREAMS on the chest. He laughs a lot when he practices. You can tell just by looking at him out there that he’s totally likable and cool.

²⁰ If you’ve played only casually, it is probably hard to understand how physically demanding really serious tennis is. Realizing that these pros can move one another from one end of the 27′ baseline to the other pretty much at will, and that they hardly ever end a point early by making an unforced error, might stimulate your imagination. A close best-of-three-set match is probably equivalent in its demands to a couple hours of basketball, but we’re talking full-court basketball.

²¹ Something else you don’t get a good sense of on television: tennis is a very sweaty game. On ESPN or whatever, when you see a player walk over to the ballboy after a point and request a towel and quickly wipe off his arm and hand and toss the wet towel back to the (rather luckless) ballboy, most of the time the towel thing isn’t a stall or a meditative pause — it’s because sweat is running down the inside of the player’s arm in such volume that it’s getting all over his hand and making the racquet slippery. Especially on the sizzling North American summer junket, players sweat through their shirts early on, and sometimes also their shorts. (Sampras always wears light-blue shorts that sweat through everyplace but his jockstrap, which looks funny and kind of endearing, like he’s an incontinent child — Sampras is surprisingly childlike and cute on the court, in person, in contrast to Agassi, who’s about as cute as a Port Authority whore.)

And they drink enormous amounts of water, staggering amounts. I thought I was seeing things at first, watching matches, as players seemed to go through one of those skinny half-liter Evian bottles every second side-change, but Michael Joyce confirmed it. Pro-grade tennis players seem to have evolved a metabolic system that allows rapid absorption of water and its transformation into sweat. I myself — who am not pro-grade, but do sweat like a pig — drink a lot of water a couple hours before I play but don’t drink anything during a match. This is because a couple swallows of water usually just makes me want more, and if I drink as much as I want I end up with a protruding tummy and a sloshing sound when I run.

(Most players I spoke with confirm, by the way, that Gatorade and All-Sport and Boost and all those pricey electrolytic sports drinks are mostly bullshit, that salt and carbs at table and small lakes of daily H2O are the way to go. The players who didn’t confirm this turned out to be players who had endorsement deals with some pricey-sports-drink manufacturer, but I personally saw at least one such player dumping out his bottle’s pricey electrolytic contents and replacing them with good old water, for his match.)

²² The taller you are, the harder you can serve (get a protractor and figure it out), but the less able to bend and reverse direction you are. Tall guys tend to be serve-and-volleyers, and they live and die by their serves. Bill Tilden, Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, Roscoe Tanner, and Goran Ivanisevic were/are all tall guys with serve-dependent games.

²³ This is mind-bogglingly hard to do when the ball’s hit hard. If we can assume you’ve played Little League or sandlot ball or something, imagine the hardest-hit grounder of all time coming at you at shortstop, and then you not standing waiting to try to knock it down but actually of your own free will running forward toward the grounder, then trying not just to catch it in a big soft glove but to strike it hard and reverse its direction and send it someplace frightfully specific and far away.

²⁴ Something else that’s hotly debated by tennis authorities is the trend of players going pro at younger and younger ages and skipping college and college tennis and plunging into the stress and peripatetic loneliness of the Tour, etc. Michael Joyce skipped college and went directly onto the pro tour because at 18 he’d just won the U.S. National Juniors, and this created a set of overwhelming inducements to turn pro. The winner at the National 18-and-Under Singles automatically gets a wild card into the U.S. Opens main draw for that year. In addition, a year’s top junior comes to the powerful but notoriously fickle and temporary attention of major clothing and racquet companies. Joyce’s victory over the 128-man National field at Kalamazoo MI in 1991 resulted in endorsement offers from Fila and Yonex worth around $100,000. $100,000 is about what it takes to finance three years on the Tour for a very young player who can’t reasonably expect to earn a whole lot of prize-money.

Joyce could have turned down that offer of a three-year subsidy and gone to college, but if he’d gone to college it would have been primarily to play tennis. Coaches at major universities apparently offered Joyce inducements to come play for them so literally outrageous and incredible that I wouldn’t repeat them here even if Joyce hadn’t asked me not to.

The reason why Michael Joyce would have gone to college primarily to play tennis is that the academic and social aspects of collegiate life interest him about as much as hitting 2500 crosscourt forehands while a coach yells at you in foreign languages would interest you. Tennis is what Michael Joyce loves and lives for and is. He sees little point in telling anybody anything different. It’s the only thing he’s devoted himself to, and he’s given massive amounts of himself to it, and as far as he understands it it’s all he wants to do or be. Because he started playing at age two and competing at age seven, however, and had the first half-dozen years of his career directed rather shall we say forcefully and enthusiastically by his father (who Joyce estimates spent probably around $250,000 on lessons and court-time and equipment and travel during Michael’s junior career), it seemed reasonable to ask Joyce to what extent he “chose” to devote himself to tennis. Can you “choose” something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?

Joyce’s response to this line of inquiry strikes me as both unsatisfactory and marvelous. Because of course the question is unanswerable, at least it’s unanswerable by a person who’s already — as far as he understands it—“chosen” Joyce’s answer is that it doesn’t really matter much to him whether he originally “chose” serious tennis or not; all he knows is that he loves it. He tries to explain his feelings at the Nationals in 1991: “You get there and look at the draw, it’s a 128 draw, there’s so many guys you have to beat. And then it’s all over and you’ve won, you’re the National Champion — there’s nothing like it. I get chills even talking about it.” Or how it was just the previous week in Washington: “I’m playing Agassi, and it’s great tennis, and there’s like thousands of fans going nuts. I can’t describe the feeling. Where else could I get that?”

What he says aloud is understandable, but it’s not the marvelous part. The marvelous part is the way Joyce’s face looks when he talks about what tennis means to him. He loves it; you can see this in his face when he talks about it: his eyes normally have a kind of Asiatic cast because of the slight epicanthic fold common to ethnic Irishmen, but when he speaks of tennis and his career the eyes get round and the pupils dilate and the look in them is one of love. The love is not the love one feels for a job or a lover or any of the loci of intensity that most of us choose to say we love. It’s the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people who’ve been happily married for an incredibly long time, or in religious people who are so religious they’ve devoted their lives to religious stuff: it’s the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one’s given up for it. Whether there’s “choice” involved is, at a certain point, of no interest… since it’s the very surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.

²⁵ (aka serve-and-volley; see Note 22)

²⁶ I don’t know whether you know this, but Connors had one of the most eccentric games in the history of tennis — he was an aggressive “power” player who rarely came to net, had the serve of an ectomorphic girl, and hit everything totally spinless and flat (which is inadvisable on groundstrokes because the absence of spin makes the ball so hard to control). His game was all the stranger because the racquet he generated all his firepower from the baseline with was a Wilson T2000, a weird steel thing that’s one of the single shittiest tennis racquets ever made and is regarded by most serious players as useful only for home defense or prying large rocks out of your backyard or something. Connors was addicted to this racquet and kept using it even after Wilson stopped making it, forfeiting millions in potential endorsement money by doing so. Connors was eccentric (and kind of repulsive) in lots of other ways, too, none of which are germane to this article.

²⁷ In the yore days before wide-body ceramic racquets and scientific strength-training, the only two venues for hitting winners used to be the volley — where your decreased distance from the net allowed for greatly increased angle (get that protractor out) — and the defensive passing shot… i.e., in the tactical language of boxing, “punch” v. “counterpunch.” The new power-baseline game allows a player, in effect, to punch his opponent all the way from his stool in the corner; it changes absolutely everything, and the analytic geometry of these changes would look like the worst calculus final you ever had in your life.

²⁸ This is why the phenomenon of “breaking serve” in a set is so much less important when a match involves power-baseliners. It is one reason why so many older players and fans no longer like to watch pro tennis as much: the structural tactics of the game are now wholly different from when they played.

²⁹ © Wichita KS’s Koch Materials Company, “A Leader in Asphalt-Emulsions Technology.”

³⁰ John McEnroe wasn’t all that tall, and he was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived — the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad.

³¹ One answer to why public interest in mens tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thuggishness about the power-baseline style that’s come to dominate the Tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime — for so small a man and so great a player, he’s amazingly devoid of finesse, with movements that look more like a Heavy Metal musician’s than an athlete’s.

The power-baseline game itself has been compared to Metal or Grunge. But what a top P.B.er really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It’s awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.

³² (compare Ivanisevic’s at 130 mph or Sampras’s at 125, or even this Brakus kid’s at 118).

³³ The loop in a pro’s backswing is kind of the trademark flourish of excellence and consciousness of same, not unlike the five-star chef’s quick kiss of his own fingertips as he presents a pièce or the magician’s hand making a French curl in the air as he directs our attention to his vanished assistant.

³⁴ All serious players have these little extraneous tics, stylistic fingerprints, and the pros even more so because of years of repetition and ingraining. Pros’ tics have always been fun to note and chart, even just e.g. on the serve. Watch the way Sampras’s lead foot rises from the heel on his toss, as if his left foot’s toes got suddenly hot. The odd Tourettic way Gerulaitis used to whip his head from side to side while bouncing the ball before his toss, as if he were having a small seizure. McEnroe’s weird splayed stiff-armed service stance, both feet parallel to the baseline and his side so severely to the net that he looked like a figure on an Egyptian frieze. The odd sudden shrug Lendl gives before releasing his toss. The way Agassi shifts his weight several times from foot to foot as he prepares for the toss like he needs desperately to pee. Or, here at the Canadian Open, the way the young star Thomas Enqvist’s body bends queerly back as he tosses, limboing back away from the toss, as if for a moment the ball smelled very bad — this tic derives from Enqvist’s predecessor Edberg’s own weird spinal arch and twist on the toss. Edberg also has this strange sudden way of switching his hold on the racquet in mid-toss, changing from an Eastern forehand to an extreme backhand grip, as if the racquet were a skillet.

³⁵ Who looks rather like a Hispanic Dustin Hoffman and is an almost unbelievably nice guy, with the sort of inward self-sufficiency of truly great teachers and coaches everywhere, the Zen-like blend of focus and calm developed by people who have to spend enormous amounts of time sitting in one place watching closely while somebody else does something. Sam gets 10 % of Joyce’s gross revenues and spends his downtime reading dense tomes on Mayan architecture and is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met either inside the tennis world or outside it (so cool I’m kind of scared of him and haven’t called him once since the assignment ended, if that makes sense). In return for his 10 %, Sam travels with Joyce, rooms with him, coaches him, supervises his training, analyzes his matches, and attends him in practice, even to the extent of picking up errant balls so that Joyce doesn’t have to spend any of his tightly organized practice time picking up errant balls. The stress and weird loneliness of pro tennis — where everybody’s in the same community, sees each other every week, but is constantly on the diasporic move, and is each other’s rival, with enormous amounts of money at stake and life essentially a montage of airports and bland hotels and non-home-cooked food and nagging injuries and staggering long-distance bills, and people’s families back home tending to be wackos, since only wackos will make the financial and temporal sacrifices necessary to let their offspring become good enough at something to turn pro at it — all this means that most players lean heavily on their coaches for emotional support and friendship as well as technical counsel. Sam’s role with Joyce looks to me to approximate what in the latter century was called that of “companion,” one of those older ladies who traveled with nubile women when they went abroad, etc.

³⁶ Agassi’s balls look more like Borg’s balls would have looked if Borg had been on a year-long regimen of both steroids and methamphetamines and was hitting every single nicking ball just as hard as he could — Agassi hits his groundstrokes as hard as anybody who’s ever played tennis, so hard you almost can’t believe it if you’re right there by the court.

³⁷ But Agassi does have this exaggerated follow-through where he keeps both hands on the racquet and follows through almost like a hitter in baseball, which causes his shirtfront to lift and his hairy tummy to be exposed to public view — in Montreal I find this repellent, though the females in the stands around me seem ready to live and die for a glimpse of Agassi’s tummy. Agassi’s S.O. Brooke Shields is in Montreal, by the way, and will end up highly visible in the player-guest box for all Agassi’s matches, wearing big sunglasses and what look to be multiple hats. This may be the place to insert that Brooke Shields is rather a lot taller than Agassi, and considerably less hairy, and that seeing them standing together in person is rather like seeing Sigourney Weaver on the arm of Danny DeVito. The effect is especially surreal when Brooke is wearing one of the plain classy sundresses that make her look like a deb summering in the Hamptons and Agassi’s wearing his new Nike on-court ensemble, a blue-black horizontally striped outfit that together with his black sneakers make him look like somebody’s idea of a French Resistance fighter.

³⁸ (Though note that very few of them wear eyeglasses, either.)

³⁹ A whole other kind of vision — the kind attributed to Larry Bird in basketball, sometimes, when he made those incredible surgical passes to people who nobody else could even see were open — is required when you’re hitting: this involves seeing the other side of the court, i.e. where your opponent is and which direction he’s moving in and what possible angles are open to you in consequence of where he’s going. The schizoid thing about tennis is that you have to use both kinds of vision — ball and court — at the same time.

⁴⁰ Basketball comes close, but it’s a team sport and lacks tennis’s primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close — at least at the lighter weight-divisions — but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful: a level of abstraction and formality (i.e. “play”) is probably necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).

⁴¹ For those of you into business stats, the calculus of a shot in tennis would be rather like establishing a running compound-interest expansion in a case where not only is the rate of interest itself variable, and not only are the determinants of that rate variable, and not only is the interval in which the determinants influence the interest rate variable, but the principal itself is variable.

⁴² Sex- and substance-issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are in many ways our culture’s holy men: they give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward (the monk’s begging bowl, the RBI-gurus eight-figure contract) and love to watch even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words they do it “for” us, sacrifice themselves for our (we imagine) redemption.

⁴³ In the Qualies for Grand Slams like Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, players sometimes have to play two three-out-of-five-set matches in one day; it is little wonder that the surviving qualifiers often look like concentration-camp survivors by the time they get to the main draw and you see them getting annihilated by a healthy and rested top seed in the televised first round.

⁴⁴ Meaning a two-handed forehand, whose pioneer was a South African named Frew McMillan and whose most famous practitioner today is Monica Seles.

⁴⁵ The idea of what it would be like to perspire heavily with large amounts of gel in your hair is sufficiently horrific to me that I approached Knowle after the match to ask him about it, only to discover that neither he nor his coach spoke enough English or even French to be able to determine who I was, and the whole sweat-and-gel issue will, I’m afraid, remain a matter for your own imagination.

⁴⁶ What Joyce has done is known as “wrong-footing” his opponent, though the intransigent Francophone press here keep calling the tactic a “contre-pied.”

⁴⁷ Who is clearly such a fundamentally nice guy that he would probably hit around with me for a little while just out of politeness, since for him it would be at worst somewhat dull. For me, though, it would be obscene.

⁴⁸ The example of Michael Joyce’s own childhood, though, shows that my friends and I were comparative sluggards, dilettantes. He describes his daily schedule thusly: “I’d be in school till 2:00. Then, after, I’d go [driven by father] to the [West End Tennis] Club [in Torrance CA] and have a lesson with [legendary, wildly expensive, and unbelievably hard-ass Robert] Lansdorp [former childhood coach of, among others, Tracy Austin] from 3:00 to 4:00. Then I’d have drills from 4:00 to 6:00, then we’d drive all the way home — it’s like half an hour — and I’m like, ‘Thank God, I can watch TV or go up and talk with [friends] on the phone or something,’ but Dad is like, ‘You didn’t practice your serve yet.’ At twelve or thirteen [years old], you’re not going to want to do it. [No lie, since two hours of serious drills alone were usually enough to put your correspondent in a fetal position for the rest of the day.] You need somebody to make you do it. [This is one way of looking at it.] But then, after like a hundred or so serves, I start to get into [standing by himself out on the Joyces’ tennis court in their backyard with a huge bucket of balls and hitting serve after serve to no one in what must by then have been the gathering twilight], I like it, I’m glad I’m doing it.”

⁴⁹ An important variable I’m skipping is that children are (not surprisingly) immature and tend to get angry with themselves when they screw up, and so a key part of my strategy involved putting the opponent in a position where he made a lot of unforced errors and got madder and madder at himself, which would ruin his game. Feelings of self-disgust at his errors, or (even better for me) bitter grievance at the universe for making him have “bad luck” or an “offday” would mount until usually by sometime in the second set he’d sink into a kind of enraged torpor and expect to miss, or occasionally he’d even have a kind of grand Learesque tantrum, complete with racquet-hurling and screamed obscenities and sometimes tears. This happened less and less as I got older and opponents got more mature, and by the time I was in college only genuine head-cases could be counted on to get so mad that they’d basically make themselves lose to an inferior player (viz. me). It’s something of a shock, then, to watch Joyce do to his third-round Qualies opponent what I used to do to twelve-year-old rich kids, which is essentially to retrieve and avoid errors and wait for this opponent to have a temper tantrum. Because Sunday was a rainout, Joyce’s third round is played Monday at 10:00 A.M., at the same time that some of the main draw’s first rounds are beginning. Joyce’s opponent is a guy named Mark Knowles, 25, the 1986 U.S. Junior Indoor Champion, a native of the Bahamas, now known primarily as a doubles player but still a serious opponent, ranked in the world’s top 200, somebody on Joyce’s plateau.

Knowles is tall and thin, muscular in the corded way tall thin people are muscular, and has an amazing tan and tight blond curls and from a distance is an impressive-looking guy, though up close he has a kind of squished, buggy face and the slightly bulging eyes of a player who, I can tell, is spring-loaded on a tantrum. There’s a chance to see Knowles up close because he and Joyce play their match on one of the minor courts, where spectators stand and lean over a low fence only a few yards from the court. I and Joyce’s coach and Knowles’s coach and beautiful girlfriend are the only people really seriously standing and watching, though a lot of spectators on their way to more high-profile matches pass by and stop and watch a few points before moving on. The constant movement of civilians past the court aggrieves Knowles no end, and sometimes he shouts caustic things to people who’ve started walking away while a point is still in progress.

“Don’t worry about it!” is one thing Knowles shouted at someone who moved. “We’re only playing for money! We’re only professionals! Don’t give it a second thought!” Joyce, preparing to serve, will stare affectlessly straight ahead while he waits for Knowles to finish yelling, his expression sort of like the one Vegas dealers have when a gambler they’re cleaning out is rude or abusive, a patient and unjudging look whose expression is informed by the fact that they’re extremely well compensated for being patient and unjudging.

Sam Aparicio describes Knowles as “brilliant but kind of erratic,” and I think the coach is being kind, because Knowles seems to me to belong on a Locked Ward for people with serious emotional and personality disorders. He rants and throws racquets and screams scatological curses I haven’t heard since junior high. If one of his shots hits the top of the net-cord and bounces back, Knowles will scream “I must be the luckiest guy in the world!” his eyes protruding and mouth twisted. For me he’s an eerie echo of all the rich and well-instructed Midwest kids I used to play and beat because they’d be unable to eat the frustration when things didn’t go their way. He seems not to notice that Joyce gets as many bad breaks and weird bounces as he, or that passing spectators are equally distracting to both players. Knowles seems to be one of these people who view the world’s inconveniences as specific and personal, and it makes my stomach hurt to watch him. When he hits a ball against the fence so hard it seems to damage the ball, the umpire gives him a warning, but in the sort of gentle compassionate voice of a kindergarten teacher to a kid who’s known to have A.D.D. I have a hard time believing that someone this off-the-wall could rise to a serious pro plateau, though it’s true that when Knowles isn’t letting his attention get scattered he’s a gorgeous player, with fluid strokes and marvelous control over spin and pace. His read on Joyce is that Joyce is a slugger (which is true), and his tactic is to try to junk him up — change pace, vary spins, hit drop shots to draw Joyce in, deny Joyce pace or rhythm — and because he’s Joyce’s equal in firepower the tactic is sound. Joyce wins the first set in a tiebreaker. But three times in the tiebreaker Knowles yells at migratory spectators “Don’t worry! It’s only a tiebreaker in a professional match!” and is basically a wreck by the time the first set is over, and the second set is perfunctory, a formality that Joyce concludes as fast as possible and hurries back to the Players’ Tent to pack carbohydrates and find out whether he has to play his first round in the main draw later this same day.

⁵⁰ Hlasek lost in the first round of the main draw Tuesday morning to obscure American Jonathan Stark, who then lost to Sampras in the second round on Wednesday in front of a capacity Stadium crowd.

⁵¹ This is in the Stadium and Grandstand, where the big names play, this ceremonial hush. Lesser players on the outlying courts have to live with spectators talking during points, people moving around so that whole rickety sets of bleachers rumble and clank, food service attendants crashing carts around on the paths just outside the windscreen or giggling and flirting in the food-prep tents just on the other side of several minor courts’ fences.

⁵² This is Canada’s version of the U.S.T.A., and its logo — which obtrudes into your visual field as often as is possible here at the du Maurier Omnium — consists of the good old Canadian maple leaf with a tennis racquet for a stem. It’s stuff like Tennis Canada’s logo you want to point to when Canadians protest that they don’t understand why Americans make fun of them.

⁵³ (though best of luck getting fudge home in this heat…)

⁵⁴ “Le Média” has its own facilities, though they’re up in the Press Box, about five flights of rickety and crowded stairs up through the Stadium’s interior and then exterior and then interior, with the last flight being that dense striated iron of like a fire escape and very steep and frankly dangerous, so that when one has to “aller au pissoir” it’s always a hard decision between the massed horror of the public rest rooms and the Sisyphean horror of the Press bathroom, and I learn by the second day to go very easy on the Evian water and coffee as I’m wandering around.

⁵⁵ (a recent and rather ingenious marketing move by the ATP — I buy several just for the names)

⁵⁶ It’s not at all clear what N.V.G.B.’s have to do with the Omnium, and no free samples are available.

⁵⁷ Du Maurier cigarettes are like Australian Sterlings or French Gauloise — full-bodied, pungent, crackly when inhaled, sweet and yeasty when exhaled, and so strong that you can feel your scalp seem to leave your skull for a moment and ride the cloud of smoke. Du Maurier-intoxication may be one reason why the Canadian Open crowds seem so generally cheery and expansive and well-behaved.

⁵⁸ (=“Give me your mouth”—not subtle at all)

⁵⁹ These are usually luxury cars provided by some local distributorship in return for promotional consideration. The Canadian Open’s courtesy cars are BMWs, all so new they smell like glove compartments and so expensive and high-tech that their dashboards look like the control panels of nuclear reactors. The people driving the courtesy cars are usually local civilians who take a week off from work and drive a numbingly dull route back and forth between hotel and courts — their compensation consists of free tickets to certain Stadium matches and a chance to rub elbows with professional tennis players, or at least with their luggage.

⁶⁰ He will lose badly to Michael Stich in the round of 16, the same Stich whom Michael Joyce beat at the Lipton Championships in Key Biscayne four months before; and in fact Joyce will himself beat Courier in straight sets next week at the Infiniti Open in Los Angeles, in front of Joyce’s family and friends, for one of the biggest wins of his career so far.

⁶¹ Chang’s mother is here — one of the most infamous of the dreaded Tennis Parents of the men’s and women’s Tours, a woman who’s reliably rumored to have done things like reach down her child’s tennis shorts in public to check his underwear — and her attendance (she’s seated hierophantically in the player-guest boxes courtside) may have something to do with the staggering woe of Chang’s mien and play. Thomas Enqvist ends up beating him soundly in the quarterfinals on Wednesday night. (Enqvist, by the way, looks eerily like a young Richard Chamberlain, the Richard Chamberlain of The Towering Inferno, say, with this narrow, sort of rodentially patrician quality. The best thing about Enqvist is his girlfriend, who wears glasses and when she applauds a good point sort of hops up and down in her seat with refreshing uncoolness.)

⁶² Who himself has the blond bland good looks of a professional golfer, and is reputed to be the single dullest man on the ATP Tour and possibly in the whole world, a man whose hobby is purported to be “staring at walls” and whose quietness is not the quietness of restraint but of blankness, the verbal equivalent of a dead channel.

⁶³ (Just as Enqvist now appears to be Edberg’s heir… Swedish tennis tends to be like monarchic succession: they tend to have only one really great player at a time, and this player is always male, and he almost always ends up #1 in the world for a while. This is one reason marketers and endorsement-consultants are circling Enqvist like makos all through the summer.)

⁶⁴ Nerves and choking are a huge issue in a precision-and- timing sport like tennis, and a “bad head” washes more juniors out of the competitive life than any sort of deficit in talent or drive.

¹ (though I never did get clear on just what a knot is)

² Somewhere he’d gotten the impression I was an investigative journalist and wouldn’t let me see the galley, Bridge, staff decks, anything, or interview any of the crew or staff in an on-the-record way, and he wore sunglasses inside, and epaulets, and kept talking on the phone for long stretches of time in Greek when I was in his office after I’d skipped the karaoki semifinals in the Rendez-Vous Lounge to make a special appointment to see him; I wish him ill.

³ No wag could possibly resist mentally rechristening the ship the m.v. Nadir the instant he saw the Zenith’s silly name in the Celebrity brochure, so indulge me on this, but the rechristening’s nothing particular against the ship itself.

⁴ There’s also Windstar and Silversea, Tall Ship Adventures and Windjammer Barefoot Cruises, but these Caribbean Cruises are wildly upscale and smaller. The 20+ cruise lines I’m talking run the “Megaships,” the floating wedding cakes with occupancies in four figures and engine-propellers the size of branch banks. Of the Megalines out of South FL there’s Commodore, Costa, Majesty, Regal, Dolphin, Princess, Royal Caribbean, good old Celebrity. There’s Renaissance, Royal Cruise Line, Holland, Holland America, Cunard, Cunard Crown, Cunard Royal Viking. There’s Norwegian Cruise Line, there’s Crystal, there’s Regency Cruises. There’s the Wal-Mart of the cruise industry, Carnival, which the other lines refer to sometimes as “Carnivore.” I don’t recall which line The Love Boat’s Pacific Princess was supposed to be with (I guess they were probably more like a CA-to-Hawaii-circuit ship, though I seem to recall them going all over the place), but now Princess Cruises has bought the name and uses poor old Gavin MacLeod in full regalia in their TV ads.

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 7NCI 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 l000h. 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 promise 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, 101 forget, 9’s the Bahamas Deck, 8 Fantasy and 7 Galaxy (or vice versa), 61 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 appeared 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.

Apparently Mona’s special customary little gig on 7NC Luxury Cruises is to lie to the waiter and maître d’ and say that Thursday is her birthday, so that at the Formal supper on Thursday she gets bunting and a heart-shaped helium balloon tied to her chair and her own cake and pretty much the whole restaurant staff comes out and forms a circle around her and sings to her. Her real birthday, she informs me on Monday, is 29 July, and when I observe that 29 July is also the birthday of Benito Mussolini, Mona’s grandmother shoots me kind of a death-look, though Mona herself is excited at the coincidence, apparently confusing the names Mussolini and Maserati. Because it just so happens that Thursday 16 March really is the birthday of Trudy’s daughter Alice, and because Mona declines to forfeit her fake birthday claim and instead counterclaims that her and Alice’s sharing bunting and natal attentions at 3/16’s Formal supper promises to be “radical,” Alice has decided that she wishes Mona all kinds of ill, and by Tuesday 14 March Alice and I have established a kind of anti-Mona alliance, and we amuse each other across Table 64 by making subtly disguised little strangling and stabbing motions whenever Mona says anything, a set of disguised motions Alice told me she learned at various excruciating public suppers in Miami with her Serious Boyfriend Patrick, who apparently hates almost everyone he eats with.

³³ (Which, again, w/ a Megaship like this is subtle — even at its worst, the rolling never made chandeliers tinkle or anything fall off surfaces, though it did keep a slightly unplumb drawer in Cabin 1009’s complex Wondercloset rattling madly in its track even after several insertions of Kleenex at strategic points.)

³⁴ This on-the-edge moment’s exquisiteness is something like the couple seconds between knowing you’re going to sneeze and actually sneezing, some kind of marvelous distended moment of transferring control to large automatic forces. (The sneeze-analogy thing might sound freaky, but it’s true, and Trudy’s said she’ll back me up.)

³⁵ Conroy took the same Luxury Cruise as I, the Seven-Night Western Caribbean on the good old Nadir, in May ’94. He and his family cruised for free. I know details like this because Conroy talked to me on the phone, and answered nosy questions, and was frank and forthcoming and in general just totally decent-seeming about the whole thing.

³⁶ E.g. after reading Conroy’s essay on board, whenever I’d look up at the sky it wouldn’t be the sky I was seeing, it was the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky.

³⁷ Pier 21 having seasoned me as a recipient of explanatory/justificatory narratives, I was able to make some serious journalistic phone inquiries about how Professor Conroy’s essaymercial came to be, yielding two separate narratives:

(1) From Celebrity Cruises’s PR liaison Ms. Wiessen (after a two-day silence that Tve come to understand as the PR-equivalent of covering the microphone with your hand and leaning over to confer w/ counsel): “Celebrity saw an article he wrote in Travel and Leisure magazine, and they were really impressed with how he could create these mental postcards, so they went to ask him to write about his Cruise experience for people who’d never been on a Cruise before, and they did pay him to write the article, and they really took a gamble, really, because he’d never been on a Cruise before, and they had to pay him whether he liked it or not, and whether they liked the article or not, but… [dry little chuckle] obviously they liked the article, and he did a good job, so that’s the Mr. Conroy story, and those are his perspectives on his experience.”

(2) From Frank Conroy (with the small sigh that precedes a certain kind of weary candor): “I prostituted myself.”

³⁸ This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift, i.e. it’s never really for the person it’s directed at.

³⁹ (with the active complicity of Professor Conroy, I’m afraid)

⁴⁰ This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry; and noplace in my experience have I been on the receiving end of as many Professional Smiles as I am on the Nadir, maître d’s, Chief Stewards, Hotel Managers’ minions, Cruise Director — their P.S.’s all come on like switches at my approach. But also back on land at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, on and on. You know this smile — the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement — the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?

Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?

And yet the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker’s scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.

⁴¹ (Which by the way trust me, I used to lifeguard part-time, and fuck this SPF hooha: good old ZnO will keep your nose looking like a newborn’s.)

⁴² In further retrospect, I think the only thing I really persuaded the Greek officer of was that I was very weird, and possibly unstable, which impression I’m sure was shared with Mr. Dermatitis and combined with that same first night’s au-jus-as-shark-bait request to destroy my credibility with Dermatitis before I even got in to see him.

⁴³ One of Celebrity Cruises’ slogans asserts that they Look Forward To Exceeding Your Expectations — they say it a lot, and they are sincere, though they are either disingenuous about or innocent of this Excess’s psychic consequences.

⁴⁴ (to either Deck 11’s pools or Deck 12’s Temple of Ra)

⁴⁵ Table 64’s waiter is Tibor, a Hungarian and a truly exceptional person, about whom if there’s any editorial justice you will learn a lot more someplace below.

⁴⁶ Not until Tuesday’s lobster night at the 5C.R. did I really emphatically understand the Roman phenomenon of the vomitorium.

⁴⁷ (not invasively or obtrusively or condescendingly)

⁴⁸ Again, you never have to bus your tray after eating at the Windsurf, because the waiters leap to take them, and again the zeal can be a hassle, because if you get up just to go get another peach or something and still have a cup of coffee and some yummy sandwich crusts you’ve been saving for last a lot of times you come back and the tray and the crusts are gone, and I personally start to attribute this oversedulous busing to the reign of Hellenic terror the waiters labor under.

⁴⁹ The many things on the Nadir that were wood-grain but not real wood were such marvelous and painstaking imitations of wood that a lot of times it seemed like it would have been simpler and less expensive simply to have used real wood.

⁵⁰ Two broad staircases, Fore and Aft, both of which reverse their zag-angle at each landing, and the landings themselves have mirrored walls, which is wickedly great because via the mirrors you can check out female bottoms in cocktail dresses ascending one flight above you without appearing to be one of those icky types who check out female bottoms on staircases.

⁵¹ During the first two days of rough seas, when people vomited a lot (especially after supper and apparently extra-especially on the elevators and stairways), these puddles of vomit inspired a veritable feeding frenzy of Wet/Dry Vacs and spot-remover and all-trace-of-odor-eradicator chemicals applied by this Elite Special Forces-type crew.

⁵² By the way, the ethnic makeup of the Nadir’s crew is a melting-pot mélange on the order of like a Benetton commercial, and it’s a constant challenge to trace the racio-geographical makeup of the employees’ various hierarchies. All the big-time officers are Greek, but then it’s a Greek-owned ship so what do you expect. Them aside, it at first seems like there’s some basic Eurocentric caste system in force: waiters, bus-boys, beverage waitresses, sommeliers, casino dealers, entertainers, and stewards seem mostly to be Aryans, while the porters and custodians and swabbies tend to be your swarthier types — Arabs and Filipinos, Cubans, West Indian blacks. But it turns out to be more complex than that, because the Chief Stewards and Chief Sommeliers and maître d’s who so beadily oversee the Aryan servants are themselves swarthy and non-Aryan — e.g. our maître d’ at the 5C.R. is Portuguese, with the bull neck and heavy-lidded grin of a Teamsters official, and gives the impression of needing only some very subtle prearranged signal to have a $10000-an-hour prostitute or unimaginable substances delivered to your cabin; and our whole T64 totally loathes him for no single pinpointable reason, and we’ve all agreed in advance to fuck him royally on the tip at week’s end.

⁵³ This is counting the Midnight Buffet, which tends to be a kind of lamely lavish Theme-slash-Costume-Partyish thing, w/ Theme-related foods — Oriental, Caribbean, Tex-Mex — and which I plan in this essay to mostly skip except to say that Tex-Mex Night out by the pools featured what must have been a seven-foot-high ice sculpture of Pancho Villa that spent the whole party dripping steadily onto the mammoth sombrero of Tibor, Table 64’s beloved and extremely cool Hungarian waiter, whose contract forces him on Tex-Mex Night to wear a serape and a straw sombrero with a 17" radius^53a and to dispense Four Alarm chili from a steam table placed right underneath an ice sculpture, and whose pink and birdlike face on occasions like this expressed a combination of mortification and dignity that seem somehow to sum up the whole plight of postwar Eastern Europe.

^53a (He let me measure it when the reptilian maître d’ wasn’t looking.)

⁵⁴ (I know, like I’m sure this guy even cares.)

⁵⁵ This was primarily because of the semi-agoraphobia — I’d have to sort of psych myself up to leave the cabin and go accumulate experiences, and then pretty quickly out there in the general population my will would break and I’d find some sort of excuse to scuttle back to 1009. This happened quite a few times a day.

⁵⁶ (This FN right here’s being written almost a week after the Cruise ended, and I’m still living mainly on these hoarded mint-centered chocolates.)

⁵⁷ The answer to why I don’t just ask Petra how she does it is that Petra’s English is extremely limited and primitive, and in sad fact I’m afraid my whole deep feeling of attraction and connection to Petra the Slavanian steward has been erected on the flimsy foundation of the only two English clauses she seems to know, one or the other of which clauses she uses in response to every statement, question, joke, or protestation of undying devotion: “Is no problem” and “You are a funny thing.”

⁵⁸ (At sea this is small agorapotatoes, but in port, once the doors open and the gangway extends, it represents a true choice and is thus agoraphobically valid.)

⁵⁹ “1009” indicates that it’s on Deck 10, and “Port” refers to the side of the ship it’s on, and “Exterior” means that I have a window. There are also, of course, “Interior” cabins off the inner sides of the decks’ halls, but I hereby advise any prospective 7NC passenger with claustrophobic tendencies to make sure and specify “Exterior” when making cabin-reservations.

⁶⁰ The non-U.S. agoraphobe will be heartened to know that this deck includes “BITTE NICHT STÖREN,” “PRIÈRE DE NE PAS DÉRANGER,” “SI PREGA NON DISTURBARE,” and (my personal favorite) “FAVOR DE NO MOLESTAR.”

⁶¹ If you’re either a little kid or an anorectic you can probably sit on this ledge to do your dreamy contemplative sea-gazing, but a raised and buttock-hostile lip at the ledge’s outer border makes this impractical for a full-size adult.

⁶² There are also continual showings of about a dozen second-run movies, via what I get the sense is a VCR somewhere right here on board, because certain irregularities in tracking show up in certain films over and over. The movies run 24/7, and I end up watching several of them so many times that I can now do their dialogue verbatim. These movies include It Could Happen to You (the It’s a Wonderful Life-w/-lottery twist thing), Jurassic Park (which does not stand up well: its essential plotlessness doesn’t emerge until the third viewing, but after that the semi-agoraphobe treats it like a porno flic, twiddling his thumbs until the T. Rex and Velociraptor parts (which do stand up well)), Wolf (stupid), The Little Rascals (nauseous), Andre (kind of Old Yeller with a seal), The Client (with another incredibly good child actor — where do they get all these Olivier-grade children?), and Renaissance Man (w/ Danny DeVito, a movie that tugs at your sentiments like a dog at a pantcuff, except it’s hard not to like any movie that has an academic as the hero).

⁶³ What it is is lighting for upscale and appearance-conscious adults who want a clear picture of whatever might be aesthetically problematic that day but also want to be reassured that the overall aesthetic situation is pretty darn good.

⁶⁴ Attempts to get to see a luxury cabin’s loo were consistently misconstrued and rebuffed by upscale penthouse-type Nadirites — there are disadvantages to Luxury Cruising as a civilian and not identifiable Press.

⁶⁵ 1009’s bathroom always smells of a strange but not unnice Norwegian disinfectant whose scent resembles what it would smell like if someone who knew the exact organochemical composition of a lemon but had never in fact smelled a lemon tried to synthesize the scent of a lemon. Kind of the same relation to a real lemon as a Bayer’s Children’s Aspirin to a real orange.

The cabin itself, on the other hand, after it’s been cleaned, has no odor. None. Not in the carpets, the bedding, the insides of the desk’s drawers, the wood of the Wondercloset’s doors: nothing. One of the very few totally odorless places I’ve ever been in. This, too, eventually starts giving me the creeps.

⁶⁶ Perhaps designed with this in mind, the shower’s floor has a 10° grade from all sides to the center’s drain, which drain is the size of a lunch plate and has audibly aggressive suction.

⁶⁷ This detachable and concussive showerhead can allegedly also be employed for non-hygienic and even prurient purposes, apparently. I overheard guys from a small U. of Texas spring-break contingent (the only college-age group on the whole Nadir) regale each other about their ingenuity with the showerhead. One guy in particular was fixated on the idea that somehow the shower’s technology could be rigged to administer fellatio if he could just get access to a “metric ratchet set”—your guess here is as good as mine.

⁶⁸ The Nadir itself is navy trim on a white field, and all the Megalines have their own trademark color schemes — lime-green on white, aqua on white, robin’s-egg on white, barn-red on white (white apparently being a constant).

⁶⁹ You can apparently get “Butler Service” and automatic-send-out dry cleaning and shoeshining, all at prices that I’m told are not out of line, but the forms you have to fill out and hang on your door for all this are wildly complex, and I’m scared of setting in motion mechanisms of service that seem potentially overwhelming.

⁷⁰ The missing predicative preposition here is sic—ditto what looks to be an implied image of thrown excrement — but the mistakes seem somehow endearing, humanizing, and this toilet needed all the humanizing it could get.

⁷¹ It’s pretty hard not to see connections between the exhaust fan and the toilet’s vacuums — an almost Final Solution — like eradication of animal wastes and odors (wastes and odors that are by all rights a natural consequence of Henry VIII — like meals and unlimited free Cabin Service and fruit baskets) — and the death-denial/-transcendence fantasies that the 7NC Luxury Megacruise is trying to enable.

⁷² The Nadir’s VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM begins after a while to hold such a fascination for me that I end up going hat in hand back to Hotel Manager Dermatitis to ask once again for access to the ship’s nether parts, and once again I pull a boner with Dermatitis: I innocently mention my specific fascination with the ship’s VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM — which boner is consequent to another and prior boner by which I’d failed to discover in my pre-boarding researches that there’d been, just a few months before this, a tremendous scandal in which the I think QE2 Megaship had been discovered dumping waste over the side in mid-voyage, in violation of numerous national and maritime codes, and had been videotaped doing this by a couple of passengers who subsequently apparently sold the videotape to some network newsmagazine, and so the whole Megacruise industry was in a state of almost Nixonian paranoia about unscrupulous journalists trying to manufacture scandals about Megaships’ handling of waste. Even behind his mirrored sunglasses I can tell that Mr. Dermatitis is severely upset about my interest in sewage, and he denies my request to eyeball the V.S.S. with a complex defensiveness that I couldn’t even begin to chart out here. It is only later that night (Wednesday 3/15), at supper, at good old Table 64 in the 5C.R., that my cruise-savvy tablemates fill me in on the QE2 waste-scandal, and they scream^72a with mirth at the clay-footed naïveté with which I’d gone to Dermatitis with what was in fact an innocent if puerile fascination with hermetically-evacuated waste; and such is my own embarrassment and hatred of Mr. Dermatitis by this time that I begin to feel like if the Hotel Manager really does think I’m some kind of investigative journalist with a hard-on for shark dangers and sewage scandals then he might think it would be worth the risk to have me harmed in some way; and through a set of neurotic connections I won’t even try to defend, I, for about a day and a half, begin to fear that the Nadir’s Greek episcopate will somehow contrive to use the incredibly potent and forceful 1009 toilet itself for the assassination — I don’t know, that they’ll like somehow lubricate the bowl and up the suction to where not just my waste but I myself will be sucked down through the seat’s opening and hurled into some kind of abstract septic holding-tank.

^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/Plexiglass 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 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 first 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.

¹³² (an I who, recall, am reeling from the triple whammy of first ballistic humiliation and then Elegant Tea Time disgrace and now being the only person anywhere in sight in a sweat-crusted wool sportcoat instead of a glossy tux, and am having to order and chug three Dr Peppers in a row to void my mouth of the intransigent aftertaste of Beluga caviar)

¹³³(which S.R. apparently includes living together on Alice’s $$ and “co-owning” Alice’s 1992 Saab)

¹³⁴ At least guaranteeing the old Nadirite comedian w/ cane a full house, I guess.

¹³⁵ His accent indicates origins in London’s East End.

¹³⁶ (Not, one would presume, at the same time.)

¹³⁷ One is: Lace your fingers together and put them in front of your face and then unlace just your index fingers and have them sort of face each other and imagine an irresistible magnetic force drawing them together and see whether the two fingers do indeed as if by magic move slowly and inexorably together until they’re pressed together whorl to whorl. From a really scary and unpleasant experience in seventh grade,^137a I already know I’m excessively suggestible, and I skip all the little tests, since no force on earth could ever get me up on a hypnotist’s stage in front of over 300 entertainment-hungry strangers.

^137a (viz. when at a school assembly a local psychologist put us all under a supposedly light state of hypnosis for some “Creative Visualization,” and ten minutes later everybody in the auditorium came out of the hypnosis except unfortunately yours truly, and I ended up spending four irreversibly entranced and pupil-dilated hours in the school nurse’s office, with the increasingly panicked shrink trying more and more drastic devices for bringing me out of it, and my parents very nearly litigated over the whole episode, and I calmly and matter-of-factly decided to steer well clear of all hypnosis thereafter)