A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

by David Foster Wallace

The only real constant to the nautical topography of the m.v. Nadir’s Caribbean is something about its unreal and almost retouched-looking prettiness 73 —it’s impossible to describe quite right, but the closest I can come is to say that it all looks: expensive.

The 12-Aft Towel Guy has almost nobody to exercise his zeal on, and by 1000h. I’m on my fifth new towel.

You can see why people say of calm seas that they’re “glassy”: at 1000h. the sun assumes a kind of Brewster’s Angle w/r/t the surface and the harbor lights up as far as the eye can see: the water moves a million little ways at once, and each move makes a sparkle.

You can tell that the magnetic record of Captain Video’s Megacruise experience is going to be this Warholianly dull thing that is exactly as long as the Cruise itself.

As each person’s sandal hits the pier, a sociolinguistic transformation from cruiser to tourist is effected.

in primitive and incredibly poor Cozumel the U.S. dollar is treated like a UFO: “They worship it when it lands.”

The Nadir’s crowds move in couples and quartets and groups and packs; the line undulates complexly.

There is something inescapably bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity about them. Us, rather. In port we automatically become Peregrinator americanus, Die Lumpenamerikaner. The Ugly Ones. For me, boviscopophobia 80 is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port. It’s in port that I feel most implicated, guilty by perceived association.

toward the pier from the right. And then in the late A.M. the isolate clouds overhead start moving toward one another, and in the early P.M. they begin very slowly interlocking like jigsaw pieces, and by evening the puzzle will be solved and the sky will be the color of old dimes.

Part of the overall despair of this Luxury Cruise is that no matter what I do I cannot escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness. This despair reaches its peak in port, at the rail, looking down at what I can’t help being one of. Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, ashamed, despairing, and greedy: the world’s only known species of bovine carnivore.

What’s neat about the sight is that everybody on the boats is looking straight down, a good 100+ people per boat—it looks prayerful somehow, and sets off the boat’s driver, a local who stares dully ahead at the same nothing all drivers of all kinds of mass transport stare at.

he gives me a look of what I can only call withering neutrality

A group of Nadirites is learning to snorkel in the lagoonish waters just offshore; off the port bow I can see a good 150 solid citizens floating on their stomachs, motionless, the classic Dead Man’s Float, looking like the massed and floating victims of some hideous mishap—from this height a macabre and riveting sight.

concupiscent

A lot of the Dreamward’s passengers turn and crane to marvel at the size of what’s just disgorged them.

Captain Video, now inclined way over the starboard rail so that only the toes of his sandals are still touching deck, is filming them as they look up at us, and more than a few of the Dreamwardites way below lift their own camcorders and point them up our way in a kind of almost defensive or retaliatory gesture, and for just a moment they and C.V. compose a tableau that looks almost classically postmodern.

their Towel Guys are ruddily Nordic and nonspectral and have nothing resembling withering neutrality or boredom about their mien.

start to feel a covetous and almost prurient envy

This saturnine line of thinking proceeds as the clouds overhead start to coalesce and the sky takes on its regular clothy P.M. weight. I am suffering here from a delusion, and I know it’s a delusion, this envy of another ship, and still it’s painful. It’s also representative of a psychological syndrome that I notice has gotten steadily worse as the Cruise wears on, a mental list of dissatisfactions and grievances that started picayune but has quickly become nearly despair-grade. I know that the syndrome’s cause is not simply the contempt bred of a week’s familiarity with the poor old Nadir, and that the source of all the dissatisfactions isn’t the Nadir at all but rather plain old humanly conscious me, or, more precisely, that ur-American part of me that craves and responds to pampering and passive pleasure: the Dissatisfied Infant part of me, the part that always and indiscriminately WANTS.

Death and Conroy notwithstanding, we’re maybe now in a position to appreciate the lie at the dark heart of Celebrity’s brochure. For this—the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS—is the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn’t that this promise will be kept, but that such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie. 87 And of course I want to believe it—fuck the Buddha—I want to believe that maybe this Ultimate Fantasy Vacation will be enough pampering, that this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered that my Infantile part will be sated.

But the Infantile part of me is insatiable—in fact its whole essence or dasein or whatever lies in its a priori insatiability. In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction.

sepulchral

mordant

a phatic little four-page ersatz newspaper printed on white vellum in a navy-blue font.

In Quest of Managed Fun.

his movements have the birdlike economy characteristic of small plump graceful men.

Menu-wise, Tibor advises and recommends, but without the hauteur that’s always made me hate the gastropedantic waiters in classy restaurants.

Tibor is omnipresent without being unctuous or oppressive; he is kind and warm and...

There was no hauteur or pedantry as he addressed us. He just meant what he said. His expression was babe-naked, and we heard him, and nothing was perfunctory again.

in terms of death/despair/pampering/insatiability issues.

and worn-looking, slump-shouldered, the way usually only much older girls get—a kind of poor psychic posture.

fianchetto

Three simultaneous venues of Managed Fun,

all in Celebrity’s snazzy white/navy motif.

sedulous

The lecture’s audience consists of bald solid thick-wristed men over 50 who all look like the kind of guy who rises to CEO a company out of that company’s engineering dept. instead of some fancy MBA program.

knocking my swimcap almost clear off my head and toppling me over hard to starboard into a pool that’s not only got a really high Na-content but is also now covered with a shiny and full-spectrum scum of Vaseline, and I emerge so icky and befouled and cross-eyed from the guy’s right hook that I blow what should have been a very legitimate shot at the title in the Men’s Best Legs Contest, in which I end up placing third but am told later I would have won the whole thing except for the scowl, swollen and strabismic left eye, and askew swimcap that formed a contextual backdrop too downright goofy to let the full force of my gams’ shapeliness come through to the judges.

In the public loo off the elevators on Deck 11-Fore, which has four urinals and three commodes, all Vacuum-Suction, which if activated one after the other in rapid succession produce a cumulative sound that is exactly like the climactic Db-G# melisma at the end of the 1983 Vienna Boys Choir’s seminal recording of the medievally lugubrious Tenebrae Factae Sunt.

Except in the O.H.C. it’s more like pumping ultrarefined titanium alloy: all the weights are polished stainless steel, and the place is one of these clubs with mirrors on all four walls that force you into displays of public self-scrutiny that are as excruciating as they are irresistible, and there are huge and insectile-looking pieces of machinery that mimic the aerobic demands of staircases and rowboats and racing bikes and improperly waxed cross-country skis, etc., complete with heart-monitor electrodes and radio headphones; and on these machines there are people in spandex whom you really want to take aside and advise in the most tactful and loving way not to wear spandex.

The very best way to describe Scott Peterson’s demeanor is that it looks like he’s constantly posing for a photograph nobody is taking.

and I have to admit that some of them seem to like Scott Peterson a lot, and really do enjoy his talk, a talk that, not surprisingly, turns out to be more about what it’s like to be Scott Peterson than what it’s like to work on the good old Nadir.

I swear I am not exaggerating: this occasion is a real two-handed head-clutcher, awesome in its ickiness.

where he’d been practicing his Professional Smile in the bedside table’s enormous vanity mirror,

the swart blue-collar gaze of the impending Staff Plumber,

a flying skeet, 129 when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia—erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a distinctive corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.

are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail.

an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like—i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left—and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.

1600h. – 1700h.: Lacuna.

The hideous Mona has, recall, opted to represent today as her birthday to Tibor and the maître d’, resulting tonight in bunting and a tall cake and a chair-balloon, plus in Wojtek leading a squad of Slavic busboys in a ceremonial happy-birthday mazurka around Table 64, and in an overall smug glow of satisfaction from Mona (who when The Tibster sets her cake down before her claps her hands once before her face like a small depraved child) and in an expression of blank tolerance from Mona’s grandparents that’s impossible to read or figure.

The result of all this is that stony-faced Alice and I 132 have tonight established a deep and high-voltage bond across the table, united in our total disapproval and hatred of Mona, and are engaging in a veritable ballet of coded little stab-, strangle-, and slap-Mona pantomimes for each other’s amusement, Alice and I are, which I’ve got to say is for me a fun and therapeutic anger-outlet after the day’s tribulations.