7NC Luxury Cruises always start and finish on Saturday. Right now it’s Saturday 11 March, 1020h., and we are deplaning. Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today. Over near the back wall, a number of brisk-looking older ladies in vaguely naval outfits hold up printed signs — HLND, CELEB, CUND CRN. What you’re supposed to do (the Chicago lady from the plane is kind of talking me through it as BIG DADDY shoulders us a path through the fray) what you’re supposed to do is find your particular Megaline’s brisk lady and sort of all coalesce around her as she walks with printed sign held high to attract still more cruisers and leads the growing ectoplasm of Nadirites all out to buses that ferry us to the Piers and what we quixotically believe will be immediate and hassle-free boarding.
Apparently Ft. Laud. Airport is always just your average sleepy midsize airport six days a week and then every Saturday resembles the fall of Saigon. Half the terminal’s mob consists of luggage-bearing people now flying home from 7NCs. They are Syrianly tan, and a lot of them have eccentric and vaguely hairy-looking souvenirs of various sizes and functions, and they all have a glazed spacey look about them that the Chicago lady avers is the telltale look of post-7NC Inner Peace. We pre-7NCs, on the other hand, all look pasty and stressed and somehow combat-unready.
Outside, we of the Nadir are directed to deectoplasmize ourselves and all line up along some sort of tall curb to await the Nadir’s special chartered buses. We are exchanging awkward don’t-know-whether-to-smile-and-wave-or-not glances with a Holland America herd that’s lining up on a grassy median parallel to us, and both groups are looking a little narrow-eyed at a Princess-bound herd whose buses are already pulling up. The Ft. Laud. Airport’s porters and cabbies and white-bandoliered traffic cops and bus drivers are all Cuban. The retired Chicago couple, clearly wily veterans about lines by their fourth Luxury Cruise, has butted into place way up. A second Celebrity crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler’s List.
Where I am in the line: I’m between a squat and chain-smoking black man in an NBC Sports cap and several corporately dressed people wearing badges identifying them as with something called the Engler Corporation. 16 Way up ahead, the retired Chicago couple has spread a sort of parasol. There’s a bumpy false ceiling of mackerel clouds moving in from the southwest, but overhead it’s just wispy cirrus, and it’s seriously hot standing and waiting in the sun, even without luggage or luggage-angst, and through a lack of foresight I’m wearing my undertakerish black wool suitcoat and an inadequate hat. But it feels good to perspire. Chicago at dawn was 18° and its sun the sort of wan and impotent March sun you can look right at. It is good to feel serious sun and see trees all frothy with green. We wait rather a long time, and the Nadir line starts to recoalesce into clumps as people’s conversations have time to progress past the waiting-in-line small-talk stage. Either there was a mixup getting enough buses for people in on A.M. flights, or (my theory) the same Celebrity Cruises brain trust responsible for the wildly seductive brochure has decided to make certain elements of pre-embarkation as difficult and unpleasant as possible in order to sharpen the favorable contrast between real life and the 7NC experience.
Now we’re riding to the Piers in a column of eight chartered Greyhounds. Our convoy’s rate of speed and the odd deference other traffic shows gives the whole procession a kind of funereal quality. Ft. Laud. proper looks like one extremely large golf course, but the cruise lines’ Piers are in something called Port Everglades, an industrial area, pretty clearly, zoned for Blight, with warehouses and transformer parks and stacked boxcars and vacant lots full of muscular and evil-looking Florida-type weeds. We pass a huge field of those hammer-shaped automatic oil derricks all bobbing fellatially, and on the horizon past them is a little fingernail clipping of shiny gray that I’m thinking must be the sea. Several different languages are in use on my bus. Whenever we go over bumps or train tracks, there’s a tremendous mass clicking sound in here from all the cameras around everybody’s neck. I haven’t brought any sort of camera and feel a perverse pride about this.
The Nadir’s traditional berth is Pier 21. “Pier,” though it had conjured for me images of wharfs and cleats and lapping water, turns out to denote something like what airport denotes, viz. a zone and not a thing. There is no real water in sight, no docks, no fishy smell or sodium tang to the air; but there are, as we enter the Pier zone, a lot of really big white ships that blot out most of the sky.
Now I’m writing this sitting in an orange plastic chair at the end of one of Pier 21’s countless bolted rows of orange plastic chairs. We have debused and been herded via megaphone through 21’s big glass doors, whereupon two more completely humorless naval ladies handed us each a little plastic card with a number on it. My card’s number is 7. A few people sitting nearby ask me “what I am,” and I figure out I’m to respond “a 7.” The cards are by no means brand new, and mine has the vestigial whorls of a chocolate thumbprint in one corner.
From inside, Pier 21 seems kind of like a blimpless blimp hangar, high-ceilinged and very echoey. It has walls of unclean windows on three sides, at least 2500 orange chairs in rows of 25, a kind of desultory Snack Bar, and restrooms with very long lines. The acoustics are brutal and it’s tremendously loud. Outside, rain starts coming down even though the sun’s still shining. Some of the people in the rows of chairs appear to have been here for days: they have that glazed encamped look of people at airports in blizzards.
It’s now 1132h., and boarding will not commence one second before 1400 sharp; a PA announcement politely but firmly declares Celebrity’s seriousness about this. 17 The PA lady’s voice is what you imagine a British supermodel would sound like. Everyone’s clutching his numbered card like the cards are identity papers at Checkpoint Charley. There’s an Ellis Island/pre-Auschwitz aspect to the massed and anxious waiting, but I’m uncomfortable trying to extend the analogy. A lot of the people waiting — Caribbeanish clothing notwithstanding — look Jewish to me, and I’m ashamed to catch myself thinking that I can determine Jewishness from people’s appearance. 18 Maybe two-thirds of the total people in here are actually sitting in orange chairs. Pier 21’s pre-boarding blimp hangar’s not as bad as, say, Grand Central at 1715h. on Friday, but it bears little resemblance to any of the stressless pamper-venues detailed in the Celebrity brochure, which brochure I am not the only person in here thumbing through and looking at wistfully. A lot of people are also reading the Fort Lauderdale Sentinel and staring with subwayish blankness at other people. A kid whose T-shirt says SANDY DUNCAN’S EYE is carving something in the plastic of his chair. There are quite a few old people all travelling with really desperately old people who are pretty clearly the old people’s parents. A couple different guys in different rows are field-stripping their camcorders with military-looking expertise. There’s a fair share of WASP-looking passengers, as well. A lot of the WASPs are couples in their twenties and thirties, with a honeymoonish aspect to the way their heads rest on each other’s shoulders. Men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts, I’ve decided; their legs are hairless in a way that’s creepy; the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for hair, particularly on the calves. It’s just about the only body-area where you actually want more hair on older men. Is this fibular hairlessness a result of years of chafing in pants and socks? The significance of the numbered cards turns out to be that you’re supposed to wait here in Pier 21’s blimp hangar until your number is called, then you board in “Lots.” 19 So your number doesn’t stand for you, but rather for the subherd of cruisers you’re part of. Some 7NC-veterans nearby tell me that 7 is not a great Lot-number and advise me to get comfortable. Somewhere past the big gray doors behind the restrooms’ roiling lines is an umbilical passage leading to what I assume is the actual Nadir, which outside the south wall’s windows presents as a tall wall of total white. In the approximate center of the hangar is a long table where creamy-complected women in nursish white from Steiner of London Inc. are doing free little makeup and complexion consultations with women waiting to board, priming the economic pump. 20 The Chicago lady and BIG DADDY are in the hangar’s southeasternmost row of chairs playing Uno with another couple, who turn out to be friends they’d made on a Princess Alaska Cruise in ’93.