Now Playing in Theaters

Now Playing in Theaters: The Travel Diary Cont’d

It’s just about nine p.m. at one of those recently constructed yet doleful Southern California hotels, the kind newly fashioned out of cardboard and glass. In the background an incessant musak sound track of incessant, original 80’s musak is humming away day and night, and there's also a supposed “Starbucks” (oh, yipppeee), though it’s really just a breakfast counter with the famous green and white logo and serves powdered eggs. Despite the hour and although I’ve been here for a week, it still feels like the darkest midnight that indeed it is on the east coast at the very moment, and I’m floating on a burgeoning cloud of virus particles that have moved from my throat to my head to my chest and back again.

It’s unusually quiet because the soccer gangs and biz travelers are gone, at least for the time being. I am sitting on a stool at an empty bar waiting for yet a fourth cup of exceedingly cheap and tasteless Chamomille tea to go. When it arrives I will  try to lug the perilously unstable paper vessel in which it swirls back up to my room, albeit with sticky fingers from a series of frustratingly un-open-able honey packets, and attempt to do this without the cover falling off and scalding me.

There will no doubt be a fifth, and very possibly a sixth shot of watery healing essence somewhere in the middle of this long night, this last indulgence no doubt when I work my piteously sad, disheveled, weak and croaky voiced persona upon a half asleep, night shift front- desker who would rather keep me alive than have to deal with something more “intense.”` Truth is, I am coughing like crazy, I am not young, and this scares them. And so the night guy half wakes up and trudges the quarter of a mile or so into the big, empty kitchen to find a tea bag and some hot water. He ambles back and sort of half heartedly wishes me well with a look that really means please, pleaze, don’t die lady while I’m on duty.

Like everyone else who has once been, now is, or soon may very well be enjoying this same viral nightmare in the place some of the locals affectionately call “Cally” I currently have the flu, I tried to ignore it at first. It’s just a little cold, I said. It’s the flu though. If it is not the flu, it is the flu’s twin brother, or perhaps a younger, smaller sibling with an eerily striking resemblance. It seems I have the flu. And apparently so does,  did, or soon may almost anyone who plays fast and loose here and sets foot out of their house this January, vaccine notwithstanding, that is if they ever bother to get one.The day clerk scoffs  openly at such an idea although he brags he’s been sick for almost a month, since Christmas.

The giant screen that cruelly dominates the wall above the shiny glasses and bottles that are all lined up to soothe testy travelers is like a taunting distraction from disinterested tech gods in the midst of my great earthly misery, and it’s in hugely bold color as well. There is a lot of fuscia and electric blue. At the moment I am the only testy customer in the whole place and really cannot distinguish between a gladiatorial event taking place across a football field or CNN blaring one of its alarming, disgusted, outraged and appalled diatribes. I am simply too tired to care, too beaten down to hate or to be mildly frightened or even weakly chagrined.

I soooooo want to be home. Sooooooo Sooooooo much. Really a lot!!! Three thousand miles far, far away!!! The closest I’ve come to any kind of hope for surviving this or attaining some sort of soothing balm of creature comfort to ease the aches (other than zoning out on Tylenol which hardly counts) has happened in the dimmest hours of the pre-dawn, and involves the following: locking myself into the windowless, cardboard bathroom, opening the glass shower, flipping the spiffy, confusing circular water handle to its very hottest setting and turning the whole, much too bright, windowless, fluorescent box- yes,, the very one on whose unconcerned floor I am lying prostrate-, into a humongous, steaming neti pot. But there are limits even to this ancient curative as I am certain the paper walls may start to melt away if I pursue the activity with too much gusto. The water already is creating far too many wet, wavy lines on the cardboard surfaces. Actually, this is such a silly thought. I have no gusto whatsoever and feel totally horrible, listless, completely apathetic. Let it fall!

How did I get here? Were there auguries? Omens? Occasional spurious prophecies from tall soothsayers with long, scraggly, white beards and crazy eyes?

Hmmmm. . . let me think. . .oh yeah. . .  about six days ago, I got on a plane and the guy across the aisle had this persistent, dry cough. . . . Then some sniffling, hacking away hotel staff signed me in and another with dripping nose and look of pure agony served me a frozen bagel in the morning with my Starbucks. . . .

Of course I am home now or I would not be plopped dazedly at a keyboard, just rambling on in the present tense. But I still have the flu, even though at this point I’m supposed to say “the worst” may be over. It's not. I also have prednisone and jet lag.

(Next Friday “Part Two," and a flashback!)