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!)
