Just when you thought it was safe—I’m back!
Not from the dead, nor the leave of absence. No, I’ve returned from the No Man’s Land of writing the book that never ends. And now, feeling very much like the Russian woman who birthed the 17 pound baby, I am spent, exhausted, and never want to do that again.
Of course, I probably will, but at the moment I’d rather shove bamboo shoots under my fingernails than entertain the thought of writing one craftily-clad sentence ever again.
During this time, I’ve been to Kentucky, to New York, to Toronto, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee… and Italy—ah, Italy!—where I was verbally made love to by an Italian man my father’s age with via an English-speaking accomplice sitting nearby in the hotel lobby bar (“Antonio says he never—never!—see a woman as beautiful as you. He only want you to meet him for a drink tomorrow, and please to come back to Firenze perhaps for some dinner and drinking. He is not this kind of man who says this to every woman. He only want to have some drink, and to make love to you.”)
In Italy, I stumbled into the Duomo, saw the statue of David just before museum closing time (I thought he was supposed to be Jewish?) and consumed a respectable—or not so respectable—amount of Chianti.
Somewhere in between I taught a seminar to several Italians in a show room full of clothing, shoes, and purse samples—none of which fit in my briefcase. It was inhumane and cruel; what I made in one day of teaching the Italians was not enough to afford even one of their handbags. The universe is unjust.
Alongside my Italian-to-English innocence, I also lost my 1K status and became one of the milling throng yearning to breathe free—the poor, the disenchanted… the United Airlines customers with only Premiere Exec Status.
***
Winnipeg, Canada: Huddled Mass
So here I am now in Winnipeg. Every other store front is appears indefinitely closed And though I hate to be uncharitable, there is something distinctly moribund about this city so that it seems the Dollar Stores are the only thing thriving well here.
I have a notion to take myself to a movie (no book to write, no edits—I hardly know what to do with myself)—until a colleague partner originally from here, suggests I may not want to walk parts of downtown at night.
Gotcha.
I work out. Take myself to dinner. Build tomorrow’s Powerpoint in front of the movie “21,” prepare for bed.
Recall with me: I have only been free in spurts, my last edit a mere 20 hours behind me; only at 3am last night did I finish a list of errors in my current project’s galley after my initial scratches were unceremoniously FedExed back.
After a week of listing out the case for every misspelling, omitted word, klunky sentence and remainder of earlier versions—not to mention two nights of 20 year high school reunion (voted “most likely to become a librarian,” right here), what I really need is rest. But freedom is like a shiny new toy, beckoning, intoxicating, and…
I’m ready for bed by 10:00.
I’m talking on the phone with Rick when I notice blood in the toilet water.
Yes. I was peeing on the phone. Not literally, but—
Don’t even try to tell me you haven’t done it yourself.
Somehow, I don’t think this is right (the blood—not the peeing on the phone.)
“Maybe go to bed and see what your sister says when you get to Boston,” he says. My sister is probably the most talented family physician in Boston and her house is tomorrow’s destination.
Still, the blood thing freaks me out. I call my mom.
“Get to the doctor,” she says. “You need a prescription right away or you’ll be miserable by tomorrow.”
I call the front desk. They don’t have access to a doctor. What kind of hotel is this? I can just call an ambulance, she says. Um, no. “I can give you a nurse line and she can give you some advice,” she says.
Yeah. Because advice is good for blood in urine.
Joan, the nurse on the phone, is not sure what to do with a foreign southern neighbor.
“I’m trying to make your file.”
Why are health professionals always so interested in files?
“I don’t want a file. I want a prescription.” My bladder is pulling, more insistent by the minute.
“You’re passing blood.”
“Yes.”
“Does your lower flank hurt at all?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” I thought only horses had those.
Joan makes me a file. It makes her feel better. She directs me to go to the med center, and gives me an address.
I have been ill in Thailand and Korea, been to the ER in Honolulu and seen the hotel doctor in Beijing. I am no stranger to illness out of town. But that doesn’t make it any more fun.
The taxi is prompt—there’s something squeaky-clean about taxi drivers in Canada, with their prompt arrivals and neatly-written receipts. I briefly think I’m in Singapore.
I ask him to take me to Misericordia.
“You’re sick?” he says.
“Yes,” I groan. It positively hurts now.
“No worry. You’ll be fine.” And while I expect he’s telling the truth, I’m beginning to wonder if there is indeed a 24-hour pharmacy nearby and how I will make it there and back. I’m beginning to flirt with misery.
We pull up to the glass doors. “There are few people inside. You will be able to be seen right away. You will be better soon,” he smiles and diligently fills out the receipt.
In fact, everyone here is nice.
“Allergies?” the nurse asks.
“Sulfa.”
“What happens when you take it?”
“I turn into Swamp Thing.”
She blinks.
“Seriously.”
“That really limits what we can give you. It’ll probably be Cipro.”
Hey, if it works on anthrax it’s good enough for me.
By now, I feel as though I might need to go to the bathroom. Forever.
The nurse sends me one desk over to reception… so they can start a file.
“Oh. You’re from outside the country? You’ll need to pay.”
I hand her my wallet, all my cards, everything. Anything.
“You need to pay at security, down the hall.” I peel myself from the chair.
The man in the security office smiles. “Tosca? That’s a nice name.”
I grunt.
“I hope you feel better. That’ll be $405.”
I shove my money at him.
I take the receipt back to reception. She makes my file. At last. I have a file. Can I have some pills now?
With a shiny new hospital bracelet on my wrist, I sit and wait. And wait. And pee. And drink water. And pee some more. And wait. And pee. I have never peed this many times, cumulatively, in my life. I wonder what people without $405 do and how they get pills in this place.
An hour and a half later, I’m sure it must be Friday already. The man next to me offers me the TV changer. There are only some four people waiting to see the doctor. I can hardly stand to sit on anything that doesn’t have a toilet seat on it.
I call my mom. “Tell them to hurry up,” she says, “That you need to get in now.”
“I have a file,” I offer.
By now, it’s 2am. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get meds here, or if I’ll have to find a way to survive a taxi drive to a 24 hour pharm.
“If I’m not here when the nurse comes, I’m in the bathroom,” I tell reception.
“The nurses are clever. They’ll figure it out considering what you’re here for.”
I am in no mood for coyness. I want, in fact, to shove her ID badge up her left nostril.
I wait. And wait. In the bathroom.
Two hours later, the nurse takes me back.
There a bed in my curtained-off room, but I cannot by now sit or lay down. I’ve been in the bathroom perhaps 40 times since arriving… and spend most of the next hour in the one off this room.
When the doctor comes in, disaster strikes.
He’s cute. Strike that, he’s unerringly handsome. This is so wrong.
“So, we have some problems with urine?” he says.
I do not want to talk to a handsome doctor about my urine. Please get the ugly doctor—really, it’s fine. I can wait.
He prescribes me ten days of antibiotics and the nurse comes back with my first dose and one of those pills for the spasms. It’s well after 4am and I’m free to go. But for the next twenty minutes, all I can do is sit in the bathroom.
I’m not sure how this is going to work.
By 4:30, I’m nauseous and buy some chips from the vending machine. I wonder how in the hell I’m going to teach in three hours.
There’s a dedicated phone line for the cab company—but lo and behold, there’s one waiting outside, just hanging out. He looks surprised to see me. “You need a cab?”
I nod.
Back at the room, I pee again, E-mail my manager and my internal partner on the project. If I can get three hours’ sleep, I’ll get up, find a 24 hour pharm, get my prescription for the rest of the day, dress, go teach, fly on to Boston.
Apparently I think I’m superwoman.
7am. My security company calls. The alarm on my house is going off in Lincoln.
Rick is on his way over. The police are already there.
And then relief: the partner has postponed the workshop.
I go back to sleep, more relieved than I have been in days.
By late morning, I’ve found a pharmacy at a mall, taken breakfast in the hotel. I arrange a late checkout, fall asleep, and barely wake up in time to go.
At the Winnipeg airport—part small-town airport, part café and bait ‘n tackle shop—I realize I’m missing my cell phone.
I inquire at security. They don’t have it. I confront an actual pay phone with my work calling card, locate the taxi company with a number located from an actual paper phone book. I think I remember how to do this.
The cab company has it. I’ll call later, from Boston, and learn it’ll be cheaper to get a new one than finagle this one home from Winnipeg.
One hour, one cell phone and $405 in cute doctor’s fees later, I take off for Boston.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Queens to Florence: The Coming
Today began at 5:30, which is 4:30 at home and not so bad; I never got to sleep the night before in order to get Havah—messy, overweight, redundant, missing research, to my editor. In bed by 10Est is the earliest I’ve been to bed in maybe five years. I’m frankly surprised there’s a world to wake to, that it hasn’t ended. But all signs point to a disappointing lack of apocalypse.
At least for today.
I’ve spent a half hour calling Italy to reverse a hotel booking that the hotel cannot do because it was made by a website after a misunderstanding with my colleague. I am hung up on three times by the Italian representative when it becomes clear I didn’t speak Italian.
I e-mail the hotel, get dressed, panic that I can’t cancel my reservation, and run out the door, bootlaces trailing. Luckily, nobody sees me sitting in the hallway two minutes later, laboring to lace them up.
The Marriott car driver takes out his glasses, opens a book of maps, and pages through them. Has he not heard of GPS? Does he not know I have a class to teach, that Jesus is probably coming and if he doesn’t get his act together I will miss class, Jesus and apocalypse all?? Drive on, man!
Queens is not my favorite place in the world. I admit it—industrial, ramshackle in parts, graffiti-scrawled. I love Manhattan more.
I’m teaching a class of participants—many of whom it is obvious do not want to be here. I open a vein and do my job. The class finishes, the client is pleased, says this is a tough group, I was the right one for it. No matter that I am, by now, bloodless and a husk of the woman I once was.
I change my clothes. George, the driver, is back by noon and off to LaGuardia I go in my pumpkin.
***
I’m not a fan of LaGuardia, with its Red Carpet Club outside security. (What’s up with that?) I’ve barely gotten settled in when a man announces my flight to Dulles is cancelled.
I go to the desk. When it’s my turn, it’s as though I’m suddenly shopping in Asia.
“I can get you out at 6.”
“No. Too late.”
“How about Delta?”
“What’ve you got on Delta?”
“I can get you in by five.”
“No good.”
“Nothing else goes from Dulles. I can get you direct to Munich on Lufthansa.”
“No way. I finagled an upgrade to business.” And it’ll be a cold day in hell before I let him pry it out of my post-apocalyptic hand.
“How about US Scare?”
“They only go to Reagan. I can get you out of JFK at four.”
“No good. Put me on the Scare Shuttle.”
US Air operates an hourly service to Boston and D.C. I get the ticket downloaded to my e-mail, see that my reservation at the hotel in Italy has been reversed and the Weston made in its stead, and take off.
I look for the B bus to move one terminal down. I see a public bus and ask the driver. He waves me over to the curb and points: number 5 is coming. He honks and waves me over again.
Anyone who says people in NY aren’t friendly haven’t been there.
Mr. Miagi is driving the B line. Seriously. I wax on. I loop all the way around the check-in. I go through security. I fly to Reagen. I catch a cab. I call my manager and talk about another trip, call T&T and book flights. I arrive at Dulles, check in, go through security.
The shuttles at Dulles look like giant snow cats on tires instead of treads—something of a mix between a tank and a mini-van on wheels. That is to say: weird.
I eat a chicken taco, get green tea, buy a book. I’ve already got three on me, but I have a phobia—second only to pool drains—of being bored on planes. Which is stupid since I couldn’t stay awake on them to save my life anyway.
In the Dulles Red Carpet Club, the woman at the front desk offers me a drink coupon. “Would you like a drink-—a drink with ALCOHOL?” She says with the hypnotic look of pedophillic men with candy.
“Um, no thanks,” I say, backing away slowly.
***
This is one of those new planes with business class that lies flat. The TVs are the size of my computer monitor. They have 30 movies, TV, games, and books on tape. Holy shit. Clearly this flight needs to be longer so I can fit all of this in.
By the time I eat dinner, watch two movies and write 50 (seriously) e-mails, watch three episodes of 24, eat breakfast, we’re there. I am so not finished.
It’s been a year since I’ve been overseas—by choice—but I’m still jonesin’.
The last time I was in Frankfurt was with Mom on the way to Greece.
This is a weird airport—hard to find flights in. I look around and do the logical thing: ask one of the guys who was sitting in my cabin for help.
“Well, what you do is go to the lounge. Get your pass. Follow me.”
I have a pass.
“Are you traveling for work?” he asks as we walk.
I sigh.
“How often do you get out to Europe?”
“Never,” I say. “I mean, except this time.”
He shows me his international phone simm cards. Advises me never to book hotels—to book apartments instead.
I’m only staying two days, I tell him.
“Oh! And use Skype. See, if you had Skype, I could call you, wherever you are, and say, ‘Hey, want to meet up in Brussels?’”
“Here’s the A gate. Gotta go!” I announce.
The only thing I want to rendezvous with is gate A3.
By the time I get to Florence, I’d like some soup. A shower. A nap.
No such luck.
Today began at 5:30, which is 4:30 at home and not so bad; I never got to sleep the night before in order to get Havah—messy, overweight, redundant, missing research, to my editor. In bed by 10Est is the earliest I’ve been to bed in maybe five years. I’m frankly surprised there’s a world to wake to, that it hasn’t ended. But all signs point to a disappointing lack of apocalypse.
At least for today.
I’ve spent a half hour calling Italy to reverse a hotel booking that the hotel cannot do because it was made by a website after a misunderstanding with my colleague. I am hung up on three times by the Italian representative when it becomes clear I didn’t speak Italian.
I e-mail the hotel, get dressed, panic that I can’t cancel my reservation, and run out the door, bootlaces trailing. Luckily, nobody sees me sitting in the hallway two minutes later, laboring to lace them up.
The Marriott car driver takes out his glasses, opens a book of maps, and pages through them. Has he not heard of GPS? Does he not know I have a class to teach, that Jesus is probably coming and if he doesn’t get his act together I will miss class, Jesus and apocalypse all?? Drive on, man!
Queens is not my favorite place in the world. I admit it—industrial, ramshackle in parts, graffiti-scrawled. I love Manhattan more.
I’m teaching a class of participants—many of whom it is obvious do not want to be here. I open a vein and do my job. The class finishes, the client is pleased, says this is a tough group, I was the right one for it. No matter that I am, by now, bloodless and a husk of the woman I once was.
I change my clothes. George, the driver, is back by noon and off to LaGuardia I go in my pumpkin.
***
I’m not a fan of LaGuardia, with its Red Carpet Club outside security. (What’s up with that?) I’ve barely gotten settled in when a man announces my flight to Dulles is cancelled.
I go to the desk. When it’s my turn, it’s as though I’m suddenly shopping in Asia.
“I can get you out at 6.”
“No. Too late.”
“How about Delta?”
“What’ve you got on Delta?”
“I can get you in by five.”
“No good.”
“Nothing else goes from Dulles. I can get you direct to Munich on Lufthansa.”
“No way. I finagled an upgrade to business.” And it’ll be a cold day in hell before I let him pry it out of my post-apocalyptic hand.
“How about US Scare?”
“They only go to Reagan. I can get you out of JFK at four.”
“No good. Put me on the Scare Shuttle.”
US Air operates an hourly service to Boston and D.C. I get the ticket downloaded to my e-mail, see that my reservation at the hotel in Italy has been reversed and the Weston made in its stead, and take off.
I look for the B bus to move one terminal down. I see a public bus and ask the driver. He waves me over to the curb and points: number 5 is coming. He honks and waves me over again.
Anyone who says people in NY aren’t friendly haven’t been there.
Mr. Miagi is driving the B line. Seriously. I wax on. I loop all the way around the check-in. I go through security. I fly to Reagen. I catch a cab. I call my manager and talk about another trip, call T&T and book flights. I arrive at Dulles, check in, go through security.
The shuttles at Dulles look like giant snow cats on tires instead of treads—something of a mix between a tank and a mini-van on wheels. That is to say: weird.
I eat a chicken taco, get green tea, buy a book. I’ve already got three on me, but I have a phobia—second only to pool drains—of being bored on planes. Which is stupid since I couldn’t stay awake on them to save my life anyway.
In the Dulles Red Carpet Club, the woman at the front desk offers me a drink coupon. “Would you like a drink-—a drink with ALCOHOL?” She says with the hypnotic look of pedophillic men with candy.
“Um, no thanks,” I say, backing away slowly.
***
This is one of those new planes with business class that lies flat. The TVs are the size of my computer monitor. They have 30 movies, TV, games, and books on tape. Holy shit. Clearly this flight needs to be longer so I can fit all of this in.
By the time I eat dinner, watch two movies and write 50 (seriously) e-mails, watch three episodes of 24, eat breakfast, we’re there. I am so not finished.
It’s been a year since I’ve been overseas—by choice—but I’m still jonesin’.
The last time I was in Frankfurt was with Mom on the way to Greece.
This is a weird airport—hard to find flights in. I look around and do the logical thing: ask one of the guys who was sitting in my cabin for help.
“Well, what you do is go to the lounge. Get your pass. Follow me.”
I have a pass.
“Are you traveling for work?” he asks as we walk.
I sigh.
“How often do you get out to Europe?”
“Never,” I say. “I mean, except this time.”
He shows me his international phone simm cards. Advises me never to book hotels—to book apartments instead.
I’m only staying two days, I tell him.
“Oh! And use Skype. See, if you had Skype, I could call you, wherever you are, and say, ‘Hey, want to meet up in Brussels?’”
“Here’s the A gate. Gotta go!” I announce.
The only thing I want to rendezvous with is gate A3.
By the time I get to Florence, I’d like some soup. A shower. A nap.
No such luck.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
St. Lucia: The Drain
My hair has transformed, overnight, into fuzzy brown wool. A veritable Asian afro. In the shower I dump a travel-sized bottle of conditioner on it. I clip it up wet. The ends slump to one side and drip onto my shoulder for an hour.
I have no TV. No internet except at reception. No cell service, air conditioning and no phone except for two unreliable credit card gizmos posted on the bulletin-board style wall in front of the reception shack. There is only a clock on the dresser that intermittently scares the shit out of me by turning itself on to a local French-speaking reggae station.
I take breakfast at the restaurant up the hill. And I mean “hill” quite literally. By the time I reach the top, I’m winded, sweating, and more ready to barf than eat. But then someone puts a basket of toasty baguette slices and fresh banana jam in front of me and I am restored.
Somewhere between baguette and Creole omelet, I am beset by a herd of kittens. People make jokes about this kind of thing. At first I mistake the mother—scrawny and runtish—for one of her litter. She stares at me, eyes huge in her head, and I feed her some omelet. Afterward, her taut belly full with my shared breakfast, one of her kittens begins to suckle as she’s trying to give herself a bath. Isn’t that how it always goes?
On the way back down I see a dead spider on a step, legs folded in arachnid rigor mortis. It’s the size of a tarantula. Now I understand what my taxi driver, Bryos, meant when he called the spider in the car “little.”
There are bugs everywhere. Tiny ants, crawling on the tables, larger ones on the floor. Bees and wasps. And phantom mosquitoes, Ninja-stealthy.
I spend the rest of the day alternating between the hammock, the kitchenette table, and, when I can stand it, a beach towel laid out on the deck. By mid-day I summon the courage to step into the plunge pool. The paint has peeled away in splotches on the bottom forming spooky-looking pock marks and the drain is as ominous as a submerged carnivore. I get in up to my knees and then skitter back out.
It rains without notice in full sunlight. Sometimes I get up and go inside. Sometimes I just lay there, naked from the waist down, and slide my book under the eaves to safety. Rain trickles in crooked paths down the curve of my nape, the small of my back, the arch of my foot. I close my eyes and drift. When I open them again, the rain has stopped and I am hungry.
I take lunch at the restaurant, and dinner, too. And then read some more, looking for tidbits of reality to add to a story that, for many, will be a fairy tale brought, I hope, to plausible life.
On Friday, I’m not sure I can stand it any more. I have made a fine meal for the mosquitoes—which I have yet to actually see. All attempts at natural, aloe-infused repellent have failed. I now believe mosquito-bite scratching rivals sex. It’s time for some Deet Jujitsu.
I take the shuttle to town in the plainest shorts and camisole I own. I saw the town on the drive in; single-room homes with rotting boards and laundry lines strung across the tiny front porch make up the prosperous front of the block. Some of them boast a second story, their balconies precariously supported by thin wooden struts. Tarp and siding shanties line dirt alleys a block from the center of town. Chickens poke through street gutters running with urine.
There is rust everywhere: on crusty plaster, window casements and broken eaves, on the metal roof of the only hotel in town. It is a ramshackle two-story building with peeling white paint and open shutters. It looks out on the square, a fenced-off area replete with brick walkway and a wealth of flowering bushes, trees sprouting red Dr. Seuss flowers lorded over by a tall, sparse fir. Locals loiter on the fence, lean against the gate, call out to familiar others on adjacent street corners.
It is a place, I think, that would be beautiful, except for the evidence of human poverty and neglect. As it is, people sit in dirty t-shirts and ragged shorts—on store stoops, on home porches, on crumbling mossy curbs and steps—watching life go by without them.
I was told there was a mall of sorts near the square. It is the finest building in town, and that isn’t saying so much. Inside, the building is near-silent, like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. The tiny pharmacy—the largest and busiest store in the building—is full of goods imported mostly from the states. A small line waits to consult the pharmacist. I buy Benadryl and bug spray and cortisone cream. I pay with dollars and receive local currency in exchange. I ask where the mall restroom is and a man who does not seem to work there offers to show me the way. I am, as I have been, suspicious of his willingness to help. When I come out he is waiting and my hackles rise, but then he steps around me and I realize he was waiting for the toilet.
What’s wrong with me that I’ve become so much on guard? Truthfully, I’m not sure I would have it any other way; I travel alone and put myself at the mercy of strangers plenty enough. I’ve been called naïve and too trusting before. But I wonder at this new suspiciousness in me.
Down the hallway in the mall is an empty Asian restaurant. Its white-tiled walls look more like a bathroom than a place to eat. Its few tables are empty, the counter sparse, the kitchen beyond it silent except for one lone worker. Farther down there’s a barber shop with two chairs. They’re full and the locals study me with as much interest as I do them. Again, the store is sparse, but at least it looks like they might be having fun. They’re the first smiles I’ve seen.
I’m ready to leave town. I want to leave. Not for the poverty—I’ve seen it in China, in Thailand and most notably in India—but for the air of stagnancy.
I walk past shops filled with cheap clothing and plastic sunglasses, open-air bars as big as a closet stocked with some 10 kinds of rum, past a bank filled full of people, down towards the dock. I’ve got twenty minutes until the shuttle returns.
There’s a restaurant on the harbor, obviously designed for tourists. As I walk past the tiny kitchen toward the bar, one of the girls duly gets up from a stool. She does it with the air of a back alley massage parlor girl trudging out to meet her next client. I just want coffee. Idiotic in the hot weather, but I’m looking for a pick-me-up. She makes it fresh, strong, and loiters nearby as I drink it, saying nothing, looking with arms closed around herself out toward the bay. The dining area is open to the water, characteristic wicker basket lights suspended from naked ceiling beams. There’s a miniature galleon docked just out on the pier. I noticed it now as I watched a line of fat, white Americans waddle in their tank tops and flip flops down the same dock to a tour boat. Suddenly, I feel like a schmuck of a tourist, a predictable American. I quickly pay and leave.
I walk toward the little park lining the water, trying to snap when the breeze lifts the black flag just right. And that’s how I meet the Rasta man.
“I saw you over there,” he said. “Going into that restaurant. I could see from here that you are a spiritual person, and a positive person.”
I raise a brow, wondering what he wants.
“I’ve got a boat. I’ll take you out on the water. Snorkeling. Around the island. On a fish safari if you like, for two hundred dollars. I’m a Rasta Man. Spiritual is my name.” He’s carrying a book about Jesus.
I shake his hand. “You’re bald,” I say.
He grins and we meander toward a picnic table. I’ve still got ten minutes until the shuttle returns. “Yes, I had to cut off my hair.”
He sets down the book and I see that it’s written by Ellen White. He’s a Rasta man toting a Jesus book written by a Seventh Day Adventist. St. Lucia is a strange place.
A girl comes to the table, carrying an aluminum plate. She’s dressed in the uniform of the small supermarket in town. Spiritual greets her and she smiles. “I want that book.”
“I know. You can’t have it,” he says, grinning, as she sits down.
“You see,” he says, “I used to have hair down almost to my knees. But there are so many negative people. People who cannot see the positive in life. And they saw that I had my own boat, and that I had a good business. And one day I went out to my boat, and there was a powder there. And when I touched it, I became very sick.”
I nod. “Sounds like voodoo powder to me.” I know stuff.
The girl is biting into a fried chicken leg. “Mm-hmm,” she intones, intent on her lunch, stuffing a fry chaser in her mouth.
“I became very sick. I tried everything. I went to every doctor. But it was not something a doctor could heal. Because sickness, you see, is a spiritual problem.”
“Hmm-hmm!” the girl says, her mouth full.
“I had aches and pains. My kidney hurt. Finally, I had to cut my hair.”
“Why do Rastafarians not cut their hair?” They remind me, in that sense, of the Sheiks.
“Because our strength is in our hair. We are not to let a razor touch our head.”
“Like Sampson,” I say.
“Like Sampson,” he nods. I study him then, a skinny guy with nubs of black stubble upon his head. If his strength is in his hair, I figure I could probably take him.
“You know Sampson?” he says then, seeming surprised.
“Yes.”
“You know the Bible.”
Well, some.
The girl finishes her fried chicken and asks the Rasta man for his book again. He won’t part with it.
By then, it’s well past time. The shuttle has forgotten me. I’m scorching out in the heat at the picnic table with the Chicken Girl and the Rasta Man. Luckily, there’s a bank of taxis nearby.
The ride is ten minutes back to the old plantation and ten dollars. Taxi rates are exorbitant on this island, as I’m sure gas prices are.
Back at my villa, I strip off the clothing that has somehow melded to my skin. I start to head for the shower but then stop and pull on a towel.
Out on the deck I step onto the second step of the plunge pool, hand clasping the hot aluminum rail. I take another step down, and another, and hitch a breath as cold laps my thighs. The peeling paint wavers beneath the water in grotesque shapes. The drain peers from beneath the shadow of an overhanging tree.
I hurry back out and track wet footprints to the shower.
There is another cat now, no doubt the tomcat. He appears at dinner. He’s got a black splotch on his nose that makes it look dirty. Another cat behind him has ears that turn this way and that, like two radio antennae trying to find a frequency.
I take tea, tuna salad, pumpkin soup, looking directly at the piton, and then out toward the sea. I should go to the beach. I should climb the piton. I should see the turtles.
But I came here to work.
It rains in the afternoon. I read, organize my notes, and lay in the sun. My beach towel looks like a bikini-clad shroud of Turin. Confused roosters from the direction of the forest crow throughout the day and a cow lows in return.
That night a shaq shaq band plays at the restaurant. I ask why it’s called that and the waitress points to the metal cylinder filled with beads that one of the band members is shaking. Shaq shaq.
There’s a couple there with their son, come to hear the band. We end up chatting and I learn that they’re staying not at the estate but at the house of the woman’s father in the forest. They don’t stay long, having only come for a drink. “We’re eating at home,” the woman says. “Dad caught barracuda today.”
After dinner I return down the hill past birds of paradise. The flowers I pay large sums for at home grow as wild and free as dandelions here.
The security guard, Daniel, is waiting at the bottom of the hill outside my villa.
“I want to know,” he says, “Did God know that Adam and Eve would eat the fruit?”
“I suppose he must have known,” I say.
“Then why did he put it there?”
It’s a question I’ve pondered.
“I suppose that if there is no chance to choose wrong, then there is no true morality,” I say. He nods and seems to accept this. I walk to my deck. He holds the gate door for me. “Do you think that Adam and Eve looked on this same moon that we are looking on now, and that Eden was as beautiful as this place?”
“I suppose so,” I say and wish him good night. I go inside my villa until he is gone and the gate is shut after him. Several moments later, I return to my deck.
I stretch out on the hammock and feel vaguely as I did the night in Maine, except rather than avoiding shadows, I know what—or rather who—is there, standing outside the gate. I’m not sure whether I feel annoyed or safe. The cicadas sound like stringed instruments tuning and re-tuning the same note. Like the shaq shaq band with their repeating melodies, playing the same refrain over and over again
Eventually, I go inside and bolt the door.
***
By morning, the cicadas are silent, and the birds are out in force. Their songs sound somehow less sophisticated than their six-legged competitors. But they’re fascinating. A hummingbird hovers beneath the tree outside my villa. Smaller birds perch on my hammock.
Inside the villa, a brown lizard poses on a wooden slat inside my bedroom. Later, when I see a lump on the slat, I think it looks like a fly. But I know it is, in fact, lizard poop. Having had a pet lizard, I know these things.
I have well over 15 mosquito bites and am no doubt damaging my skin laying in the sun without benefit of sunscreen. But I do not burn easily once I start, and though I know I should still put some on, I find I don’t care.
Some time late morning, I trek to registration to drop off postcards and check my e-mail. I’ve just learned that the immediate area around the reception shack is wireless, that I need not hurry on and off the reception guest computer. So I dawdle with my laptop, missing, for just a while, the outside world.
Stephen King has responded to my e-mail about professor Mark.
“Thank you for that blast from the past,” he writes. “I had forgotten the nicknames we had for one another while I was there.” He’s referring to a fact told me by Professor Mark that I relayed to Mr. King in my e-mail: that there were two Mr. Kings at the high school he used to teach at: A Weird Mr. King and a Big Mr. King. Stephen King was the Big one. I understand that he’s quite tall.
During lunch I mention the cicadas, how they seem to sing at night beneath the full moon.
“You’re not the first to say that,” the girl waiting on me says. She gives a strange smile, as though she couldn’t imagine them sounding any other way and I suppose she can’t.
Up the hill. Down the hill. Up to registration. Down to my villa deck. Up to eat. Down to sleep.
After dinner the next night, Daniel is waiting for me again. He’s taken to parking outside my villa. I find it irritating but I don’t have the heart to be mean.
“Would you like to go to town, or climb the piton?” he asks me.
“I went to town. I don’t need anything more now. And I think I won’t climb the piton. I came to work.”
“Is that why you are always writing?”
“Yes. Besides. You work in the post office during the day, you said.”
“I would take off from work for you.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“I pray to God that you will return to St. Lucia. When do you think you will come back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come when you are ready to get married.”
“Why?”
“Because I will be waiting to marry you.”
“Um. How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“You see, I am much too old for you. And you are much too young for me.”
No matter that this is a boldfaced lie, that I have, in fact, had mad crushes on men (a man) ten years younger than me.
“I will still pray to God for you,” he says.
“Well,” I tell him. “It is always good to pray.”
I walk onto my porch and he comes to push my hammock for a bit before I bid him goodnight and go inside.
Once he has left, I return to the hammock and look out at the ocean. The water is still, silent, fixed by the silver of the moon
***
Pale grey clouds scrape the petit piton. Drops splash rings into the pool. When it passes, the heat comes back in full.
I hurry down the first three steps of the pool and then quickly up to my waist. The water is cool enough to make my heart skip. I plunge in to my neck and stare out toward the drain.
I stay there for several minutes before casually, coolly sauntering up the steps and out.
There is a tree here, growing abundantly on the property, that looks rife with fuschia flowers. But they’re really pink leaves on the tips of the branches. The real flowers are tiny, obscured beneath their flamboyant covers.
At dinner I order fish steamed in banana leaves. I like fish, but really don’t like it steamed. I feed most of it to the cats when no one is looking. And I wonder why I have a veritable feline swarm around my table at every meal.
I take margaritas, too—they make them with fresh time juice here. They’re delicious and after two I find I can stop thinking just a little. By the time I head down the hill I am ready for sleep, or to listen to the cicadas—anything but work, and anything but the melancholy that has plagued me in fits since my arrival.
Daniel waits at the bottom of the hill. I walk to my deck and sit down in my hammock. He sits down in a nearby chair, talks about something or other, pushes my hammock like a swing. He wants to dance, to show me that he knows how to two-step. Instead, I get up and show him out the yard gate.
The next night he brings me a card. He brings me CDs. He says I should come back and marry him. I must leave this place.
By the time I leave at 5am the next morning, the taxi is late. Reception isn’t open yet. The manager has to be fetched from sleep in her villa. She calls a new taxi for me, and by the time it comes I am beyond ready to be gone. I have come to a beautiful place but not found the solitude I wanted or left behind the vulnerability I have felt. I barely say goodbye as I climb into the taxi.
“You should sit in the front seat,” the driver tells me. He is right. He drives like a madman. I am, at first, terrified as he takes winding roads up and down mountain passes, seemingly careening toward the ocean before turning sharply into the mountain, all at 60 miles per hour.
I am going to die here, on this island, away from everyone I know, with a suitcase full of books and a pile of dirty underwear. I am going to die, die, die in the process of getting to the airport on the other side of the island in time.
“I am rushing so we get there in time,” he says.
Suddenly, this strikes me as hilarious. Bryos, who drove me in, came cautiously and gently, waving at friends around each bend. This man drives pell mell in all directions, as though pulled by wild, demon horses. And indeed, I am in a hurry to get home. I have had enough. And I am tired of being such a coward.
I sway right and then left in my seat as he takes curves in the road, caught in the throes of centrifugal force. And in the midst of all that rocking back and forth, the rushing over and around mountains and through tiny towns, I am lulled into strange comfort. Into the knowledge that I am going where I need to go as quickly as possible, driven by a manic angel.
“Yes,“ I say. “Drive quickly.”
My hair has transformed, overnight, into fuzzy brown wool. A veritable Asian afro. In the shower I dump a travel-sized bottle of conditioner on it. I clip it up wet. The ends slump to one side and drip onto my shoulder for an hour.
I have no TV. No internet except at reception. No cell service, air conditioning and no phone except for two unreliable credit card gizmos posted on the bulletin-board style wall in front of the reception shack. There is only a clock on the dresser that intermittently scares the shit out of me by turning itself on to a local French-speaking reggae station.
I take breakfast at the restaurant up the hill. And I mean “hill” quite literally. By the time I reach the top, I’m winded, sweating, and more ready to barf than eat. But then someone puts a basket of toasty baguette slices and fresh banana jam in front of me and I am restored.
Somewhere between baguette and Creole omelet, I am beset by a herd of kittens. People make jokes about this kind of thing. At first I mistake the mother—scrawny and runtish—for one of her litter. She stares at me, eyes huge in her head, and I feed her some omelet. Afterward, her taut belly full with my shared breakfast, one of her kittens begins to suckle as she’s trying to give herself a bath. Isn’t that how it always goes?
On the way back down I see a dead spider on a step, legs folded in arachnid rigor mortis. It’s the size of a tarantula. Now I understand what my taxi driver, Bryos, meant when he called the spider in the car “little.”
There are bugs everywhere. Tiny ants, crawling on the tables, larger ones on the floor. Bees and wasps. And phantom mosquitoes, Ninja-stealthy.
I spend the rest of the day alternating between the hammock, the kitchenette table, and, when I can stand it, a beach towel laid out on the deck. By mid-day I summon the courage to step into the plunge pool. The paint has peeled away in splotches on the bottom forming spooky-looking pock marks and the drain is as ominous as a submerged carnivore. I get in up to my knees and then skitter back out.
It rains without notice in full sunlight. Sometimes I get up and go inside. Sometimes I just lay there, naked from the waist down, and slide my book under the eaves to safety. Rain trickles in crooked paths down the curve of my nape, the small of my back, the arch of my foot. I close my eyes and drift. When I open them again, the rain has stopped and I am hungry.
I take lunch at the restaurant, and dinner, too. And then read some more, looking for tidbits of reality to add to a story that, for many, will be a fairy tale brought, I hope, to plausible life.
On Friday, I’m not sure I can stand it any more. I have made a fine meal for the mosquitoes—which I have yet to actually see. All attempts at natural, aloe-infused repellent have failed. I now believe mosquito-bite scratching rivals sex. It’s time for some Deet Jujitsu.
I take the shuttle to town in the plainest shorts and camisole I own. I saw the town on the drive in; single-room homes with rotting boards and laundry lines strung across the tiny front porch make up the prosperous front of the block. Some of them boast a second story, their balconies precariously supported by thin wooden struts. Tarp and siding shanties line dirt alleys a block from the center of town. Chickens poke through street gutters running with urine.
There is rust everywhere: on crusty plaster, window casements and broken eaves, on the metal roof of the only hotel in town. It is a ramshackle two-story building with peeling white paint and open shutters. It looks out on the square, a fenced-off area replete with brick walkway and a wealth of flowering bushes, trees sprouting red Dr. Seuss flowers lorded over by a tall, sparse fir. Locals loiter on the fence, lean against the gate, call out to familiar others on adjacent street corners.
It is a place, I think, that would be beautiful, except for the evidence of human poverty and neglect. As it is, people sit in dirty t-shirts and ragged shorts—on store stoops, on home porches, on crumbling mossy curbs and steps—watching life go by without them.
I was told there was a mall of sorts near the square. It is the finest building in town, and that isn’t saying so much. Inside, the building is near-silent, like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. The tiny pharmacy—the largest and busiest store in the building—is full of goods imported mostly from the states. A small line waits to consult the pharmacist. I buy Benadryl and bug spray and cortisone cream. I pay with dollars and receive local currency in exchange. I ask where the mall restroom is and a man who does not seem to work there offers to show me the way. I am, as I have been, suspicious of his willingness to help. When I come out he is waiting and my hackles rise, but then he steps around me and I realize he was waiting for the toilet.
What’s wrong with me that I’ve become so much on guard? Truthfully, I’m not sure I would have it any other way; I travel alone and put myself at the mercy of strangers plenty enough. I’ve been called naïve and too trusting before. But I wonder at this new suspiciousness in me.
Down the hallway in the mall is an empty Asian restaurant. Its white-tiled walls look more like a bathroom than a place to eat. Its few tables are empty, the counter sparse, the kitchen beyond it silent except for one lone worker. Farther down there’s a barber shop with two chairs. They’re full and the locals study me with as much interest as I do them. Again, the store is sparse, but at least it looks like they might be having fun. They’re the first smiles I’ve seen.
I’m ready to leave town. I want to leave. Not for the poverty—I’ve seen it in China, in Thailand and most notably in India—but for the air of stagnancy.
I walk past shops filled with cheap clothing and plastic sunglasses, open-air bars as big as a closet stocked with some 10 kinds of rum, past a bank filled full of people, down towards the dock. I’ve got twenty minutes until the shuttle returns.
There’s a restaurant on the harbor, obviously designed for tourists. As I walk past the tiny kitchen toward the bar, one of the girls duly gets up from a stool. She does it with the air of a back alley massage parlor girl trudging out to meet her next client. I just want coffee. Idiotic in the hot weather, but I’m looking for a pick-me-up. She makes it fresh, strong, and loiters nearby as I drink it, saying nothing, looking with arms closed around herself out toward the bay. The dining area is open to the water, characteristic wicker basket lights suspended from naked ceiling beams. There’s a miniature galleon docked just out on the pier. I noticed it now as I watched a line of fat, white Americans waddle in their tank tops and flip flops down the same dock to a tour boat. Suddenly, I feel like a schmuck of a tourist, a predictable American. I quickly pay and leave.
I walk toward the little park lining the water, trying to snap when the breeze lifts the black flag just right. And that’s how I meet the Rasta man.
“I saw you over there,” he said. “Going into that restaurant. I could see from here that you are a spiritual person, and a positive person.”
I raise a brow, wondering what he wants.
“I’ve got a boat. I’ll take you out on the water. Snorkeling. Around the island. On a fish safari if you like, for two hundred dollars. I’m a Rasta Man. Spiritual is my name.” He’s carrying a book about Jesus.
I shake his hand. “You’re bald,” I say.
He grins and we meander toward a picnic table. I’ve still got ten minutes until the shuttle returns. “Yes, I had to cut off my hair.”
He sets down the book and I see that it’s written by Ellen White. He’s a Rasta man toting a Jesus book written by a Seventh Day Adventist. St. Lucia is a strange place.
A girl comes to the table, carrying an aluminum plate. She’s dressed in the uniform of the small supermarket in town. Spiritual greets her and she smiles. “I want that book.”
“I know. You can’t have it,” he says, grinning, as she sits down.
“You see,” he says, “I used to have hair down almost to my knees. But there are so many negative people. People who cannot see the positive in life. And they saw that I had my own boat, and that I had a good business. And one day I went out to my boat, and there was a powder there. And when I touched it, I became very sick.”
I nod. “Sounds like voodoo powder to me.” I know stuff.
The girl is biting into a fried chicken leg. “Mm-hmm,” she intones, intent on her lunch, stuffing a fry chaser in her mouth.
“I became very sick. I tried everything. I went to every doctor. But it was not something a doctor could heal. Because sickness, you see, is a spiritual problem.”
“Hmm-hmm!” the girl says, her mouth full.
“I had aches and pains. My kidney hurt. Finally, I had to cut my hair.”
“Why do Rastafarians not cut their hair?” They remind me, in that sense, of the Sheiks.
“Because our strength is in our hair. We are not to let a razor touch our head.”
“Like Sampson,” I say.
“Like Sampson,” he nods. I study him then, a skinny guy with nubs of black stubble upon his head. If his strength is in his hair, I figure I could probably take him.
“You know Sampson?” he says then, seeming surprised.
“Yes.”
“You know the Bible.”
Well, some.
The girl finishes her fried chicken and asks the Rasta man for his book again. He won’t part with it.
By then, it’s well past time. The shuttle has forgotten me. I’m scorching out in the heat at the picnic table with the Chicken Girl and the Rasta Man. Luckily, there’s a bank of taxis nearby.
The ride is ten minutes back to the old plantation and ten dollars. Taxi rates are exorbitant on this island, as I’m sure gas prices are.
Back at my villa, I strip off the clothing that has somehow melded to my skin. I start to head for the shower but then stop and pull on a towel.
Out on the deck I step onto the second step of the plunge pool, hand clasping the hot aluminum rail. I take another step down, and another, and hitch a breath as cold laps my thighs. The peeling paint wavers beneath the water in grotesque shapes. The drain peers from beneath the shadow of an overhanging tree.
I hurry back out and track wet footprints to the shower.
There is another cat now, no doubt the tomcat. He appears at dinner. He’s got a black splotch on his nose that makes it look dirty. Another cat behind him has ears that turn this way and that, like two radio antennae trying to find a frequency.
I take tea, tuna salad, pumpkin soup, looking directly at the piton, and then out toward the sea. I should go to the beach. I should climb the piton. I should see the turtles.
But I came here to work.
It rains in the afternoon. I read, organize my notes, and lay in the sun. My beach towel looks like a bikini-clad shroud of Turin. Confused roosters from the direction of the forest crow throughout the day and a cow lows in return.
That night a shaq shaq band plays at the restaurant. I ask why it’s called that and the waitress points to the metal cylinder filled with beads that one of the band members is shaking. Shaq shaq.
There’s a couple there with their son, come to hear the band. We end up chatting and I learn that they’re staying not at the estate but at the house of the woman’s father in the forest. They don’t stay long, having only come for a drink. “We’re eating at home,” the woman says. “Dad caught barracuda today.”
After dinner I return down the hill past birds of paradise. The flowers I pay large sums for at home grow as wild and free as dandelions here.
The security guard, Daniel, is waiting at the bottom of the hill outside my villa.
“I want to know,” he says, “Did God know that Adam and Eve would eat the fruit?”
“I suppose he must have known,” I say.
“Then why did he put it there?”
It’s a question I’ve pondered.
“I suppose that if there is no chance to choose wrong, then there is no true morality,” I say. He nods and seems to accept this. I walk to my deck. He holds the gate door for me. “Do you think that Adam and Eve looked on this same moon that we are looking on now, and that Eden was as beautiful as this place?”
“I suppose so,” I say and wish him good night. I go inside my villa until he is gone and the gate is shut after him. Several moments later, I return to my deck.
I stretch out on the hammock and feel vaguely as I did the night in Maine, except rather than avoiding shadows, I know what—or rather who—is there, standing outside the gate. I’m not sure whether I feel annoyed or safe. The cicadas sound like stringed instruments tuning and re-tuning the same note. Like the shaq shaq band with their repeating melodies, playing the same refrain over and over again
Eventually, I go inside and bolt the door.
***
By morning, the cicadas are silent, and the birds are out in force. Their songs sound somehow less sophisticated than their six-legged competitors. But they’re fascinating. A hummingbird hovers beneath the tree outside my villa. Smaller birds perch on my hammock.
Inside the villa, a brown lizard poses on a wooden slat inside my bedroom. Later, when I see a lump on the slat, I think it looks like a fly. But I know it is, in fact, lizard poop. Having had a pet lizard, I know these things.
I have well over 15 mosquito bites and am no doubt damaging my skin laying in the sun without benefit of sunscreen. But I do not burn easily once I start, and though I know I should still put some on, I find I don’t care.
Some time late morning, I trek to registration to drop off postcards and check my e-mail. I’ve just learned that the immediate area around the reception shack is wireless, that I need not hurry on and off the reception guest computer. So I dawdle with my laptop, missing, for just a while, the outside world.
Stephen King has responded to my e-mail about professor Mark.
“Thank you for that blast from the past,” he writes. “I had forgotten the nicknames we had for one another while I was there.” He’s referring to a fact told me by Professor Mark that I relayed to Mr. King in my e-mail: that there were two Mr. Kings at the high school he used to teach at: A Weird Mr. King and a Big Mr. King. Stephen King was the Big one. I understand that he’s quite tall.
During lunch I mention the cicadas, how they seem to sing at night beneath the full moon.
“You’re not the first to say that,” the girl waiting on me says. She gives a strange smile, as though she couldn’t imagine them sounding any other way and I suppose she can’t.
Up the hill. Down the hill. Up to registration. Down to my villa deck. Up to eat. Down to sleep.
After dinner the next night, Daniel is waiting for me again. He’s taken to parking outside my villa. I find it irritating but I don’t have the heart to be mean.
“Would you like to go to town, or climb the piton?” he asks me.
“I went to town. I don’t need anything more now. And I think I won’t climb the piton. I came to work.”
“Is that why you are always writing?”
“Yes. Besides. You work in the post office during the day, you said.”
“I would take off from work for you.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“I pray to God that you will return to St. Lucia. When do you think you will come back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come when you are ready to get married.”
“Why?”
“Because I will be waiting to marry you.”
“Um. How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“You see, I am much too old for you. And you are much too young for me.”
No matter that this is a boldfaced lie, that I have, in fact, had mad crushes on men (a man) ten years younger than me.
“I will still pray to God for you,” he says.
“Well,” I tell him. “It is always good to pray.”
I walk onto my porch and he comes to push my hammock for a bit before I bid him goodnight and go inside.
Once he has left, I return to the hammock and look out at the ocean. The water is still, silent, fixed by the silver of the moon
***
Pale grey clouds scrape the petit piton. Drops splash rings into the pool. When it passes, the heat comes back in full.
I hurry down the first three steps of the pool and then quickly up to my waist. The water is cool enough to make my heart skip. I plunge in to my neck and stare out toward the drain.
I stay there for several minutes before casually, coolly sauntering up the steps and out.
There is a tree here, growing abundantly on the property, that looks rife with fuschia flowers. But they’re really pink leaves on the tips of the branches. The real flowers are tiny, obscured beneath their flamboyant covers.
At dinner I order fish steamed in banana leaves. I like fish, but really don’t like it steamed. I feed most of it to the cats when no one is looking. And I wonder why I have a veritable feline swarm around my table at every meal.
I take margaritas, too—they make them with fresh time juice here. They’re delicious and after two I find I can stop thinking just a little. By the time I head down the hill I am ready for sleep, or to listen to the cicadas—anything but work, and anything but the melancholy that has plagued me in fits since my arrival.
Daniel waits at the bottom of the hill. I walk to my deck and sit down in my hammock. He sits down in a nearby chair, talks about something or other, pushes my hammock like a swing. He wants to dance, to show me that he knows how to two-step. Instead, I get up and show him out the yard gate.
The next night he brings me a card. He brings me CDs. He says I should come back and marry him. I must leave this place.
By the time I leave at 5am the next morning, the taxi is late. Reception isn’t open yet. The manager has to be fetched from sleep in her villa. She calls a new taxi for me, and by the time it comes I am beyond ready to be gone. I have come to a beautiful place but not found the solitude I wanted or left behind the vulnerability I have felt. I barely say goodbye as I climb into the taxi.
“You should sit in the front seat,” the driver tells me. He is right. He drives like a madman. I am, at first, terrified as he takes winding roads up and down mountain passes, seemingly careening toward the ocean before turning sharply into the mountain, all at 60 miles per hour.
I am going to die here, on this island, away from everyone I know, with a suitcase full of books and a pile of dirty underwear. I am going to die, die, die in the process of getting to the airport on the other side of the island in time.
“I am rushing so we get there in time,” he says.
Suddenly, this strikes me as hilarious. Bryos, who drove me in, came cautiously and gently, waving at friends around each bend. This man drives pell mell in all directions, as though pulled by wild, demon horses. And indeed, I am in a hurry to get home. I have had enough. And I am tired of being such a coward.
I sway right and then left in my seat as he takes curves in the road, caught in the throes of centrifugal force. And in the midst of all that rocking back and forth, the rushing over and around mountains and through tiny towns, I am lulled into strange comfort. Into the knowledge that I am going where I need to go as quickly as possible, driven by a manic angel.
“Yes,“ I say. “Drive quickly.”
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
(with non-drug-induced flashbacks to July 18 and 21)
Lincoln to St. Lucia: Open Hearts
Must. Eat... Tuna tomato.
I trudge through my pre-flight ritual. It’s 5am and it hurts to move. My step-dad, still in town and staying at my house, drove me to the airport this morning after a very painful 4:10 alarm. I considered postponing this departure by a day more than once this morning; one day between trips is not wise planning.
But I did love my time in Maine. Here’s my excerpt from my third day at Moosehead Lake:
***
July 18: Greenville, Maine
Fly, Fly Away
By 7:30am I’m sliding into my favorite, now super-grimy cargo pants and loading up my backpack.
I’m going fishing.
Bob, my instructor, is waiting for me in the lodge. The owners need some help finishing a new suite on time for a guest, and he’s on the phone with his brother, asking him to come lend a hand. And then he turns to me.
A bear of a man, he grins and shakes my hand. It disappears in his. This man has set three world records in fly rod fishing and yet here he is, ready to fit me out in waders.
We go into town to a little shop so I can buy a license. We hit a gas shop for Luna bars (for me, not him) and coffee. And then we’re off to the river.
Bob runs a hunting lodge an hour north of here. His wife does the cooking, he leads the fishing and hunting. “I’ve got a group of bikers there right now,” he says. “They came hunting last year and had so much fun they brought their women this year and they’re just riding around all over.”
“So how’d I get lucky enough to get you to come all the way down here?” Despite not being free, I know he can’t be doing it for the money.
“I like to meet people,” he grins. I believe him.
“Here, put these on first,” he says. The waders are huge and Bob chuckles. “You’re just a tiny thing!”
After spending a solid, critical few moments in front of the mirror, butt naked yesterday, I can attest that I am not as tiny as he thinks. But I don’t. He hands me a pair of boots. “Try those on.”
They fit perfectly. I peer into the back of the truck. It’s the only pair. “How’d you know these would fit?”
“I could tell by your voice on the phone.”
Walking stick and rod in hand, we head out into the water and upstream.
I am so frickin’ excited, I could pee my waders.
I have a theory that people who can do this kind of thing with idiot beginners over and over again—or worse, with idiot beginner couples or even full groups—are saints. I would go stark raving mad and kill someone, were it me. But Bob has the patience of a kindergarten teacher as he ties the fly on the line, showing me how the line gets thinner and thinner toward the fly.
We practice casting and mending the line, false casting—and most difficult, keeping an eye on the fly floating down the surface of the river.
“See, the fish don’t want to have to swim against the water. So they hide out behind a rock. Rocks look like that, out there, where the water swells up. See that? And they just wait out there, their fins sort of floating like this and wait for their food to come to them.”
I nod.
“The flies we’re using are supposed to look like these bugs that live in the river.”
“Bugs live in the river.”
“Right. They’re everywhere. They live under rocks. They look like little lobsters.”
“What?”
“And then they come up to the surface and shed their shells and they’re flies now, with these wings. And they sit on the water and dry their wings. That’s what we’re trying to look like.”
Bob wades off toward a rock and comes back with a little tiny something clinging to his finger. “See that? That’s the shell those bugs crawl out of.” And sure enough, it looks like a little lobster.
I will never eat lobster again.
I work on getting a natural-looking float. I work on casting. The line and the fly are so light, it’s harder to sling that poor thread bug out there than it is with a weighted lure.
But it is surprisingly easy to keep track of the fly.
A ripple on the surface. Bob yelps. I start and almost drop the reel.
“There’s one! Did you see it! That was a trout!”
I barely saw it, though I heard it. “That was like, just his lip. How could you tell what it was?”
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” he says. And I realize that yeah, that was a stupid question.
It takes me a while to react fast enough; without a quick tug on the line, the hook doesn’t catch. This is quite different from eating cookies on the deck of a boat while herrings lay gored on the bottom of the ocean in Alaska, waiting for halibut to come swallow them whole.
“There’s one!” The line flinches. I react—too slowly.
I swear a few times, but Bob doesn’t seem to mind. He swears, too. We share a cup of coffee from his thermos.
“She got it kind of sweet today,” he comments. “There’s one!”
I almost fall over.
Another guy in a vest and waders comes by, asks how the fishing is. I want to laugh at him and explain, if he could not tell, that I’m just trying to keep from sinking my fly. The other guy pulls out a camera to show us a trout he caught in this very spot yesterday. He introduces himself to Bob. Bot tells him his name.
“Oh. I know who you are,” the guy says. It’s quite obvious he’s an admirer.
We go upstream.
“Now here’s a bunch of fish that don’t know you’re here yet. I want you to cast out there, in that lane there.” And, surprisingly, I do.
“There’s a bunch of fish here, I can see ‘em,” he says.
I narrow my eyes. “How can you see them?” I know he’s done this forever, but as far as I know he doesn’t have x-ray vision. He hands me his polarized glasses.
He has x-ray vision.
“There’s one!” I jerk the line and reel it in.
“What is it what is it whatisit?!” I demand. It’s a wriggly little something.
“Well look at that. It’s a little salmon,” Bob says, lifting it up. I lean over and peer at it.
“Now, when you take the hook out, you just turn them over like this—“
I reach for the fish, to hold it upside down. It squirms out from between my fingers. Bob picks it up, turns it back over. “See, we turn it upside down because the fish is like, ‘What the hell is going on? I’ve never been like this before.’” And sure enough, it holds still.
It takes a pair of clamps to get the hook out, but then we’ve sent junior on the way.
It’s overcast and getting chillier. It’ll rain for most of the day, Bob says. I can feel it, seeping like water into my waders. I wonder if I should have eaten more than a Luna bar; my heart has started to flutter.
I catch another little salmon and we turn it lose. After another hour, my wrist is stiff and my heart is flapping as much as those slippery little salmons. I wonder if being recently declared anemic (again) has anything to do with it.
“What time is it, about?”
Bob shrugs, “Probably time to go.”
Back at the truck, my cargos are wet inside the waders. Aha! I’m not crazy after all. I slip into socks, dry shoes. Bob puts the gear away and hands me the fly to keep. I’m really touched by this, somehow.
“You should come out to the lodge some time. You’d have fun!”
“Do you teach women to hunt?”
“Sure!”
“Women by themselves?” He’s talked a lot about women coming with their husbands.
“Well,” he hesitates. “It’s been a while. But that don’t matter. And you don’t have to hunt. There’s a lot more to harvesting animals than just shooting them. You could learn a lot.”
I add this to my mental list of Things To Do Before I Die. I ticked one off today, might as well add a new one.
“So when you go hunting with guys, do they know how to shoot?”
“Well, some of them are more experienced than others.”
“What do you think of Cheney peppering his friend hunting?”
Bob says there’s a lot that we don’t know about that—where the friend was, if Cheney could see him. “That happens more often than you know, getting peppered. Sometimes people I take out pepper me.”
“They do??”
“Sure. And then I say ‘holy son of a gun!’ and then I go have a little talk with them.’”
I sure wouldn’t want Bob having a little talk with me.
Back at the lodge, we sit down for coffee. Bob’s hanging out to be social. I’m trying to warm up. By the time we part, he hands me a coin from his pocket that reads: “With God all things are possible.”
I add it to the fly in my backpack.
***
Having never logged the rest of the Maine trip, let me sum it up here:
After leaving Moosehead/Greenvill, I drove to Deer Isle. Deer Isle is a tiny little mist-shrouded island on the coast just south of Bar Harbor. Getting to Deer Isle required nearly four hours of drive-time and a trip across a particularly frightening suspension bridge. It was a newer one, built right alongside the old one—one my GPS system was apparently unaware of; it literally showed my car driving across an expanse of water the entire time I was on it.
Suffice it to say I wasn’t thrilled about the bridge—or the causeways that connects Deer Isle to Blue Hill… or the one connecting smaller parts of Deer Isle to the main island.
Here is a little-known fact about me. Among my list of fears are:
Natural water bodies
Heights
The dark
Swimming pool drains.
There are others, too, weirder than these, but these are the usual suspects. At any rate, combining the fear of heights with the fear of natural water bodies just does not make bridge or causeway-crossing in the evening one of my favorite activities.
Anyway, I do finally find the Deer Isle Pilgrim’s Inn and decide then and there that I will prolong my stay in Maine by two more days (leaving me only a day to regroup before I leave for St. Lucia). So my two-day sojourn on Deer Isle becomes three, and I spend my last bonus evening in Maine tucked in the lovely Bar Harbor Bass Cottage Inn, reading through the last of the books that I brought with me.
During my time in Deer Isle, I read, occasionally drive the tiny island in search of lunch, and take dinner at the Whale’s Rib Tavern.
A few highlights from the Pilgrim’s Inn: watching the husband in the couple that owns the inn ably carry my book-laden suitcase up three flights of stairs before realizing that he has a prosthetic leg. I learn later he lost his leg below the knee to a bad sprain that never healed properly. Add losing a leg to a bad sprain to my list of fears.
Also, deciding that my attic room in the Pilgrim’s Inn is haunted. This is a thought that dismays me only insofar as I do not relish the idea of waking up and having the shit scared out of me upon seeing an ectoplasmic face staring at me in the dark. This never happens, but I still believe it could have.
My last day at the Pilgrim’s Inn I move to a ground-level room—not because of the ghosts but because of the new mortal tenants who have already booked room 14 for the night. The full logue of that day follows:
***
July 21: Deer Isle, Maine
Pick Up
I can’t sleep in. I think it’s the champagne I’ve become so fond of that makes it hard to sleep. Or drinking anything before bed, for that matter. I roll out of bed, put on my Red Sox cap and go downstairs for breakfast.
Apparently, I’ve turned into a guy.
Later, the maid shows up to help me make the transition to Room 3, which I am certain will be less haunted than this one. I warn her we ought to get Tony, since my bags—splitting at the zipper with dirty laundry, shoes, and bogarted Gilcrest and Soames toiletries—are heavy. I did, at least, keep a stack of books out of them.
“He’s not around,” she says. “But I can help you.”
I frown. “These are really heavy. If you’ll just take the small one—“
“I can take the big one. I grew up on a farm, hauling bales of hay.”
I accept and never tell her I’m from Nebraska.
The tiny library across the street is open today, from 11-3, I believe. I’m excited about this. With only a few select hours on Saturday and two hours on Wednesday (it used to be open for a couple hours Monday, too, but that part of the sign has since been covered up), the opening of the Deer Isle library seems to rank up there with the occurrence of partial eclipses.
Deer Isle—the little main town part, at least, where the Pilgrim’s Inn is—isn’t even as long as a football field. I walk a half block to the art gallery, which also doubles as an espresso bar, consider pre-work tea or coffee, but then just settle for perusing jewelry. I peer into the windows of the ice cream parlor next door—which doubles as a snack joint—and then head to the library.
It’s closed. It’s just past noon now and I was mixed up on the times; it was only open from 9-12. I pound on the door and shout out that I’m not there for the newest Harry Potter, that it’s safe to let me in.
I get nothing.
I go back to the ice cream/snack shop and order a tuna sandwich.
In an unannounced appearance reminiscent of Sammy Hagar at the Cabo Wabo Cantina, the sun has come out. I’m sitting on the back deck of the inn, eating a little tuna with my mayo, reading David Rohl’s “Legend” (fascinating book) in camo shorts and a camisole. I bake until I can’t take it any longer, retreating to the cool air of the inn study. I spend the rest of the afternoon studying the Sumerian similarities of Gilgamesh’s epic and Noah’s flood, dissecting the meaning of the Hebrew “rosh,” and pouring over the geography of northwestern Iraq.
By the time I hear diners entering the Whale’s Rib restaurant one level below the narrow staircase just outside the study, I realize it’s almost time to eat. Though the last thing I want to do is add any food to the pool of mayo sitting in my stomach, I’m already getting hungry.
Ten minutes later I’m at the restaurant bar, doing my best to infect one of my as-of-yet unworn tops with the stench from my mid-day sunning. The massage oil of three days ago has long congealed in the roots of my hair, making it amenable to keeping just about any shape I mold it in. I can’t remember where my makeup is but I’m just feeling good that I found my toothbrush after the move. Not that I used it.
So, given all of this, doesn’t it just go to follow that someone should try to pick me up?
The fellow in the middle of the bar is trying to order his beer and dinner to be delivered onto the deck. I’m trying to get my hands on some of tonight’s special sushi appetizer. He orders one, too. I really don’t know how the conversation started—something to do with my comment on feeling weird eating sushi dipped in pesto and with a fork (I’m pretty sure I violated several international laws in the process), or his telling me about his summer home here, in Maine and his winter home… in Maine, or how he’s a professor of government, apparently, on his summer leave. At any rate, we ended up talking and he never did take his dinner outside. The conversation went like this:
Me: I took government. My teacher had a twitch. I didn’t get very good grades. Maybe that’s why I have to get all my political news from The Daily Show.
Professor M: You’re funny!
Me: And even then I don’t get it. My friend interprets it for me.
Professor M: How long are you in town?
Me: Wanna buy my book?
Professor M: (Looking at the cover on the bookmark.) I’m not religious.
Me: Wanna buy my book?
Professor M: So what have you done in Maine?
Me: Eat.
Professor M: You’re funny!
Me: I had to have a rib-eye last night to neutralize all the lobster. And soak up all the booze. Oh, I went to Moosehead Lake.
Professor M: You went to Moosehead Lake?
Me: I went fly fishing.
Professor M: You did?! Look at you!
Me: I caught two salmons. (I measure them out on the bar. They’ve grown since the last telling.)
Professor M: How long are you here? Want to go to dinner?
Me: We’re at dinner. And sorry. I’m stalking Stephen King tomorrow.
Professor M: He was my high school English teacher. He wasn’t famous yet.
Me: When was this?
Professor M: Late 70s. I’m sorry I’m so old.
Me: How old are you?
Professor M: 48.
Me: What are you doing talking to me? Frickin’ pedophile.
Professor M: I’ll take you to dinner. To my favorite place.
Me: I’m going to Bar Harbor.
Professor M: When?
Me: Right now. I mean, tomorrow.
Professor M: I just meet the woman of my dreams and you’re leaving tomorrow!
Me: (Stare.)
He asks about Nebraska. He thinks it must be conservative, Bush-loving country. He tells me he’s very liberal. Very non-religious. The bartender asks for my order. I waffle about a drink—and settle for a glass of champagne, asking her if I can buy a split to take to my room and drink later.
Professor M: I’ll buy you champagne.
Me: I just remembered I hate champagne.
Professor M: Think you’ll be back? We can go sailing.
Me: I hear the Baja peninsula is great for that.
Professor M: Let’s go.
Me: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?
***
That evening I jot a note to Stephen King, to tell him I ran into a former student of his. As one of my MySpace friends I figure he probably wants to hear from me.
The trip home is long and delayed. My flight to Lincoln from O’Scare is cancelled. I fly into Omaha and Scott, who knows this drill very well, picks me up.
Two days later, unpacked and repacked with fresh underwear and provisions, here I am: St. Lucia-bound.
While Maine was, as my character, Clay, would say, a reclamation trip, this is only a clamation trip. That is to say, I haven’t been to St. Lucia before.
I expect to get a lot of work done on the five hour flight from Chicago to San Juan—but fall into conversation with my seatmate, an engineer named Kyle.
You know how you meet people sometimes, and you just take to one another well? It happens like that. I guess it helps when, in watching an in-flight version of Blade of Glory, you realize you’re both laughing idiotically at the same parts of the movie and randomly snorting in your ginger ale.
We spend the three hours after the movie talking about failed marriages, work, things we like to drink. We share my roasted veggie sandwich and I show him pictures from India and Singapore and Maine.
I spend most of my four-hour layover in San Juan roaming the airport, looking for anything to eat that is not fast food. I have to say, I do not like this airport. I do not like the food options. I do not like the bathrooms, which are dirty. I do not like the American Eagle seating area, which is too air-conditioned. I do not like them, Sam I am.
Arriving in Castries, St. Lucia, at 10pm, there is no Air Jamaica rep to arrange land transportation as there is supposed to be. This is really bothersome, considering how tired I am, how very muggy it is even at this hour, how small and congested the open-air receiving area is.
“Do you need transport?” one lady asks. She’s with the Ladera, which I remembered was the place I originally wanted to go after I had already booked with the Stonefield Estate. She finds me a cab driver. I climb into his Mercedes SUV in a daze.
Half-way out of the airport property, it occurs to me that I don’t know for sure if this man is a cab driver. That there is no meter. That I am, in fact, more paranoid of late about being on my own than usual. I am beset by images of kidnapping, being sold off, of being raped and pillaged.
Especially pillaged.
I ask him where his identification is. The meter. The note from his mother. He reminds me that there is a “TX” on his license plate, that they do not use meters in St. Lucia, and shows me the insignia on his shirt. And I remember that I have read these details in one of my travel books and so stand down.
“You’re so far away,” he says, and invites me to the front seat. His name is Bryos, he says, giving me his card. It looks official.
We wind along the mountain road, on the wrong side, as he explains that St. Lucia, though independent, is part of the British Commonwealth. I’m not sure of the implications of this, but I’m too tired to care. He points out the rainforest, the site where they filmed Dr. Doolittle, the town named after the sulfur that runs in the water. The towns are mostly comprised of shanties. The kids are dancing in the broken concrete of the street, a boombox blaring somewhere.
“It’s the summer now, so the children are not in school,” he explains. I nod, but am still struck by the level of poverty I see.
And I have seen poverty in many forms: in Chinese communes with nothing but a concrete floor and drainpipe in the middle for a kitchen, in the sprawling city laundries where citizens of Mumbai go to beat their clothes in a trough, in the cardboard houses built on Bangkok city sidewalks, and the colorful saris of women splashed like flowers across a dumpster as they foraged for food with the pigs in Delhi.
I ask about crime and Bryos shrugs. “Anywhere you have drugs, you have crime.” I ask where the drugs come in from, and he says Venezuela, mostly. “There is the ganja, of course, but the crime is mostly surrounding the cocaine. Do you understand?”
I learn that the locals speak Creole patois. That they do not dislike Americans or even George W. “Americans are our friends. They are the tourists. They are very open—they will talk about anything. How can we blame them for the actions of the president?” he says. “Do you understand?”
Yes, I understand, though I don’t point out that we’re the ones who voted him into power.
We pass through Cannaries, where, on Fish Friday, vendors come out with shellfish and lobster, hawking them in the street. Where dances turn into “jump-ups.”
“You should go to Fish Friday. Do you understand?”
“I don’t know anyone.”
“You know me.”
And so does everyone else. Cars honk and people seated inside plywood bars lean out of paneless windows and wave at my escort.
All this time, the cicadas and crickets have been filling the open windows with a chorus more musical than their state-side counterparts. And I should know; the same creatures serenaded my acreage every April, but they never sounded like this. They have the voices of birds here, tuning and retuning their notes to perfection in a symphony of song.
By the time we arrive at the Stonefield Estate Villas, I have cited a spider in the car. “Ack!” I say, pointing.
“Oh, that,” he shrugs. “It isn’t a big one”
Reception has closed for the night already, and after some confusion one of the security guards produces a key. After paying Bryos and tipping him handsomely for the cultural introduction, one of the guards helps me carry my suitcase to my villa.
The villa is simple but stunning. The front porch faces the Petit Piton—the smaller of the two signature mountains of St. Lucia. It drops dramatically down to the ocean, visible beyond the tropical forest that sprawls just below my villa.
“You are here alone?” he asks, squinting at me. Again, the usual disconcertion. I hate to admit the truth, but everyone will soon know it.
“Yes, alone. I came to write a book. About Eve.”
“How about one about Daniel—Daniel in the lion’s den?” he says, introducing himself. I smile slightly. He leaves my bag inside, shows me the light switches, where the shower—a fenced-in area open to the stars—is. I wonder if it’s a hint. The villa is rustic and open-air, with slats in the doors and windows that allow the sounds of every musical bug in along with the breeze.
“You are not married?” he queries after that.
I am tired, sticky and stinky. No, not married, I tell him. I am divorced, traveling the honeymoon capital of the world. And tired. And did I mention tired?
I tip him outrageously mostly because I have no change and want him to go away.
“Would you like to climb the pitons? Or go into town? Just tell me what day,” he offers, energized. He tells me he works at the post office, but would take off to take me there if I liked, but please not to tell anyone here he has another job. I tell him I’ll think about it but for now I’m tired.
When he finally leaves, I shut the outside door and turn on the security lights. Stripping off sticky clothes, I take a shower beneath the night sky.
Refreshed at last, I step out onto the deck and gingerly edge along the stone path that frames my pool, peering down at the forest below. The ocean lies beyond it, covered in a wash of denim-colored moonlight.
I edge back to the safety of the deck and slide onto the hammock. Venus and the moon are bright in the sky. The cicadas have coalesced into an old fashioned hymn-sing. Every now and then I hear the ch-ch-ch of some insect that reminds me of yard sprinklers.
Air brushes my back through the cords of the hammock and I wonder if Eden was like this: green and womblike and filled full of sounds.
I feel my face crumple and cover my eyes with a hand as the wind rustles the banana trees and the cicadas sing to God.
Lincoln to St. Lucia: Open Hearts
Must. Eat... Tuna tomato.
I trudge through my pre-flight ritual. It’s 5am and it hurts to move. My step-dad, still in town and staying at my house, drove me to the airport this morning after a very painful 4:10 alarm. I considered postponing this departure by a day more than once this morning; one day between trips is not wise planning.
But I did love my time in Maine. Here’s my excerpt from my third day at Moosehead Lake:
***
July 18: Greenville, Maine
Fly, Fly Away
By 7:30am I’m sliding into my favorite, now super-grimy cargo pants and loading up my backpack.
I’m going fishing.
Bob, my instructor, is waiting for me in the lodge. The owners need some help finishing a new suite on time for a guest, and he’s on the phone with his brother, asking him to come lend a hand. And then he turns to me.
A bear of a man, he grins and shakes my hand. It disappears in his. This man has set three world records in fly rod fishing and yet here he is, ready to fit me out in waders.
We go into town to a little shop so I can buy a license. We hit a gas shop for Luna bars (for me, not him) and coffee. And then we’re off to the river.
Bob runs a hunting lodge an hour north of here. His wife does the cooking, he leads the fishing and hunting. “I’ve got a group of bikers there right now,” he says. “They came hunting last year and had so much fun they brought their women this year and they’re just riding around all over.”
“So how’d I get lucky enough to get you to come all the way down here?” Despite not being free, I know he can’t be doing it for the money.
“I like to meet people,” he grins. I believe him.
“Here, put these on first,” he says. The waders are huge and Bob chuckles. “You’re just a tiny thing!”
After spending a solid, critical few moments in front of the mirror, butt naked yesterday, I can attest that I am not as tiny as he thinks. But I don’t. He hands me a pair of boots. “Try those on.”
They fit perfectly. I peer into the back of the truck. It’s the only pair. “How’d you know these would fit?”
“I could tell by your voice on the phone.”
Walking stick and rod in hand, we head out into the water and upstream.
I am so frickin’ excited, I could pee my waders.
I have a theory that people who can do this kind of thing with idiot beginners over and over again—or worse, with idiot beginner couples or even full groups—are saints. I would go stark raving mad and kill someone, were it me. But Bob has the patience of a kindergarten teacher as he ties the fly on the line, showing me how the line gets thinner and thinner toward the fly.
We practice casting and mending the line, false casting—and most difficult, keeping an eye on the fly floating down the surface of the river.
“See, the fish don’t want to have to swim against the water. So they hide out behind a rock. Rocks look like that, out there, where the water swells up. See that? And they just wait out there, their fins sort of floating like this and wait for their food to come to them.”
I nod.
“The flies we’re using are supposed to look like these bugs that live in the river.”
“Bugs live in the river.”
“Right. They’re everywhere. They live under rocks. They look like little lobsters.”
“What?”
“And then they come up to the surface and shed their shells and they’re flies now, with these wings. And they sit on the water and dry their wings. That’s what we’re trying to look like.”
Bob wades off toward a rock and comes back with a little tiny something clinging to his finger. “See that? That’s the shell those bugs crawl out of.” And sure enough, it looks like a little lobster.
I will never eat lobster again.
I work on getting a natural-looking float. I work on casting. The line and the fly are so light, it’s harder to sling that poor thread bug out there than it is with a weighted lure.
But it is surprisingly easy to keep track of the fly.
A ripple on the surface. Bob yelps. I start and almost drop the reel.
“There’s one! Did you see it! That was a trout!”
I barely saw it, though I heard it. “That was like, just his lip. How could you tell what it was?”
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” he says. And I realize that yeah, that was a stupid question.
It takes me a while to react fast enough; without a quick tug on the line, the hook doesn’t catch. This is quite different from eating cookies on the deck of a boat while herrings lay gored on the bottom of the ocean in Alaska, waiting for halibut to come swallow them whole.
“There’s one!” The line flinches. I react—too slowly.
I swear a few times, but Bob doesn’t seem to mind. He swears, too. We share a cup of coffee from his thermos.
“She got it kind of sweet today,” he comments. “There’s one!”
I almost fall over.
Another guy in a vest and waders comes by, asks how the fishing is. I want to laugh at him and explain, if he could not tell, that I’m just trying to keep from sinking my fly. The other guy pulls out a camera to show us a trout he caught in this very spot yesterday. He introduces himself to Bob. Bot tells him his name.
“Oh. I know who you are,” the guy says. It’s quite obvious he’s an admirer.
We go upstream.
“Now here’s a bunch of fish that don’t know you’re here yet. I want you to cast out there, in that lane there.” And, surprisingly, I do.
“There’s a bunch of fish here, I can see ‘em,” he says.
I narrow my eyes. “How can you see them?” I know he’s done this forever, but as far as I know he doesn’t have x-ray vision. He hands me his polarized glasses.
He has x-ray vision.
“There’s one!” I jerk the line and reel it in.
“What is it what is it whatisit?!” I demand. It’s a wriggly little something.
“Well look at that. It’s a little salmon,” Bob says, lifting it up. I lean over and peer at it.
“Now, when you take the hook out, you just turn them over like this—“
I reach for the fish, to hold it upside down. It squirms out from between my fingers. Bob picks it up, turns it back over. “See, we turn it upside down because the fish is like, ‘What the hell is going on? I’ve never been like this before.’” And sure enough, it holds still.
It takes a pair of clamps to get the hook out, but then we’ve sent junior on the way.
It’s overcast and getting chillier. It’ll rain for most of the day, Bob says. I can feel it, seeping like water into my waders. I wonder if I should have eaten more than a Luna bar; my heart has started to flutter.
I catch another little salmon and we turn it lose. After another hour, my wrist is stiff and my heart is flapping as much as those slippery little salmons. I wonder if being recently declared anemic (again) has anything to do with it.
“What time is it, about?”
Bob shrugs, “Probably time to go.”
Back at the truck, my cargos are wet inside the waders. Aha! I’m not crazy after all. I slip into socks, dry shoes. Bob puts the gear away and hands me the fly to keep. I’m really touched by this, somehow.
“You should come out to the lodge some time. You’d have fun!”
“Do you teach women to hunt?”
“Sure!”
“Women by themselves?” He’s talked a lot about women coming with their husbands.
“Well,” he hesitates. “It’s been a while. But that don’t matter. And you don’t have to hunt. There’s a lot more to harvesting animals than just shooting them. You could learn a lot.”
I add this to my mental list of Things To Do Before I Die. I ticked one off today, might as well add a new one.
“So when you go hunting with guys, do they know how to shoot?”
“Well, some of them are more experienced than others.”
“What do you think of Cheney peppering his friend hunting?”
Bob says there’s a lot that we don’t know about that—where the friend was, if Cheney could see him. “That happens more often than you know, getting peppered. Sometimes people I take out pepper me.”
“They do??”
“Sure. And then I say ‘holy son of a gun!’ and then I go have a little talk with them.’”
I sure wouldn’t want Bob having a little talk with me.
Back at the lodge, we sit down for coffee. Bob’s hanging out to be social. I’m trying to warm up. By the time we part, he hands me a coin from his pocket that reads: “With God all things are possible.”
I add it to the fly in my backpack.
***
Having never logged the rest of the Maine trip, let me sum it up here:
After leaving Moosehead/Greenvill, I drove to Deer Isle. Deer Isle is a tiny little mist-shrouded island on the coast just south of Bar Harbor. Getting to Deer Isle required nearly four hours of drive-time and a trip across a particularly frightening suspension bridge. It was a newer one, built right alongside the old one—one my GPS system was apparently unaware of; it literally showed my car driving across an expanse of water the entire time I was on it.
Suffice it to say I wasn’t thrilled about the bridge—or the causeways that connects Deer Isle to Blue Hill… or the one connecting smaller parts of Deer Isle to the main island.
Here is a little-known fact about me. Among my list of fears are:
Natural water bodies
Heights
The dark
Swimming pool drains.
There are others, too, weirder than these, but these are the usual suspects. At any rate, combining the fear of heights with the fear of natural water bodies just does not make bridge or causeway-crossing in the evening one of my favorite activities.
Anyway, I do finally find the Deer Isle Pilgrim’s Inn and decide then and there that I will prolong my stay in Maine by two more days (leaving me only a day to regroup before I leave for St. Lucia). So my two-day sojourn on Deer Isle becomes three, and I spend my last bonus evening in Maine tucked in the lovely Bar Harbor Bass Cottage Inn, reading through the last of the books that I brought with me.
During my time in Deer Isle, I read, occasionally drive the tiny island in search of lunch, and take dinner at the Whale’s Rib Tavern.
A few highlights from the Pilgrim’s Inn: watching the husband in the couple that owns the inn ably carry my book-laden suitcase up three flights of stairs before realizing that he has a prosthetic leg. I learn later he lost his leg below the knee to a bad sprain that never healed properly. Add losing a leg to a bad sprain to my list of fears.
Also, deciding that my attic room in the Pilgrim’s Inn is haunted. This is a thought that dismays me only insofar as I do not relish the idea of waking up and having the shit scared out of me upon seeing an ectoplasmic face staring at me in the dark. This never happens, but I still believe it could have.
My last day at the Pilgrim’s Inn I move to a ground-level room—not because of the ghosts but because of the new mortal tenants who have already booked room 14 for the night. The full logue of that day follows:
***
July 21: Deer Isle, Maine
Pick Up
I can’t sleep in. I think it’s the champagne I’ve become so fond of that makes it hard to sleep. Or drinking anything before bed, for that matter. I roll out of bed, put on my Red Sox cap and go downstairs for breakfast.
Apparently, I’ve turned into a guy.
Later, the maid shows up to help me make the transition to Room 3, which I am certain will be less haunted than this one. I warn her we ought to get Tony, since my bags—splitting at the zipper with dirty laundry, shoes, and bogarted Gilcrest and Soames toiletries—are heavy. I did, at least, keep a stack of books out of them.
“He’s not around,” she says. “But I can help you.”
I frown. “These are really heavy. If you’ll just take the small one—“
“I can take the big one. I grew up on a farm, hauling bales of hay.”
I accept and never tell her I’m from Nebraska.
The tiny library across the street is open today, from 11-3, I believe. I’m excited about this. With only a few select hours on Saturday and two hours on Wednesday (it used to be open for a couple hours Monday, too, but that part of the sign has since been covered up), the opening of the Deer Isle library seems to rank up there with the occurrence of partial eclipses.
Deer Isle—the little main town part, at least, where the Pilgrim’s Inn is—isn’t even as long as a football field. I walk a half block to the art gallery, which also doubles as an espresso bar, consider pre-work tea or coffee, but then just settle for perusing jewelry. I peer into the windows of the ice cream parlor next door—which doubles as a snack joint—and then head to the library.
It’s closed. It’s just past noon now and I was mixed up on the times; it was only open from 9-12. I pound on the door and shout out that I’m not there for the newest Harry Potter, that it’s safe to let me in.
I get nothing.
I go back to the ice cream/snack shop and order a tuna sandwich.
In an unannounced appearance reminiscent of Sammy Hagar at the Cabo Wabo Cantina, the sun has come out. I’m sitting on the back deck of the inn, eating a little tuna with my mayo, reading David Rohl’s “Legend” (fascinating book) in camo shorts and a camisole. I bake until I can’t take it any longer, retreating to the cool air of the inn study. I spend the rest of the afternoon studying the Sumerian similarities of Gilgamesh’s epic and Noah’s flood, dissecting the meaning of the Hebrew “rosh,” and pouring over the geography of northwestern Iraq.
By the time I hear diners entering the Whale’s Rib restaurant one level below the narrow staircase just outside the study, I realize it’s almost time to eat. Though the last thing I want to do is add any food to the pool of mayo sitting in my stomach, I’m already getting hungry.
Ten minutes later I’m at the restaurant bar, doing my best to infect one of my as-of-yet unworn tops with the stench from my mid-day sunning. The massage oil of three days ago has long congealed in the roots of my hair, making it amenable to keeping just about any shape I mold it in. I can’t remember where my makeup is but I’m just feeling good that I found my toothbrush after the move. Not that I used it.
So, given all of this, doesn’t it just go to follow that someone should try to pick me up?
The fellow in the middle of the bar is trying to order his beer and dinner to be delivered onto the deck. I’m trying to get my hands on some of tonight’s special sushi appetizer. He orders one, too. I really don’t know how the conversation started—something to do with my comment on feeling weird eating sushi dipped in pesto and with a fork (I’m pretty sure I violated several international laws in the process), or his telling me about his summer home here, in Maine and his winter home… in Maine, or how he’s a professor of government, apparently, on his summer leave. At any rate, we ended up talking and he never did take his dinner outside. The conversation went like this:
Me: I took government. My teacher had a twitch. I didn’t get very good grades. Maybe that’s why I have to get all my political news from The Daily Show.
Professor M: You’re funny!
Me: And even then I don’t get it. My friend interprets it for me.
Professor M: How long are you in town?
Me: Wanna buy my book?
Professor M: (Looking at the cover on the bookmark.) I’m not religious.
Me: Wanna buy my book?
Professor M: So what have you done in Maine?
Me: Eat.
Professor M: You’re funny!
Me: I had to have a rib-eye last night to neutralize all the lobster. And soak up all the booze. Oh, I went to Moosehead Lake.
Professor M: You went to Moosehead Lake?
Me: I went fly fishing.
Professor M: You did?! Look at you!
Me: I caught two salmons. (I measure them out on the bar. They’ve grown since the last telling.)
Professor M: How long are you here? Want to go to dinner?
Me: We’re at dinner. And sorry. I’m stalking Stephen King tomorrow.
Professor M: He was my high school English teacher. He wasn’t famous yet.
Me: When was this?
Professor M: Late 70s. I’m sorry I’m so old.
Me: How old are you?
Professor M: 48.
Me: What are you doing talking to me? Frickin’ pedophile.
Professor M: I’ll take you to dinner. To my favorite place.
Me: I’m going to Bar Harbor.
Professor M: When?
Me: Right now. I mean, tomorrow.
Professor M: I just meet the woman of my dreams and you’re leaving tomorrow!
Me: (Stare.)
He asks about Nebraska. He thinks it must be conservative, Bush-loving country. He tells me he’s very liberal. Very non-religious. The bartender asks for my order. I waffle about a drink—and settle for a glass of champagne, asking her if I can buy a split to take to my room and drink later.
Professor M: I’ll buy you champagne.
Me: I just remembered I hate champagne.
Professor M: Think you’ll be back? We can go sailing.
Me: I hear the Baja peninsula is great for that.
Professor M: Let’s go.
Me: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?
***
That evening I jot a note to Stephen King, to tell him I ran into a former student of his. As one of my MySpace friends I figure he probably wants to hear from me.
The trip home is long and delayed. My flight to Lincoln from O’Scare is cancelled. I fly into Omaha and Scott, who knows this drill very well, picks me up.
Two days later, unpacked and repacked with fresh underwear and provisions, here I am: St. Lucia-bound.
While Maine was, as my character, Clay, would say, a reclamation trip, this is only a clamation trip. That is to say, I haven’t been to St. Lucia before.
I expect to get a lot of work done on the five hour flight from Chicago to San Juan—but fall into conversation with my seatmate, an engineer named Kyle.
You know how you meet people sometimes, and you just take to one another well? It happens like that. I guess it helps when, in watching an in-flight version of Blade of Glory, you realize you’re both laughing idiotically at the same parts of the movie and randomly snorting in your ginger ale.
We spend the three hours after the movie talking about failed marriages, work, things we like to drink. We share my roasted veggie sandwich and I show him pictures from India and Singapore and Maine.
I spend most of my four-hour layover in San Juan roaming the airport, looking for anything to eat that is not fast food. I have to say, I do not like this airport. I do not like the food options. I do not like the bathrooms, which are dirty. I do not like the American Eagle seating area, which is too air-conditioned. I do not like them, Sam I am.
Arriving in Castries, St. Lucia, at 10pm, there is no Air Jamaica rep to arrange land transportation as there is supposed to be. This is really bothersome, considering how tired I am, how very muggy it is even at this hour, how small and congested the open-air receiving area is.
“Do you need transport?” one lady asks. She’s with the Ladera, which I remembered was the place I originally wanted to go after I had already booked with the Stonefield Estate. She finds me a cab driver. I climb into his Mercedes SUV in a daze.
Half-way out of the airport property, it occurs to me that I don’t know for sure if this man is a cab driver. That there is no meter. That I am, in fact, more paranoid of late about being on my own than usual. I am beset by images of kidnapping, being sold off, of being raped and pillaged.
Especially pillaged.
I ask him where his identification is. The meter. The note from his mother. He reminds me that there is a “TX” on his license plate, that they do not use meters in St. Lucia, and shows me the insignia on his shirt. And I remember that I have read these details in one of my travel books and so stand down.
“You’re so far away,” he says, and invites me to the front seat. His name is Bryos, he says, giving me his card. It looks official.
We wind along the mountain road, on the wrong side, as he explains that St. Lucia, though independent, is part of the British Commonwealth. I’m not sure of the implications of this, but I’m too tired to care. He points out the rainforest, the site where they filmed Dr. Doolittle, the town named after the sulfur that runs in the water. The towns are mostly comprised of shanties. The kids are dancing in the broken concrete of the street, a boombox blaring somewhere.
“It’s the summer now, so the children are not in school,” he explains. I nod, but am still struck by the level of poverty I see.
And I have seen poverty in many forms: in Chinese communes with nothing but a concrete floor and drainpipe in the middle for a kitchen, in the sprawling city laundries where citizens of Mumbai go to beat their clothes in a trough, in the cardboard houses built on Bangkok city sidewalks, and the colorful saris of women splashed like flowers across a dumpster as they foraged for food with the pigs in Delhi.
I ask about crime and Bryos shrugs. “Anywhere you have drugs, you have crime.” I ask where the drugs come in from, and he says Venezuela, mostly. “There is the ganja, of course, but the crime is mostly surrounding the cocaine. Do you understand?”
I learn that the locals speak Creole patois. That they do not dislike Americans or even George W. “Americans are our friends. They are the tourists. They are very open—they will talk about anything. How can we blame them for the actions of the president?” he says. “Do you understand?”
Yes, I understand, though I don’t point out that we’re the ones who voted him into power.
We pass through Cannaries, where, on Fish Friday, vendors come out with shellfish and lobster, hawking them in the street. Where dances turn into “jump-ups.”
“You should go to Fish Friday. Do you understand?”
“I don’t know anyone.”
“You know me.”
And so does everyone else. Cars honk and people seated inside plywood bars lean out of paneless windows and wave at my escort.
All this time, the cicadas and crickets have been filling the open windows with a chorus more musical than their state-side counterparts. And I should know; the same creatures serenaded my acreage every April, but they never sounded like this. They have the voices of birds here, tuning and retuning their notes to perfection in a symphony of song.
By the time we arrive at the Stonefield Estate Villas, I have cited a spider in the car. “Ack!” I say, pointing.
“Oh, that,” he shrugs. “It isn’t a big one”
Reception has closed for the night already, and after some confusion one of the security guards produces a key. After paying Bryos and tipping him handsomely for the cultural introduction, one of the guards helps me carry my suitcase to my villa.
The villa is simple but stunning. The front porch faces the Petit Piton—the smaller of the two signature mountains of St. Lucia. It drops dramatically down to the ocean, visible beyond the tropical forest that sprawls just below my villa.
“You are here alone?” he asks, squinting at me. Again, the usual disconcertion. I hate to admit the truth, but everyone will soon know it.
“Yes, alone. I came to write a book. About Eve.”
“How about one about Daniel—Daniel in the lion’s den?” he says, introducing himself. I smile slightly. He leaves my bag inside, shows me the light switches, where the shower—a fenced-in area open to the stars—is. I wonder if it’s a hint. The villa is rustic and open-air, with slats in the doors and windows that allow the sounds of every musical bug in along with the breeze.
“You are not married?” he queries after that.
I am tired, sticky and stinky. No, not married, I tell him. I am divorced, traveling the honeymoon capital of the world. And tired. And did I mention tired?
I tip him outrageously mostly because I have no change and want him to go away.
“Would you like to climb the pitons? Or go into town? Just tell me what day,” he offers, energized. He tells me he works at the post office, but would take off to take me there if I liked, but please not to tell anyone here he has another job. I tell him I’ll think about it but for now I’m tired.
When he finally leaves, I shut the outside door and turn on the security lights. Stripping off sticky clothes, I take a shower beneath the night sky.
Refreshed at last, I step out onto the deck and gingerly edge along the stone path that frames my pool, peering down at the forest below. The ocean lies beyond it, covered in a wash of denim-colored moonlight.
I edge back to the safety of the deck and slide onto the hammock. Venus and the moon are bright in the sky. The cicadas have coalesced into an old fashioned hymn-sing. Every now and then I hear the ch-ch-ch of some insect that reminds me of yard sprinklers.
Air brushes my back through the cords of the hammock and I wonder if Eden was like this: green and womblike and filled full of sounds.
I feel my face crumple and cover my eyes with a hand as the wind rustles the banana trees and the cicadas sing to God.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Chicago to Lincoln: End of Days
I planned to eat breakfast in bed, maybe in front of a movie. But there seems to be something inherently wrong with watching movies in the morning—something too decadent in a city like Chicago where one could otherwise wander, visit the museum, walk by the river…
Shop on Michigan Avenue.
I’ve used hand cream on my face and find it moisturizes much better than wimpy face lotions. And no wonder, if it’s strong enough for cracked, dry hands. We should all use such potions. I have a girlfriend, a former queen, no less, who used to use Crisco. I’ve used virgin olive oil, myself.
I am secretly having a ball on my forced retreat, and the rest has made me philosophical.
The retired major I recently met on my last trip is seeing more and more cases of people worried about the end of days; the Mayan calendar, I Ching, and Doomsday clocks all point to the same end date in 2012. Apparently this is causing some anxiety. Christians alone contend that the date is unknowable, though that hasn’t stopped some theologians from making predictions (and thereby ruling out that particular slot on the calendar).
At any rate, if the world is going to end, I have only a few things left to achieve: to further share my observances of the world and philosophies on God with others and posterity. To possibly have children (note to self: must find sperm). To better enjoy moments away from the moving sidewalk of life. To learn, perhaps, to even be still.
For as frustrated as I was yesterday on the tarmac, I am grateful. In the glass atrium of the Hyatt I take breakfast sitting by a stretch of water filled with trees that seem to float. As Norah Jones’ “Come Away With Me” soars through the steel rafters, I think, only distantly, about the tab for my pimped-out stranding, but more immediately about how grateful I am. And in that moment of quietude, it seems to me as though God himself has said: “Savor.”
And I do, starting not least of all with the food. This wrap is amazing. I bite through eggs and sausage and think of the 1996 Miss Universe who, when asked what she would do if she had only one day left to live, said, “I would eat everything. Twice.”
An hour later I’m back at O’Hare. I anticipate an eight-hour workday but lo, there is room on the 3:30 flight back home. I’m almost disappointed.
I work for three hours until time to go to the gate. I board, and almost feel a bit sad that I’m going home so early.
And then a storm hits and we sit out on the tarmac like idiot birds in the middle of a lightning storm.
A long line of idiot, metal birds.
“There were more than 100 planes on the runway trying to leave at the same time yesterday,” the attendant says.
I don’t care. I’m tired of this. I want to go home. The woman next to me sighs and throws up her arms. I offer to buy her a drink when we’re airborne.
The black wall of clouds and lightning blows through and the rain has hardly stopped spitting when the attendant rushes down the aisle, shoving people into their seats. We take off before ground control can even fart in our general direction.
I buy my seatmate a drink. She’s on her way to Lincoln for training, from New York. We talk and talk.
By the time we hit the tarmac, Lincoln has never looked so beautiful to me. It’s perhaps 80, the sun is shining and I am tired but blessed.
I planned to eat breakfast in bed, maybe in front of a movie. But there seems to be something inherently wrong with watching movies in the morning—something too decadent in a city like Chicago where one could otherwise wander, visit the museum, walk by the river…
Shop on Michigan Avenue.
I’ve used hand cream on my face and find it moisturizes much better than wimpy face lotions. And no wonder, if it’s strong enough for cracked, dry hands. We should all use such potions. I have a girlfriend, a former queen, no less, who used to use Crisco. I’ve used virgin olive oil, myself.
I am secretly having a ball on my forced retreat, and the rest has made me philosophical.
The retired major I recently met on my last trip is seeing more and more cases of people worried about the end of days; the Mayan calendar, I Ching, and Doomsday clocks all point to the same end date in 2012. Apparently this is causing some anxiety. Christians alone contend that the date is unknowable, though that hasn’t stopped some theologians from making predictions (and thereby ruling out that particular slot on the calendar).
At any rate, if the world is going to end, I have only a few things left to achieve: to further share my observances of the world and philosophies on God with others and posterity. To possibly have children (note to self: must find sperm). To better enjoy moments away from the moving sidewalk of life. To learn, perhaps, to even be still.
For as frustrated as I was yesterday on the tarmac, I am grateful. In the glass atrium of the Hyatt I take breakfast sitting by a stretch of water filled with trees that seem to float. As Norah Jones’ “Come Away With Me” soars through the steel rafters, I think, only distantly, about the tab for my pimped-out stranding, but more immediately about how grateful I am. And in that moment of quietude, it seems to me as though God himself has said: “Savor.”
And I do, starting not least of all with the food. This wrap is amazing. I bite through eggs and sausage and think of the 1996 Miss Universe who, when asked what she would do if she had only one day left to live, said, “I would eat everything. Twice.”
An hour later I’m back at O’Hare. I anticipate an eight-hour workday but lo, there is room on the 3:30 flight back home. I’m almost disappointed.
I work for three hours until time to go to the gate. I board, and almost feel a bit sad that I’m going home so early.
And then a storm hits and we sit out on the tarmac like idiot birds in the middle of a lightning storm.
A long line of idiot, metal birds.
“There were more than 100 planes on the runway trying to leave at the same time yesterday,” the attendant says.
I don’t care. I’m tired of this. I want to go home. The woman next to me sighs and throws up her arms. I offer to buy her a drink when we’re airborne.
The black wall of clouds and lightning blows through and the rain has hardly stopped spitting when the attendant rushes down the aisle, shoving people into their seats. We take off before ground control can even fart in our general direction.
I buy my seatmate a drink. She’s on her way to Lincoln for training, from New York. We talk and talk.
By the time we hit the tarmac, Lincoln has never looked so beautiful to me. It’s perhaps 80, the sun is shining and I am tired but blessed.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Chicago: A Moment in Time
I stayed up too late to spring out of bed at 6:30am, (I went, frantically, into that good night around 2:30am) but slept fitfully enough that the alarm didn’t scare the bejeezus out of me. It’s almost an elegant awakening, refined and quiet, this tossing and turning business.
Uh huh.
I stumble into the bathroom and wonder which of my two outfits to wear today: cowboy Jane or Chinagirl Chow?
I opt for Chow, without the fake ponytail that is too dark to match my fading red highlights and wonder why I lugged my shitkickers here in my carry-on. Yesterday I realized I forgot eyelash adhesive and while I might consider lash glue a necessity, I doubt the Westin keeps it at the front desk for guests.
No boots, no fake hair, no lashes. I feel so naked.
I meet up with Eric, one of Nav’s sales guys, downstairs. Eric was one of the infamous threesome of the New York City cab accident. Having had a recent kidney transplant, he gets more and more healthy-looking each time I see him. Today I even swear he has a tan. We eat breakfast, talk about the show, Demon, the upcoming book. I will feel like a heel later for not asking him more about his family and job, but am so focused on learning more and more about the sales and marketing future of Demon that I forget. Focus, Gallup calls it.
Obsession, I say.
At a table behind me Danielle, the media relations manager, is sitting with Sharon Hinck, author of The Restorer. What an odd thing, sitting over breakfast discussing book sales and numbers, reminding myself I want to meet Sharon before we leave breakfast since we’re going to be signing together later.
Is this really my life?
At the convention center I stand in line for my badge. The bag of a man in a western jacket in front of me reads: Hartline Literary. “Hi,” I say. “Joyce Hart is my agent.” I befriend an author next to me, a writer of WWII historical fiction, and we exchange propaganda. I know her later as Tricia Goyer. I am such a newbie I don't realize that the woman's practically a legend. At the window, the volunteer who helps print her badge asks her if she’s signing and Tricia pulls a book from her bag like a magic rabbit, asking who to make it to.
Oh, she’s good.
Badge in hand, I skip over to hug Joyce, standing at another window, and then jot down to the exhibition floor and Nav’s substantial booth. It’s larger than the BEA one complete with larger desk in front, tables in the back and two semi-private meeting areas. It’s nearly ten o’clock and marketing friends at Nav are setting up my poster, pulling out boxes of Demon.
Suddenly, Greg Stier from Dare2Share appears like a magician. I am so happy to see him, to ask about his new book—he, too, has some with him and signs one for me on the spot. I ask him to check with his movie director friend re: Demon, the movie. I think that would be uber-cool.
By the time I have my pen out, my bookmarks out, and before I can slip from my sneakers into my heels, there’s a line at the counter. I abandon the heels and sign in bare feet: books for bookstores, churches and their libraries, ministries, spouses of ministry workers, kids of bookstore owners. (I have a sneaking suspicion more than a few of these will end up on Amazon.com’s new and used list for sale.) I meet people from the south, from L.A., from Norway, , New York, Florida, Idaho, Togo, South Africa, the U.K., Korea. Members of the sales team help pull books from the boxes in shifts, slip bookmarks into each one as they hand them to me.
“I’ll call in and join discussions with book clubs,” I say. “I’ll send you posters, shelf-talkers, my shar pei.” I point out my website on the bookmark, my e-mail address. I answer questions about the book, myself, where I live, how I got my name. Will I do online interviews? Yes! Will I do radio? Absolutely. Camy Tang stops by and we take a picture together. That girl is so cute. Lincoln author Steph Whitson stops by and tells me I clean up good (she’s never seen me with makeup on.) I tell her I actually bathed for this. People comment on my eyelashes in the author’s picture and some even tell me I'm pretty. I remind them that I’m currently wearing a gob of cosmetics to make up for my lack of eyelash glue.
I never stop; there is a line. I sign and write and chat and take pictures. I must be dreaming. “How’re you holding up?” one of our sales guys asks. I don’t know how to tell him that I’m high, that this is the greatest feeling I’ve ever had. How does one explain the most gratifying and fleeting moment of a life?
Two and a half hours of my life disappear before the faces and name badges, the signatures (“she signs in hot pink!” one gal says, delighted). I stop to slurp water only twice, to shake hands with a couple Korean publishers.
And then there are only four books left. “These are the last four,” I say, looking at them as one looks at the last woefully wonderful spoons of the best crème brulee of her life, wishing there was more. The end of the line slumps off.
And then they’re all gone. I’ve signed all 200 shipped by the publisher. My back is sore. I’m hungry, thirsty and probably have bad breath.
I could do it all again in a second.
Joyce, my agent, has been there through the last half hour, waiting for me. We go to lunch; she’s buying. I ought to eat a salad, some chicken. But I’m celebrating and order a hotdog and chips. I’m so happy. The hotdog is happy inside me. I return to the booth to help set up for the next set of authors, and one of the sales team gestures me toward the semi-private conference room. I show up, and two men rise to shake my hand. “We’re going to sell your book in South Africa,” they say, and ask me to sign a book. I do it in a daze, offer to round up some more bookmarks.
***
On the Atlanta airport tarmac, we’re waiting on O’Hare. Of course.
We sit for three hours.
They’re selling Demon in South Africa.
As we finally take off, I strike up a conversation with my row mate. I buy myself a Cape Cod. I do not like Finlandia vodka, but it’s all there is. And I feel entitled. (I have no idea yet just how entitled I feel.)
Outside my window, a ceiling of stratus clouds has crash-tilted into a range of cotton. It whispers lightning like secrets into giant plumes of white. I want to celebrate. To eat a steak and a giant baked potato. To call my friends and tell them that I love them. The clouds are albino thunderheads and I swear I’ve never seen them so closely or well-formed. We descend past misshapen warriors with hard, glowing edges; I’ve never seen the clouds like this—their auras white-hot. And I think I could die and all would be right in the world.
We land and. I’ve got enough time for Panini en route to F5. The plan: Panini for now—steak dinner in Lincoln.
At F5, I’m just picking at a chicken Panini and humus when the gate announces the flight is cancelled.
I fold up my dinner and head to the Dead Carpet. The lady at the desk comes up with… nothing. Nothing until the same 8:20 flight tomorrow night.
I stare at her, uncomprehending.
“I’m an author,” I say.
She stares back.
“I’m a 1K?”
She’s unmoved.
There is no other flight—not to Omaha, Denver, KC, Minneapolis, or Siberia. Not on United or any other airline. She hands me a coupon for some unfamiliar inn and tells me where to catch the shuttle.
I schlep past four-hour customer service lines down the stairs toward the bag claim and transport curb, which I am totally unfamiliar with in this ant farm called O’Hare (is it legal to leave?).
Outside, I cannot find the shuttle. The taxi line is an hour long. I call the hotel and ask what restaurants they have.
“Uh. We have a Denny’s nearby.”
That is the last straw. I march in the rain to the Airport Hilton and slap the counter guy with my Hilton Honors card. I demand a room. He come up with a big, fat… nothing. I ask for a suite. Nothing. I beg him to call other Hiltons. Nada.
I signed 200 books today. I lived a dream. I am not going down without a fight. I pull out my Hyatt card and call for a reservation—anywhere. The lady on the phone books me at the Hyatt Regency downtown. I ask the Hilton bellman to call me a cab. He offers a car service. "Anything," I tell him. I just don’t want to stand in the rain for an hour.
A green town car shows up 20 minutes later and whisks me off to the Hyatt. I phone my Dad inside the car.
“I signed all the books, Daddy,” I tell him. “There was a line and everything.”
“Good girl.”
“I’m going to the Hyatt. I’m stuck here.”
“Good, baby. Just go inside and have some room service. Don’t walk around,” he says. “It’s Chicago, after all.”
At 37, I’m still his little girl.
The doorman at the Hyatt asks me how I am.
I grunt.
“Long flight?”
“Tarmac. Hungry.”
“What for?”
“Steak.”
“The chophouse just closed,” he says, “But Gibson’s is open until 1am.” He takes me up to the bell desk, keeps my bottle of water for me. I check in, throw my cold panini into a trash can. Then I’m in back down in the luggage elevator and the doorman sends me off in a magical taxi cab to steak paradise.
My cabbie is the strangest man. An African American fellow with a spacey, lifeless falsetto. There’s a white rabbit sitting next to him and a strange grinning cat smoking a doobie in the rear-view mirror.
At Gibsons the valet guys grin at me. The hostess smiles.
Today was the realization of a 24-year dream. Tonight is celebration, a diversion planned by providence.
I order a split of White Star. Blue cheese salad. A bone-in ribeye. A giant baked potato. I eat and write. There is no husband, no S.O., no token pretty boy sitting across from me. There is only me and this seems somehow fitting; I alone saw those long, last hours of writing through the night before the morning of my deadline as I dashed off the final 84 pages of my manuscript. I order another split of champagne. The waiter puts the little baby-sized bottle in a large water glass full of ice. I take out my camera and snap a shot of the miniature ice bucket.
On the way back to the hotel, the stone buildings and cathedrals of Chicago’s downtown remind me of Zurich by night. I’m so glad I’m here. I’m so glad I took my pen and thereby you, vicariously, with me. I wish you could see the nightscape at that moment, half-dazed and sleep-deprived as I am, drunk on more than champagne.
At the Hyatt I call Scott. I’m feisty because I'm so tired and will have no recollection what I say tomorrow. I crash out and give myself the greatest indulgence of all:
I sleep in.
I stayed up too late to spring out of bed at 6:30am, (I went, frantically, into that good night around 2:30am) but slept fitfully enough that the alarm didn’t scare the bejeezus out of me. It’s almost an elegant awakening, refined and quiet, this tossing and turning business.
Uh huh.
I stumble into the bathroom and wonder which of my two outfits to wear today: cowboy Jane or Chinagirl Chow?
I opt for Chow, without the fake ponytail that is too dark to match my fading red highlights and wonder why I lugged my shitkickers here in my carry-on. Yesterday I realized I forgot eyelash adhesive and while I might consider lash glue a necessity, I doubt the Westin keeps it at the front desk for guests.
No boots, no fake hair, no lashes. I feel so naked.
I meet up with Eric, one of Nav’s sales guys, downstairs. Eric was one of the infamous threesome of the New York City cab accident. Having had a recent kidney transplant, he gets more and more healthy-looking each time I see him. Today I even swear he has a tan. We eat breakfast, talk about the show, Demon, the upcoming book. I will feel like a heel later for not asking him more about his family and job, but am so focused on learning more and more about the sales and marketing future of Demon that I forget. Focus, Gallup calls it.
Obsession, I say.
At a table behind me Danielle, the media relations manager, is sitting with Sharon Hinck, author of The Restorer. What an odd thing, sitting over breakfast discussing book sales and numbers, reminding myself I want to meet Sharon before we leave breakfast since we’re going to be signing together later.
Is this really my life?
At the convention center I stand in line for my badge. The bag of a man in a western jacket in front of me reads: Hartline Literary. “Hi,” I say. “Joyce Hart is my agent.” I befriend an author next to me, a writer of WWII historical fiction, and we exchange propaganda. I know her later as Tricia Goyer. I am such a newbie I don't realize that the woman's practically a legend. At the window, the volunteer who helps print her badge asks her if she’s signing and Tricia pulls a book from her bag like a magic rabbit, asking who to make it to.
Oh, she’s good.
Badge in hand, I skip over to hug Joyce, standing at another window, and then jot down to the exhibition floor and Nav’s substantial booth. It’s larger than the BEA one complete with larger desk in front, tables in the back and two semi-private meeting areas. It’s nearly ten o’clock and marketing friends at Nav are setting up my poster, pulling out boxes of Demon.
Suddenly, Greg Stier from Dare2Share appears like a magician. I am so happy to see him, to ask about his new book—he, too, has some with him and signs one for me on the spot. I ask him to check with his movie director friend re: Demon, the movie. I think that would be uber-cool.
By the time I have my pen out, my bookmarks out, and before I can slip from my sneakers into my heels, there’s a line at the counter. I abandon the heels and sign in bare feet: books for bookstores, churches and their libraries, ministries, spouses of ministry workers, kids of bookstore owners. (I have a sneaking suspicion more than a few of these will end up on Amazon.com’s new and used list for sale.) I meet people from the south, from L.A., from Norway, , New York, Florida, Idaho, Togo, South Africa, the U.K., Korea. Members of the sales team help pull books from the boxes in shifts, slip bookmarks into each one as they hand them to me.
“I’ll call in and join discussions with book clubs,” I say. “I’ll send you posters, shelf-talkers, my shar pei.” I point out my website on the bookmark, my e-mail address. I answer questions about the book, myself, where I live, how I got my name. Will I do online interviews? Yes! Will I do radio? Absolutely. Camy Tang stops by and we take a picture together. That girl is so cute. Lincoln author Steph Whitson stops by and tells me I clean up good (she’s never seen me with makeup on.) I tell her I actually bathed for this. People comment on my eyelashes in the author’s picture and some even tell me I'm pretty. I remind them that I’m currently wearing a gob of cosmetics to make up for my lack of eyelash glue.
I never stop; there is a line. I sign and write and chat and take pictures. I must be dreaming. “How’re you holding up?” one of our sales guys asks. I don’t know how to tell him that I’m high, that this is the greatest feeling I’ve ever had. How does one explain the most gratifying and fleeting moment of a life?
Two and a half hours of my life disappear before the faces and name badges, the signatures (“she signs in hot pink!” one gal says, delighted). I stop to slurp water only twice, to shake hands with a couple Korean publishers.
And then there are only four books left. “These are the last four,” I say, looking at them as one looks at the last woefully wonderful spoons of the best crème brulee of her life, wishing there was more. The end of the line slumps off.
And then they’re all gone. I’ve signed all 200 shipped by the publisher. My back is sore. I’m hungry, thirsty and probably have bad breath.
I could do it all again in a second.
Joyce, my agent, has been there through the last half hour, waiting for me. We go to lunch; she’s buying. I ought to eat a salad, some chicken. But I’m celebrating and order a hotdog and chips. I’m so happy. The hotdog is happy inside me. I return to the booth to help set up for the next set of authors, and one of the sales team gestures me toward the semi-private conference room. I show up, and two men rise to shake my hand. “We’re going to sell your book in South Africa,” they say, and ask me to sign a book. I do it in a daze, offer to round up some more bookmarks.
***
On the Atlanta airport tarmac, we’re waiting on O’Hare. Of course.
We sit for three hours.
They’re selling Demon in South Africa.
As we finally take off, I strike up a conversation with my row mate. I buy myself a Cape Cod. I do not like Finlandia vodka, but it’s all there is. And I feel entitled. (I have no idea yet just how entitled I feel.)
Outside my window, a ceiling of stratus clouds has crash-tilted into a range of cotton. It whispers lightning like secrets into giant plumes of white. I want to celebrate. To eat a steak and a giant baked potato. To call my friends and tell them that I love them. The clouds are albino thunderheads and I swear I’ve never seen them so closely or well-formed. We descend past misshapen warriors with hard, glowing edges; I’ve never seen the clouds like this—their auras white-hot. And I think I could die and all would be right in the world.
We land and. I’ve got enough time for Panini en route to F5. The plan: Panini for now—steak dinner in Lincoln.
At F5, I’m just picking at a chicken Panini and humus when the gate announces the flight is cancelled.
I fold up my dinner and head to the Dead Carpet. The lady at the desk comes up with… nothing. Nothing until the same 8:20 flight tomorrow night.
I stare at her, uncomprehending.
“I’m an author,” I say.
She stares back.
“I’m a 1K?”
She’s unmoved.
There is no other flight—not to Omaha, Denver, KC, Minneapolis, or Siberia. Not on United or any other airline. She hands me a coupon for some unfamiliar inn and tells me where to catch the shuttle.
I schlep past four-hour customer service lines down the stairs toward the bag claim and transport curb, which I am totally unfamiliar with in this ant farm called O’Hare (is it legal to leave?).
Outside, I cannot find the shuttle. The taxi line is an hour long. I call the hotel and ask what restaurants they have.
“Uh. We have a Denny’s nearby.”
That is the last straw. I march in the rain to the Airport Hilton and slap the counter guy with my Hilton Honors card. I demand a room. He come up with a big, fat… nothing. I ask for a suite. Nothing. I beg him to call other Hiltons. Nada.
I signed 200 books today. I lived a dream. I am not going down without a fight. I pull out my Hyatt card and call for a reservation—anywhere. The lady on the phone books me at the Hyatt Regency downtown. I ask the Hilton bellman to call me a cab. He offers a car service. "Anything," I tell him. I just don’t want to stand in the rain for an hour.
A green town car shows up 20 minutes later and whisks me off to the Hyatt. I phone my Dad inside the car.
“I signed all the books, Daddy,” I tell him. “There was a line and everything.”
“Good girl.”
“I’m going to the Hyatt. I’m stuck here.”
“Good, baby. Just go inside and have some room service. Don’t walk around,” he says. “It’s Chicago, after all.”
At 37, I’m still his little girl.
The doorman at the Hyatt asks me how I am.
I grunt.
“Long flight?”
“Tarmac. Hungry.”
“What for?”
“Steak.”
“The chophouse just closed,” he says, “But Gibson’s is open until 1am.” He takes me up to the bell desk, keeps my bottle of water for me. I check in, throw my cold panini into a trash can. Then I’m in back down in the luggage elevator and the doorman sends me off in a magical taxi cab to steak paradise.
My cabbie is the strangest man. An African American fellow with a spacey, lifeless falsetto. There’s a white rabbit sitting next to him and a strange grinning cat smoking a doobie in the rear-view mirror.
At Gibsons the valet guys grin at me. The hostess smiles.
Today was the realization of a 24-year dream. Tonight is celebration, a diversion planned by providence.
I order a split of White Star. Blue cheese salad. A bone-in ribeye. A giant baked potato. I eat and write. There is no husband, no S.O., no token pretty boy sitting across from me. There is only me and this seems somehow fitting; I alone saw those long, last hours of writing through the night before the morning of my deadline as I dashed off the final 84 pages of my manuscript. I order another split of champagne. The waiter puts the little baby-sized bottle in a large water glass full of ice. I take out my camera and snap a shot of the miniature ice bucket.
On the way back to the hotel, the stone buildings and cathedrals of Chicago’s downtown remind me of Zurich by night. I’m so glad I’m here. I’m so glad I took my pen and thereby you, vicariously, with me. I wish you could see the nightscape at that moment, half-dazed and sleep-deprived as I am, drunk on more than champagne.
At the Hyatt I call Scott. I’m feisty because I'm so tired and will have no recollection what I say tomorrow. I crash out and give myself the greatest indulgence of all:
I sleep in.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Lincoln to Atlanta: White Rabbit
I pull around the house in a fog, knowing I ought to pack, wondering why I stayed up so late, thinking I’ve got to overcome this Amazon.com rank obsession.
I wrote a book. People can buy it.
I give a mad giggle that scares the dog.
Tomorrow I’ll sign my book at the International Christian Retail Show and shamelessly hand out bookmarks to anyone who will take one.
It’s real. Like Pinocchio, I’m a real boy—I mean, writer.
I can’t believe it, and keep waiting for some second shoe to drop.
***
The airport is busier than I’ve seen it in months. Perhaps ever. Allegient is flying to Vegas and everyone in line is wearing shorts and flipflips.
Upstairs I eat the requisite tuna tomato and a cup of vegetable soup.
This is the first log I’ll put up in months, but that isn’t to say I haven’t gone anywhere or haven’t logged. Au contraire. It’s that the logs have been incomplete, like brittle lost scrolls, with little bits missing and only conjecture to fill them in.
I can tell you with certainty, however, that in the last six months I’ve been to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Kalamazoo, Fayettville (AKA “Walmart town”), Ann Arbor (Borders town), and New York City. I got in a cab accident in New York City while attending Book Expo America—which is where I got a copy of The Butt Book signed by author Tosca Reno (“Who do I make it out to?” she asked. “Tosca,” I said.). I also got Sex for Dummies signed by Doctor Ruth, just to see if she really knows her stuff.
***
Downstairs in the check-in line, I turned around just in time to see one of those priests from Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Can I just say that I find these priests, in their crisp black robes and manly skirts like Japanese martial arts guys, extremely masculine and more than a little sexy? This particular priest is weathered, like Clint Eastwood. Upstairs in the gate area, he’s reading his Bible, his lips moving in silence. I imagine he’s saying a kick ass prayer over this flight and feel safer than usual, not to mention a little turned on.
I think of handing him a bookmark. Of telling him that I like to read my Bible, too, that I write Christian fiction, but I’m star struck and tongue-tied. So I just peer at him sidewise from beneath my bangs.
These have to be the most virile priests on the planet. All of them are broad-shouldered, athletic men with military haircuts. They look like soldiers. I wonder if they’ve been doing spiritual warfare. They’re sexy men of God. I even have it on good authority that these priests sometimes enjoy a holy pint at Lazlo’s.
Preparing to board, I run into Sara Pipher, just fresh from Maui (I hate her). She asks me where I’m off to.
“A Christian thing, to sign books,” I say, glancing sidelong at the priest.
I can practically hear her gaze taking in my Cinco de Mayo skull necklace, my purple-black nail polish, the serpent ring coiling about my finger.
“Uh huh.”
On board the plane, the priest passes my seat and I stare at him, mute, stars in my eyes.
After takeoff, I feel guilty perusing Victoria’s Secret in my aisle seat. That priest might be sitting within viewing distance. I don’t want him looking at Giselle Bunchen in a bra. I put the catalogue away and take out Crate and Barrel instead.
The plane has no ice. The stewardess reminds every single seat as she serves drinks. I accept a mini-me bottle of water and fall asleep, my head bobbing three directions it was never supposed to go.
***
There’s a new food option in Chicago O’Hare’s B terminal, toward B 1-5. Tepanade is a Mediterranean café complete with paninis, salads, wraps. Your side can be pasta, couscous or hummus. I give the Portobello veggie Panini a whirl (which isn’t a good choice since I’ve just learned I’m officially anemic) with hummus on the side. It comes out hot from the Panini grill—the hottest sandwich I’ve ever had—but I can’t stop eating it, picking it apart, dipping it in hummus. It is the tastiest Panini I’ve ever had and for sure the best thing I’ve ever eaten at O’Hare. By the time I finish I’m a pesto-y, hummus-y, olive oily happy girl.
As I’m eating a nun sits down opposite me in the seating area (you can’t take food into the Dead Carpet Club). She’s got a polar fleece vest over her grey habit. She’s wearing a rosary over a bouquet of hardware (keys, chains, handcuffs) at her waist. She reminds me of a medieval pantler—or prison guard.
What is it with all the holy people today?
At the Dead Carpet I check e-mail, my website, my Amazon ranking (I wrote a book!). At $6 an hour internet here is a rip-off, but I do it anyway.
And then I hurry to my gate to catch my flight to Atlanta.
You’ll never believe this: my flight out of purgatory—I mean, O’Hare—is delayed. The United robot calls me on my cell phone (we’re on a first name basis) to let me know. So I slide into the other B-concourse RCC and proceed to pay another $6 an hour to shop online. And then, realizing that the delay time got moved up, I pack up in a panic and run to the gate.
There’s a guy at the gate that I ran into at the RCC counter earlier. We end up waiting on the plane so we loiter like waifish orphans and he asks me what I do for a living. I tell him I write books and give him enough bookmarks for his neighborhood. He has all kinds of questions after that, and I’m suddenly reminded of something author Jon Konrath (Whiskey Sour) wrote in an article: that people want to talk to authors because they seem like celebrities.
And I see a little bit of what he means, which is so weird. Because, you know, I was an author before—just not of published fiction. What is it about getting an elaborate lie published that makes people look at you with wide eyes?
Who cares? It’s frickin’ cool!
All the while I’m talking with this guy, I’m scanning the gate area. Surely there are others here going to ICRS. Maybe they’ve seen Demon in the NavPress catalogue. I peruse intent, book-holding forms for the familiar flaming cover. I’m desperate to fulfill the book-sighting fantasy I talked about in my Novel Journey interview: http://noveljourney.blogspot.com/2007/07/author-interview-tosca-lee.html.
But it looks like the fantasy will wait for another day.
***
We sit on the plane, which has ice but no AC. We have no pilot either.
I’m reading I, Eve, an account of Eve (of apple-eating fame) written with in 60s jargon with occasional play on words by what must surely be a shroom-chewing bibliophile. It won’t qualify as my favorite book ever, but anything on the subject matter seems to spawn ideas.
***
Atlanta airport is a silly place. When I called the Link shuttle service from O’Hare to tell them I was delayed, they told me to go to the red south terminal and head out door S5. Running around this rabbit hole, I wonder if a red terminal even exists. I see blue, yellow, white. North. East. This place is packed. It’s like some bad dream after watching a Sci Fi channel Twilight Zone marathon and eating pickles—that is to say, trippier than a shroom-chewing bibliophile.
Finally I find S5. I get on the shuttle, hear a pair of people talking behind me on the ride to the Westin. One of them is a writer here for ICRS. The other owns a Christian bookstore in San Diego. I plaster them both with bookmarks.
And so it begins.
I pull around the house in a fog, knowing I ought to pack, wondering why I stayed up so late, thinking I’ve got to overcome this Amazon.com rank obsession.
I wrote a book. People can buy it.
I give a mad giggle that scares the dog.
Tomorrow I’ll sign my book at the International Christian Retail Show and shamelessly hand out bookmarks to anyone who will take one.
It’s real. Like Pinocchio, I’m a real boy—I mean, writer.
I can’t believe it, and keep waiting for some second shoe to drop.
***
The airport is busier than I’ve seen it in months. Perhaps ever. Allegient is flying to Vegas and everyone in line is wearing shorts and flipflips.
Upstairs I eat the requisite tuna tomato and a cup of vegetable soup.
This is the first log I’ll put up in months, but that isn’t to say I haven’t gone anywhere or haven’t logged. Au contraire. It’s that the logs have been incomplete, like brittle lost scrolls, with little bits missing and only conjecture to fill them in.
I can tell you with certainty, however, that in the last six months I’ve been to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Kalamazoo, Fayettville (AKA “Walmart town”), Ann Arbor (Borders town), and New York City. I got in a cab accident in New York City while attending Book Expo America—which is where I got a copy of The Butt Book signed by author Tosca Reno (“Who do I make it out to?” she asked. “Tosca,” I said.). I also got Sex for Dummies signed by Doctor Ruth, just to see if she really knows her stuff.
***
Downstairs in the check-in line, I turned around just in time to see one of those priests from Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Can I just say that I find these priests, in their crisp black robes and manly skirts like Japanese martial arts guys, extremely masculine and more than a little sexy? This particular priest is weathered, like Clint Eastwood. Upstairs in the gate area, he’s reading his Bible, his lips moving in silence. I imagine he’s saying a kick ass prayer over this flight and feel safer than usual, not to mention a little turned on.
I think of handing him a bookmark. Of telling him that I like to read my Bible, too, that I write Christian fiction, but I’m star struck and tongue-tied. So I just peer at him sidewise from beneath my bangs.
These have to be the most virile priests on the planet. All of them are broad-shouldered, athletic men with military haircuts. They look like soldiers. I wonder if they’ve been doing spiritual warfare. They’re sexy men of God. I even have it on good authority that these priests sometimes enjoy a holy pint at Lazlo’s.
Preparing to board, I run into Sara Pipher, just fresh from Maui (I hate her). She asks me where I’m off to.
“A Christian thing, to sign books,” I say, glancing sidelong at the priest.
I can practically hear her gaze taking in my Cinco de Mayo skull necklace, my purple-black nail polish, the serpent ring coiling about my finger.
“Uh huh.”
On board the plane, the priest passes my seat and I stare at him, mute, stars in my eyes.
After takeoff, I feel guilty perusing Victoria’s Secret in my aisle seat. That priest might be sitting within viewing distance. I don’t want him looking at Giselle Bunchen in a bra. I put the catalogue away and take out Crate and Barrel instead.
The plane has no ice. The stewardess reminds every single seat as she serves drinks. I accept a mini-me bottle of water and fall asleep, my head bobbing three directions it was never supposed to go.
***
There’s a new food option in Chicago O’Hare’s B terminal, toward B 1-5. Tepanade is a Mediterranean café complete with paninis, salads, wraps. Your side can be pasta, couscous or hummus. I give the Portobello veggie Panini a whirl (which isn’t a good choice since I’ve just learned I’m officially anemic) with hummus on the side. It comes out hot from the Panini grill—the hottest sandwich I’ve ever had—but I can’t stop eating it, picking it apart, dipping it in hummus. It is the tastiest Panini I’ve ever had and for sure the best thing I’ve ever eaten at O’Hare. By the time I finish I’m a pesto-y, hummus-y, olive oily happy girl.
As I’m eating a nun sits down opposite me in the seating area (you can’t take food into the Dead Carpet Club). She’s got a polar fleece vest over her grey habit. She’s wearing a rosary over a bouquet of hardware (keys, chains, handcuffs) at her waist. She reminds me of a medieval pantler—or prison guard.
What is it with all the holy people today?
At the Dead Carpet I check e-mail, my website, my Amazon ranking (I wrote a book!). At $6 an hour internet here is a rip-off, but I do it anyway.
And then I hurry to my gate to catch my flight to Atlanta.
You’ll never believe this: my flight out of purgatory—I mean, O’Hare—is delayed. The United robot calls me on my cell phone (we’re on a first name basis) to let me know. So I slide into the other B-concourse RCC and proceed to pay another $6 an hour to shop online. And then, realizing that the delay time got moved up, I pack up in a panic and run to the gate.
There’s a guy at the gate that I ran into at the RCC counter earlier. We end up waiting on the plane so we loiter like waifish orphans and he asks me what I do for a living. I tell him I write books and give him enough bookmarks for his neighborhood. He has all kinds of questions after that, and I’m suddenly reminded of something author Jon Konrath (Whiskey Sour) wrote in an article: that people want to talk to authors because they seem like celebrities.
And I see a little bit of what he means, which is so weird. Because, you know, I was an author before—just not of published fiction. What is it about getting an elaborate lie published that makes people look at you with wide eyes?
Who cares? It’s frickin’ cool!
All the while I’m talking with this guy, I’m scanning the gate area. Surely there are others here going to ICRS. Maybe they’ve seen Demon in the NavPress catalogue. I peruse intent, book-holding forms for the familiar flaming cover. I’m desperate to fulfill the book-sighting fantasy I talked about in my Novel Journey interview: http://noveljourney.blogspot.com/2007/07/author-interview-tosca-lee.html.
But it looks like the fantasy will wait for another day.
***
We sit on the plane, which has ice but no AC. We have no pilot either.
I’m reading I, Eve, an account of Eve (of apple-eating fame) written with in 60s jargon with occasional play on words by what must surely be a shroom-chewing bibliophile. It won’t qualify as my favorite book ever, but anything on the subject matter seems to spawn ideas.
***
Atlanta airport is a silly place. When I called the Link shuttle service from O’Hare to tell them I was delayed, they told me to go to the red south terminal and head out door S5. Running around this rabbit hole, I wonder if a red terminal even exists. I see blue, yellow, white. North. East. This place is packed. It’s like some bad dream after watching a Sci Fi channel Twilight Zone marathon and eating pickles—that is to say, trippier than a shroom-chewing bibliophile.
Finally I find S5. I get on the shuttle, hear a pair of people talking behind me on the ride to the Westin. One of them is a writer here for ICRS. The other owns a Christian bookstore in San Diego. I plaster them both with bookmarks.
And so it begins.
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