Novelist in room 717, recuperating

The Column: 12.09.22

I picked up COVID last week sitting in an airport lounge, writing, and I pulled my mask down because my masked breath fogged my glasses, and now I’m holed up in a cheap hotel in Fort Lauderdale, waiting for the Paxlovid to kick in. I pass through numerous airports every month because in the comedy business, people tire of you after an exposure or two — the dog who walks into the bar and says, “How about a drink for a talking dog” and the bartender says, “Sure, the toilet’s down there, first door on the left” is not a life-changing joke — and so I keep on the move, and besides, I’m in love with my woman and want to get back to her promptly and not travel by bus. She puts her arms around me and whispers things that nobody else whispers. Sometimes TSA agents feel up my inner thighs but intimacy with a guy with a badge and blue rubber gloves doesn’t interest me.

Airports have become ginormous as they’ve added vast shopping arcades and fine restaurants so it’s a mile from the TSA guy with blue gloves to my gate and sometimes a man in a motorized cart stops and asks if I’d like a lift and I am tempted but so far I have declined. My legs are not so strong because I no longer drink milk, which builds strong bodies. I suppose I could order a double latte, but in my mind I cannot hear John Wayne say, “I’d like a double latte, Pilgrim” and so I don’t. And I feel that accepting a ride in a motorized cart is the first step to assisted living and a salt-free diet and hiring a woman trainer named Melissa to come help me do squats. I do squats privately and for a purpose, to plug in a power cord, but I wouldn’t want Melissa to observe this.

Anyway, here I am in Fort Lauderdale in a hotel, and I should be grateful for the sunshine but I miss winter, the sense of purpose it gives. My purpose is to write and write until I get the hang of it and most good writing occurs in northern latitudes. Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Idaho, other books in Paris and Illinois, and in Key West and Cuba, he mostly went fishing and drank and got depressed. Saul Bellow was a Chicago guy. Tolstoy never lived in Tahiti nor did Proust hang out in Polynesia. They needed bitter cold mornings to rouse them to make coffee and build a fire and get to work.

The effect of comfort is to make you sleepy; bitter cold promotes alertness. Make note of it.

In January 1841, Herman Melville, 22, eager to escape a New England winter, sailed on the whaling ship Acushnet to the South Pacific. He jumped ship and lived among the Typee cannibal tribe in the Marquesas Islands and had a love affair with a Typee girl and wrote a book about it, Typee. It has paradise scenery and nudity and cannibalism in it and if only he’d included those elements in his next book, Moby-Dick, it would be more widely read. It’s an American classic, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, but nobody reads either of them.

Everything on the Best Books of 2022 lists is very dark, not a single comic novel anywhere, they’re all about traumatic displacement and grief and alienation, and sitting in this little hotel room, I think about writing a COVID novel. The virus brings on an intense temporary adolescence with identity issues, self-pity, a sense of meaninglessness, which fits in well with the current trend in fiction.

A COVID novel with a cannibal romance. It won’t be based on my wife’s family, they’re all semi-vegans, so I’ll invent a lover, a hefty girl who gives me love bites, whose family is very touchy-feely, especially of my meatier parts, and at mealtime they sit close by and say a prayer in hopes I’ll close my eyes but I don’t, I sing to them instead. I read somewhere that music calms the cannibalistic urge, so I sing:

Here I sit beside the fire
With my love, my heart’s desire,
While her family looks my way,
Imagining me as their entrée. 
If you eat me, you will get
A virus you will soon regret,
That gives you feelings of putrescence
As you felt in adolescence. 
Feast on fowl, feast on fish,
You can make a tasty dish
That is healthy and mammalian,
But spare this old Episcopalian. 

I can promise you one thing. I intend to survive at the end.

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Tomorrow’s featured show on our Facebook page comes from The Town Hall, December 2015, with special guests: Keb Mo’, the DiGiallonardo Sisters, and Heather Masse. Join us at 5:00 p.m. CT on Facebook. Or if you can’t wait, you can listen right HERE.