A JOURNAL OF MY PLAGUE MONTH

Valentine’s Day fell on a Sunday this past February. In the week that followed, I developed a bad cough.

By Wednesday afternoon, it had gotten severe and constant enough that I left work early. The Wife was also feeling ill, so on Thursday we went to an Urgent Care near our house and both got tested for COVID. It came as no surprise at all when, Saturday morning, we were told that both tests were positive.

The Wife shook it off after a few days of relatively mild flu-like symptoms. I did not. Throughout the week that followed, I was sleeping 20 to 22 hours a day, though it was a shallow, dream-troubled, unsatisfying sleep. For a couple of hours a day, I would drag myself to the couch to watch reruns of The Andy Griffith Show or whatever, but sitting up gave me a headache that felt like somebody splitting my head open with a hatchet and then ladling purple lava—in my imagination, the lava was always purple for some reason—into the crack.

I never lost my senses of taste or smell, as so many people report, but I did lose my appetite. Looking at food made me feel ill. I was getting down maybe a piece of toast or a slice of cheese a day. I would think about getting up to do some work or answer some emails, but after dragging myself out of bed to go to the bathroom or get a drink from the fridge, all I could do was collapse into bed again.

A kind friend sent me a little fingertip pulse-oximeter, and I was told that if my blood’s oxygen saturation level fell below 88, I should go to the emergency room. By Thursday of the second week, my readings were in the 84 and 85 range. By Friday they were in the high 70s. The Wife called 9-1-1, and I was loaded into an ambulance and driven to the hospital.

I anticipated a nightmarish ordeal waiting to be seen to at the ER; it wasn’t the case. I was placed in a comfortable private waiting room with a TV, an oxygen mask was put on my face, and I lay there for hours watching Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall in the original Coming to America while sweet young nurses came in periodically to check on me. A nice chatty technician came in and took an x-ray of my chest. A while after that, a harried-looking young ER doctor came in and said “Yeah, we’re going to admit you; your lungs look like crap in that x-ray.”

Bluntly put, no doubt, but I appreciated the candor.

I hadn’t stayed in a hospital as a patient since I was six years old and got my tonsils out. But I spent the next eight days alone in a room, hooked up to IVs and wires, with oxygen tubes up my nose, watching Turner Classic Movies.

I was able to stumble to the bathroom once or twice a day, the wires trailing behind me, but could manage little activity beyond that. My big excursion out came when they took me to get a CT Scan; it was startling to see the scary stern warnings about the dangers of entering my isolated realm that were posted on the outside door of my room.

I can’t say that I felt sure I was going to die, but I did feel like it was possible. For the first few days I wasn’t sure if I’d get out of the hospital; early on I wasn’t even sure how much I cared. In retrospect I can see that I had an uncommonly fortunate bout of this illness; I was never placed on a ventilator, for instance, which often indicates a plummeting chance of survival.

The care I got was excellent, skilled and kind. I was given daily treatments of the antiviral Remdesivir, as well as steroids, and gradually began to feel stronger. My appetite returned, almost as soon as I was admitted; maybe it was the increased oxygen, but in any case, the skimpy “cardiac control” meals they gave me became the highlights of my day (this may also have been due to boredom and absence of reading material), and I developed an unaccountable craving for Fig Newtons, a cookie I had never much cared for previously. Encouraging nurses took me for walks up and down around the hallways, and though I found them embarrassingly arduous, I showed enough improvement that I was sent home the following Saturday evening, with an oxygen concentrator.

About two weeks after I was released, I got my first vaccination at State Farm Stadium. By the end of March, I felt well enough to return to work. This past Friday I got my second shot. I still get winded and fatigued easily, but the pulmonologist tells me that this will likely continue for at least a couple more months.

My big takeaways from the experience? One is gratitude for the first-rate treatment I received, both from the health care professionals and from The Wife and The Kid and my family and friends, who showed me so much support and encouragement through daily phone calls and texts.

Another was a new respect for the health care profession. At some level I probably always understood, but now have seen first-hand, that the nurses, doctors and aides do more for humanity on any given day they work than I’ve done in my whole life.

My other big takeaway is a concrete, non-theoretical respect for this virus that I didn’t have before. So that’s my advice: wear a mask, stay socially distanced, and get your shots. As somebody who didn’t get anywhere near the worst that this disease can give, I promise you that you don’t want even the second-worst.

ARE WE HAVING FUNGUS YET?

Opening in theaters this weekend:

The Truffle Hunters--Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw directed and shot this documentary-ish portrait in the mountain forests of Piedmont, Italy. It chronicles some elderly men who, aided by their dogs, search for and dig up the elusive fungus that commands thousands of Euros per kilo from the upscale restaurant market. The men, some of them in their eighties, are marvelous, peculiar, vital characters, and they bring the movie a warmth and humor that balances the poignant sense that we're seeing a dying culture.

The action shots of these "hunts," sometimes seen from the POV of dog-mounted cameras, are kinetic and exciting; Dweck and Kershaw's static images of the men in their homes, by contrast, are beautifully composed, with Caravaggio-worthy chiaroscuro. The filmmakers are clearly infatuated with these guys and their hearty engagement with the planet, but they also seem aware of the irony that this profession depends on a decadent high-end "foodie" market and the greedy truffle pirates it spawns, who, the hunters complain, are not above poisoning dogs. Nothing in the movie is as strong as the scenes of these hunters bonding with their dogs; as so often in the movies, the dogs steal the show.

Voyagers--A big spaceship is carrying a group of very attractive test tube babies from Earth to a habitable planet almost a century away; their grandchildren are the intended settlers. About the time the gang hits adolescence, they figure out that they're being drugged to keep their hormones in check. They stop taking the drug about the same time they lose their grown-up chaperone (Colin Farrell), with the predictable result: sex and violence. Eventually one wound-up, wild-eyed kid (Fionn Whiehead) forms his own lawless faction; the morose responsible hero and heroine (Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp) in favor of rules and reason form another, unsurprisingly much smaller.

Written and directed by Neil Burger, this blend of The Blue Lagoon and Lord of the Flies, with agreeable echoes of earnest '70s-era sci-fi spectacles like Silent Running, starts a little slow, but in its second half becomes fairly tense and gripping, with flashes of eroticism. Eventually it starts to take on allegorical resonances too, about how easily reactionary fear-mongering and mob rule can sprout in society, that seem all too relevant these days. The movie's suggestion that the rationalist and democratic impulse is a recessive human trait feels distressingly plausible.

SKIRT TALE

Dockyard Press, which also publishes my novel The Night Before Christmas of the Living Dead...

...has run my short story "Three Days in Skirt World" on their website. Please note that the narrator's sentiments are not representative of the author's.

CLEESE CALL

Last week I was lucky enough to see one of my idols, the great John Cleese, perform at House of Comedy with his daughter, stand-up Camilla Cleese. They've been held over for one more night...

...Tuesday, April 6, so this weekend I got the chance to interview them both, by phone, for Phoenix Magazine.

A FEW AMERICANS IN PARIS

Opening today in theaters:

French Exit--Frances, an elegant, widowed Manhattanite played by Michelle Pfeiffer, finds herself broke at around 60. She’s been warned for years about the impending collapse, but she blithely assumed she’d expire before her finances did.

A kind friend offers her the use of an apartment in Paris, so Frances liquidates her art, books and other valuables. She, her twentysomething son (Lucas Hedges), and her rather marvelous black cat Small Frank make the crossing to the City of Light. Her plan is to exhaust what’s left of her money, then end her life.

Adapted by Patrick deWitt from his own novel and directed by Azazel Jacobs, this wistful comedy of the unconscionably upper class is carried by Pfeiffer’s brittle, enchanting performance, and by the dialogue, as polished and carefully curated as the décor in the socialite homes we see. Pfeiffer gives her lines an edge of polite impatience behind the dizziness, as if Frances can’t believe that she’s expected to deal with these irksome details of reality. But she’s too essentially good-natured to make a fuss about it.

In 2017 Jacobs wrote and directed The Lovers, a terrific marital comedy that I thought was one of the more original films of its kind in years; I put on my list of the best of the ‘teens. His directorial touch here is light and smooth as well. He gets delightful performances not just from Pfeiffer but from Hedges as the helplessly enthralled son, Valerie Mahaffey as an eccentric Paris widow who insinuates herself into the drama, and Danielle Macdonald as a sullen psychic. Jacobs even brings off a mild supernatural element, connected to Small Frank the cat, with amusing urbanity.

But there was something about the skewed fatalism by which Frances lives, and that I seemed expected to admire, that I couldn’t help but find off-putting from my view in the cheap seats. French Exit is a comedy, and at times it’s laugh out loud funny. But there’s also an aching sadness to it, and a sense of wounded entitlement that’s almost infuriating.

BEAST PICTURE

Opening in theaters and on HBO Max...

Godzilla vs. Kong--The colossal ape of the title, plodding groggily toward a morning shower under a waterfall, scratches his butt. On the soundtrack is Bobby Vinton singing "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea." This was the point, barely a minute in, that I was pretty sure this movie was going to be fun. I wasn't disappointed.

I was indeed disappointed by the 2014 Yank version of Godzilla, but the 2017 Kong: Skull Island and the 2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters were both big improvements. This clash of the titans, their first movie meeting since the 1962 Japanese King Kong vs. Godzilla, may be the best of the latter-day lot. It's certainly the silliest, which works to its benefit.

After years of peaceful coexistence, the gargantuan reptile of the title is turned from heroic protector of humankind back into a menace, for purposes of the main event; he attacks a shadowy corporate facility in Pensacola, Florida. A conspiracy-minded podcast host (Brian Tyree Henry), a teenager (Millie Bobby Brown) and her best friend (Julian Dennison) investigate the sinister reasons behind the incident.

Meanwhile, those same corporate interests have Kong transported--in chains, by ship, just like back in 1933--from Skull Island to Antarctica in hopes that he'll lead them into the Hollow Earth. Traveling with him are a Hollow Earth expert (Alexander Skarsgard), a "Kong Whisperer" scientist (Rebecca Hall) and her adopted native daughter (Kaylie Hottle), who communicates by sign language. The two strands converge, via an actual hole to the center of the Earth, in Hong Kong, where the title monsters plus one other kaiju icon scrap in the streets.

As you can tell from this synopsis, director Adam Wingard and his screenwriters certainly don't let utter preposterousness get in the way of telling this tall tale; they loot sources from Verne and Burroughs to pro wrestling. When Kong socks Godzilla in the jaw for the first time, it reminded me of Alex Karras punching the horse in Blazing Saddles. This pop pilferage has the feel, at times, of kids improvising a make-believe monster game in their back yard.

Yet there are moments, like the scenes involving Kong negotiating the gravity deep underground, that have a near-poetic wonder. And the monsters, especially the soulful, fed-up Kong, are truly vivid characters, engaging our sympathies more than any of the human actors.

Absent profound, meaningful filmmaking and drama--and maybe, sometimes, in preference to it--this is what I want my summer blockbusters to be: fast, funny, unpretentious, with dash of heart. It clocks in at under two hours, but it didn't leave me feeling cheated.

CLEESE IN OUR TIME

Check out my brief encomium, online at Phoenix Magazine, to John Cleese...

The great man is slated to take the stage (!) tonight at House of Comedy on High Street, with his stand-up daughter Camilla Cleese.