F E A T U R E S

Sleepless in L.A.
By Don George, Editor

Giving good gnocchi
A five-course seduction in Venice
By Linda Watanabe
McFerrin
- Books on Venice
- Getting there

Meeting Moses
on Mount Sinai
By Deb Fellner
- Getting there

D E P A R T M E N T S

Postmark: Lamu
God's Wake-up Call in Kenya
By Don Meredith

Passages:
On China's Yangtze:
"The River at the Center of the World"
By Simon Winchester

Table Talk
- Boycott Burma?

Salon Taste
Adventures in eating

- - - - - - - -

Your virtual travel agency

- - - - - - - -

E A R L I E R

Tuesday April 15

My Favorite Flick
By Don George, Editor
Las Vegas
By Cynthia Gorney
Postmark: Bangkok
By Steve Van Beek
Passages:
"Under the Tuscan Sun"
By Frances Mayes
Readers' Tips
and Tales

A full list of all Wanderlust articles

BY DON GEORGE | as a confirmed wanderluster, I leaped at the chance when the L.A. Times Book Festival Planning Committee asked if I would fly down for their festival this past weekend and chair the panel on travel writing. I'll take any excuse to get on an airplane, and this one added the big bonus of talking about travel writing. What's not to like?

What was not to like was this: I was flying down Saturday morning and on Friday night I came down with a cold: an ornery, head-stuffing, sinus-flooding, muscle-aching, run-through-four-handkerchiefs-in-an-afternoon cold.

Before that happened, I had envisaged that I would zoom down to sun-drenched L.A., enthuse about my favorite subject with the other writers on the panel, schmooze with festival authors and editors afterwards, repair to some oh-so-trendy boîte for dinner and some other oh-so-trendier post-boîte spot for drinks and people-watching, grab the essence of L.A. and return to write a short, impressionistic evocation of palm trees and neon lights and tanner-than-I'll-ever-be people.

Then the head and the sinuses went kablooey, and now here I am back in the Bay Area on Sunday night trying to compose a lyrical evocation of a nonstop-nose-blowing dinner and a hellish night trying to will myself to sleep and not being able to. I hate it when that happens.

I do want to mention three highlights of the weekend:

Because he was a fellow panelist, I discovered the work of the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, whose book on Spain, "Roads to Santiago," has just been translated into English. This is travel writing at its best, full of richly perceived descriptions, deeply educated reflections and worldly passions. Highly recommended.

I stayed at a terrific hotel called Le Parc, located in West Hollywood at 733 N.W. Knoll Drive, an extremely comfortable all-suite place with a rooftop pool and tennis court, set in a relaxing residential neighborhood -- and at $225 for a one-bedroom suite, a competitive price for an area right next to Beverly Hills. Although the sad tale that follows transpired in that serene setting, in general the hotel truly felt like a home away from home.

And I had a delicious dinner right around the corner from the hotel at a dramatic Italian eatery called Alto Palato Trattoria, located at 755 La Cienega, near Melrose.

But because misery loves company, what I really want to tell you about is the nadir of the weekend: It all started at about 1 a.m. I had been restlessly turning, dropping off to almost-sleep and then awakening because I had to blow my nose or it was too stuffy and I was feverishly sweating, when a relentless tap-tap-tap-tap sound began outside my window.

At first I tried to ignore it, figuring it would soon stop. But it just kept on, drumming steadily through the black stillness of my room. Tap-tap-tap-tap.

After about 20 minutes of unsuccessfully ignoring it -- and in fact focusing on it more because I was trying to ignore it -- I decided to track it down. The sound was coming from the little kitchen area in the suite, more precisely from the air-conditioning unit mounted on the wall there.

Aha! I tried everything I could think of to make it stop: I turned knobs, adjusted levers, plugged and unplugged it -- to no avail. The tap-tap-tap-tap sounded as strong as ever.

I tried taking the cover of the unit off, but that just revealed a foam-like undercover, and I figured if I took that off, I might get into something I wouldn't know what to do with. I thought about calling the front desk, but it was 2 a.m. and I felt a little silly asking them to stop a tap-tap-tap-tap I couldn't even locate.

I tried stifling it with a pillow. Tap-tap-tap-tap.

I went back to bed.

As I lay in bed listening, my head pounding, my sinuses exploding, that little sound came to consume me.

Finally, I decided that outside my air conditioning unit there was a little man with a little wooden hammer making something, like in a fairy tale. As I imagined this more, I actually began to believe it, and I tried mentally to tell the little man to stop his tapping so I could fall asleep. Then I realized that I was really beginning to believe this and I got worried.

I had to find that sound and destroy it -- before it destroyed me.

I opened the doors onto my balcony and discovered that it was drizzling. After some seriously hallucinogenic investigative work involving clambering onto my plastic patio furniture, I determined that the little man was really condensation from the air conditioner above, which was doing its little skull-dance onto my unit: tap-tap-tap-tap.

I thought about trying to throw a towel onto the top of my unit, conjecturing that it would muffle the noise. This led to the intriguing sight of me in my pajamas at about 3 a.m. trying to balance on the slippery grillwork balcony of my patio with a towel twirling in my hand. When I realized I was really losing it and endangering myself in the process -- and how would I explain plunging into the bushes around the entrance to the hotel in my pajamas at 3 a.m.? -- I decided to go inside and turn on the radio. For a few moments the sounds of jazz blissfully obscured the little man, but then I could discern his steady beat beneath the notes: tap-tap-tap-tap.

In desperation I turned to the TV. I watched a "Mad TV" skit involving a guy who had just killed his parents, then Beavis and Butt-head thinking they were getting drunk on non-alcoholic beer, then Richard Gere saving Shelley Duvall from some really creepy French-speaking guy by blowing away the guy and his thugs at about 3:30. Tap-tap-tap-tap. I was finally debating whether I should order "Sorority Sex Kittens" from the Late Night Movie pay-per-view menu -- thinking that a numbing display of on-screen sex might both drown out the little man with the hammer and lull me to sleep -- when -- mirabile dictu! -- the little man stopped tapping. The drizzle had ended; the condensation had apparently dried up.

And so sometime in the pre-dawn hours silence descended like a benediction over my room, and I finally fell asleep.

A happy ending, (West) Hollywood-style.
April 22, 1997

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Don George is the Editor of Wanderlust. You can email him at dgeorge@salonmagazine.com.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Salon Wanderlust is published every Monday evening at 6 pm PST in Salon. Send all reader mail to wanderlust@salonmagazine.com. To receive a colorful weekly update on what's happening in Wanderlust, sign up here. Published articles are housed in the Wanderlust archives.