Help! Dottore Gianni is sliding down a rabbit hole concocted by an abandoned trip, The Rum Diary, and the Depp-Heard Proceedings
Eh?
A few weeks ago I canceled a three-week trip to Italy due to Covid complications and personal fears. Somehow, between Fall 2019, when, at age 72 I took my last trip abroad (of many - just scroll down the posts in this blog) and now, in spring 2022 I managed to age many more than 3 years...more like 30. Perhaps some of you have felt the same. I have lost confidence in my ability to cope with foreign travel, which is sad because it is the greatest love of my life.
I grew angry at myself. How can I be so afraid of three weeks in Europe? Of the flights there and back? Even of getting to and from the airport, for God's sake? I felt ashamed that I let cowardice get the best of me.
Dottore Gianni treated me to a few stiff drinks, and I calmed down. I decided on an antidote, therapy, something to settle my fears. I'd take a very short trip, in my own time zone, to a place that offers a foreign feel but that is still in the US: A three night stay in Viejo San Juan Puerto Rico. No Covid tests (I am fully vaccinated and boosted) either way, no jet lag, and a much shorter flight than taking a red eye from the US to Europe. An interesting, historical to a city and state, a territory that I'd not yet visited. Great!
I booked a Delta flight, and a boutique hotel - very posh, too much so for my pocketbook, but it was for only three nights, not three weeks - right in the center of the Old Town. Next I did what I always do before I travel. Research. I found an unusual history of Puerto Rico from its founding to 1903, just a few years of its acquisition by the US after the Spanish American war. I also found two very short and dull books that describe walking tours of the Old Town, one geared for two days there, the other stuffing the activity into just one. So far so good...but wait...
Since retiring in 2012, in addition to poring over histories and guide books I began to read some fiction set in the place I was to visit. Not a lot that interested me in novels featuring San Juan, except for an early novel by author/journalist/gonzo Hunter S. Thompson (hereafter HST). In case you don't know him he is probably most famous for his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his outrageous lifestyle, and...well, let's just say he didn't want his ashes scattered to the wind, instead he ordered them shot out of a cannon. Oh well. My find is titled The Rum Diary, an account of his own time in Old San Juan. The setting was perfect for me, set for the most part in the old town. The first scene features the protagonist, a dissolute journalist, boarding a plane from the continental US to San Juan. His fellow travelers are mostly Puerto Ricans returning home, but he spots a beautiful blonde and literally shoves the old man sitting next to him, waving for the blonde to come next to him. It doesn't work out, but later...well, what happened after that is not important, but suffice to say that the journalist and the blonde are featured throughout the book.
It's a nasty book, cynical, violent, downright brutal at times, and although pretty well written it nearly put me off my journey. The rabbit hole loomed before me...
Watching CNN or MSNBC I discovered that at the same very time (and still going on) Johnny Depp was/is in court accusing his ex-wife, Amber Heard, of harassment and of ruining his career. So? Well, it happens that Johnny Depp was friends with HST, one of the gonzo journalist's many manly male pals, but my slide into the rabbit hole began with my discovery that Depp had starred in the film version of The Rum Diary as the journalist. Guess who played the beautiful blonde in the film? Amber Heard. Yes, you heard it here. The two met on the film set and fell in love, and, to steal a line from Eugene O'Neill, were "so happy, for a time..." After which I suppose they began a slide down their own private rabbit hole.
To be fair, my own treacherous journey (down the rabbit hole, not down to Puerto Rico) had already begun. While I was much more confident of the brief trip to Puerto Rico than the planned much longer trip to Italy, I had already come to feel doubtful and dubious about the journey to San Juan. But this odd and slightly uncomfortable set of coincidences: discovering the "perfect" novel, reading it, being bothered by it, then the seeing reports of the Depp/Heard trial - stoked my doubts about traveling to Old San Juan.
I can't tell if I would have given up the trip on this weird set of circumstances alone, because the final catalyst, the one that practically buried me in the rabbit hole, came just after. The night before my flight I heard on the news, PBS Newshour? CNN? MSNBC? Doesn't matter - that a meddlesome Trump-ist judge did away with the mask mandate for travel, just hours before my flight. That really put me in a funk as I imagined the confusion at airports and on flights etc. I couldn't sleep a wink at all that night, tossing and turning until at 4 am I cancelled my flight and hotel. I was to leave for the airport at about 7 am.
It is now a few days later. I am calm. But to Covid, The Rum Diary, Depp and Heard and a Trump-judge I shout to the winds:
A plague on ALL your houses!
Fact fueled the flames, and fiction flung me down that hairy rabbit hole.
The (somewhat bitter) End
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