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The next destination choice, which Alexas steered us towards for some
reason, was Puerto Rico. A very ex-girlfriend of mine, JENNIFER LEE
RIVERA, had lived there for a couple years and always raved about the
place.
"Clyde," she'd
say, "you just have to go. You just have to!" (Clyde's my
middle name, by the way.)
Alexas, clearly
hot for the Caribbean herself, kept trying to lure me in with talk of
hikes through some jungle abutting the hotel; meanwhile, I couldn't have
cared less. Although simultaneously excited by and scared to death of
scuba diving—the only thing I was really interested in doing down there—I
just wasn't feeling it. Besides, Alexas and I are about as tan as hairless
albino bats, so unless we wanted to fry (literally), the Caribbean wasn't
an option.
My Lust for Adventure
Trips and little schemes like this play nicely into my manic side, so in
no time I was caught up in the possibilities for adventure.
"Adventure!" I said to Alexas with clenched fists on my hips. "We need
adventure!"
What poor Alexas really needed was sleep and a sea kelp protein pack, but
she'd gotten me started with all of this talk about going somewhere, and
suddenly I was spending hours online looking at travel options for
anyplace that sounded interesting. My friend,
TONY SCOTTO, who was down for a visit, advised us to go someplace he'd
never been so he could get in his "vicarious travel quota." I said we'd
try to oblige.
Having taken over the travel planning, I decided to dump the whole spa
idea and instead became fixated on seeing interesting things. I tried to
think of places where no self-respecting American college student would
even consider going for Spring Break, and the best place I could
come up with was London. Neither of us had been there, but since the two
of us were Sherlock Holmes and Beatles fans, I thought we'd fit right in.
When I proposed London, Alexas crinkled up her nose and shook her head.
So, next on my list was Rome. No, she
said, too far and not enough time.
On one level I
agreed with her, however I reminded Alexas of another four-day trip we
took a couple years back to Las Vegas for the wedding of my friend,
JASON SADOFSKY, and his bride-to-be, NICOLE SPARKS. In a few short days, with a Corvette
convertible for a rental car, we covered over 1,500 miles and most of the
major sites in that part of the Southwest: Hoover Dam, Grand Canyon, Bryce
Canyon, and our favorite, Zion Canyon. How'd I manage it? Easy. I
stopped taking my medication and didn't sleep. Of course, Alexas didn't
get much rest during that trip, but we weren't out there to rest.
Back in the present, I thought about the sites that had eluded us that
time: the Four Corners (where you can step in four states—Colorado, New
Mexico, Arizona, and Utah—at the same time!), the Hopi Cliff Dwellings,
Arches National Park, and Monument Valley—land of Wile E. Coyote and the
Road Runner. There was talk of us finding a spa or two along our driving
route, where we could ride horses in the mornings and take mud packs in
the evenings.
It
sounded great. Great, that is, until I sprang awake one night and decided
against it. I suddenly realized that it was Alexas who really needed such
a trip, and what she needed was time to relax.
So, that's how we ended up in beautiful, exotic—Saratoga Springs, New
York.
Preparations
Together, Alexas and I stumbled on an inn/spa that had been a location in
one of our favorite movies, The Way We Were. This sold me immediately, but Alexas, being a bit more thorough than I, actually did
some research, calling the owner and asking about their treatments. Liking
what we heard, we started packing. (Actually, she started packing
while I ate a bag of Cracker Jacks and watched our new
Open Range DVD.)
In the process of deciding on a trip to take, we'd pared down our plans
considerably. What started out as a 6-day, 5-night expedition was quickly
whittled down to an overnight trip. Part of the problem was that our
wonderful kitty, SWEETIE, needs
fresh food and water every day. ELISSA MRAZ, my wife's best friend from
her days in acting school, normally cat-sits for us when we're away, but
she couldn't that weekend because she had to bird-sit for another friend.
She's now ash-sitting for another friend whose mother recently died in a
nursing home in the Bronx; someone needed to hold on to the cremated
remains, and the woman's family is in Chicago and can't get out here to
pick up the urn. (True story.) Were it not for Elissa, there'd be a hell of
a lot of hungry, lonely birds and cats out there, not to mention abandoned,
cremated remains of people. Dead or alive, we're all lucky to have her.
Anyway, we could only do an overnight thing because we needed to get back
for Sweetie. Meanwhile, it's just as well; it breaks my heart to leave her
for even a few hours during the day, never mind a long trip. Anytime I'm
away, I worry that I left the door open, that something is on, that
cat-stealing commandos will rappel down from the roof of our building and
steal our sweet kitty. As you can see, I tend to worry about the ones I love.
Since we sold our car last April, the boys at the Enterprise office in our
neighborhood have come to know me well. This time, they hooked me up with a little
upgrade: a black
Cadillac
Deville with the big 4.6L Northstar V-8. I got the full
insurance "protection" because my philosophy is, when the car you just rented is now a
smoking hulk on the side of the road, all you want to do is
walk away without any hassles. It's what Tony and I refer to as "You got the numbah!"
insurance.
The idea for this came about during a drive up to
the hinterland of Machias, Maine—real Down East—when I bumped into another
car at a stop light and my front fender caught on his trailer hitch. (Yes,
a trailer hitch on a CAR. You know you're in hick country when you see
that.) Continuing with the story, after I exchanged insurance info with
the guy—just in case his rusted-out Ford Granada suddenly developed a
broken frame—Tony kept joking that we ought to follow the guy and keep
ramming him. (Tony's originally from Brooklyn, by the way.) And when the poor wretch complained we'd yell out the window,
"You got the numbah!"—because he already had our insurance info. Get it?
Taking the Waters
We made it to the inn late Friday morning, and as we were walking up to the
entrance, I stood in the spot where Robert Redford was in The Way We Were
and pointed at where Barbra Streisand had been.
"Isn't it great?" I said.
"Yes, it's wonderful dear," Alexas said.
We went inside, chatted with the owner for a few minutes, and half an hour
later we were in this tiny room together adding cold water to our hot
mineral bath. A minute into the procedure, I was already uncomfortable.
The sound the water made coming out of
the pipes disgustingly resembled an old man coughing up phlegm. And the color of the water was strange
as well.
"Alexas, something's wrong," I said.
"What?"
"This water, it's brown."
The water didn't look brown coming out of the spigot, but once it
collected in the tub and I swished away some of the bubbles the owner had
added (obviously a ruse to disguise the brownness of the water) it was the
color of Gulden's mustard.
"There's sulfur in it," Alexas said. "It's good for you. Sucks the toxins
right out of your body.”
"All right." I said, sounding like a suspicious cartoon character. "I'll try it."
Alexas got in first and stretched out. Immediately I was annoyed because
the owner had told us we were getting a tub large enough for two, which to
me meant that two people—presumably
one male and one female—could
fit comfortably, like a Jacuzzi. Once, Alexas and I stayed
overnight at a place with an outdoor hot tub during a blizzard and had
complete use of it ourselves. Roomy. In this case, as soon as I got into the thing, Alexas was crowded out. She did her best to appear content with the
dime-sized section of the tub left to her, and I did my best not to look
cramped. Finally I got out and let her lay back with her champagne flute
of sparkling
cranberry juice.
Near the end of our
bath time,
before our other treatments began, Alexas let me back in the tub, and I
entertained her with a small act of rebellion: I kept adding water and
agitating the bath bubbles until they rose four feet out of the tub. Then
I'd partially submerge myself, move around beneath the bubbles, and
surface in a different spot. It made her laugh, which was my intention,
but I also wanted to stick it to the owner by making the bubbles hard to
get rid of.
(By nature, I'm
a spiteful guy. The kind of guy who saves rejection slips with the idea
that one day, when one of my books is a bestseller and those sad little
journals that rejected me come groveling for a morsel of my work, I can
snub them. I live for this sort of quiet, seething revenge.)
Mineral bath finished, it was time for the two of us to part for the afternoon. My
massage was next, and Alexas had a series of treatments for relaxation and
beautification. We kissed goodbye, and I sat down on a cushy wing-back
chair in a terrycloth robe they gave me. The robe was a good deal smaller
than my
Hammachler-Schlemmer robe at home, making it difficult to keep my
boys covered. I worked it out though, and then I started worrying about
the upcoming massage.
I'd had a
massage only once during my life—many, many years ago when I was in
college. (No, not one of those massages.) Coincidentally, I was
home on Spring Break at the time, and I went to see a girl I'd been hot
for in high school, TARA ROUGH. Tara was studying to become a massage
therapist, and she offered to give me a free one—kind of like those beauty
school people giving discounted haircuts.
The thing that had me worried about my upcoming massage at the inn was
that during my first and only massage, the one performed by Tara, I
experienced a
profound erection. Tara was somewhat taken aback, as I
recall, but tried to cover by explaining that sometimes the body has an
erotic response to the release of tension. Knowing that a man named Jason
was going to be giving me my massage, and associating the name "Jason"
with my brilliant but hirsute friend JASON SADOFSKY, I
prayed that my body didn't have a similar response.
Thankfully, it didn't. It turned out that Jason, my masseuse, was a huge,
heavyset man with a hypnotic voice. He had traveled the world
and been the masseuse for AXL ROSE in Guns and Roses. He was fascinating to listen to, and as his elbow dug into the
muscle between my shoulder blades, I felt a sensation of such startling
intensity—a cross between pain and release—that I almost passed out. But,
no hard-on, thank God.
After the massage, I retreated to our room, where I showered and changed.
Then I caught myself watching Adam Sandler's Happy Gilmore on USA and
knew I had to get outside for a while. Hey, I had the Caddy—why not go
exploring?
NotExploring
Saratoga Springs has a pretty main drag, even though it's flanked on
either side by pretentious versions of chain retail establishments like
Coach, Starbucks, and Banana Republic. They're all trying to give you that quaint, old
town feel, like they've been there since the 1800s. Sorry, folks. Not
buying it.
Driving through
town, I expected to find a lot of rambling horse farms with women sporting
big hats and men sipping mint juleps on their verandas, but I didn't.
Instead there were people in Range Rovers and Mercedes SUVs. Once I
reached the outskirts, however, the true character of this slice of
Upstate New York came out: lots of small businesses with fucked-up names,
as if the owners were willing to offend or disgust in order to bring in
the customers. Here's just a sample of the ones I saw: Rickets Dry
Cleaners, Locust Motel, and Slander Pool Supply. Oh, and don't
forget the
National Bottle Museum!
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WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE: Actually,
this is an alleged photo of the famed
Puerto Rico El Yunque Rain Forest.
Alexas wanted me to go out there
so I'd get eaten by a snake and
she could shack up with Jorge.
MONUMENT VALLEY: Land of my
favorite cartoon character, that model
of persistence, Wile E. Coyote, Genius.
I
entertained her with a small act of rebellion: I kept adding water to
the tub and agitating the bath bubbles until they rose four feet in
the air. Then I'd partially submerge myself, move around beneath the
bubbles, and surface in a different spot. It made her laugh, which was my
intention, but I also wanted to stick it to the owner by making the
bubbles hard to get rid of.
THE CULPRIT: A mineral bath allegedly
designed for "two" that barely held one.
After I was done with them, the bubbles
were higher than the backsplash.
COMFY: Here we are, in our robes,
after the mineral bath. Now we're
about to choke down some of
the disgusting sulfur water.
QUESTION: Why is it that these massage
rooms, Spartan as they are, so closely
resemble prison cells?
NOT WHAT I SAW: Instead, I got to see
about
20 Banana Republics and a dry-cleaning
establishment named Rickets.
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