Journey Aboard the Great White Bus

My friend Sara and I are going to the Caribbean island of St. Maarten to try and escape the current misery of Minnesota, if only for a week. On the morning of my 6 a.m. flight to paradise, I wake up to a moderate feeling of nausea and dizziness. The first thing I do is a little Period Math to rule out the possibility that I might be pregnant. Then I tally the number of drinks I had the night before (two Tanqueray and tonics, which are not hangover inducing at my level of functioning alcoholism). Then I try and remember everything I did or didn’t eat the day before and I don’t remember doing anything foolhardy like playing with a wild monkey and its feces or licking the escalator railing at the mall.

None of this matters, though, because I still feel as though I have a combination of all the sicknesses in the world, including pregnancy, alcoholism, food poisoning, and bird/swine flu.

Considering that the thought of showering is enough to make my eyes pop out and stomach turn inside-out, I am starting to question whether or not this trip to heaven is going to happen. I remain hopeful that this nausea is just a passing fancy because I rarely throw up or catch the flu of any kind. I am from a hearty stock and it just isn’t in my DNA to throw up. My DNA is more likely to fake throwing up or to catch other fake flu-like symptoms to avoid work or school or wearing unfashionable clothes. I just hope that God isn’t just now catching on to my little fake flu charade and has decided to collect on my countless empty promises to never fake an illness again.

I slowly make my way toward the shower on my hands and knees. Doing this makes me realize that this is not going to be a fake throwing up attack but a real-live projectile throwing up situation. I weakly run to the bathroom and puke out my intestines for at least 15 minutes. Even though I still feel like someone landed an airplane on my head, I do feel slightly less queasy and thus encouraged that this puke attack is over and my trip is going to happen. That is, until I stand up and turn the shower on and realize that the only place my body wants to visit is the bathroom floor or the toilet bowl or both.

I fight every urge to die and weakly step into the shower, or more accurately, crawl into the shower and lie down. I let the water splash down on any really dirty body parts while hanging my head out of the tub to puke in the nearby toilet. I am just toweling myself off when I hear the “ding-dong” of my doorbell downstairs and I curse the fact that for once I called for a taxi to the airport the night before so I wouldn’t be “rushed.”

It takes me at least 10 minutes to crawl to the bedroom, throw on sweatpants and a t-shirt and slowly shuffle-step to the front door. My eyes, when open, are trained on the floor and I am focusing all of my energy on not throwing up on the nice foreign-looking man standing on my patio. I shield my puke-breathy mouth with one hand and cling to the wall with the other and tell him I am running just a few minutes late. Then I shut the door and go lie on the floor out of his eyesight and call Northwest Airlines to see if they can fit me onto another flight out of Minneapolis.

The customer service rep is surprisingly chipper considering it is 4:30 a.m. and I am barely audible or coherent when I ask if there are any other flights to St. Maarten today or tomorrow. I can hear the click-click of her keyboard as she enters in my information and hums some sort of torturously happy song in my ear. Then the ohhhhh-ing starts. “Ohhhhhhh, no ohhhhhh no. Wait. Ohhhhhh no no. We do not have any other flights going to St Maarten until next Sunday. Ohhhhhh no. If you do not make this flight today, you will not be making it at all. Sorry but that is your only option unless you check with another airline and buy another ticket. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

I don’t even have the strength to come up with some sort of smart-ass comment so I hang up and crawl back upstairs to have a pep talk with myself. “You can do this! It’s only an eight-hour trip. You can sleep the whole way. You have nothing left to throw up so I’m sure you just need to eat something and settle your stomach. You’ll be fine. Be strong! Get going!”

My phone rings and it’s my friend Sara calling (most likely to make sure I am awake and not going to miss the flight). I can hear her sing-song voice as I answer and the sound of her happiness nearly makes me faint. “Hellllloooooo!!!! Are you ready to go to paradise???” When I explain the situation I am in, I can literally hear her internal screams of anger and frustration. She wishes me luck and says she hopes to see me at the airport and I can tell it took her a church-load of patience and kindness for her to spit out that much.

I begin zipping up my suitcase (Have I even finished packing?) and dragging it down the stairs. While I let the taxi driver load it into his car, I make one (hopefully) last stop in the bathroom to throw up my guts before I head to the airport. When I step outside, I notice that the taxi company didn’t just send any old taxi in the fleet but a Lincoln Towncar. Lovely.

I would not have felt horribly bad if I had blown chunks in a Yellow Cab but I will certainly feel bad for yakking it up all over his new beige leather interior and getting puke permanently encrusted into his new power doors and locks. Lord knows how many years of drunken college kids, bachelorette parties, and feuding couples he had to put up with before he finally earned a spot on the Lincoln Towncar team, and I am going to ruin it all in just one 15-minute ride. As I slump into the back seat, I just hope I have thrown up for the last time and that he has not caught on that I am most certainly going to decorate his back seat with a whole lot of last night’s pizza.

I make it approximately four minutes in the car before I have to yell, “Let me out LET ME OUT LET ME OUT NOW!” He squeals across three lanes of traffic and stops the car along the side of the road just as I am hanging my head out of the door.

When I am done, I shamefacedly look at him and mutter, “Thanks for pulling over. I don’t think I got anything on your interior,” while he looks on in disgust. He hands me a few Kleenexes and motions toward my face, signifying that while I didn’t throw up on his car, I did throw up on myself, and as it turns out, in multiple spots. As I clean my face off, I do not dare look or sniff anywhere near my clothes. If some puke landed anywhere on or near the only outfit I brought with me for the plane ride, then I will surely break down and make him take my home. I push on.

I have to make him pull over on the highway twice more on the ride to the airport. I give him the largest tip known to taxi drivers the world over for not kicking me out on the highway to fend for my pukey self. I have an hour to check in and find my gate and hopefully find a way to stop myself from puking all over.

I see Sara walking toward me and the look on her face makes me feel like puking just in shame. She silently grabs my suitcase and helps me check in while I throw up in two garbage cans in the main terminal. If my heaves were contractions, they would be about one minute apart and would result in at least puke triplets.

I get the gate information from her and then I tell her to go ahead without me and I’ll do my best to get to the gate in time. She is gone before I even have the words out of my mouth (most likely because while I am saying it I am also shoving a person out of the way and throwing up into yet another garbage can).

I am so close to that goddamn plane and I tell myself that there is no turning back now. I decide to go to the bathroom one last time and hopefully empty my system for good before I shuffle to my gate. Unfortunately the bathroom is at least 50 feet away… while a nice convenient trash can is a mere three feet away, so I bury my head into the trash can and silently pray that maintenance has not seen any of the damage I am doing to each and every one of the garbage cans at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.

As if God is silently mocking me, our gate is the LAST gate in the terminal. I am too sick to even move on the automated walkways; instead I stand hunched over while the normal healthy people pass me by on their way to fabulous puke-free vacations. I arrive at the gate 15 minutes before it is supposed to take off, and I see that Sara is there waiting for me. She points at me and says to the flight attendant, “See? I told you she’d make it!” and we all briefly smile.

I have made it to the finish line and I feel relief and the slight need to puke so I reach over the flight attendant scanning my ticket and throw up (for the last time?) into her trash can. I gracefully grab my ticket out of her hand and victoriously make my way onto the plane. I say a silent “Fuck you!” to my tummy and celebrate my triumph over acid reflux.

As we settle in, Sara asks one of the flight attendants for a few extra airsickness bags “because her friend isn’t feeling very well.” This news moves like wildfire through the entire flight crew and they all quickly convene in a circle around me to discuss the situation. For my part I am trying my best to look well and swallow back any impulses to use one of my airsickness bags even before we have left the ground.

“Ma’am, we cannot let you fly to another country if you are carrying any sort of contagious virus. You are going to have to exit the plane and fly another day. We just cannot risk you spreading something to the other passengers.” I quickly explain that I am just fine and that I don’t have the flu – just a little food poisoning that is now completely done. If they think they are getting me off the plane then they are crazier than even me for puke-walking a mile from the terminal to the plane.

I can sense that while I am explaining myself in a semi-coherent manner, I am also doing a half-gag/half-speaking motion in front of the flight crew. They look at me very closely and I smile (mouth closed just in case something blurts out) and they warn us that they will be watching me very closely and will not hesitate to turn the flight around if needed. I don’t care – I am on the plane and I have five puke bags and a blanket. I’ll figure the rest out later.

The next five hours of the flight go something like this:

• Sleep for 45 minutes
• Dry heave for five minutes
• Receive small “I will injure you if you ruin my vacation” pat on the arm from Sara
• Chew piece of gum for puke breath
• Dry heave the piece of gum out
• Get dirty looks from the passengers and flight attendants
• Pass out

On the bright side, I have moved past the throwing up stage and into the dry heaving stage. I feel like I have made Olympic-level strides in just the past four hours. I begin to calculate how many pounds lighter I will now be on vacation due to this unexpected puke-fest. Having the bird flu/malaria/food poisoning does have its pre-vacation advantages! A big bag of fried food to celebrate my new slimmer physique is soon to be mine – All mine!

Now that I have stemmed the tide of throwing up, I am left with a massive headache. I add an aspirin to my hourly dry heaving schedule but it does little to help since it only reaches the top of my esophagus before getting forcibly spewed back out.

We have a three-hour layover in Puerto Rico and I tell Sara to go tour the city without me, which was our original pre-puking plan. I will find a bench or concrete sidewalk to pass out on and she can find me exactly where she left me and then transport me to the connecting flight on a Smart Carte in a few hours. God bless her heart, she says she will stay with me. I decide that the only way I will kick this fucking cholera is to coat my stomach with grease.

I wish I could say that there are times in my life when I’ve been too nervous/upset/sick/tired to eat, but that is not the case. I also have never “forgotten to eat” like some of those ridiculous stick insect-type people claim. I can forget to do a lot of things, like shave my legs or put deodorant on or wear clean underwear, but never would I just plain forget to eat. Rather than “feeding a cold, starving a fever,” I follow the “feed the flu and starve nothing” approach.
I order a chicken strip basket at Long John’s Silver (in my defense, it was either LJS or Pollo Loco so I think I chose the lesser of two evils) and try to at least swallow a fry or two to see if it will stay down. It does and I feel like I’m already on the other side of this strange tuberculosis attack.

We decide to hop onto a random shuttle bus and see where it takes us. Turns out the next random shuttle bus is the shuttle to the Ritz Carlton. I am wearing a slightly puke-stained white t-shirt and pink sweat pants with glasses, no make-up and old flip-flops… To the Ritz Carlton. I walk through the lobby and hide behind plants and people with large pool toys until we hit the beach where I can blend in with the Spring Breakers and indigent islanders.

After two hours of lying in the shade next to the ocean, I can indeed confirm that the beach has the ultimate restorative powers. By the time we arrive in St. Maarten that evening, I down a free “welcome to the island” shot and chow down on appetizers at the French restaurant near our hotel.

All was forgiven with Sara within completion of our first fruity drink and beachside massage. I know that I don’t always take the straightest or most convenient path to my destination, but I do end up exactly where I need to be.

© Copyright 2009, Jennifer Cresap.

Double Down, Part 2

When we left off, the Cresap's were merrily on their way to Vegas when their luck ran dry. As we pick up the story, the Cresap's are left with the possibility that their 4-of-a-kind trip was on its way to going bust.

The flight attendants and the pilots decide that we will continue the flight and land in Vegas, but my mom will have to go straight to the hospital. They have an ambulance waiting on the tarmac to whisk her straight away. While we are letting the paramedics take a look at her, we are yet again stuck in the galley with Thor, the world’s most climb-able photographer and Canadian.

I have forgotten about him in the rush of everything else going on, but my sister is still quite smitten. I can hear her making awkward small-talk and trying to get Thor’s hotel name out of him before he leaves the plane. When she doesn’t get very far, I reassure her that she wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with him anyway, as giants have lower lung capacity and tire easily and he’d have to stop midway through sex to eat a full meal which would ruin the mood and make it extremely difficult for him to properly satisfy her needs.

The ambulance will only allow my dad in the vehicle with my mom, so my sister and I are left to track down all of the luggage and try and drag it to our hotel. Then we are left to check into our room and down a few margaritas. And then gamble for a few hours.

We keep calling my dad and asking if we should come to the hospital but he insists it isn’t necessary. Finally the doctors tell him they are going to make my mom stay overnight for observation. Nothing looks wrong and my mom has started self diagnosing herself with “a case of gas” for the past few hours. She could be completely right but I am still skeptical since I have never heard of someone farting so much that they faint and I just want to rule out any other freakish diseases or conditions. I don’t think she would actually mind being stuck in the hospital all night if it had a slot machine next to her bed. Then we could probably leave her there all week and would only need to occasionally stop by and drop off some new clothes and a few dozen rolls of quarters.

We get my dad settled into his hotel room and then leave him to officially start his Vegas vacation with a long nap. We don’t get very far because my mom calls to check and make sure he (i.e. we) have remembered to hang up all of her blouses in the hotel closet so they don’t get too wrinkled. I assure her that all of her shirts will be ready for her once they finally spring her out of the hospital in the morning, and then we go back and pester my dad into letting us into his room so we can shake out her clothes and put them in the bathroom so that the steam from tomorrow’s shower will do the job that we are all too lazy to do.

We arrive at the hospital the next afternoon (we didn’t want to show up too early and interrupt her rest, plus the slots were playing very loose that morning, most likely in my mom’s honor), and manage to sneak a few pictures of my mom in her un-showered hospital gown glory.
They have done a battery of tests on her and can’t seem to find anything wrong, which is comforting and frustrating all at once. I almost wish for the doctors from the TV show House to appear and solve this medical mystery so we can shake the uneasy feelings that the first 12 hours of our trip have left us with.

While my mom practically catapults herself into her clothes and races to the door, we manage to squeeze some medications out of the doctor just in case another un-diagnosed and un-treated mystery attack occurs. As we walk out of the hospital, my sister, dad, and I flank her on all sides, watching her like a 13-month-old toddler taking her first steps. She won’t let us hold her hand or form a support chain around her and after about 30 minutes, we loosen up and let her walk two feet in front of us as long as she agrees to raise her hands or yell “Oy!” if she needs to stop and rest or feels like fainting in public.

The bad karma of the previous 12 hours follows us around for the next 12 hours, and we are all on edge waiting for the next shoe to drop. Which Cresap will go down now? Will dad choke on a chicken wing and smear sauce all over the EMTs who arrivesto help him? Or will Jodi trip on a dancer’s feather boa and land face-first in a cement fountain? Or will Jenny go blind and start eating food off the street? Any of these things were possible, and we feared that they would all happen at once.

What we didn’t expect to happen is that my mom’s bad fortune would turn into the best kind of good fortune. Within half-hour of starting to gamble, she won $1,100 at a slot machine. The woman hit a hot spot and could not lose. Her mystery illness translated into mystery good luck. Neither could be explained by any of us, but it wouldn’t have been a family trip without either (or both) of them happening.

© Copyright 2009, Jennifer Cresap.

Double Down, Part 1

My sister and I somehow weaseled our way onto our parents’ Vegas getaway and we feel pretty good about it. The parents will get free entertainment by their charming and stimulating daughters and we will get free meals and possible gambling money (and maybe a new pair of shoes if we can successfully shake our dad off our tail for a few minutes so he is not monitoring our abuse of mom’s credit card).

We fly to Denver in the morning and have a connecting flight out of Denver. Since our flights were paid for by the generous Parents de Cresap, my sister and I would have been happy with connecting through New York, making our way to Atlanta, connecting through Orlando and then over to our final destination of Vegas. When it’s free, we are surprisingly flexible.

On our connecting flight out of Denver, my sister is seated one row ahead of me, which allows me the golden opportunity to annoyingly tap her on the head and ask her questions throughout the flight (Is it warm up there? Do you smell oranges? Do you have any gum? Can I borrow $50? Ok then, $5?). When she finally yells at me to leave her alone and puts on her headsets, I look for other ways to amuse myself and find that if I look through the crack in the seat between my sister and the passenger on her left, I can read what the passenger has on his laptop.
And it is good.

The passenger is a guy who is clearly new to the area of lovemaking because he is reading some sort of “Scorin’ with the Ladies 101” book. From the small sliver of his head that I can see from my vantage point, he doesn’t look like an unattractive guy but maybe I can’t see the eye patch or dwarf arms or missing ear or something else that has hindered his ability to do the deed. Based on his black nondescript t-shirt, dark-washed jeans, and fancy techno-type headphones, he looks like he could safely pass for a 23-years-old non-virgin. But who am I to say?

The book offers step-by-step instructions to getting’ it on, like, “When you start to kiss a member of the opposite sex, make sure you form your lips in a round oval shape and that you don’t have too much spit or saliva on your tongue. Kiss her gently at first with both lips making a puckering motion onto her lips, and then, if it is appropriate, lightly use your tongue to touch her tongue or lips. Remember, kissing can be a way of communicating your respect so be sure to do it right.

“Many men think that they can touch a woman’s breast right away, but they couldn’t be more wrong. First, you should start by tenderly caressing her cheek to make sure she knows you find her attractive before you even look in the direction of her breasts. When you do finally touch her breasts, be gentle. Lightly stroke them and if appropriate, you can use your tongue to very lightly lick them.”

I am in heaven! I am hoping the book carries on to the sex part soon, although there could be three more chapters just on different kinds of kisses (butterfly, Eskimo, angel, etc) and I don’t have that kind of time. I would love to get my sister’s attention and see if she can speed him along a little bit by offering a high-level verbal tutorial on kissing and foreplay so we can skip ahead to the good stuff but she is currently still ignoring me.

I am so wrapped up in finding out what happens after the kissing but before the heavy petting that I barely hear one of the flight attendants ask if there are any doctors on the plane. I see a few flight attendants go whizzing past me and up the aisle and I wonder if a little kid or an old person has thrown up or had a panic attack. I look up for a few seconds but I don’t want the kid to scroll ahead in the book when I’m not looking and I miss out on reading about how to work the other erogenous zones. I am amazed that this kid can read about sex on a plane and: 1) does not have a huge hard-on (even if the text borders on clinical) and 2) would not be embarrassed if someone (me) caught him reading it in public.

A few minutes go by and I notice that the flight attendants are now walking briskly toward the back of the plane, kind of back by where my parents are seated. I immediately think, “Oh no, just their luck – I bet my parents are sitting next to a sick guy!”

When I look back to check on them, I notice my dad is standing up and motioning down toward my mom and mouthing the words, “It’s mom. Something’s wrong.” I can see that she is slumped to the side of her seat and may be throwing up or just looking for the SkyMall magazine. It is hard to say at this point until I see her begin to heave into an airsickness bag and slump backward into her seat again.

Crap! We have a Cresap down!

As I try and grab my sister and leap over the guy seated next to me to get into the aisle, we nearly have a second Cresap down. My mom is completely out of it and looks like she has fainted and possibly more. A nurse or doctor-type lady is in my dad’s seat and taking her pulse and putting an oxygen mask on her face. I instantly think that her heart is giving out and we are going to have a serious problem on our hands since we are currently flying over the Rocky Mountains.

My dad is a little shaky and trying to give the flight attendant some basic info about my mom but we take over that task and move into the galley so we aren’t blocking the path for others. In the galley, we give the flight attendants what they need and notice there is a large ruggedly handsome man standing back there. He must be the guy sitting next to my parents who is now displaced due to my mom’s unfortunately timed fainting spell.

While we are in crisis mode and completely worried about my mom, we are also using the only coping mechanism available to us and that is completely inappropriate humor. My sister starts egging me on to talk to the large stranger and I am inclined to do it since I have tried hovering over my mom and the doctor and I can’t hear a thing and I need to do something to distract myself from my worry. He is very tall and sturdy and I can already picture myself repelling up and down his large torso during a day of wild sex either on the plane or in one of our hotel rooms.
Thor is a very nice photographer who has been traveling from Toronto to Vegas, a trip that has taken him 13 hours so far. He is clearly tired and I can only think of one thing that I could do to help perk him up out of his hazy exhaustion and that thing starts with blow and ends with job. Unfortunately another guy comes into the galley area and starts talking to Thor, thus thwarting our attempts to sexually harass him and forcing us to focus on the reality of what is wrong with our mom.

I peek my head around the corner and it seems like my mom is more alert. This time she recognizes me when I look at her and gives me the thumbs-up sign through the oxygen mask. She would be absolutely mortified if she could see the serious case of fainting hair she has, as well as that the doctor has unbuttoned her blouse halfway, exposing part of her tummy and bra.
I mention this to my dad, but being that he is the Grand Marshall of the Completely Inappropriate Thought Parade, he gets a mischievous glint in his eye and suggests that we let the medical professionals do their work and if mom’s breast needs to be exposed to help save her life, then so be it. Clearly he will sneak a peek at my mom’s goodies no matter the situation, which is sort of heartwarming and also disgusting at the same time.

When this incident started, we were about halfway to Las Vegas and there was talk of turning the plane around and going back to Denver so my mom could get medical treatment. When my mom catches wind of this rumor, she insists that she is okay and starts protesting the notion of going back. Sadly for her, she has lost her power to vote, being that she passed out and all. We decide not to tell her this small fact as we don’t need her walking up and down the aisles insisting to everyone she is okay and then giving them all hugs and $10 in tokens for their trouble.
Tune in next week to find out if Jodi or I get to repel up and down Thor's body in sexual and non-sexual ways, if my mom finds a slot machine even in her medical time of need, and if my dad is able to sneak a peek at my poor mom's exposed body without getting a dirty look from my mom.

© Copyright 2009, Jennifer Cresap.