The Eagle Has Landed
October 7th, 2023
I couldn’t tender the last entry in this diary before quickly relaying your author’s long overdue, firsthand experience with Covid face to face, so to speak, at last, after birthing a whole friggin’ treatise about it, after near three years of dodging the bugger-fucker.
Here’s the tale of my first and only (so far, knock on wood) case of Covid.
I’ve mentioned several times throughout this narrative about the magical yet turbulent nature of the high desert in SoCal. It’s one of my go-to places, in terms of scrubbing the brain and finding some quiet time. I take my doggies out there quite often, in and around Joshua Tree, and down the Salton Sea way to visit the wanderers.
Anyhoo, there’s a cool little roadhouse way out in the boondocks, in a former Hollywood studio-built place called Pioneertown, where they used to film westerns of all kinds. After production companies folded tents there, locals cleaned it up and now it’s a touristy kinda place to visit, with local artisan offerings and kitschy Old West facades.
One of its main draws is a bar called Pappy and Harriet’s, a rustic venue that often hosts local talent and over the years, a few globally acclaimed acts as well, including the likes of Robert Plant and Paul McCartney. It was announced the Pretenders were going to play there in early October of 2023. Kind of a big deal, them playing so far out in the sticks. The only reason major acts play there on very rare occasions is for the novelty of it, jammin’ old school style at some hole-in-the-wall roadhouse off the beaten path.
I’m a big Pretenders fan. I love Chrissie Hynde. I’ve seen them several times live. I’d already returned to the live music scenes in ’21 and ’22, having seen the Stones, the Black Keys, Joe Bonamassa, and several others, though I’d been masked at each of those events, even though I was vaxxed five times over by that time in late ’23. I didn’t think I’d score a single ticket – my girl was out of the country in Singapore visiting family – because it’s such a small venue with limited capacity, only 900 people allowed inside, give or take. I knew it would sell out in less than sixty seconds. And it did. But somehow, I landed a GA ticket all the same before the clock ran out.
Off I went, into the high desert.
And as you surely have guessed, seeing as how most Americans had stopped wearing masks, I said fuck it, I’m vaxxed, I’m gonna attend this thing naked as a jaybird for the first time unmasked in a crowded space.
It’ll be fine.
Ha, ha. Famous last words, made infamous by good old twenty-twenty.
Now you might be thinking, well, sure, he sucked in some random aerosol droplets in a big crowd and boom, there ya go, serves him right.
But no. No, I think I know exactly how and why I became infected, and it was actually before I stepped one foot inside the venue.
Ya see, I got there a little early. I lined up in a waiting queue, sans a mask, with other fans who wanted the same thing I did…access to front row, so I could be up close and personal with Chrissie Hynde. A dangerous thing to do, actually, if you’re in the know about Chrissie and her cranky proclivities.
So, there was this dude in line right behind me. He was attending solo, same as I was. He was a local, had a place in 29 Palms down the road. He was a big fella, decked out in black leathers, lots of ink on his arms (he was indeed a Tattooed Love Boy…that’s for you Pretenders fans), his head topped with a white Stetson. He was already two sheets to the wind, having imbibed a good amount of something that smelled suspiciously like Jim Beam or Yukon Jack. His face was red as a beet, and not from the blazing sun overhead. He was amiable, outspoken, and clearly looking for a friend or a like-minded Pretenders fan. Have I mentioned how broken or lonely folks tend to gravitate toward me? I have? Okay then.
I humbly obliged him, enduring his rants and raves on how awesome Chrissie was, how much he missed the 80s, how we were all so fortunate to have landed our rare tickets to an exclusive show in the high desert, and where did I live and what did I do, blah blah blah.
Thing was, he was snottin’ and coughin’ and appearing feverish all throughout our extended conversation…we were in line for well over an hour, maybe two. And while I desperately tried to keep six feet of distance between us, well…you know how that goes, especially with folks under the influence who forget about standard personal space boundaries. I was just hoping he had a cold, or was maybe just sloppy drunk.
But nope.
When we went inside, I lost him in the crowd, and I did make it to the front rail. Which was awesome, of course. The Pretenders kicked ass, burned through a number of their big hits as well as a few new tunes, though Chrissie gave me a nasty side-eye for taking a few photos (she’s notorious for disavowing cell phone use at her performances), as seen in the photos here.
I hadn’t a clue I’d already been infected, and I rocked out for two hours before driving home in the dead of night back north. What drives me crazy in hindsight isn’t wondering whether that guy knew he was sick, didn’t care, and attended anyway, but rather that I stopped on the way home at an open-all-night IHOP outside of Morongo Valley for pancakes and coffee, and possibly infected my graveyard shift waitress.
Anyway, three days later, just like average Covid clockwork, I start feeling ill on a Saturday morning, and I took one of our leftover Covid tests in house, and boom, that dreaded second line appeared, after three years of not appearing in countless tests before.
Damn!
How’d it go, you ask?
Not near as bad as others, fortunately.
The first night was the worst. The fever. It was rough. I kept thinking about what my youngest boy had said, when he got his first case of Covid, back in its heyday of 2020. He said the fever and chills and aches were rough, but the emotional aspect of existential dread, the way Covid affected his feelings, his emotions, his brain power, that was what he said was the worst of it, and damned if I didn’t feel some of that myself. Not necessarily in the mortality ‘omg, I could die’ way, but rather, I felt as if the virus was altering my perceptions, and it didn’t feel precisely dreadful, but something close to it, something like ‘this ain’t right, this feels alien.’ That fucking bug. It messes with neurology as well as circulatory and respiratory systems.
In any case, my fever broke by morning. The rest of it was a cough and body aches for a week. Thanks to my vaccines. I didn’t even tell my girl I was sick ‘til she came home from overseas, ‘cause I didn’t want her to worry while she was trying to see family for the first time in years. She was not happy about my choice, upon reveal.
Yup. I chose to attend a gathering without protection, and I paid for it. A lesser cost than many others. Was attending the Pretenders live worth it? Ehh. I’d say yes, except for the fact I ran the risk of unknowingly infecting others as I stood there, smack dab in the center of the crowd. And that poor, midnight waitress. I think of her sometimes, even now, six months later. It’ s not like we were face to face, but we did chat a bit, mostly about the show I’d just seen and whether the cook had prepped his pancake batter fresh or if I was getting the stale batch.
Interestingly, my girl got Covid a month later, after she’d arrived back from Asia, when she attended a family gathering not far from Pappy’s, about 15 miles west of there. Both of us caught our first cases of Covid in the high desert, one of our sacred places. She soldiered through it.
Vaccines work.
Funny thing. About a month after her case of Covid, we both ended up catching RSV, and we agreed the RSV was a lot worse than the Covid. Blecch. But again…that’s ‘cause vaccines work, and we weren’t vaxxed for RSV.
I’m actually about to go get another Covid booster today. That’ll be my sixth, at this point. My girl is too, because we’re slated to see the Stones yet again, at the same place we saw them in ’21. Can’t believe Richards and Jagger are still jamming at 80 years young. There’s currently a Covid surge here in SoCal, what with Omicron variants JN.1, KP.2, KP.3, and LB.1 scourging through the masses, and we’re about to be exposed to 70,000 Angelenos down in Inglewood in two weeks. We figured more protection was prudent.
Will we wear masks? I dunno. Of the many thousands of folks that will be there, we’ll probably be the only two masked. I expect we’ll cave to mass peer pressure, but only because we’ll be recently vaxxed. Yet wearing masks in high impact gatherings like concerts still feels prudent.
That’s my Covid story.
Sorry, Chrissie. Up that close, I had to snap a few pix. Actually, for all I know, if my new pal in line did indeed just have a cold, it might’ve been Chrissie Hynde herself who first gave me Covid. That’s how close I was to her. Or…yikes…I may have ended up giving Covid to the rocker queen of Akron, Ohio. And as you can plainly determine from these images, I would rather not incur the wrath of Chrissie Hynde, especially if she knew I gave her Covid.
