In Which I am Dreaming

Mister MacFarland and I are in Hawaii on vacation. We're at the front desk of our hotel in Waikiki, checking in, and the clerk informs us that we're Shark Level guests - room 341, mahalo. We turn towards the elevators, rolling our bags along on a rather rickety carrier, and I take stock of the place as we walk.

The hotel is a four-story open square; one side of the square is the beach, the ocean. The others enclose a swimming pool area chock full of water-features - a floating bar, a faux waterfall, a slide apparatus disguised as a rock outcropping, a diving board shaped like a surfboard. There are little astro-turf "islands" in the pool, on which stand plastic flamingoes and coconuts carved into little tikis. The decor, the building - everything has this kitschy nineteen-fifties feel, this sort of Space-Age Does Hawayah! ambience that makes me feel as if I'm in a Polynesian version of one of James Lileks's decorating books.

Mister MacFarland and I repair to Shark Level, which, we shortly discover, is really only a tarted-up way of saying "third floor". Our room, while clean and tidy, is something on the order of the room that I stayed in while vacationing with my parents in Daytona Beach in 1973. Thin, tropical-patterned poly-cotton bedspreads, unraveling rattan chairs, a battered but serviceable desk with the hotel's literature in a naugahyde binder and containing, no doubt, a Gideon's Bible. The all-glass "front" of the room, facing the pool and the ocean, is bordered on the bottom by a cheap-motel air-conditioner, and heavy drapes of an unnervingly dissimilar tropical pattern and color from the bedspread hang on a slide rod, ready to shut out the view - and the neighbors - with the pull of a cord with a plastic tassel shaped like a pineapple.

We set down our luggage. I pee, while Mister MacFarland shuffles through his things for his cigars. He finds one, I change clothes, and we go out to explore.

I wake up.