No Easy Way to Hollywood

There is no quick drive to Hollywood. I can take the freeway north through the San Fernando Valley, a twenty mile trip. Or I can take it east through downtown for nineteen miles. A direct route is eight miles, but that’s tedious stop-and-go on city streets. Taking the long way doesn’t mean an easy drive because the freeway is often but unpredictably jammed.

When Loews in Hollywood called at 11 p.m. my heart sank less than usual. It was late enough for most drivers to be in bed.

But not quite late enough. The male fun fair in West Hollywood was in full swing, filling the streets.   

Loews in Santa Monica calls me exclusively, but the Hollywood Loews keeps a list of doctors, thus assuring that none of us will lean over backward to accommodate it by, for example, coming during the rush hour (no hotel doctor lives near Hollywood).

My immediate problem in a nonexclusive hotel is that parking valets may not recognize me, so my mantra:  “I’m the hotel doctor. They let me park here” might not work, and I would have to pay. But it worked this time.

As usual, delivering medical care was the easiest part. A perk of hotel doctoring is that I go home after seeing a single guest. During my best months, I go home a hundred times.

I like my job, but going home always feels better than going to work. I played my audio tape. I looked benignly on the midnight revelers as I crept through West Hollywood. Beverly Hills and Century City were nearly deserted, but traffic lights ensured that I would not make haste.

Ever Hopeful

I made a housecall to the Four Seasons recently. Years ago, I shared the Four Seasons elevator with Robert Duvall. He was reading a script, and I pretended not to notice.

I’ve responded to half a dozen calls from that hotel over thirty years, but this was not one. Assistcard, a travel insurer, had sent me to see an 18 month-old with a cold. I took care of the child and left without introducing myself to the concierge.

The Four Season’s house doctor is the only colleague who has been around longer than I, and he serves half a dozen premier luxury hotels around Beverly Hills. In the distant past I covered for him when he wasn’t available. My records show 45 visits to the Four Seasons and several hundred to his other hotels. I loved those calls.

I retired in 2003 and unretired in 2007. During my absence he found someone else to help out. While he welcomed me back, I’m no longer his main support, but he phones at rare intervals.

When insurance services send me to hotels that don’t call, I remind the staff of my superior qualities. This has proved an excellent source of new clients but, ever hopeful, I don’t solicit this doctor’s hotels.  

Another Year

A wave of heat poured out of the guest’s room as he opened the door.

“Another year has passed,” I reminded myself. May 13 marked Los Angeles’s first heat wave of 2013. The temperature reached 91. Since autumn I’d forgotten that people around the world, Arabs excepted, consider air conditioning unhealthy. They tolerate it as one of the exotic discomforts of travel but not when someone gets sick.

This is not a belief amenable to reason, so I go about my business, sweltering in my suit and tie. I rarely take off my jacket because I keep tools (thermometer, tongue depressor, flashlight, otoscope, syringes, prescription pad) in various pockets. Sometimes medicine is hard.