Hell of a Book Read online

The angry man behind me shouts something about the high cost of two daughters with braces.

  The elevator doors start to close and I kick it into a gear higher than I knew I had. I’m just a blur of knees, and elbows, and naked flesh. Even my genitals have pulled themselves into an aerodynamic tuck.

  I’m just close enough to make a dive as the elevator doors begin to close. I take the leap.

  It’s all slow motion. I sail through the air for what seems like an hour. As I soar past the Blue Hair—just before my face meets the back of the elevator—I can see from the smirk on her face that this isn’t her first late-night rodeo. She’s been around. She’s danced on water in life’s late hours.

  My face meets the elevator wall a split second before my body does. Momentum holds me there like a bug on a windshield, then gravity shows up again and I thud to the ground.

  “Thirty-second floor, please,” I say as soon as my naked body has come to rest on the floor of the elevator. The Blue Hair complies and pushes the elevator button.

  The two of us watch the doors grind closed just as the husband with bloody murder in his eyes—who probably isn’t a bad guy when you really get to know him—reaches the elevator a moment too late and can’t do anything other than watch me leave. He shouts something indecipherable as the doors close in front of him. Something to do with responsibility. Something to do with family, and marriage, and love.

  Then he’s gone and there’s just me and the Blue Hair. The two of us watch the elevator count off the hotel floors one by one. I imagine the silence is awkward for her. Most people don’t like silences. I learned that at my old job. I used to answer phones for a living. All day long, that job was nothing but talking to people. I’m not what you might call a people person. I hated that job. But the irony is that by working there, I found out how to talk to people really well. One thing I know is how to make folks feel comfortable.

  “Hell of a night,” I say.

  “I could tell you stories,” the Blue Hair replies, quick as a whip.

  “I’ll bet you could. You’ve got that look about you.”

  “Life’s chaos,” the woman says, sounding suddenly like an oracle. “It’s all just a runaway mule hell-bent on destruction.”

  “That’s some mule.”

  “You bet it is.”

  I give a nod to indicate her grocery bags. “Good haul?”

  “Capital,” she says. “Just capital.” She gives a nod to indicate my exposed genitals. “You wax?”

  “No, ma’am. Razor.”

  “Gets that close?”

  “Five blades. Pivoting head. Marvel of the modern age.”

  The woman nods in agreement. Then she clears her throat and contorts the corners of her thin, old lips into a thin, old frown and says “Did you hear about that boy?”

  “Which boy?”

  “The one on the TV.” She shakes her head and her blue hair sways gently like the hair of some sea nymph who’s seen the tides rise and fall one too many times. “Terrible. Just terrible.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say.

  The truth is that I haven’t heard about whatever boy on the TV she’s suddenly so sad about, but I don’t have to know about it to convey the appropriate amount of sadness and concern. I turn the corners of my mouth into a frown that matches the one the Blue Hair’s got. I don’t want to frown too much and make it look like I’m trying to make this terrible thing—whatever it is that happened—about me. But I also don’t want to not frown enough and come off uncaring. There’s an art to knowing how sad you’re supposed to be at moments like this.

  “A terrible shame,” I say. “Just can’t believe such a thing could happen in this world.” I shake my head.

  The old woman sucks her teeth in pointed disapproval. “So sad,” she says. “Just so sad.”

  I don’t say anything for a while. I let the air grow cold between us. A moment of silence for whatever boy’s sad tale we’re both grieving over right now. I want this wonderful stranger to know that I cared about this boy, because caring about people is what good people do. And more than anything, I want people to think of me as a good person.

  The elevator chimes, breaking the silence. The doors open at my floor.

  “Well,” I say, stepping out into the soft, empty hallway that has no angry husbands or wooden coat hangers, “I guess this is goodbye. Thanks again for your help. And God bless that poor boy.” I give one final nod. I feel like I should say something meaningful about chance meetings, the allure of strangers, serendipity . . . all those sorts of things. But nothing comes to mind so I turn on my heel and begin my naked walk back to my room.

  After I’m a few steps down the hallway, I hear her call out: “Hey!”

  “Yeah?”

  “You look familiar. Have I seen you before? Are you famous?”

  “Aren’t we all?” I say.

  She nods and retreats into the elevator. The doors close and I’ll never see her again. Not because I don’t want to. But just because that’s how it goes. Life decides.

  I walk the rest of the way back to my room feeling pretty good about life. Tonight’s been an adventure. Met a lovely woman. Met her husband—who I’m sure is just as lovely when you get to know him. Even met a sweet old lady with a flair for conversation. I’ve got fresh air on my naked skin.

  What more can a person ask for in this life?

  It’s only when I get to my hotel door that I realize I’ve left my key in my pants back in the bedroom of the angry husband’s wife.

  * * *

  —

  With it being as late as it is, the hotel lobby is nearly empty. It’s one of those big hotels where the floor is overly polished and the ceiling is so high you can hear yourself breathing if you really stop and listen. It’s an eerie place, especially when it’s crowded. The whole room sounds like some grand train station. Voices blend together into that familiar assonant murmur, suddenly sounding like every conversation you’ve ever had has come rushing back to you and, in spite of yourself, you can almost believe that at any moment a train might come rumbling up right in front of you, right behind the concierge’s desk, carrying every person you’ve ever known. It’s strange, but I get that particular feeling six days out of seven in my life.

  “How can I help you?” the woman working the front desk asks. From the calmness in her tone, you’d think she’s spent every day of her life dealing with naked hotel guests.

  “I seem to be locked out of my room,” I say.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” she replies brightly, her voice almost in a singsong. “I’ll definitely help get that straightened out for you. Which room?”

  “3218.”

  She clicks on her keyboard.

  “Do you get a lot of naked people in your hotel lobby at this hour?” I ask.

  “Define ‘a lot,’” she says, smiling a toothy, slightly crooked smile that’s as warm as sunlight in August. After a few more keystrokes, she says, “Now, I’ll just need some type of identification.”

  I reach past her and into the nearby magazine rack. I pick up a copy of Entertainment Weekly. My beautiful mug is right there on the cover, larger than life, even overshadowing the headline about Nic Cage’s newest Cagetacular film, beneath the looming demi-Helvetica headline: AMERICA’S HOTTEST NEW AUTHOR. I hold the magazine up next to my face and say, “How’s this?”

  * * *

  —

  Because my face and a copy of Entertainment Weekly don’t qualify as “acceptable identification,” the receptionist and I are in the elevator together. I’m still naked. She still doesn’t seem to mind. Hotel policy says she needs to see a driver’s license, which, luckily, wasn’t in my pants—which are still in the room of a certain married woman and a coat-hanger-wielding husband. So she’s riding up to let me into my room so I can show her that I am who I and Entertainment W
eekly say I am.

  She smells of vanilla.

  “You smell like apples, Sport,” she says, maybe reading my mind, maybe not, and she glances at me with a grin—being sure to keep her eyes above the waist. It’s the kind of grin that I sometimes don’t know what to do with. The kind of grin that says maybe she likes me. And, believe it or not, I’m never really sure how to act when a woman throws me that kind of attention. So I just stand there, thinking about what a random thing what she said is to say to someone. “I know that’s a pretty random thing to say,” she continues, continuing to be uncanny. “But I think it’s a pretty random thing to experience. You know?”

  “I do know,” I say. I want to tell her that “a pretty random thing to experience” would make for a fitting send-off on my tombstone one day, but I think that might come around as a bit morbid, and I don’t think morbid is what this moment calls for. So, instead of the headstone remark, I just say something along the lines of “It’s amazing the things we notice sometimes. Makes us wonder if they’ve always been there.”

  “I know what you mean,” she says. “Also, I read that if you meet someone and they smell like apples, what you’re really smelling are pheromones. You know what pheromones are, don’t you, Sport?”

  “Pheromones, huh?” I spend a second just thinking about the word “pheromones.” A good word, that one. Looks sharp on the page and feels good on the tongue. “Why do you keep calling me Sport?” I ask.

  “What’s the matter?” she replies. “Aren’t you a sporting kind of guy?”

  Somewhere around the sixteenth floor I start to figure out that maybe she’s flirting with me and even before the sixteenth floor I knew that she was beautiful in that managerial way and so I think it’s time I let her know that, hell, I think she’s pretty swell too. So I put on my best Bogart brogue and I give it to her right down the middle:

  “Nice set of pillars you’re standing on.”

  “They hold me up,” she says, not missing a beat. She says it like she’s read the same script as me. She’s a caricature and so am I and right now in my life that’s, well, that’s pretty aces in my book.

  “I always knew heaven had to stand on something,” I say.

  “Is that a quote or something?”

  “Or something.”

  This is one of those times when I can’t tell how much of this moment—or almost any moment of my life, honestly—is real and how much is imagined. I’ve got a condition. I’ve got several conditions, actually. The most interesting one is this thing I got where my mind runs away with itself. It’s like daydreaming except it doesn’t really go away when I want it to. It lingers. Sometimes people call it a disorder, but I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy so I don’t go in on that dime-store wordage.

  Basically, I’m a daydreamer. But my daydreams tend to persist longer and more intensely than most people’s do. At least, that’s what I’ve been told by every doctor I’ve ever seen. The end result of it is that reality is a very fluid thing in my world. It’s probably the reason I got into this whole writing thing to begin with.

  Another thing you should know about me, beyond my tendency to have an overactive imagination, is that I’m a sucker for old black-and-white movies. You know the type. The ones with fast-talking men and even faster-talking women.

  Right now, my imagination and I could easily change the lighting in this elevator and it would be a scene fit for Double Indemnity. The same hard-shadowed lighting and machine-gun dialogue. Nobody today talks the way those characters talked in that movie. Maybe they never really did. So maybe this isn’t exactly how the exchange between her and me went. Or maybe it is. Like I said, I get the sense that she’s read the same script as me. I rarely worry about the facts, only about the reality that my imagination and I choose to see.

  “You’re confident,” the receptionist who smells like vanilla says.

  “And a confidant to those who need it. You got something you wanna share with me?”

  “You always drive this fast?”

  “You should see me in the curves.”

  And then she smiles.

  * * *

  —

  We tumble through the bedroom door. it’s hard to tell where my body ends and hers begins. It’s all just skin, and nerves, and warmth, and those little butterflies that come bubbling up in the pit of your stomach when you know—I mean really KNOW—that you’ve met someone special. Someone who will endure. Someone whose face you’ll see again and again for years and live a life all the richer for it.

  She could be the one. This could be love.

  That’s how alive all this feels. But love happens like this sometimes, doesn’t it? A lightning strike rather than a rising tide. You meet someone and everything goes warm inside you and when they put their hand in yours, you can feel every inch of their body, like dipping your finger into a river and being able to feel the whole ocean.

  And I feel that with this woman. At least, that’s what my imagination tells me.

  * * *

  —

  The morning comes and I wake up and still don’t know what midwestern city I’m in and the receptionist is already up and gone and she’s left a little note behind on her pillow that reads, “You’re a good sport, Sport!” And in the light of this new day I don’t feel like last night was love at all, but it was a hell of a fun way to interact with another soul. Think about it: it took over 4 billion years for her life and mine to come together in that elevator. If that ain’t special, I don’t know what is.

  So right now I’m feeling pretty good about fate and kismet and being a good sport, and I’m also feeling pretty hungry. I want pancakes, and orange juice, and maybe a little bit of vodka to get the aforementioned orange juice up on its legs.

  I put on my clothes and ease out the door.

  * * *

  —

  Downstairs, breakfast is in full swing. The hotel is a bit on the swanky side but when it comes to feeding people they aren’t much better than the usual Holiday Inn—a fine establishment, by the way; I’m just saying that for $300 a night—even when the publisher’s footing the bill—I expected a little more than what’s presented to me. But since I’m not the picky sort, I move through the buffet breakfast line and grab my plate and take a seat in the far corner and I look out into the city—whatever city this is—and I wonder what the day will bring.

  It’s about this time that I feel myself being watched. It’s one of those animalistic feelings. Something that rings of alarm and worry in the softest of ways. Like standing in the shade of an oak tree and getting the feeling that it’s all about to come crashing down on your head.

  “Hey,” a voice says.

  I turn to find a kid standing beside my table.

  I peg him at about ten years old. A little gangly, meek, and nerdy-looking, you might say. Like the kind of kid who’s spent too much time in books and not enough time grabbing life by the short and curlies. Sometimes you see kids and you just know. You can just see their entire future in their eyes. That’s who this kid is: he’s his entire future seen at a glance.

  But all of that is secondary to his skin. It’s black. But not just black, he’s impossibly dark-skinned. The darkest skin I’ve ever seen. It’s like a clouded ocean sky in the dead of night. It’s like burrowing into old caves where sunlight has never set foot. It’s the kind of black that makes me think he’s got to be wearing some sort of makeup. The kind of black that makes me question if what I’m seeing is real or if I’m in the beginning stages of some kind of ocular or neurological crisis.

  His lips are moving but I’m so startled by the color of his skin that I can’t hear a word he’s saying. “What was that?” I say.

  “Can I sit here?” He points to my chair and begins seating himself before I have time to give him permission.

  The kid has a plate of pancakes and sausage that’s so mu
ch like my own I’ve got to respect it. As he starts eating, I look around, trying to lay eyes on whoever it is among the rest of these fine breakfast goers that might be his parents. The last thing I want is to have some terrified parent come up to my table screaming at me about why I’m having breakfast with her son. That kind of publicity can kill a book tour.

  When I can’t find anybody that looks like they might be the progenitor of this dark-skinned splendor, I resign myself to having met a new friend and I jump into the same type of banter I would offer anyone else in this world. “You look like someone who’s had his fair share of adventures, Kid.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” The Kid says. He keeps his eyes on breakfast as he talks, which I’m glad about because it allows me to look at the inky depths of his skin without making him feel awkward. It’s hypnotic, The Kid’s blackness. The kind of thing that has to be seen to be believed. Staring at this kid’s skin makes me feel like I’m falling. Like it’s pulling me into him. Like I was never separate from him to begin with and his skin—all shadow and shade—is only trying to take me back where I belong so that it can keep me safe.

  “It’s cool,” The Kid says.

  “What’s cool?”

  “Staring like that. It’s cool. Everybody does it.” He shovels another forkful of pancakes into his mouth and I imagine that they taste like embarrassment.

  “Nonsense,” I say. “I shouldn’t be staring at anyone. I’ve got no grounds for it. Why, just last night I was down here in this very lobby naked for the world to see. Naked as a jaybird, as my dear, departed father might say. If anyone deserves to be stared at, Kid, it’s me.”

  The Kid nods but continues to keep his eyes aimed at breakfast. I know shame when I see it. A twinge of guilt runs down my spine.

  “So, to what do I owe the honor of this breakfast?”

  As I talk, I look up at the television on the far wall just in time to catch the tail end of a report about some dead boy. Got himself shot by somebody but I don’t know who because the television switches to ESPN and suddenly there are grown men slamming their heads into one another and shouting about first downs. “Tired of hearing about that shit,” says the gentleman apparently responsible for the channel change. From the reaction of the others in the dining room, they’re all a little tired of hearing about that shit too. So I turn my attention back to The Kid, who still hasn’t answered my question.