Riverside 32

“It’s like saying you got sent to Hell so you’d be well cared for.”

“I hate the lobby scene,” Alex said.

“This is a lush lobby, oriental, almost. I suppose if you didn’t have to eat sleep and perform other bodily functions, you could live here — live a life abundant.”

The lobby was a fascinating place. It hadn’t been designed formally. There had been no one designer, architect, or interior decorator to think out its remarkable arrangements.

If you had to wait in a lobby, this would be the lobby.

“The Shakers wouldn’t have liked this place,” Alex remarked. He was talking to a stranger who was also in the lobby.

“The Shakers– isn’t that the American religious sect now defunct because they rejected having sex and babies?”

“That’s the one,” said Alex. “I was getting at that, but also–believe it or not–the Shakers were venerated for their architecture and furniture design by the most successful architects of the mid-twentieth century, such as Mies Van der Rohe.”

The stranger could have cared less. To the stranger, the minute he learned the Shakers had no interest in doing it, the stranger had no interest in them. The only thing the stranger had an interest in was doing it. In fact, the stranger was oblivious to everything else. He was oblivious to the lobby, and to Alex, and even the topless brothel clerk discretely manning the lobby’s teak tongue-in-cheek-teak check-in desk. The stranger had a hard on. A big one.

The stranger was muttering quietly. Though there were hardly any weirdos, or rather no weirdos in the establishment, the stranger was pressing perilously close to being the exception. The anomaly.

Just audibly, Alex could hear the muttering of, “asshole…”

To step before someone else in a lobby is to block them. Steps to take before going to hell, to be well cared for, the stepping before is an intrusion, a messing of minds, a wake up call to the deep sleep of the oblivious, albeit the oblivious experiencing one big wet dream. The lobby where you wait before going to hell– is well appointed– and you have an appointment. An appointment with death and sex. Alex, in his, and his being led up the stairs, decidedly not in despair. Out of jail, Alex, gives himself, freely, with cash abounding, this beautiful lady Alex wanted to have a transaction with, to take candy from a baby.

The stranger was walking across the lobby, but there was a bottleneck between two large potted plants. That’s where Alex stationed himself.

Alex envisioned a body check, with the stranger staggering stumbling into one of the biggest ferns in the lobby. The stranger would strike it hard, have the wind knocked out of him. It would hurt. Plus, the stumble would be attributed to the stranger being intoxicated, and getting a whiff of the stranger prostrate on the lobby floor, stinking of whiskey, the assumption of intoxication would be affirmed. Plus, there’d be dirt from the pot breaking and quite a lot of it would be on the stranger.

“He’s dirty! He’s filthy! Get him out of here.”

The stranger would be tossed out on his head. There would be brain damage. The stranger would never be allowed back into the establishment again.

There were no surveillance cameras anywhere in the bordello. Obviously.

Yet you wanna no-no know who the stranger came into The House of the Rising Sun to engage?

Eve!