Thanking and tipping the valet two hundred dollars, I turned towards “the complex.” Nowhere in the sizable body of literature was it referred to as a mere building. “The stately complex that overlooked” a fucking parking garage.
“Your daughter?” the concierge asked.
“No, the girl from Poltergeist. We’re fucking.” I studied the man’s non-plussed features. “I’m joking I don’t even see a girl.”
“Behind you.”
“Yeah, we actually are fucking,” I answered with a smile. “How old do I look?”
“Does your partner have a pass?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Do you have a pass? If not, she may wait for you to obtain one. First floor of the complex, right then left.”
I held my arm out to Daphne.
“She may wait,” the concierge repeated.
I had expected an arboretum or perhaps a plaque commemorating some event or listing a group of people for an almost arbitrary accomplishment but the foyer to the complex was just a cramped mesh of receptionist desks and hallways. Two lead off to the right, one for traffic each way it seemed. I took the right, presuming a crosscut would exist to the pass office and reluctant to push through the oncoming traffic. Voices from the ceiling warned of the end of the moving walkway but we all walked on marble tile. I caught glimpses of neon signs that advertised gambling, prostitutes, and free alcohol for time with either. Surely these were the outskirts of the complex, and the floor was moving backwards. I could tell this now by the Parque floor supporting the railing of a topless bar for little people. The patronage, that is. I shook my head, feeling dazed. I had almost certainly passed the pass office. The white Stetson hat on one of the men ahead of me now that I noticed it, spun and walked past me. Most of the crowd ahead was heading the other direction, in fact. I sat on a stool at an exposed bar to catch my bearings.
“Heroin and gay sex?” asked the bartender.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ll have to cross hallways for heroin and gay sex.”
“Eurotrash?”
He gave me a dirty look. “We don’t discriminate between clientele in the complex, sir.”
“Could you point me in the direction of the cut through to the other hall?”
“Yes. Head up to floor above and open the service panel to the electrical box. Flip the large black switch and a walkway will extend.”
“The second floor?”
“Yes, immediately above us.”
“Will the panel be labeled?”
“No. No sense in it. We all know the way. Stop for heroin and gay sex if your business here permits. They’re quite enjoyable.”
“Yes, I know. They just both feel so good.”
“Indeed, sir.” He wasn’t smiling, but then neither was I.
I climbed an ornate, wrought iron staircase and saw a room of little people playing billiards overlooking a strip show below. I felt elated at the sight. It was somehow settling to see where they’d gone.
“Which one of you cupcakes will put your slimy fucking cunt up against a can of copenhagen that you know when Vigeta went supersayen?” one of the midgets yelled to the girls below.
“Show some manners. That’s somebody’s little girl.” I joined him in laughing.
“Could you buy me a drink?”
I arched my eyebrow, annoyed. “What’s wrong with heroin and gay sex?”
“For niggers and faggots. I don’t touch the stuff. So what about the drink?”
I punched him with enough weight to send him backstepping six feet bounce of the wall.
“Piss on him!” called one of the billiard’s players.
“No,” I stated flatly.
He scampered around me, fiddling with his zipper. “Best time to piss on someone,” he called.
“Has any one seen a service panel to an electrical box?”
“Along the side of table three.” The midget had set his foot atop the other little person, the one who had so casually besmirched sucking dick and being black, and had begun to piss.
The panel slid outward, not to the side. Outward as a drawer. Indeed, it seemed to be a drawer for four rabbits wearing small metal bead collars with tags. I grabbed one. “Fizzy.” Then “Fuzzy.” Then “Big.” I stood and kicked the rabbit drawer. The little person on the ground pointed and snarled. “Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big, and Buzzy didn’t do one fucking thing to you. Not one of them.”
“Prick,” I muttered and I stepped over him, heading back downstairs. “For the last time,” my voice boomed, “I want somebody to use his head for five seconds and tell me where the pass office is before they have to take the animatronics out of what used to be my fucking head and put my walking fucking corpse in the ground.”
“Take the tram, asshole,” a man at the bar cried around his sandwich, jerking his thumb back the way I had came. I spun. The wall behind me was not the wall of a hallway but a line of plexiglass windows with railing on the ground. And plexiglass windows on the other side! The other hallway. “It runs between the walls.” The sound of food exiting his mouth as he spoke seemed that it could not be my imagination.
“Thanks,” I answered hesitantly. “I didn’t see it.”
“Tram arriving at egress five. Departing for egresses six through thirteen.”
I stepped through the doors that opened before me and dialed Daphne.
“Do you always take this long?”
“Midget trouble,” I answered in a very strained voice. “And four rabbits.”
“You’ve been waiting your whole life to say that or you’re an asshole.”
“I’m an asshole, Dove.”
“Please just get out with calling me your little wifie poo or threating to hit me. These moods of yours. I swear, it’s like watching two fourteen-year-old boys try to figure out how do dork each other for the first time.”
“It isn’t always that simple.”
“Set jokes up for the pass office. I’m getting horny.”
“Yes, Love.”
“Egress seven.”
“Thank you, Love.”
“You’re late.”
“Love?” My tone was strained again.
“The pass office will think so. Splash your face if you get a chance. I don’t think impressions matter but you can’t be too sure.”
“Have you been having a bit too much fun with the cocaine?”
“I’m not paranoid. Not entirely. Thee people always seem to have a motive, or a reason. Whichever is worse, likely, if there is a difference. And thank you for not stopping for heroin and gay sex. I think that was some sort of test.”
“We’ll get you in here by lunch. How’d you know about the heroin and gay sex?”
“Everybody does. They just both feel so good.”
“Will I want to exit to the port or starboard?”
“God, you are such an absolutely an asshole. Starboard, ass pirate.” She clicked off.
Passing a display of a woman getting her picture taken with Amenhotep in his sarcophagus, I strode confidently through the front door of the pass office. “Hail and well met,” I greeted the desk worker with an outstretched hand.
“Good morning, sir.” She replied, eying my hand mistrustingly.
“You’re young and pretty and likely think I want to do more than fuck you.”
“No, sir. Thank you for drinking from the fountain.”
“Fuck yes. I deserve to be thanked by someone like you.”
“Why are you here.”
“I try not to think about that shit too much. Keeps me young, or so I like to think.”
“Very witty, sir. Why are you here?”
“I need something you have.”
“We’ve been over that.”
“My wife requires one of your fine passes. So do I, I believe.”
“I cannot. You abused our rabbits, sir.”
“Fuck the worst excuse I ever heard. I require passes.”
“It’s not an excuse, sir. Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big, and Buzzy are very special to the proprietor.”
“Then why fuck are they kept inside a wall in a poolhall for midgets?”
“These are things I’ve learned not to ask.”
“You’re cute. I do want to fuck you.”
“Happily. It’s part of my job.” She rose and motioned to a body scanner.
“No need.” I pulled out my penis.
The receptionist disrobed and stepped inside the moving scanner, hands planted forward and feet back. “Why did you do that to the bunnies?”
“It’s damned good to meet a woman who likes small talk. I wanted to.”
“Was there a reason you wanted to, sir?”
“Sir! I like the sound of that!”
“Sir?”
“Yes, cupcake!! Call me sir!”
“I require an answer, sir.”
“Gotta finish, angel baby.”
“Sir?”
“The lying bartender.”
“The bartender lied, sir?”
“Yes!”
“You lack permission, sir.”
“No, no, God, fuck, no.” The receptionist stepped out of the body scanner while I remained on its floor.
She lit a cigarette from the pack on her desk. “That was oddly gratifying,” she remarked, eyebrows furrowed. “Thank you. I’ll have the bartender punished, but I’m afraid you cannot have a pass.”
I furiously masturbated my flaccid penis. “I’ll cum, Mommy. I’ll cum.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Fine. One pass.”
I sighed.
“One pass?”
“Thank you, Mommy,” I answered, my fist moving again.
“You are so cute,” she smiled and pulled something from a drawer that she placed on top of her desk. “Finish.” The door to the inner office clicked shut behind her.
After finishing, I grabbed the pass from the desktop and another from the drawer, and left nude. Unsure the water from the fountain had worn off, I opted to walk the hallway rather than calling Daphne for an egress number. The hallway traffic moved in the right direction. A few short minutes later and I spilled out into the foyer. Daphne had called our car up and was inside with a pull. “Jesus God, most people think there six good lines to a gram.” She sucked up two as long as the driver’s seat was wide and I sat. “Baby, that was half a sixteenth. I’m going to start to think I’m fucking a stripper.”
“You smell like cunt,” she commented, twisting the pull and sealing it with a cigarette lighter.
“I had an encounter, but I wouldn’t have gotten our passes otherwise.”
“And you’re not fucking me. Your dating me.”
“Doctor’s don’t date women like you, Love. I’m sorry. It just isn’t done.”
“We live together, Michael.”
“I lived with a girl in Tijuana when I was going to med school. I wasn’t dating her.”
Daphne stared straight ahead for a moment and began blinking rapidly. “Okay, let’s go.” She put on her sunglasses and stepped out of the car. A rolled over pad of pills passed between her and the valet.
“You will find it in the glove compartment,” he spoke in an austere voice befitting his height, age, but mostly his moustache.
“We are ready to enter the complex,” I announced to the concierge and held out our two passes.
“I’m afraid not, sir. One of these is stolen.”
“You can’t tell me that.”
“Sir,” he began in a patronizing tone. “You would not have been given two passes.”
“That was what you sent me to find.”
“And you have interrupted the process with your theft. This complicates things, I’m afraid.”
“Could you at least tell us where to find something to eat? It’s 2pm.”
“Amenities are to the right as you enter the complex.” He handed me one pass. “Your lover may remain here.”
“What am I to do about the other pass.”
“Try the office, sir,” he said in the same tone.
Convinced there was a better way, I took the hallway to the left. Fuck them, after all.
“Gravity. Only two shillings, sixpence,” a young man cried from the corner.
“Will you take a twenty?”
“Two shillings, sixpence or fuck your mother, sir.”
“She’s not here?”
“Can’t help what can’t be helped, now can I?”
“What will happen if I don’t have gravity?”
“There’s nary such thing as a stupid question I’m told, still it baffles me to see so many laid before me.”
“Thanks, guv’ner.”
“Go with God, Padre.”
“Faggot.” I strode on.
“One more moment, if you’d care. I’ll give you a can of gravity from my own pocket if you can tell me who shot JR.”
“Sue Ellen. Why?”
“Are you sure?”
“Not entirely, no.”
I grabbed the can of gravity. “Christ. Cracker?” I flopped to the floor upon hitting it.
“Gravity. Only two shillings, sixpence,” he cried.
Breathing was difficult, but difficult in a dreamlike way, as though if I got it wrong, it would all start again. I was rather sure this was not so. There was some commotion above me and the gravity hawker was led away. “This one has a pass!” a voice yelled and someone was rolling me onto a gurney and I was wheeled down the hallway on the left. Fate is whimsical. I opened my mouth to comment and yammered obscenities instead. My head was clear enough to understand the words, but still I didn’t stop them. “I’ve gonna give it to you straight up in that ass about the demon, dopie. The demon on the ceiling at the steeple chase. What do you think about when you fuck with your dirty ass?”
“You racist prick,” said one of the men wheeling the gurney.
“Catch me up on the rebound on the med side, bro. Llello.”
“Man, fuck this.” He took off his white lab coat, tossed it to the floor, and walked off. “They don’t pay for that.”
“Come on,” chimed the other attendant. “He has a pass. How bad can he be?”
“Find out!”
“We’ve gotta drop him at security.”
“Not me. Heroin and gay sex, then home.”
“Why?”
“The just both feel so good.”
I was sitting upright on the gurney, wild eyed and high as a kite form the gravity comedown, when they wheeled me through the doors of security. “Is this where I can get a pass?”
“This is where they need to talk to you.”
A man in his mid-thirties, wearing glasses with stains on his striped, button-down shirt stood up from his desk to greet me. “Hello, I’m Albert. You’re comfortable? I can find you a chair or perhaps bring in the sofa from my private office if you’d be more comfortable. Or we could even relocate. Let me know what you want. I try to please.”
“Albert?”
“Yes, Michael?”
“How did you know my name?”
“I know everything about you, I’m afraid. Quite too much.” He tapped his head. “Yes, every little last bit of it. And may I say that you’ve done a remarkable job at coping with the challenges you’ve faced in life. A lesser individual would have fallen before the combine of adversity you overcame. Any lesser individual. Myself included.”
“Why am I here, Albert?”
“We’ll talk. Get down, please. Would you like the chair or the sofa. Oh, I have a very comfortable desk chair too, the good kind with a back that bends independently of the seat. It’s actually my chair, but you may have it. I shouldn’t have. I don’t want you to feel awkward for taking my chair. Do you mind if I smoke?”
I smiled. “May I have one, Albert? It’s been that kind of day.”
“No. They’re mine. Just mine. Only mine. Always and always mine. Go! Sit in my chair and gloat about how superior you are!” He sniffled, guarding his face as though I might strike him. “May I smoke please?”
“Yes. Please.”
Albert stared at my crotch. “You know, my truck is out back.”
“Really?” I asked with a sinking feeling.
“Yes, right out back, behind the complex. I could show it to you.”
“Is there a pass in your truck, Albert?”
I burst forth from the complex an hour later. “Passes! . . . .”
