Still, it wouldn’t hurt to take precautions.
I completed fifty-two push-ups and seventy-five sit-ups before 7:00A .M.
When I got downstairs, I walked over to the bellman’s desk and said hello.
“Hi,” the bell captain said.
“Not too busy today, huh?” I said.
“Nope.”
Then I was pretty much out of things to say.
“How long have you worked here?” The good conversationalist will always ask the other person about himself.
The bellman looked kind of suspicious. He was about forty or forty-five, I guessed, greasy hair combed in a kind of pompadour, a style about forty years out-of-date.
“A while,” he said.
“Get any days off?”
“Why?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why do you want to know if I get any days off?”
“I don’t know. Just making conversation.” That, at least, was what I was attempting to do.
“Oh, I get it,” he said.
“Huh?”
“What kind you looking for? You want white, black, spic . . .what? ”
“Excuse me?”
“You looking for a date or not?”
I blushed. “No. I was just . . . talking. . . .”
“Right,” the bellman said. “Fine.”
In this hotel, apparently the bell captain did a little more than carry your bags.
“Are you the only bellman?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation where I needed it to go.
“Why?”
“I was just wondering if you had any — ”
“Whatexactly you looking for, mister?” He sounded irritated now. “You got something going with Dexter, ask him, okay?”
Dexter. That was his name. Dexter.
“When does . . . Dexter work?”
The bell captain shrugged. “Wednesdays and Fridays.”
“Oh.”
“You need your bags put somewhere?”
“Bags? No.”
“Right. Well, I’m the bell captain. So if you don’t need your bags put somewhere . . .”
He was asking me to shut up. I retreated back to the couch, where I sat for another half hour or so, or until lunchtime.
When I came back in from my 7:00A .M. coffee run a few mornings later, Dexter was standing behind the desk.
I sat on the lobby couch and opened my coffee cup with trembling hands.
I was afraid Dexter would recognize me, and I was feeling kind of scared again; I might look like a dangerous man with my oversize shades, but looks can be deceiving. For instance, Dexter looked more or less harmless reading a magazine in that pale green uniform. He looked like a guy who might even help you with your bags if you asked him nicely. Not like a guy who’d slam you up against an alley wall and laugh when you were punched in the stomach.
I could feel a vague pain there, the vestige of that wallop to my solar plexus, which might have been the body’s way of warning me. What are you doing, Charles? my body was saying. Don't you remember how much it hurt? You were crying. You couldn’t breathe, remember?
I remembered just fine.
There was another reason my hands were trembling.
Wednesdays and Fridays, the bellman had answered me when I’d asked about Dexter’s work schedule.
But today was Tuesday.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I got the gun out from behind the radiator — it was hot to the touch. I just wanted to know it was still there, that it hadn’t disappeared, hadn’t fallen down the hole in the bathroom wall or been stolen by the maid.
I held it like a rosary — something that just might grant me my dearest wish.
I put it back into the hole.
When I exited the elevator into the lobby, I could see Dexter sitting behind the bell captain’s desk with his head in his hands. He appeared to be reading a women’s muscle magazine.
I walked slowly over to the front desk and perused an old stack of tourists brochures. “Ride the Circle Line,” one said. “Broadway Tours.” All the things New Yorkers themselves never get around to doing.
The lobby was fairly quiet this morning. There was a couple who seemed to be waiting for a cab; every minute or so, the man poked his head out the front doors and announced there were no taxis yet. His wife nodded and said they were going to be late. The man said you can say that again. When the man announced that there were still no taxis two minutes later, she did.
The man in the University of Oklahoma jacket I’d seen on the elevator was complaining to the deskman that there was no King James Bible in his room.
“Are you kidding?” the deskman said to him.
An old man stood hunched over his walker just to the left of the elevators. He might’ve actually been moving, but if he was, it was too slowly to register on the eye.
I was happy for the company. It was hard to imagine anything really bad was going to happen to you while an old man was shuffling along next to you in a walker and someone else was complaining about there being no Bibles in his room.
Dexter looked directly at me and asked if I had the time.
“Eight o’clock,” I said.
And then I tensed up and waited for Dexter to recognize me.
Wait a minute, I know you — what the fuck are you doing here?
But Dexter went back into his magazine.
The old man seemed to be suffering from some kind of emphysema in addition to his leg problems; he wheezed, gurgled, and heaved with each tiny shuffle.
A woman with six-inch heels, who wasn’t suffering from any walking problems, sashayed into the lobby with a fat little man in a bad suit. She detoured past the front desk without actually stopping and grabbed a room key the deskman had already laid down on the counter.
“Come on, sweetie,” she said to the fat man. “Come on.”
The fat man kept his face trained on the worn carpeting in the lobby. He remained that way until the elevator opened up to rescue him.
Two young couples walked in with luggage and asked how much a room was. But the two women — girls, really — spent the entire time peering around the lobby with obvious distaste. They looked at the old man as if he were walking around without any clothes on. They didn’t seem to like the sight of me, either.
I heard them whispering to their boyfriends, who seemed interested in staying — the price was right, wasn’t it? But the women won out — the guys shrugged and said no thanks, then all four of them left.
“Next month . . . is my . . . birthday,” the old man in the walker said.
He’d maneuvered his way over to me. I remembered a game I used to play as a kid. It was called red light, green light, and the object of the game was for you to sneak up on someone without ever actually being seen to move. Whoever was “it” had to close his eyes and say, Red light, green light, one, two, three, then quickly turn around and attempt to catch the pursuers in the act of advancing. It wasn’t fun being it. It was eerie — seeing someone twenty feet back, then turning and seeing them frozen not five feet from you. It was like that with the old man, who every time I’d looked had seemed stuck in place yet was suddenly there by my right shoulder.
“Eighty . . . three . . . ,” he said again. He had to pause before every word or two in an effort to get enough air in his lungs. Vegas would’ve given you attractive odds on his making it to eighty-four.
“Happy birthday,” I said.
“Lived here . . . twenty years,” the old man said between gasps.
I imagined that was just about the time the hotel began its precipitous decline.