Chapter Fourteen
Friday
of Labor Day Weekend, 1980
The ashtrays
are full; empty drink cups are scattered everywhere. Somebody else’s half-eaten
farewell and congratulations sheet cake is sitting on the desk backed up
against the key locker. The electrical fans are waving out a warm breeze and a
transient is wandering around the lobby.
“Are they
going to close up this Hotel?”
“Yes sir, the
renovations are scheduled to start in November of this year.”
“Well, are
they going to keep it a hotel?”
“Probably so;
they're just going to clean it up and enlarge it and remodel it and paint it
all.”
“Ya know, I
came here for a one-night honeymoon in '42. It hasn't changed one bit. (Out of
the mouths of rubes). Can I bother you for some quarters?”
“Sure.”
I dutifully go
over to the cash drawer and break open a new roll of quarters. One drops to the
floor. Let it stay there. My final good-bye.
I have finished
the audit and it is a meagre $ 257.44.
I have counted
the cash drawer and it is only four cents over.
I have sat and
talked to Mandy in the witches' den outside the fountain room.
I have checked
people in and out and I have seen something unforetold occur:
The decline
and fall of humanity.
All my life:
parents and poets, preachers and playwrights, doctors and domestics, children
and charlatans, intimates and idiots, have consistently pointed to what is good
and great and hopeful about mankind: the striving, the effort to be what we are
not now.
Now I have
seen what we are.
It has
fascinated me. Terrifying and intimidating me, my struggle to understand what
we really are, has occasionally uplifted my spirit as it dragged me through a
quagmire of those acts of genealogy which we are compelled to repeat. Out of
all this, I have learned that there is no such thing as freedom; there is only
free will, and free will means free fall for legions. Our Commonwealth of Ladies
and Gentlemen blindly exert their free will to construct grander and grander
fantasies about themselves, about their community, about this hotel that I will
leave tonight. They thrive on False Grandeur.
Fantasy.
Grandeur. Reality.
At the Jefferson , Grandeur is the bridge that spans from Fantasy
to Reality. The Hotel’s Grandeur makes the final statement. Its majestic palm
fronds are nothing more than brittle wafers of plaster stuck into the ceiling.
The Mezzanine’s renowned Southern-Style cooking comes out of a plastic bag
packed in Seattle Jefferson prides itself on a Gone With the Wind staircase where
Scarlett never fell.
When it's all
said and done, the truth charms very few people and fantasy leads most of us
astray. It is only the gilt-edged superimposition of truth and fantasy, their
dualistic symbiosis in the human mind, the creation of a peaceful tension,
mundane joy, and hopeful desperation which had entranced me.
It has tired
me now.
This Grandeur
is no longer necessary.
I must abandon
it.
Now I know
what we are.
Tonight I shed
no tears.
My heart is
heavy but I shed no tears.
Now I have
eyes to see.
- Fin -
