Chapter Fourteen
The Last Hour
The Last Hour
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 -
