The Enigma of the 16th Floor Elevators

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Rumrazor

Okay. So I travel to downtown Los Angeles to attend a meeting with a “name” well-connected film industry producer.

DOWNTOWN

I can’t find parking under 20 dollars for the day or 8 dollars an hour. Since I don’t know how long I will have to wait in the producer’s office, these things tend to vary, I drive around until I find metered parking about 7 blocks from the building where the meeting will take place. The meter ONLY takes change for a half-an-hour so that is useless. I am forced to return to the area of the building and pay the 20 bucks for parking in what looks like the regular resident parking of a loft building. The valet doesn’t really park the truck in a parking spot. He just parks my truck perpendicular behind cars already parked in regular spots. And I think to myself, how ridiculous to live here in that every time I want to leave my loft to buy milk and cookies, I have to wait for the valets to remove all the cars blocking in my car and vice versa when I return 20 minutes later.

On the way to the building, I literally pass a bum-looking dealer selling whatever it was he was pssssssting me for while standing RIGHT NEXT to a police officer.

THE BUILDING

I don’t want to name the building but I will say that all my North Carolina School of the Arts peeps will recognize the building as the one in LA that most closely resembles the penis shaped formerly named Wachovia Center in Winston-Salem. Except the one in LA I think is taller and more penis looking. I need to get to the 16th floor.

LOBBY

I don’t want to bother the concierge desk. Mostly because I don’t know which desk to bother. Four desks are present that I could approach, including the horseshoe one in the middle of the plaza sized lobby. I go to the elevators, nobody notices, nobody minds. I get in, the doors close. I look to press button 16, makes sense right? Except that no 16th button exists. Only the buttons for the first dozen floors and floors 50-53. I have to wait to go all the way up to the 53rd floor. Some lawyer types get in who all look at me suspiciously on the elevator ride all the way back down.

In the lobby once more, I sprint across the hall to stop the other set of elevators from closing and I look at the button panel, same story, no 16th button, only the buttons for 1-12 and 50-53. This only takes literally 2 SECONDS but that was too long for the lawyer type person going up who impatiently demands, “In or Out?!” I ask him, while holding the door open, if he knows where I can find the elevators that go to the 16th floor. He shrugs disdainfully and then physically pokes my hand with his briefcase! I am surprised enough that I let go and let the elevator doors close. I stand there and fume for a couple of seconds. I waste a few more minutes checking a different elevator in the same row as before, and again, no 16th floor button, I was here with 10 minutes to spare and now I only have 5 minutes to spare, and stuck in a mystery.

I look around, I see a Jamba Juice stand, a set of doors to a bank, a laundry window, a cell phone kiosk, a coffee cubbyhole with a newsstand, and an office about web and postal services but no other sets of elevators. So already flustered, I am finally forced to approach the middle horseshoe concierge desk. I ask the good looking Asian chic with her hair tied back and wearing a bow tie if she can direct me to the elevators that go up to the 16th floor. She doesn’t look at me because she is too busy reading something and sucking on a Jamba Juice straw and she simply points at the concierge desk to her left; she does not point at any set of elevators, but to another concierge desk. I have to confirm what she meant, “you mean, ask those guys over there?” She looks at me, while still sucking on her Jamba Juice, like I am the dumbest guy in the world.

I approach the second concierge. He turns out to be a tuxedo dressed black guy with a British-Jamaican accent.

“Can you direct me to the elevators that go to the 16th floor?” He asks me my destination. I tell him. “The 16th floor is part of our private offices and residences. Do you have an appointment?”

“Yes, of course. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.” My frustration, at this point, spills over.

The concierge types on his computer. “Your name?” I tell him. “I’m sorry but you are not on the list and the computer does not show any appointments for today. I will need to call to confirm.”

Okay. A couple of thoughts swirled through my mind at this point:

1. Private offices and residences? People actually live here? That is cool and disturbing at the same time. I guess you can afford to live here if a) you are filthy rich and b) you write off your home as your office in taxes or something. Also, I thought all offices were, in essence, private unless we are talking about the DMV or something.

2. I am perturbed that the meeting did not warrant enough attention or importance to include my name or the meeting down at the concierge’s desk or computer or whatever.

3. Does the concierge double as the producer’s assistant? Then with whom did I talk to on the phone to get a time and place? I am pretty sure the person did not have a Jamaican / British accent. In fact, I spoke with a woman.

4. Just point at where I need to go. If you call then the producer or his assistant will know that I simply can’t find a set of fracking elevators.

5. Where are the fracking elevators? Behind a secret panel or something?

I received the answer to that last mental question post-haste. The concierge got off the phone, turned around, and opened a set of doors that were indiscernible because they were inlaid into the wood paneling of the lobby. In fact, I had to walk around the concierge’s desk, actually walking through an attached knee-height swivel door, just to get to the hidden side hallway that housed the secret set of elevators. Aside from the fact that the whole rigmarole was unnecessary, apart from letting the “residents” of floors 13-49 feel all kinds of special, what got on my nerves the most was the balderdash furtiveness of the ordeal.

I had a little time to ponder the nonsense on my way up to the 16th floor. And when I got there, to the office / residence, the secretary confirmed my suspicions with her smug attitude. She was suppressing conceited contentment when she told me to take a seat. Listen lady, all you gave me in your e-mail of confirmation was a date, time, and address. Nothing about the horrid parking conditions, nothing about 20 bucks wasted because I am the only person in the office so I will not be here obviously over two hours, nothing about actually getting here 10 minutes ahead of time but now being 30 seconds late because I had to take an avoidable ride up to the top floor of the skyscraper and back, nothing about wasting time with secret handshakes and passwords and treasure maps leading to the lost and mythical set of elevators that were the epic gateway to the inapproachable 16th floor, and sure enough, when I get here, all you can do is snicker under your breath, tell me to take a seat, call your boss and state, “the person who had to call from the lobby is here for his meeting.”

Was this some kind of a test? The secret set of elevators are some kind of personal joke obstacle course aren’t they?

One of the first things that the producer says to me, after introductions, “I really need to work with somebody who knows how to get to where they are going in a timely manner. Punctuality is very important. In fact, I prefer people to be early and ready than late and unprepared.” So, 30 seconds late because of an unexpected obstacle course is the equivalent of being unprepared. Okay. You suck and your building sucks. Even your hot Asian bow-tied concierge sucks. On a Jamba Juice straw. With something green coming up through it and into her perfectly puckered red lips.

EPILOGUE

The rest of the meeting went as expected from people like this.

I wait a bit before writing this diatribe. And I still RAGE.

Posted in My Daily Life | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Watching the Eccentrics

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Rumrazor

Red weather tigers skulk drunk sailors
in dreams of the suspended men,
the hopes of the men in red suspenders.

The thin women in their awkward heels
never received the awaited postcard from Vesuvious,
their knockoff Hermes scarves in a thousand knots,
tied in a thousand knots, a thousand knots,
a wilted rose.

And some hobble, some smirk and lift both arms,
point at the red wall, point at the green wall,
and there are so many words written and lost
in the books, the books, in the books.

The books oppress.
Clever sculptures,
clever sculptures oppress.

The rinomato regents of their demesne
trim their grey soul patches
into perfect little grey triangles.
They want to dance with their silver canes
but they can’t dance with silver canes.
They can barely walk in clodhopper suits,
grayish suits, these garish suits
don’t account for accouter contradictions.

Plaintive poets sing sad jeremiads at the memorials
of other sad dead poets, all in their own remembrance.
Words exchanged, in fact, the words are harvested like flax,
flax from which to extract linseed oil, linseed oil to bind paint
or putty tears shaped rough-hewn from the carved out tracks
scratched down coarse and pallid willow wooden cheeks,
these cricket bat faces with their long droop tongues sagging,
tongues that prolong chin waggling. Chinwag drool dribbles
past wattle chins, past screeching sprats murdering spiderlings
still cocooned asleep in dangling webs, past pink stickers
stuck on bicycle helmets and past discarded popsicle sticks,
past the shrill glee of innocents, innocence bored with death.

Luthiers could not be more proud when their fingers cramp.

And always watching, watching the eccentrics,
the bicorned outsider, j’accused! Brown Recluse.
His right hooked-tailed boot famous since Munich,
the left distracts attention with a belled wheel spur.

Words flutter past him, ghost of words, torpid words.
Oh they talk, they move their mouths, even smile.
But they also recoil and roil at his presence, indignant.

He knows what they can’t do and they know what he can do.
They know what they can’t do and also know what he can do.
So they show their teeth, a woman even adjusts her pelisse.

In another time they would condemn him to death by lapidation
and tell themselves that they saved the rest of the children.
Death by interminable trepidation is just death by isolation
and this is all that they have learned since they were children.

And he watches, watches the calculations of these eclectics.
They flit and turn and curtsy. They forget who eats hogs.
They burp the onomatopoeia of thunder. Rattapallax.
Excuse me. No. Excuse you.

On me dit que le destin se moque bien de nous.
Serais ce possible alors?

We exemplify the dull disillusionment of scholars
and blind rabbits humping mounds of grass.
Vintage dresses always fray first at crotch level,
fray from all that subconscious touching and rubbing.

Why resent the black beast when all he wants to do
is blanch and evaporate while walking to Wichita?

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Venal

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Rumrazor

I was so strong at one time
that I rigged a pitching machine
to hurl two fastballs at me top speed,
one after the other,
and with a bat in each hand
I could hit one over the left field fence,
the other over the right field fence,
while standing squarely on home plate.
I could swing with ease,
I could swing with grace,
and I could swing those hips.
And with a bat in each hand.,
I impressed a girl so much at one time
that she smeared black and gold streaks on her cheeks
and just glared at me with a pout and a leer
to get my attention.
And after I grabbed her by the neck,
we made mad love in the hallway,
not even halfway to the bathroom,
and got our sweaty bodies kicked out of the bar.

This during Derby week in Louisville,
all hotels being full to capacity
so we flitted between all the wedding receptions,
ate all that food, drank all that free booze,
and fucked each other raw in all those hatcheck rooms.

The breakup months later was almost as frantic.
I got so drunk I slid down a wall,
stripped an extension cord beneath me
and almost electrocuted myself
when I was incapable of preventing my bulk
from leaning against the prongs still stuck in the wall socket.

She took my bats,
smashed every window of my car,
and shaved her head into a crooked mohawk.
She was ambidextrous if not dexterous.

When I attempted to talk to her,
she declared herself a lesbian
loudly
at a wine and cheese art auction,
broke into a crying jagged fit
then pretended to kiss me
but bit into my lower lip
and would not dislodge,
severing a nerve and branding me
with this discolored scar underneath my mouth
which used to be much more conspicuous,
more worthy of the cause celebre.

Now, as witnessed, I tell the truth
about my Stallone droop.
A sucker punch fastball used to be my best excuse.

Now, as confessed, as evinced,
I watch baseball from the nosebleed seats,
a fat and bloated slumgullion,
indistinguishable from everyone else,
a ninnyhammer with a stammer,
with nary a groatsworth of strength.
My vitality has lost all luster
and this along with a seed of mustard
will take me to my grave.

Glimfire,
I don’t know what happened to her.
I honestly don’t know.
She does not appear online
on any social networking sites.
She is diaphanous without surname.
I heard she married a dentist,
moved to Denver
and indulged in her oral fixations.
She might have kept her threat
on becoming Canadian
since the Republicans have kept on winning elections.
She had this fantasy of opening a ballet school
in Cuba
and dancing with the kids by the Caribbean sea.

I know what happened to me.
Rapscallion, I waste my time
in a cluttered studio apartment
shuffling around constipated
between telephone, refrigerator,
sagging futon, and toilet.

My bellybutton protrudes
and hurts, feels unyielding
and hard, an orange golf ball
driven into pimpled sourdough.

I think about her when I gargle
and swallow a bit of mint.
Her dazzling bleached smile
is a travel brochure
to places I’ll never revisit
except in those windblown
pages in my mind,
those deep sighs
while sitting on the can
trying to take a shit.
Yes, today and everyday,
which all qualify as these days,
these days my greatest desire
is the relief accompanied
by my decreasing ability
to defecate.

Ah pasha ah harem square,
I’ll kill the chanticleer
and serve him midday steaming.
Bribe me every Sunday
until Whitsunday
but stop the sirocco
billowing through this body.
Acquit me of all decency
and convict me, please.
All that is eradicable
will not extirpate
from deep inside
my bowels.

5 Comments

Márquez en Mississippi

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Rumrazor

Indio,
inculcado surreal y peláo
del demótico inquieto,
arrepentido,
sudando en el extranjero.

These dusty roads reject you.
These suited passengers reject you.
The grey bus driver rejects you.
This language rejects you.
Faulkner rejects you
along with the confederate ghosts,
they will always reject you,
then memory begins to reject you
and all you can find is dejection.
Rejection,
a spit on the mote in the eleventh eye of the fly
dying on the cornstalk, unblinking.
A slap on the rump of the mule by the stump
in front of the train station, unthinking.
Monotonous question,
“throats so wide and gules so gluttonous,”
what were you thinking?
what was you thinking?

No existe ninguna vellonera especial
con música imparcial en este país.
No existe
ni ardor ni perdón
ni el infierno sin calor,
ni estas miradas de odio sin dolor.
No existe ninguna razón
en darle valor
a este lugar retrocedido donde
todavía tienen los graneros encendidos
iluminando sus tendencias prejuiciadas,
ilustrando una alma arruinada
que no permite igualdad de color.

Barnburners,
bona fide, incarnate, and real,
feel the flame broiling behind their sockets,
fingering the imaginary noose in their pockets.
If they could make you swing
they would make you swing
and you would swing quadroon,
quintoon, octaroon, hexadecaroon,
whatever the hell you are,
a good for nothing coon,
whatever you call yourself,
moreno, mustee, mustefino,
colombiano de nacimiento muy fino,
un inocente, columbino pero atrevido,
no? Descarado, imprudente, caraduda,
de esto no hay dudas. Fijate:

You come here searching for your fiction,
for your romantic tragedy of tangible descendants
redeemed by the imposed desecration of civil war.
Fool. Imbecile. Here you find an embellished
fantasy of dignity unaffected neither by expediency
nor circumstance. Not a chance. No greater liberation
prevails other than pride. Understand?
Discover our intransigent affliction, this pride.
We shall not be moved, not by emotion
nor sentiment, nor adversity or calamity,
misfortune or scourge.
We will endure any and all invasions
and occupations, whether from within or without,
whether from local or national governance.
Bathe in our wrath, breathe our resolve.

This is our actual microcosm as witnessed,
the rest is simply drama read in some book.
So go home. You are not welcomed.
These antebellum mansions reject you.
The inchoate trees with incipient branches,
the tangled clay roots wrapped around muddy boots,
the gaping cannon mouths in pristine cemeteries,
the yawning drunks waking up in the hostelries,
we all reject you. We reject you now,
we reject you then, we’ll reject you when.

Indio,
inculcado surreal y peláo
del demótico inquieto,
arrepentido,
sudando en el extranjero.

Posted in My Poetry | 6 Comments

The Mansfield Bar

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Rumrazor

Not a drinking establishment,

sparks strike when scraping asphalt,
just twenty-two inches off the ground,
a standard to annoy the truck industry
since that infamous death long ago
on a balmy night in June,

“Kiss them for me,” she said,
“I may find myself delayed.”
Did a Banshee sing this?

The underride prevention guard
was not fully implemented until 1998.
Please, Siouxsie, sing about this.

“And here they are, Jayne Mansfield”
was her welcome on the Tonight Show.
And she would laugh and arch her back
and squeeze her bosom into the camera.
She always danced with her eyes closed
and one hand held high above her head.

She furnished her Pink Palace with free samples
worth more than the mansion.  She ordered
her husband Hargitay from a cocktail menu,
“I’ll have a steak and that tall man on the left.”

But her biggest juggling act, her greatest charade,
was balancing the allure of her vaunted stereotype
against the reality of an intellect well exercised.
So she bared her body in the pages of Playboy
and bared her voice on recordings with Hendrix.
She entertained USO sailors in 5 different languages
and delivered a smile above ubiquitous cleavage.
“Men are those creatures with two legs
and eight hands.”

And that summer, plant bugs were problematic
in Mississippi.  They had decimated the first crop
of fruits and vegetables, of invaluable cotton.
Mosquitoes had swarmed after flood waters receded
and carried a nasty contagious strain of encephalitis.

Insecticides were thick in the air that night,
a mist, a brume.  And the tractor-trailer
was forced to slow down behind the one
spraying the fogger.  Visibility was naught,
shrunk to haze and blurred stars and light.

In the aftermath, comparisons were made in death
as they had been in life.  Instead of Monroe,
or Van Doren, she was gruesomely compared
to Isadora Duncan, to Francoise Dorléac who died
three days earlier.  Mariska remembers only fear
and a vague recollection of blood raining down
on the floormats and her zizag scar.

But reminders of her mother’s death
will never disappear. They travel behind
every truck by law, in the guise
of the extra bumper, the underride bar,
better known as the Mansfield bar.

“If you’re going to do something wrong,
do it big, because the punishment
is the same either way.”

Posted in My Poetry | 3 Comments

Tsunami Wave Train

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Rumrazor

for Morgan Gibson

Spring sea;
Blinking turtle
exposed in drawback.

Silent cage cricket,
bitter persimmon,
await moon glare.

Laughing anglerfish rises.
Fallen leaves swirl,
dissolve in oyster stew.

Posted in My Poetry | 1 Comment

Anxiety Before Finals

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Rumrazor

is equivalent to exhaustion afterwards
when trudging back to the dormitories
unaware the original architect rehashed
prison plans so that all the cinerea blocks
are indistinguishable from one another.

You climb and you climb the side stairs
a thousand times and enter the dim halls
and find the third room from the right
and strip in the dark and step in the shower
and lean your forehead on the tile and let
the hot water unknot the muscles of your back.

The water pressure feels different, better.
You smell lavender soap.
You are addled for the time of day
since you studied all night again
and the coffee mixed with energy pills
singes and bubbles up the heartburn.
But this is not your purple sponge,
you don’t use a Loofah or Nair Care
your shaving razor is not round or pink
and you realize your troubling mistake
while wondering if this is just a dream.

Drip out of the bath looking for your clothes,
Turn on the light, one bed empty but one girl
in panties in fetal position wearing sleep mask.
Turn off the light and desperately search
for tennis shoes, for socks, anything, can’t find
underwear, can’t find jeans, can’t find underwear,
cough, snort, all garments are impossibly black and
blanket the floor, these girls are as messy as you are,
these girls are as messy as you are, hyperventilate.

Finally, you feel your thick leather belt buckle and
wrap your jeans around your waist, these oversized
sneakers must be yours, here is a button up shirt,
slip that on fast, no wait, a perfumed blouse constricting,
pull it off fast, the sleeve catches on your wrist, pull on it,
can’t get it off, you can’t get it off, it’s stuck on you.

Keys jangle and insert, the door begins to open.
You jump and push it close, the girl curses, tries again,
push it close, the girl yells at someone named Tiffany,
You hear a muffled “what” behind you with a stirring,
You open the door quickly with your hands apologetically
in front of you, the girl takes one look at her dangling blouse,
the unzipped jeans, one untied shoe, soaked hair, and screams
and screams, she screams, and lights are turned on, women
run out in the hall, gasp, cell phones, camera flashes, gasps,
and all you can say is “I got confused”, all you can say is
“I got confused.”

Posted in My Poetry | 2 Comments

Christmas Spirits Lost and Strong

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Rumrazor

So they know me by my fake name,
they know that I’m good for a few bucks in the till,
they can tell that I can talk up a good line of bull
until the world lies very still.

And the chalk corpse out on the sidewalk
only wanted to bum a cigarette
but got to arguing about the body politic
and borrowed an angry bone instead.

Children these days don’t learn about Christmas.
All the commercials give the surprise away.
The tree and the lights are an annual chore
of boxes to be stored or thrown away.

And the deadlines come and go,
packages are stamped.
Holiday songs seem old
and this bar is wet and cramped.

The chalk ghost wonders about his smoky hands
silhouetted against the distant moon.
He doesn’t know that he disappears in strands.
He has no idea his postage became due.

And kids unwrap one gift on Christmas eve
and don’t wait up expectantly anymore.
The next morning most visit an extra home
where their parents exchange return receipts.

Oh, I hold on to the cold while I cough out my lungs
and those that know my name call me all day long
but I never bought the fare to get on that homeward bus.
I’ll be shuffling with those Christmas spirits lost and strong.

Posted in My Poetry | 4 Comments

Off Kilter

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Rumrazor

What an off kilter morning so far. I woke up to my neighbors hanging up something on their wall at 7:30 in the morning, bang bang bang bang. Never mind that they go ballistic if I sneeze in my apartment after 10 o’clock at night. Then I went to the doctor, that went ok, my fears were assuaged that I will not die anytime soon, in the meantime, between now and death, I have to lose weight, exercise, eat healthy, watch my sugar, cut back on caffeine, give up chocolate, not drink so much diet soda, buy a better pair of sneakers, wear a back brace when lifting heavy objects, not expend myself unduly during sex, regularly check my blood pressure, and never forget or skip to take any of my seven different medications, lest I hasten that early death that has been feeding my anxiety lately.

Then at Best Buy, the pimply sales kid pretended like I didn’t know the difference between a jet-ink and a laser printer. My stupid Epson cartridge is up to forty bucks so I just sprung 20 more dollars and got a new printer so that those cartridges will only cost me 18 future dollars a pop. And the check out counter cool guy with the shades (why?) and the dreads (oh god, why?) tried a hard sale with the warranty. He said that for only 20 bucks if there is anything wrong with the printer I can bring it back and they will fix it, otherwise I had to mail it directly to HP. I asked him if they physically fixed it or if they sent it to HP and then he looked at me like I just sprouted three heads like a hydra and didn’t respond. So I reiterated that it just sounded like that for 20 bucks I would save myself a trip to the post office. And then he got pissy and said that they would replace it or give me another refurbished printer if they couldn’t fix it. I told him that didn’t answer my question if they just sent it to HP or not. And then he asked me if I wanted to check out. I told him I didn’t want to check out until he answered me honestly and then he had to admit that all they do is forward the broken printer to HP. Then I shrugged, paid, and left.

So I’m hungry by now and I go to the Teriyaki Chicken place. I order a bowl. She rings up a dinner. I’m standing there trying to figure out why a bowl is 9 bucks when the menu on the wall says it is only 5 bucks. Then she screams at me, because I wasn’t paying attention, if I wanted the food for here or to go. I didn’t understand her because of her thick Chinese accent and I thought she said that she wanted me to go. I asked her what did I do? Everyone was so confused. So I ended up paying something like 12 bucks for a huge Teriyaki dinner and a diet pepsi when I only wanted a bowl. Oh well, leftovers.

On my way home, I glance over at some girl in the passenger seat of a convertible and I guess I looked at her too long for her liking. She goes what are you looking at? I’m pissed off by now because of all the shit that has happened to me since I was woken up and I don’t know what kind of answer she is used to, I guess she is used to polite guys who quickly shake their heads and mutter “nothing” under their breath and look away or whatever, trouble is I’m in a bad mood and not feeling very polite, so I just look at her harder, actually lean out of the window and retort, “I’m looking at your ugly face and there’s nothing you can do about it.” The look on both their faces, her and the driver’s, was priceless. She quickly scrunches up her face like Rene Zellweger if Rene Zellweger had just bitten into a lemon and screams, “you’re the ugly pig, you’re the big fat pig, you fatso.” And I was like, “ok, but how is that gonna make me quit looking at you.” By then the light had turned green and the girls squealed out of the intersection.

I’m home now. It’s barely 1:30pm. I was going to do some other chores, you know, to take advantage of what I thought was gonna be a lazy Monday, I was gonna get a haircut, wash the truck, go to Walgreens and fill some prescriptions and also try to buy a new shower curtain but screw it, I think I’ll take a nap. I’m tired.

Posted in My Daily Life | Tagged | 2 Comments