El Rio Hotel

Chapter 3 – El Rio Hotel

The El Rio Hotel made no pretense to good taste. It was exactly what it had been for fifty years under the same name and various owners, a flophouse for the wanted, the marginal, the alcoholic and the addicted. The original owner and builder of the establishment knew he could depend on an unlimited customer base. Los Angeles, California would always be a destination for a certain breed of American who, for any number of attributable reasons, wished for nothing more than to forget everything and be forgotten; to chemically walk off the continental shelf and die very numb in a warm locale. The management catered to a clientele that had come to expect the worse, and it served them accordingly. The El Rio Hotel fed this expectation, this desire, by consistently offering its guests the fewest amenities and services possible: a small room, a toilet, a sink, a light bulb, plenty of noise and no air conditioning. No one felt short-changed. Most of the guests were accustomed to various forms of institutional living. They would have felt ill at ease in any other accommodation. Their expectations, their sense of identity and place in the scheme of things, had been long determined. They might have dreams, but they were only comfortable having them as dreams. Dreams held aloft, becoming like pretty frescoes on a barrel-vaulted ceiling. To bore through the plaster to the other side would let in the terrible light, open them up to the sky and chip the paint. The habitues of the Rio liked looking at pictures most of all.

            Mildew, bleach, and stale beer. It reminded Carson of his past, of his grandparents home, of an era that weakly cast a bygone light from a netherworld, a detached universe that nevertheless still existed, behind a curtain, through a door, a world that never changed and re-enacted itself over and over and had intimations of its own obsolete nature, like all the characters of a silent movie reel conscious of being watched by the future, recognizing their own decrepitude, their quaint actions, their uselessness, really; an existence set out for nothing more than a future audience’s need to feel nostalgia for some other time, and that same audience not knowing why it felt this nostalgia, this need to seek comfort in an old place that didn’t exist except in the mind. It felt real and that’s why people went there looking for something. A place where they weren’t held responsible; a place where they could do nothing but observe and feel, never being required to act, to think, to plan, to design or be clever; a place carved out in innocence and sorrow, in self pity, the comfort of self pity, the comfort of the squalid admission that they were not responsible for their lives, that they had been cast there by a design greater than their own; the sorrow of not knowing why this was, and taking comfort in that great dolorousness of not knowing, that great feeling of being a child-like victim, a comforting and paradoxical feeling, crying for the thing that everyone vaguely recalls and no one can name.

The lobby of the El Rio was sad like nostalgia. It was bitter but not really threatening. Carson followed Mickey silently, as though they were acting out a part the two of them had been rehearsing for a thousand years. The floor was concrete. There was only the light of one window facing the street and a green lamp on the desk of a clerk dozing in a chicken wire cage. A blind black man sat in a chair in the middle of the room. In the seat next to him sat a small dog looking pensively at Carson and Mickey. The blind man was alive. Carson could see his chest moving up and down, in and out with each heavy breath, but the rest of him didn’t move. The furniture, the table and chairs, were of chrome and vinyl plastic, green and orange. They were set around the room like wayward planets whose gasses were dully erupting in the dark heavens. On the walls were framed pictures of dead, silent movie stars, of Ramon Novarro, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Valentino. There was a badly done watercolor depicting a group of Tyrolean revelers singing in lederhosen in a town square. The women had redundant breasts and the men leered at them as though they were in possession of a recondite knowledge well beyond what they could actually deliver. A ceiling fan stirred the musty air in a circle, having a sorrowful and negligible effect. At the long end of the hall a door creaked open dropping a shaft of grey light along the floor toward Carson. He followed the line to the opening of the door and saw a man’s face spying on them through the crack. The door shut as their eyes met. The walls were concealed in red crushed velvet that crawled its way up toward a length of milled pine that was shedding a skin of cheap gold paint. Above the molding, sheaves of silver and black metallic wallpaper clung to the surface of the wall before terminating at the ceiling. The paper, curling back on itself in the corners and at the seams, repeated a silhouetted motif of a man and a woman in Victorian costumes. The adumbrated couple struck various unlikely poses – playful, amorous, carefree.

Something like a high-pitched, throat-lodged gurgling tripped out from a small birdcage beside the desk clerk. Carson noticed a parakeet there, warbling in front of a suspended and dirty mirror, a yellow and white bird tossing its voice between the stamped tin ceiling and the concrete floor. Carson observed the clerk as he passed by his sentry box. The man was middle-aged. He, too, was asleep. Like a goiter on a pachyderm, he had an enormous gut that grew out tightly against his guinea T-shirt. The areas where his sweat had collected and dried over the life of the shirt gave it a mottled beige pattern. He had an irregularly shaped and narrow neck at the top of his heaping abdomen. Abundant tufts of gray, white and black hairs grew from his nostrils and ears, and from several dark, malignant looking moles on his cheekbone and chin. His face was the color of hepatitis yellow. He wore a mint green baseball cap with the words “GO FUCK YOURSELF” emblazoned above the bill. A sign on the wall behind him read:

                                  Credit? Does This Look Like College to You?

Fastened to the wire mesh that enclosed his office was another sign, white and metallic, with large bold letters stating: ALL WEAPONS MUST BE CHECKED AT THE FRONT DESK. On a table next to the clerk was a .45 caliber handgun. Beside it was a half-eaten bologna sandwich on a paper plate, looking as if it had been used for several meals running. Alongside the plate, sporting flecks of breadcrumbs and what may have been mayonnaise, were several tit and ass magazines and the latest issue of Fish and Game. Carson wondered how often the clerk had seen a fish outside of the pescaderia at the Grand Central Market. He imagined the hotelier standing knee deep in some alpine rivulet, attired in his sweat-stained T-shirt, baseball cap, a pair of mustard colored Bermuda shorts, shivering from the cold, his testicles taking refuge under the large glob of his belly, warily casting his fly rod into the teal green water, snagging his line on everything but the wily and elusive brook trout, fearing the onset of darkness and the strange sounds of night birds, giant moths, sloths, packs of wolves, and other human-meat loving creatures, and wishing, pining, for his secure and warm berth back in L.A., seated at his formica desk behind the chicken wire mesh, with all the predictable crazies, hustlers, drug-addled and wine-sloshed homies in downtown L.A. to keep him company, helping him re-establish that familiar orientation far from the perilous dales and sylvan glens where danger lurked behind every bush and tree.

The parakeet stopped its obnoxious twittering. Carson looked at the thing. The tiny bird was rapidly blinking its eyes. Its wings fluttered for a couple of seconds, then it froze, and fell dead from its plastic perch, face down into its water dish at the bottom of the cage.

“I always hated that fuckin’ bird,” said Mickey.

With the still air of the lobby trailing them, Carson and Mickey entered the stairwell and ascended to the fifth floor. When Mickey opened the door, the quiet that was the bird’s brief legacy was quickly extinguished. The hallway belched with invisible echoes. A tortured confusion and babel issued from behind two rows of steel fire doors that lined each wall of the hard, unpolished floor. Beyond the square membrane of room number 501, a man was beating a woman, holding her by the hair and slamming her head into the wall. With each blow, Carson could hear the woman’s lover say, “I’m a man, goddammit, I’m a man.”

Across the hall, was a man who lived on social security disability and general assistance. The man was a serious collector and artist. He gathered the sins of the world and compiled their histories in his room, where he could observe their beauty and manipulate their illimitable shapes and colors. Only he didn’t call them sins. He named them the threads of life. Each day he wandered the streets of downtown with a pair of scissors that he sharpened fresh that morning. When he saw a man or woman overcome by the draughts of poison they had imbibed, and he was sure they were unconscious, he took out his sharpened scissors and cut a piece of cloth from their coat or shirt or trousers, some portion of the soiled raiment they had selected to wear on their dead-end journey. And the artist took that scrap of the fallen ones home with him to Room 502 of the Hotel El Rio, and spent the night unraveling the fibers of the swatches, until he had mounds of cotton, wool, dacron, rayon, polyester, tweed and, rarely, Chinese silk filaments, all of it piled over the cool, smooth finish of his concrete floor. And he took these separate heaps of cloth and fiber and he carefully laid them into empty jam or pickle jars made of glass, of various sizes and shapes and colors, all cleaned and transparent, with all their labels removed. Upon the clear smooth surface of the glass he applied a strip of masking tape. In careful handwriting with a felt tip pen, he inscribed the date and location from where he obtained the specimen, and the race and gender of its former bearer. Then he sealed the jars, and with a small amount of glue he adhered one to the other, stacking them along the wall opposite his window, as high as the ceiling. And after he had filled the wall completely, he started another row and repeated the same procedure. And at the beginning of each day, he waited for the sun to come through the window, which faced east across the old Southern Pacific rail yards. He waited for the light to pass through his room and illuminate the hundreds of glass jars he had erected like a vitrine showcase, the beams of natural daylight passing through or reflected by the thousands of fibers, all their colors, natural and dyed, found in nature or devised by chemists. And he sat and watched as the colors shifted, grew bold, faded or sparkled with the transiting arc of the sun. He felt the colors of the fibers, joined and fused by the sun, wash over him, spill over him like a great quiet tide. He admired all the beauty that was there in the cloth that had wrapped and protected the men and women who had been brought down around him like sacrificial lambs, offering themselves up to him, his own designs, his own intentions, to whatever, without a struggle, after the struggle, when they were at peace, or in some drenched horrible dream, it didn’t matter. Their world was his world, but he had taken their soiled cloth and he made it something that shimmered as the planet spun like a loom. This is all he did. This was all he wished to do. He was a failure. No one would ever know what he had accomplished and it didn’t matter. When he died, the fat, hairy man at the desk would clean out his room and say, “look at all this shit,” and he would be right. Look at all this shit. It would be thrown out. Discarded. Buried. It would be forgotten. Just like shit.

Down the hall a woman studied her bed. She wasn’t happy with the way it had turned out. The corners were not symmetrical. They were not crisp and tight like her father had taught her. She unmade the bed and started over. She had been meaning to go outside since yesterday. She wanted to see some friends. She was running out of ice. She would leave any minute now, but first she had to get the bed corners just right. She had to make them perfect 45-degree angles. The blanket had to be tight, like her father had showed her. He was a mean son of a bitch. She hated her father, but he had showed her how to make the bed the proper way; the only way. And she had to get it just right before going out to meet her friends. The problem was…the sheets were not clean. If the sheets were clean they would be crisp and stiff and tight and just perfect for tucking under the corners of the mattress. And she didn’t like the way the sheets felt in her hands. It had to feel right in her hands before she could get the corners tight. Maybe she would wash her hands. Maybe the dirt on her hands was getting in the way. She looked at her hands. They looked clean. But the dirt could be microscopic. Her father had clean hands. His fingernails were always sparkling. There was never a speck of grease or dirt or nothing beneath her father’s fingernails. He’d always told her she was a pig. She would wash her hands now. To get out the microscopic dirt. After that she would tuck the blanket and sheet in just right. But what if the dirty sheet made her hands dirty again? Wouldn’t that interfere with the proper tucking? It would. Maybe if she had some gloves. But she didn’t have any gloves. Maybe she ought to go out and get some gloves. No. She couldn’t do that. The bed would remain unmade. Her father would be upset if he knew. She would be upset. She had to make it first. First she would wash her hands in the sink. But then wouldn’t her hands become dirty again when she turned off the faucet with her hands after washing them real good? The faucet was dirty, surely. She went to the sink anyway to have a look. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. She looked worried, she thought. She was worried, she thought. Was it her father’s nose she inherited? She was ugly. It wasn’t her father’s nose after all.  It was her nose and it was crooked and narrow. She hated her nose. She mustn’t look at it. She turned away. She saw the bed was unmade. She pulled the sheet and blanket out from under the mattress. She had to start over, the way, doing it the way, he made her do it. But her hands weren’t clean. She was confused and afraid. She climbed in the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. She tried to imagine that she had no hands. She tried to imagine her father in the room in his uniform. He would make the bed the way it had to be made. He would make the bed with her in it. She with no hands. He took her hands. She had only stubs now. He tucked in the sheets real good now with her in the bed. He pulled the blanket up over her head. It was dark. She couldn’t breathe. He liked it when she couldn’t breathe. Then he picked up the bed with her in it. He was very strong. She was dead now and he put her in a big hole in the earth and that was where she would stay. She didn’t have to make the bed now because she was dead and she had stubs instead of hands. Her father was a mean son of a bitch.

In 505 a man was masturbating and crying while the image of his mother alternately reproved and seduced him in his thoughts. He stood at his father’s grave site, mouthing his eulogy with an erection, with his mother at his side gripping his member. He masturbated all day, every day, until his penis was chafed and sore. Then he went to his night job at the flower mart on Wall Street, meeting the trucks that came in from Visalia, Carpenteria, and Long Beach, unpacking the hundreds of boxes of tiger lilies, birds of paradise, orchids and roses, delivering them to the vendors to prepare for yesterday’s orders from the florists in Beverly Hills and San Marino. He hated the fragrance of flowers that hung in the air. He hated his job. He was 60 years old. He had never been with a woman. Whores didn’t count. He had never been with a woman.

In 507 two men and a woman shared whiskey from a bottle that had been bought from the proceeds of an unknown woman’s purse. One of the men had posed as a messenger, walked straight into the Transamerica building and took the purse from where it had been left unattended in the woman’s office. As they became increasingly drunk, and loud, and vied with one another in recounting other daring escapades, most of which were untrue, they argued over the clothing and electronic components that had been purchased with the victim’s credit cards. Accusations were traded. This is mine. No, it’s mine. And their faces took on the slack-jawed and fiery-eyed quality of too much booze and little formal education, so that Being, that quality of knowing one is in the world, was constituted in perceived insults, offenses, and their basest companions, vengeance and violence. One man didn’t like the way the other was looking at his woman. The woman told her man to shut up. The other man said he wasn’t looking at shit. The woman said she ain’t shit. Her man told the other man to take it back. The other man, after a long suck from the bottle, told his friend to fuck himself. He tried to walk out of the room with several of the new cell phones. His friend stabbed him. His woman said, What, are you fuckin’ crazy? Her man told her to mind her fuckin’ business, that, if it weren’t for her big mouth, his friend wouldn’t be bleedin’ on the floor. She told him to fuck himself. He hits his woman, and takes another drink, while the two bleed and he says, shit, no one’s gonna fuck with him, not him, he don’t take no shit from nobody. And he felt like shit but he put that down, back away, and let no one see the weakness, the guilt. His mother had been a good woman, a church goin’ woman, and she had taught him right from wrong, but that didn’t count on the street, it didn’t play with a man’s pride. There ain’t no right and no wrong when a man’s been disrespected. If a man let that slide he’d be dead. And if his mother was there in the room, she’s the only one could have made him cry. She’s the only one could, whose eyes could, shine back at him what he’d been before he let life seduce him. Without her, he’d forgotten everything, and that’s how it would be, too. 

In the next room an older man with AIDS fucked a young Latino street hustler in the ass. The boy hadn’t demanded he use a condom. The man would never see this boy again. He hated him as much as he desired him. He was nothing to him but a pretty face, nothing but body temperature and a deep dark orifice. He had such a nice young ass, this boy, who was just starting out, and the man ejaculated into it forcefully, feeling virile and briefly invincible on the little money he had scraped together for a young piece of ass. He gave the boy his money and then kicked him out of his room. The boy walked into the hall toward the stairs. The boy was smiling, until he saw Carson and Mickey and everything about him clenched into a hardness that was intended to deflect danger but faltered like the first steps of a foal, and Carson saw fear in the boy’s black eyes, and he saw that he was on a death march, but Carson blocked any feeling he detected in himself. To feel now was to waste himself. Feeling was an extravagance. He was fighting not to feel. He was fighting to stay clear. To contain and exclude anything that might impede his survival. He was in training like an athlete, like a soldier preparing to kill, a programmed automaton thrusting its killing blade into meat and nothing but meat. Unreflecting and insensate. He was a machine. His purpose was to obtain that which would sustain him, keep him breathing. His focus was on money. With money he could buy his life back. His aim was on Giambone.