Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,12

top of her breasts. There were two. I hadn’t but I nodded again and smiled again.

‘From then on I knew,’ Shi said. ‘From that day on.’

‘Knew what?’ I asked, drawing a thicker and thicker circle around the dark ‘X’ I’d made on the message pad in front of me. ‘Knew what, Shi?’

‘C’mon man. Vibes. You know.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Course Mister Mistofsky’s got his rules. A policy about never fraternizing with a hotel guest.’

He reached under the desk and produced a gray loose-leaf hotel manual, flipping it open to a tab where there were two pages of numbered employee procedures and policies. ‘See,’ he said, ‘Mister Jeffrey M’s got a directive for everything.’ He thumped the plastic page with his finger. ‘Frankly, personally, I regard most of this as over-management. You know, excessive.’

I nodded. I knew excessive.

Later on we did a walk-around of the hotel. The building had only four stories. There was no elevator.

Shi showed me the laundry facilities and the roof sundeck. We went from floor to floor with him unlocking doors and pointing out the differences in amenities in the remodeled rooms. Some had newer carpeting. Each had a toaster oven, a small refrigerator, a color TV, and Hawaiian-type pastel bedspreads featuring exotic, stupid flowers.

Room number 316/318 was next to one of the hall toilets. ‘Remember who lives here?’ he asked, unable to contain himself, as we passed Tonya Von Hachten’s apartment.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘Blanche-fuckin’-Dubois?’

The beginning of the end for me started the night before my scheduled first day off which was Sunday. My stuff had been in and unpacked and, except for a couple of times when the phone had rung past twelve, there had been no late-evening activity in the hotel to disturb me. Zero check-ins. No problems.

Shi was staying the four hours after his shift every day from five to nine, to train me, help me get used to the desk and the credit card machine and the manual accountingentry system.

If a steady month-to-month tenant came in through the front door, he’d introduce me.

My daily habit was to have a few beers with dinner after he left and after I closed the desk. Nothing heavy, just enough to take the bumps out of the road.

That night, because I was about to complete my first week, I decided to celebrate. I sat up, well past midnight, working on my play, finishing the second act, drinking gin with ice and grapefruit juice.

At one forty-five Ms. Von Hachten showed up outside my manager’s apartment and began pressing the night buzzer on the front desk. She was a resident so I knew that she knew that the hotel was officially closed. A big sign read, ‘EMERGENCIES ONLY AFTER NINE P.M.’ I watched through the distortion of my peephole for over a minute as she continued buzzing, hoping maybe she’d fuck off and disappear. Finally, having no other option, I unlocked the door.

She had on a silky robe with matching slippers, coordinated shades of green. To me, everything she wore announced, ‘lick me, fuck me.’

I was still wearing my tie.

‘Hello Miss Von Hachten,’ I said, flicking the front desk lights on, measuring the words, wanting to sound unintoxicated. ‘Can I help you with something?’

She was way higher than me. Blasted on booze but something else too. As soon as I saw her eyes I knew. ‘No,’ she slurred, ‘you can’t. I need to talk to Shi. Where is he?’

It was downers. Maybe Valium. Maybe Seconal. ‘He’s unavailable. Gone home. He doesn’t live here,’ I said, still trying to appear businesslike, avoid problems.

She flopped down on the lobby couch then glared at me. ‘I’ll wait.’

‘Look, I can take a message. Do you want me to do that?’

There was an interval, a few seconds until the meaning of all my words fully filtered past the narcotics in her brain. Ms. Von Hachten got up, teetered for a moment, began walking away, then stopped. ‘Hey look,’ she slurred, ‘I’ve…we’ve got a problem.’

‘Ha ha. I see.’

‘…You find me funny?’

‘What’s our problem, Ms. Von Hachten?’

‘…Noises. I was changing…getting ready for bed after my bath…there were sounds…from outside the window, or in the hall. You’d better come up…you know, check it out.’

‘Someone using the hall washroom?’

‘…What?’

‘Somebody taking a piss.’

She shot me an evil look - it too came on time delay. ‘Hey, goddammit, listen! That’s not what I said! I said…there’s somebody…spying…watching me. Like a perv. A weirdo.’

Getting rid of her was my only priority. ‘Ya know,’ I said, measuring my words carefully, ‘I did my rounds