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Excerpt from A Horse
Will Eat Itself to Death
We emerged from our
respective head trips a few minutes later.
Did your bathroom have
the... Toilet seat
prophylactics? Nothing
less. Casually, we sauntered
into the lobby. It was teeming with the Best of Baltimore, who all appeared to
be waiting for one reason or another: tightly-wrapped, glittering, coiffed,
potentially festive... And waiting.
Theyre in line for the
elevator, said my girlfriend. Come on, Lets take the
stairs. I followed her through
the lingering mass toward the back of the lobby, but before we could voice any
sort of protest, a series of courteous but professionally insistent people in
matching black shirts herded us into a remote service elevator as the door
closed tightly after my heels. The heat
in the crowded steel box curled my hair. I worked my eyes upward enough to see
the little round numbers above the door. Eight.......Nine....Ten.....Eleven....
Like many old hotels, there was no thirteen. Only a circular void to
acknowledge the existence of anything beyond twelve. I noticed the gap where
number four should have been and was wondering if it bore some sort of ominous
overtones when the sweat box inched to a halt. We all stood baking in the heat
of each other, looking at the number twelve, over which someone had scrawled in
black marker Ready to Die?.
Have a nice time, said the
operator as the elevator door opened. |