The Amethyst Hotel

The Amethyst Hotel

She gave monumentally bad head and it took him forever to come, though he eventually did gurgle out thick, desperate ripples. To repeat, alarmingly bad head (Exhibit A). He considered this along with the fluffy blond down on parts of her nape (Exhibit B) and stomach (Exhibit C), which ex facie suggested she had lied about her age. As he washed beneath his foreskin at the wet bar it dawned on him that she was some father’s little princess, a fresh entry into the club scene with a fake ID and probably no more than 17 years under her belt. The realization swept over him like a sentence.

He wandered aimlessly about the eighth floor and felt touched by its symphony of lives behind numerous identical doors. He wondered how many behind those doors had been shanghaied into mouth-fucking a minor. He imagined the knocking of gavels and the swish-swish of orange-bootied inmate shoes.

He rode the elevator to the lobby, feeling the electricity of resolution. Being an adult—he ruminated as he walked into Bacchus, the tastefully appointed hotel bar, for the second time that night—means dealing with the consequences when you fuck up. He had fucked up (abysmally) and now he would atone. He scoped the bar for the burliest corn-fed football fanatic he could find, preferably one who exuded martial arts training. Approaching his target from behind, he slapped this blue-blooded ox of an Amerkan in the back of the head, hard, and quipped, “Look a’ this lil’ faggot.”

There was quick action, the kind that required tenfold longer to explain than to observe. What did stand out to
Bacchus' patrons that night was the sheer malice expressed by the smaller man, as displayed by his acerbic harangues barked through clenched teeth (“Come on, you fucking terrorist!”). The motive for the smaller man's actions was hard for the witnesses to ascertain, at least while the punches were still flying, and—subsequently, as a direct result of the previous subordinate clause—while the man leaked forth onto the floor, checkered in different shades of purple.

But this was all easily explainable—reasoned the bar patrons seriatim, after mulling it over and swishing it around in their pints. After all, how often have we seen someone get a little brave, boastful? And how often have we seen a drunk flare up like a tinderbox and devolve into a beast?

And one by one, the stool-sitters and nut-munchers deliberated until their minds had dotted the "i"s and crossed the "t"s of the SNAFU’s unfolding, arriving finally at a satisfactory explanation they could take home to their wives or coworkers as proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they were “good men.”

But why—and this singular fact, forgotten by most in the bar that night, continued to bother the blue-blooded Amerkan ox until he found peace in a frenzied interaction between a ball-peen hammer and two underutilized fingers on his left hand—why, in all the depraved, sick lunacies of the motherfucking free world, why had that drunken instigator never once fought back? He had only chomped down—like someone getting dental X-rays—on an Amethyst Hotel matchbook, waiting for the punches to come, each one landing, making his eyes dial rotary telephones in the air.

For Those of You in the Exit Rows

For those of you in the exit rows:

It’s not worth jumping. Don’t even try. The windows are sealed with double paned fiberglass, sandwiching a pocket of inert gas and high-density polyurethane spines. The cabin door may look like it’s easy enough to open, but that’s only in the event of an actual cabin or systems emergency, when the pilot has activated the Emergency Maneuvers Button Console and flicked not less than seventeen attendant switches, only then does the automated clasp holding the emergency exit in place retreat into the latch housing and allow for unrestrained motion of the cabin’s over-wing doors.

So jumping up and heaving at the door lever will only succeed in revocation of your air clearance for the rest of your natural life, and no flight school will re-admit you, no flight attendant training courses will understand that you are a complicated and melancholy person. When you apply for jobs, men with sucked-in lips and furrowed brows will scoff at your portfolio, of which the only distinguishing characteristic is an FAA dossier clipped inside the front cover that bears a menacing, red-stamped "Aviation History Incident Report." You will become instantly never-remembered. You will have to travel to the international headquarters of a little-known Grecian island hopper and apply in proper so they can weigh your English proficiency against your sifted and porous resume (“Yes, that sure is all of it. I took some years off to become a homemaker”).

And make haste, lest your demons catch wind and clutch you before the wall of emotional security is mortared. You will have to act now, or risk checking into that motel off route CA-111 in the Salton Sea with its half-blinking “Bombay Beach Motor Inn” sign, except in the dark, when it reads “Bom Beach or Inn.” You know that if you go back there, this time there will be no return, no crawling back full or focus and resolutions.

No: you will stockpile your 401k’s weight in booze. You will cry while watching daytime television, searching for curatives, you will cry lamenting a bad lot in life and you will die thinking something’s broken in you, that something broke long ago, that something had never worked, could never work, as long as ruinous thoughts existed in your clanging head: coins shaking in a bell jar, rattling harder, sharper, crashing.

Then you will become pieces. And sink. And like a ripple, your memory will spread. Just the ripples now, lapping at what remains, reminding everyone. And they will have to guess, “What could I have done?” and “Is she at peace now?” and, in their own difficult times, “Where is my friend?”