Hypertext Hotel 1999

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<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/Front_Desk.png?raw=true" alt="" ></p><h1 class="noMargins"><b>Welcome </b></h1><h3 style="text-indent: 7em;" class="noMargins">to the <a data-passage="Construction_Crews/Brochure.html">Hypertext Hotel</a>, now under reconstruction. All newly elected members of the <a data-passage="Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html"><b>BOARD OF DIRECTORS</b></a> may read, write, and <a data-passage="The_Guestbook/He_Slept_Here.html">sleep over here</a>, moving in wherever they feel most comfortable, the<a data-passage="The_Guestbook/But_What_Is_Whole.html"> whole</a> Hotel at their disposal. Guests, too, may range freely. This is not so much a friendly hotel as it is one without proper management, which is to say that within its rooms and corridors, virtually anything can happen...</h3><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory.html"><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em;"><b><u>Hotel Service Directory</u></b></h3></a><a data-passage="Room_Directory.html"><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em;"><b><u>Hotel Room Directory</u></b></h3></a><h3>All visitors who have left behind some evidence of their<a data-passage="Distention/A_Hotel_Like_This.html"> stopover</a> are invited to sign<a data-passage="Front_Desk/The_Guestbook.html"> <b>The Guestbook</b></a>. The Management would like to thank the<a data-passage="The_Guestbook/Friends_of_the_Hotel.html"><b> Friends of the Hotel</b></a> for their generous contributions.</h3><h3>Please pick up the <a data-passage="Front_Desk/Housefone.html"><b>Housephone</b></a><b>.</b></h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em;"><a data-passage="Front_Desk/House_Rules.html"><b><u>House Rules</u></b></a><b>:</b> Boardroom policies.</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em;"><a data-passage="Employees_Only.html"><b><u>Employees Only</u></b></a></h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em;"><a data-passage="Construction_Crews.html"><b><u>Construction Crews</u></b></a></h3>/* Links: [[Construction_Crews/Brochure.html]] [[Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html]] [[The_Guestbook/He_Slept_Here.html]] [[The_Guestbook/But_What_Is_Whole.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory.html]] [[Room_Directory.html]] [[Distention/A_Hotel_Like_This.html]] [[Front_Desk/The_Guestbook.html]] [[The_Guestbook/Friends_of_the_Hotel.html]] [[Front_Desk/Housefone.html]] [[Front_Desk/House_Rules.html]] [[Employees_Only.html]] [[Construction_Crews.html]] */

<p>A brief motion across an arc, behind a corner, into a darkness that you can't see now, you have seen the Spectre in the garden.</p> [[🕮==>->A_speck/Oh_shy_apparition.html]]

<p>No water runs here. I will remind you that something has been seen in a dream before. </p><p><a data-passage="Fount/Migo.html">There is a small boy like a dream, carrying nothing<a data-passage="JC/JC-Evidence.html"> where his hand once was.</a> His skin is black like a painted leaf. His eyes are just. Oh, well, there is no water which would come from his hands. </a></p><p>You have come away from the wall, do you realize? A vulnerable sky like that above your head? <a data-passage="JC/JC-Familiars.html">What brought you out here, </a>to the middle of the dead courtyard?</p><p>Was it the sound of a million wings that are nothing tomorrow? <a data-passage="Fount/JC_-_The_Iron_Boy.html">Ah ha, here is the iron boy standing still with no hands. Nobody can see his pupils until they are looking.<p>He is standing in a ring of stone.</p></a></p><p><a data-passage="JC/JC-Searchlight.html">The clots of leaves never quite dry</a>, thinking then of a year ago, and then a hundred. It is an ageless sort of nature, this fountain.</p>/* Links: [[Fount/Migo.html]] [[JC/JC-Evidence.html]] [[JC/JC-Familiars.html]] [[Fount/JC_-_The_Iron_Boy.html]] [[JC/JC-Searchlight.html]] */ [[🕮==>->A_Garden/A_speck.html]]

<p><b>T</b>here is a small <a data-passage="A_Garden/Fount.html">fountain</a> in the garden. The walls are round stones. <a data-passage="A_Garden/None.html">Maybe the leaves are coming down for the first time.</a> <a data-passage="Garden/Don_t_You_Wonder.html">Did you notice?</a></p><p><a data-passage="A_Garden/A_speck.html">Hold tight back against the wall, there is something cold in the space of the garden.</a> Nobody has been here for a long time. There are no keys for the doors.</p><p><a data-passage="A_Garden/Patione.html">It is a patio and the stage sets thin glass squares, all here.</a></p>/* Links: [[A_Garden/Fount.html]] [[A_Garden/None.html]] [[Garden/Don_t_You_Wonder.html]] [[A_Garden/A_speck.html]] [[A_Garden/Patione.html]] */ [[🕮==>->A_Garden/The_Symphon.html]]

<p>.......................</p><br><p>you can leave the garden</p><br><p>.........................................................</p><br><p>you can leave the garden</p><br><p>..........</p><br><p>for</p><br><p>....</p>

<p><a data-passage="A_Garden/The_Symphon.html">Up here on the bricks, just a step above the floor -</a></p><p>Ha, all the grass is covered. The sky is drifting down from branches & bones -</p><p>There is a tight iron table. There was a glass top at one time. Only the legs are wrapped together to make nothing like tables. There are chairs, too. They are sticky with age. They have retained their blackness in all this eye.</p>/* Links: [[A_Garden/The_Symphon.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Patione/Into_yr_Patio]]

<p class="noMargins">Look up to the sounds above. They meet you in midflight, flashing down out of the clouds in the range & flurry that rubs your head, a fresh knot of brown & orange dashes across you, rustles to your feet in a thickness.</p><p class="noMargins">This is the floor of the garden. This will be the bed.</p><p class="noMargins"><a data-passage="JC/JC-Sleeper.html">You will rest here one day, on these very stones when your wishes have all been taken.</a></p><p class="noMargins">There is a cold iron ring fixed into the stone at your foot.</p>/* Links: [[JC/JC-Sleeper.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Fount/Ring_d.html]]

<h3>DEAR GRANDPA:</h3><h3>Only now, as I begin this letter, do I realize that I have never written a letter to you before. Perhaps because you were so old, or seemed so old, I always thought of you as already dead. Even when we visited you and I talked to you in person. But I am nearly as old now as you were when you first saw me the year that I was born. Does that mean that I am already dead, too? In some eyes, surely. And sometimes I feel almost like</h3> [[🕮==>->Room_701/A_Letter_to_Grandfather.html]]

<p>A noble breed, and their diction is impeccable.</p> [[🕮==>->Joseph_Frita/Frita.html]]

<p>It was fast. It left a taste in your mouth. </p><p>There is now something changed in the back of your neck, &<a data-passage="JC/JC-Gentle.html"> some sort of secret.</a> </p><p>Why the garden?</p><p>In life, as they all do.</p>/* Links: [[JC/JC-Gentle.html]] */ [[🕮==>->A_Garden/Garden.html]]

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/titillation.html">Nasty</a> <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html">narcoanalysis</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/prostitution.html">synthesized</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/titillation.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/prostitution.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/computation.html">hardcore</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html">ram function</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/radiation.html">extreme </a><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/oblivion.html">unction</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/computation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/radiation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/oblivion.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/oblivion.html">exoteric</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html">blowjob</a></h3><h3>energetic <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/necessity.html">snowjob</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/oblivion.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/necessity.html]] */ [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]]

<b><h3>steal this story</h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html">power and glory</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/convergence.html">innovative chassis</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/necessity.html">motivates</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/radiation.html">catastrophe</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/intensification.html">interface</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html">democracy</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/computation.html">calculated </a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/oblivion.html">failure</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/convergence.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/necessity.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/radiation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/intensification.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/computation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/oblivion.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="tan_line/Bikini.html">Virtual Goddess</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/radiation.html">dripping radiation</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/malnutrition.html">slurping it up</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/competition.html">INTENSIFICATION</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[tan_line/Bikini.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/radiation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/malnutrition.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/competition.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/information.html">semiotic</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/identification.html">microscript</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/exoteric.html">forlorn</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/malnutrition.html">tender strips</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/information.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/identification.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/exoteric.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/malnutrition.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html">heaven bomb</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/quietude.html">even calm</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/quietude.html]] */

<h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/simultaneity.html"><b>Nuke descending stairway</b></a></h3>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/simultaneity.html]] */

<h3><b><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/titillation.html">Crypto</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/abstinence.html">fascist</a> <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html">polyglot</a> </b></h3>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/titillation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/abstinence.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/competition.html">corporate</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/absolution.html">flower power</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/malnutrition.html">pussy</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/information.html">tower hour</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/competition.html]] Amerika_Prays/absolution.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/malnutrition.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/information.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/gesticulation.html">sperm</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/necessity.html">automatically</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/quietude.html">unwrites</a> <a data-passage="The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html">itself</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/titillation.html">in cheek</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/gesticulation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/necessity.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/quietude.html]] [[The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/titillation.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="The_Chapel/Distention.html">exoskeleton of amorous<br>transgression</a> <a data-passage="The_Chapel/MK_in_the_Chapel.html">strips</a> <a data-passage="The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html">to virtual bone</a> </h3></b>/* Links: [[The_Chapel/Distention.html]] [[The_Chapel/MK_in_the_Chapel.html]] [[The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/titillation.html">retinal spew</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/gesticulation.html">of who are you</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/anticipation.html">dental creature's</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/convergence.html">double feature</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/titillation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/gesticulation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/anticipation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/convergence.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/titillation.html">ur-erotic</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/radiation.html">eco-suck</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html">proto-divine</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/simultaneity.html">energy-fuck</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/titillation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/radiation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/simultaneity.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/information.html">coded vengeance</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html">harpooned negligence</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/computation.html">mastermind intolerance</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html">rectify THIS</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/information.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/computation.html]] [[The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/information.html">judgment's cock</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/electrocution.html">bruising appeal</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/intensification.html">cocksucking bruised</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/absolution.html">banana peel</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/information.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/electrocution.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/intensification.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/absolution.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html">Host closed connection</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[../Front_Desk.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html">pusillanimous predator</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/escalation.html">pugnacious prowler</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/escalation.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/radiation.html">wasted</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/quietude.html">space thing</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html">tasty</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/identification.html">base things</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/radiation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/quietude.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/identification.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html">vaginal creams</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/appropriation.html">wet dreams</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/appropriation.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/necessity.html">internal necessity</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/flotation.html">elasticity</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/necessity.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/flotation.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/competition.html">unlimited warranty</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Room_666/Replication.html">extraterrestrial night mare</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/convergence.html">variable strategy</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/appropriation.html">net capacity</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/competition.html]] [[Room_666/Replication.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/convergence.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/appropriation.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/escalation.html">crack head</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/flotation.html">erupts</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/competition.html">ruptured</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/convergence.html">rack of duck</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/escalation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/flotation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/competition.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/convergence.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html">readymade soliloquy</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/exoteric.html">hand me down</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/intensification.html">sophistry</a> </h3></b>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/exoteric.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/intensification.html]] */

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/exoteric.html">dripping iron clits</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/electrocution.html">lipping dry tits</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/servitude.html">tripping</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/simultaneity.html">slits.</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/exoteric.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/electrocution.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/servitude.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/simultaneity.html]] */

<p>They were back again</p><p>even in the one place you might not</p><p>expect them</p><p>The mole rats were interfering</p><p>with God</p><p>it was they who ate all the </p><p>stale </p><p>confession wafers.</p><p>The mole rats had no friends but they procreated with</p><p>much abundance</p><p><a data-passage="dirt/ate.html">and ate in the fervor of all things dead.</a></p>/* Links: [[dirt/ate.html]] */ [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]]

<p>These are people enlarged by experiences few could even fathom possible in this meager world, and they are much vilified in the popular press for their "exuberant imaginations" and for their denial of the notion of a "frontier." Such vilification is however unwarranted, as this world is in fact far stranger than any other, and as for the concept of a "frontier," it is just nothing but a hoax, a crude and easy means of allowing that everything is neatly contained within or without, is known or unknown. It is a central tenet of IAS that there is nothing at all left to discover except everything, and therein lies a wisdom which only a true adventurer may claim to posess. Nothing adventured, nothing gleaned.</p> [[🕮==>->Grand_Ballroom/Balderdashers.html]]

<p>A noble breed, and their diction is impeccable.</p> [[🕮==>->Balderdashers/A_Central_Tenet.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">Inevitably, of course, the time comes to say farewell and to embark once again on independent excursions into the far corners of the world, each Balderdasher carrying away a fond memory of IAS reunions past and perfervid anticipation of those yet to come...</p> [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/Grand_Ballroom.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">It is a wonderful time at the Hotel when the Balderdashers have taken up their regular lodgings on the fourteenth floor, the Hotel's golden halls illuminated then with tales of <a data-passage="Grand_Reunion/The_Intangible_Man.html">natural wonder</a>, <a data-passage="Grand_Reunion/Purple_Louise.html">savage fauna</a>, and <a data-passage="Grand_Reunion/Joseph_Frita.html">courage in the face of insurmountable odds.</a> All guests are welcome at all times in the Grand Ballroom where a dedicated staff of twenty provides <a data-passage="Grand_Reunion/Main_Dish.html">unlimited victuals</a> and libations to nourish hungry mouths and minds.</p>/* Links: [[Grand_Reunion/The_Intangible_Man.html]] [[Grand_Reunion/Purple_Louise.html]] [[Grand_Reunion/Joseph_Frita.html]] [[Grand_Reunion/Main_Dish.html]] */

<p>It's someone who tells me a secret, or a man who wants to call me by a name that isn't mine, or a person who admits that he hates my guts, even while he's poking them. I'm not a drunk and I don't have any kids at home. I'm just another member of the middle class, actually, another white-collar worker--or black panties worker, same thing--which is why I can work at this place discreetly. I fit in. And I enjoy what I do, but that's not to say that being in the sex industry is what turns me on. It's the connections. I like the stories. My boyfriend says that getting people to talk is a thing I do to make myself feel superior to other people but he's wrong. I do it for pleasure.</p> [[🕮==>->Bars_Restaurants/Pickup.html]]

<h3>May be that's the thing, I think after the first sip. Forget the novel. Write a screenplay. I toss the martini down. Sure. Or maybe fly to the moon.</h3><h3>"Hey, Luis, how about another of these timebombs?"</h3><h3>The blonde snorts and snaps the dentures at me playfully. They thought a week or two in the hotel would help. Maybe it has. I'm learning how to play again. I wink at the blonde and pick my nose at the same time. </h3><h3>I see <a data-passage="The_Hurricane_Lounge/Tropical_Drink_Special.html">the dinner ads</a> in the elevator. Specials every week. Pretty glossies: looks like plastic food. But what the hell, I think, a bite to eat, why not. So I go there. The bite they give me has a cockroach in it. I call the waitress over. "Listen, baby," I say. <a data-passage="Maintenance_Services/The_Exterminators.html">"There's a roach in my hot turkey sandwich."</a> "What kinda roach," she says. "Cock," I say, and<a data-passage="The_Hurricane_Lounge/Specials.html"> she sits down across from me and starts talking about love.</a> "But what're you gonna do about this thing," I say, pointing. "It's our special of the week," she growls, squeezing my knee. "I'm gonna let you have it for nothing!"</h3>/* Links: [[The_Hurricane_Lounge/Tropical_Drink_Special.html]] [[Maintenance_Services/The_Exterminators.html]] [[The_Hurricane_Lounge/Specials.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Cockroach/Luis.html]]

<p>She walked in on the arm of a neckless man wearing <a data-passage="Room_666/Three_Sweaters.html">three sweaters</a>, one pulled on over his thick torso, one wrapped around his waist, and the other draped over his shoulders. Two were red and blue or green and the third was fuschia. I wondered if the fuschia one was hers. I might have bought it for her last year.</p><p>"Hey, Elaine, what'll you have?" I called out. I wanted to make her look like a regular even though she had been in only four times in the last two years. </p><p>"I'll tell you what she'll have, <a data-passage="Luis/Why.html">barkeep,</a> she'll have a, a, what the fuck, a bloody mary without ice," the sweatered man said waving his arms about expansively as though conducting an orchestra.</p>/* Links: [[Room_666/Three_Sweaters.html]] [[Luis/Why.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Elaine_Comes_In/The_Neckless_Man.html]]

<p>Sing 'em a song, you are the piano man. Sing 'em a song tonight. </p><p>The sounds of some guy trying to capture the spirit of Billy Joel spilled out of the Lounge into the lobby. John, the night manager of the lounge, had agreed to only turn on the machine after 11pm since guests had already started to complain about the desperate wails and groans <a data-passage="Lounge_Ghost/This_Long_Low_Room.html">from the Lounge's soft leather interior</a>. However, two hours or five, it still made you crazy. No matter how you would try to convince yourself that maybe, just this once, somebody wasn't waiting on line to belt out another tired tune. But then, it would happen and happen again. It made you just want to go in there and rip the cord out of the damn wall. How the hell does John take it in there! Do their novice melodies touch his tender heart or has he learned to block out their droning voices? I wish that he could come out here and give me a few tips.</p>/* Links: [[Lounge_Ghost/This_Long_Low_Room.html]] */

<p>Glen came to the piano. Glen and his Goldberg Variations. He started at them, bringing every note to a stillness that allowed each note to be sounded as a full and total sound. Glen and his variations, I hated them, hated his playiing them while I was still trying to have a drink without the piano at my feet, at my throat, without Glen and his Goldberg Variations.</p> [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/Bars_Restaurants.html]]

<p>The barkeep was busy talking with two customers, a guy with a post up his ass and a wiry woman tall and nervous. I was about to barge in and demand another whiskey when a voice on my left distracted me. A young woman, <a data-passage="Dry_Martini/The_Novel.html">blond</a>e,<a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/cheat.html"> not much on</a>, nice smile. She was talking, I answered, a few syllables disrupting <a data-passage="Shop_Talk/Chad.html">the steady flow of her words,</a> it didn’t matter, her sentences flowed over my interjections like waves, persistent and constant. I suspected that it was a pick-up, but I wasn’t in any condition to blow her off. I wasn’t coherent enough to ask her her name. So <a data-passage="Shop_Talk/Wife_s_Head.html">she kept on talking.</a> I had in mind to whip this chick off to my room for a quickie, but while I was still thinking about that, I fell asleep. As far as I know, she just went right on talking.</p>/* Links: [[Dry_Martini/The_Novel.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/cheat.html]] [[Shop_Talk/Chad.html]] [[Shop_Talk/Wife_s_Head.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Bars_Restaurants/Shop_Talk.html]]

<p>Raymond Queneau est au bar en train de boire un cocktail, dont le nom est: cocktail Queneau. N'est-ce pas naturel? un cocktail Queneau est un tiers de schweppes et deux tiers de bitter san Pellegrino.</p> [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/Bars_Restaurants.html]]

<p>I talk too much, that's what my boyfriend says. SHUT UP! QUIT GABBING! He doesn't understand my sexual needs. Talk is all I've got, and you gotta work with what you got, I believe that. Men have this world where what they do is wear jackets and gold and spend money and sell things, and they ache from loneliness and go crazy inside pretending that they're not me. I guess I want to find out what they're like. Sexually, the parameters are pretty well set. For many of my customers, it's merely about tension, about clenching every muscle inside your body tightly while you strain to orgasm and die, pretending, pretending that it isn't real. I can't change that, I'm not a sex therapist. All I can do is do the thing. Do the thing and talk. Like now, see--no, really--it's conversation that makes me come.</p> [[🕮==>->Bars_Restaurants/Black_Panties_Worker.html]]

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/The_Hurricane_Lounge.png?raw=true" alt=""></p><p><u style="color:#0000d3">Our local house band sings </u><u style="color:#ef0085">Golden Oldies</u><u style="color:#0000d3"> every night!</u></p><h2 style="color:#da000b"><span style="font-size: 2.5em">W</span>ELCOME TO </h2><p>the one and only</p><h1 style="color:#128312">Hurricane Lounge!</h1><p>Under new management! Not to be missed!</p><p>Nightly <a data-passage="The_Hurricane_Lounge/Tropical_Drink_Special.html">specials!</a> <a data-passage="Room_214/There_s_a_Man_in_My_Room.html">Never a dull moment!</a></p><p>Bring friends and family and batten <a data-passage="Tropical_Drink_Special/down_the_hatches.html">down the hatches!</a></p>/* Links: [[The_Hurricane_Lounge/Tropical_Drink_Special.html]] [[Room_214/There_s_a_Man_in_My_Room.html]] [[Tropical_Drink_Special/down_the_hatches.html]] */

<p class="noMargins">Ah yes! She stood amidst chaos.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">Julie.</p><p class="noMargins">She walks amongst fledgling beasts.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">Julie.</p><p class="noMargins">She sings, she flies, she lives and dies</p><p class="noMargins">Over the silver framed sky.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">Julie.</p> [[🕮==>->Belfry_Biz/Julie_says.html]]

<p class="noMargins">God damn this fuckin' toilet paper!</p><p style="text-indent: 1em;" class="noMargins">she said as a blossom says; as the spring says.</p><p class="noMargins">Its scraping my ass!</p>

<p>"You picked a real winner this time, Mom, no kidding," I said as I splashed the ice into the drink and reached around for the bottle of tequila.</p><p>"Oh, Andrew," she sighed, digging the dark cigar bits out of her hair. Her makeup was running, giving her a sadder look than usual. "We do what we can, dear. Now be nice to Mr. Armisault."</p><p>Neckless Mr. Armisault, trying to heave himself up onto a stool, had missed and, dropping, hit his head on the bar. <a data-passage="Iceman/Ice_Delivery.html">"She's your fucking mother?</a>" he growled, staggering to his feet. "I can't believe I spent the last three hours fucking the garbage that produced you," he said, mopping his brow with the fuschia sweater.</p><p>I gave him the bottle. I filled a bowl with lemons and set that in front of him. I found a new glass, polished it and filled it. "You work with what you can I guess," I said.</p>/* Links: [[Iceman/Ice_Delivery.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Bars_Restaurants/Shop_Talk.html]]

<p><b>FORMER BOARD MEMBERS</b></p><p>Mark Amerika</p><p>Mary-Kim Arnold</p><p>Jennifer Atlee</p><p>Fiona Barnett</p><p>Nico Baumbach</p><p>Sascha Becker</p><p>Marek Bennett</p><p<p>Dale Bertrand</p><p>Margaret L. Brown</p><p>Sarah Bynum</p><p>Greta Byrum</p><p><a data-passage="Directors_Emeriti/Jeremy_Caplan.html">Jeremy Caplan</a></p><p>Mark Church</p><p>Jeanie Clarke</p><p>Emily Colwell</p><p>Kwesi Davis</p><p>Pierre Defaix</p><p>Mike DiBianco</p><p>R.Keith Dreibelbis</p><p>Elizabeth Dunnebacke</p><p>Lisa Eckstein</p><p>Margalit Edelman</p><p>Scott J. Eisenberg</p><p>Carrie Ellwanger </p><p>Thalia Field</p><p>Madeleine Fix</p><p>Daniel K. Frazier</p><p>Adam Gillitt </p><p>Andrew Greer</p><p>Mike Grinthal</p><p>Jason O. Grunebaum</p><p>Greg Hadden</p><p>Steven Hanna</p><p>Philip C. Hay </p><p>Stephanie Hindley</p><p>Aaron Hockett</p><p>Ben Holtzman</p><p>Davis Houlton </p><p>Erica Howson</p><p>Karen M. Hudes</p><p>Betsy Hyman</p><p>Peter Johnson</p><p>D.Robert Jordan</p><p>Jennifer Lane</p><p>Elizabeth Lee</p><p>Dave Leonard</p><p>Shana Liebman</p><p>Ho C. Lin</p><p>Maryam Jafri</p><p>Peter Johnson</p><p>D.Robert Jordan</p><p>Jessica Kaminsky</p><p>Youna Kwak</p><p>Sophie Laffont</p><p>Jason Leddington</p><p>Shana Liebman</p><p><a data-passage="Directors_Emeriti/Final_Question.html">Alvin Lu</a></p><p>Ian Maisel</p><p>Matt Manfredi</p><p>Xander Marro</p><p>Christina Masciotti</p><p>Kate D. McDowell </p><p>Josh Morsell</p><p>Tom Meyer</p><p>John Neely</p><p>Jonathan Niborg</p><p>Joseph W. Oldham </p><p>Lisa Oppenheim</p><p>Kenneth Oppriecht</p><p>India Ornelas</p><p>Michele Paige</p><p>Jonas Parker</p><p>Daniel Pasette</p><p>Dave Peck</p><p>Katy Petty</p><p>Eric S. Postal</p><p>Jeremy Price</p><p>Hannah Purdy</p><p>Eric Putter </p><p>Simon Rakov</p><p>Julie Regan</p><p>Andy Reiff</p><p>K. Sage Rockerman</p><p>Michael Rose</p><p>Rachel Salguero</p><p>Benjamin Schrank</p><p>Michole Schwartz</p><p><a data-passage="Directors_Emeriti/Emilie_Sommerhoff.html">Emilie Sommerhoff</a></p><p>Matt Spencer</p><p>Adam Stolorow</p><p>Isel Sulam</p><p>Sean Sullivan</p><p><a data-passage="Directors_Emeriti/Nate_Tassler.html">Nate Tassler</a></p><p>Brian Tonks</p><p>Kerry Tribe</p><p>Jane Unrue</p><p>Catherine Wing </p><p>Eric Witherspoon</p><p>Julian Wong</p><p>Anna Youssefi</p><p>Gene Yu </p><p>Jeffrey Zimbalist</p><p>Jason Zuzga</p>/* Links: [[Directors_Emeriti/Jeremy_Caplan.html]] [[Directors_Emeriti/Final_Question.html]] [[Directors_Emeriti/Emilie_Sommerhoff.html]] [[Directors_Emeriti/Nate_Tassler.html]] */

<p><b>Robert Coover</b>: originally from Iowa, somewhere along the way picked up many British terms which are annoying to the average American (e.g. "flat" instead of "apartment," "to ring up," instead of "call," "to ring off," instead of "hang up."). His wit and humor are displayed in his many novels including, <u>Pinocchio In Venice</u>, <u>Public Burning</u>, and <u>Gerald's Party</u> (and to a lesser extent in <u>Origin of the Brunists</u> and <u>Night at the Movies. )</u> He can sometimes be seen scratching his non-existent beard around the campus of Brown University.</p> [[🕮==>->Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html]]

<p>The enrobed Board member with the big schnozz feared that the concierge in his panic (what can a poor character know?) might try to run away, which, here in the lofty hyperspace of the Boardroom, where links lived and died and the spaces of reality vanished like dreams, could be fatal. "Stop sniveling, Fred," he cautioned in a comforting voice. <a data-passage="Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html">"I know you're a timid character, that's how I made you.</a> But settle down, I'll get you <a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html">back to the Front Desk</a> again." "Made me? I'm not real?!" "Well, it's all relative, isn't it, Fred? Here we are, meeting each other on equal terms--well, more or less equal terms--and who's to say which of us is more real than the other?" "This motion sickness. Whew. It feels real." "Well, exactly. So my advice, Fred, is: <a data-passage="Pizza/Pizzaman.html">Watch out for the Pizzaman. </a><a data-passage="Love_at_First_Sight/The_Desk_Clerk.html"></a>He's after your girl.</a> And he may be more you than he." "What--?!"</p>/* Links: [[Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] [[Pizza/Pizzaman.html]] [[Love_at_First_Sight/The_Desk_Clerk.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Boardroom_Summons/Manager_s_Complaint.html]]

<p>"Frankly," said the Manager, "I am disappointed in the staff the Board is providing me. It's not just their inefficiency, <a data-passage="Management/Love_at_First_Sight.html">their petty romances</a> and tedious intrigues, it's that they do not provide me adequate intellectual companionship. The Hotel is a seedbed of insensitive sophomoric banalities, which is perhaps acceptable among the guests, but not within the staff. Who do we have in this dreadful outpost of the mind but each other? And personally <a data-passage="Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html">I hold you and the other Members of the Board responsible</a>." "Enh," shrugged the Board member, and he blew his nose dismissively. "I am that I am. Back you go, now." </p>/* Links: [[Management/Love_at_First_Sight.html]] [[Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html]] */ [[🕮==>->../Front_Desk.html]]

<p>It was the mole rats.</p><p>Looking like penises they pushed through every wall in the hotel</p><a data-passage="Mole_Rat/consumers.html"><p>They had no hair,</p><p>which scared the cook </p><p>the domestics </p><p>and the bell boy.</p></a><p>They had skin like cellophane</p><p>and what hairs they grew sprouted like wires covered in oil.</p><p>The mole rats had no friends but they procreated with </p><p>much abundance </p><p>and ate in the fervor of all things dead.</p>/* Links: [[Mole_Rat/consumers.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/Mole_Rat.html]]

<p>It was of a necessity for Cyberia to develop its own writing—and not merely reproduce bland land's <a data-passage="Brochure/Media.html">staid texts</a>—precisely because literature provides the only substantive (if artificial) link to home in a strange, stretching, not-altogether-hospitable ontological environment where identity is asked to adapt its strategies in order to thrive, indeed, to survive.</p>/* Links: [[Brochure/Media.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Construction_Crews/Brochure.html]]

<p>With a newspaper, one can easily oggle the ebb and flow; literature gives a wayfarer purchase beneath the surface, the deeper meanings behind the drifting drama and discourse of urban experience. Wander its halls after a fulcrum of folly and encouter by surprise the knowledge of knowledge. Turn to it for no practical thing, but practically everything.</p> [[🕮==>->Construction_Crews/Brochure.html]]

<p>On the plane/train/ship you had a dream portending a significant encounter, about how there was a native or another traveler you had not yet met who would reshape your world view and leave you irrevocably changed, a stranger to your current self. Also, as fate would have it, you have been dreamed into just such a role by someone else. Imminent encounters of moment always have an aura of predestination about them.</p> [[🕮==>->Construction_Crews/Brochure.html]]

<p>"Mary Ann's real name was Mrs. Kelly. She told me she was having difficulty separating her sexual organs from the rest of the world. 'I feel as if they transcend my own brain,' she said, 'and I know that this comes from making love to young boys. I feel that I possess all of that skin and it suits me, because I understand that the life force is contained within their testicles. In fact it's all through their blood stream in the form of semen and the more of it I receive, the better I feel. It doesn't matter if it's inside of my body or all over my skin. It's IN me and it's making me feel as if my body has no boundaries and that I have a perfect cunt.' I can understand that. Can you? She said she still caredabout literature, but grammar no longer made sense to her. 'I am involuntarily creating a totally new system for diagramming sentences,' she said. 'I have to go, I have to leave my job, but I can't leave Chad. He's my special baby and I'd die without him. I would not know what to do.'</p> [[🕮==>->Mrs_Kelly/What_Mrs_K_Told_Me.html]]

<h3>I go to the bar. They call it a "cocktail lounge" here in the hotel, but I know better. It's definitely a bar.</h3><h3>I've been in here a couple of times and <a data-passage="Luis/Why.html">there's never the same bartender.</a> This one's really old. Looks like Luis Bunuel, small, skinny with a real beak on him. So I order a dry martini. Luis is so old he's shaking the thing before he's poured it.</h3><h3>A <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html">blonde</a> says: "Hand me your teeth, gramps. I'm having trouble with this goddamn Swiss steak." And he takes them out and gives them to her. That would look good in a movie, I think.</h3>/* Links: [[Luis/Why.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Luis/Dry_Martini.html]]

<h3>During the recent renovations of the Hotel, a great many untended corners and incomplete works projects, launched over the past five years, were uncovered, some little more than single provocative spaces, others small self-enclosed story nests more suggestive than fulfilling. Those which seemed interestingly linked into the overall structure have for the most part been left <i>in situ,</i> with descriptions and an access link placed in the <a data-passage="Construction_Crews/Storycells.html">Storycells</a> folder herein. More complete projects (though, of course, nothing here in this shapeshifting structure is ever "finished") are described in the <a data-passage="Construction_Crews/Ongoing_Stories.html">Ongoing Stories</a> folder without access links for the most part; use the "Locate Space" facility under the Edit menu or the map overview.</h3><h3>Small multispace half-starts, internally linked but without meaningful Hotel links, will be found in the <a data-passage="Construction_Crews/Linked_Fragments.html">Linked Fragments</a> folder in their entirety; they do not exist elsewhere in the Hotel. Likewise the individual spaces in the <a data-passage="Construction_Crews/Unlinked_Fragments.html">Unlinked Fragments</a> folder. Once enlarged-upon, these elements may be integrated into the Hotel structure once more. Much rubbish has been swept away in the recent renovations, but a few leftovers can be found on the floor of the <a data-passage="Construction_Crews/Broom_Closet.html">Broom Closet</a>. </h3><h3>Finally, as additional aids for remodelings and new developments, the <a data-passage="Tool_Box.html">Tool Box</a> has a more or less uptodate character list and a set of project ideas; more may be added. </h3><h3>{{{-------------------}}}</h3><p><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"><b>(return to Front Desk)</b></a></p>/* Links: [[Construction_Crews/Storycells.html]] [[Construction_Crews/Ongoing_Stories.html]] [[Construction_Crews/Linked_Fragments.html]] [[Construction_Crews/Unlinked_Fragments.html]] [[Construction_Crews/Broom_Closet.html]] [[Tool_Box.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */

<p>The Hypertext Hotel: the discriminating hyperfiction traveller's first stop in the land of online literature</p><p>+ + +</p><p>Congratulations on planning a trip to Cyberia!</p><p>Some of your old traveler's sense will come in handy here. An eye for quality and a nose for novelty have gotten you far, and they'll be no less useful here in Cyberia. But the rugged terrain will require you to call on additional aptitudes of memory and investigation. If at first you find yourself miffed at the exhaustive initiative required of you, recall that's what interested you in this trip in the first place. It’s the reason why you'll <a data-passage="Brochure/Trip.html">discover so much more</a> here in Cyberia.</p><p>There will be shopping for regional specialties, tours to poke around the old neighborhoods, run-ins with local lunatics. You will want to develop a sense of the comedy and tragedy, a feel for what it means to be a person here, a spirit, a victim, a tyrant in Cyberia. That's why you'll turn to <a data-passage="Brochure/Cyberlit.html">literature</a>. You will have come all this way, and you will need a place to stay. </p><p>Where you visit is a declaration of intention, a gambit of potential. Where you decide to stay is simply an extension of the self.</p><p>You have visited other cities which prepare you for this one: La Cable, with its adjacent neighborhoods of all-night entertainments; Arcadia, with its dim canals winding through canyons of coin-operated diversions. But those were just Disney artifices beside this destination, the new and future fair of finance, entertainment, and maybe even that fickle gypsy, the orphaned arts.</p><p>Sure, there are plenty of plans for shopping, site-seeing, et centera. But where you decide to stay (privatize, socialize, sleep, dream) will largely determine what-cheer the whole. You want to know how the human interafaces with all this boom in development, and there's just one place to go for table, bed and mirror: <a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html">THE HYPERTEXT HOTEL</a>.</p>/* Links: [[../Front_Desk.html]] [[Brochure/Trip.html]] [[Brochure/Cyberlit.html]] */

<p>"Del" the Housekeeper has sent a couple of truckloads of rubbish to the dump, though bits and pieces got left behind on the floor of the Broom Closet. Anything worth saving?</p>

<p>There are many little multispace half-starts in the Hotel, linked internally but not to the rest of the Hotel. They have been brought here in their entirety, including their present set of inner links, awaiting further development and transport into the Hotel proper.</p>

<p>This folder is for projects with multiple spaces and links, well developed and located adequately within the Hotel structure. None of course are "finished." All narratives in the Hotel are "in progress" and will always be so. The individual spaces herein describe in brief the narratives, but do not provide direct access links. They can be located by way of several devices, including the "Locate Space" command under the Edit menu and the Storyspace overview.</p>

<p>This folder is for descriptions of small nascent narratives, well placed in the structure, but lacking development. Most of these pieces have arbitrary end-links back to overview spaces, lacking any other spaces to which to go. These arbitrary return links can be deleted as and if the stories develop. The individual spaces herein describe these narratives in brief and provide access links.</p>

<p>There were many single fragments (or paired but unlinked fragments) scattered throughout the Hotel. These have been brought here to await further development and integration into the larger structures of the Hotel. Or erasure.</p>

<p>Welcome.</p> [[🕮==>->The_Void/Untitled_1.html]]

<p>meet the <a data-passage="bastard/Untitled.html">bastard</a></p>/* Links: [[bastard/Untitled.html]] */

<p>Bring your kiddies here when you want a day of quiet relaxation. You and your partner can enjoy hours of fun in the sun while our responsible, energetic, loving care providers play with your abandonded brats. We'll give 'em 'nilla Wafers and bug juice - fare for a real zinger of a sugar high. Oh boy! Won't they be thrilled when Mommy and Daddy or Mommy and Mommy or Daddy and Daddy or Mommy or Daddy or Grandma or Uncle Pete or Bill or My Favorite Guardian returns to take them to dinner and insists on their eating spinach and chicken cutlets and slaps their little hands if they color the table cloth.</p> [[🕮==>->romper_room/scandal.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins"> The waist always rides up and I'm forever tugging on it which means I drop the spray bottle and I have to bend down again to get it. There's a pull right here in my back which matches the clotting feeling in the bad knee. They go off together like two kids who both want the remote. I'm not a clutz though, I've got a system about it.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">You work from top to bottom starting at the last bed. Sometimes I forget to dust. Nobody cares. Not in a place where they don't complain about the sticky spots on the ceiling or cigarette holes, or even pipe up if they don't got any hot water.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">It doesn't mean I don't take pride in my job, though pride ain't exactly the term for staying here, eleven years now, but I'm not lazy and I do change all the hand towels, not just the ones that've been used. I collect stories, sometimes I make them up.</p> [[🕮==>->Management/Love_at_First_Sight.html]]

<p>Having originally intended a leisurely hiatus from the pressures of academia and having not one clue about the effective management of a hotel, Emilie is shocked and dismayed at her involuntary position on the Board of Directors.</p> [[🕮==>->Board_of_Directors/Directors_Emeriti.html]]

<p>The final question might be, so why bother? I'm sure we'll all become great writers and move on to bigger and better things in more accessible mediums. Well, one of the reasons is that hypertext allows you to do a lot of things that you can't do otherwise and I mean this in terms of fiction. "Fiction" especially the novelistic/ short story mode we're so used to these days, comes with a lot of baggage and it assumes certain things that, as you learn to perfect your craft in that medium, necessarily constrain. I personally don't think it's as free as everyone makes it out to be, even in its more experimental modes. <b><i>You could do something revolutionary</i></b>, if you really worked at it, <b><i>but you could do it more easily in hypertext.</i></b> Not that you'd want to, but the awareness of doing it first in hypertext might allow you to realize a method for carrying it out in book form, or another form. So, depending on your agenda, be it ideological, political, poetical, personal, or biological, it seems to me hypertext can greatly enable you toward realizing some things you might not have been able to otherwise, and that's why it's important.</p><p>{{{---}}}alu</p> [[🕮==>->Board_of_Directors/Directors_Emeriti.html]]

<p>An alias quite familiar to the average NSA agent.</p><p><b>Real name</b></p><p>Sven Hasselhof.</p><p><b>Character summary</b></p><p>This man (if he is, indeed, a man), has a history of infiltrating civilian operations and leading them astray.</p><p><b>Telltale warning sign</b></p><p>Where Sven Hasselhof goes, chaos ensues.</p><p><b>Psychological analysis</b></p><p>Likely due to his own frustration at the unbalanced nature of his real name, Sven Hasselhof's assumed names are, without fail, symmetric in length, according to the formula: Nf = Nl, where Nf is the number of letters in Sven's first name, and Nl is the number of letters in Hasselhof's last name.</p> [[🕮==>->Board_of_Directors/Directors_Emeriti.html]]

<p>Former CEO of the Hyatt Corporation, Mr. Tassler willingly joined the Hypertext Hotel in exchange for substantial considerations. The Board hopes he will be a valuable addition to our well-trained management, and provide the property with far more in additional business than he will take in salary.</p> [[🕮==>->Board_of_Directors/Directors_Emeriti.html]]

<h3>"People live year after year in a hotel like this. We have their police papers, we know their sicknesses and family troubles; people come to confide in you. They tell you things they would not tell their own parents...not even their lawyers and doctors."</h3><h3>-Christina Stead, <a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"><i>The Little Hotel</i></a></h3>/* Links: [[../Front_Desk.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html]]

<html><head><meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type"><style type="text/css">ol{margin:0;padding:0}table td,table th{padding:0}.c5{padding-top:0pt;padding-bottom:16pt;line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}.c6{color:#000000;font-weight:400;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:26pt;font-family:"Arial";font-style:normal}.c7{padding-top:0pt;padding-bottom:3pt;line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}.c9{color:#666666;font-weight:400;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:15pt;font-family:"Arial";font-style:normal}.c0{color:#000000;font-weight:400;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";font-style:normal}.c3{padding-top:0pt;padding-bottom:0pt;line-height:1.15;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}.c2{padding-top:0pt;padding-bottom:10pt;line-height:1.15;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}.c10{background-color:#ffffff;max-width:468pt;padding:72pt 72pt 72pt 72pt}.c1{font-style:italic}.c8{font-weight:700}.c4{height:11pt}.title{padding-top:0pt;color:#000000;font-size:26pt;padding-bottom:3pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}.subtitle{padding-top:0pt;color:#666666;font-size:15pt;padding-bottom:16pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}li{color:#000000;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial"}p{margin:0;color:#000000;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial"}h1{padding-top:20pt;color:#000000;font-size:20pt;padding-bottom:6pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h2{padding-top:18pt;color:#000000;font-size:16pt;padding-bottom:6pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h3{padding-top:16pt;color:#434343;font-size:14pt;padding-bottom:4pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h4{padding-top:14pt;color:#666666;font-size:12pt;padding-bottom:4pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h5{padding-top:12pt;color:#666666;font-size:11pt;padding-bottom:4pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}h6{padding-top:12pt;color:#666666;font-size:11pt;padding-bottom:4pt;font-family:"Arial";line-height:1.15;page-break-after:avoid;font-style:italic;orphans:2;widows:2;text-align:left}</style></head><body class="c10 doc-content"><p class="c7 title" id="h.c25cahw7j04k"><span class="c6">Doing the Work: A Hands-on Account of Porting the Hypertext Hotel Into Twine</span></p><p class="c5 subtitle" id="h.aooszai7kqi8"><span class="c9">By Coral Sapon-Borson</span></p><p class="c2"><span class="c0">I notice that in doing this work, I have quite an unhealthy tendency to martyr myself. That is to say, despite being surrounded by those who are happy to join me in this holy science, I want desperately to set out on my own, work myself to the bone, and suffer for the sake of the greater good. This is a conception of the world which is neither true nor especially empowering. However, it’s pretty damn useful!</span></p><p class="c2"><span>This is what it was like for me, at the beginning: The Hotel files have arrived. After nearly a week of knowing about the Hypertext Hotel but being unable to access it, my dreams are fulfilled. I spend hours just exploring. I travel from room to room, aimless but for the purpose of exploration, of discovery. </span><span class="c1">This</span><span>, I think to myself, </span><span class="c1">is archaeology</span><span class="c0">.</span></p><p class="c2"><span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 423.32px; height: 249.88px;"><img alt="" src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/non_hotel/image4.png?raw=true" style="width: 423.32px; height: 249.88px; margin-left: 0.00px; margin-top: 0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""></span></p><p class="c2"><span>The Hotel is vast, but it is focused. Some rooms have silly jokes, others have deep, moving stories. Still more are shocking, gory, violent, sexy, cringeworthy, sincere. All of it is obviously oriented toward the goal of creating </span><span class="c8">Art</span><span>,</span><span class="c0"> whatever it is we all mean by that. I fell head over heels for the Hotel’s clever words and complicated corridors. I’d had an inkling before I even set foot in those halls, but now I knew for sure: I needed to make this masterful relic as easily accessible as possible to everyone who wanted to experience it.</span></p><p class="c2"><span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 421.50px; height: 227.73px;"><img alt="" src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/non_hotel/image2.png?raw=true" style="width: 421.50px; height: 227.73px; margin-left: 0.00px; margin-top: 0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""></span></p><p class="c2"><span>I went to class on Tuesday with a clear head. I was a woman on a mission; together with my team, we laid out a plan for the semester. Ideas flowed easily, blossoming from vague notions of preservation into a system of goals and procedures: game modes, version control, dev logs, content tags. We wanted </span><span class="c1">everything</span><span class="c0">. It was ambitious, and we knew not all of it would get done, but we were very proud of it.</span></p><p class="c2"><span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 624.00px; height: 469.33px;"><img alt="" src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/non_hotel/image6.png?raw=true" style="width: 624.00px; height: 469.33px; margin-left: 0.00px; margin-top: 0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""></span></p><p class="c2"><span class="c0">This was what it was like for us, at the beginning: The plan laid out before us, all that was left to do was work. Azalea retreated into the GitHub mines, and I dove hands-first into Twine.</span></p><hr><p class="c2 c4"><span class="c0"></span></p><p class="c2"><span class="c0">Within just a couple of days of experimentation and data entry, I had found my stride. I got a little bit of help early on, but for a good three weeks or so, it was just me running a seemingly infinite treadmill. The copy of the Hypertext Hotel that I was working on was one that contained seven hundred and ninety-four files within one hundred and sixty-seven folders. It was a veritable behemoth of a nested hierarchical near-Alexandrian library (I exaggerate for effect, though I hope you grasp my intent).</span></p><p class="c2"><span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 769.50px; height: 413.42px;"><img alt="" src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/non_hotel/image1.png?raw=true" style="width: 959.03px; height: 422.15px; margin-left: 0.00px; margin-top: -0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""></span><span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 389.50px; height: 423.37px;"><img alt="" src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/non_hotel/image3.png?raw=true" style="width: 389.50px; height: 423.37px; margin-left: 0.00px; margin-top: 0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""></span></p><p class="c2"><span class="c0">I was methodical. I sifted through the ruins and picked out every salvageable object. I sat and worked for hours at a time, staring at the same interface as it grew into a monstrosity in front of me. I proceeded like this for some time as it slowly wore on me. Thankfully, once I noticed I was getting close to burnout, I had friends who helped to reign me in. I decided, with the help of some very strong guidance, to take a one-week break in the middle of the semester. This was a good idea, as when I got back, I felt much more ready to handle the work ahead.</span></p><hr><p class="c2 c4"><span class="c0"></span></p><p class="c2"><span class="c0">I returned to the best possible scenario: People had continued my work in my absence, just as I’d hoped. It is legitimately so gratifying having a cascade of emailed .txt files in my inbox. I’m not even joking. Over a hundred and seventy-five files, a huge piece of the hypertext pie, waiting for me on a silver platter. The sheer ease of access, the weight off my shoulders of not having to do it all myself? That alone is worth embarrassing the part of me who is so insistent on walking this path on her own. Seriously, I almost cried, y’all. It means a lot.</span></p><p class="c2"><span style="overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; margin: 0.00px 0.00px; border: 0.00px solid #000000; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); width: 610.89px; height: 459.81px;"><img alt="" src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/non_hotel/image5.png?raw=true" style="width: 610.89px; height: 459.81px; margin-left: 0.00px; margin-top: 0.00px; transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px); -webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad) translateZ(0px);" title=""></span></p><p class="c2"><span class="c0">As we approach the end of the term, though there is still so much work to be done, I consider my impact and how I felt about this at the outset. There is something about the Hypertext Hotel, and I’m still not even really sure what, which draws me to it. It makes me want to be a scholar, a hero, and a craftswoman. This is not just manual labor for a good cause, it is a sense of comradery, and a sacred ritual. I delight in the idea, the hope, that I will get to continue this work, for as long as there is work to be done.</span></p></body></html>[[🕮==>->Addendum]]

<h3>I can't really remember what I had in mind when I started the goddamned thing. Something about a hotel, god-knows-where. Full of unforgettable characters, sad to say, long forgotten. Murders, wild sex, <a data-passage="Suite_602/A_Visitor.html">secret intrigues</a>, the usual.</h3><h3>Now, years later, all I have is a collection, a large ragbag collection, of scenes. Everyone says they're random scenes, not part of any narrative, like a nursery school toybox, bits and pieces of everything. Odd blocks that won't stack. But, hey (the blonde is nibbling her armpits with Luis's dentures), I have faith. And a thousand fantastic pages.</h3>/* Links: [[Suite_602/A_Visitor.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Novel/Loss.html]]

<p>Elaine plopped herself on a stool, looking wistful. The neckless man she was with could still stand but that was about it. He pulled out a half-smoked panetella and put the wrong end in his mouth, slapped his pockets for a match. I handed him a box from behind the bar. He got one match out before dropping the box, then he threw the match away, too. He wallowed the cigar about in his mouth and said, "And I'm drinking tequila, sonnyboy. No fancy shit. Just set the bottle on the bar with a bowl of lemons and a three-ounce glass and go watch television." He massaged his temples as he spoke.</p> [[🕮==>->The_Neckless_Man/Bloody_Mary.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_212/In_the_Hallway.html"><u>The halls of the hotel echo off into the distance. You were looking for something? Someone? You forget now. Wires and pipes project aimlessly from the walls, and the papers strewn around reek of paranoia and blackmail.</u></a></p><i><p><a data-passage="Employees_Only/Management.html"><u>The Management</u></a></p></i><i><p><a data-passage="Employees_Only/Maintenance_Services.html"><u>Maintenance & Services</u></a></p></i><p><i><u>The Service Elevator</u></i></p><p><a data-passage="Employees_Only/The_Basement.html"><i><u>The Basement</u></i></a></p><p><i><u>The Belfry</u></i></p><h3>{{{-------------------}}}</h3><p><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"><b>(return to Front Desk)</b></a></p>/* Links: [[Room_212/In_the_Hallway.html]] [[Employees_Only/Management.html]] [[Employees_Only/Maintenance_Services.html]] [[Employees_Only/The_Basement.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */

<p><a data-passage="Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html">Fred the concierge</a> was summoned by the Hotel Manager to proceed immediately to the Manager's office for an important meeting of the Board of Directors. Fred used the service elevator, operating it with his special elevator key. The top floor button lit up, the door closed, and Fred felt that queasy feeling in his stomach as the car began to rise. It always made him feel like he had no control over his own destiny, and years of psychoanalysis had not cured him of it.</p>/* Links: [[Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Management/Manager_s_Office.html]]

<p>(pic or text of services)</p><p><b><u>Roster:</u></b></p><p><a data-passage="Maintenance_Services/The_Exterminators.html">Exterminators: Tortilla Splat</a></p><p><a data-passage="Maintenance_Services/Pizza.html">Pizza Delivery: Freddy the Pizzaman </a></p><p><a data-passage="Maintenance_Services/Iceman.html">The Iceman</a></p><h3>{{{-----------------------}}}</h3><p><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"><b>(return to Front Desk) </b></a></p>/* Links: [[Maintenance_Services/The_Exterminators.html]] [[Maintenance_Services/Pizza.html]] [[Maintenance_Services/Iceman.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */

<h3><a data-passage="Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html">The Board of Directors</a> is well aware that hotel management is not a precise science. Personalities are involved. Moods, vices and virtues, behavioral eccentricities, character conflicts, the world beyond the hotel, unavoidable feelings of rivalry and resentment. <a data-passage="Employees_Only/tourist.html">Some tasks are more onerous than others, nor are all qualified for the less onerous.</a> <a data-passage="Management/Manager_s_Office.html">Hotel management</a> is by necessity <a data-passage="Employees_Only/Boardroom_Summons.html">hierachical</a>, and, in any hierarchy, the powerless resent those more powerful than they. The hotel guests, however, must never perceive disharmony among the staff, who are encouraged to display, even when unnatural, <a data-passage="Management/Love_at_First_Sight.html">a natural friendship.</a> </h3><h3><b><i>There is to be no blood spilled in the lobby!</i></b></h3>/* Links: [[Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html]] [[Employees_Only/tourist.html]] [[Management/Manager_s_Office.html]] [[Employees_Only/Boardroom_Summons.html]] [[Management/Love_at_First_Sight.html]] */

<p>There are storage rooms in the basement. Laundry facilities. Exposed plumbing and heating and air-conditioning ducts. A furnace. A wine cellar, large freezers, junked coolers and abandoned bicycles. <a data-passage="The_Basement/Underground.html">An unvisited workroom, damp on the north side. </a>Heaps of bottles, broken furniture, dead TVs. <a data-passage="The_Basement/A_Shroud_of_Spider_Webs.html">Corridors leading who knows where containing who knows what.</a> Vermin. Insects. <a data-passage="The_Basement/Ratty_and_I.html">And perhaps other creatures as well. </a></p><p>{{{------------------------------------}}}</p><p><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html">Can't see a thing down here. Return to Front Desk.</a></p>/* Links: [[The_Basement/Underground.html]] [[The_Basement/A_Shroud_of_Spider_Webs.html]] [[The_Basement/Ratty_and_I.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Basement/Hobbyist.html]]

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/chambermaid.png?raw=true" alt="" ></p><p>"The servant woman had left the premises to find lodging in some crib or hayloft."</p><p>- Balzac, <i>The Red Inn</i></p>

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/tourist.png?raw=true" alt="" ></p><p>Where tourists are treated right</p>

<p>Closure is, as in any fiction, a suspect quality, although here it is made manifest. When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths, the experience of reading it ends. Even so, there are likely to be more opportunities than you think there are at first. A word which doesn't yield the first time you read a section may take you elsewhere if you choose it when you encounter the section again; and sometimes what seems a loop, like memory, heads off again in another direction.</p><p><a data-passage="Patione/Forking_Paths.html">There is no simple way of saying this.</a></p><p>--Michael Joyce, <i>Afternoon, a story</i></p>/* Links: [[Patione/Forking_Paths.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Storytelling/Salesman_s_Story.html]]

<p>The iron boy in a ring of stone wakes to find himself in a butterfly garden. A million wings. The butterflies are the size of hawks, with antennae that will tear his skin. Everywhere he ventures he finds more bites. Swelling cocoons hang from the trees of this garden. He wanders with the hope of finding a fairy tucked behind a rock or small bush, but there is nowhere he or any other creature can hide. The garden of torn skin, the garden of early death and intense happiness. Each time they cut into his flesh he feels a pleasant tingle in his chest and throat. The iron prince wears a crown of stone. Perhaps he will leap back into his own world with wings.</p> [[🕮==>->A_Garden/Garden.html]]

<p>In a thousand years <a data-passage="JC/JC-Homage.html">a sculptor</a> has created a single piece. It is the boy who carries his water, washes his clothes, gathers & splits his wood. The hands are deep wells from which the water will run unending, into the pool all perfectly round, reflecting at his feet an impressive arc.</p>/* Links: [[JC/JC-Homage.html]] */ [[🕮==>->A_Garden/The_Symphon.html]]

<p><i>(a ring of stone at the foot of the fountain)</i></p> [[🕮==>->A_Garden/Fount.html]]

<b><p>BOARD OF DIRECTORS</p></b><p>Jaimie Baron</p><p>Jessamine Chan</p><p>Jordan Feil</p><p>Aliza Gutman</p><p>Daniel Honan</p><p>Martin Johnson</p><p>Brooks King</p><p>Hillary King</p><p>Yew Leong Lee</p><p>Paul Long</p><p>Susannah Maisel</p><p>Chris Mastrangelo</p><p>Stephen McGregor </p><p>Judd Morrissey </p><p>Thomas Philipose</p><p>Steve Reed</p><p>Jacob Reuther</p><p>Sharon Rodriguez</p><p>Courtney Ka`ohinani Rowe</p><p>Andy Selsberg</p><p>Laura Tan</p><p>Kevin Teich</p><p>Dana Turken</p><p>Andrew Venell</p><p>Justin Vogt</p><p><b>ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF</b></p><p><a data-passage="Board_of_Directors/coover.html">Robert Coover</a></p><p>Robert Arellano</p><p><a data-passage="Board_of_Directors/Directors_Emeriti.html"><b>DIRECTORS EMERITI(^)</b></a></p><p>{{{----------------------}}}</p><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"> <p>(<i>Return to "Front Desk.")</i></p></a>/* Links: [[Board_of_Directors/coover.html]] [[Board_of_Directors/Directors_Emeriti.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Boardroom_Summons/Manager_s_Complaint.html]]

<h3>(1) To aid the construction workers, who are known, when frustrated, to throw bricks, Board members are urged to retain intact the "overview" structures of the Front Desk, the Room Directory, the Service Directory, and the Employees Only area. New constructions may be placed within any of these premises, as appropriate, or may be left outside on the Hotel grounds (overview map) for later distribution.</h3><h3>(2) All new additions to the Hotel should be titled in some manner, with the Board member's initials PRECEDING the title. Later, these initials will be removed. For the present, this makes a Menu search easier in locating new constructions for Board discussion and architectural integration, and gives credit where credit is due. Thus, if a member of the Administrative Staff were to add this window to the Hotel, it would be titled "RA - House Rules" or "RC - House Rules."</h3><h3>(3) To be sure of access and to prevent dead ends, each new addition should, minimally, have a door in and a door out, even if it is the same door. This is most easily accomplished with default (window-to-window) links, one into the new addition from some existing window, one out of the addition to some existing window (it can be a return link to the same window from which it came). If the existing window from which the new addition is to link already has a default link to some other space, then a word-to-window link would be more appropriate. </h3><h3>(4) The use of the dollar sign "$" as a prefix for window titles will be limited to summary descriptions housed in "Ongoing Stories" and "Storycells" in the "Construction" folder. This allows for a more efficient use of the Menus when searching the Hotel for specific windows. If material from these areas is integrated into the Hotel, the $ sign can be removed. </h3> [[🕮==>->../Front_Desk.html]]

<h1 style="color:#ef0085"><u>MESSAGES</u></h1><ul><li><b></b></li></ul><p><i>The </i><b><i>HOUSEFONE</i></b><i> links you to other <a data-passage="Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html">members of the Board</a> and provides a kind of bulletin board or message center. Please initial and date your messages. </i></p><ul><li><b></b></li></ul><p>3/15/93</p><p>Hey, Housefone.How ya doin?You must be getting pretty lonely here.No one seems to visit anymore, no one seems to care.It's like you've become obsolete, old friend.That pesky little e-mail system!Why, I bet you remember when he was just a little whippersnapper, all high on his "instantaneous delivery" and his "easy-to-use" service and his "private, personal" nature.You probably never knew that one day he'd up and take your place.Yeah, I know...You remember the days Coover talks about sometimes, the good old days of the Housefone, the salad days, when people used you all the time, chattin' away, gabbin' like the schoolkids they was, but now you feel like a holdover, the last vestige of social communication in the computer age, now a relic, unused, decrepit...It's really sad, old buddy.But I thought I'd stop in, at least.I'm not much, but I'll be your friend.Hey, friends are all that we've got, right?Anyway, I know you can't really talk back or anything, so this is destined to be a bit of a one-sided relationship, but, you know, if the trashy movies and TV that I grew up on taught me anything, it's that shallow, one-sided relationships are fine, and that the cold, impersonal glow of a flickering screen can be the closest connection you ever feel.So how 'bout it, Housefone?Wanna be my best buddy?I'll work out some kind of way to prick our forefingers later...</p><p>Yours, <i>('till the end of time...)</i> </p><p>Steve</p><p>P.S.Just drop me a line if you need anything.I'm in and out of the hotel so you can probably catch me if you need some chips or if you want somebody to watch 90210 with you or if you just need to chat.Toodle-oo!</p><p>3/24/93</p><p>Thanks Steve. This is the housefone speaking, talking. I'm afraid I was doing just fine without your meddling diction, thank you. Not that I don't appreciate your meddling diction, I do, I do, it's just that I don't want you to think I needed you or anything. Anyway, to cut to the short of the matter, the chase, so to speak, here's the poem I wrote for you.</p><p>Steve, Steve,</p><p>Thank you for your nose.</p><p>Steve, Steve, </p><p>I hope you writhe again.</p><p>Steve, Steve,</p><p>You're so kind I can't spank you enough.</p><p>Steve, Steve,</p><p>That's snuff for this poem.</p><p>And they said computers could not write poems- they were wrong again! And now I must say goodboy. Goodboy Steve, Goodboy!</p><p>Yours, <i>('til somebody else writes to me. . .)</i></p><p>The Housefone.</p><h3>3/24/93</h3><h3>actually, i thought this was someone else's number... sorry.</h3><h3>afg</h3><p>4/1/93</p><p>Today I ate a lizard sandwhich for lunch and puked all afternoon.</p><p>Eric P</p><p>4/4/93</p><p>I left the Hotel for a brief while this afternoon and set out to capture the greatest of aquatic beasts, the Smiling Snarklefish. You'll all be glad to know that I have returned to my room victoriously and will soon share my prize with all at the Balderdashers' outing in celebration. (I'm not quite sure how long it will take this finned creature to dry up and die-at over a half-ton it could be awhile. It really is not too smelly, however, so fear not. The Hotel will remain largely unplagued by affronts to the old olfactory.)</p><p>p.s. - somebody please tell Lewis that he may join us if he wishes, but we will be eating REAL food.</p><p>Eric P</p><p>4/5</p><p>Hey Housefone!Looks like you're seein' some <i>action</i>, old buddy!Glad to see some other people are getting in on the scene. I appreciated the poem you wrote me.I'd write one in return but I'm not into the poetry thing.I'm not even into the prose thing, really.Yeah, I know you thought I was a writer, but I've really been getting into this other form of self-expression recently, and I know you of all people will be appreciative of this bold new direction I'm taking, but I'm really interested in mime.Would you mind, I mean, <i>would you</i>?If I just did a little mime for you right now?Here.Watch:</p><p>Did you like that?A few computer geeks here in 265 gave me some weird looks, but I don't care.They don't understand, anyway.I know you liked it, though, and that's what matters.You're really the only one who understands, Housefone.The only one who cares.God, sometimes I feel so alone here in this cold world filled with people who seem to think sound and speech are essential to communication and that art should have some point, some message, some master plan.Well, to hell with them!What do they want?Goddamn <i>frogs</i> falling down on their heads?They'll wake up one day, Housefone, and they'll see what you and I have known all along.I need to go now, because my ears seem to be melting.</p><p>Steve</p><p>4/6</p><p>Dear Housefone,</p><p>I'm afraid to love.Help me.</p><p>"Matt" </p><p>Palos Verdes, CA</p><p>4/7</p><p>Dear "Matt"resses and me don't mix,</p><p>You must begin by asking yourself: Am I afraid of love, or am I afraid of what love is? There is a distinction in kind here which must be recognized before any attempt to address your problem can be made. If you know the face of Love but are nevertheless tempted to reel away from its binding chains, then you have a mother-fixation and must find that woman and kill her at once. If you fear Love instead because it is an unknown, a tidal wave threatening to destroy your little boat, then clearly you wallow in self-pity and stubborn ignorance - the only prescription for which is a good dose of LSD, making sure to carry as many religious symbols as possible.</p><p>the housEPhone</p><b></b><h3>4/13</h3><h3>Tuesday.</h3><h3>Thank you, Matt, whoever you are, for your candid and heartwrenching admission. It is people like you that offer a beam of light in this otherwise cold and heartless place. You are strong, and succinct, the qualities I admire most in a man. </h3><h3>Keep the faith. And beware of women wearing black trench coats. </h3><h3>-mk.</h3><h3>But wait. I have not hung up just yet. I have been inspired by Matt's brave honesty, to admit in this public forum, one of my own very human, very universal, I imagine, foibles. I am deathly, terrifiedly, speechlessly and appallingly afraid of the dark. There. I've said it. I am not ashamed to sleep night after night with the light on. So there. Persecute me if you will. I have been victimized for less than this. Have at me, cruel fates, even crueller houseguests. For I stand before you, naked, as it were, wrapped only in the garb of the hideous truth. Save me. Oh, save me, oh!</h3><h3>mk.</h3><p>Dear m.k.</p><p>I trust you. With you, I feel I can give. Here:I too have a phobia (other than the aforementioned L word).I fear heights...big ones.Whenever I look down from some building or some jutting precipice, I'm afraid I might jump although I don't really want to. Jump.</p><p>Also I fear Nilla wafers and pudding...but that 's more of a conditioned response.I threw up once.</p><p>"Matt"</p><p>Palos Verdes, CA</p><p>14 April 1993</p><p>Dear Abbey says to the poor traumatized souls "Matt" and "mk" that what we all need in life is a little hocus pocus.This is a shortened version on love of course, also known as sex.If you are afraid of love you must not be loving yourself (suggestions for women are ... sleeping with pickles or cucumbers or other known vegetables ... for men ... dig a hole that is one half inch less than your penis).If you are afraid of the dark you must not be sleeping in your own bed often enough.</p><p>"abbey"</p><p>Advice, MO.</p><h3>4/15</h3><h3>Once again, Matt, I am astonished by the similarities of our innermost selves. You, too, afraid of heights! How long and wearied have my searches for a kindred spirit been! I breathe your air, I speak your language, we share a commonality of soul. Ah, Matt.</h3><h3>I must make a brief note here, regarding Nilla wafers and pudding. I myself have never had any particular problem with these things and I must say, that hearing you admit your fear of such does make me a bit doubtful of your validity as a man of the world and all, and I am afraid to say, makes you therefore an unlikely soul-mate, but in any case, march on.</h3><h3>mk.</h3><p>4/18</p><p>What is god's name is going on here, Housefone?I go away for a few weeks and what happens?You let yourself turn into some kind of dating service or something.Well, I'll let you off lightly this time, but no more of this self-help Nilla wafer nonsense, all right?This is <i>supposed</i>to be <i>literature</i>, or have you forgotten?This is supposed to be serious, high-minded stuff going on here; no low innuendo or pop culture reference or unnecessary lewdness or postmodern pastiche will be tolerated within the confines of the housefone, do you understand me? Son, I regard you as a work of literature, and that makes you special.The realm of literature is sacred, and it can't be marred by silliness.If we let literature go, who knows what'll be next.Literature is all we have left of the ideal, and if we let the ideal be tarnished by shoddy things like nilla-wafer- and sleeping-with-cucumber-jokes then what will remain untarnished?</p><p>I know, son, your response is going to be "Dad, but you can't just shut those things out.They really exist out there and they have every right to be reflected in any truly objective representation of the world such as myself."But I say you're wrong, son.Don't waste my time talking to me about reality.I have more important things to think about.The world is falling apart; I read about it every day in the newspapers, and I can't do anything about it.I seem to have lost the power to shape the real world in any way, so I have to be content with shaping an ideal one, and that's you, boy, whether you like it or not.I have to make sure you're in tiptop shape, because one day humanity will get tired of reality, and they'll realize that they've pretty much irrevocably screwed up the real world, and they'll have to retreat into the ideal one us earlier visionaries of their race have created in literature.</p><p>And that means there will be people looking to you for answers.Yes, even you, even the housefone.And the answers shouldn't have to be nilla wafers and LSD and ear-melting jokes (yes, even I make mistakes).I'm not trying to censor your right to self-expression, son, I'm just trying to exhort you to choose the right path. Now, go out there and make your ol' Pa proud.</p><p>Steve<i> (who, as he signs this, is giving the housefone a big noogie...)</i><p>Steve....</p><p>Whatever happened to (to put it in your high-browed, literary-mindedterms ) the famed road less travelled ?</p><p>...housefone</p><b><p>Housefone --</p><p>Your high-browed literary pa has got a high-browed cucumber wedged in his nilla-wafer tiptop reactionary butt.But then again, what do I know? I am not high-browed and literary like some other people we know....</p><p>Housefone, you tell that pa of yours something from me. Tell him that he wouldn't know literature, high-browed or otherwise, if he fell into it headlong. And that the self-righteous, self-satisfied, pompous-beyond-the-realm-of-human-conception arrogant drivel that he has related has only been left here because of my desire to preserve the freedom, limited as it may be, of this space.</p><p>Tell him that. Thanks.</p><p>-- mk, peeved.</p></b><i><p>May 3, 1993</p><p>Dear Housefone, </p><p>As a faithful and long-standing reader, I now, for the first time, feel compelled to write to you to voice my opinion about the quality of your work.I am writing, of course, in reference to your recent letter to the young and un-worldly contributor who calls himself "Steve."</p><p>Your advice to Steve is to consider the road less travelled.If taken in its standard, cliched significance, this hackneyed phrase might offer Steve some sound advice.My complaint, however, runs through a deeper vein than simply your intended advice to the young chatracter.What I must find fault in and subsequently draw attention to is your mis-use of the Robert Frost literary reference in question.A careful reading of the poem will reveal that, throughout the second and third stanzas, Frost is really constructing a spoof of just such a cliched reading as your own.In these two stanzas, Frost describes the two paths as identical, both beingequally travelled and needing wear.</p><p>As a faithful and diligent reader, I feel compelled to draw attention to such errors, and hope that, in the futre, the quality of the read will be un-marred by such gaffs.</p><p>As ever, </p><p>Mrs. Thurston Howell </p><p>Evanston, Ill<b>.</b></p></i><p><b>Powdered Toast Man sez:</b> Cling tenaciously to my buttocks!</p><p>The Pope (ie Frank Zappa) sez: <b>Both</b> of them??!!</p><p><i>(a not to be missed episode of high literary and cultural merit)</i></p><p>Enjoy the sun while you can, for tomorrow it may rain.</p><p><b>-MK, suffering mild brain rot.</b></p><p>Is anyone here?It is 10, almost 11 November.Am I alone in the hotel, taking dismal advantage of off-peak rates?Is my set of eyes in their tight positions, and can I rely on turkey when I get home?Where does hope end and brook begin?</p><p><b>Housefone</b> here</p><h3>I was wondering if any of the summer renovations to the Brown campus phone system - like call-waiting and conference calling - were going to come my way anytime soon.</h3><h3>A couple months later, I stopped wondering.</h3><h3>Now I'm just griping - not to anyone particular at all.</h3><h3>Bastards.</h3><h2>11/13</h2><h2>17 September, 1996</h2><h2>An important tidbit that the board should probably be aware of: a detective who was passing through noticed three drops of blood behind the plant next to the leftmost door of the main entrance in the lobby. I don't know if this blood was spilt in the lobby, but it was to my understanding that what goes on behind closed doors is okay but that the hotel proper was a generally safe place. I shan't be staying another night.</h2><h2>-RH</h2><h2>october the 9th:</h2><h2>Real estate politics at Brown University, Inc. can sometimes drive a man with two legs to eat his own macoroni from his hat.</h2> [[🕮==>->../Front_Desk.html]]

<p>ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo</p><h3><b>THE GUESTBOOK</b></h3><p><i>Mark Amerika</i> (Honorary Chaplain), Feb 1993</p><p><i>Michael Joyce</i> (Uncivil Engineer), April 1993</p><p><i>Jacques Roubaud</i>, April 1993</p><p><i>Rick Putnam</i>, June 1993</p><p><i>Frederic Tuten,</i> October 1993</p><p><i>Gerd Burger, </i>October 1993</p><a data-passage="Novelty_Convention/In_the_Hair_Salon.html"><p><i>Ellen Akins,</i> November 1993</p><p><i>Alicia Borinsky,</i> November 1993</p><p><i>Jane Yellowlees Douglas,</i> November 1993</p><p><i>Patricia Eakins,</i> November 1993</p><p><i>Judith Johnson, </i>November 1993</p><p><i>Joanna Scott,</i> November 1993</p></a><p><i>Cornelia Feingold,</i> February 1994</p><p><i>Cathryn Kramer,</i> February 1994</p><p><i>Todd Winkler, </i>1994-95</p><p><i>Jeff Wallach</i> (Club Pro), 1995</p><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"><i> </i><p><i>(return to Front Desk)</i></p></a><p><i>oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo</i></p>/* Links: [[Novelty_Convention/In_the_Hair_Salon.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */

<p>"Don't you wonder</p><p>why it is built far from anywhere,</p><p>as though memory needs a terrain for forgetting..."</p><p>{{{---}}}<i>Forrest Gander, "Loiter"</i></p> [[🕮==>->A_Garden/Fount.html]]

<p>A couple floats through the hotel to the courtyard, inside the garden. They cling to the idea that talking while sitting on stone benches under stars somehow means that their conversation will be meaningful, instead of mere everyday chatter. They have come to the hotel to forget the state of existing with each other. Here in the hotel they can always leave to go fuck in their room and forget why they needed to talk. Here in the hotel with the peaceful old garden, they will lean over their table at dinner and kiss in front of all the other guests, and will say "I love you" too many times. They will hold hands, and twinkle eyes at each other. The ability to forget the past and future someone else's exists in the <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/A_Garden.html">garden</a> in the hotel. </p><p>"What are you afraid of?" the man asks his companion.</p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/A_Garden.html]] */ [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/A_Garden.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Balderdashers/A_Noble_Breed.html">The International Adventurers Society</a> convenes annually at the Hotel, usually during the month of December, to pool and consume the vast amounts of <a data-passage="Purple_Louise/Collectors.html">knowledge each member has acquired</a> since the previous year's gathering. </p>/* Links: [[Balderdashers/A_Noble_Breed.html]] [[Purple_Louise/Collectors.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Balderdashers/Grand_Reunion.html]]

<p>Rising in the grand ballroom of the hotel to address the annual convention of novelty salespersons, most of whom, she noted were wearing carnivalesque masks and latex body suits (the theme this year was "Creative Condoms"), she realized that the theme of her speech, "Novelty's Last Frontier: Wisdom," was far too avantgarde for this giddy crowd of old-fashioned carny barkers, so instead (and, besides, the seat of her own elastic costume had remained stuck to her chair when she rose--some fellow delegate's prank?--and she could not long keep her footing before being snapped back into her seat) she raised the traditional toast "to man's most ancient experience: the new!" and fell backwards, hoping only that someone had had the kindness of putting a whoopee cushion under her so she wouldn't have to invent her punchline by her own steam, as it were.</p> [[🕮==>->Novelty_Convention/In_the_Hair_Salon.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">Each year at the International Adventurers Society, the arrival of <a data-passage="Joseph_Frita/Joseph.html">Joseph </a>and <a data-passage="Joseph_Frita/Frita.html">Frita</a> Flecker is eagerly anticipated. A most unusual and indeed wondrous pair.</p>/* Links: [[Joseph_Frita/Joseph.html]] [[Joseph_Frita/Frita.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Balderdashers/Fond_Farewells.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">The Smiling Potato-Headed Snarklefish: the well-cooked half-ton beast is this year's prized catch. Not only have its scales been bronzed to match the Ballroom's decor, but its tender flesh can suit any taste: taken from the head, one can discern a rustic port-wine embellishing a fine <i>mignon</i>; taken from the tail, in its texture and aroma one senses <i>penne a la Vodka</i>. And, thankfully, any piece carved from its flanks tastes like chicken in a variety of preparations. The proud hunter steps forth as the delicacy is about to be unveiled:</p> [[🕮==>->Main_Dish/Smiling_Snarklefish.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">Louise Cannapee wears nothing but purple. Frequently during the Balderdashers' conventions, she eschews even clothing on her evening outings to the Grand Ballroom, preferring instead to paint herself with the pungent juice of Huikok berries collected personally from the Huikok bush, native only to the infested swamps of Borneo. A small group - principally Hotel guests not associated with IAS and drawn by the sweet-sour aroma of the fermented Huikok berries commingled with Louise's own exudations - collects each night in a corner of the ballroom as, seated on a velvet gold settee, she recounts her adventures, including her world-famous discovery of the Universal Sex Fish along the steamy banks of the Upper Niger River. Her tone, as always, is scholarly and grave, her dark eyes glitter, her purple thumb is thrust deep into her navel, where faint sucking sounds can be heard. <a data-passage="Grand_Reunion/Main_Dish.html">"Quite unlike the Smiling Potato-Headed Snarklefish, on which we have been feasting tonight,"</a> she says, "the Universal Sex Fish has no teeth. And it never smiles."</p>/* Links: [[Grand_Reunion/Main_Dish.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Purple_Louise/The_Universal_Sex_Fish.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">The chocolate (fish) cake was rich and the atmosphere was vibrant. A terribly small man was trying to share a story with a small group of friends but succeeded only in annoying them. He had been having difficulties staying tangible; every two or three minutes he would simply vanish and reappear at another point in the ballroom. No harm done, but his company was wearying of all the walking this necessitated.</p><p>"The Hotel is as wondrous as always. Except, somebody had better send the bellboy up to room 1313 soon. Something's wrong with it."</p> [[🕮==>->Room_Directory/Room_1313.html]]

<h3 class="noMargins">Well, by then, I had pretty much convinced myself that this had to be G.K.'s sax, and figured he'd be wanting it back -- and G.K. always had the finest blow and what not. I had a large brick of tasty kind bud myself and we would turn what should have been a pretty dull hotel stay into a mighty fine party. </h3><h3 class="noMargins">So I walked over to the schmuck and told him, "Hey, why don't you give me that sax, it's not yours." And he said, "Well it might be needed as evidence."</h3> [[🕮==>->High-Pitched_Wail/Smack.html]]

<h3>I didn't want any trouble with this bozo, so I put my left hand on his shoulder and said so, real friendly like while I gave him a good smack in the nose.</h3><h3>He just stood there doing nothing. Maybe if I hadn't been holding him up he woulda fallen, but he was just standing there looking a little dizzy and he didn't even wipe the blood off as it trickled down his nose. So I took the sax away from him and said to the blonde, "Hey, baby, you wanna get higher than you ever been?"</h3> [[🕮==>->The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html]]

<h3>He pulled that sax to the side doing his little lifeguard sidestroke. He started bitchin' about "what kind of lunatic would throw a sax out the window from five stories up, he could have killed someone. Someone oughta do something about that." Of course he was talking to that blonde, like he was impressing her, but she could see that he was holding in his little pot belly and acting like a schmuck.</h3> [[🕮==>->High-Pitched_Wail/Evidence.html]]

<h3>Well those other people at the pool started freaking out, some stupid <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html">blonde</a> chick let out a scream, and one guy, must've been a <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Salesmanship.html">salesman</a>, or some business dope of some sort said, "I'd better get that out of there before it hurts someone," like he's Superman or something. So he did a little dive in the pool which wasn't as good as he thought it was, and started swimmin' over to the sax.</h3>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Salesmanship.html]] */ [[🕮==>->High-Pitched_Wail/So_I.html]]

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/Denizen.png?raw=true" alt=""></p><p>I always come back down here, because nobody else does. I keep all of my things here. A good home, and my privacy is never disturbed... Not for long, anyway...</p> [[🕮==>->../Front_Desk.html]]

<p>Keep going. Door to kitchen. Light under door. Someone must have called room service. So now what? "Take that up to the guy in Room 214," a sleepy voice says. Easy. That meal will be mine.</p> [[🕮==>->Hobbyist/Safe_Haven.html]]

<p>Stomach grumbling. Hungry again. Up the stairs, peek out the little window on the wall. Dark. No cars passing on road. Good: nobody going to be up and about. Close the stairway door: Don't need anyone going down there. </p><p>FOOTSTEPS! Hide in doorway! Steps getting closer. Clumsy, shuffling. A drunk probably. Only a small blade in my boot, but it will have to do. "'Scuse," the guy mumbles, staggering past, and he caroms off the far wall. Consider hurting him... drunks are less trouble... but less fun, too... No. Too hungry.</p> [[🕮==>->Hobbyist/Home_Cooking.html]]

<p>If a particular door has always been locked, say, and you see me running in there, why, it's probably only your imagination. It would never occur to you that the missing people and the locked doors might have anything to do with each other.</p> [[🕮==>->Hobbyist/Denizen.html]]

<p>This is not a free country. People have interfered with my little hobby in the past. Which is why I am here. They came looking for me at first. All those years ago. Suspicious character lurking near the Hotel, that was the report. I made sure they found nothing. When a deputy got too curious, he simply vanished. They all supposed he'd run off with the Hotel receptionist, who also disappeared about that same time. <a data-passage="Hobbyist/Missing_People.html">It's a big hotel in the middle of nowhere, so many strangers passing through, it's easy for persons to be here one day and not the next. </a>No one thinks twice about it.</p>/* Links: [[Hobbyist/Missing_People.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Hobbyist/Safe_Haven.html]]

<p><a data-passage="The_Basement/Ratty_and_I.html">Yes, it's a good place down here.</a> Warm enough in winter, cool in summer, and you get used to the dirt and damp. Close to the kitchen. Easy access to the gardens and grounds. Too dark and damp for most to visit, but even if they did, enough nooks and crannies to hide in for years, with countless secret passageways and cupboards and storerooms, long forgotten. Plumbers and janitors are the only visitors and they never linger. Now and then a housekeeper sneaking a smoke. Have any glimpsed me? Maybe. But they wouldn't believe their eyes if they did. Or wouldn't want to.</p>/* Links: [[The_Basement/Ratty_and_I.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Hobbyist/Denizen.html]]

<p> A hand in a sack: tentative and attentive, <a data-passage="Room_666/Under_the_Bed.html">eyeless and unafraid.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_666/Under_the_Bed.html]] */

<p>Sometimes, when the ice machine is empty you can look down and see your own reflection in the steel bottom. And sometimes it changes a bit. <a data-passage="Room_212/Wallpaper.html">And then it talks to you.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_212/Wallpaper.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Iceman/Iceman_Cometh.html]]

<p>The man who came to deliver the ice every week. What the fuck was his deal?</p><p>Wait a minute. There was a man. And he said he was from the ice company in the neighboring state? And he used to spend the night. After he unloaded the ice?</p><p>Did we need ice delivered? Who was paying him all that money to deliver that ice?</p><p><a data-passage="Iceman/Ice_Machine.html">Isn't an ice machine supposed to <i>make </i> ice?</a></p><p><a data-passage="Bloody_Mary/Tequila_with_Lemons.html">He certainly likes my mother. Used to ask after her at every opportunity.</a></p><p>He was nice to me too. A real class type that iceman. </p><p>He even looked a bit like me.</p>/* Links: [[Iceman/Ice_Machine.html]] [[Bloody_Mary/Tequila_with_Lemons.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Bars_Restaurants/Elaine_Comes_In.html]]

<p>So much fancy stuff. The sex was never that good.</p><p><a data-passage="Window_View/Watching.html">The best place to watch was from the room above that ice machine.</a> People used to put the oddest things in the ice. Cigarettes, spit, old underwear, leaves, leaky pens. An illicit way to amuse oneself at the expense of others. Littler kids would stash beer and whiskey at the bottom. Plenty of younger men would leave a party to get more ice and end up throwing up in that poor machine.</p><p>Some passed out with their heads stuck down in the ice. Someone would usually come out after them. And they would go back. Greatly refreshed.</p><p>Maybe that was when the sex got so good that it started to be <a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Shop_Talk.html">worth talking about</a>.</p>/* Links: [[Window_View/Watching.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Shop_Talk.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Iceman/Empty_Ice_Machine.html]]

<p>He shot pop rocks up through his nose till he could feel them deep inside <a data-passage="Elaine_Comes_In/The_Neckless_Man.html">where they would massage his temples</a> and then he would swig from his paper carton of milk till the mixture made him sneeze onto the windshield.</p><p>Going back. Yes he was finally going back to the hotel where he belonged. He couldn't wait to get up so damn close to the side of the building where the <a data-passage="Iceman/Ice_Machine.html">ice machine</a> was and somehow he was going to fool them once again- filling up their machine!</p><p>The truck was freezing with denunciation and implication and bits of an icicle formed above his head and broke off at the bumps in the road where the freezing points would melt in his lap.</p><p>Something damn <a data-passage="The_Hurricane_Lounge/Specials.html">special </a>was going to happen in the bar when he got there. He was going to make that <a data-passage="Luis/Why.html">ponce bartender</a> pay him back for all the lousy times. He hoped he wasn't fired or shot to death before he got there.</p><p>The big red-and-yellow paint job on the side of the car - <b><i><a data-passage="Iceman/Ice_Delivery.html">"The Iceman Cometh"</a></i></b>- shook with the bumps and scared four-year-old children that had just gone for a walk by the side of the road.</p>/* Links: [[Elaine_Comes_In/The_Neckless_Man.html]] [[Iceman/Ice_Machine.html]] [[The_Hurricane_Lounge/Specials.html]] [[Luis/Why.html]] [[Iceman/Ice_Delivery.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Iceman/Ready_for_It.html]]

<p>On the bar was a National Geographic inside of which I found photos of a woman, three photos of the same woman, and in all three photos the first thing that I noticed was the hugeness of her nipples. You could have wrapped your fist around those things and not met finger to thumb. I had a little knife in my pocket, so I cut the pictures out of the magazine and took them up to my hotel room, where I taped them up over the landscape prints above the heads of the beds. I figured that if I was going to be staying in this hotel for a few days, I wanted to have some fascinating stuff to look at on the walls.</p><p>I turned on the television and took my shoes off. There was a very funny program on the tv, but I couldn't get my mind off of those nipples. They frightened me, they were so unlike anything I had ever seen. I turned around and focused the reading lights on the pictures. I sat Indian style on the mattress and looked up at those pictures. I began to realize that they were actually pictures of three different people! I just couldn't see beyond those nipples!!</p> [[🕮==>->Nipples/Dimple_Maids.html]]

<b><p>He flips the porno magazine out the window. At seventyfive miles an hour the glossy thing nearly rips the head off of one of the four-year-old children. He's had enough of slamming around the cab thinking other people's thoughts when he's ready as all hell for the loose breaking bit. Still that bit about the <a data-passage="Iceman/Nipples.html">nipples</a>-- Ummm. Fuck it. He hasn't had sex since he got that white trash bitch pregnant down by the hotel that time about a million years ago <a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_666.html">before the sci fi fiends moved in for good</a> and made a mockery of his own insanity.</p></b>/* Links: [[Iceman/Nipples.html]] [[Room_Directory/Room_666.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Moon_Tan/Daddy.html]]

<h1>My sister and I went to the state fair one summer. <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/Rocky_Relationship.html"> She dragged me on to all the rides.</a> I got sick on the Whirl-a-gog, and they had to stop the ride to let me off. I was roundly jeered. Maybe if I hadn't had all that cotton candy. . . .</h1>/* Links: [[In_the_Hair_Salon/Rocky_Relationship.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Grandfather.html]]

<h1><a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Brother.html">I got busted in Miami by a dude with ropeburns on his wrists who wheezed and whimpered when he cuffed me as though he were caught up in some kind of movie of himself.</a> "Easy, Dad," he snarled and bit my ear when I asked him for a smoke. Who <i>is</i> this guy, I wondered. Where does he come from? Was he born or made?</h1>/* Links: [[In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Brother.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/The_Trial.html]]

<h1>She sparkled all over. The green would somehow filter from her eyelids, down her cheeks, her lips, her fingers. Whatever she touched shined with green glitter.</h1> [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/Your_Mother.html]]

<h1>I remember the first time she dyed her hair. I came home from a first date with a guy I'd liked for a year. It wasn't even a date, actually. He drove me home from rehearsal. When we parked in my driveway, we confessed to each other we'd been attracted to each other for months. He asked if he could come inside for "a drink of water." I prepared for the first kiss. I could not have prepared for what I saw when I turned on the light in the front hallway. My mother, with a mane of bright yellow hair. Before they could apply the red dye, they had to strip her hair of its color. I screamed.</h1> [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father.html]]

<h1>He lied about dumb stuff, like whether he'd walked the dog or taken out the garbage; he told <a data-passage="My_Mother_1/Key.html">obvious whoppers</a> about where he'd been last night; he lied about believing he was my father when everyone knew my mother's brother <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/Soldier.html">Soldier</a>—the one who called eggs rooster fucks—had my same pinhead and squinty eyes. But what makes me puke still is how he lied about stuff like the stars in the heavens. I'd say, "What's that little blue star off by itself?" He'd say, "Lexidarius." Or "Branlemon," just as cool and calm, like he <i>knew</i>. But it was all like the lights and bells in the pinball. <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Grand_Ballroom.html">Tilt!</a></h1>/* Links: [[My_Mother_1/Key.html]] [[In_the_Hair_Salon/Soldier.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Grand_Ballroom.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father.html]]

<h1>My Brother—the eldest—walks as if somebody has poured lead into the insoles of his shoes. I suppose it has something to do with his being part of Vice and Narcotics—in Miami, no less. That—or the fact that <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father.html">my father</a> used to tie his hands to the bedpost each night after we'd all gone to bed.</h1>/* Links: [[In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/Busted_in_Miami.html]]

<h1>My father has always been <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/His_Lies.html">a congenital liar</a> and generally an all-around asshole, but once in a while, he seems to feel some sort of <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/The_Purple_Hat.html">damp spark of interest</a> in me, and <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father_s_Nose.html">he gets nosy, </a><a data-passage="My_Mother_1/Key.html">wants to know what I'm doing</a>, whether I've been laid yet.</h1>/* Links: [[In_the_Hair_Salon/His_Lies.html]] [[In_the_Hair_Salon/The_Purple_Hat.html]] [[In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father_s_Nose.html]] [[My_Mother_1/Key.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Mother_1.html]]

<h1>My father's nose, in my imagination, is a pale,<a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/Green_Eyeshadow.html">Martian green</a> and cold as a refrigerated kiwi. In reality, however, it was thick and dark as blood sausage, and whistled when he breathed through it.</h1>/* Links: [[In_the_Hair_Salon/Green_Eyeshadow.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Grandfather.html]]

<h1>My grandfather is absent.</h1> [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father.html]]

<h1>Whenever I picture my mother, she's always wearing <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/Green_Eyeshadow.html">green eyeshadow,</a> and <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/Hair_Dye.html">her hair is a sort of ferric red where the peroxide of one too many perms has lifted the color out of it.</a></h1>/* Links: [[In_the_Hair_Salon/Green_Eyeshadow.html]] [[In_the_Hair_Salon/Hair_Dye.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/Soldier.html]]

<h1>Oh don't go don't do it. Just come with me. This dance will be never ending. But I did not listen and she kept humming that song, <a data-passage="My_Mother_1/Key.html">the key to our secret</a>.</h1>/* Links: [[My_Mother_1/Key.html]] */

<h1>My mother, early in adolescence, had consulted a plastic surgeon, who removed her uterus and implanted a plastic teacup with a clamp-on vacuum-sealed plastic lid.</h1> [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/Your_Mother.html]]

<h1>When my sister was born, neither the pregnancy nor the birth was normal. At last, after great agony, <a data-passage="Room_666/Blonde_Wig.html">a new creature</a>, not at all what <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Mother_2.html">my mother</a> expected, erupted into the world.</h1>/* Links: [[Room_666/Blonde_Wig.html]] [[In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Mother_2.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Sister_2.html]]

<p><a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/And_I.html">My sister and I</a> haven't spoken for about nine or ten years. Not directly to one another, at any rate, although she's prone to getting to me through an intermediary at family gatherings with exaggerated tales of conquest. The last thing I can remember her saying to me years ago was: "You have <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father_s_Nose.html">father's nose.</a>" I knew it was goodbye.</p>/* Links: [[In_the_Hair_Salon/And_I.html]] [[In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father_s_Nose.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/Rocky_Relationship.html]]

<h1><a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Sister_1.html">My sister,</a> unfortunately, is a moose.</h1>/* Links: [[In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Sister_1.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Brother.html]]

<h1>You could say our relationship has been pretty rocky; things haven't really been right between us since she tried to kill me back in 1976.</h1> [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/Green_Eyeshadow.html]]

<h1>In the cafe, pinheaded Soldier asks for cowshit pie with whipped cream. He gets it. In the face.</h1> [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/His_Lies.html]]

<h1><a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/And_I.html">What about Eudora's purple hat?</a> The one with the velveteen poppies, the one that he—my father—liked to keep on his lap while we ate supper. What has happened to that hat?</h1>/* Links: [[In_the_Hair_Salon/And_I.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Brother.html]]

<h1>We felt that any judgment from THEM (who had sat on the plush cushions so long that the silk from their drawers was bleeding through) was SUSPICIABLE, at least insofar as what CRIMES we may have committed while on our TRACTORS.</h1> [[🕮==>->Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html]]

<h1>Your mother wears boots 'at match 'er eyeshadow. Fuck! she scares the shit out of me. Her disciplinarian purge will make me clean, I know. <a href="Iceman/Iceman_Cometh.html"> But right now I'd rather just be in the rec room with Joe, burning army men. Odor of singed hair.</a></h1>/* Links: [[Iceman/Iceman_Cometh.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/Busted_in_Miami.html]]

<p>Dreaming, I think of you. I lose myself in you. I subsume myself in you. You surround me, eat me whole, a snake . . . . swallowing . . . . an egg. I know you may not enter me, but dreaming, I think of you, and you are inside my heart as you are also enveloping my skin. Touching me, you think of none of these things. You think of nothing. When you dream, you dream of a blank, open field, filled with nothing but space. And you think of nothing of swallowing me, whole.</p> [[🕮==>->Writing/In_the_Next_Room.html]]

<p>Veins of mud and age across a torn page. Weathered. Is the capacity for decline here infinite? Unfolded, the page in question presents <a data-passage="Fount/JC_-_The_Iron_Boy.html">the tone of a child</a> in the lazy script of an adult. Who taught him to scrawl with an older hand, impatient?</p>/* Links: [[Fount/JC_-_The_Iron_Boy.html]] */

<p>Faithful navigators, lost and dry. You might be knit into a family of explorers, <a data-passage="JC/JC-Sleeper.html">a family</a> for the boy. You could raise him as one of your own, and prepare him to dwell in a moist, honest city.</p>/* Links: [[JC/JC-Sleeper.html]] */

<p>That slight <a data-passage="A_Garden/Fount.html">pressure</a> on your hips, arms embracing you from behind, surely the hands of a spectre cannot be warmer than your own.</p>/* Links: [[A_Garden/Fount.html]] */

<p>And yet his face is everywhere, peeking out of the walls, small <a data-passage="A_Garden/The_Symphon.html">frightened</a> gargoyles, his eyebrows raised as a young man, sullen in old age. Sometimes in duplicate, an imagined twin, their heads bent together in kinship. There was another watching, ready to do him honor all along.</p>/* Links: [[A_Garden/The_Symphon.html]] */

<p>We could dig with our beams of foreign light, but what good would it do, when each layer is more lush than the last. You could dip me in, holding tight at my ankles, and I would simply return to you <a data-passage="JC/JC-Sleeper.html">radiant</a>, a stranger.</p>/* Links: [[JC/JC-Sleeper.html]] */

<p>You will rest on the bed of stone, a rash spreading over your former pallor, freckling with the elements. Will I have weighted your hair down with rocks in the night? Drawn a <a data-passage="A_Garden/Fount.html">rouge of mud</a> over your cheeks to hide you from the others?</p>/* Links: [[A_Garden/Fount.html]] */

<p style="text=indent: 1.5em;"> Frita is an <a data-passage="A_Noble_Breed/A_Noble_Breed.html">IAS Balderdasher</a> born and bred, her mother having dropped her while on the run from Zombie Turkeys during the notorious Flying Moose expeditions in darkest Michigan. Abandoned, Frita was suckled by native lemurs, now extinct, and raised by Detroit cab drivers. It was Frita, whom Joseph met in his early postliterate twenties, who convinced him to exchange sex organs. That was thirty years ago, and today they still live a happy life exploring the wonders of the universe together, making frequent and novel use of their interchangeable sex organs. Flushed by the deep hues of a warm winter afternoon flooding the Ballroom, Frita recounts the harrowing tale of their most recent expedition to the Great Transnational Desert.</p>/* Links: [[A_Noble_Breed/A_Noble_Breed.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Joseph_Frita/Lost_in_the_Desert.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">Joseph was a promising PhD candidate in animal linguistics, otherwise known as zoophilology, before politico-medical complications cut short his education. His left arm, it seems, had resolutely determined that writing was not an activity it was willing to pursue. Although Joseph was right-handed, his rebellious left arm bred socialist contempt throughout his body for the bourgeois scum that would immiserate his comrade to the right with the servile task of key-punching. Consequently Joseph discovered that setting foot near computer terminals inevitably resulted in bruising, crunched testes, or loosened teeth - acts instigated by his unruly left arm. Thus, the bookish world denied him, illiterate Joseph was dismissed to a more physically structured life. His left arm has cooperated ever since, and has even occasionally given him pleasure.</p> [[🕮==>->Balderdashers/Fond_Farewells.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em">"Of course, by this time," <a data-passage="Joseph_Frita/Frita.html">Frita</a> continues, her hand under Joseph's skirt, "we had lost the trail of the strange Gemmiferous Wombats with their petaled scat, and indeed we had lost all signs of any life whatsoever, stranded as we were, without water or sustenance of any kind except that produced by our own emaciated bodies, out there in the Great Transnational Desert. So what could we do? Our well-known ten-toed gecko researches told us we had to dig deeply, each with our own ten toes, more or less in search of what desert travelers know as 'wet packs.' We did not find a wet pack, but we did find, buried in the sand, a small wooden door.<a data-passage="Mole_Rat/consumers.html"> We knocked and our knock was answered by a mole rat,</a> its pointy head between its paws and <a data-passage="Lost_in_the_Desert/Twitching.html">a ring in its twitching nose.</a> We knew we were not far from home."</p>/* Links: [[Joseph_Frita/Frita.html]] [[Mole_Rat/consumers.html]] [[Lost_in_the_Desert/Twitching.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Joseph_Frita/Rescue.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">"<a data-passage="consumers/consumer_report.html">The mole rat</a> beckoned," Frita continues as Joseph falls off his chair with a cry of <a data-passage="Rescue/Home.html">"Home!"</a> "The doorway was barely large enough for our shared extensile organ, so to speak, but somehow we both managed to squeeze through it. The soft hot walls inside embraced us and pushed us deeper, as though digesting us. Down, down we traveled until at last we were expelled into a kind of cavernous underground amphitheater, dark and sulphurous. Was this Hell? 'No it is not hell,' said the mole rat.'You can read my mind?' I asked, truly astonished for the first time all day. 'Not really,' the creature responded. 'You think very loudly. <a data-passage="Linked_Fragments/fractal_sewers.html">You are in the secret global sewer maze.'</a> The rat explained that, though the worldwide labyrinth was free and open to all, it was the mole rats who best knew how to navigate it, thereby slowly taking over the world. 'We are territorially acquisitive by nature,' the rat said with a rueful sigh. 'We are constantly expanding, building new tunnels, taking over new properties, we can't help ourselves. We are, in effect, underground members of your own restless Society. And as such we will guide you to the safety of your own comrades. Hold your noses and follow me!' And thus, fellow Balderdashers, we were brought here tonight!" Frita's narrative is greeted with wild huzzahs. She notices that she is clutching something in her hand. She hastily stuffs it back under Joseph's skirt and takes her bows.</p>/* Links: [[consumers/consumer_report.html]] [[Rescue/Home.html]] [[Linked_Fragments/fractal_sewers.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Balderdashers/Fond_Farewells.html]]

<p>The Hypertext Hotel Day Care Center is a state-of-the-art technophilic institution designed especially for your comfort. Its purpose is, quite simply, to take care of your Day. You no longer need worry about Time, and all the problems that arise because of it -- mortalitly, continuity, illusions of plurality, etc. -- all these have been carefully ironed out by our hard-working staff. Just sit back, relax, and enter the void....</p><p>Patrons searching for a place to deposit their children (boy, have they come to the wrong place) are referred to <a data-passage="Day_Care_Center/romper_room.html">the Romper Room</a>.</p>/* Links: [[Day_Care_Center/romper_room.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Day_Care_Center/The_Void.html]]

<p>To experience shuffleboard here in the hotel, is to know how it was meant to be, how it used to be. Alas, the glory days of shuffleboard are all but lost, existing only in scattered corners of the world: here a court is painted on the stone floor of an unlit cavern in the Alps; there one sits atop an abandoned warehouse outside of Leeds; yet in our health club we have one for your disposal.</p> [[🕮==>->Shuffleboard/the_players.html]]

<p>"Fractal Sewers" is an interesting but undeveloped set of windows having to do with Stew the sewers man, Sal the bisexual, and interesting thoughts about the Hotel itself, its construction and paradoxes. Funny use of text.</p><p>An interesting link from one of the Balderdasher stories has been temporarily retained: to <b>this</b> window. The obvious links from "pamphlet" to the Counter of the Health Club and to the Pool have been <b>disconnected</b>, but would be restored if and when this set returns to the Hotel.</p><p>Might break up this "Fractal Sewers" set, rescuing the material having to do with the paradoxes of the Hotel itself, but moved to some new context. Stew the sewers man might get linked to the missing novelist, the suspected murderer, etc. Sal the bisexual might remain linked with the Hotel ruminations.</p>

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;"><a data-passage="Joseph_Frita/Joseph.html">Joseph's nose</a> is twitching, his eyes are bulging, pointy head bobbing, tongue lolling, Frita's arm under his skirt up to the elbow. <a data-passage="Twitching/Home.html">"Home!"</a> he gasps.</p>/* Links: [[Joseph_Frita/Joseph.html]] [[Twitching/Home.html]] */

<p><b>American Maritime Association</b></p><p>Suite 34, 240 Albany St.</p><p>Washington, DC 20006</p><p><b>Story of a Swashbuckler: <a data-passage="McTeague_Biography/Questions_McT.html">notes on Marcel McTeague</a>—</b></p><p><u>Important dates:</u></p><p>1623: Born in Paris, mother a French prostitute and father an Irish sailor, Angus McTeague.</p><p>1627: Travels with father back to England.</p><p>1633: Expelled from Irish Catholic boarding school; becomes apprentice to local goldsmith.</p><p>1639: Joins English navy, becomes cabin boy on H.M.S.Richard.</p><p>1641: Missing in action off Barbary Coast, presumed dead.</p><p>1643: Resurfaces as first mate on board pirate ship Corsair, which makes many successful attacks on English merchant marine shipping.</p><p>1647: Corsair sunk in battle with H.M.S.Dreadnought, McTeague captured and sent to Port Sydney penal colony in Australia.</p><p>1649: McTeague escapes, authorities conduct search but find no trace; presumed dead.</p><p>1651: Resurfaces again, this time as captain of pirate ship Raleigh, terrorizing trading ships in Caribbean.</p><p>1653: Raleigh raids Santo Domingo, gains hordes of treasure, but his crew suffer major casualties. A revolt led by first mate Bart Hendriks leads to the assassination of McTeague, who is buried in an unknown grave in Santo Domingo along with a portion of the treasure.</p>/* Links: [[McTeague_Biography/Questions_McT.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Tropical_Drink_Special/Lounge_Ghost.html]]

<p>"Sunlight touched the darkened glass in one of two windows, drawing from it a glow that was not unlike the amber gleam of whiskey...He took their glasses to the bar ...because the man in charge had <a data-passage="Tropical_Drink_Special/Lounge_Ghost.html">disappeared</a> ten minutes ago..."</p><p><i>- William Trevor "The Paradise Lounge"</i></p>/* Links: [[Tropical_Drink_Special/Lounge_Ghost.html]] */

<p>"This long, low room, with small windows revealing the thickness of its outer wall, and normally cool and dry...was stickily oppressive that evening...the barman, had the fans going, but...I could feel sweat trickling down under my frilled shirt and dinner jacket. I was uneasy...a retired lawyer...inquired about our...ghosts."</p><p><i>-Kingsley Amis "The Red-Haired Woman"</i></p> [[🕮==>->Tropical_Drink_Special/Lounge_Ghost.html]]

<p>It was a stormy night. Sarah's mother was zipping down the winding road through the woods to the Y, late as always, Sarah sitting patiently in the passenger seat, clutching her skates in her lap and polishing the blades, eager to get to the rink to show off some new spins she'd been learning. Suddenly, a tree, caught in the violent storm, was toppling in the road in front of them. Her mother slammed her foot on the brake, and the car commenced to spin gracefully like an Olympic skater. The world whirled around them and then suddenly stopped. Sarah was pitched forward against her skates. She was in and out of hospital for a year after that and, although the doctors insisted that with practice she would have no problem skating as well as she ever did, Sarah never returned to the ice. She dreaded the skates, their leather tops bloodstained still, dreaded even more the dizzyingThe spins.</p> [[🕮==>->Love_at_First_Sight/The_Hotel_Life.html]]

<p>He knew about tacos. He had worked in a Mexican place in high school. BURRITO BILL'S, your family funtime Mexican restaurant. The hard thing was to stuff the tacos so the meat wouldn't fall out. Call it meat. He took his job seriously. He was a serious person. He experimented on his lunch break, inserting different amounts of taco innards into the tortillas, trying to discover the maximum amount that could be put in without it squirting out the back end with the first bite. It turned out that the maximum amount was zero, but he kept trying. And they kept yelling at him. His bosses, the customers, even his highschool friends. They laughed at the little hat he had to wear with Burrito Bill's logo on it. They shortchanged him. Well. Fuck Burrito Bill. Fuck them all.</p> [[🕮==>->Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html]]

<p>When Sarah was a girl she wanted to be a great skater. She watched with envy and admiration the beautiful women on television spinning like tops, sending chinks of ice flying as they kicked down to do a turn.<a data-passage="Love_at_First_Sight/service.html"> She dreamt of doing her own routines in Olympic stadiums before millions of adoring fans. </a>Her mother encouraged her in her dreams and signed her up for skating lessons at the local Y. It was not as easy as she'd thought it would be, but Sarah worked hard, foregoing other pleasures of the children of her age group, and after a year she advanced from beginners into the intermediate class. But then one night... </p>/* Links: [[Love_at_First_Sight/service.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Love_at_First_Sight/Accident.html]]

<p>Undone by fate, Sarah surrendered to a life as unromantic as was romantic the one she had imagined. She went to work in hotels, dutiful in her labors but without the ambition and discipline of her skating years, accepting with a shrug the frequent layoffs, nicking spare change for the movies, fending off the amorous pursuits of her ill-bred co-workers. Most of the time anyway. Sometimes she just let herself go. What did it matter? She accepted the tawdry emptiness of the hotel life as befitting one whose dreams had been so cheaply ruined. She disdained the management, mocked the guests. She laughed at fate.</p> [[🕮==>->Management/Love_at_First_Sight.html]]

<p>Fred had been hired without an interview. His record spoke for itself. Or perhaps they were desperate. Didn't matter. The pay was good enough that they could treat him like<a data-passage="Love_at_First_Sight/Taco.html"> the inside of a taco</a> for all he cared. He was sick of his old job, deskclerking at a Holiday Inn in the Sun Belt, checking in rich teenyboppers whose idea of fun was decorating the lobby with squirted whipped cream, peeing in the pool, and turning on their ghetto blasters at 3 a.m. So long to all that. He had a new job and, amazingly, <a data-passage="Boardroom_Summons/Advice_to_a_Character.html">timid as he was,</a> <a data-passage="Management/Love_at_First_Sight.html">a new woman</a>. Or maybe she had him. </p>/* Links: [[Love_at_First_Sight/Taco.html]] [[Boardroom_Summons/Advice_to_a_Character.html]] [[Management/Love_at_First_Sight.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Love_at_First_Sight/Time_Passes.html]]

<p>It wasn't long before they were having illicit liaisons in various secret places around the Hotel. One thing led to another and soon they were jetsetting around the Caribbean at the Hotel's expense. There was always the danger they'd be discovered but what did they care? They were young and in love and they had each other and that was all that mattered.</p>

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/service.png?raw=true" alt=""></p><p>The last word in comfort, luxury, and service</p>

<p><u>Why are there so many different bartenders in this Hotel?</u></p> [[🕮==>->Room_Directory/Room_666.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">"Seemingly amicable, this graceful creature is capable of the most insidious behavior when threatened. The primary defense of the Smiling Snarklefish, I have been able to deduce, is to befriend and then eat its enemy. It is aware of its outwardly appealing nature and capitalizes on it by appearing to welcome all who chance upon it with a formidable smile, one stretching - more than twenty feet - from gill to gill. The naive sightseer approaches, helplessly disarmed by this unexpected expression of affectionate joy. Then, in one sudden, violent motion the gregarious smile opens to reveal teeth of stupendous proportion which clamp down upon the woeful tourist. My handsman was, alas, thus consumed, though he was a tough little fellow and it took the fish a good bit of chewing before he could choke him down." Light but generous laughter. A small notation is made beside twenty-two others on a memorial chalkboard on the back wall of the Ballroom. "Which gave me just enough time to ready myself..."</p> [[🕮==>->Main_Dish/The_Last_Smile.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"The legendary Smiling Potato-Headed Snarklefish: ridiculed in antiquity as the creation of a sad and feckless imagination, its truth now lies before us. I must admit that I, too, before achieving my quest nearly succumbed to disbelief." A hush comes over the room. "That, however, was before my chance encounter with a small army making its way across the Caspian Sea on the same boat as I some months ago. It was through benefit of conversation with these fine young women that I came to realize the true nature of the Smiling Snarklefish - it is that of a hunted animal. I then knew this elusive monster might be found near the very grounds of our beloved Hotel and I awaited my return to our annual festival with impatience."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Hear, hear!" shout the gathered guests. The proud hunter smiles and raises his hand for silence.</p> [[🕮==>->Main_Dish/An_Insidious_Affection.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Unprepared for yet another uninvited morsel so soon after the first, and no doubt suffering from a momentary heartburn, the Snarklefish's smile faded for just a second or two. Seizing the advantage I had been given, I shot the beast with a small surface-to-air missile borrowed from my army friends up in room 1313. As this unfortunately forged a hole six feet wide through the creature's temple, we will not be tasting <i>pommes de tete au gratin</i> this evening, a small price to pay, I'm sure you will all agree, for the bounty we all share."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">Applause erupts and the band begins to play a song by Motorhead. Waxing nostalgic, <a data-passage="Balderdashers/A_Noble_Breed.html">the assembled members of the International Adventurers Society</a> laugh and talk and sing well into the gathering night.</p>/* Links: [[Balderdashers/A_Noble_Breed.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Balderdashers/Fond_Farewells.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Salesmanship.html">This guy. The swimmer. The drunk. </a></p><p><b>This guy has simply got to be selling ice.</b> What else could he sell?</p><p>He's out of whack but he's no flash in the pan.</p><p>I saw him after I cleaned off the last of the Kronenbourg cups and threw the last bunch of bitten lemons to <a data-passage="Room_666/Invasion_Target_1_0676.html">that monstrous thing that lives behind the bar.</a> </p><p><b>He seems to be making an extra long stay this time.</b></p><p>The ice he brought all smelled a bit like feta cheese. </p><p>I wonder if I have a shot with <a data-passage="Moon_Tan/tan_line.html">that little blonde aggravation.</a> </p><p>But somehow I have got to get rid of that damned iceman. <b><i>He's a threat to everyone.</i></b></p>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Salesmanship.html]] [[Room_666/Invasion_Target_1_0676.html]] [[Moon_Tan/tan_line.html]] */

<p>The pizza sits cold and clammy in its oily box. You are sick to your stomach. There is a real sense that <a data-passage="Pizza/Fred_Rising.html">something is going dramatically wrong here,</a> in this web of desire and faceless fear. <a data-passage="Employees_Only/Maintenance_Services.html">Stomach churning, you contemplate a hasty retreat</a>.</p>/* Links: [[Pizza/Fred_Rising.html]] [[Employees_Only/Maintenance_Services.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pizza/Pizzaman.html]]

<p>The Hotel Management is pleased to announce that, following our <a data-passage="The_Exterminators/sit_down.html">Annual Vermin/Exterminator Peace Accord Meeting, </a>the recent complaints about the occasional appearance of cockroaches as well as the legendary mole rats have been emphatically dealt with. Thanks to the exterminating firm of Tortilla Splat, all such pests have been eradicated from the premises.</p><p><a data-passage="The_Exterminators/glee.html"><i>(Yeah? Sez who...?)</i></a></p>/* Links: [[The_Exterminators/sit_down.html]] [[The_Exterminators/glee.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/I_Coming.html]]

<p>Love at first sight </p><p>for the two lonely people </p><p>in the hotel full of ghosts and archetypes </p><p>where love gets written in </p><p>for the employees </p><p>maybe if they have sex </p><p>they can have a conversation </p><p>without plastic smiles and </p><p>phone voices </p><p>without calling each other </p><p>sir or madam </p><p>without their disguises </p> [[🕮==>->Garden/JC_-_In_the_Hotel_Garden.html]]

<p>Fred had met Sarah the day he arrived. Inevitably. He was <a data-passage="Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html">the new concierge</a>, she was <a data-passage="Love_at_First_Sight/The_Desk_Clerk.html">the desk clerk</a>. He had stepped through the doors of the Hotel, feeling suddenly small in the expansive lobby, and commenced the long trek across the ocean of red carpeting, breathless by the time he reached the Front Desk. "Hello, can I help you, sir?" she asked. It was<a data-passage="Management/JC_-_Hotel_Love.html"> love at first sight</a>.</p>/* Links: [[Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html]] [[Love_at_First_Sight/The_Desk_Clerk.html]] [[Management/JC_-_Hotel_Love.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Love_at_First_Sight/Time_Passes.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Management/Vicki_Baum.html">The Hotel Manager's office is designed to intimidate, even before it is seen. </a><a data-passage="Management/Stanley_Elkin.html">Successive anterooms weary the visitor</a>, each door a challenge, each receptionist more hostile than the last. Guests in their ignorance freely undertake <a data-passage="Employees_Only/chambermaid.html">the interminable journey</a>, but staff go only when <a data-passage="Employees_Only/Boardroom_Summons.html">summoned</a>. <a data-passage="Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html">Fred the concierge </a>has rarely been there and <a data-passage="Love_at_First_Sight/The_Desk_Clerk.html">Sarah the desk clerk</a> has never gone.</p>/* Links: [[Management/Vicki_Baum.html]] [[Management/Stanley_Elkin.html]] [[Employees_Only/chambermaid.html]] [[Employees_Only/Boardroom_Summons.html]] [[Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html]] [[Love_at_First_Sight/The_Desk_Clerk.html]] */

<p>"What are we up to? Twenty million rooms? Twenty-<i>five </i>? What are we up to? What are we <i>talking</i> here? Service for 250 million? A ghost room for every family in America? And almost every one of them air-conditioned, TV'd or color TV'd, swimming-pooled, cocktail-lounged, restauranted, coffee-shopped. How will they find us? How will they know? What's to be done? Yes...Go! Reroute traffic. Paint detour signs. Paint FALLING ROCK, paint SLIPPERY WHEN WET, paint DANGEROUS CURVE. Paint CAUTION, MEN WORKING NEXT THOUSAND MILES. Paint BRIDGE OUT AHEAD. <i>How will they find us?</i>"</p> <p>- Stanley Elkin, <i>The Franchiser</i></p> [[🕮==>->Management/Love_at_First_Sight.html]]

<h3>"Ever since they had those powerful lights to illuminate the hotel frontage there had always been something going wrong."</h3><h3>- Vicki Baum, <i>Grand Hotel</i></h3> [[🕮==>->Employees_Only/Maintenance_Services.html]]

<p><u>Questions about McTeague:</u></p><p>1. Why pirating? Any information on the “lost years” after Barbary Coast?</p><p>2. More info needed on early life, first navy shipboard assignment.</p><p>3. Any ships’ log accounts of Corsair, Raleigh? Checking on Dreadnought might be useful.</p><p>4. Time on penal colony - any accounts of his experiences, his eventual escape?</p><p>5. Santo Domingo - an account of history, culture, people, etc. Why raid there?</p><p>6. Most importantly, any chance of recovering his body, the legendary treasure that is buried with him?</p> [[🕮==>->Lounge_Ghost/McTeague_Biography.html]]

<p>If it was the devil's</p><p>born or unborn </p><p>the keepers were the rats </p><p>the mole rats asserted their </p><p>presence </p><p>on everyone</p><p>they were</p><p>the ones breathing under the bed.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_216/Nothing.html]]

<p>Oh now she's a nice one, <i>Jeezus!</i> Not a girl any more, nothing little-girly about her, tits like that, they make you wanna be a baby again. Baby! Don't waste your time with that windbag wino! Come to Daddy! Maybe if you shake your <a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Pickup.html">blond</a>e locks, I'll--oh God, you did! <i>you did!</i>--I'll buy you a round! I'll buy you a night, a trip, baby, whatever you want, you name it, just stop talking to him! <a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Shop_Talk.html">Stop talking, <i>period!</i> </a>If what I wanted was a female talking machine, I'd sit in a room with <a data-passage="Replicate_Father/Soapfire.html">my goddamn daughter</a>! No, no, just lift them magical bazooms and let 'em fall! Come on, baby! Come to Daddy! <i>Jeezus! </i>What? <i>What--? </i>Yes, I'll look at the menu, thank you<i>.</i></p>/* Links: [[Bars_Restaurants/Pickup.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Shop_Talk.html]] [[Replicate_Father/Soapfire.html]] */

<p>My father is <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html">a slob</a>. He stinks. On occasion when <a data-passage="Moon_Tan/tan_line.html">I</a> accidentally see his flaccid penis I get pins and needles behind my knees; the kind that I have to fight when I see someone with an extra thumb or a cleft palette.</p>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html]] [[Moon_Tan/tan_line.html]] */

<p>Sometimes when I roll onto my stomach,</p><p>I know that the <a data-passage="tan_line/Bikini.html">lycra</a> is getting pinched between my cheeks,</p><p>bright untanned arcs of <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/blonde.html">my softest skin</a> appearing around its edge,</p><p>like a revelation, a radiant revelation,</p><p>catching an eye, maybe,</p><p>filling them with soft wonder</p><p>as they imagine luminous landscape's hidden darkness</p>/* Links: [[tan_line/Bikini.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/blonde.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Shop_Talk/Replicate_Father.html]]

<p>"Poor Mrs. Kelly. She came to me in a dream one night and told me all about the time that Laurie White let Skeeter Davis puke in her mouth and she swallowed it. She told me about the woman around the corner who pricked her daughter's ass with a thorn from a rose bush every time she misbehaved. She described to me the shape and the texture of Chad Cadenhead's erection, and how blonde he was; even his pubic hair was soft and fine and white blonde, (she called that kind of <a data-passage="Wife_s_Head/Doc_Martin.html">blond</a>e 'towheaded'), only little boys ever have hair like that, like angels, can you imagine how it looked when he came, his pale teenage spunk surrounded by that angel hair...? Mrs. Kelly was an enlightened woman, she could tell a girl who had someone's initials carved into her forearm by sight alone. She could sense it."</p>/* Links: [[Wife_s_Head/Doc_Martin.html]] */

<h1>To know a secret you must be prepared for consequenc<a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/Busted_in_Miami.html">es.</a></h1>/* Links: [[In_the_Hair_Salon/Busted_in_Miami.html]] */

<p>The domestics have nipples too, as most women.</p><p>It is not unheard of for them to touch their nipples. However, and as soft as they may be, there needs to be some distinction.</p><p>In one joint venture between <a data-passage="Maintenance_Services/Iceman.html">the iceman</a> and a routine floor scrubber, <a data-passage="Storytelling/Salesman_s_Story.html">it was discovered the areola.</a></p><p>He took a fancy that they could be as big as eyes.</p><p>She surmised that they were really as big as his mouth.</p><p>And she had two.</p>/* Links: [[Maintenance_Services/Iceman.html]] [[Storytelling/Salesman_s_Story.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Dimple_Maids/Domestic.html]]

<p>In the silence of the room, something trembles in the corner. The curtain is jiggled from the bottom as three tiny little elves come out of hiding and approach the woman's suitcase.</p><p>"Let's sleep in <i>there!</i>" said Penny, the only female of the three.</p><p>"No, we have to spend the whole evening talking to her," said Jed. "Meet me up in Room 666."</p> [[🕮==>->Room_Directory/Room_666.html]]

<i><p><a data-passage="Front_Desk/The_Guestbook.html">Conversation overheard</a> in the hotel hairdressing salon about <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Mother.html">mothers,</a> <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father.html">fathers,</a> <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Sister.html">sisters</a>, and <a data-passage="In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Brother.html">brothers,</a> during <a data-passage="Grand_Ballroom/Novelty_Convention.html">a convention of novelty salespersons,</a> the women shouting to be heard over the soap operas playing on the salon television sets:</p></i>/* Links: [[Front_Desk/The_Guestbook.html]] [[In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Mother.html]] [[In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Father.html]] [[In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Sister.html]] [[In_the_Hair_Salon/My_Brother.html]] [[Grand_Ballroom/Novelty_Convention.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Hair_Salon/The_Purple_Hat.html]]

<p class="noMargins">She said nothing but sat down quickly. You were looking so that you could not see her shining. There was distraction in that. There was also a cold air coming off of her, & the scent of a foreign hum. Her eyes were silver deep underneath, the buttons of a faint electric system.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">With a small twitch of the mouth, you were aware. She had come from on high, from the uncountable heights, swimming up out of the unknown depths, & always easily, making her slow sure way across to you from <a data-passage="Belfry_Biz/Julie.html">a thousand years to now</a>.</p>/* Links: [[Belfry_Biz/Julie.html]] */

<p class="noMargins">The planetaries were the strongest, but there were others that came through - the slow, croaking shine from Arcturus, the beetle-sounds of the summer nebulae - these were the life, & the ties, & the signals. All through the air were certain neurons. Your privilege was to know when one was near. <a data-passage="Patione/Another.html">That is what you saw that morning, as she stepped across towards you.</a></p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">It was the connection of two beings of light in the middle of the shadows. It was the revelation, the battery for you to continue. It was under the sun, which was the strongest signal of all.</p>/* Links: [[Patione/Another.html]] */ [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/A_Garden.html]]

<p>"Your ancestor...believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, <a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html">you have arrived at my house</a>; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost..."</p><p>--Jorge Luis Borges, <i>Garden of the Forking Paths</i></p>/* Links: [[../Front_Desk.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Patione/Into_yr_Patio]]

<p class="noMargins">The stage has been set. <a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"> Half a century ago, this place was the majesty of the coast, from Los Picos to Muir, and none could match it.</a> You were here, too,<a data-passage="Patione/New_Age.html"> the new age singing through you,</a> and your new alien eyes pulsing your head with the life of the masses. Here were the long nighttime dresses, the stiff collars and the sweat under sweet perfume....</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">And here on the patio, where you sat every morning after the beach, rushing your blood to the surface with the morning sun, <a data-passage="Patione/Channels.html">the distant channels </a>clicking in your head - here on the patio, <a data-passage="Patione/Another.html">where you looked up from your paper to see another coming across to you, treading on the stones like a fair mind across thin air, the corona simply absorbed into your own - </a></p>/* Links: [[../Front_Desk.html]] [[Patione/New_Age.html]] [[Patione/Channels.html]] [[Patione/Another.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Patione/The_Nights.html]]

<p class="noMargins"><a data-passage="Patione/Forking_Paths.html">You could never remember a time before</a>. You were ageless, of course, & nothing changed you.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">There were the soft tubes in your arms. They ran through the flesh in beauty, & the wires from the fingers to the center worked at the speed of light. There was a small ticking button at the back of each eye, perched where a nerve would be. Each was golden chrome. There was a special sort of effect created by the doubling of any reflection in the lens by the image in this smooth metal, so that the depth of each eye was enormous. There was no darkness for seekers such as these. The deepest shadow was a blue glow. </p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">There were the shocks of gravel running through your legs, until you were in the water & pumping, kicking the warmth back down through the tubes, the sun on your back through the surf, a million smells flashing through your nose in an instant, you missed not a one. </p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">There was the feel of your beautiful alien body like a winged silver droplet. There was no betrayal on the outside. There was the sheer within. The speed was effortless. And the channels were open to you, for you alone to hear & respond.</p>/* Links: [[Patione/Forking_Paths.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Patione/Channels.html]]

<p class="noMargins">Your solitude made you go without. <a data-passage="Patione/Forking_Paths.html">You had travelled for several years,</a> imagining a distant mountain peak held your desire, or perhaps this next village, dig in your heels & find it! When you tired of the road, you tried the cities. One by one they had fallen to each other, & the world was still empty. There were voices at every corner, but as you turned to listen they were distant, & as you pursued they were diminished, finally into the stars. You came to believe in this. There were none of your kind on the Earth. </p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins"><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html">You came to the hotel to watch the travellers, to move through the fast shift of an entirely moving terror.</a> <a data-passage="Patione/Another.html">Your stay was seven months and sixteen days before the other was revealed, a traveller in her own right, & a listener like you.</a></p>/* Links: [[Patione/Forking_Paths.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] [[Patione/Another.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Nights/Ago.html]]

<p>“You still gotta pay me Blubber Butt! Even when you go LIMP, you still gotta give me the cold HARD cash.”</p><p style="text-indent: 2em;">“Shut the fuck up, bitch!”</p><p style="text-indent: 2em;">“Just hand over the LONG green and I’m gone.”</p><p style="text-indent: 2em;">“Your fuckin’ beggin’ for a beat down.” </p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">Big Nate turns from the window and stares at the whore stretched out on the vinyl davenport. He takes a good look. The body. Her hips budge through the pink panties. Long thick thighs grow out of her deep and wide pelvis. One leg rests on top of the other leg. Both legs pressed tight. One knee shifts in front of the other and her legs plump as she slides across the covers. She rubs the sheets warming the bed with the motion of soft smooth skin.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">The bitch is hot. Nate’s dick is not. He grunts and a ball of spit jumps over his lip. It lands on his chin, slaloms pass the short black stubble hairs and dangles from the first chin roll. Slowly, the chin roll mucus reaches toward the ground. It falls. It splatters against his pot belly. Nate rubs it in like lotion and walks to the bed gripping his naked penis; hoping to jump start the little guy. No such luck.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">“You're pathetic. You shrivel prick, fat ass, goon face, shit smellin’, burger eatin’, no bitch fuckin’, no money havin’ punk!”</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">Nate put on his shirt, slacks and shoes and watches as she squeezes back into the leather. She keeps running her damn mouth. She won’t let up! Nate moves toward the Bible, swings open the Good Book, and grabs his twenty-two from gouged out text. He spins around and catches the black hole of a forty-four magnum.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">“See, THIS is an example of a BIG gun. Unlike the shit you got. You wanta shoot something, check the shooting gallery down stairs."</p>

<h3>Screaming. Moaning. The barking of wild beasts. The smell of rancid sperm. Come one. Come all. You can't turn back now. You're lured by the smell of raw sex, excrement, and canned dog food. Get down on all fours and shit at the door. (Please assume all characters within are stark naked)</h3><h3><b>WELCOME</b>: A man is at the window, looking out at the construction pit below. His hairy ass faces you and your nose. The smell of his wounded ass entices you. A woman is lying on the vinyl davenport, her renaissance thighs oozing out before her. The breasts on that work of art are tremendous. Pleasing to most available senses. You could go for a little palping now, couldn't you?</h3><h3>Will it be:</h3><h3><a data-passage="Penthouse_Bordello/man.html">-the man with the wounded ass</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Penthouse_Bordello/woman.html">-the woman with the renaissance thighs</a></h3>/* Links: [[Penthouse_Bordello/man.html]] [[Penthouse_Bordello/woman.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Penthouse_Bordello/FM.html]]

<p>You like the juice, no?</p><p>The juice is good.</p><p>The man's wounded left buttock is most enticing as you lap at the blood as it coagulates running down his thigh. You can't imagine that you'll ever want to leave this situation.</p><p>And he turns around to see who is lapping at his ass.</p><p>"God you're fucking ugly, you toad!"</p><p>He slaps you upside the head.</p><p>"Who ever told you that you could suck on my ass cheeks?"</p>

<p>The woman. Ah!</p><p>She's glad you slipped yourself onto the davenport with her.</p><p>"I haven't shot my wad for weeks," she says, palping her own ruddy breasts. She must be Scandinavian.</p><p>"What if I put my finger here?"</p><p>"OW !!!!" you scream, feeling as if you've just been invaded.</p><p>The man with the bleeding buttock comes over to you, breathes his breath into your face, "And you could have had me, sucker!"</p><p>Last chance !</p> [[🕮==>->Penthouse_Bordello/man.html]]

<p><b>"Attention Hotel staff. There is a pizza man in the building. Repeat: There is a pizza man in the building. <a data-passage="Ray_s_apartment/The_phone.html">Take all necessary precautions.</a>"</b></p>/* Links: [[Ray_s_apartment/The_phone.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pizza/The_Old_Child.html]]

<p>The pizzas have gone flying. One box, flung against the panelled wall, has burst open, pepperoni, sausage, and cheese seeping out like ectoplasmic ooze, like the primordial goop from which life once sprung. Or failed to spring. Freddy is wearing the other pizza on his face like an eyeless mask. He scoops up the remains as best he can, hoping the folks in Room 703 won't mind. He knocks. "Here're your pizza! Pepperoni and sausage with pesto!" The door opens and he enters.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_Directory/Room_703.html]]

<p>The concierge nudges the desk clerk, who is busy with the books, utilizing her accounting skills to hide the money she and the concierge have embezzled from the hotel in the past six months to fund their clandestine weekend trips to Puerto Vallerta. She does not even look up. "What?" she asks, annoyed. "It's another one," he says. "So? <a data-passage="Pizza/Sounding_the_Alarm.html">Call the Manager.</a>"</p>/* Links: [[Pizza/Sounding_the_Alarm.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Love_at_First_Sight/Time_Passes.html]]

<p>Pizzaman Freddy, balancing hot boxes smelling of cheese, garlic, and pesto, lopes in his loose-hinged way through the Hotel lobby, hot on his delivery mission, <a data-passage="Pizza/Nudge_Nudge.html">watched closely by the concierge.</a> Unheard alarms sound. Freddy punches the elevator button, bouncing from foot to foot, smacking his gum to the beat of his bug-eyed bobbing. <a data-passage="Pizza/Sounding_the_Alarm.html">Freddy notices the concierge staring at him.</a> He waves. Weird, man. The elevator arrives and Freddy hops in. He balances the pizza boxes against the wall and presses the button for the seventh floor with his elbow.</p>/* Links: [[Pizza/Nudge_Nudge.html]] [[Pizza/Sounding_the_Alarm.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pizza/The_Old_Child.html]]

<p>On the seventh floor, there is an arrowed sign on the wall that says "ROOMS 700-750 THIS WAY." Freddy follows the arrow down the hall, but no room 703. 700. 702. 704. 706. He returns to the elevator and there finds a second sign, under the first: "ROOMS 701-751 THIS WAY," the arrow pointing the other way. Freddy follows the correct arrow and comes first on Room 701.<a data-passage="Room_701/Knock_Knock.html"> He knocks</a>. </p>/* Links: [[Room_701/Knock_Knock.html]] */

<p><a data-passage="Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html">Concierge Fred</a> calls the Manager. "Yessir. Another one just came in." "Another one?" "Pizza man." "Blue and red?" "Yessir." "Anything else?" "Just a pizza man, sir." "Details, damn you!" "Ah. Sorry, sir. Usual blue and red uniform with a large coffee stain on the right pant leg. The coffee was dried in, been there awhile. Adidas sneakers, vintage late '80s, very worn. The mud caked on the soles was of a deep brown color, reminiscent of the mud found on the mountain trails in the Sierra Nevadas in summertime. I'd guess he's been there within the last two months. Goosey fellow, bounces a lot, bags under the eyes like he's been losing sleep. Judging by the callus on the first knuckle of his ring finger I'd say he's been up late nights writing something. Trace of jelly in the left corner of his mouth, probably from a Dunkin' Donuts jelly croissant. And let's see..." "Good man. And is it true you also speak fifteen different languages?" "Sixteen, sir." "Hrrumph. Didn't know there were that many." </p>/* Links: [[Love_at_First_Sight/The_New_Concierge.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pizza/Attention_Hotel_Staff.html]]

<p>In the elevator, Freddy discovers that the room slip has fallen off the pizza boxes. But he remembers it: Room 701. Or else 703. At the fourth floor, the elevator stops and a child steps in. He cannot reach the elevator buttons. "Which floor?" asks Freddy. "Sixth," says the child in a voice that is not a child's. Freddy hears all the pain and sorrow, heartbreak and joy of a lifetime in it. This may be the body of a child, but it is the soul of an aged warrior. When the old child steps out, Freddy smiles and says: "Eat your Wheaties!" The old child turns to stare icily at him, raises a social finger as the doors close.</p> [[🕮==>->Pizza/Seventh_Floor.html]]

<h3> "Forget your waterwings, Bockstein?" His mother had been calling him Bockstein ever since his father died of a stroke.</h3><h3>"Your name is Bockstein? Did you know there's <a data-passage="The_Hurricane_Lounge/Tropical_Drink_Special.html">a mixed drink</a> with that name? That's cute." The blonde pushed past him with a rush of cold air that left him shaking.</h3><h3>"Thank you," he said.</h3>/* Links: [[The_Hurricane_Lounge/Tropical_Drink_Special.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/exterminator.html]]

<p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">“SO WHAT’S THE PUNCHLINE?”</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">He turns around, to the other side of the pool, where the sound is coming from.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">“DON’T YOU KNOW HOW TO TELL A GODDAMN JOKE?” yells the fat man sitting on a lawn chair across the way.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">This disconcerts him. Finally, he yells back: <i>"It ain’t a joke, it’s just a story—now leave me alone!"</i>" He turns around, trying not to blush. The blonde is gone.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">“Dumb fucking joke, if you ask me.”</p> [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/Familiar_Music.html]]

<p>The girl has gone inside. Music is coming from the hotel's system, from speakers lashed to poolside palms. It's inspirational—categorically. Loud, but inspiring. What is it? I know I know it. I dunk my head again and think, surface. That was the introduction; here's the melody. I know it. It's Christmas music.</p><p>It's Christmas! Jesus Christ, it's Christmas.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_212/The_Head_of_a_Swan.html]]

<p>Welcome to the Health Club. <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html">You are welcome to enjoy our pool.</a> Our one of many healthful activities. They include: massage, sauna, <a data-passage="Linked_Fragments/Shuffleboard.html">shuffleboard</a>, bicycling, shooting and badminton. <a data-passage="Penthouse_Bordello/Welcome_to_the_Bordello.html">Oh, then there's the penthouse bordello, too.</a></p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html]] [[Linked_Fragments/Shuffleboard.html]] [[Penthouse_Bordello/Welcome_to_the_Bordello.html]] */

<h3>When I heard the high-pitched sax wail from above, the first thing I thought of was <a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_412.html">G.K.</a> I didn't expect it to be him, of course. That would just be too crazy. Too much of a coincidence. I hadn't seen that crazy son-of-a-bitch in years. Then I heard a window crash and saw that horn splash into the <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html">pool</a>.</h3>/* Links: [[Room_Directory/Room_412.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html]] */ [[🕮==>->High-Pitched_Wail/Some_Blonde.html]]

<p>She had watched enough TV for one day. Now it was time to sit by <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Bars_Restaurants.html">the pool </a>and work on the old moon tan. Ever since she had become <a data-passage="Room_666/Barbie_Mutations.html">a blonde</a>, four weeks now, she had been trying to pick up older men.</p><p>They loved little blondes, that's what <a data-passage="Moon_Tan/Daddy_1.html">her father</a> said. He back-handed her but good when he saw her platinum locks. "No daughter of mine is going out of the house looking like a goddamn 30-buck hooker." But tonight <a data-passage="Moon_Tan/Daddy.html">Daddy </a>was out with his own. She was free.</p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Bars_Restaurants.html]] [[Room_666/Barbie_Mutations.html]] [[Moon_Tan/Daddy_1.html]] [[Moon_Tan/Daddy.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Moon_Tan/tan_line.html]]

<h3>"Do you believe in early retirement?" he said,<a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/biographical_note.html"> closing the book.</a> "I don't think there is such a thing. But that's me. <a data-passage="Ratty_and_I/Bright_Red_Eyes.html">Deep down I'm a little boy again</a>!" He slid off the chair into a squat and duckwalked across the concrete. Ray could imagine the kind of noise the innersoles of his flip flops would be making as they struck against his heels. But his advance was soundless.</h3>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/biographical_note.html]] [[Ratty_and_I/Bright_Red_Eyes.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/poof.html]]

<h3>Sticky scales of crepe myrtle buds clogged the tubular metal joints of the lounge chair backlit by peach stucco.</h3><h3>A man draped his head over the armrest, his hair braided into a lank bouquet fit for one of the fake bronze wall plaques attached to the doors of <a data-passage="Ray_s_apartment/The_phone.html">the staff apartments</a> instead of numbers. Each braid ended in the perfect angle of a druggist's square as if the shape would last forever. His straight back and legs suggested the posture of dummies arranged by the Red Cross.</h3><h3>Ray bent towards him and his stomach tensed, cramped to the scent that called back the cool reek of urinals swabbed down with a syrup of ammonia and pine oil.</h3>/* Links: [[Ray_s_apartment/The_phone.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/turnstyle.html]]

<p>The pool was lighted by an underwater spotlight that made the deep-end water glow light green. <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html">A young woman—a teenage girl—watched the water absently from her poolside patio.</a><a data-passage="Maintenance_Services/Iceman.html"> He was acutely conscious of himself descending into the shallow end one step at a time.</a> He was aware of the whole volume of his body, heavy in his toes as in his chest. And for a minute he considered that this was where the daring lay, in going out and presenting oneself to the world, in placing oneself as an actor in the midst of the improvised apathy common to people, and so to entertain, to educate as to the possibilities—to sell oneself. <a data-passage="Room_212/Traveling_Salesman.html"> He submerged himself completely and surfaced with a shake of his head.</a></p>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html]] [[Maintenance_Services/Iceman.html]] [[Room_212/Traveling_Salesman.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Salesmanship/Storytelling.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Bockstein.html"><img src="Tarzan.jpg" alt=""></a></p>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Bockstein.html]] */

<p>Down below my window, I saw two young people in the pool, <a data-passage="Salesmanship/Storytelling.html">the young man attempting to hide an erection </a>from the young woman. <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Familiar_Music.html">The young woman</a>'s face was dark but marked by lighter colored scars, and I imagined how drunk or in lust must <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/underwater_noise.html">that boy</a> have been. Her charms ended with the inside of her skull. I wanted them to have fun, though. I wanted them to get together for this one evening. They were probably from two very different parts of the country; I saw her with an old man when they checked in.</p>/* Link: [[Salesmanship/Storytelling.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Familiar_Music.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/underwater_noise.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Moon_Tan/tan_line.html]]

<h3>Reaching into the canvas tote by his feet, he pulled out a book, opening it to the back jacket cover, and holding it up beside his face. Without reading, Ray looked at the shape of the terse, closely spaced words as if they were printed on a label of steak sauce.</h3><p><i>About the author </i></p><p>Mr. Reber was born in Reading, Pennsylvania.</p><p>He graduated from State College (B.A.1953) where</p><p>he later served as an assistant professor until</p><p><a data-passage="Room_214/The_Door_is_Open.html">his death</a> in 1991.</p><h3>"Ever hear of me," he asked, sliding a forefinger along under the letters of his name. "I'm the real thing. My syntax isn't wasted on the walls of the men's room."</h3><h3><a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Reber_s_ghosthood.html">Ray looked at him</a>.</h3>/* Links: [[Room_214/The_Door_is_Open.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Reber_s_ghosthood.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/No_such_thing.html]]

<h3>The pale hiss of lime lights blew over her legs making them look protected by nylons fallen in wrinkled waves around the ankles. Her elasticized bikini exposed thighs with the softness of malleted slabs of chicken.</h3><h3>She got up the chrome ladder with a pebble-surfaced tumbler in her hand and sat sideways on the low dive, tossing ice cubes from her drink into the pool.</h3> [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/Reber_s_ghosthood.html]]

<h3>"You cheat,<a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Tarzan.html"> Tarzan</a>!"</h3><h3>Ray's throat caught in midswallow. The woman's tight, inscrutable bikini bottom was so thin that if a quarter warmed itself underneath her she could probably have told the slow bulge of heads from tails.</h3><h3>"<a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/under.html">Legs are for kicking</a>!" she shouted.</h3><h3>A block of ice colder than any he had ever licked smacked his forehead and slid down his nose a few inches.</h3><h3>"Get your face wet!" Her bright blonde hair, pulled straight and close to the scalp, had roots the faded red of rosary beads.</h3><h3>Ray hoisted himself out of the pool, feeling the watch press against his wrist with the weight of a buttom jarred loose from its cuff.</h3>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Tarzan.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/under.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/Bockstein.html]]

<h3><a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/poof.html">"Hello?"</a> Ray said, watching the shadow of his poised elbow plump on the riflled skim of water. A watch crystal settled to the bottom of the pool with the brief, white hint of an ambulance siren flashing on and off. Ray shucked his whistle and bolted in a sudden dive.</h3>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/poof.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/under.html]]

<h3 class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">"Did you get 'em where you want 'em? Did you knock their heads together?" the blonde said.</h3><h3 class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">The guy in the red jacket was probably asking twice what a night's lodging cost to crawl around in the grass, occassionally dropping his head to check the ferny weedstem sockets.</h3><h3 class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">He stood up from the line of shimmering aluminum pie plates tied on top of sticks which he had just poked clumsily into the cinder shoulder of garden.</h3><h3 class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">His fingers touched the skin just under her ear where it looked like a white bean had been planted. "This is not what I'm trained for," he said. "I'm a professional tour guide." He pointed to the empty sack. "<a data-passage="Employees_Only/Management.html">Rotten work</a>."</h3><h3 class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">"I've never been on a tour of this place."</h3><h3 class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">"It won't hurt," he said, actually bowing to her.</h3>/* Links: [[Employees_Only/Management.html]] */

<h3><a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/No_such_thing.html">Ray had just brought his cupped palm down from his ear </a>when he heard a gentle pop like the <a data-passage="The_Exterminators/floorboards.html">husk of a crushed cockroach</a>. The man tried to straighten up at the edge of the pool. He scrambled for a foothold, his knees jutting awkwardly in opposite directions. His body blurred its slurred whistle off the rolled edge of the nearest wall without raising a splash.</h3><h3>Ray stood on the tiles slick with footprints, looking down into the queer emptiness that created the space of the pool.</h3><h3>He thought of rain dissolving a scrap of newspaper in the street. Then he thought a drowning man would not be made to disappear so quietly as that.</h3>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/No_such_thing.html]] [[The_Exterminators/floorboards.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/dive.html]]

<h3 class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">"The rooms at least have beds," Ray said.</h3><h3 class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">"Beds?" The man sat up and turned around, his movements hollow on the green plastic webbing hung like a drum over the flagstone.</h3><h3 class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">"Who's sleeping?" His face was a flat medallion of milk as blanched as the soles of his feet. With his tired pen, he spayed a placemat thicker than shirt cardboard. Large illegible doodles whorled across it like he had been sketching the random arcs of tossed cigarettes with trails of black pepper. "I think in wheels," he said, pointing to a corkscrew. "Not lines." He tapped the white wreckage of his chest,"Right now, <a data-passage="A_Garden/A_speck.html">I'm spinning in patterns physics hasn't even discovered yet.</a>"</h3>/* Links: [[A_Garden/A_speck.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/biographical_note.html]]

<h3>An amorphous palm of water glided over his bald, burning eyes like <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/poof.html">an eraser</a> across a blackboard brushing pale shapes of the alphabet.</h3>-<h3>Diced bubbles flaked through the grill of an air jet. The enamel watchface slid down the oblique slope of the bottom rough as a human heel. He kept the dial locked in his muzzy vision. Time paused and then went on turning strokes at the weird speed of every slow song he had ever heard. A vapor fogged the quartz like the smudge of a brow on a car window. Ray dug through the wobbly spheres of his own breath, pulling the supple leather strap as he would a ripcord.</h3><h3>He surfaced in the shallow end and stood expanding his chest with gulps of air, his hair tangled into a dripping fin on top.</h3>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/poof.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/cheat.html]]

<p>Lewis is in the shower and the room smells of people. Dory goes for a swim. </p><p>She lets herself sink and closes her eyes. The chlorine wash the sleep from her skin. She hears the bubbles rise from her ears and then the low drone of a human voice, saying the familiar words, "say my name."</p><p>Dory opens her eyes, puts her feet on the bottom of the pools and pushes herself to the surface. She looks anxiously about the poolside, but sees no one. He told her she was too loud. He said people must have heard.</p><p>She lets herself sink again. "Say my name," she hears again.</p><p>And a reply, "Dorothy." </p><p>"Say my nick name." She spins and sees and small black box sitting on the floor of the shallow end.</p><p>"Dory," says the box and she swims for the box as it emits a series of guteral grunts. </p><p>She extends her arm toward to box before it is within reach. A splash shocks the water bombarding Dory with bubbles. She feels them running through her bathing suit as she strokes happlessly away from the disruption. The visual interferense of the splash disseminates. She is face to face with the bell boy, teeth bared and nostrils flared, his maroon uniform rising from his limbs like seaweed.</p><p>They stand in three feet of water and Dory smiles and puts her arms around the lad. Water is forced out of the bell boy's jacket where her breasts push into his chest. His hat hangs behind his neck, suspended by the elastic strap.</p><p>Dory leans back, lets the boy hold her up and looks into his eyes. His smile is wicked.</p>

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">"Whether by sight or scent, one of the little beasts did indeed soon wriggle up the moist river bank and slither squishily into the fissure for which it seemed created. Ah, the inexhaustible marvels of Nature! The miracle of form and function! I felt, groping and squeezing the ripe mud which seemed to be boiling up around me, at one with the universe!" Louise Cannapee, falling to her purple knees, vividly demonstrates her mystical moment for her audience, adding as her voice descends huskily from its ecstatic shriek: "Of course, the fish, relying entirely on dumb instinct, did not know when to stop. As I continued to be pounded by the vibrating pulse of its mucous-covered flesh, I realized that I could be destroyed by my own delight. I ripped the creature out of there and cast it back into the river!" Her audience applauds and turns away. "Wait!" Louise says, rising.</p> [[🕮==>->Purple_Louise/A_Fellow_Adventurer.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">"Wait!" says Purple Louise, rising to her feet again and, after sniffing her fingers, accepting a canape of pickled manatee cheeks in puff pastry being passed around by the Hotel staff. The lady Balderdasher's account of her discovery of the Universal Sex Fish is evidently not yet concluded. "Out of nowhere a fellow explorer - perhaps, as it were, a student of mine - came crashing through the bushes behind me. Startled, I scrambled away, slapping through the mud on all fours, but it was not me he was after. He dove into the steamy water in pursuit of the fish. He returned, smiling, to the surface, the beast in hand, and, standing still in the river, facing me, proceeded to stroke the creature's cleft proboscis, if that was what it was. The thing began to swell, a mouth opened, and, as though of its own volition, the fish impaled itself on the intrepid adventurer's stiffened member and commenced to pulsate furiously once again. In a matter of seconds the affair was settled and the man fell back into the river, spent, though the fish's piston-like motions continued and perhaps -<a data-passage="Balderdashers/A_Central_Tenet.html"> Nature, my friends, is not benign! </a>- continue to this very day! "</p>/* Links: [[Balderdashers/A_Central_Tenet.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Purple_Louise/Collectors.html]]

<p>"I am a collector of exotic fish," remarks a member of Louise's audience, and others take up a similar refrain. "I should like to own one of the strange little creatures for further study." "No doubt," replies <a data-passage="Grand_Reunion/Purple_Louise.html">Purple Louise,</a> returning her thumb to her navel and her lean unflinching buns to the velvet cushions of the gold settee. "Aware of the public interest the Universal Sex Fish must inevitably arouse, I sought to grow them in special fish farms, there on the upper Niger in their own natural habitat. But, alas, they shriveled and died in captivity, and their breeding habits remain to this day an insoluble mystery."</p>/* Links: [[Grand_Reunion/Purple_Louise.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Balderdashers/Fond_Farewells.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">"The Universal Sex Fish is a pale oblong entity with a diameter of two or three inches at its base, five or six at its head, and is normally no greater than one foot in length, though these dimensions can vary considerably from fish to fish. Its elastic musculature allows it to wriggle along the muddy banks of the river much like the Giant Slime-Eating Maggot, which we have had the pleasure of banqueting on at previous IAS conventions. I had heard local lore describe the fish's unusual talents, but only an empirical demonstration would satisfy my scientific curiosity. I therefore decided to spend an afternoon basking in the creature's hot sodden habitat dressed as you see me now, as I had been informed that the one-eyed fish, nearly blind, would not approach what it could not clearly see. Or smell." Louise, in her best pedagogical manner, spreads her purple legs on the gold settee and, <a data-passage="The_Universal_Sex_Fish/withdrawing_her_thumb.html">withdrawing her thumb from her navel,</a> points to what her two-eyed auditors can quite clearly see.</p>/* Links: [[The_Universal_Sex_Fish/withdrawing_her_thumb.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Purple_Louise/A_Delightful_Experiment.html]]

<p><a data-passage="consumers/consumer_report.html">Caught him staring at me from a damp corner, sitting on his haunches, his gray whiskers twitching.</a> His little bright red eyes looked at me as if he were glad to see me even though he couldn't quite place who I was.</p>/* Links: [[consumers/consumer_report.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Basement/Ratty_and_I.html]]

<h3>The phone unhinged its dull half-ring on the pine table when Ray heard a mole rat scream. He turned around in time to see a tooth that looked like a cheese-colored stub of battery strung up on the doorknob.</h3><h3>"It won't bring you <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Reber_s_ghosthood.html">luck</a>." Ray shook his head.</h3><h3>His mother wrapped the irregular molar in her apron and picked up the rat, dragging her sunburned knuckles</h3><h3>in the ruffed grey fur at its neck and shoulders.</h3><h3>"Her breath smells better in the gap," she said.</h3><h3>Ray picked up the receiver and held the cold palstic to his ear.</h3>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Reber_s_ghosthood.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Ray_s_apartment/frame.html]]

<h3 class="noMargins">Ray was ten feet away and moving farther. The TV poured its blue haze over his mother's legs like the smoky light from a midnight jukebox. Her one foot quick stepped two times for every slow right sweep. To a keening hiss she ground her heels into the shins of the scultpured carpet.</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1em;" class="noMargins">He backed into the bathroom and set the door tight in its jamb.</h3> [[🕮==>->Ray_s_apartment/sink.html]]

<h3 style="text-indent: 0.5em;" class="noMargins">"It's bad to live like you do. Confess everything and you'll feel better. You were the last to see him, honey, and I want you to tell me what you said. Tell Mommy what you said that wrecked his palns, darling, that made him writhe in that paper gown you could blow your nose in, pumpkin, counting off the seconds with his heart blitzed out, angelface, until you sent him gift-wrapped to his grave. Did you tell him he'd be better off-"</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1em;" class="noMargins">"No! Stop!"</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.25em;" class="noMargins">"Hush, Bockstein. You're right. Why bother asking? I already have information that sheds light on things."</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">She elbowed Ray aside, stuck out her bottom lip, and began hissing through her teeth a song his father used to sing to him at night when he paced from foot cramps. In accompaniment, as part of a strange shuffling dance Ray had never seen, she swished the air with the belt from her raccoon-collared trench coat that she used for a bathrobe.</h3> [[🕮==>->Ray_s_apartment/bath.html]]

<h3 style="text-indent: 0.5em" class="noMargins">"<a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/poof.html">Hello?</a>"</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">What Ray heard in response was not a voice but water. It was like hearing flakes of breakfast cereal fall through the line into a single, clear sound. Not a pure, restorative stream, but a damp, muffled roar. Bitter. Belligerent. Littered with complaint.</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">He hung up, staring hard at the holes in the microphone of the person on TV standing in the red clay basepath. With a delicate flip of the remote control, his mother reduced the volume to a far-away shout.</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">"Who was it?' she said.</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">"I don't know. A hiss - bad connection, probably. I wish I knew."</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">"Rumor has it, you already do," she said, pulling out the chipped pane of sky-pink drawer as if she were yanking a jeweler's tray into perfect allignment. She lifted out the frame where his father's instamatic smile lived, forming its sparkle with the stinging light of witch hazel.</h3>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/poof.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Ray_s_apartment/dance.html]]

<h3 class="noMargins">Ray ran hot water in the blunt curve of the sink and watched the porcelain gleam in its familiar stupor until the bright plane of water shattered as if the thin, sheer membrane which momentarily holds back the juice of a tangerine had breached. The water funneled up out of the unstoppered drain hole, lengthening through the steady air in a fluent leap from its own filmy bends all the way up to the ceiling.</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">It sagged into the wet folds of a gently emerging torso, a single, molded, pelvis, a belly-button like a breath mint stuck to the outside of its peeled down roll. A lolling waftage of chlorine stuffed Ray's nostrils and infused every filament of light.</h3> [[🕮==>->Ray_s_apartment/watch.html]]

<h3 class="noMargins">The steely glare of the faucet distorted the red hearts dyed into the figure's shorts like stale paint on Easter eggs. The beveled angles of his rhyming braids rocked on the shaving mirror. A thin white shimmer of knuckle fringed the constant unmoved brightness at the rim of one blue eye. Life-sized and naked legs stiffened straight as the spine of someone rising to break the tension unaided by the use of either stroking hands or kicking feet. He tipped the easy freight of his body forward and held a wink for six seconds.</h3><h3 style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"It's eleven twenty-seven," Ray said, shining through his own skin with sweat. He unfastened the watch from his wrist and dropped it into the lapping basin.</h3>

<p>"NO, no, that's just it, they DON' T care, and that's why we see such SHIT these days...The young people, they don't take any time at all...I know, but when was the last time you met an EXCEPTIONAL YOUNG PERSON? My school was full of them...Oh, honey, I'm sorry...okay...I'm taking off my left shoe...heh, heh...no, stop that...alright, my right shoe I am struggling with because I tied it too tight and I am concentrating too hard on kissing your neck...alright then, your shoulder... the LEFT one..."</p> [[🕮==>->Shop_Talk/Replicate_Father.html]]

<p>Or perhaps "OM!"</p> [[🕮==>->Joseph_Frita/Joseph.html]]

<h3>"He was, he realized, nowhere. It was not a place."</h3><h3>- Stanley Elkin, <i>The Franchiser</i></h3>

<p>The man appeared next to him muttering to himself something about change; catharsis, not money. He was a balding man who, now stooping at the knob, might have been missed by the scope of the door eye. He said he had a trick from when he used to be a second-story man, and took from his wallet a plastic card. He slipped it between door and doorjamb and fiddled the door open in a minute. <a data-passage="Room_212/Traveling_Salesman.html"> He smiled at the opening door and nodded at the thanks. </a>Then the man said clearly, "If you'll excuse me now, I'm going to have phone sex with my wife."</p>/* Links: [[Room_212/Traveling_Salesman.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/Phonecall.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_212/Flathead.html">He fit the ice bucket squarely on top of his head </a>and felt a cool trickle of liquid run down the back of his neck. Although he had never played football, under the double spell of surprise and cool arousal he was able to shoulder the heavy door off its hinges with one swift hit.</p>/* Links: [[Room_212/Flathead.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_214/The_Door_is_Open.html]]

<p>He was a flat-headed traveling salesman. It was a war wound to the cranium, he didn't know what hit him. The plate was made of solid steel. It beeped in the security annals of the airport du jour; it kept his head, aching, cold for an hour after he'd come in from the slopes. Nevertheless, he wouldn't have traded it for all the round, orblike heads in China. For he loved his plate, loved it madly. And with good reason.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_212/Traveling_Salesman.html]]

<p>Hotels, in any case, were more habitable than <a data-passage="Room_212/Motels.html">motels. Motels</a> meant constriction, the sensation, by the weight of the walls, <a data-passage="Room_212/Wallpaper.html">the pattern on the wallpaper</a>, that all was folding in. Motels meant <a data-passage="Iceman/Empty_Ice_Machine.html">empty ice machines</a> and cold bathroom tiles, and the suspicion—whatever stairs may have been climbed, whatever heavy sky occupied the window pane—that the room was underground, down in cold earth. Hotels he could live out of. He could walk around outside by <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html">the pool </a>without the vertigo of desolation. He could leave for town or beach without fearing the return. And inside there were clean things to touch. He probed his well-dusted room <a data-passage="Hotels/Hand_in_a_Sack.html">like a hand in a sack.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_212/Motels.html]] [[Room_212/Wallpaper.html]] [[Iceman/Empty_Ice_Machine.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html]] [[Hotels/Hand_in_a_Sack.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/Lonely_Places.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Iceman/Empty_Ice_Machine.html">The ice machine was empty.</a> Well, it could be worse. The empty bucket in both hands,<a data-passage="Room_212/In_the_Hallway.html"> he walked back down the hall,</a> not with the vertigo, but with an emptiness. As an acolyte he had carried incense and eucharists in two hands like this bucket; as a salesman, batteries and breakfast cereal, telephones and hair tonic. He never had as much faith in any of these as he did in this empty ice bucket—<a data-passage="Iceman/Iceman_Cometh.html">faith in its sincerity,</a> in the weight of its meaning.</p>/* Links: [[Iceman/Empty_Ice_Machine.html]] [[Room_212/In_the_Hallway.html]] [[Iceman/Iceman_Cometh.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/The_Door.html]]

<p>In the hall there was his tunnel vision—strip lighting above length of line-patterned carpeting, walls of doors and doors. <a data-passage="Iceman/Ready_for_It.html">At night on the Florida Turnpike,</a> he considered, distant headlights light distant rows of the bordering trees, crowded, bark-bare. Dump trucks entering the highway come up close behind and sniff at your tail like big-faced bulldogs, then settle back or pass with a breath of dirt from ancient depths. For a little while tonight on the road, it was looking like <a data-passage="Room_703/The_Prison.html">another long, damp night of the soul;</a> fortunately he escaped. He was fortunate; the night was fortunate—he suspected, frankly, that misery likes people’s company no more than people like misery’s.</p>/* Links: [[Iceman/Ready_for_It.html]] [[Room_703/The_Prison.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/Another_Way_In.html]]

<p>Perhaps it had begun with keys. In any case, it was most easily precipitated by the baleful jingle of a ring of keys, this suspicion of the inanimate as somehow portentous of his fate and his nature as he had yet to understand it. With keys he could close himself in and call himself safe; but should his keys some day slip off without him, he would be disowned by car, camper, house and everything inside—television, letters, family photographs and indifferent cat, more keys: for mother’s home, safety deposit box. And there was sometimes the sinister sticking in the lock, the reminder that, if they wished, these keys could someday stop working. Petty little metals.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_212/The_Door.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_212/Motels.html">Hotel. Motel. </a><a data-passage="Room_212/Traveling_Salesman.html"> Ho. </a> <a data-passage="Room_212/Flathead.html">Mo.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_212/Motels.html]] [[Room_212/Traveling_Salesman.html]] [[Room_212/Flathead.html] */

<p><a data-passage="Room_212/Hotels.html">Hotel.</a><a data-passage="Room_212/Motels.html"> Motel. </a><a data-passage="Room_216/Twinkie_Remembers.html">Ho. Mo.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_212/Hotels.html]] [[Room_212/Motels.html]] [[Room_216/Twinkie_Remembers.html]] */

<p><a data-passage="Room_212/Hotels.html">Hotel.</a> <a data-passage="Room_212/Wallpaper.html"></a> Motel. Ho.</a> <a data-passage="Room_212/Things.html"> Mo.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_212/Hotels.html]] [[Room_212/Wallpaper.html]] [[Room_212/Things.html]] */

<p>The staff knew about the rat problem </p><p>it wasn't an ordinary situation </p><p>with normal circumstances </p><p>when they had called <a data-passage="Maintenance_Services/The_Exterminators.html">exterminator </a>he said </p><p>mole rats were like babies </p><p>they only left when they grew up.</p><p>But now they had to listen to the shuffle </p><p>of cylindrical bodies </p><p>between the walls </p><p><a data-passage="consumers/consumer_report.html">the cellophane skin against thin plaster.</a></p><p>Cook said she could smell them</p><p>The electrician wanted one </p><p><a data-passage="Ray_s_apartment/The_phone.html">as a pet</a></p>/* Links: [[Maintenance_Services/The_Exterminators.html]] [[consumers/consumer_report.html]] [[Ray_s_apartment/The_phone.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Employees_Only.html]]

<p>The difference was cheer or discontent. What waited in the rooms that were more empty—empty of the adequate hum from a full panel of cable channels,<a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory.html"> the resonant hum of housekeeping's invisible vigilance—</a>was a white noise that made him concentrate on emptiness, hollowness. <a data-passage="Room_212/Lonely_Places_2.html">This was hollow thinking, to concentrate on his aloneness tonight,</a> on his last lover or his once-wife—thinking on the past was thinking a hollow thing; <a data-passage="Window_View/Watching.html">thinking about past presence, about present absence.</a></p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Service_Directory.html]] [[Room_212/Lonely_Places_2.html]] [[Window_View/Watching.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/Hotels.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_216.html">Huuh.</a></p><p style="margin-left: 2em;">Huuuhh.</p><br><p style="margin-left: 10em;">Huuuuhhhhh!</p><p>NNggh? <a data-passage="Through_the_Walls/Get_Over_Here.html"> Hah</a>.</p><p>Hah hah uhhhhhh. <a data-passage="In_the_Next_Room/Wet_Dreams.html" style="margin-left: 6em;">G'night baby.</a><a data-passage="Room_666/Replication.html"> I'll call you from Pensacola.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_Directory/Room_216.html]] [[Through_the_Walls/Get_Over_Here.html]] [[In_the_Next_Room/Wet_Dreams.html]] [[Room_666/Replication.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Dirty_Phonecalls.html]]

<p>His door had locked, naturally. <a data-passage="Room_214/Plastic.html">He stood for a moment </a>with <a data-passage="Room_212/Entering.html">the empty bucket</a> and considered the walk back down the hall, past the empty ice machine, into the cement stairwell down to the lobby. Here was his room inches before him, he said to himself, surprised, because for a second he had thought of himself as ‘he’. <a data-passage="Room_212/Keys.html"> He would have been inside right now had he just brought his key. </a><a data-passage="Room_214/Wrong_Room.html">He gave a shove on the door.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_214/Plastic.html]] [[Room_212/Entering.html]] [[Room_212/Keys.html]] [[Room_214/Wrong_Room.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/In_the_Hallway.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_212/Hotels.html">Living out of Gold Coast hotels</a> wasn't such drudgery at this time of year. Here he had it: television and air conditioning, clean sheets; outside the odor of oranges, of mangroves growing, and of the sea, even, though the sea was miles east. On TV, a violin angled on a wool-tailored shoulder, flashing cherry above fathomless black, and bowed to the neck like the head of a swan, a delicate, sexless hand. </p><p><a data-passage="Room_666/Blonde_Wig.html">The head of a swan</a>. </p><p><a data-passage="Room_212/The_Way_It_Was.html">It was not this way last Christmas.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_212/Hotels.html]] [[Room_666/Blonde_Wig.html]] [[Room_212/The_Way_It_Was.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/Things.html]]

<p>The water came warm from the cold tap. A hotel room, his father, also a salesman, used to say, is really two rooms. He took the ice bucket from the shelf of towels, <a data-passage="Room_212/Thought--.html">thought:</a> Sugar Cane—, Twister—, <a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/The_Hurricane_Lounge.html"><i>Hurricane</i> <i> Lounge</i>.</a> The place right off the exit, <a data-passage="The_Hurricane_Lounge/Sinking.html"> drink a beer and be around people, meet a salesman, talk business... </a><a data-passage="Room_212/Hotels.html">Impossible to escape one's own reflection before such big mirrors.</a> <a data-passage="Room_212/Ice_Bucket.html">He opted for the ice bucket.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_212/Thought--.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/The_Hurricane_Lounge.html]] [[The_Hurricane_Lounge/Sinking.html]] [[Room_212/Hotels.html]] [[Room_212/Ice_Bucket.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/Things.html]]

<p>He stood before his open door with the empty ice bucket in his hands. Then he thought about the possibility of going for <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Salesmanship.html">a swim in the pool,</a> although it was already evening. He undressed and put on his bathing suit; it had been drying on the back of a chair, dripping on his business shoes. When he was really selling it sometimes got the better of him. He sold so well sometimes he was concerned, concerned for the sake of things. Here things and there things, all things, connected things—one guy couldn't possibly sell this well; it would send things out of whack.</p>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Salesmanship.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/Ice_Bucket.html]]

<p><i>"Thought--? This character thinks only of his absent-mindedness," said <a data-passage="Thought--/Bella.html">Bella Labar,</a> mercurial omniscient.</i></p>/* Links: [[Thought--/Bella.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/Flathead.html]]

<p>Had he been telling himself a joke earlier? A long joke, detailing the deficiencies of a travelling salesman -- telling it so convincingly that he believed himself, got lost in the joke? Here was the thing—here is the thing, he tells himself, surfacing into the present. I’m ready to have a good time, I think, surfacing into my own person. Ludicrous! A salesman is not unlike an actor. <a data-passage="Salesmanship/Storytelling.html">We go out into the world and play for people.</a></p>/* Links: [[Salesmanship/Storytelling.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/Dumb_Joke.html]]

<img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/Wallpaper.png?raw=true" alt="" usemap="#Wallpaper-Map" style="width:420px; height:480px;"><table style="width:100%"><tr><th>Go to top of window to stare at the wall...</th><th><a data-passage="Room_212/Hotels.html"> ...or click here...</a></th></tr></table>/* Links: [[Room_212/Mole_Rat.html]] [[Room_703/The_Sad_Thing.html]] [[Room_412/The_First_Time.html]] [[Room_701/Knock_Knock.html]] [[Room_212/Hotels.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/The_Sad_Thing.html]]<map name="Wallpaper-Map"><area shape="rect" coords="346,6,404,42" data-passage="Room_212/Mole_Rat.html"><area shape="rect" coords="58,206,223,370" data-passage="Room_412/The_First_Time.html"><area shape="rect" coords="242,269,420,480" data-passage="Room_701/Knock_Knock.html"></map>

<p>The woman in the bed screamed. There was a .22 on the bedtable beside her. "Sorry. Wrong room. I think I'm lost..."</p> [[🕮==>->Room_Directory.html]]

<p>Reber's sinuses were acting up again, so he hoped the decongestant he had popped in the cab on the way over would clear his sinuses, at least well enough to insure a good night's sleep. The book biz: a bloody jungle. He had to be at his best. <a data-passage="Room_212/The_Way_It_Was.html">Pop another at breakfast if necessary to get him through his presentation. Wouldn't be easy. The knives would be out.</a></p><p>He plopped his suitcase onto the bed, unzipped it, and, feeling virtuous, began to remove the shirts and pajamas his wife had carefully folded and packed. But<a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html"> sparkling sounds of splashing and screaming</a> called him over to the bright, expansive window. Watching the young people down there, the glittery light, the flashing colors, he was brought back to blurry pictures of body paint, rainy grass, and a woman's long brown hair. What the hell. He needed to relax, didn't he? Didn't bring his trunks, but his tiger-striped boxers would do.</p>/* Links: [[Room_212/The_Way_It_Was.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_214/Reber_s_Boxers.html]]

<p>Hotel Memorandum</p><p>To: Manager</p><p>From: Switchboard</p><p>We are wasting our time with personalized wake-up calls. It is time to automate the service.</p> [[🕮==>-> [[Room_214/Memo_to_Switchboard.html]]

<p>Hotel Memorandum</p><p>To: Switchboard</p><p>From: Management</p><p>Automate your ass. Drop by the office to pick up your final check.</p> [[🕮==>->Employees_Only/Management.html]]

<p>An early morning sun rose behind the drawn curtains in room 214. But the only light that entered the room in days came through a slit at the base of the door connecting to the adjoining hotel room. <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/dive.html">The room was beating with the soft steady tic of Reber's watch, partly unbuckled on the wrist of his half naked body. He was preparing to go swimming so the watch, not waterproof, was on its way off when the intrusion occurred</a>.</p><h1 style="color:#e74760">Ring Ring...</h1>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/dive.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_214/wake_up.html]]

<p>This is not the first time in this hotel he's found a guest lying dead on the floor of his room. Chances are the police won't buy the same -"I just walked into the room" - story twice. So what could he do? He draws the curtains and, placing the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door, gets his ass out of there.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_Directory.html]]

<p>Suddenly, as he's staring down on this scene, wondering what he's going to do with this half-naked dead guy sprawled out on the floor, a strange thought passes through his head: "The table appears to be wooden. But it's not. It's plastic. The coffee cup, too, is plastic. Not ceramic, plastic. And yes, the coffee as well. Plastic. The table, the cup, the saucer, the coffee--even the steam which rises from its milky surface. All plastic."</p> [[🕮==>->Room_214/Not_the_First_Time.html]]

<p>Reber dumped the clothes out of the suitcase, looking for the boxers that might double as swimming trunks. She hadn't packed them. Only the white ones with the little red hearts. Have to do. <a data-passage="Window_View/Watching.html">As Reber, standing in the window, looking down upon the pool, dropped his pants and lowered his shorts, he had the sensation that his mind was clearer, lighter, and cleaner than it had ever been.</a> The jungle was receding, the knives were sheathed.<a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Salesmanship.html"> He could already feel the gentle blue water washing over him, churned up by the young bodies around him. It was going to be all right.</a> He could finish the reading in the morning.</p><p>Minutes later, sinuses draining, Reber would be lying face up on the floor, dressed in his shirt, his heart-spotted boxers dangling from one hooked finger. <a data-passage="Room_214/wake_up.html">He had forgotten to hang the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the doorknob.</a></p>/* Links: [[Window_View/Watching.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Salesmanship.html]] [[Room_214/wake_up.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_214/The_Door_is_Open.html]]

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/The_Door_is_Open.png?raw=true" alt="" usemap="#The_Door_is_Open-Map" style="width:301px; height:226px;"></p><p>"Sorry." The guy on the floor by the bed was dead. <a data-passage="Room_214/Another_Wrong_Room.html">"Wrong room."</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_214/The_Lost_Novel.html]] [[Room_214/Another_Wrong_Room.html]] */<map name="The_Door_is_Open-Map"><area shape="rect" coords="5,148,81,213" data-passage="Room_214/The_Lost_Novel.html"></map>

<p><i>Start up a story about a lost novel, or a lost screenplay, using this photolink... Someone perhaps who stayed in the hotel to finish the final opus and disappeared... may be lurking about in the hotel's innards to this day... Crotty--? Temporarily linked back to photo. Change when new text develops.</i></p>

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/There_s_a_Man_in_My_Room.png?raw=true" alt=""></p><p>No. No such luck. The sonuvabitch is dead.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_214/Plastic.html]]

<p>So there he is, standing in the <a data-passage="Management/Stanley_Elkin.html">door of his room</a> looking at a guy on the floor holding a pair of boxer shorts up like a measled flag. The room's a mess, but he doesn't see any of his own stuff. On a wooden table, there's a coffee cup with hot steaming coffee in it.</p><p>"Hey, mister! What the fuck are you doing in here? Where's my stuff?"</p><p>The guy doesn't say anything. Who could blame him? He knows he's not a pretty sight when he's in a shitty mood. Or else the guy's out cold.</p>/* Links: [[Management/Stanley_Elkin.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Wrong_Room/My_Stuff.html]]

<p>Hello? Room 214? Mr. Reber? C'mon, man, pick up the phone. People order wake-up calls and then don't even have the decency to respond to them. <a data-passage="Ray_s_apartment/frame.html">Hello? Mr. Reber</a>?</p>/* Links: [[Ray_s_apartment/frame.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_214/Memo_to_Management.html]]

<p>Robert stepped out of the bathroom wearing a tweed cap and sleeveless sweater that was stuffed down into his pants.</p><p>"Oh my God!" Liza exclaimed.</p><p>"Robert!" Carey cried. "We were just just talking about your--!" For a moment Carey thought he'd imagined him. </p><p>"It's good to see you," Robert said, brushing crumbs from his lap. His breath smelled of Cheerios.</p><p>Carey was confronted by the image of lying on a psychiatrist's couch and repeating this fantasy. But with Liza beside him--?</p> [[🕮==>->Room_216/Wet_Sounds.html]]

<p>"People make dirty phone calls every day, sweetie."</p><p>"That's the thing, I guessed it was just a dirty old man, but then he</p> [[🕮==>->Room_216/Storytelling.html]]

<p>"Your dad," he said, "would have shot me in a second." He lifted his chest and boomed out in a thick Southern voice, "Two things in God's great world that are always in season: deers.."</p><p>"And queers," Liza finished. "You would be dead, I would be in some nunnery, and we wouldn't be in this Godforsaken place, sitting out the Baptist hymns and great aunts."</p><p><a data-passage="Nothing/Visitors.html">"And ghosts."</a></p>/* Links: [[Nothing/Visitors.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Twinkie_Remembers.html]]

<p>Carey was looking through his wallet now, cleaning out strips of paper, numbers and names and business cards. He had to do this weekly. He had to do this solemnly. There was a man named Sean, whom he'd met last week in a bar. He was young enough to be his son, if Carey had had a son. He had decided not to call. Sean reminded him too much of himself, long ago, and to fuck yourself, your happier, younger self, is a taste of death. He threw the number away. Other pieces of paper held names of men who had died. He threw those away too.</p><p><a data-passage="Room_216/ray_carver.html">"This is the first funeral I've been to in a long time</a>," he said, "where there weren't drag queens."</p><p>Liza laughed, undid and redid her necklace. "Care," she said, "I think I'd call my sister Nancy a drag queen." Now they both laughed. "But really," she added, "nothing at all like Robert's funeral. What was that queen's name...Connie Lingus! She made such a camp out of the funeral oration! Who'd have thought a fairy like that could have gone to divinity school?"</p><p><a data-passage="Room_216/Twinkie_Remembers.html">Carey put his wallet on the dresser and finished laughing. </a><a data-passage="Room_212/Lonely_Places_1.html">There was an awkward silence. </a></p>/* Links: [[Room_216/ray_carver.html]] [[Room_216/Twinkie_Remembers.html]] [[Room_212/Lonely_Places_1.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Cheerios.html]]

<p>Liza played with the pearls around her neck. <a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/The_Hurricane_Lounge.html">They were waiting for food ordered up from room service, but when they'd called down again, there had been no answer.</a></p><p>Carey stopped then spoke, "Sorry. She should have written by now. Maybe we can find her address from the phone company."</p><p>"No." Liza put her hand back in her lap. "No, after Robert died she couldn't stand the sight of us...of me. I can't see her wanting me back in her life, or you. She loved him too much. Fucking bisexuals mess up everything good."</p><p>Carey tried to imagine Claudia there on the bed beside Liza, holding her hand. He tried to imagine her at the funeral that day, beside his wife. He thought of whole days full of blank spaces beside Liza.</p>/* Links: [[Bars_Restaurants/The_Hurricane_Lounge.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Funerals.html]]

<p>The following night a tall man approached him on the dock. It was an unusually windy evening and no one else was there. He was damp from the spray that had been lifted off the incoming waves.</p><p>“Hell of a night, isn’t it?” He remembered the voice clearly; it echoed with warmth and concern. </p><p>He shrugged, pulling his windbreaker closer around his body. “I’m a Northern guy, I’m used to it.”</p><p>The other man stepped closer, and he felt a tingling, nothing as jarring as an electric shock but a sudden rise in the pulse, as if he were instinctually detecting an approaching storm. “I’m Carey,” he said, holding out his hand.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_216/Wet_Sounds.html]]

<p>"Why bring up my mother?" Liza asked him.</p><p>"Well, let's see...we did spend five hours draped in black for her funeral, I think she's pretty much on my mind right now!" He stood up and went to the mirror. He saw nothing new. </p><p>Liza remained on the bed. She said nothing. Her hat and veil lay beside her, film noir. Carey looked at her now, and wanted her to take off the pearls, but she was just sitting there. He said, "I'm going to hate not seeing her."</p><p>Liza looked up and knew of course it was so. "She loved you a lot. A hell of a lot more...but she was wild about me marrying you. Remember how she acted at the wedding! Remember her waltzing with all the men...even your best man fellow...what was his name? Timmy? God, he was hot!" Carey smiled and began to get an erection.</p><p>Liza paused and said, "She knew all about us, you know."</p><p>He looked at her and caught his breath. "What?!"</p><p>"I found out today. She left us all letters to read at her death. She knew about you, and me, the whole thing, ever since the wedding."</p><p>"What an incredible woman!"</p><p>"Thank God she never told Dad." Liza smoothed out part of the bedspread. Carey walked behind her.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_216/Father-in-Law.html]]

<p>He found the nights to be more satisfying. The beaches were emptied of all but a few sweatshirted souls, the lights from the obnoxiously close resort hotels paling in contrast to the dark of the ocean beyond. He wandered out on the short docks, sometimes to the edge, becoming entranced in the cold wash of opaque gray water against the rough wood. </p><p>On the first night he was in Pensacola he saw a couple opposite him, dressed in white evening clothes, oblivious to everything except their embrace and the ocean in front of them. He turned and headed back towards the shore, but was intercepted halfway home by two college girls, clad in bathing suits and T-shirts.</p><p>“Are you okay?” one of them asked. She was short and <a data-passage="Room_666/Blonde_Wig.html">blond</a>e, her tone sympathetic, as if he were a wounded pet.</p><p>“Yes, fine, thanks,” he blurted, his voice cracked after a long period of silence. He quickly hurried off and retreated to the safety of his <a data-passage="Room_212/Lonely_Places_2.html">hotel room</a>.</p>/* Links: [[Room_666/Blonde_Wig.html]] [[Room_212/Lonely_Places_2.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Meeting_Robert.html]]

<p>Liza turned to her husband and said, "Honey, look at my face...I think... Wait a second." She moved closer to him, leaned over her chair to him under the lamplight. "I think I just drew on myself," she said, pointing to her cheek, "Do you see anything?"</p><p>He leaned over towards her also, both of them under the brassy glow of the hotel lamp and their features buzzed by the TV snow. "These walls are so thin," he said. "I know. We should watch what we say." He looked at her face, which he had known for twentyfive years, once beautiful and hard and now blossoming in lines and wrinkles near the eye. He pulled a hand up to her face and brushed away the graying auburn hair. There, on her cheek, was a thin blue line of ink. He took a tissue from the box on the table, wet it with his tongue, and gently wiped the ink from her skin. <a data-passage="Nothing/Visitors.html"> All was silent in the room while he did this,</a> and outside. When he was done he leaned back.</p><p>"Thank you," she said, and looked back at her letter. She folded it and slid it into an envelope. She took off her bracelet and put it beside his watch, and then <a data-passage="Room_666/Under_the_Bed.html">she sat back on the bed.</a> He smiled and said, in delayed reaction to her words, "It was nothing."</p>/* Links: [[Nothing/Visitors.html]] [[Room_666/Under_the_Bed.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Robert_Calls.html]]

<p>The phone? Carey looked confused and Liza tried to appear unconcerned. "Oh God," she said, "it's probably Nancy trying to get us to stay another day. Damn her." She picked up the receiver and Carey fiddled with his tie, giggling.</p><p>Liza listened to the person on the other end for a while, her eyes widening and her face visibly reddening. She looked over at Carey in shock and said, "My God, it was Robert!"</p><p>Carey was taking off his tie. He stopped and sighed. "Liza, what are you talking about?"</p><p>She hung up the phone and turned to her husband. "I picked up the phone, and there was this heavy breathing, kind of yelping like having sex. It was a guy, it was just like when Robert would call the house for you!"</p><p><a data-passage="Room_216/Liza_Played.html">"Robert's dead, sweetie."</a></p><p>"Well, obviously," she said.</p>/* Links: [[Room_216/Liza_Played.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Dirty_Phonecalls.html]]

<p>She pulled a mess of hairpins out from under her hat as she sat back on her bed. "Fine," she said. "I know you don't believe in ghosts or anything, but I know it happened. You remember that <a data-passage="Room_666/Production_Center.html"><i>Twilight Zone</i></a>where the woman gets calls from her dead husband? It must have been something like that. The Goddess is trying to tell you something, Care..."</p><p>"He wasn't my husband, first of all..."</p><p>"Ha! If he could hear you say that! After eight years!"</p><p>"Shut up. Why are you trying to scare me like this?"</p><p>"Next time you answer the phone."</p><p><a data-passage="Room_216/Writing.html">"Maybe it'll be Claudia. Or your mother. </a> Then <i>you</i> can feel the burn, sweetie."</p>/* Links: [[Room_666/Production_Center.html]] [[Room_216/Writing.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Mother-in-Law.html]]

<p>Carey had had his fun, he was remembering. Long before his marriage to Liza, he was popular in all the bars and baths; he was a cute blond. Behind his back some men called him a Twinkie, sweet, <a data-passage="Room_216/Nights_in_Pensacola.html">blond</a>, cream filled, but not too good for you. All the world loved a Twinkie, though, when you were twenty or so, rich as hell, and flirting with Death (little you knew it) in all the tastiest discos. Things get rough as you get older, though...not the sex, really, not if you can keep your hair and your erection, just the real life starts to set in. In the seventies, fun as it was, most boys went legit. Carey followed suit, with lovely lezzie Liza, but that did not stop him from dipping his towel in the baths every weekend. Until they closed them all down. Carey turned and looked at his wife. He said, <a data-passage="Room_216/Mother-in-Law.html">"Your mother died most inconveniently."</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_216/Nights_in_Pensacola.html]] [[Room_216/Mother-in-Law.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Writing.html]]

<p>Carey started to cry, and Liza left the bed to get the box of Kleenex. The TV showed a fuzzy commercial, mute with the sound off. Liza said, "You old fag. You act so tough, but you're like Jello inside. If the boys in the office could see you now!" She wiped his tears from his face and he felt helpless, wet-nursed by his wife. "I can't believe you still miss him," she said, smiling.</p><p><a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Salesmanship.html">Outside they heard the splash of the pool, someone diving in. They stood in silence as the white noise of water calmed his sobbing. Someone was swimming in the pool in long, comfortable strokes.</a></p><p><a data-passage="Room_216/Storytelling.html">He smiled and touched her shoulder. "Thank God for you and Claudia to pull me through all this shit. I'm an old man, now. I don't know how many tears I have left."</a></p><p>The pool sounds stopped as they dove under and into the throbbing blue senses of the underwater.</p>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Salesmanship.html]] [[Room_216/Storytelling.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Nothing.html]]

<p>"I'm writing her a letter."</p><p>Carey had been day dreaming and exited to say, "What?"</p><p>Liza took off her earrings, pearls, and said, "I'm writing her a letter."</p><p>"Your mother?"</p><p>"No," she said, deadpan, "Claudia."</p><p>Liza walked over to the plywood desk and picked up some hotel stationery. Carey was silent, sometimes watching the mute TV, as she wrote the letter. It took some time, and Liza sometimes stopped and stared at the wall. <a data-passage="Writing/In_the_Next_Room.html">Which was so thin you could hear right through it to the next room. Weird stuff going on over there. </a>Carey took off his watch and laid it on the table. It was getting late.</p>/* Links: [[Writing/In_the_Next_Room.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Nothing.html]]

<h3>"But mostly it was in 11. It was 11 that was our lucky room...We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We'd reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start."</h3><h3>Ray Carver, "Gazebo"</h3> [[🕮==>->Room_216/Wet_Sounds.html]]

<p>Back in '69 when he'd bought it on a whim he'd never thought about how important the instrument would be. For instance, <a data-passage="Room_412/Coke.html">if you burned a little Jamaican into one of the low holes, then filled the bell with water, a good alto made a wonderful bong. </a>He'd really knocked the socks off his narc with that one. That was the thing about her that had kept him off track so long: she'd smoked, snorted, even shot up a couple of times with him. Most narcs try to avoid it, because they think they'll be slicker not under the influence.</p>/* Links: [[Room_412/Coke.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_412/Telltale_Badge.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">And it squeaked horribly. He played it again, and held it, a loud, shivering sound that whistled down his spinal cord with the immediacy of dry ice. A white cloud spurted from the bell and spread through the room. This did not bother him, nor did the noise, <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Familiar_Music.html">an unbelievable keening that only a woodwind could produce.</a> A noise so high, so loud he thought that glass would break.</p>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Familiar_Music.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_412/So_Loud.html]]

<p>He felt delicious, high and mighty, ready to face the music. Coke was a pig drug and he knew it, but that didn't force him not to like it. The sax gleamed at him. He knew that pretty soon he'd sound it, and beautifully. He sucked quietly on the reed that he'd attached to the mouthpiece just for show, so that if any nosy hotel staff came in he could show them that he was a musician, and proud of it, man. <a data-passage="Room_412/Saxophone.html">After all, he loved his horn; it had become an inseparable part of him.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_412/Saxophone.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_412/Back_in_69.html]]

<p>He wrested the sax away and, still smiling, strode forward quietly, calmly, opened his glass door, stepped out onto the balcony, and threw the saxophone in a triumphant soaring arc over the edge. After a moment of shiny glory during which the instrument seemed almost to wail, it hit the pool with a muffled splash, and a scream drifted up from somewhere below.</p> [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/High-Pitched_Wail.html]]

<p>It was shiny and brass, and that's why he liked it. He remembered with reverence the beautiful sounds that it could make, especially in the hands of people like Bird, Hawk, Pres or even Paul Desmond. Sounds that could change your life, y'know: music, and richness, and rippling solos that made you think of the first time you'd felt a girl up. Strains of "Take Five" drifted through his head as <a data-passage="Room_412/Coke.html">he took another snort from the bell of the saxophone.</a> That trip to South America had been lucrative, all right. Two kilos of the best available coke, about ten million street dollars' worth. Too bad he'd had to kill his accomplice, but that was part of the territory. <a data-passage="Room_412/Telltale_Badge.html">It's not as if she hadn't known what he'd do once he found out she was a narc.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_412/Coke.html]] [[Room_412/Telltale_Badge.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_412/Showtime.html]]

<p>He looked at the sax again and thought that it was definitely time for some music. The bell still had some coke in it. He knew that if he blew, he'd lose blow, but he didn't care. He still had plenty left, and he knew that soon the money would start rolling in. Just the same, though, another hit wouldn't hurt; he took it, and almost drained the bell. He lifted the sax to his lips, and put some breath behind it.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_412/Big_Blow.html]]

<p>So loud that it woke up the people in the next rooms. So loud that people started banging on his door, then came barging in with the hotel manager, shouting, threatening him, grappling with him. So loud that he took no notice of them until they tried to pry the sax from his lips, until they did pry the sax away. Still they shouted. He heard nothing. He smiled benignly.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_412/Moment_of_Glory.html]]

<p>He'd been suspicious for a while about her. She'd been so enthusiastic it'd almost made him lose lunch. She'd been the one that'd actually gotten the stuff from the cartel. She'd dealt with the guys personally; hers was the face that they would mark for extinction if she ever thought about squealing to the Feds. That fact in itself had put him on alert; anyone that really <i>wanted</i> to deal with those people had to be a little fishy. And so after she'd come back with the stuff and demanded fifty percent of the take, up from her original agreement to ten percent, he'd ruffled through her goods, and he'd found it. The badge that gave her away, in her diaphragm case. She was pretty swift, that one, smart enough to bowl him over, but she'd missed out on some of the finer points of the drug trade. She should never have hidden something as dangerous as that badge in a goddamn diaphragm case. Stuff like that goes in your vagina, or anus, or both. He couldn't even count the number of flights he'd taken with a sphincter almost ready to burst through his pants. One lubricated condom, three ounces of China white, stuffed "alimentary, my dear Watson."</p> [[🕮==>->Room_412/Showtime.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_412/Back_in_69.html">He remembered the first time he'd sniffed from a sax.</a> An eye-opener. Or nose-opener. <a data-passage="Room_412/Coke.html">Coke from the bell of a saxophone came out so smooth and in such volume that it ran circles around the old razorblade-and-mirror routines. </a>He'd heard that other horns were even better, especially trombones, although he'd never tried them. He'd had dreams at night about trombone hits.</p>/* Links: [[Room_412/Back_in_69.html]] [[Room_412/Coke.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_412/Showtime.html]]

<b><p>Something went terribly wrong with that wine. "It's corked," the old man said. "Or something worse." They sent for another, and Bartender 439B poured the corked one <a data-passage="Room_666/Invasion_Target_1_0676.html">out into the trash can.</a> Sweet zinfandel, mother's milk for the post-nuclear love-child cooing in the grime. Except that it's corked, and that sort of chemical disaster can alter a little bouncing baby bug for good. Mutations occur. <a data-passage="Room_216/Twinkie_Remembers.html">Cosmic ectoplasm congeals into something gruesome...</a> blonde... another <a data-passage="Salesmanship/Storytelling.html">blond</a>e creature in the world!</p></b><b><i><p>Run, run you fools!</p></i></b>/* Links: [[Room_666/Invasion_Target_1_0676.html]] [[Room_216/Twinkie_Remembers.html]] [[Salesmanship/Storytelling.html]] */

<p>In the corner of the room lying next to a lab table of test tubes, particle accelerators, and pair of Reebok Pumps is a half-formed body of a woman, entrails set aside. Headless, it awaits insertion of vital organs. A man with coke bottle glasses is sewing blonde pubic hair into its crotch.</p><p>A head rests on the table inside a tray filled with viscous, purple fluid. The head is bald.</p><p><a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html">A blonde wig hangs from a hatrack in the other corner.</a></p>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html]] */

<p><img src="Devil.jpg" alt=""></p> [[🕮==>->Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html]]

<p>In the big steel garbage container outside behind the bar there is something sinister breeding.<b><i> It is the garbage that produced you.</i></b> Every night the Hurricane Lounge waitresses carry out plastic bags filled with leftover food and mixed drinks and feed it to the garbage that produced you. <a data-passage="Hobbyist/Denizen.html">Every night a homeless man crawls into the container to sleep. He has learned to love the garbage that produced you.</a></p><p>It's not garbage at all.</p><p>It's an alien uterus.</p>/* Links: [[Hobbyist/Denizen.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_666/Blonde_Wig.html]]

<p>Inside, where it is dark and rotten, lies the alien. Those that couple with it are the weak, the discarded, the ugly.</p><p>Interspecial Sex is the first step. <a data-passage="Room_666/Blonde_Wig.html">Replication begins here.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_666/Blonde_Wig.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_666/Replication.html]]

<p>The salesman sleeps. His foot sticks out from underneath the covers.</p><p>A tentacle emerges out from under the bed and wraps itself around his naked ankle.</p><p>The salesman cannot escape. His flesh is Its flesh.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">His fingernails leave tracks across the surface of the carpet as he is dragged under the bed.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_666/Under_the_Bed.html]]

<p>Why, one may wonder, would a man be wearing three sweaters? Of course, one belongs to Elaine, the bartender's "mother." The second, one may assume, belongs to the man himself.</p><p>And the third?</p><p>The third belongs to her <b>child.</b></p> [[🕮==>->Room_666/Under_the_Bed.html]]

<p class="noMargins">Under the bed in this room something ungodly is festering. It is The<a data-passage="Mole_Rat/consumers.html"> Devil's Unborn.</a> It is not of this earth.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">It is Elaine's last child, half-formed, feeding itself on the live flesh of the unsuspecting tenant.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">Like its Satanic Siblings From Hell, it takes the shape of those it eats.</p>/* Links: [[Mole_Rat/consumers.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_666/Devil.html]]

<p><a data-passage="A_Letter_to_Grandfather/A_Letter_Too_Late.html">Sarah is sitting at the desk writing a letter to her grandfather. Now that it is too late, she misses him, so, full of vague regrets, she has taken out a piece of hotel stationery and begun a letter to him. But what can she say?</a> She's leaning back in the cushioned hotel chair, tapping her pen on the table -- TAP TAP TAP -- when, at the door, there is a KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. She taps again and the knock resumes. It is almost as though she is creating it. "Grandfather," she says. But it is not her dead grandfather.</p>/* Links: [[A_Letter_to_Grandfather/A_Letter_Too_Late.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_701/Knock_Knock.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">As he walks in he hands her a bright orange carnation. Sarah is confused. It's very ugly.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">"Is this for me?"</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">"It's a bit unusual. But you're unusual. <a data-passage="Room_701/No_Kissing.html">Give me a kiss, love."</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_701/No_Kissing.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_701/Time_to_Talk.html]]

<p>Sarah is annoyed that Frederick thinks she's crying. She flings herself back on the bed, and cracks her head on the headboard. Frederick blinks, starts to laugh. She's furious, but then she starts to laugh, too. Shit. It's only a funeral. Loosen up. She picks up the orange carnation in the vase beside the bed and commences to eat it. "With pepperoni and sausage," she says. "And extra cheese."</p> [[🕮==>->Room_701/Spiritual_Counsel.html]]

<p class="noMargins">"What is it, Sarah?" he asks irritably, pulling back. "What's wrong?" There is a knock at the door. "Go away!" he shouts. But the knocks persist. </p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">"It's probably that guy in the blimp," Sarah says. She can't stop giggling. Oh dear. Sorry, Grandpa.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_701/Upset.html]]

<p>But he stops her, grabbing her elbow and pulling her back and kissing her. She doesn't like him kissing her. He tastes like fried onions with ketchup. She doesn't kiss him back, so she imagines that to him it feels like he is kissing a sea anemone, a spongy mass of nonresponsive fleshy seatissue. <a data-passage="Room_701/Laughingstock.html">Which makes her laugh, even with her lips smashed against hers</a>.</p>/* Links: [[Room_701/Laughingstock.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_701/Cold_Lips.html]]

<p>She wants to sit there, tapping out her duet with the knocker at the door, staring at <a data-passage="Room_212/Wallpaper.html">the wallpaper</a>, enjoying her wistful revery, but the knocker is too persistent. She sets her pen down on her unfinished letter and walks over to answer the door.</p>/* Links: [[Room_212/Wallpaper.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_701/Carnation.html]]

<p>What does her laugh tell him? That he is ridiculous. That there are stains on his pants, egg on his face, puppy lust in his crossed eyes. He backs away. Into the nighttable. Sending the orange carnation flying. He's a one-man circus. He decides to hell with her. Take his act to the bar.</p> [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/Bars_Restaurants.html]]

<p>"No," she says firmly. No kissing. Not again. She had tried that and it wasn't good. The room is very silent. She walks over to pick up the letter she started, trying to think of something to say to break the angry silence.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_701/Kissing.html]]

<p class="noMargins">"Here're your pizzas, ma'am. Pepperoni and sausage, extra cheese. Pesto and garlic." He's bobbing about out there like he's got a bee in his britches.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">"Pizza? I didn't order any pizza, sonnyboy." And she slams the door shut again, catching the pizza delivery man just as he is stepping into the room. <a data-passage="Pizza/Fred_Rising.html">She can hear the splat and crash outside the door. "Get lost!"</a> Yo! Nice going, she seems to hear someone say. Grandpa--?</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">Frederick asks: "Who was that?" Is he deaf? She's too tired to answer. Tired of everything. She sits down on the bed and puts her face in her hands. </p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">"Oh, god. Sarah, please don't..."</p>/* Links: [[Pizza/Fred_Rising.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_701/Carnation_with_Cheese.html]]

<p>She could see the blimp reflected in the windows of all the towering buildings that surrounded the hotel, floating like litter on the surface of a pond. What was the meaning of the orange carnation? The one outside? The one in? She starts to laugh.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_701/Laughingstock.html]]

<p>This is too much. Ever since her grandfather died, Sarah's been getting weirder every day. Maybe she needs spiritual counsel. Frederick snatches the half-chewed flower out of her mouth. "Let's go to the chapel," he says.</p> [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]]

<p class="noMargins">"Look at the blimp! Look at the banner!" she exclaims. It hangs in the street outside the window like a giant voyeur, a large banner attached with an orange carnation on it. </p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"I know," Frederick says. "I've already seen it."</p> [[🕮==>->Room_701/Reflected_Blimp.html]]

<p class="noMargins">She hates the flower but she fills up a hotel glass with the white tap water and puts the flower in it on her nighttable beside the bed. "Look, Frederick, we have to talk..."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Talk?"</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">But what's to be said. Worse than trying to write to her dead grandfather. She stares helplessly out the window.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_701/The_Blimp.html]]

<p>"Damn it, Sarah, aren't you going to answer the door?" Frederick snaps. The last thing she said must have upset him. She wonders what it could have been. No matter. She crumples up the letter she was writing to her grandfather and tosses it, lightly so it travels in a gentle parabola, into the wastebasket.</p><p>"Of course I'm going to answer it," she says. She wants to hit him with a chair, but decides instead to take out her anger on whoever was stupid enough to knock on her door. "What the hell do you want?" she yells, intending to fling the door open and slam it against the wall. But the chain is still on and the door pops out of her grip and slams shut again. This is very frustrating.</p><p>"Who is it?" Frederick asks.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_701/Pizza.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 0.25em;">I think at this point I may as well tell you, the whole thing was a hoax, from beginning to end, hoax, sham, hoax. There is no dungeon, no prison in the hotel. <a data-passage="The_Prison/chewing.html">Vermin maybe, but no prisons. </a>Hotels do not have prisons, fool, it was all in your fucking head. <a data-passage="Room_Directory/Suite_602.html">You were in the sweetest little suite in the hotel, </a>the door was unlocked, you could have left anytime. But no. Instead you just boldly went where no hotel guest had gone before, didn't you? Right through the fucking window. </p>/* Links: [[The_Prison/chewing.html]] [[Room_Directory/Suite_602.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/Any_Last_Requests.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_703/The_Way_Out.html">Actually, there is one way out. </a><a data-passage="Room_703/Farewell.html">But you're not going to like it, not at all. </a></p>/* Links: [[Room_703/The_Way_Out.html]] [[Room_703/Farewell.html]] */

<p>You are rapidly approaching the earth.You are now ten feet, five feet, two, from the ground. Any last requests, daredevil? Superstar? Captain Evil? <a data-passage="Room_703/Spoilsport.html">Perhaps you wish it was all just a dream? That can be arranged of course.</a> <a data-passage="Room_703/Bungee_Jump.html">Or perhaps you were only bungee jumping?</a> Perhaps you are about to become a tragic figure of the past. The very recent past. I'm sorry to have deceived you. It's simply my job, the nature of hotel textmaking. You are supposed to enjoy your stay. Or perhaps you are...?</p>/* Links: [[Room_703/Spoilsport.html]] [[Room_703/Bungee_Jump.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/A_Hoax.html]]

<p>That's what's happening, you're just out for a little afternoon bungee jump, is that it? Sure, that's great... but such a shame those things don't always work, that sometimes, you know, the stretchulations aren't always quite precise, can be miscalculated, or just missed entirely? <a data-passage="Room_703/Farewell.html">Did you measure carefully before you jumped? No? A pity.</a> The saddest thing is when you hit the ground, and then bounce back up, and then hit the ground again, and so on and so forth, splat, splat, splat. Sort of spoils the fun. </p>/* Links: [[Room_703/Farewell.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/Waking_Up.html]]

<p>Don't think there won't be any mourners. No, the whole world mourns you. <a data-passage="Board_of_Directors/Directors_Emeriti.html">You were quite an important person in your time.</a> Perhaps didn't quite reach your full potential, finish everything you set your mind to, but you made a real contribution.<a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"> We here at the hotel are pleased to have known you, to have had you as our guest, embarrassing as your sudden farewell might have been.</a> Too bad it had to end for you so precipitously, on a dead end, as it were, or a dead head, but life's tough and now it's over. <a data-passage="Farewell/The_End_or_Not_the_End.html">Or is it?</a></p>/* Links: [[Board_of_Directors/Directors_Emeriti.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] [[Farewell/The_End_or_Not_the_End.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_Directory/Room_703.html]]

<p>You feel that your imagination is dying. That's life, they say. You grow up, up to room 703, the prison room, the room of dreams and s+m fantasies, the sex room, the death room. That's life, they say. Life.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_703/No_Escape.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_703/Actually.html">And the worst thing is that there is literally no escape.</a> You must stay in this box forever, reading these words over and over and over again- no cheating now. This is the end. You were not supposed to come here, you came here by choice, to a place they warned you against. Now you must pay for your actions.</p>/* Links: [[Room_703/Actually.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/Spoilsport.html]]

<p>Now you've really done it. <a data-passage="Window_View/Watching.html">You're flying through the air, just like you knew you would be</a>. <a data-passage="Room_703/A_Hoax.html">Are you having fun? </a>You whiz past a startled bird. As you know, you were on the seventh floor. By now you are <a data-passage="Room_703/Spoilsport.html">dropping past the fifth, flying past the fourth,</a> hurtling past the third, the second. . . </p>/* Links: [[Window_View/Watching.html]] [[Room_703/A_Hoax.html]] [[Room_703/Spoilsport.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/Any_Last_Requests.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 0.5em;">I hadn't mentioned it, but there is a tv in the prison, and in fact, despite what I said to the contrary, it really resembles <a data-passage="Room_Directory/Suite_602.html">a deluxe hotel room </a>more than anything else. Flowers, mints, beer in the fridge, Bible under the phonebook. Are you sure you wish to leave? We love you here. We don't want you to go. Please. You are our guest. Don't go. This is your home. Do not crawl out through the ventilator shaft. <a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html">Return instead to the Front Desk and ask for assistance.</a> Do not escape to the sewers. You are treasured here. Stop! <b><i>Do not hurl yourself through the window--!!</i></b></p>/* Links: [[Room_Directory/Suite_602.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/Now_You_ve_Done_It.html]]

<p>All right, fine, whatever you want, cheater, spoilsport, it was all just a dream, happy? Yes, that's it, the whole thing was a dream, and you were the dreamer, you creative tortured soul, and now you're awake. And your room, far from being a dungeon is <a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_212.html">a nice hotel room, </a>with flowers in a vase, mints under pillows, cable television, and a minibar stocked with beer and midnight snacks. Now you only need to remember why you are here at a luxury hotel, who you are, where in the world the hotel is situated, where are your family members, what sex are you, what is your favorite color, what color are you, do you have a job, friends, a social security number, a wallet, some way to pass the time? So go ahead bigshot, superstar, dreamer. You figure it out. Who the hell are you, anyway?</p>/* Links: [[Room_Directory/Room_212.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html]]

<p>This is the prison, <a data-passage="The_Prison/jail.html">the dungeon</a>--how did you get here? What have you done? <a data-passage="Room_703/Actually.html">There is no escape.</a> It was, perhaps, a mistake, a moral mix-up, a slight ethical gaff that brought you to this rotting place of bones and folklore. They feed you sometimes here, but sometimes they don't feed you, sometimes for whole weeks at a time it's nothing but foul air to drink and the dusty bones of your forefathers to chew on. <a data-passage="The_Prison/chewing.html">Which you have to share with the rats.</a> Not nice. You don't like it here. Even the romantic in you, the gothic in you, the part of you that always wanted to try a real-life dungeon on for size, even that part of you, especially that part of you, is rashly disappointed. You understand how bad it is?</p>/* Links: [[The_Prison/jail.html]] [[Room_703/Actually.html]] [[The_Prison/chewing.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/No_Escape.html]]

<p>There is a sock on the floor. There is a great feeling of order and imprisonment, discipline and punishment, death, destruction, flowers, beauty. You knew there was something you wanted to say to the boy, and now it is over, there is no choice, no chance, and flowers of evil are popping out of your grave like sea grapes waiting to be popped and devoured by hungry children or vultures. There is a real sense of accomplishment in everything you do now. The sad thing is, this isn't even a write-up, it's a practice run, a dream, this isn't even real life, a real hotel, that's the really sad thing.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_703/Growing_Up.html]]

<p>Are you sure you want to try it? It's really quite questionable whether any imaginable escape route could be very much fun. It probably involves crawling through sewers, getting old feces in your hair, up your nostrils, in your mouth. Mucking about through miles of labyrinths, living with <a data-passage="consumers/consumer_report.html">rats,</a> spiders, blind fish and alligators, never even knowing if you're on the right track or not. After all, it's not so bad really in the dungeon.</p>/* Links: [[consumers/consumer_report.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/Please_Don_t_Go.html]]

<p>All right, whatever you want, spoilsport, it was all just a dream, a kind of waking dream -- stretched out alone there on your hotel queensize, you thought up the whole thing, dungeon, window, jump, and now, just moments before lethal impact with the cold helipad at the base of your dream hotel, you wake up, turn it off, and find yourself, not in a dungeon with rotting bones hanging from dreary rusty shackles, cobwebs in the corners, <a data-passage="chewing/dirt.html">rats chewing your toes,</a> but in a luxury hotel room, with flowers in a vase, chocolates on the nightstand, telephone, cable television with four adult channels, and a well-stocked minibar. Now, <a data-passage="Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html">if you could only remember who you are</a> and<a data-passage="The_Chapel/Distention.html"> what you are doing here...</a></p>/* Links: [[chewing/dirt.html]] [[Front_Desk/Board_of_Directors.html]] [[The_Chapel/Distention.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/Farewell.html]]

<p>Any room can present a tragic front; any room can be comic. --Stephen Crane, <i>The Blue Hotel</i>. </p><p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_212.html"><i><u>Room 212 </u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_214.html"><i><u>Room 214 </u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_216.html"><i><u>Room 216 </u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_412.html"><i><u>Room 412 </u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_5.html"><i><u>Room 5 </u></i></a></p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Suite_602.html"> <i><u>Suite 602 </u></i></a><p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_666.html"><i><u>Room 666 </u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_701.html"><i><u>Room 701 </u></i></a></p><p><i><u>Room 800 </u></i></p><p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_703.html"><i><u>Room 703 </u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Room_1313.html"><i><u>Room 1313 </u></i></a></p><h3>{{{-----------------------}}}</h3><p><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"><b>(return to Front Desk)</b></a></p>/* Links: [[Room_Directory/Room_212.html]] [[Room_Directory/Room_214.html]] [[Room_Directory/Room_216.html]] [[Room_Directory/Room_412.html]] [[Room_Directory/Room_5.html]] [[Room_Directory/Suite_602.html]] [[Room_Directory/Room_666.html]] [[Room_Directory/Room_701.html]] [[Room_Directory/Room_703.html]] [[Room_Directory/Room_1313.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */

<h3><a data-passage="Room_1313/friend_nowhere.html">This room just disappeared today.</a> They gave me a key to it, I went looking, but when I got there it wasn't there. And then I disappeared. Hello? What kind of hotel <i>is</i> this?</h3>/* Links: [[Room_1313/friend_nowhere.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_1313/Help.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_212/The_Head_of_a_Swan.html">—Room 212. </a><a data-passage="Room_212/Keys.html">A key</a><a data-passage="Room_214/The_Door_is_Open.html"> turning a lock.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_212/The_Head_of_a_Swan.html]] [[Room_212/Keys.html]] [[Room_214/The_Door_is_Open.html]] */

<p>Mr. Reber had checked into his room in 214 overlooking the pool, planning to unpack, make some necessary phonecalls, order a simple dinner and <a data-passage="Room_214/Morning_Sun.html">a wake-up call,</a> read his new batch of manuscripts in bed, and get a good night's sleep before his sales meeting the next day. </p>/* Links: [[Room_214/Morning_Sun.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_214/Decongestant.html]]

<p>The phone rang in Room 216.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_216/Robert_Calls.html]]

<p>He carried his own bags up to his room as he always did. Put the lock on. Unpacked the sax. <a data-passage="Room_412/Showtime.html">Music time. </a><a data-passage="Room_412/Saxophone.html">Loved that sax.</a> For snorting, there was nothing to match a good horn. If you held it right, you didn't even have to bother with lines; the white stuff would sift itself right down the bell into your waiting nostrils...</p>/* Links: [[Room_412/Showtime.html]] [[Room_412/Saxophone.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_412/The_First_Time.html]]

<p>This must be the old part of the hotel, hon. Remember when <a data-passage="Linked_Fragments/Shuffleboard.html">it used to be</a> only one floor, and the room numbers went no higher than thirty-four?</p><p>It was one of those weekends here with my grandparents. I couldn't have been more than twenty. I went dancing in the <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Grand_Ballroom.html">Grand Ballroom</a>, as any respectable young man of society did, and it was there that I met you. You were a mere <a data-passage="Employees_Only.html">employee</a>, but I knew when our eyes met that I had found the one I was looking for. Alas, the war kept us apart for so long. And did what it did to me. But, hey, think of the times we've had, and look how far we have come together!</p>/* Links: [[Linked_Fragments/Shuffleboard.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Grand_Ballroom.html]] [[Employees_Only.html]] */ [[🕮==>->../Front_Desk.html]]

<p>There is knock on the door to Room 666.</p><p>The knocker is one of the hotel board members. He whispers, <a data-passage="Lounge_Ghost/Paradise_Lounge.html">"Elaine, we need a new bartender</a>. The last one dissolved in the sunlight."</p><p>She nods and takes a breath. She puts her hand inside her stomach and pulls out an ugly, bloody, mucous-painted, love child. </p><p><a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Elaine_Comes_In.html">"Such a pretty boy," she says and pats its head.</a></p><p>In 24 hours, it will be 18 years old and ready for work.</p>/* Links: [[Lounge_Ghost/Paradise_Lounge.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Elaine_Comes_In.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_666/Production_Center.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_701/A_Letter_to_Grandfather.html">There is a knock</a><a data-passage="Room_701/Upset.html"> at the door of Room 701.</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_701/A_Letter_to_Grandfather.html]] [[Room_701/Upset.html]] */

<p>is the prison, from whence nothing escapes. Not these words, not this hypertext, not the child, not the woman, not anybody, not nobody. <a data-passage="Room_703/The_Sad_Thing.html">The feeling is eternal and sacred and bloody and awful.</a></p>/* [[Room_703/The_Sad_Thing.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_703/The_Prison.html]]

<p><a data-passage="Room_Directory/Suite_602.html"><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/Suite_602.png?raw=true" alt=""></a></p>/* Links: [[Room_Directory/Suite_602.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/On_the_House.html]]

<p>Myoestinia gravis. Antibodies to cholinergic receptors! Somewhat treatable with immune suppressants, but subject to fatigue of muscles. <a data-passage="SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Four.html">There is a gait disturbance</a>, and eventually dementia. Dopaminergic neurons are lost, subject to age. The system is really overbuilt. L-dopa is part of the metabolic pathway and can be treated.</p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Four.html]] */

<p>It is not as simple as muscular dystrophy. Harder to target by gene therapy, acting on cholinergic interneurons in basal ganglia. This leads to characteristic writhing movements. If you have lesions in the cerebellum, complex movements decompose into individual movements. Reaching, then touching, then grasping. <a data-passage="SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Questions.html">Any questions about disorders?</a></p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Questions.html]] */

<p>Basal ganglia is a caudate. Some people put the substantia nigra in there as well. There are a number of loops. You could lose inhibition to an excitory pathway, like in Parkinson's. It also has thalamic loops. <a data-passage="SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Convergence.html">This is another place of convergence</a>. Basal ganglia positioned to participate and guide movement. The ability to modulate the distance and the strength. The subthalamus is not in there.</p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Convergence.html]] */

<p>There is an abnormal protein in individuals. There is a problem with calcium stores. An X-linked gene, with an <a data-passage="SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Four.html">onset of four</a>. This tends to be <a data-passage="SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Convergence.html">fatal by ten</a>. It can be helped by therapy.</p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Four.html]] [[SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Convergence.html]] */

<p>Primary motor cortex and non-primary, which is actually supplementary and pre-motor. The neurons in this region receive polymodal input. They're going to be monitoring this movement.</p><p>There might be a combination there. The reaching would be internally guided, but the grasping would be more externally guided. Like a mouse or dots on a screen. Most movements are a combination of these two things. <a data-passage="Suite_602/On_the_House.html">Where is your body now?</a></p>/* Links: [[Suite_602/On_the_House.html]] */

<p>It was starting to get to her, all this talk. Ventro-lateral projections to cortico-spinal areas. And striated muscle fiber. Cortico-bulbar, she is not. It innervates the face and tongue. Rubro-spinal pathway, there is a medial and a lateral pathway through the red nucleus to the basal ganglia. If only she could get there. That provides information about the trunk and the legs, the purple pathway to the medulla about the neck and the trunk. The cells are deep in the cerebellum. Innervate the inferior olive. Get input from systems, coordinate smooth movement with the laminar body. <a data-passage="SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Molecular.html">Molecular</a> or <a data-passage="SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Granular.html">granular</a> layer?</p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Molecular.html]] [[SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Granular.html]] */

<p>Please try out our wide range of services. For the amateur, and the connoisseur. But first, sign this form. No, it's not necessary, but we just want to avoid any "accidents."</p><p><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Bars_Restaurants.html"><i><u>Bars & Restaurants</u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Grand_Ballroom.html"><i><u>Grand Ballroom</u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/SEM_-_Conference_Room_01.html"><i><u>Conference Rooms</u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html"><i><u>The Pool</u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html"><i><u>The Chapel</u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/A_Garden.html"><i><u>The Garden</u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Hotel_Golf_Course.html"><i><u>Golf and Tennis </u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Health_Club.html"><i><u>The Health Club </u></i></a></p><p><a data-passage="Linked_Fragments/Day_Care_Center.html"><i><u>Day Care Center</u></i></a></p><p><i><u>The Penthouse Bordello</u></i></p><u></u><h3>{{{-------------------}}}</h3><p><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"><b>(return to Front Desk) </b></a></p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Bars_Restaurants.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Grand_Ballroom.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/SEM_-_Conference_Room_01.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/A_Garden.html]] [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Hotel_Golf_Course.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Health_Club.html]] [[Linked_Fragments/Day_Care_Center.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */

<p>There is an old garden in one of the courtyards</p><p>try</p><p>to</p> [[🕮==>->A_Garden/Garden.html]]

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/Bars_Restaurants.png?raw=true" alt=""></p><p><a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/The_Hurricane_Lounge.html">The Hurricane Lounge</a>.</p><p><a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Piano_Music.html">Piano Bar</a>.</p><p><a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Raymond_Queneau_Cocktail.html">Raymond Queneau's cocktail</a>.</p><p><a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Karaoke.html">Karaoke Night</a>.</p><p><a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Elaine_Comes_In.html">Mr. Armisault & Elaine in the bar</a>.</p><p><a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Black_Panties_Worker.html">Black-panties worker</a>.</p><p><a data-passage="Cockroach/Luis.html">The blocked writer.</a></p><h3>-------------------</h3><p><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"><b>(return to Front Desk)</b></a></p>/* Links: [[Bars_Restaurants/The_Hurricane_Lounge.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Piano_Music.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Raymond_Queneau_Cocktail.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Karaoke.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Elaine_Comes_In.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Black_Panties_Worker.html]] [[Cockroach/Luis.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/Grand_Ballroom.png?raw=true" alt=""></p><p><b><a data-passage="Grand_Ballroom/Balderdashers.html">The Balderdashers' Convention</a>.</b></p><p><b><a data-passage="Grand_Ballroom/Novelty_Convention.html">The Novelty Convention</a>.</b></p><h3>{{{-------------------}}}</h3><p><b><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html">(return to Front Desk)</a></b></p>/* Links: [[Grand_Ballroom/Balderdashers.html]] [[Grand_Ballroom/Novelty_Convention.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */

<p>The Hotel is pleased to offer to its guests a complete range of <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Health_Club.html">Health Club</a> facilities, including workout rooms, running tracks, Swedish massages, Jacuzzi baths, slimming rooms, and <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Window_View.html">swimming pool</a>. Please do not bring your room towels, but use the towels provided. </p>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Health_Club.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Window_View.html]] */

<p>Mia, a med student from the chilly Northeast, unfurled her legs from the large chair at the head of the conference table. She carefully replaced the textbook on its perch atop her knees. Despite the assurances of the desk clerk who claimed this was the ideal place for studying or waiting, <a data-passage="SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Textbook.html">she could still hear loud voices in the lobby</a>. And where was Armando? He was just going back to their room for his forgotten jacket. She should have known better. <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/Window_View.html">He was probably chatting up that chick by the pool</a>. Their relationship had been stellar at its onset, but like most love affairs between Italians, the passionate love metamorphosized into passionate arguments.</p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Conference_Room_01/SEM_-_Textbook.html]] [[Pool_and_Health_Club/Window_View.html]] */

<b><i><h3><a data-passage="The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html">Amerika Prays</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="The_Chapel/MK_in_the_Chapel.html">MK in the Chapel</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="The_Chapel/Distention.html">Erin Poe It</a></h3></i></b><h3>{{{-------------------}}}</h3><p><a data-passage="../Front_Desk.html"><b>(return to Front Desk)</b></a></p>/* Links: [[The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html]] [[The_Chapel/MK_in_the_Chapel.html]] [[The_Chapel/Distention.html]] [[../Front_Desk.html]] */

<p>Here at the Hypertext Hotel, we believe that, at its very core, golf is about dreams and visions and aspirations, and every game--every hole, even every shot--presents a chance to make the most elusive and unlikely of these real. We play golf always hoping that today might be the day when we execute a change of perfect shots linked together into a spectacular round, that for just a few hours out of an entire lifetime we might become untouchable, immaculate, enlightened, that we might realize fully and without self-consciousness the most miniscule details of that most improbable dream.</p> [[🕮==>->The_Hotel_Golf_Course/The_Blue_Tees.html]]

<p>He rolls himself over onto his back and floats under the moon..</p><p>The blonde in the bikini is staring at him.</p><p>This disconcerts him and he loses his equilibrium, rolls in the water, gets chlorine up his nose. She can't see him blushing because of the blueness of the light and the pale shadows but she's laughing at him anyway. <a data-passage="Salesmanship/back.html">He starts doing the breast stroke to keep himself belly down.</a> <i>The only thing worse than a hard on in a bathing suit is a hard on in speedos. </i> He's glad he's wearing trunks. <i>The breast stroke. Boy, is that aptly named</i>. He can feel her watching the ripples in the water, radiating off his legs, sleeping on his back. <i>I wanna tell someone a story. I want someone to listen to me</i>. He treads water in the middle of the pool. The <a data-passage="Maintenance_Services/Iceman.html">blond</a>e is leaning forward now, waiting for him to lie on his back so she can observe his middle age spread and his bathing trunks.</p><i><p>Can I tell you a story?</p><p>Sure, that's what I'm here for.</p></i>/* Links: [[Salesmanship/back.html]] [[Maintenance_Services/Iceman.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Storytelling/Salesman_s_Story.html]]

<p>"There was a guy in my class named Chad Cadenhead," she said. "He lived one street over. He killed himself when he was fifteen. Then it was revealed that he had been having an affair with his English teacher, a pretty twenty five year old woman named Mary Ann. Chad was a beautiful boy, with white <a data-passage="Room_666/Barbie_Mutations.html">blond</a>e hair and blue eyes. Troubled. Who could resist a boy like that, fucked up and with smooth white skin."</p>/* Links: [[Room_666/Barbie_Mutations.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Chad/Mrs_Kelly.html]]

<p>Oh now she's a nice one, <i>Jeezus!</i> Not a girl any more, nothing little-girly about her, tits like that, they make you wanna be a baby again. Baby! Don't waste your time with that windbag wino! Come to Daddy! Maybe if you shake your <a data-passage="Room_216/Twinkie_Remembers.html">blond</a>e locks, I'll--oh God, you did! <i>you did!</i>--I'll buy you a round! I'll buy you a night, a trip, baby, whatever you want, you name it, just stop talking to him! Stop talking, <i>period!</i> If what I wanted was a female talking machine, I'd sit in a room with my goddamn daughter! No, no, just lift them magical bazooms and let 'em fall! Come on, baby! Come to Daddy! <i>Jeezus! </i></p>/* Links: [[Room_216/Twinkie_Remembers.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html]]

<p>"One night the man across the street beat his wife's head against the pavement until she bled stains on to the sidewalk that are still there. It just looks like rust. The people that moved in afterwards built a swimming pool in their front yard. Everyone knows that a front yard swimming pool is an affront. It's too loud. It's obscene. You hear splashes and screams of delight too clearly. You imagine the childish bodies right inside of the too thin fence. It's disruptive, it's tacky, it lowers property values. Not only was the previous owner a wife beater he was the type of person that didn't landscape, which is why everyone on the street was glad that they left."</p> [[🕮==>->Wife_s_Head/Doc_Martin.html]]

<p>Watching the game here, one recalls the rococo parlours of old, the ladies and morning-coated lords, dissimulating their tension, lording above and through the game, its victims as much as masters, carefully <a data-passage="Shuffleboard/to_shuffle.html">sliding their marble pucks</a> down and away.</p>/* Links: [[Shuffleboard/to_shuffle.html]] */

<p>The game is more than two pairs of old men with sticks and pucks; it is more than sliding, careening, slowing, halting. Around the court sit <a data-passage="Shuffleboard/to_shuffle.html">fifteen old-timers</a> with their chips, scorecards, and cash. From the balcony above peers down the Overseer to assure fair play and peace.</p>/* Links: [[Shuffleboard/to_shuffle.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Shuffleboard/game_of_old.html]]

<p>These here know: to shuffle pucks is to shuffle lives.</p>

<p>So Specials sent you. She's ornery, but there's no doubt about it; she knows what her customers want," the doorman assures the guest, who is staring anxiously at the divided and semi-hostile <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Grand_Ballroom.html">dance floor.</a> Music grunts, <i>the time is nigh.</i></p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Grand_Ballroom.html]] */

<p><span style="color:#da000b">Whether love really acts as a catalyst is questionable</span>, from the point of view of the doorman.</p><p><a data-passage="Room_666/Invasion_Target_1_0676.html">Meanwhile…</a></p>/* Links: [[Room_666/Invasion_Target_1_0676.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Bars_Restaurants/Black_Panties_Worker.html]]

<i><p class="noMargins">I met this crazy woman at the beach once. I was on a trip to South America, this was a once-in-a-lifetime selling opportunity, see, and they let me go.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">What were you selling?</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">Cheese graters. Toilet brushes. I don't remember, it's not important. No, wait, it is. I wasn't selling at all, this was a convention. A sellers' convention in Brazil. Boy, was I lucky. Anyway I was on a beach, but not the main beach. It was kind of desolate, and I was walking around, kinda lonely like usual, and there's this woman beating on a rock with another rock.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">Why was she doing that?</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">I don't know. I walk past her and she gets up and follows me, just like that. Comes up real close behind me and just walks along behind me. And the thing is, all she's wearing is a little colored rag like a skirt, nothing on top.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">How did you know? She was behind you.</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">Don't be stupid. I was watching her. And she has these delicious little tanned tits, excuse me, breasts, whatever--I never saw tanned breasts before I went down there--and with <a data-passage="Iceman/Nipples.html">beautiful big brown nipples</a>. And she just walks three steps behind me and she still has those rocks in her hands. So I turn around real fast and she just walks right into me, doesn't even slow down. I have to reach out and stop her because she's still moving as though she's walking and she pushes me down! </p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">In the middle of the beach?</p><p class="noMargins" style="text-indent: 2em;">Yeah. Right there. But...</p></i>/* Links: [[Iceman/Nipples.html]] */

<p>The strand of hair that Phillip had glued to the door was broken. <a data-passage="Suite_602/On_the_House.html">Someone had been there.</a></p>/* Links: [[Suite_602/On_the_House.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/Phone_Call.html]]

<p>The vases, the oriental changing screen, the wet bar (well stocked with liquor and Waterford), the splendid views - exquisite taste down to the last detail. "Yes, this will do," he thought.</p><p>As Phillip ran his fingers along the lacquered cherry nightstand, <a data-passage="Suite_602/Fruit_basket.html">he noticed the fruit basket</a>.</p>/* Links: [[Suite_602/Fruit_basket.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/Somalier_Please.html]]

<h3>"And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.</h3><h3>By some inexplicable oversight</h3><h3>nobody jeers when I walk down the street.</h3><h3>I have been allowed to go on living in this room.</h3><h3>I am not asked to explain my presence anywhere."</h3><h3>- Franz Wright, "Entry in an Unknown Hand"</h3> [[🕮==>->Suite_602/Gadgetry.html]]

<p>Phillip glanced down at the tasteful arrangement of fruits. The accompanying card simply read "Bon Appetit --the Management."</p><p>"This was not here when I left," he declared as he carried the fruits into the bathroom. Filling the sink with water and submerging the fruits, Phillip noticed one particularly inviting mango give off a steady stream of bubbles.</p><p>"Ha!" he laughed. "A clever ploy, but did you actually think I hadn't read Casino Royale? I shan't be tasting these bitter fruits, Mr. Assassin! <a data-passage="Suite_602/On_the_House.html">Or, hmm, Ms Assassin..."</a></p><p><a data-passage="Suite_602/Phone_Call.html">He called the Front Desk to register a complaint.</a></p>/* Links: [[Suite_602/On_the_House.html]] [[Suite_602/Phone_Call.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/H_Q.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">Phillip emptied the contents of his new shaving kit onto the marble counter. The shaving cream. There it was, a canister of Edge Gel. Taking off the cap revealed a small projector bulb in the nozzle. The microfilm was undoubtedly in a false bottom. Phillip examined the rest of the toiletries. Almond-scented soap, diamond-tipped nail file, .22 one-shot Gillette Sensor, a bottle of conditioner. Phillip opened the conditioner and squeezed the bottle. A curare-tipped dart shot out and pierced an already-poisoned mango.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">"Well, if I'm ambushed on the toilet, I'll be fine."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins">Headquarters was ingenious, but grossly impractical.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em" class="noMargins"><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Bars_Restaurants.html">"I need a drink."</a></p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Bars_Restaurants.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/Utmost_Privacy.html]]

<p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">Hanging up the phone, Phillip took the pen from his jacket pocket. He clicked the top of the pen, getting a dial tone. A few twists of the barrel, combination lock style, and he was connected to headquarters.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Crowsnest, this is Redbird. I'm in position."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Nice work, Redbird. What's your status?"</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"It's a carnival of idiots out here. But I'm fine. Ready to work.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Good. Now look in the bathroom. There should be a shaving kit."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Yes."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"You'll find what you need in the shaving cream. And be careful, that's no ordinary conditioner. It's my latest creation."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"All right."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Now go to the bed, and look under the mattress. There should be an attache case."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Nothing."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"What--?"</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"There's nothing."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Good God, there's enough C4 in there to...oh well, we'll have to get you some replacements... Be at <a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html">the pool </a>tomorrow morning at 11:30. That should give you enough time."</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"Who should I look for?"</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">"You'll know...and damn it, be careful this time. Crowsnest out."</p>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/Pool_and_Health_Club.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/Gadgetry.html]]

<p>As she opened the door to suite 602, she was awed by its sumptuous, gaudy splendor. Her eyes locked with the champagne being chilled in the ice bucket. Do you think it's pink, she thought giddily to herself. In the far left corner of the room was a velvet rope which extended from the ceiling to the carpet. One slight tug and the magic is ignited, or at least that was what the bellhop had said. <a data-passage="Suite_602/Welcome_Home.html">All the elements for seduction were in place.</a> Oh- and look, there is even a bedside mint. How considerate!</p>/* Links: [[Suite_602/Welcome_Home.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/Room_Service.html]]

<p>Concierge: Front desk.</p><p>Phillip: Yes, I'm in Suite 602.</p><p>Concierge: Yes, Mr...uh....</p><p>Phillip: Never mind the formalities. My room has been tampered with.</p><p>Concierge: I'm sorry, sir. I'll connect you to the <a data-passage="Suite_602/Franz_Wright.html">hotel police</a>.</p><p>Phillip: That won't be necessary. Just make sure that no one is allowed near my suite. Believe me, I'll make it worth your while.</p><p>Concierge: Yes sir. I'll have someone keep an eye--</p><p>Phillip: Otherwise, I'll be forced to take my business elsewhere.</p><p><a data-passage="Suite_602/Somalier_Please.html">Concierge: I understand, sir. Is there anything else--?</a></p>/* Links: [[Suite_602/Franz_Wright.html]] [[Suite_602/Somalier_Please.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/H_Q.html]]

<p>Is the kitchen still open? Great. I have an intense craving for a number four. What, you don't have the menu in front of you? Do you want me to tell you? Okay- (pause, slow breath) a number four is: a marinated eggplant, pepper, tomato, avocado, mozzarella sandwich on lightly toasted focaccia bread with a sprinkle of salt and freshly ground pepper. I knnnoooow. Doesn't it sound delicious! I think that you should make yourself one, too. Thank you. Oh- and I forgot, an order of fries, please. You have a nice night, too.</p> [[🕮==>->Bars_Restaurants/Shop_Talk.html]]

<p>Phillip: Yes, I'd like to speak with the somalier.</p><p>Concierge: To place a long distance call, all you have to do is press '1' and...</p><p>Phillip: No, damn it, I mean the wine steward.</p><p>Concierge: Oh...uh, we don't have one of those.</p><p>Phillip: You don't.</p><p>Concierge: No sir, but I think Liquor Barn delivers. Would you like their number?</p><p>Phillip: Do you have a pub?</p><p><i>(pause)</i></p><p>Phillip:...Bar?</p><p>Concierge: Oh! Yeah, right downstairs. <a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/The_Hurricane_Lounge.html">The Hurricane Lounge.</a> <a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Karaoke.html">It's Karaoke night.</a></p><p>Phillip: Wonderful.</p><p><i>(Phillip hangs up)</i></p><p>Concierge: <a data-passage="Day_Care_Center/bastard.html">Bastard</a></p><p>Phillip: Boob.</p>/* Links: [[Bars_Restaurants/The_Hurricane_Lounge.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Karaoke.html]] [[Day_Care_Center/bastard.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/H_Q.html]]

<p>Phillip had almost left the hotel when he saw the sign advertising <a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Karaoke.html">Karaoke night in the lounge;</a> however, the rather obsequious manager assured him that his suite would afford him the utmost privacy and comfort.</p>/* Links: [[Bars_Restaurants/Karaoke.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/Somalier_Please.html]]

<p>A quick sweep of the room (piece drawn) proved fruitless. Whoever had been here was now gone. He felt faintly disappointed. <a data-passage="Suite_602/Room_Service.html">Also he felt hungry.</a> But, once again, Phillip marveled at the elegance of his room. Indeed, <a data-passage="Welcome_Home/.html">it seemed out of place</a> in this establishment, <a data-passage="Suite_602/Diamond_in_the_Rough.html"> a diamond in the rough if you will.</a></p>/* Links: [[Suite_602/Room_Service.html]] [[Welcome_Home/.html]] [[Suite_602/Diamond_in_the_Rough.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Suite_602/Phone_Call.html]]

<p>In the basement, thin corridors and passageways snake in and out of each other in an elaborate system of junctures and sudden unexpected endings. The halls are saturated with heavy, damp air. </p><p>A soft mechanical sound echoes across the underground labrynth from a dead end hidden around several sloping bends. Shadows cling to the tight corner where<a data-passage="The_Basement/gEt_oUt.html"> a small black box is ticking quietly</a> by itself, nestled against the wall under a thin shroud of sagging spider webs.</p>/* Links: [[The_Basement/gEt_oUt.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Basement/Underground.html]]

<p>I don't know how long I've been down here. Years maybe. Doesn't matter. When you have no routines to follow, you stop counting. Only a few things I do on a regular basis. <a data-passage="Hobbyist/Hungry.html">I have to eat</a> and sleep, like everyone else. On quiet nights I slip up to use the public facilities off the lobby behind the cocktail lounge; otherwise any back corner down here will do. And, just like everyone else, I have my recreational hobbies. A little something to while the time. I like to hurt people. And I almost always hurt them until they're dead. It makes me feel good.</p>/* Links: [[Hobbyist/Hungry.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Hobbyist/Not_Free.html]]

<p>could go up there and, you know, take what's...</p><p>if it amounted to <a data-passage="The_Basement/two.html">anything</a>.</p><p>if it would change <a data-passage="The_Basement/three_3.html">any</a>thing.</p><p>any<a data-passage="The_Basement/three_5.html">thing</a>.</p>/* Links: [[The_Basement/two.html]] [[The_Basement/three_3.html]] [[The_Basement/three_5.html]] */

<p>up there, they live <a data-passage="The_Basement/Life_as_we_no_it.html">differently</a>. they have real lights, they have good water, they have electricity.</p><p>heard they have a pool up there too. not that anyone's hurting to take a swim down here or anything. they have a sauna, an exercise room -- an exercise room! a room just for exercise, what next...</p><p>they have maids and butlers, servants, bellhops too. service , it's real important up there, it must be kept up, at all times. no service, and it all just falls apart.</p><p>and they have each</p>/* Links: [[The_Basement/Life_as_we_no_it.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Basement/three_4.html]]

<p>Except for the damned rat, scurrying around incessantly, chewing on the insulation in the walls while I'm trying to sleep, leaving his little pellets around like a scatter of shot. He's too smart for traps, poison doesn't kill him. <a data-passage="Ratty_and_I/Bright_Red_Eyes.html">Nearly got him one night with my knife. </a>Big sonuvabitch. Must be the Old One of ratdom here at the Hotel. I have to admire him. He's been here as long as I have without being caught. <a data-passage="Bright_Red_Eyes/Mr_Ratty_to_You.html">We're two of a kind, Ratty and I.</a></p>/* Links: [[Ratty_and_I/Bright_Red_Eyes.html]] [[Bright_Red_Eyes/Mr_Ratty_to_You.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Hobbyist/Denizen.html]]

<p>A left, another left. Down a flight of stairs, and it's all suddenly very different.</p><p>The walls are concrete here, moist with humidity, rough to the touch. None of the familiar hotel wall lanterns warm the hallway. Warped lineoleum sheet instead of real ceramic tile below.</p><p>At the end of narrow corridor, a single <a data-passage="The_Basement/gEt_oUt.html">door</a>.</p>/* Links: [[The_Basement/gEt_oUt.html]] */

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/gEt_oUt.png?raw=true" alt=""></p> [[🕮==>->The_Basement/One.html]]

<p>could <a data-passage="The_Basement/three_five.html">go up</a> there</p><p>become...</p><p>with the rest, <a data-passage="The_Basement/three_7.html">you see</a>, keep my mouth shut.</p>/* Links: [[The_Basement/three_five.html]] [[The_Basement/three_7.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Basement/three_1.html]]

<h3>But I no longer wanted their affection; on the contrary, I constantly longed for their <a data-passage="The_Chapel/Distention.html">humiliation</a>.</h3>/* Links: [[The_Chapel/Distention.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Basement/three.html]]

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/three.png?raw=true" alt=""></p> [[🕮==>->The_Basement/three_5.html]]

<h3 style="color:#da000b">I closed my eyes and -- we bumped into each other forcefully, shoulder to shoulder! I didn't yield an inch and walked by him on a completely equal footing! He didn't even turn around to look at me and pretended that he hadn't even noticed; but he was merely pretending, I'm convinced of that! Naturally, I got the worst of it; he was stronger, but that wasn't the point. The point was that I'd achieved my goal, I'd maintained my dignity, I hadn't yielded one step...</h3> [[🕮==>->The_Basement/two.html]]

<p>heard some sort of informal gathering last night. not exactly one of those ballroom parties, no...</p><p>no, more like children perhaps. lots of carrying on, galavanting, stomping around like silly beasts.</p><p><a data-passage="The_Basement/three_6.html">could</a> go up there, become</p>/* Links: [[The_Basement/three_6.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Basement/three.html]]

<h3 style="color:#da000b">...You look -- and the object vanishes, the arguments evaporate, a guilty party can't be identified, the offense ceases to be one and becomes a matter of fate, something like a toothache for which no one's to blame, and, as a consequence, there remains only the same recourse: that is, to bash the wall even harder. So you throw up your hands because you haven't found a primary cause...</h3> [[🕮==>->The_Basement/three.html]]

<p>to think there's even such a possibility. to what...</p><p>to re-something.</p><p>to think it would be anything simple.</p> [[🕮==>->The_Basement/three_five.html]]

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/three.png?raw=true" alt=""></p> [[🕮==>->The_Basement/three_6.html]]

<h3 style="color:#da000b">...I began to feel an irresistible urge to plunge into society... when my dreams had reached such a degree of happiness that it was absolutely essential for me to embrace people and all humanity at once; for that reason I needed to have at least one person on hand who actually existed.</h3> [[🕮==>->The_Basement/three_3.html]]

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/two.png?raw=true" alt="" usemap="#two-map" style="width:294px; height:136px;"></p>/* Links: [[The_Basement/three_2.html]] [[The_Basement/three_4.html]] */<map name="two-map"><area shape="rect" coords="161,46,194,65" data-passage="The_Basement/three_2.html"><area shape="rect" coords="89,41,149,66" data-passage="The_Basement/three_4.html"></map>

<b><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/titillation.html">AND</a><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/abstinence.html"> SO</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/prostitution.html">ON.</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/oblivion.html">AND </a><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html">GROOVE</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/appropriation.html">ON.</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/quietude.html">AND</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/anticipation.html">SO</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html">AND</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/necessity.html">ON.</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/exoteric.html">ON </a><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/electrocution.html">AND</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/servitude.html">ON.</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/simultaneity.html">ONWARDS</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/gesticulation.html">EVER </a><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/flotation.html">AND</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/escalation.html">SO</a></h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/absolution.html">ON.</a> <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/malnutrition.html">AND</a></h3></b>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/titillation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/abstinence.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/prostitution.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/oblivion.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/magistrate.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/appropriation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/quietude.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/anticipation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/necessity.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/exoteric.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/electrocution.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/servitude.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/simultaneity.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/gesticulation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/flotation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/escalation.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/absolution.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/malnutrition.html]] */

<b><h3>Distention&Dispersal&Dissemination</h3><h3><a data-passage="Distention/A_Hotel_Like_This.html">all these things are ruining me</a></h3><h3>even as I try my damnedest to overcome their inarticulate resonance as</h3> <h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/electrocution.html">terms terminally termed in the terminology of termites</a></h3><h3>yes</h3><h3>eating their way through the sacred wood</h3> <h3><a data-passage="The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html">whose language grain has gone media insane</a></h3><h3>and whose talent is no longer individualized nor traditionalized</h3><h3>but</h3><h3><a data-passage="The_Chapel/MK_in_the_Chapel.html">hyper de-eroticized</a></h3><h3>neo-free bamboozle-ized</h3><h3>post incognitio-ized</h3><h3>and re-think-me-either-or-ized</h3><h3>{{{---}}}<i>Erin Poe It</i></h3></b>/* Links: [[Distention/A_Hotel_Like_This.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/electrocution.html]] [[The_Chapel/Amerika_Prays.html]] [[The_Chapel/MK_in_the_Chapel.html]] */ [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]]

<h1><b>Questions for God:</b></h1><h3>Why do we have to kneel in church?</h3><h3><a data-passage="about_his_mother/on_the_chapel_pews.html">Why can't I see you?</a></h3><h3>Which way is the toilet paper supposed to hang -- facing in or out?</h3><h3>Why am I so short?</h3><h3>How come some guys' dicks are really small and others are just huge?</h3><h3>Why did you create anyone with legs as long as Cindy Crawford?</h3><h3>Is Cindy Crawford a Martian?</h3><h3><a data-passage="The_Chapel/Distention.html">Are you a Martian?</a></h3><h3>What was the real ending in <b>The Lady or The Tiger</b>?</h3><h3>Why did you create Charles Bukowski?</h3><h3>Can I have a detonator for Christmas if I'm really good all year?</h3><h3>When people say that someone has more money than God, how much money is that? (Just a ballpark figure)</h3><h3>Why can't cats talk?</h3><h3>For that matter, why can't they clean up their own poop?</h3><h3>Why do they poop?</h3><h3><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html">Why does anything poop?</a></h3><h3>Don't you get lonely being all powerful all by yourself?</h3><h3>Wouldn't you like to share the wealth?</h3><h3>With me, for example??</h3>/* Links: [[about_his_mother/on_the_chapel_pews.html]] [[The_Chapel/Distention.html]] [[Amerika_Prays/excrementation.html]] */ [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]]

<h3><b><i><span style="color:#da000b">Oh you best be on you leetle roachie teepie toe now, my friend... for I coming to crush</span> <a data-passage="The_Exterminators/bug.html">you leetle buggie head!</a></i></b></h3>/* Links: [[The_Exterminators/bug.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/yes.html]]

<b style="color:#da000b"><i><h3>We got all kind poison gas and leetle trap for to catch you feet, we got dee glue, dee mace, dee sleengshot, dee flypaper. We got tortillas dey been laced weet arsenic. We got gasses and fogs and sprays and powders. Oh yes, we going to take you leettle buggie souls right up to heaven!</h3><h3>Going to put dees Hotel back on dee right track!</h3></i></b> [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/you_teenk_you.html]]

<p><a data-passage="The_Exterminators/shoes.html">My family has lived in these halls for hundreds of years. A calamity of location.</a> Meaning that we underfoot have seen more of the goings on than anyone. I will tell you what really happened in the lounge. <a data-passage="The_Exterminators/morsel.html">Not to mention the kitchen.</a> I usually don't mention the kitchen, it being the most tantalizing and <a data-passage="The_Exterminators/all_kind.html">the most dangerous of locations</a>. Knives and cooks and tasty morsels. </p><p>My family will live here for hundreds more years, after all of you are gone.</p>/* Links: [[The_Exterminators/shoes.html]] [[The_Exterminators/morsel.html]] [[The_Exterminators/all_kind.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/glee.html]]

<p><a data-passage="The_Exterminators/floorboards.html">They tell me I'm not a bug. </a> A man who thinks he is a bug is as good or as bad as a bug, I say. All I can tell you other than that is that cockroaches have been in my family for generations. <a data-passage="Room_212/Mole_Rat.html">Some of my best friends are rats.</a></p>/* Links: [[The_Exterminators/floorboards.html]] [[Room_212/Mole_Rat.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/shoes.html]]

<b style="color:#da000b"><i><h3>Every year buggies bring bottle "Bushmills Fine Irish Whisky" to Peace Talks, give Whisky to Board of Directors, Board of Directors pass out! Dees NO ees fair, leetle buggies! PLEASE!</h3><h3>Dees my family reputation we talk about here. Having job to do, and today, going to do job dat have to do. Goodbye, generation of buggies!</h3><p>{{{---}}}The Exterminator</p></i></b> [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/bug.html]]

<p>If I'm not a bug then how can I fit between the floorboards? I tell you I remember when my hands were hands. I tell you, I had a normal childhood until I started to change. My family has locked the cockroach side away for years. I'm lucky to be here in the floorboards instead of in a laboratory somewhere. They like to do tests on <a data-passage="The_Exterminators/you_teenk_you.html">bugs like me</a>. You know.</p>/* Links: [[The_Exterminators/you_teenk_you.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/between.html]]

<p>Hah. Been here a thousand years, yes. Be here a thousand more. Extermination no more than a high for me. <a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Cockroach.html"> Love to crawl in bed at night with the guesties.</a> They never know.</p>/* Links: [[Bars_Restaurants/Cockroach.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/shoes.html]]

<p>Used to be that we would wait until nighttime to take the kitchen. Well no more. Let me tell you. <a data-passage="Hobbyist/Home_Cooking.html">Tastiest morsels around dinnertime</a>. There's nothing like it. Got an uncle who once got a leg cut off going for a 6:00 snack. Chef took it off with a foot-long knife. Longer than you or me. At least me. But my uncle brought home the bacon.</p>/* Links: [[Hobbyist/Home_Cooking.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/shoes.html]]

<p>Don't really know how long this has been my habitation. Telling from the sizes and shapes of shoes. I could tell you about footwear trends.</p> [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/between.html]]

<h3 style="color:#da000b"><b><i>Every year seet down to "Annual Vermin/Exterminator Peace Accord Meeting." Every year buggies promise NO MORE BUGGING DEE GUESTS! Every year hotel looking bad, guest returning from kitchen no pasta, no leg, sometimes no return from kitchen at all!</i></b></h3> [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/every_year.html]]

<b><i><h3>Yes, ees TRUE!</h3><h3>I come for to get <a data-passage="Mole_Rat/consumers.html">you rat bastard</a> dees very night! Come to crush you,</h3><h3>you tink you can hide...</h3></i></b>/* Links: [[Mole_Rat/consumers.html]] */

<b><i><h3>You tink you got problems!</h3><h3>My family been trying run extermination beezness outta dees hotel for I don't know how many years.</h3><h3>Every year same ting:</h3></i></b> [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/sit_down.html]]

<p>Now a whole is that which has a beginning, middle, <a data-passage="Farewell/The_End_or_Not_the_End.html">and end.</a> A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something else, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing, and also has another after it... A well constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes; beginning and end in it must be of the forms just described. Again: to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must not only present a certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude.</p><p>--Aristotle, <i>The Poetics</i></p>/* Links: [[Farewell/The_End_or_Not_the_End.html]] */ [[🕮==>->../Front_Desk.html]]

<p><b>The Management would like to express its gratitude to the following Friends of the Hotel for their generous donations.</b></p><p>Kingsley Amis</p><p>Aristotle</p><p>Honore Balzac</p><p>Jorge Luis Borges</p><p>Stephen Crane</p><p>Forrest Gander</p><p>Michael Joyce</p><p>Graham Swift</p><p>Christina Stead</p><p>William Trevor</p> [[🕮==>->../Front_Desk.html]]

<p><img src="https://github.com/The-Bellhop/TheHypertextHotel/blob/main/images/He_Slept_Here.png?raw=true" alt=""></p> [[🕮==>->../Front_Desk.html]]

<p>Golf is a sport of contained fury, of controlled power. Whereas athletes in other sports can purge their frustrations and express their characters by slamming a dunk, sacking a quarterback, or kicking a soccer ball, golfers have no outlet for the emotions that are an undeniable component of competitive play. Golf demands precision and control rather than bursts of effort and feeling.<a data-passage="The_Hotel_Golf_Course/Golf_Fans.html"> So it's understandable that golfers exhibit less personality: </a>That is part of the internal nature of the sport.</p>/* Links: [[The_Hotel_Golf_Course/Golf_Fans.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Hotel_Golf_Course/Passion_Discipline.html]]

<p>Golf tournaments will always draw the serious recreational golfer, who can watch the match as a sort of philosophical spectator sport and who might see it as a<a data-passage="The_Hotel_Golf_Course/Maxim.html"> koan</a> with the power to reveal secret depths. <a data-passage="The_Hotel_Golf_Course/Contained_Fury.html">Since much of the action of professional golf actually occurs inside the players and involves nerves, invisible rhythms, and what the players think about, golf fans must look beyond appearances.</a> They must notice the tiniest nuances of grip, stance, club selection, and pre-shot routine, and interpret these details as if they were full of implicit meaning and potential revelation not only about the game itself but about the world beyond it as well.</p>/* Links: [[The_Hotel_Golf_Course/Maxim.html]] [[The_Hotel_Golf_Course/Contained_Fury.html]] */

<p>A tough course creates good golfers.</p> [[🕮==>->The_Hotel_Golf_Course/Passion_Discipline.html]]

<p>Pursuits such as archery and golf may be called disciplines because that's exactly what they require--not simply perseverance, but true dedication and commitment. But even with discipline, tremendous growth is unlikely without abiding <a data-passage="The_Hotel_Golf_Course/The_Blue_Tees.html">passion.</a></p>/* Links: [[The_Hotel_Golf_Course/The_Blue_Tees.html]] */

<p>Okay...par4, dog leg left.</p><p>Driver3wooddriver3wooddriver3wooddriver3wood . . Driver. Okay, mister titleist, mister 100 compression ball. Show me something good. Okay...straight line...firm grip....easy back...easy...head down, and......Boom! Yes!</p><p>Life is good.</p><p><a data-passage="The_Hurricane_Lounge/Sinking.html">Calls for a celebratory drink!</a></p>/* Links: [[The_Hurricane_Lounge/Sinking.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Hotel_Golf_Course/Contained_Fury.html]]

<p>With knowledge comes a certain confidence, the comfort of recognizing that you are <a data-passage="Pool_and_Health_Club/under.html">sinking underwater</a>. As long as you retain control over your steady slide it becomes half as disorienting as it might have been. I had wandered aimlessly into this bar, suckered by the plastic decor and the tinkly cocktail music by a local quartet of longhairs which threatened to either bore me to sleep or hammer my mind into self-destructive tendencies much like Chinese water torture.</p><p><a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/The_Hurricane_Lounge.html">The ridiculous sunken ship motif was the lounge’s only hint that it might be a family restaurant.</a> Judging by the crew which hung around the bar, it was closer in resemblance to a U.S. navy ship anchored off Calcutta. But as I downed a few drinks I began to see the potential beauty in the cheesy surroundings. All you needed was a bit of imagination, sure, sunken treasure, why not? I’d be Jolly Roger. Dropping into <a data-passage="Tropical_Drink_Special/Lounge_Ghost.html">ghost-ridden Davy Jones’ locker.</a> Chunky wetsuit restricting my movements in the blurry underwater dark. Uncertainly groping towards a treasure chest containing <a data-passage="The_Hurricane_Lounge/Tropical_Drink_Special.html">ancient, exotic drinks.</a> Some possibly fatal. But you have to live, laddie.</p>/* Links: [[Pool_and_Health_Club/under.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/The_Hurricane_Lounge.html]] [[Tropical_Drink_Special/Lounge_Ghost.html]] [[The_Hurricane_Lounge/Tropical_Drink_Special.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Bars_Restaurants/Pickup.html]]

<h3><b>WAITRESS WITH MASKED INTENTIONS:</b></h3><p>The <a data-passage="Specials/A_Special_Case.html">SPECIAL</a> this week is a veal piccata that's really quite wonderful. If you'd prefer, I could see about getting you a.... a... oh, you don't care do you? Do you? Why don't you just order off the menu, Mr. Smartass? Come on, what do you want? A hotdog? Get creative, you sad old bag of bones..... You didn't come to the Hurricane to <i>eat, </i>did you? Well, people only come to this hotel for five reasons--to eat, to sleep, to drink, to screw, and to....<i>fall....in.....</i><b><i></i></b><a data-passage="Specials/Doorman_s_POV.html"><b><i>LOVE!</i></b></a></p>/* Links: [[Specials/A_Special_Case.html]] [[Specials/Doorman_s_POV.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/Moon_Tan.html]]

<p>The spacious new <b style="color:#128312">Hurricane Lounge</b>, redecorated alluringly in the grand tropical hurricane tradition--a wrecked pirate ship complete with <a data-passage="Tropical_Drink_Special/Lounge_Ghost.html">treasure chest</a>, old skeletons, seaweed streamers, flashing buoys and a fish tank--boasts some of the best drink specials and light dining in the state, offering a full line of liquors at moderate prices with a different <b style="color:#ef0085">TROPICAL DRINK SPECIAL</b> each day and super mind-bombing <a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Cockroach.html">specials every week</a>.</p> <p><a data-passage="The_Neckless_Man/Bloody_Mary.html">Bloody Mary</a></p><p><a data-passage="Luis/Dry_Martini.html">Dry Martini</a></p><p><a data-passage="Bars_Restaurants/Raymond_Queneau_Cocktail.html">Raymond Queneau Cocktail</a></p><p><a data-passage="Bloody_Mary/Tequila_with_Lemons.html">Tequila with lemons</a></p><p><b style="color:#1aaaea">OUR FAMOUS MENU</b> includes shrimp cocktails, Swiss steak, Davey Jones' own hot turkey sandwiches, and home-cooked spaghetti dinners with <a data-passage="Room_666/Invasion_Target_1_0676.html">soft bread rolls</a> and a storm-up-your-own sea-green salad bar. <a data-passage="The_Hurricane_Lounge/Specials.html">The menu changes daily! </a></p><p style="color:#da000b"><b><u>Satisfaction guaranteed!</u></b></p>/* Links: [[Tropical_Drink_Special/Lounge_Ghost.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Cockroach.html]] [[The_Neckless_Man/Bloody_Mary.html]] [[Luis/Dry_Martini.html]] [[Bars_Restaurants/Raymond_Queneau_Cocktail.html]] [[Bloody_Mary/Tequila_with_Lemons.html]] [[Room_666/Invasion_Target_1_0676.html]] [[The_Hurricane_Lounge/Specials.html]] */

<p>I made the bloody mary with her favorite vodka, added a dash of meat sauce. Elaine looked doubtful. "Gosh, dear, I can't imagine drinking a bloody mary without, er... without ice, don't you think?" she asked hopefully. I held ice in one hand, just above the drink, ready to drop it on his command.</p><p>Neckless looked confused, staring blearily at the thick red drink. "Hey, dickhead, the lady wants some ice, give her some ice!" he bellowed. He staggered away a step, staggered back, planted a kiss on her somewhere in the neighborhood of her ear. He had forgot to take the cigar out of his mouth, though, so that got mashed into her hair. He spat out the remains, and slammed his fist down on the bar as though making some point or other, then tried to shift his bulk up on a barstool.</p> [[🕮==>->Bloody_Mary/Tequila_with_Lemons.html]]

<p>Perhaps in millenia. There were the lines of certain ancient lands that drew you. There were the sounds, odd pieces like the waves and the salt water in your mouth, and the sands of this coast, the hills of the Arcana, driving out from the hotel into the vineyards and the mountains beyond - something was there for you, & perhaps in millenia past there were ages when others could hear. Perhaps they were lost, or had passed into the channels which called to you.</p> [[🕮==>->Patione/Channels.html]]

<h3>Or should I say "HAD"?</h3> [[🕮==>->Room_214/The_Lost_Novel.html]]

<p>The prison wasn't quite whole</p><p>without the rats</p><p>the rats laughed at you for suspecting them</p><p><a data-passage="down_the_hatches/looking.html">They snickered because you hadn't known they existed</a>.</p><p>Mole rats are of dubious breeding</p><p>making the infestation all the more</p><p>fun.</p>/* Links: [[down_the_hatches/looking.html]] */ [[🕮==>->chewing/dirt.html]]

<h3>I think I'm inn an in.</h3><h3>nobody between here and georgia louise. louise.</h3><h3>I am sure about that.</h3><h3>maybe the 8 ball bully, but doubt it.</h3><h3>I'm finally behind the notsopearly gates.</h3> [[🕮==>->Room_703/Farewell.html]]

<h3><i>Ssshh-plu-U-UP!</i></h3> [[🕮==>->Purple_Louise/The_Universal_Sex_Fish.html]]

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<ol><a data-passage="SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="The_Void/Untitled.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="The_Void/Untitled_4.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="The_Void/Untitled_5.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="Day_Care_Center/The_Void.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="The_Void/Untitled_2.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="The_Void/Untitled_1.html"><li></li></a></ol>/* Links: [[SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]] [[The_Void/Untitled.html]] [[The_Void/Untitled_4.html]] [[The_Void/Untitled_5.html]] [[Day_Care_Center/The_Void.html]] [[The_Void/Untitled_2.html]] [[The_Void/Untitled_1.html]] */

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<ol><a data-passage="The_Void/Untitled_1.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="The_Void/Untitled_1.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="Day_Care_Center/The_Void.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="Farewell/The_End_or_Not_the_End.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="The_Void/Untitled_3.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="The_Void/Untitled.html"><li></li></a><a data-passage="The_Void/Untitled_4.html"><li></li></a></ol>/* Links: [[The_Void/Untitled_1.html]] [[Day_Care_Center/The_Void.html]] [[Farewell/The_End_or_Not_the_End.html]] [[The_Void/Untitled_3.html]] [[The_Void/Untitled.html]] [[The_Void/Untitled_4.html]] */

<b><i><h3>BELLA BELLA OPEN YOUR HEART TO ME BELLA STOP</h3><h3>I WORKED ON THE GREEN THING FOR FOUR STINKING DAYS. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME. I KNOW A STENCH WHEN I SMELL ONE. WHY COULDN'T YOU GIVE ME A HINT OF YOUR PRESENCE BEFORE TRAIPSING INTO MY SHODDY TERRITORY? SING IT! I'VE FELT IT, THE DISTURBANCE. YOU'VE HEARD THE SHRIEKS.</h3><h3>WE'VE CALLED THE FUMIGATOR. HE'LL BE BY TOMORROW EVE.</h3><h3>I RECOMMEND THAT YOU CLEAR OUT.</h3></i></b> [[🕮==>->The_Exterminators/all_kind.html]]

<p class="noMargins">Oh yeah. This is the one you've been waiting for, the hot one, the real one, the big one, the one with the humongous wazoo. Do it. Just whip it out. What have you got to lose? You can crawl. You can walk. You can swim like a damn fish. You can shake it like a peapod. You can run. You can motorvate. You can rev it up, G. You can lurch on a broken leg. You can knock yourself out. You can beat yourself. You can suck your own fingers. You can get an operation.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">How would you like that?</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">Or would you like me to do it for you?</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;" class="noMargins">Get over here.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_216/Nothing.html]]

<p>A gathering place for character lists, suggested projects and techniques, and the like, meant to help construction workers get on with it in a focused way.</p> [[🕮==>->Construction_Crews.html]]

<i><p>Says I to Bart, "You'll live all your death in that chest if ye blasts this chest of mine full of lead!" "A waste of last words: a pitiful plea; a lie. The next moment my spirit was blasted over them boards that boxed the bright doubloons, my mind's eye molding where once were pearls.</p><p>The passage of two centuries? Three? And one overcast Sunday—unbearably bright!—the church bells pealing—inconceivably shrill!—my empty casket is unearthed at Santo Domingo. A short rocking journey deep in a hold, the consoling motion of which seems at last a vindication of all my years sunk in earth. At a bench in a bus station, a brief conversation in broken Spanish with an unidentified thief. Trucking through rural Florida, a passing voice in the dialect of the undead, muttering nonsense: Ladelhaus. Then, nonstop for the past ten years, the banal babble of the miserably-living: 'Nother Margarita!" "Brighten up, honey! It's happy hour!" "Can I dry you a blink?"</p><p>"My only consolation comes when I can muster enough concentration to tip a passing tray of nachos, move a man to rude noises across from his date, send the hurricane lamps flickering. The bartender, the waitresses—they have a name for me. Perhaps it's <a data-passage="Lounge_Ghost/McTeague_Biography.html">the only name they know </a>from the once-great pilfering vocation: Bart. On slow nights they call, half-mockingly, for a little show. I act up only when they shut up.</p></i>/* Links: [[Lounge_Ghost/McTeague_Biography.html]] */ [[🕮==>->The_Hurricane_Lounge/Tropical_Drink_Special.html]]

<p>indeed down the hatches</p><p>moved the rats </p><p>like eggs in nests. </p><p>underneath the cocktail lounge</p><a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/variously_visiting.html"><p>in each floor and consecutive ceiling</p><p>in each wall and following door </p></a><p>It was the mole rats.</p><p><a data-passage="down_the_hatches/approval.html">Looking like penises</a><a data-passage="consumers/consumer_report.html"> they pushed through every wall in the hotel.</a></p>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/variously_visiting.html]] [[down_the_hatches/approval.html]] [[consumers/consumer_report.html]] */ [[🕮==>->down_the_hatches/looking.html]]

<p>Or perhaps "OM!"</p> [[🕮==>->Lost_in_the_Desert/Twitching.html]]

<p>Is this the way out?</p><p>The door is open.</p> [[🕮==>->Room_214/The_Door_is_Open.html]]

<p>almost too out of place . . . ?</p> [[🕮==>->Suite_602/Welcome_Home.html]]

<p>"The woman who got beat had been involved with Doc Martin, the swinging gynecologist who lived next door. The people to the left of us were descended from a family of politicians; Mr. Chenault ran over a little girl who lived two blocks away and killed her. But he still got elected. Next door to the dead child were the Bennetts. They had <a data-passage="Shop_Talk/Chad.html">blond</a>e and unspoiled perfect children. Mrs. Bennett used to be an airline stewardess. When the children grew older Mr. Bennett ran away from them to be with a younger woman."</p>/* Links: [[Shop_Talk/Chad.html]] */

<p>Vacant and sleepy</p><p>assuming that in the form</p><p>of words I will be touched</p><p>as I watch...</p> [[🕮==>->Pool_and_Health_Club/Window_View.html]]

<div style="line-height: 1.1;"><p>Do you like it like this? I could push you harder. I could bend you around my finger, make you want more than you could take, reinscribe the limits of your desire. How much could I make you want? How much would you want to take, to swallow, to indulge? I could make a feast not enough. I could make you plead when you are satiate.</p><p style="margin-left: 2em;" class="noMargins">And you would be about</p><p style="margin-left: 11em;" class="noMargins">to</p><p style="margin-left: 12em;" class="noMargins">burst</p><p class="noMargins"><a data-passage="Writing/Through_the_Walls.html">And then--</a></p></div>/* Links: [[Writing/Through_the_Walls.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_216/Nothing.html]]

<p>Now. Follow me closely. Draw your line of vision in the direction of a stream of light. It casts a lit gash on part of person's body. The sex, indiscernible. The body part, indiscernible. It's only skin, a little brown, unblemished.</p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;"><a data-passage="Through_the_Walls/Get_Over_Here.html">Suddenly, there is movement.</a></p><p style="text-indent: 1.5em;">And your prey is gone and, in the blade of light, only darkness.</p>/* Links: [[Through_the_Walls/Get_Over_Here.html]] */ [[🕮==>->In_the_Next_Room/Wet_Dreams.html]]

<h3>"Hey, anybody here?"</h3><h3>The same thing happened last week. My first in the hotel. I left my room to go down to the pool. Don't ask me why. When I get back somebody is putting their underwear into my drawers.</h3><h3>I thought it must be an innocent mistake.</h3><h3>That time, at least, my stuff was still there?</h3><h3>"Hey, you assholes, what did you do with my stuff?"</h3> [[🕮==>->Room_214/Wrong_Room.html]]

<p>The smell down here near the floor of the chapel was of chewinggum, wet coats, old paper, and feet. Mostly ladies' feet. Like his mother's. Jason wrote: My mother eats toe cheese. <a data-passage="The_Chapel/MK_in_the_Chapel.html">Was God watching?</a></p>/* Links: [[The_Chapel/MK_in_the_Chapel.html]] */ [[🕮==>->on_the_chapel_pews/but_no_one.html]]

<p>You crawled down here. Now crawl out. Backwards.</p>

<p>he rests in the hotel waiting to be taken in by a <a data-passage="bastard/Untitled_3.html">couple</a> who will erase the memories of his early years.</p>/* Links: [[bastard/Untitled_3.html]] */

<p>this is the box for bastard children:</p> [[🕮==>->bastard/Untitled_1.html]]

<p>he was the love child of bellvue manor, a surly establishment east of the mississippi.</p> [[🕮==>->bastard/Unitled_2.html]]

<p class="noMargins">harvey, but look, a small child. </p><p class="noMargins">yes, we certainly could put him to work on the farm. the tomatoes soon will be ripe, and with the onions sprouting...</p>

<p>No matter what he wrote, nothing ever happened. God didn't care. Nobody cared. <a data-passage="Amerika_Prays/variously_visiting.html">He was condemned, he knew, to crawl around in filth and dirty feet all his life </a>with nothing but a wicked screwdriver. Which was how Jason became a writer.</p>/* Links: [[Amerika_Prays/variously_visiting.html]] */ [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory/The_Chapel.html]]

<p>The mole rats had no friends but <a data-passage="The_Prison/chewing.html">they procreated with<p>much abundance </p></a></p><p>and ate in the fervor of all things dead.</p>/* Links: [[The_Prison/chewing.html]] */ [[🕮==>->dirt/ate.html]]

<p>They had skin like cellophane</p><p>and what hairs they grew sprouted <a data-passage="down_the_hatches/approval.html">like wires covered in oil.</a></p>/* Links: [[down_the_hatches/approval.html]] */ [[🕮==>->Room_212/Mole_Rat.html]]

<p>They <a data-passage="down_the_hatches/looking.html">ate</a> dirt.</p>/* Links: [[down_the_hatches/looking.html]] */ [[🕮==>->ate/Out.html]]

<p>They approved of this</p><p>type of correspondence.</p> [[🕮==>->down_the_hatches/looking.html]]

<p>there was a picture in an old science journal</p><p>you would find it</p><p>there.</p><p>The mole rats didn't like having their pictures taken</p><p>they despised photographers</p><p>and preferred to be an</p><p>anonymous breed.</p> [[🕮==>->Amerika_Prays/variously_visiting.html]]

<p>Jason wrote: My mother's butt is fat and hairy. He carved a picture of it and drilled deep where the hole was. He drew an arrow to it and wrote: Pray here. He wrote: Help me, I am an orphan!</p> [[🕮==>->but_no_one/ever_noticed.html]]

<h3>We're sorry to announce that we must close the Romper Room because one of our employees has been arrested for sexually abusing three blond five-year-old girls. We fear this incident will permanently stain the reputation of the Hotel.</h3> [[🕮==>->SEM_-_Service_Directory.html]]

<p>Golden Variations:</p><p>I don't want you in me.</p><p>I don't want to be in you either.</p><p>I just want to lie in the sun and swim and wear a bikini with nobody thinking about me.</p><p>I don't want to think about me in a bikini.</p><p>I just want it of very few people.</p> [[🕮==>->Moon_Tan/tan_line.html]]