Hotel Fragments

Take your car service up the great crumbling interstates until you reach those seldom-used exits to the off-downtown districts that always seem suspiciously good at deafaning the urban noise. Run a great expensive tab on someone else’s money. Take notice of your surroundings. Feel the fake trees, taken from a museum, it was replanted here along the parkway where every car is zero emissions, every dogwalker clean of sweat, even the grime of help washed off down sub-street level service entrances where an awestriking basement can cleanse even the deepest impoverishments. Pull up to the curb and let the valet whisk it away to some rebar cavern out of sight & mind. The man will welcome you. There’s a portal to hell in the basement. You take one last look at the trees, museum pieces hand-carved out of jungle mahogany with artificial plastic leaves they spray gold in the autumn, rooted into shovelholes trenched along the asphalt. The master sleeps upstairs in surgical-scrub bathrobes pre...

Three blind dogs were eating loud burgers and drippy-oiled fries on the opposite side of the restaurant. The eldest had his porcine face deep-slathered in the fat of the land as he sucked down a corncola. The middle one was delicate, fries quaffed in like caviar on gilt china. The youngest timidly poked at handfuls, masturbating in a deep pit of himself. “I know what they did.” My date turned to me, hiding our glances in conversation. “Did I ever tell you what they did?” “No. Under the yellow lights? Tell me what they did.” “It was under the yellow lights.” They were three marching proud as siblings in a row, middle child flanked by the bookends. They were hot, baking in their element, among the tropical fugue, neon lights bzzbzz to shine discoglow on the skinny prostitutes contorting their bodies to flash hips and nips at the music of money. The middle child was glowing, beaming smile, as he picked up a baby and thrust it into the burning GODSUNLIGHT above his head, blinking eyes of t...