Smoking Crack in the Elevator

“There’s this guy staying on the other end of the hall,” Carla, the beautiful dancer, said as she passed me in the hall.  “And he was smoking crack in the elevator!”

“And nobody said anything?” I asked.

“What do you think?  Of course not,” Carla said.  “And in the lobby!” she added. “You know who I’m talking about?”

I thought I did.  “He’s a Southerner?”  I said that because he reminded me of the guys I used to hang out with when I was a kid.

Carla considered it.  “Uh, no,” she said, shaking her head decisively.

I tried again: “He looks like a garage mechanic?”

“That’s him.”

In fact I had run into the guy.  The night before my power had gone out and so I put on my slippers and went out to the fuse box in the hallway.  As I was resetting the circuit breaker, a goofy, manic guy, moving jerkily, burst through the door from the other side of the hall and bounded up to me.  “Was some asshole messing with that?!” he said.

            Though I didn’t have my glasses on, I could see that the man, in his early thirties perhaps, wore a trucker hat and a worn football jersey; his hair was greasy and scraggly and he sported a three-day growth of beard.  A Southerner ironically, I suppose.

            “I don’t think so,” I replied, puzzled by his question.  “Did you see somebody messing with it?”

            “Just you,” he said.  “If nobody’s been messing with it, then what are you doing?”

            “My fuse just blew.”

            He popped his head up close to get a better look.  “You want me to look at that?” he asked.

            “No, I think I fixed it,” I replied, still wondering as to why he was so interested.  “Did your fuse blow too?”

            He didn’t answer.  “I’ll get somebody who knows what the hell they’re doing to look at that,” he declared as the elevator arrived.

“Smoking crack in the elevator and the lobby!” Carla reiterated.  “You’ve got to write about that!  He told me he was paying $1000 a night in rent.”

That sounded even more remarkable.  “I guess he’d have to be smoking crack to pay that,” I said.  “But even so, he should be able to think of better things to spend his money on.”

Like, for instance, more crack. -- Ed Hamilton