Nearly Dead by Brendan P. Myers

Author:Brendan P. Myers [Myers, Brendan P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Genre Fiction, Zombie, Literature & Fiction, Fiction, Comedy, Humorous, General Humor, Short Stories (single author), horror, Humor & Satire, Humor, One Hour (33-43 Pages)
Publisher: Exigua Publishing
Published: 2010-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

TWO

The Camelot

My apartment is on Ninth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd in the old Camelot Hotel. It ain’t much, just a single room with a sink, a steel-framed bed, and a nightstand. There’s no phone or television or air conditioning or other amenities like that. Still, it has its charms.

The last of the old flophouses, the Camelot is also the last midtown hotel that still rents rooms by the hour. Just four stories tall, it’s now dwarfed by the steel and glass towers that have grown up around it. It has some retail at street level – a greasy pizza shop, a smoothie joint, and a camera place. The second floor is devoted to the hourly rooms. The third and fourth floors have week-to-week tenants been living there for years. Tenants like me.

After walking up the fabled twenty-nine steps, I glanced across the lobby and saw Paresh asleep in his cage behind bulletproof glass. A graduate of City College, Paresh had inherited the building from his old man a year or so ago and had since spurned all entreaties and eight-figure offers to sell. Thanks to the city’s grandfather laws, even the mayor couldn’t shut him down, though that never stopped him from trying. I asked him once why he didn’t sell. Hell, I woulda.

He went thoughtful a moment, just as a John passed us by still hiking his pants. Thought he might have looked familiar too. An assistant attorney general, maybe?

“These people,” Paresh answered finally and with deep sincerity as we watched the John walk away. “They need SOME place to go.”

I had to admit, he had a point. Of course, left unsaid between us was that by ‘these people,’ he didn’t just mean the Johns and the hookers on the second floor, but the rest of life’s losers up on three and four as well. People like me. I appreciated the sentiment.

Walking past the caged and sleeping Paresh, I smiled to know that if he hadn’t recognized my gait, his eyes would have flashed open and a baseball bat would suddenly materialize. As it was, he slept on.

Using my key, I unlocked the thick steel door and was struck full force by an aroma only hinted at in the lobby, a pungent blend of urine, sweat, sex, and desperation, that was the essence of the Camelot lifestyle. It’s funny how you stop smelling it after a while, and only smell it again after being away. That afternoon, it was powerful enough to set you off ever leaving the building again.

As I walked along the cracked and filthy checkerboard linoleum, I heard soft moans coming from one room I passed, some light spanking from another. It was good to be home, I thought, as I walked up the stairs.

When I reached the dimly lit third floor landing, I kicked aside an empty condom wrapper and took a left down the narrow hallway toward my room. Halfway along, I heard the familiar clicking of a half-dozen sliding locks and then heard a door open behind me.

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