Debaser

“You’re here because you’re dead.”

The clerk at the hotel desk, dressed in a red uniform with white-trimmed lapels, spoke in an abrasive, upper Midwest dialect, and said this like he was explaining something painfully obvious. He looked familiar, not from a personal encounter, but from a photo somewhere, but Danny couldn’t place the face.

The hotel lobby was nouveau boutique, bright colors, garish art, black and white porcelain tile. People loitered in groups of two to perhaps ten, many in period dress, as if waiting for a costume party to begin. The lobby smelled like a hundred thin layers of aromatherapy, and discordant music with wailing flutes and thundering drums filled the space between murmurs of conversation and laughs. Somewhere a woman shrieked in delight.

The desk clerk yelled out to no one in particular, “Hey, can someone tell Birtwhistle to turn that shit down?!”

To Danny, he said. “Fuck, that modernist crap gets on my nerves after about two minutes.” He gave Danny as assessing look, and not a positive one.

He said, “So where’s it going to be, kid? The Stan Lee Wing?”

“I’m not sure … why I’m here.”

“I told you. You’re dead. Mixing molly and acid and gin – not a great plan.” He thumped his own chest with two fingers. “The ol’ ticker gave out.” He made a sound like a small explosion. “That hot chick you were dancing with – I hear the look on her face when you hit the cement was priceless.”

Danny said, “But–”

The clerk stopped him with an upraised hand. The wide u-shaped face and red, sunken eyes should have been a giveaway on his identity, but Danny wasn’t thinking right.

The clerk said, “Just give it up and get over it. You died, due to your own stupidity. And now you’re in the Afterlife for Creatives. And if you don’t tell me in what area you want to reside pretty fuckin’ fast, I’m going to hand you a tutu and assign you to the Nijinsky Wing.”

“Is this … Heaven?”

“There ain’t no heaven, kid, just this place. Today it’s a nauseating trendy hotel. Tomorrow, the smart guys in Architecture will set up the freakin’ Taj Mahal. Never a dull moment with those brain-os.”

Danny recovered, at least a little, and his memory of the hours before started to align in some kind of order than made sense. A party at one of his sponsor’s offices, and then a late-night rave at an old factory building basement where they’d set up studios. He remembered dancing with a young woman whose substantial breasts seemed about to leap from her loose-fitting smock, and then an over-powering sense of exhilaration and heat, and then his heart pounding …

He was dead.

He said, “Umm, sir, if I’m dead, why do I have a body and why do I feel things like I’m still in my flesh. Shouldn’t I be like a disembodied spirit or something.”

“Ya’ know, I wisht they’d give lessons on this shit in the physical world so I wouldn’t have to explain it to every fiddler and paint pusher that comes across. You’re dead, right? But the head dogs that set up this place made it so you’d come in just like you checked out, to ease the shock. But you can adjust all that later – dull the pain, increase the pleasure – although I wouldn’t recommend that one if you’re interested in getting any work done. You can change your appearance, but few people do, really. Joan Crawford looks like ‘The 50-Foot Woman’ now, but she’s the exception. Because none of that appearance shit matters here. It’s best to find a place that feels comfortable, settle in a while, get your feet on the ground.”

He let Danny think about that for a moment, just one moment, then said, “Now I need to know where you want to start out. Uh, rules. Yeah, there are none, but there are some very wise guidelines you want to pay attention to. First – don’t choose to make your situation permanent so you can’t change your mind. Spending eternity paddling a pirogue in a South Louisiana swamp with your camera slung to your back sounds romantic, but it would get old after a few weeks – or minutes, in my case. Second rule – no going back home, or setting up a delusional allusion that you have. And becoming a ghost to hassle your family is plain amateur bullshit.”

Danny felt his head spinning, as if the Ecstasy was kicking back in. “I’m sorry, I just don’t – I mean, who are all these people, and what do they do here?”

The clerk closed his eyes for a moment, took an exasperated breath. “Awright. See that group over there, dressed in flouncy shirts and pants, all bright fuckin’ colors, and the Halloween wigs? Baroque musicians. The dude with the pot belly who looks like Larry Howard from the Three Stooges in a silver wig is Handel. The one in the red robe with his schnozzle in the air is Vivaldi. Ah, he ain’t so much. The one hovering over him in the brown wig parted like he was hit with an ax is his old teacher, Corelli. The others, you’ve probably heard of.”

As Danny watched, the group began to argue about something in Italian, and then several of them broke into song, an opera song, an aria maybe, sung in falsetto. The clerk winced.

Danny asked, “Which one is Bach?”

“Oh, he ain’t here. He’s still a freaking workaholic. Probably over at the cathedral writing this week’s mass. Dude needs to cut back before it kills him.” The clerk laughed bitterly.

Danny said, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m at a loss. What do you suggest?”

The clerk donned a pair of wire-rims, then leafed through a large registration book that appeared in front of him.

“Let’s see … grumble … you paint, you dabble in photography, and you make art out of odd shit, drinking straws, burnt toast, colored packets of prophylactics – huh, kinky. You must be okay at it, or you wouldn’t be at this desk, you’d be over at the Hampton. Kinda avant garde, right? If you did film, I might point you at the Salvador Dali wing, but eh, cutting up eyeballs and shit, maybe not. Although the Pixies had fun with that one, didn’t they?”

“I’m so confused. Do all creative people come here?”

“Just what you’d call purveyors of the ‘The Arts,’ kid. Engineers got their own place, set in the side of a cliff, built like a fuckin’ fortress. They let the military types bomb it about once a month for kicks.”

“What about actors?”

The clerk sneered. “Yeah, they’re here. Buncha brain-dead prima donnas. I can’t wait for one big mouth jackass to get here, so I can punch his lights out. Asshole tried his best to take over my screen play so he’d have the most lines. I set up the sidekick as the protagonist just to piss him off.” The clerk shook his head. “But look, I gotta get you moving along. I got a queue backed up like the slush pile at a major pulp mag. You paint funky landscapes. How does the Georgia O’Keefe Sanctuary sound? I got a nice little adobe cottage near a red butte. We can throw cattle skulls in the dirt, if you want.”

The clerk looked past Danny and cursed. “Sweet baby Jesus, I’ve died and gone to hell.”

Danny turned to see a short, wire-haired older man with silver mutton-chops approaching the desk, with a tall blond woman on each arm, both in red sequined dresses that left little to the imagination, and tall feathered head pieces like Vegas showgirls.

The clerk said, “Well if it ain’t the Sensuous Dirty Old Man himself.”

The man said, “Hello, Hedwin. Say, you might want to have the ‘formulation’ checked out on this building. It seems a little weak. Get it? Formulation?” He and the women laughed.

The clerk said, “Yeah, yeah. What do you want, Freddy?”

The man said, “Has my application moved forward? I should be at the top of the waiting list.”

The clerk said, “Yeah, any day now. So why don’t you go write another inane chemistry mad professor story and leave those of us who are trying to get stuff done alone, will ya’?”

The man turned his leggy entourage to go, then eyed Danny. He said, “Looks like you’re behind schedule. ‘Bing bong! Sing it Wrong!’” They laughed again, and sauntered away.

The clerk called after them, “Yeah, whatever, short stuff. How ‘bout I send you to the Menagerie with the other typing chimps.” He shook his and rolled his eyes for Danny. “You ought to check that place out, kid. A whole bay full of Cetaceans composing unreal sounds. Fuckin’ beautiful.”

Danny said, “That was…he wrote ‘The Formulation Endeavor.’”

“Yeah, it’s Strickenoff, the insufferable putz. The more I’m around people, the more I like whales.”

“Where was he applying to go?”

“The Polymath Palace. It’s a think tank for all the real heavy hitters. He thinks he’s another DaVinci. More like DeVito. Hmmph. Actually, I can’t wait for the real DeVito to die. We need some real humor around here. Between Burns, Carlin, and Dangerfield, it’s like a clown circus.”

“And you’re Hedwin Ascot. You wrote ‘The Clockmaker Gets It Wrong.’”

“No, I’m Petyr Tchaikovsky. Jesus, kid, gimme a break.”

“So I can choose—”

“Any place you can imagine. That’s kind of the creative part, right?”

“What if I choose a place that’s completely new – like nothing else here?”

“Like I haven’t heard that one before. We don’t design ‘em, kid, we just build ‘em. You give me the specifications, and it can be done. But when someone says ‘Send me to a place no one else ever thought of,’ I just want to choke them. So don’t go there. Tell you what, try the O’Keefe place, and if that doesn’t float your skeleton, I’ll move you over to Warhol’s Fun Factory. Just stay away from Capote, if you know what I mean.”

A commotion broke out in the far corner of the lobby. Ascot cursed, and flagged down an elegant looking older woman in a tailored business suit and black hat.

He said, “Hey, Coco. Can you please find out what the trouble is in the bar? If it’s Pollock and Thomas again, I’ll kick both their asses.”

END