in the elevator
There was a night that I got stuck in an elevator with the gymnast. We had gone to a concert in downtown Indianapolis and parked in a big garage there that had lots of signs posted listing lots of rules. After the concert we got in an elevator along with about four other guys. I kind of felt like it was a bad idea at the time. When the elevator doors wouldn’t let us out onto the fourth floor I felt the nearness of each of the elevator’s chrome walls. It was a precarious moment. I sort of looked at the four guys I didn’t know and there was a weird charge of static pulsing from the desires of their collected consciousness. I wondered how long social laws would hold. I drew mental pictures of myself punching the throats of the other men in the elevator to keep them off the gymnast. We tried pushing different buttons for a while and holding down the the door open button and all sorts of things. There were some long minutes there. I can’t remember what I did, but I figured out how to get the elevator to go back down to the first floor and open up. Ten minutes of recycled elevator air and six bewildered bodies spilled out. I laughed along with the gymnast. “I really thought we were going to be jammed in an elevator for the rest of the night,” she said. “Holy crap yeah. I was sort of fighting off a mounting sensation of panic,” I said. She fell asleep during the hour drive back. I felt good because of the trust she placed in me. I wanted to drive and drive.
