Skateboard Heroes of the Twentieth Century

103.

   'You can’t do anything if you don’t want to.'

Such was the thought of the night porter when slipping his pass key into the lock of the cold store door to obtain provisions for the travelers who had arrived at an hour when the chef was at home drunk and asleep with a low pressure fountain drooling sweat for a belly button.

   But, at his trial he did not recount this thought. It had been forgotten as a separate component of an entire notion which only materialized in retrospect of the crimes for which he had been apprehended.

Even the idea of regret had been tainted by the desire which had both overcome and overwhelmed his restraint.

His crime had been to have used the credit card numbers of the hotel guests to buy various items through phone and mail order.

    He had discovered the step by step instructions on the methods to perform these deeds when he was idling away the slow spare moments of dawn’s early morning on the internet at the reception desk. when the assistant manager had left him in charge and was unofficially away from the premises in his car by a river, closing a drug deal.

But these details were never uncovered.

All he could muster before they passed sentence was,

    “I was brought up by a TV As a child I shuddered at the thought of a bomb that could kill every living thing at any time. The opulence of the sixties afternoon sitcoms told me I could just walk into any career I wanted when I grew up. I pinned on a bath towel as a cape and nearly broke my neck jumping from the back of the lounge suit because I thought I could fly!

   "You knew the machines would take away our jobs and didn’t do anything about it because you owned the factories and you knew we all still thought machines offered all of us freedom in some kind of mechanized Utopia!

I am guilty! Throw the book at me. Take me away.”

That was all he could say.

    The hotel stood in the blue-grey powder of the bay side. At night, it appeared as a stiff black chunk with few, if ever any, windows illuminated.

There were hundreds of miles in every direction from it to the nearest city.

In his cell at night he would often picture it.