Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

Elliot loathed this elevator. This one, and the one next to it. A thirty-story hotel with a dozen or more rooms per floor needed more than two elevators. Both of them were always busy.

“I don’t believe this,” Elliot said.

His partner, Leonard Faulks, said, “It’s okay. It’ll get here eventually.”

“I’ve got my doubts,” Elliot said.

Elliot and Leonard, both thirty-one years old and both from Toronto, were on a weeklong trip to New York. They’d both been here before on business in their respective jobs — Elliot was a financial adviser and Leonard a freelance book editor — but they had never visited together. A friend had recommended to Elliot that they stay at the Klaxton 49, one of four Manhattan hotels owned and managed by the small Klaxton chain. Elliot did the booking online after reading good things on TripAdvisor. Well, his review was not going to be like the others. He’d already been writing it in his head. It was going to read something like this:

“This 30-story hotel may be clean and centrally located and the staff are nice enough but DO NOT GO HERE UNLESS YOU LOVE TO WAIT FOR FIVE FUCKING HOURS FOR THE ELEVATOR TO ARRIVE.”

This had been their experience since day one. They were on the fifteenth floor, the building’s midpoint. Had they been given a room on a lower floor, they would have used the stairs. And even now, Elliot was considering them. Descending was a lot easier than ascending. Not that the two of them weren’t in good shape, but sometimes, after seven or eight hours of walking all over Manhattan, the last thing you wanted to face when you got back to the hotel was a grueling climb.

Elliot was watching the numbered lights to see where the two elevators were. One was at the fifth floor and moving up. The other was on the twentieth floor and moving down. And the time the elevators were spending on each number was evidence that many guests were boarding and exiting.

The ascending elevator stopped at seven, then nine, then twelve. Elliot was hopeful that last person to disembark would be at fifteen, meaning they could step right on and go down. But the descending elevator was now on the move, heading toward them. Only two floors away now.

“Why don’t you press it again?” Leonard said.

Elliot gave him a look, knowing he was being needled, but that didn’t stop him from doing exactly what Leonard asked. He hit the button.

He attacked the button.

The descending elevator stopped one floor above them.

“This has to be it,” Leonard said, striking an optimistic note, hoping his partner would calm down.

The elevator moved. They heard it whiz past in the shaft.

It did not stop for them.

The light flashed at fourteen, twelve, nine. It was heading straight to the lobby.

Elliot, in a sign of defeat, slowly leaned his head forward and rested it on the wall above the buttons.

The elevator coming up went right past fifteen and stopped at twenty-two. Leonard watched, wondering if it would keep on going up, or start coming back down.

Now it was coming down.

“Elliot,” he said cautiously.

Elliot raised his head slowly, then looked up at the numbers. The second elevator was three... two... one floor way.

They did not hear the sound of something whooshing past. The elevator sounded as though it was coming to a stop.

And then the doors opened.

“Sweet Jesus, it’s a miracle,” said Elliot.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the car was nearly full. Jammed into the back were an elderly couple who were clearly at the end of their stay, each one clutching the handle of a wheeled carry-on bag. Also on board were a fortyish woman in a pink tracksuit and two teenage girls, also in matching tracksuits and running shoes. Elliot didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out these were the woman’s daughters.

At least there was still just enough room for him and Leonard to get on without having to scrunch shoulders.

No one said anything as they boarded, but there seemed a collective sense of despair in the car; the others had been waiting an eternity as well for this ride to street level.

Leonard went to press the L, for Lobby, but it was already lit.

The car began to descend.

And then stopped.

They had gone one entire floor.

One of the teenage girls said, “Of course.”

The doors parted to reveal a young couple and — Elliot wanted to scream — a stroller with a small child in it.

“Uh,” said Elliot, “I don’t think so. We’re pretty full here.”

“No, we can do it,” the father said, pushing in the stroller first, bumping the tiny rubber wheels over the metal edge.

Everyone else in the elevator had to back up. Once the father had the stroller in, he positioned it sideways so as to make space for the mother. She stepped in and waited for the doors to close.

“I always wanted to feel like a sardine,” Leonard whispered into his partner’s ear.

Someone had to say it, Elliot thought.

The elevator descended one more floor, and then stopped again .

A groan slipped through the lips of everyone in the elevator, with the exception of the couple who had just entered, and their child, of course, who was oblivious to everyone else’s aggravation.

“Seriously, this is too much,” said the elderly man to his wife.

“The way this is going we’ll miss our flight,” she said softly. “If there’s traffic, we’ll never get to LaGuardia in time.”

The doors parted.

Everyone thought, Jesus Christ no .

Before them stood a man in his early twenties, about five-ten and easily three hundred pounds. He was decked out in a pair of shorts, and a pair of oversized, unlaced sneakers, and an “I Love New York” sleeveless shirt where “Love” was a heart symbol. The thick laces trailed behind him like bright orange worms.

“I really think you’re gonna have to wait for the next one,” Elliot said.

“Fuck that,” he said. “I’ve been standing here ten minutes.”

He started to board, forcing his body into the mass of human flesh. The small boy in the stroller looked up, wide-eyed, at this towering mass of person hovering over him.

The large man continued to force everyone to squeeze back even farther. The older woman said, “I don’t think I can breathe,” although that might have had less to do with being compressed and more to do with the newest passenger’s sleeveless shirt.

He was, not to put too fine a point on it, aromatic.

Everyone was jammed in so tightly that the man did not even try to turn around. He faced the back wall of the elevator and said to one of the teenage girls who was closest to the panel of buttons, “Can you hit Lobby?”

“It already is,” she said.

Her sister said, “Hit the Close button.”

“The what?”

She pointed to the button with the two triangular symbols pointing at each other. Her sister hit the button.

The doors started to close, then bounced back. The newest passenger’s butt was in the way.

It was the girls’ mother’s turn to speak up. “Honestly, I think you’re going to have to take the next—”

But rather than get off, the man pushed in even farther, his belly hovering over the head of the child in the stroller. The girl pushed the button again.

The doors once again attempted to close, and this time they made it.

“Shit!” said one of the girls, looking down.

The door had closed on a trailing orange shoelace from one of the big man’s unlaced sneakers. As the car started to move downward, the slack went out of the lace. In less than a second, the shoe it was attached to was dragged suddenly to the door, which pitched the large man forward.