Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

At midnight, the Hotel Penumbra looks like some curse-tinged, truly haunted fortress, pulled from the soaked and wormy earth of an Eastern European mountain community and transplanted, intact, into the drug-crazed terrain of Bangkok Park.

The inside of the hotel, however, is a different story. No one but Cortez knows for sure, but there are rumors that he’s dumped anywhere from two to five million into restoration and renovation. On the first floor, where the Standish Lounge and Supperclub were once located, Cortez has modeled, out of a gutted cavern, the now-infamous Club 62, by many estimations, the darkest, hippest, most dangerous nightspot in the Western world. Club 62 is more like an upscale, outlaw flea market than a nightclub. Everything is for rent or sale. What is not readily available can be procured and delivered within an hour.

The interior walls of Club 62 are high-quality red brick and mortar, painted a cool white. Cortez has had them customized so that a continuous stream of red-dyed rainwater runs down the walls into a sewer grating. One regular is said to have thought the walls looked like “an autopsy-room floor turned sideways” and that this is the exact effect Cortez was going for. Certainly, the furnishings and decor do not emphasize comfort. Though there is no need for them structurally, huge black iron beams with endless rows of rivets and studs run through the air. The tables and seating follow this same iron-and-steel/heavy-industry motif with enormous I-beams laid down as benches and small, mock conveyor belts mounted here and there as cocktail tables. Lighting comes from a continuous row of industry-sized, high-intensity, neon-green bulbs trapped inside wire-mesh caging high up near the ceiling. It has been said that the mixture of the green light playing off the rushing blood-water of the walls can give the place a Christmassy feel, but Lenore finds this hard to believe.

The cocktail waitresses are all Amazons. There are minimum height and shoulder-span requirements for hiring. Their uniforms consist of black leather motorcycle pants with red stripes down the side, neon-green suspenders, and black, pointy, steel-toed boots with odd cowboy spurs mounted on the back. The hostess is signified by the wearing of a black miner’s hard hat with inset flashlight.

The floor of the club is simply a bed of crushed gravel. This makes for a constant cushing background noise.

It is rumored that people disappear into the bowels of the club for weeks on end, emerging with skin paler than the dead and eye pupils so small they can barely be seen.

It is rumored that the drugs of choice are a synthetic designer amphetamine called Opie, short for Oppenheimer, and an antique hallucinogen called Rucksack Ho. It is rumored that these goods are sold openly, by waitresses moving from table to table with large trays supported by a thick strap around their necks, old-time cigarette-girl style.

It is rumored that on Tuesday and Thursday nights, orgies of unspeakable shape and length are regularly scheduled and executed, and that often Cortez himself will direct the activities, barking out acrobatic instruction, from a hidden balcony, with an old-fashioned police bullhorn.

On the second floor of the Hotel Penumbra is Cortez’s brothel, what he calls the Secretarial Pool, and what customers know as the Deer Park. It is rumored to house a dozen girls in a blend of royally pampered Euro-luxury and subtle Oriental beauty. It is rumored to capitulate to any fantasy a customer can call up or refund 110 percent of your money. It is rumored that no one has ever requested the refund.

On the third floor are the living quarters of Cortez’s staff. There is Mingo Bouza, newest member of the group, chauffeur, valet, and companion. Cortez likes to laugh often, to be entertained. Mingo is something of an amateur stand-up comedian. This was his main qualification for the job.

Next to Mingo’s suite is Jimmy Wyatt’s. Jimmy is the hotel’s resident muscle. He lives on steroid injections, raw eggs, and a mystery liquid that he keeps in a silver pitcher next to his bed. Jimmy was born and raised by a schizophrenic ex-nun just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. He killed his first man in a dispute over who would purchase the last newspaper at a drugstore. He was sixteen years old. He can bench-press over 250 pounds, run the mile in 4.4 minutes. He spent three years in Korea sleeping under burlap, perfecting a martial art that has yet to be named. Jimmy is a mute, having had his tongue cut out during the ’76 prison riots out at Spooner Correctional. Jimmy considers himself something of a natty dresser, which Mingo finds a riot. All of Jimmy’s clothes are made of spandex or leather. Jimmy serves as Cortez’s personal bodyguard and, rumor has it, traveling assassin.

The last of the third-floor trio is Max, a local kid, about fifteen years old, born in the middle of the Park, a native in every sense of the word. Max is the houseboy, the gofer, the collector of loose ends. He never seems to sleep. He has lived in the hotel for over three years now. He’s all dark skin and thin bones and a wild head of bushy jet-black hair that tends to wave, like some southwestern American Indian. Max dresses in army fatigues and high-top sneakers. He takes a chronic but good-natured ribbing from the Secretarial Pool. One rumor has it that Max is Cortez’s son. Max is not sure one way or the other. So far there is no rumor about him being the Widow’s snitch.

The top two floors of the Hotel Penumbra make up Cortez’s penthouse residence. They are connected by an authentically restored gilded-cage elevator. The rumor is that most of the renovation money went into the top of the building. Cortez has more square footage in, say, his bathroom than most of the houses of immigrant families of Goulden Ave. The rumor is that Cortez went through two architects, three interior designers, and an uncountable number of contractors before he got his home the way he wanted it. He lives alone. Very few people have seen the inside of his place, the Sanctuary, as he calls it. The regulars at Club 62 play games, making up details about the place. They say his kitchen has a separate electrical system for the sea of cutting-edge appliances, that his master bedroom could house a regulation running track, that his closet space would throw Princess Diana into a rage of envy. Though no one can come up with any logistics, the favorite notion is that his living room floor somehow retracts into the walls to reveal an Olympic-sized pool.

Cortez seems to be spending more and more time within the walls of the Sanctuary. The latest rumor is that he’s got some kind of special library up there. That it takes up most of the top floor. That he’s had the whole place fireproofed. That little Max is the only one to have seen it. And that it consists of either the world’s most extensive collection of pornography, secret histories, or occult material.

For some reason, Lenore finds it easy to picture Cortez as the sole figure in a huge, dim, exotic library, perfectly postured in an ancient, uncomfortable wooden chair for hours, days, head bent slightly and hovering six inches above the pages of some enormous and weighty book, an atlas or an original philosophical treatise from fifteenth-century Italy, all worn-out purple leather and red vellum and smelling of oceans and the deepest caves of Europe, with all the words hand-printed, calligraphied, and illuminated by obsessive, virginal, paranoid monks.

She can picture Cortez unmoving, dressed in a floor-length maroon robe with loose cowl hanging down the back, subsisting on cold bitter coffee, his hair becoming tangled and matted, sweat breaking from the hairline to the eyebrows, his lips opening and closing, twisting in new ways to learn an unfamiliar language, conquering yet another risky frontier—