Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 6b)

So... The elevator...

And, yes, you should go back and read 6a for context.

The elevators were jammed every morning with teenagers waiting until the last possible moment to leave and, yet, still get to the convention on time. That first morning, it was something like a 10-15 minute wait just to get on the elevator. Being that we were on something like floor 887, the stairs were not an option. Of course, by "elevator" I mean the main elevators that were just off of the lobby area, basically, the "center" of the hotel.

However, either in looking for the ice machine or just looking around the first night, I discovered that there were other elevators. Or, at least, one other elevator. It was at the end of the wing our room was on, well away from the central elevators. The second morning, I suggested that we should try that elevator instead. What was the worst that could happen, right? That it would also be crowded?

And I had to convince everyone! Seriously, what's with having to convince everyone all the time? Okay, I didn't have to convince the girl since she was just, I don't know, along for the ride. I think she actually just lived right outside our hotel door since she was always there waiting for us every morning when it was time to leave, and that's where we left her every night. I seriously don't think anyone knew where her room was.

So we went down to the other elevator, and it was completely empty! No line. No other people at all, in fact. [Why do people always argue with me about these things? I will never know.] So we pushed the button, waited the moment for the elevator to arrive, got in, someone pushed the button for the first floor... and that's when things got interesting.

As soon as the door started to shut, there was a voice from down the hall, "Hold the door! Hold the door! My granny's coming. My granny's coming." Now, the elevator wasn't just at the end of the hall. The end of the hall turned about 30 degrees so that the elevator was facing a window that overlooked the city rather than a blank wall across the hall, which meant that you couldn't see down the hall without actually stepping out of the elevator and looking to the left. But the voice was decidedly childlike. Jeff reached out and stopped the door from closing.

An eight- or nine-year-old boy appeared in front of the elevator. A skinny, little black boy... wearing a tuxedo. A black tuxedo with red, canvas high-top basketball sneakers and a red baseball cap. To say the least, he was adorable. "Hold the door! My granny's coming!"

The door, though, didn't like being held and was fighting against Jeff's hand, so Jeff, being the brilliant college student that he was, decided to "stop" the elevator. By "stop," I don't mean that he pushed the button to hold the doors open or anything like that; by "stop," I mean that he pushed the big, red, emergency "stop" button. Before anyone could do anything about it or even think that we should do anything about it. An alarm sounded.

Bob was gone. I mean that very literally; he was just gone.

If you've been reading this whole series, Bob lived in the neighborhood around our church with his grandmother and his father. It was a big house, one that I'm sure had been very nice when his grandmother had first moved into it something like 60 years earlier. But the neighborhood was in as much of a state of neglect as the house, which is to say that it wasn't, hmm... It wasn't what you'd call safe. So, when the alarm went off, Bob ran so fast, we didn't even see him leave the elevator. [Yes, he did that in front of the girl, whom, if you remember, he had a crush on.] He just wasn't there anymore, and there wasn't even a cloud of dust with the word "zoom" hovering in it to mark where he'd been.

The little boy's eyes were huge, like the proverbial "as big as saucers" kind of eyes. Jeff literally grabbed me and the girl and carried us out of the elevator, almost under his arms, as it were, and said, "Go!" As we came out of the little alcoved corner where the elevator was, we saw Bob way down at the other end of the hall peeking around the corner at us. And, when I say "way down," I mean "way down." The other end of the hall was a good 50 or 60 feet away, and Bob was all the way down there before we'd gotten all the way out of the elevator.

But Bob was not the only one we saw. Coming down the hall was the smaller duplicate of the boy at the elevator. He was probably about four, had on a black tux with red, canvas, high-top basketball sneakers and a red baseball cap. It was like adorable overload with his slightly chubby cheeks. He was saying something like, "What's happening, Granny?" to a short, large black woman in a big, flower dress, and she was saying as we passed, "There go those white boys, done playing in our elevator." Or something to that effect.

Despite the fact that the... incident was definitely user error, we never went back to that elevator and suffered through the long wait times at the regular elevators for the rest of the trip. However, that might have more to do with what happened later...

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 6a)

Wow! A new part! And a less serious part, just to give a bit of a break from all of the heaviness around here, lately.

In the summer of 1985, I went to a youth conference in Washington D.C. with my friend Bob (which I talked about some here, but that is a heavy post, so be aware before you click through). One thing I didn't mention in that other post is that we had to have a chaperon in order to be able to go since we were only 15. We were already hitching a ride with a group from Texas just to be able to go, but we had to provide our own chaperon, which was almost a sticking point for us, because we couldn't find anyone in our church willing to go with us even though the church was willing to foot the bill for the trip for the chaperon.

So I had to get ingenious. We'd been to summer camp a few weeks before the D.C. trip and had met a college guy there. He was between his freshman and sophomore years, too, just Texas A&M instead of high school. Jeff was one of those charismatic guys whom everyone loves right away, and he was also from Shreveport, so I gave him a call and asked him if he wanted to go on a free trip to Washington D.C.

Now, I want to make one thing really clear, here: We liked Jeff, but we didn't really know Jeff. But the church okay'd him to go with us as chaperon, anyway. Of course, I did a lot of convincing, both to get Jeff to go (Because I had to convince him to go on a FREE! trip to D.C.! What the heck?) and to get them to let him go.

Another thing: Jeff's family was rich. Not only was his family rich, but he was rich. When he was around 10 or 12, he'd written (put together) a book of Aggie jokes that had become a bestseller (I have a copy somewhere). The royalties had all gone into a trust fund that he had received when he turned 18, several hundred thousand dollars. He had a Camaro with a TV and VCR that came out of the glove compartment area and was really only good for the driver. Having been a passenger in that car, I can tell you that the TV was not viewable by anyone else. That car was the first thing he spent his joke book money on.

Of course, there's a lot more to all of this, but it's not the actual story. I just need you to know enough about Jeff so that you have an idea of what's going on.

And there was a girl. Because there's always a girl.

I don't remember exactly how we met the girl except that it had to do with a screw up with the hotel. The hotel we were supposed to stay in had overbooked and, since our little trio wasn't really apart of the group we were supposed to be with [And we were, actually, supposed to be with that group, which is probably part of why my church let Jeff go with us. You know, how much trouble could we possibly get into when we would be with this other youth group?], they peeled us off and sent us to a different hotel. A swanky hotel a block from the Capitol Building. You know, one of those hotels that puts mints on your pillows every morning after they came in and cleaned your room. In fact, we could look out our window and see the Capitol Building up at the end of the street.

That's where we met the girl. Probably during check in, because she was attached to us almost the entire trip. No, I don't know whom she was supposed to be with. No one ever came looking for her. She was, maybe, a year older than Bob and me. Bob had a big crush on her, and she had a big crush on Jeff. To his credit, Jeff wasn't interested.

Fun fact:
The hotel the rest of "our group" was supposed to stay in had a fire the morning after we arrived, and they got shuffled out to various budget motels on the outskirts of D.C. None of them were very happy with us when we'd run into them. They had to get up super early to get bused to the convention center, no one cleaned their rooms, and they didn't get mints. Not only did we get mints, but we were able to just catch the Metro to the convention center; it took no time at all. In fact, the longest part of the trip was waiting for the hotel elevator.

Speaking of elevators... Well, let's just say that what happens in elevators doesn't always stay in elevators. But you'll have to find out about that next week.