Irene Godly is dead

It was now with a nearly despotic hunger that I made my way to the front counter of the hotel. No one greeted me with much deference. That was to be expected I suppose, given the state of my legs. I had not sought medical attention but the desert heat had somehow managed to dry up the ugly weeping welts that afflicted me. 

It was there, on making my way to the elevator that I met Nancy Pillgroin who I was to learn later was the hotel's resident pervert. Show me your purple squirter she demanded.

I looked with incredulity at the counter clerks but there was no help to be found. Clearly this was the kind of place that let anything go. 

I stuck there just long enough for the lady dressed in brown weave blazer and khaki blouse that seemed to irreverently large underneath move at the rate of a concussed sloth to pass me the relevant paperwork. I signed it and tried not to focus on the hair that was invading parts of her ears. 

She peturbed and harassed me that Pilgroin woman, for another whole hour and each time I cast her a peremtory, she redoubled her efforts. At this rate I would never finish the document, it seemed, but at long last I did. 

At long last I was done and she shrieked some a final blaze of tyranny my way. 

"That's not going to happen I'm afraid." The elevator doors closed and I was up the shute quicker than you could say give me an aneurism. 

There is something awfully  regrettable about wanting to see anything more from a man like me and further up his bad legs than you could already see through tattered slacks and with his nose so big it reminded one of a volcano. The nose was something of which I was 'ticularly self conscious and it would have demanded someone handy with an osteotome to look half decent. Moreover I was not going to take such measures while I was in town. Especially not a town that smelt this foul. The last thing I needed was a more perfect sense of smell in such a place.

Now, though I was no beggar, I wasn't in any position to be a chooser either. The room was full of dusty boards and dust worms, and dust cakes in cupboards that had no shortage of napthalene to stave off the life forms in them, but were completely overwhelmed. These were the kinds of worms that would eat the clothes off the rails if you don't clean the place up beforehand. The clothes off your very back. So I gave the place a solid dusting with a rag that had been left outside the door with some kind of pink concoction the maid had left outside in a bucket. I must have taken out a good thirty black bags of dust and by the end of it my nostrils were so clogged up I could hardly stay conscious. This was the price of a room that you got paid to live in. 

The former resident, fortunately, was nowhere to be found, either turned to dust himself or chased out by health conditions I could just only bearly understand (and just in time by the by). Speaking of time, now it was time for a shower, and that's no exageration, but in my present state of collapse, I just fell against the door on my way back in and the napthalene gave me strange dreams. Dr. Morris was there with his calm demeanor, and and Mrs Gillis too. Dr Morris in his artichoke coloured tie and white waistcoat and fatherly cognizance. He was chasing a bevy of cagey men away who had come in through the back of a hospital with an artillary needles, trying to jab me with them, and he was using all the thunderous authority vested in him to cause the hospital staff to go flying every which way. Kindly Mrs Gillis was just a spiritual presence, a rosy colored glow that came and went like the setting sun, projected against the wall with a twee smile in mechanical intervals and saintly singing,  and when I awoke, I was not sure I had even met her in real life. 

I was to clear a debacle in front of my door in the morning. Two dwarves dressed in devil suits were clobbering two angels that had come in through the eves. Feathers were flying everywhere and they were insistent that the angels had insulted their mother.

I was indignant. I marched outside and declared: "Irene Godly is Dead!" I slammed the door. I don't know where it came from or what it meant, but it seemed like a volcano at the time, and it got the whole thing settled. I heard the angel men get up as they realized they were behaving like fluttering fools, and I heard the two half-devils shake hands and make apologies in working-man Liverpool accents. It turned out to be a bit of class warfare that was dressed up as religion.