Willie felt his stomach churn.
The cause wasn’t indigestion but the thought of spending even five minutes in the New Sphinx Hotel. New! There was nothing new about the narrow, four-story relic between a parking lot and a laundry in the 1000 block of South State Street. Of all the shit holes he’d flopped in during his years on the street, the Sphinx was the worst.
Willie paused for a moment outside a heavy wooden door flanked by two windows covered with slabs of plywood. Overhead a fire escape clung precariously to the front of the building. Good luck to anyone using that, Willie thought. The Sphinx was a four-alarm waiting to happen. Willie figured that the hotel violated every health and safety code in the book, probably overlooked by the city in exchange for payoff by the rich slumlord who lived in some ritzy suburb.
Willie sucked in a lungful of fresh air before he entered the small, unfurnished lobby. An old man who looked like a zombie surfaced from behind a beat-up reception desk.
“Wanna room?” the zombie croaked.
“No, I’m looking for a friend.”
“He gotta name?”
“Got lots of names. Try Marcus Washington.”
The zombie brushed a cockroach off a coffee-stained register that had emerged from beneath an open sack of Fritos and squinted through bifocals at the names of the guests.
“No Washington. I got two Marcuses. Johnson and Lawson.”
“My friend’s a big black dude.”
“That’d be Johnson. He’s in 415…Paid up for four days. Haven’t seen him since. He’s been sending out for food and booze.
Room service, Willie thought, provided by the skeezers, crack whores who worked the Sphinx for whatever small change and drugs they could scrounge from the all-male residents. Marcus must have hit a big-time lick to afford a four-day binge, even at the bargain rate of $15 a night.”
—Richard Rose ’54, from The Lazarus Experiment, Savant Books, 2011
