Elevator Adventure

If I were ever to write a coffee table book, I think it would be about things that have happened to me or in front of me in various elevators throughout the course of my life. Some depraved, hilarious, scintillating stuff happens in elevators, you know?

For example:

Today I got on the elevator on the 25th floor of my building. I was going down. On floor 19, the doors opened and a verrry old man got on. He was basically the embodiment of the color gray. Gray hair, gray skin, gray wrinkles, gray eyes, grayish/bluish clothes. Gray walker.

He was not a fast-moving gentlemen, what with the lifting of the walker and the thrusting of it forward and the slow stepping. (Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat.) He was slow enough, in fact, that the doors nearly shut on him twice in the amount of time it took him to cross the "threshold". Once he was (finally) in, he stepped to the back of the elevator and leaned against the handrails, exhaling heavily.

I zoned out on the little flat screen that displays today's headlines in the elevator, awaiting our arrival at the lobby. I heard the *ding* signaling our approaching floor, and as the doors opened (I was still reading headlines), I heard a second sound. The old man. Saying the following, with true horror in his raspy old voice:

"OH. MY. GOOOODDD."

As you can imagine, this was a bit unsettling. I looked up, and followed his slack-jawed stare beyond the elevator doors, where our next passenger was waiting. You see, we hadn't arrived to the lobby. We were on the 13th floor. And our newest passenger was a giant.

Well, a giant woman, anyway. She easily tipped the 400 lb mark. In fact, standing outside the elevator, she almost seemed too wide to fit through the double doors.

The old man was near apoplectic about this development. He wheezed, and, still wide-eyed and grimacing in revulsion, took his hand off his walker and clamped a death grip on the handrail inside the elevator. He then spread his legs, as if bracing for the elevator cables to snap under the weight of our new companion, sending the whole box hurtling through space. This man was honest to God afraid the woman was going to break the elevator and kill us all.

As you can imagine, this was both terrible and incredibly funny. So much so that I had to remind myself to shut my own mouth and wipe the look of gleeful horror from my own face.

As the large woman stepped onto the elevator, the old man shrunk back into his corner, still gripping the handrails and "getting low", with his legs spread wide as if he were in a defensive basketball stance.

The large woman then turned around to press the "door close" button, and it just got better. She was one of those HouseSpiders. By which I mean she had the shape of those spiders you find in your house that have huge, disproportionate backs full of tiny baby spiders, which spill out and scatter when you squish the mother. In other words, this woman had a heinie the size of a second normal human being.

She adjusted, backing further into the elevator as the doors shut, and I had to again close my own mouth and stifle a snort as the old man reached out his right hand (the one holding his walker), and gave her rear end a little nudge with his closed fist, just to let her know he was there.

It was priceless. This old man was so frightened that he'd be crushed by this large woman's sizeable behind that he actually gave her a little bump for good measure. I nearly peed.

I swear to God if a book called "The Life of an Elevator" comes out now I'm going to just totally lose it. The only good news if this happens is that no one reads coffee table books, (particularly when comprised of short stories) so it will probably flop, right?