Henry Mosto ’24
Elevators With Strangers
“You can see how Stanley Kubrick influenced Henry Mosto’s writing, given his dark interpretation of the prompt, ‘What significant personal narrative is embedded in the everyday popular cultural artifacts in your life? In a well-organized, focused essay, write about a specific and pivotal experience that has intersected a specific element of popular culture.’
The reader can visualize the spooky and claustrophobic situation. Henry clearly thought about the impact of the specific details and his stylized and concise prose.”
—Professor Alysa Robin Hantgan
*
Elevators feel endless with a stranger. You aren’t trying to be rude but you feel like you need to get out.
Something on the floor is sticking to my shoes but I ignore it, thinking this ride will end in a second. My former girlfriend and I had no purpose in this elevator ride. We were just wandering around our hotel. You don’t know if it’s going down or up.
He peed, medically alcoholic smelling urine dribbling on the floor. I don’t know what is happening. He’s 56, we’re 14.
Trust is consistently unreliable. An expanding and shrinking force within us. At a certain point, before forms of trauma unearth tenderness within ourselves, we naturally trust people easily. Gradually, through experience, we naturally retreat further into our interpersonal shells. The same way an elderly woman walks slowly even when she is not in pain, there is a fear of experiencing more pain from a past trauma.
Five floors left. Standing in this grown man’s aromatic urine, I notice a fidget spinner with his sausage thumb lodged inside of it spinning around. His eyes look lost and scared, but the children’s toy and flamboyant attire project innocence, or an attempt to regain it. Weighing roughly 250 pounds and being 6’4”, I know he can kill both of us in an instant. And it would’ve been accidental too. Like a lion stepping on a moth.
I think I first lost trust through some not-so-noteworthy childhood experiences with my parents and friends. Simple retractions of promises or backstabbing reaffirm the need for social and physical caution. Retracting Lyme disease, from lying in the grass or scraping a poison ivy plant when cavalierly running through the woods all make you move with forethought.
I don’t remember anything he said, because every breath or motion he made prompted me to picture each possible scenario that might follow any given reaction I might have. If I stop him from walking towards us, he could crush my face into the miniature elevator buttons without breaking a sweat. If i scream or call the police this could cause similar aggravation.
Everybody trusts art because it was not made for us or by us. Art is a purely pre-formative and expressive form of communication that does not change unless we want it to. You can watch a Kubrick film or stare at a painting until you don’t want to. Its availability will never surprise you, and we become completely invested in the art of the experience.
He makes three paces towards my then girlfriend, Corey. Slowly and sluggishly and incoherently, he’s attempting to communicate with her or both of us. All I’m seeing myself doing is physically striking him or stepping in her way to act as a barricade. But much like an encounter with a bear, your fear is stronger than your courage.
2016’s Blonde by Frank Ocean and Radiohead’s pre-2010 to current-day discography acted as integral parts of my nostalgic memorabilia. Whenever I listen, I’m transported back to the time of turning points and reaffirmation in my lack of knowledge. For the same reason they acted as emotional bedrocks of consistency then, they mean something different now that a further exterior of doubt has developed.
The man gropes Corey’s breast with a fidget spinner in hand as the elevator doors open. For probably five seconds my 14-year-old mind and body freeze completely, and I feel nothing. I want so much, but I genuinely feel nothing. Once his finger moves from pressing into her nipple to attempting to fully grab her we run out the elevator splashing the urine on the ground and he stands totally still looking emotionally hurt.
The initial shock of the assault results in Corey running away crying and me running to the front desk, attempting to get the cops called. The man working at the counter is clearly unable to understand what I’m asking. The situation overtook me, and I screamed at this innocent man, who is just unable to understand me. Shoving him out of the way, I step behind the desk to use the telephone and call the police.
Apparently, the man ran away. The cops are questioning us, but it doesn’t matter. I should’ve been the man and risked myself, so that he never touched her. I wanted to be dead rather than to live with the guilt that I could have possibly stopped this life shattering assault. Still in shock, it seems like a hallucinatory image when i see the man walking towards the front desk from outside the hotel.
The initial questioning of Corey and I concludes, and I’m silently sitting by the front desk, listening to Blonde, when I see him approaching. Before I have a chance to say anything, the officers are directed towards the man. I trail behind them and wait in the vestibule between the entrance and lobby. Headphones still in, Frank Ocean’s “Pretty Sweet” plays.
“Pretty Sweet” is one of the more abrasive and striking songs on Blonde, a relatively minimalistic album. Using a children’s choir for the majority of the vocals, there is a painful juxtaposition of this distorted nostalgic music playing within my headphones and the assaulter that I am viewing. Only separated by a sheet of glass, I still feel so separate from the images. Four officers are attempting to straddle this man without the use of tasers, but once he is clearly fighting back, they have no choice.
This behemoth of a man is convulsing on the cobblestone hotel entrance. Blood spills on the entry mat, and an officer uses a counterfeit Gucci slide as a makeshift club. The rattling hi-hats of “Pretty Sweet” are circular, like the repetitive sound of a moving train. Somehow, even in the moment, I’m so separated from the situation that I’m aware of the artistic experience.
My pleasure in seeing this man physically hurt stays with me to this day. Am I trying to distract myself from the guilt of what I could’ve done? Is there no way to feel love for the rapists and pedophiles of society? Just because he ended up in a mental institution, as I would generally want to happen to a similar situation, doesn’t mean that this provided me or her any catharsis. There’s no grandiose conclusion or thread of growth that can be drawn from this. To quote Brett Easton Ellis, “Even after admitting this, there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself, no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling, this confession has meant nothing.”