Susan meets Justin Bieber in an empty elevator.
It was late and Susan just wanted to go to bed after paying her last respects to her friend's mother who had died. It was an Irish funeral and there was as much drinking and laughing at her childhood friend Colleen's house as there were tears and sadness. Surely knowing that it would, she needed to get out of there before something happened, as always it did.
Even at a funeral, the same old thing happened with drunken men hitting on her. Whispering their inappropriate words in her ear, they squeezed her ass and groped her breasts. They never failed to show her the lust they had for her by putting her hand on their cocks through their pants when pushing her up against the wall and trying to kiss her. Even old, Father Monahan trying to corner her in a room alone was intent on getting her down on her knees to give her more than just his blessing.
Tired of fighting off men, she was tired of being sexually abused by drunken men and/or men who just wanted her for the night. She swore that the next man who touched her in an unwelcomed, sexual way would be sorry. Wishing and wanting to have a real loving relationship with a kind and caring man, she had enough of one night stands. Surely, being the good and attractive woman she is, there's someone out there for her.
She hasn't dated anyone since her divorce and before when she was the faithful wife, albeit pressured by her Ex to experience the swinging lifestyle. Her ex-husband was the one who wanted to watch her having sex with other men and woman. Only, when she did what he wanted her to do, he deemed her a slut and dumped her.
Thinking back now of her swinging days, it was more good than bad. She met a lot of nice people. Normal but for their abnormal and overactive libidos, she's glad she experienced that dark side of sexuality with having multiple partners while her husband watched, joined in, or masturbated in the corner.
With a watchful eye of every man around her at that late hour, she walked the four blocks to her hotel. It was cold but she didn't care. She didn't dare take a ride from anyone at the funeral. They were all too drunk to drive. Besides, having been down that road many times before when accepting a ride from someone, with desperate groping and forced kissing while exposing their cocks to her, once getting her alone, they all tried to get her to have sex with them in the car.
Spending the last hour with Colleen's friends and family singing old, Irish ballads and lullabies, she left there on a high note. Her apartment was stuffy with wall-to-wall people all talking at the same time and breathing in the same stale air. She needed some air and she needed to clear her mind of the alcohol before it was too late and she did something stupid with someone that she'd regret later. Eager to leave, she had enough and Colleen's apartment was too close to the hotel to even bother taking a cab. Besides, being that she had a little too much to drink too, the chill of the night air felt good.
Finally alone with her thoughts, she remembered Colleen's mother, Maureen, and how kind she had been to her through the years. After losing contact with her friend for so many years, she was sad to receive the phone call from Colleen that her mother had passed. Much has happened since the good old days when she'd walk over the bridge from Boston to meet Colleen in a South Boston bar to hopefully meet someone nice from the old neighborhood.
Now, after her marriage and subsequent divorce, she was alone. Then, after losing her job, being unemployed for a long time, and then losing everything in a flood, sometimes she wished she was dead too. Living life, on the other hand, has been hard, very hard. Compared to living, dying was easy. Yet, knowing there were so many others worse off, she was lucky that she had her health.
Now living in the cramped space of a spare bedroom in a house owned by a kind Mennonite woman, better than sleeping in a shelter, eating in a mission, and roaming the unsafe streets of downtown Harrisburg as she did this time last year, she was lucky to have a roof over her head. Yet, feeling suffocated and trapped in the middle of nowhere on a farm with no one to talk to, sometimes she felt as if she was a prisoner in a minimum security women's prison with Margret, her hostess as her warden. Her own worst enemy by allowing the stress of her situation to get to her, she needed to get her life back. She needed a job and her own apartment.
Always trying to fix her up with one of her four sons, her mind suddenly flooded with Colleen's mother telling everyone how pretty she was while making her feel so very special and so very loved whenever she was in her friend's house. Unlike her selfish, self-centered, and self-absorbed mother, Maureen was a kind and selfless mother. That was then and this is now. Times have changed and life must continue even if it meant continuing without Colleen's mother.
No one made a big deal over her any more in the way that Colleen's mother had, except for men who wanted to fuck her and men who wanted her to suck them. It was the same, sad, old story with men. All the men she ever met were married or divorced with one foot in the past and the other in the present. Content just to sexually use and abuse her, none of the men she knew were wanted to leave their wives enough to put a ring on her finger. Filling a role and a need, she was nothing more than a little something on the side. Overdue for a stroke of luck before experiencing a stroke herself from being so alone, she wished something good would happen to her.
There was a limousine pulling away from the curb of the hotel when she walked up to the front door. She wished someone would whisk her away in a limousine. Pretending that she was someone special to somebody, she wished someone would take her out on the town and treat her to dinner and a movie. She wondered who was in the limousine or who they dropped off at the hotel.
It was a swanky hotel, a place she could never afford if Colleen hadn't paid for her bus fare and hotel room. She wished her life was different. She wished she was rich. She'd love to have a wedding reception here. She wished she had married better. Married to a Boston cop who made good money between overtime, special detail duty, and court appearances, she wished she had Colleen's life.
Somehow life isn't always fair and things don't work out as planned. While Colleen always struggled in school, it's funny how Susan was always the smart one, the one who excelled in school, the one who's now drowning in unpaid student loans for the sake of graduating college in the hopes of getting a better job and having a better life. Even though she worked hard to obtain her American dream life, it's somehow oxymoronic that she's still unemployed, still homeless, and still living in the spare bedroom of a kind Mennonite woman. Now Colleen, barely a high school graduate, has everything that she wanted, a good husband, a happy marriage, three children, and a nice home, while she has nothing and no one.
Susan walked through the revolving shiny brass and glass doors and through the huge chandeliered lit lobby of the hotel. Reverberating off the marble walls to fill the high ceilings as if she was arriving late for Sunday mass, her heels echoed her notice on the Travertine tiles that she had arrived, even though she hadn't. Nothing more than an interloper, a fake, a phony, and a fraud, her travel expenses were paid by Colleen for her to be here to pay her last respects to her friend's deceased mother.
The hotel, except for the doorman out front, and except for the desk clerk in the lobby, was empty. Everyone who was supposed to arrive had arrived before everyone who was supposed to leave filled the lobby to leave in the morning. No doubt, all the guests were in their rooms having sex, watching television, or sleeping.
With an entire bank of empty elevators waiting for her, as if destine to take this particular elevator at this particular time, Susan walked on an elevator that the doors were already open. There was a kid wearing a black, leather jacket leaning innocuously against the back wall. She took note of him but didn't get a good look at him because he had a head full of long hair and had his head down as if he was drunk on alcohol, high on drugs, and/or sleeping. She pushed her floor and the elevator doors closed. She pushed her floor again when the elevator wasn't moving.
"The elevator isn't moving," she said obviously waking him up when he yawned and stretched to the man behind her.
"Don't you know who I am?" He looked up at her and smiled.
"Should I know who you are?" She looked at him with the attitude of a woman who just wanted to go to bed alone.
"Yeah," he said. "My face is plastered everywhere."
He pushed his hair out of his beady, brown eyes and looked at her with his pearly, white teeth. He was just a kid. He couldn't have been more than twenty-years-old and 5'7" tall. With her high heels and hair up, she towered over him by six inches.
"No, I don't know who you are but you look a little like Justin Bieber," she said with a laugh. "Sorry, if I insulted you by saying you looked like that goofball," she said.
"I am Justin Bieber," he said striking a pose. "I accept your apology," he said with a bow.
"No kidding. Wow. Every teenyboppers' fantasy, I'm trapped in an elevator with Justin Bieber," she laughing before looking from him to stare at the closed elevator doors. "What should we do? Should we press something or call someone? There's usually a phone to call security," she said looking back at him in her inebriated fog before helplessly staring at the elevator panel.
Justin walked past her to insert his key to his penthouse suite. The elevator silently moved. Bypassing her floor, the elevator suddenly became an express elevator to the top
"You're very good looking for an old broad," he said leaning in to sniff her hair as if he was a dog and she was something to eat or hump. "You smell like cigarettes and whiskey. You smell like I do when I do Vegas," he said with a laugh.
"Thank you for your rude comment but I'm hardly old and I'm not a broad," she said insulted. "I just turned forty in July."
"You're old to me," he said. "I'll be nineteen on March first."
