I was walking out of the Stanley hotel one day when by the main entrance across from the office sprawled on the floor was this guy who was crying. I knew him from before but, I never really knew anything about him. I was aware that he was a cocaine dealer of some sort who also had a room in the Stanley on the first floor and that was about it. I had never had a conversation with him, I had never bought any cocaine from him and in general I had always thought it best to avoid him because of his business. These type of people are generally business oriented and since I was not a cocaine user at the time I never really had any business with him. Needless to say I really didn't know him at all.
So, while he lay there sprawled on the floor sobbing I carefully stepped over and around him on my way out. But, he stopped me. I can't really recall what it was he was talking about. I was to learn later upon that he had been robbed of some 2000 dollars in cash and drugs from his room and that was what he was crying about. A young fella too, no more than maybe in his early twenties, he looked decent enough, he stopped me on the way out the door and through his sobbing and reluctance to talk to me about what his real problem was I could understand nothing about what he had stopped me for. He said, something to the effect of how little problems I seemed to have and considering what I was to hear later compared to him that was quite true. He also mentioned how he had scene me around the hotel and had always thought or heard that I was quite a solid fellow and that we most likely could or would have been friends under different circumstances. He also went on the talk about the people in general of the hotel to be untrustworthy bums and that somehow he had been screwed.
Only now I wish I might have paid more attention to him laying there on the ground pouring his heart out to me. If I only knew his sincerity for a true friend at that moment in his life. But, I was eager to get going and get on with whatever business I had in store for that day. And, as these stories go in retrospect I have no idea anymore what could have been so important that I had to leave him there crying about his life on the ground.
So, here is what I said, 'Give this man anything he wants'. Now, with what authority and to whom exactly I was speaking to about him is known only to me thus far. As it was those days and still now I was speaking with the authority of an angel, God's angel to be exact. And, I was speaking then, as I do still now from time to time, to the other angels who are always around me. In my haste to leave the building physically I said rather loudly and abruptly as in order to finish our rather awkward conversation, I said to the thin blue air around me, I said, 'Give this man whatever he wants'.
And, with that air of abrasiveness I got up and left the man sobbing on the floor. Whatever, it was that I had to do that day got done. In all likelihood I probably had a doctors appointment to make and that is why I was in such a hurry to leave on time. On the other hand I am not always a very sociable person when I am in those type of horrible surroundings like is at the Stanley hotel when I stayed there. I am always trying to find my way out of those types of situations and back to some world of normal decency that I can finally call home. And, as such I did not spend anytime at the Stanley hotel trying to make friends, nor connections nor anything else for that matter really but to stay there because I had no other place left to go.
But, anyways by the days end and by the time I came back to the hotel from whatever, presumably, had kept me from being with this man longer as he sobbed incoherently on the hotel lobby floor, he was dead. I don't remember his name but, apparently some time after I left and before I arrived again he had gone into his hotel room and hung himself with a belt from the light fixture. That poor young fella. Barely twenty five, handsome and popular as it were among the other tenants had hung himself over a 2000 dollar drug debt.
But, in private what stung was my rather rude comment to nobody it would seem and the way I had stepped over him to get out of there only to find out he had committed suicide because he couldn't name a single good friend in the Stanley. And, that is what he had confided in me. I don't know if I had been able to save him if I had stayed, maybe. But, it was my odd comment and my complete feeling of having the actual authority to command something like that to come about. My only condolences to him, his family and myself is that if that is truly what he wanted then, then through God's good grace as His messenger and angel of mercy, I am able to afford him such that he wanted knowing he has still then a safe passage to heaven above.
God bless his soul.
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