She was a single mom,
didn’t smoke, and didn’t have any vices. She was just looking for a daddy to take care of her, her baby, her mom, and
she didn’t mind using her gifts to do it. But she wasn’t about to jump into
anybody’s arms. She’d been hurt a few by fast talking players, and so she became very
circumspect, selective.
I met Jorge there, a
cool dude, who was a mortician. We sometimes called him Ghoul, and he lived above the funeral parlor where he
worked. I forget the name of the place, but it was in a triangular building, like the
Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue and Broadway in Manhattan. Like any parlor it was glammed up,
and had a beautiful, winding, white marble staircase. It had a shiny golden
bronze hand rail, rising to the left as it climbed up to the second floor, and
into a long, kind of Twilight Zone looking hallway.
The second floor had
several private viewing rooms, and its walls were covered with lavender velvet
wall paper. Hung upon them were rich oil paintings of its stern looking founders, (some of whom looked like Vincent
Price), the sea, and picturesque pastoral scenes. These images also went up the
stairs to the second floor. At the bottom of the stairs, on the left was the
laboratory, which was locked during visiting hours, and on the right were the
restrooms.
The residential
entrance was on the east side of the building, and George’s apartment was on the second floor, right above the parlor, with
one door leading right into that eerie, freaking hallway. There were twenty or
thirty apartments in the building, and if you visited George, and didn’t know
about the funeral parlor, you would never know it was there.
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