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Elevator Encounters

 

In the summer of 1980, several things happened. The most important, personally, was my move from Banff, Alberta to Vancouver, BC.  I’d been a chambermaid at a hotel in the resort town and hoped for an office job in the big city.  I bunked with a friend in townhouse in North Vancouver and, armed with a trusty umbrella, took the sea bus across the Burrard Inlet to work every day at various offices as assigned by a temp agency. I should point out that, since I couldn’t type, these jobs mostly involved filing various bits of paper into file folders in various filing cabinets all in alphabetical order. I did know the alphabet. One job involved feeding recipe card-sized pieces of paper into a micro-fiche machine. I sat for hours moving only my thumbs as I fed each card into the maw, imagining, but not actually writing, a novel. I digress.

Another thing that happened in the summer of 1980 was the release of the Brian DePalma movie Dressed to Kill, in which Angie Dickenson met a ghastly and blood-soaked end in an elevator at the hands of a transgender serial killer.  I’d met Angie at the hotel in Banff. Made her bed. She smiled at me in the elevator.  

Various filing cabinets at various office buildings aside, life in Vancouver wasn't working out as I’d hoped. Things that did not happen in the summer of 1980 included me finding any kind of a career path that was feasible and more defined than, “work in an office,” or me finding the man of my dreams for whom any kind of career would happily go out the window anyway. Had any man been smitten just once in the entirety of the 1980’s, I would not be writing this.   

My friend Charlene, who everyone called Chucky, lived in downtown Vancouver at the time and so I took the sea bus to visit her several weekends. Chucky, who was working as a legal assistant and well on the way to a thriving career, lived in a high rise with views of the water. I joined her in running down 34 flights of stairs one Saturday when the smoke alarms sounded in the building. It was only when we were gathered in the parking lot that she remembered she’d left muffins baking in the oven. She approached a firefighter (ring on left hand) to let him know that there would soon be a real fire if we were not allowed back into the building, pronto. By the time the false alarm was confirmed and hundreds of residents had inched their way back to their high-rise homes using three very slow elevators, the muffins were browned but edible.

Another Saturday, en route to see Chucky, a hand slid in and stopped the elevator doors just as they were about to close. A handsome young man dashed in and smiled at me (no ring on left hand). The doors swooshed closed and he took up a position opposite me without having pressed any of the buttons. With a delightful twinkle in his eye he said, “Hey did you see what happened to that woman in an elevator in that movie?”  

With one fluid motion I picked up my umbrella and pinned him to the corner of the carriage. “Well, it’s not going to happen here!” I growled, looking as formidable as possible.

The seconds turned to minutes. Have I mentioned the elevators were slow and Chucky lived on the 34th floor? The assent was filled with tension and perhaps a little embarrassment.

“I wasn’t going to kill you,” he said miserably as I positioned myself closer to the doors.

Maybe it was just a terrible pick-up line, and I’d scared off the only man in the decade who might have been smitten. Or, maybe he was a serial killer. Either way, without a trusty umbrella and cat-like reflexes, I never would have met the true man of my dreams in 1990. Nor, would I be writing this. 

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