Pleasure Palace
Richard Dinges, Jr.
Two rows of rooms, one stacked on top of the other, face out over a concrete drive and a line of parking spaces, one for each room, all wedged into the space once occupied by a one-and-a-half story Craftsman Sears Order Bungalow with a chain link fence in front and a backyard shaded by a bur oak tree, now long gone. In this human marlin house live nine young itinerant humans, both male and female, five in the top row and four in the bottom row, with one room allocated to community use pay washers and driers along with small wire cages for storage.
The doors on the upper level open onto a balcony that runs the length of the building, with stairs on either end. Each room has a door and a picture window with a view of an old large white house next door that has been converted into apartments rented out to other young itinerant humans of mixed gender. Inside are a small kitchenette, bathroom, closet, and a single room to serve all other purposes. All in all, it is a very efficient and practical design for young itinerant people without a lot of money, which is how it maintains a nearly one hundred percent occupancy with turnover usually occurring at the start of semesters at the nearby university.
In the middle of a picture window, in the middle room on the upper tier, a face appears between partially drawn drapes. He looks out toward the next house, and then down at the parked cars, and then at an angle past the alley and into the gravel parking lot beside a nondescript building with a sign that faces away toward the next street over, seen from this vantage only from the back. His face comes into focus only closer up, to be seen by anyone who walks up the stairs and across the balcony in from of his window. He seems lost in thought, or he looks for someone who has yet to arrive, or he simply looks for anyone with whom he can connect, even from a distance, and entice him out from the dark interior of his small abode. He turns away from the window and draws the drapes closed.
The doors on either side of his room are closed and the drapes are drawn. No sounds can be heard from the rooms. It is midday and quiet. They either sleep after long late nights or they are away. They are all students at the nearby university and they are probably in class or meeting in study groups. Only the young man in the middle room on the upper tier occupies the entire building at this moment, confined in his own thoughts and locked out from the other rooms by walls, doors with dead bolts, drawn drapes, and a lack of connection with anyone else who lives in the building.
Inside his small room, he sits down at the small table in the kitchenette and opens a book, one that he must read before the next day’s class. The words on the page blur and he is unable to focus. He feels secure in this tight little cubby hole that has become his home. The rent is paid. He has groceries for a week. His part-time job provides sufficient income to support a meager lifestyle and tuition for part-time classes. He believes he should feel fulfilled, as these are the choices he made in order to finish his degree and to begin the next phase of his life, when he can expect to feel fulfilled. This life is what he had expected at that time. Yet at times, he does not feel fulfilled by whatever may have happened in that particular moment.
He thinks about the nondescript building beside the parking lot he walks through on his way home from classes. He walked through that parking lot just this morning and looked up at the sign that faced the street, which he can see only from the back from his window. The sign was a faded blue neon that flickered the words “Pleasure Palace,” on and off, in a random pattern. He had never entered the building and did not know what type of business it actually was, perhaps a massage parlor or an adult bookstore. There were always cars parked in the lot beside the building, although he had never seen anyone enter or exit the door with no windows. The windows on the sides of the building were painted over in a sort of off-white like the rest of the building. As he walked past, he wondered what type of pleasure it promised, although he had no desire to find out. It would always be unknowable to him and he was comfortable with being left in ignorance.
He thinks about the young woman he passed coming up the stairs that morning when he returned from class. She had just left her room, closed the door, and turned toward him. He had not met her before. He knew nothing about her. She had short blond hair and blue eyes set in a round face. She had been looking down at what she had been holding. He does not remember or he had not noticed what she had been holding. What he does remember was the moment she looked up at him, met his gaze, and she had smiled. That smile had been a moment for him. He felt his face grow warm from a connection with her, with her smile that fulfilled that single moment. Then they passed each other and continued on their separate ways. The moment passed, yet he still felt the warmth from that fleeting glimpse of a smile that he carried forward with him into this moment.
The young woman was in a hurry. She was late for class. She had promised her parents that she was old enough now, mature enough, to live separately from them, across the state and hundreds of miles away. She could take responsibility for her day-to-day life. She would be prepared for class, buy her own groceries, make her own nutritious meals, and most of all, attend all classes on time. She remembered that promise specifically because her mother doubted her ability to read a clock, much less to follow a strict timetable on her own. Her mother had softened her father’s lecture about dating and about boys by simply saying to be careful. There would be no problems with boys, she thought, or with men for that matter. They were the last thing on her mind. Topmost was to achieve her degree and begin her professional life.
But she was late that morning and she burst through the door with a load of books and notes cradled awkwardly in her arms. She adjusted her grip to keep from dropping anything and then making herself even later. She looked up and realized she was nearly walking straight into someone, a collision that would initiate a catastrophe. She recognized him, someone she remembered seeing before, and then placed him as someone who lived a couple doors down from her. She had seen him passing by in front of her window, always with a serious fixed stare down in front of his feet. He struck her as the committed, disciplined person she wanted to be in the eyes of her parents.
Now, face to face, almost close enough to touch, with no pane of glass between them, with him looking back at her, he struck her in a different way. He had soft brown eyes and unkempt hair and a shirt with the tail half in and half out. She saw him as a doleful lost puppy who just needed to be picked up and held to be happy. The thought was silly and made her smile. He smiled back and then she was on her way again, eager to make it to class on time and disprove her parent’s apparent inability to recognize that she was capable of taking care of herself.
With his doleful lost puppy look softened by a slight smile, he had continued walking along the balcony. He was nearly knocked over when the door next to his burst open and another young woman backed out with a frenzy of waving arms and a loud flurry of words he could not understand. Flustered by the sudden appearance of the young woman, the emotion overwhelmed him and he could not hear the words through the pressure of the rage. The young woman straightened her halter top at the same time as windmilling arms toward the inside, with volumes of sound exploding from her lips. She turned and almost ran him over. Then the explosion evaporated with the softening of the muscles around her eyes and lips. She dropped her chin slightly, raised her right hand to her mouth, adjusted her halter top with her left hand, and gently excused herself as she slipped past him. He felt only a gentle push of air and a light flowery fragrance he could not identify.
At the open door, the young man who lived there appeared with no shirt or shoes, only wrinkled gym shorts and the frail shadow of a day-old growth of beard. The young man in the gym shorts stopped at the threshold, looked at his neighbor’s puppy dog face, and said hi, mainly because he had not expected anyone else to be there and he could think of nothing else to say. He had already forgotten about the girl who had left in a huff. His intense need for her had passed and now he felt only impatience with her and her histrionics. These displays of emotion conflicted with what he felt after his intense need had been fulfilled.
About his neighbor, he thought little, only that he was a shadow that passed by his window on occasion. There was rarely any sound that he could hear through his wall, almost as if no one lived there. He knew he himself should be quieter but it did not cross his mind until the noise and commotion had already occurred. It would have been helpful if his neighbor would make his presence more known by making more noise, or at least by having company on occasion, to remind him that someone was living next door. But he was quiet and the puppy dog look did not invite any sort of connection. After saying hi, he could think of nothing more to add, and he closed the door.
Before he could say hi back, or initiate any other kind of conversation, the door closed in his face. He did not really want to talk with this man who lived next door and who led such a tumultuous life. That was probably the third woman he had seen erupting through his neighbor’s door since he had moved in. So he returned to his own room and closed the door on that tumultuous side to life in the martin house.
The previous evening, he had heard loud whispers outside his door, which he kept open during the hot evenings to let in the cooling evening breeze. The whispers probably would not have been heard if the door was closed. He went to the door to close it and allow the whisperers some privacy. He saw the shadowed form of his neighbor in the dim light, and a young woman who leaned back against the railing, holding the top rail in two fists. This neighbor occupied the room on the other side of him from the neighbor who had loud arguments with an itinerant array of young women. This neighbor was usually quiet, very polite in passing, and had mentioned to him once that he was pursuing a graduate degree in finance.
As he was about to close his door, his neighbor turned to him. His neighbor’s face was lit by the glow of light from inside his opened door. His neighbor smiled and said hello, his face slightly flushed and his eyelids half-closed. His neighbor said they were just having a discussion about how to tell the difference between intoxication and someone experiencing a diabetic episode. The young woman, who he said he had just met that evening and did not introduce by name, was taking EMT courses and hoped to be certified before the end of the year. He turned to her and asked her to show how someone who is intoxicated appears. She released the rail and swayed forward, looked up from half-closed eyes and spoke several slurred and unintelligible words. She slumped back against the rail again, tilted her head and half-smiled with eyes closed. His neighbor then asked her to show how someone experiencing a diabetic episode would act. She repeated the same performance, lifted her hand and twirled her hand along with a slight bow forward. She staggered back against the rail again.
His neighbor stared at him with eyes hidden in shadows. He felt himself enter his neighbor’s thoughts and they made him shiver. There were no words in his thoughts, only an intense longing on the brink of rage. His neighbor did not want him there. He realized now that he did not know this man. This quiet polite man grabbed the woman by the arm and pulled her toward his door. She stumbled after him, whether in an alcoholic haze or from low blood sugar or on the verge of a diabetic coma. It did not matter. She was pulled into the room and the door closed. He returned to his own room and prepared to go to bed. He did not sleep well that night.
Now in this evening twilight, he opens his drapes and sits down to watch the light dim after sunset. The lights in the old house next door that was divided into apartments come on one by one. Most are obscured by curtains and only a glow the color of the curtains appears, with life trying to imitate a Mondrian painting. The largest window is directly across from his. The light is not on in that apartment. He rises from his moment of idle contemplation to close his curtain so that he can turn on his lights. Just as he stands up, the light in the window across the way goes on and reveals a room with a couch and a picture that appears to be a landscape on the wall above the couch. He stops where he stands and does not approach his own window.
He does not know why he stopped, perhaps because he is afraid that someone will see him from the apartment across the way before he can close the curtain, and he can remain unseen where he stands farther back in the room. Just as he decides it is safe to approach the window to close the drapes, a shadow falls across the couch below the picture of the landscape. He pauses to see what will happen next.
A woman in a white tee shirt and jeans appears in the framing of the window. She holds a baby in the crook of her left arm. The baby is in a white diaper and he cannot tell whether the baby is a boy or a girl. The woman looks down at the baby and he can see, or at least he imagines he can see her smile at the baby. Then she sits down on the couch, facing out her window toward his window, but still looking down at the baby. He cannot move for fear she might see him and believe him to be a window-peeping pervert. Then she pulls up her tee shirt and holds out her right breast to the baby. Right before his eyes, he witnesses them become one, first the gaze with locked eyes, and then the mouth and nipple and suckling eyes closed. He cannot actually see any of these things in detail, from this distance or through these windowpanes misted by dust and smudged by exhaust. He merely believes he sees them, driven by a strong desire to see them, or perhaps a feeling dredged up from some unknowable memory, only from his desire to feel connected to this moment and to their bond, a bond he no longer knows.
The sky darkens and disappears behind the faint rooflines and crooked tree limbs. The neon light from the business by the parking lot flashes pale blue reflections across the gray gravel. The parking lot light suddenly blazes on and reveals everything in a stunted image of shadows and dirty whites. Below him, he hears a mumbling monologue from the television set that always seems to be on in the room on the ground floor. He cannot make out actual words, only the vague patter of language spoken in an unending stream, without reason or meaning. There must be a message there somewhere, he thinks. Yet he never could make out what it was. He slowly closes his drapes in hopes his movement will be unseen and he can hide again, absorbed by the obscurity of his dark room, where he prepares to go to bed. He has early classes the next morning. He hopes he will sleep well.
March 2026
Richard Dinges, Jr.
Two rows of rooms, one stacked on top of the other, face out over a concrete drive and a line of parking spaces, one for each room, all wedged into the space once occupied by a one-and-a-half story Craftsman Sears Order Bungalow with a chain link fence in front and a backyard shaded by a bur oak tree, now long gone. In this human marlin house live nine young itinerant humans, both male and female, five in the top row and four in the bottom row, with one room allocated to community use pay washers and driers along with small wire cages for storage.
The doors on the upper level open onto a balcony that runs the length of the building, with stairs on either end. Each room has a door and a picture window with a view of an old large white house next door that has been converted into apartments rented out to other young itinerant humans of mixed gender. Inside are a small kitchenette, bathroom, closet, and a single room to serve all other purposes. All in all, it is a very efficient and practical design for young itinerant people without a lot of money, which is how it maintains a nearly one hundred percent occupancy with turnover usually occurring at the start of semesters at the nearby university.
In the middle of a picture window, in the middle room on the upper tier, a face appears between partially drawn drapes. He looks out toward the next house, and then down at the parked cars, and then at an angle past the alley and into the gravel parking lot beside a nondescript building with a sign that faces away toward the next street over, seen from this vantage only from the back. His face comes into focus only closer up, to be seen by anyone who walks up the stairs and across the balcony in from of his window. He seems lost in thought, or he looks for someone who has yet to arrive, or he simply looks for anyone with whom he can connect, even from a distance, and entice him out from the dark interior of his small abode. He turns away from the window and draws the drapes closed.
The doors on either side of his room are closed and the drapes are drawn. No sounds can be heard from the rooms. It is midday and quiet. They either sleep after long late nights or they are away. They are all students at the nearby university and they are probably in class or meeting in study groups. Only the young man in the middle room on the upper tier occupies the entire building at this moment, confined in his own thoughts and locked out from the other rooms by walls, doors with dead bolts, drawn drapes, and a lack of connection with anyone else who lives in the building.
Inside his small room, he sits down at the small table in the kitchenette and opens a book, one that he must read before the next day’s class. The words on the page blur and he is unable to focus. He feels secure in this tight little cubby hole that has become his home. The rent is paid. He has groceries for a week. His part-time job provides sufficient income to support a meager lifestyle and tuition for part-time classes. He believes he should feel fulfilled, as these are the choices he made in order to finish his degree and to begin the next phase of his life, when he can expect to feel fulfilled. This life is what he had expected at that time. Yet at times, he does not feel fulfilled by whatever may have happened in that particular moment.
He thinks about the nondescript building beside the parking lot he walks through on his way home from classes. He walked through that parking lot just this morning and looked up at the sign that faced the street, which he can see only from the back from his window. The sign was a faded blue neon that flickered the words “Pleasure Palace,” on and off, in a random pattern. He had never entered the building and did not know what type of business it actually was, perhaps a massage parlor or an adult bookstore. There were always cars parked in the lot beside the building, although he had never seen anyone enter or exit the door with no windows. The windows on the sides of the building were painted over in a sort of off-white like the rest of the building. As he walked past, he wondered what type of pleasure it promised, although he had no desire to find out. It would always be unknowable to him and he was comfortable with being left in ignorance.
He thinks about the young woman he passed coming up the stairs that morning when he returned from class. She had just left her room, closed the door, and turned toward him. He had not met her before. He knew nothing about her. She had short blond hair and blue eyes set in a round face. She had been looking down at what she had been holding. He does not remember or he had not noticed what she had been holding. What he does remember was the moment she looked up at him, met his gaze, and she had smiled. That smile had been a moment for him. He felt his face grow warm from a connection with her, with her smile that fulfilled that single moment. Then they passed each other and continued on their separate ways. The moment passed, yet he still felt the warmth from that fleeting glimpse of a smile that he carried forward with him into this moment.
The young woman was in a hurry. She was late for class. She had promised her parents that she was old enough now, mature enough, to live separately from them, across the state and hundreds of miles away. She could take responsibility for her day-to-day life. She would be prepared for class, buy her own groceries, make her own nutritious meals, and most of all, attend all classes on time. She remembered that promise specifically because her mother doubted her ability to read a clock, much less to follow a strict timetable on her own. Her mother had softened her father’s lecture about dating and about boys by simply saying to be careful. There would be no problems with boys, she thought, or with men for that matter. They were the last thing on her mind. Topmost was to achieve her degree and begin her professional life.
But she was late that morning and she burst through the door with a load of books and notes cradled awkwardly in her arms. She adjusted her grip to keep from dropping anything and then making herself even later. She looked up and realized she was nearly walking straight into someone, a collision that would initiate a catastrophe. She recognized him, someone she remembered seeing before, and then placed him as someone who lived a couple doors down from her. She had seen him passing by in front of her window, always with a serious fixed stare down in front of his feet. He struck her as the committed, disciplined person she wanted to be in the eyes of her parents.
Now, face to face, almost close enough to touch, with no pane of glass between them, with him looking back at her, he struck her in a different way. He had soft brown eyes and unkempt hair and a shirt with the tail half in and half out. She saw him as a doleful lost puppy who just needed to be picked up and held to be happy. The thought was silly and made her smile. He smiled back and then she was on her way again, eager to make it to class on time and disprove her parent’s apparent inability to recognize that she was capable of taking care of herself.
With his doleful lost puppy look softened by a slight smile, he had continued walking along the balcony. He was nearly knocked over when the door next to his burst open and another young woman backed out with a frenzy of waving arms and a loud flurry of words he could not understand. Flustered by the sudden appearance of the young woman, the emotion overwhelmed him and he could not hear the words through the pressure of the rage. The young woman straightened her halter top at the same time as windmilling arms toward the inside, with volumes of sound exploding from her lips. She turned and almost ran him over. Then the explosion evaporated with the softening of the muscles around her eyes and lips. She dropped her chin slightly, raised her right hand to her mouth, adjusted her halter top with her left hand, and gently excused herself as she slipped past him. He felt only a gentle push of air and a light flowery fragrance he could not identify.
At the open door, the young man who lived there appeared with no shirt or shoes, only wrinkled gym shorts and the frail shadow of a day-old growth of beard. The young man in the gym shorts stopped at the threshold, looked at his neighbor’s puppy dog face, and said hi, mainly because he had not expected anyone else to be there and he could think of nothing else to say. He had already forgotten about the girl who had left in a huff. His intense need for her had passed and now he felt only impatience with her and her histrionics. These displays of emotion conflicted with what he felt after his intense need had been fulfilled.
About his neighbor, he thought little, only that he was a shadow that passed by his window on occasion. There was rarely any sound that he could hear through his wall, almost as if no one lived there. He knew he himself should be quieter but it did not cross his mind until the noise and commotion had already occurred. It would have been helpful if his neighbor would make his presence more known by making more noise, or at least by having company on occasion, to remind him that someone was living next door. But he was quiet and the puppy dog look did not invite any sort of connection. After saying hi, he could think of nothing more to add, and he closed the door.
Before he could say hi back, or initiate any other kind of conversation, the door closed in his face. He did not really want to talk with this man who lived next door and who led such a tumultuous life. That was probably the third woman he had seen erupting through his neighbor’s door since he had moved in. So he returned to his own room and closed the door on that tumultuous side to life in the martin house.
The previous evening, he had heard loud whispers outside his door, which he kept open during the hot evenings to let in the cooling evening breeze. The whispers probably would not have been heard if the door was closed. He went to the door to close it and allow the whisperers some privacy. He saw the shadowed form of his neighbor in the dim light, and a young woman who leaned back against the railing, holding the top rail in two fists. This neighbor occupied the room on the other side of him from the neighbor who had loud arguments with an itinerant array of young women. This neighbor was usually quiet, very polite in passing, and had mentioned to him once that he was pursuing a graduate degree in finance.
As he was about to close his door, his neighbor turned to him. His neighbor’s face was lit by the glow of light from inside his opened door. His neighbor smiled and said hello, his face slightly flushed and his eyelids half-closed. His neighbor said they were just having a discussion about how to tell the difference between intoxication and someone experiencing a diabetic episode. The young woman, who he said he had just met that evening and did not introduce by name, was taking EMT courses and hoped to be certified before the end of the year. He turned to her and asked her to show how someone who is intoxicated appears. She released the rail and swayed forward, looked up from half-closed eyes and spoke several slurred and unintelligible words. She slumped back against the rail again, tilted her head and half-smiled with eyes closed. His neighbor then asked her to show how someone experiencing a diabetic episode would act. She repeated the same performance, lifted her hand and twirled her hand along with a slight bow forward. She staggered back against the rail again.
His neighbor stared at him with eyes hidden in shadows. He felt himself enter his neighbor’s thoughts and they made him shiver. There were no words in his thoughts, only an intense longing on the brink of rage. His neighbor did not want him there. He realized now that he did not know this man. This quiet polite man grabbed the woman by the arm and pulled her toward his door. She stumbled after him, whether in an alcoholic haze or from low blood sugar or on the verge of a diabetic coma. It did not matter. She was pulled into the room and the door closed. He returned to his own room and prepared to go to bed. He did not sleep well that night.
Now in this evening twilight, he opens his drapes and sits down to watch the light dim after sunset. The lights in the old house next door that was divided into apartments come on one by one. Most are obscured by curtains and only a glow the color of the curtains appears, with life trying to imitate a Mondrian painting. The largest window is directly across from his. The light is not on in that apartment. He rises from his moment of idle contemplation to close his curtain so that he can turn on his lights. Just as he stands up, the light in the window across the way goes on and reveals a room with a couch and a picture that appears to be a landscape on the wall above the couch. He stops where he stands and does not approach his own window.
He does not know why he stopped, perhaps because he is afraid that someone will see him from the apartment across the way before he can close the curtain, and he can remain unseen where he stands farther back in the room. Just as he decides it is safe to approach the window to close the drapes, a shadow falls across the couch below the picture of the landscape. He pauses to see what will happen next.
A woman in a white tee shirt and jeans appears in the framing of the window. She holds a baby in the crook of her left arm. The baby is in a white diaper and he cannot tell whether the baby is a boy or a girl. The woman looks down at the baby and he can see, or at least he imagines he can see her smile at the baby. Then she sits down on the couch, facing out her window toward his window, but still looking down at the baby. He cannot move for fear she might see him and believe him to be a window-peeping pervert. Then she pulls up her tee shirt and holds out her right breast to the baby. Right before his eyes, he witnesses them become one, first the gaze with locked eyes, and then the mouth and nipple and suckling eyes closed. He cannot actually see any of these things in detail, from this distance or through these windowpanes misted by dust and smudged by exhaust. He merely believes he sees them, driven by a strong desire to see them, or perhaps a feeling dredged up from some unknowable memory, only from his desire to feel connected to this moment and to their bond, a bond he no longer knows.
The sky darkens and disappears behind the faint rooflines and crooked tree limbs. The neon light from the business by the parking lot flashes pale blue reflections across the gray gravel. The parking lot light suddenly blazes on and reveals everything in a stunted image of shadows and dirty whites. Below him, he hears a mumbling monologue from the television set that always seems to be on in the room on the ground floor. He cannot make out actual words, only the vague patter of language spoken in an unending stream, without reason or meaning. There must be a message there somewhere, he thinks. Yet he never could make out what it was. He slowly closes his drapes in hopes his movement will be unseen and he can hide again, absorbed by the obscurity of his dark room, where he prepares to go to bed. He has early classes the next morning. He hopes he will sleep well.
March 2026
