The Moxy Hotel

           Out my rear window every night, I see comers and goers at the Moxy Hotel.  On Thursday nights, groups of West Campus sorority girls travel in packs, stamping the asphalt in endless fleets of white Air Force Ones.  The Moxy's in-house restaurant, Zombie Tacos, and the neighboring bar Hole in the Wall usually attract an array of university students and fresh graduates draped in stylish, current-day trends.  "Current" of course means vintage hand-me-downs, as any twentysomething Austinite will tell you either with uninhibited excitement or the calculated appearance of fashionable disinterest.  Boasting sexual prowess but somehow never seen with a date, muscled fraternity brothers roar through the night, ripping the air with the impressive noises their engines make when they fiddle the gear shift just right.  Making clever remarks about these road warriors are the snarky collegiate couples.  Playing stimulating games of intellectual chess in their shared discovery of Marx and Steinbeck, the young lovers trade witticisms as they click-clack together, giggling up and down wet pavement glistening in golden streetlight.

Either ignored or unnoticed, a variety of nine-to-six laborers nurse new gray hairs, sleepy eyes searching for the city bus.  Bleary eyes of the blue-collar watch the young party crowd in their haphazard chase of intoxication.  Clockwork of inexperience keeps the youthful fed while time-tested cogs creak for sustenance. Chronos does not measure pain, but maturation does. Experience cracks scars of age which define the adolescent from the adult. A decent number of the grown-ups waiting at the bus ponder youth's fleeting flame, whether with a bittersweet smile or just plain bitterness.  Those bitter souls can rest easy that some of these smooth-skinned hooligans will one day join them on the bus.  All the while, long beards obscure faces caked with years of dirt, deliberately abandoned on the benches outside the hotel.  Some live in their own world, muttering to themselves about the demons who drove them out to their permanent home in the gutter. Once the pretty students and their intelligent friends are safe inside the doors of the Moxy Hotel, they needn't see or smell these unfortunate souls again.  The longbeards seem too windburnt and tired to care, their hopes and dreams dashed into a constant haze of starvation and struggle.  The short distance between they and the vintage-shoppers' expensive liquor is split by tinted glass.

And yet the glass remains unbroken, the bus keeps on a-goin', and cackling miscreants rip up the pavement, shaking the ground all night outside the Moxy Hotel.