Random Elevator Story

How long has it been since I've been on an elevator?  Is it weird to think there are elevators I've been on that don't exist any more?  But there are!  Here's a random story about one of them.

From sometime in 1988 until the building was renovated in the early 21st century, I worked in a building on the University Of Texas campus called Batts Hall.  It was built in the early 50s, & I assume the elevator dated from around that time - it certainly seemed to need to be serviced a lot, & sometimes I felt a little unsafe in it.

But almost every weekday morning for almost a decade I got in that elevator around 7:45am, rode up to the second floor, opened the lab I ran (it began as a language lab then ended a computer lab).  Some mornings - lots of mornings - I would have to go back downstairs for a meeting.  (Sometimes I did take the stairs, especially if I were late.)

Some mornings - not every morning - not even once a week - someone would have written, in precise penmanship, using a sharpie perhaps, the phrase "Jesus was gay" on the inside door of the elevator car.  "Jesus" was often not capitalized - "jesus was gay."  The first time I saw it - at 7:45 in the morning! - I chuckled & wondered who the fuck was up so early to write in the elevator?  Then I worried someone would think it was me when I got off the elevator!

Classes began at 8, & students are naturally late for 8am classes, so I was usually on the elevator alone, but I'm sure there were people up & down to all three floors of Batts after I was in my lab.  My meetings were often around 8:30, so I'd go back down - I'd try to use the elevator if I had seen the scribbled phrase - & inevitably, "jesus was gay" was violently scratched out, sometimes in marker, sometimes in pen, sometimes with so much pressure it fucked up the paint on the door.

Personally I don't believe in anything supernatural & I don't worship the people I admire, so anyone is allowed to think whatever they want about them.  It doesn't matter to me if you think Leonard Cohen is an asshole, & if you want to write it on the walls of a tiny elevator car, be my guest.  I'll think it's weird, but I suspect anyone who knows Leonard Cohen will know it's false, & anyone who doesn't know who Leonard Cohen is will likely think it's about some undergrad who's pissed off a girlfriend or something.

& yeah, I know, Jesus is a religious figure, who some think is the son of a god or a god himself or one-third of a god-thing, or all of the above, so it seems disrespectful.  So what?  If even some of the stories about him in the gospels are true, he endured way more opprobrium than an early morning graffito in an unsafe elevator in a college building.  What would he think of the anger & hate demonstrated by the person doing more damage to the paint than the simple sharpie?  It's hard not to marvel at the intense insecurity of the person who came to his god's "defense."

By lunchtime, someone had been dispatched to repaint, or clean off the sharpie, & I'm sure it was all forgotten - until a few days or weeks later when it happened again.

When did it start?  I began running the lab in 1994, & I saw it for the first time in the Fall of that year.  When did it end?  The whole building was gutted & remodeled - although I think they saved the elevator shaft though not the elevator - sometime in 2003 or 2004.  I had stopped running the lab in 1999, so the last I would have seen it was spring of that year.  (I worked on the ground floor then.  Not much need to go upstairs.)  I can't recall if I did - but I remember seeing it a lot.

Oh my gosh I want so badly to end this with the confession "It was me all along!"  But it wasn't.  I suspect it was someone who worked somewhere else in the building - the Spanish & Portuguese Department was on the second floor, where my lab was, so perhaps it was a disgruntled employee.  Maybe a grad student?  I never knew.  There were simply too many people in & out of the elevator for me to keep an eye on any "regular."

But perhaps that prankster made it a point to check up on his or her handiwork.  Maybe they even took pictures.  I have no idea why they would want to do such a thing, but I saw the whole chain of events happen more than a dozen times.  & there were days I never had to go back downstairs, or arrived late, or took the stairs.  I suspect if it were a scientific experiment, the results were the same every time.

How weird would it be if the person who did it found this blog post & wrote to me?  A twenty-year-old secret revealed at last?  Too bad I & this blog are hopelessly obscure.