SEYBOLD BUILDING: INTERIOR: FIRST STREET ENTRANCE

Come through all breeze on North West First Street, then straightaway the grey and dark grey diamond tiles patterning sieve of dark grey diamond tiles (or perhaps the sieve is light grey?). 20 feet to your left, the stairs for the mezzanine, which you won't want to take unless you need dull gems from Italy or like a horse mane brush with corral inlay.

Prime storefronts jut out and blaze the lucre in their windows; their displays: their most valuable, encrusted, gleaming champaigne soap bubbles on headless, velvet displays. House of Byzantine horrors, half-limbs and sample shoulders, half-conceived but for their flank wheren lay a whopping piece of metal exuberance.

The first stores on your sides as you come in are Aaron's Jewelery & Diamonds and Aruba Gold Jewelers, but I remember a time in the early 90's when a whiz kid from Italy had an expensive glass shop at the entrance that sold fragile oil and vinegar glass dispensers that held both liquids simultaneously in the glass dispenser at the same time, but separated them by a clever bladder or some shit.

And, this dude was there for a couple of months before his fragile glass outpost crumbled; he grew dependent on pain pills and turned into a pillhead and nearly lost his monthly allowance from some castle in Tuscany.

Immediately after, a mosaic on the tile floor that must take up just about 30 feet, in which a topaz frame is festooned in a beige background so that two brown tile X's fasten the ends of the mosaic to the (dark-grey/light-grey) sieve-expanse.

Straight ahead, jutting out of the ground, a parapet that holds the staircase for the sotano, and about 30 feet beyond that, the security guard Octagon-kiosk, an embattlement manned at all times by at least two security guards that are also weekend pilots for Hermanos al Rescate.

Inside the Octagon-kiosk, just below chest level, the panels all closed-circuit television screens, maybe 4 inches by 6 inches, with very little actual counterspace to let's say write notes or enter security log data. On the netherside of the Octagon-kiosk, an alphabetical index of all the DBA's, LLC's, and Proprietorships that can be found inside.

The slope of the entrance drains towards the sotano stairwell, but at such a small grade that it's hard to tell if it's slanted at all. In between the Octagon-kiosk and the sunken sotano stairwell lay a hole in the wall cafeteria for the more discerning bastards and mistresses.

We almost never went to eat there, and not because the food was bad. We almost never went to eat there because the air was no different than in the taller, in the tin can office on the sixth floor at the far end of the floor, by that cluster of Brazilian castiadores.