We were spending the weekend at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago. After enjoying dinner at the Blackhawk restaurant on Wabash Avenue I pushed the revolving door for my wife and we walked into the comfortable, palm decorated lobby of the hotel, we stopped to take a look in the bar, but our friends had not yet arrived. We headed to a bank of golden door elevators. It was our plan to change into our evening clothes before meeting our friends for a night on the town.

Our room was located on the seventh floor. I pushed the up button next to Elevator 4. We watched the floor indicator arrow tooling down, then it stopped at number 2, the ballroom floor.
Thumping and banging echoed down the elevator shaft.

I turned to my wife and said, "Did you hear that? I hope this elevator is working okay. Maybe, we should take a different one."

Just as I pushed the up button for Elevator 3, we heard a long, sorrowful whine and then a half-hearted hee-haw.

"It sounded like a donkey, like it was hurt or something," my wife said.

Elevator 4 thumped to a stop, the door slid open and there to our horror was a little brown donkey, his throat slashed, blood pooling into an expanding pond. Standing over the animal like an angel of death was a man holding a knife blood dripping from the blade. One last faint hee-haw was uttered by the donkey. My wife and I could not believe the scene that unfolded before us. We stared at the man with incredulous eyes.

The man gave a shrug and said, " The jackass wouldn't move. I tried to push him into the elevator, but he wouldn't go. I had to get rid of him because it wouldn't do to have a donkey greeting people coming to a Republican fundraiser. "