Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog

Dashiell Takes a Tour of the Chelsea

     A couple of weeks ago we took Dashiell, who writes the column “The New Guy” for Gawker, on a tour of the hotel.  We showed him the Stairwell of Death and various interesting paintings, as he recounts in his column. 

            Apparently he wasn’t too impressed with the décor, remarking at one point that the place looked like a hospital.  “Yeah, a mental hospital,” Debbie and I both said, predictably enough.  He sat on our toilet and pretended to read Dee Dee’s Chelsea Horror Hotel.  I feel compelled to point out, it’s also the beat writer Herbert Huncke’s old bathroom—and we had a hell of a time keeping the junkies out of it, even after the old man had been dead for years.

            After that—or maybe before it, I don’t know--we decided to see if Dashiell would climb out on the fire escape and look in somebody’s room.  We told him it was Thomas Wolfe’s room or something ridiculous like that.  And sure enough he did!  There was a naked lady in there and she screamed and hid under the bed.  We’ll be sure to try this prank with other people we lead on the tour.

            At the climax of the tour we introduced Dashiell to a real live artist, Arthur Weinstein, who greeted him with a friendly, “How are ya kid?”   But once again Dashiell seemed strangely unimpressed, even after we told him that it was Arthur who had created the mobile on the tenth floor— which of course he thought was pretty cool.

            At the end of our tour we sat Dashiell down in the Vortex of Madness, otherwise known as the lobby, to see how long it would take him to lose his mind.  We figured he’d write a more interesting account of his tour that way.  Surprisingly, however, he seemed to keep his sanity.  Apparently he has an unusually resilient psyche.  Or maybe it was just because it was a Sunday and there weren’t too many certifiable nuts wandering around.

            (Oh, by the way, Dashiell, I was just kidding about the fire escape thing: that really was Thomas Wolfe’s room.  The naked lady could have been the ghost of his old mistress, Aline.  But most likely she was just a Midwestern tourist, albeit, hopefully, a live one.) -- Ed Hamilton

Happy Thanksgiving From Montana

We heard them come in late last night; several people checked into the transient room next door and all had to go to the shared bathroom in the hallway, one after another.  The next morning I met the last of them as he was clearing out, a thin man in his late thirties dressed in rugged winter gear with a Afghani hat and carrying a green army duffle bag.  He said he was from Montana, which (maybe) would explain the getup, and that they had driven thousands of miles in 33 hours to get to New York.  “Sounds peaceful,” I said, meaning Montana, not the drive.  They had one more night in New York, he said—though not, apparently, in the Chelsea—and then it was back on road, back to Montana.  (Maybe they came to see the Macy’s parade.) “I know this building has lots of history,” he said.  “You have no idea,” I replied and took that opportunity to hand him a blog card.  “Come here,” he said, leading me back into the transient room, “I want to show you a letter I left on the desk here.”

            Ever the suspicious New Yorker, I thought, Oh shit, it’s going to be one of those goddamn chain letters and now I’m going to be cursed if I don’t send it to a hundred people.  Instead, he had left a pen, a stamped envelope and a notepad with a note on it that said: “Write that letter today.  You know which one I’m talking about.  You’ll feel better if you do.”  “That’s nice,” I said, thinking, hell, nobody from New York would ever think to do that, we’re all too selfish, too caught up in our own lives.  The man said he had checked into a hotel several years back and had seen a note just like this sitting on a desk, and that it had led to a bout of soul searching with the end result that he had sat down at that desk and written a long, and long-overdue letter to his father (he left the details to the imagination).  Since then, he said, whenever he checks out of a hotel room he always leaves the note and the rest of the stuff.

            He asked if the maid would leave the note and I said yes, though actually I wasn’t quite so sure; it was just that I didn’t want to say no, since it was such a touching gesture in such a God forsaken place as this that I didn’t want him to take it back.  For the next few hours I listened for the maid and when I heard her rustling around over there I rushed over just in time to see her closing the pen up in the notepad and getting ready to take it away.  She said she didn’t know what that was about, but I told her she was supposed to leave the things and I believe she did.

            Oh, one more thing: I told the guy that I had just been to my cousin’s wedding in Montana this summer, though I couldn’t remember the name of her town.  Now I remember.  So in case your reading, guy from Montana, it’s Lewistown. (Ed Hamilton)

They're Out To Get Me

On a rainy night last week, Susan and I were cutting through Washington Square Park on our way to a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club.  A soggy homeless man wrapped in a blanket shambled toward us across the lawn.  “Excuse me people,” he said.  “I want to tell you something that the CIA doesn’t want you to know.”

            Always on the lookout for scraps of suppressed information to bolster my various conspiracy theories, I was eager to hear what the man had to say, but Susan grabbed me by the arm and hurried me along.

            “I’m J.F.K Jr.!” the man called after us.  “The knowledge of that could get you killed!”

            Gee, thanks for telling me, J.F.K.  I’ll be on the lookout for black helicopters.

            When we got to the edge of the park, two other street people, a man and a woman, were arguing on the street corner:

            “Where’s my money?!  Give me my money, bitch!” the man said.

            “I don’t have your money!  You owe me five dollars!” the woman retorted.

            “I want my money!”

            “Give me my five dollars!”

            Continuing to scream at each other to that effect, the couple stepped out into the street, blocking traffic.  Cars couldn’t get by, and they all started honking their horns.  The couple were standing right in front of a cab and the cabbie leaned his head out the window and yelled at them to get the hell out of the road.  I turned around to watch, and, doing so, stepped backward and stumbled into a tree well.

            “Don’t watch them,” Susan said.  “They’re trying to create a distraction so that someone else can commit a crime.  Do you still have your wallet?”

            I felt my pocket: I did.  Then I noticed I was standing in an inch-deep puddle in the tree well.  The street people really had it in for me tonight.  “I think they wanted to create a distraction so that I would step off into the mud,” I said. (Ed Hamilton)

PANIC AT CHURCHILL DOWNS

Susan and I were back in Louisville for a visit recently, and though we didn’t make it to the track, we did run into our old drinking buddy Brian, and he related this somewhat Bukowskian equestrian yarn:

               You know John Gordon?  I was at Churchill downs for his dad’s birthday party.  John and the rest of his siblings had paid to have a race named after Mr. Gordon for the occasion.  You can do that you know, pay $500 or something and they’ll name a race for you, put it in the program and announce it and everything.  When Mr. Gordon’s race came up I placed a bet on a horse to show and I won.  I was getting ready to go cash in my ticket when one of Mr. Gordon’s children said, why don’t you give that ticket to my dad for a souvenir?  He’s already got the winning tickets to win and place, and he just needs that one to make a set.  I didn’t want to part with it since it was $12, but John and the other kids kept bugging me and said, look, we paid for you to get into the track and we’ve been buying you liquor and food that’s worth way more than $12—we see you’ve had about 6 mint juleps already!--so I finally gave in and said, alright, OK, and gave Mr. Gordon the ticket. 

               Well, a couple months later it’s my birthday, and I get a card in the mail from Mr. Gordon.  Mr. Gordon’s never sent me anything before but now here’s a birthday card from him--and when I open it up there’s the $12 ticket!  So I thought, well, that’s nice; I didn’t know why he did it, actually, since I had forgotten all about the ticket, but I figured he just felt guilty that he had taken it away from me—especially if maybe he heard that I didn’t want to give it up.  So a week or so goes by and I’m walking around with this ticket in my wallet.  Finally a friend of mine, Mike, says he has to go to the track to cash in a ticket, and I say, you know what, I’ve got this ticket right here that I need to cash in too, so I might as well go with you.  So when we get to Churchill Downs, Mike gets in line for the ticket window and I give him my ticket to cash in too since there’s no sense in both of us standing in line.  When he gets up to the window, he gives them his ticket first, no problem, they give him the money.  But then when Mike hands the guy my ticket and he runs it through the machine, all these red lights start flashing and a siren goes off, and cops and FBI agents come running from every which way and they all converge on Mike.  “That ticket is a forgery!” they say.  And Mike points at me and says, “I don’t know anything about it!  I got it from him!”  And so they all converge on me too.  It turns out the ticket is a Xerox copy of the one I gave Mr. Gordon!  The real one had already been cashed in, that’s how they knew.  So I tell them the whole story of the ticket, and they say, “Sir, your story does not make any sense.”  “Why would I do it for only $12?” I said.  “If I was gonna do it I would do it for the trifecta or something where I win fifty-thousand dollars!”  “We don’t know,” the cops said, “but you did it.”

                So we had to go into the office and sit there and be grilled for a couple of hours.  They ran a background check on both of us to see if we had any outstanding warrants, and luckily neither of us did.  Thank God they didn’t arrest us, but the upshot of it was, we were banned from Churchill Downs!  Now, I go there all the time, I love the place.  And Mike is, like, almost a professional gambler, so he goes every day!  When they told us, we couldn’t believe it, and the first thing we both asked was, “For how long?!”  And they said, “What do you mean for how long?  For life!!!”  Now I don’t know why Mr. Gordon did that, and I don’t really know him that well, so I’m kinda uncertain about how to approach him on it, but you better believe I am gonna say something to him about this the next time I see him.

Yeah, I would like to hear what Mr. Gordon has to say for himself.  Next time we’re back in Louisville, I’ll be sure to ask Brian for an update. (Ed Hamilton)

THE GRAY MAN OF THE CHELSEA

An old Chelsea babysitter writes:

            Though I never lived at the Chelsea Hotel myself, I used to babysit for a young couple who lived there back in the early nineties.  They were not artists. The man was an engineer and the woman owned a small business and I’m not sure why they chose the Chelsea.  Perhaps because they liked to enjoy a hedonistic lifestyle (they had an active social life) or maybe they wanted to be thought of as artistic or daring.  Or maybe just because it was cheap.  That’s the only thing I can think of.  I was a teenager at the time, and since they were gone all the time I babysat for them nearly every day one summer, and they went out a lot at night too.

            Their little boy was six or seven years old.  They were very protective of the child, and tried to keep him away from the dubious characters that roamed the halls of the Chelsea, and they were always complaining to Stanley about somebody doing something immoral. In fact, that’s probably why they hired me, because I came from outside the hotel.

            Now, what I’m going to say is the God’s honest truth, though the couple won’t admit it and they called me a liar to my face, but one night they had gone out to a cocktail party and they came home really late with another couple and they were all talking and joking around out in the stairwell.  I wanted to leave and I was waiting to get paid. The cocktail party was in the hotel I think, or at least there was some sort of party on one of the lower floors.  All I know is it was really loud.  They lived on the tenth floor.

            The boy, for obvious reasons I don’t want to say his name, came out in his pajamas.  When we noticed him we all said, what are you doing out here, go back to bed, but he wouldn’t.  Instead he went to the railing of the stairs and looked up at the skylight.  He just kept looking up and finally he said, “Mommy, who is that man up there?”    His parents just laughed and said, “Oh, what are you talking about?”  But instead of dropping it, the boy became increasingly excited, pointing and screaming: “Mommy, why is that man up there?!”  “There’s nobody up there honey,” his mother said.  “That man!  That gray man up there!”  “There’s nobody up there,” his father said sternly.  “Get back to bed.”

            Then the boy got quiet.  He kept staring at the skylight, but he was quiet.  I probably should have taken him to bed, but it was late and I really wanted to get paid and go home.  “He’s just tired,” the parents said to their friends, who said their goodbyes and got on the elevator and went down.  But while we were distracted watching them leave the boy had somehow managed to climb up on the railing and stand there, I don’t know how he did it, balanced on the top rail.

            Luckily, they saw him.  “Oh my God!” they said.  “What are you doing?!” the mother said, and the father grabbed him back down from there before he could jump or fall.  The boy started shaking and shivering all over as they both held him, almost having an epileptic fit, and he peed in his pants.  The parents were drunk and had been smoking pot I think, but that really sobered them up quick.  I didn’t even get my money that night but I guess after that I forgot about it and really just wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as possible.

            Like I said, they say I’m a liar about this.  But what they can’t deny is that their son changed after this incident.  I can’t prove anything but I personally think he was possessed by some kind of spirit that night.  He was a really sweet kid before but after that he was either like a zombie or else he would go into a violent rage.  They told me to keep sharp objects locked up and not to let him out of my sight and not to go anywhere.  They were keeping him locked in his room at night because he would try to sneak out and one time he turned on all the burners on the gas stove and almost killed them all.  When you took him out him out you had to hold onto him because he would go for the railing, not rushing for it but like pulled to it in a trance.  And he was strong too.  A couple of times he got away from me and tried to climb up onto the railing, whether to jump or what I don’t know, but I was able to pull him back down and get him into the elevator thank God.  I don’t know if he was trying to get to the man or to throw himself over but it was clear that if he kept doing it he would fall eventually.  Darkness was bad, but an overcast day was the worst.  He tore his room all up when he went into his violent rages and he graffitied all over the walls in crayons in gibberish or an unknown language.

            After a few days of this I wanted to quit but the parents begged me to stay and said they couldn’t get anyone else.  These days they would probably say the child had ADD, and they got a doctor and medicated the child and it kept him quiet but he still couldn’t be left alone or he would go out into the hallway and head for the railing.  I lasted about two weeks, it was not worth the money even though they agreed to pay me double.

            Now I’ve done some research on this issue since then and this type of possession is never straightforward.  (Though I was a babysitter then I went on to get a college education and studied psychology and parapsychology.)  The boy was smart and he knew what was happening to him in a way though understandably he would often become confused and I think this was the source of his violent rages.  Sometimes he thought that adults were trying to lead him to the railing or even to throw him over.  He would scream and run away and hide in his room.  I guess in these instances he was not possessed and maybe he even thought the adults were the Gray Man.  When he was like this then you couldn’t get him out the door for anything.

            I mention this because of what happened next.  I was trying to take him out to the dentist one day.  His parents were stupid for making me do this but they insisted because they wanted to pretend that nothing was wrong.  I knew better by this time and I kept a tight grip on the boy and kept my body between him and the railing as I steered him toward the elevator.  This time though he didn’t go into a trance like usual and try to make it to the railing.  Instead as soon as we got near the railing he started screaming hysterically and struggling against me.  I held on and told him to shut up as I pushed the elevator button.  But he bit my hand and got free and ran back to the room and started struggling to open the door, turning the handle and pulling and  pushing against it.  Of course it was locked but he started screaming at me and cursing me, calling me a fucking bitch and every other name in the book, telling me to open the door and let him in or he’d kill me.  Alright that’s it, we’re not going anywhere I thought, and I got the key out of my pocket and opened the door.  He burst in and before I could get in he grabbed the door and slammed it on me.  I got my body in the way and stuck my foot in the door so he couldn’t close it all the way but he was freakishly strong and I couldn’t push it open.  He got the chain on somehow and he ran back into the apartment.  I couldn’t just leave him in there because who knows what he was going to do so I tried to stick my hand in and get the chain off.  When he saw that he ran at the door but I had my foot in  it and though it hurt like hell he couldn’t close the door.  Where he got the scissors I’ll never know, but the next thing I know he stabs me in the hand!  I screamed and pulled my hand out and my foot too, and he slammed the door and threw the dead bolt.

            So then I was standing there bleeding and I didn’t know what to do.  I was bleeding profusely and I couldn’t even leave to go to the hospital because what if the kid got out and killed himself?  Or killed himself in there?  I tried calling for him in my confusion, begging him to open the door but of course that did no good.  Finally I banged on all the neighbors doors and finally somebody opened up and gave me a rag to wrap my hand in.  I told the lady to call the mother at work and she came home and tried to act like it was no big deal and I was the one who was crazy and caused the problem in the first place.  I don’t think anybody believed her, but still!  I was the one who was trying to help!  I had to get five stitches in my hand at the hospital.

            There was no way I was going back after that, and I told them they should get the child institutionalized.  They didn’t appreciate that one bit but there wasn’t much they could say after the kid had just stabbed me.  The man paid me, overpaid me by several times, trying to pay me off I guess, to buy my silence and it’s true I didn’t say anything to anybody for nearly a year after that and by that time they had already left the Chelsea.  And New York, I think.  The reason I didn’t say anything was not the money but because they made me feel like I was crazy for even mentioning it.  I was just seventeen, remember.

            They got another babysitter, a girl in her twenties who I knew from school, and the kid drove her crazy.  She started taking drugs, maybe she had been taking them before, and eventually she had to get psychiatric help.  I think she may have even spent some time in a mental hospital.  The couple tried to blame her for their child’s condition, saying she was a junkie, but she had nothing to do with it since like I said the child was like that before.  I feel more sorry for her than for anybody to tell you the truth.  Except for maybe the child.  He was supposed to start school in the fall, but they held him back and I doubt he was ever normal again.

            Since then I’ve often thought of the Gray Man, wondered who he was, perhaps the ghost of someone who committed suicide by throwing himself down the stairwell.  Or maybe a more elemental spirit, a sort of evil pied piper of children.  When I asked the boy one time who the Gray Man was, he said he was smoke.  I don’t know whether this makes any sense or not, but this was when the boy was in a good, or rational state of mind.  The parents and their child disappeared into middle America and obscurity, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the Chelsea as possible.  The boy would be in his early twenties now which is typically when a dormant mental illness manifests.  I assume they’ve had him on medication all this time, but now that he’s an adult what if he decides to stop taking it as often happens?  There was a powerful attraction working on him, that I know, pulling him toward that railing and that skylight.  And so I have to ask, is this paranormal force still drawing him to the Chelsea?  Will he return to the scene of his childhood and his lost innocence?  And what form will his madness take in adulthood?  It seems only time will tell.

Wow, this place is even scarier than I thought.  Junkies and schizophrenics are one thing, but elemental spirits are more than I can handle.  Almost makes me want to live in the suburbs!  And this woman seems pretty authoritative too; after all, she’s studied parapsychology.  Keep your doors locked tonight!  (Ed Hamilton)

Harry and the Zombie

Today we kick off our blog-of-horror week. Everyday, leading up to Halloween, we will be running ghost stories set in our favorite spooky, old hotel. So don't miss a single scare!

            It’s well known that underground filmmaker Harry Smith was also a painter, folklorist and ethnomusicologist, and that he collected string figures and paper airplanes.  Less well know is that, during his time at the Chelsea, Harry kept a Zombie.  A disciple of uber-Satanist Aleister Crowley— whom he often claimed, much to his mother’s embarrassment, to be his real father—Harry was a consecrated bishop in the O.T.O., the Ordo Templi Orientis, a mystical order founded in Germany in 1902 and reorganized by Crowley in 1912.  The order is fairly eclectic, embracing all world traditions of magic, and that’s what led Harry to the study of Voodoo.  Traveling to Haiti in the sixties in order to fully immerse himself in the dark art, Harry soon attained the rank of Houngan, or Voodoo priest, amazing even seasoned practitioners with the ease with which he channeled the spirit of the powerful snake god Damballah Wedo.

            Raising the dead, however, is another matter altogether, and it would take Harry the greater part of the next two decades to attain the competence necessary to negotiate the intricacies—and to avoid the myriad perils--of the arcane reanimation ceremony.  (In Harry’s defense I should note that he did have a lot of irons on the fire.)  Finally, by the end of the eighties, he was ready to give it a go.  Knowing that the only place in New York that would tolerate such an abomination was the Chelsea Hotel, he made an appointment to see our illustrious proprietor, Stanley Bard, and he was moving his stuff into the Dowager of 23^rd St. that very afternoon.  Now, all Harry lacked was a suitable subject for his diabolical ministrations.

            Luckily, in my early years at the Chelsea, there were still several residents around who remembered Harry and the Zombie, and by questioning them at length I have been able to reconstruct the events surrounding the Zombie’s tenure at the hotel.  I spoke with a man—for obvious reasons he chooses to remain anonymous--who was involved in the actual ceremony, and what follows is an account, in his own words, of that terrible night:

At the time I was Harry’s disciple, so when he mentioned the idea to me I was all for it, since I figured with a Zombie slave around that meant less work for me.  One night this deadhead dude came over, and Harry sat him down on the bed with a big bowl of reefer and a bottle of Jack.  I had never seen the dude before and I don’t know where Harry picked him up.  But while he was busy with the pot and the liquor, Harry went around lighting all the candles around his tiny junked-up room, dozens of them, stuck with melted wax onto every flat surface.  Then he put on a ratty yellow robe and a cardboard headdress, and started chanting and dancing around, and it wasn’t long before he was possessed by the spirit of Daballah Wedo.

      The deadhead didn’t seem to care, or even to really notice, what was going on, until Harry began to anoint him with cat’s urine and a greasy, foul-smelling pitch-like substance.  “What the fuck, man!” the deadhead dude said.  “Smoke some more reefer, dude,” Harry said.  “Try some bong hits  this time.”  Harry drug a bong out from under the bed.  It should come as no surprise that the bong was shaped like a skull, except this was a real skull, bored out and fitted with a pipe stem and mouth piece.  “Try a couple of these Quaaludes, too,” Harry said.  “OK, don’t mind if I do,” the deadhead said.

      Harry pulled a cage containing a live chicken from under his bed, and grabbed the chicken out by the neck.  It was squawking and flapping and making a hell of a racket, but Harry quickly put an end to that, holding it down and sacrificing it with a sacrificial knife on a sacrificial altar made from the cabinet of an old stereo speaker.  “Alright, man! Fry it up!” the deadhead said.  “I got the munchies like a motherfucker!”  Harry squirted blood from the chicken’s all over the deadhead, and in general all over the room, and then he threw the headless chicken down and it ran around slamming into boxes and rolling in the cat litter.  “Hey man, be careful with that thing!” the deadhead said.  “Where’s the skillet.  Put that shit on the stove.”  Of course, Harry’s room had no kitchen, but that’s another story.

      Producing a handful of white Zombie powder, Harry blew a huge puff of it in the deadhead dude’s face.  The dude started sneezing wildly and blowing his nose on the blood-and-urine-stained sheets, but soon he grew quiet.  “Far out man,” he said.  “I’m hallucinating my ass off.  Where can I get hold of some of that shit?”  But soon he stopped speaking altogether and his eyes glazed over and he flopped back onto the bed.  I then helped Harry to strip off the dude’s clothes and prepare his body for the final stages of the ceremony.

            Now of course, as everyone knows, a Zombie must be buried in order to “die” and subsequently be reborn in his new incarnation as the living dead.  And further, as anyone who has had to keep dead pets in their freezer knows, it is not easy to find a place to bury a mammal—even a small one--in New York City.  Harry was able to accomplish this feat in the rooftop garden of the Chelsea.  Although he caught hell from the woman whose tomato plants he uprooted, in three days time Harry was able to dig up the deadhead and reanimate him beneath the light of the full moon as a fully-functional Zombie.  (As you might imagine, it was incidents such as this that led Stanley Bard to restrict rooftop access.)

            Over the next few years, Harry used the Zombie to go out for beer and cigarettes and the occasional sandwich.  Sometimes he sent him on more nefarious errands as well--I suppose that goes without saying—such as to stand in line at crack houses on the Lower East Side.  Toward the end, Harry’s legs hurt him and he didn’t like to walk down the hall to the bathroom, so he took a dump in a plastic bag and had the Zombie take it to the trash bin late at night.  The Zombie slept standing up in the hall closet, though sometimes Harry, a drug addict and somewhat forgetful himself, would leave the door ajar and the Zombie would get out and roam the hotel.  One time he was discovered huddled in a corner of the basement, nearly catatonic, his eyes glazed, blood and gore caked on his face and arms, the remains of a devoured cat strewn about him.  Stanley gave him a stern lecture and sent him back up to his closet.

            Now you might wonder at this last incident, as you might well wonder why none of the other hotel residents seemed to notice that there was a ravening, bloodthirsty Zombie in their midst.  Well, most likely, everybody who encountered him just thought he was a particularly down-and-out junkie.  For in truth, the Zombie—whose name, by the way, was Paul--was actually quite a bit more cogent and well-put-together than many of the nuts who were running the halls of the Chelsea in those days.  And besides, you know how self-involved these creative types can be.

            Only the hotel maids, hailing as they did from Old World cultures steeped in mysticism, understood what was going on.  They wouldn’t go anywhere near the Harry’s room, wouldn’t even clean the transient room next door to Harry.  Godfearing Christian women, they held no truck in Voodoo.  But eventually Stanley began to put pressure on them to clean the rooms in that corridor, as the area was beginning to smell like a privy on a hot August day.  Pushed to extremes, the maids knew they had to act to wipe this ungodly scourge off the earth.  Biding their time, they waited until one day when Harry had stumbled into his room and collapsed in a drug-induced stupor, and then, armed respectively with broom, feather duster, and bucket and mop, the three large, formidable women advanced into the dingy corridor to clean out once and for all Harry’s filthy den of perfidy.

            Knowing enough to go after the master rather than his servant, the maids found Harry passed out on his bed, immobile and seemingly lifeless.  They lit sacred deodorizing candles and took up their positions around the bed, chanting in the words of darkness forbidden by their religion of light.  After several minutes of such noise, Harry still did not stir.

            “He’s dead,” the maid with duster said, leaning over Harry.

            “Don’t get too close!” the one with the broom cautioned.

            The duster-wielder put her head to Harry’s chest.  “There’s no heartbeat.”  She poked him with her duster.  “He’s dead!  He’s dead!”

            “He’s dead, he’s dead!” the two of them chanted, dancing about the bed, poking Harry repeatedly with broom handle and dust mop.

            The third maid, wanting to get in on the fun, raised her sopping mop from the bucket.  “Should I give him the holy water?”

            “Yeah!  Give him the holy water, sister!” the other two sang out.

            And the third maid raised her mop from the bucket and swung it over her shoulder in a broad arc, strewing soapy brown water all about the walls and ceiling, and brought it down with a resounding SPLAT! right square in Harry’s face.

            Sputtering and cursing, Harry sat bolt upright.  His detailed knowledge of the occult allowed him to immediately intuit the gravity of the situation.  Grimacing at the worst hangover of his life, Harry reached under his bed and then sprung to his feet.  And then the tiny, bearded, gray haired man chased the three big maids down the hallway in his underwear, wielding a Ceremonial Aztec Dagger that he had stolen from the Met.

            Harry’s anonymous disciple had this to add:

The problem was, they forgot to sacrifice the chicken! Can you believe it! Anybody knows that!  For anything related to Voodoo you gotta sacrifice a chicken!  In Voodoo you gotta sacrifice a goddamn chicken to get outta bed in the morning!  What a laugh.  Harry and I spent many a night howling with laughter at their ignorant gaffe.

            In the end, however, the maids’ spells, amateurish as they no doubt were, seem to have weakened Harry.  For he gave up the ghost not long after, famously singing, “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying!” as he bubbled with excitement at the prospect of moving on to the next plane of existence.

            Naturally, Harry made one final attempt to exercise control of the Zombie from beyond the grave.  Unfortunately, he had spent too much time on filmmaking and ethnomusicology, and not enough time on necromancy.  It’s a competitive art, and those who succeed in it these days are generally narrow specialists.  Harry was one of the last of the Renaissance men, and ultimately he paid the price.  Alas, his like will not soon be seen again.

            After Harry was dead, as is well know, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs came to collect Harry’s papers and films and other artifacts.  Among these items was Paul the Zombie, still holed up in the hall closet.  Ginsberg, in an attempt to draw Paul back to the world of the living, attempted to coax him into a lotus position and persuaded him to chant a few mantras, but this had no lasting effect.  Burroughs, on seeing someone so down-and-out that even he could draw no inspiration from his existence,  finally decided to sell out, and the result was his infamous Nike commercial.  In the end, not even these giants of literature could figure out what to do with Paul, so they just left him in the closet, where he seemed happiest anyway.

            Although the rent on the hall closet was actually fairly low, especially since Chelsea was a depressed neighborhood at the time, Paul the Zombie could not afford it; still believing himself to be dead, he saw no reason to get a job.  And so, after a few months of hounding him, Stanley had no choice but to have Paul evicted.  Since then, in between stints in the mental hospital, Paul sleeps in a cardboard box on 22^nd street, sneaking back into the Chelsea periodically, or, when he manages to save enough money through panhandling, checking into one of the more modest rooms for a night or two of ungodly revelry. (Ed Hamilton) (Zombie Photos -- here and here)

Another Satisfied Customer

A middle-aged woman and her two teenage daughters had checked into the room next door to us at the Chelsea Hotel.  The woman, blond, Midwestern, overweight, was cheerful and seemed open minded—good qualities to have around this place.  Speaking to her in the hallway outside her room, I had to draw her out a little bit to get her to talk about her impression of the hotel.  After I got to know her a little bit, I asked, “So how do you like this place?”

            “It’s kind of idiosyncratic, isn’t it,” she said, tentatively.

            “I’ll say!  Although ‘Insane’ is more the word that comes to mind.”

            “Well, that’s not exactly what I meant,” the woman said.  “The people here have certainly been very nice.  I was referring more to the physical state of the hotel.”

            “Yeah, it’s kind of run down.”

            “Mmm hmm.  They showed me another room before I took this one, but for one reason or another it was unacceptable.

            “Surely it couldn’t have been any worse than this one,” I said.

            The woman looked at me askance.  “Well, I hate to say anything, since you live here.”

            “Oh come on, tell me,” I prodded her.

            She kept her voice low.  “They didn’t see it,” she whispered, indicating her daughters in the room behind her.  “It was a nice room, nicer than this one, clean, and it had its own bathroom, which was a definite plus.”

            “That’s for sure,” I said.  The room she was in now shared a bathroom with our room and two others.

            “But there were condoms scattered on the bed,” she continued.

            “Oh no!” I exclaimed.

            “No, listen, let me finish.  I didn’t mind that.  They were unopened.  And my first thought was: Oh, that’s so sad, the poor people didn’t even get to have sex.  But isn’t that nice of the maid to leave them for the next guest.” 

            “Yeah, that is,” I said.

            “And then I looked on the floor on the other side of the bed and saw the USED ones!”

            I cracked up laughing, and the woman, too, was unable to stifle her laughter.  Hearing us, one of her daughters called out, “Mom, what are you doing out there?!”

            We chuckled a bit more quietly.  I asked, “Now was it Stanley who showed you this room?”  I was rather hoping that it had been.  Stanley Bard is, of course, our illustrious proprietor.

            “Oh no, it was just one of the bellmen.”

            “And did he see the condoms?”

            “Yeah.  He didn’t bat an eye,” the woman replied.  “He just shrugged his shoulders and brought me up to this room.”  (Ed Hamilton)

Prehistoric Comedy

I was at the gym across the street from the Chelsea, the New York Sports Club.  The locker room was almost empty, which was odd, but I suppose that’s because it was early on a Sunday morning.  A fit and trim, rather bulked-up young man strolled past me into the shower room, half yelling, half singing at the top of his lungs: “La la la, banana peels and cream pies, the ancient times of comedy, prehistoric comedy, slipping on banana peels and pies in the face.”  He kept it up while he was in the shower.  I could hear him singing the whole time I was getting dressed.

            Finally, somebody else called out, “Would you mind being quiet?  I’m trying to shower in peace.”

            “I’m like this because I was shy when I was a child,” the loud guy yelled.  “I was late talking, not until I was two years old.  Even after that I never used to say anything, and my parents were worried there was something wrong with me.”

            “They oughta be worried that there’s something wrong with you now,” the other guy said. (Ed Hamilton)

TWO TALES OF URBAN MOXIE

I. Old Lady on a Walker

       A decrepit, bent-over old lady in a green dress and a pillbox hat was trying to make it across 7^th Avenue at 23^rd street.  Of course she moved very slowly and the light changed before she could get all the way across, and so she was stuck about half-way out in the street as cars whizzed around her.  Still, eyes set straight ahead, she struggled determinedly on, step by step toward the curb.

         A bread truck roared around the corner and headed straight for her.  It looked like he was going to plow her down, but instead he slammed on his brakes, stopping mere feet from her and laying on his horn.

            The old lady started, then stopped dead in her tracks, straightened herself up, and turned to face the trucker.  “Fuck you!” she said, and gave him the finger.

II. Old Man and a Motorcycle

            A bit farther down 7^th Avenue, at the corner of 21^st Street, a biker came roaring down the Avenue on his chopper—you could hear him coming for blocks—and sat idling at the light.  He was hugely fat, hairy, tattooed, with a tiny helmet atop his head.  The thunderous rumbling of his engine shattered the relative calm of the morning.

            An older man, somewhat disheveled in t-shirt and jeans, was walking along, and when he heard the chopper he stuck his fingers in his ears.  A look of intense irritation on his face, he strode right over to the curb and yelled, “Hey asshole, you think you got it loud enough?”

            The biker turned and looked at the older man.  He couldn’t hear over the din of his bike.  “Excuse me?” he yelled back.

            “You think you’ve got it loud enough, asshole?” the old man repeated.

            The biker shook his head in disbelief and, as the light changed, put the chopper in gear and roared off. (Ed Hamilton)

All Hopped Up and Ready To Go

     There was a clean cut, middle-aged man in a polo shirt and neatly pressed khakis sitting in the Chelsea lobby one evening.  He looked like a Frenchman—though maybe that had something to do with the bottle of wine he was swigging from.

            An old rocker in a tee-shirt and tight, ripped jeans burst through the doors.  Tall and thin with spiky gray hair, his face had the gaunt, drawn look of a heroin addict.  He was wearing huge headphones and dancing and bopping around to the tune in his head.

            To my amazement he bopped straight up to the Frenchman and tapped him on the shoulders: “Hey, you ready to go?  What are you doing, come on!”

            The Frenchman rose wearily from his chair.  He must have been the rocker’s handler.  He followed the rocker onto the elevator.  I got on too.

            The rocker never stopped dancing.  As we went up he was hopping and bopping all around so much that he was really shaking the old elevator.  Between the second and third floors he snatched the headphones off his head and proffered them to the Frenchman, saying, “Hey man, listen to this!”

            “I’m really tired,” the Frenchman said.  He did indeed have a French accent.

            The rocker shrugged and put his headphones back on and continued rocking and bopping.

            “Do you know who died here?” the Frenchman asked the rocker, loudly, so as to be heard over the music.  “I’ll bet you don’t even know that do you?”  He turned to me: “Can you tell him who died here?”

            “Everybody knows that Sid killed Nancy here,” I said.

            “You hear that?” the Frenchman said.  “You didn’t even know that, did you?”  Somehow, I got the sense that they had known Sid and Nancy, or at least run in the same circles.

            The rocker didn’t pay him the least attention.  He kept on rocking, and when their floor came he hopped off the elevator and bopped on down the hall. (Ed Hamilton) (Painting, "Angel of the Lobby" by David Combs)

VORTEX OF PSYCHOSIS

            The lobby of the Chelsea Hotel is the vortex of the building’s fabled madness.  I rarely spend much time there, since, well, my tender psyche can’t withstand the heavy spiritual and paranormal onslaught.  But one night I was feeling particularly reckless, and I so I had a seat in the middle of the crowded lobby to wait while my girlfriend Susan was getting ready upstairs.

            None of the regular lobby-sitters—those bold psychonauts who daily venture into uncharted reaches of the collective unconscious of the Hotel—were in attendance.  Instead, it was just a bunch of tourists sitting around.  But what tourists they were.  A man sitting in a chair behind me announced loudly, “I’m writing a book called Women Who Read and the Men Who are Homicidal Maniacs and Kill Them!”

            What?!  I couldn’t resist it; I turned around in my chair to see who had made such a retarded remark.  It was a sixty-year-old man, his eyelids and jowls sagging, bald on top, with long stringy gray hair on the sides.  He glared at me, as if to say: what the hell you lookin’ at?

            I turned back around in my seat, feeling a bit uncomfortable.  A small, tidy red-haired man sitting next to me was talking to a large woman and he immediately said to her, “I have lived in two societies where the dogs and cats run wild.”

            Not one such society, mind you, but two.  The italics were his.  He was speaking rather pedantically.

            “If they were cornered,” he went on, “they would kill you.”

            “Even the cats!?” I exclaimed, chuckling.

            “Excuse me?” he said.

            “Oh, nothing,” I replied. 

            My head exploding with visions of rabid cats shredding my skin, I decided to go stand outside where the metaphysical air was sure to be a bit fresher.  Before long Susan came out and we walked together down the street.  We were going out to dinner, but we had to stop in the deli first to get something, a pack of gum, I think.

            An elderly man who had lived in the Chelsea for years was in front of us in line, fumbling with his change.  One of the deli men from the back came charging up to him and shook an open bag of Oreos in his face.  “Why did you open this bag and eat a cookie and then put it back!?!” he demanded.

            “I only ate ONE!” the old man replied indignantly.

            Yeah, buddy, like, I can see if it was two.  Of course, the cookies were not individually wrapped, so he couldn’t have resold them.  It looked like they were going to argue for awhile, so I jumped in front of the old man and paid, and we left the store.

            Now, I know you’re probably thinking that there must’ve been a shortage of Zoloft at the Duane Reade or a brown-out at the shock treatment facility.  I couldn’t tell you whether there was a full moon that night because the sky was overcast.  But full moon or not, I can assure you that it was business as usual at the Chelsea. (Ed Hamilton)

Book Publishers Finally Discover Internet Writers

Collegestories.com, a humor website (not to be confused with collegehumor.com, the site which was recently purchased by Barry Diller for several million dollars), just released an anthology entitled Class Dismissed (Villard, 2006).  Without a doubt this book will make several times as much money as all the movies set to be derived from the collegehumor content.

It seems that drunken frat boy humor is making a comeback of late. The New York Times reported on this trend recently in the Style section, singling out the lifestyle magazine Modern Drunkard and several forthcoming novels.

Why, may you ask, should we care?  Well, this blog's Slice-of-Lifer, Ed Hamilton, has a story in the Anthology.  We haven’t seen a copy of the book yet, so we don’t know if they used the author’s photo, but they requested a humorous one.  Here’s what they got from Ed, much to the dismay of his mother, who wanted us to send a photo of Ed in his first communion outfit.  In retrospect, perhaps that would have been funnier, or at least more ironic.

Here’s an excerpt from Ed’s story, but that’s all you get for free.  You’ll have to buy a copy of Class Dismissed to read the whole story.  (It’s also an excerpt from a novel, but Ed’s still waiting for somebody to snatch that up.)

Soon, I was hopelessly lost. The houses were getting shittier and shittier, more ramshackle. At one of the houses there were some long-haired rednecks hanging out on their front porch. They were older than me, probably in their early thirties. There were three of them, and a fat woman redneck.

They looked friendly enough, so I figured I'd ask them for directions. But in my drunken state, stumbling up into their yard, I chose an ill-advised greeting:

"Hey you guys, got any reefer?"

The men just sat there, expressionless, but the woman jumped up and screamed at me, hysterically, "No! Get out of here!

That seemed downright inhospitable. I decided to take my revenge on her by hanging out there for a while. "I wasn't even talking to you, lady," I said. Then, addressing the man nearest me, the one with a beard, I said, "You probably got some reefer, don't you, man?"

THE MYSTERIOUS GODAWFUL STENCH

The hall smelled like shit, night after night.  It was July, and the stench was ungodly.  The smell seemed to be coming from the trash bin, though sometimes it was more focused in other areas, like right in front of our door, inexplicably lingering there.  But we just attributed that to weird air currents in the hundred-year-old Chelsea Hotel.  We thought about cat litter, since one of the women on the floor had a cat, but that smells more stale, it seems to me--and don’t they put disinfectant in that stuff?  No, this smelled like somebody opened the lid of the trash bin and took a good long dump right in the can.

Diapers, that’s all we could come up with.  The people with kids that age live on the other side of the elevators, separated from the trash bin by two heavy doors, and so presumably don’t have to smell it and are therefore less likely to care.  On the other hand, they surely knew better; surely knew to seal those things up in a plastic bag.

We weren’t the only ones bothered by the smell.  One evening we ran into Sarah, the gray-haired costume designer, sniffing around out by the trash bin.  She said she had complained to the people at the desk.

“So what did they say?” I asked.

“Oh, they didn’t take me seriously.  They never do,” she said, as if she expected as much, a smile still enlivening her round, pleasant face.

“Maybe because you’re only paying $500 in rent,” I said, jokingly.  She’d been living in the hotel, in a huge, rent stabilized suite of rooms, since the sixties.

“That has something to do with it, for sure,” she said.

            Sarah was rather scatter-brained, too, I thought.  Possibly they thought she was imagining things, or at least exaggerating.

            “We’ve got to do something about it,” she said.  “We can’t go on living like this.”

            The upshot was that she asked us to call down and complain as well, on the theory that they were more likely to take action if more than one person bothered them.

My area of specialization is the bathroom, so my girlfriend was the one who called.  The only one there at the front desk was the telephone operator, a kindly elderly lady named Anita.  I could only hear half of the conversation, of course, but my girlfriend filled me in on Anita’s part:

“The trash really stinks, and somebody needs to come get it,” my girlfriend said.

“You know nobody’s gonna come get your trash honey,” Anita said.  “You gotta take it out yourself.”

“No, the trash in the hall.  It’s stinking.”

“Well, if you left your trash out in the hall, that’s why it’s stinking.”

            My girlfriend hung up the phone, and said, “I don’t think they’re gonna do anything.”

“Why didn’t you explain it to her better?” I asked.

“It was no use,” she said.
She was probably right.  That’s the kind of thing that generally happens when you complain around here: a sort of willed incomprehension.  To accept that there was a problem would have required action.  (Ed Hamilton)

THE LOST ART OF ANGLING (IN THE HUNDRED-DEGREE HEAT OF JULY)

            Capitol Fishing Tackle, which has been in its present location on the ground floor of the Chelsea Hotel for sixty-five years, is moving at the end of July.  Since we’d never been in there before, my girlfriend Susan and I figured we should visit the store at least once, and maybe even buy something to show our support.

            Inside the tackle store we looked at various lures and bobbers and sinkers, and finally decided on a cheap rod and reel to use to play with the cat who lives on our floor.  At the register a tall, gaunt man with red, curly hair rang up our purchase, scarcely even glancing at us.

            “I heard you guys were moving,” I said.  “What happened?  Did Stanley raise the rent on you?”  Stanley Bard is the owner and manager of the hotel.

            The man looked up.  “Twenty-one-thousand he wants!  Can you believe it?  Up from nine-thousand he’s getting now.”

            “He’s raising it on a lot of us tenants too.”

            “He’s got a good thing here, good people,” the man said in a Brooklyn accent.  “Why’s he want to screw it up?  He don’t know what he’s gonna get with the new people, he don’t know who’s gonna move in here.”  The man seemed bitter.

            “At these prices he’s going to have to provide luxury accommodations,” I said, half-jokingly.

            “Yeah.  And this place is fallin’ apart.  You don’t know the kind of shit we’ve had to put up with here.  It’s just greed.  Greed is all it is.”  He shook his head in disbelief.  “Sixty-five years,” he said.  “Why would he want to ruin a good thing?”

     Back on our floor at the Chelsea, I couldn’t wait to try out my new toy.  I unwrapped the reel—a Shakespeare!--and fastened it to the rod, then threaded the string through the eyelets and tied it to plastic casting plug.  But the cat was nowhere to be found.

            It was sweltering inside the hotel as well.  Susan and I went out to the stairwell and I hung the rod over the edge and let the plug drop the eight stories down to the first floor landing.  “Works pretty good, eh?” I said as I reeled it back up.

            Somebody came into the stairwell on the second floor and started down the stairs.  “I’ll freak this dude out!” I said, and I let the plug drop. (photo)

            As I reeled it back up, a gray-haired man stuck his head over the railing and looked up at me.  “Oh, shit!” I said, ducking back out of the way.  “It’s Stanley Bard!” 

            Susan laughed, and said, “Quick, do it again!”

            I let the plug drop.  This time our illustrious proprietor was on the final flight of stairs before the first-floor landing.  When he heard the plug hit the ground he reached out for the line.  I jerked it out of his way but he ran down a few stairs and grabbed the plug as I was reeling it in.  He was surprisingly spry and quick for a seventy-year-old man.

            “Oh, we caught a big one!” Susan exclaimed.

            Plug in hand, Stanley looked up and called out, “Why are you doing that?”

            I was at a loss to explain it.  “We’re practicing for our fishing trip to Montana,” Susan said.  Sounded good enough for me.

            “Well, stop it!”

            My rod bowing, I jerked at the plug and tried to reel it back in, but Stanley didn’t want to let go.  I think he was trying to either break the line or untie the plug, but I had it on there pretty good.  Finally, he released the plug and it shot back skyward.

            Stanley came up in the elevator.  “It’s you!” he said with surprise when he saw me.

            “Yes,” I replied.

            “You could hurt somebody with that.”

            “I’m just dropping it straight down,” I said.  The first floor landing is enclosed by the railing, and nobody can get in there.

            “A little kid could stick his head out and get a concussion,” Stanley said.

            Whoops.  I didn’t think of that.  Seemed unlikely, the plug was too light, but he did have a point.  “OK, I’ll stop it,” I said.

            Stanley Bard: patron of the arts, sworn enemy of fishing.  I guess he has to put up with a lot around here too.  Some idiot casting a fishing reel down the stairwell, what next?

(Ed Hamilton)

A TRANSLATION OF HIROYA’S DEE DEE RAMONE PAINTINGS

Hiroya, the crazy Japanese graffiti painter with wild black hair who used to stand in the lobby in paint splattered suits and accost tourists with boasts of his artistic prowess, left several paintings behind in the hotel when he died.  Two of them, replete with crosses, caskets, and the symbolism of death, and heavy on Japanese text, have long intrigued us because they seemed to tell the story of Hiroya’s falling out with his friend, the punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone.  We have been waiting for a Japanese person to happen by and translate them for us, and finally we found one in Yuko Shingyoji, a Japanese fashion designer.  The yellow one that hangs in the stairwell between the seventh and eighth floors is rather poetic and reads approximately as follows:

From here it’s heaven,

Heaven is a forest.

Drink Rum in the morning, 

Everyone dance.

Beyond Death: darkness, time, space, land of God. 

De De Land.

The orange one that hangs in the stairwell on the first floor, though it touches on a similar theme, tells more of a story:

De De Land.  In heaven I meet De De and Barbara.  De De always thinking something very deeply.  The job of Barbara is reading “pustory” (“true story?”) to De De.  De De makes blueberry jam.  He writes a poem on the pink chalkboard.  My job is after he finish writing a poem, put the poem into drawing.  My girlfriend Marcia take picture of the drawing and record to De De Land’s diary.  End of day at De De Land.  De De Land is very good feeling (comfortable), mellow world.

Yuko says Hiroya’s English is not very good, ungrammatical.  Yeah, that’s Hiroya alright.  The “De De” in question is the punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone of the Ramones.  Barbara is Dee Dee’s wife.  The story of the paintings is that Dee Dee paid Hiroya $500 to make two paintings of the Chelsea Hotel for the front and back cover of Dee Dee’s novel, Chelsea Horror Hotel.  Hiroya took the money, but then started to have second thoughts about whoring himself like that, and so couldn’t bring himself to complete the paintings.  This led to a falling out between Dee Dee and Hiroya, but in the end Dee Dee insisted that Hiroya at least owed him two paintings of some sort, and these are what Hiroya came up with.
About a year after their falling out, Hiroya left the Chelsea Hotel to enter a rehab program.  He attempted to move back into the Chelsea a couple of years later, but Stanley wouldn’t give him a room.  On the very night he was rebuffed by Stanley, Hiroya checked into the Gershwin Hotel and died. Dee Dee proceeded him in death by a year.  As often happens with such deaths, there was no way to know for certain whether it was an accident or suicide.  (Ed Hamilton)

JUNKIE JOE & THE EUROPE OF THE MIND

The most beloved--and enigmatic—character ever to grace the halls of the Chelsea is of course our illustrious proprietor, Stanley Bard.  Among his many endearing qualities,  Stanley possesses a congenital inability to admit that anything bad has ever taken place in the hotel.  There are no roaches or mice, and certainly no junkies have ever lived here.  If pressed, he might be willing to admit that Sid and Nancy had a slight altercation one night back in the seventies, but absolutely nothing untoward has happened since.  The writers and artists living here are all brilliant, contented and wealthy.  The magnificence of the Chelsea ’s luxury accommodations is scarcely rivaled even by The Plaza or the Waldorf-Astoria—perhaps not even by Buckingham Palace itself.
        We were talking to a friend in El Quijote the other night, someone who used to live here back in the eighties and nineties, and he told us a tale that’s perfectly illustrative of this tendency of  Stanley’s:

I was going up to the ninth floor to visit my friend one time.  The elevator was slow, probably somebody was holding it up, so I walked up the stairs.  As soon as I turned onto his wing I saw cops all over the place, about eight or ten of them.  They were coming in and out of an apartment.  There was a stretcher in the hall with a body in it in a black body bag.

I knew whose apartment it was—it was a guy I knew, I’ll call him Joe--and I assumed it was him in the body bag.  Joe was a junkie, so of course I immediately suspected that he had ODed.

One of the cops finally noticed me standing around, and said, ‘Don’t come up here yet.  Go back downstairs.  We’ll let you know when you can come up.’

The elevators still weren’t working, so I walked back down to the lobby.  It was full of people.  They weren’t allowing anybody to go up. 
      Stanley was standing behind the desk and so I went up to him and said, ‘What’s going on up on the ninth floor?’
       ‘Nothing, why would you say that?’  Stanley said.
        ‘There were cops all over the place!’

‘No there weren’t.’

‘Yes there were!’

‘You may have seen one or two policemen,’ Stanley admitted.  ‘They probably have a room here.’ Stanley’s manner was so matter-of-fact and convincing that he made me doubt the evidence of my own senses.  I began to think that maybe I was becoming one of the crazy people wandering the halls here.  Still, I’m not that far gone, so I said, ‘ Stanley, you can’t tell me nothing is going on.’
         ‘Well, I don’t know what you want me to tell you then.’

‘That was Joe, wasn’t it,’ I said.  ‘Joe’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘Joe?’  Stanley said.  ‘Oh, no.  Joe’s fine.  He just went on a little vacation.  Europe, I think.   He’ll be back in a couple of years, I’m sure.’
        In the days that followed there were plenty of rumors circulating around the hotel, but nobody ever got any definite information, and nothing about the incident ever appeared in the papers.  Stanley has his ways of keeping things like that quiet.
         It’s difficult to discern how much of Stanley’s act is a con, and how much a sort of rosy-spectacled tunnel vision.  Whatever his secret, he’s a brilliant magician whose slight of hand has allowed him to conjure up the infinitely seductive shadow reality of the Chelsea.  Who but a Philistine, a sworn enemy of art, would mention such trivialities as heat or running water?  It hardly matters that Joe—or whatever his name was before he passed into myth--has yet to return from his sojourn abroad.  (Ed Hamilton)

FRIGHT WIG FLIPPED

Susan and I were walking up Eighth Avenue late one Saturday night.  Susan was wearing a brown t-shirt that said Ciao Manhattan!  As we approached the Hudson Diner we noticed a pretty girl in a floppy hat and a blond bob haircut sitting at an outdoor table sucking on a milkshake.  She kept staring at us over her milkshake with her big blue eyes.  What the hell is she looking at? we wondered.  Finally, as we got up to her, she stopped slurping her milkshake long enough to raise her head and blurt out, “Edie Sedgwick!”

            Yeah, that’s right: Edie starred in the film back in the late sixties.  But who the hell even knows about that old movie, we wondered, much less cares?  And then we recognized the girl: it was Sienna Miller.

            That would explain a lot, since Sienna recently finished shooting the Edie biopic, Factory Girls.  But the more pressing question remains: What was Sienna Miller doing at the Hudson Diner?

            Perhaps she was just really getting into her role, we speculated, slumming it in an attempt identify with the tragic bohemian princess.  Sienna visited the Chelsea for just that purpose, we knew, and we heard that she even went to Edie’s grave and wept.  But then, that was when she was filming the movie; by this point the shoot had already wrapped.  Had Sienna flipped her fright wig entirely?

            And anyway, not even Edie would’ve been caught dead at the Hudson Diner. (Ed Hamilton)

GH

EASTERN (EUROPEAN) PHILOSOPHER

There was a new guy staying next door in the transient room.  “I hear him out there,” my girlfriend Susan said.  “Open the door and see what he looks like. Maybe we can interview him for the blog.”  It was late at night and she had just settled into bed.  I didn’t feel like talking to anybody, since I was tired and ready for bed too, so I waited until I didn’t hear anything outside before I went to take a piss.

            The guy was still out there, hanging out in the hallway.  Short, thin, with gray, close-cropped hair, he eyed me up and down as I stepped out of my door.  “Are you something?” he inquired.

            “Uh, well, I’m a writer,” I said.

            “I’m a writer myself, of a sort.  I do ontology.  I’m from Tennessee.”
            He was an older man, and half-way distinguished looking, so I thought he meant he was a professor there.  “You must be in the Philosophy Department,” I said.

            He clearly didn’t know what I was talking about, but decided he didn’t mind being taken for an academic.  “Uh, yeah.  I just got back from Hungary.  I decided I needed to familiarize myself with western philosophy before I immersed myself in the eastern variety.  But you know what, once I started studying, I found out that they were the same thing.
            It seemed like an oversimplification to me, but I didn’t feel like getting into it at the moment.

            “You live here, don’t you?” the philosopher inquired.

            “Yeah, 11 years.”  Since he was curious, I opened the door and showed him my room.  Susan hid her head under the covers. 

            “Not bad,” he said.

            “Thank you,” I said, closing the door.  I still had to use the restroom, as I headed in that direction.

            “Can I live here?” the man asked hopefully.   

            In the old days, no problem, I thought; he would have fit right in.  “Well, I don’t know,” I said.  “You’ll have to talk to Stanley Bard.  It’s pretty expensive these days.”

            “I saw a bag lady in the hall.  She can’t be paying much, if anything.”

            “Well, you’re probably right about that.  But she’s been here 30 years.”

            “I’m going down to the Spanish bar next door for a drink,” he said.  He seemed to be inviting me to come along.

            “The El Quijote,” I said.  “Say hello to Santi for me.”

            The philosopher left a Hungarian bill on the bathroom sink when he checked out.  A tip for the maids?  I left the bill tacked to his door in case he came back looking for it. (Ed Hamilton)

LIKE APPLE PIE

There’s a large, shady garden on top of the Hotel Chelsea, complete with flowers, bushes, and fully grown trees, one of which has taken root in the roof itself, sending its roots down into the apartment below.  The garden is surrounded by a brick wall, insulating this idyllic retreat from the swelter and commotion of the city below.  Over the top of the wall you can see the top of the empire state building and the other tall buildings uptown.

On the evening of last year's Gay Pride Parade, a couple of the Chelsea people, two men who lived together in one of the hotel’s more lavish suites, gave a party in the garden.  They had hung some rainbow-colored balloons, but besides that it was just the usual Chelsea party, with, by and large, the usual Chelsea denizens.

The gay guys of the Chelsea Hotel are not the buff Chelsea Boys you hear so much about.  Any actual, self-respecting Chelsea Boy wouldn’t be caught dead here.  The Chelsea Hotel boys are more flamboyant, artistic, fabulous; whatever their age, they dress more like old time gays, in lavender jackets, cravats, fedoras, things like that.  There were even a couple of drag queens, Chelsea Girls.  One man, tall and thin, with a lined, weathered face, wore a pink seersucker suit.

The lesbians at the party were, by and large, girls next door (looking like boys next door), in jeans and t-shirts, though one of them wore a retro polka dot dress and had a beehive hairdo.

There was lots of liquor, and lots of food: one table filled with fancy, catered appetizer platters, another with potato salad and coleslaw, and burgers and hotdogs to throw on the grill.  My girlfriend and I talked to our friends, got drunk, and then, as the sun was setting, slipped away from the party to explore other areas of the roof, higher levels toward the rear, where the purple sky, and Greenwich Village, it’s streets alive with the gay pride revelers, spread out before us in a panorama.

When we came back, everyone was finishing up their food, and it was time for the desert.  A heavy-set, husky woman, butch, in flannel shirt with hacked-off blond hair, brought out a platter containing the dinner’s piece de resistance: three cakes in the shape of round, white tits, C-cups, approximately, with delicate pink nipples set enticingly on top. Smiling, she showed the cakes around the crowd proudly.  The tits were coated with a glazed, hard shell of icing, making the confection seem more like candy, rather than cake.  They looked mouth watering, almost too pretty to touch.

Finally, after everybody had had a good look at them, they were placed upon a table, a knife was produced, and everyone gathered around as the blond butch dyke cut into them.

And, lo and behold, they were green inside!  The tits were filled with a green gel of some sort.  Everybody was surprised.  “Oh, they must be Irish tits!” the guy in the seersucker exclaimed.

The blond woman glared at him, and looked him up and down in disgust.  “These are American Tits,” she said, crossly.

            The man in the seersucker was too frightened to say anything.  He just stood there for an uncomfortable moment with his mouth agape.

Finally, as the woman turned her attention back to the cake, the seersucker turned away, and, making his escape, rolled his eyes and remarked in a low voice, “Yeah, tits on a plate, real American!” (Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton)

TRIVIA MASTER OF FLORENT STUMPED

            Florent was in the Meat Packing District before it was cool—or really when it was a lot cooler, before the neighborhood was taken over by Sex-in-the-City wannabees.  The food is always great there (get the Moules Frites), as is the atmosphere.  Ask for a table outside and watch the sun set.
            Lots of famous people come into Florent, so it’s kind of like the Hotel Chelsea in that respect.  When we’re there, we always play a celebrity trivia game with our waiter, the tall and urbane Josiah (author of The Unauthorized Donna Summers.)  In the past, he’s always been able to figure out our questions, but recently we stumped him.
            “There was an actor checking into the Chelsea a couple of weeks ago,” I said.  “I was waiting for the elevator and he kept staring at me like I was supposed to acknowledge his presence.  But I was way too cool for that.  He has a new hit TV show.  About southerners, I think, or anyway about some kind of trailer trash.”
            I thought this one was going to be easy, but Josiah stared at me blankly.  “He used to be a skateboard champ,” I said.  “But now he’s a scientologist.  He was in the papers recently because he named his child something crazy.  Let’s see, ah, Pilot Inspector.  That’s it.”
            “I like the name,” Josiah said, “but I have no idea.”
            “You, know, that Earl guy from My Name is Earl.”
            “You’ll have to tell me.”
            “Jason Lee,” I said.
            Josiah still didn’t know who he was.  “A Chinese man?” he asked.
            “No,” I said.  “Finally, we stumped you!”
            Josiah didn’t like the sound of that.  “I don’t watch TV anymore,” he said.  “It’s too engaging.”
            Josiah went away for awhile, presumably to attend to his tables inside.  But when he came back he immediately announced, triumphantly, “I asked all the waiters in this restaurant and all the cooks, and no one knows who Jason Lee is!”
            The implication was that this was too obscure a question, and therefore illegitimate.  “Uh, it’s a very popular show,” I said defensively.
            “You must watch a lot of TV,” Josiah said. (Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton)

No Room for Stanley Bard's Long Lost Son

The two desk clerks were laughing when I came in, though one of them, Morgan, was laughing the loudest.  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Henry just said a transvestite came in last night and said he was Stanley Bard’s son,” Morgan said.

When I heard that I cracked up too.

“So what did he look like?” Morgan asked Henry.

“He was tall,” Henry said, indicating with his hand. 

“Was he dressed in women’s clothes?” Morgan asked. 

“No, but he had on all the makeup and everything.” 

“Did he look like Stanley ?” I asked.
          Henry seemed to be tiring of the interrogation.  “Well, he was the same color.”

“I wouldn’t just dismiss it out of hand,” I said.

“Yeah, you never can tell what kind of weird shit goes on around this place,” Morgan said.  “You’d have to get a DNA test to rule it out.”

“He didn’t have one of those,” Henry said, irritably.

“Are you sure it wasn’t just David?” I asked, naming Stanley’s actual, known son.
          “No!  I know what David looks like!”

“So did you give him a room?” I asked. 

“Joe talked to him.  He was going to rent him one, but I guess he didn’t like the price, so he went away.”

“I’m gonna call Joe right now and ask him about this!” Morgan exclaimed, snatching up the phone.

I didn’t wait around to hear from Joe.  “Hard to believe you can’t even get a decent rate when you’re the owner’s son,” I said.  (Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton)

Something Like An Eternal Debate

I was talking to the painter Michael Bell and the poet Sheryl Rubenstein at the party for the one-year anniversary of our Chelsea blog.  The New York light, orange at sunset, was streaming in through the west-facing window, much the same as it would have seventy years before when Thomas Wolfe lived in this very room. (Photo from Lisa Chamberlain's Flickr set)

There was a reporter from the New York Times at the party, taking notes.  “It’s nice that someone is finally paying attention to all this,” Michael said with a sweep of his arm, “all this creativity going on around here.”

United in our thankless plight, we all agreed that it was patently unfair, this misunderstood toiling in obscurity that we seemed doomed to endure.

“Who do you think has it worse,” Sheryl asked, “writers or artists?”

“Well,”  I said, “at least people don’t think they could just crank out a painting like they think they could sit down and write a novel if they felt like it.”

But Michael said, “Oh, yes they do.  They think they can just throw down paint.  They don’t think there’s anything at all to color theory or technique.”

“But it’s so much more obvious that you’re creating something,” I protested.  “An object of beauty.  I know damn well I could never paint anything.  But people use language every day, and they probably figure their office memos are just as good as anything I write.”

I thought Sheryl would back me up, but strangely, she agreed with Michael.  “They especially say that about abstracts,” she said.  “When they see one they say, Oh, if you like that you should see what my child paints!”

“Yes, but that’s almost a cliché,” I said.  “People have been saying that for years.  But these days, of course, they’re joking.”

“I don’t think so,” Sheryl said, and she and Robert both chuckled.  I was facing right into the streaming light.  I could scarcely make out Michael and Sheryl’s faces for the glare.  I saw merely their dark silhouettes: they were shaking their heads back and forth in unison.  I broke out in a sweat, less from the sun’s heat than from the realization that they were right.

I sighed.  “You know, there was a lady in the lobby saying that very same thing just the other day,” I said.  “I don’t think it was your painting, Michael, but maybe it was Philip Taffe’s.  Besides that, she was a nice lady, from North Carolina, a tourist of course.  And now I’m feeling really bad about this.  Because I just burst out laughing right in her face.”  (Ed Hamilton, 2006)

THE PETER PAN COLLAR

            Since the old McBurney Y closed down, I go to the New York Sports Club on the corner of 8^th Ave. and 23^rd St.  I came into the locker room the other day at about one o’clock, and there was a neatly dressed young man of about thirty standing in front of the mirror.  He was tying his red-and-beige striped tie, obviously ready to head back to work after a lunch hour workout.

            Another man came into the locker room; he was maybe in his mid-twenties, dressed in baggy jeans and a t-shirt, a gym bag over his shoulder.  “Hey Dan, what’s going on!” he piped up heartily.

            “Oh, hey Joe,” Dan said, with notably less enthusiasm, as he finished tying his tie.  He seemed to have things on his mind.

            Most of the guys that go to my gym are gay, and of course you never know, but these guys seemed pretty macho.

            “You’re all dressed up today!” Joe observed.  “Dapper Dan!  That’s a Peter Pan collar you’re wearing there, ain’t it?”

            “Peter Pan?!” Dan exclaimed in puzzlement.  “Hell no!  What the hell are you talking about?”

            “Yeah, that’s what it is,” Joe said.  “A Peter Pan collar.  That’s what they call it when it’s rounded like that.  You know, instead of pointed like a regular collar.”

            I noticed then that Dan was indeed wearing a pink shirt with a rounded collar.

            “Great,” Dan said, his voice tinged with disgust.  “Well, I’m sure as hell not wearing it anymore if that’s what it’s called.”  He had finished dressing and was gathering his things into a gym bag.

            “Uh, well,” Joe stammered, “You know, I could be wrong.  Come to think of it, I think that’s just what they call it when it’s a girl’s collar.  For a man it’s just a, uh, rounded collar.”

            Dan slung his gym bag over his shoulder and turned to go.  “Too late now,” he said.  “Thanks a lot.  I’m throwing it out.” (Ed Hamilton)

Bonnie and the Angel of 23rd Street

            Bonnie Kendall, with her exquisitely coifed red hair and painstakingly-applied make-up, always dressed to the nines to sit behind the desk and answer the phone, was something of an institution around here.  Though she recently left us, hopefully for greener pastures, she’s difficult to forget.  The other day I recalled a conversation that I had with her in April of 2002.

            If you remember, that was when the Japanese guy who dressed like an angel lived here.  When I came into the hotel that day, he was sitting in one of the lobby chairs, dressed in a long white  gown, with white wings and a halo.  He was talking to a conservatively dressed, middle-aged Japanese woman.

            Bonnie was sitting in her chair behind the desk, and I greeted her as I walked up.

            “Between that angel, and Jimbo, and the blond woman who runs around here, it's getting to be like a nuthouse,” Bonnie said.

            The blond woman she was referring to was a woman with Tourette’s syndrome who used to live in the Chelsea.  Jimbo was a desk clerk with whom Bonnie argued constantly.

            “Is this the first time you noticed that?” I asked, chuckling.

            As was her way, Bonnie paid my remark no heed.  “That's his wife he's sitting out there talking to, if you can believe that,” she said.  “Or at least she used to be.  I guess she pays for all this.”

            “All this luxury?”

            “Which makes her crazier than he is!” Bonnie went on.  “He's a transvestite, but he used to be married.”

            “I guess that’s before he died and went to heaven,” I said.  “Hey, maybe this hotel is heaven!”

            “Oh, you're not supposed to notice his wings,” Bonnie said, sarcastically.  “Oh no!  Just act like they're not there.  Well, I'm sorry, but it's kind of obvious.  It's not like he's up on a cloud or something.”  (Ed Hamilton)

The Spoon Game

Susan and I went to our favorite neighborhood diner for lunch one afternoon.  There was a new waitress serving us, an Eastern European girl—you could tell by the garish make-up--and apparently it was her very first day.  I ordered a split pea soup and grilled cheese, and when the soup arrived, the waitress gave me a t-spoon to eat it with.  “Could you bring me a larger spoon,” I said.

            I guess I wasn’t being specific enough, because when the waitress returned, she brought me a selection of spoons: a soup spoon, a table spoon, and a long-stemmed iced-tea spoon.  I selected the soup spoon.  “This really large one is a table spoon,” I said, figuring I’d clue the girl in for future reference.  “It’s used more for serving.  And this long one is an iced-tea spoon.”  I picked it up to demonstrate: “You see, it’s long so you can get down to the bottom of the glass.”

The waitress rolled her eyes at my stupidity.  She spoke good English, albeit with an accent.  “It’s a matter of individual preference,” she said.  (Ed Hamilton)

HITTING ON THE GIRLS

My girlfriend Susan and I were in the Malibu Diner late one evening, on 23rd St., east of the Chelsea.  There was a young guy sitting at the table behind me, looked like a bridge-and-tunneler, a Jersey guy. He was talking to two girls who looked like they were from Jersey as well.  The man had his hair slicked back and wore a leather jacket; the girls wore tight pants and spangly tops.  Though they seemed out of place in the homey diner, I figured they just needed to fuel up for a night of clubbing.

The man related a story in a loud voice.  He said he was at a club one night and they were having a male strip show.  “You know, like Chippendales,” he said.

In response to the girls’ puzzled queries, he explained that he went to such places because, “When those girls get done watching all those sweaty male bodies gyrating up on stage, they’ll be hungry for some hard cock, and I’ll be all too happy to provide it for them.”

I wasn’t even tempted to laugh, since I knew that was why most men go to see male go go dancers.
          “Anyway,” the guy went on, “So I’m in this club filled with people, when somebody throws a beer bottle and hits this girl in the head over near the DJ booth. So she’s on the ground and her head’s all cut open and she’s bleeding all over the place.  I’m just heading up the stairs to the second level, when this guy starts screaming that I did it and he comes running after me, swinging like he’s gonna kill me.  So I push him back down the stairs, but there’s a crowd of people on the stairs and so they catch him and he can’t fall far.  He keeps trying to come back after me, and I keep kicking him back down the stairs.
        “Then the DJ gets on his cell phone and tells the management there’s a fight.  Then about eight big bouncers and a couple of the strippers are there in about two seconds, and they’re grabbing me and restraining me like I’m going to go after the guy.  And I’m just like, hey dude, I’m not doing anything, just minding my own business.  I don’t know what the fuck his problem is.
      

“They threw the guy out, and then they took the girl out of the club and put her in an ambulance.  So I thought that was it.  But then after about five minutes one of the bouncers said that the guy I fought got on his cell phone and called all his friends and now they were waiting for me outside the club.  Some of them came out of the club and some of them drove there from other clubs, and now they were all out in front of the club trying to overturn cars and shit.  They were trying to rush the door, saying I beat up their friend’s girlfriend and now the club was protecting me.  The bouncer said if they just let me walk out the door those guys would kill me, so they were going to have to sneak me out the back door to 11^th Avenue.
         

“Well, when we got out there, one of the guys who was after me was there with his cell phone.  The bouncers were trying to hail me a cab, when all of a sudden all these guys start running around the corner, heading our way.  The bouncers were able to hold them back, but then they said if they put me in a cab those guys would follow and wherever the cab let me out they would get me and beat me up.  So the head bouncer, Shorty, said he was going to take me home in his SUV.  Sure enough, as soon as we got in, those guys came roaring around the corner in their cars, but the bouncers were waiting for them and they blocked their way with two trucks.  Shorty had a gun so he could protect himself.

It sounded like the bouncers had dealt with this sort of thing before, perhaps on a semi-regular basis.  I made a mental note not to be caught dead in this particular club.

“Shorty asked me where I lived but I’d didn’t want to go home yet, so I told him some place on 37th St.," the guy went on.

“When we got to the building on 37^th St.Shorty said, is this where you live?  I said, yeah, and he said, I’m not going to drop you off here just in case they’ve been following.  I don’t want them to see where you live.  So he drove me around the block and let me out.”
         The girls didn’t say anything.  The table lapsed into silence as they ate their food.  The story seemed to be over.

I had been sitting with my back to the guy and I wanted to see what he looked like, so when we got up to go I glanced in his direction.  He glared at me, aware that we had been listening—though he had made no attempt to keep it quiet.

We paid at the register and left the diner.  “He seemed very angry,” Susan said, disturbed by the story.  “And you know he was the one who threw that bottle too.”

Yeah, sexual frustration’s a bitch, I thought.  “I wonder if that story made those girls hungry for his cock,” I said. (Ed Hamilton 2006)

Jerry's Famous Tour of the Hotel Chelsea

     Walking through the lobby on Sunday after-noon, I noticed that Jerry had a group of college students lined up for one of his Chelsea Hotel tours.  In all the years I’ve lived here I never have gone on one, so I figured this was my big chance.  Knowing that he wouldn’t reveal his secrets to an outlaw blogger such as myself, I quickly ran upstairs, donned a collegiate disguise, and hid myself in amongst the kids.             
         Jerry didn’t tell too much that I hadn’t heard already, but it was interest to note how he tailored the message to appeal to a younger audience.  He talked about how the Grateful Dead used to live here, back in the 60s, and said they gave the absolute best parties in the history of the hotel.  He said you could get happy just by walking by their door.
          He told a familiar story about how Jimi Hendrix was hanging around the front desk when an old lady was checking into the hotel and, mistaking him for a bellhop, ordered him to carry her bags upstairs.  Well, in Jerry’s version, Jimi was such a nice guy that he actually grabbed the ladies bags and went up with her in the elevator.  Unfortunately there were no tales of more recent rockers such as Rufus Wainwright or Ryan Adams.
          Jerry told one thing I didn’t know – the room off to the right of the lobby, which is now being refurbished as Stanley’s office, was originally a “Ladies Waiting Room.”  This, naturally, inspired Jerry to tell a joke about hookers – of which he commented that we no longer have any here.  At that exact moment a resident was walking past.  “Yes we do have hookers!” he said.
            “You got that right!” I exclaimed on impulse.  But then, my cover blown, I had to flee up the stairs as Jerry and the college students presumably adjourned to the famous Hotel Chelsea Bar to do a few beer bongs and jello shots.

Bohemians, Bloggers & Book People

If you ever plan on entertaining a bunch of bohemians, skip the crudites and order more sushi.  We’re still trying to finish off all of those damn vegetables. 

The blog’s first-anniversary party was held in Thomas Wolfe’s old room, now occupied by the photographer Julia Calfee, who was kind enough to let us borrow it for the event.  Even Robert Lambert and Dave Linter gave up their lobby spots to drop by.  Highlights include Robert’s cell phone going off constantly (whoever it was no doubt thought he was still in the lobby), and Dave, who walks with a cane, announcing loudly as he exited, “I need a wide berth, here!” and scaring a couple of Brooklyn bloggers, who didn’t know that he has a sense of humor, half to death.

The painter George Chemeche, commenting on the aging bohemian population of the Chelsea, said that every time someone dies, he figures he’s going to be next.  But anyone can see he’s still got a lot of life left in him.

Befitting the creatively charged atmosphere of the Chelsea, there was at least one scene, theatrically staged, between two artistic rivals, but the principals have asked us not to discuss it until 50 years after their deaths.  (Rest assured, an account will be found in my papers!)

Robert Lasner of Ig Publishing went home with the door prize, a bottle of Makers Mark, for answering the most Chelsea Hotel trivia questions.  Winning question: In what room did Sid kill Nancy?

The real highlight of the party didn’t come, however, until most everyone had gone home.  The Irish lady who was staying next door in the transient room popped her head out and told us how nice it was that there were still hotels like this left.  She drank a glass of wine with us and showed us her room – the other half of Thomas Wolfe’s old suite – and what should we discover there but the fashion designer Charles James’ ancient drafting table!!  Readers of the blog know that, not having enough room, we set this table out many years ago, with a note attached describing what it was.  We’ve been wandering ever since who might have retrieved it, and now we know: Stanley Bard!  He has it nailed into a bookshelf, so no one else can ever again throw it in the trash.  The party pics are here.

A Year of Slices - The Revelatory Work

Hard to believe, but soon we'll be celebrating the blog's one-year-anniversary. It's an excuse to re-post my favorite Slice of Life story.

The Revelatory Work
     I found a purse in the shared bathroom one morning.  It contained the usual junk that women carry around, and a wallet with an ID and forty dollars in it.  From the picture on the ID, I could tell that it wasn’t anybody who had any business using our bathroom.  I suspected the worst, that she was a junkie who had broken in to shoot up, and that made me feel like taking the money and throwing her purse in the trash just to teach her a lesson.  But really I had no evidence of that, and I’d seen her around the hotel, so I asked for her room number and took the purse up to where she lived on the fifth floor.
     The woman who answered the door was tall, middle-aged, with long, dyed-red hair.  She wore bracelets and a flowing, robe-like, Turkish hippie shirt.  She had apparently been sleeping, or otherwise indisposed, and at first she didn’t understand what the hell I was saying, but when she caught on she was really grateful: “Oh my God!  I didn’t even know that was gone.  Oh thank you so much.  Let me give you a reward.”
            “That’s OK.”
            “No, no.  I should give you something for your trouble.  I’m so scatterbrained!”  She checked her wallet, then said, “Oh, I’m afraid I’m kind of short right now.  I’m unemployed at the moment.”
            “Don’t worry about it.”
            “Actually,” she said, “I’m a poetess.  At the moment I’m composing a long revelatory work of scope and vision that I believe will open the eyes of a great many people around the world.”
            “Wow,” I said, and then, mercenary son of a bitch that I am, asked, “You think you’ll get some money for that?”            
         “Perhaps,” she said, with a touch of condescension. “Certainly I’m not in it solely for the money.”

            “Of course not.”

            “Cynthia Blair, by the way,” she said, extending a long, thin hand.

            I didn’t hear anything more from Cynthia for a few weeks after that, but apparently it had been bothering her that she couldn’t give me a reward, because one day she showed up at my door.  “I still don’t have any money,” she said, “but I have this coffee pot.  It’s a nice coffee pot, don’t you think?”

            There was nothing nice about it whatsoever.  It was an old, used coffee pot.  I must have looked rather bewildered, because she clarified her offer: “You can have it if you want.”

            I took the pot.  “Thanks,” I said.

            “I just wanted to give you something for your trouble.”

            Now the strange thing about it was, it was a very small coffee pot, apparently for espresso.  I had never seen one before.  “Uh, how do you use it,” I asked

            “I don’t know.  I’ve never used it before,” Cynthia said.  “I think you just put it on the burner.”

            “Hmmm.”

            “It needs a basket or something to go inside, but maybe you can find one of those.”

            “Oh yeah, I’m sure that’ll be no problem,” I said, unable, despite myself, to suppress a hint of sarcasm.  “Thanks.  It looks real good.”

            We stood there in the doorway for a moment, not knowing what more to say to each other.  Finally, I asked, “How’s the revelatory work coming?”

“What?  Oh, very well, thank you.  I believe it’s being well received.”

            “Good.”

            “However, as I’m sure you must realize, these things take time to be resolved, and in the meantime the mold is growing thick all around us.”

            Cynthia turned to go.  But then she thought of something and turned back and said, “Oh, by the way, I’d rinse that pot out if I were you.  I had bleach in it.”

            I wondered, but I didn’t ask.  Something for the trash after all.

Ed Hamilton