Living with Legends

From WFMU’s Beware of the Blog comes a tale of a failed suicide here at the Hotel Chelsea.  I find it hard to believe that someone jumped from the roof and lived.  Perhaps this is the guy we heard of who flung himself down the stairwell and bounced back and forth off of the wrought iron bannister and lived.  It’s more popular to jump down inside the hotel, since that way your ghost can haunt the actual building instead of the street.

TERRY "TK" FOLGER was an eccentric misanthrope, and one of WFMU’s more mentally unhinged staffers. As a personality profile, these characteristics imply that TKF (by which he self-identified) was fun, when he wasn’t self-destructive, and could be an unforgettable programmer, when not jeopardizing the station’s license.

He arrived here around 1982. He would never have made it to WFMU had he not been a suicidal failure. In 1981, distraught over the murder of a Beatle, Folger leapt from the roof of the Chelsea Hotel, but miraculously wasn’t united with his hero. What the 23rd Street pavement couldn’t claim, AIDS did in April 1994, his infection reportedly traced to a contaminated blood transfusion. TKF was one of two staffers to die of immune deficiency syndrome just months apart (Val Sebastiano passed away in late 1993).