Living with Legends

In his memoir, SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME, David Goodwillie describes a Chelsea character, but we can’t for the life of us figure out who it could be.  Below is the excerpt. Any guesses as to who the cigar smoking man who walks into rooms with closed doors might be?

Here he is again, the man from across the hall.  He doesn’t care that my door was closed, that I was working, or trying to.  He comes in, takes a seat in the corner, and produces a cigar from the depths of his crumpled jacket.  It’s one of those skinny hybrid cigars, the type smoked by street kids and men who no longer fit in the world.  He rolls the thing around in his fingers, then lights it and sighs. 

“I’m here to save you,” he says. 

He says the same thing every time.  He talks without breathing, streams of words rushing past thoughts.  Today it’s Edie Sedgwick and the fire.  It was candles, he tells me, candles and coke and too much confusion.  He says he was here in the hotel that night and I believe him.  The names are what get me, so many famous names that I wonder if he ever knew anyone ordinary.  Back when he knew people. 

Arnold at the front desk laughed when I asked about him.  Said he’s some kind of writer, been here almost 40 years, one of their permanent transients.  He’d been a talent once, a voice of his generation and all that.  There were a few published stories in the sixties, heady comparisons, soft fame, but then a book deal went wrong, addictions emerged, and the spotlight moved on.  The requisite poetry came next, bitter and unreadable, and then nothing.  Two decades of silence.  For a while, in the mid-eighties, he’d started work on a new book, a history of everything left unsaid. But then his wife left him for a banker and he withdrew again, became the Joe Gould of 23^rd Street—a sad loner spinning tales that never were. Arnold said I shouldn’t listen.

            But I can’t help it.  The man looks past me out the window and speaks of ghosts. Heroes of that New York.  Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, William Burroughs and toothless Gregory Corso.  He was here the night Sid stabbed Nancy, the night Mapplethorpe met Patti Smith.  Leaning forward he describes Edie’s skin, how the pills made it pale, how all that speed had her running in circles.  He talks with his hands, conducts a symphony with every sentence, and when he’s done, when the only story left to tell is his own, he gets up, looks solemnly at the pages piled on my desk, and walks out.

Goodwillie lived here in the early 00s, so this would have to be someone we all know.  Any guesses?  {Remember that certain identifying characterisics may have been changed.}  By the way, Mapplethorpe didn’t meet Patti Smith at the Chelsea.  And even more importantly, what the hell is a "permanent transient."