Living with Legends

As a former guest reminds us, sometimes the Chelsea ’s famous spirit of tolerance can be taken a bit too far:

        I stayed in the Chelsea Hotel for a week  back in the eighties and what I saw did not make me eager to come back.  Of course the place was a wreck and filled with freaks, but I’m not even talking about that.  I’m kind of a freak myself, in the sense of being a misfit or whatever (I write poetry and plays for the theatre, and am also, professionally, a hairdresser), but at some things I draw the line.  One night I’d been out partying at the clubs—as I often did in those days—and in the early morning I stumbled back to the Chelsea and flopped onto my bed and immediately went to sleep.  I don’t know what it was, but some uneasy feeling woke me not long afterwards.  I had rented the cheapest room possible, with a window that looked onto the airshaft that separates the Chelsea from the building next door [ed. note: the Carteret ], and so, with no street light the room was dark as a cave.  But through a crack in the curtains I saw a faint light, and so I drew back the curtains to take a look.  Across the pitch black, seemingly bottomless airshaft, I could see into the room next door.  In the sparsely furnished room I saw an old man and a young girl, a skinny teenager, though she must have been a prostitute from the looks of her heavy makeup and ornate, bouffant hairstyle, and what was left of her skimpy outfit.  The old man was beating her, and engaging in other, even more depraved and disgusting acts that I can’t even bring myself to mention.  Now I’m no pervert, but I watched anyway, spellbound, for what must have been a minute or more.
         Finally, it dawned on me that something was really wrong here.  I went out into the hallway, found the door to the room, and knocked.  When nobody answered I kept banging and banging.  Finally, the old man opened the door a crack and peered out.  He was ugly, with a horrible, pock-marked face, with a grizzled, patchy beard.  Summoning up all my courage, I said, “You gotta stop what you’re doing, because I’m pretty sure it’s illegal.”  The old man looked at me with naked contempt in his red, watery eyes.  “She’s my wife,” he snarled.  In the middle of a room littered with his dastardly accoutrements, the young girl lay tied up on the bed.  “That is not your wife, dude!” I said.  It was then that I noticed that he was holding something in his hand that was so repugnant that I’ve never dared speak of it to anyone in all these years.  In horror, I backpedaled into the hallway, and the old man slammed the door in my face.

Not waiting for the elevator, I ran down several flights of stairs and told them what was happening at the front desk.  The clerk said that no one had checked into that room that night, but I insisted that somehow they had got in.  The clerk got the bellman to accompany me up to the room.  No one answered when he knocked, and so he used his pass key to open the door.  When the door swung open, creaking on its hinges, a musty smell hit us.  The lights didn’t work, and the room was a wreck, filled with junk, and actually looked like it hadn’t been used in years.  The bellman shrugged his shoulders like this kind of thing happened all the time, and went back downstairs.  When I got back to my room I looked across the airshaft, but the room was dark, the curtains drawn, and I couldn’t see anything.  Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much that night!

I’ve thought about this incident a lot over the years, without coming to any definite conclusions.  I don’t know what plane of existence they were on.  Maybe they were in Hell.  I hope the girl didn’t die, but it sure looked like it was headed in that direction.

Damn!  Such, apparently, are the tribulations of a working girl when she checks into the Chelsea.  I hope at least she got her money.