I was walking through the Chelsea lobby one day.  The owner, Stanley Bard, a small, dapper older man in a suit and tie, was standing up by the desk talking to a younger man with a beard and paint-stained overalls–a common type at the hotel.  The man had obviously come to…

           III. A Threat. It was inevitable that The Umpire should eventually run afoul of Magda.  A ballet dancer in the forties and fifties, now elderly, Magda was a tough old broad who had cultivated a life-long habit of never taking any shit from anyone.  Magda was famous for threatening junkies—with a…

II. The Umpire There’s a middle-aged woman who hangs out in the Chelsea lobby and apparently can’t control her gestures.  (Maybe she has Tourette’s too; unfortunately, I’m not a psychiatrist.)  When you walk through the lobby she’ll let you know what she thinks of you through a series of hand signals: thumbs-down, up-yours, the finger,…

I. Lobby Mascots Stanley Bard, our justly esteemed proprietor, always sees to it that his guests are well entertained.  In particular, he provides us with an unbroken series of inadvertent performance artists, appearing daily on that grand old stage known as the Chelsea Hotel lobby. The first, in my residence, was Hiroya.  A fat Japanese…

There’s a nightclub in the basement of the Hotel Chelsea.  Most everybody who lives in the hotel would rather have a laundry room, or something practical, but instead we’ve got a trendy nightclub where hardly any of us ever venture.  (A real A list place. I saw Monica Lewinski go in there!)  I went in…

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…

Bob Dylan turns 64 today, but I’m not going to do an extensive blog about his relationship to the Chelsea because, as they mentioned in yesterday’s New York Time’s article, "he is a shill for Victoria’s Secret."  Instead, I’ll dwell on his cat Smoke who either ran off or went up in smoke, depending upon…

Coming back from the deli, a bag of muffins in one hand and a tray of coffees in the other, I rounded the corner to the elevator just as it was opening. There was a man in a black leather jacket in the back corner of the elevator, head down, slumping forward, on the nod. …

We used to have a doctor in the Chelsea.  I needed a flu shot one fall, and, since I had seen his fliers in the elevator, I went to his office, on the first floor.  It was eleven in the morning.  It took him a long time to answer the door, and when he did,…