Part II: Ghosts Of The Old Hotel (PART I)
Eventually someone must have complained—or more likely a lot of people, repeatedly, because that’s what it would have taken to get a response. Anyway, one of the desk clerks came up and confronted the woman while she was in her room. I recognized his voice: it was a young Chinese man named Joe. I felt sorry for the poor guy for having to deal with this nut. He was obviously low man on the totem pole. He didn’t have a very advanced command of the English language, or at least not good enough to talk his way out of this assignment. Joe knocked on her door and said, "Is there problem?”
"Damn straight there’s a fucking problem!" the woman screamed.
"What is problem?" Joe asked.
"Can’t you see?!"
"No,” he said. Then he made a stab at it: “The window is open?"
"The fucking window is open because the fucking room is filled with smoke! I know that smell: you’ve been spraying for bugs! You assholes can’t fool me! My late husband was an exterminator! I better not wake up in the morning with black eyes!”
Apparently, she believed that the inhalation of bug spray causes black eyes. I don’t know whether this is true or not. Maybe she just was making a faulty association, and the black eyes she 
had received in the past had been from beatings by her late husband, the exterminator. I could see him now: balding, potbellied, rough and unshaven after a hard day’s work, drifting through the halls in his ectoplasmic fog of insecticide.
"No one has sprayed," Joe said. "I smell nothing."
"I know the score, you fucking asshole! I’ve been around! I know what goes on in these fancy hotels!" In her delusional state, the woman believed the Chelsea to be a fancy hotel.
That was the craziest thing the old woman had said yet. The hallways of the Chelsea were dimly lit by long florescent tubes, the linoleum in the corridors was worn, the plaster of the walls cracked, the paint peeling, and exposed wires and pipes jutted out from the ceiling. Inside the rooms was even worse. The cheap hotel furniture hadn’t been replaced since at least the sixties, and was rotting and falling apart. The carpets were stained and dirty. Some of the rooms were better than others, but they were all infested by roaches and mice. That was another thing that made the exterminator story so funny. I doubted there had been an exterminator in the place in years.
It hadn’t always been like that. The hotel had been built in 1883 as a luxury apartment house, and then soon after that had been converted to a hotel for the big shots of the theatre world, people like Sarah Bernhardt—who reputedly slept in a coffin–and Lillian Russell. Late at night, in the flickering fluorescent lights, it was kind of hazy in the hallways, and the past had a tendency to bleed through into the present. Then, if you used your imagination, you could see the lingering traces of the grand old hotel. The layers of peeling paint hid the fancy woodwork, and here and there a stained glass transom had survived.
So perhaps the woman was remembering the good old days. I caught myself thinking that maybe she had lived here as a young woman, perhaps with her late husband, at the time a virile young exterminator in the prime of his life.
The only problem was that she wasn’t old enough to remember that far back. As far back as the time of Dylan Thomas and even Thomas Wolfe, the place had been down at the heels. She would have been young in the fifties or sixties, when the place was a serious flophouse, on the order of a Bowery Hotel. By that point the luxury suites had long since been chopped up into cubicles, like the one in which I lived.
"Please do not curse me," Joe requested of the woman.
"They did this exact same thing to me at the Harold Johnson’s!" That’s what she said: Harold Johnson’s. I guess she was under the delusion that that was a fancy hotel too.
"I am sorry," Joe said.
"I want another room! Immediately!"
"No other rooms are available."
"I paid my $800!!!" That was apparently what they were charging her for a week’s rent.
"You can have your money back and go some place else."
"You’re not getting rid of me that easy!"
Then she abruptly changed the subject. Your guess is as good as mine on this one. "And another thing," she screamed, "I want you to turn off this heat!"
"But it is February," Joe protested."
"I said no fucking heat!"
"It is thirty degrees out. You will freeze."
"I paid my fucking $800 and I say no heat!"
Joe went out and got the key that was used to adjust the temperature of the radiator. He came back and turned the radiator off. "There," he said, a tone of perverse satisfaction in his voice. "No heat."
But Joe wasn’t getting off that easily. The woman returned to her favorite topic: "Can’t you see this whole room is filled with smoke?!"
"You are blind, lady."
"I’m not fucking blind! I’m legally blind! That means I can see things up close, just not far away! Who told you I was fucking blind?! I’m not fucking blind, you asshole!"
"Please, you no curse me!" Joe pleaded.
"Can’t I get a fucking clerk who fucking speaks fucking English?!"
"You no curse me, please!"
"You fucking foreign asshole!"
Joe finally got fed up with this abuse. "You are crazy lady!" he yelled at her.
"I’m not crazy!"
"YOU ARE!!!"
As Joe walked away down the hall, the woman came out of her room and screamed after him, "I better not wake up tomorrow with black eyes!" Next Week Part III: The Police Investigation (Copyright 2006, Ed Hamilton)
