The Chelsea is a mix of permanent residents and transients—who could be tourists or businessmen, or prostitutes or junkies. For the past few years we’d been lucky, and the room next door to us was rented by a dancer—exotic or otherwise, she never did say—who kept weird hours but was reasonably quiet. But then she found a boyfriend and moved to New Jersey.
About a week later we heard a commotion outside. Someone was rattling all the doors on our floor, trying them to see if they were open. He rattled ours—locked, thank God. He seemed to get into the dancer’s room, and then things settled down for perhaps two minutes. Then somebody banged on their door and we heard Bart, the security man, say, in a loud voice, “If I had known it was you, I would have never rented her this room!” What had happened was that an old junkie (I had stuck my head out for a look, and seen a thin, toothless, older man), had got his slightly younger girlfriend to rent a room for them, and then he had tried to sneak in past the front desk. “You were trying to trick me, Tony!” Bart said.
“Ah, no I wasn’t,” Tony said, in a thick Brooklyn accent.
Bart seemed ready to let Tony and his girlfriend stay. Referring to the bathroom we were to share with them, Bart said, “Be sure to keep this door locked at all times.” He left them in the room and went back downstairs.
“You told me this was gonna be OK,” I heard the woman say.
“It’s gonna be OK, baby, just let me handle it,” Tony said. He’s letting us stay, you see?”
But in a flash, Bart was back. He had talked it over with the night manager. “Sorry Bro, nothing personal, but you got to go. You’re 86ed from the list, bro. You want a room you’ll have to talk to the owner, Stanley Bard, he’s the only one who can rent you a room.”
“Stanley’s my friend. He’ll rent me a room. Just talk to him.”
“You talk to him,” Bart said. “Stanley ’s in at six in the morning.”
Then Tony’s true feelings toward Stanley seemed to surface, as he exclaimed: “That fucking bastard!”
“So you gonna make it easy or do I have to call the cops.”
“Yeah, go ahead and call them,” Tony said. But then he immediately thought better of it and agreed to go. He was probably well known to the police, and who knows what kind of contraband he was holding. “We’ll be down in a few minutes,” he said, but Bart wouldn’t leave him for even a minute.
“Don’t worry, baby,” Tony said as they left, “we’ll go over to a place I know on east 23rd. It’s much better than this dump. They have a weight room and everything, and they’re thirty dollars cheaper.”
The woman wasn’t having any of it. As they walked out to the elevators, she said, “I didn’t know they would call the cops on you!”
We were relieved to be rid of them. Sharing a bathroom with junkies is no picnic.
Fifteen minutes later somebody was down on the street, yelling hysterically, “I’m done with you!” He yelled the same thing, over and over, for about a half and hour. Then he moved on down the street, still yelling, and his voice trailed off and finally died away he rounded to corner.
Later that night I asked the night manager, “Was that Tony yelling in the street?”
“Yeah,” he said. “He was yelling in the lobby too. I just wish people would keep that shit upstairs so I didn’t have to deal with it.”
Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton
