Living with Legends

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 Serena’s once just to see what it looks like, and—surprise!–it looks exactly like a basement, with low ceilings and exposed pipes.  But besides that, it’s nicely decorated, in red and black like a lot of clubs these days.  I have to admit they did a good job with it, under the circumstances.

            The club was started by Serena—I forget her last name—who actually lived here for a time, maybe she still does, in order to cash in on the hipster cache of the Chelsea.  Serena herself no longer owns the club, however.  She sold it, hopefully for big bucks.

One night recently, a thin, pretty, young blond woman, in Manolo Blahnik heels and a sexed up dress, burst through the front door of the hotel, and came running frantically up to the desk. “Please don’t send hotel guests to my club!” the woman said, hysterically.  She was apparently the hostess at Serena’s.

“People come downstairs and ask where the bar in the Chelsea Hotel is,” the desk clerk said, matter-of-factly, “and so I give them directions to Serena’s.”

“Oh, my God!  Please don’t do that anymore!” the woman shrieked.  “There’s a guy out there who’s already been drinking!  And he’s wearing a Kentucky Wildcats sweatshirt!  And now he wants in my club!”

I was standing there waiting for the elevator, and, hearing this crazy rant, I burst out laughing and the hostess turned and glared at me.  “Sorry,” I said.

The hostess turned back toward the desk.  “What am I supposed to do with this guy?” she said, a bit more calmly.

The desk clerk shrugged his shoulders.

“Not our problem!” the switchboard operator piped up from her corner.

The staff likes to play tricks on people.  Or maybe they just get tired of explaining that there really is no Chelsea Hotel Bar.  In certain guide books—apparently written by people who never visited the hotel, it says things like, “Be sure to stop by the Chelsea Hotel Bar, where Dylan Thomas and William Burroughs hoisted beers.”  If they mean anything, they mean the El Quijote, which was once, 80 or 90 years ago, the hotel dining room.  The El Q has more in common with the hotel, and anybody who wants to hoist beers with bohemians would obviously be better off there.  But sometimes I guess it’s just good for a laugh to send an unfashionable looking tourist or two down to Serena’s.

Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton

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 she was a junkie who had broken in to shoot up, and that made me feel like taking the money and throwing her purse in the trash just to teach her a lesson.  But really I had no evidence of that, and I’d seen her around the hotel, so I asked for her room number and took the purse up to where she lived on the fifth floor.

The woman who answered the door was tall, middle-aged, with long, dyed-red hair.  She wore bracelets and a flowing, robe-like, Turkish hippie shirt.  She had apparently been sleeping, or otherwise indisposed, and at first she didn’t understand what the hell I was saying, but when she caught on she was really grateful: “Oh my God!  I didn’t even know that was gone.  Oh thank you so much.  Let me give you a reward.”

            “That’s OK.”

            “No, no.  I should give you something for your trouble.  I’m so scatterbrained!”  She checked her wallet, then said, “Oh, I’m afraid I’m kind of short right now.  I’m unemployed at the moment.”

            “Don’t worry about it.”

            “Actually,” she said, “I’m a poetess.  At the moment I’m composing a long revelatory work of scope and vision that I believe will open the eyes of a great many people around the world.”

            “Wow,” I said, and then, mercenary son of a bitch that I am, asked, “You think you’ll get some money for that?”            

“Perhaps,” she said, with a touch of condescension. “Certainly I’m not in it solely for the money.”

            “Of course not.”

            “Cynthia Blair, by the way,” she said, extending a long, thin hand.

            I didn’t hear anything more from Cynthia for a few weeks after that, but apparently it had been bothering her that she couldn’t give me a reward, because one day she showed up at my door.  “I still don’t have any money,” she said, “but I have this coffee pot.  It’s a nice coffee pot, don’t you think?”

            There was nothing nice about it whatsoever.  It was an old, used coffee pot.  I must have looked rather bewildered, because she clarified her offer: “You can have it if you want.”

            I took the pot.  “Thanks,” I said.

            “I just wanted to give you something for your trouble.”

            Now the strange thing about it was, it was a very small coffee pot, apparently for espresso.  I had never seen one before.  “Uh, how do you use it,” I asked

            “I don’t know.  I’ve never used it before,” Cynthia said.  “I think you just put it on the burner.”

            “Hmmm.”

            “It needs a basket or something to go inside, but maybe you can find one of those.”

            “Oh yeah, I’m sure that’ll be no problem,” I said, unable, despite myself, to suppress a hint of sarcasm.  “Thanks.  It looks real good.”

            We stood there in the doorway for a moment, not knowing what  more to say to each other.  Finally, I asked, “How’s the revelatory work coming?”

“What?  Oh, very well, thank you.  I believe it’s being well received.”

            “Good.”

            “However, as I’m sure you must realize, these things take time to be resolved, and in the meantime the mold is growing thick all around us.”

            Cynthia turned to go.  But then she thought of something and turned back and said, “Oh, by the way, I’d rinse that pot out if I were you.  I had bleach in it.”

            I wondered, but I didn’t ask.  Something for the trash after all.

Ed Hamilton