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 whose story you believe, during the fire that Edie started in her room.
In the spirit of Smoke, today’s Slice of Life is about those crazy hotel cats.
There’s a big orange cat that comes in our window from the fire escape—which it uses to travel between floors. One time it got into our room late at night without our knowing it, and just went to sleep amidst all the dusty papers and boxes under our bed. At the break of dawn it clambered out on the opposite side of the bed—near the wall—scaring the hell of both of us. We thought a rat must be climbing into bed with us.
There’s no rats in the hotel, as far as I know, but there are plenty of mice. Lately we’ve set out glue traps, so we have to be careful and not let any domestic animals into the room. But one time in the middle of the night I had to go down the hall to the bathroom, and, half asleep, I opened the door and a little gray cat darted into the room. She went straight for the glue trap under the bed—a big one for rats, those are the best—and got stuck in it straightaway. Howling and thrashing, she leapt wildly about the room, crashing into furniture, until she finally dislodged the glue trap, at which point she darted from the room and sped away down the hall. I turned on the lights and found the glue trap: the cat had left behind three perfect paw prints, framed in thick gray fur. At least that kept her away for a few days, though now she won’t let me pet her anymore.
This little gray cat runs into rooms all the time, especially tourist rooms, and gets trapped inside. Her owner then has to comb the halls, calling out the cat’s name, and listening for it’s piteous cries. When she finally tracks it down, she has to call the front desk to get somebody to open the room and let the cat out.
We used to have a dog too, Gingie, a fat brown mutt. Gingie had free reign of the hotel and would ride the elevator form floor to floor. Whenever I opened a can of tunafish, I could always count on hearing Gingie’s scratch on my door—though it would usually come about an hour later, when the tunafish was long gone. After this happened several times, I learned to save a small portion for her. Poor Gingie, alas, has long since joined the ranks of the Chelsea ghosts.
Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton
38 photo of Thomas Wolfe taken in the Chelsea? The date coincides with Wolfe’s tenure at the hotel. The LOC was unable to find any documentation regarding the location of the setting. The photographer, Carl Van Vechten, was noted for his photographs of writers and celebrities. Photographs of Sherwood Anderson (Chelsea Author) such as the one below taken in Central Park, are also part of Van Vechten’s collection.
