Living with Legends

Children all over America raised their tiny voices in a shrill cry of joy recently, upon learning that Marlene Krauss had resigned as director and chairman of Woonsocket-based Summer Infant, a  company that designs, markets and distributes “health, safety and wellness” products for children.  Summer Infant, as reported on this blog, had been implicated in a scandal wherin their crib monitor were found to be broadcasting signals received from space-based NASA satellites (no joke!)  “Now we can finally be free to grow and develop to our full God-given potential without undue corporate and governmental interference,” said three-year-old Trevor, a spokesman for a support group for survivors of the diabolical, Orwellian brainwashing campaign.
       But seriously, folks, we have no idea as to the reason for Marlene’s resignation, ie. as to whether she was forced out or just decided to spend more time with her family.  But she can’t be too pleased about the loss of income.  As far as we can figure out, she was being paid 125,000/year as chairman, and $220,000/year with $1500/month for travel and up to half of her salary each year as a cash bonus for her job as executive vice president of product development (and probably she got a raise when she became director of the company).  Marlene also was apparently cashing out her stock in advance of her departure.

Coincidentally or not, Marlene’s departure coincided with all the eviction notices that were sent out to Chelsea Hotel tenants.  Though I doubt that she’s going to make up much of her income by squeezing late-payers, I guess every penny counts.  More significantly, Marlene is going to have a lot of time on her hands now, and if we’re lucky, maybe she’ll spend some of it with us here at the Chelsea.  By her own admission she’s a hard worker, and doesn’t need much sleep.  Sound like anybody you know?  Now maybe we can finally get somebody to stand at the desk from 6 in the morning until 6 in the evening and manage this place properly.

Finally, Marlene, we recommend that you set up one of those baby monitors in Elder and Tilley’s office.  They certainly have been running a rogue operation lately, and we feel they are desperately in need of adult supervision. — Ed Hamilton

As a former guest reminds us, sometimes the Chelsea ’s famous spirit of tolerance can be taken a bit too far:

        I stayed in the Chelsea Hotel for a week  back in the eighties and what I saw did not make me eager to come back.  Of course the place was a wreck and filled with freaks, but I’m not even talking about that.  I’m kind of a freak myself, in the sense of being a misfit or whatever (I write poetry and plays for the theatre, and am also, professionally, a hairdresser), but at some things I draw the line.  One night I’d been out partying at the clubs—as I often did in those days—and in the early morning I stumbled back to the Chelsea and flopped onto my bed and immediately went to sleep.  I don’t know what it was, but some uneasy feeling woke me not long afterwards.  I had rented the cheapest room possible, with a window that looked onto the airshaft that separates the Chelsea from the building next door [ed. note: the Carteret ], and so, with no street light the room was dark as a cave.  But through a crack in the curtains I saw a faint light, and so I drew back the curtains to take a look.  Across the pitch black, seemingly bottomless airshaft, I could see into the room next door.  In the sparsely furnished room I saw an old man and a young girl, a skinny teenager, though she must have been a prostitute from the looks of her heavy makeup and ornate, bouffant hairstyle, and what was left of her skimpy outfit.  The old man was beating her, and engaging in other, even more depraved and disgusting acts that I can’t even bring myself to mention.  Now I’m no pervert, but I watched anyway, spellbound, for what must have been a minute or more.
         Finally, it dawned on me that something was really wrong here.  I went out into the hallway, found the door to the room, and knocked.  When nobody answered I kept banging and banging.  Finally, the old man opened the door a crack and peered out.  He was ugly, with a horrible, pock-marked face, with a grizzled, patchy beard.  Summoning up all my courage, I said, “You gotta stop what you’re doing, because I’m pretty sure it’s illegal.”  The old man looked at me with naked contempt in his red, watery eyes.  “She’s my wife,” he snarled.  In the middle of a room littered with his dastardly accoutrements, the young girl lay tied up on the bed.  “That is not your wife, dude!” I said.  It was then that I noticed that he was holding something in his hand that was so repugnant that I’ve never dared speak of it to anyone in all these years.  In horror, I backpedaled into the hallway, and the old man slammed the door in my face.

Not waiting for the elevator, I ran down several flights of stairs and told them what was happening at the front desk.  The clerk said that no one had checked into that room that night, but I insisted that somehow they had got in.  The clerk got the bellman to accompany me up to the room.  No one answered when he knocked, and so he used his pass key to open the door.  When the door swung open, creaking on its hinges, a musty smell hit us.  The lights didn’t work, and the room was a wreck, filled with junk, and actually looked like it hadn’t been used in years.  The bellman shrugged his shoulders like this kind of thing happened all the time, and went back downstairs.  When I got back to my room I looked across the airshaft, but the room was dark, the curtains drawn, and I couldn’t see anything.  Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much that night!

I’ve thought about this incident a lot over the years, without coming to any definite conclusions.  I don’t know what plane of existence they were on.  Maybe they were in Hell.  I hope the girl didn’t die, but it sure looked like it was headed in that direction.

Damn!  Such, apparently, are the tribulations of a working girl when she checks into the Chelsea.  I hope at least she got her money.

 Surprise!  Our old buddy Glennon Travis has finally resurfaced from the muck.  After a few months of selling golf clubs at a country club, Glennon now has a job at the old Riverview Hotel at the corner of West Street and Jane Street in the village.  The St. Louis beach bum thought he had hit rock bottom when he was at the Chelsea.  Guess again!  Now he’s at a real flophouse—not the pretend kind with slumming artists in it.  Now Glennon is forced to stand behind a bullet-proof glass partition as he abuses residents.  (This is probably a good thing for Glennon, since everyone he meets immediately develops the intense desire to kill him.) 
            Actually, I’m sure there are a lot of fine people at the Riverview, including some artists, and they certainly don’t deserve this affront to their dignity.  For, make no mistake, that’s what it is.  Richard Born, for that is apparently who hired the boy again, knows that Glennon is not a qualified or even remotely appropriate manager for a residential building  (if he didn’t know it before, then he certainly does now, after the Chelsea fiasco).  Born hired Glennon because he wants to empty the Riverview of rent stabilized tenants, and he knows that Glennon has an irritating, abrasive, and obnoxious personality that will make tenants want to move to New Jersey (or shoot themselves in the head) rather than have to deal with him.  Though a better career move for him would have been to take a job as night watchman at Ice Station Zero in Antactica, Glennon can now take pride in being a sought-after specialist in the fine art of driving people bat-shit crazy.
            Unfortunately for the folks at the Riverview, they don’t have quite so high a media profile as we have here at the Chelsea, which deprives them of an important weapon in combating the greedy developers who are looting the city.  Already, according to a Riverview resident’s e-mail, occupancy in the SRO is down from 200 to 50 due to evictions since Born took over.  The good news is, residents are fighting back, and have taken a step that we creative types at the Chelsea never thought of, saddling Glennon with the ridiculous nickname of “Gigi” in recompense for the renaming of their august hotel as the insipid-sounding “Jane Hotel” (?!?!)  May the ghosts of the Titanic survivors rise up from the briny deep this Halloween and drag Gigi and Born and all their sociopathic ilk down to Davey Jones’s locker where the fish can condo-ize their barnacle-encrusted bones. — Ed Hamilton