CHELSEA HORROR HOTEL #2
March, 2011
Sinister as bat wings, a dual veil of heavy and strange hangs around the Chelsea Hotel. The New York Times called it “the air of a great dame”, but like a démodé drag queen on a permanent drunk, she’s all tragedy and no comic relief. I think of the Chelsea as a place you go to look for inspiration but instead, tumble into depression. A place to wallow around in your own egoist muck, live out the last days of a doomed love affair (alone), write melancholic songs, do drugs, o.d. on drugs, feel cool because your heroes may have slept (and had sad, dark sex) in the bed beneath you. A place to engage your Tom of Finland fantasies with sailors you pick up on Times Square who turn around and pick your pocket.
Some poor saps fall into the Chelsea vortex and never escape. One fellow speaking in a documentary about Hotel Hell claims this vortex becomes either dark or light depending on your polarity. Harumph. It’s more about how far you can shut down all your senses, or not, to survive the place at all. Another long-term tenant who trained herself into full shutdown spoke about how often she’d hear the thump of bodies hitting pavement. Leaping from balconies or through windows is a favored form of suicide at the Chelsea.
Of course as a young nihilist I was dying to check in on that blistering day, summer of 1977 when I first walked through its doors. The first thing to hit me was the morbid fragrance of Lysol and human misery peculiar to prisons and mental institutions, but I wasn’t about to let this miasma dissuade me. After all, the two Dylans, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Sartre, de Beauvoir and so many others had lived and worked at the grand old dame. I wanted to join that list, wanted some of that fairy dust but ended up with demon ethers. The Chelsea is downright creepy, and I’m talking bad bad juju. Each time I’ve stayed there, truly wretched things have occurred and to this day when I turn a corner onto 23rd Street and see it loom into view, I cross the street to avoid its sinister maw.
Thanks in part to Stanley Bard and the host of artists living there whom fame has eluded, it has been mythologized that every important artist who has ever called the Chelsea home created their greatest works there. Arthur C. Clark’s 2001. Kerouac’s On the Road. I’m just not buying it. Shall we talk about the great songs it allegedly served as womb to? Sure, if we’re talking great funereal music. Dylan’s Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. A masterpiece, yes, and as doleful as its name. Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel #2. Imagine how much darker the unsung #1. I’m betting Rufus Wainwright wrote his dreary tune Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk at the Chelsea. Dee Dee Ramone spoke truth when he titled the book about his experiences there Chelsea Horror Hotel. My own horrified take on the Chelsea is in part due to a memory of Sid Vicious.
I never believed Sid actually killed Nancy. Everyone I knew ran from Nancy. She was a nightmare, the incarnation of Beelzebub with a bad dye job. Whenever she came into any club, Max’s, Mudd, CB’s, it was time to duck and cover. You did not want to get caught in the trajectory of Nancy’s maelstrom of nasty. As for the night of her demise, the Chelsea was always a notorious drug den, so imagine being a dealer having to deal with, let alone deal to Nancy Spungeon. Hell hath no bottom. Skeevy pushers wandered in and out of the Chelsea at all hours, and the nefarious commerce going on in Room 100 the night of her assault is well-documented.
The following incident happened in the early winter of 1978. I was living on East 3rd Street in a building filled with musicians and artists. Members of Crass lived there, and Jerry Nolan rented the first floor apartment. Jerry had the basement hooked up as a rehearsal studio. I think Johnny (Thunders) lived at Jerry’s when he wasn’t at one girl’s place or another’s. I liked them both a lot. Jerry was a soft-spoken guy, always very sweet, and Johnny reminded me of a sexy greaser girl I knew back in Cleveland. Jerry and I would hang out sometimes listening to records, and on nights when Johnny was a no-show at the Heartbreaker rehearsals, he’d invite me down to play with them. I’d sing on their covers of "She’s Something Else" and "C’mon Everybody" by Eddie Cochran. The Heartbreakers were a truly rockin’ band. Walter Lure was another friend I hung out with sometimes at CB’s. The musicians in New York were far nicer than the insecure women-haters I’d known in Cleveland.
One afternoon in late October, I was on my way home, shivering, because I never dressed properly in the cold. Looks always trumped comfort. It was an untypically frigid afternoon for that time of year. No rain no snow, just a rather sad day, sky the weight and color of concrete. Turning the corner onto 3rd Street I saw a fellow in a studded leather jacket hunched over on my front steps. It was Sid.
Sid was good friends with the Heartbreakers, Johnny and Jerry in particular because they all shared a habit. Although Jerry was a junkie, he never ever offered it to me, which I thought was quite gentlemanly of him. The idea of actually using it petrified me.
I said “Hi” to Sid, and very shyly, he said “Hi” back. He was white as porcelain and as fragile. As if someone had drained all life from him. I knew about his troubles. The Nancy debacle had occurred earlier that month and he’d been in jail and attempted suicide since by slitting his wrists. He was not in good shape, not the same cocky punk I saw spitting and roaring from the stage at Max’s Kansas City a few months previous. He looked so small.
“You all right?” I asked, and he nodded, trembling like me but probably from more than the cold. “You waiting for Jerry?”
He barely glanced at me and asked, “Yeah, you know where he’s at?”
“No but do you want to wait inside where it’s warm and have a cup of tea?” He shrugged, said “Yeah” and followed me up to my apartment.
I made him tea. A little smile curved his lips, the only smile I’d see from him – I think he was pleased that I served PG Tips. We sat in my tiny kitchen at the table and his desolation, his loneliness was overwhelming. I’ll never forget that vision of him, so pale, so shy, picking at the fresh scars there on his wrists. He looked broken, delicate and utterly lost. It was heartbreaking. I couldn’t bring myself to try and engage him in small talk, or bring up his troubles, so we barely said a dozen words to one another. I had a profound longing to make him feel safe, if only for a moment.
“Everything will work out, you know.”
He kept his eyes down, didn’t reply or even look up.
I don’t know why I said it when I knew it wasn’t true. His defeat scared me. I suddenly wished the stupid cliché could have raised the old Vicious ire and he might have a retort for me, maybe a gruff punky “What do you know?”, or “It’s all bollocks.” But he was silent, eyes glued to the table. He took another gulp of tea.
In the time we passed together, I played records for him. Burning Spear, Fela Kuti. We smoked an endless amount of fags, drank endless cups of milky tea and I watched to see if his foot would tap to the thumping rhythmic soundtrack that eased our silence. I did see a little smile flash, just for a second. I kept dialing Jerry’s number until finally, he picked up. And then Sid thanked me, he thanked me, sweetly, and was gone.
It felt as if I’d been visited by an apparition, one haunting and haunted. A wraith slipping through the time he had left. He’d already died, in Room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel.
Since writing this story, my ideas about the Chelsea have shifted. I have a friend that has lived there for decades, a brilliant artist with a fantastic loft-like space. She was kind enough to allow me to house-sit for several weeks. I felt the spirits of the place not as malevolent, but in the tradition of the outcasts before me, as mischievous and provocative. I felt inspired to write a few songs. Yeah they are dark, but haunted is a way of life for some. I haven't returned since the new ownership renovated. May the long-term tenants be good stewards, and may they be safe and protected. It is an extraordinary spot. Long live the Chelsea Hotel, its beautiful ghosts... and the poets gone and who remain. 🖤