PART I: A DIABOLICAL PLOT

Those fancy hotels work like this: first, they take your money, say for a week’s stay, in advance. Then they gas you, so you either die or get fed up and leave early. In either case, they get to rent your room out again to some other sucker, thus doubling their money.

One night I was sitting in my tiny room in the Chelsea Hotel, drinking and writing. (My girlfriend, Susan, I think, was away on a business trip.) I had gone out for another six-pack, and had just got back into the hotel and was walking down the hallway toward my room. It was February, and the hall was freezing cold. One of the rooms on the hall had the door standing wide open; I could see inside it, and the window was wide open, too. An old woman with long, dyed-blond hair came out of the room, wearing a long suede coat and holding a sandwich. I had never seen her before.

“Hello,” I said. “How are you?”

“I have to eat my dinner out here because my room is filled with smoke!” the woman screamed. Her eyes were darting back and forth in her head like she couldn’t see very well. She didn’t wear glasses, though it seemed like she needed them. There was no smoke in her room.

“That’s terrible,” I said. “Why is your room filled with smoke?”

“What the hell are you asking me for!? Why don’t you ask them down at the front desk?!”

In those days the hotel was filled with crazies. We used to joke that the Chelsea was the last stop on the way to the nuthouse. Sometimes it made me wonder what I was doing there myself. Crazies and creative types: the line was kind of blurred.

But not in this case. “Well, can’t talk now. Gotta run,” I said, and turned my back on her and walked away down the hall.

She followed after me, screaming: “I don’t want to talk to you! I’m just eating my dinner! Why are you asking me about the smoke?! Huh!? Why are you asking me about the smoke?! You’ve been living here for years! You know what’s going on!”

At this point I had only been there for a few months. But I was beginning to get an inkling as to what was going on. They would rent these transient rooms out to just about anybody: pimps, prostitutes, con men, street hustlers—people who couldn’t get a room elsewhere—often at exorbitant rates. The theory was, that kept the rent down for the permanent residents, the writers and artists and musicians.

Breaking into a run, the old woman hot on my heels, I made it to my door. On the verge of panic, I fumbled around finding the right key, but got it into the lock before the woman could catch up to me. I slipped inside and slammed the door in her face. Goddamn crazy bitch.

Something I had said or done really set the woman off. She screamed for two hours about how there was a conspiracy to kill her. The management of the hotel and the long-term residents were in cahoots in this plot. Unfortunately, the halls wrapped around in such a way that my window was directly across from hers. I couldn’t concentrate on my work, and it didn’t take long before the old woman was driving me nuts. I was grateful when she went out in the hall and screamed, though I don’t think anybody else in the hotel appreciated it.

PART II: GHOSTS OF THE OLD HOTEL

Eventually someone must have complained—or more likely a lot of people, repeatedly, because that’s what it would have taken to get a response. Anyway, one of the desk clerks came up and confronted the woman while she was in her room. I recognized his voice: it was a young Chinese man named Joe. I felt sorry for the poor guy for having to deal with this nut. He was obviously low man on the totem pole. He didn’t have a very advanced command of the English language, or at least not good enough to talk his way out of this assignment. Joe knocked on her door and said, “Is there problem?”

“Damn straight there’s a fucking problem!” the woman screamed.

“What is problem?” Joe asked.

“Can’t you see?!”

“No,” he said. Then he made a stab at it: “The window is open?”

“The fucking window is open because the fucking room is filled with smoke! I know that smell: you’ve been spraying for bugs! You assholes can’t fool me! My late husband was an exterminator! I better not wake up in the morning with black eyes!”

Apparently, she believed that the inhalation of bug spray causes black eyes. I don’t know whether this is true or not. Maybe she was making a faulty association, and the black eyes she had received in the past had been from beatings by her late husband, the exterminator. I could see him now: balding, potbellied, rough and unshaven after a hard day’s work, drifting through the halls in his ectoplasmic fog of insecticide.

“No one has sprayed,” Joe said. “I smell nothing.”

“I know the score, you fucking asshole! I’ve been around! I know what goes on in these fancy hotels!” In her delusional state, the woman believed the Chelsea to be a fancy hotel.

That was the craziest thing the old woman had said yet. The hallways of the Chelsea were dimly lit by long fluorescent tubes, the linoleum in the corridors was worn, the plaster of the walls cracked, the paint peeling, and exposed wires and pipes jutted out from the ceiling. Even worse conditions prevailed in the rooms themselves. The cheap hotel furniture hadn’t been replaced since at least the sixties and was rotting and falling apart. The carpets were stained and dirty. Some of the rooms were better than others, but they were all infested with roaches and mice. That was another thing that made the exterminator story so funny. I doubted there had been an exterminator in the place in years.

It hadn’t always been like that. The Chelsea was once a luxury residence catering to the big shots of 23rd Street’s bustling theater scene. Late at night, in the flickering fluorescent lights, it was kind of hazy in the hallways, and the past had a tendency to bleed through into the present. Then, if you used your imagination, you could see the lingering traces of the grand old hotel. The layers of peeling paint hid the fancy woodwork, and here and there a stained-glass transom had survived.

So perhaps the woman was remembering the good old days. I caught myself thinking that maybe she had lived here as a young woman, perhaps with her late husband, at the time a virile young exterminator in the prime of his life.

The only problem was that she wasn’t old enough to remember that far back. As far back as the time of Dylan Thomas and even Thomas Wolfe, the place had been down at the heels. She would have been young in the fifties or sixties, when the place was a serious flophouse, on the order of a Bowery hotel. By that point the luxury suites had long since been chopped up into cubicles, like the one in which my girlfriend and I lived.

“Please do not curse me,” Joe requested of the woman.

“They did this exact same thing to me at the Harold Johnson’s!” That’s what she said: Harold Johnson’s. I guess she was under the delusion that that was a fancy hotel, too.

“I am sorry,” Joe said.

“I want another room! Immediately!”

“No other rooms are available.”

“I paid my $800!!!” That was apparently what they were charging her for a week’s rent.

“You can have your money back and go someplace else.”

“You’re not getting rid of me that easy!”

Then she abruptly changed the subject.Your guess is as good as mine on this one. “And another thing,” she screamed, “I want you to turn off this heat!”

“But it is February,” Joe protested.

“I said no fucking heat!”

“It is thirty degrees out. You will freeze.”

“I paid my fucking $800 and I say no heat!”

Joe went out and got the key that was used to adjust the temperature of the radiator. He came back and turned the radiator off. “There,” he said, a tone of perverse satisfaction in his voice. “No heat.”

But Joe wasn’t getting off that easily. The woman returned to her favorite topic: “Can’t you see this whole room is filled with smoke?!”

“You are blind, lady.”

“I’m not fucking blind! I’m legally blind! That means I can see things up close, just not far away! Who told you I was fucking blind?! I’m not fucking blind, you asshole!”

“Please, you no curse me!” Joe pleaded.

“Can’t I get a fucking clerk who fucking speaks fucking English?!”

“You no curse me, please!”

“You fucking foreign asshole!”

Joe finally got fed up with this abuse. “You are crazy lady!” he yelled at her.

“I’m not crazy!”

“YOU ARE!!!”

As Joe walked away down the hall, the woman came out of her room and screamed after him, “I better not wake up tomorrow with black eyes!”

PART III: THE POLICE INVESTIGATION

To save money, we had rented a room without a bathroom. Since I was drinking beer, I had to piss frequently, and since the bathroom was at the end of the hall, I had to walk past the woman several times during the night. The first few times I didn’t say anything to her, and she didn’t seem to recognize me. But one time, on the way back from the bathroom, I just couldn’t help myself: “Sure is smoky in here,” I said. Predictably, the woman screamed at me and ran after me again, but this time I had my key out and ready.

The woman continued to yell about the conspiracy—off and on—until about three in the morning. Then she finally wore herself out, closed her door, and was silent for the rest of the night.

But she was up at the crack of dawn. “Jesus Christ!” I said as I thrashed around in my bed. “This shit’s gonna drive me to drink!” Since I had been up the night before, writing—and drinking—her rant hadn’t completely unhinged me then, but it was a different story when I was trying to sleep. I pictured myself strangling her, shaking her by the neck until her body swung limp and her teeth rattled in her skull.

“You may kill me,” the woman raved, as if she’d read my thoughts, “but you’d better dispose of my body good, because there’ll be a police investigation!”

Well, I thought, at least she seems to have resigned herself to her fate. I only hoped that somebody would hurry up and gas her to death so I could go back to sleep. With any luck, the police wouldn’t wake me up for questioning.

And then she started singing “God Bless America” over and over again. She was being ironic, of course, and so it was kind of funny, but I would have much rather slept. The woman sang poorly, in a hoarse, throaty cackle, and the joke soon wore thin. Once in a while she would switch to “Glory, Glory Hallelujah,” and that came as a welcome relief—even though she didn’t know all the words.

But then something occurred to me. In her blindness, through the haze of the dimly lit halls, what the old woman glimpsed may not have been the past but rather the future of the Chelsea. The hotel, like the city itself, was on the verge of a transformation. In a year or two the fluorescent tubes would be gone, shining new globes in their place, as would the linoleum, replaced by inlaid wood. Soon there wouldn’t be any room for her kind here. Even now, the old bohemians were dying off, or drifting on. Rents were going up. The Chelsea was gradually being gentrified.

The woman seemed determined to sing all day. A jackhammer would have been preferable. A bullet to the head, and then a blissful oblivion.

Giving up on the notion of sleep, I put on my clothes and went out to get a cup of coffee.The woman was leaning against the wall, singing boisterously, but also coughing and sniffling between her verses—probably the result of sleeping with the window open in February.

Along with the coffee, I picked up some beer and cigarettes and a sandwich so I wouldn’t have to go out again. Back on my floor, the old woman was still in the hallway. I took a better look at her this time. Her hair had come out of its curl and was dangling limply, its gray roots having worked their way up during the night. Her clothes, the same as the day before, were rumpled. Her makeup was smeared, as if she had slept in it. She had quit singing for the moment. She was looking into a small mirror and smearing some kind of black stuff under her eyes. I didn’t speak to her, and she showed no signs of recognizing me from the night before.

PART IV: ANOTHER SORT OF HOTEL

The old woman wore herself out early from singing all day and went into her room and closed the door at about nine o’clock that evening. I was still pissed off about having been deprived of sleep. By this point I was so angry, in fact, that I couldn’t even write once it was quiet. As the night wore on, all I could think of was revenge. At about midnight I threw open my window and stuck my head out to see if I could see into the woman’s room. Her lights were out and there was no sound coming from within. No smell of gas either. If I had had a smoke bomb, I would have heaved it in through the woman’s window. I’ve got to remember to keep some of those suckers on hand.

I thought about dressing all in black and going over there to perform an exorcism, but I would have needed a suitable text. (I wished I had held onto my copy of Naked Lunch, written by William Burroughs while he was living here. That would have scared that bitch!) Unfortunately, I had sold off most of my books before I moved into my closet at the Chelsea.

Anyway, I had a better idea. I drained my beer for courage and headed out into the hall. I got the fire extinguisher down off its hook, walked over to the crazy woman’s door, and banged on it good and hard. Harder than necessary. It was taking her a while to answer, so I banged some more. She appeared at the door in her bathrobe, with her coat over the top of it. A blast of cold air hit me in the face.

“What the hell?!” she screamed, her eyes darting back and forth. “Who are you?!”

I held the fire extinguisher in one hand and the hose in the other. “I’m the exterminator,” I said.

For just a moment, her face showed terror. “What?! What do you want?!”

“I’m here to spray your room.”

The woman just totally went off: fucking this and fucking that. I thought she was going to attack me for a minute, the way she was thrashing her arms around. I got away from her quickly, almost running. The time I took to hang up the fire extinguisher probably would have given her a chance to catch me, but something must have given her pause. She just screamed; she didn’t chase.

And really, I don’t know what she had to complain about.You’d think she would have appreciated this independent confirmation of her theory. But maybe she just hated her late husband, the exterminator, so much that she couldn’t bear to be reminded of him. Poor man, at least now he’s at rest. For the second night in a row, the woman screamed long into the night.

They got rid of the old woman when her week ran out. I was surprised: I thought she was going to be one of those who barricade themselves in their rooms and refuse to leave. We get a lot of those cases around here, people whom they just keep on gassing, but who never seem to take the hint. Anyway, she went on her way to cause trouble elsewhere: hopefully to the nuthouse, but most likely just back to the good ol’ Harold Johnson’s.