Legends of the Chelsea Hotel

Even so, there are limits. One holiday season, the person living directly above me acquired The Willie Nelson Christmas Album. This album involves Willie singing the old standards—“Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night,” “The Little Drummer Boy”—only with a guitar and a country twang. It was a little bit interesting, maybe, the first couple of times. But it got old really fast. Like the traditional holiday season, the playing of this album began around Thanksgiving and went on from there—not just once or twice a day, but repeatedly, morning, noon, and night.

It was a young guy named William who was playing it. I could tell by his voice, as he often sang along. Apparently, he was really trying to get into the Christmas spirit, psyching himself up. A rich kid who fancied himself a poet, William was the kind of guy who went from one fad to the next and didn’t do things in half measures but really went all out. As soon as one side of the album would finish, he would flip it to the other, over and over again. The pauses between sides were maddening: maybe this will be the end, I prayed each time.

But I had only been in New York a year or so, and I still had plenty of patience. Knowing William, I knew that sooner or later he would get sick of the album, and then he would never play it again. In the meantime I tried to keep my window closed.

Come to find out, I wasn’t the only one who was annoyed. When I came out of my room to go to the bathroom one afternoon, I saw Ray standing in the open door of his tiny room, 328, which also happened to be Harry Smith’s old room. As he was a painter, Ray had replaced Harry’s stacks of boxes with stacks of canvases. I had become accustomed to thinking of Ray as the archetypal New Yorker, I guess because of his gruffness, though it turns out he was from Minnesota. Ray had been working on a canvas, and he wore his paint-spattered work clothes. His long black hair, too, was speckled with paint.

“Who in God’s name is making that infernal racket?” he asked crossly. “How in the hell am I supposed to work? I have my art to do, my painting. How can I maintain inspiration with this insipid garbage echoing through my brain. Who is doing it?” he demanded. “Who!?” He acted almost like I was responsible.

“That figures! I’d like to go up there and wring his scrawny neck! It’s driving me fucking crazy. It’s like cats yowling! What is his problem? Listen to it once, then give it a rest, you asshole! And turn down the fucking volume, for Christ’s sake. Jesus. Has he got the record player in the window or something?” Ray gestured toward his window.

Ray’s window, I could see, was wide open. He had to keep it open when he was working to avoid being asphyxiated by the paint fumes. In general, there was too much heat in the back of the building anyway. In the brief pause in our conversation, we heard strains of Willie’s guitar as he crooned, “Have a holly, jolly Christmas. . . .”

As I mentioned, Ray lived in Harry Smith’s old room, 328, the room that shared the corridor with our room and Ryan Adams’s room. Ray had lived there since they had cleared out Harry’s room, which took them some time, apparently, since Harry was a notorious pack rat. Unjustly obscure, Smith was perhaps most influential as a filmmaker. A book called American Magus, consisting of interviews with Harry’s friends and acquaintances, came out on him a few years after his death, and that’s where I’ve gotten most of my information about him—though sometimes older Chelsea residents tell stories about him as well.

Harry was born in 1923 in Portland, Oregon, and grew up on an Indian reservation, where his mother was a teacher. His parents were Theosophists, which no doubt contributed to his lifelong obsession with magic and the occult. Short and slight, with his wisp of a beard, he actually looked like a troll or a gnome or some sort of elemental being. After a year or two studying anthropology in college, he settled in San Francisco, where he established a reputation as a painter and underground filmmaker. But he soon moved to New York, where he was to live, for the most part, for the rest of his life.

Harry’s paintings are mandala-like, composed of weird swirling colors and alchemical symbology. He was uncannily attuned to the rhythms in life and music and based many of his early paintings on the jazz of Monk, Parker, and Gillespie, attending their club dates and painstakingly recording each note of their performances, then reproducing these in brushstrokes on the canvas. He used much the same method in many of his early animated films, the most famous of which include Mahogany, Heaven and Earth Magic, and The Tin Woodsman’s Dream, and was the among the first to develop frame-by-frame hand painting of films. Sadly, Harry stopped painting once he started drinking heavily, as his style required precision and a firm hand. In the sixties he switched to live action in his films.

In the fifties Harry compiled his American Folk Music Anthology for Folkways Records. Recorded mainly from old 78s—some of them very rare, with only a few copies in existence—which Harry collected in used record stores in San Francisco, the anthology introduced a new generation of musicians to the music of such folk masters as Doc Boggs, the Carter Family, and Mississippi John Hurt. Some say Harry single-handedly brought about the folk music revival of the early sixties, but in any event he had a profound effect on the musicians who gathered in the coffee shops of Greenwich Village in those days. Bob Dylan, another old Chelsea resident, based several of his songs on recordings from the anthology. In the last year of his life, 1991, Harry was awarded a special Grammy for his work on the anthology.

Harry was an ethnomusicologist and made field recordings as well. One of Harry’s most famous recordings is of a Kiowa Peyote ceremony, which he attended on the invitation of Indians he met while in jail for drunkenness in Oklahoma. Back in New York, he recorded the ambient sounds of the city, sticking a microphone out the window of his room at the Chelsea to document the daily rhythm of the street life below. (He listened to the tapes over and over in order to discern patterns.) While living in a Bowery flophouse, he recorded the sounds of the down-and-out men in the surrounding cubicles, including the death throes of the old and sick. Here, too, he found a certain rhythm.

Harry obsessively collected and cataloged records, books (including a large number of pop-up books), cassette tapes, gourds, Ukrainian Easter eggs, tarot and playing cards, folk crafts, cheap plastic toys, and all kinds of pop ephemera. Of special interest are his collections of mounted string figures, of which he had thousands, and paper airplanes from all over the country, which he donated to the National Air and Space Museum. He stored these collections in whatever apartment he was living in at the time, and with friends, and basically with whoever would have them. (As I, too, am a pack rat, this makes Harry a character dear to my heart.)

A true polymath, in his early work Harry seemed on the verge of synthesizing his myriad influences. But alcohol and amphetamine abuse weakened him: though basically good-natured, in his later years he became ill-tempered and belligerent. An all-around weirdo, Harry had an abiding interest in magic and alchemy, the cabala, and all things occult. As I mentioned earlier, he was a disciple of Satanist and fellow drug abuser Aleister Crowley and a bishop of the Ordo Templi Orientis, Crowley’s mystical society. He liked to keep birds as pets, and when they died he stored them in the freezer. Asexual, Harry didn’t like for people to touch him. However, he once took a “spiritual wife.” To consummate their marriage he marched the young girl up the Bowery, instructing her to kiss each of the hundred or so derelicts they encountered on their walk. They were both rip-roaring drunk, however, and the girl didn’t seem to mind.

Harry refused to sell his work for money, although he was willing to trade it for drugs or for the books and records he was constantly buying. He was known to destroy his films and paintings in fits of rage, and a lot of his best work (and boxes of his collections as well) was thrown out or stolen by landlords when he was evicted from various places for not paying his rent. Always virtually penniless, he survived by bumming money off Allen Ginsberg—with whom he lived in the East Village for a time—and the rest of his friends. In his later years the Grateful Dead (who, legend has it, once performed a concert on the roof of the Chelsea) gave him a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year fellowship to honor his work on the folk anthology.

Harry lived here at the Chelsea off and on in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. In the seventies he lived on the seventh floor but moved out because he thought the building was becoming too violent; he had apparently been assaulted by one of his acquaintances. Becoming increasingly frail in his final years, he died in 1991, coughing up blood, in Room 328 of the Chelsea. Harry famously faced death singing: “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying!” Not too original, admittedly, especially for a genius of his caliber, but still not bad, considering the circumstances. It takes a real man to go out singing.

The guy who sublet us Room 332 knew Harry Smith. Gerald told us that when Harry lived there, his room was piled to the ceiling with boxes of junk, so that there was hardly any space to move around. Harry couldn’t even open the door all the way because there were boxes stacked behind it. He said that after Harry died his room remained sealed up for several months, since nobody could figure out what to do with all the stuff, and of course Stanley—by no means your average run-of-the mill landlord—knew better than to just throw it away.

One day, Gerald recounts, he came home and saw several people standing in the corridor outside Harry’s room. Others were inside the room, moving boxes around. As he squeezed through the men to get to his door, who should come out of Harry’s room but Allen Ginsberg himself: round-bellied, bespectacled, gray-haired, and bearded. Gerald stood there staring at him for several moments but was too shocked to say anything.

“I could hear them out there for a long time talking,” Gerald said. “And I could hear them moving things around, and I wanted to go out there and introduce myself to Ginsberg, but I was kind of intimidated. Here’s this guy I’ve idolized my whole life, I mean, this great poet! But I really wanted to tell him how much I admired his work. Finally, I had to go out anyway, and so I worked up the nerve and opened my door.

“There were some guys standing around and they had some boxes on a luggage rack, but I didn’t see Ginsberg. I said hi to those guys and tried to get a look in Harry’s room, but I couldn’t see anything. I walked on down the hall, disappointed that I had missed my chance.

“I was cursing myself for not talking to Ginsberg,” Gerald went on, “and not really paying attention to what I was doing. I guess I must’ve had my head down, because I remember looking up, and when I did, who should I see coming through the door at the end of the hall, but William Burroughs!”

Ginsberg and Burroughs both lived in the Chelsea in the late fifties and early sixties, as did Jack Kerouac. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch here. (And I don’t know why he doesn’t have a plaque on the front of the building!) But anyway, when two-thirds of the Holy Trinity of Beatdom turn out for a shot at the spoils, you know you’ve got a significant figure here. And Kerouac, of course, was indisposed at the time.

Harry didn’t collect everything, however. Notoriously—several people around the hotel have mentioned this to me—Harry used to throw his trash out the window onto the roof of the synagogue next door. Some think this was a symptom of anti-Semitism on his part, while others maintain that Harry himself was part Jewish, so who knows? Personally, I think it was probably just the easiest way to get rid of his trash. Which leads me to suspect that part of his collecting, too, had to do with the fact that he just didn’t feel like walking the paper airplanes and string figures down the hall to the trash bin, so he cataloged them and put them in boxes. Disgusted that there were certain things he couldn’t collect, like rotting fruit and old containers of Chinese food, he flung these from his window. On the other hand, it would have been easier simply to throw them down into the courtyard below. As his window faces south, and the synagogue is to the west of the hotel, he would have had to lean out the window and sling the trash in order to get it onto the roof. In his later years, Harry had trouble with his legs and couldn’t walk so well, but I suppose there was nothing wrong with his arms.

(Years later, the folks at the synagogue had their revenge—if not exactly on the right person, at least on a resident of the offending corridor—an episode which I recount later in the book in my story “The Transformative Power of Dirt.”)

Not only nutballs lived down this corridor. Later, after we were gone, a very nice girl with pink hair moved into Room 328. She wore pink clothes and painted the room and everything else she came in contact with pink as well. (Come to think of it, that’s a little nutty too.) You can see her picture, taken in Harry Smith’s old room, in Rita Barros’s photo book, Chelsea Hotel: Fifteen Years. She was a painter, she said, but mostly I think she was just a walking work of art herself. I wonder what Harry would think of his room now: pink. He’d probably put a hex on the girl. Or maybe he’d marry her—spiritually, of course.