The Transient Room
The Chelsea is a mix of permanent residents and transients—who could be tourists or businessmen, or prostitutes or junkies—and though that keeps things interesting, sometimes it makes for some pretty dicey situations. For the past year we’d been lucky: first we had Dee Dee Ramone next door, and then the room was rented by a dancer who kept weird hours but was reasonably quiet. But then she found a boyfriend and moved to New Jersey.
About a week after the dancer moved out we heard a commotion in the hallway. Someone was rattling all the doors on our floor, trying them to see if they were open. He rattled ours—but it was locked, thank God. He seemed to get into the dancer’s old room, and then things settled down for perhaps two minutes. Then somebody banged on their door and we heard Bart, one of the bellmen, say, in a loud voice, “If I had known it was you, I would have never rented her this room!”
What had happened was that an old junky—I had stuck my head out for a look and seen a thin, toothless, older man—had gotten his slightly younger girlfriend to rent a room for them and then he had tried to sneak in past the front desk. “You were trying to trick me, Tony!” Bart said.
“Ah, no I wasn’t,” Tony said, in a thick Brooklyn accent.
Bart seemed ready to let Tony and his girlfriend stay. Referring to the bathroom we were to share with them, Bart said, “Be sure to keep this door locked at all times.” (We had a note on the door to this effect. This precaution was designed, ironically, to keep out the junkies.) Bart left them in the room and went back downstairs.
“You told me this was gonna be okay,” I heard the woman say. They both spoke very loudly, almost yelling.
“It’s gonna be okay, baby, just let me handle it,” Tony said. “He’s letting us stay, you see?”
But Bart was back in a flash. He had talked it over with the night manager. “Sorry bro, nothing personal, but you got to go. You’re eighty-sixed from the list, bro. You want a room, you’ll have to talk to the owner, Stanley Bard. He’s the only one who can rent you a room.”
“Stanley’s my friend,” Tony said. “He’ll rent me a room. Just talk to him.”
“You talk to him,” Bart said. “Stanley’s in at six in the morning.” Then Tony’s true feelings toward Stanley surfaced, as he exclaimed: “That fucking bastard! That bloodsucker!”
“So you gonna make it easy or do I have to call the cops?” Bart asked.
“Yeah, go ahead and call ’em,” Tony said. But then he immediately thought better of it and agreed to go. He was probably well known to the police, and who knows what kind of contraband he was holding. “We’ll be down in a few minutes,” he said, but Bart wouldn’t leave them there for even a minute.
“Don’t worry, baby,” Tony said as they left, “we’ll go over to a place I know on East 23rd. It’s much better than this dump. They have a weight room and everything, and they’re thirty dollars cheaper.”
The woman wasn’t having any of it. As they walked out to the elevators, she said, “I didn’t know they would call the cops on you!”
We were relieved to be rid of them. For a moment there it looked like the return of the bad old days. Sharing a bathroom with junkies is no picnic.
Fifteen minutes later somebody was down on the street, yelling hysterically, “I’m done with you! I’m done with you!” He yelled the same thing, over and over, for about half an hour: “I’m done with you!” Then he moved on down the street, still yelling, and his voice trailed off and finally died away as he rounded the corner.
Later that night I asked the night manager, “Was that Tony yelling in the street?”
“Yeah,” he said. “He was yelling in the lobby too. I just wish people would keep that shit upstairs so I didn’t have to deal with it.”
