Ghosts and Legends: Hiroya’s “De De” Paintings

Hiroya, the crazy Japanese graffiti painter, left several paintings behind in the hotel when he died. Two of them, replete with crosses, caskets, and the symbolism of death and heavy on Japanese text, have long intrigued us because they seemed to tell the story of Hiroya’s falling out with his friend. We have been waiting for a Japanese person to happen by and translate them for us, and finally we found one in Miho Sakai, who directs documentaries for Japanese public TV (she was making one about the Chelsea at the time). The yellow painting that hangs in the stairwell between the seventh and eighth floors is rather poetic and reads approximately as follows:

From here it’s heaven,
Heaven is a forest.
Drink Rum in the morning,
Everyone dance.
Beyond Death: darkness, time, space, land of God.
De De Land.

The orange painting that hangs in the stairwell on the first floor, though it touches on a similar theme, tells more of a story:

De De Land. In heaven I meet De De and Barbara. De De always thinking something very deeply. The job of Barbara is reading “pustory” (“poetry”?) to De De. De De makes blueberry jam. He writes a poem on the pink chalkboard. My job is after he finish writing a poem, put the poem into drawing. My girlfriend Marcia take picture of the drawing and record to De De Land’s diary. End of day at De De Land. De De Land is very good feeling (comfortable), mellow world.

Instead of writing in actual Japanese, Hiroya is transliterating his English words, and Miho says his English is not very good, ungrammatical. Yeah, that’s Hiroya all right. He took a perverse pride in his poor English-language skills. The “De De” in question is the punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone. Barbara is Dee Dee’s wife. Marcia is the photographer Marcia Resnick. The story of the paintings is that Dee Dee paid Hiroya $500 to make two paintings of the Chelsea Hotel for the front and back cover of Dee Dee’s novel, Chelsea Horror Hotel. Hiroya took the money, but then started to have second thoughts about whoring himself like that and so couldn’t bring himself to complete the paintings. This led to a falling out between Dee Dee and Hiroya, but in the end Dee Dee insisted that Hiroya at least owed him two paintings of some sort, and these are what Hiroya came up with.

It was Dee Dee who introduced Hiroya to drugs. Dee Dee died in the same way as Hiroya, of an overdose, proceeding him in death by a year.

It’s rather sad that Hiroya couldn’t make it back to the Chelsea. I envision his ghost wandering the halls of the Gershwin, confused, disoriented, thinking: Where am I? What is this place? It looks kind of like the Chelsea, but not really. No, not exactly.

So the rumor I want to start is that as part of the memorial service at the Chelsea, we dumped Hiroya’s ashes from the top of the Chelsea Hotel stairwell. A lot of people at this hotel believe in ghosts: the Chelsea, with its faded grandeur, with all the famous, tormented geniuses and larger-than-life characters it’s held over the years, seems to be conducive to the belief. And so I would like us all to start seeing Hiroya walking around the hotel late at night, painting in the halls, accosting tourists, performing bizarre Butoh skits, and in general being his good old annoying self. Maybe in this way we can conjure him up, and he can haunt the halls of the place where he really belongs. For what else is a ghost, anyway, except the traces of a person in someone’s memory, reflected through visions and dreams.

So if you don’t mind, please spread this rumor. This is how legends often start, after all: somebody says something crazy, as a joke or whatever, and then someone else repeats it as fact. From there it’s on its way to a life of its own, and even its creator can no longer deny it. It is elevated to mythical status and becomes, for all functional purposes, the truth.

A legend is kind of like a ghost in this respect and kind of like the Chelsea itself: it’s what’s in the mind that’s important.