Adam & Eve

I’ve shifted my business—when I’m in New York—to the Chelsea Hotel. On the face of it this is something of a cliche: a writer, a hell raiser in my youth, a bohemian with concerns about trouser style and trans-gender—where else would I stay but the Chelsea? The chosen doss house of scribes as various as Arthur C. Clarke and Dylan Thomas; the crucible for Dylan’s namesake, Bob’s Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, and Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning (the inspiration, in turn, for the Bill and Hillary’s baby-naming, but we’ll draw a discrete veil over that ugliness). The Chelsea, where the eponymous girls slapped on the foundation and droned to Andeeee, while Edie torched her room; the Chelsea, not so much a hotel as disordered state of mind, a stroboscopic collage of sights, sounds and touches, cut up and rearranged by one-time resident William Burroughs to the accompaniment of a pulsing beat laid down by the Velvet Underground. Ah! The Chelsea, where demented punks pogo in the cavernous lobbies, while in Room 100, over and over and over again—like a Bruce Nauman video loop—Sid stabs Nancy to death.

But the fact is that I’ve only moved my business to the Chelsea recently—for years I gave the cliché swerve and put up at the Gramercy Park Hotel on the east side. True, the first time I went to Manhattan as an adult (at the late age of 32), I did stay there. The city had yet to be Gulianied and Bloomberged into antiseptic respectability—in as much as it ever can be—and the discarded crack vials crunched beneath my friend Charles’s and mine feet as we made our way along 23rd Street and in through the hallowed portals, to a lobby cluttered with garish artworks—op-art swirls, manikins dangling from the ceiling, bronze blobs on pedestals.

The same gravel-voiced, grey-thatched guy was behind the dark-wood desk then as there was this morning, fifteen years later, when I checked out. Given that 60% of the Chelsea’s residents are long-term there may well have been some of the same denizens lurking around the lobby: shaggy-headed women with lean dogs on leashes; effete, puffy-faced men awoken from Nembutal slumbers; boys and girls in black, with black eyeliner and blacker hearts. It could be that the guy behind the desk—who I suspect may be called ‘Robert’, as in ‘Dr’—looked a little bit younger, but I think it quite as likely that he looked exactly the same, and that he’s been preserved for a decade-and-a-half in the formaldehyde of decadence.

I had to stay at the Chelsea on that first trip because I’d visualised the hotel so completely, fifteen years before that, when, as tortured—and frankly, tortuous—adolescent, I sat in my grotty bedroom in a dull suburb of North London, cutting out the newspaper clippings that told of the dismal denouement of Sid and Nancy’s folie a deux. I had the pus-engorged earlobes of piercings effected with a candle-blackened needle, I had the pointy hair and shoes, but mostly I had the attitude: boredom x nihilism = mindless iconoclasm; and the prospect of a Romantic death—to cease, smacked out on the midnight hour—seemed ineffably grand.

By the time I was 32 such thoughts were grotesquely inappropriate—even if the likelihood of such a thing happening: me, karking it in the Chelsea, was distinctly more likely. I don’t remember a great deal about that trip—we were only in New York a few days. The first night we went downtown with friends and did the clubs and too much blow. Getting back at 3.00 a.m. and with an early flight to catch (I was, predictably enough, going upstate to interview the veteran Viennese anti-psychiatrist Dr Thomas Szasz about his latest book ‘Our Right to Drugs’), I found the squishy beds, old-puke Draylon drapes, and banging water pipes of my room to be a veritable torment, and had to knock Charles up so he could give me a tranquilliser. Of such experiences are prejudices formed.

So, in the coming decade—during which I visited New York three or four times a year—I shifted my business from the childish clichéf the Chelsea to the gathering senescence of the Gramercy. The Gramercy was more or less a perfect hotel for me, with its air of Manhattan grandeur as foxed as the end boards of an ancient hymnal. It stood on a quiet square full of the hush of antediluvian money. In the huge brownstones opposite were the National Arts and Players’ clubs, old New York preserves, full of little apple-cheeked mummy’s men sporting plaid trousers and plum blazers, who at the drop of a snap-brim hat, would urge the members to ‘gather under the tree for the carolling’. (They were still doing this when I looked in a couple of days ago.)

From the bar of the Gramat the unfashionable back of thre hotelercy, with its dark panelling and brass railings, to the lobby with its concession stand, to the rooms with their striped wallpaper in shades of grey and ecru, the Gramercy felt set obliquely to time, frozen in a indeterminate decade—perhaps the 1940s—while a block away on Lexington Avenue the traffic tore towards the millennium. I drank ultra-dry Martinis—straight up, with an olive—in the bar, and guzzled the cocktail fish that were a specialty of the establishment. Up in my room I lay and listened while the heavy old Bakelite phone rang with that curious purring ring, at once pantherish and deeply relaxing. From time to time I’d venture out to the Strand Bookstore on Broadway, south of Union Square, and there I’d prowl its celebrated ’22 miles of books’, feeling secure in this papery cavern.

I should’ve stuck it out at the Gramercy; true, the steady accretion of dark experiences was beginning to tarnish the already tarnished brass. There was the lost week spent there with a girlfriend when we became convinced that a pile of old sacking on a nearby rooftop was a human figure, slumped and staring up at us—a totemic warning of what awaited us if we carried on. There were many many savage all-nighters., and the last few times I stayed there I couldn’t help referring to the place by the nickname my friends had given it: ‘the Grimercy’.

The very last time I stayed coincided with the last time I got drunk in New York. Arriving back at around midnight I slumped across the bed in my room—which was at the unfashionable back of the hotel—and lay there, resolving never to resolve again. The claret and the stout and the whiskey lay cold and heavy atop me, as if it were a slopping demijohn that had been lashed around my stomach. Suddenly there was a loud crash and a muffled cry, as of someone hurling them self violently against the door then falling to the floor, next, nothing—only a pathetic mewling.

It took me about twenty minutes to haul myself up and investigate: there on the floor of the corridor lay a middle-aged man in his distempered underwear with grey hair, semi-conscious—and mewling. I called the desk and slurred the bad news—they assured me someone would be up ‘right away’. Another twenty minutes passed, during which, leaving the door open, I slung the demijohn back on the bed. I supposed—even at the time—that I should be administering CPR, or mouth-to-mouth, or the Heimlich manoeuvre, but I didn’t know how to do any of these, and besides, the Unknown Man was still mewling—I could hear him.

Then a bang, a crash and the corridor was full of New York’s finest: the manager, a brace of paramedics, a couple of cops. They all applied themselves to the Unknown Man with grim attention: the paramedics probed him with needles and Velcroed on blood pressure cuffs, the manager kept watch for other guests, the cops tried to talk to him—but he only mewled. They kept on for about five minutes. The paramedics had some gizmo that did an instant toxicology report, and they’d confirmed that all his other vital functions were fine, so eventually one of the cops leant down, rolled up the Unknown Man’s eyelid—none too gently—and barked at him: ‘Are you fooling us, sir? Are you fooling us?’

I never learnt what happened to the Unknown Man after they’d taken him off in a wheelchair stretcher (looking curiously like Hannibal Lecter being transported between ultra-secure prisons in The Silence of the Lambs), however, I know what happened to me: I stopped drinking, and I sopped staying at the Grimercy when I was in New York. I didn’t want get disappeared like the Unknown Man, and besides, I knew the truth: I hadn’t been fooling anyone but myself.

The next few years I spent dabbling in designer hotels. It’s a bad habit, and I recommend you strenuously avoid it. I’m not saying it’s as bad as dabbling in smack—but I can also lead to addiction. Luckily the likes of the Royalton and the Soho Grand really didn’t agree with me—I had bad experiences from the get-go. In the former I couldn’t find the door to my bathroom in the smoothly aerodynamic::—and utterly featureless—internal passage of my 22nd floor room. The corridor outside was even worse: a dim expanse of blue nothingness, space conceived of as a form of money. I hated the way that everything Phillipe Starck had turned his hand too—whether newel post or magazine rack, lighting sconce or cushion—looked like a high-concept lemon squeezer that wouldn’t work.

As for the Soho Grand, my dear! The sand and the rock, the ‘concepts’, the savage turn-down service, the grandiose lobby, the women who looked like Borzois and the Borzois that looked like highly-groomed women—the whole machined experience of luxury hotel living. If this was finally having arrived—then I very much wanted to leave. Right away. I even had recourse to staying in one of those pseudo-Japanese, designer budget hotels. You know the kind: like an exposed hive of student study bedrooms, complete with desk modules and internet TV, all ranged in a great wall beside an hideous and plunging atrium. Aaaaaaaargh!

I tried returning to the Gramercy Park Hotel, but, horror of horrors—it was too late! The poor old gaff had been ruthlessly and completely Schabelled. The designer-cum-movie director had taken this venerable old lady and tarted her up. No longer would the Gramercy be allowed its sanctity as a place—oh no—now it had to be an event. I’d’ve sooner gone into that dark night with the Unknown Man than checked in again.

So, about three years ago I thought to myself: why not go back to the Chelsea? They say it’s had a bit of refurb’—gone upmarket; perhaps the passage of time will have carpeted over your bad memories? Well, there had been a refurb’, but mercifully it was a light and inefficient one that had completely failed to cover up the Chelsea’s deep and quintessential shabbiness. Because, by now into my forties, I knew the truth: shabby is good in hotels, shabby is comforting, shabby is as close you’ll get to a home from home, because let’s face it: no one tiptoes into your bedroom at six ever evening, exposes a triangle of the bottom sheet and lays a small box of Godiva chocolates on your pillow.

No, no refurb’ could eliminate the David Lynchian lighting at the Chelsea, or the way the power sockets sparked disturbingly when you put plug into them. No refurb’ could drive out the pervasive odour of bouillabaisse that for some perverse reason emanates from a shut door next to the lobby. No devil of a designer could hope to eliminate the hanks of wiring, the ill-fitting drawers in the ill-conceived storage spaces, or the nonsensical kitchenettes in the suites, equipped with lackadaisical cutlery and random pots and pans. They say that God is in the detail, and at th Chelsea I began to perceive a divinity in this refusal of a modern Goham hotel to conform to the dictates of international ‘taste’. That first night when I returned to the Chelsea I felt so at home there that I turned the radiators full on simply in order to savour their banging.

The Chelsea! The truth is that it’s too old, too established to be a cliche—it’s a genuine institution, possessed of the wisdom of whores. Its twelve, wrought-iron balconied, brown-stone rendered storeys have been hunkered down there on 23rd Street for pushing a century-and-a-half now. There’s nothing—nothing!—it’s 250 rooms haven’t witnessed at one time or another, and while Stanley Bard, the eccentric proprietor who gave the hotel its distinctively bohemian feel may’ve gone to be replaced by a succession of business-minded owners, the truth is that I’m confident any moves they may make to commercialise the establishment and get rid of its ageing permanent population of drag kings and dipsos are utterly doomed: the Chelsea is bigger than all of them, and now, with the recession deepening by the day, the hotel will have gained a further reprieve. Get along there soon, savour the fustiness, smell the mustiness, swap banter with the wiseacre guy on the desk. As they say in New York: what’s not to like?