The Chelsea Girls(85)
ACT THREE
The ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel draw closer, eager to greet their latest member the moment the soul leaves the flesh. Over the years, the dust of the hotel’s many occupants has spread thinly over the walls, the floors, the mantels, and the hallways, though only a small number remain in spirit. The handrail on the stairs holds the residue of actors and poets, singers and dancers, passed from guest to guest. Great successes and bitter failures, or bitter successes and great failures? No matter.
The dust lingers in the air, and when the woman breathes it in, her lungs fill with the heady hope of the innocent. Breathe again and it’s the desolation of the lost. Close now, but she keeps breathing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Hazel
March 1967
The cloying scent of marijuana wafted across the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel as Hazel returned from her morning walk, the obvious culprits yet another group of long-haired musicians, judging from the mix of duffel bags and instrument cases scattered about. They looked like they’d been waiting for their rooms for a while, and had dug in for the long haul. One man was fast asleep on a low banquette, another slung a jean-clad leg over the arm of a chunky Victorian chair and strummed a guitar.
In the past several years, the hotel had attracted a different sort of artist than had come before: Beat poets and beaten ladies of the night, rumpled folk singers and vacant-looking pop artists. They scurried down the halls and stumbled down the stairway, making the place feel overwhelmed, congested, and unseemly. Even the walls of the lobby were chaotic, filled with a riot of paintings whose tight arrangement—less than an inch between frames in some cases—rendered any serious appraisal of the works impossible.
Hazel stepped over a guitar case and breezed forward, not wanting to appear like some fussy old lady—after all, she was only forty-seven—who remembered with great nostalgia the days when the Chelsea Hotel was, if not elegant, at least respectable. The place had acquired a dirty mystique in the past seventeen years.
The communists on the first floor had been usurped by languid, underdressed prostitutes and their pimps, but none of this seemed to bother the permanent residents, who had gotten used to the parade of new bohemians who made the hotel their home for days or years at a time, the hippies, the groupies, the international artists and novelists who came and went.
She’d just completed her daily, brisk walk up to Central Park and back down along Seventh Avenue, although she always crossed to the west side at Fifty-First Street, not wanting to pass the spot where Floyd’s broken body had landed.
Floyd’s funeral had fallen on the same day that Charlie had asked Hazel to meet him at the library. Hazel had decided it was a sign that she be done with all that, done with the fierce pain of fighting against a machine that was so much bigger than she was. Floyd’s death had closed her down, she had nothing left. On her way to the service that morning, she’d dropped off a letter with the information clerk at the library and asked her to give it to Charlie when he appeared. She told her to look for a dark-haired man with a dimpled chin who would show up around noon. She’d written him that she’d moved on, found someone new, and it was best they not see each other again. It was the only way she knew that she could force him out of her life completely.
“Hazel, Stanley wants to see you,” said the Chelsea’s day clerk.
When David Bard passed away three years earlier, his son Stanley took over his duties with the incompetent enthusiasm of a golden retriever. Not that David had been the most efficient hotel manager, but where the maids tended to blandly disregard David’s directives, they openly mocked Stanley, who often laughed along with them, as if he were in on the joke.
Hazel stepped back over the guitar case and turned into Stanley’s office, where the Spanish leather padding on the walls reeked of cigarette smoke and the clutter had reached epic proportions. Stanley rose as she entered, a lanky man wearing a stretched-out sweater badly in need of a trip to the dry cleaner’s.
“Hazel, how are you?” He gestured for her to sit.
She looked at her watch. “My shift starts in five minutes.”
“That’s fine. If you’re a little late, it won’t matter.”
She’d been working the switchboard of the hotel for what felt like forever. It was a ghastly old piece of wiring beside the front desk, a throwback to another era that badly needed updating. The antiquated system often crossed lines, so Hazel would end up connecting a stoned actress on the second floor with the maudlin dress designer on the sixth, the two of them making no sense at all while refusing to hang up. There were days when Hazel was excoriated for not putting a call through fast enough, or was stuck chatting with Mr. Thomson because she was too polite to interrupt his musings. But David, and then Stanley, had let her work a couple of shifts each week in return for a free room, and for that she was thankful.
The rest of her living expenses Hazel covered with a weekly beat reviewing theater for a downtown newspaper. Lavinia, once again coming to the rescue, had connected Hazel with the editor, who allowed her to write under the pen name W. S. Pear and gushed over her reviews, which he said bristled with sharp observations. While reviewers for The New York Times and the Post still carried a lot of weight, the “in” crowd knew to look for Pear’s column for the real skinny. The work kept Hazel connected to the theater world, which she still adored in spite of how it had mistreated her in the past.