A bold psychonaut writes in with his tale of otherworldly adventure at the Chelsea Hotel:
Though I’ve traveled the world in search of the strange and miraculous, the Chelsea hotel is the only building I have yet found that permits such an easygoing communion with the dear departed. (I still live at the Chelsea, of course—where else would have me?—though I’d like to maintain my anonymity.) Everyone knows that the famous lobby is a way station for spirits coming and going between metaphysical realms, so I won’t run that theme into the ground. But one phenomenon that has not been widely reported is that, late at night, the elevators will often deposit the unwary traveler in another temporal realm. I can’t tell you how often I’ve stepped off that creaking, rattling contraption and found myself back in the hotel of the eighties, the place filled with junkies and prostitutes, or the fifties, or even earlier. One evening many years ago, while listening to a Mozart concerto, I ingested a bitter tea which I brewed from some strange seeds that I had found in the woods behind my parents house in New Jersey. After breaking out in a cold sweat, convulsing in a violent paroxysm, and losing control of my bowels, I decided to go out for an ice cream. On the first floor, the elevator landed with a jolt, bouncing in place as the doors opened. As the hallway was lit by fluorescent tubes, and the white walls were bare of art, I knew I had returned to an earlier era.
Before I could get off the elevator and explore, who should bound onto the elevator but Sid Vicious himself, knife in hand, bleeding from slashes he had carved in his chest and arms. He was followed by none other than Nancy, and, as to my surprise the elevator went up rather than down, Sid started bouncing up and down from wall to wall, smearing blood all over the place.
“Sid, get the fuck away from me!” Nancy screamed. “You’re getting blood all over my new outfit!” He was getting blood on me too, but I wasn’t too worried because it was ghostly blood, and presumably fairly easy to get out of most fabrics. With this in mind, I said, “Give the guy a break, Nancy. He’s just trying to have some fun.”
“You stay out of this, you little weasle!” she screamed at me. And then she attacked me, beating me over the head with a purse that felt like it had several cans of hairspray in it. Sid stopped pogoing in order to watch us. And then, chuckling, he let out a long, loud fart. Now, unlike ghostly blood, a ghostly fart is a serious matter, as noxious as the gasses escaping from a bloated corpse. Stale as the grave, it filled the elevator with it’s deathly odor. One whiff of it, and my head reeled and I passed out cold on the elevator floor—only to wake up the next day at St. Vincents.
On another occasion, after cooking up and injecting a gummy, resinous substance that I had found caked in an old pharmaceutical bottle I purchased at the flea market, and subsequently gnashing my teeth, biting off the tip of my tongue, bleeding from my eyeballs, and losing control of my bowels—all to the strains of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony--I decide to go down to the El Quijote for a big pot of seafood paella. Alas, it was not to be, as the elevator jolted to a stop on the 4th floor. Stepping off the temperamental elevator, I noticed that I was once again back in another era. I heard a crash and a tinkling of glass, and so I walked down the hallway to see what was going on. Old man Krauss, the plumber, was busy trashing a stained glass window with his trusty pipe wrench. As I looked on in horror, two men carrying a stretcher came out of one of the smaller rooms. The man on the stretcher was the famous Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and when he spied me, he thought he was seeing a ghost. “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed in terror. “You’re dead, aren’t you?! Am I dead too? Is that why you’re here? Are you taking me down to hell?”
Before I could answer, one of the stretcher bearers, who apparently hadn't heard Dylan, said, "This is what he gets for drinking all that liquor.” “It wasn’t that much!” Dylan protested. “Only 18 whiskeys!” He looked to me imploringly, as if for some kind of support. “Never touch the stuff, myself. But maybe if you just puked a little, you’d be okay."
Dylan promptly turned his head, hung it over the side of the stretcher, and let loose with copious flows of vomit—red and yellow, green and brown—pouring out in torrents, filling the halls from wall to wall and sloshing up from the floor toward the ceiling. As the vomit engulfed me, smothering me and stifling my screams, I passed out and woke up in restraints at St. Vincents the next day.
Not long after that, I licked the belly of a toad belonging to a man who checked into the Chelsea claiming to be the Shaman of a primitive Brazilian tribe. My breathing became shallow and my heartbeat slowed to about 3 beats per minute as I entered a deathlike catatonic trance from which I was not to arise for several days. As I floated near the ceiling watching my body lose control of its bowels, the Shaman stole my wallet and busted up all my classical music CDs, so when I came too I popped a Jazzy Jeff CD into my walkman and went out to the ATM machine so I could get money for a fried Oreo from that greasy British fish place on Greenwich Avenue. Of course I never made it. The elevator went up instead of down, stopping with a jolt and the familiar bouncing that I had learned to associate with the passage between dimensions. The elevator hadn’t quite come all the way up, and as I clambered out into the hall on my belly, a huge, bearish man, obviously drunk, lurched through the swinging hall doors, whipped out his penis, and let fly over the wrought iron balcony. Well, I immediately recognized the specter as the great writer Thomas Wolfe. Being a huge fan, I wanted to show my appreciation in some small way, and so I too whipped out my penis and pissed over the railing in solidarity.
Wolfe burst out with a thunderous belly laugh: “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Come on up and get me, you sissy!”
You could tell the clerk wanted to come up and settle the score with Wolfe, but as Wolfe was gigantic and intimidating, he apparently thought better of it. Then, just as I was zipping up, the clerk spied me, and said, “Well, I’ll get you, at least, you scrawny little weasel!” And he started up the stairs to carry out his threat.
As I abhor the very thought of violence, the clerks words threw me into a panic; my head reeled and I thought I was going to pitch head first over the railing. Luckily, Wolfe must have pulled me back from the brink just in time. Though I have no knowledge of my subsequent actions, to judge from the mysterious charges which later appeared on my hotel bill, I apparently went on some kind of a rampage. Waking up in the psycho ward at St. Vincent’s, I gnawed through my restraints and wondered the streets of the Village until morning.
Now, a few of you may say I’m crazy, but then again, they called Christopher Columbus crazy too (though, in truth, I don’t think they ever put him in restraints). Anyway, I believe that all eras of history and even prehistory extending back to the big bang and who knows, even beyond, exist simultaneously and that what we call the present is only one of infinite presents ongoing at the same time, and our inability to see this is simply the result the poverty of our perceptual apparatus. The use of mind expanding psychotropic drugs helps open up what Aldous Huxley called the Doors of Perception, allowing us to see these hidden dimensions, and that’s why I take as many and as varied a selection as humanly possible. Presently, I’m trying to break on through to the time of Mark Twain, and with any luck I shall have succeeded and lived to tell the tale in an e-mail to the blog before I embark on the greatest trip of all, that from which there is no returning.
And no e-mail either. Don’t try this at home, kids. Especially not if your home is the Chelsea Hotel
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