Sid's Room

     Dee Dee Ramone moved around from room to room in the hotel.  He was always dissatisfied with whatever room he landed in, and after a year or two in one room he would move to another floor.  He told me that one time they had put him in a new room, and no sooner had he moved his few possessions in, than he began to feel uneasy.  Though he knew he hadn’t lived there before, he had a vague feeling of déjà vu.  He thought his unease would pass, but as the hours wore on he just couldn’t shake it.

            Finally, nodding off in bed late that night, it suddenly hit him, and he sat bolt upright with a shock of awareness.

            “It was Sid’s room!” Dee Dee told me.  “I knew him!  I lived here when he was here.  He was my friend!  I partied in that room.  I hung out in that room.”

            But it wasn’t really Sid’s room, because Dee Dee would have noticed that at once and would’ve never agreed to move in.  What had happened was that after Nancy was killed in the room,

and after Sid committed suicide, the owner, Stanley Bard, hadn’t wanted the room to become a shrine for morbid punks.  He’d had it carved up into sections, distributing these among several other rooms.  Sid’s room, properly speaking, doesn’t exist anymore.  But Dee Dee had got a window.  And the play of the shadows in the corner, in the half-light of the moon and the streetlights, had been something that the renovations had failed to alter, something that had remained constant over time.
            In a panic, Dee Dee fled the room, refusing to stay there another minute, and demanding to be moved to another room immediately.  They didn’t have any rooms open on such short notice—or perhaps, as Dee Dee thought, they just wanted to torment him--and so Dee Dee ended up drinking coffee in an all-night diner until morning.

            “I knew him!” Dee Dee repeated.  “I knew them both.  They were my friends.  I used to visit Sid there, him and Nancy.  We sat in that room together and got drunk and played the guitar.”  Even in the retelling, Dee Dee shuddered, and seemed genuinely terrified by the incident.  “I told Stanley, how could you do that to me!? (Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton)  Read more "Slice of Life" columns.
Oct. 12 is the anniversary of the death of Nancy Spungen.