Valentine's Day at the Chelsea Hotel, 1977

     I was a senior in college, invited to New York for a long Valentine's Day weekend by a young man a few years older than I, who lived in a small apartment on Avenue A, with the bathtub in the kitchen. Next to it hung a vintage robe, a debonair manly number in purple wool twill, with white piping around the lapels and a heraldic crest on the pocket.  It was mine to keep, and keep it I did, for a very long time.
      We visited his grandmother, who lived in a mansion on the Upper East Side, where a maid served us cocktails in the library amidst first editions of books published in Paris in the 1920's. The grandmother had acquired these books in Paris in the 1920's, because her friends were writing them, and she kindly, and modestly re-told first-hand stories about legendary writers because I was an English major, writing a thesis on Virginia Woolf, and hung on every word.
      Our weekend also included dinner at Lady Astor', a restaurant on Lafayette Street, which I don' t believe exists any more. Too bad, as the table in the front, which could be completely enclosed by heavy green velvet curtains with gold tassels (just like the curtains Scarlett O'Hara desperately fashions into a cap and dress), was very romantic. And the young man also invited me to a party, a Valentine's Day party, given by some friends of his who lived at the Hotel Chelsea, about which I knew not much. I learned though.
      The lobby and the stairway walls were entirely painted with murals by residents. I seem to recall my date pointing out to me works by notable residents, but I can't remember the artists' names. I recall riding up in a creaky elevator, perhaps with an elevator operator, and I believe that its walls were decorated too.
      The party was given by a couple of guys who were recent graduates of Yale, but I have long forgotten their names. Their apartment was just a room or two, and jammed with party guests. As we entered we were handed paper hearts, and instructed to write our names on our heart twice, tear it in half, and deposit one half in a large pickle jar, and hold onto the other half of the heart. There would be a drawing later, for a door prize.
       Only slowly did the word circulate through the party that the door prize was in fact a hustler, a man as handsome and blond as my date, but much more muscular, a bit older, and wearing more leather. He mingled like a guest, and I had to ask exactly what a hustler was. And then I wondered what my date (who liked boys as well as girls) would want to do if either of us won him. I love to win even the smallest little prize, a magazine subscription, a to-go mug--but loosing the drawing that night was fine with me. The guy who did win dropped everything, and left instantly, all smiles, victorious and proud, with his prize. I felt pretty cool to just be a guest at a party where something so decadent could happen. I've never been back to the Chelsea, and that handsome hustler comes to mind whenever I hear or read of it. I hope that he survived the incipient epidemic that we had no inkling of, that deliciously licentious Valentine's Day.
       As for me and my date, we went back alone to the apartment on Avenue A, where I was told that the ornate carved bed had been a gift from the Baron von Rothschild to the grandmother, his paramour, once upon a time.

Cynthia Baughman lives on a farm in Douglassville, Pennsylvania with her husband, dog, and three goats. She writes short fiction, journalism, and media criticism. She is currently working with filmmaker LeAnn Erickson on a documentary about women mathematicians involved in a secret ballistics project during World War II.