The most beloved--and enigmatic—character ever to grace the halls of the Chelsea is of course our illustrious proprietor, Stanley Bard. Among his many endearing qualities, Stanley possesses a congenital inability to admit that anything bad has ever taken place in the hotel. There are no roaches or mice, and certainly no junkies have ever lived here. If pressed, he might be willing to admit that Sid and Nancy had a slight altercation one night back in the seventies, but absolutely nothing untoward has happened since. The writers and artists living here are all brilliant, contented and wealthy. The 
magnificence of the Chelsea ’s luxury accommodations is scarcely rivaled even by The Plaza or the Waldorf-Astoria—perhaps not even by Buckingham Palace itself.
We were talking to a friend in El Quijote the other night, someone who used to live here back in the eighties and nineties, and he told us a tale that’s perfectly illustrative of this tendency of Stanley’s:
I was going up to the ninth floor to visit my friend one time. The elevator was slow, probably somebody was holding it up, so I walked up the stairs. As soon as I turned onto his wing I saw cops all over the place, about eight or ten of them. They were coming in and out of an apartment. There was a stretcher in the hall with a body in it in a black body bag.
I knew whose apartment it was—it was a guy I knew, I’ll call him Joe--and I assumed it was him in the body bag. Joe was a junkie, so of course I immediately suspected that he had ODed.
One of the cops finally noticed me standing around, and said, ‘Don’t come up here yet. Go back downstairs. We’ll let you know when you can come up.’
The elevators still weren’t working, so I walked back down to the lobby. It was full of people. They weren’t allowing anybody to go up.
Stanley was standing behind the desk and so I went up to him and said, ‘What’s going on up on the ninth floor?’
‘Nothing, why would you say that?’ Stanley said.
‘There were cops all over the place!’
‘No there weren’t.’
‘Yes there were!’
‘You may have seen one or two policemen,’ Stanley admitted. ‘They probably have a room here.’ Stanley’s manner was so matter-of-fact and convincing that he made me doubt the evidence of my own senses. I began to think that maybe I was becoming one of the crazy people wandering the halls here. Still, I’m not that far gone, so I said, ‘ Stanley, you can’t tell me nothing is going on.’
‘Well, I don’t know what you want me to tell you then.’
‘That was Joe, wasn’t it,’ I said. ‘Joe’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘Joe?’ Stanley said. ‘Oh, no. Joe’s fine. He just went on a little vacation. Europe, I think. He’ll be back in a couple of years, I’m sure.’
In the days that followed there were plenty of rumors circulating around the hotel, but nobody ever got any definite information, and nothing about the incident ever appeared in the papers. Stanley has his ways of keeping things like that quiet.
It’s difficult to discern how much of Stanley’s act is a con, and how much a sort of rosy-spectacled tunnel vision. Whatever his secret, he’s a brilliant magician whose slight of hand has allowed him to conjure up the infinitely seductive shadow reality of the Chelsea. Who but a Philistine, a sworn enemy of art, would mention such trivialities as heat or running water? It hardly matters that Joe—or whatever his name was before he passed into myth--has yet to return from his sojourn abroad. (Ed Hamilton)
Recent Comments