THE MYSTERIOUS GODAWFUL STENCH

The hall smelled like shit, night after night.  It was July, and the stench was ungodly.  The smell seemed to be coming from the trash bin, though sometimes it was more focused in other areas, like right in front of our door, inexplicably lingering there.  But we just attributed that to weird air currents in the hundred-year-old Chelsea Hotel.  We thought about cat litter, since one of the women on the floor had a cat, but that smells more stale, it seems to me--and don’t they put disinfectant in that stuff?  No, this smelled like somebody opened the lid of the trash bin and took a good long dump right in the can.

Diapers, that’s all we could come up with.  The people with kids that age live on the other side of the elevators, separated from the trash bin by two heavy doors, and so presumably don’t have to smell it and are therefore less likely to care.  On the other hand, they surely knew better; surely knew to seal those things up in a plastic bag.

We weren’t the only ones bothered by the smell.  One evening we ran into Sarah, the gray-haired costume designer, sniffing around out by the trash bin.  She said she had complained to the people at the desk.

“So what did they say?” I asked.

“Oh, they didn’t take me seriously.  They never do,” she said, as if she expected as much, a smile still enlivening her round, pleasant face.

“Maybe because you’re only paying $500 in rent,” I said, jokingly.  She’d been living in the hotel, in a huge, rent stabilized suite of rooms, since the sixties.

“That has something to do with it, for sure,” she said.

            Sarah was rather scatter-brained, too, I thought.  Possibly they thought she was imagining things, or at least exaggerating.

            “We’ve got to do something about it,” she said.  “We can’t go on living like this.”

            The upshot was that she asked us to call down and complain as well, on the theory that they were more likely to take action if more than one person bothered them.

My area of specialization is the bathroom, so my girlfriend was the one who called.  The only one there at the front desk was the telephone operator, a kindly elderly lady named Anita.  I could only hear half of the conversation, of course, but my girlfriend filled me in on Anita’s part:

“The trash really stinks, and somebody needs to come get it,” my girlfriend said.

“You know nobody’s gonna come get your trash honey,” Anita said.  “You gotta take it out yourself.”

“No, the trash in the hall.  It’s stinking.”

“Well, if you left your trash out in the hall, that’s why it’s stinking.”

            My girlfriend hung up the phone, and said, “I don’t think they’re gonna do anything.”

“Why didn’t you explain it to her better?” I asked.

“It was no use,” she said.
She was probably right.  That’s the kind of thing that generally happens when you complain around here: a sort of willed incomprehension.  To accept that there was a problem would have required action.  (Ed Hamilton)