There was a clean cut, middle-aged man in a polo shirt and neatly pressed khakis sitting in the Chelsea lobby one evening. He looked like a Frenchman—though maybe that had something to do 
with the bottle of wine he was swigging from.
An old rocker in a tee-shirt and tight, ripped jeans burst through the doors. Tall and thin with spiky gray hair, his face had the gaunt, drawn look of a heroin addict. He was wearing huge headphones and dancing and bopping around to the tune in his head.
To my amazement he bopped straight up to the Frenchman and tapped him on the shoulders: “Hey, you ready to go? What are you doing, come on!”
The Frenchman rose wearily from his chair. He must have been the rocker’s handler. He followed the rocker onto the elevator. I got on too.
The rocker never stopped dancing. As we went up he was hopping and bopping all around so much that he was really shaking the old elevator. Between the second and third floors he snatched the headphones off his head and proffered them to the Frenchman, saying, “Hey man, listen to this!”
“I’m really tired,” the Frenchman said. He did indeed have a French accent.
The rocker shrugged and put his headphones back on and continued rocking and bopping.
“Do you know who died here?” the Frenchman asked the rocker, loudly, so as to be heard over the music. “I’ll bet you don’t even know that do you?” He turned to me: “Can you tell him who died here?”
“Everybody knows that Sid killed Nancy here,” I said.
“You hear that?” the Frenchman said. “You didn’t even know that, did you?” Somehow, I got the sense that they had known Sid and Nancy, or at least run in the same circles.
The rocker didn’t pay him the least attention. He kept on rocking, and when their floor came he hopped off the elevator and bopped on down the hall. (Ed Hamilton) (Painting, "Angel of the Lobby" by David Combs)
Recent Comments