A couple of weeks ago we took Dashiell, who writes the column “The New Guy” for Gawker, on a 
tour of the hotel. We showed him the Stairwell of Death and various interesting paintings, as he recounts in his column.
Apparently he wasn’t too impressed with the décor, remarking at one point that the place looked like a hospital. “Yeah, a mental hospital,” Debbie and I both said, predictably enough. He sat on our toilet and pretended to read Dee Dee’s Chelsea Horror Hotel. I feel compelled to point out, it’s also the beat writer Herbert Huncke’s old bathroom—and we had a hell of a time keeping the junkies out of it, even after the old man had been dead for years.
After that—or maybe before it, I don’t know--we decided to see if Dashiell would climb out on the fire escape and look in somebody’s room. We told him it was Thomas Wolfe’s room or something ridiculous like that. And sure enough he did! There was a naked lady in there and she screamed and hid under the bed. We’ll be sure to try this prank with other people we lead on the tour.
At the climax of the tour we introduced Dashiell to a real live artist, Arthur Weinstein, who greeted him with a friendly, “How are ya kid?” But once again Dashiell seemed strangely unimpressed, even after we told him that it was Arthur who had created the mobile on the tenth floor—
which of course he thought was pretty cool.
At the end of our tour we sat Dashiell down in the Vortex of Madness, otherwise known as the lobby, to see how long it would take him to lose his mind. We figured he’d write a more interesting account of his tour that way. Surprisingly, however, he seemed to keep his sanity. Apparently he has an unusually resilient psyche. Or maybe it was just because it was a Sunday and there weren’t too many certifiable nuts wandering around.
(Oh, by the way, Dashiell, I was just kidding about the fire escape thing: that really was Thomas Wolfe’s room. The naked lady could have been the ghost of his old mistress, Aline. But most likely she was just a Midwestern tourist, albeit, hopefully, a live one.) -- Ed Hamilton
Recent Comments