The Chelsea Hotel

CHAPTER TEN from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale

The Chelsea Hotel

10

In her mind, Alan was to blame for her fall from grace and her sudden exodus uptown to the Chelsea Hotel. Infamous for death and rebirth, both in the literal and the spiritual sense, the hotel had a well-known history of housing a bizarre array of guests. Inside, the thick iron banisters lined hallways haunted by the living and the dead. Petra should know she was one of its specters. Clad in pink striped silk pajamas, she roamed the halls, night after night, chasing hallucinations.

By this time, she was a 98-pound, flesh-on-bone, cocaine-crazed, drug-dealing, heroin addict.

The Chelsea, like a hip, exclusive club, had a hierarchy. The more prestigious the guest, the higher the floor. Troublemakers lived in the basement with the ghosts of Sid and Nancy. They placed her on the fourth floor overlooking 23rd Street. Stanley, the hotel proprietor, would soon regret that prominent placement.

“I should have paid more attention to her and less to the man paying for the room.”

“Oh, Stanley, did you think I had a sugar daddy? Well, in a sick, twisted way, I guess I do.”

She often had to pay the bellhop to walk Balu Bear. She was too weak, too wasted, or too paranoid to venture out. This gave him a bird’s-eye view of her sad, declining state.

One night, Balu Bear climbed out onto the window ledge. That’s right, he went out for a stroll on a twelve inch ledge, four stories up from the ground. She discovered him frozen with fear five feet to the left of her open window. Petra banged and banged on the door of her next-door neighbor.

“My dog is outside your window. Open up! I know you’re in there. C’mon, it’s raining.”

No one answered. She had a solid reputation as a paranoid, hallucinatory coke addict and everyone, rightly so, assumed she was insane. She called the front desk frantic.

“I need help with my dog. He’s outside on the ledge and my neighbor won’t let me in.”

The night manager ignored her and hung up. All coked-up, still dressed in pajamas, with her heart beating out of her chest, she took a slow ride down the elevator to the lobby.

“Please—Come on, I swear to you, my dog’s trapped out on the ledge. You gotta help me. The neighbor won’t answer. Balu Bear is inches from his window—Please!”

He followed her upstairs. It was the only way to get her off his back. In an unusual twist, the dog was right where she said he’d be. As suspected, the neighbor had been in his room all along. Imagine his surprise when they entered unannounced, yanked open his window and pulled in a wet, wind-blown, half-frozen, shaky, shaggy dog.

What do you imagine drives a dog onto a building ledge? Was he looking for a place to pee? Was the hotel room so toxic he needed a breath of fresh air?

It did not take a rocket scientist to figure out that Petra was an unfit pet parent. Nettie, now a pseudo-nemesis because of her constant sexual advances, was a dog lover, a true aficionado. She often borrowed Balu Bear for a week at a time.

“It’s for his own good.”

One lazy afternoon, a frantic Petra telephoned her.

“Balu Bear’s not breathing. I don’t know, I think he’s OD’d. I need help!”

She had been lying about on the bed and the silly dog was soothing himself by licking her armpit. She thought little of it, besides; it felt good in a peculiar sort of way. The next thing she knew, he fell over onto the floor, overdosing on her toxic sweat. Nettie instructed her to do CPR. Two fingers ten times on his little doggie heart and two breaths into his doggie mouth. It was awful, but she revived him.

When Nettie burst through the door, she found Petra on the floor holding her filthy, half-dead, coked-up dog.

“What the hell? Give him to me. Give him to me NOW!”

She obliged.

“He stinks. Why does he stink? Why does he have dreadlocks? Don’t you brush him? Oh, my God! Why is there shit on the floor? Don’t you walk him? It’s too much. It’s too fucking much! I’m taking him.”

And you know what?

She took him, all the way, across the ocean to Lebanon, to her fancy family home in Beirut. A home with white marble floors and a white marble banister winding up and around an alabaster staircase. Petra later found out that one marble tile, in the middle of the foyer, centered under an elaborate crystal chandelier, was permanently stained yellow. It was the tile where a defiant Balu Bear stood and looked Nettie right in the eye before taking a giant whiz.

The management at the Chelsea knew Kurt and Joanne well. When Petra first met them, they had a room at the Jane West Hotel in the Meat-Packing District. It was a shit hole in the truest sense of the word, super cheap, rented hourly, or weekly, cash only, no questions asked. They lived like animals. Piles of dirty clothes, puppies pissing and shitting everywhere, stagnant, humid, sweaty air. It was like living in a landfill. Not unlike Lance’s loft, one visit was enough for Petra’s upper-middle-class sensibilities.

“Vincent, you deal with it.”

Speaking of Vincent, he popped in to see if she was still breathing. He found her pointing toward the window, shushing him, waving him over, whispering.

“There’s two cops standing out on the ledge. They’re deciding if they should arrest me or not.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake! No one is on the goddamn ledge.”

Filling a syringe with a substantial amount of cocaine, she injected it and took a nap.

“This is fucking insane.”

It had been several months since she parted ways with the love of her life, who had all but ceased in his efforts to slow her down. He no longer judged her for silly things that upset him, like finding her passed out on top of a Cheese Danish he bought her for breakfast. She had transitioned well beyond the point of redemption. A few days prior, down on Rivington Street, while waiting to cop Methadone, he informed her he wouldn’t be coming around much. Witnessing the way she was using was just too disturbing, altogether heartbreaking.

“Whatever!”

Never mind that he introduced her to heroin. Was it her fault that she learned to love oblivion more than him? That she left him, with no warning, and moved into a posh loft in Tribeca? She offered to split the drug clientele right down the middle. He could have all the writers, poets, and artists. She would take the doctors, lawyers and stockbrokers. He could peddle the heroin, she would continue to sell the coke. Made sense to her.

“Fair and square baby.”

Whenever they compiled enough cash, Kurt and Joanne upgraded from the Jane West to the Chelsea. Stanley required three months’ rent, upfront, to even consider letting them in. He tucked the two of them away in a remote corner of the basement.

Kurt made it clear, “Do not zell to Joanne, not unter any circumstance.”

Of course, she sold to Joanne. They were two peas in a pod. Hallucinating, crazy bitches with uncontrollable compulsions to do more and more cocaine. Petra recognized that her current state resembled a condition she once found unacceptable. The only difference between her room and Joanne’s was the streak of daylight peeking through closed curtains, just enough sunlight to illuminate her disgusting, filthy surroundings. Low bottom addicts inevitably end up in the same place. It doesn’t matter where they started.

The two met in secret, halfway between the basement and the fourth floor, on a narrow back staircase few knew about.

Heavy footsteps echoed from the steps below.

“Petra, you up there?”

“Yeah, you’re late.”

“I know, fucking Kurt. Oh, shit…I can’t catch my breath.”

Joanne fell onto the step below Petra. They exchanged product, and each did a respective line.

“I couldn’t get away from him. He’s watching my every move. Sometimes, I’m not sure if he’s real. I cut him the other day.”

“What?”

“Nothing major. A slice to the forearm. I figured if I was hallucinating, there’d be no blood.”

“And?—Was there blood?”

“Oh, hell yeah, there was lots of blood and screaming too!”

“You need to be careful. I think you’re living in the room where Nancy got stabbed. My fucking room’s haunted as shit!”

“That’s what Kurt keeps saying. He thinks I’m possessed. I told him to call a fucking priest already!”

In those last days, Petra had crazy hallucinations. She thought a documentary film crew was on a scaffold outside her window. They had a lens that could see through the crack between the curtains. Their film was about the decline of a privileged white female addicted to cocaine.

Even more terrifying were the blacker-than-black, bloated blobs with yellow eyes who lived inside the walls. When they inhaled, they would expand into the room and, with each exhale, they retreated behind the plaster. They had voices like condemning old lady crones.

“She’ll be dead soon.”

“She should be ashamed.”

“What a waste.”

“Everyone will be better off without her.”

And then it happened, the final straw. Someone broke in and robbed her. She had no recollection of where she had been because she never went outside. Her best guess was that someone she knew had coerced her into an unsolicited field trip.

Her room was to the right of the elevator, at the end of a long, dark hallway. The door was ajar. She entered on tiptoe to find all the Tibetan art missing. Her escape plan to Bora Bora dashed in an instant. The safe lay haphazardly on its side, full of pockmarks. It was obvious the thief struggled to beat their way inside with a hammer, to no avail. She sank onto the edge of the bed, paralyzed, paranoid and too confused to imagine who had done it.

Maybe the film crew?

Unable to report the robbery, she did the next best thing. She punched the code into the safe, and even in its damaged condition, it opened. For hours, she sat in silence, doing lines, feeling more and more vulnerable and violated. She continued to snort coke until the black, bloated blobs that always tormented her returned. They had a field day.

“Pathetic!”

“What a poor excuse for a human.”

“Loser!”

“She should have been the one to die, not her sister.”

“What a colossal mistake.”

“An accident they say? I think not. She’s a murderer.”

With an enormous, prolonged inhale, an ancient, deeply wrinkled, hooked nose blob expanded into the room, right up to the edge of the bed where she was sitting.

The ghastly, swollen creature hypnotized her with its searing sulfur eyes.

“Do the right thing. Kill yourself.”

Without thinking, she filled a spoon with an entire gram of cocaine, shot up, and died. Collapsing backward on the bed, she felt her heart explode.

Seconds later, she awoke with a clarity of mind she had never experienced on her best day. She found herself laid out in a prone position, surrounded by a brilliant blue sky. She tried to get up and run, but couldn’t. Glancing down to see what was restricting her, she realized her soul was hovering six inches above her dead body with heavy chains securing her to it.

“What the fuck!”

She struggled violently, to no avail. All of her benevolent characteristics were absent, and she seemed eternally linked to the parts of her personality she despised. Maybe she was in Purgatory waiting to be assigned to one of Dante’s circles of hell? In the distance, she saw a man in long white robes walking away from her. He turned and faced her, a single tear ran down his face.

“Hey Mister, hey, wait. Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Not like this. Please.”

He was preparing to pass through a narrow gate. Every part of her that had any value was with Him and in Him. Before she knew what had happened, she was standing upright, quite a ways down the path. The man was beside her, so close she could feel him. She looked over her shoulder at the spot where she had been. She was still there, still chained.

“How is this possible? How can I be in two places at the same time?”

The man pulled back a heavy, thick, black velvet curtain. Behind it was a throng of people. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. With every passing moment, the crowd multiplied. Without words, he revealed an indisputable truth. He dropped it straight into her heart and mind. The truth was this: her life, cut short like this, had consequences, not only for her, but for countless others.

The next thing Petra knew, she was sitting upright on the edge of her bed, gasping for air.

She fell prostrate onto the floor and began repeating over and over, “Not my life. Your life. Not my life. Your life, NOT MY LIFE…”

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A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.

This autofiction (autobiography and fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.

It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.