Free Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell Page B

myself relax, almost as if I were still out on the street keeping my wits about me. Maybe it’s because I know the late William S. Burroughs used to haunt, I mean live, here, but I can’t shake the watch-your-back imperative: as if, any second, Burroughs, or someone similarly croaky, will creak open one of the doors and tap my shoulder with the bony hand of death. And after a staredown with a disquieting ghoul in the elevator, I start taking the stairs down, racing past flight after flight hung with the brushstrokes of madmen that are the tenants’ paintings, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “bad hotel art.”
    The botanical beauty of the stairs’ famous ironwork would be well worth a lingering look, but every time I leave my room, a voice in my head whispers, Keep it moving.
    My room, marked 923 in ballpoint on a crumbling index card taped to the door, is an Edward Hopper painting waiting to happen. So Hopperesque, in fact, that upon entering I feel a need to put on a grimy old slip and slump into the dusty armchair so that I can stare wantonly at the wall. The drapes are caked with enough dirt to house a medium-size ant farm; the rug is salted with the dander of life; the bathroom might have crumbled but for the architectural support offered by other people’s hair. Though the television has cable (a new development), the remote control does not work. Another concession to progress, a professional hotel telephone, exists for the sole purpose of receiving other guests’ voice mail, several of whom were invited to a Brooklyn barbecue at “the Delgados’ “on the Fourth, not that they would ever find out. And taking up most of the counter space of the “kitchenette” is a hot plate—is there a sadder appliance on the face of the earth?—pining for ramen, soup cans, and other suicide food. At least I end up facing Twenty-third Street: Dylan Thomas got stuck in a dark room at the back on his final trip and everybody knows what happened to him.
    I’m no neat freak. It’s just that, like a lot of people from working-class backgrounds, I don’t particularly romanticize squalor. Just because I have dirty little books by Jean Genet on my shelves at home, doesn’t mean there aren’t cleaning products labeled “antibacterial” under the sink.
    At the Chelsea, I know from the first night that my impulse to wear shoes at all times I’m not in bed is sound when my left sneaker crunches down on something as I’m talking on the phone. A quick,horrified glance down at my foot reveals the roommate who would keep me company for my entire five-day boho holiday: a condom wrapper, empty. I consider throwing it away, but that would require touching it.
    Often in hotels, I entertain myself falling asleep imagining my room’s past occupants. Were there honeymooners? Lonesome businessmen? One-night stands? Incognito Sally Field–type mothers on the lam from abusive husbands? In anonymous hotels, anything could have happened. At the Chelsea, I’m armed with too much information. History is a two-way street. I wanted to stay here because it’s where Patti Smith was getting her act together on the verge of her album Horses, where Mark Twain cracked wise, where William Burroughs was up to God knows what. But every night when I turn off the light, all I can think of is Nancy Spungen’s blood, seeping.
    In Alex Cox’s biopic Sid and Nancy, the ex–Sex Pistols bassist and his bleach-blond girlfriend get kicked from one Chelsea room to another thanks to fire (Sid never got famous for originality, and in ’78 blazes at the Chelsea were so ’65). In the movie’s best line, the bellman looks Sid in the eye and piously intones, “Bob Dylan was born here.” Though patently untrue (as Virgil Thomson said about his once neighbor in Jean Stein’s Edie, Dylan “is a perfectly nice Jewish high-school graduate