Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (23 page)

As I stepped outside to face the world with my new, second really important law in place, I discovered a street fair was going on right in front of the hotel. There, amid all the cheese-covered corn on the cob, discount Peruvian sweaters, and other things that seem like a good idea at the time, I spotted a guy selling marionettes of stuffed farm animals. I had to have one. Not only was the guy making them walk around and everything, but in them I saw an opportunity for myself to become the world’s preeminent stuffed goat marionettist, something I was certain no Chelsea Hotel resident past, present, or future could possibly compete with.

“How much for the goat?” I asked excitedly.

“Forty bucks,” he told me.

“I’ll give you thirty-nine!” I said, playing hardball.

“Uh, sure,” the guy said, handing me the goat.

I was halfway down the block and a bit embarrassed when I realized it only took about ten minutes for me to break another one of my “rules.” But then I just focused on how awesome I was about to become at stuffed goat puppetry and everything was cool.

“From this day forward, I shall illustrate the human condition with this stuffed goat,” I thought.

Needless to say, I was feeling pretty good about myself. So with the “art” part of “artist” now officially covered, I decided to focus on that other key ingredient of being an artist—a decadent lifestyle.

To that end, I starting having friends over for parties on weekends. I dubbed them “miniraves,” a term I borrowed from my friend Johnny. And though they never involved any actual raving, I’d like to think the miniraves embraced the same sort of joie de vivre (if not all the drugs and ridiculous outfits) as their namesake. I would invite as many people over as could fit somewhat comfortably on the floor and on my bed (usually about six or seven), they’d all bring a six-pack, bottle of wine, or some kind of whiskey, and we’d sit there for hours talking, drinking, and listening to music on a CD player I’d picked up for thirty dollars at Kmart once I decided to take this artist thing more seriously. It was kind of like a college dorm room party, only there was no chance in hell that we would ever get busted for it.

“People have been murdered in this hotel,” I reasoned. “So what if I have a few friends over every once in a while?”

When I wasn’t entertaining friends in my room, I still never strayed too far from the Chelsea. A couple of nights a week, I’d see how many margaritas I could handle at El Quijote, the stopped-in-time Spanish restaurant in the ground floor of the hotel. I had heard that Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe used to hang out there when they lived at the Chelsea, so—as a fellow icon in the making—it felt important to do the same whenever possible.

When I wasn’t getting drunk at El Quijote, I’d sit in the lobby and watch people wander in and out. On any given night, I’d see famous actors, teenage models, wide-eyed tourists, total nutjobs, and even Arthur Miller pass in front of me as I sat on a couch eating an ice-cream bar I bought from the deli next door. Being 2003 and all, I’m sure it wasn’t anything near the wild scene it had been in past decades, but, seeing as how I had been living above a hair salon in Cleveland only weeks before, I felt like I was living Warhol’s
Chelsea Girls
anyway.

One night, as I stood talking to one of the front desk guys, a drunken woman visiting from Italy stumbled up to the reception area.

“I would like to live in this hotel next time I come here to New York City,” she slurred in a sexy, English-as-a-second-language sort of way.

The front desk guy said nothing, instead just smiled politely as she pressed on like a wasted Sophia Loren.

“How much does it cost to live here?” she asked.

“The rooms are all different prices,” he answered as if he were simply repeating lines being whispered to him by someone crouching under his desk.

“Tell me how much. I can afford it; I have plenty of money. You don’t need to worry so much, meeester.”

“You could have all the money in the world,” he replied, stepping forward a bit for emphasis. “That doesn’t mean you can live here.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” the drunken Italian lady asked, insulted. “Why you say that to me? Why?”

The madder she got, the sexier (and drunker) she seemed to me. I thought I might be falling in love.

“Living here is like being in a real-life play,” the front desk guy began to explain. “You have to come here and audition for the manager, Stanley. And then he decides if he wants to cast you.”

Dumbfounded, the drunken Italian lady shook off the entire conversation as if she were spitting out an ice cube before stumbling back into the street. To me, however, the place was finally starting to make sense. Despite its history, the Chelsea Hotel wasn’t some sort of cool kids’ club or hipster residence, as people (myself occasionally included) often mistook it for. It was more like a Tennessee Williams play come to life, with a hodgepodge of characters all thrown in the mix to see what might happen next, one of whom was a little more into peeing in the sink than most people but whatever—everyone knows Williams was out of his mind toward the end anyway.

As much as I was certain I had become a key player in the “real-life play” that front desk guy was talking about, I reluctantly decided it might be time to move on after nine months of calling the Chelsea Hotel home. It was mostly because I had yet to find steady employment and could no longer afford it. But it was also because there didn’t seem to be any end in sight to my peeing in the sink, and I felt like it might do me some good to go somewhere where that sort of thing simply would not be tolerated.

When I told my friends I was moving on, the same ones who initially begged me to leave the Chelsea, they offered to take up a monthly collection so I might be able to stay, if only to keep the miniraves going. Still, I knew it was unfortunately time to go, so I packed up my duffel bag, Christmas lights, plastic flowers, and whatever else I had accumulated over the past few months, and moved in with some friends who had a spare room in Brooklyn.

“Holy fucking shit, I’m in Brooklyn,” I thought as I woke up for the very first time at my new outerborough address, tears practically forming in the corners of my eyes.

Don’t get me wrong—I love Brooklyn. But when you’ve been living history, getting hammered with the ghost of Mapplethorpe, and peeing in the sink whenever you goddamn well feel like it at the Chelsea Hotel, waking up on the other side of the East River is a bit of a blow. Still, I’ll always know I experienced that rare Chelsea Hotel magic firsthand, if only for a little while.
7

If you look up the Chelsea Hotel on Wikipedia, you’ll see a long list of all the legends who have called the place home, some for just a few nights, some for a few weeks or months, and some for many, many years. Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Johnny Thunders, Nico, Dennis Hopper—the list is endless. I’m proud to say that my name is also a part of that list, but not because of my vast body of work, my mastery of goat puppetry, or even the fact that I actually did end up stabbing someone while I was there. (Don’t worry, it was only with a pen and it was an accident.) It’s mostly because Wikipedia lets anybody with Internet access edit its pages. They really gotta start regulating that stuff. It’s hard to know what to think or believe anymore.

The Streets Are Hell

If there’s one thing I pride myself on, it’s my crime-fighting skills. Wherever there is violence, villainy, or even just garden-variety shenanigans, nine times out of ten (assuming I’m already in the area) you will find me righting wrongs, wagging my finger, and handing out my own swift brand of justice. And, naturally, the criminals in question end up wishing they’d made other plans that day.

Unfortunately, just about all of my crime fighting tends to go unrecognized by the authorities.
1
And the fact that the crime rate in New York City seems to be at an all-time low doesn’t help matters much. I just read on the Internet that the murder rate in this town hasn’t been this low since 1963. It’s like people aren’t even trying anymore.

Fortunately, there’s a place I can always go when I need a taste of the action, the mean streets of Cleveland, Ohio, my hometown. Thanks to a perpetually struggling economy, general urban decay, and basketball asshole LeBron James skipping town for Miami, Cleveland manages to rest comfortably on the list of America’s top-ten most crime-riddled cities with more murdering, burglarizing, and other negative behavior per capita than you can shake a stick at. In 2010, Cleveland’s neighborhoods even made it onto the ABC News list of “America’s 25 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods.” Twice. Not too shabby. Say what you want about the Indians, but when it comes to crime, Cleveland is hitting it out of the park.

I managed to get the lowdown on all this from my friend Travis, a kindred spirit in giving the finger to crime. Travis has been on the Cleveland police force since shortly after college. He was always good at giving orders. His dad was a cop. And he could grow a fuller mustache than anyone else I knew in high school. It was pretty much his destiny to wind up “on the job.”
2

Travis and I met when we were sixteen. Our mutual friend John’s parents had gone out of town for a few days and, as these things often go, John decided he should probably throw a party. Given Travis’s natural air of menace, John asked Travis to guard the front door and decide who should and shouldn’t be let inside to drink warm Miller from a keg in the basement, and see if they could talk anyone into giving them a handjob in one of the upstairs bedrooms. An ideas man, Travis saw an opportunity and decided to charge an entrance fee as long as he was at it.

“Five bucks,” Travis said to me stone-faced as our eyes met for the very first time.

“No,” I told him, somehow sensing he was on the grift. Between the mustache and his size (Travis was already a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than everyone else in our class), I’m guessing I was the first person of the night to challenge him on the cover charge. Despite, or perhaps because of, my insolence, Travis and I have been friends ever since.

*   *   *

Travis and I hadn’t seen each other in about five years when we decided to get together for lunch during one of my regular visits back home to Cleveland. I’d heard he’d been assigned to the motorcycle unit, so I made a point to meet with him while he was on patrol. It seemed crazy not to try to get a ride out of him, especially if he had a sidecar like I hoped.

Travis asked me to meet him at noon in a parking lot inside his district—a cool, coplike thing to do. So I borrowed my parents’ Buick and rolled out of relatively crime-free suburban Cleveland and into the bedlam of downtown. When I arrived, I was disappointed to find that Travis had shown up in a regular police car.

“We don’t ride the bikes much in the winter,” he explained.

“This is bullshit,” I protested.

“Just get in.”

Shaking off my dismay, I hopped in the front passenger seat of his squad car, where there were extra guns and a really cool radio.

“Don’t touch anything,” Travis warned.

“Fine,” I huffed.

Despite the rough start, Travis and I hit the ground running, easily settling into the familiar camaraderie we’d established back in high school.

“How awesome is it that David Lee Roth is back in Van Halen?” he asked.

“It’s totally awesome.”

“Totally.”

As Travis rattled off various food options, a call came in on his police radio. After we settled on Italian, he picked up the receiver and began speaking in undecipherable police code—lots of numbers, abbreviations, and other gibberish. Sitting next to him, I felt like a dog watching television—plenty intrigued but not taking that much away.

“Code two, ten-four,” Travis said before dropping the receiver and flooring it.

Within seconds, we were flying down a residential street at double the speed limit.

“What’s going on?” I asked while scrambling to pull my seat belt across my chest.

“B and E,” Travis said, staring intensely at the road ahead.

“What’s that stand for again?” I asked like I had somehow just forgotten.

“Breaking and entering,” Travis answered in a tone that suggested anyone, even I, might be a suspect.

“Does this mean we’re not getting lunch?” I asked.

If the answer was yes, then I’d be this crime’s first auxiliary victim, which was bullshit. My parents rarely got around to picking up any groceries before my visits, so I was pretty hungry.

“We’ll get lunch, but I gotta deal with this shit first,” Travis answered, this time more irritated than wary, before screeching around a corner.

Being a civilian, it was hard not to worry that we were going to be pulled over by the cops for going so fast. But then I remembered that we were the cops and it was intoxicating. As Travis’s driving became increasingly erratic, however, I started to worry again, this time for my safety. The fact that we were the cops and, as a result, no longer had the cops to call for help, made things even worse. All I could do was hold on tight and hope for the best. I calmed down, though, when we pulled up to a ranch house in a run-down section of town. The place was so beat-up it was hard not to wonder who would have thought it was a good idea to pull a B and E there in the first place.

“What should I do?” I asked nervously as Travis cut off the ignition and jumped out of the squad car.

“I don’t care.” He smiled.

I took the smile to mean that if I decided to join him, he wasn’t going to do a damn thing about it, so I giddily unbuckled myself, hopped out of the passenger seat, and scurried after him as he walked toward the house.

“This is my friend Dave,” Travis said to Jim, a mustachioed cop who was already in the driveway breathing in the crime scene.

“Nice to meet you,” Jim said in a joyless, coplike way before the two of them turned and headed for the front door. I followed gingerly behind them. It’s not always good to move gingerly or even to use words like that when you’re fighting crime, but I didn’t want to take any chances.