Trying to Float (5 page)

ARTIE

THE QUIETEST TIME
at the hotel was the morning. Unlike those of other residences, crowded with people en route to work, the lobby of the Chelsea was always empty until about noon. The exceptions to this were Stanley (the owner), the one or two people who had passed out in the lobby the night before without ever making it up to their rooms, and the rotation of homeless people who inhabited it.

Stanley's father, who was born in Hungary, purchased the hotel in the 1940s. Stanley took it over when his father became ill. He had been running it ever since.

To Stanley, the hotel residents fell into two groups, those who weren't paying rent and those who weren't paying enough rent, a view that caused great agitation within Stanley. He was there in the lobby every morning to express that agitation.

People in the hotel were not impressed with Stanley's suffering. Stanley, they pointed out, lived in a grand apartment in a very fancy neighborhood far from the hotel. The hotel, in
contrast, was well over a hundred years old and showed every year of it.

As tenants passed through the lobby, Stanley would announce how much rent was due and that it had not been paid. It was humiliating. Most of those who owed rent would call the front desk to check if Stanley was in the lobby before exiting the hotel. On those occasions when Stanley left to get a coffee at the Aristocrat, a swarm of tenants would rush out of the hotel.

For those who could not wait for Stanley's caffeine break, there was another option. A couple times a day, an employee from the hotel would move from floor to floor collecting trash on a cart. When full, the cart was taken to the basement on the service elevator, rolled onto a platform, and then lifted up from the basement directly to the sidewalk on Twenty-third Street. Bypassing the lobby, the cart went unnoticed by Stanley. One resident who was behind on their rent would hide among the trash bags. Quite often I would hear, “Hello, Nic,” “Give my regards to your parents,” or similar greetings from the trash bags as they passed me in the hallway.

But it was not just those who were delinquent on their rents who feared Stanley. Even if a tenant paid on time, Stanley was upset with them, for he took the regular payment of rent as a sign that the tenant was paying too little and that he (Stanley) had been outsmarted in the lease negotiations. My father was in this group.

“How can you live with yourself?” Stanley would ask my father as they passed each other in the lobby.

“Do you have any idea,” Stanley continued in a pained tone, “what I pay in electricity? In taxes? And the unions, oh, the unions! They're killing me!”

My father would reply with something like . . .

“Unions? Stanley, the only people who work here are guests you overcharged and who are trying to pay off their bills.”

Or . . .

“Stanley, I renegotiated my rent a week ago.”

But nothing mattered, for the very next day, putting his arm around Father's shoulders, Stanley continued.

“When you first moved in, I thought, ‘This is a good man.' But I must be honest with you: I've been having my doubts. Every day I ask myself, ‘Would a good man, with a good family, pay his landlord so little?' It makes me sad to think that.”

This would be accompanied by a moistening around Stanley's eyes.

A man who preferred strong coffee in the morning to strong emotion, my father joined the person who hopped on the garbage cart.

But there was one person who didn't care about Stanley.

His name was Artie, and I met him for the first time one morning when I was waiting in the lobby for my mother to take me to school, and Artie came through the front doors. He was in his fifties, with thick dark hair, an athlete's body, a
James Dean swagger, and, as I noticed when he passed, a flask in his back pocket.

Before Artie reached the elevators, Stanley appeared from behind the front desk.

“Artie, I need to talk to you.”

“You do? Well, that's funny because I need to talk to
you
!”

“Artie,” Stanley pleaded, “come into my office and we can discuss it quietly.”

“No! We're going to discuss it
here
!”

Stanley touched Artie's elbow, coaxing him toward the office. Artie shook it off.

“I know what you want, Stanley.”

“You do?”

Artie pulled out his wallet.

“YOU WANT MONEY!”

Stanley waved his hands frantically as if to shake off Artie's suggestion.

“Artie, please . . .”

Artie was now tapping his wallet against Stanley's chest.

“
How much fucking money do you need, Stanley?
What? You aren't
rich
enough? What? Living across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Fucking Art isn't enough for you? And you didn't even earn it! You got your money from
Daddy
! An itty-bitty
daddy's boy
!”

Artie moved in to finish him off, sticking his finger into Stanley's face.

“
You tell me! Right now!
HOW MUCH FUCKING MATZOH DO YOU NEED?”

“Matzoh? Artie, I beg you . . . .”

“You heard me, Stanley,
mu-cha-cha
.”

“Muchacha?”

“Will this do, Mr. G-R-E-E-D-Y?”

Artie pulled something from his wallet and flipped it at Stanley.

“A tensky,” announced Artie triumphantly.

Stanley scurried back to his office.

Artie pulled the flask from his back pocket, took a swallow, and by the time it was returned to his pocket, he had, with his other hand, retrieved a bottle of mouthwash from his motorcycle jacket. Standing at the elevator, Artie took a shot, and then, just as the elevator door closed, spat the fluid in an effervescent green arc into the center of a nearby wastebasket.

MY BABYSITTERS

A DOLL IN
a dollhouse. That was Jade.

Unlike other babysitters, Jade, who worked in the evenings, was available all day, and with her apartment in the hotel, it was very convenient.

Jade's apartment was decorated with wood paneling, marble floors, leopard skins, and rabbit pelts. Everything was comfortable. Very comfortable. Although her apartment had a balcony and faced the Empire State Building, her shades were always drawn. The apartment was lit with chandeliers, lamps covered in patterned silk shades, and candles. On the shelves was Jade's collection of stuffed quail, raccoons, foxes, and other woodland treasures. Bounding through this was an Egyptian sphinx and miniature greyhound.

My Barbie doll had a small waist; Jade's was smaller. My Barbie had full breasts; Jade's were fuller. Jade's eyes and hair and skin were shinier than Barbie's. So why would I play with dolls when I had Jade?

Unlike Barbie, Jade had a brain. She was smart and witty, and I spent as much time in her apartment as my parents and Jade would allow. Upon my arrival, she would always offer a glass of champagne.

I reminded her every time, “I'm a kid. I don't drink anything but milk, juice, and water.”

“Too bad. It's French, from a small vineyard.”

Sitting on her red velvet couch, she would bring the glass to her lips, the bubbles never reaching her mouth. Jade did not drink.

It is said her name was not really Jade, but Stacey. That she arrived at the Chelsea Hotel in the middle of the night during a blizzard, a runaway from Florida. It is said she walked from Port Authority to the hotel wearing only a T-shirt, tattered shorts, and flip-flops. That Stanley Bard said she could stay for a few nights, which extended to months, then years. And that in those years she transformed herself from a little girl to a goddess—her home, from a dark, single room without a toilet, to a suite.

It was not to last.

After a year, I noticed that Jade's spotless apartment was coming undone. She was no longer vacuuming every day, and clothing, which was once stored on cushioned hangers, was piling up around the apartment.

“Jade, do you mind if I ask you something?”

“Of course not, dear.”

“Well, things are a little messy and you seem . . . worried.”

“Is that all?”

“Not exactly . . .”

“Please.”

“You have a smell.”

Normally, Jade had the most beautiful odor, the result of the perfumes that filled her bathroom shelves. She and I had such fun going through those perfumes: rose, lilac, blueberry, and musk.

“What sort of smell?”

“The smell, well . . . ”

“Shalimar?”

I hesitated. “Dog.”

Jade sighed. And then explained.

“One day, Nicolaia, you will meet someone and despite how comfortable you are or even happy you are, you won't want to do anything but be with that person.”

“When that happens I'll smell like dog?”

Jade continued and told me—and I suspect it was only part of the story—that she had a job which paid her a lot of money, and caused her to work late. She was happy with that job, and it allowed her to buy fancy things and to live in a nice apartment in the hotel.

But one day she met someone. Someone she liked.

“He is studying and doesn't have a lot of money. If I want to be with him, I need to find another job, and the only one I could come up with was betting. I learned from my father when I was a kid, and it's the one way I can make enough to support the two of us.”

She retreated to a pile of newspapers in the corner, returning with a copy of the
Greyhound Review,
which, according to Jade, was essential to her new life.

For the next hour, she taught me how to handicap “the hounds.” Interesting, but not exactly something that was going to help me with elementary school.

What she didn't tell me was that she was moving out of the Chelsea Hotel.

—

With Jade gone, I had no babysitter.

On those evenings when my parents went out, there was a scramble to track down one of the various girls who had looked after me in the past. My parents could never quite remember their names, and if a name was recalled, the number was on a scrap of paper that was lost in a drawer or pocket or inside a book. Often, my parents would give up and haul me along to wherever they were going.

A solution arrived one afternoon when we met a young lady and her mother in the lobby of the Chelsea. They lived in the hotel, and the girl, Dahlia, worked as an au pair. I liked her, and she volunteered her services as a babysitter.

The first few times that Dahlia took care of me, she stayed in our apartment. After playing with me for a while, she would excuse herself, go into my parents' bedroom, and fall asleep. With time, she would take me downstairs to where she and her family lived, so she could sleep in her
own bed. If she had other babysitting jobs, she would take me along.

Dahlia's apartment was filled with things her mother had picked up at the flea market and neighborhood antique shops. On the walls were sculptures and paintings by artists in the hotel. Dahlia and her mother had lived there a long time, and the apartment was very crowded.

I should mention that there was always a man lying in a bed just off the living room. That man was Artie, whom I knew from his exchange with Stanley in the lobby. Artie was Dahlia's father.

On the first day I went to their apartment, Artie was in his pajamas, bathrobe, and sunglasses. On his stomach was a camera with a long lens—a scene that was repeated on each of my visits.

At the end of Artie's bed was a television. Completely still, a hunter in his blind, Artie waited until he saw what he was looking for on the screen and then snapped a shot. Every few hours, he would get out of bed, put on his clothes, and leave the apartment. When he came back, he would return to his perch.

Not once, as he passed through the living room, did he acknowledge me or the fact that we had met before.

—

I became close with Dahlia's mother, Colleen. She often returned home with her arms full of flowers, which she would arrange while we talked.

But most exciting was the fact that they, unlike my parents,
had animals: a dog, two cats, and a hamster. It was the hamster, Hammie, I liked the most. Once or twice a day I would run downstairs to play with Hammie.

With time, Dahlia began to babysit other kids at the hotel. Two or three years my junior, these kids already had big groups of friends and rarely wanted to spend time with me. I was fine just hanging out with Dahlia's mother instead. There were times, however, when neither Dahlia nor her mom was around, and it would only be Artie and me.

Artie spent each day dormant in bed. Every so often this would be interrupted by a phone call or a visit from someone who wanted to ask him questions. Artie seemed to know about a lot of things.

Artie didn't talk much, and when he did, it wasn't about himself. So it was a long time before I learned that the big canvases on the walls of the hotel, the ones with pictures of FBI agents, men dressed as girls, politicians and actors, were photographs that Artie had taken from the television.

But these were not my favorite of Artie's creations: at the very top of the hotel, suspended from the roof of the tenth floor, were large discs of clear, thin plastic. Infused into those circles were portraits that Artie had taken with his camera. The circles were three or four feet wide, hung from invisible wires, and were lit by multicolored spotlights. When Artie turned on the lights, the photographs would create shadows on the walls—shadows of the people in the portraits. As the discs rotated on their wires, the shadows would mix. Dwight
Eisenhower's face merged into Salvador Dalí's and Muhammad Ali's. For a few minutes, Dwight Dalí Ali was in the hotel.

Though it is true that Artie and I rarely spoke, he understood me. On those rare times when he left the apartment, often wearing a leather jacket and pajamas, he would, as he returned to his bed, toss me a pack of black licorice or a chocolate bar.