Chapter 6. Hell's Kitchen.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d be staying so I lived in hotels, preferring cheap and sleazy which led me to the Chelsea on Twenty-Third Street. Many aspiring artists lived there over the years: Arthur Miller, Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Jackson Pollock, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, Virgil Thompson and original art hung  all over the walls. I was in the company of ghosts. But I only lasted three nights.  I found hypodermic needles in the bureau and wondered if this was the room Sid Viscous stabbed  and murdered Nancy. I checked out and walked uptown and found Rosoff’s Hotel on the west side on Forty-third near Times Square. 

I rented a small room, up the threadbare stairs on the first floor. It was dark and cramped but adequate and fitted the image of the struggling writer. I was on the road half the month with Australian Television and I wasn’t planning staying. My rent was thirteen dollars a day and I paid a month up front. It was a small classy hotel that had lost its luster, a couple of doors down from New York’s Town Hall Theater. 

Rosoff’s dining room ceiling was stained glass. Downstairs the bar was often crowded with theater people and newsmen. Carlos, the  Puerto Rican barman was always snappy in a crisp white shirt, bow tie and black waistcoat and knew me and gave me drinks with the free hors d’oeuvres. At night when the crowd dispersed, Broadway and Times Square grew desolate. The Nathans hot dog joint across the street lit up the dark in bright yellow and green neon like an Edward Hopper painting. 

It was bracing living alone in the heart of the city, coming back to my small hotel room late at night to boil water for tea, with a classical music soundtrack, sit on the edge of the bed and write my first and only, never published screen play on my second-hand portable Remington type writer. I bought the beautiful curvaceous mat black portable  from a guy selling on the sidewalk. A bargain. And then I heard about a fellow Australian looking for a flat-mate and I called and I moved in. 

It was November 1977 and I was living on Restaurant  Row in Hell’s Kitchen a few blocks from Times Square and Broadway. It was a brownstone painted blue and white. Eva the landlady was Greek. She owned Eros One, a hole-in-the-wall gay porno joint around the corner on Eighth. “Give the rent to the girl in the box office”, she said in her thick Greek accent.

Hell’s Kitchen, where Leonard Bernstein set “West Side Story” lined with Brownstones and fire escapes, built in the Gilded Age but its dark and working class, tenement dingy. But sometimes, when the sun goes down behind the Jersey Cliffs on the western side of the Hudson river, it sends spears and arrows of golden light straight up Forty-Six Street enough to blind you, and the old stone tenements were golden.   

I’d made the decision to stay in New York until my visa expired. That first day I walked the neighborhood I came across the Film Center Building right around the corner and I felt the gods were with me.  The Center was an art deco, thirteen-story building full of filmmakers. The front was all brass and glass with German Arriflex cameras and Italian Angenieux lenses and Swiss Nagra tape recorders, German Neumann microphones and Steenbeck flat-beds for sale displayed in a plate glass window with brass borders and it looked like art to me. And a diner in the tiled foyer where real-deal film makers came for coffee and a sandwich and you could look out the window at the traffic streaming past. And the New York Times building was around the corner and so was Sardis. 

I loved the rhythm of it, the cut and thrust of the city. Endless rills and runnels, streams and tributaries, the side streets and avenues and rivers of people, an ocean filled with history, opportunities, hopes and dreams, disappointments and difficulty that knocks the wind out of you. New York City was Emerald City to me  like in The Wizard of Oz. In fact I had my letterhead and business card printed with that title: Emerald City Films.

_____

The train glided into Grand Central Station. It was late at night. The platform stretched out like an airport runway, silver tracks that disappeared into a dark tunnel with glowing red lights that burned like coal braziers or dragon’s eyes. 

Just two of them standing, talking then stopping, looking into each other. They hardly  moved their bodies and they seemed frozen solid until the rip and hiss of air brakes shook them back and they walked slowly towards the exit.  

And a frail, pale man with wisps of yellow hair floating  around his scalp, wearing a navy blue gabardine overcoat and light gray, fine-checked pants and black nylon sox and flat heeled shiny soft  suede shoes like a funeral worker, sat rocking in his seat on the train. There was dandruff sprinkled on the shoulders of his coat.

It could have been my friend Jack. We shared the apartment on Restaurant Row.  There must have been more than two dozen classy joints and a few dive bars on the strip and a Lutheran Church and across the street a parking lot for the Broadway theater crowd. I watched them from the casement window,  the guys who ran the lot parking cars in the slush and the snow and the slime making a dime and they squeezed them nice and tight like sardines in a can as they say. Jimmy Ray’s Bar and Broadway were just up the way and the theatre goers from the suburbs packed the lot on weekends. And AIDS was lurking just around the corner. 

Jack was an Aussie and worked as a news announcer on Australian radio. His voice was smooth and unadorned and I never heard him raise it, only when he laughed and drew deeply on his joint with coffee when we chatted before he went to work in the morning. I don’t remember when he told me he had AIDS. Jack lived one end of the railway apartment in the bedroom and I slept upfront in the living room on a Castro convertible couch with my clothes in a milk crate in the corner. Jack and I were ships in the night and we didn’t see much of each other. And here was Jack back from the grave, sitting in the New York subway car swaying and bumping reading the New York Post.

His apparition haunted me more than once. We were both travelers, survivors, in a way, living outside conventional boundaries,  twelve-thousand miles from home. We were not lovers and hardly friends really; we simply shared the rent. And soon Jack moved out and found his own place down the block and I visited a couple of times and each time there was less of him and he slowly disappeared.