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By Zach Selwyn
Tag: New York
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Read Zach’s New Short Story: “Out of Touch at the Dream Hotel”
Out of Touch at The Dream Hotel * 2015 By Zach Selwyn
It was two-o-clock in the morning and I was standing on the street outside the Dream Hotel in New York City when a slick looking hustler in a Panama hat sided up to me.
“You looking for girls tonight?” He said.
“Naah man, I’m just trying to get some air.”
“You sure? Just up those stairs across the street is all kinds of hoes… I’m talking Thai girls, Russians, Mamis… You ever bang a bad bitch?”
“What exactly is a bad bitch?” I asked.
“If you don’t know, then you’ve never banged one…”
I have been in New York City for roughly 36 hours. In that time, I have averaged 4 hours of sleep a night, eaten 7 street hot dogs and drank close to 19 cups of bad deli coffee. I have also realized that I am the most out of touch loser in the city. The average Manhattan man around my age is sporting a hundred dollar undercut and a long beard – which is eerily similar to L.A. (With only a few less Man-Buns). The difference is, these guys are also rocking 3,000 dollar Ted Baker suits and wingtips. As for me, I am wearing a 1970’s – era Wrangler cowboy shirt, some Lee Riders from the early 80’s and a pair of ¾ boots I scored from a TV show wardrobe department about 4 years ago. My hair is pretty tame and I still have Beverly Hills 90210-era sideburns. I’m also wearing a trucker cap that reads “Roy Clark” on it, bellbottoms and a belt buckle that features Chester the Cheetah riding a Harley motorcycle beneath the inscription “Cheesy Rider.”
I feel a little like Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy because NOBODY is dressed like me. Funny thing is, this is how I have been dressing for 15 years. A few years back, in the early 00’s, everybody started dressing like this. Now, those days are long gone and I’m the only guy on 8th Avenue wearing a shirt that unsnaps when you tear it apart and a turquoise ring.
And apparently, I have no idea what a “bad bitch” is.
I realized I was grossly under-dressed when I attended the first business dinner with the company I am working for. I figured it would be a quick bite at a local bar, but it turned into the type of place where they asked me to remove my hat as I sat down. The next day, at the company’s request, I made my way to a J. Crew to try and find something respectable that I would feel comfortable wearing. I settled on a checkered red, white and blue button-down and some horrendously skinny jeans. The price? $254.
When the sales associate asked me “how my sock game” was, I told him, “Fine. I buy all my socks at Ross: Dress for Less.”
He grimaced.
“How’s your shoe game?” He asked.
“I have these nice ¾ boots,” I said.
“Uggh, please – nobody is wearing ¾ boots anymore,” he retorted. “You need some wings!”
I walked out of the store.
I couldn’t place my finger on it, but Manhattan had begun to seem too cookie cutter. I guess I was aware of the Duane Reade explosion and the Starbucks on every corner, but I was not prepared for the fashion clones that had sprouted up everywhere. Sure I was ten years older than the average guy out on a Wednesday night, but even I could sense a lack of originality. New York City, which was once full of punk street kids, trendsetters and Mapplethorpe-worshipping leather daddies sticking whips in their asses and walking into a Saks Fifth Avenue, had become somewhat tame.
I recently read an interview with AdRock of the Beastie Boys talking about how the “New York of his youth had disappeared.” I was beginning to understand what he was talking about. Manhattan in the 70’s and 80’s – before the crackdowns and the $8200 a month rent – was an artistic and fantastic place to be. These were the days before the smelly Times Square Jack Sparrows. Before Hell’s Kitchen was a gentrified hipster paradise. In the late 80’s I would visit my second cousin and roll down Canal Street to buy fake Gucci jackets, leather African medallion necklaces and a bootleg cassette of LL Cool J’s Walking With a Panther. The tape-dealers would offer me “smoke,” which scared the crap out of me. At one point, my mom dragged me away from a couple of black guys who were standing around Washington Square Park discussing the new Bobby Brown On Our Own song from Ghostbusters II. I tried to inject some white boy wisdom by saying I thought Bobby should’ve written a second rap verse instead of repeating the “Too hot to handle, too cold to hold” line and they ignored me as if I was “Chester the Terrier” following around the bigger “Spike the Bulldog” in the Looney Tunes cartoons.
The only exception I could find was in the Dream Hotel. The first couple of nights I was in town, I took it easy, stayed in my room, watched TV and had sex with the full-length pillow. However, a hotel room can only hold you captive for so long and eventually I came downstairs to find out where the notorious dark side of this fantastic city had wound up. I now believe it all centers around the Dream Hotel. Within an hour of hanging in the lobby, I was propositioned by more pimps, hustlers, hoes and drug dealers than I have seen in 20 years in Los Angeles. Methy looking skinny teenagers were offering me weed, cocaine and what they claim is “Government pure MDMA.” The lobby was crawling with hookers and late night denizens of the rooftop nightclub, which is named “PDH.” An acronym for what I can only imagine is “Pimps, Drugs and Hoes” based on the army of thick women standing around comparing 9 inch Indian weaves and elastic black twat-length skirts that barely cover their clitori. (Is that the plural for “clitoris?”)
The new Manhattan underbelly had become what Jay-Z sang about in Empire State of Mind. “Ballplayers, rap stars, addicted to that limelight…” Everywhere I went folks were talking about money, cars and rap music. If Los Angeles is supposedly a vapid, material city full of superficial idiots, New York City has embraced a lifestyle full of flashy watches, bottle service, velvet ropes and hangers on… So much so that when I tried to get access to the PDH nightclub on the top floor, the bouncer looked at my “shoe game” and instructed me to “please wait in the other bar.”
I didn’t really want to go up to PDH, but it did seem like it had to be part of my Dream Hotel adventure. So I waited in the bar drinking 17 dollar glasses of shoddy tempranillo wondering how anyone can listen to this much house and trap music in one day. The hotel sort of felt like Miami, but it was 40 degrees cooler and Pitbull wasn’t here singing some shitty song about how “white girl got some ass.”
Finally a large Puerto Rican man came over and told me that since I was a guest of the hotel, all I needed to do was show my room key and I could gain access to the club. I sauntered up towards the door, bypassing the line of desperate gold diggers and club kids and flashed my hotel room key. It was the first time in my entire trip that I had felt somewhat cool.
The nightclub was everything I always hated about nightclubs. Expensive drinks, a DJ mixing Calvin Harris with Blondie, hairy men pouring vodka-cranberry drinks for girls who were most likely being paid to hang around them and intimidating looking security guards who mad-dogged anybody ordering a single beer instead of a 2500 dollar bottle of Grey Goose.
I stayed for 8 minutes.
On my way downstairs, I decided I had to get outside and just see the street. I was sick of the lines, the attitude and the fact that a cast member from Real Housewives of Atlanta had demanded to cut the line… and was placated with a free bottle of vodka. I had to walk to a deli and buy some water and eat a sandwich and try to get some sleep before my work event the following day.
I came back to the hotel with my snacks and drinks – which, by the way, were shoved into about 11 plastic bags by the deli owner as if the plastic problem doesn’t exist in New York – and stopped to listen to the sidewalk pimps do their thing. They were like the dude selling Eddie Murphy’s gold hair dryer in Coming to America. I heard some remarkable stuff:
“You wanna table shower my man?”
“I got one tranny but she visiting her brother at Riker’s right now.”
“Playa, I can get you three at once, but you gotta wear three rubbers.”
I guess Manhattan hadn’t changed that much. Instead of bootleg tapes, men were looking for the booty. These hipster hotels had become infidelity dens and the cops just seemed to look the other way. And as for the falling crime rate – well – as this night was coming to a close, NBA player Chris Copeland was actually stabbed in an altercation outside of 1OAK nightclub just a few streets away from where I was staying.
As I strolled towards the entrance, I passed by my friend in the Panama hat one last time.
“Yo, son – I got you. I know you wanna find out what a bad bitch is,” he propositioned.
“I’m good, man,” I said. “I gotta get to bed.”
I went up to my room and had sex with the full-length pillow.
Read Zach’s new Short Story “647 Dollars and 97 Cents”
In February of this past year, I traveled to New York City and somehow spent $647.97 in just under 12 hours.
And I have absolutely nothing to show for it.
New York has always been one of my favorite magical cities. From the first time my mother took my siblings and I there as kids to look at the Macy’s holiday window displays – to the nights spent out eating at fabulous restaurants like Trattoria Del’Arte – to the time when I urinated in a Yankee Stadium phone booth after a tough loss to the Blue Jays, I have always loved New York. The city has enchanted me for all these years and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.
Still, for all of New York’s charms, romance and restaurants, the place has continuously sabotaged my wallet time and time again. And no matter how hard I try to keep my expenditures under a budget, I forever find myself failing miserably.
Last February, I was flown out to New York to read a short story at a start-up literary festival called the “New Poets and Writers Rooftop Recital.” I anticipated a catered and boozy event that would be full of accomplished writers, sexy New York celebrities like Uma Thurman and dozens of opportunities presenting themselves at every rooftop sip of champagne. It was the literary Mecca of the world and I was there to take it by storm… Or, at least, try and get my stories printed in some kind of respectable magazine. After all, my last published work was in the underground marijuana culture magazine THC EXPOSE. (Sadly, it folded after the second issue).
I arrived on my Jet Blue flight eight hours before the story recital was to begin and I called my wife back home as I bull-rode the never-ending taxi line heading into Manhattan.
“Hey!” I squealed, alive with anticipation of the glimmering city light. “This is going to be a great time!”
“Do NOT spend a bunch of money,” My wife countered.
“I won’t,” I said. “Besides, it’s all paid for… They’re putting me up, there’s food and an open bar and everything. Besides, I can get through a week on like, 30 bucks. I wont spend more than like, 200 dollars.”
“Don’t go out and buy wine,” she explained. “That town overcharges for everything… if you need to get drunk, go buy a bottle at a grocery store and drink it in your hotel room.”
“Right,” I said. “No problem.”
The thought of spending an evening in New York City straddling the filthy sheets of a SoHo Radisson with a plastic cup full of Chilean Merlot while watching SportsCenter seemed dreadful and horrendous. After all, I was in New York City! The Big Apple! The City That Never Sleeps! This wasn’t the “City Where the Guy Away From His Family For One Night Sits Alone Drinking Wine in his Hotel Room…”
By the end of the evening, I was wishing I had followed my wife’s advice.
I dropped my first $100 getting into Manhattan. I had made a classic New York mistake of getting into a gypsy cab with a driver named “Doopsha” who took me to SoHo and charged me extra because he said the tolls had skyrocketed. Not knowing what to believe, I paid him and walked into my hotel, preparing to decompress for an hour or two before going out to find some food.
The hotel had no record of my reservation. Apparently the hosts of the festival had not booked me like they were supposed to, and I now was being told that I needed to pay $379 for the room – which was the standard “walk-in price.”
Excuse me? Walk-in price? What if I jogged in, would it be any cheaper?
Failing to find my humor amusing, the woman ran my credit card as I frantically texted the festival hosts and told them what was happening. I did not hear back. Still, I figured they would cover the expense and reimburse me.
After a long shower, I performed the typical disgusting routine every man does in a hotel room when they first arrive. It starts with naked push-ups in front of the window, followed by a full body shave that leaves hair all over the bathroom floor. It always finishes with a nude half-hour of television spent with my wong pressed up against a cold pillow.
After a quick nap, I decided to ride the subway over to the East Village and find the rooftop where the event was scheduled to take place and get comfortable beforehand. I opened my laptop and logged in online – only to quickly be hit with a $14.99 WiFi charge. Unaware that they had free computers in the lobby – and knowing that $14.99 would save me a late night trip to the Adult Bookstore called “Babeland” that I had passed on the way in – I shrugged it off.
By the way, when I looked up “Babeland’s” website, they were offering the following in store promotion…
Receive 25% off any lube when you purchase a vibrator at any of our stores. Valid until February 14, 2013. Happy Valentine’s Day!
The next thing I discovered, was that the afternoon before I had arrived, a psychotic, racist woman had pushed a Middle-Eastern man to his death on the subway tracks at the very station near my hotel. This was noted in the New York Post I bought in the hotel lobby. (Along with some toothpaste and a $9.00 bottle of Renu Multi-Purpose eye solution). Immediately cowering in fear for a similar copycat incident to befall upon me once I stepped onto the subway platform, I decided to stay above ground, and summon a taxi to the event.
Following the $15.00 ride over to the East Village, I decided to step into an Italian restaurant-bar to catch the score of the New York Knicks game with a bunch of real sports fans that were cursing at the TV. I decided I would buy one glass of wine, knowing that it would probably be my last before going to the event – where the open bar would keep me well lubricated for the rest of the night. I ordered the house Chianti.
16 bucks.
After downing it in three sips and admiring Carmelo Anthony’s offensive output, I cursed myself for ordering the drink and made my way over the rooftop building. It was then that I first began to realize that I was dealing with a faction of complete amateurs. Outside the doorway, on a makeshift sign that looked as if it had been patterned by some NYU freshmen who were flunking graphic design, read the following:
New Poets and Writers Rooftop Rectal.
YES. They had misspelled “Recital” as “Rectal.”
I called attention to it at the door before giving my name to the bouncer – who was way too large and intimidating to be working the guest list at an event for writers and poets – and he completely ignored me. He slipped me my Artist Pass and a small schedule before telling me that GREG and BLAISE, the two hosts of the event, were waiting for me in the “green room upstairs.”
Nice, I thought. Finally, a green room. I was looking forward to some Manhattan catering, some ravenous red wine and to be rubbing elbows with the elite of the New York literary world. I climbed those steps aloft with dreams of exchanging email addresses with Jonathan Safran Foer as Woody Allen and I discussed the flaws in Soren Kierkegaard’s criticisms of idealist intellectuals.
Instead, as I walked into the green room, which was actually the bus-boy stand of the restaurant in the adjoining room, I was greeted with a frozen vegetable platter, bottles of $1.99 Charles Shaw red wine and a red-haired doofus in a sweater named Riley who handed me a tiny water and told me I “sort of looked like Jason Bateman.”
So much for Kierkegaard.
Meanwhile, Greg and Blaise were very young. Like, early 20’s.
When I told them I needed to be reimbursed for my hotel room, Blaise said, “We already paid the 129 dollars last month.”
I told them there was no reservation when I had arrived. They flipped out and informed me that they would not be able to cover my room charges beyond getting me a check for $129.00
There went another $250. I was already way over my $200 limit.
Greg apologized and tried to cheer me up by offering up information about the after party.
“After the event, there’s a huge after party on my dad’s boat,” he announced. “Trust me bro, it’s killer… we’re gonna throw down.”
I cracked the Charles Shaw. There was only one way I was getting through this.
I read my story to an enthusiastic crowd of roughly 25 people. I followed a young writer who received a lot more attention and got more laughs than anybody with his banal, arcane and totally lame story about how he thought he saw a mermaid in the East River.
When I asked him if he had ever seen the film Splash, he responded with a gruff, “No.”
“Netflix it,” I told him.
Following the readings, they actually brought out some edamame and hummus to snack on. Starving, I put away nearly three full dishes before folding up my story and preparing to attend the after party on the boat. First, however, Greg and Blaise needed to clean up the event.
“We’re gonna be about an hour or two, man,” they said.
I looked at my watch. It was 10:30. I almost forgot… New York City nights don’t even start until around midnight. Luckily, I was on west coast time. I wasn’t tired and the buzz from my reading had me thrilled to be assaulting the Manhattan bar scene for the next few hours… especially if we would end up partying on some guy’s father’s yacht.
I headed downstairs with some other writers – including a guy who claimed he was about to publish his third novel. We straddled against an old wooden bar in a place called 2A located on Avenue A. We spent a few minutes talking about the pathetic festival we had all just been a part of, and the novelist sipped a whiskey before saying, “I’m so sorry you flew out for this, man.”
I told him I didn’t care. He bought me a glass of wine and we drank to creativity.
It was then that I put my credit card down, which is undoubtedly my most consistent mistake. Once I pass a certain threshold of intoxication, I get extremely generous with the liquor. If you are standing near me at a bar when I am in my cups, I will undoubtedly end up buying you a drink. Or two. Or in this case… four. The novelist and I shared stories of east coast adventures and I showed him pictures of my kids. We talked writing and sports and for the first time in awhile, I felt like a man again.
As the drinks flowed, I barely noticed Greg and Blaise come in the door and announce that it was time to head to the after party on the boat. They had a few cute girls with them and the novelist’s eyes perked up. I swiveled on my chair and texted my wife the following lie:
Got a cab home, don’t worry… going to sleep. Event was fun – call you in the morning.
I’m pretty sure I did that so I wouldn’t face any unnecessary distractions the rest of the evening. After all, a calm wife is a happy wife – and she didn’t need to know that I was soon about to be popping champagne corks off the bow of a yacht into the Hudson River.
When it came to splitting a 15 dollar taxi ride with the novelist, I suddenly became aware that my credit card was still planted at that bar back on Avenue A. I forgot to close it out. Luckily, the novelist covered me – and we eventually arrived at a nice brownstone tucked away somewhere back near SoHo. Expecting to end up at the Chelsea Piers or in some Upper West Side marina somewhere, my evening was quickly derailed when I noticed Greg pressing the combination to an electronic lock on a garage door. When it finally lifted, I was somewhat thunderstruck.
What Greg neglected to mention, was that his father’s boat was above ground and parked in a garage.
“Get on, boys!” He yelled. There should be margarita mix inside!”
I climbed a ladder from the cement floor and did my best to try and stay festive with the party-goers, but this, for me, was the final straw. I was still hungry and not exactly willing to spend the next four hours listening to Jay-Z on the deck of a boat that was in a dark garage. Concerned about my credit card, I pulled what we like to call an “Irish Good-bye” and quietly slipped out the door with three bottles of water under my arm.
Following a three block walk to a major street, I was able to flag a cab and weave my way back to the bar on Avenue A, convincing the driver I would have money for him at the bar. He cursed at me in Pakistani, and I wrote down what he said, hoping to look it up on my laptop when I made it to the hotel.
“Behanchood… Tatti Kaa.”
When we arrived, I closed my tab at the bar. Nine drinks and a bag of barbecue Lay’s chips cost me $111.98. At this point, I was so tired I didn’t even care. I slayed two $4.25 slices of pizza from the all-night place next door while the meter ran and eventually, the taxi took me back to SoHo where the foul-mouthed driver charged me $49.00 for my cross-town detour. I tipped him three dollars and stumbled into the lobby where I was greeted by a new hotel clerk asking me if I was going to require a late check out.
“Hell yes,” I exclaimed.
I also pre-ordered my breakfast, knowing very well that I would not be in the mood to go out searching for egg whites and coffee the next morning. The charge for eggs, coffee, fruit and room service? $65.00.
That night, after I crawled into bed, I went through my receipts.
In exactly 11 hours and 32 minutes in New York, I managed to spend the following:
Car into Manhattan: $100.00
Hotel Room (after $129 refund) $250.00
Hotel WiFi: $14.99
New York Post/Toiletries in Lobby: $17.50
Cab to East Village: $15.00
Glass of wine at Italian Restaurant: $16.00
Drinks at 2A Bar on Avenue A: $111.98
Two slices of pizza: $8.50
Cab from Soho to East Village to SoHo: $49.00
In Room Breakfast: $65.00
The grand total? $647.97. Yeah. I could have stayed home and bought myself an iPad Mini.
Before shutting off the TV and sinking into the starched bed sheets, I remembered to look up exactly what the Pakistani taxi driver had said to me in his native tongue. I entered it into a Google search bar and watched as the following popped up:
Behanchood… Tatti Kaa.
Translation? Sisterfucker… Eat shut.
I wasn’t quite sure what “shut” was, but I had a pretty good idea.
Upon arriving home the next afternoon, I tried to explain to my wife that all of the circumstances were out of my control and that I was miserable the entire time. Unfortunately, this kind of pleading only goes so far and I still ended up looking like a spendthrift loser who squandered a lot of money on absolutely nothing. That night, I promised her it would never happen again.
The following morning, I got an email from Greg and Blaise thanking me for coming and reading at their festival. They said that since it was their first year, they would be making improvements and throwing a kick-ass event the next time. At the end of their email, they invited me back to New York to read any story I liked at the 2014 “New Poets and Writers Rooftop Recital,” promising me an incredible opportunity to meet and greet Manhattan’s literary community.
I responded with one simple phrase.
“Tatti Kaa.”
Hopefully, they won’t look it up.
