from the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel

a dream too big to dream - and it coming true

[prologue]

The day I turned 27, I was weird. I was tired and jet lagged and anxious and overstimulated and scared. Some things are too big to even dream about – like staying at the Chelsea hotel, the night of your 27^th birthday. Having something you don’t even dare to wonder about come true is terrifying.

I was a teenager in Middlesbrough with pocket money and I spent it on a £3.99 book because I liked the cover. It changed my life. Patti Smith wrote of her life, her journey into the life of an artist, her love of another artist, her love of a hotel and a city, in a way I’d never felt before. Beautiful isn’t right, it’s not enough. It was writing that changed everything, it was a perspective that changed everything. The Hotel Chelsea became the symbol of that.

On a logistical level, the book changed my life. I wrote about it for my GCSEs and I did well. I wrote about it for my A-Levels and I got into uni. I wrote about it for my dissertation and I passed and I graduated and I got a job and another and another and I got fired and I got a music journalism job and I quit and I got another - I write about the Hotel still. The names of other heroes were printed in type; Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Cohen, all played an essential part.

On a bigger level, a woozy level, a somewhat embarrassing to articulate level, the book changed my life. “I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one,” Patti wrote about being in a small town, untethered from any real sense or accessible examples about what that could possibly mean or feel or be acted on. “I wondered if I had really been called as an artist. I didn’t mind the misery of a vocation, but I dreaded not being called.” I read about her coming to understand and allow herself the label, about her crawl to confidence and the fact its not really about confidence at all; it’s about work and trust. I’ve tried since my first read to be dedicated to both.

“When you hit a wall, just kick it in,” she wrote. I was weird on my 27^th birthday – the end of a year marked by memory loss, disassociation, disconnection and a lot of work on a novel I had hoped to have finished by then. I feel closer than ever to a sense of calling but Patti taught me that’s not a divine and done thing, it’s an offering from somewhere that requires effort.

So I took 15 minutes to myself, alone, in room 6Z, at the Chelsea Hotel. Some things are too big to even dream about and when they happen, it’s terrifying; a feeling compacted by the themes of the year and the resulting obsession with capturing things in a panicked mission to keep it. I’d felt the day’s first weird sad tears start to swell out the front when I felt ugly, desperately trying to get a perfect photo in front of my dream where I looked pretty. I had to go upstairs and let it out. These are the things that fade, I told myself it over and over and I know it will stick true. I already think I look nice in the pictures.

Some things are too big to even dream about but it doesn’t mean they’ll be perfect. I wept for 15 minutes out of fear I’d ruined it, fear I’d lost it, fear I wouldn’t get that perfect photo. But then I woke up the next morning and I did what I’d always wanted to do. I had black coffee in the lobby, sat where so many of my heroes sat, and I wrote like they wrote, right there. This is what I wrote. I’ll treasure it more than any photo, although I’ll treasure them too, capturing me 27, and in front of my dream, and being weird.

[26/4/25 - From the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel]

The lobby of the Chelsea is green like spring when it’s raining – and it is, lightly, outside; balcony concrete polka dots, game of chicken being played with opening umbrellas.

I will win because I did not bring one, because I will be happy to walk in the melancholy of a shower after this, because a patch of dry hair under my headphones will be enough. I will walk uptown, past the Rockefeller Centre, listening to ‘Only Living Boy In New York’ and I hope to feel like it – the only person in the world’s city, I will speak to no one for six hours in increments interrupted by gentle thank yous and purposeful pleases. I will sit somewhere and get into the weeds of myself.

And the spring of this lobby will stay in me. In central park, I will likely stroke my own arm like a mother and whisper that. I will handle the red tassel key back, wonder how much it would have cost me if I’d kept it in my pocket. But with my honesty, I will enter an exercise of trust, stretching over and over. A life long dedication when the spring velvet, the yellow glass morning light, the sweet decades-stale smoke smell, the stately fireplace, the 10 big canvases and the imprint this gold embossed metal table has left on my wrist comes back codified and meaningful in these messages forever. At 80, I will sit in a chair and recall ripping heads off prawns and wincing at the filthiness of the filthy martini I asked for, the filthiest they could make. I will tell someone, again, about how I cried outside before I even dared to get close to the door. People I will know, or who will know me through stories, will hold the photo Ellise took and it will look like youth, that black dress likely gone or worn by someone’s someone, donated and bought and passed down to somewhere. My old hands will hold it too and I will think I was pretty. I won’t remember that I didn’t feel it that day – that’s how it goes, beautifully so. I will still remember those lyrics about remembering. I will still remember they met there – left elevator, 4^th floor, his room on the left, hers by the door on the right, just diagonal. He said he was Kris Kristofferson, she said he was too short. I will remember the feeling on the 2nd floor. The old woman on the 1st.

I will remember blowing out the candle and wishing to finish my novel and to make it great. I will remember my hair being blonde, my arm being bruised by the bite of a lover, even if he is lost. I will remember the blue stars on my back, they will still be there – for Patti and Robert, for the two friends who paid for it, for me, turning 27, jabbed into my skin the day before Spanish man on a sunny day in Brooklyn. Maybe I will remember the strength of the negroni I followed it with – all spirit, totally clear, the backroom of the bar was like a greenhouse. I will be old and brag about the comped drinks, the tour, or all will be normal by then – the Chelsea? I’ve been so many times but the first was my birthday; 27, blonde, bruised, wearing a black dress.

The photo holds that. But this is clearer.

Unpictured. Wearing a pink dress when I wrote, 10:30am. The sofa was a green velvet that looked like spring, the rain lightly polka dotted the balcony, the room smelt like a history of lighters held up to someone else’s cigarette, a history of their perfumes. I ate a croissant; I drank a black coffee. “Good spot,” the waiter said as he carried it over to me, to the big bay window where I could see it all, making sure I could keep all this. I sat for as long as I could, the words came easily, I had spirits to make proud. I made plans to walk uptown, past the Rockefeller centre towards the met, to be the most alone person in the city – I was independent like that when I was young.