Serenity

They run in packs – relying on each other for safety and reassurance. Nobody will harass them for being lost if there are in groups of twenty. No nightmarish, unseen vagabond will pluck them up and introduce them to violent, urban horrors when they are using the buddy system, en masse.

And none of them feel lost when every street corner requires a group decision. With enough heads working on the problem of getting from here to there, they have a better chance of success, even if it means moving slower.

To keep themselves from getting too lost, they don’t go far at night. They are a gaggle of swooping, hollering art students, going door to door in search of a bar or club that will let in minors. Arms wide in imitation of toy airplanes, they run up the sidewalks. One, named Adam, skips across the Bowery, hopping from corner to corner. Another, Jacinthe, clutches around her friend Stephanie and watches, sometimes laughing loudly and encouraging them. Their stop and search strategy leads them into dark, backwater bars, poetry clubs and, eventually, to the tourist destination of the disaffected, CBGBs.

The point is: they are clueless. And with the right kind of eyes, a group of clueless kids (on holiday, with disposable income and a predilection for art) is not a gaggle. It is an audience and a market.

And while the Ottawans are running around the hotel, getting ready for the night, Shadow has, all the time, been sitting in his corner of the lobby, shoveling up wilted spinach and chomping on it like a sacred, Hindu cow. He eats out of a clear plastic tray using a white plastic fork, and in between bites he quizzes the students on their life goals.

The giant man speaks in a high pitched voice that makes you flinch for all it’s surprising raspiness, like the sounds a teenage boy might make. Why is his voice so sour and stunted? Has he eaten too many citrus fruits?

One girl tells Shadow she is studying education. No hesitation. Shadow is preaching, letting whatever words enter his mind exit through his mouth without any thought except rhythmic continuity.

“You don’t go to school for education. You’ve got to Be a teacher. You can’t go to school to learn that. You got to be that now and always. What do you teach? What are you teaching me right now?”

In unplanned, organic order, the Ottawans take turns at Shadow’s table. Sometimes he is asking them about his art – which drawings do they like, why, rank the art, 1st, 2nd, 3rd – and sometimes he is bending their heads around a corner they hadn’t imagined. He sits, a little slumped, encouraging his more reticent guests with a nodding head and an occasional, “Um hmm,” or, “Oh yeah? Really?” And he sounds surprised when he says these things.

He has the look of a man with no sense of his own size. In ancient times, stories would have been written about the giant black ogre who will seize a person in their tracks just with the sound of his voice…adventurer heroes, who we would call vagabonds, would warn each other about the losing your momentum as you pass him…if he catches your eye, if you pause to look at the lines and colors on the walls, he will stop you and unravel you with the rhetorical talent of the mystic sophists.

The question is, does he know what he is doing? This giant who swaggers and dresses with dapper flair must know he has crafted a complicated character in the form of Sir Shadow. He never hesitates, sometimes because he is just repeating himself, the same as a skilled salesmen; but he muses as well, always consistent in his descriptions of the world, but looking at people with precision. He uses no barbs, but he cuts to the bone.

How different is Sir Shadow from the Pied Piper? Here he sits, surrounded by younglings, all paying Big Money to learn art, and the man, who has learned only the most basic uses of pen, paper and paint, sits in the middle of them, talking, and there is a buzz. He has laid the weight of planetary gravity on the landscape they thought was theirs to roll around upon.

******

The Ottawan art students go to dinner at Acme, a southern style theme restaurant Shadow recommended. They are eager for the night, but a little exhausted by the day. They eat heavy portions of spicy gumbo and ribs. They flirt and try to guess the musicians playing through the speakers. They have a few beers on the table, but none of the students drink like professionals.

Back at the White House Hotel, Shadow has changed into loose fitting, yellow clothes. He has a table set up where he was eating, and has begun covering canvases with horizontal brush strokes, layering the paint into bright patterns of green/yellow/red, or pink/white/orange. The colors look like the landscape of a Caribbean beach town. He spends time looking at the canvases, thinking on where to apply color, and then attacks with a variety of brushes (including a shoe shine brush). He dribbles paint on the canvases in left/right swoops, and then mashes the paint into the mix. The end result couldn’t be more dissimilar from the one-line art. It is figureless, abstract, and moody.

Shadow: I’m working with some people to try and market my stuff. We could put this on bath towels and ties and shower curtains, you know? You like these patterns? Could you see yourself with some bedsheets with that yellow pattern on them?

A couple is standing next to Shadow and the girl says yes. Is she being polite or is she serious?

Shadow: Oh, I like you. Yes. Hmm. Which pattern would you like to see on a scarf?

This goes on for some time. Shadow is doing what might be best described as market research. When several people say they like his dark red painting, he takes their advice seriously. Tonight, when everyone has left, he will experiment with a 6 panel painting that is a deep, sensual red. He says he wants to sell the patterns and retire from the money.

Shadow: I used to make these kinds of paintings in San Francisco. They used to hang in galleries and I made a lot of money doing that. It’s time to get back to that so I can cash it in.

Now, the Ottawans are filing back in. They head to the back. They filter into every corner of the White House Hotel. They sit in their rooms, tired, asking each other where they will go tonight. They all pass by Shadow, as he paints or talks to them. By the time they are ready to leave, some good and drunk, they have all clustered up in the lobby… a small reservoir on the side of a major river…and Shadow, expecting the audience, is in the middle of it, smiling…

******

The lobby of the White House Hotel is not an art gallery. It is a public space. People walk in from the streets, permanent residents sit and read the paper or look out the window, tourists stop here, on there way somewhere else. Its uses are unlimited, but you would have never thought it was an ideal location for a performance unless you were standing there, in a circle, surrounding Shadow.

He says hello to those who have sat with him. Having heard that he is the author of the drawings on the walls, more people ask him how he started. Will he draw for them? Will he talk to them? Will he speak?

And Shadow is all grin. His bottom four teeth jut out from a swollen smile. People are at him from every direction and more are coming in the room, thinking about walking past him, to the door.

So he announces.

“Now here we go loop-de-loo. Here we go again. The story is about to start.” It sounds like singing…

Now I want everyone to get together /
and understand /
that this is the story of a /
lonely, lonely man.

In the middle, the stage is a black plastic chair. Shadow draws, as he always does, from memory. The faces at upward angles, the hands on keyboards, or gripping drumsticks, or raised, potential energy aimed at a hand drum. He starts rocking with the swoops and dips of the lines. He sings sour blues songs. He is not a musician and the music does not come out right, but he sings straight through the songs. The notes are dissonant and mismatched. Maybe they are old standards, but it sounds more like he is improvising.

He finishes the first drawing, a complicated dance scene and holds it up to applause. The room is filled. He says, “Let the bidding begin.” But his audience is made from young art students. They have very little money and when the drawing sells for ten dollars, Shadow is surprised. He expected twenty, and had been charging as much earlier in the evening. His mouth is still open, eyes looking back and forth, gauging the crowd and realizing this will be the average price. The next one comes more elaborate, but still only reaches ten dollars. Now he knows, he will have to sell as many as possible to make some money.

Therefore, whenever one drawing is finished, he hands it to the girl next to him and keeps singing and drawing. The audience will stay for as long as there is a performance. It would be rude to leave a man, singing and performing just for you.

…he falls back into rhythm...it is all one long song…or is it one long drawing…different angles of the same scene…

…but if I could see her again
Maria, oh, Maria…
How you made me fall apart

Dun-doo-dee-dun-doo-dee-dun
What a story this turned out to be…
Now you know, how the blues all start’d
When she stole each man’s heart…

Maria! He sings about Maria! She’s be gone for three months and there is no question that it is not just a character, not just a name he chose at random. I am on the ground, aiming the camera at his face and trying to get good audio. I am close, just at his knees, and he is almost crying the music. I feel ashamed to see him like this, knowing it is not a show. The man pours, pours, leans on the page, swoops up the back line of a woman’s dress, draws to her shoulder, flairs outward, ink shape on black construction paper. He, sitting down, all faces angled down to watch him, below but approaching his zenith, a bright nirvana path of total revelation. What if she could see him? The ogre, singing heartbreak and confession.

Nobody in the crowd would know Maria, but they will all ask themselves what kind of life Shadow has lead. Who are these people, these faces? Do they come from his past? Are they real?

But we know; it is the little German girl, Maria. He is singing loss.

And anymore, it would be rude to think Shadow is just a salesman/mystic. He is a believer; a real, old-world bluesman who touches the dirt.

The Ottawans Arrive

The lobby, despite the efforts of Shadow, and Lincoln before him, is not an art gallery. It is a dull white room which is occupied because if it’s location between the front door, the lounge, the dormitories and the front desk. This might seem obvious, but I want you to think about it as a small reservoir on the side of a major river. Water passes by and happens to build up, some times settling into a steady pond, and other times swirling heavily, creating a whirlpool. The presence and character of this buildup is unpredictable, and hard to anticipate.

Most of the time, the lobby has a steady, small congregation. Lee sits near the front desk or at a table. Sam shuffles in and out. Two or three couples sit at the small silver tables and look over their tour books. They eat sandwiches and drink orange juice from “Steve’s,” the bodega next door. They talk about museums and fifth avenue and ask how to get to Rockefeller Center.

Tom stands, his hands in the pockets of his black jacket. He nods at everyone near him, makes a joke or tells a story you’ve already heard thirty-five times (“Oh you’re from England? There’s a great fish and chips place up the block called ‘A Salt & Battery.’ Get it? They like me there. If you go, tell them Tom says, ‘hello.’”). He waits for a response and they, not knowing why an old man is at their shoulder, try to act like he isn’t there. They laugh a little to be polite, but Tom gets tired of it and walks out side to have a cigarette.

This is the normal, standard, average scene inside the lobby. In the day, it is flooded with blue and red light from the forward windows. In the evening, the overhead bulbs give the room a yellowish appearance. It is a colorful place, despite the usual, slow pace. The walls and floors are decorated with occasional flairs – a green 7Up sign, a brown tile pattern, bright, blue doors – and this uneven indulgence matches the noise level of the room: sometimes there is only the radio, sometimes there is shouting which will either yield laughter or a small standoff.

But all the mood of the room will veer towards festivity when the place fills up with a large group of young tourists – as happened on February 19th. They were here to see the Central Park art installation called “The Gates.” They were a gaggle of Ottawan art students. All of them, youthful, eccentric, wearing weird furs and crooked jackets, most of the guys with creative facial hair and the girls with piercings in weird crevices of their ears and faces.

This kind of crowd, they sell out the building. At 8 in the evening, there are no keys on the back wall; everyone is upstairs, running from room to room, making plans for the night, washing up, planning how to get into each others’ pants. This is the kind of crowd that can only happen on school field trips. Everyone already familiar, but now bound together by group activities and long bus rides, everyone bubbling, getting changed together, leaning in each other, giddy with static electricity inside their skin. They are carrying their world from the great, white north down with them, wherever the trip pauses. They are a moving microcosm caravan – Canadian Art Students in New York.

They are giddy tourists, searching New York for the originals works that populate their textbooks. They get loud when talking about the Tim Hawkinson installations at the Whitney Museum. They meet Cristo and giggle. They stand outside and smoke cigarettes, or sit in the back, scanning the Village Voice music listings, talking about the great Miles Davis performances they have on video, collecting and comparing what they know. Their currency could not be experience; they are too young to be accomplished. Instead, it is a competition: who is more clued in to what’s really going on…who is the first to see a trend…who will tell the news of the next wave…and in doing, who will be chosen to embody the spirit of the next big thing…

They pass through the lobby, on their way out to the street, or upstairs with smuggled bottles of rum and beer and they get slowed down by the lobby. Their friends are standing there, looking, waiting. Everyone is expecting something. Where are we going? Where can we eat? I want to untie your belt and put my fingers in the band around your waist. Where are we drinking? Whose room will I end up in tonight?

They stand in line to get their keys and Tom leans against the glass barrier between the clerk and the lobby. He looks at two girls and points to their hat, which reads, “Canada.” Of course, he has a joke for this.

“Oh your from Canada, ey?”
This is Tom affecting a Canadian accent, complete with the ‘ey’ at the end.
“You know how you spell Canada?”
Of course they do but if they said yes, they would clearly miss what is bound to be a great joke.
Tom says, “C-EY-N-EY-D-EY”

Would you laugh? Probably not. And neither did they. But Tom, never deterred by a timid audience just waits until the next patron steps forward and he tries the joke again. Literally, the man just repeats himself.

The two girls who heard this joke must have laughed and Tom, who knows it’s all about shots on goal, has them in the corner of the room. How drunk is Tom now? The girls are trying to open a can of tuna, and he offers to go upstairs and lend them his can opener. They are grateful and now spend a few more minutes with him. Tom, ever the entertainer, is happy to have an audience, especially an audience of two girls, with bright white skin and big teeth.

After a while, I leave Tom and the girls. I can’t listen to Tom’s stories about the Navy anymore. I could repeat them myself, and sometimes do. Later, when I return to see if anything interesting is happening, Tom is onto a new story. I haven’t heard this one, but it’s clear right away that Tom has lost track of who he is talking to; the punchline of the joke is something about a midget with a giant cock. After this, the girls, became conscious of the picture they present – two attractive college girls listening to a desperate old sailor tell dirty jokes…is he hitting on them…are they entertaining an old man…mining the romantic, rusty past…or is he drooling – suddenly uncomfortable, they move to the rear lounge, where permanent residents are not allowed.

The Site

Go check out the website for the film at WhiteHouseFilm.com. Kudos to FYA Magazine's guru and fellow Astorian, Drew Eastmead, for his work on the site. If you like it, tell him.

Interlude

Around the world, the tide has changed.

So we go back to the White House Hotel..."the last stop" for the down and out, you might say.

Well, once upon a time, that was true. Now it's turned into the last stop for last stops. And after a little more than a month of heavy shooting, I suppose I am overdue for a written report.

The problem (aside from laziness and exhaustion) is that, when you spend so much time inside of a place (essentially, inside someone's home), it's hard to pull your head high above water and get a good sense of what is around you. So, for the last week, Graham and I have been reviewing footage and thinking aloud about where things stand, how far along we have come, and what we have seen so far.

On this website, you have had a good introduction to some of our main characters (Tom, Shadow, Mike, and Maria). But very little has been said about our process, and about the daily experience of people inside the WHH.

To begin, Graham and I have had very different experiences at the White House. This was made abundantly clear to me when I followed Mr. Meriwether to the Permanent side of the building one night while we were looking for Mike Powell. The sight was overwhelming. The hall was dark and took on an evening musk that was not present during the day. The hallway, usually bookended by half-dimmed windows, was now lit only by a couple of red and blue bulbs that hung from crooked wires. There were sounds of televisions, and grunts coming out of the tops of the cubicles, and I had the distinct sense that, from the moment we stepped on the floor, we were being watched by people we could not see. Every move we made, the rustle of our jackets, the creeks of the floorboard, it all broadcast our presence, and told the residents that we were there. The sense of exposure reminded me of the old notion about how, if you are blind, your other senses become stronger.

My surprise came from the difference between the permanent side and the transient side of the hotel/flop. Graham and I have, in some ways, split our attention - i.e. Graham has focused on the permanent residents, and my primary focus has been the transients. While there is a tremendous amount of overlap, it explains how I had been left unaware of the nocturnal conditions on the flophouse floors.

I have spent several late nights at the WHH. At night, I have usually followed Maria, and watched as lonely-hearts, down-and-outs, middle-aged burnouts, and one sad, French prevaricator clung on to her as if she were a source of salvation. At night, Darren, a British backpacker, raver, and three-week resident of the White House, would come back from some jungle party and laugh with Maria. They would smoke cigarettes on the roof and make up stories about elaborate luxury in some other world. This is how it is with Maria...pure fantasy. Her and Tom could speak for hours about free spirit. Shadow includes her in his uptown visits to galleries and restaurants. Milton feeds off of her late-night visits to the front desk, where they spend hours talking about various, personal ideas. Tom once said that Maria has a litter of puppies, constantly following her around, looking for a pat behind the ear. And for a while, I was one of these pups, looking for some outburst, or some tender mix between Maria and her resident neighbors. Sometimes, waiting around, we would find Sam in the lobby with his cats; on one occasion we were met by a drunk British tourist who rightly described herself as a 'liability' when she goes out at night; but always, things appear to Maria as if they were part of a grand, on-stage improv, where characters come and go, and the only thing that matters is your demeanor.

But always Eric. He would find Maria, wherever she was. He would wait outside for her to return, he would pace the hallways and bathrooms if he knew she was on a particular floor; once I caught him spying on her in the basement; and occasionally he would interrupt a conversation by appearing suddenly and bearing down as if his weight and scowl would bring some subservient respect, or at least might wear down his target until she would let him stay and feel accepted.

Eric was the first one to be called a puppy, and Tom's nickname was appropriate. As might be expected, Eric did not take it well and eventually began to lash out at anyone who did not respect him, leading to a showdown between the desk attendant (who threatened to call the police) and an episode (a week before Christmas) where Eric was reportedly smoking in the basement and was caught by the building's plumber. The report gave Meyer an excuse to kick Eric out of the building - but as I write this, Eric is still at the White House Hotel, maintaining his story that the French authorities are sending his passport post haste and he will soon be free to return to Paris.

If this is all somewhat vague, then accept my apologies. I submit it only as an example of the kind of drama that can be found at the Hotel, despite the fact that the average demographic among permanents is over 50 year old men. Moreover, I think Eric was in an odd position. He does not realize the unlucky similarities between himself and the permanents - nor does he realize how close he is to becoming one of them (if not for Meyer's refusal to accept any new residents).

Eric, with his sad proclivities, unending lies, and myriad versions of his history and his future, is a man who only sees the benefit of the next five minutes. Sometimes it seems to me that he is drowning, but the next day I would see him with a tie on and hear reports of wads of cash. I don't know what to believe. All I know is that, as a person, I do not have a lot of positive things to say about him.

But again, his proximity to the old men...

In truth, we are all close to the men. Anyone of us... sitting next to them, talking on the level, leaving behind any ideas of superiority or class... when you sit there and join them, you form a perfect image. I had this experience the other night when I found Graham sitting quietly alongside one of the residents. The two of them would speak occasionally, and slowly. The two had found a common pace and a similar idea about how to speak, but from behind only to ideas came to me: 1) Graham (or myself) was not so far away from the lives of these men, and that given a certain preference for drink or another habit, we could all end up here; and 2) Graham was probably doing the admirable thing I have seen in a long time, in becoming a friend to a man who appears to me more like a corpse than a human.

The sight of Graham and myself in the lobby has created a bit of a stir inside the hotel.

That night when we went to find Mike, the men knew we were there and who we were looking for. They knew Mike was waiting for us and had gotten dressed for the occasion. The men, by now, knew there was a documentary in the works, and our conversations would never be private.

Living in one space, word spreads. Worse than a knitting circle, or a college dorm, gossip in the White House Hotel takes a vicious, paranoid character. The men, most of them 'street people,' expect that we are taking advantage of them, somehow exploiting their names and faces and stories for our own profit. It has become a common conversation to explain that we are interested in telling stories, and that the idea of making money off this documentary is tertiary to our goals.

As I've said to the residents, many times, our goal is to tell the stories. Graham has addressed this issue in earlier posts, and might update these principles soon, but for now, it is sufficient to remember that we are trying to figure out how these men live, and to show what we find.

Mr. Pittsburgh Steelers Cap

Go look at the Website for the White House Hotel. They have a funny page of testimonials (which must be edited to disclude anyone who ever had a bad experience).

One of the testimonials includes this passage:

The staff had time for us which was appreciated and i also think they conveyed the easy new york vibe very well - especially mr. pitsburgh steelers cap who isn't a steelers fan and the super chilled older black guy, i don't know their names but both very good folk! It was also good to talk to miguel about harlem, u.s and european culture, it's not every day we can sit about for a few hours talking to people from the other side of the world, all very interesting. I guess the white house was a good place to get to meet local folk, which helps me to get a alot more out of new york than going shopping and some night clubs. Also a true bonus for us was meeting a few of the residents too. Going out for an evening with jeff paz was probably one of the best things we did out here, it was a top night away from the touristy areas with a genuinly good guy. Also the other resident with the long blond hair a la jeff was a good guy, the ten minuite/ half hour we talked to them every day just helped make the trip a better one.

From:  Jimmy and Grant
Date:  Sunday,  June 30, 2002 7:45 PM
To: manager@whitehousehotelofny.com
Subject:  RE: Youre stay at the Whitehouse

You mean the White House Hotel doesn't exist?

Here's some quickie background info about flophouses. I'll have some more up here soon, but this article gives a little context.

Such scenes have defined the Bowery since the first lodging house opened in 1874, creating a cheap, transient place to stay for New York City’s homeless Civil War veterans. Small cubicles then cost a quarter, and a dime bought a canvas sling for the night, hung from the ceiling of a crowded room. By the early 1900s, the Bowery was lined with flophouses and their attendant whiskey bars, dime museums, theaters, slop joints and some of the first tattoo parlors in the country. By the Great Depression, more than 100 lodging houses dotted the Bowery, sleeping between 25,000 and 75,000 men each night.

Flophouse Redux: A new generation of cubicles goes up on the Bowery.
By Elana Berkowitz
December 3, 2003
NEW YORK PRESS

But don't put too much weight on Ms. Berkowitz' reporting. She later writes: "Today, there are only three flophouses left on the Bowery, the last of the others having been turned into backpacker hostels or sold to Chinese businessmen who lease the spaces to arriving immigrants."

While it's true that many flophouses have been converted, and the number is dwindling, it still hovers closer to 7. Proof? The author lists the three remaining flophouses, but doesn't include the White House Hotel...which, if you've been reading, obviously still exists.