The extended Salut! empire always does its bit to encourage young writers. Occasionally, it offers a helping hand to older ones, too. Here's Bill Taylor, my old pal from local newspaper and folk club days in the North East, with some charming reminiscences of being Down and Out in NYC. That's Bill above, with Lesley, the Pennsylvania lass who became Mrs Taylor, pictured early in his American adventure ...
The train from Washington that paused for a minute or two at Paoli station near Philadelphia was hauled by one of Raymond Loewy’s superb GG1 electric locomotives, an Art Deco tour-de-force.
In hindsight, anyway. On that late, bitter evening of Christmas Day, 1973, a Tuesday, I was unimpressed by its dull green livery and unappreciative of its flowing lines. I’d been in the United States for only a few weeks and, in my mind, American locomotives were silver diesels with rakish red and yellow flashes that said Santa Fe.
I was on my way to live in New York and, two months shy of my 26th birthday, about to start growing up.
Christmas had been celebrated in a comfortable split-level on the Pennsylvania Main Line, the home of friends of my girlfriend’s parents. They dropped me off at the station and wished me well. I was grateful for the gloves I’d received as a gift. I hadn’t come from England prepared for much, let alone an east-coast winter.
When I got off the train at Penn Station (surprised and disappointed that it wasn’t Grand Central) and went outside and found a taxi, I said to the driver, “Hotel Ashley, please”, as if it ranked with the Sherry-Netherland, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza.
My first New York cabbie could have been a lot worse.
“Huh?” he said.
I gave him the address, 47th St just off Times Square. I had no idea where that might be. He took me, I realised later, by a commendably non-circuitous route. And when we pulled up outside, he turned and said, through his bulletproof shield, “Are you sure about this?”
I wasn’t at all, but having come this far…
I’d found the hotel through a tiny ad in the New York Post. It had the twin virtues of being within both my poverty-level budget and, I calculated, walking distance of where I was starting work next day on Third Ave. between 51st and 52nd sts. I called to reserve a room.
It was not an inviting place. A narrow and neglected frontage, a creaking, unattended door, a lobby with two sagging couches inadequately lit by low-wattage bulbs. A film-noir cliché. Had it not been about to become my home, I might have been charmed.
The night clerk, of course, had no record of my reservation. And it was getting on towards midnight, neither the time nor place to be lugging my bags around these baleful streets looking for a bed that might well be out of my price range. My face must have fallen hard and fast enough to arouse his sympathies. He cracked an unsardonic smile.
“No sweat,” he said. “We have rooms. We always have rooms. How long you gonna be here?”
I’m not sure, I said. A while. How long can you fit me in for?
He laughed at this. “As long as you want and longer. It’s cheaper by the month.”
But I could only afford to pay for two weeks in advance. “No sweat,” he said again. “I’ll give you the monthly rate, anyway.”
The elevator was another cliché, as old and ratty as the building and attended by a Hispanic youth with his nose buried in an English grammar. I discovered there were several of these studious kids, taking turn and turn about to run the elevator; one hand for their book and one to clatter the gate to and fro and push the buttons. In the three months that I lived there, none of them ever seemed to learn my floor, the sixth. They’d say, “Hi,” then wait to be told.
My room was fairly small and very cold. Unsure of how far the night clerk’s sympathy might stretch, I experimented with the radiator and after a struggle to free the wheel from its prison of paint the beginnings of warmth began to seep through. I had my own bathroom, too, with a tub large enough to soak in. I would do this sometimes to try to stave off boredom and loneliness.
The Ashley’s sheets and towels were worn and thin but clean and changed irregularly but reasonably often. I had heat, hot water and noisy neighbours who argued a lot but taught me that I could sleep (the walls being almost as thin as the linen) through pretty much anything. A double bed, too. No phone in the room but that would probably have bankrupted me. As it was, I quickly learned how to cheat long-distance calls out of the payphones on the street. Ma Bell in those days was far too trusting.
The couches in the lobby were – cliché number three – the province of several old men, shabby enough to be an extension of the upholstery. They sat there, day after day, and sometimes talked and sometimes simply stared. Occasionally, they’d have a pint of popskull whiskey in a brown bag to pass back and forth. But that wasn’t often. I used to look at them as I came and went and tried to imagine myself in that position. I never could. It’s easier now.
The girl who eventually was to become my wife was not quite 20, a small-town Pennsylvanian going to school in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She’d never seen prostitutes working the streets before. She couldn’t understand at first why we’d exchange nods and the occasional word of greeting.
“Who are these women?” she asked.
My neighbours, I replied.
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