his eyebrows at me as he waited for the callback. “Yes?” he said, when the phone finally rang. “A redhead. Very pale, you say. No makeup? Oohhkay… it is a she, then. Jeans. Plain top. Plain everything. Right.”
Click.
“Please make your way upstairs,” he ordered. “Mr. Lovecraft is in The Blue Room. You can ask the hostess on the penthouse level for directions when you get lost.”
“When?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you’d been here before.”
“I haven’t.”
“I didn’t think so. Enjoy your night.”
The Blue Room was indeed virtually impossible to find. Although Maison Chelsea is located atop Fortune Plaza for the views, the hallways that join the bar, restaurant, bathrooms, cinema, and private rooms are entirely windowless. I felt as though I were inside a tenth-century château, what with the narrow, wood-paneled walls, oppressive ceilings, and low-watt fixtures. It must have taken an interior design budget in the tens of millions to turn what had originally been a modern, open-plan office space into something so gloomy and unnavigable.
None of the doors were marked. Some were locked; others weren’t. As for the staff, they didn’t wear uniforms or make eye contact, so unless you caught them directly in the act of a service-oriented task, it was difficult to know who they were. Even then, they weren’t exactly very helpful. “Honestly, madam, the only way I could tell you how to get to The Blue Room would be to take you there myself,” as one waiter explained, as though he were describing a physical impossibility.
I found it by myself in the end, using a system of trial and error. The very instant I pushed open those gigantic double doors, there was no doubt I was in the right place. Aside from its size—I’ve walked through more intimate hotel atriums—it was… well, it was very blue. The ceiling was blue. The floor was blue. Even the view through the thirty-foot-high panoramic windows was blue, given that it was comprised mostly of early-evening California sky. The rest of the blueness, meanwhile, came from light reflected through water, which was possible because the room—and I appreciate how crazy this sounds—was inside a swimming pool. Or to put it another way: The ceiling was the glass-bottomed floor of the pool’s upper deck, while in several places throughout the room, the water deepened to fill transparent cylinders that served as kind of Roman columns, which were in turn linked to more water under the opaque floor.
“What the hell took you so long?”
I turned to see Joey, alone on a king-size recliner. He was wearing nothing but a fluffy white gown, his wrinkled, skinny legs—along with that enormous, fading sock tattoo on his right calf—poking out from underneath. Not even Joey’s tan could make those legs look any healthier. They were as mangled and gnarled as rotting timber—a result of forty years spent doing airborne splits while singing “Hell on Wheels.” No wonder he’d fallen off the stage that time in Houston. No wonder he snacked on painkillers like they were M&M’S. It was incredible his legs could support a grown man’s body weight, nevermind comply with the acrobatic demands of a world tour with Honeyload.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Gone,” he replied, sadly. He was surrounded by at least two dozen trays of half-eaten food—I caught sight of spring rolls, steak au poivre, lobster tails, steamed vegetables, a Cobb salad, three doughnuts, and a banana pudding—and as many empty champagne flutes. I hoped it had been non-alcoholic champagne. “They were all here,” Joey continued, not quite sounding himself. “Mitch, Len, Bibi, JD, the ex-human cannonball Ed Rossitto—who still creeps me the hell out, just FYI. Oh, and that nasty little fuckhead Teddy. But they all went home.”
“So soon?”
“Oh, y’know. Bibi got upset about the view.”
He pointed to the aquarium-like glass above us. Now I noticed there were swimmers in the pool. Three or four women. Young. In exceptional physical shape. And all completely naked. They appeared to be performing some kind of water aerobics for Joey’s benefit. One of them was now underwater, thrusting herself deep into one of the see-through Roman columns in front of us, leaving a trail of bubbles as she went. She righted herself and waved, treading water. Then she flipped over and performed a split, holding the gynecologically detailed pose for as long as the air in her lungs would allow.
Joey applauded.
“Um-hmm,” he said, as if tasting a vintage port. “LA strippers, man. Fuckin’ outstanding. No wonder Mötley Crüe wrote a song about ’em.”