I am listening to a Scotch brand cassette I found somewhere at the Parc Lincoln, probably in the basement. I believe this tape to have been owned by an elderly neighbor in room 314.
I don’t know if it was intentional but I thought she used her front door to make her statement to the world: DO NOT DISTURB but with a footnote: the door was always propped open, 24 hours a day. I heard her mumbling things from room 314, unintelligible to me and, I suspect, to herself. I heard songs from this cassette float a short distance from 314 into the hallway, crawling against the grain of the sodden carpet, dying before disturbing people in other rooms.
Room 314: DO NOT DISTURB
I do not remember the red object next to the door. That cannot have been a receptacle for postal mail, could it? I thought everyone picked up mail at the front desk but maybe this woman was too old to make the trek downstairs and the hotel employees delivered it to her door for her.
I cannot be certain this was her cassette, but if it was she probably discarded it because it is infested with a constant clicking noise. I was careful playing this cassette in my room. I did not want her to hear it and thus know that I found it and that her property intended for oblivion had in fact changed hands. I played it at very low volume to keep her from hearing it.
The tape contains songs and dialogue from A Star Is Born, with Judy Garland and others. Content on the tape seems to have been chosen deliberately and individually, and was probably recorded from a television broadcast. I can hear the timbre of spatiality, the acoustics of a room, possibly 314. I am listening to this tape in its entirety at full volume with attention given to sounds not coming from the television. I want to hear the woman cough, move a piece of furniture, or emit some shred of aural ephemera.
There is something engrossing to hear cassettes like this, made for what I interpret as some sort of posterity, tokens collected by solitary individuals who accumulate this material hoping to secure a shred of their legacy. How many hours of tapes like this go unheard, unknown, and undiscovered by anyone but their creators? Certainly there is nothing unknown in the material of this cassette. It contains well-known material from a film that has always been popular. But the content is surgically dismembered and arranged in ways I don’t understand. I don’t know the show well enough to understand why so much dialogue was saved but most of the songs were not . Is there something more to this show than I think? Is the dialogue laced with some kind of coded message that comforts the elderly? At present one of the characters, Norman, is drunk and repeatedly saying “I need a job” in front of a stunned audience. Why would anybody save this particular speech?
I should talk about the seemingly quixotic content hoarding of others. This tape itself was among 100+ other cassettes stuffed in plastic bags at the old storage locker on Northern Boulevard. This tape is somewhat unusual among the others for not being mine. I feel like I am listening to this from outside this woman’s head. I am sitting in room 314 with her, taking her up on the subtle invitation that she wants to be DISTURBed. The Parc Lincoln was not the sort of hotel where room service came around every day. Some people stayed very short term but for the most part it was a long-term SRO residence.
Having said that I find I have no memory of how I got my sheets, which were branded Marriott. This was no Marriott, and I assume the sheets were hand me downs from that hotel chain. In the 9 or 10 months I stayed at the Parc Lincoln it may well be that I never changed those sheets.
The Scotch brand cassette has ended and I am no more enriched than before it played. I have listened to it before, maybe 2 or 3 times, but never with so much concentration. I do not think about the Parc Lincoln as much as I used to but landing on and hearing this cassette would seem to make such streams of consciousness inevitable. I also had in the back of my mind a hope that the tape contained a recording I made of that woman’s voice crawling out of room 314. I know for certain that I made such a recording but whatever tape I used is lost on me. I did something similar in high school though that time it was by accident. I was showing off my boom box, which of course included a cassette player, when I accidentally hit the record button. I wouldn’t say I panicked but I was a little upset that I had overwritten some of the music I had so diligently recorded from the radio. Months or even years later I heard that little accident, and found it far more compelling than all the hours of music I’d recorded on countless other cassettes. It was the sound of the schoolyard. I remember Willy yelling something toward Mr. Peloquin, the Latin teacher. It was all in good spirits. I think someone named Fritz, who I knew from as far back as grade 3, was also on the tape. Fritz was a funny guy, and from a glance at his Facebook page it looks like he still is.
I intend to listen again to my mix tapes, which I digitized, just to know if I still have that sound from the schoolyard.
Marriott Sheets
I cannot be sure but it looks like the number “181” appears under the Marriott logo. That would be… something. 181 did not become my magic number until a few years later. I did not even have the 181 PO Box while at the Parc Lincoln.
I forgot about the world map, which I must have thought was quite the extravagance. Years later I was having lunch with a friend of many years who had me questioning if I knew this person at all. He started bragging about a world map he recently procured, and how awesome it was. It was, he added, a CRAM map, and from his description I remember thinking it was similar if not identical to the one seen on the wall above. I could see commenting on or even bragging about a Hagstrom map, like the one I have. But a CRAM map?
…
OK, I am up early, listening in on an NPR piece about Joe Frank. Will post it next.
