Chelsea Hotel Eulogy #1: George Chemeche

This is the first in a series of eulogies of artists who lived in the Hotel Chelsea, by A.G. Chemeche, who still lives there, in an apartment they once occupied with their now late father, the artist George Chemeche. In 2011, the building was sold to new developers and in 2022 it was reopened. Only forty residents of the original Hotel Chelsea community still reside in the building.

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It was January, 2022. Omicron had surged through New York City. And my father, 90 years old, contracted it. I was allowed to visit him at Mount Sinai Hospital for only two hours a day. It was during one of those visits that his doctor told me he was going to die, and that the best thing I could do is take him off life support. I didn’t have much time to mourn this in his presence; I was being hustled out of the hospital by well meaning nurses who, bless them, had let me sneak in a few extra hours with him that day, anyway.

I remember entering the lobby of the Hotel Chelsea, which had just started its “soft opening” following a ten-year renovation. I passed by a small memorial to Bettina Grossman, another Hotel Chelsea elder and artist, that was placed on the mantel piece. A photo. A candle.

I took one of the two elevators. They were new now: a sort of gun metal black with high ceilings. It had a false patina that suggested age + luxury. Cast iron panels framed the buttons, and I’d already winced more than once when a guest stroked one, saying, “These must be original.” The old elevators had been rickety-looking things. Plastic-walnut wood paneling, nicked metal bars bisecting the middle. As a child, I’d spoken to them, “Hello, elevator. I love you, elevator.” They were once called the “slowest elevators in the city.” Leonard Cohen bragged of mastering them: knowing how to push the buttons in just the right way to launch them up and into the recesses of our building efficiently. I wonder if my little chants were an attempt to do the same.

Then again, I’d been an only child who tick-tocked between isolation and overstimulation, depending who resided in the building at any given time. I’d come to anthropomorphize the building: its banisters, the small cast iron spiral servants’ staircase (no longer here), the basement, the paintings hung on the wall. It had been a semi-treacherous playground and playmate of mine.

I zombie-walked into Dad’s bedroom. There were his paintings. Stacked against the far wall. I pulled back his most recent canvases. Rendered in watery house paints—a medium his quavering arms could manage—they would not do. Behind them I found a painting from the 1990’s. Figures made out of bent aluminum dominated the canvas, dancing and marching across it in three rows. I remember his hands back then, scabbed with small cuts from using the material. In between were dabs of electric-colored oil paints mashed into the surface with a brush. His brushes were always destroyed by his work. I remember that. Rendered into little more than sticks with worn down nubs of bristle. The whole piece is kept in a plexiglass box.

I wrapped my arms around it. I pressed my body against it. I ran my fingers along the clear surface, tracing the indents of his vitality inches away on the canvas. This was his spirit. This was him alive. Not the empty form I’d just left, shrunken and sustained in unnatural motion by machines. A distant, adult voice comforted me: What a gift. What a gift to be the child of an artist. I have these. In countless paintings, I have the marks of his being. Be grateful. Be thankful. Despite that, a wrenching sound came out of me. And, like a child, I called his name. I heard myself saying, over and over, “Who am I going to be without you? How am I going to be without you?”

Theoretically, I have prepared for his death since I was 15 years old when he, in his 70’s, had an emergency triple bypass. A constant, pressurized anxiety reminded me to memorize him. In the evenings, I asked him to tell me his stories and he shared them because he would have anyway.

But when the time came, I was not prepared.

***

In May, 2022, four months after he died, I held his party. He didn’t want a funeral. His friend kindly lent his space, a beautiful Soho loft. I remember wobbling on the top of the staircase in the 19th C factory space. I made a semi-coherent speech, staring down at the mish mash of friends and acquaintances—directly below me was a couple my father once derisively called “The Adams Family.”

My grief had stupefied me. I remember one thing, though. I said to the crowd, “Each person is a country unto themselves. Shaped by the places they’ve been. The people they knew. The particular skills and knowledge they cultivated. And once they’re gone, so is that ‘country.’ My father’s world was remarkable. He welcomed me into it. And now…I feel like a person in exile.”

Theoretically, I have prepared for his death since I was 15 years old when he, in his 70’s, had an emergency triple bypass. A constant, pressurized anxiety reminded me to memorize him. In the evenings, I asked him to tell me his stories and he shared them because he would have anyway. But when the time came, I was not prepared.

My father was born in Basra, Iraq in 1932. If you Google him, it says 1934. That’s because, when his family moved to Israel in 1949, his parents changed his age so he could attend Kibbutz. His lifetime exposed him to a series of beginnings and endings. The end of the Jewish community in Iraq. The beginning of the State of Israel. The twilight years of Bohemian Paris in the 1960s. The rise of Pop Art in 1970’s New York, not to mention the city’s near economic collapse and some of the most infamous years of the Hotel Chelsea. He’d belonged to another century.

When I was little, he told me stories charged with magical realism about his time in Basra. A mermaid disguised as a fish in the marketplace. A calif who challenged my uncle, Naim, to stand on a freezing mountaintop, naked. The time when the evil eye struck Father with a liver infection. His mother banished it through a combination of mysticism and penicillin.

Outside of these fables, I did not know much about the Middle East, but I was marked by it. Black, curly hair. Big nose. And what my mother’s Pennsylvanian family sometimes called, “green skin.” This, along with mine and my father’s dubious bohemian lifestyles was enough to alienate me from the gentile side. As such, he was the only link that made sense. And when he died, I had lost my anchor to an identity.

The way I feel about him draws parallels to my experience in the Hotel. I’m just old enough to remember the before times and the before people. For me it was the 90s. I carry within me imprints of their aesthetics, ways of talking, even their philosophies on artistry (which seem increasingly at odds with this current century). But I am not quite one of them. We were passengers on trains headed in opposite directions. They were at the end of one era of Bohemia, and I was at the beginning of a new one.

The reality is made stark these days. I am one of two tenants under the age of 40. There are a few others, but they are the children of residents and the question of whether or not they will inherit their parents’ apartments—or how hard the owners will fight their right of succession when the time comes—has an unknown outcome. You see, I was fortunate because my name was on the lease alongside my father’s. I am aware that one day I may be alone here.

In 2021, my father told me he was done. He was ready. People weren’t meant to live so long. He comforted me, saying, “But I will be all around you, Amanda.” He gestured to his library of books, the paintings interspersed with Kuran pages on the walls, the Judaica on the mantel piece, the Persian carpets on the floor, the African Art on the shelves. Material culture, object d’art, knick nacks…pieces that attested to the story of his mind.

The way I feel about him draws parallels to my experience in the Hotel. I’m just old enough to remember the before times and the before people. For me it was the 90s. I carry within me imprints of their aesthetics, ways of talking, even their philosophies on artistry (which seem increasingly at odds with this current century). But I am not quite one of them. We were passengers on trains headed in opposite directions. They were at the end of one era of Bohemia, and I was at the beginning of a new one.

In the four years since my father’s passing, several more residents have died. Amongst them are Susanne Kleinsinger, a dancer, choreographer, and painter, and Ronald Fagan, a speech writer for the UN. The latter lived down the hall from me. He loved my dog, Nico (who I inherited from my father). A hoarder of books, he’d leave ones with nasty titles in front of your door if you’d pissed him off. There are worse ways to insult people.

Many of the residents who’ve passed on lived alone. Some were fortunate to have relatives who visited them, cared for them. Some did not. The final years of the aging artist, the eccentric outsider, the queer activist can be lonely and poor. I have witnessed Hotel staff, garbage bags in hand, emptying the rooms. There was no one to sift through what might look like innocuous things, separating the ones charged with history from mere tat.

I tried to be grateful to my father for leaving me his things. Along with the stories he’d told me, I had a wealth of him to keep alive within me. I was not alone. I was more prepared than most. What a gift, to be the child of an artist. But I dissociated from it all. In fact, short of the dinner parties I hosted—packed full of people who transformed the place into something chaotically alive—I rarely left my bedroom.

It was the incremental, slow encounters with the forgotten or unfamiliar that changed things.

In the back of a drawer, a small, 1”x2” photo with bent edges and Arabic written on the back. My grandmother; wide black eyes, long nose, proud cheeks. Father handing it to me when I’m little. It was one of the only things he’d smuggled out of Iraq. “You look like my mother, Gala.”

An email from Nimrod Raphaeli. He was my father’s schoolmate in Basra. He clarifies to me, “[Your father’s] name is pronounced Gurji (beautiful), not Gorgi. The family name was Sayegh (goldsmith), not Saiq (driver). No, he was not very friendly. He did not talk much.”

Many of the Hotel residents who’ve passed on lived alone. Some were fortunate to have relatives who visited them, cared for them. Some did not. The final years of the aging artist, the eccentric outsider, the queer activist can be lonely and poor. I have witnessed Hotel staff, garbage bags in hand, emptying the rooms. There was no one to sift through what might look like innocuous things, separating the ones charged with history from mere tat.

A cracked, yellowing photo. He’s a young man now, cleaning a monstrous computer the size of a room in Tel Aviv. I recall that then, during the day, he’d worked for IBM, while in the evenings he took classes, after which he painted through the night.

Pressed between the pages of a book: a sheaf of letters from Lady Fergusson, the patron who supported him while he attended the Ecole des Beaux Artes in Paris. In one, she tries to soothe him, promising to send funds soon. It’s clear he’s sent multiple letters in a panic.

An email from Kaarina Krohn: “My summer in Paris in 1963 [comes] vividly back to me with good memories of the people I met in the café Select in the Boulevard Montparnasse…Your father was one in our group…I bought from him the attached picture, ‘The Wife of Lot’ which has been on display in my home in Helsinki, Finland, since then.”

A small stack of magazines.

GQ Japan, 1997, Issue No 56: Father sits in a Syrian chair in his apartment. To his right, one of his “Stained Glass Window” paintings, to his left, the wall of African Art. He’s flashing a wide, gregarious smile, his hair silver.

Free and Easy 2001, Volume 4 No 35. He sits on the leopard print couch. A painting composed of bent aluminum and oil paint–similar to the one I will clutch in 2022–hangs above his head. He’s portly now, the smile is gone, he gazes off in the distance, serious. I know he’s about to quit painting. Hotel owner Stanley Bard had taken back his studio space. In the 19th Century, it used to be the ballroom and was accessible through a small door behind the front desk. He’d worked there from 1972-1998.

Voices, photos, letters, and emails. A multimedia archive of stories had come to me. Rendered through the subjective perspectives of people outside of myself, they anchored me. Fleshed out his story. Added dimensionality.

Some of the information was new. My father, gregarious and brilliant, had been a shy boy. A dreamer. I shivered when Nimrod said it impatiently, banishing the ever assured, precocious avatar I’d imagined.

Bearing witness now to an earlier version of him, I felt kinship with the young man: struggling with his ethnicity, pushing against the current to become an artist, searching for a sense of place. Feeling terminally placeless. This never quite left him, I knew that. We were the descendants of a disappearing culture, artists in exile. Like many, here at the Hotel.

Some of it added a human quality to things I already knew. His panicked correspondence with Lady Fergusson, made this comment of his hit differently, too: “I saved money to buy a suit and a long, red scarf. I was very proud of it.” He laughed self consciously at the vanity of his purchase. “I was very thin. We didn’t eat much. But the women liked me, a romantic, starving artist.” He always told his stories with a twist of humor. He hid his suffering, or perhaps his vulnerability from me.

The father I knew dressed in elegant, pressed suits in simple tones like beige and black; floral tie, whimsical pin or beret punctuating his otherwise somber aesthetic. At times he was serious. At others, charming. His manners were strict, but he was generous to the point of detriment. Young men visited him for tea, sitting before his easy chair like acolytes. One referred to him as “Noble.” He’d been a figure of wisdom and assurance.

Bearing witness now to an earlier version of him, I felt kinship with the young man: struggling with his ethnicity, pushing against the current to become an artist, searching for a sense of place. Feeling terminally placeless. This never quite left him, I knew that. We were the descendants of a disappearing culture, artists in exile. Like many, here at the Hotel.

As for the photo of my grandmother, I understand now: He was creating lineage between his mother and me. My father had long abjured his Iraqi heritage. He’d dated blondes and redheads only. He forgot his Arabic. But in his old age, he’d looked at his Arab mother and he looked at me, who resembled her so much, and he was proud.

***

P.S. One more thing. My father published a chapbook of poetry in 2014. As a young person, I’d neglected to read it. After his passing, I couldn’t bear to try. His writing was too alive with his voice.

But I open it now. There, the first poem. One of the bedtime stories he told me as a child.

A.G. Chemeche is a musician and writer living between Edinburgh and New York City. Their writing is featured in Jezebel, Harper’s Bazaar, Harvard Review Online, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, among others.

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