Birthday at Chateau Marmont

Or: A melancholy haunting

It started when we stepped into the hotel: My dog began whimpering, softly crying. She’s usually excited, but it was something else this time -- an anxious fear, tail down. The woman at the check-in counter, in the infamous dark gothic lobby, slid two silver keys over the dark wooden desk to me and said “No, no, it’s not haunted.” My dog kept softly crying. 

We made our way to Bungalow 2, a two-story cottage with dark wooden floors, small shadowy paintings, a fully decked out retro kitchen. In the final room of the cottage, I find a desk with pristine Chateau Marmont letterhead with In residence: Sarah Rose Etter printed on it.

It was storming in LA, what the news called an historic storm, a bad enough prediction that I canceled my birthday party and decided to spend the night here, crossing the Chateau off of my LA Bucket List. The rain through the wavy paned glass windows was relentless, all the trees around the bungalow whipping back and forth like shadows. The dog was still softly crying. 

I wasn’t sure why, but a few days of melancholy had descended on me that week. My lifelong depression had abated into something lighter, more gentle -- I hate when people do this, but I like the etymology of the word melancholy, derived from the phrase black bile. I had a bit of it, the black bile, the birthday bile. 

My therapist, who I see less and less of, told me birthdays are a celebration of our very first trauma: being born. Is that true? Was that a trauma? It must have been, all of that blood and the cutting of the cord, sucking in air for the very first time. I told my therapist that Los Angeles was softening me a bit. Maybe it is the sunshine, maybe it is the brightness of the light in my living room in the morning. 

Or maybe it is what I’ve been calling Schroedinger’s Book -- the liminal space between the printing and the publication of a book, before any reviews come in, a time when the book is both dead and alive, before anything good or bad has happened. I feel a certain terror about the book -- a compulsion of wanting to be seen and not seen, almost as if I’ve released an accidental intimacy into the world every single time, a vulnerability I always want to take back, revoke, create a boundary around. Every time I publish a book, I pretend it isn’t mine. I say I’ll never do it again.

---

The Chateau Marmont is made for people who don’t want to be seen. The bottom of the menus request no photos, no smoking next to an ashtray with a pair of Chateau Marmont matches. It’s the complicated double-sided nature of the place: Be here, but don’t. Be seen, but don’t. The entire time I’m there, my vision is blurred, confusing -- there’s always the frond of a gigantic green plant or a brocade curtain or a shadow obscuring my view. It adds to the feeling of being surrounded by ghosts, of never being quite sure what or who you have seen.

The restaurant is mostly empty because of the storm -- save for one famous director mapping out scenes for his new movie with two colleagues. I hear him saying “Gore Vidal…” and it takes everything in me not to insert myself, ask questions, be nosy. A few random other people dot the place, one who eventually reveals himself to be some kind of powerful politician when he interrupts the famous director’s meeting to gush about the movies the famous director has made. Then there are a tourist husband and wife, and a few other people who might or might not be famous. It’s hard to tell in the darkness, between the silver walls of the rain.

On the way back from the restaurant, I pass the smoking area in front of the hotel. A man sits on the bench there in a baseball hat and sunglasses, even though it is nighttime and raining. He wears a coat with long sleeves and gloves, and he’s lighting a cigarette with the end of another cigarette, that tell-tale sign of chain smoking. He looks like he’s on a bender. I’ve never seen someone who doesn’t want to be seen so badly. 

The rain keeps coming down in silver curtains, and back in the Bungalow, I can hear voices moving past my window all night long, British accents, men mumbling, the howling of the wind. I can’t tell what is conversation and what is the storm raging against the walls of Bungalow 2.

I don’t scare easily, but I feel uneasy in the giant white bed in the room on the second floor of Bungalow 2. My dog sleeps on top of me, panting so heavily from the anxiety of the place that I find myself timing her breath, 1, 2, 3, counting her heartbeats, 1, 2, 3, but I keep losing count because she’s breathing too fast and then I have to start counting all over. She’s so frantic that I almost checkout to take her to the emergency veterinarian, but eventually we both fall into a strange sleep. 

I suddenly wake at 2AM. It’s my birthday. I’m a year older now. I feel restless, wired, feeding off of the energy in my room. I try to watch a movie, but it’s hard to focus -- the rain is still coming down, the wind is still harsh, and voices keep passing by the window even though the storm is bad, even though it is now 3AM, even though when I look out of my windows, the hotel that stretches up beside us almost seems deserted, with only two lights in two rooms that stay on all night, orange and eerie. For some reason, I keep thinking I can’t wait to leave this place. 

Restless, I make the mistake of looking into the history of Bungalow 2, and the stories are wild and conflicting -- it’s widely believed that Jim Belushi infamously overdosed and died in Bungalow 3, but Getty Images has it as Bungalow 2. The other stories involve Nick Ray holding rehearsals for Rebel Without a Cause in Bungalow 2, allegedly where the love triangle involving Natalie Wood began. History about the Chateau is also ghostly -- shifting, mercurial, whispered. 

There are also stories of the wild parties, of the booze and drugs, Led Zeppelin riding a motorcycle down the hotel hallway, Jim Morrison jumping from a bungalow window, the $50K Lindsay Lohan eviction, Britney Spears smearing food on her face, it goes on and on and on. I feel a small pit in my stomach reading the stories -- as if my wilder years recognize themselves in these tales, an old version of myself that I’ve killed and buried. Most of the stories just make me sad.

I don’t see any ghosts, but the energy of the night, in that cottage, in the storm, is so charged that it gets to me. The dog has stopped shaking, but she still won’t leave my side. The middle of the night is when you are the most alone, isn’t that true? I feel it then, the melancholy, the anxiety, the ghosts all around us, maybe waiting to reveal themselves. Black bile, birthday bile. I can’t wait to leave this place. 

---

A few hours later, I wake in the giant white bed, the rain still pounding down. I must have found a way to sleep. My phone is full of Happy Birthday!!! texts. The dog seems calmer, and we play for a bit before I get dressed, check out, and sit down to have breakfast in the lobby. 

There are only a few people here, in this room of brocade and gothic light fixtures. I feel certain that I see a big movie star, but I’m too scared to look directly at his face. If you can fuck him, do it a friend texts me and I laugh so hard I can feel him staring at me but I can’t meet his gaze. I’m afraid something will happen if I look directly at him, the way a solar eclipse can burn your retinas out if you stare right at it. Another man enters the lobby with a sweatshirt hood up over a baseball cap. He sits behind a big green plant so I can never see who he is. I order coffee and sparkling water. The dog still whimpers now and then beneath the table. 

Outside, they pull my car around. The garage is full of old beautiful automobiles, expensive Porches, cars that are so rare I can’t even place them. The wealth is so exorbitant that when the valet pulls up in my murdered out 2018 Honda CRV, I feel a brief flash of humiliation. 

Before I get into the car, I notice a man in the smoking section at the hotel’s front entrance. He’s got wild hair and he’s moving his body erratically, rocking forward and backward, smoking a cigarette with a strange desperation, mumbling to himself, chanting. He looks like a rockstar on a bender but I can’t place him.

In Los Angeles, I’ve been mostly sober. It’s hard for me to even have a glass of wine now without feeling poisoned, wrecked, depressed. The man makes my melancholy come roaring back, the black bile, the birthday bile, and I think about all of the stories of celebrities gone drugged out in the place, the wild partying. I realize the Chateau Marmont isn’t just haunted -- it's also the first place I’ve ever been that seems to want something from me, as if I owe it something for all of its history, its decadence, its ruin. It’s almost as if I owe it some madness that I’m not delivering, a night of snorting cocaine or smashing glasses or having an affair. 

Then I’m driving home in the rain, a year older, my dog in the front seat, breathing normally. I’m relieved to be leaving, but at the same time, a strange hypnotic feeling urges me to turn the car around, to return, like the Chateau Marmont is calling me back, tugging at me, a place that wants a story, a bender, a stint of insanity. It’s a place that still wants what I owe it. It’s a place I know I’ll return to.