The price one pays to be in Time Square

I am sitting in a room on the 14th floor of Hotel Hell, less than a block from Times Square, looking out at a veranda adorned with a shattered vodka bottle, two beer cans and a crumpled cigarette package.

I am envisioning a previous occupant of the room lounging on the veranda in his underwear on a distant summer morning finishing the last bit of vodka, then tossing the bottle aside to smash against a metal railing. He follows his final drink with a beer chaser and a cigarette before returning to the room and passing out on the imitation Persian rug.

Months have passed since then. Summer has gone and the autumn temperature outside is 29 degrees. Many others, I presume, have occupied this room which, though it isn’t exactly sleeping in a cardboard box under the Santa Monica Pier, neither is it a suite at the Ritz.

Though the bed is adequate and the toilet works, the paint on the wall is chipping, the towels are threadbare, a metal handle on the shower tends to clatter into the tub when the water is turned on, and the broken front piece of a bureau drawer has come off and lies on the floor. Oh, and the television set doesn’t work.

You might wonder what a man in my position is doing in what can only be described as, well, a rat’s nest. It has to do with (1) economy and (2) location. I was looking for that old middle-class dream, the Best Deal in Town, and wanted it near theaters and fine restaurants. But what I also should have considered was (3) a room that was habitable.

I booked the Hotel Carter through an online service that featured a photograph of the building bathed in a golden, almost heavenly, light. One would guess from the picture that it was a stately edifice, fit for European nobility and perhaps for the pedigreed dilettantes of Manhattan itself.

I should have been suspicious. No hotel in such a location goes for slightly over $100 a night and advertises that it has private baths in every room. Among hotels, that is the equivalent of boasting of an indoor toilet. One expects such basics. I mean, hey, this is New York City. This is the big time.

It struck me as odd when we first entered the building that a major hotel would greet its new arrivals with a hand-scrawled sign taped to the main entryway that said “door broke.” I was similarly baffled by the language of a sign on its marquee, “You always wanted in Time [sic] Square and less.”

Cinelli, who makes the best of everything, suggested that they simply ran out of space and dropped the “s” in Times Square to accommodate the notion of “less,” alluding to the cost of the rooms.

But then, another peculiarity: When we were issued two plastic keys, the desk clerk said, “That will be $2.” Two dollars? “For the keys,” she explained. Two keys, $2. There was little choice. While the room had been confirmed, nothing in the contract confirmed the keys. We either bought the keys or we didn’t get into the room.

Stepping into our quarters was like entering into a set for that old Ray Milland movie “The Lost Weekend,” where its main character, an alcoholic writer, ends up with the DTs on skid row. For a moment, we simply stared. This is what they meant by “less.” Paint chips from the wall edged the ancient carpeting. A lone chair, its plastic torn, furnished the only sitting place. Illumination was provided by a single light fixture on the ceiling, casting the room in a kind of dim, yellow glow.

“Well,” Cinelli said, fighting for restraint, “isn’t this interesting?”

The trip to New York was for her birthday. Christmas shopping in the Big Apple. Ice skaters at Rockefeller Center. Leggy Rockettes kicking up past their perky little heads at Radio City Music Hall. Broadway shows. Art museums. We had all of that and more. But it wasn’t supposed to include a room in its final stages of deterioration at a hotel where one had to plead for clean towels and empty his own wastebasket.

“Don’t unpack,” I said. “I didn’t bring you to Manhattan to stay in a gulag.”

She laughed. When Cinelli laughs it simultaneously embraces truth, an effervescent joy and a wry perception of the ironies. It is a laugh that understands strange moments and even appreciates their anomalies.

“I’ve always wanted to stay in a flophouse,” she said.

So here we are, half a block from Times, I mean Time, Square, and now there is beauty among the ruins. Snow is falling in a feathery swarm, purifying the view, coating the broken shards of yesterday’s party and covering the mundane with a new and glowing reality.

“I can take this,” she said, marveling at the altered landscape.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

The bed was nice. The toilet flushed. The elevator worked.

(To be continued)

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.