2nd excerpt from "867-5309, the song that saved my ass"

The Chelsea Hotel in Earl’s Court Square
Our album was out at last. Jacko had come up with a name for the record that we agreed to for some unknowable, influenced by aliens reason. Right chasps; here’s the thing: You’ve been unavailable for years, so let’s call your album that. Unavailable. Yes? Yes? His bug-eyed, gesticulating enthusiasm was infectious, and obviously it spun even McFee and Huey’s heads around so they were staring off like flounders at some mirror-image world. This made sense? It was more like group psychosis. Unavailable. Unavailable? What the fuck were we thinking? Somehow it seemed like a good idea at the time. Jake had a passion and an apparent genius for naming things and people. Like “Elvis Costello”. Ridiculous, but it worked, if not all of the time. For example, Dave Robinson didn’t have a now, new wave name, and frankly couldn’t be bothered to create one for himself, so Jake took Dave’s middle name, Watson, and dubbed him Watson Television. Dave just let that one slide off him. So Clover became Unavailable. Dave’s name didn’t stick; ours did.
For the moment we were actually quite available, waiting for the next thing on our schedule. We were now staying in Earl’s Court Square, an area filled with foreigners of all stripes, at a tourist hotel called the Chelsea: The Chelsea Hotel in Earl’s Court Square. Go figure. I suppose we could have as easily been in the Knightsbridge Hotel in Kensington, or the Upper Tooting Hotel in Brixton, but no matter. The Chelsea Hotel was a typical cheap tourist hovel, carved from the remnants of a Victorian era townhouse, with narrow, ill-lit hallways painted war-surplus green, lukewarm baths down the hall(water also war-surplus green), and a completely nonsensical floor plan. The rooms weren’t numbered in any logical fashion; room one was across from room eight, but number five was on the next floor. It was quite a confusing place, but hey, it was home.
We designated it a temporary lawless zone for wild nights and steam off- letting. We’d met a lot of people in London now, and the hotel bar, which would otherwise have been basically empty, often had a good crowd. The Lizzys were there, Nick Lowe, Elvis, J.B., various girls and hangers-on of different stripes, from groupies to label people. There were some models and music-biz girls as well. It was time to let some of the pent-up, unspoken pressure off. We’d been out there getting pounded on by audiences and the press. Our internal springs had been wound pretty tightly. We were now aware of just how much of a pressure cooker it was in which we were stewing. Hey, if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Or, for another approach, pour some vodka on the fire and see how hot you can make it burn.
So, without the structure of a tour to keep us under control for the moment, we were running a bit hot and wild. J.B. introduced us to a place near Harrod’s in Chelsea called the Loose Box, which was a wine-bar literally jammed with swingin’ singles, young bankers, secretaries, and the like, each pressing through the packed room or the equally packed balcony clutching his or her own bottle of Leibfraumilch and a glass. It was a pick-up joint. Everyone knew what the action was. Suddenly, you could find yourself squeezed face to face to a member of the opposite sex who might be interested, and away you went. One morning after a Loose Box night, I woke up in an extremely hungover state in an apartment I didn’t remember going to the night before. The young lady was getting ready for work. I awkwardly excused myself and left. The flat was in one of those white, three or four-story walk-ups that are everywhere in London. The apartments, just like the hotels, had been created out of former Victorian townhouses which had once had bigger rooms. The floor plans, as in the Chelsea Hotel, didn’t make much sense. I stumbled down the stairs and opened what I presumed to be the door leading to the outside, only to find myself in the flat of a couple just having their breakfast. Uh… good morning! What’s worse, I did that again before somehow finding the welcoming cold, gray, wind-blown street. Don’t people lock their doors, ‘fer fucksake?
Our old pal Marcus was hanging out with us at the Chelsea. He’d been trying to hook on with us as a drummer for a long time. He was a good guy, a part of the family, but he had never been, nor would he ever be, the ultimate drummer we were looking for. Marcus was known to keep a stash of nasal stimulants about his person from time to time, so we were always hitting him up for the same, and he was very generous. He and Ciambotti had a silly stoned thing going on. Johnny called Marcus Harry the Hebe, because Marcus is Jewish, and rather hairy. Men will be boys. In the wee hours of the night, Ciambotti was often on the prowl searching to find Marcus in the warren of rooms we inhabited, while Marcus was on his endless, Lancelot-like quest of a self-described panty raid.
One night I was lying in my little twin bed, trying to sleep. Our long, narrow rooms had four twin beds in a row, like a dormitory or a barracks. I was one bed in from the window.
I awoke to find Marcus standing over me, breathless. He’d come in from the balcony, which adjoined the next room’s balcony. You could easily climb from balcony to balcony.
If Clambottle comes through here, tell him you haven’t seen me! He whispered breathlessly. With a furtive glance over his shoulder towards the open window, he hustled out the door at the far end of the room.
Sure, yeah, whatever, man. Shit, can I sleep, please?
A few minutes later, my dreams were once again interrupted by a wild-eyed Ciambotti, weaving as he loomed over me in the dark room, lit by the diffused glare of the earls’ Court streetlamps. He too had come in the window from the other room. He was waving his big folding knife around. His breath was like the bottom of a whiskey barrel.
If I find Harry the Hebe, I promise not to stick this knife in his throat! He hissed intently. Then, like a psychotic combination of dapper vampire and mafia hit man, he was gone into the night.
The young, vaguely hip Lebanese guys who run the hotel were glad to have us as paying guests in their otherwise mostly empty establishment. They liked the women who visited us and they liked making money at their bar. They really did try to be cool, but they just didn’t have the stamina to keep up.
One evening they closed down the bar at midnight for some darned reason. They didn’t realize that, even though we’d run out of money and the time bell had definitely rung, Ciambotti and I weren’t near finished drinking and carrying on yet. The bar was, of course, locked behind those wooden shutters that many British bars employ that pull down like blinds from above and keep the bottles so inconveniently out of reach. After sneaking back into the bar and ascertaining that the coast was clear, Ciambotti took a pool cue and tied a shoelace on the tip with a slip-knot hanging down like a little noose. He used the cue to pry up the bar shutter as far as it would go, maybe three or four inches, stuck cue into the bar as far as it would reach, and angled the slip-knot over the neck of a liter bottle of vodka. He raised the tip of the cue and the knot tightened. He had it. Down the big bottle slid on the cue into our waiting hands. We squeezed it under the shutter, and our problem was at least momentarily solved. The managers never did figure out how a liter of vodka could have disappeared from the locked-up bar, though I’m sure they knew who was responsible.