Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets Read Online Free PDF

why I let him call me John. Everyone else calls me Doc, and I was qualified, though I hadn’t lifted a scalpel, a stethoscope or so much as a band-aid since the year before, since I came home with shrapnel in my shoulder. My extensive experience in treating syphilis, jungle rot, and sucking chest wounds was of no use even at Bellevue. My hands weren’t steady enough to practise any more. My license and my knowledge of pharmacology kept me in high demand, however.
    Grass was everywhere. Cannabis, mushrooms, and chemicals cooked up by burned out long hairs, as likely to contain strychnine as not.
    The people who came to me weren’t looking to turn on or tune in; they had more specialised tastes. They craved knowledge, the power to be creators, to be active participants in life, rejecting every custom, from money to their own sexuality and even gender. They who could only fit in here in New York.
    I was a doctor, but it was good that the American Medical Society never saw my shaking hands, or the patients for whom I prescribed an increasingly esoteric variety of chemicals. Chemicals used for creativity, to give an edge, to support the frenzied, creative mind. Make something. Do something. Start something.
    The news showed college kids burning their draft cards, dropping LSD, eating mushrooms, smoking marihuana, growing their hair long and burning bras on farms, trying to get away from everything, like that was going to change anything. Not so much in our little corner of New York. Downtown, making a living in empty warehouses. Staying up all night. Creating art out of anything, from cardboard to bodies, inventing superstars out of nothing. This was our buzz, our vibe. Sex. Drugs. Experiment and creation. Create something. Anything. Lots of things. Some of it would stick. We’d change the world, or at least our little corner of it.
    “Which way, John?” Sherlock’s voice shocked me out of my reverie.
    “I live at the Chelsea, like everyone else,” I sighed.
    T HE C HELSEA H OTEL . Heiresses desperately seeking disgrace with artistes. Writers and artists praying for a muse. Even in New York in 1968, you would be hard-pressed to find a more miserable hive of the desperate and demented.
    The landlady was used to people making disturbances to get guests up to the rooms against the house rules. Someone would fake a fight, or try to sell drugs, or tip over an ashtray, and the rest of the people would run past the barricade. At two-fifty a night or fifteen dollars a week, the Chelsea was cheap, collecting youthful hope, grey enterprise, madness and decrepitude, along with any kind of bottom-feeding scamster. It also had an infamously liberal attitude towards rent, which meant that nearly every resident was constantly in arrears, and could be extorted for any money, valuables, or drugs they had while no complaints could be lodged against the owners about leaking roofs, flickering electricity, or the constantly failing boiler.
    It was an arrangement that worked for most of us, particularly considering the heiresses and young men with rich fathers who came to spend time in this bohemian palace, tasting our lifestyle, but back up to Park Avenue for Sunday brunch. They kept the place running, paying their rent for the few rooms in good shape on the second and third floors in the front. The only part of the hotel that ever saw the super’s hands.
    Sherlock walked into the Chelsea Hotel and demonstrated his useful observation trick. He walked straight up to the desk.
    “I’d like to enquire about a room, please. I’d prefer monthly rates over weekly, if that’s all right? I can pay in advance.”
    The hotel manager looked up through bleary eyes, and turned to get a resident’s form, a cigarette dangling from his lip.
    “Ah. I see that you only have rooms on the top floors available, and that it’s been over a year since you’ve had your boiler inspected, and your exterminator certificate...”
    I slipped past the doorway and