Up in the Old Hotel

Up in the old hotel, late one Saturday night

Ma and Pa Kettle on the radio, spoiling for a fight

And it's oh, oh yeah, I remember it well

The night we fell in love up in the old hotel

Up in the old hotel, you threw your laundry down a chute

And old drunken Maggie yelled up, "Well, rooty toot toot toot!"

And our clothes came back smelling of cheap perfume and Muscatel

Ragtime Maggie the queen up in the old hotel

The ghost of Joseph Mitchell came stumbling down the hall

"I got nothing more to say, folks, I believe I said it all"

And who could argue with a ghost because he said it so well

In that book he wrote called Up in the Old Hotel

Remember that Spanish restaurant right outside the door?

Saffron and chorizo came up through the cracks in our floor

And the jugs of dark sangria cast that Andalusian spell

Every Friday night up in the old hotel

Eighteen straight shots of whiskey, boys, I believe that's the record

The last words of Dylan Thomas, they took him out on a stretcher

And we could hear his wife Caitlin screaming all the way from Wales

"Is that bastard of a man dead yet up in your old hotel?"

Do you recall that song that haunted our winter bones?

Louis Armstrong's "I Guess I'll Get the Papers and Go Home"

And it conjured up New York and it put us in a spell

Every Sunday night up in the old hotel

Up in the old hotel, some old ones ended up alone

All those things that seemed so quaint now haunted their fragile bones

But there's a thin line between nostalgia

And a drunken "Oh, what the hell!"

They were the best of times up in the old hotel

So out on the wrought iron balcony, I stare into the New York night

A little weary, but building wings for the second half of life

Spouting lines from Prufrock about sawdust and oyster shells

We had poetic leanings up in the old hotel

They were the best of times up in the old hotel