Resurrecting Bobby Kennedy
A trip to The Ambassador Hotel
Breaking into and wandering about LA’s (formerly) illustrious, (currently) closed and creepily dilapidated Ambassador Hotel by cover of night is particularly poignant in a time when our nation is once again involved in an ill-planned, if not entirely unnecessary war fought for the freedom of a people we understand far too little, thereby potentially screwing much more than we’re helping. Little ol’ Nam’ers, was fought against an ideological enemy. The new battle is also supposedly ideological. The new enemy, World Terrorism, is impossibly illusive. Though we’re told its soldiers like to hang out in Iraq and neighboring countries.
Had Bobby Kennedy not been shot at the Ambassador on June 5 of 1968, he would have received the Democratic nomination and likely been elected president. The Vietnam War could have ended years earlier, saving 20,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. It’s impossible to say how long this war in Iraq will last, and we could certainly use some of BFK’s guidance about now. He was shot in the Ambassador’s kitchen by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian angered by Kennedy’s position on Israel. His assassination has been called “the first shot in the Muslim war against the American ideal.” There’s also some speculation that Sirhan was merely a CIA patsy, firing blanks to draw attention away from Kennedy’s real killer, a newly hired Lockhead security guard standing directly behind him. At any rate, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination is, I believe, the point at which our country ended its empathetic progression and began movement toward Paranoid World Power and ultimate stagnant self-interest.
Bobby Kennedy was just what America needed to remind its people that care for all can translate into happiness for all. His ghost was never said to have haunted the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, but it’s exciting to try to make yourself believe that it has, when you’ve navigated a razor wire fence in the pouring rain at 3 a.m. to sneak through the abandoned halls, rooms and lounges of one of America’s most storied hotels. A place that has fallen into eerie disrepair in the 37 years since it began its slow death and 16 since its final closure.
The Ambassador Hotel opened on New Years Day, 1921. At that time it was the most expensive hotel ever built, and its 500-room main building, ballrooms, Cocoanut Grove lounge and expansive bungalows sit, today, on a 23-acre plot on Wilshire Boulevard behind extensive chain-link fencing. As America’s great(est?) journalistic adventurers, we decided to find a way inside, seek guidance from the man that should’ve been America’s greatest president and scare hell out of each other.
After trudging through the muddied, early construction (a new public school will soon be built on the grounds) and gingerly peaking our hands through the slightly open but chained doors like bewildered children poking around a graveyard, we made our way around to the west side of the plot, to a building that must’ve served as employees’ quarters (the rooms were real small). We found an open and unchained door, entered it and began to freak ourselves out.
The rooms were dark and mold stinking. Rainwater ran down the walls and pooled on the floors. We walked through slowly, inching around corners, unsure of what lay ahead. Everything was grey and brown from years of dust and mold. The paint was peeled and cracked everywhere and curled out inches from its walls. It’s a strange feeling to be in an abandoned building that had obviously seen a lot of action in the past. The arguments and bad days, nervous pacing, laughing, horsing, screwing and screaming are all still there, somehow. Seeing a hotel’s hallways abandoned gives the impression that it happened suddenly. That these rooms went from vibrant to lifeless quickly and unexpectedly. And this, I think, is what makes them so creepy. It seems unnatural. All the dirt and grime compounds this to give a feeling of malevolence. Or there might be a grumpy, drunken, stiletto-wielding bum around one of the corners. That thought was menacing, too.
So, we walked about; into rooms, up stairs; hiding from each other; pretending to take dumps in the bathroom, careful not to laugh too loud. Always suspect that an extra presence could make itself known at any moment. We snuck around, toes first, like Indians do when they want to scare deers. We came to a spotty, rusty-framed mirror in one of the rooms. It sat, incongruous in the middle of the shedding and crusty wall, as if it had been hung more recently—after the hotel had already closed. We gathered around it, captivated by its improbability in this posh-house cum shack. We pulled our gazes from the mirror, nodded to each other in agreement, knowing what is to be done and said when scared and facing a mirror. A collective, anticipatory gulp muscled our Adam’s apples up—then down–as we redoubled with fear. And, together, wishing to terrorize ourselves a bit more, determined to observe some real wickedness, repeated the infamous incantation five times into the mirror, “Starfucker, Starfucker, Starfucker, Starfucker, Star…” just as Mick Jagger had done in the eponymous song of fright and intrigue.
Alright, so we really said, “Candyman.” But as no one exploded into bees, we moved on through valet offices, small banquet rooms and double doors, into the main hallway of the hotel. The hallway is where one gets some real perspective of the hotel. It’s a sprawling warren of a place. It must’ve been quite beautiful in its heyday. We found a small, classy lounge and nippled up to the bar. The booze was all gone, but here, even more than in the halls and rooms, we felt the celebratory joy turned suddenly sour. We half expected to find a former patron still slumped-over at one of the tables in drunken slumber. This, perhaps, is where BFK would’ve enjoyed a drink with some of his brother’s Hollywood buddies, had he not been gunned down that night.
We realized, as we began to wander again, that the kitchen where Kennedy had been shot was just around the corner. We entered it cautiously. Heard some noise, suddenly; it was sharp and seemed to be moving. It sounded like heels. Someone was in there walking in high heels! Bobby? No, some woman. She’d probably been there the whole time. A giant, muscular Amazon of a woman, for sure. She was sharpening knives, perhaps. She’d bind us into submission and bleed us all slowly—her beautiful, though slightly Dolph Lungren-y, face our final consolation as we lay dying, using this last opportunity to tell each other how much our friendships had meant, sorry that we hadn’t emptied our hearts like this more often.
We knew it was dangerous, but we had to find the woman, if only to resign to our fate, to prove her existence and meet death. The sound of her feet was coming from a small passageway, down a grouping of stairs on one side of the kitchen. We huddled up in a single-file line, peeking over each other’s shoulders like the Baby-Sitters Club on an adorable midnight detective mission. “Listen to that,” one of us whispered. “It’s a person for sure.”
The clip-clip of the woman’s massive shoes was almost upon us; it was pants shitting time as we...slowly...turned...around... the...corner and realized the noise actually came from water dripping into a tin pan at the bottom of the stairs. Oh gawsh, we thought, it’s not a lady at all. But a dumb little pan. We threw our arms up in a self-deprecating, but totally relieved, renunciation of our silly minds. Those imaginations! Always getting us into trouble!
Re-creating murders is totally cool for detectives, but when private citizens get involved it’s considered a bit morbid, like some torturing animals type of stuff. However, opportunities such as this don’t come about very often. We had to put those imaginations back to work. And if we weren’t to go after it then, we’d have no future chances to bring back the brightest Kennedy in his last public appearance. It was all pretty hard to resist. The room had a pull over us.
After seeing news footage of the shooting and photos of Kennedy lying on the floor, his head spouting blood, it was an impressive experience to be standing, unchaperoned, at such an incredibly historical site—in the dark, trying to force each other into refrigerators.
