New Haven’s Duncan Hotel is a vision in authentic outdated suicide aesthetic. My glorious coucou troubadour friends took a trip to picturesque New Haven to visit me in my collegiate glory. The evening was filled with the following things (not necessarily in this order): sipping wine, examining Slim Aarons photography for senior essay research, dancing in the attic of a grungy house on Howe Street, sleeping in a claw-footed bathtub, drinking a curiously strong champagne and whisky cocktail, singing “My Funny Valentine” while ambling down Chapel Street, ordering Alpha Delta Pizza, walking up and down five flights of stairs due to out-of-service elevator attendant at suicide Duncan Hotel (to retrieve Alpha Delta pizza), sleeping in purple leggings under suspicious satin bedding.

My dear friend came to visit us around one in the morning. During the walk from his off-campus apartment on Edgewood Street to the Duncan Hotel, he thought contentedly about how lucky he has been to have survived almost an entire four years at Yale without encountering any of the crimes of allegedly sketchy New Haven. At that very moment, two anonymous Wankers of the Week approached him from behind, and before he knew it, he was being punched in the face by an aggressive stranger with a shaved head.

With the doors of the David Lynchian Duncan Hotel only steps away, my friend raced to the entrance. The nighttime receptionist buzzed him inside, saving him from a potential sidewalk tragedy. Safe and sound in the hotel suite, he paced around with a new found appreciation for life and a slight anxiety about an unhinged jaw.

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