Rex Stories

In Rick Lawton’s Rex Stories, the occupants of the Manhattan-based Rex Hotel have their stories to tell and Lawton is the one to tell them. Amongst others, there’s Ric the paranoid Cuban, who’s beset upon by a CIA-led infestation of cockroaches; there’s Joey (poor cousin to Pal Joey?) who aspires to ski the slopes on white lines of cocaine; there’s deluded Alex who preaches life without illusions; and there’s Luce who looks upon the Rex as “the last refuge of the Real People.” Whether or not true, Lawton makes them seem real enough; moreover, surrounded by gentrification, theirs is a reality they can’t always bear. Thus readers should be warned: Lawton doesn’t offer us a cast of raffish Guys and Dolls, Damon Runyon-type characters. The occupants of the Rex are much more descendants of those who once frequented a Greenwich Village saloon-rooming house nearly a century before, the same ones the playwright Eugene O’Neil first introduced us to in the Iceman Cometh.