We arrived at a small blue roadside motel in Monterey on June 19, 2013.
It had a Burroughs-ian romance … gantries, metal stairwells, kidney shaped pool inside a rusty cage, breakfast room a shed with toaster and kettle.
But it was blue.
Cannery Row was a bendy bus ride away.
When we got to our room, it was dark. But this was our real McCoy Blue Hotel.
Andrea and I slid onto the bed, pressed the button for the TV and began to relax, we were knackered after driving the Big Sur from the Beverley Garland where we’d spent a bit of time with a very pasty Ethan Hawk.
Knackered.
Then the news came on … James Gandolfini had died in Rome. A heart attack was suspected, mainly because he was so overweight, smoked big cigars and drank red wine.
The Sopranos was dead too. We were mortified and had three bottles of wine between us holding a wake in the caged pool.
Then Tony Soprano and Gandolfini faded into history, not forgotten but a gravestone to TV and story-telling.
Now, almost 20 years after the black-out final scene of the Sopranos, the classic American diner booth where it was filmed was sold at auction for a $82,600.
Tony Soprano and his family were sitting in that booth in a New Jersey diner when the brilliant series came to a dark-hole ending.
Tony drops a quarter in the table-top jukebox and orders onion rings – that’s the end.
The booth, with deep red benches and a yellow Formica table had been in the real ice-cream parlor Holsten’s in Bloomfield, New Jersey, for the decade.