Next Stop Times Square

Born of condensation and wind on top of the world, the snowflake is one of the most spectacular objects of the earth and beyond. Beautiful, intricate, and complex: for a while it lives: floating down from heaven to corruption on earth lasting only as long as the conditions that made possible its existence.

My last morning was like any other. I awakened with my mouth open, in the snow, with no shelter to speak of. Some of us called the empty lots behind the old matzo shop, at the corner of Norfolk and Rivington, the toxic waste dump. One never knew what or who might end up there, shiny needles, wine and other more intimate fluids were exchanged freely, we kept each other warm with song, spit and stories, of better, longer days and places where the sun filtered soft and lovely through fluttering leaves and left Indian paint patterns on our innocent faces.

Maybe there were fifty or so of us in the lot that night, none of our mothers when they walked us to kindergarten that first day and left us in the parking lot imagined their lovely child would ever end up in a place like this, even for one night. Everyone knows vacant lots are haunted by the men who once came home here where the walk was and hugged their pealing children tightly to their chests. It was almost an entire block, big enough for a baseball field. Some of us had fashioned temporary bivouac structures out of discards: cardboard boxes, found pieces of wood and orphaned plastic tarp.

The snow had begun sometime in the night as you remember waking up, pissing steam against the brick building side and watching the flakes outlined against the moon’s face like falling keepsakes fashioned by the delicate hands of virgin weavers somewhere who all looked like young Judy Garland and sang as they worked in voices that were plaintive but not yet broken up.

My mother had given me the money for rent.

“I can see you’re trying, son.”

“I promise, ma.”

We wished together over spaghetti and meatball at the last Italian diner on Delancey Street, a counter where the old street disappears into Kenmare at Cleveland Place, two blocks across Bowery for some reason I could not picture my mother in the far east.

“Do you hear from your wife?”

“I see her on Sundays in church, ma.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“Sometimes we talk to the minister together afterward.”

“Really?”

“Sure we do.”

She watched my plate. “It’s good to see you eating, son. You’ve gotten so skinny.”

Her marriage had broken up after we boys had bailed, like a ship caught in a storm and rent to pieces in the shoals in sight of the land’s break, each of us ended up hanging on to a separate piece of wood and swimming ashore. Everyone survived with only our hearts broken, scratching our heads and wondering how the hell it could happen. My father had tried to kill himself in the garage, my mother moved to Jersey to sleep in the bed where she had dreamed as a teenager of something much more pleasant.

She never liked the city but for once she did not ask me to come back home and live among our own people. She feared the chaos I would bring to grandmother’s house. I took the money, some $350. I went to the Laundromat, three shirts, two pants, two pairs of socks, underwear, all of it fit into a messenger bag. I left the apartment without a word to my roommates as they had already taken me aside.

“You can choose using or staying, man.”

What if I can’t?

I could have said but did not. The words did not come.

"Well, you paid for this month.” Neil’s declaration filled up the silence of the dusty hallway.

I turned the rest of the money my mother gave me into dope. My actual plan was to cross the Williamsburg Bridge by foot to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway travelling west and hitchhike south from there. I would stay with my brother until I got myself together. Maybe—that’s all it was. I walked over the frigid bridge. There’s no place as cold as high in the sky atop a bridge. As I crossed to Brooklyn and looked over the water, the snow had stopped and everything looked gray and frozen it was still light of day. The sun set like an abscess over the river.

I knew I would never get a ride, that it was a ridiculous plan but I kept walking. I had a lot of dope and I would do it all that night, ending up on a bench under the highway fashioned out of the very steel structure of the great bridge, a traveler in space and time, the snowflake either disappears or joins the greater whole.

I stayed on the bench watching the headlights careening into the darkness above me one of the coldest nights of the year until I finally shivered onto the subway, looking for the best place to melt away into nothing I remember riding out to Coney Island and walking on the beach to the edge of the shore, I must have got back on the D train because I was awakened by a cop below Times Square, who gently suggested I move on and just thus ended the chronicle of my first life in the East Village.

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by Charles Lloyd Quartet, 1966.
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photo: © Ted Barron
Snow on Grand Street, 1996.

Ho Chih Minh Was a Sailor

We worshipped at the spangled feet of pagan idols. Like Frankie, a knockout who worked the bulletproof window at an after hours coke cop-spot on Avenue B. Frankie had a collection of New York Dolls she had made out of Barbies with red, black and blond wigs, glittered boots, splash-painted sequin Sgt. Pepper coats, scale size cardboard guitars, drumsticks and a microphone stand with bluebird feathers. She set them up every night on the counter behind the glass where we stuck in our grimy twenties hoping for an interested glance from Sweet Frankie.

Rumor had it she was a trust fund intrigue, a sophomore year runaway from Sarah Lawrence, or the direct descendant of Pocahontas and John Smith. She had eyelashes as light as hummingbird’s wings and a voice and attitude like Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe when she took Gary Cooper off the street and saved his life. We all wanted her to swoop in and save ours.

In a vacant lot down by the waterside all the way east. You could see the water from there. It’s said that Ho Chih Minh was a sailor. That he came from China to New York in the 20’s when there was a Communist Party and Eugene Debs ran for President and pulled nearly 18% of the vote in NYC.

Downtown was talking and I was listening. A few of the others were too. We could see the Williamsburg Bridge trains from where we were and the lights from the windows reflected on the river.

They say Ho worked as a waiter and he rode that train from the overcrowded tenement where he lived in East Bushwick on Knickerbocker Ave with hundreds of other illegal aliens, though they were not called that then, to his job at the Waldorf where he served Baked Alaska and Roquefort Lamb to stuffed shirts with bibs and drool running down their cufflinks.

"Don’t you mean waitress?" Beatdown Fred asked. The night of the dolls Fred had a gaping hole in his cheek about an inch in diameter that he swore came from the jagged edge of a broken bottle of Negra Modello. Everything was a Capital case, everyone was hanging from a limb and somewhere there was always the sound of a baby crying for mommy or tears wetting the leather pocket of a Johnny Bench signed catcher’s mitt. This is who we were then.

Downtown went along with the joke.

“I’m talking about Ho Chih Minh not some waitress,” he said. “Waiter, brother…”

“Not the streetwalker?”

“No, man the Revolutionary.”

The projects and riverside parks cornered our vacant lot. In the day you went because there were a couple broken down benches and it was a quiet place to read and write. At night it was a pretty solid place to find someone willing to hand over a loose cigarette and for the weird scene that sometime spilled all the way out into the river.

We were not exactly up to enjoying the finer things in life or anything like that. I spent a lot of time riding hundreds of blocks out of my way to bookstores scattered around the city where I would steal what I could to turn into drugs. It’s hard to earn much that way. The company was a new one, a cooperative whatever that means, run by a former messenger called Thunderball. We inhabited a tiny office off of 26th and Broadway across from the Madison Avenue Park.

As so many others the day had started weird and went from there: cold, snowy and rain with little pins of ice that fell out of the sky. Bad shoes, no front fender and the whoosh of the my wheels through the water on the streets created a freezing stream of slush that wet through my cheap canvas pull-ons and turned my poor toes into blue kid popsicles. I was suffering out there by ten o-clock in the morning.

I called in and was sent to an artist’s loft on Greene St. I walked up the long stairs and heard a man’s voice calling as I mounted the last landing.

“Come on in. The door is open. I am in the studio. I am naked and painting in the dark. There’s a twenty dollar tip on the table in the kitchen.”

The gray outside filled the great space with a shimmering sort of dingy light that I realized came from tin foil hung on the walls in hues of blue, yellow and red. There were also amazing paintings from ceiling to floor, city scenes with fire escapes with flames from the windows and beautiful half-clad women viewed from old-fashioned door transoms or the frosted glass of one of those 40’s offices with the company’s name painted on that in our days still existed in the far reaches of many of the older Art Deco office buildings. The Empire State, the Chrysler or the Fuller Building on Madison. They are also great places to smoke dope on the fire stairways for messengers when you’ve been riding the streets all day sucking soot from tailpipes of buses and you need an open air balcony to look over the great city you dreamed of conquering someday when you were young and still had dreams that had not cracked like eggs fallen forty stories to the streets. When the eggs were birds that flew by on their way to the river.

This was the metaphor I was trying to evoke for one of the dancers who had come out to join us that night at the river. Telling her the saga of my day and she was kind enough to listen. She had wide open eyes and enough coke to share though all I thirsted for was the female aura that wafted off of her glowing skin towards the river.

We were out in the tall grass, dozens of us, a couple days after the ice storm truth to tell, on one of those balmy false spring nights that blow into New York from the high seas and shoot up the rivers. That sometimes fool the dogwoods and dingo trees that burst buds and bend toward the breeze and they fooled us. We were willing to believe anything for one night. The girls maybe had come to New York to dance but not in dingy clubs on side streets near the World Trade Center where bad lighting turned their skin green and accountants fingered their skin with the scroungy hunger of disappointed men who had never sailed the seven seas because they were scared. We saw how used up everything was, all the lost continents had been discovered so we made new ones in abandoned children’s parks rumored to be toxic waste dumps like the one we stood in that night.

“Can you make it $25?”I called to the direction of the dark studio. “These are really great paintings,” I hastily added.

The artist came out. It wasn’t Warhol but he had the same Soho urban pioneer presence. He spoke with an accent. He appeared in the doorway pulling on a robe that he did not bother to sash, so that his person dangled like an adverb. Behind him Peggy Lee lisped sweetly.

“You’re a cheeky one, aren’t you?” he said.

He winked but he clearly wasn’t gay. He had the face of a German who had been indulged for way too long with an imagination riper than a South American peach in February. I come from that stock, so I know of what I speak.

“I need a pack of cigarettes,” I told him. I ended up giving him the address of the park and he showed up, like I said a couple nights later I guess. By the end of the night he had invited the whole sordid crew back to his loft for soup and he was painting one of the dancers in a negligee with the window open. There was something about the way the wind blew the material just right and the goosebumps, her left aureole and nipple and the moonlight.

It was rich for me, but I was glad to be there. It was more interesting than what my own life had become. I was five steps behind my own last lie in a losing race and rent was due.

The funny thing was that I picked up his package, a well-taped flat of obvious artwork, a commission bound for a clearly well-heeled client at the St. Moritz on Central Park South. I was looking forward to seeing those digs but my feet were cold so after scoring some dope downtown I took my pack of smokes up Eighth Avenue and could not resist a pair of boots in the windows of one of those old Robbins Department stores near Port Authority Terminal. The only problem was I didn’t have any more cash on hand and I was not due to be paid until 3 that afternoon. I went into the store, grabbed the boots and bolted for the door. The guard tackled me. A cop was walking by and within an hour I was warm and cozy in a holding cell in Midtown West.

The cop had a date so he let me off with an appearance ticket. He had even given me a pair of boots that had been laying around the locker room for my feet.

“We can’t have you going around the city freezing like that.”

“A man can get into all kinds of trouble that way.”

He wagged a finger at me but he laughed. He had a red nose from boozing and had changed into this slick two toned bowling league shirt. His girlfriend, something Spanish he bragged about as we were pals by then. You never know where the love and kindness might come from in New York and that’s the beauty of it. These were his words as he stuck the hastily written ticket in my back pocket and pushed me out the door and out of his Brylcreamed and thinning mane. By quarter to three I was picking up my check on way downtown to score. A mere fifty bucks, which would all go to my head with none of it saved for food or rent but I was beyond that into the 4th dimension without any practical concerns in which we all of us downtowner artist slash addicts lived.

I didn't go back to work for a couple days so when I ended up at the loft the German's package was still in my bag. The same Peggy Lee record was playing, along with Tchaichovsky’s violin concerto. He had one of those record players where the next record to play would splat down on the one before it, highlights from Pucinni’s La Boheme. We had a laugh about the package, he paid me again.

We were all pretty distracted by the time we got to his loft, what with moonlight and the way it reflected off the tin foil on the walls onto the skin of the lovely young women. I stood by smoking trying to learn something about art.

“What does the moonlight feel when it touches her skin?” He asked me. “That’s your angle." He told me the achievement of art not money or anything else was the important thing and who would doubt a man like him in a place like that. Not me.

I ended up in the back room with one of the girls. She helped me with a problem I had been having and held me for a long time afterwards. We sat in the moonlight and watched as the German painted the others.

“I didn’t recognize you at first.” I told her, no other than Frankie, the doll of Avenue B.

“Don’t tell…” she put a finger to her lips sweetly.

“You would get into trouble?”

“You never know?”

“You got to get out of there.”

She nodded and looked off at the night outside the window for a long time, shivering slightly. I was scared to hold her and I’ve always regretted that. There was something too bright, too private about her solitude. It seemed infinite, like the reflection of the moon on the night river.

“When I do,” she said finally, real quiet, “Will you come find me?”

“Where will I look?”

“Try Times Square,” she said. And I did, and I found her but that’s a story for another time.

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photograph: © Ted Barron
Sailor, Operation Welcome Home Parade, NYC, 1991.

Stranger

There’s something peaceful about the slaughterhouse. In the killing season when the wind stops and everything is still, you can really see the colors, the browns of the oaks, the red maples, the evergreens. Even the dirt is pretty and they're sheep after all, so they line up meekly. You kill them quickly, gut their sacks and put the canvas down on the floor of the barn.

“This was in Canada?”

“Newfoundland.”

“Wow, that’s interesting.”

We stood there not knowing what to say for a few minutes. What was left on the canvas was dark and spooky. I didn’t know if I could agree that it was art, but I thought it was a hell of a thing to do. My third roommate on Ridge Street had brought me over to his studio to see his work. He was the only one who was not a doper trying to stay clean. I don’t know where they found him: the bulletin board at the Laundromat I think.

He had dirty blond hair, not much of a build the kind of face you would never remember and might not if you ever saw him again, you could ride next to him on the subway fifteen years later and not even know. Who knows who we see everyday?

He had about fifteen different canvases with the sheep guts on them. He had done them all up in Canada and transported them down. He showed me no other work, so I don’t know what he did with his time in the studio.

I was passing through. That day I spent maybe fifteen minutes with him and it was the only time we talked. I never collected much for my room either, just a few books that I found on the street or took home from the used bookshop slash cokespot on 4th Street. It was on 4th Street just down the block from one of the NA meetings, which was convenient but disastrous, just my style. I had a copy of Sheltering Sky and a few others. When you're boosting the books come and go, depending on what I had been able to get any money for. I remember discovering James Ellroy that winter and going on a binge, also Heretic had turned me onto Blood Meridian, which I would find again whenever I sold one, to pick up where I left off. I told that to Cormac when I met him later; he looked at me funny then laughed.

The last guy had left a mattress and I used the blanket Neal had given me. That was it, a couple change of clothes. When I smoked, I tapped my ashes out the window. The church money took care of the first month, after that it was only a matter of time. The one key thing you have to do to stay clean is to not pick up, so no matter what else I did I was out of control on the first turn.

The meeting on 4th Street was on Wednesday in a spare room at Our Lady of Mercy, a giant church that took up the whole block with an open-air courtyard that belonged in the Italian countryside, but maybe the east village was that one time to someone, when the church was first built a hundred years ago and none of us knew what was going to happen to anything in our exquisite corner of the universe. NA, Narcotics Anonymous was the Battle of the Bold in those days with cop-spots steps away from every meeting place. There was one in an old synagogue on Mondays on Houston Street, across from Ludlow Street. Tuesdays and Thursdays we met at the Cardinal Spellman community center on 2nd Street. This was the best scene of them all, at least a hundred folding chairs spilling over with freaks on the floor and sitting on the counter in the corner of the cellar. I wished I was a part of it and tried to keep track of how much time I was supposed to have. They had asked me to speak that night I got out of jail, so I tried to keep up appearances. I wasn’t the only one chipping away at a habit. We were all making it up as we were going along. Until 1979 it had been illegal for even two addicts to be seen together in New York City. Addicts carried ID and were arrested if the cops rolled up on them in the street. The meetings in NYC were begun by the old dopefiends who were left over from the hippies but were mostly just street toughs, the new breed were rockers, refugees from the Mudd Club, CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. Everyone wore leather and carried guitars, too cool for school wearing the leathers and animal stripes of whoever had gone back to using the week before and sold their finest threads on the sidewalk for a hit.

I was always a stranger in that scene, never dressed the part or learned the chords. I was on my way out from the beginning. Not to say people were not nice to me. There were ten or fifteen of us who went out for dinner nearly every night. I stayed clean for days at a time, never more than three, so it wasn’t like I was high when I went to the meetings.

I stood by the fire and felt its warmth, but I never copped to where I was really at. I didn’t get that was what you were supposed to do. One Sunday night a nice pretty girl named Layla took me to a meeting called Artists in Sanity. I had scored beforehand and I did some blow in the bathroom.

“There are meetings here every day of the week,” she told me. “All day and night.”

I tried to kiss her on the sidewalk outside but she shied away. She had brown eyes and curly hair. She ended up marrying one of the other guys who was around then, they had a kid too, but it didn’t last. I remember how it felt when I saw them holding hands a week or two later when they were just hooking up. I remember thinking that it could have been me.

“This is a good place to come if you’re having trouble getting over the hump,” she told me outside the Artists meeting. I thought it was cool that she brought me there, that she thought it was the kind of place I belonged.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s good to know.”

She knew more about what I was going through than I did.

When it got bad later in the month, I would just buy blow, no H. We had all been taught that coke was the party drug, that it was not addictive. Also the old schools told me that it was out of your system in three days, which was useful when you had to go see your probation officer. Of course it wasn’t true, they were liars and schemers from the get. No one can hold a lie better than a doper.

I started skipping the meetings because I was high earlier and earlier in the day. I went to my messenger job but spent most of the day riding around boosting and selling books. I came home after work, out of money and coke and lie on the bare mattress in the dark, pretending I was not there.

The hours passed. Neal and Martin would come home from the meetings and eat or not. When they went into their room, I would skulk out of mine and wander the streets looking for someone to bum a cigarette from, unable to sleep. I would look up at the lights of the Williamsburg Bridge and slit my eyes until they were like stars.

As it is in New York City when winter sets in there seemed always to be snow swirling in the air and when the snow stopped there was bone-chilling cold when you could see everything with diamond clarity. As one of the conditions of my release from jail the city sentenced me to four weekends of community service. I woke with a start after finally fainting dead asleep for an hour or two as the night waned into morning for the dawn call to Union Square to poke pieces of paper from the ground into plastic bags. It snowed one weekend toward, great big flakes that fell lazily in the wind and hit you like a big wet kiss right in the face. We started a snowball fight that eventually took in the entire square.

Mayhem, brother. It was one of those beautiful spontaneous New York City things that takes on the proportions of an epic. It is the thing about the city that all of us first fell in love with, the sheer possibility for campaigns of enormous size to begin for no one reason and turn into beautiful chance displays of beauty. A tall guy with no teeth who bragged of old exploits on Harlem basketball courts aimed for my back but hit some kids. They got into it and within moments everyone within a five block range was in the fray. It lasted for hours. The snow was too bad for us to work anyway and the truck never showed up. Everyone had a good time together, laughing and acting like seven year olds.

Some nights I hopped the train or even walked all the way up to Times Square. I walked around taking notes, trying to sketch with words the buildings, the way the windows looked that reflected the all night signs, the steam from the manholes, the walk of the stoney-eyed hipsters and painted ladies on the clicking heels. I was among them, but I was invisible. Like it was my destiny, like I could be gone in a moment and no one would ever know I was there.

A few times I forgot my key to the apartment. I went around back and climbed the fence around the public school. There were gates on our windows but I was able to pull it far enough away from the window to squeeze through. I remember wondering what someone would say if they saw me, if they would believe that I lived there. If they did they would have had one up on me.

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"Here" mp3
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photograph: © Ted Barron
Wild Dog, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1990.
( click image to enlarge )

Ghosts

I had bought a couple bags of dope when I left jail. Traded my arrest warrant for a pack of cigarettes. But I didn't do them right away. I went to the meeting. After I shared my tale, a couple fellows told me they were looking for a roommate that could stay clean. It would help them. They invited me back to the apartment that night. We talked for hours, then we all turned in for the night.

Within the hour, I walked away from my new apartment on Ridge Street and pretended that I had not sniffed down half the bag of dope and lit a cigarette. I went to a storefront on B and copped a dime of coke. It was the one where Sweet Frankie used to set up her dolls. She wasn't there, just another fiend and a single refrigerator cabinet filled with blue water containers, something like Kool Aid. You took one of those and were welcome to a bag of chips from the stand.

That was the fiction that you had gone in there to get some chips and a plastic container of blue water, so it would look right when you walked out, just to keep up appearances. The cops knew, we knew, the dealers and the neighbors knew. It was an illusion that no one believed really, like looking at a mirror and expecting not to see your face. I went on to Mona’s, ordered a black and tan, drank, it then went into the bathroom for a little of the coke. The dope was the base drug. It was really best like that. It allowed you the distance to lie to yourself about anything.

The thing was I could have stayed clean, even after I scored the dope. I didn’t even really want to get high, in a way. I didn’t know then that I would always want to get high, all the people or most of them anyway at the meetings still wanted to get high. They just had made a choice not to. I could have told someone about the dope. No one would have judged me.

“Of course you did,” I imagined Neal, one of my new roommates, saying as I sat at the bar. He was the film tech. He actually worked in stunts, pyrotechnics was his specialty I would learn.

Martin, the former stickup man, would laugh and pat my shoulder. “You just got out of jail. You didn’t know any better.”

“The important thing,” Neal laughed and turned serious. “The important thing is that you told us.”

“So what do we do now?” I imagined myself asking.

“We are going to throw it away.”

“No fucking way…”

“Yes.”

I kept repeating this last part to myself in my head. I must have actually mouthed the words because the guy next to me at the bar noticed. He was balding, older.

“What was that?” he smiled coyly. It was one of those conversations that start with both of us looking in the mirror behind the bar, like we’re watching each other on television and not necessarily sitting next to each other talking. I don’t know if it was a symptom of the bar-life, downtown or the city in general but we were all pretending we were doing things we were not a lot of the time I was not the only one.

“Nothing,” I said, a little embarrassed to be discovered.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I talk to myself too,” he said casually.

“I wasn’t talking to myself,” I said.

“Have it your way,” he said then blinking, maybe he realized how high I was. “What are you having?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I want to buy you a drink.” He motioned to the bartender.

The bartender I knew from NA rooms and from the poetry readings. I had talked to him about staying clean once and he looked at me a little warily, but he took my money. I understood so little in those days I am sure I half-expected him to say something to me, or refuse me service. He had his own higher power, though, I was still looking for mine. Funny to think I thought he was hiding when it was me, when I thought God or whatever you want to call it didn’t believe in me.

I had become a ghost. I had achieved the thing I had set out to do. It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. Neal and Martin were eventually going to find out I was getting high. They would have to kick me out. I took a job at a messenger house called Thunderball. They paid for me to get my bike fixed, but it wasn’t practical, I could not really support myself that way and if I kept getting high all the money I earned would end up at the cop man’s anyway. I was on probation as well, facing a 2-year suspended sentence. If I caught a dirty urine or got arrested, I was facing either Riker’s Island or real upstate time. But somehow none of this was actually happening.

My first marriage was over. Julie had moved to a new place in Brooklyn near the Smith Street F stop. Sometimes I saw her at the Unitarian Church in Brooklyn Heights. Julie and I had started attending the church in what turned out to be the last year of our marriage and she still went on Sundays, having grown up in the south a church-going good girl. My uncle had found his calling there, while working at Bankers Trust in the late 60’s. He had quit the bank job and gone to Harvard Divinity School. I called him and he had referred me to the minister, a man named Meek. I would go to see him the next week. He had offered to pay my first month’s rent after I told him I was trying to stay clean.

He took me to the bank and gave me the money. I took it over to Martin and Neal and paid them. I was clean when I did it. Later I went and copped with the difference. Meek had called it “living expenses,” after I told him exactly what the rent was. I was trying to be honest. I was trying to toe the line. Meek understood I might need a little more. He joked about what he called “a period of transition,” meaning he didn’t even expect me to stay clean. He lived in the real world.

But let’s go back to the bar for a little while. It’s after midnight, so only those of us with a real commitment are there. My friend next to me is telling about the state of his marriage. He had been looking at me for a little while but I had not turned to him until the bartender came over. My new friend has his own problems.

“You know what my wife said to me?”

“What?”

“We’re allowed to be happy, y’know.”

“Sounds fair.”

The fellow next to me laughed and maybe he winked. I thought he did but I did not acknowledge it. I had gone into neutral and I think he got that. Maybe he understood it all, that I was high and had gone off into my own world, that now I was just trying to be nice. Maybe he got that I had to keep at least one place removed from where I was and what I was doing. Maybe he was doing the same thing.

He said, “I thought everything was fine, that she was happy.”

“Women are funny.”

He laughed and took a drink. He offered his glass to mine and we clinked them together.

“What do you do?”

“I just got out of jail.”

His eyes widened. I was so proud to say that, just that once and to see how he reacted. He seemed to sense that and he did not disappoint. He let it stand out there as truth for a moment.

“I’m a writer,” he said, after a minute.

“Oh yeah, that’s what I want to do,” I said. I wished I had not said want, but it had come out that way.

He nodded. He didn’t lord it over me and I appreciated that.

“Do you know that squat around the corner?” he asked.

“Sure I do.”

“I’ve been living there for the last year.”

“To write about it?”

He nodded. “The thing is they don’t know.”

“Wow, no?”

“I created a fiction. I kept my place with my wife, my apartment. It worked for awhile, then I don’t know, I lost it.

He was gesturing with his hand and when he said lost he opened his fist like he had dropped some something, like coins or keys, from it.

He said, “I got a great story, but my life is shot.”

It was my turn to nod, and I did.

I finished my beer, went into the bathroom and did the first bag of dope. I went to the squat with him and we went onto the rooftop with a bunch of different people. When the birds started to chirp, things started to break up. It was still dark, but day was coming. We all knew it.

Download:

"Day In The Life Of A Heel" mp3
by Sonny Smith, 2007.
available on Fruitvale

"The Ruling Class" mp3
by Loose Fur, 2006.
available on Born Again in the USA

"Ill Fated" mp3
by Golden Smog, 1996.
available on Down by the Old Mainstream

photograph: © Ted Barron
Belemax, Brookyn, New York, 1997.
(click image to enlarge)

East of Bowery at the Gershwin Hotel

Gershwin Hotel
7 East 27th Street NYC
Tuesday March 24th 8pm

Jim Coleman: Sounds and Textures
Drew Hubner: Words
Kirsten McCord: Cello
Ted Barron: Images

Jim Phylr Coleman and Drew Hubner met early one Friday evening in 1993 on the corner of 12th St. and Avenue C in what was once called Alphabet City. At the time Phylr was a charter member of one of the coolest and seminal punk bands NYC has ever known, Cop Shoot Cop. That Friday night he was looking forward to his next gig. Hubner was fifteen minutes out of a rescue mission in Utica; he was looking forward to his next meal.

Since that night Phylr has gone on to score films, television series and commercials and has performed all over the world. Hubner has written two novels, both published to significant acclaim and much professional envy.

More importantly both have married interesting and beautiful women who are much more talented than they are. Phylr lives in Jersey with Beth B and Lola. He plays with sounds and has plans for a garden. Hubner lives in the Bronx with Sarah, August, Eleanor and Henry; he teaches at Hostos.

Until this outing as LOST CITY, they have never performed together. For your entertainment they will animate selections from his web-log East of Bowery, for which Phylr has promised not to take any further legal action for turf infringement.

Critical to this initial live sojourn are two other veteran New York creative forces: Kirsten McCord (on cello) and Ted Barron (on photos/projections).

After years of piano and cello training in her early formative years, Kirsten started a punk band and never looked back. She developed her own style composing for soundtracks, as well as employing a more traditional rock approach with a variety of musicians such as Rex, Elliot Smith, and The Walkmen. She currently has a solo album out on Ecstatic Peace.

Ted Barron has been making photographs and films since he was a twelve year old kid in St. Louis. For the last 25 years he has called New York City his home. His work has been widely exhibited and seen in numerous publications, including most recently, YETI and Bald Ego. He also writes at and publishes the popular blog Boogie Woogie Flu.

Cover $10

top photograph: © Ted Barron
Reader, Brooklyn, New York, 1996.
(click on image to enlarge)

The Tombs

Everyone’s heard of the tombs. These are the cells underneath the criminal courts on Centre Street downtown. When you are just visiting or facing a date, you go in front, when you are brought against your will by the Blues you go in the back. There’s a little street by the park where the Chinese do their slow motion dance. The cells are underground, clammy and infested, not just with bugs and slime but with the busted dreams and bad life karma of all those that have come before.

They have always been there, dating back to the beginnings of New Amsterdam and evoke dungeons, torture and other things that really suck to be a part of. And of course they are called that because you can get lost down there, forever. They are also a transporter terminal to Rikers and upstate where the North American police state stores its disappeared.

For us none of it was that serious. It gave us a chance to talk and act tough, to feel a part of the life the dealer immigrants lived everyday. For us the Tombs were like an annex to our neighborhood. It took about twenty minutes to walk home when you were released and it was even quicker to get there, handcuffed in a police car or with some other poor souls in a paddywagon.

All of us on the street were picked up in sweeps eventually, usually to be sprung in a matter of hours, over the weekend was a bummer. Or a skid bid like mine, at most 30 days. Anything more and you were sent to the island or upstate. But that didn’t happen to many of us, unless we went hardcore or hurt somebody. Upstate was for the dealers, for the blacks and Latinos, we were mostly white kids out in the life on a pass. It could turn serious on a dime, though and the thing about jail is that when you’re locked in there, life goes on outside.

You talked to the men in your pod of cells, never having a clear idea how many of them there were. You made a buddy or two, mine was called Tyrone. One night he asked me what I was doing and I don’t know why I told him:

“I’m looking for my grandfather.”

“Oh yeah, is he still around?”

“He was last seen on the Bowery or in Times Square.”

“You saw him?”

“I checked with the Veterans Administration.”

“He was an army man?”

“That’s right.”

Tyrone had kids he was thrown out on by three different women and a father of his own that he had only seen once getting into a taxi.

"That’s your father,” his mama said. Tyrone looked good and hard. He expected more, maybe an introduction but his mama just stared.

“Longer and harder than me,” he said. “Biting her lip.”

“The fact is my grandfather’s probably dead.”

“You never know, man.”

“He’s my great great grandfather.”

“So you’re looking for a ghost?”

“Yep.”

“That makes it harder.”

Bless his heart he said it as casually as you would put on your shoes to go outside. Jail was good for that. People had nothing better to do than listen, nowhere to go and nothing to burn but time.

“But why you looking for him?”

“He was the last man in my family to go down as far as me.”

“I only wish I could say that,” Tyrone said and he laughed. We all laughed as much as we could in there, it was a veritable laugh fest.

When I caught my breath, I told Tyrone something else. “I used to look at so & so and think he’s worse than me. All of them. Dozens I can think of.”

“And none of 'em done what you have.”

“How did you know?”

“That’s what we call looking in the mirror."

We laughed and all the others joined in because you know laughter’s infectious and the sound of us echoed in the cells long after we were gone to some place else to live, play, love, suffer and die.

Our cells were six feet wide and eight feet long. There were bars just like in the old west that clanged shut. The painted cement walls sweated whether the heat was on or not. Usually it wasn’t. You could see your breath when you talked or breathed and the cold was something you had to get used to. Blankets were something you might find crumpled in the corner and stained that you reached for desperately in the dark.

Tyrone was looking for his family too, as we all were, whether we admitted it or not, the idea that life was going on very well without us is like the weather in jail. We didn’t have windows but the voices of our brothers, children and wives found a way into our cells and sat down beside us, lived in our heads, took forms of life we never knew existed, something like daydreams that have sensory weight like a smell or a fear or something gaseous that you can taste in your saliva when you breathe, that pressures the eardrums and prickles the skin.

Most of all we lived with the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing we could do to effect whatever was going on out there. We could not stop our wives from taking solace in some other dude’s arms, our kids from throwing that rock through the window or soften our father’s shame or mother’s lament. All that was real, it was happening just beyond our grasp but we could not touch it. And that makes a man really angry, whether he gets with it or not.

So you exercise, pushups and sit-ups, running in place, miles from nowhere and you pound things or lash out and find yourself twisted into positions you never knew were possible. Because all of us we only know a tiny fraction of what is possible to withstand.

Just ask Donny J. or any of the others who told their stories.

Donny broadcasted in a laughing voice that fooled no one that night, his voice at once as sharp as a knife and fleeting as the dream just before you awake. He was a low level coke dealer, paranoid enough to bury his stash in the backyard plot behind his tenement building on Pitt Street facing the projects. His wife was eight months pregnant. On his birthday he dug up the coke and his wife cooked his favorite, spaghetti with red clam sauce.

He heard the banging on the door as he was snorting his second line. He did the third and stood up as the door bust open. A cop put a gun to his wife’s head.

“Where the fuck is it?” he demanded.

His wife went into labor. He saw the ambulance coming down the street as the squad car took him away. From the first phone call he learned of the complications, from the second of a collapsed lung, from the third that the motherfucking doctor put the hose in the wrong way, collapsed the other lung and the baby died. Donny didn’t even know the sex, whether in its short life it was Donny Jr. or Elizabeth after his wife’s grandmother.

Shackled, wearing an orange suit, the muscles in his face constricted by shame, he tried to convey how he felt to his wife. It was the last time he had seen her. The last time he would if she knew better. We did, now, anyway.

We knew that everything that happened was our fault. This is what jail taught you, if you were paying attention, or even if you weren’t. Even someone like me who thought it was all happening to make a great book one day, I realized that my sweet young pretty wife had lost her husband, that the stress that caused the outbreak of her epilepsy was no accident. I was the driving wheel. And I had a life too I was missing.

One thing that was true was that I did not get high in there. Others did, but I had no money and nothing to trade. You could bum cigarettes, for awhile, but nothing more. When I got out I was clean. I walked through the brightly colored Chinatown night on a Saturday straight to the Narcotics Anonymous meeting on 2nd Avenue at 2nd St. For the first time it meant something to me. For a little while anyway.

An oldtimer shared about how hard it was for junkies in the old days. How they had to carry identification so if the cops rolled up on them in the street and found two or more together they were arrested.

“This is a meeting of addicts who have found a better way,” he said. That they were really clean was something I could never believe before.

I raised my hand and told them what had happened to me. I got phone numbers, a meal and even the offer of a place to live. I wish I could say that I never used drugs again after that. Well, to be honest, that’s a lie, because I still wanted to get high. And I would because I was too scared to try anything else plus it was still sweet and compelling to me. Like a bad girlfriend.

Download:

"Jail House Blues" mp3
by Lightnin' Hopkins, 1950.
available on Classic Sides: 1946-1951

"Fish In The Jailhouse" mp3
by Tom Waits, 2006.
available on Orphans, Brawlers & Bastards

"30 Days In The Hole" mp3
by Humble Pie, 1972.
available on Smokin'


top photograph: © Ted Barron
Southside Doorway, Brooklyn, New York, 1996.
(click on image to enlarge)

Bent

The thing was that through everything that happened I kept writing and it was the first time in my life that I relinquished everything else. For good or ill I come from the school that believes that writing is neither a choice nor a career, but a solemn and ridiculous vocation. Whenever someone has given me something to read I have always done it as soon as possible and given my honest appraisal. This got me into some trouble in Hollywood but that’s a story for another day.

I was riding east on Houston when for whatever reason I swerved slightly to the left. The oncoming car, a Chrysler Caravan with a low scoop in front, did not see me. The car struck my rear wheel and shot me into the air above the intersection. I might have reached a height of fifteen feet and a distance of twice that before I came down sprawling and scrambling out of the way of the honking oncoming traffic into the gutter, where I belonged.

The East River is half a mile away, the southern tip of Manhattan Island and the great sea beyond less than a mile. Avenue A has always been the border between the real and the unreal, the border between the cool and uncool, the authentic and the decidedly bogus, the exact meeting point of latitude and longitude for every aspiring and neglected weirdo reading a fanzine, Rolling Stone or the Village Voice in some far flung provincial backwater; at least for the generation of artists I have known and lived among.

Now this is crucial. When I lost control of the handlebars, I was struck in the side of the head by their whirling metal, sans grips, and this must have been when the adjustment of my sensory perceptions occurred, when I was in the air. This is what occasioned the release of my mind in the high above. Picture someone in a parachute who is knocked unconscious while in the air by a passing great bird or something falling from the outer atmosphere, except even the parachutist has the purchase of the chute. Except that according to my recollection I never went out of consciousness: it was like another eye opened up, or something.

I would submit as well that height must not matter. I had nothing. My mind was altered and I was up in the air and 0ut of control: this is what I had been looking for my whole career as a stoner. It did not disappoint.

I had been researching my story, going to Times Square to look around, taking notes one night while on acid with the hippie where we started watching the hookers and the lonely men on Thanksgiving. At Jimmy's Corner Bar on 43rd a former prizefighter with the knuckles to prove it had a spread of turkey, stuffing and sweet potatoes to salve the wayward souls of the men who had come there from their families. I had gone to the VA at the other end of Houston and found out about my ancestor August, the last man to be arrested in my family, the last felon, the last abandonist before me. I had found his last known address was somewhere along the Bowery, another on Times Square.

I had descended further into the Alphabet City we once knew and loved, and my book went with me and to my mind, it must have improved it. In the sense that it must have improved Dostoyevsky’s future work for him to stand on the dirt in the middle of the Peter and Paul’s fortress facing a firing squad, as it must have improved Melville’s work to bob in shark-infested waters beside a mammoth bleeding whale, as it must have improved Orwell’s work to wash all those dishes and take out the cigarettes extinguished in congealed cake frosting as I had in my first job. Whether it might have improved Burroughs work to shoot his wife in the head while drunk and then chase and bugger little Arab boys is work for someone with a sensibility monitor more greatly acute than mine but I would hope you get the point.

Thanks to the impact of the blow from the speeding vehicle, I had taken flight, like a bird whose brain is the size of a pea, like a fly whose eyes are bigger than its brain who can see everything but discern nothing. I was like the scrap of paper caught up in the wind. I and all of my aspirations had come to nothing and were part of everything, like the word that the Indians had for America before our great great grandfathers killed them all and put up all the fences.

Imagine the sensibility of Crazy Horse when he finally came into the reservation to be chained to a post like an animal, spit at until so greatly provoked and unleashed he was killed like some rabid dog. What must he have been thinking? That this happened on the same scrap of land where his grandfathers walked, where they had massacred the yellow-haired colonel’s cavalry and left them sprawled and gory on the dirt hills above the Little Bighorn River in the hopes they would all go away and leave them alone, as it had been for thousands of years.

When I was a graduate student at Hunter College I had the occasion to visit the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, the Fifth Avenue branch with the famous lions out front. I signed in and was handed a box which I unwrapped and found within Kerouac’s nickel notebooks from traveling in Mexico. From reading this I learned that voice comes from landscape + subject matter. You tell the story and take notes of physical impressions.

Since then I have written in the same notebooks. You can still get them for less than a dollar. Even bodegas carry them. You can store them in any of your pockets with a pen and whip them out anywhere. What I learned was to start writing down the story and then find places that you can see and write down what they look like. The imagery of physical things will carry whatever sort of lies you can think up.

When I landed, I was attended chiefly by the driver of said van. He came to my aid, helping me across the intersection to where he had parked. He was a blond haired man, maybe 32, with a fudgy build, who looked destined to sell real estate or insurance, a future scoutmaster who had not yet discovered his calling.

In the back of the van I spied a copy of the Narcotics Anonymous basic text and was hit with an undeniable spate of dopefiend inspiration. I realized in the flash of an instant that if I played it right in moments this man would make it possible for me to get high that day.

“Is there anything I can do for you,” he asked. It was like I was pulling a string to his tongue.

“You’re trying to get clean too?” I parleyed, gesturing coolly at the blue-covered book on his back seat. A little abashed, he admitted he was having a hard time getting any time together.

“What’s your pleasure?” I asked, as knowing and world weary as possible.

“Pills,” he said.

“That’s a tough one.”

“Tell me about it,” he nodded and shrugged. It was really cold that day and we could see our breath in front of us as we stood there. He had pulled over upon impact backing into a parking spot a few feet from the front of Katz Deli and Ludlow Street. I was looking in that direction and thinking of what cop spots might be open early. One of my favorites was on Eldridge below Delancey, only moments away.

“There’s a lot of good meetings around here,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ve been hitting them mostly in Jersey. This is a bad neighborhood for me. I envy anyone who can stay clean around here.”

“It ain’t easy,” I nodded.

I was walking a very fine line. The thing was to get the money from him without lying. And the other thing was that I had been going to meetings again.

I could never put more than two days together, but you could get food there, cookies and coffee with the occasional after-meeting dinner paid for by the crowd; and there were kind, pretty women who would listen to your tale of woe, look for your eyes as you looked away and make you feel like when and if you decided to come back and rejoin the human race there might be a welcome place to fall. Honestly, it was all that was keeping my body and soul together.

I looked at my bicycle, dragged out of the gutter with me, he had picked it up and laid it against his car. He looked at it with me, his neck pulled marionette-like by the string I held.

“The thing is the frame is bent and the front wheel too.”

“What’s it going to cost? I can pay for it.”

“Shit I hate to ask you, man.”

“It’s the right thing,” he said and I was nodding. He was already reaching for his wallet.

“Seventy-five, I guess. For the frame and the wheel.”

He counted out the money, three twenties, a ten and a five. At least five bags, a pack of cigarettes and money left over in my pocket. Any good junkie street person slash writer should be able to last a week on that. It might last me a few hours if I was lucky. It was transporting to stand there, to take his money, in all good conscience, dazed as I was, blood on my temple.

I shook his hand.

“Maybe we’ll see each other at a meeting some time.”

“Yeah man, easy does it.”

I watched him get in his car and drive away toward the Holland Tunnel, I thought about locking the mangled bike to a street sign, but I was never going to fix it, so I left it in the gutter and headed over to Delancey Street to see a man about some horse.

Download:

"Bike" mp3
by Pink Floyd, 1967,
available on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

"Trust" mp3
by The Pretty Things, 1968.
available on S.F. Sorrow

"Big Sky" mp3
by The Kinks, 1968.
available on The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society

"The Journey" mp3
by The Small Faces, 1968.
available on Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake

"Flying" mp3
by The Beatles, 1967.
available on Magical Mystery Tour

photograph:
Houston Steet, New York City 1985.
(click on image to enlarge)
© Ted Barron

Hurricane

The intersection of Avenue A and Houston Street is the meeting place of four very distinct and disparate worlds. To the southeast are the river side projects, the bridges and the sea beyond, to the southwest the old Lower East Side, that in the first great wave of American immigration held a population denser than Calcutta, to the northeast Alphabet City where we freaks ruled and no law but survival was respected; and to the northwest lay what we thought of as the rest of NYC and the world.

Once on my bicycle I was hit by a speeding car in the middle of the intersection and from the force of the blow, I was separated from the bicycle and took flight over the intersection.

In the resulting concussion, time split open and exploded like a pod burst open with seeds and the seeds were my memories and impressions, I saw my whole life and the lives of everyone that who had made me who I am in fine relief in front of my eyes, not as if I were going to die, but as if I were going to live. I saw the past, present and future in all their dimensions all at once.

I held the trapdoor single shot rifle with bayonet that my first American ancestor had used to gut three separate Indians on a single day in the frontier Montana territory that was not yet part of the United States, but that was always America, the name the Cheyenne Indian Chief American Horse had given to himself, his horse and the land. Were not they all one thing? Before the bastards came to take it away.

My great grandfather was not strictly a bastard in that sense. My great grandfather was named George like my dad and his dad before him. George the 1st wasn’t really an orphan, or a bastard. He was a fatherless child. He knew his father as a spectre, as a drunken voice, smelling of liquor and cursing. Having a hard time keeping a job. Quick to say things like:

"Why don’t you just go on to hell?"

He had seen things and done things out in the Indian country again, with the Crow, the Sioux, the Cheyenne that when he came home and had three kids and a family he could not hold it all at once. His family was a rain storm that grew to a hurricane when he tried to love it.

The first George knew August, his father, better than the other kids because he was five or maybe six when August, his father left for good. I can imagine what my great grandfather knew of his father because I was about that age when George the 1st passed on, in 1968. George the 1st for fifty years served as caretaker for a historic mansion in New Jersey that at different times during the revolutionary years was held by English gentry, Scottish renegades and finally the nascent Jersey government. Maybe because he was fatherless my great grandfather kept a tight house.

He required lunch at noon every day, with freshly baked bread and the classical music station on the radio. He raised prize chickens and he grew roses in the garden of the Buccleuch Mansion. The roses are still there many years later, though the mansion is mostly forgotten, open seasonally for a couple hours on Sundays.

It is still on the historic register and maintained by the city of New Brunswick, overlooking the mighty Raritan River, behind the grounds of the old part of Rutgers University campus, where my uncle was the first of us to go to college in my family. Uncle Dave put himself through Rutgers and joined the Navy afterward. He had his own father to escape.

Forgive me these digressions. The roses will last forever and go wild. What else remains is a sundial, maybe from the old Englishmen, or from some of the renegade Scottish Enniskillen Dragoons.

The funny thing is that August, when he was drunk and didn’t want to go home, when the great house was without a keeper, would join other vagabonds who slept on the grounds. He slept in the 200 year old rose garden, under the elm trees overlooking the riverside, in the dale by the creek, but never inside, as others did. His son was hired to keep drunks like his own father out.

“There’s a lesson you can learn about America in that," my grandmother told us, when we were kids. She wanted to help us to get along as men in the country where we lived, as George the 1st had when he showed us how to fold the American flag. He was patriotic in a way that I suspect his father, the war veteran, never was. He never left home in the way that his father could never stay.

August became an American citizen by enlisting in the army. My older brother Dave, carrying on the tradition, is an American Colonel, veteran of two desert wars. A commander in the town where Hussein was unearthed from his spider hole, he survived three different IED attacks. He doesn’t have to go back anymore because his back is wrecked, though you wouldn’t know it from seeing him walk. That’s how we are.

We are also incapable of controlling our feelings which is something of why I believe my great grandfather took counsel in things that required discipline. Like the chickens, like the Christian Scientist faith he adopted, and like the sundial he consulted faithfully. It was a steel slab of raw metal molded in the shape of the sun, facing north, and set on a stand that caught the light of the sun and cast a shadow that told the time perfectly every single day. It still does, it will as long as it stands.

My great grandfather showed this to me, my older brother and our younger brother Steve, who was barely three and will be forgiven for not remembering. My curse and my joy is to remember everything.

I describe the sundial because for me it somehow evokes what I saw of the world from above the intersection that day. There is a point everyday when the sun hits the dial just right and there is no shadow. Time becomes vertical, the past, present and future are cast up in the sky.

It was barely after dawn on a weekday. On a cold cold day. In a few moments I would come to my senses and dopefiend the driver of the car out of money. A matter of hours after that I would be arrested in the same firm where I had worked with distinction in the past. I was arrested for trespassing, for breaking and entering, though I had walked into an unlocked office as my great great grandfather had walked onto the grounds of the Buccleuch Mansion. His only crime was vagabondage. I would be dragged bodily from the building, still quite out of my head from the morning’s blow and held for a photograph, flash, as was my great grandfather on his wedding day. It is the only one that exists of him.

He had a glint in his gray eyes, our family hair line and forehead, a strong chin and a corduroy suit. I would spend the night in a holding cell like where drunks are thrown to sleep it off, taken downtown in a police cruiser where virtually twenty four hours later I passed through the same intersection where the wreck had occurred.

"You won’t believe this?” I said to the officer not driving. “But I’ve been here before.” He looked nicer than the other one.

“Sure you have.”

“No, yesterday. That’s what started all this.”

“What started all this, maybe you better check out, is that you’re a goddamn dopefiend.”

“Look, you can still see the mark on my forehead.”

I ended up in the tombs and got sentenced to thirty days, and when I finally got to my cell I thought of August and what it must have felt like to touch the tawny backs of his kids’ necks and think of dead Indians. Believe it or not, it’s the truth, and it's the vortex eye center of the story before you, friend.

Download:

"Expecting To Fly" mp3
by Buffalo Springfield, 1967.
available on Buffalo Springfield Again

"Broken Arrow" mp3
by Buffalo Springfield, 1967.
available on Buffalo Springfield Again

"Like A Hurricane" mp3
by Neil Young, 1977.
available on American Stars 'N Bars

photograph: © Ted Barron
White Bicycle, New York City, 1985.
click on image to enlarge

Sucking Icicles

Have you ever ridden the J train and looked out the window late on one of those cold winter nights when everything is shades of black and the stars are out with the whole city outlined by the faint reflection of your own face; everything is frozen, the river has stopped and you can see the lightest sheen of ice on its surface and above the dark water reflected in it the city sits like a great crystal palace? You can see the Brooklyn Bridge and the ice hangs off its cables like the ice that hung from old Walt Whitman’s beard when he crossed the river on the ferry for they say the old man of American letters always had a passion for crossing rivers even when ice floes floated by the barges and his words hung in the air before his face from their heat.

The spire of the Empire State building is an icicle, the Chrysler building a silver skater’s giant blade in the north sky and for just a moment you know that you were put on this earth just to see this and nothing more and it is enough. You don’t have to save the world and the wind howls your mother’s name and the story of the children, three of them that you will be the parent of one day and you will be able to sit on a porch with all of them on your lap and it will be summer and the breeze will cool your brow and the woman you love will come to you with water and wet your lips with her kiss.

The next morning I awoke in Williamsburg with my bicycle walking past a bodega with the door open and all the windows fogged the radio is playing the news and the announced temperature is officially ten degrees. No money for the train and without the heart to hoist the bicycle over the turnstile I decide to walk back over the bridge. The slush from the day before has frozen with everyone’s footsteps cratered in the ice, hard shoe prints, even one boot frozen lost in the slush you can hear the suction sound it made and the drunken laughing of the mad cold footed sojourner who gave up the shoe for lost and left it to freeze as you realize helplessly why would anyone do this.

It was impossible to ride the bicycle over this odd once in a lifetime terrain. The crossing took an hour. The wind is never harder than on a high suspension bridge over a North American sea bound river. My hair froze from sweating and tiny icicles grew in my nose, but the view down the gray river was superb all the way to Queens.

At nine a.m. in the bustling crowd of Delancey Street, I walked by a young Jewish man with beard, yarmulke, and ear curls holding a bank deposit bag. My eyes welded to the bag with heat that could melt metal. The man saw me looking at him and furtively he tugged it up under his shoulder. With all my life’s heart and ambition I wished to grab that bag from him and run through the crowd as he chased me among the multitudes knocking over a fruit cart in my imagination like my indigent immigrant Scottish grandfather Hamilton might have except he would never have done anything like that and that’s where something happened that I am trying to describe here.

“But you couldn’t, could you?”

“No.”

“That’s good, man.”

I was standing at the cop spot talking to some guy I used to see there. He never got more than a chippie. He never had enough money to get anything more. His name was Brackett and his ambition was to be an actor. He put on plays with the New Theatre that no one understood and said that was the point. He was good looking with long brown hair and a beautiful girlfriend, he could have had Hollywood but he would rather put on plays in parking lots under the bridges. He told me they were doing one later.

“When it gets dark.”

“Under the bridge?”

I told him about the frozen crossing and he laughed out loud. He had just done a bag as I was walking up and he had no money either. I told him about how I felt about the man and his money. I was suspended between right and wrong. I had left who I was and I didn’t know what I was going to become.

"I don't know when I might make it over there y'see." I was sweating and I was scared, pale, even for the cold. He could see that and wanted to help.

He lit a cigarette. His eyes were pinned and I wanted them. I wanted to take his eyes from his skull and put them in mine if with them I could see the frozen solid world that the dope had given him.

“Suspended is a good word.”

“But it's abstract, I still think you need a metaphor you need something physical you can see, touch and feel and maybe a really evocative image.”

That’s when I thought of the bridge and told him about the view from the window. But he had not been there.

“You couldn’t have opened it anyway.”

“You think?”

“I know. Those bags are impossible to open without a key, man. Try to come to the performance,” he said and he gave me a cigarette, walking off. He had seen the way I was looking at his eyes and I think that spooked him, but I could be wrong about that. I could be wrong about anything.

“At least you’re not a criminal,” he said. “That’s a good thing.”

If he only knew what I wanted to do with his eyes, I thought and I leaned back against a brick wall. It was painted with a colorful mural, greens, blues, reds and yellows of springtime in Los Dominica and you could have seen me standing there if you walked by with the smoke from my cigarette frozen in time and space. It partly obscured my face in one frame of the photograph you didn’t take of me that day. If you had I would have it to show my children on the porch that golden day.

It’s that corner of Houston and Avenue B where they used to have works for sale.

“Clean works,” the barker called, as if when his mother patted her belly with that special gleam in her eye on the el train from Brooklyn riding to her ball bearing factory job when they still had such things on the great isle of the Manhattoes tribe that sold it to the likes of Herman Melville’s father-in-law, Gansevoort’s the name, as if this is what the barker’s mother dreamed he was born to do.

I stood there smoking like a faint fire flashing on the two or three other times I had crossed on to the frozen bridge that divides right and wrong. I had found a bank statement in our mailbox once addressed to a man named John Jonah Hechtmann. When I opened it there was a balance of some hundred dollars. I went to the Citibank south of Bleecker past the great statue of LaGuardia intent on committing fraud.

Another time in the same mailbox I found a check for one of my colleagues in my mailbox. Often I went to the check cashing storefront around the block and the proprietor had stopped asking me for identification. I realized all I had to do was sign the check. I became a petty larcenist and passed bad checks in my ex-wife’s name.

I was unable to take the bank bag from the son of the shop owner. My sense of right and wrong was suspended somewhere above the river. The bridge was frozen over. It is possible to ride back and forth on the trains all night with one single token even without if you jump and never get anywhere. On the other side of the bridge awaited the vision of the sunny porch and the three children, it would be a long time before I got to the other side.

Brackett’s play that night was underneath the Manhattan Bridge on Catherine Street. It was freezing and you could hear the wind howling as it whipped off the East River and swooped down that narrow lane under the great steel and concrete columns. Someone had built a bonfire and you could see it reflected in Brackett’s eyes as he danced and chanted. People stood in the middle of the street, reciting lines of Shakespeare. A pretty woman in a corner sang an aria from La Boheme. Construction workers in yellow hardhats walked on and off the street stage carrying ladders and shaking their heads. The vulgar pigeons watched from a girder. For a moment it was almost possible for me to believe that it was my life and I was there.

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photograph:
Williamsburg Bridge, Brooklyn, New York, 1997.
© Ted Barron

Late for School

It wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. The weird feeling you had being in there at night. The children’s art would be on the walls. Someone would have left a coat on their desk or some note sticking out of a math book. It always seemed like they had left in a rush, but then you remember how it was like when we were there, watching the clock, those last long fifteen minutes. Once you got used to it, the sadness of unrealized potential that hung over the experience like the smoke bomb you and Bobby Parillo had let loose after sixth period that day, it was fine. And it was warm in there on cold, cold nights. There was the PS on 6th Street near B, one on 10th and another on 3rd I think, I hit them all. You jumped over the fence or squeezed through the gate. There was always a window open somewhere.

I got a lot of work done too. The streetlight through the windows cast onto one of the little desks. Find a half-chewed pencil in the little groove at the front of the desk, some of that elementary paper with the really big lines they learn to first write on. I started to look forward to it and to write well into the early morning. You had to be careful when you crashed and that's what got me into trouble.

But let me talk about something else first. It was there, where I didn’t belong anywhere that I started to see that the writing could save my life. And that it could kill me too if I didn’t find a way to do it.

Sometimes you just did it to be ready when the story comes. That night I remember writing about cop spots. They always seemed like such an ad-hoc phenomenon to me. Here one day and thriving and busted and gone the next. Like life.

It was really dark in the little coat area. Grab a couple left there for a pillow, pull back the metal/plastic screen they used to have. You remember the type. I was fast asleep when I started hearing the voices of children. It went on for a few minutes. I was really out of it, had a good head on and crashed. I was half-awake and nodding for a long time. Then I heard the teacher’s voice and a few seconds later a little girl opened the screen to put her coat away.

I will never forget her face. The way her mouth opened and her little jaw began to tremble. It was the most frightening thing I have ever seen in my life, the way her eyes looked at mine, then at me. When she finally found her voice, what could I do? I jumped out and ran past her. I tried not to look at the kids, filing the classroom in the bright morning light, the sound their voices made, the excited horror and mockery of the boys, the caterwauling thrilled shame of the girls, the disgusted teacher. I bolted down the hallway and I would have made it but for a big moose of a security guard who tackled me and the gym teacher who blocked my way.

“Where do you think you’re going?” He was a real prick and I should have punched him, but I never have, punched anyone that is. He could sense that and the moose was there, so he acted tough.

“What do you want to do with him?” The moose had my arm, half-twisted behind my back. If I moved he would break it. At least that was the message of the look on his fat face.

“Oh we better call the police,” the teacher said. He had sideburns, a comb-over and trimmed his mustache below his nose. Snidely, you wanted to call him. What hair he had was slicked back with so much Vitalis you could smell it.

“You know that stuff’s flammable,” I said to him.

He just looked at me, like he had no words. I was the cucharacha he had cornered. I wasn’t worth messing up his shoe with. I never did well with guys like him, something about the disdain I projected for their manhood. They led me to the cafeteria and were kind enough to give me one of those little cartons of milk to suck on. Chocolate.

Only one cop showed, which was strange. He had a car. He looked like my cousin Joe. He made me feel a whole lot worse than even the teacher. Because he was like me, we could have been family. The teacher explained the whole thing to him, all indignant. You could see the cop had better things to do. He would rather forget the whole thing. But he couldn’t. Snidely would not let him.

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” the cop said.

He led me to the squad car. All the kids had come to the windows of the classrooms and they pressed their noses on the glass and you could see the fog their breath made. Me in handcuffs, the cop let me walk on my own and just opened the back door and went to the front. I could have run off and it was hell closing the door with cuffs on. The cop was on the radio and I thought he was calling me in, but he was talking about the Giants. It was one of LT’s last good years.

“Ahh he’s as high as the rest of us,” I heard the cop say, talking about the great linebacker.

“You like the Giants?” I asked. There’s a certain thing in a criminal that wants to engage the cops in conversation, like they can let you back a little into the civilization you just pissed on.

He turned and looked at me, really for the first time. He was more of an offensive lineman himself, with the dyed blond of lifter. His voice was soft and what was strange was the tone, like he was asking me for something.

“Look,” he said. “I got a few places to go and things to do. You just sit tight.”

“It’s a little early for me,” I said, feeling him out. What I meant was that I had some dope on me, but had not had the chance to get straight yet.

“You do what you got to do.” He knew what I meant.

“What about the cuffs?” I asked.

He laughed. His eyes were slits of glass, like he was one of those lock down cells where the only light comes through the sliver in the metal door.

“Are you under arrest or not?” His body shook with laughter as he pulled the car to a stop on third. It was an unmarked brown. Everyone in the neighborhood from old ladies to us on the street knew what they were though. His whole body convulsed at the end of the laugh and he put the car in gear to stop it. I slipped down into the seat, trying to get the dope out of my back pocket. Use your imagination, friend. I worked it out eventually, but it wasn’t easy. A dope fiend could pick up a car, if there was dope under one of the tires.

He came back breathing hard, with a handful of money and threw his weapon on the front seat. A single bead of sweat ran down the very center of his forehead. He got back on the radio and picked up the conversation where he had left it. That was the bodega on 3rd Street. I had scored coke there. He laughed and tossed something in the air like a philosopher might toss a coin.

“You want this?”

It was a bundle of dope. Ten waxed envelopes in a rubber band. As big as a walnut maybe, worth at least a hundred dollars on the street. I had never had one of my own before. I had always dibbed and dabbed.

“Sure,” I said, like my three year old son does these days when I offer him a lolly pop.

“Open your mouth,” the cop squinted, leering just a little like you might slightly open up a door, to look into a dark room, like say if you were a cop and you were getting ready to toss someone and you knew they were asleep in bed and you just wanted to make sure it was cool before you popped the light and got them.

I grinned then opened my mouth. He made a fist and I flinched, choking at just the thought. He laughed again convulsing, grabbed my hair and stuck it in my left ear, where it stayed for the next three hours as we drove on.

But before that something happened that was worse than everything else, except maybe the little girl. He said something under his breath.

“Pusher,” he said. No one said that anymore. It was an expression from our childhood.

“What was that?” I asked. I should have kept quiet but it was almost involuntary.

“Fucking pusher,” he said. It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about me, himself or neither of us but the way the words escaped from his mouth, that’s what it was, chilled my blood, made my skin feel like ice all over. It was like I could see inside the cell he showed to the world and in there was a little three year old boy who had broke down and asked his mother what had happened to his big brother and that’s what she must have said, back when people used that word. Like it had something to do with how and where I was found and what that word meant to all of us when we were schoolkids. The feeling that filled the car was as real as the smell of paint. And it got all over me. I’ll never wash it off.

We made a few more stops, once at a bar where he stayed inside for forty-five minutes and came out smelling of beer and wiping off his nose.

We ended up downtown at One Police Plaza, after a few stops in Chinatown. He let me finish his lunch, eating off the seat from the Styrofoam container.

“The sniff dogs got better manners than you,” he said.

But it was almost like he had forgotten about me.

“It’s just I’ve never been straight downtown?”

He ignored my question and parked. There was another cop, a beefy guy with a brush mustache who came to the window. My cop gave him a handful of money. He pulled a thumb at me, but the other only glanced back. He did see the bundle in my ear and that caused him pause, but he was a cop and he had other things to worry about. All I could think about was what was going to happen and if I would be able to pull it out myself.

Brush mustache looked at my ear again, but he got this disgusted look on his face. Either he didn’t want to touch me or the ridiculous opera we all had our parts in was playing in his head and it was too much. He just sighed, lit a cigarette and gave me one when he saw the way I looked at his. Together they took me to a cell, taking off the cuffs before they pushed me in.

“What do I do with this?”

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” my cop said. He shrugged his shoulders like he had a big weight on them, a piano, and I was one thin wire 0f it, even less.

“You do what you go to do,” he said. “I got a plane to catch.”

I got to do the dope, which was all that mattered to me. I just wished I could have enjoyed it more.


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Photograph: Norfolk Street, New York City 1985.
© Ted Barron (click on image to enlarge)

The Benches

On cold nights we burned the slats from the benches in the median park on Allen St. Only Cisco didn’t approve.

Maybe you know that 1st Avenue below Houston St. becomes Allen St, that Allen was designed as a settlement, and that the tenements were built just after the turn of the century with their backs to the wide avenue. They had backyards and even balconies. In the middle of the boulevard, a park stretches all the way into Chinatown near the Manhattan Bridge and the south end of the East River, once the home of tall shade trees and gardens and grass.

I believe in Cisco. In our day the trees were gone and on cold nights the likes of us would gather around a trash can fire to keep warm. I carried my notebook and in my mind I was interviewing them and/or taking notes for some great documentarian novel I would one day write.

Cisco knew more about Allen St. than he was saying, something about his eyes told on him, some flashing warmth when he spoke, like someone’s face when they stand around a fire burning in a trash can and you can see the red orange glow reflected off their skin and in their eyes.

It was the usual faces. Cisco was the only one that cared. We were all passing through.

You don’t ask for names. Everyone acquires a nickname eventually and often they are certain universal ones, based on things like place of origin or buzz preference.

As always Cisco is master of ceremonies. When they call him the mayor, they are making fun of him, but he takes it as his due and nods benevolently from his wheelchair, a long black dude with a soft southern drawl and a caring manner.

I never asked him if that’s what happened to him to put him in the wheelchair. Whenever I had money, I would give him a couple dollars but never more and I never got high in front of him. They took care of rookies like me. We were the sons they never had. Cleveland was around and, Sonny of course, and Cool Breeze. Cleveland, a Puerto Rican Methodonian, liked to brag about how tough he was but he had swelled up on pills and now could hardly hold down any wine. Sonny was the last who would understand him.

Chickie had led a stickup crew in his youth but now was so strung out on coke that he could never stand still or finish a sentence. He took shots in a port-o-potty around the corner and then tried to sell time, but if they pushed past him what could he say, skinny as a rail. He also sold clean works, though no one believed that since he looked like as good a candidate as any to have the virus.

Cleveland and Sonny made fun and drank the wine from discarded paper cups, Cool Breeze’s namesake, peach flavored fortified wine for a dollar fifty one and tax. Whoever got the bottle shared.

They called me Scribe because when I stood with them, I wrote down what they told me. It never went any further, but they liked to believe it would someday and I liked them to believe it too. It gave us a little more going on then a bunch of nowhere men standing around a trash barrel. We were living for that single day, you worry about tomorrow when it comes.

You cannot live forever like that or it becomes your life and then you die out there, on a bench on a city street, in the cold. The wisdom of Cisco.

I had to punch a ticket and make a move or my ticket would be punched for me. If you dance too long with the dark lady, she just going to dance you right out the door. This is another thing that Cisco said, and again I tended to believe him. The funny things was that I did believe always that I was going to take all this somewhere. I had come from the school that said you had to suffer to write, born in the suburbs to a father and mother who never had it better. Neither gone to college, my cousins either, but my father expected more from us. I never asked him what he thought when I pissed on it like I did, quit school in North Carolina to come to New York. One day he came into my room with a clipping from the local newspaper, an ad for a writer’s workshop. We both could have cried, if we were capable of such emotion.

I eloped to the city with my first wife Julie. She had finished college and had a career waiting for her in design. I had a two bit dream, a fifty cent notebook and a borrowed pen. I worked in a bookstore, then went back to college, hustled my way into two degrees in two and a half years at the City University, a game to me, I told them what they wanted to hear and walked out with a master’s degree. My real college was the East Village and the trouble I found east of Bowery. It was the only thing I ever finished to the bitter end.

If you will then, this is less a story than a painting in words. Of a certain cold winter night in December in New York City, the winter when we started burning the benches in the park on Allen.

Everyone walking by us has dates and jobs and ambitions, college degrees, parties to go to and concerts to see. They have stories, and they fill their lives with interesting things.

There is so much more you can do than stand around a trash can keeping warm over a fire. We knew that as well as anyone else did. But we did not stand around talking about it. Cisco drank five fifths of wine a day. When I first interviewed him, he told me so.

He complained about what was happening to the benches. “It’s a damn shame,” he said.

“You don’t need a bench,” I said and instantly regretted it.

“That ain’t the point now is it? Tsk, tsk,” breathed Cisco, watching Cleveland and Chickie working with a crowbar they had gotten somewhere. You never know what’s going to turn up in a place like that. Nothing lasts. That’s the rule. Everything could be and would be sold, for wine or for dope. What’s your pleasure? Cisco didn’t like seeing me around anymore. You could hear the edge in his voice.

“You’re a smart kid. I know you been to college.”

He lectured me on all the fine points. One or two of them would take shifts panhandling the after work crowd for quarters and change. Whoever got enough first would go to the liquor store, right across Houston next to the appliance dealer, the kind of place that had a cage around the counter. Old Augie took your money, wore a porkpie hat and chewed on a pencil. His son-in-law ran the hardware store two doors down and in the day time he complained about him.

“Shiftless sonofabitch,” he called him.

But in a fond way. Everyone who came in tried to short Augie and ask for ever so slight discounts but he had a strict policy. Everything had a price from rotgut whiskey to Mogen David wine. He didn’t sell any of the good stuff. He went as high as the Chivas Regal and no further. And he brooked no shorts at all.

“There’s a million guys out there just as thirsty as you,” he told me. “You go and find one and make a deal with him. Pool your resources, kid.”

I never asked him again. I was with Cisco and he twisted my arm and ponied up the fifteen cents I was trying to short Augie.

“Look kid,” he said sternly when we stepped outside. “You got to give that man his due. Let him show he’s softhearted. He’s all we got out here.”

I looked at Cisco. I had never seen him stray more than a few blocks from that skinny island of park on Allen. Augie must be one of the very few contacts he had with the beyond world. I asked him a lot of questions and he told me a lot of things. There were certain places you didn’t go when you were sitting on the benches. He told me that you could always sleep out by the river in East River Park. “That’s they only place the cops won’t bother you.”

He went on to say that it was too dangerous a place to sleep.

“They will kick your ass just for the hell of it and take your shoes and throw them in the river.”

He told me to stay away from the bridges too. “Some badasses out there.”

He recommended the benches.

“The cops are not going to bring you in just for sleeping. They might roust you and then you just go find another place. Don’t carry no money though or someone’s going to want to fight you for it.”

Whatever he got he spent on wine. I never saw him eat a thing. His lips were yellow, his skin chalky and all his fingers were chapped. We never spoke about what had happened to get him out here. What I gathered from the stories he told around, his mother had worked the streets around here. His grandmother had an apartment. He was drafted and served two tours in the army before one of his legs was blown half off. He could stay in the VA up on 23rd, but what was that? You imagine he had a habit when he went in the army and when he got out. Anything that he had to do with love or family was behind that. His grandma died and his mother lost the apartment. He never said that she died, but you could see by the way the sentences trailed off that she must of, and it had not been pretty.

“I’m going away,” I told him that night.

He looked at me. “You have a Happy New Year, kid. And don’t forget old Cisco,” he said. “You’ll have a Hollywood movie, a wife and three children.”

We gave each other the last of what was in our cups and each tossed it over the fire, which flamed blue. He had the two dollars I had given him and the liquor store lights were beckoning.

“Augie’ll be closing in a little while.”

“Don’t you worry about me.” His eyes had gone a little moist, so he turned his chair and wheeled off into the street. A horn sounded but I turned the other way. There was nothing I was going to do for him. I had told him I was going, my word was all I had left.

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Photograph: Allen Street, New York City, 1987.
© Ted Barron ( click on image to enlarge)

The Gas Station at the End of the World

The Gas Station on Ave B at 2nd St was a very avant garde art space had a yard with one of those junk metal constructions and the whiff of immortality when old nabe artists spoke the name. I remember it for having the very worst bathroom I have ever entered.

The plumbing was broken. There was no water or even moisture at all. Somehow the atmosphere sucked everything wet out of the years of caked piss and excrement on the walls. An ancient six by eight space, wide enough to stand or sit and little else, a cracked ceramic bowl and sink under the blackened window, the air in there had not stirred in a generation; it simultaneously peeled the skin off your flesh and suffocated you as you stood there for a paralyzed moment wondering if you should piss or get out as fast as possible.

There is a time in any Loisaida’s experience where such a place stops being a cool and trenchant metaphor, an art statement, for what we humans have done to the earth and becomes a nasty place you have chosen to stand in. Then the metaphor flips in mid-air like a trapeze act and becomes a trope for your life.

This is how it happened for me anyway.

I had begun that day dodging baseball bats and was ending it re-living a seminal episode from my early manhood.

In the Jewish faith, a boy is given a Bar Mitzvah at 13, boys in the Sioux tribe are sent on a vision quest into the wild mountain dunes where Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse are buried to find their own inner strength.

I was sent to the North Carolina State Fair on my 12th birthday with some neighbors from school, a pack of cigarettes we had stolen from my father’s pantry carton and 16 dollars in birthday money. I rode the rides, bought a lot of junk food and smoked with my friend Scott Lackey who had requested the cigarettes, behind the public bathrooms. His mother gave us a ride.

We looked at all the pretty girls and Richard Petty’s Dodge, but what fascinated me the most were the freak shows. I went to both of them twice, even though they cost seventy-five cents a piece. While my friends rode the bumper cars again, I sought out the weird. In the animal one the thing I remember is a live cow that had two heads. One of the heads ran snot from the nose continually and the other head lapped it up with its tongue. It was an awful sight and it was hard for me to take my eyes off of it.

The main attraction at the human freak show, for me at any rate, was Otis the Frog Boy. This was a black man just starting to gray around the ears who had been born with polio. He was introduced by a midget, waddled to the front of the stage and proceeded to roll a cigarette with his tongue and lips. His hands were useless. They hung like lamb chops in front of his chest. Then he pulled a match from his breast pocket with his teeth and lit the cigarette. He held it in his teeth and rubbed his coat zipper.

He sold tiny plastic dimes, each hermetically sealed (like dope) in wax paper. You didn’t know whether to cry at each of these acts, but you did not laugh. No one did. The occasion that brought me to the Gas Station that night years later was a benefit for a sideshow on Coney Island. This was before they went commercial and employed regular people who did freakish things, a whole different trip.

Otis was past sixty at this point and he was not called freak or a boy, but instead billed as The Human Cigarette Factory.

I was in the bathroom. There had been the usual run of East Village performers. A number of us had read. A young woman had stripped beyond her underwear and extracted some curio from her anus. A young man in blindfold had played pin the tail on his sister.

When Otis was introduced, I hurried outside, my eyes pinned and there he was big as life.

That morning I had awakened on a bench locked into the schoolyard on 3rd Street between 1st and Ave A. When the school janitor unlocked the yard at dawn and the first few cute youngsters trickled into the freezing yard, I was freed back into my life. This was a scary moment because the janitor had pushed me off the bench and the kids as they walked into the warm school had laughed at me, brushing myself off and yelling absurdly at the poor man with the keys.

“You cannot stay here,” he yelled back at me.

Checking my pockets I found a grand total of thirteen dollars left over from the night before. I went to a storefront toward B, bought a dime of bad coke then to the liquor store for a quart of cheap wine.

An hour later I emerged from the subway high as a bluejay. I had a few ways of still getting dope at that point, but it would be hard to get away without being arrested. I could rob another dealer, but I had been chased away from two spots in the last week, one by a man with a sawed-off baseball bat who spit at me. I still had a few checks left and this was what I decided on.

At a bodega opposite Tompkins Square Park, the man behind the counter waving his hand.

“Go away,” he shouted. “Get out of here.” He pointed at me and came out from behind his counter. “You,” he pointed, shouting. “You.” It was as embarrassing as it was demoralizing.

The next one was the charm. I was able to walk away with 25 dollars in cash. I bought a pack of smokes and two bags of heroin.

“This is the last time,” the teller said to me.
I nodded. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “You’ll get your money.” He had a white comb-over and thick glasses. He reminded me of my Uncle Joe.
“Don’t come back here again,” he said.

On my way from the cop-man I came across a fellow on his face in the gutter, twitching. He had swallowed his tongue. It was on Delancey Street, right outside the old OTB, a particularly seedy spot. I kneeled over him and pulled his tongue mouth from his throat. He was gagging on it. I held his tongue until he started breathing again. A small crowd had gathered and when after a few minutes I got to my feet, I told the man next to me.

“Call an ambulance.”

An hour later I had read before the small crowd at the Gas Station. The stage was a square plywood box painted black. We were in what had once been the office. A wall had been knocked out and the audience stood in the garage.

The rest of us got small spatters of applause and Otis got little more. Except for me. I clapped for him and whooped like my life depended on it. When I had seen him he was part of a traveling act. Must have been carnys and state fairs all over the country, groaning Greyhounds. Maybe the promoter drove his freaks around in a Rambler station wagon.

He had been taken off the road and been given a gig on Coney Island. It was a step up for him surely. He would not have to travel anymore.

After his act I watched as the promoter wheeled him from the stage. What could you say to him? What could anyone?

I could not think of the first thing. So I lit a cigarette and started to walk away.

My old friend Ringo Heretic appeared. Maybe he was the organizer. I had stopped paying attention.

He looked at me like I was stopping traffic.
You could see he wanted to ask if I was alright. Instead he said, “What are you doing for Christmas?”

I acted like I didn’t hear him. It was the easiest thing.

A few days later I borrowed a bicycle and rode over the Verrazano Bridge to New Jersey. This turned out to be quite perilous as there is no bike lane. My front tire slipped through these giant metal teeth that hold the span together. My knee struck the raw metal with such force I thought it was broken, but with holiday traffic whizzing by at high speeds I had no time for triage.

I made it to Grandma’s after everyone else was gone.

“I still have everything warming on the stove,” she said as if she had been counting on my arrival.

We sat and talked. I told her everything. She told me about the time a man in a sports car had exposed himself to her and her friends. It was on Doris Duke’s estate.

“She was the richest teenager in New Jersey,” Grandma told me. And she told me of a great grandfather I had never heard of before. August had gone out west to kill Indians to become an American. He came home, married, had three kids then walked off. Grandma met him only once.

“He ate his peas with a knife and was missing the little finger on his left hand.”

“What happened to him?”

“That’s a good question,” she sighed. We talked until late and she asked me to spend the night, but she understood when I said I had to go. And she knew better than to ask why or where I was going. As my cousin Bill once said, it was honor among thieves.

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photo: Delancey Street, New York City, 1987. © Ted Barron

Freeman Alley

I was awakened before dawn when a squad of SWAT cops in vests stepped into the alley to talk over their day. One of them saw me and gave the courtesy of a thumb signal to vacate the premises. I brushed myself off and complied, walking across Roosevelt Park to a row of tenements slated for destruction.

Some of them were inhabited, some not. I went around back and looked for an open window. The first building was all locked up. I scaled a homemade fence made entirely of plastic bread palates. The first floor storm door was wide open and I walked in. It got real dark real fast. I felt along the hallway before I came to a door that gave. When I pushed it open, there was a guy I knew standing there.

“Voila,” he said.

He gave me the quiet sign and motioned to a couch in the corner. A skinny guy that I knew from basketball in Tompkins Square, and as a dealer over on Ludlow Street. This came to me as I was standing against the wall, still half in the nod-world. My day was beginning before I had planned with less than 20 dollars to face it with. There was a pack of cigarettes on an old side table with an opened bottle of red wine. I lit a smoke and took a pull from the bottle. An adjacent door opened and the room filled with other young men of the Spanish persuasion.

My man Flaco sat down and palmed me two bags, smiling. I kept my money in my pocket. As he watched benevolently I took the pack of Newports from the table as if it were mine all along. I offered him one and slipped the pack into my shirt pocket. Someone came out of a small bathroom and I took his place. I pissed, snorted half a one of the bags then retook my place on the ratty, overstuffed couch.

Flocko pointed me out to his friends with a smile.

“You want a job?” one of them asked. He passed the wine around. We lit cigarettes. By now there were nearly twenty other guys in the small room. I bided my time, careful not to make the wrong move.

A railroad apartment, a head would appear and each man in turn was motioned into the next room. Each of them disappeared for a few moments then came back out and left. Flocko watched me watching them and raised his eyebrows. He patted his pants pocket and winked.

I raised my own eyebrows.

He winked again, smiling. You couldn’t tell if he was laughing with or at me. Reality had already been outstripped by something stronger and more intoxicating.

A faint knocking sound could be heard. One man went into the hallway. Another shut the door. Suddenly the door burst back open and hurled him into the wall, where he slumped to the floor. I was just starting to nod. I remember noticing that the ash on my latest cigarette was at least an inch long, a clear sign of a pretty good high. I blinked and looked around.

I came to with the room full of SWAT vests and drawn weapons. The exit was blocked. In the next room police were shaking down dealers. There was a table full of dope and beyond it an open window, but no way I could get to both, so I ran for the window, climbing through with a quick hop and dashing up the fire escape. They were the same cops as the alley, I was sure of it.

Crazy.

No one followed after me. After a few moments of breathing hard two floors above, I climbed to the roof and lit a cigarette. The sun had just come out and you could see the river in shades of beautiful silver yellow and blue-green, like the side of a big rainbow trout.

But, I was still feeling stetchy. What if the cops came up the stairwell to look around? I could jump to another building rooftop like you see in all the movies. But when I looked, the gap was almost seven feet by and we were six stories up, a little too far for me. I looked down to the street and saw that there were two police vehicles in front of the building, a truck and a squad car.

But neither had their lights on.

It was a double building with wings of apartments on each side. I mounted the opposite fire escape and began to climb down. The first window I came to was locked. A rose-haired woman in a bathrobe sat over a cup of coffee with a newspaper. Fresh lipstick on her cigarette. You could smell it through the window. She had bacon in a pan on the stove. She turned, saw me and waved, scowling, like I was a nuisance pigeon. Maybe I was.

What I really wanted was a vacated apartment. I could chill for a couple hours then walk right out in a few hours if all went well, counting my blessings.

I climbed in the window and sat down at a chair at a kitchen table. I smelled coffee and heard a shower in the next room. I took a cup down, turned and sat just as an old man came into the room. He was wearing a bathrobe that hung open to reveal a graying, scarred chest. He burped and sat down at the table, pulling the robe over his knees. He was cold. When he looked up, straight at me, I saw that he was blind. My grandmother had cateracts but I had never seen anything like this. Both of his eyes were a blotted gray. You could tell he knew someone else was in the room but he just nodded. Whoever he thought I was he expected to be there.

I could have jumped up and ran out but something kept me in the chair. I don’t really know what. The whole day was a surprise, maybe I felt untouchable, maybe just because I was high, but I sat right there. I sipped off my coffee. There was an ashtray on the table so I lit a cigarette. When I did, he smiled and felt for the pack. I pushed it toward his hand like we had done this before and upon grasping the pack, he smiled and winked not at me but toward me. You would have had to be there to understand what I mean exactly.

When in a few moments the shower went off I stayed where I was. An old woman came into the room, toweling herself off. She wrapped the towel around her head, Nefertiti-style and sat down. She paid no mind. It took me a moment to realize she was blind too. She didn’t have the eyes like he did. She was wearing only a damp slip that evidently she had put on in the bathroom. She made a show of waving away the smoke from her face.

She turned to where she must have known the old man would be. He had gotten her a cup of coffee and poured her juice.

“Did you hear those sirens Abe?”

“Woke me up. Always does.”

“Did you sleep well, sides that?” she asked in a lilting, wifely voice.

The man grunted and drank from his cup.

“I heard it might turn toward snow later.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” he smiled and blew smoke towards the window.

They both had those old-timey New York accents you don’t hear anymore.

“Do you have to smoke so early in the morning?” she asked, the slightest nagging edge to her tone.

“Oh that’s not me,” he winked my way. “That’s Jimmy.”

She smiled and tugged her slip higher toward her breastbone. “Oh Jim, I didn’t think you were up.

So to them, for now, I was Jimmy. Whoever he was. I finished my coffee and rose to leave.

When I turned I saw a rather big man filling the doorway with his frame. Dark circles under both eyes and his tongue jutted out from his lips. A chalky film whitened his lips. When he saw me, something flashed in his eyes and his whole body tensed. Brother was a little tardy by the looks of him, but he had six inches and maybe 100 pounds on me. I lurched for the window.

From the fire escape when I looked back, he just stood there, a patch of drool darkening his shirt front.

I climbed down two more levels. A siren sounded from the street and then two more. I slipped through another unlocked window: the apartment was empty and dark, and something smelled foul. I opened a door, just dust bunnies and something small crawling into a corner. I sat down in a corner, lit a cigarette and closed my eyes.

I have no idea how much time went by. It could have been twenty minutes or two years. A loud noise awakened me. It took me a minute to come back far enough into the world to get that there was an exchange of gunfire on the floor below me.

In the bathroom there was an old shower curtain over a claw-foot bathtub. When I touched it the plastic felt brittle, like it was made of seashells. I lay down in the bathtub and pulled the curtain back tight, then took out the half-bag and snorted it down. Closing my eyes with another cigarette. It was really great dope. It slowed down everything.

More shots sounded and with my eyes closed, I counted them in a soft whisper to myself.

On the fire escape, where I came to, it was dark and the wind was blowing. I climbed down, with coast clear, leaped to the dirt and climbed the bread palate fence again. In the park a twitchy dealer sold me two more bags. I still had ten cigarettes. I headed toward Sophie’s where I knew the barman would take my check and I could drink black and tans and smoke until four.

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"Soul Eyes" mp3
by John Coltrane, 1962.
available on Coltrane

Photograph:
Mozart on the Roof, Clinton Street, New York City, 1985.
© 2008 Ted Barron (click on image to enlarge)

Purple Majesty

We freaks would have one last hurrah, a benefit to save Adam Purple’s garden, an old man who rode around on a bicycle collecting trash, raggedy garb garnished by a purple bandanna. Few of us really knew who he was.

He lived in the last of a row of condemned houses on Forsyth, south of Houston and east of Bowery, a last surviving ex-hippie from the scene that begat ours, living with no heat or water, reputedly burning his own dried shit for fuel.

Five story walkups, turn of the century built in weeks for the cost of the mortar and bricks.
You always think of such tenements packed and teeming with lives in close quarters, abandoned during the burnings and the Alphabet city days of the 70’s, in these cavernous graffiti–scarred hulks rats ran free, and junkies folded over cracked and dry toilet bowls, their names shot in blood on the walls. A good place to get your head stove in.

As the other buildings went to seed, Sir Purple planted gardens. Everything from corn to flowers and hemp peaked over the chain links. The city always put fences around what they didn’t want to deal with.

The event was organized by many of the underground figures of the neighborhood, including Clayton Patterson who made strange hats and ran a storefront on Essex Street; Chris Flash, a younger more militant version of Purple who organized the first bicycle protests which later grew into the acts of defiance that still bedevil the NYC police force to this day; and John Shadow, a Tompkins Square Park activist who published an underground newspaper called The Shadow, a purported watchdog against all the forces that were conspiring to close down our condemned scene.

All of the would-be scene-makers, local dignitaries and organizers made speeches. One of them, I don’t remember which, spoke of the Honorable Guiliani, who at that time had just lost a close election to David Dinkins, “As a bullet aimed for our heads.” Who knew how accurate that was then?

The whole point of the event seemed rather dubious; the buildings were empty and being torn down for a city project to provide housing for low-income families. This is what actually happened. You can see them there today. They are three-story and most and really fit in with the neighborhood. However it was more romantic to identify with Mr. Purple. In our eyes we were all doomed, misunderstood bicyclists in a world trammeled over by cars, Moloch-machines and government-controlled projects, burning our waste in futile protest against the encroaching powers.

I could be wrong about all of this because to tell you the truth, we made fun of the local loudmouths. Downtown was our leader. Our sentiment was expressed in a mock performance by Peter Greene. A childhood friend of Downtown, Greene appeared at the time as Jim Carrey’s adversary in Mask. We all knew him from scoring around the neighborhood. And when he had a load on he liked to make up quotes he claimed were from unclaimed works “of the great bards of old.” Typical neighborhood shooting gallery bullshit really, the kind you heard coming off the barstools at great old haunts like the Parkside, Blue and Gold or The International, before they were over run by wannabes like me.

None of us knew the classics well enough to call him on it. Green was a big guy with a face you would never forget if you saw him. A very talented actor, he still works in Hollywood. You can see him taking a bullet in Training Day with Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington. Maybe Hawke knew him from the old neighborhood.

That night was rainy and cold. The weather wreaked havoc on the sound system and eventually a fire broke out.

Quoth Greene, “Alas all the toils of men are made futile by the march of time, victors over us all and all our glories end in loss and decrepitude.”

He walked off the stage and fell in a heap on the bare dirt. We didn’t know if it was an act or he was that zonked. A little of both, if you knew him like we did.

I am not a reliable narrator nor witness, because I had spent the whole day running around trying to score, picked up in a midnight sweep by the Pitt Street projects the night before, on a two day chill because I had frankly run out of ways to pay for my get high.

Valiantly I tried to explain this to the cops but they were not hearing it.

I spent the night in the lockup at the precinct underneath the Williamsburg Bridge worrying about the reading. At the last minute my arresting officer walked me out of the bullpen and led me out the front door in handcuffs.

“Now you gone and done it man. The river ain’t far from here.” A jailhouse buddy whispered at my back. Outside the policeman cut my plastic cuffs with a pocket knife and pushed me my first few steps down the street.

“What was that for?” I asked.

He looked at me for the fool I was, tense and fevered as a starved junkyard dog.

“G’wan, get out of here,” he hissed. “This is your lucky day.”

Stumbling, I fell to my knees and barfed in the dirt. When I looked back he was gone. I cursed and walked toward the dawn breaking purple over the brick tenements.

Let’s stop me frozen there and explain a few things. I was cold enough to freeze in the chilly dawn, kept warm only by my terrible desperation to get high. I had sneakers with no socks, an old pair of gray Levi corduroys, a ragged jean jacket and a blood-stained flannel shirt:

When I was at the City University, I had changed over the course of two semesters from a fresh-faced naif in button down Oxford cloths to a vaguely meanacing character in thrift store garb who haunted the campuses where I had worked, often in pre-dawn hours in curious untold pursuits sometimes accompanied by nefarious companions for whom I would have to vouch under increasingly troubling scenarios. I still had a valid ID but I could not longer pass for my own photo. I was a ravaged version of the fresh-faced literai I had been less than a year before.

With nothing better to do and exhausted, I went into Freeman Alley off of Rivington Street between Chrysie and Bowery and lay down behind a trash pile.

The rain awakened me. A stray dog was pulling at my sneaker.

The wind was chilly and as I got to my feet, yanking my foot from the jaws of the cur, I was struck with an obsessive compulsion. Slowly the idea grew until it loomed over me like some giant blob protoplasm, like the one Steve McQueen had to fight off in his first movie. Well, he lost too.

At Eldridge Street I walked straight up to a dealer standing out of the wet under a doorway awning. I pretended to have money in my hand and said,

“I’ll take five,” holding out the fingers of my other hand.

When he held out the dope, I gave his chest a shove, grabbed the bags, turned, leaped down the stoop onto the sidewalk, and ran past an old man reading a newspaper while walking, turning him on his heels like some madcap comedy, clutching the dope in my enclosed fist until I got to the train station at Essex and Delancey. I did the first bag behind a steel pillar on the platform. It had not tasted so good since the first one. By the time I made it to the reading I was lit up like train rails at sunset.

I caught Greene and Downtown’s performance, though I must admit, I have no idea what his poems were about. I was scheduled to read after my old friend, Ringo Heretic. He gave me an odd look as I mounted the stage. I must have looked pretty horrible, but in my mind I was some kind of Alphabet City reincarnation of Huck Finn. During my reading the police arrived & made an announcement.

“Because you have no permit for this event. Everyone must leave the premises." At that point a short occurred in the sound system and smoke began pouring from the speaker to my left. I kept reading.

Later I found out that my ex-wife Julie had attended. She knew that I would never miss something like that and she must have thought it might be the last time she saw me alive. She was gone by the end. Everyone was. When I finished, the area in front of the flatbed truck, where the audience had stood, maybe fifty to seventy-five people at its peak, was empty.

It was just a trod-over field of mud quickly turning to puddles in what had suddenly become a downpour. The cops stayed in their cars and when I jumped down, I was the only one there. I slipped in the mud and glided past the flashing lights blue and red lights. It seemed important to keep running.


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"Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie" mp3
by Black Flag, 1978.
available on Everything Went Black

"What To Do" mp3
by The Meat Puppets, 1982.
available on Meat Puppets II

"Trash City" mp3
by Joe Strummer and The Latino Rockabilly War, 1988.
available on Permanent Record [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]

Photograph:
Rivington School Sculpture Garden, New York City, ca. 1986.
© Ted Barron (click on image to enlarge)

European Son

Did you ever sit in the kind of rickety chair you found in the street and brought back home into your apartment because this is where we all got our furniture back in the day, cast off from someone else’s life? Did you sit and look at the place in the wall where the paint job was peeling and you got up, picked at it and found another layer, a different color of off yellow, off green or off white, even red than what you had since the day you moved in because that was what landlords did they painted over and threw out the old broken down chairs when someone else moved in and painted layer upon layer of paint on the wall, on the pipes, on the door jambs, on the exposed brick, on the bathtub in the kitchen with animal claws.


Did you ever get out a butter knife and gently peel off the layers of paint all the way down to the original color? If the sun hit just right through your window as it set in the west, you realized it must have set the same way over 100 years ago when the original European son gypsy family lived there, and for just a fleeting moment, as the magic hour of sunlight lit up all the bricks and the ivy on the rusty fire escape outside your window, you believed you were the youngest bawling son of that gypsy family and for a minute you stopped crying and all your aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters looked at you?

“Did you ever think that?”

“Not really,” I told John Dakota.

“Well then you really don’t have much of an imagination, do ya?”

"I guess not,” I shook my head.

We were standing in the largest empty lot east of Bowery at that time, what later became a mud bowl parking lot and now a Whole Foods franchise below another grand scale apartment building courtesy of the architect’s plans of someone who drew them in Cleveland or some such place and nothing against Cleveland but he had never ever set foot in any place called the East Village.

We are here because John Dakota’s girlfriend threw him out, and he talked me into helping him put up a tent there, more of a lean-to really, a blue tarp that we tied to the branch of a tree that hung over a fence from someone’s backyard plot on Bowery. We’re between Bowery and Chrystie.

“Did you happen to check a weather report?” I asked him.

“Why?” He was looking over his shoulder at Gypsy.

“You don’t feel that wind blowing in?”

“What wind? I don’t feel nothing.”

“It’s just I heard it might snow is all.”

“Don’t be a square, man. Lou Reed made this town.”

“What?”

“Lou Reed made this town.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. He shook his head. He knew better and he had a tent to put up. Why were we here? Because John Dakota was proud.

He was too good to sleep with the skeavy crowd in Tompkins Square in the city of the homeless and lost there. A lot of people assume that the Tent City came before the riots and might even have been one of the actual causes. But the Tent City came after the riots, and got worse and worse until the cops came in to kick everyone out. They closed the park for months.

We were just feeling the first snowflakes as the sun was going down in the west. Strangely there was still a yellow streak of sunlight atop purple clouds in the northern sky. The night before John had emceed a talent show that I had been lucky enough to attend, at a particularly memorable and bizarre place called Save the Robots on Avenue B, I think between maybe 3rd and 4th Streets. The first act was an old friend of ours who came in with a live pig, wearing a black leather zipper mask, our friend that is not the pig. He led the pig onto the stage and the pig sat down. At the end of the performance he took the pig away.

The second act involved a chain saw and a man in a full body cast. You could smell the fear in the air as the chainsaw was switched on. What you smelled was the sweat that we all broke out in as the chainsaw cut through the plaster cast toward the man’s skin.

I went to the bathroom to get high; it was too much for me.

I came back and John Dakota was holding up the cast and the room was filled with applause. No one was bleeding. A man in a tutu held out his arms and threw kisses. But they did not win first prize. This was a young woman with an amazingly detached air about her, who took off her clothes bent over her lap and sewed her sex shut with a needle and a thread. Fifty dollars first prize.

After the show I talked to John Dakota, a big long-haired Indian in a black t-shirt and beaded headband. I told him about the problems I was having with my wife.

“I’m going away,” I told him.

“You need a place to stay for a couple days?”

“Exactly.”

“No problem, just meet me here at the bar, tomorrow noon. I get paid then.”

I was there and so was he, but in the meantime his wife kicked him out and that was what found us in the empty lot on Houston. It was a giant space. Where an entire block of tenements had been torn down. In the tall grass lay parts from a carnival that had been held years before and then for god knows what reason abandoned there. You would be walking around and suddenly there would be a rusting gondola from a ferris wheel at your feet. John Dakota told me to meet him in a few hours.

“When it’s getting dark,” he said.

“Meet you, in the lot?”

“It’ll be fine, man. I got to get the tent.”

“So things are over with your wife?”

“Girlfriend. You’re not going to believe this, but she’s pregnant and she wants to have the kid.”

“Congratulations, man.”

We had come out of the dark bar into the daylight and we were both standing on the sidewalk of Avenue B blinking at each other. He held up his finger to his mouth like to say keep it quiet man.

“I gave her the money to have an abortion.”

“You don’t want to be a father?”

“I’m a guitar player, man.” He looked around like someone passing by might be listening and lowered his voice. “We’ve been through this before a few times and…”

“How many times, John?”

He held up some fingers. “Not more than four.”

“You can’t blame her.”

“Sure okay,” he said gesticulating wildly with his hands. “But she took the money and had an ultrasound.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“How is that right?”

He shook his head. He pulled the headband from his head and smoothed his long black hair. He had a thing about his hair. His claim to fame was that he had played drums in a jam session with Jimi Hendrix. Everybody knows that when Johnny Thunders. I asked him why he had not played guitar and he assured me. No one played guitar in the same band with Hendrix, man.

"What about Sylvain?"
"Nuff said."

That night he showed up at the lot at dusk astride a horse. I could not believe it when they came through the tall grass. It was like a movie. It was a miracle. He jumped down and yelled.

“Grab the reins and help me tie it to the tree.”

I must have jumped back at least five feet and he stood there holding the horse’s reigns laughing at me.

“Where the fuck did you get that?”

“It’s a male, man. Gypsy.”

“Heavens to Betsy.”

But by then I had seen the blanket under the saddle and recognized the NYPD emblem.

“Don’t tell me where you got that, John. I don’t want to know.”

“The stable is down by the Holland Tunnel. The door was open. I walked right in there and took him.”

“How did you get it here?”

“Rode it, man,” he said proudly. "I’ve been riding horses since I was a kid."

He tied the horse to the tree. It looked around and its eyes looked wide and shiny. What that horse was thinking one can only guess, but it did not look too happy about being kidnapped by the likes of John Dakota. We set to work on the lean-to. John Dakota turned on a portable tape player. The first song was an unreleased version of European Son by the Velvets. He turned it as loud as it would go. The snow was falling hard and we were shivering.

For just a minute though, it was beautiful: the way the snowflakes hit the strands of grass and stuck on the tiny gray pods, the way the horse looked in the gloaming there in the empty lot east of Bowery. You could see it breathing, the heat that came off its flanks in the wisps of condensation. John Dakota bent over a post he was hammering into the bare earth.

Then it was over. Thank God for Downtown. We didn’t hear him, the guitar solo was too loud and screechy. He pulled my sleeve and there he was, looking as he always did as an Okie version of Joe Buck's long lost illegitimate son.

“Let’s get out of here man.”

“What about John?”

I looked over and tapped his shoulder. He turned down the music.

“What are you going to do with that horse, man?”

He looked at me and Downtown then at the horse. He shrugged. The look on his face was the most forlorn thing you ever saw.

Downtown took me by the sleeve and dragged me toward the hole in the fence on the Houston St. side.



“You can crash in Times Square with me.”



What I can say? I left John Dakota with the horse in the empty field. Later I heard that he was arrested as a horse thief and ended up in a police lockdown flight deck on Ward’s Island for more than a year. His girlfriend had his son and raised it herself. Now the kid is in school. John got out, came into some money from a dead uncle and opened a guitar sales and repair shop on Rivington. You cannot make this up. The kid comes and visits him, working there on weekends. He and the old lady get along fine. It would be a few weeks before I was ready to leave for good. How did I know that when I came back all we had known then, the whole life would be gone and the East Village would be a completely different place?

Download:

"Nowhere Is My Home" mp3
by The Replacements, 1985.
available on Tim

"European Son (to Delmore Schwartz)" mp3
by The Velvet Underground, 1966.
from April 1966 Scepter Studios - Norman Dolph Acetate
bootleg

"Dreary Life" mp3
by Ramsay Midwood, 1996.
from Shoot Out at the Ok Chinese Restaurant
on first pressing only (out of print)

Photograph: Empty Lots, Lower East Side, circa 1986.
(click on image to enlarge) © Ted Barron

The Dolls of Avenue B

We worshipped at the spangled feet of pagan idols. Like Frankie, a knockout who worked the bulletproof window at an after hours coke cop-spot on Avenue B. Frankie had a collection of New York Dolls she had made out of Barbie’s with red, black and blond wigs, glittered boots, splash-painted sequin Sgt. Pepper coats, scale size cardboard guitars, drumsticks and a microphone stand with bluebird feathers. She set them up every night on the counter behind the glass where we stuck in our grimy twenties hoping for an interested glance from Sweet Frankie.

Rumor had it she was a trust fund intrigue, a sophomore year runaway from Sarah Lawrence, or the direct descendant of Pocohontas and John Smith. She had eyelashes as light as hummingbird’s wings and a voice and attitude like Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe when she took Gary Cooper off the street and saved his life. We all wanted her to swoop in and save ours.

Until she began to disintegrate before our eyes. The first thing to go is always the light in the eyes, then the clothes are sold from the sidewalk on Friday night on Avenue A and it’s only a matter of time. No one could last in a gig like that anyway, under the thumb and sick depraved whim of some scary scar-faced Columbian ex-boxer turned dealer for her dope. She disappeared one night she just wasn’t there anymore. It was a game we all played to lose. I saw the dolls a few times after she was gone, then they disappeared too. You wonder what happened to them. You wonder, what happened to all the New York Dolls of Avenue B?

Another pagan idol was this fellow I used to see on my way to work at my first job at the City University of New York. I had an eight o’clock class and the campus is down on Chambers Street near City Hall. He looked awful. Often shouting drunk, he belligerently accosted passersby for money. A big guy with blond hair and google-eyed glasses, he spit as he spoke and one of his feet had been hacked off very badly halfway down the arch and it had not healed properly. God only knows how it happened. Maybe he had done it himself with an axe in a fit of self-loathing. He appeared to be very addled in a way that went very far beyond the drunkenness. He was a scary and weird idiot savant and many people walked out in the street to go around him as he sat there on West Broadway or propped up on the brick wall. Brother was in bad shape.

He wore a wooden cross on a leather thong around his neck. By afternoon he would pass out sleeping loudly, breathing through his nose. Then in the afternoon he lurched to his feet and took a second shift, haranguing the evening rush hour crowd. The city was filled with a lot more freaks in the old days, they had just cleaned out all the old asylums and only later did the police department make a policy of taking weirdoes off the streets. Who knows what happened to them all. I spoke to this man a few times but he never answered in anything but his guttural monster voice.

I used him as a character in a novel I was writing at the time, I called Barefoot in Hell. It told the story of an American Indian novelist who becomes the rage, loses his soul and ends up trying to kill his agent. The agent was based on Robert Wylie, who I never met but had read about. He was the one who got the million dollar advances for writers like Rushdie, Amis and others and in the process ruined their careers. Well, they made a lot of money but they were no longer the artists they had been.

Who after all can write a novel to fulfill a million dollar advance upon request? One does not follow the other. Take it from me. I never made a million but the money I did make eventually was always looking over my shoulder, and it forever changed what I was trying to do. It’s hard to write looking over your shoulder. It’s a big nut for little squirrels like us to carry.

Anyway the novelist in my book hires this homeless madman who I named Billy Sunday to scare his agent. Instead he axe murders him. Or something like that. It was more of an idea than a fully formed project and I soon lost the thread and began to write what became Times Square. Things had gotten pretty uh… wide open for me. I had told Julie about all the drugs but I could not stop yet.

I had stopped seeing the Idiot bartendress and just wandered the streets high and long, looking for what I had lost somewhere along the way. I would go home or not and Julie let me be with the tacit understanding that I was going away sooner or later. She did not give me any more money and I did not steal anymore from her. Whatever I got to support my habit I got from ripping off dealers and boosting books and selling them on the street. She wanted me to seek help, I could just as well have died, but she would be free soon and more importantly we were both too emotionally and physically exhausted to deal anymore with the reality of my drug addiction and madness.

The novelist in my book was based on the celebrated writer Jet Boy Jealous, the youngest of my generation to enjoy any real and lucrative success. I met him one night early in this period when I was still a worthy escort and Julie and I went to MK on Broadway where I read in William Norwich’s New York Post column that he was throwing a party for a first-time novelist.

This fellow’s name is lost to history but I do remember that he was living on a boat in Venice Beach. It was the kind of thing that made good jacket copy. Julie knew the bass player for a band that was playing downstairs so we got in for free. I sought out the party promoter in house and he invited us upstairs. First we had to wait for the principals to finish dinner. On the second floor we sat on the stairs like little kids at the adults’ party, watching. For a wannabe writer like me it was like looking at a holograph of the last supper with Jesus and the apostles in attendance. Jet Boy Jealous was there with his best friend and fellow novelist Frat Sibalant. On either side sat the brilliant nouveau editors Gary Fisketjohn and Morgan Entrekin. Donna Tartt sat nearby looking odd, brilliant and ignored by the men.

Later upstairs I was introduced to the editor who was looking at my book. He had sent me a kind note that entreated me to, Keep writing. It was the most encouragement I had ever known. Tonight he was drunk.

“You’re looking at my novel?”

“What’s your name?” he asked. “I must look at fifty things a day.”

I told him the title. He looked at me blearily. He didn’t remember.

“You said you liked it and to keep writing.”

“I did?”

“Yes, I am almost done with the second part.”

“That’s great,” he said. “I say that to everyone. I am glad it was encouraging.”

I walked away with the body weight and carriage of a deflated balloon. Jet Boy Jealous was a lot nicer.

“I will read your work,” he told me. “Just drop it by my house.”

He was the inspiration for the character in the book I had given him to read. Some might call that balls, but it was closer to a psychotic break. For the days before I escaped to Times Square to kick he was all I had to connect me with the real world. He met me at the Coffee Shop which at the time was new, very chic and an actual gathering place for models and cool men about town like Jet Boy. He bought me lunch and talked to me about my work.

At the time he was just going through the nightmare that became the enormous success of his second novel. The story of Wall Streeter who goes mad, tortures women on the side while at the same time making a lot of money for himself and his bosses. It was rejected and deemed unfit for his first publisher which interestingly enough became my first publisher three lives later. It was later published and made into a movie helping to singlehandedly initiate the period where fame and artistic achievement became indistinguishable and rendering the whole art thing a moot point.

Jet was as embarrassed about the whole situation as anyone else. He caught a lot of shit for what he wrote, but I would argue until this day that he was one of the last of us to attempt to write honestly about what the hell we were all doing to the world. He had a lot to vent about.

“It is a ghastly book, Jet.”

“I know.”

“You have to have known the reaction might be intense.”

“I really never did,” he said and took a deep breath. He told me what I needed to hear about my own work.

“It’s overwritten, man. You’re trying too hard to sound like a writer.”

“Anton didn’t like it either.”

“He’s an asshole. He’s angry because his own work sucks.”

“He writes?”

“A lot of editors do but it’s a bad practice; it just makes them angry.”

“What should I do?”

He shrugged his shoulders and gracefully ordered us a couple more beers. I would always just order mushroom soup and bread, ashamed to spend his money. He finished chewing. “Didn’t you say you were writing something new?” I nodded and pulled a few stained and ragged sheets of paper from my coat. It was cold as hell outside and snowing. I had not been home for a week. My fingers were chapped and left fresh blood-smears on the pages. Jet Boy harrumphed sympathetically as I unfolded it. Before I had finished reading the second page he interrupted.
“That’s what you should be writing!”

“You think so?”

“Definitely.” He nodded, drinking, burping lightly with the consummate grace and politeness with which he did everything.

“Should I go to Times Square?”

“Yes.”

My third idol called me out of the blue. “I’ve been arrested,” my cousin Joe told me. “I’m moving to LA.”

“Have you uh… thought this over.”

“I’ll be at Port Authority tonight at midnight.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

Joe went to LA, hit the streets upon arrival and he has to this day never recovered. He’s still getting high, even with his kids approaching high school age and it makes you sad. I didn’t see Jet Boy again for almost five years after I had gone to hell and back. He ended up helping me a lot with my work and I named him in the acknowledgements of my first book. Joe was like my twin brother. Our moms were identical twins and we were born within a year of each other. He was a natural and could hit a baseball, climb a tree or jump into a river without thinking about it. I was always the self-conscious one. That night we got drunk on Jack Daniels and I said farewell to him in the bus station as he walked off in his Yankees hat carrying only a plastic Playmate cooler with a foil-wrapped T-bone he had taken from his mother’s refrigerator.

Download:

"Cheree" mp3
by Suicide, 1978.
available on Suicide

"Fear Is A Man's Best Friend" mp3
by John Cale, 1974.
available on Fear

"Jet Boy" mp3
by The New York Dolls, 1973.
available on New York Dolls

"Ten Dollar Bill" mp3
by Cop Shoot Cop, 1993.
Live - East of Bowery

Photograph: © Ted Barron
East Houston Street, New York City, 1987
(click image to enlarge)

Werewolf

Did you ever see one of those real Lon Chaney Jr. movies, the look on his face just before he turned, when he knew it was going to happen and there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it. I was like that once. We had a word for it: we called it dopesick.

When I started to go out with the first woman that I married she lived in what amounted to the girl’s sorority punk rock house in Raleigh NC. This was during the Jesse Helms days in the North Carolina Capitol city, when you could count the number of rockers on a couple of hands and one foot. The house band was called COC, which was a rather pointed acronym for Corrosion of Conformity. My best friend in high school produced a couple of their albums years later at Electric Lady Studios on 8th Street. I showed up there a couple of times holding and spooked him. He never returned my calls.

Julie and I met on the night when NC State the college she attended won the 1983 ACC basketball championship. Bonfires burned in the middle of the main street. The bars stayed open all night and the streets were filled with wild revelers. We made out under the bare branches of the old maple and oak trees of that southern capitol city.

Soon after she broke up with me I moved into the fraternity punk house on North Street. She stood me up one night when her ex swallowed a lot of pills and tried to kill himself. That was where I found out what a broken heart felt like. It was also the first time I saw someone kicking dope, the first time I ate peyote, and first I ever met someone who was AWOL from the Navy, a man whose brother ran the house. They hung with the punks but they were really, looking back, nothing more than common criminals. Donny the younger brother told me his theory one night when he was buying the whiskey that the two greatest American books were Huckleberry Finn and On the Road. Who could argue with that? Not me for sure. Donny was a sweet guy. Later he was busted in the largest drug sweep ever in Raleigh. He was the only target, having moved to another house right smack in the middle of Helms neighborhood. He was growing dope, mushrooms and manufacturing LSD in the cellar. He was sent away for 20 years.

The two worst charges I ever got were the first. I was in high school. The first was inciting a riot and the second was forcing an officer of the law off the road with intent to harm. They were both accidents. Teachers at school got me out of trouble both times. I always had this Murder One look, though and it got me into trouble. The first time I smoked pot I went out with this big kid from the football team named Chip who later made a name for himself by crashing a friend’s car through the living room wall of a highway patrolman’s house. I never saw Chip after his car wreck.

But you know what? This story is not about any of that. This story really begins with a little square hole in the pavement on 2nd Avenue, sometime in the mid late 80’s, when 2nd Avenue was the borderline between the rest of New York City and what was at that time the Wild Wild East. Out of this little square hole steam was released from the bowels of the city. This steam was white hot and some of it bit my young pretty wife’s leg.

“Ow,” she said.

“What? What happened baby," I asked her.

“Ooh,” she said. It feels like something bit me.

When I looked at her leg, I saw the red spot and she saw the steam hole. We did not think any more of it. We crossed Houston Street further east to Ludlow and a place called Max Fish. This was one of only two bars on the block at that time. Now it’s teeming with them, but then Ludlow Street was the deserted cool tip of the heroin iceberg. An old friend of hers from the college days had called, Brooks, the one who had sat shivering in his bed kicking dope in Raleigh.

“Now I’m dealing commodities on the market downtown,” he told us.

“How’s that working for you, man?”

“Pretty fine,” he said and lit a fat joint on the corner outside El Sombrero, a Mexican Restaurant where a few years later I used their bathroom to snort dope at least once or twice daily before I lost my pants and everything else, when it was still cool and I was just a little skinny and still had my green sharkskin suit jacket with the sharp elbows, when I was still living in some Hemingway novel in my head I would sit at their tables after snorting some sweet cool dope, sip strong coffee, munch some tortilla chips, smoke Camel Filters at the table and read from El Heife's 1st 49 Stories digging into the master’s voice, but that’s another story too.

In this one we sit down with slick talker Brooks high as shit after smoking his dope. I’m watching my wife because my shit was kicking up with this dude reminding me of how she had dumped me back in Raleigh years before. Brooks had nothing to do with it, but he was cooler than me in those days or talked like he was anyway and he always had the prime dope, which meant nothing to Julie but a lot to me. I still thought hipster status meant being able to cop the good shit wherever you were and for the men of my generation and time in America having the good shit was as much a cock measuring stick as anything else. Julie started to slowly slide away into her seat and her eyes went gray.

“Hey babe,” I called.

“It’s really good dope,” Brooks said with pride. “I’ll get her some water.”

“Fuck you man,” I muttered as I caught her before she fell below the table and carried her into my arms out onto the sidewalk. Julie was almost six feet tall and big boned as they say, but very thin. Her entire frame went rigid as I leaned her up against Brooks Harley.

“Here, I brought a beer,” he said. “Is she alright?”

I rubbed her brow with the cold bottle and very slowly she came back to life. She had one more seizure, while sitting on the toilet after her leg was burned by our radiator. I ran to the deli down the street to cash a check because we didn’t have any money to get to Methodist Hospital. She started coming home from work and falling into a dazed sort of weak sleep on the couch. She went for a brain scan at a doctor’s office in the tallest tower in Brooklyn on Atlantic Avenue. She was given amino acids by a natural no drugs doctor. I started waiting until she went to sleep, slipping out and going to cop in Manhattan.

Suddenly I was 29, my wife had a mysterious brain ailment, I was discovering this whole new scene downtown and I did not know how to reconcile that with being married.

We had just met the second generation hippie cat who had gotten me the acid for the trip down south to see my dad and worked as a miller at Angelica’s herb shop on 1st Avenue. He never washed.

He said, “I just rub whatever I’m mixing on my body.”

We let him sit across the room in the corner the first time we invited him over to our place. He gave us a whole bunch of acid which I stuck in the freezer. Some ice melted and all of the acid went into the water catch at the bottom of the freezer. I got up one morning and drank it down then left the apartment without telling Julie where I was. By the time I got off the train at Wall Street I didn’t know myself. My throat had constricted so tightly that I couldn’t breathe well. When I looked at my hands my skin was blue. This took about twenty minutes tops. I was higher than I had ever been in my entire life.

For some reason I decided it was really important to walk by all the dope and coke spots I knew without copping. I was so thirsty. When I finally called Julie from the newly opened Angelica Theater on Mercer I was convinced I was the second coming. They had already called my parents to let them know.

“Your son is the one. He will be taken up to heaven sometime today, but it’s all right.”

“Your son is going to save the world.”

When I told this to Julie over the phone she said, Don’t go anywhere. Stay right there.

She tried to call somewhere to have me committed but could not get through. When she finally showed up there I thought she looked a lot like Indira Gandhi. I willed myself to come down by that afternoon but after that I went over the edge. Julie started to get stronger though she would not be diagnosed with what turned out to be epilepsy for a couple more years.

I became a street junkie. A woman who had hired me to teach at LIU in Brooklyn told me years later that the last time she saw me I was coming out of the train barefoot. I am quite sure I had a good reason for that, somewhere way off in my head somewhere. Six months and five rehabs later Julie sat me down in our backyard and shaking her pretty head said,

“You don’t know how bad you are.”

The werewolf never does.



Download:

"Goo Goo Muck" mp3
by The Cramps, 1982.
available on Psychedelic Jungle

"She's Like Heroin To Me" mp3
by The Gun Club, 1981.
available on Fire of Love

"New Pleasure" mp3
by Richard Hell and The Voidoids, 1977.
available on Blank Generation

"Until Lately" mp3
by The Dream Syndicate, 1982.
available on The Days of Wine and Roses

"She's Lost Control" mp3
by Joy Division, 1979.
available on Unknown Pleasures

Photograph: Dog In A Truck, Second Avenue, 1987.
© Ted Barron ((click on image to enlarge)

MIA

Ask 100 people what was the spark that caused the bloodshed between police and citizens in the Tompkins Square riots of 1988 and you will probably get 100 different answers. The park had become an open-air homeless shelter and squat. The Avenue A Merchants Association felt that this attracted the wrong element and demanded that the police set a curfew. The police came in on the 31st of July and again on August 6. My favorite comes from Mark Ashwill who was at the time drummer for the band Missing Foundation. This band was known for its haunting tag which depicted an upside-down champagne glass and was spray-painted all over the neighborhood. Mark’s band was playing when the police came to clear the park.


“I did not stop drumming until they pulled me off the stage,” he said. He fought against a policeman for his drums, a shoving match on stage until he and the rest of the band were overwhelmed.


“It was chaos after that,” he said. The bandshell has no opening in the back and Mark was trapped there at the very beginning of the riot that ensued. Hundreds of people were in the park and hundreds more police tried to evict them. A melee ensued. Melee (from the French mêlée: generally refers to disorganized close combat involving a group of fighters. A melee ensues when groups become locked together in combat with no regard to group tactics or fighting as an organized unit; each participant fights as an individual.


“This was what we were about,” Mark said. “This was the best show we ever played.” I would meet Mark years later when he was clean. This was when he wasn’t.

In fact I was at the show but when things got ugly I split, going to the circle bar right outside the southeast exit of the park on 7th St. where we had an open shot and a beer triage for anyone who came in with blood on them. It was a great big weird party in there. The cop spots stayed open late and I went back and forth a couple times on runs for myself and others.



The clash did not end until the next morning at six a.m. Passersby were assaulted by both police and protestors and drawn in the chaotic fray. Rubbish and bottles were thrown from the rooftops of nearby buildings. According to Wikipedia 38 people, including reporters and police suffered injuries. Nine people were arrested on riot, assault and other charges, six complaints of police brutality were logged.

Mark later became the singer for a band called The Spitters. One of the first times I attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting after coming back to the city, he played me a tape of his band. Later I saw them play at CBGB’s, Continental Divide, Friday’s and other clubs. At CB’s I was living in Jersey, my first time staying clean for any time and I brought some friends from the meetings over there. Mark kicked over our table during the first song and we ran for shelter into the mosh pit further back. Their shows always dissolved into mayhem. A girl came on stage and broke a beer bottle over Mark’s head. He swung from the speaker cabinets and leaped onto the crowd. But that was later.


Maybe we were the last generation that came of age believing pop music mattered, that it defined us somehow, that it was something like church must have been for people many years ago. Every squat had a band and nearly every band had a squat. We didn’t really believe anymore that someone singing into a microphone could change the world, as maybe many of our older brothers and sisters had, but we did believe that if it couldn’t, then the singing helped. In those days, in our neighborhood, it still mattered. We liked to rock.


The first Tompkins Square riot took place in 1874 when thousands of unemployed New Yorkers protested and clashed with police. In 1991 when hundreds of us protested against the Persian Gulf War in Times Square, we were chased by police all the way downtown. I remember getting on a train to go home from the Delancey Street stop. Many of us who came to live or play in the East Village were attracted by the potential for chaos. We sought it out. We thrived on it. We were interested in the breaking down of American society. We broke down our consciousness with drugs and our physical well being with more. We let our art and our lives stand as metaphors for the breakdown we saw taking place in American society.


In the 1970’s and well into the 80’s and early 90’s hundreds of people lined up to buy heroin from storefront and corner dealers. The police kept their distance or some of them took a cut; many of them got caught up in the same shit that we did. There were dozens of squats in the neighborhood below 14th Street and East of Broadway with the highest concentration in Alphabet City.



It didn't start with us. An old junkie I met in Jersey told me he had lived on East 6th Street in the 60’s when dope was two dollars a bag.

There were all kinds of crash pads and places where kids went to get away from their parents, away from it all. A lot of us never went back. Abbie Hoffman lived in the East Village and in his apartment on St. Mark’s held the first meetings to plan protests during the Democratic National Convention in 1968 in Chicago. The Yippies had a meeting house on Bleecker Street just a few hundred feet from where CBGB’s opened a decade later.



The longest continuously meeting NA meeting is across the street and upstairs. Before 1979 addicts were not allowed legally to meet on the street. They carried ID cards with their pictures on them and if one or more were caught congregating they were carted off to jail.


When my first NA sponsor left the army during the Vietnam war and decided to go underground, he met a contact at the War Resistors League on Lafayette Street and was put up in a safe house on St. Marks a block down from the Electric Circus. A few months after the World Trade Towers fell he sat at a table in Café Orlin and reminisced with my wife and pointed up at where the building had stood right across the street.

“My mother made me quit the army,” he told us. A lot of the neighbor boys started coming home in boxes. Whenever the FBI came to the house to look for me, she would yell at them and chase them away."


When I was a little kid visiting my grandmother in New Jersey my cousins and I would take day trips into the city on the bus. Later when we came home we would compete in telling my grandmother all the crazy things we saw. We were saddened by the bag ladies and wowed by the tallest buildings but the stories that always won the day were of spontaneous moments of grace.

"You climb up on to the rooftop to get a little closer to the sky.”

Some people have this in their blood. Others are smart enough not to go up there or if they do they take the proper precautions. One of the first nights I went out with Ingalill I was still living with Mark Zero who had video tapes of the riots that he kept in his freezer. They were destroyed when the police condemned his building in 1995. They were not allowed to go back in. That night I tried to tell Ingalill what it was like to do heroin. She wanted to know because her brother had fallen into using out in LA. Later he joined the army, fought in Iraq eventually came home and had a family. I told her how wonderful it felt, using the rooftop analogy.

She wrinkled her nose. “But it can kill you,” she said.


From Zero I met the legendary East Village figure Rockets Redglare. Everyone knew Rockets and he remembered everyone. He had been a bouncer at CB’s, The Mudd Club and Max’s in their heyday.


"Anywhere you wanted, Rockets could get you in."


Later he achieved a near unbelieveable neighborhood trifecta: movie actor, Basquiat's bodyguard and Sid Vicious' dope connection.

When I knew him he had ballooned to over 300 pounds, he drank and was on methadone. the summer I worked the door at the Lakeside Lounge, he drank for free. His skin looked terrible and his jaw had that spasm thing that long-term Methadonians get. Still he always remembered my name though I only met him a few times. He talked like he cared about what happened to me. He was like that with each and every person that he met and there are not many people like that.


One night I came out my bedroom at Zero’s apt on the corner of Clinton and Stanton, to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and there was Rockets, in all his pale white naked glory, stretched out on the floor reading The Alienist. The building is gone, but in the East Village that lives in each of us, Rockets and many others, brilliant shining freaks all, light the sky.

Download:

"Kick Out The Jams" mp3
by The MC5, 1968.
available on Kick Out the Jams

"Street Fighting Man" mp3
by The Rolling Stones, 1968.
available on Beggars Banquet

"Poet" mp3
by Sly and the Family Stone, 1971.
available on There's a Riot Goin' On

"This Is My Country" mp3
by The Impressions, 1968.
available on The Anthology 1961-1977

"Teen Age Riot" mp3
by Sonic Youth, 1988.
available on Daydream Nation

"White Riot" (single version) mp3
by The Clash, 1977.
available on The Clash (U.S. Version)

Photograph: Bus Stop, Avenue A, New York City, 1988.
© Ted Barron (click on image to enlarge)

Idiot Breeze

On a Friday night I went with my best friend Broadway to a speak-out held at the Ninth Street entrance of Tompkins Square Park. It seems quaint now but at the time a Tent City had taken over the south western corner of the park, where any number of homeless drug addicts and would-be radicals lurked, gamboled and passed out headlong with scroungy dogs at their feet on the benches.

Fires burned in trash cans. The police kept their distance. Broadway talked more than I did, but he urged me to speak to Donna, a pretty girl from Mississippi who ran the thing.

“She’s hot for you, man. Look at the way she’s looking at you.”

“Really? What makes you think that?”
“G’wan.”

She published a broadsheet. She was also dating a cop and a radical at the same time. This I would all find out in due time. I took her to Mona’s on 13th Street and bought her a beer. Later I would discover this was a great place to drink black and tans with periodic trips to the bathroom to snort blow off your finger while watching the local wildlife from your barstool. Sophie’s on 5th Street and what we called the Circle Bar on 7th and B were also pretty excellent for such benign pursuits. My jukebox quarter bought Ape Man by the Kinks and Transmission by Joy Division. She worked part-time at the Village Idiot, a particularly nasty First Avenue joint. The place had absolutely no ventilation. Whatever you walked in with was staying, along with what fell off, slid or was exuded or spit by every other inhabitant who had ever come in the place. The bathroom was alive. The smart 20th Century man opened the door, left off the light and just pissed into the void.

However, it was pretty sweet to walk in the joint on a Friday night and find a woman who wanted to fuck you mixing drinks behind the bar. She wore black, was blond, buxom with librarian’s horn-rimmed classes.

She said, “Hello Sailor.”

When I put down three dollars for a beer, she gave me back change for a twenty. This was like a miracle to watch happen before your eyes, especially when you had sniffed a bag of dope around the corner beneath the scaffolding by P.S. 122.

That legendary night when I drank for free at the behest of the buxom blond bartendress, I remember two conversations, which considering the circumstances is either an Olympian feat or evidence that the order of the universe is indeed random and we are all dissolving into chaos as we speak. The first conversation was with a New York Life insurance salesman on a three-day pass. His wife had gone out of town, he needed a shave and a clear liquid ran from his nose and made his whiskers shine.

We were sitting next to each other for most of the night.

“Allow me to speak out loud,” he said.
“Think.”
“Excuse me.”
“The expression is think, man. You’re already speaking.”

He looked at me like what the hell man, let’s not quibble. Look where we are. The place was like the Star Wars bar on crack, which by the way was just beginning to show up on street corners, striking the whip over the four horsemen of the apocalypse for our scene.

“You got people coming here from all over the country.”
“Sure.”
“From small cow ass towns in Iowa, New Jersey.”
“North Carolina.”
“Right, they don’t fit in there and they come here.”
“It’s great, isn’t it.”
“They’re all a little weird though, right.”
“Maybe.”
“They come here and it’s an open market, a freaking field day, they self-medicate themselves on drugs, alcohol and whatnot.”
“Whatnot?”
“Don’t be a wise guy.”
“Yeah so.”
“They call themselves artists.”
“So.”
“I’m just saying.”

I bought him his next round and he showed me pictures of his kids. Twins, a boy and a girl and another little girl almost three. They were so cute.

“Y’say they’re at the mother-in-laws for the weekend?”

He nodded, pounding a belch from his chest, making a noise. Gibbering is the only word for it, something between a maniacal giggle and a terrible gag.

“Beautiful. Good for you.”

His eyes gleamed. The expression on his face changed completely; he turned horribly pale, his lips trembled, his eyes glowed. He raised his arms and embraced me warmly. He was only visiting here. He was going back to real life.

I was just beginning to discover all the storefront dope spots in the neighborhood. On 4th Street on the north side a used bookstore had a bulletproof glass window in the back. These were a dead giveaway. If you bought something you could take a book, but you were encouraged to bring one back too. I told one guy back there I was a writer, so he called me that whenever I came in.

“Hey writer, he said.”

I asked him about his painting. For all I knew he painted houses. He was the stooge handing out blow through the slot in a window; I was one of the tools who came by. A few doors down and across the street was a florist with one dust-covered plastic plant. These guys were not very friendly, did not stand on pretense and had no window, but they were open late. Around the corner was one of those bodegas with the old, yellowing cereal boxes stacked in the window. Once I stood in an aisle and watched an undercover policeman wearing his badge and gun on his belt go behind the counter, rifle the cash from the cash register and stick a wad in the crotch of his pants. We exchanged a glance as he walked out and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. A Latino cashier stood by and took care of my order when the coast was clear. They all had this way of wrinkling their noses that I thought was a coke giveaway but years later I actually found out just means something like, “What’s up?” On Ave. B there were a couple of storefronts that had nothing at all inside but the bulletproof window, a cooler filled with 50 cent blue water containers and a tortilla chip stand.

The second significant conversation was with Donna the green-eyed bartender.

By midnight I was wired on coke and drunk to boot. I had the feeling that I was watching myself, what I said and my movements from somewhere outside my own body. It was a priceless feeling. We were all trying to get there. It was our God. We were on a spiritual quest, like the Mayans.

“I’m thinking of leaving my wife,” I said.
“Great,” she smiled and filled my beer.
“I’m thinking of moving into a squat.”
A line creased her pretty forehead.
“I would think twice about that.”
“I met a guy on 13th. He says they have room.”
“The cops are going to bust all those places,” Donna said.
“The cops are?”
“I interviewed one,” she lied, though I didn’t know it then. “The police department just bought a tank.”
"A what?"

“Full armor. All of the squats will be closed within the year.”

I whistled. I was supposed to wait until she got off and we would go home together. Instead, I left the bar, bought some dope from a corner dealer, went down to the Delancey Street station where at the end no one could see who you were or what you were doing and if it was a cop you could see them coming from far away. The cops never came anyway. I did a bag, lit a cigarette and got on the next train.

Two years later I got off the train in the Bronx at another storefront, this one a long-term program for addicts and criminal offenders. My wife was only available for short, non-conjugal visits by this time so I looked up my old friend Donna. The Idiot had closed but she was staying at a friend’s apartment not far away. The owner was a fat greasy guy the girls were always trying to stay away from. He always encouraged the girls to drink on the job, his goal being getting them over to his apartment to crash on his couch. I realize now Donna must have been staying at this very apartment. I have no idea what their arrangements might have been. It was Halloween and I was on a weekend pass from what was left of my life. At that time I had left the Rescue Mission with a two way bus pass back to Utica to visit my wife. Julie and I spoke for awhile. When I hugged her, at first she relaxed into my arms, then she pulled away. I excused myself and left. I stayed uptown with Broadway and he lent me 60 dollars. He always had a few extra dollars from dealing weed. The next day I visited Donna. We spent an hour or so together, post coitus, at a loss for words on her couch. A loud bang sounded outside the window. A young kid had blown off his forefinger with an M-80. You could see the skin hanging off the bone from the third floor fire escape.

Download:

"In The Bar" mp3
by Peter Laughner, 1975.
from Take The Guitar Player For A Ride
out of print

"Hot Wire My Heart" mp3
by Sonic Youth, 1987
available on Sister

"Freak Scene" mp3
by Dinosaur Jr., 1988.
available on Bug

"Barstool Blues" mp3
by The Feelies, 1991.
from Doin' It Again EP
out of print

Photograph: International Bar and Grill, New York City, 1986.
© Ted Barron (click on image to enlarge)

Chippie

This is street parlance for a small heroin habit. Not the teeth-grinding, vomit inducing waking nightmare where your best friend locks you in a cellar for a week with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a prayer for your soul, but a little one, where you know something is wrong and you feel it but you are able to ward it away with a couple beers maybe and a day in bed. Old timers refer to it as a little cold. I met mine in jail, picked up in a drug sweep on Attorney Street, some sweet irony there. I was supposed to be teaching a class at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. I had my nice shirt and tie, what I considered to be inoculation from a street bust. Only it did not work out that way. I went into a bodega on Stanton Street. It was early afternoon on a sunny day in Autumn. I had already scored some dope before dawn, AA brand below Delancey Street-- with the logo of the jet airplane on the waxed envelope-- and taught one class. I had a couple of bags left which I had hid in a folded piece of paper in my breast pocket.

“Not now,” the man behind the counter warned me. “Is bad time. 5-0 is right outside.” 5-0 was street for the police, as in Hawaii 5-0, the old television show.

I ignored him and pointed to my money on the counter.
He rolled his eyes. “I tell you,” he said. “Bad time, you get bust-o.”

He was speaking in a form of pigeon Spanish that Latino dealers sometimes affected to communicate with their clientele. He was a Spanish guy with bad teeth and a pot belly. If I got busted, he got busted. Though chances are if the cops were outside, they already knew what he was up to. Still he pleaded.

"No, I got it,” I told him.

I was in the stage where you think you are invisible and immortal at the same time. I had scored dozens of times and never been busted. I imagined they had a lot better people to arrest than a fellow in a nice shirt and tie, someone who obviously had better things to do and better places to be, someone who had stepped into the wrong neighborhood for obviously wrong reasons and was perfectly ready to clean up any misunderstanding with a smile, a jaunty quip and a pat on the shoulder. Yeah right. If only the world worked the way it does in the junkie’s illusion of life. If this were the case then everyone would be high all the time. We would all be coming off a bit of a bender and everyone else would understand what it’s like out there, how tough it is to be a working professional stoner.

I took the first step outside and two plainclothes officers jumped out of an unmarked brown sedan.

“Stop right there. Show us what you have.”

They pulled out their badges and held them up just like on the television shows. I kept walking like they could not be possibly talking to me. When I turned the corner onto Attorney, I bolted. When, after 100 feet of this, I looked and saw they were still after me, I stopped and tried to explain.

“I already bought this, earlier today,” I said when the lady detective pulled the paper out of my pocket and shook out the dope.

She smiled sweetly.
“Really, I need that,” I pleaded.

“Sure you do,” the other DT, this one in a flannel shirt, mustache with shaggy hair, smiled. The young cops were always the cocky ones. They still had a horse in the race. His partner found the coke which I had, I thought, ingeniously hid in the tag of my necktie. The lady, who was kind of hot in a tough Boston sort of way, tucked it back in my pocket. This was her way of trying to be kind. I wish they would have let me keep the dope. That would have gotten me through the next 24 hours nicely. Everything would have been fine. Dope could have inoculated me from the harsh realities of my jail stay, coke only exacerbated them.

“Thanks a lot lady,” I whispered. She winked and I admired what I could see of her busty lingerie underneath the white and tan business suit. By four a.m., 12 hours later, I was in the lockup waiting to be called to night court with 50 other desperate souls. They had also allowed me to keep a paperback book to read, The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg, an account of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last gin-soaked days in Hollywood. Schulberg was assigned as the genius’ caddy on the younger writer’s first screenwriting job and later he turned it into a follow up to his seminal What Makes Sammy Run. Your honor I submit this as more evidence of the naif I was.

A fellow inhabitant of the cell vomited on the floor. We all watched as he extracted four bags of dope, hermetically sealed in plastic, from the bile and vomit. We said things like:

“Oh my!”

“You one gross-ass brother!”

And all of us backed away from him as he snorted up two of the bags.

It was a big guy with a grimy face and a ripped shirt who broke the pretense of our collective reaction.

“I’ll give you twenty bucks a piece for the other two.” They made their deal and the rest of us, the Greek Chorus of the jail cell sighed, laughed and grinded our teeth. We, all of us to a man, wanted what they had. And we disgusted ourselves.

I met the old-timer in the waiting room upstairs. Here we were allowed to speak with the court-appointed lawyers.

“How’s the book, youngblood?” he asked me.
“A little overwritten to tell you the truth.”

He nodded. He had a puffy afro turning snowy on top. His lips were dry and cracked, his skin so dry and shale-like that it was almost white. When we shook hands his touch was ethereal. It was almost like he wasn’t even there, he was a ghost.

“You can’t imagine how many times I done been up in here,” he told me. “I been here so many times they just shuffle me through. I’m a fly on the wall.”

“Oh yeah?”
“Please forgive me,” he said, “But you look a little overdone yourself.”

He had a kind face and I was scared. I told him the truth, what I should have been telling my lawyer but she was an uptight Yalie and made me nervous so I had lied.
“I never had a habit before.”
He laughed, so lightly it was like a little dust falling from heaven.
“You ain’t got a habit, no sir. You only got a little chippie. You done caught the common cold.”
“Are they going to send me to prison?”
Again he emitted the stardust chuckle. “They ain’t gone to keep you, little brother. They’ll take you name and number. You can give them a false one they don’t care. You just a digit to them.”
“Really?”
“Yes suh, they going to give us desk appearance tickets.”
“What does that mean?”
“If you care to, you can bring it to court on the appointed date.”
“What if you don’t care to?”

He winked. “Then don’t.” He gestured at the multitudes packed into the room with us, filling all the chairs, the walls, desperately talking to each other, to our lawyers trying to convince someone and ourselves as I had earlier with the cops that it had all been a mistake, a cosmic joke, a Quixotic irony.

“What should I do when I get out of here?”
He nodded sagely and stroked the peppery white whiskers on his turkey neck.
“If I were you I would get some blow and take it like medicine for three days.”
“Some blow?”
“Co-caine, baby, the little sister, God’s whore.”
“I know what blow is,” I said, getting a little irritated with the loquacity of his riffs. He had a little John Coltrane in him. Which is cool but it had been a long night. On the way in the paddy wagon I had been chained to another old salt who had shit himself. You cannot read through that. It was midnight and we did not get into the holding cell until after two. They only have to drive around the block but the driver goes out for coffee and donuts and to chat it up with the others.

“But does it work?” I asked Coltrane.
“Sure it does, Times Square. You take it from me.”

I did. I passed another bad check while I still could and next day in the bright sunshine of the weekend I went to Clinton Street and looked for coke, around the corner from where I had been busted the previous day. The great thing about being a working professional of this sort is that every single day offers itself anew, a blooming flower, another shot at utter redemption or deeper and more degrading depths. You just never know where the great roulette wheel is going to stop spinning. The unadulterated thrill of it is what brings us back day after day.

On Saturday I found a fellow about Coltrane’s age who was happy to initiate me into one of the local coke spots for a five dollar service charge. My second wife Sarah has a story of Kurt Cobain nodding out in her apartment the night before he recorded Unplugged. She was rehearsing with Naked Angels that night and came home to find burns on her couch. I don’t. I was the awkward looking white kid shambling after some black con-man looking to keep himself in dope. The woods of the East Village were full of both species in its heyday.

My guide was a coffee-colored man without a jaw.

“This is what happens to you when you smoke crack,” he said, like Miles Davis, cutting and cool.
“What are you going to spend the five on? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Crack cocaine,” he said. He could not keep from blinking and his eyes were tearing from the sun. “You are going to get me my breakfast, sonny.”

I paid him and sat down to wait on a broken piece of brick wall. We were all part of the same wreck. Coltrane was right, I got off the heroin, but I did coke everyday for the rest of the summer. By its end I was looking for heroin again, my first wife Julie often looked at me with a shocked, hurt look on her pretty face while I kept walking, backwards into a stiff wind with the fall coming on fast.

Download:

"Spanish Grease" mp3
by Willie Bobo, 1965.
available on Spanish Grease/Uno Dos Tres 1-2-3

Photograph: Clinton Street, 1987. © Ted Barron
(click on image to enlarge)

The Last Phone Booth

The last phone booth in the East Village was on 2nd Street between 2nd and Bowery in a vacant lot behind an apartment building that was connected tangentially to the famous Meg McGurk’s suicide bar where in the last century at least five desperate women, prostitutes, came in and poisoned themselves. This was on the south side of the street. The north side faced the rear of the notorious 3rd Street shelter, once the dumping ground for every single lost soul in New York City.

Standing inside the phone booth you could look up into the winking eye windows of the shelter, which for years was a big stinking mess, a dangerous festering sore of human and inhuman activity. The Zoo bar was nearby, a slumming joint for drunks to this day, but in our times a much seedier and nasty place where cocaine and dope could be bought at the bar or right outside. Across the street on the north side stood a skinny five floor walkup apartment building, the only tenement in all of the East Village to be condemned and leveled because it was uninhabitable, a lost cause. Now there are new luxury apartment buildings on both sides of the street with all the amenities and the shelter is a rehab. But there's no phone booth.

I knew the guy who ran the booth, on the night in question anyway. Rainbow Willie was a Vietnam vet whose face had been so badly burned in a combat experience that it was different colors, a bright red purple chin gave way to dull brown sort of shiny lips and yellowed jaundiced eyes. This was the story he told anyway. It was completely possible that he made up the whole thing and he had actually been burned smoking the rock, or maybe a girlfriend had thrown acid or fried potato grease at him. Things like that happened all the time in that world. Still you tended to believe Rainbow Willie. He had the aura of a man who was telling the truth.

I was working as a delivery person for a Benny’s Burrito franchise on the west side on Bleecker Street, which ends at CBGB’s on Bowery right around the corner from the phone booth. Most of my deliveries were on the West side but the drugs were east of Bowery. I had the job for all of three days. My tenure ended when after a night full of deliveries, receipts and tips, I came back 6 bucks short.

I had begun the night by riding over to the vicinity of the phone booth to cop at least five bags of dope from a certain man that Rainbow Willie had introduced me to. He was having a fight with his girlfriend, a hooker who worked out of a broken down van. By the end of the night he shook out a bottle of 151 run over her head and lit her on fire. Rainbow Willie tackled her, wrapped her in his arms and rolled over and over with her in the south side vacant lot. He got her to a puddle and none of us who were there for the witching hour, past three am, where last night starts to bridge into tomorrow all witnesses none of us will forget the terrible screaming sound she made that went hoarse, like she lost her voice, just as the water met her burning flesh and hissed.

Let me interrupt the image of sweet Lucy burning to begin to explain something about who we were then. The men of Rainbow Willie’s generation had the draft to worry about. We had nothing like this. We were on a dead end street in a vacant lot. And the clock was ticking. Since New York has had its renaissance downtown and the real estate values have gone up to the sky these places no longer exist. They exist only here, in the world we have created, with words that make images in the old fashioned way that was passed down from my father to yours and conjured barefoot around fires. We were not far from that. We were speaking in tongues, on bare earth.

Another weird thing I remember from that night was the music, someone in an apartment over our heads was blasting side two of the first Pink Floyd album. Maybe he went out to cop and got arrested. Maybe he fell asleep in the bathtub, maybe he died in there, but he had his turntable on repeat and the side kept playing over and over: The Scarecrow, The Gnome, Chapter 24 and Interstellar Overdrive. It wafted down from an eighth floor window. Everything that happened down there, for the 150 or so of us who filled the lots and the street, it lent some meaning to our actions. My brother told me in Iraq they always played music in their tank during a battle, the same sort of thing except the Floyd was like coming down from heaven and it went on and on. The south side lot took up the places of at least three buildings that had been torn down. It was filled with garbage, at least one teeming dumpster, a couple couches, a door and many other possessions that had been cleaned out the month before. There was a suckhole, rumor had it a banker had been lost down there, his tie was bound to a street sign, an oily viscous liquid showed on top of slowly draining water.

When Turn Your Head Bobby set his girlfriend Lucy on fire, he also ignited the dumpster. That auxillary fire burned for at least an hour. After everyone else took off, Rainbow Willie and I stood there. I had no where to go and a train to catch. I had left my wife on Thursday, gone to the Village Idiot, then walked the streets for the rest of the weekend. Julie came and found me on Broadway sometime on Saturday afternoon, selling books from a table. She handed me twenty five dollars. “You can still come home, y'know.”

"I called my brother. I’m catching a train for North Carolina."

“A hospital is where you need to go, buster." She was still trying. But it was like she was a passing train and I was a closed station, like Cortlandt St. after the towers went down, something sad to look at as you passed, but that you could not touch, a ghost. She walked into the night with the books under her arm. She was the kind of woman who looked really nice walking away.

On Thursday night we had dinner together. She had met me at the Benny’s in the dining room across the street from the takeout. She wore a shirt with a plunging neckline and a look on her face and in her eyes that belied her pert jokery. I told her everything she wanted to hear, spent the night in her arms and left for the Idiot an hour afterwards. When I got up to leave, she yelled at me and threw my shoes out the window. I walked out in my stocking feet, and put the shoes on one at a time while still standing, balancing on one leg. I looked up and saw she had come to the window. Her posture said she was crying.

What was the phone booth to us that night? It was something like a portal, a transporter terminal. Depending on what personal deal you made with Rainbow, you could spend up to ten minutes there. The telephone booth beamed us to a place where we didn't have to worry about who we were supposed to be in real life, a brother, a husband, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.

At one point, I saw a middle aged man in a suit with gawky glasses approach. No one was inside, but Rainbow Willie barred his way.
“Uh excuse me, buddy.”
“Dollar a minute.”
The man ignored him and tried to push past.
"I’d like to make a phone call.”
“Dollar a minute, five dollars on top of that for a phone call.”
“Five dollars for a phone call?”
“And you got to have your own change. I got no change. You have to be in charge of your own change.”
“You got to be kidding me. You cannot charge for a phone booth. This is a free country.”
"Pshaw, brother. You might not realize it but this is the last phone booth below 14th Street on the east side. It works. It’s full size. You bring a hooker here and you want to get a blow job, fine, pay me. You got some dope and you want to get off, pay me.”

"What if I just want to make a phone call?!"

"You heard the man," I piped up. Gawky Glasses walked off shaking his head. Many others of us were happy to pay Rainbow for the few seconds or moments time that we spent in the phone booth. From there was the giant empty lot, or get into trouble in the tall grass behind the shelter, maybe go back to the Zoo, if you still felt sober enough to deal with society. You could use the phone booth to step out of the world, into some other place, where early Pink Floyd played all the time.

The building on 2nd Avenue, the one that was torn down, offered another alternative, any number of horribly nefarious and dangerous pursuits could be engaged in there. You went in there you might not come out, and when you did you were forever changed. You have heard of after hours joints, this was an entire after hours building.

Turn Your Head Bobby was a big menacing guy who a brain injury had rendered naturally dopey and more than a little scary. A white guy from Philadelphia. The story went that one night he was on the platform after a long night of drinking. He heard a train but looked in the wrong direction and was blindsided. Lucy was his girl, a hot Puerto Rican-Italian, her father had run a bowling alley and bar on Avenue C when there were such things. Her mother was known for her spicy fried bananas. A straight A student until she fell for Bobby started hitting the clubs with him and both ended up in the dope. He turned her out. What else can I say about poor Lucy? Most of us knew her pretty well. She told me once this sad story about her father.

He took her to a New York Giants football game. Didn’t have tickets. Just before they got to the turnstile he punched her hard in the arm, so when she was crying, he could use that to get them in. Worked like a charm. Girl like that, with a dad like that would work real hard to make a man happy know what I mean. I remember hearing her say:

“Bobby you got to give us some room. You’re hurting business.”
“But Baby…”
“Don’t but baby me you wait outside the car and always asking me for money.”
“But baby I need…”
From there it escalated, these things happen in matters of love.

Next thing any of us knew she was on fire, running through the dark lot.

The next day we might end up back in our lives, or yours, in your first wife's bed, or in the sinkhole with the banker, or in the lot with cottonmouth and red eyes, walking away, shaking all heaven knows what off our clothes. Some of us would end up dead or in the shelter on 3rd Street, on a downward escalator that only stopped when you were shackled in a bus bound for an upstate prison. I ended up on a train for North Carolina. But for the moment we were all suspended outside of that, and somewhere early Pink Floyd was playing.
That moment ended when Lucy caught on fire.

A few of us hung around until the cops came. By then she had left with Bobby. Some relationships went like that. The cops asked a couple questions. The fire in the dumpster eventually burned itself out. The sinkhole made a couple of really wierd burbling sounds. I hung around with Rainbow Willie until after four when I walked over, all the way across town to Penn Station, caught a train and ended up barfing in the woods outside an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with my two brothers. My younger Brother Steve raised his hand and turned to me. “When are you going to stop this, already?”

He surprised me. He was just there to show support for me. He wasn’t supposed to say anything.

The funny thing was that when I returned to the city four days later, was not that I copped again within thirty minutes of getting off the train, but that when I walked down 2nd Street the phone booth was gone. The last phone booth in the East Village. I would talk to Rainbow Willie again, but not there. It was almost like none of it had ever happened.


Download:

"Fun House" mp3
by The Stooges, 1970.
available on Stooges/Funhouse

"Interstellar Overdrive" mp3
by Pink Floyd, 1967.
available on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

"Baby's On Fire" mp3
by Brian Eno, 1974.
available on Here Come the Warm Jets

Photograph: Second Avenue Phone Booth, 1985. © Ted Barron
(click on image to enlarge)

Backdoor Saint

Ringo Heretic was the most successful writer that I knew on a personal basis. He was working on a novel. He cut a very impressive figure. On ABC No Rio Sundays I remember he read from a section about a tragically hip, and…hot waitress. She was calling to him for help on the telephone. Eventually I would call on Heretic for help myself. His work was so self-consciously cool that it gave you chills. I was naïve enough to buy the whole pose hook, line and sinker. He had a motorcycle and long, stiletto sideburns, German pale blond hair and complexion, and something of the concentration camp commandant in his aspect. In his work and in his persona he gave off the aura of someone who had been through the whole East Village drug scene and come out the other side. He wore a golf cap with a Valium emblem.

15 years later I found a copy of his abandoned novel, water-stained and fouled by vermin carcasses and droppings under the sink of my own apartment. There was something crawling in the pages and I was so startled that I dropped it on the floor and stomped no less than three times, later shaking out an enormous hairy and multicolored centipede from the pages into my trash receptacle. Evidently he and my ex-roommate had been close friends. What a small world we inhabited. We thought it was so big.

Ringo Heretic organized readings at the St. Mark’s Church, a historic space with a dramatic and ancient graveyard on 2nd Avenue between 10th and 11th, and this was how many of us little mice were able to brush up against the big cat literary luminaries of the East Village. Corso, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Jim Carroll all came there to read. Anyone that was alive enough to prop against the lectern. Heretic had announced an event on the night of my initiation. It was really crowded out in front of the church and all the neighborhood freaks were out. I had copped a couple bags before walking uptown and did half of one across the street. Outside an older man with white hair sat on a blanket with a pile of paperback books. He caught my eye as I stood in the long line and motioned me over.

“Hey kid,” he asked. “How would you like to get in free?”
“Tell me.”

He explained that he was selling copies of his poetry collections and if I bought one he would be happy to get me in. I looked at the cover and saw the name Peter Orlovsky. This was Allen Ginsberg’s lover of thirty years selling books outside the event. Maybe I should not have, but I felt sorry for him. Anyway I had not yet begun to spend all the money I had on dope so I bargained him down to five bucks. He pointed behind him to a back door at the other end of the graveyard.

“Just walk in?”
He nodded.

Once inside I went upstairs. It was weird. Just as I went into the bathroom, a kid of not more than fourteen walked gingerly out of one of the stalls. He had a terribly glazed look, like someone had licked all the milk off of his fresh face. He was followed by one of the oldest, most wizened looking men I have ever seen. The good student that I was, I quickly realized that he was the one and only Herbert Huncke, the Times Square hustler who had used Ginsberg’s Columbia apartment as a stash drop for his larcenies back in the 40’s. Both had been arrested, I believe; Ginsberg landed back in the nuthouse and Huncke upstate in prison.

I just remember being freaked out that the kid was so young. I went into the stall they had vacated and sniffed the other half of the bag of dope. A few moments later, I stood in the back of the grand theater space as Gregory Corso read from his famous poem, Marriage. All of the faces in the great room glittered. Later Ginsberg sung and accompanied himself on some sort of primitive guitar- like instrument.

Weeks later I showed up unannounced at his office on Union Square. It was in the same building as Julie’s design agency job. On the downstairs directory his name was misspelled as Ginsburg and Assoc., like a Jewish law firm. I walked up the fourteen flights of stairs stopping along the way to do lines of blow off flat surfaces, windowsills, stairs and the metal tops to fire hose containers. By the time I reached his floor I was sweating, talking quite loud and very fast. When his door opened I directed some of my verbal fusillade in the great poet’s direction, pressing a flyer in his palm and inviting him to attend a reading I was giving from my novel at an art gallery in Soho. Ginsberg, as anyone who knew him would tell you, was a big sweetheart. He was also very famously fond of earnest young men like myself.

“It’s my sixtieth birthday,” he told me. He went on to explain that he was trying to concentrate a little more on his own writing.

“My God, that is exactly what you should do!” I shouted.

I went on to compare his work to Walt Whitman’s and raced on about any number of other quite irrelevant asides. He nodded graciously, scribbled his phone number on a page of my notebook and slowly closed the door. I probably never stopped talking. Somewhere I am quite sure that some version of me is still doing blow off some odd surface in that stairwell and talking out loud to the dust.

My mother did attend that reading. She recorded it for my grandmother who was my greatest booster as a writer and New Yorker but at that time too feeble to attend. The reading went great. Afterward my sweet innocent mother who graciously lent me twenty five dollars for the occasion accompanied me, Julie and some friends to Life Café. This was a boho joint with tattooed waitresses on the edge of Tompkins Square Park which in just a few weeks would explode in a police riot. I did not eat much, but I did slip out on the pretext of going to the bathroom and spend my mother’s money on coke and dope.

Later as she dozed on the couch at the other end of the apartment, a few feet from Julie in our bed, I sat at the kitchen table and snuffled drugs, too “excited” to sleep. There exists a photograph of mother and I at the Life Café. She is dressed in white and the light shines on her; I am dressed in shades of black, skeletal, my facial features twisted into a hideous smile. She looks like an angel, and I do not. In my mind it was a triumphant night, to read my work before the public on such an occasion. Only from her eyes (they look like two moist puddles of blue) does one sense how worried she was about her middle son and only in my own is suggested how hard I was working to hide the reality of the situation from my own heart. My grandmother listened to the audio tape made for her but my voice came out too garbled to be understood.

Within weeks I ran into Heretic on the subway. I made a date with him.
“I need to talk to you about, uh…drugs.”
He nodded and smiled with superciliousness, as if he had been waiting for me to bring this up.
“Meet me at the Washington Square Coffee Shop, tomorrow morning.”

That night after Julie went to sleep, I slipped out and spent the night handing out copies of a novel chapter on the dance floor of the Limelight, another historic church, turned into a nightclub. It had been published in a now defunct East side broadsheet. When I ran out of copies I went into the Ladies bathroom where I chatted up the attendant and told her my ambitions and the problems I was having with drugs and my wife. No one really looked askance at my presence there. Those were the days. When I wanted to get high, I went into a stall in the adjoining men’s room. The Ladies room attendant had blonde hair and beautifully full lips. Her lipstick sparkled and I stayed there until closing, talking fast and staring at her lips, at her skin and the opening of her dress. She wanted to be a writer too and I think she was impressed by my success. I had accomplished more than her, I guess. We grasp at anything, don’t we?

The next day I met Ringo Heretic and he told me that I needed to abstain from drugs completely and the way I would learn to do this was by talking to people in the basement of a local schoolhouse.

“That’s all?”
He nodded. It sounded utterly preposterous.

He gave me the address of the place. This was a Monday. The meetings took place on Tuesday and Thursday. On Tuesday for some reason I was on the west side, wandering around, doing blow as always. Around four I got on the crosstown L train to make the meeting between 1st and A. I rode back and forth, getting off at stations along the way to get up my nerve. It was not until Thursday that I made it there. Everyone there had the same troublesome aura of Heretic. Their eyes were bright and shiny and clean. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom imagining that no one else suspected what I was doing in the stall. Finally near the end of the hour and a half, I was called on to talk. The tears came all by themselves. When I was finished at least one third of the maybe seventy five people in the room came up to hug me and push pieces of paper with phone numbers into my hands. I went outside and stood on the corner, smoking until everyone was gone. It was the same East Village crowd that attended the punk rock shows and poetry readings. Everyone paired off and went to eat, talk, play music whatever. They all asked me, but I could not bear to come along. One other guy ended up out there with me. We went into the bar next door together, had a beer, and ended up talking. Eventually we went east to cop. We were doing the best we could.


Download:

"Venus De Milo" mp3
by Television, 1974.
from Double Exposure
bootleg

Photograph: Delancey and Clinton, Looking West, 1985. © Ted Barron
(click on image to enlarge)

No Rio

In those days New York City was absolutely lousy with people like me who had come to the big city and wanted to be writers. The East Village was the epicenter of this. There existed a circular at the time, just a broadsheet, printed on colored paper that listed all the poetry readings by location and time in a given month. It was called the Poetry Calendar. Maybe it was put out by the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, but I am not sure. This was our bible and neophytes like me would show up whenever there was an open reading. We would sit through hours until our time came. This is what later grew into the Nuyorican Café and their poetry slams which ended up famous and on MTV. But that was later.

My favorite was at a place called ABC No Rio. This was a squat on Rivington Street that happened every Sunday at 3. A squat was a building that had been abandoned by the landlord and left to wild. It seems impossible in this high-rent neighborhood but only twenty years ago it was quite common. You had buildings with trees growing out of floorboards on the third floor. I knew a self-appointed superintendent of one building who enforced his rule with a hatchet. He rented out mattresses by the night to all comers. Years later he spoke for me at an AA meeting in a detoxification unit in Beth Israel Hospital and showed off the crease scar in his forehead where someone had taken the hatchet to him.

At ABC a lot of us were working on prose too. I would get a couple tall boys of Schlitz and wait until the end. There were emcees that I remember: EAK a big brawny shouter Mexican who later became famous for his tattooed face on Coney Island and actually sold out and appeared in bank ads, his tattooed face plastered all over the city, bless his heart; Margaret who was a nice girl with black hair who played drums in a friend’s pickup band; Ringo Heretic, who was in the more legit Poetry Project and started a magazine that resolutely rejected my work and pissed me off forever. They only published their own work and that of writers more successful than they were, which is a hell of a strategy really and boasts an admirable sense of the mercenary. There was also a bald fellow named Crawford, grandson of a famous vaudeville actor, a great emcee, who moved out to San Fran, I think. Years later he came into an AA meeting with a sore head and the jitters. Then he was dynamic and committed. Margaret was sweet and she always asked me at the end, “Do you have anything this week?”

I mumbled acquiescence, and casually as I could, sauntered forward.

On the night in question I had the first draft of a new novel I had just begun that week. It was called Times Square. It was a great leap for me. Even Death was impressed. Everyone has a work when they cease being self-conscious and amateurish and begin to really fly. I read from the first chapter. It was a winter night, a little icy in the air and you could hear it flecking off the window as I read. It had gotten dark and the lighting always flickered. To light our space the emcee hooked a large orange extension cord to a streetlamp outside, gypsy style. It was one big room, up a tall, six step New York stoop into the unfinished railroad studio space. There was a basement below where the bathroom was and sometimes when things got boring I went down there to piss and take a few one-hits of weed to get the nerve up. There was a regular crowd and we were all very earnest, and then it was enough that we had this place where three hours a week, we could cast everything else aside and be writers. There were a few leftovers from the hippie days, grown old and spotty in the brain, a former Italian horse jockey and one notable psychotic who dedicated all his work to his mother, but most of us were sharp as tacks, saw ourselves as punks and wrote with a sensibility that emulated bands like the Clash, Joy Division and Iggy and the Stooges, sans guitars.

Times Square, my novel, was about a group of squatters trying to survive in the abandoned theaters and buildings of that neighborhood, as everything around them burned. It was a slightly extreme version of reality. The same thing was happening of course in the East Village with the so-called gentrification, so my work went over well and it was quite thrilling to read it.

I was always nervous and excited to read and with the beer and the weed I would pretty much forget everything and take flight in the work. The first chapter, which was all I had, ran to maybe 5 pages. I wrote single spaced all over the page, in the manner of Kerouac’s scroll, another hero. He was the neighborhood’s patron saint.

We had a lectern made of plywood. When I finished, there was loud applause and in my mind at that moment I was a writer. I had arrived. Frankly even in publication I can’t say I was ever happier. A rave review in the New York Times is nothing to sneeze at, but it does not come alive in the same way as a squat in the old East Village. We held events on weekends too with bands where we read as part of the acts, sometimes with music and the joint was packed wall to wall with the kind of black leather and Mohawk crazies that inhabited our world. It was quite a rush. We had created a whole scene all of ourselves. It was what New York was all about, like Hemingway’s Paris but punk. We were waiting for the apocalypse and we wore this all over ourselves, in our faces, our clothing, our stances. The tattoos and commercialization would come later. We were the pure article. In our minds anyway, which was where it counted. My wife did come with me for these, at first anyway, until we fell out and I, for one, was never more happier. Later I also read at an art gallery and to other readings, one in Brooklyn and went through the entire novel out loud in this fashion. Who needed Simon and Schuster?

That first night it was a smaller vibe but just as thrilling and when I walked away, I left my manuscript right there on the lectern. There it remained. I was almost to the F train stop at Delancey before I realized what had happened. I ran back but the place was locked tight with a padlock outside the door and everyone had gone. It was in the middle of the block, so I went to the corner. An old matzo ball place was closed for the weekend, Streit’s, but around the corner there was a big overgrown empty lot. I jumped the fence and walked through the knee high grass. There were needles, crack vials, dirty underwear, the lot serving as a place for shooting up, getting off or blow jobs when none of the shooting galleries were available.

At this point I knew where none of these places were and as I said I had just read the first installment of Times Square. My world was about to completely explode, but at this point I was as naïve as they come, a twenty five kid from North Carolina. I found a cement brick wall that cordoned off ABC’s backyard. The top of it was embedded with broken glass and concrete and I cut my hand. My idea of medical treatment was to smoke some more pot. Which…y’know, helped. There was a locked cellar door and a window with a bolted guard. I pulled off the guard but I could not get between it and the window to see if I could jimmy it. No go.

The flecking ice had turned to a cold spitting rain. I sat down on the cold metal cellar door and smoked another bowl. I sucked at the blood on my hand until it stopped. Over my head in the neighboring building I saw bright colored curtains behind steamy windows and heard muffled shouts.

“Hey Soozie,” someone shouted over head over and over.

“Shut the hell up already!” another voice pleaded. It was a long way from Raleigh, North Carolina. The next Monday I would go and get the ms. from the guy who ran the place and lived on the 4th floor, but then I was a little freaked. Everything seemed all or nothing. I went back out the way I had come, careful of my hand and the glass. On the corner under the busted streetlight, a dealer stood on the corner. He saw me and stage whispered at me.

“Headline.”

I knew this was drugs but I didn’t know what kind. I had up to this point only bought weed on the street. He was a Spanish guy, maybe Puerto Rican and skinny as a street sign. He could not stand still, jiggled and hopped in place. It wasn’t from the cold. I would see him around again and eventually maybe years later I figured out that he had just shot a load of cocaine.

“What’s Headline?” I asked him.
“It’s dope, man.”
“I don’t have any uh…”
“You can sniff it, man. It’s hot!” he hissed at me. His eyes were red as one of those giant cockroaches that when you hit them on the head they hiss back at you.
“It’s kicking!” he breathed, looking around for good measure like maybe a cop was coming and we had already spoken quite enough of this matter.
“How much?”
“Ten bucks, man.”

His tone mocked my questions. He looked at me like what gives? What are you, scared or something? Of course I wasn’t. I bought one and walked down the street under a scaffolding. Out of the rain, I folded the tiny waxed envelope in two. I had read just enough William Burroughs to figure out what to do with my quarry. I tore off a matchbook cover, rolled it into a tube and sucked down half the bag. The taste was unmistakable and the feeling of warm well-being almost instantaneous.

“Wow,” I thought to myself.

I bummed a cigarette off a passerby and never enjoyed one more. Every time I sniffed, I snuffled down another drip that weakened me at the knees. Now I was absolutely sure I was destiny immortal. It took the chill from my bones and put it right in the middle of my stomach, a feeling of pure pleasure spread through me. I don’t know how long I stood there. I guess it was all over my face though because when Flocko walked by, he said,

“You got your wings.”

In every raindrop that stuck to the wood and welled up like upside down tears I saw hope and possibilities. My first wife Julie and I had come to NYC in 1984 before we were married. I finished Hunter College while she began working as a graphic designer, when things like story-boards and mock-ups still existed. In 1987 I graduated and I discovered ABC that autumn. The dream to become a writer was like some genie's golden lamp to me. Anything that happened was experience that I needed to get there and whatever scrape I got in, if I only rubbed hard enough on that lamp eveything would be alright. What did I know?


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Top Photograph: Mercy, ABC No Rio, 1985. © Ted Barron