There was a park behind the homeless shelter. You could go there to get high. It was cool but it was sad because this was the shelter for families and you would see kids playing on the scabbed concrete and young mothers breastfeeding their squalling babes among reprobates like us. Sometimes the line extended that far and there was no other place to spend the night. We could see the park from where we stood. And they could hear us. All of us with our pleading eyes. Do they usually just let the [...]
I met Downtown first. Me and Billy the Kid. Billy the Kid was from the East Village, Allen Street from what I understand. There are one of maybe two addresses that could have been him, depending on his father's name or something like that. His father was a veteran of the Civil War and his mother a washerwoman or girl. She was just a kid too, which does not mean you are not responsible for your actions is what she found out. The difference between a squat and an abandoned building is night [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Gershwin Hotel 7 East 27th Street NYC Tuesday March 24th 8pm Jim Coleman and Drew Hubner 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Gas Station on Ave B at 2nd St, 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, [...]
I was awakened before dawn. A squad of SWAT cops in vests had stepped into the alley to talk over their day. One of them saw me and gave me 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. There’s a hotel there now. 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 [...]
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 precursed 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 [...]
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 [...]
East of Bowery
Prince ensaya con “Even Flow” de Pearl Jam
NU DISCO | Louis La Roche – Say I’m Your No. 1
Listen to Prince really wail on a cover of Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow”
