Dreamers Rise An Open Notebook And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate. Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. MS. Found Scrawled on the Endpapers of a Copy of Luc Sante's Low Life In January 1976, having reached a temporary impasse in my college career, I headed for Manhattan to try and sort things out. I was nineteen years old and as green as they come. New York was hitting bottom; it was the era of Abe Beame, the Municipal Assistance Corporation, and, shortly, the Son of Sam. In the as yet ungentrified East Village where I landed, students, musicians, druggies, bikers, and waifs shared the streets with the older, largely Ukrainian permanent residents of the neighborhood. I stayed with a friend for a few weeks until I found a place of my own, a bare studio occupying a back corner of the top floor of a six-story walkup on East Fifth Street. The rent was $110 a month — roughly a quarter of my income — and there was no question of key money or broker's fees, or even a lease. There were, however, abundant cockroaches, a mouse that would nibble dried egg off the stovetop at night, and various questionable goings-on in the other apartments. There was a police precinct house a few doors down, but that didn't necessarily made the area seem any safer. One afternoon I heard a voice from the backyard yell “move and you're dead!”; a cop had nabbed a burglar who was attempting a break-in to one of the adjacent buildings. A few blocks east was Alphabet City, which at the time was generally held to be beyond the pale of civilization. I only ventured there once, to visit an old schoolmate I had run into, a talented artist who was already well along into a longtime dependency on drugs, who lived there holed up in an apartment, surrounded by science fiction paperbacks. At times in the evenings I would climb to the roof and drink decent Portuguese wine or horrible malt liquor, but I was never a very dedicated drinker, and was likely to follow an evening's bender with weeks of abstaining. Once I tormented a group of hungover friends by placidly frying sausages in the morning while they lay moaning on the floor. Late one night in insomniac fury I kicked so hard on the wall of a neighbor who was playing music too loud and too long that something large and made of glass fell off the wall on the other side and shattered, leaving the tenant — fortunately for my sake — utterly bewildered as to what had happened. The storied Fillmore East was a boarded-up shell, the St. Mark's movie house hosted bums for continuous showings at $1.00 a day. On Second Avenue I occasionally ate at the Binibon, where a celebrated ex-con named Jack Henry Abbott was to stab Richard Adan to death a few years after I moved on. One evening in the St. Mark's Bookshop I heard Neil Young's “Borrowed Tune” for the first time; one verse, imperfectly remembered, would stay with me more than 25 years until I heard it again. Around that time there was a Linda Ronstadt record that had it that “the city is no place to hide in / everybody knows your number.” In my case, nothing could have been further than the truth. In fact, I never had a phone; the previous occupant of my apartment had decamped leaving a sizeable phone bill, and the phone company, suspecting that I was the same person or a close confederate, wanted an exorbitant security deposit that I was not about to pay. Had I been so inclined there would have been nothing simpler than to cut ties and disappear down a rabbit hole into the cash economy, or just to move on and leave no forwarding address. Mostly I walked, miles and miles of city blocks, haunted museums, hung out in bookshops, nearly all long gone, and much too rarely went out to nightspots like Dr. Generosity's, where there was a poetry series, or the Eagle Tavern, which hosted bluegrass. I did, though, frequent the Bleecker Street Cinema and other repertory movie houses, and managed to take in a good bit of theatre. Mostly it was off-off-Broadway and a good deal of it was forgettable, but I caught Meryl Streep and John Casale in Joe Papp's free Central Park Shakespeare, Liv Ullmann in O'Neill's Anna Christie, John Wood and Tim Curry in Tom Stoppard's Travesties, and the ambitious production of the Andre Serban/ Elizabeth Swados Fragments of a Trilogy at La Mama ETC. I remember the Purple People. There were any number of promising or terrible things going on in the city at that time; to most of them I was more or less oblivious. I look back on some of those missed opportunities with regret. “Had I only known what I know now” — but I didn't, and if I never truly managed to fully inhabit the city that was offered to me, I nevertheless lived in the one I was capable of inhabiting, and, in a way, have continued to do so ever since. 2003; reworked July 11, 2008 [ Permalink ] Previous page Next page Home Index About Email me