by Jarett Kobek
The Lower East Side, its traditional boundaries including the East Village, spent most of the ’70s and early ’80s as a plague pit soaked with spittle and jism, a grotesquerie of drugged-out decadence. Heroin reigned, the substance of choice.
By the mid-80s, the crown was in dispute, with crack staging an insurgency. Crime and personal safety became grave issues.
Compounding matters, the blocks themselves were shifting. It began with the East Village art explosion, sending out a beacon to the first wave of gentrifiers. Truth be told, these people who were akin to yours truly. Ecstatic epigones and daffy dilettantes. Yet most of that first cohort cultivated a healthy respect for the dirt in which they rocked and rolled.
They came because the neighborhood was filthy, because it was interesting. They did not seek to shift its balance, even if that’s exactly what they did.
The first wave always brings a second. Trouble erupted in ’86. On the corner of 9th and B, an ancient building suffered conversion into luxury condos. The Christodora House.
Other East Village buildings had fallen to the same ugly fate, but for one of those unknown intangibilities, the previous renovations had flown well under the radar.
Christodora. Offering a different kind of luxury to a different kind of person at a downtown price, and being on the corner of Tompkins Square, sounded the initial cannon shot of a loooooooooong war.
The park’s unofficial residents passed the livelong day by pissing, shitting, fucking, fighting, drinking, shooting up, smoking crystallized cocaine, burning trash, dying. All in the daily sight of Christodora residents, in the front yard of these bleeding-edge units du jour.
The propertied classes are born to complaint. They simply live to make their displeasure known. I know my own, darlings.
City officials felt the Great White Pressure. A decision was made. For the first time in living memory, there would be a park curfew. The city landed on 1 am.
At 9 pm on August 6th, 1988, a police brigade assembled around the park’s perimeter. Horses, infantrymen, light artillery, helicopters. This gradual amassing of the troops constituted fair warning. The implicit message being that if one were foolish enough to wander within the perimeter after the curfew, then one would receive no quarter. The police were offering the beating of a lifetime.
1 am came and went. The people did not leave Tompkins Square. They rallied against the police.
What followed was a scene that evoked all the delicacy and tactful refinement that we’ve come to associate with urban police work.
Cops wild, instigating and provoking the melee, spilling into the streets around the park, coming up 7th, chasing people through St. Mark’s, pushing outwards along Avenue A. Beating civilians, kicking the phlegm out of photographers for the Times, clubbing reporters from the Daily News.
That very night, unawares, your humble narratress attempted to ignore the stifling heat, pacing her fingers through a battered copy of Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker. It proved an impossible re-read with the cacophony of helicopters and sirens.
I gave up, headed downstairs, and stepped into 7th Street. People ran past my door towards Cooper Square. A young woman was smeared in her own dark-clotted claret. I asked a man what was happening.
“The cops is killing us down in Tompkins Park!”
An inner voice spoke, Self, you’re curiouser than a cat at Christmas. Self, it said, you must surely journey down to the place of pain.
I needed to see, but I shouldn’t much like it if the cops were killing me down in Tompkins Square. I changed into a neutral outfit. Dressed down, conservative, a power jacket and well-cut slacks, bestowing the appearance of a person with means. Beneath the jacket, I donned a moth-eaten t-shirt that I’d purchased from an LA death rock band called The Castration Squad.
A steady stream of people pushed up 7th, their faces and heads split open, sweat diluting the blood, clothes torn. At First Avenue, I couldn’t get any closer. Mounted cops on horseback blocked further access.
Over to 6th and down towards A, right into the action, at the very intersection where the tidal wave of punks, skinheads, freaks, and homeless crashed up against the police line. People shouting at the cops, hollering, screaming. Coagulate gore in the streets. Whistles being blown, horses galloping. Helicopters overhead, motorblades kicking up dust storms, spotlights illuminating the Avenue. Chants. Men on the rooftops, throwing M-80s. Bottles, cans. Violence from above. I moved off to the side, watching the NYPD discipline and punish a great swath of unarmed individuals. Four cops smashed a slight woman against the Con Edison substation, kicking her, bashing her face into the brick. Other cops stood guard, preventing rescue. A Catholic priest attempted mediation, demonstrating the direct relationship between organized religion and the state. “Come now,” he said in this lilting Irish brogue, “but ye’ll be knowing in your heart, won’t ye, that violence t’isn’t our way now?” A man knocked off his bicycle, beaten with batons. The gash in his forehead, bits of bone.
Disoriented by the blood and the exploding firecrackers, I turned and bumped into the chest of a lone police officer. He was my age, perhaps a year or two older.
Truncheon out, blue shirt, yellow badge, riot helmet. His eyes ran over my body. So this, I thought, is death. I supplicated myself with a tepid come-hither glance, hoping that he’d rather fuck a comely young woman than destroy her beauty. He lowered the baton and ran off in another direction.
The cops couldn’t get past 6th Street. Neither could the citizenry. Heads were cracked for hours but the line held.
At sunrise, the police received orders to abandon the park, returning it to the very people they’d evacuated.
Think of it, reader, won’t you?
In that month of August, in that year of 1988, the New York Police Department, the great dreaded NYPD, couldn’t manage the elementary task of rousting hobos and hoodlums. They couldn’t wrest control of a ten-acre park. A massively superior force retreated from the unarmed resistance of society’s lowest.
Think you now of thirteen years later and mark the passage of time. Mohamed Atta and his unpleasant pals crashing aeroplanes in the World Trade Centre. Cops on every corner, a complete shutdown of the city. Effortlessly. Without resistance or complaint.
The change started at Tompkins Square. That was the moment.
The bloodied masses retook the park. A blackguard contingent stormed the Christodora, trashing its lobby, pulling out its plants, breaking the glass of its front door. All the while screaming, “Die, yuppie scum, die!”
I walked home, dazed, clothes stained with other people’s blood.
AUGUST 1988
Adeline Meets Daniel Rakowitz
Shortly following this unwelcome tutorial on the nature of state power, I made the acquaintance of a homeless pot dealer named Daniel Rakowitz, encountering him at a Justice Rally in the park.
By the end of 1989, dear reader, Rakowitz will have murdered Monika Beerle, his Swiss roommate, who was a dancer at Billy’s Topless. He’ll have dismembered her body, boiled the skin off her bones, hidden her skull in a locker at the Port Authority, and made a stew of her flesh which he will feed to the homeless contingent in Tompkins Square.
The way some people live.
OCTOBER 1988
Минерва
I undertook a healthy interest in an odd character at Parsons, a young woman in the Fine Arts department named Минерва. Her reputation around school was that of a dyed-in-the-wool anarchist.
Through her first two years of higher education, Минерва produced explicitly figurative work, owing a massive debt to Francis Bacon and demonstrating a distinct Neo-Expressionist influence.
Returning from the ’88 summer break, she’d entered the realm of didacticism, stripping away pictorial elements and focusing on the presentation of messages rendered in simulated type.
A great number of art students travel down this ghastly road, but Минерваt’s work exuded a special quality.
Most of the kiddies in their third year will attempt clever aphorisms. LET’S ALL PRETEND WE’RE WORKING CLASS. WHEN THE BOMBS DROP, NO ONE WILL REMEMBER WHO YOU FUCKED. THE ONLY GAY THING AROUND HERE IS THE DANCING.
Минерва’s canvases were stark gesso white, with meticulously rendered statements in black bold face serif. The language was graphic, employing a stilted English. My favorite was a three-by-four-foot canvas that read: SHIT IN YOUR OWN COCKS, BASTARDS! Another favorite: PUSSY POWER FOR PUTRID PRINCESS!
I watched as the latter canvas emerged into being, slow parthenogenesis over a four-hour studio session. A miniature blonde Soviet in her filthy denim jacket and ripped-up leather pants, painting crude obscenities. Oh, darlings, Минерва was divine.
Whilst she packed up her materials, I asked if she’d like to go somewhere.
“Fucking shit,” she said. “What you think? My life so empty there is nothing I must do?”
“Darling,” I said, “I imagined it might be fun to get a drink.”
“Alcohol, hm?” she asked. “Fucking why not, bright girl? Let us drink until our thighs sweat with human toil.”
We landed at the Continental Divide, on Third Avenue, a restaurant-slash-bar recently redecorated in a style best described as Dinosaur Chic. Ten-foot-high murals depicting scenes out of One Million Years B.C. sans Raquel Welch and her cohort. Shrieking pterodactyls that could only remind yours truly of Mother, tyrannosaurus rex rampages, moronic little dioramas inside cubby holes. Above the bar, a shelf hosted children’s toys. Godzilla, Dino from The Flintstones, a brontosaurus.
“Do you like Parsons?” I asked. “How’s the new work being received?”
“Fuck faculty in bloodied assholes,” said Минерва. “Terrible shits who understand nothing. Those who cannot. Fuck them. But I am pissing so much money on degree. And I love New York City, even if is much better ten years ago.”
“Everyone in New York complains about how the city was better ten years ago,” I said. “Or some indeterminate period before their own arrival, whichever comes first. But it’s never better, not really. It’s always the same.”
At that very moment, darlings, this terrible fellow walked into the bar. I’d had a fling with him about two years earlier. Back then, when he was begging yours truly to dole out handjobs as if his name were George Whitney, this fellow had dressed beaucoup très preppie, but now he’d grown out his hair and was wearing a Megadeth t-shirt. Megadeth!
“Sweet thing, would you mind terribly if we left?” I asked Минерва. “Someone who I used to watch neigh and whinny whilst in the throes of orgasm has just darkened the establishment. My apartment’s only a block over.”
“Sure thing,” she said.
Walking across St. Mark’s, Минерва pointed to a huge mural painted on the north side’s tallest building. “You see this?” she asked. With a pure black background, a neon blue cartoon outline of a young man’s head, cigarette dangling from his outrageous oversized lips, his hair done in white paint. A blue patch covering the right eye. Painted across the bottom, in loose red script, was the word GRINGO.
“I’ve considered this icon before,” I said.
“Is from film called Gringo,” she said. “Is title credit, done cheap. Local asshole play character of Gringo, local junky scum. Maybe you see on his skateboard? My friend give blowjob. Starfucker. No thanks. Fuck him. Only mural matters. Looks over us, at gateway of Village, watches our existence. Unchallengeable eye. You read Great Gatsby in high school?”
We’d been assigned the book back at Crossroads, but I’d caught the film adaptation on television and faked mightily off my knowledge of Robert Redford’s lackluster performance.
“But of course, old sport,” I said.
“Myself,” said Минерва, “I believe Gringo is Cyclops of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg in vale of ash. Gringo sees all. Gringo knows all. When Gringo go, so go East Village. Game is up when there is no more Gringo. Doctor T. J. Eckleburg is only good thing in bullshit capitalist fantasy. Is Judeo-Christian god? Or emptiness on which proletariat worker projects meaning?”
Baby wasn’t home, it being the time of day when he was either in class or working at the Theatre 80 St. Mark’s.
“Roommate?” asked Минерва.
“He isn’t present.”
“Is student?” she asked.
“At NYU,” I said.
“Fucking NYU,” said Минерва. “I tell stories about NYU. Real prick institution.”
I offered Минерва some food, but she declined.
“New York ten years ago is real place,” she said. “All since is monkeys who fling shit. You and I are nothing.”
FEBRUARY 1989
Baby Invites Adeline to Bret Easton Ellis’s Apartment
Our holiday break did not include a sojourn to California. Mother telephoned on several occasions, but she hadn’t much to say, still smarting with the unspoken and implicit implications of my abscondence.
Baby was clubbing rather heavily and regaling me with tales of Mykul Tronn, Magenta, Brandywine, Oliver Twisted, and the other baroque drag queens and club kids that he’d met in the sweat-stinking bomb shelters and filth pits around the city.
“Bully for you,” I said. “Have a grand old time. My only request is that you refrain from bringing riff-raff into our apartment.”
I’d fallen upon the simple conclusion that Adeline and nightclubs were like the repelling ends of two magnets. The ridiculous jangling limbs, the open mouths and grinning faces, the repulsive joy of people who were oh, sooooooooo happy! to be there, in that moment, shaking and grinding. Some things in this world were not intended for yours truly.
So it was with no small amount of surprise on that February night when I answered our Mickey Mouse telephone at 1:47 am and heard Baby on the other end, demanding that I meet him at an apartment belonging to some fool whom he’d met at Palladium.
“Baby,” I said. “Surely you can’t expect me to trot out at this time of night? It’s freezing!”
“Listen to me, very carefully,” said he. If wires could transmit odor, it was a certain bet that I’d be flooded with his boozy breath. “I’m only a few blocks away. You do not want to miss this. I promise.”
“I’d rather not,” I said. “I’m reading. Plus, you know. Club people.”
“Adeline,” said Baby. “When do I ever ask you to do anything? When do we ever do anything together anymore?”
A voice shrieked behind him. The shattering of glass. The cheers of a small crowd.
“Do you have Queen Rex with you?” I asked.
“No,” said Baby. “I wouldn’t call if she were here.”
“ Okey-dokey,” I sighed. “What’s the address?”
“114 East 13th, between Third and Fourth.”
“What’s the apartment?”
“2D,” he said. “There’s a doorman. He’ll let you up.”
“A doorman? Jesus Christ, Baby. What sort of animal are you associating with?”
“Come here,” he said. “You will not regret it.”
“I very much doubt that,” I said.
I fortified my nerves with two swigs from a bottle of ultra-cheap tequila. I hadn’t wanted to consume that rotten stuff, but a gut-level sixth sense informed me that survival would require stiff intoxication.
The tequila was an artifact of Jeremy Winterbloss’s last visit. He’d made his appearance on the pretext of lending me certain comic books, but the true purpose of this visit was for Jeremy to grow drunk and complain about his love life. “Girls around school don’t seem interested,” he said. “Or maybe I’m not interested in them.”
“What sort of woman are you seeking?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he said. “Someone who seems like they have a clue what they’re doing with their life?”
He presented me with two trade paperbacks. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. Both published by DC Comics.
“Aren’t you a Marvel man?” I asked. Jeremy’d transitioned from his internship into a part-time job working for Larry Hama, the writer on G.I. Joe.
“I guess,” he said. “But Marvel can’t do something like Watchmen. Our corporate culture doesn’t reward excellence. Other than Larry, the only good writer we’ve got is this woman named Ann Nocenti, who’s doing Daredevil. And most of the office hates her work.”
“Because she’s a woman?” I asked.
“Because she’s interesting,” he said.
Walking up Third Avenue, my stomach burned with the old tequila churn. I examined a construction site. A new NYU dormitory. Those were the days when NYU was always erecting a new dormitory on Third Avenue.
I’d asked Baby how he felt having matriculated into an organization with the stated goal of our neighborhood’s complete transformation. “To be honest,” he said, “I haven’t thought much about it.”
In the lobby of 114 East 13th Street, I informed the doorman that I was ascending to apartment 2D. He was one of these self-important little men who cannot help but invest their jobs with an undue amount of gravity, the kind of person who acts as if they themselves own the establishment. He wouldn’t let me up. He insisted that we buzz the apartment.
A drunkard answered, slurring out the words, sure, go ahead, send her right up.
I waited for the elevator, standing by a redbrick wall. On the other side of some glass doors at the lobby’s rear, there was a well-kept garden. A private garden in the East Village. How quaint. How absolutely divine.
The apartment door was ajar. Human clamor drifted out with the smoke of cigarettes. I didn’t bother knocking, sweeping in from the tiny hallway, moving past the makeshift home office.
It was a one-room studio, bordering on loft. Sparsely decorated, prewar high ceilings. Walls painted white. Very little furniture, the bare minimum. A desk with an electric Olivetti typewriter. A futon bed up against the wall.
Three drag queens were in the throes of acrobatic entertainment. A jumble of colored tights, feather boas, and makeup so outrageous that even yours truly wouldn’t dare the attempt. Two on the floor, on their hands and knees, with the third standing on their backs, one foot on each queen. The top mama warbled out a song by Dean Martin, about a marshmallow world in the winter. “The world is your snowball, see how it grows!”