Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  You have no idea how that neighborhood was back then. The Hitmen used to have shootouts with another gang, the Allen Boys, on my block and down near Allen Street. It was all drug wars and fighting over streets where they would sell dope and coke. It was crazy. At least one apartment got robbed in my building every week. I’m not kidding—the cops were scared of the gangs in my neighborhood back then, so no one could really do shit. It was a drag.

  I used to dread walking past certain stoops and certain buildings on my block when I was a little kid. I used to try to avoid them, so I wouldn’t get fucked with and jumped. There were only a couple of other white kids in my area who were my age. There was one Irish family who lived in the projects down near my way, and they mostly all hung with the Ricans. I didn’t really get along with them. One of the Hitmen was a friend of my aunt, this redhead Puerto Rican kid named Angel. So we didn’t get fucked with too much in the beginning. But he got shot in the head one summer, and that was the end of that.

  There were a few blocks in the neighborhood that had some Polish immigrants from back in the day, so there were a few Polish restaurants here and there. There were also a few Italian pizza parlors scattered through the area and all over the city, from when the mob was doing all the heroin smuggling back in the ’70s and ’80s. It was known as “The Pizza Connection”—look it up. There was also one old coffee shop down my block, closer to First Avenue, which the old Italian men—obviously gangsters—used to hang out at. They also had a spot at the other end of my block, where they sold cases of cigarettes and shit like that. But pretty much besides that, the whole neighborhood was Spanish.

  Below Houston, there were still some Jewish family stores and businesses from back in the day—in the garment district area and by Katz’s Deli, and there were a couple bagel shops and shit. But besides that, it was pretty much all Spanish. The neighborhood was full of drugs, dope spots, and gangs. I don’t know what it was that made NYC and the LES the way it was. Back then, and historically, it had always been low-income—lots of immigrants, gang crime, drugs and gang culture. But from what I understand, it was pretty chill in the ’60s, low-income, but cool. I mean, this was before my time, so I don’t know if it was the “drug explosion” of the ’60s that started its downward spiral.

  NYC in the ’60s spawned the Velvet Underground. So instead of peace and love and shit like “When you’re in San Francisco be sure to wear flowers in your hair” type shit, here they were doing songs like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man,” Warhol and all that crazy decadent-arty-drug culture. There was a lot of crazy shit going down in those days.

  Then, the end of the ’60s happened. Everyone woke up from the sex-and-drug party with a bad hangover. Suddenly there was the post-Vietnam heroin era, the financial crises of the mid-’70s, the garbage strike in ’75, and then the blackout in ’77, and the looting. I mean, one thing after the next. It all kept adding fuel to the fire, and it all kept getting worse.

  So when we finally moved to the LES, the city was kind of nuts and run-down. It seemed like every neighborhood and every block had a gang or some kind of organized crime. Uptown and in my neighborhood you had Spanish and Latino gangs like the Hitmen, Savage Skulls, the Nomads; you had gangs all over the city like the Ghetto Brothers, the Royal Javelins, the Supreme Enchanters, the Dirty Ones, and the Sex Boys. On my block the Hitmen used to have shootouts with the Allen Boys, from Allen Street. There were lots of black gangs, white gangs, and biker clubs, like the Hell’s Angels over on Third Street, the Aliens, Nomads, and others. On the West Side, you had the Irish Hell’s Kitchen mob, called the Westies, with Jimmy Coonan and his crew. Mickey Featherstone was a famous hit man for the Irish mob, and he was my boy Tommy’s uncle—a crazy Hell’s Kitchen motherfucker.

  Tommy and me, we used to smoke a lot of dust together. Once, when he was a little kid, he walked in on Mickey and his dad cutting up a body in their kitchen. His dad was like, “Go to your room!” Yeah, they used to chop off their victim’s hands before they dumped the bodies in the river, and saved the hands in the fridge so they could use them to put fingerprints on guns and at crime scenes to throw off the cops.

  By the ’80s, drugs were the big moneymaker for them and most of the gangs. If you don’t know, and you have no clue, then picture that a lot of the gangs in my neighborhood back then looked literally like the main gang from the movie The Warriors—except the ones in my neighborhood were Puerto Rican, and not pretty-boy Hollywood/fake actors. It was ghetto and it was real. They all had cut-off/sleeveless vests, with patches on the back with colors and shit. That was kind of the look. And everybody either had a golf club, like a cane, and/or a 007 knife, which was this huge knife that from the handle to the tip was as big as your fuckin’ forearm! Those knives were real cheap, like three bucks; they sold them at every corner store. They sold knives and glue at almost every corner store, so you could get your glue, get high, and get armed all at the same bodega.

  There was one glue store on 14th Street and Third Avenue, where the dude would give me free tubes of glue if I ran errands for him. I remember a lot of the old-school Puerto Rican gangs looked like straight bikers back then, but without bikes. MC boots and shit—some rocked F Troop-style hats flipped up in the front and shit. This was before the B-boy era, back when cats still used to “up-rock.”

  I’ll tell you, if you were a “white boy” back then, you were definitely prone to getting fucked with in my neighborhood and pretty much any ghetto. And you know, people can give you all the reasons for that—“Well, that’s what happens from hundreds of years of whatever the fuck…” But y’know, when you’re that white kid getting fucked with, that shit just doesn’t matter. It was every day, guaranteed. If on my way from my house to school I accidentally made eye contact with anybody, they were gonna step to me for sure, and be like, “Yo, what the fuck is up? You got a fuckin’ problem?” It was a given because I was small, and I was white, with spiky hair and a dog collar around my neck. So, I was pretty much set up for doom from fuckin’ Jump Street.

  There was a rhyme they used to sing at school whenever a white kid would get in a fight with a black or Spanish kid, it went like this: “A fight, a fight, a nigga and a white. If the white boy wins, we all jump in.” Or, the other version would be “A fight, a fight, a Rican and a white. If the white boy wins, we all jump in.” And that’s basically how it was in my ’hood. I remember one time walking out my front door to go to the liquor store for my mom, and winding up in the middle of a shootout between the Hitmen and the Allen Boys. It wasn’t that uncommon—to the point that locals on the block wouldn’t even freak out, they’d just step into their doorways and poke their heads out. I specifically remember one time watching a van come down my block, the side door slid open, and a bunch of Allen Boys were in that van with all kinds of guns, and they just opened fire on a stoop that the Hitmen hung out on. Of course, they all dove off the stoop behind cars, cracked out their guns, and started shooting back. I was probably 12, and I was the only one that hit the floor besides the Hitmen. Everybody else knew they weren’t the ones getting shot at.

  JOHN T. DAVIS, HARLEY, DENISE, AND JERRY WILLIAMS IN FRONT OF 171A, BY PENNY RAND

  I remember one time, when we first moved back from Denmark, when these kids from the block were fucking with me. I started muttering to myself in Danish, because that was the language I was used to speaking. First, I got punched, and then they started fucking with me more: “What are you saying? What’s that you’re speaking?” And then I’d get hit for that; it really didn’t matter—no matter what you did, you didn’t win. The gang on my block would be hanging out with their golf clubs, listening to the radio, smoking dust, and their little sisters would be following me from the corner all the way to my house—spitting at me, smacking me, pulling my hair, and talking shit to me. Meanwhile their older brothers, who were straight gang bangers, were laughing and waiting for me to do something, so they could just stomp my ass into the ground.

&n
bsp; Now, this was before I started fucking people up and before I became a Skinhead—this is when I was still just a little kid. But you do this type of shit to a little kid long enough and you’re going to create a really angry, frustrated kid. I really had nowhere to turn. What was I going to do, tell my mother? What the fuck was she going to do? Was I going to tell her English poet boyfriend who’s probably never had a fight in his life? What the fuck is he going to do? No, I’m going to lie there at night, in my bed, gritting my teeth, wishing death on every-fuckin’-body.

  I went through a lot of shit and it made me violent inside. So when I finally did blow up, I fucking exploded. When I was young, I did get a bit racial. But that was a direct reaction to all the negative shit I was going through on a day-to-day basis in my neighborhood and in my school—you either go through it or you get through it, or you don’t. I did. I got fucked with so much for being a white boy in a non-white neighborhood, it was nonstop, every day; but I always had close black and Spanish friends ever since I was a little kid, and even during the worst of it. Funny thing is, I never even really knew what racism was until I moved to the Lower East Side. I’d never experienced it. Everyone I grew up around was a hippie—all into peace-and-love shit. And on the punk scene back then, all that racism and discrimination shit wasn’t really accepted either—that was just something I never knew, even as a little kid.

  A lot of my heroes were black: Muhammad Ali, Pelé, Bob Marley, and Jimi Hendrix. I didn’t know what it meant to discriminate against someone’s color or race; all that shit was new to me. And all of a sudden, everybody on the Lower East Side was fucking with me for being white. And here I am with all kinds of blood in me: Dominican, Spanish, Polish, Irish, Dutch, and American Indian… It’s not like I was this Aryan white boy. But in my ’hood, I was definitely the minority because of my race.

  I became very antisocial. I got fucked with a lot. So to me it was always “us against the world.” “Us” meant whoever I was down with—punk rockers or whatever. Years later, when Eric J. Casanova and I became best friends, he was straight-up Puerto Rican. They even used to fuck with Eric on my block too, ’cause they didn’t think he was Puerto Rican because he hung with us and dressed like us. So he got fucked with a lot too. My neighborhood was mad thugged-out. And this was just the kind of shit I had to deal with.

  HARLEY PLAYING WITH THE STIMULATORS AT MAX’S KANSAS CITY, PERSONAL COLLECTION

  So yeah, you’d see the gangs on my block practicing “The Spiderman” to get up the fronts of buildings and into apartments. They’d practice on one of the burnt-out buildings down the block. They’d scale the wall on the first floor to the fire escape, and then the window next to the fire escape, and sometimes all the way up to the roof—right up the side of the building, using the bricks and windowsills as footholds and any cracks or crevices to grab onto. They would take turns. They had a storefront down the block, where you’d see all the TVs and other stolen shit—a lot of it from my building! They’d break into the building at least once a week; it was true ghetto old-school LES style.

  But even with all the crazy shit—people doing the Spiderman in broad daylight, loud-ass music blasting, people playing congas, getting high—it just was business as usual. Just a normal day in the ’hood: kids playing in the open fire hydrants in the street and a lot of “ghetto charm.” In our building, the “white building” on the block, it wasn’t uncommon to wake up with somebody on your fire escape, trying to get into your apartment. There wasn’t much you could do about it, because maybe they’d leave when you started yelling… or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they had a gun or maybe there was a bunch of them. And we didn’t have a phone a lot of the time.

  I remember one night lying there, hearing some chick down the street getting raped, and knowing there was really nothing to do. It was like a helpless feeling. You knew that if the cops got called it wouldn’t matter because they probably wouldn’t show up, and if they did, it would be too late and they probably wouldn’t find her. One night, my mother’s then-boyfriend got the tip of his nose almost shot off by a zip gun—he has a scar to this day—just because he was white, looked a little freaky, and was walking down our block. I remember coming home one night with my aunt and Anne Gustavsson, the Stimulators bassist, who got jumped by six dudes with golf clubs and shit, trying to pull her guitar out of her hands. You don’t really think about groups of guys jumping two chicks and a kid, but that shit happened. They didn’t give a fuck. You’ve got to figure, a lot of these guys would hang out and huff glue and shit. And when you huff glue and you smoke a lot of dust, you get pretty grim and lean toward violence.

  My next-door neighbor, Luc Sante, author of Low Life, recalls: “The first time I met you [Harley], it was at a party for the Clash, after their first show in NYC at the Palladium. Happened before I moved into 437 East 12th, I think in maybe September ’79. It was in a loft on the top floor of the Provenzano Lanza Funeral Home building on Second Avenue. It was supposed to be for the Clash, but the drummer was the only member of the band I remember seeing there. Met your mom, and remember you stomping around in big boots. And then it was amazing when I moved in and found that I was across the hall from you all on 437. I keep thinking that someday, somebody will write a book about the building. I moved in November ’79. Lots of famous people lived there besides the poets; Richard Prince, who lived in #5, between my apartment and yours, is now one of the richest and most famous artists in the world, and music people I know are always impressed that I knew Arthur Russell, who died 15 years ago but, like Tupac Shakur, has put out a lot more records posthumously than he did in life. But nobody who lived there then, besides Allen [Ginsberg], had a dime. Another common feature of the landscape—our block was a favorite for dumping and torching cars that had been stolen for a joyride. There always seemed to be at least one parked outside.”

  So yeah, when I was young I was kind of a loner in my neighborhood. I was just a freak that got fucked with. They didn’t understand the spiky hair, the dog collar, the combat boots. They didn’t like me at all. I was always a target. Anybody who was into punk back then knows what I mean: you were a walking target. Depending on the neighborhood, you really took your life into your own hands if you were a punk rocker and you walked the streets alone.

  So inevitably I started getting into a lot of trouble in and out of school. I had a lot of pent-up anger and frustration over all of it, and there really wasn’t much I could do with it. When I started going to public school, that’s where even more trouble began. There were fights every fuckin’ day, lots of hassles. People nowadays, especially these “Hardcore kids,” don’t realize what poverty is. They don’t know what really “roughing it” is. We lived in a two-room apartment with a small kitchen. I slept on a chair that opened up into a bed. It was a small room with no door, and it also served as the closet. I had all the coats and stuff hanging over where I slept. Our bathtub was in the kitchen, and it had a piece of wood over it as “the kitchen counter.” It was tiny and there was no privacy.

  It didn’t help that when you took the wooden countertop off to take a bath, there were always tons of roaches in there. In the winter, it was so cold that we all had slept together in our clothes and with every blanket in the house on us ’cause our scumbag landlord wouldn’t fix the boiler and or give us any heat. We were broke. We got our clothes from second-hand stores and my mom would find stuff on the street and bring it home, be it clothes or furniture. It was embarrassing as fuck. But that was life.

  Over the years, I lived in different apartments in that building. The first apartment my mom and me lived in was Allen Ginsberg’s apartment, with my Aunt Denise. Allen also had an apartment next door to his, and soon we moved into that one. Then we moved down to the second floor, with my mother’s then-boyfriend and soon to be ex-husband English writer Simon Pettet. Then, I wound up living in another apartment in that building with Donald Murk, the manager of the Stimulators.

  I started drinking really youn
g, and then doing drugs. And it didn’t help that my mom still had a drinking problem at that point, and was completely oblivious about what was going on in my life. She worked little bullshit minimum-wage jobs and I pretty much raised myself out in the streets. As far as me joining a gang, it wasn’t something I was into, and wasn’t even so much an option in my hood because I was white. The gang thing never appealed to me so much because I always received the shitty end of bullying.

  I was probably like 11 or 12 when a bunch of the dudes on the block just surrounded me and made me huff glue with them—or they were gonna fuck me up. I mean, what do you do when you’re a little kid and a bunch of dudes from 14 up to 17 surround you and tell you to? “Put this over your face and keep breathing until you can’t breathe no more, or we’re going to fuck you up. Don’t worry kid, you’ll like it.” It’s like, what are you gonna fuckin’ do?

  There were lots of burnt-out and abandoned buildings in my neighborhood that sold smack, and there would be lines out the building down the block and around the corner going all the way up to the top floors, where they sold the shit. The dudes running those spots were like Puerto Rican Gestapo—smacking dope fiends up, talking mad shit, making bitches give ’em blowjobs right there. It was nuts. I had friends who used to work as lookouts for some of those spots. When the cops would roll down the block, you’d hear one warning cry after another, “Bajando, bajando!”—coming down, coming down—and people would scatter. Then you’d hear, “Tato bien, tato bien!”—it’s all good, it’s all good—when they’d pass and business would go back to normal. I remember seeing garbage trucks pull up and sanitation workers jumping out to cop drugs; I even saw firemen, businessmen in suits. All kinds of crazy shit—cops pulling up to take their payoffs. A lot of the old-school punks were all fucked up on dope, too, so I’d see people I knew there.