Hell Hooker Problem Remains At Large

New York City has come a long way from the violent, gritty, blood-soaked bygone times of the nineteen seventies. Disney strolled into Hell’s Kitchen and cleaned house, so to speak. Then Giuliani was tagged into the ring and moved all the smut shops, liquor stores, and sex workers two avenues down. The image of New York was transformed in about fifteen years to the kind of place tourists didn’t mind spending outrageous amounts of money on stage adaptations of classics from the Disney Vault. A greasy slice of pizza. A bagel with lox. A family picture in front of the gigantic Coca Cola. At the end of the day a pair of sore feet inside pink rubber crocs, and everyone went back to Boise with stories. New York had become a happy place for the clan of the nomad fanny pack.

How could Giuliani or the Disney Company have anticipated the backlash from the world of vice they sought to purge. Sure enough, such a catastrophic remapping in commercial sex traffic would naturally lead to company-wide confusion. Keeping track of hookers comings and goings, so to speak, would become unmanageable for pimps. Hookers, no longer able to sustain a reliable income inside a commercial zone, now had to rely on interborough traffic in order to keep up with annual returns partial to the greater vice economy—drugs, blackmail, murder squads, etc. Rogue hookers working outside a business outfit rose from the ashes and came into conflict with commissioned whores. Suddenly pimps couldn’t figure out which whore was where, whether this hooker was taking the LIRR to Babylon or this whore was riding the cross town bus to Murray Hill. How to split the money between rogue hookers working in tandem with commissioned whores? How to deal with outfitted hookers making money on the side? These problems would come to a head, so to speak.

Some crooked jobs came into the fore as a means of purging the chaos now endemic to the New York sex trade. One hooker rumored to have been playing outside the terms of her business outfit might be sent on a suicide mission to the Bronx where God knows what happened except that no one ever heard from Trixie again. Unfortunately, the barons of vice were taking their notes from Giuliani and Disney, disposing of their garbage with as little thought as to how there means might justify darker ends for themselves.

Sure enough, dead hookers were being disposed of by the trunk load inside illegal junk yards and sewage waste holds across the Hudson. No one could have expected that these dead hookers’ drug addled corpses would have a unique reaction to the pools of chemical wastes they were now marinating in as a result of their pimps’ cruel, all too hasty means of company termination. The presumed dead hookers were coming back to life in hordes, fully cognizant of all that transpired leading to their gruesome reanimation. These reanimated hookers returned to NYC imbued with comic-book style superpowers as yet another unforeseen result of their exposure to toxic waste.

Word on the street of roving gangs of radioactive hell hookers spread like wild fire, so to speak, through the New York underworld. Eventually the word over flowed into the straight world where the problem remains to this day.

“The pimpin’ days aren’t what they used to be. Back in the ol’ days a pimp didn’t have to worry about some radioactive skank knockin’ down his door with her crazy laser vision asking for money and crack unless she gonna blow my head off,” said one pimp, a Meanjeans Catmo Sheen, who’s lived through the whole ordeal since before Giuliani.

The Bloomberg administration declined all comment as to how they were going to atone for the radioactive hell hooker sins of our New York fathers. “I’m afraid to buy groceries. I’m afraid to leave my apartment or some hell hooker might shake me down with her mind powers,” said seventy year old Inwood resident, Edna Malatorres. Mrs. Malatorres neighborhood has been hit particularly hard by the hell hooker infestation. According to 2007 Cat Fancy study, hell hooker encounters incur an 80 percent mortality rate for tabby cats, a 78 percent mortality rate for manx cats, and a 53 percent mortality rate for street cats. Mrs. Malatorres, an avid reader of Cat Fancy, told me of her constant worry over her cats’ well being.

Ando Explains It All

Who remembers Jenny Jones? She had one of those trashy daytime talk shows popular in the nineties. She was blonde and white and absolutely void of any kind of personality. As a host she was completely irrelevant. But anyone that ever saw two episodes of her show would remember that Jenny Jones only covered like two subjects, which, paraphrased crudely, were: I was geek in high school but now I got a boob job and dress like a hooker! OR My teenage daughter dresses too sexy! The latter subject sometimes featured mothers and grandmothers “dressing too sexy.” Sometimes the teenage daughter “dressed too goth.” The female offender was held guilty of crimes of fashion by a crazed, hooting audience while the girl in question was given a dramatic entrance across a long runway where she strutted to her seat. As a teen it was fun to have these clownish women paraded around as objects of half hearted contempt. The women strutting to their seats would typically slouch in some salacious pose, whipping a chunky, fishnetted leg over one knee, holding a cocked, makeup-splattered face with one hand, lips glowing with cheap drug store lipstick affecting a proud sneer. Who did they think they were?

Who, indeed? If I learned anything from Jenny Jones it was that some people can in fact be “too sexy.” The white trash skanks on the Jenny Jones were just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak; most would agree that none of the painted women on Jenny Jones’ show would qualify as “sexy.” However, in presenting the question of “too sexy,” Jenny Jones has opened the conversation to the problem of people who are certifiably sexy, and who are at the same time, problematically too sexy.

But how to qualify this authentic form of sexy? I could write a whole book on the elaborate science of sexy, but to cut to the chase, we can use the women of the Jenny Jones Show as a definition of sexy by negation. So a sexy person by virtue would know how to dress themselves in a tasteful, flattering style suiting their age. A sexy person would be able to build on natural physical assets instead of pretending to have assets that just aren’t there. A sexy person would not go out wearing a doughy mask of makeup. A sexy person would have a unique self image that worked in relationship with non-physical characteristics of that person’s identity.

We now have a working set of criteria for sexy effectively oppositional to the women of the Jenny Jones Show. For whom, then, does the sexy bell toll? To answer that question, we must venture out to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. Williamsburg, according to Wikipedia, is home to many ethnic groups including Germans, Hasidic Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans. The neighborhood is also a magnet for young people moving to the city, and is an influential hub for indie rock and so-called "hipster" culture.

A hipster is someone guilty on all counts of being too sexy, and they are ruining this country. In the same wiki article on Williamsburg: Low rents were a major reason why artists [i.e. hipsters] first started settling in the area, but that situation has drastically changed since the mid 1990s. Average rents in Williamsburg can range from approximately $1400 for a studio apartment, $1,600-2,400 for a one-bedroom, and $2,600-4,000 for a two-bedroom.

Way to go douche bags! The rent hikes are partial to the insurgent sexiness of hipsters flooding the streets with their tight pants and knit hats and ironic pompadours. Everyone wants to live in sexy town! Landlords take the cue, hike up the rent, and oust long withstanding generations of tenants noticeably less young, white, and sexy.

Well the joke is on you, you sexy bastards! All your sexy clamoring for a Williamsburg apartment has forced you to haul your skinny asses to Red Hook or Clinton Hill in order to maintain status quo with romantic squalor. Sexy town rent is now too high for the incoming sexy. Great. Nobody gets anything. Sexy or otherwise. Let’s all make a hungry, sulky, skinny sigh for the American Way.

Solution: Send all the hipsters into outer space. OR. Send all the land lords into outer space. OR. Mandated citywide uniforms for all New York citizens so everyone looks like crap thus bringing an end to just about every imaginable prejudice. Problem solved!

Space Cadet

I go to Union Square Park. I expect activity. Weather like this—choking, sultry—teases people out of the cracks. No one person could honestly account for this phenomenon. Desert wraith weather systems are socially understood on a cumulative scale. I go to Union Square to take measurements.

I see a female mime without makeup. She climbs ropes, idles on swings, apes pedestrians, makes sharp, anonymous gestures in the air. She wears a red hat and sash with a black pants suit. Passersby ignore her as if she were homeless or insane. If she were anywhere else, mincing across a bridge or inside the nearby Whole Foods, they could be right. The weather and the park work together to insulate madness, performative and otherwise.

The she-mime commands space. She remains inside a five yard radius of her “center.” Her ability to endure the rich, deliberate oblivion of New York pedestrians gives her antics a sad, desperate quality. She has no makeup. What does that mean? She climbs ropes without a mask, unmasked, as though, “that’s what you do,” she thinks across her pointed rictus.

A homeless man stands behind me. It takes me a minute to realize he’s homeless. He commands space. He stands there, a meaty middle aged black man dressed in grey sweats, swaying almost imperceptibly to sounds issuing from earbuds, which, followed, are connected to a handheld radio. Homeless men listen to the radio. They listen to the radio as though taking instructions. The instructions are part of a magnificent plan. The magnificent plan stacks onto itself, detail upon detail, until, like a fever dream, the plan disintegrates, becomes incomprehensible, can only be recalled in fragments. Plastic bags stuffed with remains collect around his legs. His eyes appear to sweat—shiny, faraway, “but I see you. don’t think I don’t.”

I lean against a lamp post. I command space. I realize that if I lean against this lamp post long enough I will become a sex worker. The mime without makeup was a normal person until she stood still. She could become homeless person, a sex worker, or a street performer. If she were none of these things, she would have known to play with her phone. Normal people standing still play with their phones. Phones mean normal people can’t be bought. I play with my phone, but the effect is less as a sex worker. It’s my shorts, I think. It’s my hat. If I stand still long enough an officer will ask me just what I think I’m doing. If I stand still, watching, waiting, taking my measurements, someone will want to light my cigarette. But I don’t smoke. By then it would be too late.

I cross 14th street onto Broadway. I see a man leaning against a wall. He commands space. He has olive skin and sleepy, saturnine eyes. He is wearing a long white dress shirt and black slacks. He is smoking a cigarette in long, exaggerated drags. I realize he’s a sex worker before I pass him. He makes kissing noises at me. I smile at the horror of my developed intuition. Two blocks later, I turn around. I can squeeze his image between my thumb and index finger. He doesn’t look like the hustlers I’ve seen around the Port Authority. His outfit looks like pieces of a groom’s man. I remember the weather. I think of LA. Prostitutes come out in the heat. That’s why they love LA.

I walk to Thompkins Square Park then back to wear I saw the groom’s man. I want to speak with him, but I doubt myself. He would tell me anything so long as I paid him. But I would decide what was true, I would tell him. I would know something just by the sound of your voice. I can read voices, I would tell him.

He was gone. I turn onto 14th street. I’m looking at every face that passes me by. I’m looking at every face and notice a woman with a full face of makeup standing near the entrance to Whole Foods. She commands space. She is holding her purse with her arms crossed. Her outfit passes for discreet, but the rest of her does not. She is not dialing a phone. She is standing there with a sad, expectant look resting just beneath the heavy layers of makeup. I watch her closely as I continue down 14th. I don’t see her see me. She might have already seen me today. “Watching you,” she thinks about anyone. Day and night. Watching you.

Dinner and a Movie

It looked abandoned from the outside. The marquee was wordless, ripped apart, with the exception of one word above where the titles would be—Cinema, with a king’s crown dotting the I. Neither of us had ever been to Gravesend, Brooklyn before and deemed it ostensibly nice, reminiscent of Astoria, Queens. But the anomaly under investigation, New York's last porn theatre, did not fit in with its surroundings. The ticket office below the shattered marquee was shut off by tightly closed window blinds. A small, barely noticeable sign read, TICKET ADMISSION INSIDE. I told Laura, “I have that feeling you get just before the big drop on the roller coaster.”

Post Bike Accident Train Demon Phenomena

On the night of February 21st, filmmaker, Allen Riley, was struck by a car while riding his bicycle in the Bedstuy’ neighborhood of Brooklyn.(1) A picture was taken of the offending vehicle, and Allen was taken immediately to Bellevue Hospital. He was not seriously injured aside from mild head trauma. After a short recovery, Allen went to the NYPD to acquire the driver’s insurance information. The police had no record of the accident as no one had called them before Allen was taken to the hospital. The police could not substantiate an accident for Allen's insurance company, even with the picture, because the police were now being involved after the fact. In an effort to work around the pen-and-paper bureaucracy of the police station, Allen checked the NYPD website, which proved useless.
I caught up with Allen to ask him about any sort of post-accident phenomena which lead us to the subject of ‘train demons.’(2) Our conversation then drifted elsewhere.

Allen: I think the idea for train demons comes from my post-accident experience with pencil and paper/analog/off-line bureaucracy versus digital/on-line bureaucracy where everything is accounted for. Stuff gets lost in messy heaps of paper, or in a big physical system like the trains, so I like the idea that the trains aren't actually a closed system but there are openings to other dimensions in there where train demons come out. It sort of explains where these people come from.

Me: So train demons are kind of like the inky leaks coming from the cracks of over wrought systems?

Allen: I guess it’s sort of that digital systems are kind of omnipotent and account for all their parts, where the train is a kind of system that cannot be wholly accounted for, and there are leaks into other worlds in there. But on a literal level it’s a place where you are put into a confrontation with people whose lives are totally different from yours at the moment.

Me: What does a train demon look like? How do they behave?

Allen: Train demons are people who are doing strange things on the train in a way that sort of turns into a performance for the other people on the train. This isn't people who are asking for money, this is people who seem possessed by something. It's also obvious when its drugs or mental illness, so I want to exclude that from what I'm talking about. I've also been having fun scaring myself by thinking of the slumped over person on the train as the "familiar" of the train demon because every time I've seen a train demon, I've also seen a slumped over person somewhere else on the train. It was Lucy's idea to call it a familiar. Before she told me that word I was saying "the slumped over person projects the train demon."

Me: Awesome. Tell me about analog systems versus electronic.

Allen: It isn't electronic, it's digital. Electronics are actually the field where the term analog comes from because in analog systems you're converting one type of signal into another and things get lost or transformed in the conversion. Although the fly is a movie that shows how digital systems can do this too. That movie is amazing because it understood the concept of file compression way before that even existed. What happens in the fly is the same thing that happens to music when it’s turned into an mp3.

Me: What happens to music when it’s turned into mp3?

Allen: The computer takes the original full-quality sound file and makes a smaller file with less information in it. The new file is less of a sound file than a compact series of guesses about what the original file sounded like. So the mp3 is actually very distorted and has lost lots of information, although we can't hear the difference unless we learn to. So when you play or burn an mp3, you aren't hearing the contents of the file so much as the computer program's interpretation of what the original sound was like. So in the fly, the human body is compressed into a series of guesses, then reconstituted by the computer. However, since he was in the chamber with the fly, the computer tries to put the two files together as one, which turns him into a HORRIBLE MONSTER!!!

Me: How does this analogy translate to analog systems like the MTA or NYPD versus the internet?

Allen: Not at all.

Me: Oh.

(1) According to an NYSDOT study of bicycle crashes between 1996 and 2003, slightly more than a third (34%) of all crashes resulting in serious bicyclist injury took place in Brooklyn.

(2) According to 2010 survey by the NYC Department of Homeless, the estimate of New York's homeless population came to 3111 people without shelter, 783 more unsheltered individuals than last year, 29 percent fewer unsheltered individuals than 2005–1,284 fewer New Yorkers.

Wish You Were Somewhere

There are maybe ten places in New York City that are truly extraordinary, places that bear no copy anywhere else in America. Tourists will come in big cheesy throngs to amble clumsily around the great neon vagina of Times Square. Maybe they will see a show. Maybe they will go downtown and scope the village for some fancy New York cuisine, check out some restaurant featured on the Food Network. A younger tourist set may want to check out St. Marks Place, get some dorky tattoo, look at the shoes inside Trash and Vaudeville, and, depending on the wisdom of taste, leave with or without a set of day glow platforms. On a sultry summer’s dusk, a tourist couple will go to Washington Square Park, buy a falafel, talk endlessly of the moment’s novelty, how New York is so different from whatever Podunk they came from.

But after all the light brite Times Square broo ha ha, the officious fashion show posturing, the ultra haute cuisine, the post post modern kitsch factories, after all the glossy postcard debris, the souvenirs of servility, the nice parts of New York are just a series of overpriced tourist traps. The rest of New York is a slum, and that slum looks the same whether you’re in Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, or any of the non-rich parts of Manhattan. Staten Island is one possible exception in landscape, but don’t get too excited. Staten Island is still a slum, but with rolling fields!

Now to the people who live in the sprawling homogeneity of the New York slum there is of course more than meets the eye. Seasoned New York residents can tell you anything you need to know about where to do laundry, where to get good oxtail, where to stand during the parade, who’s a crook, who’s a saint, when to stop, when to cross, and just who that homeless guy might have been years ago when he wasn’t so crazy. Slum life is packed with riches, just not the kind that affords a way out of the slum. Though, to leave the slum is to leave New York. Beyond the slum is a cultural microcosm, a minority of wealth so particular in its exclusivity, its breadth of privilege and extravagance, that it is marvelous to think that these few and precious Eloi have yet escaped being devoured by the legion of slum-dwelling Morlocks beneath them.

In any case, meanwhile, and in other news, far enough away from New York, within the hilly exurbs of Northeast Pennsylvania are signs for a resort getaway called Memorytown, USA. Wouldn’t it be nice, I think, to go to Memorytown, knowing it’s a not a “town” or county or village or zone, nothing more than a fanciful evocation. I think, wouldn’t it be nice to visit Memorytown? Learn everything about Memorytown? Shake hands with the mayor of Memorytown? The mayor, I think, and smile, and think of my friend Zeke, an out of work accidental father at twenty six, living uncomfortably with his parents, anxiously trying to produce music in his basement bedroom, forever mindful of the sound volume.

I interview Zeke in the front seat of dad’s Civic and ask him what it’s like to be mayor of Babytown. I ask him what he thinks of the music scene in Stroudsburg. I ask him what he thinks of New York, would he raise his baby there. I ask him about his goals, what he wants, all of his answers I could recite in sync with his mouth. I tell him I that I originally planned to go to Memorytown, that I would have gone to the Tavern with a bouquet of flowers because strangers trust a man with flowers, and so armed with my flower mystique I would have asked the bartender congenial questions about the history of Memorytown, drinking gin and tonics, becoming ever more congenial, and calling it a night. Zeke smiles his dim, stoner smile and redirects my gaze back to him. He thinks he’s heard of Memorytown, might have seen signs for it, but he can’t be certain.

The back of this postcard gives this description:

Here at Memorytown, U.S.A., Mt. Pocono, Penna., home of the Hex Shop, Memorytown Motor Lodge, Paradise Valley Lodge . . . and the Country Store and General Emporium – where things are as they use to be . . . the honor of the house is hospitality . . . Open all year . . . featuring the nicest in old-fashioned candies, preserves, pickles, pretzels, rag rugs, hats, handbags, jugs, battles, toys, soap, candies, and a million other interesting items. . .

Memorytown is tucked in the woods, not even ten miles from the plush Mount Airy Resort and Casino. Far away from the rug of New York slums, though. Far away from the glass spires of privilege. Far. Away…

Depression Era Pizza Champ

Few gentlemen of leisure have the taste to appreciate the unsparkled pleasure of what your grandmother would call a bargain. Your grandmother, a person who has had the time to see hardship, has the wisdom to be satisfied by frugality just for the sake of it. That is why she and I enjoy ourselves at Two Brothers Pizza, a proliferating Manhattan pizza chain famed for its one dollar pizza slice. One dollar, no more no less, for a plain slice. Two dollars and seventy five cents for two slices and a soda. How can you beat that?! Grandma would say, “You can’t. Not in these times.” And she would be right.

Now before I go any further with my unpaid ad campaign for Two Brothers Pizza, I would like to point out the obvious (reasonable?) defects of the working man’s pizza. The slices are slightly smaller than the average New York slice. The pizza itself is nothing to scream about. It is merely good, significantly better than frozen pizza, with the crust a little on the soft side. The shops themselves are about as bare bones as you can get. Two Brothers is for the in-and-out diner; none of this sit-down chit chat business. Two Brothers is not a great place for your next business lunch, but if you were ordering for a party…

Also, and I only say this because it’s New York City, and because as Americans we live in a time where absolutely no business can be taken at face value, I accept that it’s entirely possible that Two Brothers is a front for some other kind of seediness that I’m not going to take any pains to uncover. If someone wants to pull some Woodward-and-Bernstein shit and ruin cheap pizza for everyone, then that’s their ticket. What grandma and I don’t know isn’t hurting us.

I go to the stand on ninth avenue right next to the Port Authority. Different from the three other stands I know of, this stand has a fried chicken bar with string beans and macaroni and cheese, all in the same price range of the pizza. I usually get two slices and a cherry coke before I take my bus to PA. I like to eat over the tables where you stand. Standing there, usually next to some businessman or bus driver, I like to look at all the different kinds of people that go there—high school kids, homeless guys, old ladies, and on a warm day, a Port Authority prostitute. This is when I forgive Two Brothers for everything it might appear to be—a front, a grease pit, a corporate chain.

If it’s a front, the money is for people as poor as the ones buying the pizza. If it’s a grease pit, the grease is cheap, and a soda for seventy five cents! If it’s a corporate chain, the chain is at least local to New York; no Super Bowl ad space for Two Brothers yet. The bareness of the interior becomes an absolution from heartless, bullshit eateries that charge extra for the stylized mystique of its own brand. I don’t have time or money for mystique. I am hungry. And when I am hungry, really hungry, I like to eat.

THIS. PARK. SUCKS.

In my busy schedule I so rarely have the chance to sit down on a park bench, take a deep breath, and take it all in. Now I'm no park expert. I haven't sampled parks from abroad. I have never drunk merlot on a park's grassy hide. And, if you'll forgive me for saying so, I have never taken a park to bed. With that said, I was wholly expectant in my folksy, backwoods naivety to have a one of a kind park experience when I decided to seat my fanny on a Jackson Square bench. Anyone might notice from where I was sitting that Jackson Square is a small park. The tiny, triangular plot is near the center of Greenwich Village, just off Greenwich Avenue, near Shoegasm, which is, I understand, a shoe store.

I noticed an offensive sign on the wrought iron fence warning me not to feed the pigeons or squirrels. I didn’t notice any such critters for me to hatch such a conspiracy with. About the same time I noticed that my bench was wet. It was, in fact, raining. It had been raining all day. I’m not sure what I expected, but shouldn’t New York City, the world’s most advanced city, have some kind of weather related contingency plan for its city’s parks? Maybe the benches could have some kind of electronic insulation device that melted precipitation on contact. What about retractable glass domes? The more I thought about all of Jackson Square’s missing innovation, the more the rest of the park started to irk me. What was with that fountain? I’m not seeing any water coming out of that thing. What? Is Jackson Square’s fountain too fancy to spill water out for the soaking pleasure of the cast of Friends? I’m not seeing the cast of Friends anywhere. Maybe they know the same thing the pigeons and squirrels know. This park sucks.

That was when I decided to try a new park. I walked to Union Square and sat myself down on the park’s west side. It wasn’t long before I noticed that this bench was also wet. I had become a repeat victim of this city’s pandering to the whiny, heedless voices of the so-called weather system. I could sit in my wet seat no longer than a minute before the sting of corruption goosed me to my feet. How long was this city going to keep making kickbacks for the “rain?” I was apparently a head of the curve as far as robot benches and bubble domes were concerned. But where could I sit until the glorious dawn of that progressive day?

I took off running north. I ran until I hit Bloomingdales. I went through the glass doors. I found a circular clothing rack and surreptitiously sat in the center of it. I sighed to myself. It was peaceful there in the center of ladies’ sweaters. If I were to throw an unchewed piece of gum from where I was sitting onto the floor beyond, someone, perhaps a small child, might pick it up and chew it. I took a deep breath and hoped for the future.

If Robert Moses Went Inside A Strip Club On The West Side Highway, And No One Was There, Would He Make A Sound?

The answer is no... probably.
The West Side Highway, currently stretching from West 72nd St to the Southmost end of Manhattan, was originally an elevated highway when its construction began in 1929. The highway was finished in 1951, but after quickly falling into disrepair, was closed in 1973 when a dump truck followed by a four door sedan fell through the crumbling highway. Robert Moses' finger print on the project involves the Henry Hudson Parkway, which becomes the West Side Highway after 72nd Street. Moses built the Parkway as part of an effort he called "West Side Improvement." The Parkway was completed on October 12, 1937. According to Wikipedia, the Parkway "cost $109 million, twice as expensive as the $49 million Hoover Dam that was built in the same period."
Because the HHP connects to the West Side Highway, the two are often mistaken for one another. Having made the same mistake, I took a walk down the Highway in good faith that whatever I saw would somehow reflect what I knew about Robert Moses. Though in fact Moses has nothing to do with WSH directly, he might have agreed with the architectural style of the public peers and designated paths for joggers and bicyclists. The Highway's park style is indeed, lovely, and well used by all manner of pedestrian.
I pass by a crew of skateboarders sliding over shallow sets of outdoor steps. The elderly walk their dogs. Parents walk their kids. When the weather turns warm, the peers and lawns will be full of sunbathers and hustlers. Meanwhile, the view of Hudson River sparkles after dusk from the lights of Jersey City and passing boat life.

I doubt very much that Moses would be pleased with the personality of the Highway across the street, away from the park. As hinted in my hilarious title, the commercial side of the West Side Highway is awash with tittie bars and suspicious looking car washes. Then I passed by Rib. I sarcastically thought to myself, Oh no! They closed Rib.

By the look of it, Rib was probably a diner. I would've liked to eat there were it open. I would've asked for the rib. The resturaunt was nothing to speak of anymore. According to the sticker still in its front window, Rib was Zagat rated. Of course it was.
I keep walking until I hit a porno store called West World. West World connects to a strip club around the corner where I spot a Hassidic Jew leaving through the glass doors. I wasn't fast enough with my camera, so there's no picture to prove it. But I saw him, and I'm willing to talk.
Anyway, from the corner of West World, I bequeath Robert Moses his Radiant City Beautiful Super Highway Park. It wasn't his, but why not give him credit? Tell me a better Robert Moses epitaph.

Playing in the Dirt of Old New York

Mike Strunk is a forty something Chinese food delivery man who has seen a few things. A man full of stories, Mike would guaruntee an entertaining profile of New York before the Giuliani clean up. I had to wait for him to finish his NES game of Wizards and Warriors before I could have his full attention. Meanwhile, I surveyed the apartment’s stylized accruement of horror movies and retro kitsch. The living room is the epitome of artsy eccentricity, a schlocky haven of grind house sleaze mixed with garish cabaret glamour. Mike and his fiancé, Renee, are gurus of a very particular aesthetic, a nostalgic celebration of pre internet decadence. Posters of David Bowie, Adam Ant, Prince, and Bjork accent, instead of merely cover, the walls. These artists represent a queer, campy, sexed-up fantasy world that is the ethos of the weekly Art Thursdays hosted by Mike and Renee. I became friends with these patrons of kitsch at these Thursday night art socials. I attend to them as both a friend and journalist, interested in witnessing the goings on of what is the ground work of a scene. After Mike saves the last princess, I issue my questions improvisationally. With the exception of the tape recorder, the interview is not unlike most of our conversations:

Me: So Mike… During what time of your life did you live in New York City?

Mike: (deep sigh) …About the time the album Purple Rain came out.

Me: Uhh do you know what year that is?

Mike: I think-I think it was the mid eighties… I think. Yeah…

Me: And can you describe the climate of New York in the mid eighties?

Mike: Uhhh… Something like… ehhh… Any bad—

Me: Did you run into CHUDs?

Mike: CHUDs… Oh many a CHUDs… Anything you would see off a 70’s crime drama—Deathwish, Dirty Harry.

Me: Did you see lots of dead bodies?

Mike: I saw a few. There was one area in the Bronx before the big clean-up, I remember it was called Morrison Avenue, and there was no electricity for blocks and there were pieces of buildings in the middle of the road so you couldn’t drive through there, and you never saw anything there except for mafia town cars or, on occaision, ambulances… on occaision. And there were bodies back there. There was one guy who they caught after a while, and he was just this weird hillbilly that came into New York, and he would go into that area and just kill homeless people.

Me: Whoa.

Mike: And what he would do was he would just kick the shit out of them and then douse them with gasoline and light them a fire live. So they found enough bodies that looked like this, that were killed in this way that the police narrowed it down and they did actually bust this guy. But most people could get away with anything there. It was an absolute wasteland… So yeah I saw one or two [dead bodies].

Me: Did you see any live bodies?

Mike: Live bodies? Lots of live bodies… You mean humans?

Me: Yeah, sure.

Mike: Ummm… Where did I live? I moved out there when I was fifteen years old because I was a creep. And I was nuts. They didn’t have Zoloft back then. And I just dropped out of school and moved up there with a person who lived here in Pennsylvanian who was moving back to his hometown in the Bronx. And he offered me a place with him, and I said sure. I lived up in Pelham Bay, last stop on the 6 train, Westchester Sq. And there were Guardian Angels, and every subway was completely covered with graffiti to where you couldn’t see anything.

Me: What are Guardian Angels?

Mike: Guardian Angels are a group that formed in the Bronx as a kind of vigilante protection group. They ran around without weapons, and they made citizen’s arrest and called the police. They were just a local group that protected their community. You know they tried all kinds of things… the Guardian Angels. In the Italian section where I lived, they really had it figured out best of all because if someone fucked with them, they killed them. And that’s the way things should be in a place like New York City because people are extremely greedy and extremely anarchistic in a lot of these areas and they needed the whip. So they hired Giuliani who’s a complete right scumbag, but, he had a pretty liberal looking democrat smile, which is bullshit, but he would do lots of underhanded things to get what he needed done. Therefore he was perfect for New York City because New York City was insane, and it was fascinating. There were pimps in brightly colored coats and hookers everyfuckingwhere, junkies all piled up on the street, people getting arrested, rows and rows of boxes lining alleys filled with homeless people. Just tons and tons of stuff.

Mike tells me about how he tried out for the band, Anthrax, and how the band members huffed paint and were the worst most bottom of the barrel kind of druggies. He explained how he lost his hair after contracting encephalitis from a near lethal combination of acid binges and cat scratch fever. When I ask him if he thinks they’ll ever get rid of all the CHUDs, he tells me about when his sister came out of the closet, and so to help her feel part of gay community took her to the Stonewall Anniversary Celebration. “It was just unbelievable. There were drag queens on stilts and Liza Minelli singing on floats, people coated in glitter, all kinds of decadent merriment. We were all having a great time until we ran into the church groups near mid town. Up until then it had been a completely CHUD free day. But I got to punch out a minister, and that felt pretty good. But yeah… Almost no CHUDs.”