They spent a lot of time standing around the diner, or the VFW, matching teenage posturing with adolescent insecurity, and flicking Marb’ Reds like mosquitoes. After long hours swindled by some youthful impression that this could never end, they would pile into the back of someone’s moms’ minivan, over to the bleachers at the football field, or a basement somewhere, and drink 40’s of Old E and smoke Phillies.

The town was always too small, and the city too close, and this bred a kind of unique mischief that played a central role in the type of characters that could create it. Because in this narrow piece of the universe the town was exclusively theirs, and the relative comfort that kept them insulated from the famously bustling streets a few miles down river, were still just close enough to give a residual effect. Which, in theory, meant a sophistication not usually reserved for sixteen year olds. Maybe just access to better drugs, music, culture, but it doesn’t really mean shit when your drinking and smoking in the park like every other teenager in America, ducking down every time someone’s brights belied a cop car.

Every suburb has its stars…

I heard:
Kids went down to Union Square or Tompkins to buy bondage pants off crusties with chippies for ten dollars.
Bought some stepped on seeds and stems off the guy with the fake Jamaican accent in Washington Square.

I snuck out of my parents house at night and I whistled beneath windows. I would talk my way out of my senior year at boarding school. And, back home, I would walk down the street with my pops to watch an entire childhood cityscape fall away into the Hudson. And then I left to join the dust and debris.
I left the suburbs in a shy panic, there is no value for homebase when you have never left. Just bold jumps into uncertainty because you’re not yet aware you’re jumping off and away from anything else and then to just rattle about the city.

I did not arrive on St. Marks place with any punk rock aspirations.
My familiarity with Reagan youth and GG. Allin was pure happenstance, and all it did was aid in my assimilation after the fact. Still, these were not the glory days of the East Village, or of New York City for that matter. This was not tent city, this was not the anti-cultural cultural epicenter of past years. It was not Basquiat or Borroughs or even Bloomburg.
At this moment it was floating freely, teetering back and forth on the notion that “everything had changed”, whether it was because of Al Qaeda or Guiliani.
And though it had, still maybe it was not in the way we all envisioned.
And anyway, I was in no glory state myself.

In ten years, it will mean something, to have lived in the East Village when CBGBs still exsisted, when you could shoot up on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Tompkins Sq. Park or build a fire in the east river bandshell.

Most of us, we were all just trying to stay well, not even to just bitch and posture, though we’ve all done our share.

Early on I hated the hierarchy and the heavily imposed dichotomy of “you” and “them”