summer in the city

I walked through the new Washington Square Park, expecting to be disappointed, or at least annoyed, but it was lovely. The fountain is working, the landscaping inviting. I spent an hour listening to musicians, watching kids playing in the fountain or with their families, hearing a hundred languages from tourists passing through. The park was packed with white people.

When I say white people, apparently I mean white bread– well dressed, clean, educated and wholesome. So even brown folks are white sometimes. I’m sure I’ve offended someone with that remark, it wasn’t my intention, it’s just the way it looks to me.

I left feeling “estranged”.

Maybe everyone goes through a grieving for what’s gone, for what was familiar when they were young. The New York I miss was a dark time in the city and people with sense wouldn’t miss it at all. There were fewer people, more than a million less than today but there was more crime and less money.

New York in the 70’s was anything but wholesome. The city was racially divided and so was the park. The northwest corner of the park was Puerto Rican coke dealers. One section was Jamaicans playing soccer & selling weed, another was the Native Americans and their peyote. NYU bordered the park, it did not yet rival the Church for real estate holdings. Drunks and junkies were scattered all over.

Chelsea was loud, dirty and undesirable. The East Village was a war zone. Hell’s Angels ruled East Third Street. Cabbies refusing to go past 1st Avenue would drop you off & wish you luck.  Avenues A through D were abandoned buildings, shooting galleries, lots full of rubble and an occasional homesteader. Ludlow and Essex and Rivington Streets were places to bargain with Jews for discounts on fabrics & suits or buy pharmaceutical drugs from Puerto Ricans. (Where have the Puerto Ricans gone? All the guys I knew back then were Ricans.)

Places were cheap and you could panhandle and still have a roof over your head. I had a place on 7th Street for $175 a month, Fat Phyllis lived on Waverly. Some of us had rooms in the Hotel Earle, or one of the other dive residential hotels downtown. The Indians lived in a squat on 13th Street and pirated electricity.

Some of us just lived in the park.  NYU had heated grates — good for cold nights and local joints didn’t mind us coming in and using their bathrooms. I learned to pee between cars or squat in an alley on the days they changed their minds. Wooden jungle gyms provided higher, drier ground for sleeping. Sleep low and you risked being peed on by a sleepy drunk.  My “husband”, Red Wolf, lived in Washington Square Park when we met. He moved into Tompkins when we were done. The parks were crowded with us. The drinkers and stoners, we had no jobs and if we did, they didn’t take up a lot of our time. That’s what the parks were full of in the 70’s.

I always thought I could go home, could find my way back through a tear in time somehow, if I wanted to. (Why would she want to, you think. But I do, sometimes I really do.) That New York is gone. The world changed. The city changed.

If I was 17 or 20 and showing up here for the first time today, where would I find the people who were my people back then? It used to be easy. Follow a blunt or a quart of beer. Part of the allure of the drugs and the drink was that common ground and easy acceptance. If I could chip in, I was in.

I sat in the park today looking for people I would’ve fit in with back in the day. It took a while but I finally found a few floaters, a group of four  that came together sharing a blunt, eyes constantly moving, scanning, staying alert, on a hustle, always on a hustle. They didn’t notice me watching, the me of today doesn’t even register on their radar.

My time would probably be better spent looking for people I’d fit in with today. The world moves inevitably on and sometimes I forget I’ve moved with it.

Sometimes I lose my place.