My Blank Pages

A Writer's Memoir I

I’m off on holiday tomorrow, and I won’t be posting for the next two weeks. In the meantime, I’m posting two extracts from a memoir that I wrote during the pandemic about my writing life, which I called My Blank Pages. In the introduction I described it ‘as the personal story of a writer who wanted to write more than anything else, and held onto that ambition even when it sometimes seemed that it would never be realised.  But it’s also a story about all writers, about those who succeed and those who fail, and those who do both.’

It’s a memoir about my personal writing trajectory; about how and why I became a writer; about literature, poetry, politics, and music. This extract is the first of two sections about the years I spent living in the Lower East Side in the early 80s, when I played in a rock and roll band and lived in a chaotic ‘housing association’ where a lot of very strange things happened.

I know it’s something of a departure from the pieces I usually write, and I would be interested to hear what you think, because I am considering trying to publish the whole thing one day, and may even do it on this platform.

And I assure you that every word is true…

In one two-week period alone, there were six fires and three homicides on East 11^th Street.  Most of these killings were drug-related, as bodies turned up at the bottom of elevator shafts or on piles of garbage.   Gunshots could be heard on a weekly and sometimes nightly basis, but the police rarely came out unless you told them that one of their colleagues was being attacked.  

One night I was sitting in my flat reading Chuang Tsu’s aphorisms, when I heard an exchange of gunfire coming from the building directly opposite.  Ancient Chinese philosophy had not prepared me for this, and I dived to the floor to avoid a random bullet, before peering over the window to see armed cops with torches picking their way into one of the empty buildings. 

Faced with this mayhem, some people in the street looked to God for consolation or salvation.  Street preachers would stand on cars or soapboxes speaking to rapt audiences, and storefront churches would come and go, with tongues of fire or dayglo images of Jesus and the Virgin hastily-painted on sheets of hardboard, bearing names like Iglesia del Christo Rey or El Hogar del Espiritu Santo.   

On Sundays I would wake up to the sound of the congregation from the Pentecostal Church standing on the steps opposite, beating tambourines, clapping, and singing hymns to the accompaniment of an accordion.  Unlike the other churches, this one had a large green neon cross that was permanently glowing.  At nights when the streetlights failed, or someone shot them out or broke them with stones, the green neon cross was always spared.

Most of its congregation were black and Hispanic, and I was moved to see them see them standing on the steps of the church in their best Sunday clothes, singing ‘Amazing Grace’, holding onto their faith on the edge of a corner where at least six people had been shot or stabbed to death in the two years before my arrival.

God’s mercy was conspicuously absent from New York in the winter of 1981-82.  Temperatures frequently fell below zero and the snow piled up so high that subway lines were blocked or flooded, electricity wires short-circuited, and office workers came into Manhattan on skis.  All over midtown bag ladies and bag men carried bundles of possessions like the remnants of Paulus’s Sixth Army or huddled round warm air vents.  Some died and were later uncovered from snowdrifts.  Others threw themselves in front of subway trains. 

One homeless person climbed into the polar bear enclave in Prospect Park Zoo and offered himself as dinner to its inhabitants – an invitation that the bears unhesitatingly accepted.  Once I entered the subway outside Bloomingdales and found about twenty vagrants kneeling and sitting around in the cold, while commuters hurried guiltily past them. 

In the summer the street filled up with dealers and junkies, with Hispanic girls in cut-off jeans dancing to their radios, and old men playing cards and dominoes. Almost every week someone would set fire to one of the cars that were routinely dumped in the street, leaving burned out shells that remained there for weeks.   The mood of that summer was beautifully captured by Grandmaster Flash and His Furious Five’s epic The Message, which blared from almost every radio in the neighbourhood:

               Don't push me
              'Cause I'm close to the edge
               I'm trying not to lose my head
               Ah-huh-huh-huh
               It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder
               How I keep from going under

In the hot weather our tenants’ association sporadically tried to work on the house and keep unwanted intruders away from our abandoned storefront, but it felt like a lost cause. One night we held a meeting on the rooftop with two members of a motorcycle gang called the Newcomers who wanted to use the storefront as a garage. 

When we queried whether this was the optimum use of this space, one of the bikers suddenly exclaimed “This is bullshit, man!”  The biker went on to explain that he and his friends were Vietnam vets who had once been granted carte blanche by the police to use automatic weapons to clear a drug gang from their neighbourhood, and that they would do with the storefront whatever they saw fit.   

There was no arguing with that. Nor was there much we could say to the Hispanic dealer called Gabriel who stood outside on the corner of 11^th and B most days with his shirt off and a knife in his belt. He told us that he was going to take our storefront and that he would decapitate, stab, or shoot anyone who tried to stop him.  

In the spring of 1982, a balding, fat middle-aged white guy named Mickey Cesar who looked like a degenerate Santa Claus expressed interest in the storefront.  Mickey described himself as a ‘Pope’, which should have set off warning signals.  It was not until he had moved into the gutted flat on the floor below mine that we learned that he really was the pope of an officially registered church called The Church of Realized Fantasies that worshipped marijuana and pleasure.   

One afternoon Mickey came into my flat and explained that he intended to use the house to set up New York’s first ever phone-in dope delivery service.   He proudly showed me an old newspaper cutting which described how his father had once tried to get him certified.  He explained that he had been a millionaire drug dealer in Amsterdam, until one of his competitors shot him and forced him to leave the city.  Throughout his years in Holland, Mickey had sent his drug profits to his father, who kept them for himself. Though a psychiatric report eventually concluded that Mickey was not insane, he had not been able to prove that the money was his.

“Daddy kept it,” Mickey explained. “But not for long. He had an unfortunate domestic accident. Electrocuted himself while mowing the lawn. Seems the machine wasn’t wired properly. Came as quite a shock to the old boy.  Wages of sin, my dear. Of course, he’d cut me out of his will, but mother made a deal in the end – in return for security in her old age.”

Now the Pope was reconstructing his empire using a contingent of teenage boys from broken homes, orphanages, and the streets as bicycle couriers. The aim of all this, he explained, was not to get rich, but to flood the capitalist system with black money derived from drugs, weapons, paedophilia, pornography and other illegal services. 

By ‘breaking the bank’ with dirty money, the system would eventually implode, and anarchy would prevail.   When I remarked that this sounded insane, Mickey replied happily that madness was always close to genius.  Over the next few weeks, the Pope’s couriers came in and out of the house with their bicycles at all hours, responding to orders from the UN building in Midtown and other upmarket clients. 

Often, I would hear them having discussions about their deals or fantasising about a world where women did not exist and only men could procreate.  The Pope continued to pester the tenants’ association to allow his church to use the empty storefront, and we refused to concede.  It was the Pope who introduced us to a Maoist sect called the Revolutionary Communist Party, who asked if they could use our storefront as their base of operations for a civil insurrection that they called a ‘breakout’ in the Lower East Side on May 1. 

It would be understating it considerably to say that the RCP occupied a marginal position on the American left, with their fervent support for the Shining Path in Peru and their loathing of the Sandinistas, but we hoped that their presence might keep the Church of Realised Fantasies and the heroin dealers at bay for a while.   Even the dealers were impressed, as the RCP filled the storefront with leaflets and newspapers written in Spanish, English, Farsi, Swahili, and Arabic, and pinned up a street map of the Lower East Side dotted with coloured drawing pins indicating which schools, streets, and projects were to be targeted for revolutionary agitation.   

When we pointed out that some of these buildings were the centre of a million-dollar heroin trade, an RCP cadre named Frank dismissed these ‘bourgeois cosmopolitan’ objections and insisted that they could handle a ‘few lumpen’.  Another comrade explained that the exiled party chairman Comrade Bob Avakian had given orders to proceed with the May 1^st breakout, on the basis of a precise Leninist analysis of the current balance of class forces at a local level. 

I was surprised that Comrade Bob was able to analyse the Lower East Side from France.  All this seemed rather comical, until a female RCP member was found dead at the bottom of a lift shaft in an abandoned building on 6^th Street and Avenue D where she had been distributing leaflets. It wasn’t clear whether she had fallen or been pushed, but the RCP immediately hailed her as a martyr and claimed that she had been assassinated by the CIA.  

Despite this pointless tragedy, on May 1st, the RCP marched through the Lower East Side with a megaphone proclaiming, “We’re not Americans, we’re proletarians!” before the ‘breakout’ petered out into a small demonstration whose only participants were members of the RCP itself.    

Throughout the summer of 1982 dealers continued to bear down on the storefront, breaking windows, smashing the locks on the front door, and selling heroin in front of our noses.  One day a dealer named Shorty came into the building and began banging on the stairwell with a baseball bat as he announced that his heroin had been stolen from the front entrance.  All the tenants were summoned into the Pope’s flat, where a dealer called Cool pointed a gun at my head and demanded to know what had happened to his smack. 

I sensed that the endgame was approaching, and I moved out of East 11^th Street into a flat in Spanish Harlem with a friend.  It didn’t seem like the best decision, when we came back from a celebratory meal to find that our new flat had been set on fire by members of the Moonies cult, who had apparently confused us for someone else.  A few weeks later I passed by the old ‘homestead’ on 11th Street to discover that the Pope had been shot in the stomach by a rival dealer, and the building had been overrun by Gabriel’s gang, who had trashed every apartment in the house.  It was all very Assault on Precinct 13, and I felt lucky that I only had to endure a half-burned flat with a piece of plywood over the window.

Today 546 East 11^th is advertised by real estate agents as a ‘boutique pre-war walk-up’ where an individual penthouse with a ‘rooftop oasis’ can be had for $775,000 dollars.  Few of the residents will be aware that a ‘communal marijuana sex church’ once used their building to sell dope to the United Nations, that its ‘pope’ survived his shooting and was subsequently arrested various times, before dying of liver cancer in 1995.   All that belongs to a lost chapter in the history of the Lower East Side, to which I once had a ringside seat.