Heroin and the Lower East Side

The Lower East Side has transformed beyond recognition. I'm not old enough to remember New York in the seventies or eighties, but I remember New York in the nineties. You may have heard it, you may have read it, and it's true: this city has changed.

I don't remember Soho or the Village, but I remember rundown Chelsea, the redlight "West Village" where you really didn't want to end up anywhere near the SROs on the Hudson after dark, and an empty and lifeless Lower West Side (Tribeca). Well, in the case of Tribeca, not much has changed. On the Lower East Side and especially Alphabet City, I remember the shooting galleries near Tompkins Square Park and the junkies and the ancient Eastern European and Italian women who would step over them, shaking their heads, as they walked to temple or church. Chinatown hadn't moved as far west as it eventually would, and there were many more Puerto Ricans in the area. I have a nostalgia for the look of it, for the diversity of it, for the bizarre, surreal condition of those years, but I do not miss the filth and the fear and the terrible poverty of life. People who reminisce and wish we lived in the seventies again, they're very selfish--it is an expression of privilege. The Lower East Side is filthy now! Can you imagine what was like when they were really filthy? You don't want to. You hardly see syringes on the streets these days, because heroin moved to the suburbs about ten years ago when big pharm reformulated oxycontin, but back then there were "rigs" everywhere in the nineties, sometimes floating in buckets full of opaque, pinkish water, one of the more disgusting things I've ever seen.

Why am I writing about the Lower East Side? I came across this piece, which is an articulate and accurate expression of suburban malaise and its discontents, and I have to confess I felt a touch glad when I read you could still buy heroin around Union Square. That triggered a number of memories, of being told I could go as far as Washington Square but that if I went east of Broadway and was caught I would be in big trouble, of venturing east of Broadway, of later trekking with my cousin to real Lower East Side apartments of friends of hers and thinking it was the coolest thing. An unusual and interesting project would have been/would be an ethnography on the heroin culture of the inner cities, before it all vanishes, in places like the Lower East Side, or Seattle, or Downtown Los Angeles/all Los Angeles.

The Blizzard was a total hoax, and it was incredibly frustrating to have the subway shut down for twelve hours. My mother called to remind me that "it wouldn't be a good idea to walk out on the Manhattan Bridge, and, take pictures, or whatever it is you do." Believe it or not, I went out for a few hot toddies at a bar down the block Monday night. It was the rare opportunity one has as an adult to misbehave and to harmlessly flout the rule of law, something I can rarely resist. I discovered a good number of fellow flouters upon arrival, and as usual the bar stayed open until 4. I met a guero--a catch-all term in Mexico for people of pale/light complexion, with "European" features--from Mexico City, who works at an ordinary restaurant in Park Slope. This in itself is odd enough, as people who look "white"--for lack of a better term--are not expected to "work" in Mexico. It is a caste system in many ways similar to what exists in India, and is broadly the case in much of Latin America. If you think we have a class/caste system in the United States, you're right, and we do, but it is essentially a have/have-not system, and upward mobility is highly feasible/expected for the haves. In Latin America, there is a hierarchy and a racial structure--not to say there isn't a racial structure in the US--that is very, very difficult to escape or transcend.

The guero in the bar was immediately of interest to me as it was very clear that this was no run-of-the-mill individual: he had attended a well-known prep school in Mexico City (the equivalent of Trinity or Dalton) and gone on to an equally well-known (and costly) private university. What on earth was this person doing in Park Slope waiting tables?

Well, as Mexicans are prone to do, with the drink, he began to confess, and it's an interesting story: he moved to New York with a girlfriend, as you suspected. The parents did not approve, they're estranged, and there is a substantial amount of money and a position at stake. He has no papers. The couple lived together happily for some time, until they ran out of money and wound up in a flophouse in Sheepshead Bay, where both began to work in the kitchen of an Uzbek restaurant (she's American). If neither worked, neither ate, and over the summer they lived on dollar slices of pizza at Coney Island. They were miserable, but happy together, for a year or two. Then they were miserable and miserable with one another, for another year before they split up, she having found someone new, he devastated. He had grown to love New York, though, and had no interest in returning to Mexico, and so found the job at the restaurant in Park Slope. I can't imagine what the society parents would think had they any idea their educated son had moved into an SRO in furthest Brooklyn with the American girl (of all things!) he ruined himself for, to work in the kitchen of an obscure Central Asian restaurant without papers like a commoner! He said he changes his phone number regularly because his parents have hired private investigators to track him down. He's lived in New York for two or three years.

We talked literature, and he convinced me to pick up a copy of Octavio Paz's long, likely morose essay Labyrinth of Solitude, which I was told "explains Mexico" (I also found a beautiful edition of The Years with Ross, for balance). I'm also reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and may soon reacquaint myself with George Eliot.

Charlus visits New York this weekend, and I can't decide what to do about it. Kim thinks I should avoid him altogether: for her, there is too much to lose with the new job, the stress, who knows what sort of a tantrum he may throw, etc., but I worry more what he might do if I push away the olive branch. It is a tough thing, having relations who are difficult and unstable, and mean. One experiences a mix of guilt, frustration, and anger. General consternation. If there is a nice dinner in it for me, I'll accept. I have mercenary tendencies.

I have to move again, but I do not want to leave my current neighborhood. I love it and I am happy to live in Brooklyn. My current roommates weirdly watched Obama's state of the union, giggling and clucking and chuckling and gasping along with the address like the utter simpletons they are. It was so disconcerting, and they're so foul and filthy--the sink is constantly full of dirty dishes, one is always having diarrhea or vomiting, they cook constantly and the kitchen is always a mess, filth and clutter has spread to the living room like untreated gangrene--and also judgmental and condescending. Sometimes we're talking politics and one or both of them will explain to me some political item or correct me when it is in fact they who are ill-informed, this being as you know an unpardonable offense. I will not endure it for another month, and I'm sure they can find some filthy person who can abide correction better than I.

Grieg--we endure, like Dilsey.  

Yesterday I went to the Ivorian restaurant the New Yorker reviewed a few weeks ago. The food was of middle quality--neither succulent nor delicious, but perfectly passable.

The real pleasure: to be surrounded by West African French, and to hear, when a red card was produced in the Atletico Madrid/Barcelona match on the television, shouts of "rouge! rouge!" from the gathered crowd. It's La Savane on grotty 116th.