Laughing in Her Sleep

A commenter on Stink Rock quoted the old Microdot song "Biltmore Clock" (I'll post the song if somebody tells me how) in response to a mention of Bill Boggs.  The song was my homage to growing up in New York in the 1970s and 1980s when, let's face it, the place was an open sewer - but an open sewer with a heart.  Anyway, the commenter was right to connect the name to the song, but the New York television presenter was not the person I was naming in the song.

She was actually a homeless person who slept on a grate on Second Avenue in the 1980s who became a test case in the Koch administration's attempts to commit mentally ill homeless people.  For some reason, that affair was New York in a nutshell for me.

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for those days in New York.  No, I don't want to return to the days when the subway cars were covered in graffiti and God knows what else.  But something wonderful got sucked out of the city during those final years before a massive new tide of wealth turned it into the yuppie playground it has become.  If you can believe it, when my parents moved into our new apartment in 1977, the landlord gave them two months free rent as an enticement to sign the lease.  Looking back, there's no way that my parents could give us the life we had back then at today's rates.  For a brief period, the inmates were running the asylum and it was CHEAP.

So here's to all the old head shops on every corner, the Irish bars with briskets from the Eisenhower administration still stewing in a steam plate, the Monkey House at the Central Park zoo, the big yellow cabs, the jazz clubs that once ran along 54th Street, where I grew up, the crazy drummer in Central Park who spray painted his hair black (yes, he was real, not just a character in "Taxi Driver"), and all the other wonderful old school New York things that were dead and gone by 1990.