Naturally, the homeless still trawl garbage cans and push overflowing carts jam-packed with the miscellany of their scavenging hunts. Well, wherever he is, I hope he can still bug out to some heavy metal. Actually, no, they just gentrified as well. He’s most likely living out his last days in far-off Bushwick. Poirot is, but I’m sure he’s no longer suited to this environment. You’re more likely to find the now-familiar sight of fitness junkies in tank tops glued to iPhones, drinking whey protein smoothies after a workout at the Blink Fitness, which opened last year just half a block south on Avenue A. You’d be hard-pressed to find this kind of naturally-occurring performance art in the Tompkins Square Park of today. Throughout the entire show, a Hercule Poirot impersonator sealed his left ear to one of the giant speakers and nodded his head as though listening not to the eardrum-splitting frequencies of a hardcore-metal band but to the blissed out vibes of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. The event also attracted wacky local East Villagers, aberrant personalities, like the guy with the middle finger, whose irreducible quirks had found home in this slapdash neighborhood. In fact, the homeless of the park outnumbered Prong’s fanbase and made somewhat of a show of their majority by dancing around to their set as though it were a Joan Baez concert. The day was overcast and the show, probably not well-promoted, was sparsely attended. Being Queensboys in the days well before the internet, finding a m idday concert by a hardcore-metal crossover band deep in the nacreous heart of the East Village was, in hindsight, a perhaps stunning feat of encyclopedic research. However, my namesake-friend Carlos Ramirez, virtually a Rhodes scholar of heavy metal, had somehow dug up word of this free en plein air concert. They hadn’t yet achieved their minor celebrity from the 1990 release of Beg to Differ, so I hadn’t heard of them. The band Prong was playing in the “auditorium” (actually just a shoddy open pavilion in the park’s south flank). After all, this was circa the infamous riots of 1988, when residents, squatters, and homeless clashed with police in an all-night melee over an ill-begotten 1:00 A.M. Once you passed through, new rules applied.

Little did I know at the time, Tompkins Square Park was a kind of American Christiania, a micro-society whose self-governing ethos, communal and anarchic, provided off-the-grid liberties to those willing to brave the squalor. We walked three blocks east, deeper into the hinterland, to where St. By the time my friends got out from the record store, now leaving for our next adventure in Tompkins Square Park, I felt I ’d become a master of characterology. I cataloged each purple mohawk, each paranoid strut and jerky rhythm, each audacious tattoo, awestruck by the imponderable renegade madness behind each irreducible human on the street. People-watching from the stoop of a record store took on zoological overtones. But here in the East Village, the main event unfolded live, in the flesh, an extemporaneous shot in the arm compared with MTV’s scripted assembly line of hits. I wrote it off with a chuckle, this non-sequitur finger, as all the more anthropological matter to absorb into my plastic brain, just another note to take down on the safari.īack then, in the late ’80s, a typical afternoon in Queens would’ve gotten my friends and I together to exchange notes on the last airing of Headbangers Ball. No, I just happened to be in its vicinity, so, lucky me, I’d just been treated to a front row seat of that homegrown East Village insanity I’d been warned about. But, though it was hardly a welcome package, the flip of the bird didn’t feel specific to me. My feelings would have been hurt had this finger belonged to one of my two friends who were with me on this my virgin trip into the East Village. I managed to make out his crew cut and earrings before he vanished into clattering street traffic. Mark’s Sounds one humid August day in 1988. He was a punk rocker, and he didn’t even look at me, marching, almost stomping, by me in the blink of an eye as I sat in front of St.

Pointy, stitched-on studs formed a bed of nails around the jacket’s lapels. It all started with a middle finger, protruding out of a cocked forearm draped in the calfskin leather of a biker jacket.

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