Recently I was talking with a friend about living in the Lower East Side of New York City in 1979 with all the demolished buildings and poverty and homeless people and whatnot. And then she mentioned drug dealers. I thought about what courage it must take to be a drug dealer. After all, you spend the day talking to drug addicts and crazy people and people who don’t have enough money for drugs but who want them and people with guns and knives who also want drugs. Anything could happen. You could write a really interesting book about being a courageous drug dealer in the Lower East Side of NYC in 1979 and all the things that could happen or did, although I think that it might be easier to write haikus or sing songs especially in the winter. I wonder if any of the drug dealers lives were boring. I can’t imagine they were very boring. Maybe a little boring. But just when they started to get boring, something interesting would probably happen every time. And then there was also the Dobermans, she said.
And I thought about how courageous you would have to be if you were a Doberman in the Lower East Side of NYC in 1979, because everybody would hate you right away which is probably why they barked so much. They probably just wanted love but all that got was hate and so they barked, I said. Some people loved the Dobermans in the Lower East Side of NYC in 1979 she said. Oh, I doubt it, I said. I feel I can safely say that no one loved Dobermans in NYC on the Lower East Side in 1979. And then we got in a big fight about that. I think we really didn’t disagree - I think we were just a little blue, thinking about the world and how much things have changed in New York City since 1979, particularly in the Lower East Side, which I imagine so different - I haven’t been there since.
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