picking through the remaining whoozits and whatzits from a box of memories, i came across the ring. it jogged the memory that spilled onto this “page.” the first time he walked into scrap bar in late 1986, he was wearing a huge scimitar, sheathed and belted at the waist. up…

in the end, it’s all doo-wop. if the book “please kill me, The Uncensored Oral History of Punk,” by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain holds sway regarding the history of the punk (whatever it was), then the last chapter, which had a story chronicling the seeming “end,” rhetorically speaking, was…

this one, unlike the first one, wasn’t planned. i met Bill Simon when i tended bar on the upper east side of manhattan, in NYC. i was working in one of those “power-restaurants” where table seating was determined by either celebrity and star-power or political/economic clout. i had gotten the…

i took the liberty of titling the story with their names, the names they called themselves and what they were known to us as. about a year into scrap bar’s life, they arrived. tall, handsome, high-cheeked, exact-twin brothers with huge manes of black, beaded hair that fell from their shoulders…

at last year’s scrap bar reunion in 2014 i saw fran, an old friend and someone who may have been joey ramone’s girlfriend back in the day. i was never sure. it was…25 years since we saw each other?……at least. the reunion was fun and at one point, she recounted something that…

Before moving forward, this question is meant for New Yorkers with a history, not the new blood who stumbled onto this place in the past few decades. With that….. Around the time production began on the Cinemax/Soderbergh project, “The Knick,” I was researching the doctor who saved my life in…

tiny specks of bingo gazingo zinged past me in the dream i had. he was headed at a molecularly brilliant speed toward the eighth electro-plasma-ocean of the ninth dimension, i’m almost sure of it. i’m not well-versed enough, landmark-wise, to say positively, between the speed you travel out there and the…

here are three autographs i collected on the weekend of july 20th, 1963, that i found amid the fillmore east tickets and movie stubs that are my life. i was ten years old. it happened like this; my father bought a 1962 chevy belair station wagon, in an end-of-year sale. in…

the circuitous journey of “ed wood” according to me — I was arrested and jailed in a tuxedo on August 27th, 1983, but that’s another story. That said, let me talk about Soozie; We were friendly in a casual, flirty way and I had a bit of a thing for her. Now out of work, broken-up and available (with the…