Once upon a time, when normal people could still afford to live in the city, there was a neighborhood called the Lower East Side. It was such a dangerous place that it has been disappeared. Developers renamed it the East Village and populated with galleries, college students, tourists, and artisanal coffee shops, artisanal bakeries, artisanal bars, artisanal eateries and artisanal people. Each cup of coffee is hand crafted from beans that are hand-picked by agnostic Jesuits, brought down the mountainside by golden hoofed donkeys, and roasted by NASA scientists. Each pastry is hand crafted by a member of a Coven of Seventy Sisters who had special training in the French Culinary Institute AND the Food Network AND Hogwarts. Each drink is hand crafted by a young, hip guy with a man bun who learned his trade at the University of Porcelain Springs. Each entrée is hand crafted by a master chef who has honed his skill while creating the last five blockbuster restaurants in New York City. Each entrée is hand delivered by a former cast member of Book of Mormon with a five-hundred-watt smile. That same waiter will be happy to point you to an artisanal bank where you can get an artisanal mortgage to pay for all this. Tompkins Square Park is populated by artisanal babies pushed along by their West Indian nannies or occasionally by their designer/banker/lawyer/mother.

This story is not about that place. On the Lower East Side you got a cup of cawfee from the Stage Diner that was later closed when it was discovered they had cut into the utility lines and had been stealing gas for about forty years. You got your pastry standing on line behind a girl with a chain purse and a pit bull so ugly and scary you might rethink the whole need to get a pastry. (In fairness to the pit bull, if approached it would roll over and wag its stump, giving you a big toothy grin, but most people didn’t know that. Her name was Pumpkin.) You ate at Veselka, whose motto is “We serve soup to nuts.” The bars were usually down a flight of grimy stairs which turned out to be immaculate when compared to the bar itself. The banks were robbed. Tompkins Square Park had a permanent homeless encampment complete with tents, lights and appliances which they powered by tapping into the power grid.

You could afford an apartment. You just couldn’t get to it. The sidewalks were awash with trash of every imaginable kind – and bodies. The bodies were at least partially alive. Most days they were the homeless or junkies, but Sunday mornings were special. There was a truly fabulous club, the Saint, on Second Ave and it would discharge its clientele of leather clad gentlemen into the gutter where they would roll around and puke for a while. This was while the Reformed Church across the street was getting out from morning mass. New York has always been a city of contrasts.

Of all the delights of the old days, nothing could match the Beggars’ Market for street theater. It constitited the last stage of trickledown economics; the redistribution of stolen goods. All week long, hard-working burglars, muggers and crack heads would free the citizenry of its possessions, and then fence said items to the secondary markets of electronics stores, pawn shops and jewelery stores – that is those where no one asked too many questions. (The citizenry would fortify its apartments and cars as much as possible. One battleship-gray car had steel grates on its windows and padlocks on its doors. Another relied on advertising. It had a sign on the window: “Doors unlocked, ash tray gone, glove compartment empty, radio gone, spare tire gone, too late.” But you had to watch your strategy. One friend hid his cash under his stereo. This did not work very well.)

Everything that could not be fenced during the week found its way to the Beggar’s Market, a strip of Second Avenue from Sixth Street to St Marks’s place. On Saturday night the homeless/junkie/alkie/merchants would lay out their wares on crushed stove and refrigerator boxes on the sidewalk, entirely blocking entrance to the buildings. To get in you had to tiptoe, through the stereos, to the front door, trying not to throw up, just tip toe, through the evidence, with me. Sometimes I would get calls; “Oh man, I got hit again. They got my tuner. It’s a Denon. If you see it get it back for me.” On my way home I would scan the market to see if I could reacquire stuff – at rock bottom prices. Such a deal! Anything they couldn’t sell, they just left. On Sunday morning Sanitation would come down with a couple of big trucks and throw everything out (except the disco boys.)

On one such early morning, before sanitation had arrived, a cabbie was starting his shift. He pulled over to get a paper, and while walking to the newsstand, tripped over a box. He opened the box and was surprised to find it was full of human heads, individually wrapped for freshness.  He called the police because, as he philosophically observed, “A box of heads is not something you find every day.” The police were nonplussed. From their point of view they were now six bodies short. However, the desk sergeant noticed “New York Eye and Ear Infirmary” on the side of the box. Based on the deduction that a box with a label often comes from the institution on said label, and that the contents in said box might be the property of said institution, he made a call:

“Hello, this is the Ninth Precinct. Is this New York Eye and Ear?”
“Yes it is.”
“We have a box of heads here and…”
“Oh. We’ve been looking for those.”

Sometimes, for teaching purposes, body parts have to be moved among medical institutions, in this case from Valhalla, NY to New York Eye and Ear. You can’t send heads through the mail. I don’t think you can FedEx them either. Ergo the most expedient method of transportation is to give said dead heads to someone-in this case a doctor- who works at both locations to take the heads for a drive. However, at his destination he parked on a local street and left the heads in his trunk. Might as well have gift wrapped them. No one knows exactly how the box ended up at St Marks, but you don’t have to be Benedict Cumberbatch to make a further deduction. A member of the Wealth Redistribution Society broke into the good doctor’s trunk and absconded with the box, heading straight for St. Mark’s Place, happy in the knowledge that fortune smiles upon the bold. You can imagine his disappointment on opening the box at St. Mark’s. He’s probably still running.