Mean Streets

Curbing urban blight

St. Marks Place (the street where I live) is the East Village's pipeline for human slush. It has become the

H M Bourbon Street of bad dye jobs and dawn-of-the-dead pallor; the bohemian color of its glory days faded to little more than a cheesy come-on. Gawkers of every imaginable belt size and license plate clog St. Marks on weekends, eventually siphoned off by the row of Indian eateries on East Sixth and the funkier boom-boom rooms of alphabet city. One club, for example, once advertised its admission price as five dollars for people, ten dollars for yuppies. The flotsam lining the banks of this foot traffic isn't so upscale. Used to be headband hippies camped on the stoops of St. Marks, dried husks of psychedelia with frizzed hair and fried brains and fingers crooked from rolling joints. Today it's young punks with leather jackets painted with eat-me slogans and the usual boring sadie-maisie accessories (studded wristbands, canine collars). For all their Sid Vicious drool, these punk cadets are basically a harmless tribe of posers caught in a time warp, trying to recapture the original shock-horror spirit of, oh, a Richard Hell band member showing himself on St. Marks wearing a T-shirt that read, PLEASE KILL ME. A decade later, that's the shock of the old.

Like everyone else, the punks are being bullied by the Times Squaring of St. Marks. Twenty-four-hour pizza and doughnut shops have sprung up in a pitiless blaze of white fluorescence, along with convenience stores stocking drug paraphernalia for crack users on the go. There are also video-game hangouts where chicken hawks can roost.

On one level, punks find this sleazing of St. Marks a groove. Sleaze is to punks what motor oil is to bikers, both lifeblood and lubricant. All those twenty-four-hour feeding stations give them a place to bum cigarettes and talk trash with their friends. Problem is, hard-core sleaze is stronger than soft-core punk. True sleaze eats these kids for breakfast. I used to see this St. Marks punkette who chain-smoked as if trying to puff her way into a throaty Marianne Faithfull mystique. Her hair was the yellow of butter gone bad, and her fingernails had a bluish ruin, but otherwise she seemed normal, O.K. She disappeared from St. Marks for a spell, then returned not in her punk gear but in a flimsy leopard-spot dress and teetery high heels. Her eye contact now was strictly pro. She was hooking. She had taken the first step toward becoming a hard-legged lamppost, and I later saw her standing outside a drugstore with her meter running while her paunchy john was inside, purchasing a pack of condoms. Condoms, I guess, aren't part of the deal. "Live hard, die young, and leave a pretty corpse'' is one of punk's imperatives, but in the flesh it doesn't look so hot. In the afternoon light, she was aging quick.

James Wolcott