In 1989, when I was 18, a friend and I went from Chicago to New York for the
first time. We got a ride with this girl who was going to upstate New York
for some kind of Latvian festival. We arrived and settled into a mountain
cabin. That night, we inquired as to when we'd be going to New York
CITY--she'd said we'd spend a couple nights in the city and a couple nights
upstate--and she announced she had changed her plans and had no intention of
going into the city.

Shortly after we urinated on her door handles, we got on a bus for the city.
We drove through the perilous Catskills, looking out the windows and down
the cliffs into sheer-sided icy death, and eventually got out somewhere in
Manhattan. Being broke after the bus tickets and not familiar with how the
city operated, we walked the length of Manhattan carrying our bags with us.
We passed three-card monte scammers, masturbating bums in Times Square,
two-story high asscheeks whose crack was a pair of doors leading to peep
show booths, fake Rolexes laid out on blankets, and restaurants where
breakfast was seven dollars.

"Seven bucks, can you believe that?" I said.

"Yeah," my friend replied. "That's crazy."

We finally found an SRO with a sign reading "HOTEL" that let us stay for, I
think, $40 a night. Maybe it was $80 divided by two? We hooked up with two
girls who were younger than us (they said 18 but they were probably 14).

On New Year's Eve, 1989, we bought a couple bottles of Boone's Farm
Strawberry Hill, plopped ourselves in a cab and told the driver to take us
to Bowery and Bleecker. We had no idea who the band was, the Voluptuous
Horror of Karen Black. It didn't occur to us that we might not get in. We
just wanted to see the legendary CBGB's and we were overjoyed that the cab
driver didn't care if we drank in his cab. We laughed conspiratorially,
thinking we were so cool. What a couple of Midwestern rubes. We pounded the
first bottle and then stopped outside the club because they wouldn't let us
bring the other bottle in. Since we wanted the second one for our way out,
we stashed it in a pile of stuffed-full garbage bags outside the club. I
don't think we got ID'd.

The thing to bear in mind here is how different the area was back then. The
Bowery was *shitty.* There were insane homeless all over the place,
wandering grifters and criminals...whether it was the bitter cold or the
scary eyes of the passersby, we couldn't wait to get inside just to get
ourselves off the street.

It was, in a word, dangerous. We didn't know what we were going to see, we
didn't know any of the leather-jacketed bastards in the dark and smoky
crowd, and we certainly didn't know what to make of the four naked women on
stage painted different colors with blackened teeth and giant props of the
sun, moon and stars. We drove across the country, sat for hours on a bus,
walked the pavement till our feet were swollen, and drove a cab to the
middle of nofuckingwhere to watch rock and roll being born. It wasn't the
Voidoids or Iggy Pop but it didn't matter that we weren't in on the ground
floor. Rock reinvents itself everyday, like a chrysalis that keeps making
new butterflies. It was all new to us.

I was so drunk that I thought it would be a good idea to steal the dollar
bills sticking out of the woman's purse on the table in front of me. I took
maybe four dollars, one by one. I didn't get caught. We stood on tables and
silently prayed that the Blue Evil One wouldn't strut out into the audience
and make an example of one of us. When we left at the end of the show, our
bottle was still there, jammed beneath the garbage. We danced around with
glee, draining the bottle as we waited in the freezing cold for a cab. Empty
taxis raced by without stopping. One in maybe five would brake enough to
roll down his window and demand $20 for wherever we were going. Of course
we'd balk and he'd speed up and disappear. Eventually some DeNiro-looking
guy in an army coat stopped and gave us a ride back to HOTEL. Did we meet
the girls there? I can't remember. We both had dreams of getting laid but of
course it didn't happen. The members of TVHOKB were all naked but the show
was too intimidating to be a turn-on. The hotel was too rundown to be
romantic. And our minds were too blown to think about sex in any case.

We thought all this was bad-ass. And you know what? It was.

Thanks, Hilly.

- Chauncey Hollingsworth

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