Tag Archives: guns

Angry White People – 2011

May 11, 2024 – 10:05 am

When I moved in the East Village with my hillbilly girlfriend in 1977, I never walked down East 10th Street between 1st Avenue and Second Avenue. I told my girlfriend to not do the same. She obeyed my edict, because it was the right thing to do and she was from West Virginia. No one […]

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Guns On Avenue C – 1986

May 10, 2024 – 9:50 am

In the 1970s I always said that the East Village looked like Rome three days after the sack of the Visigoths 410 CE. Buildings burned day and night. The overstretched 9th precinct triaged the streets beyond 1st Avenue. No patrols ventured farther than Tompkins Square Park. Shooting galleries outnumbered bodegas and hordes of thieves fearlessly […]

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UPPER THERE by Peter Nolan Smith

June 29, 2023 – 7:37 am

In August of 1987 friends in Michigan extended invitations to visit them in Onekema and the Upper Peninsula. Paulie, Gregg, and I celebrated our departure at the Milk Bar in Lower Manhattan. “Why are you going to Michigan for vacation?” Scottie the owner was a New Yorker. The rest of the country was a blank […]

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Guns Are USA

February 15, 2020 – 9:47 pm

In 1980 my firend Carmine slid a .38 across the table of John’s Italian Restaurant. I looked at it for a few seconds, the asked, “What’s this?” “A gun,” said the Sicilian plumber. “For what?” “For protection. This is the East Village.” Junkies ruled the streets, thieves plagued the unknowing, and project thugs roamed the […]

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BEAR MEAT by Peter Nolan Smith

September 17, 2018 – 12:11 am

In August of 1987 Pullie Fallen, Grieg Packer, and I left New York City for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The art professor, literary agent, and I took turns driving Pullie’s F-150 pickup truck through the sweltering heat of the Midwest. None of us broke the speed limit, since Pullie had two unlicensed guns under his seat. […]

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