Rev. Jen, author of the recent work Really Cool Neighborhood, includes a sort of mini-guide on the Lower East Side in her book. What I like best is that it's glaringly obvious that everything mentioned is a stone's throw from her tiny flat, home of the Troll Museum. We all performed, as usual, at Collective Unconscious one night, for one of Moonshine's spooky trailers, and Taylor Mead strolled in at about 1 a.m.?"I just woke up!" he explained guiltily, having just missed the entire show. We hunkered down in front of him while he rattled off some pearls from his daily journal. He's often up all night feeding local stray cats (I noticed a container of the unreliable Tuscan brand milk peering out of his plastic bag.)
We marched off toward Delancey with Rev. Jen, who actually gives the occasional tour, barking out information in front, wearing her signature elf ears. "Several years ago one could not find crepes on the Lower East Side!" she elaborated, as we walked by the brand new creperie on Ludlow St. "Most of us cannot afford, ourselves, to eat Nutella crepes at 1 a.m., but we can stand outside and inhale. Also the guys who work here are cute." I craned my neck to see.
We popped into Sunflower Video on Essex, where, obeying the 60-40 porn per non-porn rule, they had Robert Klein on Broadway, The Pope Must Die (a rollicking comedy) and, of course, Teen Wolf. Jen and Tom Tenney played an exhausting game of "That's your boyfriend/that's your girlfriend" with the actual porn video covers in back of the shop. Tom is featured in the premiere issue of ASS (Art Star Scene), edited by our fearless tour guide, doing arm curls with cans of Bud.
Finally at 1:45, we hit Delancey, where Rev. Jen pointed out the Municipal Parking Lot. She's a gal who makes her own entertainment: The top floor is the perfect place to take a date if it's warm out. She pointed out the bridge leading to Williamsburg, which she calls the Greg Brady basement of the Lower East Side. There's a new spot on Delancey called Alchemy 106, a late-night coffee shop with state-of-the-art computers and video games upstairs, but best of all they sell an upscale version of Snow Cones, with real cream and coconut flakes, for a mere $1.85. Junk food referenced gourmet?genius! You can play the controversial Grand Theft Auto Vice City for $6 an hour, until the reasonable closing hour of 3 a.m. Too broke even for that? Well, points out our resourceful guide, you can take shrooms and stare at the giant tooth above Cohen's Optical at Orchard and Delancey, probably for hours?hours when you don't have to buy any expensive drinks to pass the time! Tanya O'Debra of the performing O'Debra Twins meets up with us at Alchemy, and we head over to Lolita Bar, at 266 Broome, which has a rather lengthy happy hour of no less than four hours. "Probably the fact that I don't remember it is a good thing," endorsed Rev Jen. "It's rock 'n' roll but not a drug den," chimed in Larry, a red- haired Puerto Rican who's a stalwart city crawler, "and there aren't those young stuffy kids from Williamsburg either."
Rev. Jen was musing quietly. "You can call me a maximalist," she suggested, sleepily. I see somebody else grew up planning what to say on all the talk shows that would surely be part of the future. Immediately after that, Tanya spilled an entire glass of Jack Daniels on my lap. The bartender promptly gave her another one, as if she might need it. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," she kept saying, but I was looking forward to wearing the reeking denim flairs proudly on the plane ride to San Francisco. Just a little way to, you know, let 'em know who they're dealing with.