Notes

2. A Bar in Hell: 1995–1997

1. The café precedes the bookstore but the bookstore is always on the minds of culture-starved settlers. No fewer than five people came up to me in Williamsburg before 2000 and said, ‘Hey, man, we should open a bookstore!’ (Firpo’s two shelves of battered paperbacks didn’t qualify.)

2. In a different take on the end of Kokie’s, VICE magazine reports one ‘Rick P.’ as saying: “The final nail in the coffin came when the local precinct got a new police captain who had come straight from doing narcotics and vice work. She wasn’t having a coke bar in her precinct. They busted the place a few times and that’s pretty much the end of the story.”

3. Mad White People: 1997–1999

1. I got fired when they caught me adding fantastic details to the synopses (I gave people twelve fingers, Nobel Prizes and dramatic suicides). Apparently, Barnes & Noble didn’t appreciate the tribute to Jorge Luis Borges.

2. Feuer appealed and the Appellate Division reversed his conviction in 2004.