a When Huncke had nowhere to go after a jail stint in 1949, the kindhearted Ginsberg took him in, and soon Huncke and two burglar friends were storing stolen goods in the poet’s apartment. After the burglars crashed a stolen car filled with more stolen goods, and some of Ginsberg’s papers, the police arrested Ginsberg. Powerful friends among the Columbia University faculty managed to get him time in a mental hospital instead of a prison.
b Pat’s divorce from Bob Fitzgerald was amicable. They were clearly just headed in different directions.
c He’s also the central character in four others: “Boy in Coffee Shop on Third Avenue,” “Young Man in Silver Dollar Restaurant,” “Young Boy in Seafood Restaurant—NYC,” and “Boy in Horn & Hard-art’s on Forty-second Street.”
d He’d started drawing what he called his “Arthur Rimbaud lightning bolt” in the journal as soon as he got to France, perhaps to mark possible material for this, or just to mark auspicious entries. The bolt was his symbol for what he called “the vision behind the eyes.”
e He did make a separate small collage (two by three inches) called Madonna and Child with Gun. In comparison, it seems a joke.
f “The Waterfront 2 A.M. New York City” appeared in the posthumous Waterfront Journals.
g When Arthur made this film (Abuse) a year or two later, David appeared in it for about ten seconds, giving a man-on-the-street interview on the topic.
h McGough and McDermott lived in the early 1980s in a building on Avenue C with no electricity or telephone and dressed as Victorian or Edwardian gentlemen. See http://www.revelinnewyork.com/peter.
i The building’s front door is on Tenth Street, facing St. Mark’s Church.
j It did not reopen in its next location until 1982.
k Pier 34 was at Canal Street. Pier 28 would have been the one near Spring Street.
l Gracie Mansion is the name of the New York City mayor’s residence.
m “ When we were so far from the jungle / That it was completely out of sight, / We encountered those souls / Walking along the pier. / Each of them looked at us / As in the evening men are wont / to stare at one another / under a new moon light, / and sharpened their brow / like the old taylor, / squinting at the needle’s eye.” From canto XV, stanza 5, in the translation on Galietti’s website, http://www.romanhattan.com/film.html.
n This Spanglish pronunciation for “Lower East Side” was often applied to Alphabet City.
o Michael Hardwick had been arrested for having consensual sex with another man in his own bedroom. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the anti-sodomy law under which he had been arrested, ruling that the right to privacy did not extend to sexual conduct if it involved homosexuals.
p Two other prints were traded, one going to Keith Davis, for example, in exchange for some design work.
q When David moved to 529 East Thirteenth at the end of January 1986, his rent was $425. In April it was $550. In May it was $850. By 1987, he was paying $901.
r For one activist’s account of the struggle over East Village gentrification, see Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood (Autonomedia, 1999).
s Ideally this was a group of five to fifteen people with shared history and goals who could reach consensus quickly, function autonomously if they wished, and watch out for each other during large demonstrations.
t Seven scenarios are described here because the bridges were used in two of them.
u The mask protects the photo paper from the enlarger’s light. David would have had to create a mask for each circular inset or any other image he embedded, then burn those in while another mask protected the background image.
v The phrase “Silence = Death” preceded the formation of ACT UP, which then made furious use of it. See http://www.actupny.org/reports/silencedeath.html.
w Probably Totem 3 (1983) on page 123 of the “Tongues of Flame” catalog.
x The piece would not have been worth three thousand dollars in 1990 but was probably worth more than six hundred.
y People with AIDS sometimes took Ritalin to combat depression and fatigue.