LL NYC Headquarters Spring/Summer 2000

This is the now boarded up entrance to our rat infested headquarters from the year 2000. Hester between Allen and Orchard. I believe it was originally a Synagogue. We had one memorable party there before it was over. This was a great graffiti base, right in the middle of the territory I preferred.

This place was a ground floor/basement apartment with a backyard. It wasn’t zoned for residential living so the bedrooms all had pull out sofas or futons in case the fire department or someone else came looking. We had to tell everyone it was a studio.

When I say it was infested with rats I mean it. Those motherfuckers would run around in there. From the backyard into the apartment. From the front door into the apartment.

I got this sublet from a flyer that was up in the Pink Pony. The Pink Pony was the coffeeshop next to Max Fish. At night after it closed you could open the connecting door of the Fish and go into the Pony and have a private chill session. I did islands for the first time with Sace in there. I’m digressing a little.

Anyway when I went to check out the place there was a picture on the fridge of one of DLord’s old friends. I was like oh I know her. And the girl was like “oh really?” checked my reference and I got the place. Hardcore ties ran strong…

Semen lived across the street. His apartment was crazy and painted all red and blue inside. The little sperms, all this crazy stuff, it was an eye blaster. Dee Dee Ramone gave him some nunchucks. One time he came home and there was a bum in his stairs who tried to fight him. He ran upstairs to get the nunchucks to fuck the dude up and fell down the stairs on the way back down. He said he woke up in the morning laying there holding the nunchucks.

Hey do you know Dee Dee Ramone wrote graff?

I lived with this guy that was a piano mover from Texas. He was huge. He sat around and smoked weed and was cool. He had a blow gun, with razor darts. He would sit on the sofa watch HBO, do bong rips and blast the rats! It was fucking intense.

Oh and the other sublet roommate that moved in was a Croatian nursing student who used to live in a sex club on 1st avenue. The guy that she moved away from would call our house number and be like “You tell that dirty bitch I’m coming for her, and anyone that tries to stop me is going to pay!” I’d be on the phone like “sure dude, come through, can’t wait.” and he’d get even more mad and call back screaming like an animal. This cracked me up.

She showed me pictures of the inside of the sex club. The walls had semi tasteful B&W framed pictures of genitals hung on them. She got that place from the Village Voice before she even got to the city. I think the guy picked her and her friend up at the airport and began some kind of semi-kidnapped relationship with them. When they left they were like breaking free. They ran away and the guy was kind of a psycho…But like a pussy, neurotic, freako, perv psycho. You know what I mean.

The piano mover and her hooked up later…but she would still go to these Russian discos in Brighton Beach. She was involved with some serious gangsters. One time I came home and she was beefing with two FOB Russian dudes in an escalade or something, when those trucks were still status symbols and not just hood tanks with bad gas mileage.

She was trying to get me involved with the beef. I said “good night” and went inside. Not sure how it turned out but she was alive the next day.

Dudes with sex clubs on 1st avenue are one thing, Russian gangsters are another thing. I liked all of this though. I had only really been socially involved with people that came up in the hardcore scene so all of this was new and exciting to me. It was the first time I was hanging and living with people that didn’t have any connection to what I was into…

I don’t want to say straight edge or hardcore in general was/is socially limiting but for me it definitely kept me away from a lot of different people and different ways of living. New York was real eye opening for me in that way.

so…

One time me and sima were in the spot on the sofa smoking this weed that I swear was dusted watching the Godzilla with Matthew Broderick in it. The sex club dude was pranking us a lot. I think we had to take the phone off the hook.

My roommate was into BBQ. This dude would buy 10 pounds of meat and cook it all and bring it inside and put it on the counter. He wanted to share but I was a vegetarian so the rats were trying to get it instead.

So anyway.

Me and Sima are watching the movie all dusted and we started to hear shuffling coming from inside the kitchen garbage can.

There was a 2 x 4 in the kitchen for defense. I picked it up and tapped the side of the bin. Nothing.

Sima was like “jam it in there.”

I raised up the 2 x 4 like a medieval knight about to deliver a death strike and I smashed it down into the trash.

A rat screamed and jumped up in the air, like up to my face I swear!

I started jamming down the lumber in a life or death struggle. At the same time two rats jetted in the open front door from the stairs. And then we saw two others coming from the other side. We were both screaming now. We jumped up on the sofa and the rats dispersed.

We were like fuck this and left and went bombing.

I stayed at my future wife’s place in gramercy for a little while. That was with two other art school girls. Not sure which was worse the rats or the students. The Chinese landlord dudes eventually poisoned the shit out of all the rats. Then the place just smelled like decaying animals. I burnt a lot of incense but it didn’t really help.

The girl I subleased from eventually moved back in. I was actually bummed about it and wanted to stay. haha. Manhattan apartments were so crazy back then. People would live in the craziest circumstances just to be part of it. This acid dealer Krum from Vermont stayed in a crawlspace under an apartment. You could only sit up in there, not stand…

(there were no art galleries at the time)

(I wanted to point out that by the year 2000 every messenger I worked with except nemel had quit. I quit too…But then I got pulled back in. By 2001 there was an entirely new generation of bike messengers.)