7 of 7 books I love. Oscar Pino’s Address Book in a green canvas slipcase. North Patterson, NJ: Joshua Meier’s Division/W.R. Grace & Co., 1977.  With photos & paper ephemera.

“Somewhere in this little book I will start to change my life. And if that in itself means anything to anybody good.  Because I do want…”

Urban archeology at its best. In 1979 I lived at 214 East 10^th St, behind Second Avenue Deli on a block then notorious for drug sales in a neighborhood notorious for drug sales. Our block contented itself with reefer sales, which is not to say you couldn’t get whatever. I was held up in my building’s vestibule by the first crackhead I ever met. The man was too insane to pull it off.  I shut the door on his fingers.

Across the street in 217 lived Paul Cyrus Bray, a bearded weirdo poet Duncan Hannah knew so I’d known through seven years of corresponding, smoking, drinking, and mostly talking about books. Dude was tortured. His CIA father raised him wrong in Panama. To explain how he twisted the son is an amusing story too long to tell here. Suffice to say one gloomy March afternoon we were returning from a pornography buying spree in Times Square and on entering Paul’s squalor – someone dubbed it Bray’s Turd Grotto – we encountered the Conversed heel of Oscar Pino exiting by tenement fire escape, stage left, empty handed.

Being the upstairs neighbor he was home in no time. We knew soon enough where as I found, amidst the child pornography, fast food wrappers, empty fortified wine screwtop bottles, dinner wear, underwear and literature I found the fucker’s wallet. He’d broke in somewhere there was nothing to steel.  So junkie uncool.

“No, man, you found it. It’s yours.”

We knocked on dude’s door. He didn’t answer. Nothing was missing, everything was already broken, so we spent the day basically doing what we’d intended to use our day off from the Strand to do, drop the porn, scout books in the Abbey or Biblo & Tanner over on 4^th Ave, busman’s holiday style.  I didn’t find anything better than this.

As will become apparent, it is a document of it’s time. I’ve a manila envelope from the same time of a graffiti artist’s portfolio of original works. Dude entrusted them to me to show Patti Astor toward an exhibition a block over at the Fun Gallery. He left no forwarding address and never returned for it.

This slice of East Village street life before gentrication has the distinction of, as an essential prop, appearing in ‘Smoke’, a Wayne Wang/Paul Auster film set about a South Slope Brooklyn smoke shop in the ‘90s, when I lived so far in the North Slope it was Prospect Heights. What it was doing there was in Paul Bray telling Paul Auster the story of this wallet so he credited it with being the inspiration. I don’t know if Aster agrees but I’m willing to believe Bray.

For years it’s been within reach of my desk. Apropos I knows not what I pulled it out the other night and showed it to my wife, who in our 20 years together hadn’t seen it. It may not be literature.  It may not be art. It may be better. It’s the way things were/are.

Oscar & Juliette Pino with their son.                                                                     At home.

Oscar Pino’s Address Book