This South Bronx bus company was where I found my first job in New York: I drove a van for them, not a bus. It was especially good training for any Marxist. There was a byzantine pay process that required separate tallies for hours, miles, and wait times; I could never figure out how much I was going to make. Longtime drivers at Campus all had strategems for running jobs off the company's books; that was another thing I could never figure out.

One night in the yard the nozzle slipped out of my hands while I was gassing-up the van. It sprayed right into my face before hitting the asphalt. I ran to a sink inside the oversized garage doors and frantically splashed water into my eyes. As far as I know there were no long-term effects. I had no doctor and no health care so there was nothing I could have done about it anyway.

I would get off at six or nine or three in the morning; sometimes the jobs went on for days and I'd be up in Boston the whole time. I never knew when the next job would happen. Sometimes it would be every day for ten or eleven days and then nothing, and sometimes nothing lasted for weeks.

Every day that I worked I'd take the 6 train from the East Village to Mott Haven, then walk to 70 Bruckner where Campus kept its buses. That part of the neighborhood was industrial and completely empty after dark. On my way to the train I'd pass the Mitchel Houses, a ten-building complex that's always been a symbol of what's wrong with public housing in New York. Mott Haven itself was a pretty tough neighborhood even before I moved to NYC. It's still got one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the country, with all the illness and crime that implies. There was a police station right at the subway stop; sometimes I thought I looked like a cop on his way home from work. I never had any problems but I doubt that's why. (I learned later that no self-respecting policeman would be caught dead in a subway; they drove home to their places on Long Island.) Now I think I was just lucky, as I was during my years driving a cab and living through the crack epidemic in the EV.

In an ironic twist I ended up living on Bruckner in a loft almost right across the street from where I worked over forty years earlier. I was taking the same subway to get downtown for a movie. Everything had changed except the Mitchel Houses.

Later in the 80s I wrote a song for the Desis about the guy who ran Campus Coach Lines. I had an animus and he had a mansion up in Westchester.

Puerto Rican kids play in the spray from an open hydrant near the corner of 10th Street and First Avenue. I moved that summer to a railroad flat a couple doors down the block at number 256. The apartment got its name from its shape, like that of a boxcar. On the north end was a living room with two windows opening onto 10th; a water closet with a chain-flush was stuck into one corner. Next came the kitchen followed by two identically shaped small rooms, each with a window opening onto an airshaft.

We used the last room on the south end as the bedroom; a queen-sized mattress on the floor had about a foot of clearance on three of its four sides. The door to the hallway was in the kitchen, at the center of the boxcar. The kitchen also contained the bathtub. This was a very common arrangement in East Village tenements. The only difference between our building in the 1980s and its original contours in the 1880s was the WC; there used to be a common bathroom in the hall. We also had hot water, unlike the eastern European immigrants who'd lived there a century before.

Rent was two-hundred and fifty dollars a month and the place was rent-stabilized, which meant that payments could only be raised a small percentage at the end of the lease. I once found an ad in a Village Voice from the 60s that advertised places in the building for seventy-five dollars a month. When we left the place in 1997 the rent was about six-hundred.

I’m not sure exactly when i clipped this out of a magazine—must be The New Yorker, though god knows how I ended up with a copy of that during the poverty years. It so perfectly encapsulates my desperate, ineffectual attempts at living my life that I had it on the wall of my cockroach-infested tenement. Chronic skin problems, an absolute shit diet, and a Travis Bickle diary entry reflected exactly what I was basing my hopes on: Publishers Clearing House.

When I stumbled on this picture I thought back to a ride on New Year’s Eve at the end of 1980; it was one of the few New Year’s Eves that I worked. It was lucrative (though not as good as Halloween) but it was a pain in the ass from the moment I started my shift. Once again I hadn’t figured out how to make the real money. Experienced cabbies drove north along First Avenue picking up anyone they could jam in, charging them all a fixed price, dropping them only on First. When they got to 96th Street they’d turn around and do the same thing all the way down Second. A good midwestern boy like me treated the madness like any other night, too afraid and too dumb to break the rules. When I saw the PIL picture I remembered that one of my rides that night was Keith Levene and Viv Albertine, on their way to a Slits show at Hurrah's on 62nd Street.

On April 4 I'd seen Public Image Limited in their first US show. They played at the Palladium, the former Music Academy building on 14th Street near Union Square. It was a grand old auditorium just the right size for bands that hadn't graduated to the useless and expensive arenas. I saw the Clash there a couple of times, The Jam, The Pretenders, each with legendary opening acts like The Cramps, James Blood Ulmer, and Bo Diddley.

I was in total awe of PIL, obsessed by them; they were doing everything I wanted to do and were probably the biggest single influence on my songwriting at this time. In 1978 I had played their first single until I wore out the vinyl; I still think it's a near-perfect 45. First Issue and Metal Box, the first two albums, were what I wanted Desi Desi and Desi to sound like, and many of my best tunes were inspired by those recordings. I wanted to hear the seismic waves of a Jah Wobble bassline under everything. I wanted the knife-edge noise parts Keith Levene was playing, sometimes rhythmic and sometimes not, nothing anyone had heard before. I wanted Lydon-style vocals that sometimes provided a melody but often devolved into rhythmic chanting that was nothing at all like the hip-hop that arrived from the Bronx a few years later. I wanted to be outrageous, angry, scathing, and smart. I wanted to tunnel straight into my brain and let the murder out.

But I rarely got that sound from the Desis. There were gigs where it happened but not often. We were so bound by poverty! I should have been playing out of a Marshall stack; I occasionally found one at rehearsal spaces and once at a gig, the Terminal Art Show in Brooklyn '83. Fran should have had a good bass and a big amp to get that Jah Wobble tectonic groove. We needed more lead work cutting through the noise, like Byron used to do with Ed Davis, but we had reluctantly become a trio as Byron drifted away. I felt a lot more comfortable when at least some of the weird-ass parts I wanted were played by someone with a mastery of his instrument. I should have recruited someone new; I’m not sure I ever grew into my role as the only guitarist. I was as good as I’ve ever been for a few years in the 80s and that probably wasn't enough.

I almost starved to death working for Campus Coach Lines. I told them weeks in advance that there was going to be a night I couldn't work—I had tickets for The Pretenders at the Palladium and Fran had come up from Cincinnati. I ended up having to leave the concert early to get to the job and they still didn't give me another shift for weeks. I decided I knew the city well enough to get a taxi license, a ridiculously easy task to accomplish. The test was a joke, the simplest I've ever taken. Plus the fix was in since I was sponsored by a fleet; nobody with fleet backing failed.

I started working for Dover Garage in the West Village at Hudson and Charles. I began to wait around with the other drivers in a shape-up every night; after an hour or so I'd get my cab.