TUMBLEWEED

[Introduction to a story in process] 

It was in those dark days, that the bright light ascendant came in the form of the young, the creative, and the disenfranchised.  

From 1975-1981, the bright pretty things came to the city on buses, planes, cars, trains, and some on bicycles.  Some came with cash, and some with nothing more than warnings from their families of the rapists, the garbage strikes, and the pickpockets.  I believe this is where the warnings from mothers about being sold into slavery came from.  But they came and settled in the lower Manhattan environs of Soho, Tribeca, the East and West Villages.  Some went to the Upper West Side, and some to Chelsea, but come they arrived in such numbers that certain blocks of the city seemed freakishly overpopulated with the fresh faces of hope.  They moved into former tenements, storefronts and empty commercial lofts where 4 or more would share the space and the one barely functional bathroom, if it had one at all.  They built their worlds, did their art, and all met each other on the stoops of their buildings, the fleetingly rented spaces for  galleries, and the nightclubs.  These were our frat houses, our social clubs, our living rooms.

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