The sidewalks of SoHo and the East Village, where I lived then, were spray-painted with the cryptic slogans of someone named SAMO, who would later become famous as Jean-Michel Basquiat, and one day in the Astor Place subway station I saw my first Keith Haring painting — glued to the wall, though of course I didn't know what it was at the time. Eventually I met both Basquiat and Haring at a nightclub called the Mudd Club, in a neighborhood that people were still learning to call TriBeCa. I can't remember how I found my way there, since this particular scene in those days had no press and no paparazzi, and I wasn't exactly the hippest, most plugged-in guy in town — a fact-checker in chinos and Top-Siders. But I had a friend who knew Andy Warhol, one of the deities of the scene, and I tagged along and sometimes got past the bouncers and hung out at the edges, rubbing shoulders with people like Lou Reed, Deborah Harry, Jim Carroll, and David Byrne, as well as with the drag queens, drug dealers, and full-time night crawlers who were equally the stars of the scene. It seemed like a new and brilliant idea, staying up all night, drinking and snorting coke and pursuing sexual adventures in the company of artists, musicians, writers, and derelicts on the wrong side of the tracks — even as some of us imagined echoes of Paris in the '20s and Berlin in the '30s.
After the Mudd Club was shut down for being too much fun, the scene moved on to a place called Area, where the decor changed every month, with art and tableaux vivants based on themes like Suburbia and Confinement. During the latter installation I walked in the club one night to see Andy Warhol making goo-goo noises to a man in a diaper who was locked up in a cage. Or maybe it was a crib. In the bathrooms, men and women and indeterminate ambisexual beings mingled and groped. It was only appropriate when Fellini showed up at Area one night, since he might almost have dreamed up the scene himself. Almost, but not quite.
As the '80s progressed, the city gradually regained its prosperity and economic vitality, great rivers of money flowing out of the towers of Wall Street, rushing uptown and gilding everything. By the time I published my first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, in 1984, the mood of the city was decidedly bullish. Released in paperback with virtually no advertising or promotion, the book was eventually hailed, and condemned, as a defining document of the '80s zeitgeist — although I hadn't set out to do much more than write about my own coming-of-age in the city — and it seemed to me that the city had changed a great deal in the two years since I had finished writing the book. The East Village was seeing its first influx of young professionals bearing briefcases. Stretch limos prowled the streets of SoHo. Uptown, everything was plated with gold; downtown all surfaces seemed to be dusted with a fine snow of cocaine. Politics was out of fashion; fashion was in fashion. Within a year or two, there was a slew of urban coming-of-age novels written by and for the generation that supposedly didn't read. The stock market crash of '87 signaled the end of the brief period of innocent decadence that kicked in around 1984. The stock market roared back in the '90s, and the city's subsequent prosperity made the supposed material excess of the '80s seem quaint.
