On Being a Poor Black Punk and Working at the Strand Bookstore

In 1987, I got a job at the famous Strand bookstore in Union Square. My ska band, the Boilers, rehearsed down the block at a place called Giant Studios, and I stopped in the Strand one day with every intention to steal a book but instead decided to ask if any positions were open.

Every NYU student, downtown artist, and aspiring writer wanted to work at the Strand. It was a status job. It was hip to be seen wearing the iconic red Strand bookstore T-shirt only employees got.

A young woman who was as dark as the night and as beautiful as a sunrise handed me an application. I filled it out and was lucky enough to be sent directly to meet Fred, the store’s owner, in a cramped little space he called his office. The interview lasted less than a minute. Fred looked me up and down and asked, “What’s the last book you read?”

“I don’t remember the title,” I said, “but it was something by Vonnegut.”

Fred told me to come back the next day. I was assigned to the store warehouse, and when I stepped inside it, I realized why Fred wanted to be in charge of who was hired. I was fairly sure he was conducting a social experiment.

We had two floor managers. John and Paul, like the Beatles and the popes. John was an old throwback to a Haight- Ashbury hippie. All long hair, tie-dyed shirts, and bell-bottom jeans. He was always noticeably stoned. He moved and spoke slowly, started and ended every sentence with “Maaaaan,” and took frequent naps at his desk. He was basically Chong from the Cheech & Chong movies.

Paul was completely different. He was in his early thirties and super energetic, like methamphetamine-energetic. A total leather queen, complete with the thick mustache and the supertight black leather outfits. He buzzed around the warehouse giving out orders and shade. If he could have gotten away with it, I guessed he would have literally “cracked the whip.”

The secret joke we warehouse workers shared about Paul was that one of the guys had found a picture in a Robert Mapplethorpe photography book of a skinny White dude with a thick mustache wearing leather chaps. He had the handle of a big black leather whip shoved way up his ass. It was Paul.

There were about ten of us who worked the warehouse floor, including the managers. Our job was to keep the store stocked, fill mail orders, and receive shipments of books. It was a lot of time on our feet, walking up and down aisles, climbing pallets of books, and lugging heavy boxes. Our crew was as motley and unlikely as could be imagined.

We had Chelsea, who looked like the love child of Howard Stern and Joey Ramone. Years later, when I saw Marilyn Manson for the first time, I swore it was Chelsea. I’m still not convinced it wasn’t.

Every day, Chelsea came to work in that dusty, dirty warehouse dressed in a pink or yellow ballerina’s tutu and combat boots. Long before people were talking about gender nonconformity or gender fluidity, there was Chelsea.

This tall, gaunt, pale, skinny being was in a serious romantic relationship with a stud lesbian called Bobbi, who also worked in the store. Bobbi was short, round, and fat, and all trucker hats and flannel shirts. The two of them making out in the stairway was indeed a sight to behold.

We had two other Black guys on the crew. One was Nathaniel, who suffered from the worst case of eczema I’d ever seen. Every visible inch of Nathaniel looked like alligator skin. It flaked, peeled, and cracked, and he was constantly scratching. When he sat down at our break table to eat lunch, he left flakes of himself all over the chair and the table. You knew when he’d used the toilet because his dried, flaked skin sat in a ring around the seat.

Eugene was a bit older, but he always looked as if his mommy had dressed him. Creased, high-water corduroy pants and too-tight sweater vests and off-brand sneakers. He had the most unkempt afro I’d seen since middle school. I had to fight the urge to tell him to pick his shit out.

Eugene wore thick glasses and had a gentle, scholarly air about him. He was soft-spoken and well-read and always eager to discuss philosophy or the Bible. Eugene was a devout, churchgoing, born-again Christian with a secret.

Sometimes, when I was filling an order in the quiet warehouse, I’d suddenly hear a loud “Suck my motherfucking dick, you faggot bitch!” or “Lick my shitty asshole!”

Eugene had Tourette’s. He had a verbal tic he couldn’t control. Once I got used to it, I teased him about it. One day, after a particularly vile outburst, he said, “They really love me in church. They think I’ve been possessed by a demon.”

Boo-Boo Fuff was the dirtiest kid I’d ever met. He was poor White trash from the Rockaways and looked like a mix between a young Bob Dylan and Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. He was a really sweet kid.

Our hippie manager, John, actually gave him the nickname. Joey (soon to be christened Boo-Boo Fuff) messed up an order badly one day. He got really upset and started to tear up. John put a consoling arm around his shoulders and said, “Maaaaan, you’ve gotta toughen up, dude! You can’t go through life being Boo- Boo Fuff, maaaaan!”

Fuff used to bathe in the warehouse bathroom. I saw him scrub his face with soap and water, and still it looked like he’d just pulled it out of a bus exhaust pipe. He was genetically dirty. Dirt was in his DNA.

Lastly, there was Natz. Natz was my boy. We hit it off right away. I didn’t know it at first, but he was somewhat of a local legend in the Lower East Side and East Village punk scene. He was a bass player who played with everyone but was best known for his time with two iconic bands on that scene, the Undead and Cop Shoot Cop.

Cop Shoot Cop was at the height of its popularity as a noise industrial post-punk band. When Natz first told me about the band, I thought the title was literal; as in cops shooting other cops. He explained it actually meant the cycle of a junkie’s life, as in “cop dope, shoot dope, cop dope” and repeat.

Natz and I had a catchphrase: “You think it’s easy?” It’s how we greeted and said goodbye to each other.

I hung out with him after work in Tompkins Square Park and around Alphabet City, where he was hailed as a minor celebrity by the local punks and junkies. He was pretty recognizable: six foot three and bone-skinny with crazy, unkempt hair and a habit of wearing long black trench coats and heavy engineer boots—even in the dead of summer.

I went to a couple of his shows, and I was the only Black guy for miles. But Natz always made me feel welcome. At one matinee show, a bunch of Nazi punks showed up and started harassing the band. Natz calmly unstrapped his bass and smacked one of those Nazis across the face with it, and just as calmly picked up playing where he’d left off. Punk rock!

Natz lived in a big apartment off of Avenue C with his girlfriend, who was also somewhat famous in the dark, post-punk-art Lydia Lunch world. We had hung out in Tompkins Square all night, and I had to be back at work in a few hours, so he invited me to crash at their spot.

I slept on the floor in the smelly, nasty, roach- and rat-infested space. They had cats but no cat box. They had a refrigerator but no electricity. Everything was rotten and foul. The toilet didn’t flush. Things crawled on me and things nibbled at me. Natz and his girl thought it was cool to live like that. They actually bragged about it.

A couple times a week, Fred came up to the warehouse to check on his social experiment. I think he really got a kick out of playing God as he chose one of us to work the store floor for a few hours. It was a reprieve to be out of the dusty warehouse and among the public, and some of the cashiers were kind of cute.

One day, Fred selected me to work the floor, and I struck up a conversation with one of the cute cashiers. She was a punk chick, new to the city. She was a big fan of Cop Shoot Cop, and she knew Natz and I were friends. She suggested we hang out after work.

We ended up getting drunk together till pretty late, and found ourselves on a secluded bench in Tompkins Square. We made out a bit. She unzipped my pants.

I was living in a squat that had no bath or shower. The best I could do was take a cowboy bath in the kitchen sink, and I hadn’t even done that in a week. I was cheesy and nasty. I grabbed her hand and said, “Baby, you don’t want to do that. I stink like a homeless bum. Let’s wait till I can get washed up.”

She was persistent but eventually stopped trying. She’ll never know the favor I did her that day.

I quit the Strand by simply not showing up anymore. One day, I was on my way in and a voice came to me as if God herself whispered it in my ear. “It’s done,” the voice said.

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Excerpted from Concrete Dreamland by Patrick Dougher. Copyright © 2025 by Patrick Dougher. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.