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There in the fictional venue of Soho within the fictional New York City there existed the artist extraordinaire named Gatsby after the fictional character of an earlier age. Throughout the length and breadth of broken cobblestones from which rose lingering brownstones bordered by adamantine warehouses, resided successful lives to would-be lives and fulfilled attempts to scattered and unrealized purposes, as time and traffic seemed to flow by in abeyance.

No one knew Gatsby's real name nor where he came from. He could have been coming from and going anywhere and everywhere for all we knew. He could have been a struggling French painter or a struggling English musician or a struggling Russian writer...but whatever he was struggling at it was understood he was successful at because Gatsby existed side-by-side with success. However, no one knew WHAT he was successful at nor how this was accomplished. He was the legend of all because he was created by all and was only rumored to be but was never seen to be. He was the Iceman that never came, the Lefty who was vainly waited for,... but even more, the Godot who was endlessly expected because thought to exist. Indeed, Gatsby in Soho could have been a He or She or It of everyone'e rose-colored expectations leading one and all gleefully along a road which ended nowhere.

Those were adventurous times of artistry and frivolity when assorted dreamers and drifters would live off the proceeds of their hard-working but forgotten and ignored parents and perform cartwheels of creative illusion. While time and the world passed by in the outer limits of 9 to 5 workdays and other burdensome realities, the fantasizers and merrymakers of astounding prose and incredible verse, of dazzling toccatas and fugues, pursued their legendary schemes for perpetual unemployment and eternal potential. Amidst the reverberating refrains of Billy Joel to Teleman, wandering troubadours and whirling dervishes who recited philosophy and painters who portrayed colorful incomprehensibility and writers who were still "on the road" with Kerouac, there sang and danced an accompanying cast of characters on the center stage of oblivion.

Within the ambience of sweet intoxicating weeds and songs of self-pity and murderous boleros, there were also the romantic scenes of attempted suicides in harmony with setting suns and overdue rents and overspent relationships and frolicsome overindulgences. Many were those who came and went and kept on going only to gradually return to leave forever. Much was the music that went unheard and novels left unwritten and paintings unseen by fictional artists who themselves went unseen and unknown.

But Gatsby endured and would endure throughout the faded ruins and tired fragments of frustrated fantasies. He (or She or It) was the imagined personification of it all that kept the elusive fire burning until gentrification set in and merrymakers moved out. Gatsby continued throughout the city beneath numerous guises of gentrification and upscale dreaming, expressed in whimsical unfoldings of waterfront palaces coated in extravagant luxury that were once abandoned and avoided warehouses. As I write these abstracts of an abstract time, pulsating on the scribbles and scrawls of memory ,...but I must get back to reading West's THE DAY OF THE LOCUST which is, of course, another story...or is it?

(an extract from my forgotten manuscript: "On Borrowed
Time In Soho"--a somewhat autobiography)