The New People’s cast-off belongings, when they’re not taken home by old-school New Yorkers or gathered into makeshift outdoor homes, end up in sidewalk sales. We used to call them thieves’ markets because many of the objects for sale were stolen. When you got burglarized in the East Village, the police would tell you to check the thieves’ markets where, if you were lucky, you could buy your own stuff back for a bargain. We shopped the markets regularly, furnishing our apartments with the stolen goods of our neighbors. A kind of recycling.

Sex and aggression, the usual stuff, and the poor rat had to bear it all away. What does my rat hold for me? The return of the repressed. Right now, all of New York feels like that, the rejected, chaotic, sexual, aggressive city returning, pushing up from under the forces of repression. Look at that green skin on Central Park Lake—nature reclaiming her territory.