I've been trying in various ways to tell this story - or, if not this story exactly, one with similar themes and ideas - for nearly fifteen years. In the early 1990's I was living in what was then called Alphabet City, in New York City's East Village. The neighborhood, at that time, was still crawling with social outcasts and political radicals. There was a dark sub-sidewalk storefront on St. Mark's Place with a sign above the door proclaiming it "The Sabotage Bookstore." It never seemed to be open, and the only people I ever saw go in or out were teenagers dressed in tatters, safety-pinned, scabby and tattooed, the same kids who spare-changed at Astor Place. My friends and I called them gutter punks.

 
When Mayor David Dinkins closed down Tompkins Square Park for renovations (or, as many in the neighborhood believed, to wash out the homeless people who'd claimed it as their own), the streets exploded in riots. Watching the gutter punks smash bottles in the street and light trashcans on fire - pummeling each other as they did - provided my first inspiration for 
The Sabotage Cafe. I was fascinated by these kids. Their issues were different from those of the other homeless people in the neighborhood - some of them weren't even homeless at all. They were trying, through lifestyle, to effect change, though when they tried to articulate this, they invariably sounded like paranoid crackpots. Even so, it seemed to me they contained the germs of an engaging and dangerous political ethos. The cold war was over. It wasn't fashionable then - and it's become less and less so since - to define oneself politically in opposition to the social advances promised by capitalism, yet this is what I saw these kids struggling to do. But not knowing how to do so effectively, and understanding their own rage more than the complex political realities from which it sprang, they had a tendency to self-combust. Since then, our country has changed in a great variety of ways. Dissent has become even less frequent and more commodified than it was in the early 90s. Yet everywhere I travel, I see these kids still, skulking around university districts and begging for change and calling anyone who won�t help them a fascist. Part of my reason for writing this book was to attempt to understand this phenomenon, as well as the people caught up in it.