The Lower East Side of New York is a "colorful" neighborhood. It's the kind of place that causes people, when informed that you live there, to scrunch up their faces and say, "oooh, yikes, I'm sorry." I try to explain to them that the heavy heroin traffic really keeps the violent crime down. The dealers need a place where they can operate without excessive heat.

Heroin can be bought with the same ease down here as a popsicle. Lower East Side heroin comes in these little decorator packages with a rubber-stamped brand name on it. The favorite for a while among my drug-dabbling friends was a white powder smack known as "Lion King," which came in paper packages sealed in colorful blue plastic, with the face of an adorable lion on it.

"Packaging is a big deal," said H., one of my aforementioned friends. "If it's a good package, it's probably good dope. If it's a tacky package, you're probably getting burned." There were lesser brands around that people knew to avoid: "Swamp" and 'Fuji Power" were known on the street to achieve the same effect as smoking a Hershey bar.

Like heroin, the spiritualists of the Lower East Side can be identified, quality-wise, by their packaging. A clean, well-kept shop with good furniture implies that the "psychic" is probably right every once in a while. Then there are the others.

My girlfriend M. and I were out drinking recently on Ludlow Street, where trendy bars such as Max Fish and Cafe La Luna sit side by side with strange furniture stores full of fake Louis XIV bedroom sets covered with dust, tiny thrift stores with bad sculptures of naked black women in the windows, and here and there the storefronts of various seers.

"Let's go see Nova! "said M., after our eleventeenth margarita -- because we are, after all, avid seekers of mystical truth.

The storefront windows of Nova's shop were filled with ceramic cats with big rhinestone eyes, dirty teapots, old radios, weird little fetish-y carved heads wearing costume jewelry, and scraps of velvet with fluorescent astrological signs painted on them. Sauced to the gills, we pounded on Nova's door at 11 o'clock at night, leaning on each other for balance. Nova and her other psychic friend, Theresa, answered the door in stained terrycloth bathrobes, blue from the light of the television. M. was led to a big damaged couch in the middle of the room for her reading, while Nova pulled me behind a loosely-slung black curtain to stare at my hands.

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