Serpico Sandwich

Phebes Tavern and Grill 359 Bowery (4th St.), 212-358-1902

Crime Scene 310 Bowery (betw. Bleecker & Houston Sts.), 212-477-1166

Phebes used to be one of the places that the late sage Quentin Crisp would have people take him to. The deal was this: Pretty much anybody could hang out with him as long as they bought him a couple bottles of Guinness and some simple food, either at Cooper Square Diner or Phebes while he sang for his supper by repeating any number of pat witticisms, one of my favorites being the thought-provoking, "Morality is expediency in a long white dress."

Phebes was also a big cop hang-out, according to Michael McDonald, owner of Crime Scene and retiree of the 9th Precinct.

"We used to practically live here," he tells me, which is perhaps why he opened a bar on the next block.

McDonald ordered a pulled-pork sandwich ($9.95) but left the bun untouched, and didn't eat any of his sweet-potato fries.

"Sad to say, I ate the wrong type of food when I was a cop. We'd eat bar food in the car. I had a bad heart attack; I did it to myself."

I asked the waitress if the buffalo chicken wings were made in the traditional style, but she said the most traditional thing was the hamburger. Still being pre-heart attack, I ordered the classic burger ($7.95) well done with fries and cleaned the plate. If I'd been in an even more decadent frame of mind, I could've gotten it grilled with a shot of Jack Daniels and topped with bacon.

Before McDonald retired in '98, he worked narcotics in the East Village, going back to the wild early and mid 80s. I mention that I remember a junkie acquaintance of mine getting caught in a buy-and-bust. They rode him around all night in a van before he spent a night or two in lock-up.

"We used to ride around in a minivan and keep 'em until we got 10 prisoners," McDonald explains. "I'd talk to the guys, some of them had a pretty good sense of humor. They all had their reasons."

Of course, those were the days before three strikes, when your local dealer and addict would pop right back out in a day or two. "Now, four times and you're gonna stay in the system," he says.

Even in the go-go 80s, there'd be a lot of shoot-outs with dealers who couldn't afford to take the collar, and his partner got shot right around the corner, at Houston and Bowery. I remember walking down 10th Street before Avenue C offered a range of world cuisines-though you could get a mean pressed sandwich on 8th St.-and seeing people violently dragged out of their car by folks they never should have been messing with.

"Yep, we used to drive around with Jersey plates," McDonald testifies, a perfect undercover disguise.

Things were grisly back then. One standard punishment for a dealer who cut into another's territory was a severed head. The reason for the brand-name stamps that used to decorate every bag, often the names of kid's shows, was to distinguish territory. "He-Man" men used to mutter the words when you walked around Alphabet City; or, more ominously, "Sudden Death."

At one time there was a rash of dead bodies found in abandoned buildings, and the cause was more than a simple case of multiple overdoses.

"A rival dealer must have intercepted a shipment, poisoned it and let it go through. So a guy had a poison kilo, unbeknownst to him. When you cook it, poison still stays. Maybe rat poison.

"In the late 80s it started to change," he says. "More upscale people were moving in, and they'd call the police more."

Selfishly, I'm glad there was heroin around when I needed it, after a thrash-metal boy broke my heart in '87. Now, I can just go to one of the 10 new restaurants on every side street and stuff my face, legally. At Phebes, Quentin Crisp and the cops have been replaced by a natty generation of swingles at the bar, drinking glasses of wine that cost what a bag used to, and only time will tell if they're getting beat.