The E-Vil
You gotta be lucky to find affordable digs in the East Village. Way more so if, like me, you can't even afford sox much less a monthly Metro Card, and stuff like dental work is moldering on your list of things to do when you win Mega Millions.
The East Village is always everything all the time. It is energy. Almost everyone here has a story and almost everyone else is a story. It's a mile-and-a-half long, day-and-night club, custom-
tailored and monogrammed for adult alcoholic insomniacs with ADHD and all their friends and anyone else who can stand them. The more the merrier. There is no cover.
Familiarity can fuse the area into just a sprawling chaotic hurdle. But to the newcomer, Second Avenue to at least to Avenue B, and from Houston up to 14th Street, including all the Ritalin 
cross streets in between, form an enchanted patch of the planet. Especially at night. That's when row after row of lime-green naugahyde noodle bars and head shops glistening with polychrome glass-dragon pipes and Clockwork Orange Milkbar-modern smoothie shops and plush hazy amber-red hookah parlors, decorated in early Genie lamp plush, get backlit and generate incandescent light like Fabergé eggs of retail.
Your first and fifth and fiftieth time walking that grid, it clamps 
its big dirty hands on both sides of your head and jerks it ceaselessly side to side, up and down, all the while screaming in both ears that if you want a tattoo, an organic martini, a foot rub, your fortune told, or all of the above at 3AM, you're exactly where you're supposed to be.