Sure, there had previously been a Tintin phase and then a Han Solo period (I was always more a Han man than a Luke), but this was different. Here were Jewish oddballs raised by bohemians who only wanted to be left alone with their punk rock, their Led Zeppelin, their booming beats, Bud tall boys and girls, girls, girls. Just like me, my older brother Asher, and many of our closest friends in our middle class suburb of Baltimore.

And so I bought a Volkswagen medallion in a Fells Point thrift shop and fashioned it into a gaudy necklace. I wore Sharpie-savaged jeans, high-top Adidas, sweatshirts, and—as a committed Oriole fan, this still haunts me—a New York Yankees baseball cap swung sideways.

It was amazing to us that the Beastie Boys were just a few years older than we were. And yet they were already doing exactly what they wanted to do, as they would later declare in a rap. Perhaps one day we, too, could turn our lives into a wild, raunchy goof and call it a career. “My job ain’t a job, it’s a damn good time,” the band chanted and we believed them.

After graduating from high school, Asher moved to northern California to live with our dad. An advanced social creature, he quickly fell in with a roving band of stoners, which led to a gig performing The Rocky Horror Picture Show live every Saturday at midnight at a theater near the Berkley campus. Eventually he found his way to Sonoma State University.

I left Baltimore a few years after my brother and drove straight to New York City to start my freshman year in college. This was the first stop in my accidental trailing of the Beastie Boys. The trio famously grew up prowling Village clubs, collecting sounds and images they’d soon scratch into their own sample-mad, post-modern party jams.

By the time I moved into a dorm overlooking Washington Square Park in 1989, the Beasties’ second album, “Paul’s Boutique,” was my university’s de facto soundtrack. The CD bounced and grinded at parties; the cassette ticked ceaselessly from Walkman headphones. My friends and I banged into packed rooms lustily quoting lyrics: “Hey, ladies!” As another sweaty Saturday night wound down, we’d summon strength echoing the “Paul’s” sample: “Right up to your face and diss you!”

I was deep in a teenage Bukowski funk and I’d wander Manhattan in a tattered sportcoat drinking 40 ounces of Colt 45 until the brown bag was empty. “Paul’s Boutique” was my constant companion: “You know you light up when the lights go down/ Then you read the New York Post, Fulton Street, downtown/ Same faces every day but you don't know their names/ Party people going placed on the D train.”

This educational approach proved fiscally unsustainable so I left New York after one year. Asher convinced me to move to Hollywood to live with our cousin Aaron, take acting lessons and buy a motorcycle. Once he finished school, he’d join us in Los Angeles and together we would become, effectively, the Beastie Boys of the movie business. At the time we were about the same age the Beasties were when they released their first record—so why not?

Coincidentally, the actual Beastie Boys had also recently moved from New York to Los Angeles, shedding the fratty fooling of their early years for a more mature, socially conscious vision. MCA had even discovered Buddhism and become a vegan, while lyrically renouncing the group’s once-perceived misogyny.

And still their songs pumped at parties. I’d ditched my drunken poet pose back East and was once again rocking thrift store jewelry and questionable facial hair. Out West I grooved to the latest funkified iteration of the Beastie Boys.

Asher graduated from college in the spring of 1992 and a week later he pointed his Geo Tracker toward the apartment I shared with Aaron on Detroit Street, not far from the so-called Miracle Mile. There are photographs of us from that time taken at a poolside party in the Valley. Asher, Aaron, and I practically burst from the photos, chutzpah-propelled in outrageous sunglasses, mugging hardcore for the lens.

Then, on June 17, my brother was shot and killed during a botched robbery attempt. He and Aaron had been out that night working on a film script they were writing. After the work session, Asher was parallel parking on Detroit Street when a skinny dude approached the Tracker asking for spare change. My brother went for his wallet, the skinny dude stepped aside and behind him was a guy with a gun.

That fall Aaron and I, shattered, moved to San Francisco to begin putting our lives back together.

Among the many samples on “Paul’s Boutique” is one from the 1971 R&B hit “Mr. Big Stuff,” asking: “Who do you think you are?” The Beastie Boys’ MCA died of cancer in early May at 47 years of age. Asher would’ve turned 44 this month. I'm now married with two young daughters, living in Brooklyn where I sometimes play the Beasties while running Prospect Park's loop.

On one of the Beasties’ early hits, “Brass Monkey,” MCA told us in his deep bark: “I’ve got a castle in Brooklyn and that’s where I dwell.” While I hardly live in a castle, it is a 3-bedroom apartment that’s quite large by New York City standards. But any sense of modern royalty I have is not due to where I live, what I do, or the music I listen to—though all those things certainly make life more appealing. No, the feeling that I have led a rich life to this point is most poignantly due to the people I’ve known, whether intimately as in the case of my brother or distantly as with MCA and the Beastie Boys. Asher and MCA both died far too young, but not before discovering precisely who they were, and helping me figure out what kind of person I want to be.

Maccabee lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife and two kids. He is the author of Jetpack Dreams, the editor of Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader, and he has written for the New York Times, New York magazine and Salon, among others. He is a News Editor for Fastcompany.com and at work on a screenplay, a coming of age story fueled by sex, drugs, rock n roll and Edgar Allan Poe.

Many days I walked both ways, and virtually all at least one. I walked in the blustery cold days of winter and the blistering hot days of summer. Time constraints might have forced me to other forms of transportation, but the weather did not. I told myself that if I let the weather dictate, then surely I would give up walking altogether. Spring and Fall last mere days in the city, and the rest are either too hot, too cold, or too something. The weather is like all things in New York City – demanding and inconvenient. Instead I slavishly checked the weather reports and donned or removed layers of clothing and footwear, as appropriate.

In the early years, I would wear comfortable shoes or sneakers to walk in and carry my professional-looking pumps in my bag. In the middle years, I would keep an array of footwear in my office so I wouldn’t have to carry shoes each day. In more recent years, the shoes gathered dust under my desk, as I would change into them only if I had a meeting that required the professional costume.

I walked as a single woman and then with a boyfriend who became my fiancé and later my husband, and whom, in the year before our marriage moved in with me and took a job three blocks away from mine. I walked while pregnant and after miscarriages and post-partum. Most recently, I walked through a herniated disk, when I could hardly walk at all.

The early years took me up and down Broadway, but when my daughter was in our local elementary school, I expanded my territory to include some of the other avenues that line the city North to South.

Growing up, my father owned a Buster Brown shoe store in Brooklyn. As the daughter of a retailer, I know the health of the nation’s economy can be measured by the number of empty storefronts in my neighborhood. While my daughter was at P.S. 166, I could have told you the stores that lined Broadway and Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. For every empty storefront, I could also have told you what used to be there, sometimes through multiple changeovers.

A minute a block was my twenty-minute hedge against whatever awaited me at home or at work – depending on the direction I was headed. And, when I walked with my husband, typically in the mornings to drop our daughter off at school, it became our time to share as a couple. During those years, we were too tired to share much of anything in the evenings except chores and grumbling. The morning was quality time for us, when we were both awake and not yet derailed by everything else that would follow. Yet, even then, I coveted my walks alone.

Everything changed twelve days ago when I got laid off from work. My suspicions turned to certainty a few weeks before I was actually told. After more than two decades at the place, I knew roughly when and how it would happen. Previously, when I thought about leaving my job, it was always as something abstract. Suddenly, I needed to think about it as something real and imminent.

I started packing. I packed up my thick folders of health insurance forms and correspondence with the Committee on Special Education for my son. I packed up my drawer of gym clothes. I packed up the family photos, including favorites of my daughter on the rope spider web at the Central Park Zoo, and my son covered in blue face paint -- both children looking straight at the camera and smiling their brightest.

And of course, I packed up the shoes -- eight pair in all, including a pair of black leather stiletto pumps that turned any outfit, from jeans to the most conservative dress, into an adventure.

When we walk, we look forward not back. And so it was that on the day I was laid off, I packed up my day planner and my Rolodex, said a few goodbyes and walked on home.

Since then, I have walked all over. In the morning, I still walk my husband to work, but now I leave him and go to the gym across the street. After that, my day is my own as I think about my next steps both big and small, both literal and figurative. I am no longer walking the same beat and it feels good. My new life has taken me downtown to the West Village and Chelsea to my son’s school and some business meetings, uptown to a friend’s Pilates class and cross-town to my daughter’s school. I am thinking about the brilliant acupuncturist I met when I hurt my back this summer and how nice it would be to walk through Chinatown this time of year – far less pungent than in July but without the stands selling the dragon fruit I like so much.

In the coming weeks, I expect to be out of familiar neighborhoods and routines even more. The world got a lot bigger when I lost my job; luckily my hometown is still small enough for me to walk it end to end.

Paula Katz is a recovering lawyer. She lives on the upper west side with her husband Rick Mandler, their two children and dog Dreamer.

I replayed the last few moments in my head. When I arrived at the City Hall station the place was buzzing with bodies: focused business suits seamlessly weaving through crowds of lollygagging tourists, who stopped to watch street performers dance for a large group of children wearing matching summer camp t-shirts. I was running late for dinner with a friend uptown, so upon hearing an idling 6 train at the track, I quickly swiped my card at the turnstile, flew down the stairs and leapt in just as the doors were closing.

At first I silently congratulated myself for catching the train. Then I noticed that I was the only one on board. As the train started moving, I heard the muffled, crackly sound of the car’s speakers.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a deep, male voice announced. “This is a train with no destination. If you are on this train - you should not be.”

I almost peed. This is not what one typically hears upon boarding a New York City subway car.

“Hello?” I called out, and then quickly realized that the speaker is a speaker, and not a microphone.

Feeling lightheaded, I sat down on the shiny blue bench.

“A train with no destination,” I whispered, hoping that saying it aloud would somehow make the vague declaration more understandable. How could an object have no destination when it’s presumably moving away from one thing and toward another? I thought of the school buses I rode in junior high school. Upon dropping off the last group of kids, the drivers would park each bus in an abandoned lot on the edge of town and take their own vehicles home for the night. Had this train just clocked out for the day? If so, was it going to park deep underground until its next shift? Would the conductor take a secret, password-protected freight elevator back to civilization and leave me behind? Would the Mole people discover me? Would ashen men named Rascal and Cooter take me under their wing and teach me to spit-roast sewer rats over trash can fires?

I decided to go in search of the conductor. I’d apologize for somehow boarding his weird train to nowhere and ask that he please take me back to the station. I made my way toward the end of the car and opened the heavy steel door. I looked down at the point where my car ended and the next began. The two cars were gently swaying in opposite directions, held together by giant coils on either side. I tightened my body’s core and took a long, swift stride from one car to the next. I was Indiana Jones, but with breasts. I had just made my way into the second car when the conductor’s voice returned.

“Ladies and gentleman,” he said once again. His cadence was precise and emotionless. Like a serial killer, I thought. “I want to remind you again that this is a train with no destination. But since I know that no one is on this train right now…”

“I’m on the train!” I shouted.

There was a long, pregnant pause. I held my breath. A moment later the conductor returned. But the deep, calculated voice had been replaced with a high-pitched falsetto.

“I love you,” he sang. “I honestly love you.”

This, I was not expecting.

In an instant I was taken back to 1988. It was summer, and I was riding in the backseat of my mom’s station wagon. We were listening to Magic 106.7 when a slow, country ballad came on the radio. My mother turned up the volume so that she could sing along. The song was Olivia Newton John’s “I Honestly Love You,” and I hadn’t heard it since that day.

Until now.

“You don’t have to answer,” he continued. “I see it in your eyes. Maybe it was better left unsaid. But this is pure and simple, and you must realize that it’s coming from my heart and not myyyyyy heaaaaaaadddddd…”

Though some of his notes were off-key and he sang with a shaky, forced vibrato, I could feel a real sense of longing in the invisible man’s voice. The conductor was singing from somewhere deep within. He loved someone. He honestly loved someone. Was that someone me?

I don’t know why what happened next happened. In retrospect, I should have continued on with my search of the conductor. I still had no idea where the train was headed, but there was something so strange and fascinating about the events unfolding. Maybe I stayed because the song ignited a sense of nostalgia. Maybe it was because I’d just moved to the city from the quiet south and was anxious to experience my very first “Only in New York” moment, even if the consequences were disastrous. Maybe it was because my parents taught me to always be polite during someone else’s performance. Whatever the reason, I wanted to savor the moment.

So I danced.

As the conductor continued crooning, I glided through the car with my arms raised, like a ballerina. I grabbed a pole, swung around it and used the momentum to propel my body from one to the next. I flipped through my Rolodex of dance moves and, in no particular order, performed every single one. I raised and locked my arms in a way that created an invisible dance partner, something I learned from watching Dirty Dancing. I waltzed from one end of the car to the other. I resurrected a few of the zombified “Thriller” dance moves that my mom made me learn and teach the rest of the bridal party at my sister’s wedding. I salsaed, sashayed and pas-de-bourréed. I spun in circles, letting my arms flail, carefree and wildly, in every direction.

“I love you,” the conductor sang, and though I know he couldn’t hear me, I sang back, loudly, “I honestly love you!”

Light suddenly filled the car. The subway platform appeared through the windows, and standing atop it were the same business suits and lollygagging tourists I’d rushed past in the subway station. I halted in mid-spin and peered out a window. I was back on the uptown side of the track at the City Hall station, which is where I’d boarded less than ten minutes earlier. The train stopped and opened its doors, inviting a sea of people into my personal dance space. Flabbergasted, I sat down on the bench as the car filled to capacity. The crackly speaker turned on once again, but this time the voice assumed the frumpy, almost inaudible characterless, monotone I was accustomed to hearing.

“This is an uptown 6 train,” the conductor mumbled. The emotion had completely drained from his voice. “Next stop is Canal Street. Stand clear of the closing doors.”

Bing bong. The doors closed, and the train started moving. The people in the car carried on conversations, read books and fiddled with their smartphones. They were completely unaware of what had just transpired. The moment was a lingering ghost, and they the new occupants of the house it had died in.

A man sat down beside me. He had long hair and, despite the July heat, was wearing a thick, tweed jacket. He reminded me of Lindsay Weir’s math teacher on Freaks & Geeks. We locked eyes and he leaned in close. “I saw you on the train when it came up,” he said. “Did you just ride the loop?”

I furrowed my eyebrows. “The what?”

“The loop,” he repeated. “When the downtown 6 train reaches City Hall they kick everyone off the train and it makes a giant loop underground and comes around on the uptown side of the track. But it’s illegal for anyone other than the conductor to ride it.”

And just like that, most of the puzzle was pieced together. In my ninja-like feat of agility, I must have accidentally jumped into the train after they’d already checked to make sure no one was on board. The conductor thought he was alone. While the excitement of the unknown began to fade, there was something so thrilling about being an illegal, voyeuristic fly on the wall during someone else’s private moment. Here is a man who gets five-minute windows of solitude between schlepping thousands of New Yorkers up and down the east side of Manhattan, and he uses the time to sing his heart out.

When the train stopped at Union Square I got off and stood on the platform. Commuters angrily brushed past but I didn’t care. I needed to see the conductor. I had to catch his eye and perhaps nod, as if to say, “I get it,” because I’ve loved someone that much, too.

As the cars moved past I tried best to focus my eyes on the moving cars, but I couldn’t find him. The train sped up and soon everyone inside melded together to create one giant, colorful New Yorker. Then, whoosh, the train was gone. To this day, the singing conductor’s identity has remained a mystery.

I watched the red taillights of the train get smaller, until they disappeared around a corner. With that, I climbed the stairs to the busy street above and made my way toward the restaurant.

Kerri Doherty is a Brooklyn-based humor writer and storyteller. She's been a featured performer at storytelling shows all around New York City, and once came clean about her chapstick addiction on Kevin Allison's popular Risk! podcast. She currently hosts a monthly storySLAM in Park Slope called I Like You, Maude and is working on her first book of humor essays. You can read way more about her at kerridoherty.com.

On the East you could have Jonathan Ames at shooting guard, once he shakes off the rust. For the point position, we could inquire as to weather Wesley Yang has some game. We could have Leonard Michaels - Godfather of the angry New York Jewish writers taking out the day's frustrations on the court and bragging about it in print - on our jerseys. Marv Albert could call the game. (Is it absurd to state that Marv Albert has a certain literary quality to his announcing style? Or am I just conflating a slight New York City edge with literary? And is this a valid conflation? Howard Cosell also seems literary. His sense of the absurd was literary.)

Where are all the ball playing New York writers? To my chagrin they are probably playing softball.

I have always wished there was a basketball version of the softball teams that all the literary magazines put forth every summer. A three on three version of Paris Review and The New Yorker, etc. Those summer softball pastorals are very nice, I'm told, but, in basketball parlance, softball is weak! And New York is a basketball town. Surely there are some writers who are athletes, too. My fantasy is for a 1,000 dollar buy-in charity league that plays a tournament at the end of the season, winner take all. Proceeds go to the charity of the winner's choice. Given that many of the league's publications would be 501c's, this would be an excellent fund-raising opportunity for small presses. A Hunger Games for non-profits. Random House, Tin House, everyone could have a team. The only criterion to play, as with softball, would be an affiliation with the magazine or publisher.

Please volunteer your organization!

The woman had parked her shopping cart several yards away and was rummaging through the nearby garbage cans, gathering bottles and whatever other odd pieces of trash she found useful or interesting. I was gaping at her unabashedly, since, as I said, the reality of the situation wasn’t really registering. This seems to happen to me frequently: Reality doesn’t quite register—but when it does, suddenly and without warning, it crushes me.

Like right now, when to my surprise, the woman stopped, looked right at me, and spoke. Her teeth were black but her eyes were sharp and intelligent. I pulled my headphones out, embarrassed to have fallen into such a solipsistic trance. She smiled: “Have you been downtown yet?”

I stared at her, struggling to understand.

“The protest downtown,” she said. “You look like you’d fit right in.”

The protest. It was September 30, 2011. I’d heard about Occupy Wall Street, of course, but I was startled to hear myself being cast in this light. My hair and beard were overgrown, certainly—after all, at that very moment I was waiting for an appointment with my barber—but had things really gotten so dire? I tried to smile back at her as I shook my head “no.” In all likelihood, she meant it as a compliment, but my vanity was wounded. I’d like to imagine that my beard is much more grand, more regal, than the scruffy growth on some young protester’s chin. Not knowing what to say—how to defend myself, how to explain my extreme self-importance to this poor old woman—I fell silent, and eventually she shuffled back toward her cart.

I got up and hurried off to my appointment with the barber. Obviously it was long overdue.

*****

Several weeks later, on my way home one night, I got stuck behind a man on the 8th Street subway stairs with a bag on his back that was large enough to fit a small piano. Oversized bags of any kind in Manhattan are a pet peeve of mine: Rolling suitcases that drag like dead tails behind the crisscrossing hordes of office workers in Midtown; giant strollers with enough pockets for a baby and its mother to live out of for a month; piles of shopping bags so vast they take up two seats and the entire floor on a subway car. I loathe all of these things. But, for some reason—my arbitrary, peevish mood, perhaps—this guy with the enormous bag was more than I could stand. He was blocking the entire staircase, teetering slowly back and forth. I raced up behind him scowling, hoping he could feel my contempt. But when he turned to look at me, his smile was disarming. He was young, in his early 20s probably, with blue eyes and the scruff of a man who might one day grow a very respectable beard.

“Youfromzoocotty,” he said.

“What?” I said, although I wasn’t even sure he’d asked me a question. As always when I’m talking to a stranger, I felt like I understood nothing.

“Zuccotti,” he repeated. “You from Zuccotti?”

That clicked. It was November 15 and that morning in a surprise raid the NYPD had cleared the protesters out of Zuccotti Park and removed their tents and other belongings, using the pretext that the park needed to be “cleaned” and made “safe” for other New Yorkers to “enjoy” as well. According to Mayor Bloomberg, “Health and safety conditions became intolerable.” I had laughed into my morning orange juice when I read that; it sounded so phony. I could have mentioned this to the man with the piano on his back, which I now realized was probably everything he owned (or at least whatever he’d brought with him to Zuccotti Park), but instead I just blurted out: “Oh, no I’m not!”

And I probably delivered it with some contempt. But not contempt for him or his cause. Once again, I was bristling at being misidentified as part of a group I had no actual relation to. And with that dismissive exchange, our inchoate bond was broken. He turned away, and I pushed past his giant bag and fled into the rainy night.

*****

Two days later, November 17, Occupy Wall Street held their national Day of Action, with marches throughout Manhattan (and other cities too) and a rally at Liberty Park that night. I watched the event streaming live on the Internet from my cubicle at a magazine in midtown, where I was freelance editing for the week. At first, I felt like watching a video of an anti-corporate protest from my desk at one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world was a bit too brazen. But as the hours passed and I got more and more excited text messages from friends, I thought, Fuck it, I don’t really care what these people think and I barely care about this job either.

In fact, I would have been thrilled to have been scolded for watching the video feed. I probably would have even escalated the situation myself. After all, quitting a job is one of the most life-affirming experiences a person can have, and I was itching to get up and leave this one forever. If I was being really honest with myself, I’d have liked to have been downtown, rallying in favor of better jobs, or better benefits, or something. The only thing keeping me at my desk was my sense of commitment: Despite the low pay, long hours, and endless frustrations, I had agreed to do this job and I would see it through for that reason alone. But I certainly wasn’t going to enjoy it.

The next morning, on the subway back to work, the gloomy silence of the commute—the rows of ears plugged with identical ear-buds and eyes trained on rows of indistinguishable electronic devices—was interrupted by the voice of a rabble-rouser: One of those bold men that sometimes takes advantage of a captive subway car to push his own crazy agenda. A hero! The speaker was a black man, middle aged, with a strong beard and a sly smile. He was wearing a high-school-football-style jacket, but on the left breast where a name is usually printed, instead it said simply: “Somebody.”

“Listen up, folks,” he said, looking up and down the subway car at a timid crowd that would not meet his eyes. “Slavery never ended! It has just been given a new name. You all think you’re important people, going off to your jobs, your careers … but you’re no better than slaves.”

He held up a copy of the Daily News. The cover photo was of the bloodied and distraught face of a protester at the previous day’s march, with a condescending headline that read: “For Cryin’ Out Loud.”

“You all work hard, right?” the man went on. “Forty, 50, 60 hours a week, and you think you’re lucky. Well, there’s a lot of people in this city who aren’t going to do anything today.” He smiled, and by this time I’d taken out my ear-buds and was smiling too, almost laughing. “You know what Mr. Bloomberg is doing today? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. Well, maybe he’ll have another press conference to remind everyone what a nuisance the people that do want to make a difference in this city are. And there’s a lot of other people doing nothing all day too. That’s what they have you for: To do the hard work, to slave away all day at jobs that make them rich.”

No one looked at him. Perhaps they were too ashamed, or angry, or they thought he was the nuisance, another crazy black man on the subway who ought to be ignored. I felt my body getting hot, starting to tremble. He was articulating my feelings so exactly: The dread I feel every morning when I get up to go to work, the despair I feel when faced with the complacency of so many of my peers, the humiliation of being stuck in what feels like a trap. The subway doors opened and people began filing off the train.

“I’ll tell you what,” the man said, still smiling, as people pushed past him, their eyes downcast: “You all should learn the words to Kumbaya. Trust me, it helps.”

As I passed him, on my way out the door to spend another eight hours staring at a computer screen, checking blogs and chatting online while intermittently doing a bit of work, I nodded, as if in solidarity, as I had something real in common with this man. Maybe I did. And maybe I’d had something in common with the man on the subway stairs I’d acted so contemptuously toward. And with the woman in rags who’d been so polite, so genuine in her assumption that I was part of something. Part of what, however, I still couldn’t say ... and I was worried that this, whatever it was, was already coming to an end, before I’d even had a chance to understand ...

Rob Williams is a mercenary copywriter and copy editor who lives above a meat market in the East Village. You can find more of his stories at www.itmustbebobby.com.

We received many responses; here are a few.

Phone Numbers of Strangers

by Neesha Navare

She Looked Like She Was Dancing

by C. R. Lofters

Dear NYK People

by Christian Bonnard

Guided Tour

by Susan Volchok

NYC Me

by Adam Baer

Another Visit

by Peter F. Eder

Dear Jon

by erika

My Friend, The Fire Chaplain

by Kathleen Crisci

October 7, 2001

by Patrick J. Sauer

Photographic Memories

by Christie Grotheim

Manhattan Eyeline

by Jackob G. Hofmann

I Have to Be Here

by Kate Walter

“Let them see that big yellow head of yours,” Tiffany would say. We broke tradition only once, separating at a corner during a light summer rain in Greenwich Village. The ugly truth left me stunned and incensed. The cab, a canary yellow mini-van with sliding doors, slowed to a crawl. Tiffany reached for its handle just before the driver gunned his engine, bolting past her for a white couple thirty feet away.

We started taking cabs back to Brooklyn from Manhattan because, as Tiffany explained, I stared too much on the subway. If a father trained his son to do cartwheels for change on the Q train, I stared. If a man spoke to his wife in Russian while casually shaving his neck in the reflection of her compact, I was mesmerized.

I grew up in a suburb where everyone drove. Tiffany said my gaze wandered too much. I didn’t have my ‘train eyes’ yet. The two of us always enjoyed a healthy rivalry when it came to our respective upbringings yet it was the interracial aspect of our relationship, the burden and beauty it supplied, that needed to soak into our pores over a stretch of time. Regardless of how well my train eyes developed, I would never truly know what it meant to be black in America, but I was now part of a team that did.

We both taught English at a large high school in New York City under Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral control. When the Department of Education declared the building unsafe and its students failing, we vehemently disagreed with city politics and got to know each other better. Every year the building lost another wing to a trendy boutique academy and every year Tiffany and I grew closer. By the time there was nothing left of the place and our classroom belongings had all been packed, my ring was on her finger.

Initially, I just wanted to know the beautiful teacher who shared my classroom a little better. Yet when things progressed and it was time for Tiffany to inform her parents of the new boyfriend, she made a conscious decision to do it in stages. First there was a new man in her life, and his name was James. It wasn’t exactly a lie. James was indeed my first name. I just rarely used it, opting for my middle name instead. So now I was James on my birth certificate, James on my taxes, and apparently James to a loving couple in Brooklyn with strong Southern roots whom I never actually met. It was simply an easier crossover name than Bryan, which served Tiffany well until her parents demanded to know who this James character was exactly.

“You’ve been dating this guy for months now,” her mother finally said. “How come we’ve never met him?”

“Well, James lives very far. Way out on the Island.”

“Tiffany?”

“Yes?”

“Is James white, by any chance? Because you know that’s perfectly fine.”

Back in our respective classrooms, diversity was never handled quite so delicately. The students simply had no use for political correctness of any kind, producing an atmosphere of equal parts honesty and madness. Moments of tolerance could turn ugly and raw in a New York minute, occasionally taking precedence over a lesson.

“Okay, who can tell me why Macbeth wants Duncan dead..?”

“Hey, Mister, what are those white ladies doing?”
I peered down at my book. “What ladies, the witches from the opening scene?”

“No, those three witches outside!”

Heads turned. Desks and chairs groaned across the floor. Deep inside our texts, Macbeth waited patiently inside Duncan’s chambers, dagger in hand, for the twenty-first century to get back to him.

“Those aren’t witches, Tyrell. Those are secretaries and you know it.”

“But what are they doing out there?”

“Getting some sun on their lunch break.”

“Why?”

“Because they think it looks good.”

My answer was greeted with snickers and smirks. Someone said something about white ladies and wrinkles. Someone reminded the rest of us that ‘black don’t crack,’ then thankfully we were allowed to return to the much easier topic of Macbeth’s ambitious mayhem.

For the most part, my relationship with Tiffany or ‘Miss Young’ was greeted as a fun novelty item by the students. Although the union was never confirmed or denied, each year graduating seniors gleefully awaited their wedding invitations in the mail or demanded we start producing as many ‘Obama kids’ and pretty ‘Derek Jeter babies’ as possible. Light heartedness aside, Tiffany and I did plan on having children one day yet I still had much to learn about race relations. After seven years of teaching in New York City, I could not produce a suitable response whenever a student informed me that I was a ‘good white man.’

The death of a New York City high school turned out to be a long drawn out process. Once a building was declared ill there was nowhere to go for a second opinion. As the years wore on, the school’s troubles only increased. The population took its final plummet once the faculty was required to pass out flyers to students stating that we were a dangerous, failing institution and it would be best if they transferred immediately. For Tiffany and me, it was akin to studying for years to be gourmet chefs, landing dream jobs in a wonderfully diverse restaurant, then being forced to hand out leaflets saying PLEASE DON’T EAT HERE. Our student body changed dramatically. It was simply no longer the same place and it broke our hearts.

We received our letters of excess at the same time. The school where we found each other would close its doors for good in three years, operating with a small skeleton staff until that time. It was now a matter of finishing up the school year with dignity, to not let feelings of confusion and resentment filter into the classroom. Frankly, it was exhausting.

To offset the final months of our teaching time together, we began to see a lot of theater on the weekends. Here again was another lesson to be learned. Even the plays I selected for us needed to be done with an awareness I had never considered before. Tiffany had no problem sighting performances, even audiences themselves for a lack of true diversity.

She did have a valid argument. Just this past June we saw a performance of Larry Kramer’s 1985 drama, The Normal Heart, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, less than twenty-four hours after New York lawmakers voted to legalize same-sex marriage. The audience that evening was so eclectic and charged with victory that when a wedding ceremony took place in the final act the house broke down and sobbed as one entity.

It would be foolish to deny ourselves similar experiences on a stage or even in our teaching lives. We’ve since made a point to seek out theater that will enrich our relationship, as well as our careers. It was at a recent performance of an August Wilson play, an author both of us have taught for years, where the audience mix was as interesting as the performance.

“Oh, Mom,” Tiffany said, making a quick phone call in the lobby. “You should see this. We’re out in full force tonight!”

So it was on that wet little corner of Greenwich Village where I suffered a momentary setback. As I watched the driver pull away, stopping quickly to retrieve his desired passengers, my immediate response was frustrated rage. It was our last weekend together as teaching colleagues. Rather than celebrating a job well done and looking forward to our future, I instead discovered the true nun-chuck capabilities of a closed umbrella. It bounced off the cab’s back window, skidding harmlessly into traffic. I haven’t thrown anything that hard since the little league all-star game.

My reaction was immature and slightly insane, and in the end only made me feel worse. I wasn’t the one the driver elected to pass by. Mine was anger by association, something I would simply have to process better in the future, especially once children were involved. I should have realized that Tiffany and I had long since formed a unit by then. We needn’t be concerned with foolish cabbie stereotypes or Department of Education numbers games for that matter. We didn’t have to teach together in order to stay together. And as I went through all the machinations of the angry male, the huffing and puffing, the bleating heart and racing adrenaline, a tiny hand rubbed the nape of my neck until I was normal again.

“What exactly did you think you were doing?” she said, smiling up at me. “That guy has nothing to do with us. You know that… Come on. We’ll take the train home tonight. Try not to stare, okay?”

J. Bryan McGeever’s essays have appeared in Thomas Beller’s Lost and Found: Stories from New York. He lives in Brooklyn.

In Bay Ridge, I studied the diplomas that hung in a home office. In Prospect Lefferts Gardens, I thumbed a young couple’s bedside reading. In Sunset Park, I cracked open the refrigerator and looked at last night’s leftovers.

I’m on the prowl for a new place to live, a job that takes me deep into Brooklyn for open houses across the borough. Veteran house hunters know the routine: the signing of a guest list, the pitch about original floors and century-old moldings, and the questions about the boiler, the windows, and the taxes. Lines of people march through the house, looking to buy property while someone else is still using it. We’re expected to picture the place empty, to imagine what it might be like if we lived there—where our sofa would go, how the space might fit a growing family—and to ignore the current arrangement of armchairs or the mold on the shower curtain.

It’s a tough job, difficult not to see what’s right in front of us. We’re there to study the layout and condition of the house, and yet I can’t avoid noticing how its owners live within it—the mismatched furniture, the acrid smell of cat litter, the vintage exercise bike in the basement. While the real estate agents yammer on about the house’s “good bones,” I excavate clues about its owners and their lives.

At one place, I lingered over the family photos in a hallway, the shots of dated perms and feathered bangs stealing more of my attention than the stained-glass skylight that illuminated them. At another, I noticed stacks of cards for several different businesses and knew we were in the home of a graphic designer. Two weekends ago, I stood in the bedroom of a teenage boy, gaping at the topless girl in the poster thumb-tacked above his dresser. “My mother would not have approved of this decoration,” I told the guy next to me, a man who came to this open house wearing a tool belt. He ignored the poster and me, shuffling off to inspect the copper wiring and the pitch of the waste pipes, I’m sure.

After twelve open houses, I felt like a voyeur. Then, last weekend in Dyker Heights, I spotted a comrade. Three couples meandered around a townhouse, shaking banisters and counting electrical outlets. Wandering a bit, I found myself in the large master bedroom with a stranger, a woman who seemed every bit as curious about the sellers as she did about their house.

While I pretended to inspect the new windows, I watched her glance at a young child’s drawings framed on the dresser, fan the magazines on a stool in the bedroom’s corner, and wipe dust from the wooden headboard—exactly the kind of things I’d done at previous open houses. I continued watching her as she knelt to smell the flowers on the nightstand and made her way to the walk-in closet at the far end of the bedroom. She opened the couple’s closet door, admired its sizable dimensions, and paused for perhaps a second too long at the sight of the clothes inside. Then, with no evident self-consciousness, she reached for one of the shirts—the shirt of a total stranger—and rubbed its fabric between her thumb and forefinger, a gesture usually reserved for racks at department stores or thrift shops. I smiled at the boldness of this woman’s act, admiring her impropriety. Here we were, attending an open house, and she was examining clothes she’d never wear.

I didn’t stay to see if she checked the size of the shirt or held it up to her torso in the mirror. Not wanting to interrupt, I left the woman alone in the bedroom and went downstairs to inspect the wiring and ask about the waste pipes.

Nicholas Soodik is a high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

At 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning in May, a blank white truck pulled up curbside and the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in New York opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was dressed in black jeans and a spotless white t-shirt. His hair was military short. His eyes were the color of wet peat moss and dark tattoos ran down the sides of his neck and snuck up his sleeves. He extended his hand and introduced himself.

“I’m Jason,” he said, smiling a set of flawless teeth, straight and white, framed by lush lips. I’m such a sucker for polite, and for a good, strong handshake. I was immediately, completely undone.

My gaze traveled from our locked hands up his arms and across his chest—large but perfectly proportioned muscles, olive skin, a hint of Latino maybe. He smelled like fresh laundry.

“So?” Jason said.

“I’ll take you upstairs,” I said, snapping back to reality and turning toward the elevators.

In my tiny apartment, I showed Jason what had to go. I had separated the heavy things and the boxes full of books, along one wall, and I pointed these out, warning him about the weight.

“You like to read?” he said.

“Yeah. I’m a writer, or…trying to be.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “I like to read, too.” He asked me what I wrote and I told him I was working on a book about a cowboy.

“How can I get a copy?” he asked. I told him I’d have to finish it first. He said he’d watch for me. I decided not to tell him all about how I’d been working on the book for five years and was hoping to sell it soon, but how I was also too scared to put all my eggs in the precarious basket of being a writer and so would be starting a full-time, soul-sucking job the very next week for which I’d already bought a pair of black Kenneth Cole slingbacks, several conservative black suits and a professional handbag (black) to carry my office-issue Blackberry. He picked up a few of the book boxes and curled his arm around them, pausing in the doorway. I wanted to ask him what he liked to read, but I didn’t want him to have to answer my question while holding the boxes. Then again, I wanted him to stand there and hold the boxes for awhile, maybe all day. I was suddenly sorry the bed sheets were already packed. I desperately wished Dan would evaporate. The look on my face must have been confused.

“I know I look intimidating,” he said, unprompted. “But my friends say I’m a big pussy cat.”

All I could think to say was, “Okay.”

A half hour later, everything was loaded into the truck and the apartment was as empty as the day I’d moved in. Jason looked around, the way my mother does when she leaves a hotel room, making sure none of her things have blended inadvertently into the landscape of the space that is not hers.

“What’s this?” he said, picking up a stretched canvas propped against the corridor wall. It was a painting of two cowboys riding the range in black and white and shades of gray.

“Oh, that stays,” I said. “I’m throwing it away.”

“Why?”

“I never really finished it.”

“You painted this?” he said, his beautiful eyes wide. “You can’t throw this away. This is really good.” He held the painting at arm’s length and studied it the way people study paintings in museums. “Can I have it?” he asked.

“You want my painting?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think you realize how good it is.”

I think I smiled. I think I raised my eyebrows and smirked a little. It might have looked like a come-on. It might have looked like I wanted to puke.

“Sure,” I said. “You can have it.” And with that I closed the door to the apartment and we turned into the stairwell, Jason carrying the painting carefully by the frame.

Downstairs, Dan was pacing up and down the sidewalk next to the truck. It was drizzling and the door to the truck was open. Jason asked us if we wanted a ride to Brooklyn with him and I said sure. The subway would take us an hour, and it was such a dreary day. I climbed into the cab and took the middle seat and Dan got in beside me, his knees pressing against the glove compartment that was held shut with a piece of duct tape.

I wasn’t really sure, but I suggested we cut across to the FDR and drop down and cross the Brooklyn Bridge. Dan concurred. We wound up taking a wrong turn, and then somewhere along MLK everyone was honking. Jason looked in the side mirror and said, “Oh,” jerking the truck to the curb and jumping out. I looked back through the open window. Boxes were scattered down the street. “I’ll be right back,” Jason said. So Dan and I sat in the truck and waited. When Jason jumped back in the cab he said, “I got it all! Don’t worry!” And I trusted him completely.

A few minutes later, we were negotiating a series of one-way streets through Harlem when he spun around again, hit the brakes and wheeled the van around across traffic.

“Hang on a minute!” he said, leaving us idling on a sidewalk while he trotted into the open door of a junk store.

Dan looked at me, incredulous. “What the hell?” he said.

I shrugged.

Jason came back a few minutes later, got in the van and put the truck in gear.

“I just had to see about that juke box,” he explained without apology. “I collect ‘em. But the guy wanted eighty bucks, and that’s steep.” He pulled back into traffic, heading east, and I took the opportunity to look at his profile, his neck and hairline. “I watch Antiques Road Show,” he went on. “Do you know that show?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well I watch it a lot,” he said, “so I know what’s worth collecting. I really like slot machines and skulls and inkwells. You know what an inkwell is?”

“Uh huh,” I said. I didn’t look at Dan, but I was sure his eyes were rolling.

“I got this skull inkwell on lay away,” Jason went on. “Nine-hundred-dollar skull inkwell. You put the ink in the top of the skull. It’s crazy. I love it.”

By this time, I was sure we were heading in the wrong direction. In a moment, we hit Broadway.

“I think you can just turn left here,” I said.

“Okay, no problem,” Jason said. And for the first forty blocks or so the traffic moved at a decent clip. Just above Houston Street things got hung up and we sat for a long time watching the lights turn green, yellow, red. The rain was streaming down the windshield and Jason flicked the AC on.

“What’s your neck say?” I asked.

He reached a hand up and rubbed the ink embedded just above his collar.

“F.T.W.? It stands for Fuck The World,” he said. “I hate everyone, so this is my message.” He reached around the back of his neck, slipping his fingers beneath the collar, suggesting ink beyond the visible. His arm was as thick as my thigh. “I got a lot of these in jail,” he said.

I could feel Dan’s leg against mine, and it wanted to twitch.

“How long were you in jail?” I asked.

“Two years. On and off,” he said, and of course I was dying to know what for but was too afraid to ask. Luckily, he offered. “This last time,” he said, “I was in there for selling two hundred hits of X to an undercover cop. You know, Ecstasy. But the Tombs, that’s not an easy place to be. I recommend you don’t go there. It ain’t too cute.” Okay, good, I thought—drug-dealing. That’s safe. We’re safe. We’re not going to die between here and Brooklyn. We moved forward a block and a half.

“I just hang around with idiots,” he went on. “Like my friends, Mario and Carmine, they’re retarded. Mario comes up limping the other day, says Carmine stabbed him in the leg. But the next day they’re walking down the street holding hands like they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. And mostly I date strippers. I know I should date nicer girls, but that’s just the people I hang around with. I just broke up with this girl. It started off good, and then she got crazy. We used to go dancing at Copacabana. You been there? You like to dance?”

“Yeah, I love to dance,” I said. I hadn’t been in years.

“You guys should come,” he said. “Just don’t go on a Tuesday. Tuesdays is hoodie night. It ain’t too cute.”

I considered his offer. What would I wear? Could my tits compete with the stripper ex-girlfriend’s? Dan didn’t say a word, south along Broadway through Manhattan, over the bridge, through Brooklyn Heights, past Atlantic Street Center, up 4th Avenue to 3rd Street where we pulled up in front of my new place. It was still raining, but not as hard. We all grabbed something and went up to the second floor, a spacious one-bedroom, freshly painted.

“This is nice,” Jason said. “Really nice.” He looked up at the pressed tin ceilings, peered in at the newly-tiled kitchen, and I wondered where he lived, what it looked like there. He unloaded the truck in no time. And then we stood on the sidewalk, me with a wad of cash and him with an empty truck and my painting. Dan was upstairs and I could feel his eyes on us from the window.
I wondered if he was watching to protect me, or to see what I would do.

Jason held the painting out to me. “You should finish this,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t think painting is my thing.”

“But if you get famous, this is gonna be worth something,” he said. “I’m no dummy. I seen it all the time on Antiques Roadshow. Somebody gets famous for one thing, like they write a book or something, and then everything they’ve ever done or owned is worth a ton of money. So you’re going to write a book and then this painting is gonna be worth some money. You gotta finish it. Will you finish it and send it to me? I’ll give you my address. You gotta pen?”

I looked him all over, searching for something I still can’t name. I couldn’t imagine how a boy this pretty had survived in the slammer for even a day. He was a mama’s boy, a curious boy. He did his research. He liked collecting things. His eyes were open for opportunity. His eyes were open.

I pulled a yellow legal pad from my bag and gave it to him. I knew I wouldn’t finish the painting, but I thought maybe I could write to him instead. Maybe we could go dancing. He handed the paper back to me with his name and address written in a neat, blue hand.

“You know,” I said, looking at the painting, “I want you to have this one. I really do. If you like it the way it is.”

“Okay,” he said. “But if you paint another one, in blue, you can send it to me. I think it would look good in blue.”

“Alright,” I said. “We’ll see.” We shook hands. And then he got in the truck and drove away.

Upstairs, Dan said, “What the hell was that?”

“He wanted me to finish that painting.”

“What painting?”

“Of the cowboys.”

“Are you kidding?”

“He liked it. He thought it was beautiful. And he thinks it’s going to be worth a million bucks on eBay if I become a famous writer.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. Well,” I said. I ran my key along a seam of tape, opened a box and took some things out. There was no furniture in the place, nothing to sit on, so Dan sat cross-legged on the floor, asked if I wanted help unpacking and, when I declined, stood up and said he was going to go home.

I settled into my new place nicely, commuting every day to my job in Lower Manhattan and returning home to cook dinner for friends who would sit on the couch and balance plates on their laps, drink bottles and bottles of wine and make fun of my Barry-White-inspired bathroom, all black tile and gold fixtures. I worked 12 hours a day in my office with no windows and I got really good at running from one meeting to another in high heels. I had cocktails with the mayor at Gracie Mansion and rode around town in government-issued vehicles, with a driver who wore one of those curlicue wire devices behind his ear. I didn’t touch the draft of my book that sat on my desk for almost two years.

It would be a few months before Dan and I would break up, and years before I realized that at least one box of books and my favorite mug, stolen from the university student center in Reykjavik, were lost along that stretch of MLK in Harlem. Eventually I lost Jason’s address, too. For awhile I’d kept it, thinking I’d show up at Copacabana and try to find him, but of course I never did. I’m no dummy. Where Jason saw potential in my half-finished painting, in my half-formed self, I feared I would be disappointed in him. But who was I, in my suit and my slingbacks with my Blackberry, a nameless engine behind the powers that made the city go, go, go?

Much as I loved my new apartment, it was not who I wanted to be. I decided that after a year, I would move again. If I finished my book and became a famous writer, Jason could sell my painting on eBay and buy himself a cool new skull inkwell. I wondered if he would find the painting beautiful enough to hold onto until then.

Margot Kahn left New York City for Seattle where she hikes, bakes cakes and reads with her husband and son. Her book Horses That Buck, the biography of a Wyoming cowboy, was published in 2008. www.margotkahn.com

We had just left Chinatown and were cruising north, along the Hudson River, to sleep-away camp in upstate New York. My fellow 10-year-olds caught up with each other and rapped about last year but I was the rookie. They were all from the gritty NYC boroughs where they attended urban schools with cool prison names like P.S. 52 and P.S. 136. I had just come from Rainbow Vagina Academy in the suburbs.

Less than a week before, I sat in class on my last day of fifth grade and applauded myself. I had gone the entire year without blowing my cover address, which I used to protect the secret location of my apartment, in a nearby, shoddier neighborhood. It was a covert operation in order to keep me in the more expensive and esteemed school district. In our upper middle-class Jewish bubble, I felt like the poor kid. When I asked my Phys Ed partner about the logo on his new designer t-shirt, he heckled, “You don’t even know what O.P. stands for?” I gazed into the stitched California waves on his Ocean Pacific polo and imagined sailing far away from my privileged Elementary school.

My mother found a nonprofit subsidized camp for me to attend in the summer. The admission fees ran on a “sliding scale,” so we paid only what we could afford—about 300 bucks for the entire season. I looked forward to reinventing myself as an equal among a clean batch. Yet these inner-city kids had me pegged for a sheltered rich boy before I ever had a shot.

Upon arrival at our destination, a used up army barracks in the mountains, I found my trunk of clothes and followed the group to our moldy bunk house. I picked out a rusty tetanus trap of a bed and passed out for the rest of the afternoon. I thought I was pretty slick in “calling” a top bed, until it rained later that night and brown sludge speckled my face from the cracked roof above.

The next morning I had to go to the bathroom so bad that I fell onto the floor and got a splinter in my butt. A fruit bat stared me down and chased me all the way up a steep slope to our outhouse latrines. Unable to pee, I taunted myself by imagining home friends gloat about their own camp amenities, like hot showers and flush toilets. When I made the mistake of complaining to my counselor Rob, he told the rest of my bunk-mates, “Aw… Ahron wants to go to Camp Rich.” I would have been satisfied with a roll of toilet paper but I could feel their looks. “What a wuss!”

On Long Island I was too ashamed of my apartment, with its ripped pleather couches and termite outbreaks, to invite anyone over for a play date. If I asked my mom, whether a friend’s family was rich, she always said, “They're comfortable.” I decided that we were uncomfortable. But compared to my new quarters—and the broken metal springs of my bed jabbing me in the back— my mom’s place seemed like a decent resort. I promised myself never to fuss about it again, assuming I could be teleported back there right away.

A few days later, we rounded up for our first Instructional Swim lesson on a crippled dock at the bottom of a hill. I combed the area for a gleaming underground pool—like the ones I was jealous of in my friends’ backyards—but there was none. Our swim instructor led us into a sectioned off area of a polluted lake to demonstrate our skills. I jumped in and heard, “You! Get over there, with the other Advanced Beginners.” I trudged through a foot of slime to join Felix, a soft-boiled egg of a child, who refused to go into the water.

At 9 years of age, Felix moved like a sluggish 60-year-old man who seemed tired from all the years he had put into making sure his children would have a better life. As a rule, his face said, “I'd really prefer to just not do whatever it is you would like me to do." He grimaced about having to find the strength to complain aloud.

The absence of a Beginner swimmer group let everyone know that the staff added “Advanced” to our label in order to save us some embarrassment. And the fact that we all knew this also let everyone know that we were, indeed, “Advanced Rejects.” My swim coach tried to teach me the back float and carried me like an infant bathed in the kitchen sink, along the blue partition rope that quarantined us from the others. Felix shook his head from the sides. I imagined Jason, from Friday the 13th, struggling to break loose beneath. If the killer surfaced, he would see the Intermediates swim the butterfly like dolphins at Sea World, then spot me, the pathetic target, as I tried to back float away to safety. Maybe Felix was onto something.

My head counselor Rob said, “That’s enough,” and granted us refuge back on dry land. Rob was 17, but he might as well have been a seasoned Vietnam veteran to us campers. He had a tattoo of a mangled fist on his shoulder and wore a fleshy scar across his back. I assumed that he was serving a community service sentence for whatever he had done to the person on the other end of his wound. If any of us young punks started to argue with each other, he’d put us in check, jabbing, “Youse wanna’ fight? Then youse are gonna fight. Right now.”

Back at my playgrounds, in the ‘burbs, there weren’t many fist fights. The violence was mental. After winter break, children compared the number of Vermont ski lift tickets on their state of the art snow jackets and mocked each other for missing out on a new addition to Disney World. Adam, who sat next to me in fifth grade, could tell you how much the best Tennis racket in the world sold for and why the leather stripping on my Air Jordan sneakers outed them as obvious knock-offs—“It’s just all wrong.”

When Rob used his “Youse wanna fight?” technique to push me into a scuffle with Boris, a recent Russian transplant who hailed from a Brooklyn project, I laughed off the tension before we made it to the front of our bunk. Rob consoled me, whispering, “Boris’s father was a boxer in Russia you know, his little sister can probably beat you up.” I prayed he wouldn’t make me fight her in the rematch. I was too feeble to rumble with Boris, yet I was too Philistine to dispute name brand clothes with Adam at school. I was stuck in some kind of defenseless limbo, unarmed in all forms of warfare.

Just before dawn broke on our first Saturday, Freddy, who slept underneath me in a bottom bed, shook me up and yelled, “Yo, Get up man. Donut time!” A musty recreational hall hosted 7AM, Saturday morning Shabbat prayers, with a bonus. Anyone willing to get their asses up and off to services earned themselves a free Dunkin’ donut, two or three if they were one of the first few to arrive—Freddy bolted.

Apparently, back in the day, the camp was formally a Jewish institution, but there had been a drastic shift in demographics since its founding. Besides a few Soviet refuges that had recently made their way to the shores of Brooklyn, like Boris, most of the kids weren’t Jewish.

I hadn’t been to Hebrew school, the after-school program, in two years because my parents owed thousands in late dues. To the rest of the student body I was an irreverent dropout. But here, since I was one of the only kids to have ever been to a synagogue, I felt like a learned rabbinical scholar. Without any explanation for the rituals, my Black and Puerto Rican friends had no idea why chanting phlegmy sounds bought them free junk food—but no one asked questions. It was a simple quid pro quo: say the lines and get the goods. The holy prayer words evolved into a camp slang. If someone kicked a home run during kickball, Martel—a Baptist from The Bronx— yelled, “Shema Yisrael…Bitches!”

During the next few weeks I tiptoed behind my comrades and sponged up some street wisdom. I learned the lyrics to Kool Moe Dee’s Bad Mutha, how to pop lock like a b-boy—sort of, and chimed in on late night Yo Mamma battles— “Yo mamma’s like a bowling ball. She gets picked up, felt up, thrown in the alley. And then she comes back for more!” Just as I started to feel like I was on my way to becoming a made man, Parents Day arrived.

As families began to show up, my father, a mechanic from Israel, cruised into the middle of the parking field in his customer’s shiny white Rolls Royce, blasting Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling. I sprinted over to him, terrified, and whispered, “Whose car is this?!”

He smiled, certain he had just done me a huge favor. His eyes said, “You’re welcome.”

By dinner time, all the parents had left and a lucky few scarfed down treats brought for them from the real world, like Fruity Pebbles and blue Gatorade. I pleaded my case, “It’s not my Rolls Royce. My dad is just the shady repairman!” But no one believed me. I peered into their heads and saw myself escorted past millionaire estates in the Rolls—or maybe it was our Bentley, that we reserved for weekend cruises—until an English chauffeur opened the door with a glass of cold lemonade in hand.

As we changed into our bathing suits for our nightly “twilight” swim session, Danny called our attention away from Parents Day and over to a more important discovery. He pointed under Felix’s mushy belly and yelled, "What is going on down there Felix? It goes in!" Felix then replied with what was, perhaps, the weakest comeback in history: "It comes out sometimes!"

As August trickled by, I played aloof but plotted an escape in my mind. I would trek to the highway, and then hitchhike downstate to the first supermarket I could find. There, I would bask in the icy Air Conditioning and live off the truckload of dried breakfast cereal on Aisle 7.

As my clandestine prison break drew near one shweaty night, our counselors ran into our bunk and woke us up. They yelled, “Surprise trip. We’re all going to see Coming to America with Eddie Murphy!” Everyone gasped. We were Korean War soldiers and Marilyn Monroe was on her way to greet us. On the way into town the driver told us to take deep breaths so we wouldn’t hyperventilate and end up in the Emergency Room—and miss the movie.

During the film, my eyes watered in gratitude for our salvation and Eddie Murphy. When the credits rolled I snuck into another showing. I left to use the marble restrooms and flushed a high pressure toilet. Then I flushed it again just to hear that swoosh of civilization one more time. The doors flew open and Rob dragged me back to our bus, now full of angry youths and staff waiting for someone to find me. A 9 year-old girl yelled, “Dock him from Canteen!” and Rob smiled. “Two weeks." I dropped my head in defeat.

Canteen, the candy store, was our opium den. During our regular meals in the open-air cafeteria, we ate cold oatmeal, stale tuna sandwiches and watered-down, purple Bug juice. But in Canteen, the camp granted us each a credit of $2.65, as our dealer behind a counter—the same guy who played “Rabbi” at Shabbat services, only now in a dirty painter’s smock—served up packets of Fun Dip, tangy Nerds, and Type-2 Diabetes.

As dawn broke, a few days into my sugar withdrawal, I woke up shivering and wet. Then I breathed in a most humbling fragrance, of a blanket—my blanket—soaked in pee. I sprung up like a ninja who had overslept and ran the soiled evidence across our campgrounds into a dumpster. I considered finding a match, and maybe some gasoline, but I had to get back. When I arrived in the bunk, out of breath, everyone had just begun to wake but they were too groggy to notice me.

I deflated on my bed, dog-tired, and staggered from the mental smackdown I had dodged. My scare swept every other concern off the filthy shelf in my head. And I couldn’t care less about passing for a fresh city kid or a country club suburbanite but I continued to hang with both of them from a fitted spot somewhere in between.

Camp ended a few days later. I went home, flushed my toilet and braced myself for the next battle—junior high.

Ahron Yeshaiek lives in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in the anthology One for the Road, New York Press, and The New York Times. His screenplay, Miles in Time, is an official selection at the Kids First Film festival. He is currently writing a comedy set during the dot-com bubble.