Signs of the café’s demise were written everywhere, literally. Last July, a chalkboard appeared in the Smith Street window inviting passersby to a closing party. Five months later, The Fall Café was still steaming scrambled eggs and wrapping breakfast burritos, but customers knew the end was near. For one thing, the chalkboard remained in the window. Similarly, the art on the wall, a rotating assortment of amateur collages, non-representational portraits, and dreary urban landscapes, hadn’t changed in a year, and for the final few months of 2011, there were never paper towels in the bathroom. Instead, a message, scrawled in red on a sheet of loose-leaf, chastised customers for flushing them. “If you want dry hands, use your pants,” the note read.

I knew the owner only as Henry, and he reminded me of those old men Woody Allen describes at the beginning of Annie Hall—the guys who wander into cafeterias dribbling saliva and screaming about socialism. Five foot nothing and whippet thin, Henry had the body of an ex-jockey, his neck, arms, and legs a spidery map of veins and tendons. His movements were strange and spastic, and I liked to watch him dart around the café, arranging tables and chairs in a pattern only he could see. He moved like a bee and had a voice like one too, nasal and slightly swallowed. Customers heard his high-pitched murmuring as he tidied, his squeaky rants about the news as he scanned the papers. We laptop users rolled our eyes at his distracting antics, but they were also why we kept coming back.

The Fall Café became mine in 2005 when I started dating a girl who lived on Smith and Douglass, just a few blocks away. I was a grad student upstate at the time and I’d visit for four-day weekends as often as I could. Her apartment was small, poorly lit, and she had a roommate, as well as cats—all of them, roommate and cats alike, ornery and peevish. When my girlfriend went to work on Mondays or Fridays, I’d escape with my books to the coffee shop, order an endless mug, and sit near the window for a few hours, gazing blankly at the passing strollers, truant teenagers, and local Cobble Hill culture.

I began to recognize the regulars, and though I never talked much to anyone, I eavesdropped with abandon and picked up their names when the baristas would call out orders. There was Stan, a stocky Japanese gent who liked English muffins and rolled his own smokes after eating; Sanjay, an amateur economist of some sort, who loved the merits of free markets and machiattos; and Ali, a Yale professor, whose essay on Melville’s poetry I found online and once read in a pause before a refill. I learned the names of employees, too: Rachel; the two musicians, both named Chris; Becky; Scott; and Jerry, Henry’s muscle, the strongman who hauled in supplies from the beverage depot and left, I suppose, with beans. The Fall Café was a place where no one knew my name, I knew theirs, and free Wi-Fi allowed me to google their lives.

Even when graduate school ended and the girlfriend became my wife, I remained among The Fall Café’s faithful. The wife and I established our domestic lives together, bought furniture and kitchen utensils, a coffeemaker and a teapot. We were equipped to brew our own and did; yet, most Saturday mornings and every snow day I made my way to sip from Henry’s cups.

The coffee, though, was never what drew me there. Baggy and flat, the brew tasted like it was left out overnight to thaw. I wasn’t there for the food either. The place sold oatmeal and muffins, soups and shrink-wrapped baked goods. The food was meant to keep coffee drinkers from burning holes in their stomach, not for savoring or making the neighborhood’s “best of” list.

I came back for the down-at-the-heels nobility of Henry’s establishment. I liked the signs near the door ordering customers to bus their own tables. I liked the music played by the people who worked there—Pavement and Sonic Youth one day, bluegrass, nineties hip-hop, or Motown the next. I liked that the scuffed wood floors had blurry imprints of fallen leaves, which might have been an aesthetic choice but, just as easily, might have been from a failure to sweep. I liked that on two different occasions a stranger asked to borrow my computer to hold a conversation on Skype.

Near the door, there was an often-occupied velvet couch, a secondhand find that coughed out dust whenever anyone sat down. On rainy days, a street person might rest there for a spell, drying out the dirty contents of his plastic shopping bags. Then, as soon as he’d leave, a customer at one of the tables, someone who’d been there the whole time, would move to the couch and feel grateful for the chance to recline. I liked that, too.

Like me, Stan, Sanjay, and the others never left, but the crowd at The Fall Café thinned over the years as the neighborhood changed. Trendier spots opened nearby, places that advertised organic joe and vegan scones. There were probably paper towels in the bathrooms as well. Smith Street more and more resembled an eastern outpost of Manhattan, and from inside the café, I’d watch couples peer into the window before moving on to someplace Zagat-rated. Maybe they didn’t want to bus their own table; perhaps they’d seen the wood floors and the couch and opted for something cleaner. Their loss, I’d think, flicking an ant away from my breakfast.

Several Saturdays ago, after a weekend away, I walked to The Fall Café, hoping to get through a stack of students’ essays. The place was shuttered. A work order adhered to the window, and renovations were already underway for a new place called Trattoria, a name I have trouble pronouncing.

Nothing of Henry’s was visible from the street. I looked for a note, an explanation of what happened to the café. I knew, of course, but part of me wanted a good-bye, a thank-you for all the years of loyalty. The window chalkboard was gone, and the only words on the shutters were inked in graffiti. The Fall Café closed, and no sign, no story, no paper towel, told what happened.

Nicholas Soodik is a high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

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!

Doling out coin for a shave belongs on a continuum of male grooming practices, a bit closer to showering than sugar body scrubs. Several other rituals exist on this continuum, though none that evoke the nostalgia of a shave. Take the following as examples.

The airport shoeshine: flashy and entitled.

A manicure: preening, privileged, a bit effete.

Tanning: self-absorbed, déclassé.

The body wax: unconfident, self-loathing, and painful.

Getting a shave, conversely, holds the possibility of something alluring. In the barber’s chair, reclining, his face foamed with cream, the bewhiskered man looks important. His is a simpler time, a slower and more familiar decade. The man who pays for a shave tips his hat at passing ladies, wears a shirt and tie for air-travel, and says, “you’re welcome,” after thank-you’s.

Unfortunately, the image of the barber-shop shave didn’t square with what I experienced last summer. Angel’s Barber Shop, close enough to my apartment to hear Angel strum his guitar when the windows are open and business is slow, is nestled in the armpit of where Court Street hits Hamilton Ave. The place was empty when I went, the Dominican and Puerto Rican Red Hook locals who frequent the place absent that afternoon. Angel sat in one of the swivel chairs when I entered. He began laughing as I approached his chair. In three years of walking by, I had never seen a white man inside of Angel’s shop. Scissors in hand, Angel looked like Geronimo laying eyes on Paleface for the first time. No stranger to nervousness, I thought to find my horse and flee for the hills.

Instead, I told Angel what I wanted: a shave. His laughing continued as he gestured to the chair and I sat. It was only then that I noticed a telenovela played from the tiny screen in the room’s corner. Dressed in what looked like nurses’ uniforms, two women played tennis while a bemused pool boy looked on. My broken Spanish picked up only a few words from the show: “pelota,” “muchacho,” and “biblioteca,” not enough to follow the show’s narrative.

Whatever it was, Angel kept laughing. He laughed as he spun the chair, kicked the foot pedals, and knocked back the seat. He laughed as he laid on my face steaming towels, hotter than clothes just out of hell’s dryer, and lathered me with foam. And he laughed as he ran a razor blade along a whetstone, which, in hindsight, was less to sharpen its edge than to intimidate.

With the straightedge clenched in his right hand, Angel tugged on my face with his left, pulling the skin taut to draw out the tiny hairs. Lying back, I stared at the high ceiling of his shop. It was constructed out of square tiles, fluorescent in color, each bearing a whimsical pattern of screw-size holes that reminded me of a Lite-Brite. The holes were fanciful and exact, delicately spaced to resemble cartoon-like insects—a fuzzy caterpillar, a butterfly, a spider, a long-legged centipede—and no two were alike. The ceiling looked like it belonged in a preschool—a preschool, that is, designed by a ‘60’s hippie under the influence of some really good shit. Why would a shop owner choose this ceiling, I wondered? Did all hair-cutting proprietors decorate their ceilings? Did they cater to the prone, the lying-down? Had I never before noticed the ceiling in a barbershop, never bothered to look up?

Marveling at the menagerie on the ceiling, I felt a little like a tourist of the Sistine Chapel, except instead of visiting the pope, I had a date with Angel. Unfortunately, my barber’s touch with the blade was far from cherubic. Despite the rub on the whetstone, the razor felt dull; it didn’t shave so much as scrape, and my cheeks seemed to tear with his efforts to get at the stubble. My face isn’t what the moisturizers refer to as “sensitive skin” either. As a college freshman, I used the bathroom’s hand soap to wash my face. What Angel was doing now was a different story. He hadn’t yet touched my neck and I still thought one of my human rights had been violated.

Easy conversation with Angel wasn’t available as a distraction. Talking, at least to me, wasn’t one of his gifts. He had no interest in chit-chat as he worked, what with the nurses playing tennis and all. Finally, when Angel had finished razing my face and propped up my seat, he spoke for the first time.

“Aftershave?” Angel asked.

I studied my raw mug in the mirror, little razor nicks like pockmarks near the sideburns and my chin. “Sure,” I replied, hoping a good smell might compensate for a scraped grill.

“Ehsting a little, OK?” Angel said.

“What’s that?”

“Ehsting,” Angel repeated, pouring out a clear liquid into a washcloth he had rinsed in hot water. I wasn’t too sure what he meant, so I chuckled and ignored him.

I could smell the musky man scent of the aftershave, and Angel pressed the washcloth to my face. For a second, my whole being was absorbed in the pleasure of a warm cloth and a good smell—a bit like the full-body sensation of lying poolside on sun-baked concrete, nose full of coconut sunscreen and chlorine. Angel pressed the cloth into my skin, and its heat grew in intensity. As the aftershave found the razor wounds, tiny volcanoes of pain erupted on my face. All the insects from Angel’s ceiling, one thousand fiery pincers, bit my flesh in unison. I did my best not to faint. The aftershave’s ehsting stung.

Whiskers have come and gone since Angel sanded last July's away and I’m still not certain how to explain what it is I paid him ($5, plus tip) to do. I can’t seem to find the right words. In an email to Dad, I tried writing in the passive voice, “I was shaved,” but it made me sound like the victim of a crime—the hit of a connected bookie, maybe. The passive voice also didn’t specify what part of me was shaved. Was it my face or my whole hide? When I write, “a barber shaved my face,” the result’s only slightly better. I still sound vaguely victimized. “Thank God he only got my face,” I feel like saying. “It could have been terrible.”

And maybe it was. But now as I walk by Angel’s shop, tipping my hat to female passersby, I know to slow my pace, to eh-stoop down a little so I can see his ceiling through the window. I know to look up.

Nicholas Soodik is a high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

I arrive at the main restaurant at 4 AM to pick up the baked goods and pastries, which I have never tasted but hear are delicious, and bring them to the several other locations around Brooklyn and Manhattan, where hungry and hurried commuters will buy them on their way to jobs they can’t quite explain why they’re in such a rush to get to.

I return home from the pre-Rush Hour deliveries at about 5:45 AM, where I sleep until about 7:15 AM, when I awake, shower, and go back to the main location to pick up and deliver the prepped food to one of the satellite locations.

The company owns two vans. One is a fancy new freightliner; shiny grey paint, tall proud windshield, and side-view mirrors that are not cracked, chipped, or missing. The other van is an old, dying, beat up, graffitied Ford, which cost $300 and is lovingly referred to as “The Crack Van.” When I describe this vehicle as “beat-up,” you must understand, I am actually being quite charitable.

It was called Crack Van before I came to be working for the restaurant, leaving me to speculate on the origins of the name. There are several that I have hypothesized, and I imagine that one, if not all of them are probably correct.

One reason the Crack Van is so named, might be that it looks like a van in which a crackhead might live or at least sleep or urinate. It looks quite abandoned any time it is parked. And when it is in use on the roads, it just looks like someone is driving an abandoned van. Another reason, could be that it looks like a suitable if not designated location for a woman (or man for that matter) to perform sexual acts on a person or themselves in exchange for crack. The final possible reason is that if vans were drugs, this van would most certainly be crack.

It was once white, but not since long before I came into contact with it. Years of outer borough grime and graffiti, winters of over-salted roads, and streaks of other cars paint has left her freckled and muddled into a dull and ugly gray.

Outsiders who don’t know or care for the vehicle as I have come to, sometimes mistake it for something else and refer to it as a “Rape Van.” In fact, more than once, I have arrived at a catering job and been told by an aghast British doorman that he would, “sooner expect to be abducted in such a vehicle than be delivered lunch by it.” Well, theirs are clearly plebian eyes, for anyone who truly knows the Crack Van knows that it is unmistakably and uniquely a Crack Van.

The sliding side door only opens from the inside, and even then only half way and with great difficulty, thus eliminating any need to ever lock it. The back doors can only be unlocked from the inside, but only opened from the outside (and even then it’s tricky). In order to load the van with pastries (or conduct any kind of kidnapping) one must climb back over the unattached mini-van bench seat, which I will momentarily explain, unlock the back door, force open and exit through the sliding side door, walk around to the back door and push it in while pulling the handle on its axis in order to gain entry- thus eliminating any element of surprise you would need to carry out your kidnapping, rape, or delivery of baked goods.

For the peculiarity of the mini-van seat to be fully understood, you must first understand that this is not a mini-van. This is a commercial delivery van in every sense of the word. However, this commercial delivery van does not have commercial license plates. It has regular passenger plates. The reason for this is for the company to avoid higher insurance rates on the van and to allow us the use of restricted roadways such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the FDR, which prohibits all commercial traffic. Though the seat is not secured by anything more than milk crates wedged up behind it causing it humorously tip over backwards anytime I accelerate, by its very presence the Crack Van is technically a passenger vehicle, and makes this irregularity of licensing completely legal.

It should also be noted that the passenger license plates are from Michigan, despite the van’s obvious New York origins (You can tell by its accent). Anyone who has seen the Crack Van or been within a two block radius of it while its engine is running will know that it would never pass a state inspection or emissions test in any state that requires one. As Michigan is one of the few states that do not require a vehicle to be in compliance with Federal Emissions standards, we are free to continue choking the air with exhaust and CFCs completely unchecked, all while following the letter of the law.

The needle that indicates what gear you’re in usually points to “Park,” even when zipping along the highway at 40 miles per hour. When I actually do want to put it into park, it generally goes into reverse, the shifter perhaps prevented from falling into place by that stuck indicator needle. I initially tried to overcome the problem by setting the emergency brake when I parked, but found the emergency brake pedal to be only that- just a springy pedal with no actual connection to the brake itself. So now, the lever must be forced with all one’s might, in order to actually park it.

There is no clock. Just a radio/tape-deck. I did not realize they made car radio/tape decks without clocks since the advent of the digital LCD faceplate.

In order to use the Hazard Lights, the key must be in the ignition with the battery engaged. This is frequently necessary for double parking during delivery and often drains the battery, necessitating a jumpstart.

If I attempt to start the engine with the brake depressed, something in the battery shorts and I have to pop the hood and physically jiggle the battery connector cable until I see it emitting sparks. This disconnection in turn causes the non-clock radio/tape deck to reset itself to 530 AM (the station, not the time obviously) and erases all my present stations, so I have to find WNYC and WQXR and reprogram them frequently.

I enjoy listening to classical music while I drive the Crack Van because I enjoy classical music. It relaxes me. I also enjoy the comical disparity of classical music being played in such a vehicle and hope I give a laugh to any observant person who might notice it. This would not be unlikely, as I have to turn it up very loudly whenever I drive on the BQE or over a bridge because it sounds like a lawn mower traversing a gravel driveway when I accelerate past 35 miles per hour.

There were once features like heat and Air Conditioning and a Defroster, but these were gone long before I sat behind the wheel. In winter months, I would see my breath in a fog before me all day, forming a condensation on the windshield and then freezing into a layer of frost- necessitating an ice-scraper on the inside of the windows as well as the out.

The right side-view mirror, like a battered medieval jouster of yore, is cracked in many places, from countless encounters with other side-view mirrors. The left side-view mirror used to be taped into the plastic mount until February of this year, when someone scraped most of the tape away along with the ice and it flew off one morning, presumably to shatter into hundreds of tiny shards as I drove South on the FDR.

The Crack Van lists violently to the right, especially when braking. This caused me to destroy the side-view mirrors of at least three vehicles during my first week. As a result I’m not allowed to drive the fancy new Freightliner. The other driver- hired just last week- isn’t allowed to drive the Crack Van as he is unaccustomed to its many unique quirks, and would doubtless be killed on his first time out.

The irony of this is not lost on me, even if it is lost on my employers. The Crack Van has been deemed too dangerous to be driven by anyone but me and I have been deemed too dangerous to drive anything but the Crack Van.

Like some kind of antithesis of The Lone Ranger and Silver or Batman and his Mobile, we rove the streets of New York, bringing pastries to the masses and making these dangerous streets just a little less safe for everyone.

Post-Script

On April 10, 2010 the crack van expired. The engine revved, a piston shot clean through the bottom of the chassis and into the pavement, and oil bled into the street. By the time the tow-truck got there, it was too late. The crack van was just too old and had lost too much oil. Its time had come. It will be missed.

Connor Gaudet is an unemployed, 27-year-old writer/musician, living in Brooklyn and surviving on government assistance. He keeps track of his triumphs and humiliations at thedailyhell. He also runs the Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood reading series.

This story isn’t about her, anyway.

I was a month-old New York newborn, a 39 year-old infant who could only find Manhattan if I started from the F train at Smith & Ninth in Carroll Gardens. That’s where I lived – had been living – I’d just been booted. She needed some time to herself, some space to recover from her latest trying ordeal. I’d been here a month. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any place to go.

Those arguments were pointless, and besides, her parents were visiting. Couldn’t I just be nice? I didn’t think I could, so I sealed myself in a bubble of iPod ear-buds and went for a walk. Sunday night in Carroll Gardens – what could be safer?

Carroll Gardens is brownstones and baby carriages. Right? It’s tree-lined streets and charming cafes, old school enough for the Italian men to still sit in lawn chairs on the sidewalk and wave like they know you but gently gentrified to the point where out-of-towners can wander the streets after sundown, oblivious to all but Billy Joel’s melodiously mournful ode to the girl who done him wrong and their own angst-addled thoughts.

Billy Joel. I guess I was asking for it.

When I was four years old, I was a wee little lad. To pee standing up, like I big boy, I had to stretch up on my toes and lay my little winkie on the lip of the commode. Once, in mid-micturation , the toilet lid fell and mashed my nascent manhood like a porcelain hammer. My dad ran into the bathroom in response to my hysterical hiccupping and valiantly suppressed his laughter enough to comfort me. I thought I was dying.

He loves that story. That night in Carroll Gardens, my father called while I marched up and down Smith. He wanted to know how I was doing, wanted to tell me how happy he was I’d finally moved to New York, wanted to tell me, even though I was a grown man and he was sure I was safe and smart, it was hard not to picture that tiny little kid with the wounded willy all alone in the great, big city. He sounded far away while we talked. He sounded old.

I told him I was fine, dropped the phone in my pocket, decided to be fine, and started back toward the apartment. I’d paid rent through the end of the month. Uncomfortable or not, it was the only place I had to go. I replaced the ear-buds and turned up the iPod as loud as I could take it. Lost in thought, head up ass, comforted by Billy’s declaration that “she’ll promise you more than the Garden of Eden / Then she’ll carelessly cut you and laugh while you’re bleedin’,” I started down the dark street beneath the train tracks.

When I woke up on the sidewalk, two years sober, my very first thought was: “Am I drunk? How did I get drunk?” Then I saw the puddle of blood on the pavement, felt it dripping off my face, heard the ringing in my ears, the absence of music.

In the emergency room later, the nurse counted the wounds. Three blows to the left side of my head, the temple, my nose, then the jaw. That was probably the one that took me out, it being all glass and everything. And of course, there was the big bleeding knot on my forehead from pitching forward onto the sidewalk. The bloody bruise on top of my head, it seemed to her, could only be the result of someone kicking me while I was down.

I never even heard them coming. Didn’t see a thing except stars (really, just like in the comic books) and then a whole lot of nothing. I remember the electric buzz when they ripped the iPod out of my pocket and the earphone cable disconnected (they were still swinging from my ears when I woke up) and I remember hands, but that’s it. They got my iPod and my Zippo, but not my wallet or my phone. What I got was a $900 hospital bill and the surprised assurances of the cop and the EMT that “This kind of thing doesn’t happen here. It’s Carroll Gardens.”

The lesson I learned there on the sidewalk that summer Sunday night is one I should have learned thirty-four years earlier, one I think my dad was trying to tell me when he called, a hard lesson, but one I don’t think I could have done without. In life and love and living in New York City, it’s best to avoid situations where you are going to get your dick smashed.

Todd Cobb is a writer and expatriate Texan living abroad, currently residing with relative safety in Brooklyn, New York.

The man in the wheelchair shifted slightly toward me, and I gasped. Oh, my God, I thought, they’ve finally cut Eggy in half.

Because of the cap and the hoodie, I couldn’t be certain, but the guy in the wheelchair sure looked like Eggy, the paraplegic who lived with his mother around the corner from my old apartment on Hoyt Street. After Clayton, my landlord’s former worker, was no longer permitted to roam freely through the streets of Brooklyn, Eggy assumed the job of sweeping up in front of my neighbors’ townhouses and moving the recycling to the curb every Friday evening. He performed his duties assiduously in all weather, and starting about one hour after he finished, he was likely to be rolling through the neighborhood thoroughly buzzed on something.

Eggy was a wraithlike presence in the neighborhood, materializing with a startling “How you doin’, Pops” to let you know he was lurking. He was prone to surprising me late at night during steamy negotiations on my front stoop with women I’d taken to the Brooklyn Inn, his sudden appearances helping them make up their minds to just go home. Once, after Eggy and I together watched a woman with whom I had been making out hail a taxi cab and leave, I asked how much of the proceedings he had witnessed. “I saw a lot, Pops,” he said. “A lot.”

My understanding is that a drug deal arranged by his brother had gone bad, and Eggy tried to protect his sibling by stepping between him and a gunman who was seeking redress. The bullet severed Eggy’s spinal cord and left him paralyzed below the waist. Because of the protective impulse that cost him so much and his slightly addled demeanor, I judged him to be at heart a gentle soul, but maybe I’m condescending to his handicap. Certainly, he could be aggressive if he wanted you to give him a few dollars and was snappish when he was drunk, especially when he and his brother hung out on their front stoop with their boisterous thug buddies, their intoxicated swagger shabby and toothless in our now thoroughly gentrified neighborhood. The young men, at least, treated Eggy with deference, which was kind of nice to see because they were the only ones who did.

Eggy never appeared healthy. His skin tone tended to be either ashen or green-hued and sometimes he seemed close to death, very frail with ugly sores on his arms, face, and head. When I’d bring him out a beer while he was sweeping up or when he’d enlist me to haul him in his wheelchair up the three front steps to his building’s vestibule, I would ask how he was doing. “Not too good, Pops,” he’d usually say. From what he told me and what I surmised, his life cycled through periods of substance abuse, illness, hospitalization, recovery, and relapse. Cruel as it sounds, the way Eggy held on made me think of a distressed plant in a college friend’s dorm room, noticed only when it seemed just about to die, and then nourished with water that did nothing but prolong its slow demise.

I was afraid for Eggy, because I had a perhaps overheated idea of how his prospects might get worse. Anyone who rode the subways regularly in the 1990s is likely to remember the man missing his entire body below his waist who rolled through the train on a skateboard. He could open the heavy doors between the moving cars, and when he entered, he’d croak: “Help. Help. Help.” It was unsettling to watch: People who recognized the voice girded themselves, while people who didn’t would first look around to see where the voice was coming from, and then look down, then look down further until their faces twisted with horror when they first apprehended and then made space for this animate torso skating by. No other spiel was required and the straphangers grabbed for their billfolds so decisively you’d think the money was on fire in their pants. It wasn’t just the testament in flesh of unspeakable pain they responded to, or the plain pathos of the beggar’s supreme degradation – it was that the sight of this half man stretched their conception of what is possible in this world. Before seeing him, I could not have conceived that a human being existed in such a state, and probably would not have believed it had I been told.

I asked a friend of mine then in medical school for an explanation of how someone could live through such injury. He chuckled at my incomprehension, and with relish related – in that cocky, shock-the-civilians med student kind of way – the grim facts of what had probably happened to the man.

Paraplegics have to be careful. Since they can’t feel anything, they don’t necessarily know if they have an infection or an abscess. If they’re on drugs, they may not care that they have a problem. What may happen is that their lower bodies begin to decay almost as if they were already dead.

My friend had encountered such a patient during his emergency room rotation, her body so rotted through that when they cut away the gangrenous flesh and cleaned her, her pubic bone was exposed. The stench, he added, was hellish. Doctors might be able to preserve vital organs if they’re intact, cutting away the lower body above the hips, shoving necessary working parts up into the abdomen, inserting a shunt of some sort to expel waste, and then closing it all up. During rehabilitation, the patient is fitted with a prosthetic device.

“And then, apparently, they give him a skateboard and a subway token,” I said.

My friend snorted, and said that if that’s how he was living, the man would soon die. “The operation is called a hemicorporectomy,” he said, explaining that it was radical, but not exactly brain surgery in its surgical complexity, more just a matter of reconfiguring the working parts. With a smirk, he added: “We’re just meat, you know.”

Maybe it sounds naïve, but I didn’t know. I didn’t even suspect. Until I found out about hemicorporectomies, the deepest thought I had given to paraplegia was during stoned, squirm-inducing late night bull sessions during my student days, when some jackass would ask which handicap I’d wish least to have. Learning about hemicorporectomies added a dimension of awfulness to my conception, as did the epidural anesthetic I received during surgery on my left knee and foot. I felt what it’s like to lose all mobility below the waist, and also heard the sound of my bones being cut through with a power saw while feeling nothing. Did the epidural experience give me any insight into the lot of someone who is permanently paralyzed? I realize it wasn’t exactly The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, so I will leave it at this – for several disconcerting hours I was unable to move my legs even with a supreme exertion of effort, and just as bad was that when I touched my cock, it felt like a measly wattle of flesh instead of what it normally feels like: the red hot epicenter of the entire universe.

When the traffic light changed, I crossed Atlantic and followed the three men, shadowing them from the other side of Bond Street. I tried to conclusively discern the identity of the one in the wheelchair. I still couldn’t quite make out his face, and wasn’t certain it was Eggy. Whatever had happened to this person, it was the worst thing I could imagine a human being who had once been whole living through. On the one hand, I liked Eggy, and if this terrible fate had befallen him, I wanted to connect. Tell him I’m sorry about what happened, or something. But what was he going to answer? “It’s okay, Pops – it wasn’t all your fault.” I was convinced I was just a few steps away from encountering someone I knew who had had the lower half of his body cut away and discarded and I was going to have to make small talk.

I was only a block from home, and wondered if I should just turn around and hide in my apartment for ten minutes. The traffic lights would change a few times, pedestrians would move along, the streetscape would recalibrate, and there wouldn’t be anyone around I knew who had been cut in half. The prospect of never seeing Eggy again, despite the proximity of his abode to mine, was not so farfetched – New York dematerializes people like that. I know, because for more than a decade I lived a block away from someone whom I dreaded encountering; yet in all that time, I never so much as glimpsed him on the street. The rub was that every time I walked past his block, I would concoct scenarios in which we met and then rehearse the withering remarks I’d prepared about our conflict. As time passed, our imagined encounter ossified into a sequence of fantasy as delineated as the memory of an actual experience. Because our meeting never transpired, to this day every time I pass his block it seems as if it is about to, which never fails to make me feel a bit ridiculous.

By not saying hello to Eggy here and now, I would be turning the streets around my old apartment into another fantasy haunted locale. Every time I passed by Hoyt and Wyckoff streets, I would imagine I was about to meet Eggy in his wheelchair with a hemicorporectomy and would worry about what I was going to say. I am, I wanted to believe, too evolved to let that happen at this point in my life. So I resolved to get the deed over with, to cross Bond Street and offer my hand to Eggy. I reminded myself that I’ve traveled in the Third World, that I have seen horribly damaged people in hospitals and nursing homes, that I have seen enough pain and suffering to prepare me for this moment. But what do you say to someone who has been cut in half?

Still wavering when I reached the corner of Pacific Street, I tried to urge myself into the crosswalk. Just then, the man in the wheelchair faced me and adjusted his iPod. He wasn’t Eggy! He looked like a lot like Eggy, but he wasn’t Eggy. God hears from me infrequently, but I never neglect to express gratitude for benign anticlimaxes, and as I thanked the deity, I felt my pelvic floor muscles unclench and my body start to tremble slightly.

I turned left when I reached Dean Street. What luck, I thought, that it wasn’t Eggy. Now I could just feel bad for the guy in the wheelchair, like a good New Yorker convey some noncommittal compassion telepathically in his direction, and be done with it.

Then something occurred to me: Maybe Eggy is dead. Why not? I would have to ask one of my former neighbors if anything had happened to him, and began to imagine what I might find out – certainly nothing good.

As I walked, I remembered the last time I had seen Eggy. It had been about a year ago, after he’d materialized behind me on Wyckoff Street and asked for help up his front stairs. He looked awful. We exchanged long time/no sees, and I caught him up on my life – I’d moved out of my Hoyt Street apartment to live with my girlfriend on Atlantic Avenue a few years earlier. We got married. We have a son now, and I’m very, very happy being a family man – the old days sure seem like a long time ago.

Eggy congratulated me, and without smiling said: “Surprises me, though. You always was a loner, Pops.”

That was a blunt distillation of my essence more fundamental and incisive than anything that had been mentioned by the many dear friends who had toasted me at my wedding. I hauled Eggy up the stairs, then maneuvered around him and back onto the sidewalk. When I looked, he was smiling, but just a little. I told him to be well, and held back my own smile until I was down the block. My bemusement changed into something else after I rounded the corner of Hoyt Street, passed my old apartment, and started thinking of the past. Gotcha, Pops, I could imagine him thinking.

Apparently, he saw a lot.

Albert Stern has told stories at spoken word venues such as Speakeasy, LES Stories, and The Liar Show. He has published two essays on this site, The Circle Be Unbroken and The Subway Game; his writing has also appeared on Nerve and Fresh Yarn. His third one-person show, Benefit of the Doubt, debuted at the Berkshires Storytelling Festival and will appear in New York in this winter.

These are the sons of the older generation men, who would never let a woman pay for a check. And, who consider it right and honorable to pick up the tab for any person or group of persons with whom they are associated or have just a mild acquaintance.

Each weekend I frequent a local diner (Nick’s, some call it Joe’s.), sometimes alone, sometimes with my clique of friends. There is one guy, his name is actually Guy, who will always pick up my check. This makes me uncomfortable, I don’t want him to do that. There are times when I want to order my full egg breakfast, but when he walks through the door, I immediately change my order to a lonely bagel or dry toast. As many times as I have argued with him, it has all been vain. I recently figured out how to beat him at his own game. When I enter the restaurant, I will sometimes give the owner a twenty dollar bill up front before I sit and order. I tell Asia to charge me later and give me the change when I’m done.

It’s not just him. I have another friend who sells Christmas Trees on the corner of Smith and President Street. Two years ago I bought a tree from him, but he adamantly refused the money. He has the best trees in the neighborhood, but I have been forced to shop elsewhere ever since. How can I go back, it is embarrassing? Now I am stuck with inferior trees at high cost, so what favor has Jay done for me?

If I am making a purchase in D’Amico, and my cousin happens to walk in, bill paid, done. I once had a friend who would spot me getting my nails done in the local salon. He’d walk in, pay for my manicure and leave. Then he would call me a week later to borrow fifty bucks. His heart was in the right place, but he never had money, yet wanted to do the “right thing”.

Last week I was invited to dine with two brothers, one I’ve know for years and one I recently met. We met at Vinny’s on Smith Street, a real Italian neighborhood place. I knew better than to offer to pay. However, sitting at the table across from us was another neighborhood friend with his family. Of course the friend I was dining with immediately and without hesitation picked up that table’s tab, while a third friend walked in and picked up our table tab. It really gets confusing, everyone paying everyone else’s bill. I thought to myself, if anyone else we know walks in, there might be an all-out war over who will pay their check.

And I will admit this phenomenon has rubbed off on myself and my best friend Barbara. When we dine together it is a real battle for the check. We have torn checks into pieces in tug of war, cursed each other out, leaped over the table for that scribbled piece of paper. I have grabbed the check and sat on it til dinner was over, while she has warned the restaurant proprietor not to give me the check at all or else. What is it with us?

Barbara and I, we laugh at the newcomers in the neighborhood who calculate the exact amount of a tip from the check, when we ourselves leave almost as much as the check itself.

When I thought I had seen everything in the way of big tippers, I was yet again amazed. On my way home from work, on a ninety five-degree summer day, I had run into my longtime friend (and neighborhood undertaker), who invited me to join him for a drink. At a local restaurant, just two blocks away, we strolled to the bar for some martinis and wine. As we left the restaurant, the parking valet outside the restaurant bid us goodnight. My friend proceeded to tip the parking attendant. He gave him $20 just for saying goodnight. Remember, we walked the two blocks to the place, no car was involved.

This neighborhood of high rollers is disappearing fast before my eyes. And while I may complain about it, I love the absolute old world chivalry of it all.

I have been a to-go coffee drinker since before it was fashionable. In high school, I used to take my morning cup to school in a tall plastic Caribou Coffee travel mug with a lid. Then one sunny spring day, as I lounged in a car parked in the back lot behind the school, a surprise corner-eye glimpse of a prowling police officer made me drop my burning cigarette into the empty mug in a panic. The mug was ruined, and maybe that’s when it started, the drinking coffee out of anything handy.

In college, I used to save the nice Atlas mason jars that “Classico” brand pasta sauce came in. I’d rinse them out, carefully sponge off the label, and pour my AM coffee into them. I liked sitting around the table at morning classes with a big jar of brown water in front of me. It made me feel tough, and serious.

These days I share a Brooklyn apartment where my roommate and I brew coffee one cup at a time using a cone filter and plastic mug-top contraption that we pour boiling water through. My current favorite mug is white café-wear, larger at the top than the bottom, like an oversized teacup.

The coffee we make is, if I do say so myself, sublime. I’m not much better at leaving the house with time to spare than I have ever been. I have a five-minute walk up Smith Street to the subway, and how could I leave a sublime cup of coffee behind? More days than not, I carry it with. I hold the cup out from my body as I walk down the sidewalk, marveling at the ordinary human powers of balance that allow me to adjust my wrist so not to spill any. I perch the cup in the crook of my arm as I fumble for the MetroCard in my wallet, and continue drinking, on the train, as I ride. Sometimes my fellow passengers shoot me a glance, and sometimes they give me a wider berth, which I don’t mind. Still, I hadn’t considered my coffee-drinking patterns eccentric until the morning I passed two men resting outside the Met supermarket on Smith.

The Met is our local grocery store. My roommate won’t shop there because she claims it smells like corpses inside. I agree that it smells like corpses, but I am stingier and lazier than she is. Every morning, workers open the metal hatch on the sidewalk outside the Met, a truck full of food pulls up, and a team of laborers tosses the cardboard boxes down from the truck-bed; the boxes shoot down a metal ramp, through the hatch and into the corpse-smelling bowels of the store. I often look at the ramp, and the foam of dairy or maybe vegetable matter on it, and tell myself not to shop at the Met anymore. But by evening they are gone.

Anyway, I like the daily drama of the men, the metal chute, the rancid food-foam. It is the part of the morning tableau of the walk to the subway, a walk that also includes, regularly, a leather-faced old man who in my mind I call “Keith Richards,” and a frail blond woman always accompanied by her equally frail golden retriever, who in my mind I call “Dead Dog Lady,” as well as innumerable other wonderful if less dependable people and things. For me, one of the most appealing things about living in New York City is the massive variety of human life that it allows me to see each day. I know I’m not alone in this. Other people like me, who tend to get stuck in their own heads a little, find the stimulation afforded by New York street life to be a gift. Watching keeps our clanging minds safely busy. Like a bird collecting choice tidbits to weave into its nest, I burn some nervous energy gathering interesting or bizarre sights to take home to my friends in anecdote form.

Although I know that many if not most New Yorkers appreciate the city’s human spectacle, it’s still easy for me to feel as though I’m the only person on the street at a given time who’s having an aesthetic experience. I often feel invisible, as though I am walking around the city behind a one-way mirror. I’m checking out the people, looking for weirdness. I am not being checked out, and I am certainly immune from making anyone else’s mental list of “weird New York people I saw.”

I was. I was immune, until somebody on Smith Street smashed the mirror and sucked me into Weird New York. I was walking by the Met at the usual time, leaning forward from the neck to sip from my mug of sublime coffee. Without slowing down, I caught the eyes of two men who were resting from unloading boxes of food off the truck, having a cigarette in the shade of the store awning.

I sensed the first one smile, and I braced myself for a little street harassment, but he just looked at me and said, bemusedly:

“A cup of COFFEE?”

I smiled, relieved and taken aback, and I said the first words that came to me. “Why not?” I raised the mug to them, slightly, as I said it.

The two men paused. Then the one who hadn’t spoken raised a beefy hand as if in blessing, and exclaimed: “Enjoy!”

I walked away grinning into my mug, wanting to be there later to hear one of them turn to a friend and idly say, “I saw this girl today . . .”

Brooklyn. 1990s.

The man hitches up his pants, draws the mower back for another push. Frankie: He’s old and stocky, with unruly white hair; a cowlick sticks up. He wears cracked shoes, paint-stained chinos, an age-thinned beige shirt.

The yard lies at the center of a block of brick row houses in Boerum Hill; it’s separated from the neighbors’ gardens by a chain-link fence. Over one side drapes a trail of impossibly bright roses, a shock of magenta in this world of summer green. A picnic table at the far end sits next to a fig tree, its broad leaves rounded like patterns for a fat person’s glove. Wind sifts down through the trees in the center of the court; in the corner, an orange swing-chair creaks.

Sparrows chirp aggressive single notes—Brooklyn birds are too tough to sing.

Beyond the block, a distant swirl of traffic, voices, sirens. Every now and then a plane slowly tears the sky overhead, La Guardia airport bound. Some of the neighboring yards are carefully tended, with fancy gardens. In Frankie’s a few weeds spray up and the flowers, stubborn perennials, seem random, but the place is neat. A tabletop made out of the door of an old stove sits on a curlicued wrought iron base he found on the street—when it comes to lawn furniture, Frankie improvises. Three pots of basil perch on a slab of marble, which rests on two porcelain toilet tanks.

Over his head, up in the house, a face peeps out of a window; recedes.

Finished with the lawn, Frankie walks down the foot-wide concrete path sunk around the grass and pushes the mower into a shed at the back of the house. The walls are a patchwork of old boards, tarpaper, and rusted metal. Inside, light filters through dusty windows onto rakes, clay pots, the hulls of dead wasps. Frankie travels through a basement hallway, past the open door of his workshop, where neat rows of coffee cans hold nuts, washers, bolts; his tools hang from time-stained sheets of pegboard.

He mounts the stairs in the dim light. At the top, he reaches down and tugs a string slung below the banister, clicking off the 40-watt bulb below. The ground floor hallway is also dim, illuminated only by the front door’s narrow panels of frosted glass. The potted plant is plastic; Astroturf carpets the floor. Behind the mail slot sits a tray, also Astroturfed, like a tiny lawn. Under the solemn gaze of a statue inscribed to the Miraculous Infant Jesus of Prague, Frankie continues on up the stairs.

On the second floor, he pushes a door open. Inside, his sister Rose bends down to pull something from an old oven. The stove is massive and streamlined, like the front end of a DeSoto. Rose reaches a hand back to support the base of her spine, turns, holds up an angel cake. She smiles a crinkly big-toothed smile and her dentures shift, click. Her hair is white as sugar.

“Siddown,” she says. “Have a piece a’ cake.” Her voice is deep, husky, kind.

She reaches up into a cabinet over the sink, lifts down a plate webbed with faint cracks over an enameled picture of Niagara Falls. From a shelf below the window, covered with the same delicately flowered beige paper as the walls, she pulls down a box of Lipton’s tea. Next to it a stack of grocery coupons sits in a Tupperware container.

Rose crosses the cracked linoleum floor, which slopes toward the center of the room, and fills a teapot at the sink.

Frankie reaches into the refrigerator and pulls out a cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Rose shakes her head, puts the tea back in its place, and returns to a pot on the back of the stove. Every Wednesday she makes her macaroni and basil soup. She gets the basil from the garden, fresh.

The room is ripe with smells: herbs and garlic simmering in the pot; figs ripening in a bowl; the sour essence of old bodies in summer heat.

“Hey, Vincent,” Frankie calls. “Cake’s ready.”

His brother shuffles out of the doorway; it was his face peering out of the window before. Vincent’s slack smile reveals only a couple remaining teeth. His hands lift nervously from his belt to touch the buttons of his blue-and-green Madras shirt, which hangs open over an ancient undershirt. He peers shyly through heavy black-rimmed glasses and runs a hand over his slick gray hair; in back it’s faded sea-water-green.

The brothers and sister sit in their usual chairs as they eat cake from their usual plates. They’ve lived in this house for sixty-seven years. Frankie rules the yard and basement, Rose the kitchen, but the front parlor is Vincent’s domain. He sits in a spavined armchair and watches life pass in the street outside.

Over the years it ebbs and it flows.

Now some of the brick houses across the way have been sandblasted and resurfaced, the iron railings lining the stoops given a fresh coat of shiny black paint. In front, bundles of swanky catalogs are bound in twine and set out at the curbs; new tenants push blue-eyed babies in strollers. But Vincent knows the street will never be completely fancied up, not with the public housing project looming around the corner; from the window he can see its towers glowing in the dusk like a honeycomb, squares of yellow and orange and red.

He sits in his chair. He’s seen the stock market rise before, and seen it fall. Some day soon he won’t be surprised to see the swanky catalogs disappear and the iron railings return to rust.

At night Vincent peers out from behind the curtains as two men meet outside the gate in front of the house, under streetlight filtering down through summer leaves. One offers money and the other palms something into his hand. They go their ways.

At midnight couples conduct bitter traveling marital spats all down the street; Jeeps with tinted windows swing by broadcasting angry chants. Later still, the pop! pop-pop! of gunfire in the projects punctures Vincent’s sleep. In the morning, when he goes down to sweep the sidewalk, he finds tiny brightly colored pieces of plastic. He doesn’t recognize them, the stoppers of crack vials.

An ice cream truck endlessly repeats the same bars of the Maple Leaf Rag.

On holidays, a relative from Staten Island drops by. The stories flow like the shots of Seagrams 7. Frankie and Vincent talk about their early childhood in a Little Italy tenement, about the years they took a bus to Jersey every morning to work in a tool-and-die plant. Rose had a job outside the house, too, in a bakery out beyond Prospect Park.

“Oh, yeah.” She grins shyly. “I had ta get up at three in the mornin’ ta take the bus up there. I used ta work on the donut line. I got the job because of my brother-in-law Francis, he worked in the office. His wife was the supervisor, but we didn’t get along. She wanted Francis ta fire me, but he wouldn’t do it on account ‘a my husband bein’ his brother and all, so she was always lookin’ ta make my job harder. Sometimes she used ta speed up the line, so I could hardly keep up, but I never said nothin’. Wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.”

She tells how she quit the job after twenty-seven years, one year shy of her pension, because the neighborhood was changing–one time a drunk accosted her outside the bakery and her mother was afraid for her to take the bus anymore. She tells how her husband broke his back at his factory and how she supported them, how he finally had to go into the hospital for good, how she would visit him until he passed away.

Her brothers never married.

Vincent goes off to the parlor and comes back with a photo album. He sets it on the kitchen table and flips through the pages, stopping at a picture of him and Frankie in soldier’s uniform, the time they met up in Paris. He was on his way to Normandy after the invasion and Frankie was on leave from being an orderly in an English field hospital for amputees. With an arm around each other, they smile at the camera, two Brooklyn boys.

In Manhattan, they’ve never gone above Times Square.

Vincent turns to a series of snapshots he took when his infantry unit liberated the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. In one he stands next to a pile of emaciated corpses. I’ve seen such images on TV before, but there’s been a distance to them—they almost looked like cords of wood. With two of my landlords in the foreground, they look like human beings.

Vincent disappears into the back again and pulls out his prize possession. He opens a browning copy of Life magazine to a picture of a cobblestoned Paris square filled with proud people. They smile up at the photographer perched atop a light pole, hundreds of them, holding up copies of The Stars and Stripes with the banner headline “Victory Over Japan.”

“Look,” Vincent says. He extends a bony finger towards a face in the center of the crowd. It’s his own face, solemnly looking back at him across an ocean and nearly fifty years of time.

Just after sunrise Rose and Frankie step out onto the sidewalk for their monthly trip to Atlantic City. (Vincent never travels; he stays behind, holding down the fort). Brother and sister trek up the street and around the corner, where they wait for the senior citizens’ special bus.

Later in the morning, they stroll down the Jersey boardwalk as gulls swoop overhead, cawing into the wind. Frankie holds Rose’s elbow and she clutches her purse against the shore breeze. Later still, her broad shy face fills with wonder as a small avalanche of quarters clatters into the tray of her slot machine. But she and her brother are not really here for the gambling—they spend most of their day out in the salty air. On the way home, Frankie’s tousled head droops forward in sleep as the bus rolls past the bizarre industrial moonscape sprouting alongside the Jersey Turnpike, stalky refinery towers winking red through the haze of dusk.

When they’re safe at home, a car alarm whoops out in the street in front of the house. Just before midnight, bottles clink as they’re dropped into recycling bins. The next day, the important clang of the front gate announces the mailman; church bells ring in noon. Another month, another day.

I never made the film.

One night Rose turned away from the stove complaining of a pain in her chest. Her brothers continued their pinochle game at the kitchen table while she trudged off into her bedroom, lay down on her neatly made bed, and died.

Four years later, Vincent went to the doctor to check out a pain in his stomach. The x-rays showed it was riddled with cancer. Vincent was gone within a week.

One week after September 11, 2001, Frankie had a stroke and lay on his kitchen floor for hours until I found him. He had to go out to the Midwest to live with relatives, had to leave his beloved Brooklyn house behind. He eats store-bought soup out there now, and he’s getting very old, fading into the unrecorded history of the world.

I got them both.

The solace of a TV dinner had already swept over me as I stood before the foggy glass doors of the frozen-food aisle. I could feel the bachelor awakening in my bones, pining for the moment when I’d be sitting at my coffee table with a steaming plastic tray of micro waved food, a fork in one hand, the remote in the other. The lonely guy had spent the last year in exile, but here he suddenly appeared at Met Food. He directed me to a pint of cookie dough ice cream, a box of Drake’s Devil Dogs, a box of Fruity Pebbles, a bag of cheese puffs, and a six-pack of beer.

At the checkout line, I felt transparent and a little ashamed.

A woman’s items in front of mine consisted of an array of produce and meats, grains, yogurts, and organic things: stuff my girlfriend would get, stuff that provided nourishment way beyond a night of cheap excess.

She slid the plastic divider between us.

At the next line, a mother and father negotiated with their child over a chocolate bar that he had taken while his parents were unloading their carriage. I immediately understood the boy’s whining: it was like the grumbling bachelor in me, not able to think past…tonight. I gazed down at my food and contemplated the sequence of consumption that would bring me maximum satisfaction. I decided whatever I did, it would be best to end with a cigarette.

These are the perks, the bachelor reminded me, of being alone.

And then the man in line behind me plopped down a towering pile of frozen Swanson dinners ranging from turkey to chicken to meatloaf to Angus steak. He had some hot “lean” pockets thrown in there, too. I looked up at him and noticed from the white color beneath his Adam’s apple that he was of the cloth. He was an eternal bachelor whose perks I tried to weigh in my mind. Perhaps he considered them little blessings? Did he watch the Prayer Channel while eating his frozen dinners?

“That’s quite a night you’ve got planned for yourself,” he said to me.

“That’s quite a few nights you’ve got planned for yourself there,” I said to Him.

He laughed. I could see the age of his face. He was in his early forties, though he seemed younger. I doubt he’d ever had a Devil Dog in his life. I paid for my things. The teenaged cashier gave me her usual stoic expression, handing the change to the air in front of her. I turned around and wished the man a good night. He returned a hearty God bless.

Back at home, I poked holes over the Salisbury steak dinner and then watched the tray spin for a while in the microwave. I flipped the TV channels as I waited for my food. The smell crept through the house like the spirit of the past. When I sat down to eat, I thought back to the first days of having my own apartment.

I was lonely, though I never admitted it to a soul. I filled the void with junk food and TV every night. I was doing okay. When I met my girlfriend, she was alarmed to learn that I didn’t have a working stove. I can boil water in the microwave, I told her. Why pay for a gas bill? She invited me to her apartment for dinner. In the hot kitchen, she handed me a wooden spoon and an oven mitt. I stirred spices into cooking rice and checked on the status of a broiling chicken with vegetables. We smiled a lot and sat down to a quiet, beautiful dinner.

I felt the bachelor slipping away with every bite.