I like to think I have the final say on these matters, but Ernesto is already out of his seat and calling the man sir. His normal slouch has been corrected and a hand keeps his baggy jeans from falling below the waist. They shake hands and a heartbreaking gleam of admiration washes across the boy’s features. I quietly close the door while they confer in the hallway.

My respect for the military is boundless. The pride of belonging to a military family for generations is an integral part of who I am, yet I would be lying if I didn’t admit to seeing these recruiters as somewhat of a threat to New York City schools. A salesman in a crisp uniform is still a salesman with a quota to make, be it used cars or young, beating hearts.

I realize these people are simply doing their job and that Ernesto is also looking out for himself. Next year he’ll have housing and benefits. He’ll practice teamwork and the art of discipline, something he’s sorely in need of learning. Yet I also know that Ernesto doesn’t have a father in his life. His mother works tirelessly to support him, and perhaps if family dinners were eaten at home, business at the local recruitment center would not be quite as good. Suddenly there’s this man in uniform, this really cool guy who knows exactly where he stands in an uncertain world, and he’s waiting in the hall, the lobby, the school library, because he really wants to talk to you.

More often than not, it’s the quiet ones who return to show off their own uniform, peeking clean shaven cheeks and bristly heads into the doorway. The faculty always stops to make a very big deal: How’s it going? We miss you around here. Do you have any idea how proud we are?

When Ernesto’s time comes he simply can’t wait. He’s finally done with this place. Out of here, man! But did his recruiter somehow beat me? Did I fail Ernesto by not steering him in another direction? It bothers me every time it happens, seven years worth now.

“Look, Ernie, you take care of yourself, okay? Make sure you visit after boot camp.”

And then…

“Ernesto, don’t be a hero, okay? If it happens it happens, but don’t you go looking for it, alright?”

I get a great big smile and one last fist bump. Then it’s up the hall, down the steps, and straight out the door.

JB McGeever, a graduate of Stony Brook-Southampton’s MFA program, teaches Writing and Literature in NYC public schools. His stories and essays have appeared in Hampton Shorts, The Southampton Review, Newsday, and Thomas Beller’s Lost and Found: Stories from New York. The student in this essay appears under a pseudonym.

The tenant, a clammy, heavyset woman in her thirties, bustled through an obstacle course of whirring floor fans that seemed to do little to mitigate her harried, overheated condition. She pointed to light fixtures and patches of wall in need of minor repairs, and spoke highly of the time she and her husband had spent in the apartment. She emphasized that though they were breaking their lease, they were by no means fleeing. The couple had unexpectedly purchased a home elsewhere in Brooklyn and felt eager to occupy it. “I don’t think I’ve seen a single funeral the whole time we’ve been here,” she told us for the second or third time.

The apartment, I had to acknowledge, was well suited to us. It had a comfortable living room and a large bedroom with a nook that would make for me a practical workspace. It possessed certain old-world details: pressed-tin ceilings in the kitchen and living room, and crown molding throughout. Even the oddly tilted hardwood floors proffered a bit of charming whimsy. Rent was modest and the building much nearer the subway than any property we’d seen in the preceding weeks. Once I’d accepted that we would enjoy no convenient baklava, no spanakopita or stuffed grape leaves—that any fringe benefits we might incur as a result of our relationship with the landlord lay with any luck in the very distant future—the woman’s assurances about the business’s fallow state began to sound comforting. The facility below was no workshop of ghastly human taxidermy, merely a quiet office in a retired state of final dormancy. An ex-beast gone blind and toothless with age. After a brief caucus in the privacy of the bathroom, Jenna and I emerged resolved: We would take it.

Prior to attending college outside Boston, I had lived the whole of my life on one block of a tiny colonial town a few miles from Philadelphia. The summer before I entered kindergarten, my family moved from one side of the Hluchan’s immaculate redbrick home to the other, into an imposing stucco affair that proved, over the years, to require literally inexhaustible repairs. Floors were refinished and, some years later, replaced. Walls were painted and shingles flung from the rooftop. After years of carrying buckets of muddy water from the basement in the wake of thunderstorms, my father commissioned the installation of waterproof lining and a sump pump. Long before my parents became aware of the necessity for any of these projects, however, during their days of house hunting, my father felt drawn again and again to a particular sort of home.

Several were scattered about the area. Each built of clean, precise brick, with tasteful, white-pillared porticoes and mullioned windows. The owners seemed to share a landscaper; for each lawn presented martial trimness and their hedges appeared plastic in their perfectness. Lights rarely brightened these interiors, at least not in any way visible from the street, and an unnatural serenity seemed to pervade the properties. These were hushed and leafless grounds. To my father, for whom cleanliness and quietude know few superiors, they seemed ideal locales. “Here is nice house,” he would say driving through town, dropping the article in his characteristic eastern European fashion.

At some point early in my childhood, my father began to do the family’s grocery shopping, and he quickly acquired a reputation for not reading labels. As a result, our pantry often held jars of saltless peanut butter and tins of anchovies he had mistaken for sardines, and which, in due course, found their way to food drives. This ignorance of labels and signs assured his repeated disappointment in finding that each winsome home he identified from the car was, of course, a funeral parlor. Perhaps I inherited something of this trait, if such a thing is heritable, for I too neglected at first to notice the abundant signage that tags my building as a mortuary. It seems fitting, though, that some 20 years after my father coveted the funeral facilities in my hometown, I managed to locate a building in Brooklyn in which, despite its funereal purpose, I am welcome to stay.

Mr. Cusimano—that is, Dominic J., my landlord—has a son, Robert, a managing director at an investment bank, who describes his father as “the last of the Mohicans.” The lone remaining practitioner of a business that once sustained several branches of the family. Mr. Cusimano’s grandfather arrived in Brooklyn from Sicily in 1929 with his wife and a three-year-old boy who would grow to become Mr. Cusimano’s father. The couple established their first storefront mortuary on Kane Street, in modern day Cobble Hill. Sacred Hearts Catholic Church stood just across the street, and its congregants supplied a natural customer base until progress intruded some 12 years later in the form of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, whose advance saw the demolition of both buildings. The Cusimanos re-established themselves a few blocks away at the corner of Court and Baltic Streets, in a building that has served for subsequent generations as a place of both business and residence.

His grandparents, Mr. Cusimano tells me one morning in his funeral home’s front parlor—known formerly as the smoking room— ministered to a community of factory workers and longshoremen so overwhelmingly Italian that the couple’s deeply broken English represented no impediment to commerce. “We were part of the neighborhood,” he says. “We shopped in the stores. We treated people right and when they had a need they would call us.” During World War Two, his father’s bilingualism proved a boon to the neighborhood and served to further establish the business at the heart of the community. Italian immigrants, especially mothers desperate for contact with sons away at distant fronts, arrived in the foyer almost daily to enlist the teenager’s aid in translating and transcribing correspondence. “There were some Saving Private Ryan type situations,” Mr. Cusimano says with evident pride.

In those days, and during the years his father and two uncles ran things, several funerals a week represented the standard pace of business. “We used to get a couple hundred people in here,” he says, indicating the room’s cramped, dingy spread, and the small chapel toward the building’s rear, where bodies are laid for viewing. For decades, whole extended families and networks of friends and their children from the old country and new lived on the surrounding blocks. When a member of the community passed, they often turned up at the Cusimano home for 72-hour wakes that culminated in floral crescendos with a funeral on the fourth day. “It’d be standing room only,” Mr. Cusimano says wistfully.

Since taking the helm some three decades ago he has seen business slow nearly to standstill. Two satellite locations have shuttered and sold. The Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home hosts few services and almost no wakes. The funerals it does perform last only a day. On a good week, it will have one. Mr. Cusimano does not blame death industry conglomerates that have claimed a great portion of the market, or the increased preference of the public for cremation. He does not blame the five other local funeral directors, some of whom, he says, employ underhanded tactics to attract the patronage of the bereaved. “The neighborhood is just entirely different,” he says. “Go out on the street and you hardly see anyone over 50.”

It’s true. On the sidewalk beneath our living room windows, Bugaboos far outnumber Rascals. Where Sicilian stevedores and their families once shopped and gathered, young couples steer scooter-borne progeny around labradoodles and sidewalk antique galleries, fair-trade cappuccinos in hand. The odd pork store or bakery remains, but other storefronts—the cobblers, tailors, butchers and fishmongers that once catered to fervent old-world demand—have largely dissipated. It is not gentrification as such, however, that has sapped Mr. Cusimano’s business.

“Everybody’s all over the place,” he tells me, meaning families formerly resident to the neighborhood, many of which have relocated to the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, to Arizona and Florida. The corner of Court and Baltic no longer represents a nexus for newly immigrated Italians and their children; it has not for some time. Mr. Cusimano estimates the exodus began in earnest in the 1950s. Descendants of the family’s first customers have spread across the country and beyond, and increasingly few hearken to traditional loyalties when the time comes to make final arrangements. “The children don’t know who to call, so they use someone local,” Mr. Cusimano says. “Or they say, ‘Why should we call Cusimano?’” Still, he does not begrudge these flouting offspring, who are likely merely ignorant or practical, or simply see no reason to return to Brooklyn to bury their dead, to do as those that came before had done. Mr. Cusimano’s daughters, after all, are lawyers, and his son the aforementioned financier.

We did not observe a single funeral in our first months living above the Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home. I went frequently to the mortuary’s office to speak with John, the superintendent—an enormous, cloudy-eyed man who received packages for us in our absence—and could not imagine, based on the facility’s interior condition, that anyone would hire the venue. The parlor was a dim, musty room, outfitted with gray industrial carpeting and mismatched yard sale furniture. Crooked family pictures from a variety of eras hung from the walls, and odd luggage pieces and half-opened Fed Ex packages lay strewn haphazardly about. In one corner, a sprawling model trainscape presided with a somehow proprietary air. A yellowed and claustrophobic alcove, which passed for a front office, stood behind a sliding glass window with a metal shelf, as can often be seen at ticket counters. The overall effect was of a rail station in desuetude. In its apparent ineligibility to host funerals, this tableau provided some reassurance. John insisted, however, that Mr. Cusimano had an active business, and that things had merely gotten a little quiet for the moment.

Quiet, near silent, they remained for many weeks. Though returning at each day’s end to a mortuary proved at first an eerie experience, a memento mori in constant refrain, the structure’s disuse began to take on a semi-comic quality. Here was this big old creaking building dedicated to stuffing and painting corpses that seemed never to arrive, to be altogether in short supply. A hearse came and went but ferried only the living. The streets were full of the chatter of new parents, the squeak of stroller wheels. In Cobble Hill, it seemed, the mortician had with the VCR repairman joined the ranks of technicians whose services had lurched into irrelevancy. Death had become somehow rare, incongruous with the present community. Like an outbreak of bubonic plague in the American West, something very nearly amusing in its outrageous anachronism. A line from a Hemingway story looped in my head: “(Nick) felt quite sure he would never die.”

Downstairs, though, the local cessation of human demise itself represented a fatal portent. Sitting on a worn velvet sofa in the old smoking room in a preppy salmon-colored oxford shirt and olive cords that belie his gruff local accent, Mr. Cusimano, gray and in his sixties, expresses an irremediable sort of regret. He mourns the passage of time. His family, he estimates, has hosted more than 10,000 funerals since 1929. “We got to know thousands of people,” he says with a look that is at once warm and distant. “Wherever we go, anywhere in the world, we run into them.” It is their absence he laments, that they have passed on to whatever their futures held, and that they will not return to him. He misses the camaraderie of the old neighborhood, the community of immigrants and their children that greeted on another by name in the street.

I get the impression he misses the bustle and call of Italian women through the parlor—after his young father to translate their letters—long before he was ever born. Profits are way off, but they concern him little, and he makes limited efforts to attract new business. It would only be strangers, after all. The property is worth a small fortune and Mr. Cusimano receives offers almost every week. But great sentiment attaches to the dank old place, and he is reluctant to sell. He remembers when this part of Brooklyn had residents old enough to die. He remembers the children who grew up and fled to the suburbs, where they lay their dead in neat brick houses with white columns. Soon, he seems to think, he too will take his leave.

This funeral parlor, it appears to me after six months in residence, was never any ghastly workshop after all. Many have laid below at their final rest, it’s true. But funerals, as my mother told me many years ago, are for the survivors. The places where they take place must be too. And who are the survivors, but all of us? I cannot wish for people to die, but they are dying, of course. Somewhere, if not in Cobble Hill. Maybe it would be possible to route a few bodies to the Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home. Maybe a little upswing would inspire Mr. Cusimano to clear out the clutter and straighten family portraits. Maybe the business could regain its footing, though it wouldn’t be the same, I know. I almost wish I could see it working now, in the clamor of the old neighborhood. I wouldn’t even mind sharing real estate with the bodies. I just know it’d be something to see it humming along in the infancy of the Cusimanos’ faded and repurposed world. A crossroads and a meeting place, amidst all the living and the dead.

My exoticism does not go unnoticed. A doorman on Dean Street gives me a consistent greeting. "Shyaaan Weiyte," he says, alluding to the famous red-headed snowboarder. The words drift slowly past his sparkling grill on a soft Jamaican accent. He once had me pose for a few iPhone snapshots so he could show his friends.

Near dusk, I lock my bike to a fence outside of a large, old apartment building on St. Johns Place. In the lobby three men at the end of middle age are horsing around. As I pass by them on my way to the stairs I slowly realize that the sudden shouts of "Faybio, Faybio, Faybio!" are being directed at me. I turn around. "Fabio?" I chuckle. The three explode with laughter and literal knee slapping. "Fabio! He looks like Fabio!" Says one to the others with a swaying arm stretched out in my direction. "You're delivering food? I live on the other side of the building in 3D," he says proudly. Another says, "I dunno man, to me he looks like a guy who..." he puts his weight on his back foot executes a series of arm flourishes against strategic points on his friend's body. "I look like I know Ninjutsu?" Again they burst into a jovial frenzy. "Have a good night guys," I say as I slip up the stairs. When I return, the mood has changed. They are gathered around the doorway inexplicably hushed and serious. I slip through without a word, which seems to suit them.

I climb three flights of stairs in a brownstone on Prospect Place to be greeted by a mother and her two children. One of the children, a little girl no more than 6, asks me if I am a boy or a girl. I tell her I am a boy, but I have long hair the way a lot of girls do. Her mother tells her that when she met her father he had long hair like mine. Father's head appears around the door frame to appraise his wife's comparison and we share a brief smile. The little girl is unconvinced. "You look like a girl," she says. "Some people make a good living that way," I want to say, but think it might be rude putting her parents in the tight spot of explaining to her what I mean. She asks me my name and I tell her, setting the record straight. Her younger brother had greeted me by exclaiming "Hello, Pizza!" He now asks why my delivery bag is red. I pause my bill counting. "Good question" I say. I've never wondered about this before, and I tell him so.

Ernest Merrimont is a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College where he studied writing and theatre. He lives in Bushwick, where he copes with the tribulations of being a young, white, educated male. Non-fiction poetry comes out of his phone and goes into the internet here: http://txtmuseum.blogspot.com/.

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.

In the first days of my mother’s hospitalization, when she was being given steroids and fluids, and getting oxygen, and we expected her stay to be brief, my father and I stopped to feed the turkeys. Passing two birds while approaching the hospital, we pulled over and got out of the car. There was more than enough food for both, but apparently, they didn't think so, and a territorial battle ensued. It began with their heads intertwined, barely touching, as they rotated. Finally, they locked beaks as the grace of their tango gave way to something far less beautiful. Several passersby stopped to watch, mouths agape. They were still engaged when, ashamed of ourselves, we made our getaway.

My mother’s condition worsened, and she was admitted to ICU, and eventually intubated. It was during this period my father and I happened upon a hen, sitting atop her nest in the low-cut bushes just outside the revolving door of the hospital's main entrance. Something I discovered about turkeys: while defending their eggs, they hiss like a snake. We checked in on her daily, often bringing bread and (shelled) peanuts, though it wasn't uncommon to find that someone had already scattered bread. Over the next weeks, as setback followed setback, and my mother moved back and forth from a regular room to ICU, we anticipated the eggs hatching. Finally, in a moment that makes you stop and point, we spotted the hen and her ten chicks -- an estimate, since it's nearly impossible to get an accurate count on the kinetic furballs – walking along the side of the road.

One afternoon, while my father and I arrived at the hospital, and crossed the parking lot toward the rear entrance, we noticed a woman standing in the street, flapping her arms in a desperate bid to get someone’s attention. As we approached, she explained how a chick had fallen through the grate. Upon entering the lobby, we informed the security guard, who seemed genuinely concerned as she promised to alert the proper authorities. That night, while leaving, the same guard smiled at us as she said that the chick had been rescued. Later in the week, there was an Animal Control van parked around back, and we speculated that the earlier incident had lead to the chicks being rounded up for relocation. But as we neared, cheeping could be heard coming from the grate -- another chick had taken the plunge. Peering down into the storm sewer, a security van stopped, and the guard asked, rather sarcastically, "Somebody fall down there?" When we told him it was a chick, he replied, "They fall down there all the time. Sometimes six or seven of them. We pull them out when we can."

The discovery of blood in my mother’s bed triggered a Rapid Response, as a dozen doctors filled her room. Unrelated to the reason she was initially hospitalized, what was diagnosed as a cyst in her intestines, and the ensuing complications, lead to life and death surgery. With her recovery now a long-term prospect, a tracheostomy was performed, and she was transferred to the Vent Unit, as she struggled with two illnesses that complicated one another. Over the summer, as my father and I sat on the benches surrounding the clock tower in front of the hospital, feeding the turkeys Saltines from the cafeteria, the number of chicks dwindled to seven, then five, and finally, two.

When my mother’s condition stabilized, she was transferred to Silver Lake Nursing Home, as a “short-term rehab patient.” Rehabilitation went well, but then her belly swelled, as adhesions resulted in a blockage, and she was sent back to SIUH, and a second surgery became necessary. Her recovery, this time, was particularly trying, as an ileus left her intestines dormant for ten days, and she survived on an intravenous TPN drip. The chicks, grown into turkeys now, were trying to find their way in the world. Three images stand out in my mind from that period: A turkey buzzing the clock tower, like a low-flying plane in distress. Several turkeys gathered outside an idling Access-a-Ride van, as though waiting to board. A crowd watching as a turkey digs up a flower garden, circling the border, kicking the dirt out with as much enthusiasm as any dog.

The day my mother was discharged, rolled out on a stretcher, the medic paused outside the door and exclaimed, “Look at the turkeys!” and she turned to the turkeys who’d come to see her off and smiled. Back at Silver Lake, she was eating chopped-consistency food, and tolerating the speaking valve for twelve hours a day, and going down to physical therapy five times a week, culminating in her standing up, with the therapist’s help, for the first time in months. The doctors came by on rounds, and their assessment was: “She’s getting well.” In early December, the belly swelled again, and it was back to the hospital.

The turkeys were nowhere to be seen, and I feared that, long considered a nuisance in the surrounding neighborhood of South Beach, they’d finally been eradicated. I went out of my way to search for them, and eventually discovered the gang in the corner of the fenced-in field, huddled beneath the bare trees that provided desperate little shelter. This is where they spent the winter, as my mother made three additional ambulance trips to the hospital, each stay wearing her down a little more, as her albumin level dropped, and the infections lead to sepsis, until she fell into agonal breathing, and on February 4, 2012, Dianne Elaine Diriwachter lost her most courageous fight.

Tom Diriwachter is the son of Thomas and Dianne Diriwachter.

When I was ten and living on the top floor of a building in the New York City Housing Project called Pomonok -- a word the Algonquin Indians used for Long Island -- I dreamed of stabling my horse in that elevator. The fantasy of actually having my own bay mare, white blaze down the middle of her face flanked by nostrils that would flare with joy at the sight of me each morning, lulled me to sleep at night. I had given up as childish the habit of clutching in my fist each night a plastic horse that I told my mother galloped me off to miraculous adventures, but truly, I half believed that a way could be found to accomodate both the relatively simple needs of my mare and the requirements of the other residents of the seven story building. I never claimed to be a very realistic child.

But now I was an grown-up. Of a certain age. Now, my parents were both gone, I was the mother of a young adult and I was back to visit the 93-year-old last remaining friend of the family -- the woman I had grown up calling Aunt Sylvia despite the lack of any common blood between us. The woman who always recalled me as the most beautiful baby she had ever seen. After a hiatus of more than four decades I was once again pressing the bulbous brass button in the shabby lobby and waiting for the elevator to arrive.

The elevator arrived -- no bell to mark its appearance but a light behind the wired glass window where there had previously been only darkness -- and I pulled open the heavy metal door and stepped inside as I had perhaps thousands of times before. But where there had once been space for hay, oats, a water bucket and a 16-hands-tall mare, was now barely room for me and the appliance repairman who had been waiting behind me.

I know people always talk about how the summers were hotter, the winter snows deeper, the waves at the beach wilder in their youth, but to my knowledge, no one has ever been gob-smacked by the sad reality of a shrunken elevator. I pushed the button labeled 6 and leaned deep into a corner, squinting a little, hoping to recover the original propotions. The repairman pushed 3 and in a moment got out. Even without his presence, there was barely room for me and a good-sized Bernese Mountain dog, and I know good-sized Bernese Mountain dogs, believe me.

The elevator reached my floor and I got out, turned right and walked to the end of the hallway, which -- surprise, surprise -- had also shrunk. As had Aunt Sylvia. But here's the magic part: in the six or so weeks since that visit, everything has once again regained its former glory. Thank goodness.

Ellen Greenfield is a poet and novelist living in Brooklyn and Jefferson, NY with her husband and two extremely loving and wayward Bernese Mountain Dogs. Her novel, Come From Nowhere, has recently been published by 3Ring Press.

First we all ignored him, shifting uneasily in our seats. If you looked, he’d jiggle the Styrofoam cup that held his wages at you, as if toasting, and wink. Then we read and reread the advertisements for “The Vampire Diaries” and Brooklyn law offices lining the paneling overhead. When The Beggar stood up clumsily, as the train rocked along its icy rails, some of us tensed our jaws and shut our lids in mock sleep —as one does when avoiding guilt for not feeling like rummaging through pockets and purses for spare change. Our noses prickled as the soiled, old man shuffled nearer, chewing on his empty gums. The folks closest to him stood up from their seats and sat further away, or turned their body toward the window. The rest of us turned up the volume on our iPods and fixed our expressions to neutral aloofness.

Despite this, we heard—

“Don’t worry. I ain’t gonna inconvenience yous tree-scum schmucks. I’m off duty!” followed by hoarse chuckles. “Yous thinking yous the shits of the shit, yea-ah? Sittin’ there, worryin’ about those bills …that leave yous too spent to enjoy all the big things yous worked for at that big ol'job that makes yous too tired to enjoy them anyways! know what I got? I got free seatin,’ free heatin,’ all around views. Not much money to spend. But no bills to pay. Yea-ah! I’m as good as better. Look at yous, sorry ass people. Frowni-frown- frownin’. Yous all sittin’ on MY bed. Yous in my LIVING room. Yea-ah! That's right. Stop pretendin’ like yous don’t know it... ”

And with that, he began hooting so hard it flanked our ear-drums. And those of us with our eyes sealed were forced to open them to The Beggar of Brighton 5th street— who stood in the middle of the train, empty, pastel-blue seating along each side. The pom- pom bounced in animated circles over his forehead as he slapped his knee with his left hand, and with the other jutted at us a long, nicotine-stained expletive with a pitted nail.

Glora Manuilova lives in Brooklyn's bootleg Soviet Russia-- Brighton Beach (or "Little Odessa," as some call it). She teaches World Humanities at The City College of New York, where she's also an MFA candidate. Website: http://amerikanish.tumblr.com/

There is a glass of water sitting on the coffee table. It has been sitting there for three days. There are specks of something floating near the top of the water.There is a vase of dried brown flowers next to the glass. The water in the vase is cloudy.A hissing noise is coming from the heater. It hisses for a few minutes and then it stops hissing. I am reading a book. I have been reading the same two pages for the past nineteen minutes. I look out the window. The dog is barking at a squirrel in a tree. The squirrel is chasing another squirrel. I can't tell if they are in love or if they hate each other.

I open my laptop. The tabs for Gmail and The New York Times and Facebook are open. There are no new emails in my inbox. I refresh it twice to make sure. I click on The New York Times. I light a cigarette and stare at the headlines. I click on Facebook and scroll down the news feed. I close my computer. I wish someone was watching me through a camera in my apartment. I have total privacy and freedom to do anything I want and I am not doing anything. If someone was watching me I think it could give me ambition. There are too many options to choose from and too few options that seem worth choosing. I want to fight something concrete but I wouldn't want to follow orders but I would have to follow orders because I wouldn't be able to decide on my own what to do. I would be willing to kill. Who would I kill? I don't think I will ever kill anyone. Technology has stripped us of that obligation. This should make me more uncomfortable than it does.

I walk out of my apartment building. I walk down Lafayette Avenue towards the bodega. The sun is out but there is a bit of an overcast. Some kids are smashing bottles in empty lot across the street. A couple of old ladies pushing carts are walking down the sidewalk towards me. I turn the corner. A couple of middle-aged men are standing at the corner. One of them has his back turned and then he turns in my direction. I run into him and a plastic bag he is carrying falls to the ground and I hear a glass bottle break inside it. I see it was a bottle of Bailey's. The two men shake their heads and say that it sucks. I apologize and offer to pay them back for it. I can't remember how much a bottle of Bailey's costs. I don't even want to pay him. He ran into me. He puts his palm near my chest. I take the thirty dollars in my wallet and give it to him. I tell him that is all I have. I feel afraid of him because he is bigger than me. I turn and walk away. I could have easily just run away from them and not given them the money. I don't have any money left to buy anything from the bodega. I walk back to my apartment.

Andrew Worthington lives in Harlem, where he teaches at the City College of New York. He has a short fiction e-book (PangurBanParty.com), a magazine (KeepThisBagAwayFromChildren.com), and a blog (FuckingBigThoughts.blogspot.com). He is 24, and he probably has most of his life ahead of him.

I used to remark to friends and relatives that I would gladly teach any kid in the city. Oh, really? When I made this statement, I was already working at a large traditional high school in New York. We had sports teams. We had a band. We sang carols to the kids before the holidays. I signed yearbooks and hugged parents at graduation. So how do I describe this strange, new teaching universe I’ve recently entered? For starters, it’s become the greatest lesson on human dignity I’ve ever had.

My new school has a unique and troubled population. Yet they still have the right to a free education. They earn credits at this suspension site. They take their state exams here. We examine the speech patterns and motivations of Holden Caulfield, the original troubled New York teen, like we would at any other school in the city.

The drama unfolding in their respective neighborhoods, however, often takes precedent over any literature we study in the classroom. Whenever a friend or acquaintance suffers a fatality, someone will wear a t-shirt with the departed’s face staring back at me all day long, rendering the book in my hand completely useless. The neighborhood is all that matters. They argue and compete over things I don’t understand. They make remarks in the middle of a lesson that sometimes shake me to the core. So as the student body files into the building one by one, and the scanner hums and beeps over every single pocket and curve, I have to find a part of me somewhere that understands the magnitude of being their teacher.

At sixteen, I went to work washing dishes in a Long Island restaurant where my mother waited tables. The owner, who would later become the county’s district attorney, ruled his establishment in a strict, authoritarian style. It was his place and his rules. I was observed wearing cut-offs during an unofficial kitchen tour and reprimanded for it. Minutes later, I committed the error of making eye contact and the tirade began. I answered back and lost my first job. As the owner marched me through the kitchen and out a back door, he made a comment that stayed with me forever, invaluable words that I would summon repeatedly during an extremely challenging teaching career in New York City. “You just wait,” he began. “We’ll see what becomes of you!”

It was during my student-teaching experience that I encountered my first unruly student. The kid showed up late, talked incessantly, and pushed all of his assignments onto the floor. Still a student myself, I was completely flustered and dumbfounded. As I bent to retrieve the work he’d dropped, it struck me how easy it was to slip into the District Attorney’s role from my dish washing days. “You just wait,” I thought. “We’ll see what become of you.”

That summer I pulled into a convenience store and there he was, half asleep against the wall, a can of malt liquor the approximate size of his forearm beside him. He was wasted and bleary eyed, but recognized me and said hello. I recalled the prediction I’d made about his future when he was my student and how I couldn’t wait for it to come true. I sat in my car afterwards and watched him nod off again, my cheeks completely flushed with shame.

Back at the suspension site, E. approaches after class to say goodbye. Today is his last day. He’s served his suspension and will return to his home school tomorrow with a proverbial clean slate. His regular building is five stories tall with a river view of the midtown skyline. Our place is a single hallway with very small class sizes. In twenty-four hours the kid’s world will expand tenfold. E. makes his way through the building, an actual sparkle to his eyes, shaking hands and saying his goodbyes. As he takes his final walk down the hall, I can feel the entire school holding its breath and rooting for him. The mission statement here is really no different than any other school in the world. As time passes, as it does for us all, we will eventually see what becomes of him.

JB McGeever teaches Writing and Literature in the New York City Public School System. His essays have appeared in Newsday, City Limits, The new York Times, and Thomas Beller’s Lost and Found: Stories from New York.

It is not every day that one visits an Ashram for yoga and encounters a “retired” Mafia soldier, adrift there because of illness and poverty. From my end, I envisioned a documentary film covering his faded world; however, for his own security - though the events occurred many years ago - he wished to limit his exposure to the following narrative.

If you travel on the Cross Bay Parkway, past what is called Howard Beach, you probably would not give it much of a glance. More likely you are traveling through the Ozone Park district to the Rockaways. But if you look to the right, you would notice a strip of non-descript stores and located behind them, ordinary, single-family homes. Howard Beach’s claim to fame was via its most famous resident - the now deceased, "Dapper Don” John Gotti. It was there that plans were made to develop, expand and make profitable various criminal enterprises that would make him infamous. This is the story of Johnny.  He was only one of the minor minions but in speaking with him, he was quite open in his respect for Gotti and proud to describe his path to the mob.

Johnny is tall and gaunt with a wide, open face marked by a certain sensuality that shapes the contours of his mouth. His language is marked with “rough” talk, but a beguiling smile belies his claim to be a “stand up guy." You cannot help noticing the shadow of a one time “tough guy,” but now a relic; ravished by time and cancer. He proudly defines himself as gangster; actually a Mafia foot soldier...

First, I want you to know that I was always a stand up guy. Personality doesn’t change. I was from a large family and we were all different in our ways. I respected my father, but he was distant like many men of his generation. A World War II veteran, he would never talk about his experiences. He was a hard, adventuresome man and in his youth even acted as a guide for hunters in Maine. Eventually he made his way to Long Island after marrying my mom and became a truck driver then later a fisherman. Myself, I didn’t like fishing. I didn’t like studying. I was always a person of action.

I would say my family was very straight but it wasn’t “Ozzie and Harriet”. Father was a driven guy and mother was overwhelmed with seven of us. They did their best but couldn’t do much with such a large brood. We were left on our own. In contrast to my brothers and sister who were into education, I liked the active, more physical world and hung around with older, hard guys. Since I was big and strong for a teenager, they accepted me. As for my own large family, I only ever had a connection with my brother John. He never made “judgments” but we still saw the world differently. He was interested in saving humanity and I, in making it in the world the best way possible. The family ignored me and with my negative attitude toward school, assumed I was “going to fall on my face”. For a while I worked in the family business and I learned early to play two types of lives; the “knock around life style”, where one lives for the excitement of the moment”; and the straight life, which I found to be mostly a pain with its predictable hills and valleys. But even with these two kinds of lives, I was a family man; the kids came first.

There were always challenges, but I was an optimist with a faith that ultimately life is run by the angels. I believed whatever the adversity, one should figure how to make it the best way possible . In my first marriage, our new born was lethargic and had difficulty breathing. They could not handle him at the local clinic and urged us to rush him to the hospital. But there is no hospital in Howard Beach. So there I was on Cross Bay Boulevard and my car broke down. Jumping out onto the road, I tried to flag down help but no one would stop. In desperation I scooped him up in my arms and ran and ran until finally some cop picked me and brought me to the hospital. Staggering into the emergency room I screamed for a doctor. They immediately attempted to revive him but it was too late. Only years later I learned about the diagnosis of “sudden infant death syndrome". I didn’t feel anger; not at the drivers who passed me by or the failure of the doctors. I believe that when things happen, they are ordained to happen. In a way I am a religious person marked by a certain fatalism; “God chooses when to pick the flowers”.

Through a friend, I was recommended to join Gotti’s crew where I could make real money. I was invited, but not as a made man; more like a stand-in for different jobs. “When they called, I went.” I was a part time member of a crew and I knew where I stood in the pecking order. If I wanted to score in the territory of another family, I would send out feelers to learn how much it would cost to work a job on their turf. Meanwhile I was a craftsman and maintained a legitimate contracting business. I knew if I was picked up and did not have a “real job” the IRS or the cops would pounce.

Why did they let me join even though I was not Italian? Well in the straight world, you go for an interview. In that world, you need someone to vouch for you. They would tell the boss or maybe it would be a crew leader, “he can be relied on; a knock around guy, give him a shot”. We mostly functioned like a regular business. Profit was always the motive and we tried to bring in more each year. It was like a corporation with a pecking order from the top on down; and the bottom line was paramount. We were no different than the corporate raiders, except we were more likely to go to jail. We had meetings just like them. There were even family barbecues to keep us together. Anyhow it was more comfortable to socialize with the other gangsters and their families than with neighbors; we didn’t have to hide our line of work from each other since we all knew the score.

As for working for Gotti, a lieutenant vouched for me; “this guy can do the job”. I rarely interacted with him except on social occasions. He was a pleasant enough guy. Most of the time I was used as a collector or helped work the gambling weekends for high rollers. I am big and can look fierce so they used me as security, which meant keeping things peaceful and safe. The gambling crew would rent a floor in a shabby motel for the weekend and there we would set up the game tables and provide food and even women. The crew would rake in a 20% take from the gambling and, of course I would get a small piece - but it might amount to as much as two or three thousand cash for that weekend. I also had a collection route for the “numbers racket” but never prostitution or drugs. I identified with the “old timers” and they were not interested in going there.

Over the years I kept my head down and maybe I was just lucky, but I was never busted. Even if it would have happened, I was confident that someone would contact me with legal and financial support. My view was that it was important to get all my ducks in a row and if I would be hit, then I would look for the least amount of time for vacation (jail). When busted, a lawyer would probably be sent out who would suggest that should the “ducks fall” (which means convicted and go to jail), I should behave myself and keep my mouth shut. It was understood when I got out, money would be waiting for me. This made good, business sense.

For a while I served as a "bag man" but to the outside world I described myself as a “financial facilitator”. The mob trusted me to transfer their "bundles". Piles of cash were tied into blocks, fitted into garbage bags and taped up nice and neat. Money came in from various ventures but I didn’t speculate about the source just so long as I was taken care of. How they distributed it or where it was invested, I have no idea. My job was just to transfer the cash and at that time it was usually to Las Vegas; my favorite city.

One trip stands out. I was taking the back roads through Tennessee at 2:00 AM, going about four thousand miles per hour. I'mrelaxed, listening to music, I notice lights flashing behind me. The cop pulls me over and asks why am I traveling so fast on his road? I try to be cool and friendly. I explain that I am off to Las Vegas and suggest we go for a beer. I'm casual with him, though I admit my heart is pumping away. On the floor of the backseat and in the trunk, I have a few "bundles”.  He points to them but I explain, “no need to go there” and reach into my jacket. I say, “I have an envelope here that will convince you to go somewhere else. It is my intended gambling money of $15,000 and it is now yours”. This might sound cynical but wherever you are, the city or the sticks, all cops want to supplement their salary.

Finally I arrive in the City of Lights and make my way to our meeting place; not only me but “carriers” from all over. The bundles are emptied and then both are hand and machine counted. The other guys  and I wait to be rewarded, but instead of sending us out to the Strip to enjoy ourselves, they drive us out to the desert. We all get out of the limo and these bruisers who are packing order us to kneel down. I am fatalistic -“what is gong to happen is going to happen”. After several minutes of agony, they tell me, “my cards are good” and I am sent back to Vegas. Some of the guys are made to stay because they were caught short bagging. I never saw them again and I assume they found their burial plots out there in the sand. Why they'd take such a chance, I have no idea; maybe just plain stupid. If we don’t have trust, even amongst gangsters, what do we have?

To be part of that life, you need a tough temperament. Charlie, who is now on “life vacation,” was my early mentor. I met him as a kid when I joined a motorcycle gang. He taught me how to handle myself in intense situations. I learned that in this business the key is to get results with the least amount of physicality. Before sponsoring me, he arranged for a test. I guess it was like trying to get into school, but this was Mafia college. He gave me information on a guy who owed him money and was “reluctant to pay up”. I was instructed to convince him that it would be in his best interest to meet his obligation. I was given a background story, included the fact that he is a “tough son of a bitch” and two previous attempts to retrieve the debt had failed. My job was to go in with as little fan fair as possible and collect.

When I arrived at the deadbeat's deli, the first thing I did, without a word said, was to knock down the glass shelves. This was my wake-up message to remind him to meet his fiduciary responsibilities. Nobody likes to pay up to the shylock, but if you make the contract, you have to stick to the deal or there are consequences. My mentor watched my back and at the same time observed how I operated. I was successful and from then on when they needed a collector, I was the man.

It was not always so simple; sometimes there would be a fight and a few times, I got my teeth knocked out. I proved myself at the job though. In the regular world, you need to pass an exam. This was tougher. But once vouched for, there was no turning back. As a reward there was exciting, lucrative work. The word would be out, “he is a knock around guy and effective”; “give him a shot”. For example, if there was to be a truck hijacking and an additional crew member was needed, I was invited to join. They knew I would keep my head and could be counted on. Over time I became more trusted and was invited to more lucrative jobs. Like in the straight world; you do a good job and are promoted.

I am proud to say, I never needed to pack a gun because I was confident I could take care of every situation. My cue was a rage button. It was a felt sense of a rumbling fury. There would first be a “baby cry” in my voice that would build momentum until there was an explosion. The message is, “don’t be around me when I am this way.” It was a controlled anger and ended when I got my way. In many ways it was easy, I just needed to play the part of a scary gangster.

As for my family, my wife was not happy with the life. She loved the perks, but the fear of my being busted was too nerve-racking for her and it eventually broke up the marriage. My son looked at it differently.

When he finished high school he asked if he could join a crew. For him, it would be big money. I felt it was his decision to choose his life, but just as I was tested, he needed to pass and learn if there was a fit. He was big and brawny and could be physically imposing. Like how Charlie had sent me out when I was a kid, I put him to the test with a collection job - though it was actually a set-up. I instructed my pals to play act by muscling him when he arrived but not too badly as to do him harm. Well they gave him a black eye, kicked him out the door and that was the end of his career. He decided he didn’t have it in him and now has a real profession; a cop.

Do I or those “wise guys” have a conscience? I believe everyone has one. Look, I even went to Confession. The priest would tell me that he was shocked at my behavior and suggest that I do “hail Marys” and take the straight path. I knew where to draw a line. No problem for me to break someone’s thumb, but never to kill. There would be no amount of money that I would accept for that. We all have our own rules. Mine allowed me to crack some limbs but not murder.

How did I get out of this line of work? “Well, it is not like a job, where you just quit. You know too much. My cancer, which occurred a decade ago, was the “big casino” and that was my ticket out. First there was colon and then prostate cancer. The first time, I got fixed up and tried to stay healthy. The more recent bout was more difficult. First, since I had no health insurance, I went through almost two million dollars; essentially the medical costs brought me down. Once the private hospital had all of my money, it was “goodbye Charlie”. Who is the real gangster here?

Broke, it looked like the end of the rope, but I knew a lot of doctors. They taught me how to play the innocent and get medical service without paying. I kept my head straight and suffered it all; from the loss of my testicles to facing a life of homelessness. Look, all my plumbing is gone but I stay tough. Admittedly, I thought of giving up but at that time, my grandson was born and I made the decision to be around to see him grow up.

After the first bout, it was important to regain my strength but also my finances; so I returned to my favorite place, Las Vegas. I am a good gambler but I am also a guy who enjoys going to the edge. Teaming up with a friend, we decided to cheat the House. We used a number of tricks and were successful, but eventually we were caught flipping chips in a grade B casino. Four husky guys came up behind me and another four surrounded my partner. They quietly escorted us to the parking garage. There, we were given a choice; a one way trip to the desert or the cinder block routine. It was a no-brainier and I just asked them to get it over with. They placed my arm between the blocks, and broke it with a bat. For my friend, they chose to break his legs. They were gentlemen and dropped us off at the nearest emergency room. “I was not angry; to me, they were doing their job.”

I wondered to myself, why I took the risk since I could make money by legitimate gambling. For me it was the excitement of the score; the juice high. It was the same feeling when I did collections; it was not just about money but the “juice” flowing through the veins.

Now I make do in a totally different world; an Ashram, a million miles away from Howard Beach. Almost homeless and without resources, I came at my brother’s invitation. In contrast to the Mafia guys who have no illusions, here I think most of the people are full of shit and play holy. I openly tell them I used to be a gangster and that seems to be okay with them and ensures they don’t mess with me. Meanwhile I help out and my mechanical skills save the Ashram a shit load of money. In turn I found a temporary home.

In the end, the issue has never been one of conscience for the life I chose, but regrets. I failed to do more to help myself in this life. Meanwhile I am a survivor and wait to see what the angels will bring.