I was six years old in 1990 when my dad brought a white rabbit home for Easter. Unlike bunnies in other Italian-Catholic abodes in Whitestone, Queens, ours was not for eating. Snowball was for snuggling, brushing, feeding, and loving. Whenever my parents were rocking my infant brother, Ralph, to an afternoon sleep, I was outside cradling the pet. He closed his red-button eyes and thumped furry feet against my forearm. My bare toes clutched the grass as we swayed side-to-side, mother and bunny, carving temporary spaces in the air with our small bodies.

To give Snowball freedom to run, Dad put him on a dog’s leash and attached it to a red stake in the ground which, when removed, left a hole.

“You know who lives down there? Alice in Wonderland,” he said, as if “in” was part of her name.
I fell to my knees and peeked into the hole, hoping to see her. Instead, I spotted a worm. My father said if I wrote her a letter, he’d put it in the ground. I scurried inside to scribble:

Dear Alice, I’m so happy you live here. I have a white rabbit too. Write back. Love, Nicole.

Dad worked nights as an electrician for New York City, coming home when the neighborhood was stepping into slippers and turning on the coffee. He pulled his Buick into our driveway the next day when I awoke for kindergarten, and I ran outside with Christmas anticipation to greet him and to see if Alice responded. We sprinted toward the grass and our eyes fell upon a sheet of paper jutting from the ground.

I sang the words aloud:

Dear Nicole, Thanks for the letter! What’s your rabbit’s name? Let’s be pen pals. I love you. Love, Alice.

My father and I beamed, co-masters of a tiny universe we’d founded accidentally. We agreed I should write letters regularly, with one condition: “Just don’t tell anyone about this,” Dad said, “or she’ll disappear.”

I nodded, happy to accept this responsibility. This was our secret. It was why we winked at each other across the dinner table that evening when Mom was watching the baby.

The letters continued. In late September, the grass turned brown, and I skipped on crunchy leaves toward the hole to keep corresponding with my new best friend. One Sunday afternoon, I was depositing a note when my Aunt Joan swung her car into the driveway. She asked what I was doing.

“Alice in Wonderland lives down there,” I said. “We’re friends.”

“Oh, how nice,” Aunt Joan said. She smiled and bent down to hug me the way I’d now hug a child who said something cute. I knew right away she didn’t believe me.

I can still feel the way my stomach tensed up as I told her about Alice, knowing it was against the rules. I tried to ease my fears, insisting my pen pal wouldn’t mind because Aunt Joan was trustworthy. It didn’t matter. Alice never wrote to me again.

It was poor timing, too. My father had just gotten sick. His body and eyes turned yellow and he spent the next six weeks hallucinating between his bedroom and Elmhurst General Hospital. Mom was always changing a bandage on his leg, which I once saw covered a very bloody sore that took up most of his calf. We had special garbage bags for those bandages, special gloves Mom wore to apply and remove them. Sometimes an ambulance would come, and my parents would spend a few days in the hospital together. But they always came back, and I’d show my dad the gifts I got from the relatives who watched me while he was away – a doll’s blow dryer, a VHS of My Little Pony.

When he was home, he didn’t act the same around me, like the day I tried to bring his medicine to his room. I stood by his bedside with a metal spoon and a bottle of medicated liquid. “Get Mommy to do it,” he said. So I called for her, but he kept shouting: “Get Mommy to do it!” He continued to yell it, even when Mom got up to the room, and even when she kept saying, “It’s me, Ralph.” When he wouldn’t stop screaming, my mom said I should leave. She said that he was confused because we were both wearing black sweaters. I did leave, but it took a moment to get my legs to move. I wanted him to stop joking around, to scoop me up and prop me next to him in bed like he used to.

He died that fall, in early November. I learned soon after that he had hepatitis. I didn’t know what it meant and wondered if it was my fault.

I gave Alice several opportunities to write to me again. In letters I apologized for my slip. I told her that my dad died and I missed them both. I spent the rest of autumn crouched in the yard, whispering pleas to the dirt, like an animated garden gnome. When I finally realized it was over, I blinked tears into the empty hole, guilty for driving her away, lonelier than ever.

Winter’s snow and hard dirt closed Wonderland. Our white rabbit died the following summer. Alone with two babies, Mom accidentally let Snowball fall asleep in the sun. My father and he were put in the ground: Dad in St. Mary’s Cemetery, the pet in a shoebox in the backyard beneath the bushes.

I made the connection between the cessation of Alice’s letters and my father’s death when I was nine-years-old, the same day I found out that Santa Claus, too, was a fib told for my entertainment. At first, I resented my parents for forcing fantasy on me and vowed to never lie to my own children.

It has been 20 years since my dad first introduced me to Wonderland, and along with my childlike gullibility, most of my memories of him have disappeared. I no longer remember what it felt like to have a father, and only recall him in snapshots: the day we rode horses in the Poconos, the afternoon he taught me Beatles lyrics in the basement. But I’ll always remember the months we spent on the grass, absorbed in imagination. And I think of him whenever I pass the bronze Alice in Wonderland statues in Central Park, my new backyard since moving to Manhattan. I like to see her there, frozen in time and always at play, like my final lasting memories of my dad. As Alice makes her cinematic return to the rabbit hole so many years later, I hope for her sake and mine that this time Wonderland can be saved.

Nicole Ferraro’s memoir-in-progress is about losing her father at a young age. Her writing has appeared in Our Town and New York Press.

Our new place featured a long entranceway that served no practical purpose. It led from the front door to the living room. We figured we would put the sandboxes for my partner’s two cats in the useless corridor. The cats would not perceive the corridor as useless. It would be their favorite area, where they could scatter sand in privacy whenever they wished.

After I told my landlord I was going to move, a real estate agent showed my studio apartment to prospective tenants. Early one morning, dozens of people came in and viewed my home while I watched. The apartment seekers inspected the refrigerator, tested the stove units, opened and shut the windows, and kicked the floor moldings. One of them checked the plumbing by turning on the water in the bathroom sink and flushing the commode. Another asked, “Is it noisy here?”

“Well,” I said, “there’s a city street right outside.”

I didn’t mention that the apartment was on a fire route. Engine trucks regularly sped past with their sirens screaming.

I dismantled the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves I’d installed next to my bed. While sleeping next to the shelves, I often thought they would come loose and fall on me. I thought I’d be buried under tons of texts. But as I unscrewed the pine planks, I could tell they’d been solid. I’d done a good job.

I had also worried about the door lock giving way. I often rose from my mattress on the floor and checked the top device, lockable from the inside and the outside, to see if it was still attached to the door. It always was. It was so reliable I decided to transfer it to our new apartment.

Just before I left, I got a call from the woman who’d signed the lease for my place. “Can I buy those bookshelves and that door lock from you?” she asked.

I remembered her as the person who’d tested my plumbing by turning on the faucets and flushing the toilet.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m taking them with me. You can buy my mattress, though.”

She wasn’t interested in my three-inch-thick, rollable foam pad.

I helped my partner move out of her room in a painter’s loft. As we carried boxes and pieces of furniture out, we noticed that one of her cats was missing. We didn’t worry about the animal until everything was loaded onto a truck. Then we looked behind all of the canvases propped against the walls.

Unable to find the pet, we drove off with only one cat.

Our new block had a couple of stores on it. One was called Last Rites. Its small front window contained a tableau of tree roots invading an untended crypt. The roots were covered with mold, and the inside of the crypt was lit red. A mummy lay on the stone floor.

When I saw the scene, I had to check out the store. I went in and saw black mourning scarves, other religious paraphernalia, and a full-sized coffin. The store’s proprietor greeted me. “I’m available for custom work,” he said.

The other store on the block specialized in body arts. It had a comfortable-looking front room, with carpeting and couches. Next to the furniture was a glass case holding jewelry that could be hooked through the skin. In the back of the store, I guessed, were the operating rooms, where skin was pierced and jewelry inserted.

I wanted to be a piercenik, so I asked if I could join.

“You can join,” said the main activist, “if you care about needles, punches and rings. You can be one of us, if you want to perforate your virgin skin.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Welcome to the pierce movement. We demonstrate tomorrow.”

“Where will you demonstrate?”

“In the sterile studio, of course. We’ll start with eyebrows and navels, then move on to tongues and nipples. Study your pierce literature.”

I wasn’t sure if I was ready to return. I just didn’t know if I’d be prepared to tool leather with my new brother.

When I got home, I looked for a place where I could set up a pierce area, or at least a last-rites chamber. But with my bookshelves installed, the furniture positioned, and the cat boxes in place, there wasn’t an inch of space left.

My partner’s former roommate returned her missing cat. He said he’d found it behind a painting of a mouse.

I kept both cats away from our bed at night by closing a door between rooms. Each morning, the cats would wake us by howling outside the door and scratching the wood. The door would rattle against its frame. Even so, I would not get up and open the door.

One time, a friend came to visit. He was using a tape recorder to preserve sounds of the city. He taped the cats’ moaning and scratching as a memento of his trip. He played back the recording so I could appreciate the sound. Amplified, the cats’ racket was unholy.

Oddly, I became attached to the cats over time. I knew the feel of their fur, the meaning of their expressions. I didn’t mind them sitting on the furniture next to me. I even welcomed them at night.

Thanks to some planning, our status changed from single to married, and everything else started to change, too.

When my spouse decided she wanted to get pregnant, my job was to give her shots. I liked giving the injections. It wasn’t the syringe—the barrel and thumb button—that turned me on; it was the act of plunging the needle into her skin.

These were fertility shots—doses of hormones that would help in the pregnancy mission. I wasn’t interested in puncturing deltoids or biceps. What drove me crazy was the bare glutei. An exposed globe was a magnet for my needle.

Needless to say, the shots didn’t work. My spouse didn’t get pregnant until we stopped trying. Then it happened. She got knocked up without getting dosed up.

As a half-baked piercenik, I wasn’t sure I was ready for a miniature person and full-sized cats in the same place.

At about the same time, however, the cats became frail. We could see they wouldn’t stay on our plane of existence long enough to be playmates for the child.

When we set to naming the baby, my spouse explained the process. “Her name should start with the same letter as the name of one of our grandmothers,” she said.

“Is that how you got your name?” I asked.

“Yes. Sari starts with an S. I was named after my grandmother Selma. You choose the name of someone who’s passed away.”

“How about Yi Ju, the name of my mother’s mother?”

“That would be OK. We can even use the letter J.”

We searched our memories and libraries for a name that seemed suitable, something starting with J. When we found Jade, we liked the sound of it.

Our newborn’s voice was much stronger than the cats’. She cried all the time, but why? Did she want to be played with? What was her notion of play? Did she want me to eat paper with her? Switch the CD player on and off just to hear the whirring of its wheels? Did she want me to help her stand, so she could balance on one heel and one set of toes, rocking at the pelvis like Elvis? Or did she want me to talk to her in her language, say “Da doh,” “Wiss wiss” and “Wudja wudja wudja” as if these words had meaning, when we both knew they didn’t? Did she want me to line up my books neatly on the shelf so she could pull them down one by one and fling them over her shoulder? Or did she want me to boot up the computer so that she could type at random for a million years, or however long it would take for her to produce the complete works of Shakespeare? Did she want to take a trip to the changing table? Was she going to twist and shout so that I had to pin her down before I pinned her up? Did she want a sink bath, complete with slapping washcloth? Would that cool her hot head? How about a new bottle of formula to replace the sickening one? Was there any way I could prevent her relentless head banging? A little back-and-forth in the rocker? Would that stop the sobs, tears and nose drips? A close hold next to the vest? Would that quell the whimpers, wails and lip droops?

I didn’t know. But I knew one thing: I couldn’t forget her for a second. I couldn’t turn off my infant radar, shirk my fatherly duty, turn a blind eye to baby doo-doo, or buy a one-way ticket out of town. The longer I ignored her, the louder she got.

She had a bassinet instead of a room. The bassinet was convenient, because we could wheel it from room to room. But the child was going to need her own room. We were going to have to move to another apartment, one with an additional room. So we found a place no larger than the one we had, but with smaller, more numerous rooms. One contained a bathtub.

I painted the child’s room pink, then decided the color was too pink and repainted the entire surface less pink. I studied a disconnected radiator, wondering how it could be reattached to the steam system. I got down on the floor with a brush and applied a volatile lacquer whose fumes made my head spin. In this manner, I prepared the area for moving in.

A cold rain was falling when we left. The movers were two young men who weren’t very large, but they were wiry. When I started to lug a table down the stairs, they took the table from me and gave me a flowerpot to carry instead.

When almost everything was accounted for, I asked my spouse to take our child to the new place. The child was only a few weeks old, so she could be transported easily. Her mother hesitated, perhaps looking for a last time around the place we had occupied, then went out into the rain with the child.
 

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the novels Roughhouse and Tetched, both of which were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. He lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with his wife and daughter.
 

I told my mother I was going into Manhattan to spend the day at the New York Public Library on 42nd street. This came as no surprise to her. I loved that place. She knew it and delighted in the knowledge her son should find such a retreat. While she cleaned the bathroom or made the beds—she always busied herself around the apartment–I sneaked from the apartment with a small valise filled with the essentials: a toothbrush, socks, razor (for the twice a week I shaved), nail clippers, a few pair of underwear, three undershirts, an extra pair of jeans, and some shirts, including my folk period, blue work shirt and one white dress shirt—it occurred to me I might apply for a waiter’s job.

At 165th street, I hopped on the rattling old Q15 bus and rode through the lovely tree lined streets of Whitestone into Flushing. There I boarded the steamy, screeching F train. The moment I passed through those subway doors, I felt exhilarated. I headed into Manhattan with a pocket full of cash (money squirreled away from babysitting and dog-walking jobs), a packed valise, and a head filled with spectacular, if half-formed, dreams. I was really doing it. At sixteen, I was “lightin’ out for the territory,” going “on the road”; I was running away from home. Huck and Jack had nothing on me; I was about to be free, too.

Howard Mumbleby, my twenty-your-old City College friend, had agreed to put me up. He told me to meet him at his apartment on West 80th street between Broadway and Amsterdam at 11 A.M. Once there, I trudged up the stairs to the fifth floor of his five-floor walkup. I arrived at 5C and knocked. And knocked and knocked. No Howard. I walked down the stairs and examined the hallways on each floor in search of my friend. Howard was nowhere to be found. I thought he had walked down to the market on the corner at Broadway to load up on vegetables for lunch. (In the mid-60s with fast-food palaces on the rise, Howard was among a small but growing number to swear off meat.) Or, maybe he had wandered down to Amsterdam at the other end of West 80th to find one of the hookers who, as he delicately stated, “helped me out.” I walked down to the foyer, took a seat on my small but sturdy valise (a relic from the ‘40s my parents still used) and proceeded to wait for Howard.

As I sat there, I became aware of a sickeningly sweet aroma. The smell had a distinct odor I couldn’t quite place. It approximated the vapors in the Hershey chocolate factory my family and I visited years before. But this odor smelled different. It lacked the overwhelming sugary sweetness that suffused the Hershey plant. It smelled more tart or pungent, maybe vinegary, and carried a faintly nauseating sensation. The more the odor seeped into my nostrils, the more I dug into my olfactory memory to identify it. I couldn’t, and this bothered me. Finally, I stopped a guy exiting the building and asked him about the odd smell. He barely stopped to remark, “Mrs. Graham, the white ghost.” I had no idea what the guy meant. Perhaps, I thought, his answer alluded to a malodorous concoction Mrs. Graham had brewing.

I remembered Mrs. Graham, aka the white ghost. Late one afternoon as Howard and I descended the stairs from his fifth floor apartment, we passed a tall, ancient woman with skin so pale it seemed translucent. Her eyes shone the faintest waxen blue. She wore a long, black, crinoline gown. Her thinning hair appeared an astonishing white. With her ghostly pale skin and wrinkled gown, she made a striking figure standing there on the stairs. As we passed, Howard said hello to her. In answer, she just stared back at us. Howard told me her name was Mrs. Graham, she was about 90 years old, and lived alone in 4C directly below him. He said she didn’t get out much. The stairs were too difficult for her to negotiate easily. I asked who brought her food and supplies. Howard had no idea. He saw her rarely, he said, and only when he passed her on the stairs. On occasion, he told me, he heard other tenants refer to her as “the white ghost.”

At sixteen, still young and naïve, I couldn’t rightly connect the guy’s answer about Mrs. Graham to my question about the smell. I continued to wait. An hour passed and still, no Howard. The smell had filtered into my gut and made me queasy, so I got up to leave. As I stood up, an eye-poppingly attractive young woman entered the foyer. Almost too intimidated by her looks to speak, I stopped her anyway.

“What’s that smell?’ I asked.

She gave me one of those “don’t you know” looks and steamed on past. But she had second thoughts. She stopped, turned to me, and asked, “didn’t you hear about Mrs. Graham?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t live here. I’m visiting Howard.”

She flashed another peculiar look; this one as if to suggest, “oh brother, you’re kidding.” Clearly, this beauty had issues with Howard. She started to leave again, then again stopped. “Didn’t Howard tell you– about Mrs. Graham?”

“No,” I countered.

“She died about two weeks ago. The hallway began to smell terribly, worse than this. No one knew what it was. Someone figured it out though and called the fire department. The firemen had to cut through the burglar bars on the forth floor to break into her apartment. They found her in bed, dead and rotting. How awful. That’s the smell you smell. Poor old Mrs. Graham.”

A vivid picture of the natural brutality of Mrs. Graham’s sad and lonely death immediately painted itself onto a wall in my memory. Little did I know that picture would remain there my entire life. With that indelible image settling into the deepest recesses of my brain, I picked up the sturdy little valise and marched my runaway ass through the foyer and out the door. With Howard AWOL and the insistent and unnerving odor of Mrs. Graham attacking my senses, it didn’t take me long to dash my plans to run away from home– that day.

Carl Schinasi, a native New Yorker, teaches at the historically black college, Miles College, in Birmingham, AL. Recent essays have appeared in Baseball/Literature/Culture and Ducts.

Anyway, I have had to have many procedures done on my poor teeth. Many root canals, caps, etc. Now it’s the time for implants. My dentist now is superlative. I would match him against any dentist anywhere. Frederick Sterling, with offices in the famous House of Pain, at 1 Rockefeller Plaza, overlooking the skating rink, which you can see in a mirror as you recline in Dr. Sterling’s chair, but often through half-slanted Venetian blinds, so that if you do look, you may be in danger of a stroboscopically induced, Japanese-style epileptic seizure. The only thing he ever did wrong was say to his assistant, two hours into a three-hour procedure, when there was a break in the action and he saw that I was beginning to relax and unwind, "He thinks it’s over!" Mean. A sailor, a fine Waspy man, and the architect of many of my lovely porcelain caps. (Some sycophantic apprentice–a short bald, mincing I’m-pretty-sure-gay dentist who fawned over Cliff as part of his apprenticeship, said, when the capping was done, "cured" –in a darkened room, with some kind of blinding purple light–the caps sanded a little to create a beautifully artificial natural look–"Dr. Sterling, you. are. a. GENIUS!!")

Anyway I went to the dentist on Thursday for the regular cleaning of my teeth, which I think of roughly the way I think of the Maginot Line of the First World War. Dr. Sterling has a new hygienist named Vera, whom I think of as Severa, partly for good reason, partly just because that’s the kind of Aspergers pun that I like to make. Vera has taken the place of Margaret, a lunatic yakker in her own right, who gave you like three dozen free toothbrushes and enough floss to girdle the globe. Vera is a monster right out of Saw V, I swear. My daughter bled from the mouth for four days after a "routine" checkup. I had Vera once myself, and she went at the plaque removal–I have no plaque; I am a demon tooth-cleaner now, every night–like a desperate Irish potato farmer of the past trying to hoe the unyielding stony soil in Southwestern Cork as his family starved. The spit bowl looks as though it’s marbled with pasta sauce when she tells you to spit. I now believe that my body gave itself lung cancer in order to avoid the regular checkup with Vera.

(I had surgery and have a good prognosis )

But here’s the secret. Don’t tell any of Dr. Sterling’s other patients. There is another hygienist who comes in one or two days a week. The fabulous Maria. Half Puerto Rican, half vaguely "Latin American," she lives on Long Island with her husband and three daughters. Her youngest, now two, was born three months premature, but she’s fine!!! Thank God. The neurologist at Long Island General loves her because save for some small lung weakness–two pneumonias in her first year (of which she spent the first three months in the hospital)–she is doing great. Maria said that this neurologist started out very impersonal and then got warmer and warmer, and I suggested to her that he probably can’t let himself get too attached in most cases, since the preemies often have serious problems. She found that hypothesis very convincing, as did I, since it was mine. Maria’s husband is Italian. His parents, both immigrants, wanted the newly married couple to
live with them forever, in what is apparently the Italian way. After a while, Maria told me, she said to her husband, "It’s them or me." So they moved out and began turning out daughters. "My husband is very grateful that we moved out," she says. "Because now he can do so many things for himself, like even the laundry."

Maria does almost all the things that Vera does, but with so much more bonhomie and chairside manner that you don’t mind!! And she is pretty. I thought Vera was very pretty when I first saw her–she looked a little like my current fave, Jessica Biel, until she took out her "Hostel" torture tools and an hour later left me a broken man. This time when I went in, she looked more like Rene Zellweger at her worst, which is very bad, like a Sun-Kist prune kist by alum. And she also looked daggers at me, because she just knew that I had insisted on Maria. Evidently, Dr. Sterling’s patients in droves are trying to insist on Maria. I don’t give Vera long, unless she goes to the dental hygienist’s equivalent of anger-management training. But Dr. Sterling’s clerical staff, which appears to number in the scores, has cottoned on to the Vera Movement and they try to deny as many patients as possible access to Maria . But when Molly, the receptionist, called me a few weeks ago with her nagging ways about finally coming in for a cleaning–she has the persistence of a great telemarketer–I insisted on Maria and I won. I am "older," you see, and I had lung cancer–may that preterite tense be forever accurate–so she couldn’t steamroller me out of it.

This pissed my wife off–did she celebrate my Maria scheduling triumph with me? No, because she was thinking of herself, because she had a month or so earlier allowed herself to be denied Maria–had been hornswoggled into accepting the she’s-almost-never-here strategy adopted by the huge clerical staff who may sympathise with Vera and may thus be trying to salvage her position. Anyway, my wife went to Vera for the second time, and it was just as bad as the first.

But so now I have to begin the implant process for my molars, and Dr. Sterling doesn’t do implants. So he sends me to a maxillofacial surgeon–have you ever heard a more frightening seven syllables?–named Dr. Richter, who I am sure comes from however long a line of Nazis one can come from. I have been to him before. His operating theater is as clean and clear as a morgue. He has a bald head and glasses so reflective that you can’t see his surely beady eyes behind them. He has already done a couple of maxillofacial things to me–I can’t even remember what they were, and now he gets to start the implant process. I go to Dr. Sterling for a half an hour, and he numbs me up, as he puts it, and removes–to put it very gently–a couple of the caps on the lower left, and while I am numbed up, I actually go up to Dr. Richter’s office on the Upper East Side to have him clean up the rest of those molars’ roots, add some crystallized bone grafts (I believe they are from goats or cows or sheep; I’m not kidding) and then screw posts into my actual jawbone, onto which he will six months later screw implanted tooth-like objects, after re-slicing my gum open. And then more of that. Dr, Sterling told me that Dr. Richter might "bulk up" the novocaine when I got to his office. Something else to look forward to.

Dr. Richter appears to be unmarried and is by his own bragging account a great antiques specialist–an extremely troubling combination by itself, but to make matters worse he is also a bow-and-arrow huntsman, as he has proudly told me, at the obviously rehearsed prompting of his mouse-like Irish assistant. "Ask Dr. Richter what he did last June," the assistant says. "What did you do last June, Dr. Richter?" I dutifully ask, knowing that he holds the power of maxillofacial surgery over me. "I went to to a private estate in Ireland that very few outsiders are ever allowed access to," Dr. Richter said. "I got up on a Saturday morning with my guide, and together we crawled on our stomachs for almost a mile to where some great game was to be found. And it was just my luck that morning to come across–guess what?" "I can’t guess," I said. "A royal stag!" Dr. Richter said. "Twelve-point antlers! And I felled it with a single arrow to the neck at a range of almost two hundred yards!" "Wow!" I said. "That must have been some kind of thrill!" "It was," he said. "Now, would you like me to explain the procedure I’m about to perform?"

That is my report.

Daniel Menaker is the author of five books, most recently "A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation." He has won two O. Henry awards for short fiction, was an editor at The New Yorker for twenty years, and served as Executive Editor in Chief at Random House for five years. He is now an editorial consultant for Barnes and Noble’s eReader The Nook.

As we got older, Mirna would share more "Cuban" secrets with us, detailing some easy-to-use brujeria (witchcraft) that could be used for personal gain or to thwart the attempts of enemies.

Marly thought her mother was nuts, but I was fascinated. One day I went over and there were three platanos (green bananas) on her welcome mat. Upon entering I asked Mirna why she put them there. She said that they were there in the morning when she woke up and suspected that a neighbor left them there to put an evil spell on her. No matter, Mirna, explained. She knew how to combat that magic.

Marly sat on the couch rolling her eyes.

"Why not just pick them up and throw them away?" I asked, naively.

"Get this," Marly warned, before Mirna went on to explain.

Mirna said to diffuse the spell the neighbor had set to cast on her it required one to urinate on the neighbor’s doormat.

"Wait! You squatted on her doormat this morning?" I asked, incredulous.

"No, mi Niña," she replied. "I peed in a cup and then poured it there.

Well, of course.

This should have probably been enough about brujeria to last me a lifetime, but I was intrigued.

Mirna would often go to tarot card readers, and "seers."

One in particular stood out.

Marly was going through a divorce and had moved back to New Jersey to stay with her mom while she was getting back on her feet. Her mother wanted to help her get out of her funk and knew of just the person who could: A psychic named Umberto! He’d tell her what to do to make things better!

She said it takes at least six months to get an appointment, but she called in some favors so she was taking Marly next Saturday. I asked her if I was willing to pay the $60 for a reading, if Umberto would fit me in.

"Claro," Mirna said, the plan set.

Umberto lived in East Harlem so after getting café con leches for the road, we huddled into the car for the long ride.

We finally pulled up to a generic apartment building in an urban area. Kids screamed and played in the street and as we entered, the smell of mojito and lechon permeated the building.

Mirna walked through the open apartment door and quietly sat on a couch as if entering a church. Marly and I followed, squishing in together to fit. There were two other older Hispanic women–viejas–sitting on chairs across from us, one holding a huge box that appeared to move on it’s own. It’d inch it’s way a few inches to the left and the woman would kick it back.

Beyond that, there was a lot to take in.

There was a huge parrot, sitting cageless in the middle of the room, shitting on everything. The couch was covered in birdshit and the smell in the place nauseated me.

The worst part were the hundreds of roaches crawling everywhere. A huge one scurried up the back wall behind the sofa. A few smaller ones scuttled past the parrot who cawed loudly. I kept my purse in my lap and my flip flopped feet off the floor as much as I could.

"What the fuck?" I whispered to Marly.

"You wanted to come…" she replied.

Mirna acted like nothing was wrong. The smell of death, urine and garbage didn’t affect her at all, and I was mortified.

It would be a long wait, Mirna explained, the older women were next and were there for a very serious matter. So serious, they were required to bring a live chicken–that was clearly not happy to be in that box–to sacrifice.

"You have to be kidding me?" I asked.

Marly just shook her head, welcoming me to her world.

I could see Umberto, turbaned, wearing a dirty wife beater and boxer shorts, sitting at a table in the kitchen. Umberto was gesticulating frantically and it was apparent he was a very flamboyant gay man. (Mirna explained later he only dated overweight white men.)

A woman sat across from him. He laid tarot cards on the table and spoke to her in hushed tones. I could see roaches crawling all over the kitchen floor and over the woman’s shoe.

I started scratching and getting some hives from panic. I could not sit here amidst bugs and chicken killing.

Mirna started speaking in Spanish to the two old women and they explained that she was next for her reading and that they were to kill the chicken in the bathtub after we leave.

It was kind of a relief knowing I wouldn’t have to be around for the slaughter and that I’d get my fortune read quicker than I expected, but still, the roaches were crawling way too close for comfort–one got on the couch and burrowed under the cushions we were sitting on—and I jumped up and decided pacing was a better use of my time.

Mirna gave besitos (kisses) to Umberto and listened to him list all his problems before they settled down to the reading. He wouldn’t allow us to sit in the kitchen with her, so Marly and I paced in the living room trying to avoid the hundreds of roaches (and other assorted bugs) in the room.

I really had to use the bathroom and so did Marly. It had been a long ride and those cafe con leches were grande. We walked through the living room, the parrot chasing after us screeching, and discovered the bathroom had no door!

The bigger problem was that there were roaches on the ceiling that kept falling down. There was no way either of us were going to drop our pants in front of everyone else in the apartment and risk having roaches land on us. Still, nature was calling and was just getting louder and louder.

Finally Marly told her mother she was going out for a few minutes to smoke a cigarette. We went into the alley adjacent to the building and Marly asked me to be the lookout so she could pee.

Normally I’d be appalled, but I did so gladly, knowing she’d do the same for me in a few minutes.

I couldn’t believe I was about to take my pants down in broad daylight with playing children just a few feet away. On top of that, the building that faced the alley had open, mainly curtain less windows.

I finally squatted, bare-assed and let loose. The urine got on my flip flopped feet, but I knew there was no way I could go back into that bathroom.

By the time we got back into the apartment it was Marly’s turn to go. She laid her $60 down and Umberto started chanting.

Mirna plopped back on the sofa, no doubt killing a few hundred roaches that had set up camp there, and told me about how Umberto was known to speak in tongues.

At this point I was beyond traumatized. The chicken in the box was unrelenting and was trying to peck its way out.

There were little holes in the cardboard now, and every now and then I’d see a beak. The parrot was also pecking feverishly at the outside of the box trying to get in, in what was either a show of solidarity with the other bird or a way to add insult to injury to it.

Mirna went on to tell me that Umberto was always very special and always had visions.

I asked her about the roaches and she said he has his eyes trained on the future and not the present. That mundane tasks like cleaning and bug-killing were not of any concern.

I couldn’t believe I was trapped here and wanted to leave more than anything, but I had tagged along and it would have been rude of me to insist we leave, when Mirna had so graciously allowed me to join.

Meanwhile, it was clear Marly was moved by what Umberto was telling her. She had tears in her eyes as she flipped cards over. He started shouting and even though I speak Spanish, I couldn’t understand.

Mirna explained he was warding off a spirit that was threatening to take over his body.

Finally Marly’s reading was over and before she could tell me what she was told, I was summoned. In broken English Umberto commanded me to cut the cards. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tell him the reason I was there or explain what exactly I was hoping to know about my future, but Umberto didn’t seem to want to know.

As he began laying down cards, eyebrows raised, roaches crawled on the table and over them. I stood up and started screaming and he looked at me like I was crazy. He flicked them off the table—mere inches away from me–and told me to sit and stop being silly. That they were there to protect us.

"The parrot too?" I asked.

"No, she is the Devil, but we must know the Devil in order to recognize God."

Deep!

As he turned over cards he explained to me that the big problem was my mother. That a darkness had overtaken her.

He had no idea who I was or anything about my family. Yet I was pretty surprised when he explained my mother’s schizophrenia very accurately.

He went on to tell me that when women become pregnant they are very vulnerable because they open in a way to allow another soul to infiltrate them. And while my soul was good and normal, another evil soul also entered my mother and from the time she became pregnant she began to be what doctors would describe as mentally ill.

He said that was the ignorant’s explanation, but in reality she was overtaken by a demon and would have that demon in her for life. No amount of sacrificed animals would release her from its grasp, but that I could cleanse myself of the effects if I wanted to.

I was very surprised at how spot on he was in his assessment, especially because there was no way he could have known anything about my upbringing.

He said I was prone to dark moods, not because of a spell or bad spirits, but because of empathy from seeing my mother overcome by the evil one.

Sounded right to me.

He said I should get a big raw steak and wash myself from head to toe making sure there was blood touching every bit of me. He said to stand like this until the blood dried on my skin and into my hair.

I asked if there was another way. The thought of raw meat and blood touching me was nauseating.

He gave me a firm no, took my $60 and told me it’d be a hard life if I didn’t. Further, he said that if I didn’t do it now, the sadness would be forever ingrained in me.

Shaken from his words, the filth and smell, I nearly collapsed, drained, into the back seat of the car as we made our way home.

Marly explained that Umberto was on the mark about a pregnancy she had had and terminated years before and it made her very sad. He said the spirit was now still amongst us on Earth but tortured.

He told her in order to release it she must bring a chicken and be prepared to slit it’s throat in his bathroom and smear its blood on herself.

A vegetarian, she knew she couldn’t do this.

Mirna said she had to pee again on the neighbor’s welcome mat to offensively block any other displays of aggression the neighbor might be contemplating.

I never did rub that raw steak on myself, and on days of tears and ennui, I often wonder if my life would be different if I had.

Kelly Kreth is best known for being fired quite publicly for keeping a *gasp* blog. She chronicles the mishaps and woes of a single woman trying to get and keep the Big Three in NYC: a job, an apartment and a relationship. Kreth has also written a Sex/Relationship column for the New York Press aptly called, "Outside the Box." She is a frequent guest blogger at www.mikealvear.com. She was a 2009 Moth GrandSlam Storytelling competition finalist and often feels trapped in a Seinfeldian Hell.

I was still a graduate student in the late 1980s when I arrived at City Opera via an audition notice in Backstage. After waiting in a long line that snaked around the New York State Theater, I was ushered through the stage entrance, two sets of glass doors set several steps down from street level.

Inside the theater, my fellow hopefuls and I were divided into groups of twenty-five and sent to a rehearsal hall, where we were instructed to step forward and state our name, age, and suit and shoe sizes. I was so inexperienced that I actually found this process thrilling. Age 22, suit 40 regular, shoe 9 1/2, I was hired on the spot, an accomplishment not lessened by a director later clarifying the job requirements. Just be on time, he told me, and don’t make trouble.

That I could do!

While my acting ambitions were to subsequently wax and wane, I never relinquished my part-time job at fine arts central. From Day One I grasped that the stage door was a charmed portal, one separating not just backstage from outsiders, but also real life from grand fantasy. There was life outside that door, and life inside that door. I preferred the latter, a place where even death was accompanied by jewels, gowns, and an aria, generally followed by rapturous applause.

In La bohème, I served in the banda, a military band entering just as Mimi and Rodolfo proclaimed their love for each other. The other banda members and I wore red jackets with gold braid and red hats, making us look like we had wandered in from The Music Man. All twelve of us were dressed alike, except for the drum major who had a white feather in his hat instead of a red one like the rest of us.

One evening, the drum major called in sick and I was told that I was going to be wearing the white-feathered hat. I found this promotion terrifying. Having long employed a follow-the-guy-in-front-of-me routine, I was frightened at the prospect of being the guy in front of everyone else.

Before my entrance, I gripped my baton tightly and tried to compose myself. My consternation must have shown on my face because an assistant director gave me a shake and a wide smile. “Relax,” she whispered. “Remember, it’s Christmas!” She was right; the scene indeed took place on Christmas Eve. Something about this was immensely comforting, and my heart soared that night as I led the banda.

Later City Opera introduced another production of Bohème, one in which I enjoyed more stage time. In my new role, listed on the backstage callboard as Handsome Soldier, I had a flirtatious moment with Mimi until Rodolfo called her away. I extrapolated my bit part to the hilt, so much so that the singer playing Rodolfo took to physically shoving me aside because otherwise the opera would have ground to a halt.

Once, a friend of mine was visiting from Japan and I brought her to the show to watch from the wings. Although I worried that she might be bored, she was enthralled. As we exited the stage door, she stopped and looked back at the building wistfully. “You come here every night?” she asked.

Two or three times a week, I replied diffidently.

“You are so lucky,” she exclaimed, “it’s like a carnival in there!”

This season, City Opera has suspended operations so that renovations could be made at the theater. In other words, there have been no performances, no carnival.

I suppose I’ve missed working at the opera factory, because recently I was passing by the State Theater and decided to peek inside. A heavy tarp draped on the building reminded me that, thanks to a generous donor, it’s now the David H. Koch Theater. I walked down familiar steps and through the first set of glass doors at the stage entrance.

The smell of freshly-microwaved chicken greeted me as I caught the eye of the security guard on duty. He was an older black gentleman who, like me, had worked in this building for years. I hesitated before him, suddenly conscious of the fact that I had no legitimate reason to be in here.

Perhaps sensing my trepidation, the guard looked at me expectantly.

“Hi,” I said. “So, how are those renovations going? Have they done much work?”

Mostly in the orchestra pit, the guard responded.
I felt awkward. “Oh. Well, I just stopped by…”

I wanted the guard to wave me through like usual, or to smile and say Go on in, take a look. He didn’t. He seemed to be waiting to see whether I’d push through the doors.

Yet I just stood there uncertainly, like someone who had showed up for a party on the wrong night. When a UPS guy appeared behind me with a stack of boxes, I decided to leave. I mumbled something to the effect that I would come back next time.

Yeah, come back next time, the guard agreed.

I can’t say that he turned me away, since I hadn’t attempted to enter, but I still felt deflated. I walked up to street level as a wave of longing came over me. Just then, I missed my Boheme Christmases, my banda, and Mimi. Sighing, I moved off into the chilly air. A light snow had started, and I noticed that the flakes were swirling down, upwards, sideways, and on weird diagonals.

RAUL A. REYES has written for the New York Times and USA Today.
 

The text reads: “I miss looking at you.” It’s from this guy Jim who I have met once, maybe twice, this past summer. We did the walking equivalent of drive-by. Who knows why we exchanged numbers. Our meetings were vapid, innocuous at best, which is the worst. I texted him back: “do you know who this is?” He responded, “yes, Abby.” What the hell! Who is this creep? Is he outside my gated foot window crouched behind a tire? It all felt so voyeuristic. But I was bored with my studies so I got up on my perch, pressed my face to the wall for cellular reception and gave Jim a call. Asked him what was his situation since we spoke last summer and that was none too stellar.

Well you don’t have to be paranormal to guess his intent; 11pm, Friday night, somewhat seductive text message. Jim wanted a good time. Holy – dial-a –whore! Wow! What about me chillin’ in Astoria screamed Escort for Hire, Bored and Brothel, Call-For–A-Good-Time? I didn’t even know this guy, was there a bathroom wall somewhere I did not know about? But once in a while demons will rise and I did recall he was around the right height. I needed a break from my studious mind, and decidedly relapsed into bad behavior and good times.

I asked Jim for his address. Insisted there be little talking and told him for the love of god do not tell me about your feelings, pay for my cab fare coming and going, I then brushed my teeth yanked on a pair of jeans and met Jim around midnight between Avenue A and B.

Jim, who I vaguely recognized, opened the door of what was once a storefront, wearing nothing but a towel – which looked moldy and rancid with potential S.T.D.s. His place had a curtain used a partition as if the Great Oz was soon to be revealed on the other side. Yet, once parting the curtains a flat screen television lit the other side of Jim’s place with the blue glow of the smuttiest porn I had not seen the likes of since I was a curious teen. There was no bed, just a futon on the floor, no sheets just tons of pillows and more moldy looking towels. My basement studio looked like a suite at The Carlyle rather than the dungeon I believed it to be a short cab ride ago.

Here is the part of the story where fear and paranoia set in, “you don’t know this guy! The ceiling is stained with watermarks, no wonder the towels are moldy. Why is there a massage table leaning against the wall? The floor is filthy, he’s in his 40s – why aren’t there sheets? My god he is going to beat me with one of the five dildos lying on the filthy floor and screw my corpse! Then put me in the ceiling – the pieces come right out – oh my god – those aren’t water stains – that is blood – he’s done this before – this is his Friday night routine, he’s probably cleaned out the East Village, on to Queens – he is gonna crank up the volume on that shitty low budget porn and crack my skull open!”

So I made him give me the cab fare in advance – I mean you don’t want to get doubly screwed. I scrambled around nervously hiding my things, burying what little I brought deeper in my bag. And then the nervous talking began as a deterrent. I began to play twenty questions. Where are you from? Detroit. Ahhh Detroit Rock City, Motor City Madness, Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper, No More Mr. Nice Guy. Hey how ‘bout turning off that porn? Where’d ya get that tattoo? Thailand. Oh brother….don’t bother asking, but what the hell. Are you on methadone right now? No, I’m taking… then the barrage of prescription drugs poured from his lips like a Pez dispenser: amphetamines, benzos, poppers – goddamn rush – like we’re in a bathhouse circa 1977. My nervous talking turned into genuine fits of laughter as if I had a contact high from pot the one drug that did not make the hit list.

He was a good guy. He was not as tall I remembered. He smoked a lot and did not find me funny at all. I told him any chick can make a guy come, but making someone laugh, well that is a task. I should have stayed at home. He was a slow talker with a slight Mid Western accent. I had to interrupt him to imitate his pronunciation and push him to his punch lines.

The two day long acid trip was hedonistic layered with a decent soundtrack once I got him to cool it with the porn.

Sunday I was about to creep out and snag a cab uptown, sneak into my parent’s apartment as they spend their weekends on the East End. I pretend I am on vacation and their place is a hotel: cable, a landline, furniture and oh my love a bathtub – I needed the silk wood scrub down after my weekend downtown. But on my way through the curtain towards the storefront door Jim stopped me. He gave me a box of cinnamon flavored Pop Tarts, some breakfast protein bars and then grabbed a copy of Catcher In the Rye, by J.D. Salinger from a chair he had warned me not to sit on, lean on, look at – due to its impending collapse. Catcher was the maroon copy, its title in golden type, same copy I had been given as a kid. Jim had it dog eared to page 73 and told me to read the excerpt he had highlighted:

“I told them my name was Jim Steele, just for the hell of it. Then I tried to get them in a little intelligent conversation, but it was practically impossible. You had to twist their arms. You could hardly tell which was the stupidest of all three of them.”

I scanned what Jim had asked me to read, the scene in the Lavender Room, where sure enough Holden uses the pseudonym Jim Steele to deal with this “corny” place where he can’t even get a splash of rum in his Coca Cola and even a girl who is a “terrific dancer” is a “real moron” (Salinger 71). Three-dimensional Jim Steele says to me how cool it is that he has been immortalized in literature. Huh, yeah. Huh. I take off to the Upper East Side, wondering if he has actually read the book to fruition or rather if someone made the connection than pointed it out for him.

This guy on Avenue A using poppers, uppers, downers, went to school in Detroit – a city so reliant on metal in factories and musically. This guy named Steele who stole car stereo systems and ended up on probation, this guy who went to Thailand did dope and sends strange women text messages late into the night, this guy with five filthy dildos and no sheets wants me to believe it’s a coincidence that he has Holden’s Lavender Room pseudonym – yea right! Jim Steele you stole the saddest version of Holden in that story. Struttin’ the East Village avoiding copyright infringement – the one thing that gets Salinger out of bed.

Then again could this guy have a name that so precisely predetermined the events of his life as if cast in some sort of, well shit, metal? And though I took myself on a regression vacation it was hardly an adventure, just revisited bad behavior and came out looking and feeling like a “real moron” rather than the “terrific dancer.” I guess much like rereading the lines of Catcher in the Rye the older I get the darker it seems, as do rather deviant acts. Whether or not you use your real name.

Abigail Frankfurt is a freelance writer whose work has been published in The New York Times, The Minneapolis Observer, as well as read on National Public Radio’s Savvy Traveler. Her work has been included in this website’s anthology; Lost and Found: Stories From New York. She is currently in Graduate School and lives in Astoria, Queens.
 

When ninety-minutes had passed and Mr. Milano had not come, Nina began sobbing: “He couldn’t even make it to my wedding! I knew he wouldn’t come!” As she wailed, we tried to calm her. I cursed him under my breath and prayed silently that good-for-nothing would show. In the pews, the bride’s relatives, most of the crowd, whispered and clucked, craning their necks every few minutes to see if the father arrived. Occasionally a scout was sent to the back of the church for an update. Just as Nina reached the point of hysteria, her father burst in, accompanied by his girlfriend, her black hair teased into a beehive, stiletto heels, excessive make-up, short tight skirt, fur stole, and belligerent look met the definition of “tramp.” Nina’s mother and sister controlled their anger and took their seats. Nina, still hiccupping from crying, grabbed her father’s arm and they walked to the altar.

The ninety minutes of waiting at the church was plenty of time for the troops to build defenses, develop allies, draw up battle plans, and steep their hatred in an ugly brew of hair spray and perfume. One of the warring factions consisted of Nina’s mother’s side whose fierce loyalty to her was matched only by their hatred for her perfidious husband. The other faction, Nina’s father’s relatives, defended the man’s right to do whatever he pleased, especially considering that his former wife was, all agreed, a whore—her two young out-of-wedlock children all the proof needed to justify the pejorative.

When we got to the VFW hall it was the usual set up for a party: collapsible tables covered with paper tablecloths, metal folding chairs, a white crepe paper bell, a “Congratulations” sign strung across the room and red and white plastic poinsettias as centerpieces. One table held the wedding cake and the soda and liquor—several bottles of Smirnoff’s, Seagram’s Seven, White Horse scotch, Four Roses—all the components of the highball, and lots of bottles of beer and soda. The hall smelled like all VFW halls—rye whiskey and cigarette smoke with a whiff of Lestoil. The guests came in and took their seats either on Nina’s father’s side or Nina’s mother’s side. Everybody got drinks, and continued to look across the hall and talk in low voices that I knew were making sniping comments, if not outright plans for attack. The air was electric.

My mother and father were at the party and the three of us filled our paper plates with baked ziti, eggplant parmigiana, Italian bread and salad, got a few drinks, and sat at the table with Larry’s only family members—his little sister and his father. I got up to get another drink and a woman on the food line turned around and said to the woman behind her, “Stop pushing me, you fuckin’ bitch, or I’ll punch your fuckin’ face in!” That was the flashpoint, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the sinking of the Lusitania, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on a smaller, but no less incendiary scale. Plates of food and fists went flying. As if on cue, just about everybody, both men and women, started punching somebody. My father returned from the restroom to a scene that looked like a bar brawl in a Western, except there was no wagon wheel chandelier for somebody to swing on to kick people’s teeth out. My father and I, both woozy from the highballs, watched the twenty or so couples or triples swinging, tearing, and smashing. It was like a series of small fires had broken out, the sparks of one igniting another, threatening to become an inferno.

My parents and I stood dazed at our table hoping not to get hit. That’s when two men, clutching each other and grunting, crashed into my mother, sending her sliding across the floor, with such force that she went under a table and smashed into the wall. She emerged from under the tablecloth holding her arm, her hair wild, shrieking, “Jesus! Oh Jesus, Mary, and sweet Saint Joseph! Let’s get out of here.” She went running into the street waving into traffic on Fourth Avenue trying to get any car to stop and give us a ride out of that bedlam. My father and I pursued her, convinced her no one was going to stop and pick her and us up, and pushed and dragged her back into the hall, almost empty now that the melee had ruptured onto the street. She sat moaning and crying, trying to quell her panic. Once I ascertained that she was safe, I turned to leave. “Don’t go out there,” she said, but I had to find my sister who I last saw on the sidewalk jumping up to defend the bride’s mother. My sister Janet was a loyal friend, a fierce fighter and she was in the fray somewhere.

I rushed outside and saw Janet, in her vivid red velvet dress, engaged in battle. As maid of honor and friend of Mrs. Milano, Janet became a target of the father’s party. They could not wait to get their hands on her. Two of the women had grabbed her and dragged her out into the street. One woman dug her fingers underneath my sister’s Grecian curls and was pulling with all her might in what seemed an attempt to rip Janet’s scalp off, while the other woman delivered punches to my sister’s head. Janet was doubled over, trying to keep her hair attached with one hand and flailing at her attackers with the other. “Hey!” I screamed, “Leave my sister alone!” One of the assailants stopped trying to gouge Janet’s eyes out and fixed her demented gaze on me. Oh my God! It was one thing to tell someone to leave my sister alone, it was another to have to physically defend her. My attacker raised her massively fat arm, enrobed in bangle bracelets and black lace, and prepared to deliver a roundhouse blow to my face. I am not sure if it was inebriation or reflex, but I rolled back on my heels and her fist slammed into the plate glass window. She bellowed in pain and I beat it back inside, fortunate to have avoided a broken jaw, and hoping to lock myself in the ladies’ room, should she or any of the other combatants seek to finish me off.

Inside the hall, the best man’s ten-year-old brother Louie, looking anguished, got behind the cake and liquor table. He groaned, winced, and with both hands heaved the table over. The shattering of the combined whiskey, gin, beer, and scotch bottles produced a little ocean, tiny waves of liquor shimmering over the wooden floor, progressing merrily toward the door. For a moment, the hall was beautiful, an inch deep in liquor that looked like the incoming tide at Coney Island. The shards of multicolored glass jutting up like a kaleidoscope of danger were the perfect symbol of a wedding gone really wrong.

Finally the police arrived, eleven cars, and three ambulances. The sight of the cops convinced everyone to stop fighting. The police began lining up the young men, all with clothes shredded and bloody. Of the eight standing outside the hall, just one had a shirt still in one piece, and three of them were completely bare-chested. Inside the VFW, ambulance workers tended to some of the wounded, including my mother who, we initially feared, was having a stroke. The hall looked like a combination infirmary/holding cell–some wedding guests were being bandaged while others were being questioned by the police.

A few people escaped the pandemonium. The bride and groom had found shelter in the back room, a kitchen, and looked out in bewilderment on the mayhem. Nina’s nine-year-old half-brother and six-year old half-sister were found afterward hiding in a subway station a few doors away. Nina’s sister Linda, seven months pregnant, whose father and husband had been opponents in one of the main events in the slugfest, spent the night in the hospital but was released the next day, physically unharmed.

My father and I got away unscathed, but my mother’s upper arm turned black and sagged, literally a bag of blood, for a month afterward. Janet’s face was deeply scratched, and her scalp had several red and sore bald patches, but she used those injuries to redouble her determination to find the two women and kill them.

Nina and Larry stayed married for sixteen years, a solid run for such a shaky start. I recently met one of their two sons, Stephen, at a luncheon of the crowd from the old neighborhood that included Nina, Linda, and Mrs. Milano. He was a friendly 36 year-old, interested in hearing the stories told at the table. When I mentioned that his mother’s and father’s wedding was something to be remembered, Stephen asked me to tell him the story, saying he never really got the whole picture. Feeling that I did not want to embarrass the former bride, her sister, or her mother, I volunteered only that I saw the fight started when the two women on the line began cursing each other out. “Oh, no!” Linda declared proudly. “My father started that fight. I was seven months pregnant and my father didn’t like the way my husband Eddie was treating me, so he told Eddie that he was gonna teach him a lesson, and punched him in the face. That fight lasted til the cops showed up.” “Oh, please!” piped up another voice, the voice of Mrs. Milano, now tiny and frail at 88. “That’s bullshit! What happened was I seen my husband with that bitch he was goin’ with and I went right up to her and said, ‘Come on upstairs with me and I’ll beat the shit out of you’ and she said ‘Hit me right here!’ So I did! I gave her one good slap across her mouth. Then she slapped me back and then everybody got in on the action. I started the fight, not your father, Linda.”

That Linda and her mother both wanted bragging rights shocked me, but should not have considering all that happened at the wedding.

Marilyn Horan was born in Brooklyn and has spent her whole life there. Recently retired from the job of assistant principal in NYC schools, she now has time to write.
 

Not all of 12th Street, which runs from Avenue C to the West Side Highway, has ensnared me. Just two blocks—those between Fifth and Seventh Avenues—are meaningful. When my parents met in 1955, my mother lived at 31-33 West 12th Street, an 11-story, century-old apartment house named the Ardea. The building has a balconied Beaux-Arts façade of warm cinnamon stone and brick and, because it is bookended by shorter structures, it cuts a distinctive profile on the block.

My mother was 21 at the time, and she worked as a copy coordinator for Geritol’s in-house advertising agency. She lived in a large apartment at the Ardea with five roommates, one of whom had been a Miss Rheingold, the beauty contest that drew millions of ballots throughout the 1950s and rivaled Miss America in popularity. Another roommate had a romance with Marlon Brando. Although my mother said she double dated with them, my father disputes the veracity of this claim. But I think it’s true, and judging from how beautiful she was—tall and slender with deep, green-brown eyes, high cheekbones, and her hair cut in a stylish bob—I’m not quite sure why Brando didn’t date her.

Anyway, my father swept her off her feet, and they were married on February 26, 1956 at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, located nearby at Fifth Avenue and 9th Street.

Now this chronology skips ahead more than 20 years, during which my parents migrated northward, first to the Upper West Side, then Yonkers, and, finally, Connecticut, where my sister and I grew up. In 1977 I enrolled as a freshman at New York University and started walking all around Greenwich Village in an effort to get to know the neighborhood. During my sophomore and senior years, I lived in Rubin Hall, a dormitory with the swanky address of 35 Fifth Avenue. Each time I rounded the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, two blocks north, I always marveled at the manicured greenery of First Presbyterian Church, the embodiment of an urban pocket oasis.

I was vaguely aware that my mother had carried on a madcap singles life in a building somewhere on West 12th Street, but I was more captivated then by the West Village address where my father lived when he met her, 10 Downing Street (a nondescript brick structure at the corner of Sixth Avenue, which doesn’t in the least resemble the British Prime Minister’s grand residence at the same address in London). Having heard one too many tales about my steady college diet of cereal topped with Sweet’N Low, my mother would take me out for a meal at least once a week in the Village to rescue me from the inedible dorm food. We often ate across the street from Rubin at Feathers, a ground-floor restaurant with big picture windows at 24 Fifth Avenue, an apartment house that had formerly been the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

Shortly after I graduated in 1981, my parents bought a pied-a-terre in the John Adams, a massive 1960s white-brick high-rise at 101 West 12th Street, on the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue.

In 1983, my closest college friend, Ellen, moved with her husband into an apartment at 125 West 12th Street, a prewar, six-story building separated from the John Adams by a narrow brownstone. Between visits to my parents and Ellen, I spent a lot of time on 12th Street in those days, and I often imagined that Ellen’s building, with its trim window boxes and clipped, fenced hedgerow, sniffed haughtily up at the John Adams, a swaggering behemoth that probably blocked views and sunlight for some of the residents of 125 West 12th when it was erected.

In June of 1984, a truck struck my mother as she crossed the street in front of the John Adams. She was taken to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital at 12th Street and Seventh Avenue. The accident left her with three fractured ribs and three pelvic fractures.

Ellen called me two weeks later and said, “Look in today’s ‘Metropolitan Diary’ column in The New York Times.”

A former volunteer ambulance attendant who had helped my mother after she was hit had written an item about the incident, noting that, despite what had just happened to her, she was concerned about only one thing: “Please would somebody call my husband? Just tell him that I got hit by a truck and it wasn’t my fault.” Although my mother’s typical female response is funny and touching, I also find her self-doubt pathetic and heart-breaking in light of the darker turn her life took soon after.

In late 1985 she sank into a clinical depression from which she never recovered. On a weekday the following June, despite her lifelong fear of heights, she sat repeatedly on the windowsill of her apartment until neighbors noticed her and alerted the police. They promptly delivered her, once again, to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, where the doctor who examined her pronounced her psychotic and recommended a stay in a controlled environment—a psychiatric ward, where she spent a week.

The oppressively intensifying heat of that July and August mirrored my mother’s deepening disintegration. We didn’t trust her to be alone anymore, so on nights when my father was out of town on business, I’d join her at their apartment. I was finally residing on 12th Street, but hardly in the way I had envisioned.

My mother’s second suicide attempt, on September 15, 1986, was successful. My father discovered her body when he returned home from work. I arrived there soon after he called me, having hurtled in a taxi down to 12th Street from the Upper West Side. I remember that as I sat in the back of the taxi, staring at a yellow-foam-stuffed gash in the black seat next to me, I became dimly aware of the violent rip my mother’s suicide had made in the fabric of my world.

Her body was slumped across the bed, and the police had draped a blanket over her. A bloated foot, mottled purple and blue, stuck out from under the blanket. Next to her on the night table stood a glass of water, the bottles of pills on which she had overdosed, and a note. I desperately wanted to lift the blanket and see her face a final time, but my family and the police who had been assigned to stay with us to await the medical examiner and morgue wagon dissuaded me from doing so.

As a young woman striking out on her own in New York, 12th Street had been the site of such promise for my mother. The street was not only part of the physical architecture of her life, but also a feature of her interior landscape. I shared this link to 12th Street with her, and when she killed herself there, the street became a source of profound anguish for me. For a long time after she died, I couldn’t walk down the block from St. Vincent’s to the John Adams without feeling the ground shift under me, and I often avoided that block altogether.

In 1990, Ellen and her husband bought a co-op in the Ardea, and it was this confluence that made me realize, Aha!—that’s the building where my mother lived when she met my father. In 1992, my father, happily remarried, sold his apartment in the John Adams and left the city for good.

I wish I could say that the web of 12th Street connections between Ellen, my mother, and me ended at this point, but it didn’t. In 1998 I attended a memorial service at the Ardea for Ellen’s husband, who had also committed suicide. Ellen still lives in the building, and when I visit her, I can think of nothing but our shared history of love and loss on 12th Street.

I can walk down 12th Street now with ease though never without baggage. I have bittersweet memories that, over time, have become so blurred I’m not sure which are mine and which are my mother’s.

Eve Glasberg is a former senior editor at Travel & Leisure. She is now a freelance writer and consulting editor.
 

All my hopes of becoming titillated by great literature were dashed when I noticed it was written in Middle English. In order to understand the sexual connotations, you had to read the footnotes. There’s something about a footnote that slows down the action. I usually skip them. Sex is about stripping bare, relating to the other person without any clothes. Footnotes are like wearing two sweaters, adding on what doesn’t need to be there. I trust authors. I don’t need to see proof that the facts the authors claim are true do exist. I know they wouldn’t deceive me unless they had to.

She wore two scarves. One of wool to match her coat. The other of cotton to match her dress. She looked stunning. But anyone who dressed up for a Chaucer class would definitely not find me appealing. Though, I appreciated her not changing her seat. Some women don’t like you sitting in back of them. They can’t tell what you’re fantasizing about. And I fantasized a lot about Cybill’s back. I’m embarrassed to say they were all of an erotic nature. I was never a ‘Back person.’ Usually backs don’t turn me on. But Cybill had an amazing back, one of the best that I had ever seen. Most backs beckon you to catch up to the woman so you can gaze at her profile. That’s their only purpose, besides holding the body erect. I kept staring at her back. Her shoulder blades were well defined.

She must have worked out a lot. And once in a while she faced me to say hello. But I felt safer viewing her from the back. That way she couldn’t see my face while I was having fantasies about her.

The teacher asked us why we were taking a Chaucer class. Most students said they were taking it because it was required. Cybill said she was taking it because she heard Chaucer was the father of English literature. And to understand the son, which of course was the greater of the two – William Shakespeare – you had to understand the father. The teacher was impressed. But he wasn’t impressed at how she recited Chaucer. She kept stumbling over Middle English. The teacher said she was being too emotive. The emotions were in the words, they were strong enough by themselves, they didn’t need a fancy delivery. "The line, ‘When that April with its sweet roots,’" the teacher said, says it all. She didn’t have to shout it.

One male student would greet her at her desk every morning. He’d try to make small talk. It seemed that his talk kept getting smaller, because for the most part he’d just stand there and gape. One time he got brave and revealed something about himself – he was a math major. Therefore, they had something in common – he wasn’t required to take Chaucer, either. ‘Why don’t we meet one night at a café and talk about our love for Chaucer,’ he said. She must have been thinking about her recital of the Prologue of the Canterbury tales, because she shouted, ‘No. I’m not interested in meeting
you after class to discuss Chaucer or anything else.’ He was embarrassed. He ran out of the class. She stood up, faced the class and said, ‘I can’t believe a mixed-up math major would have the nerve to ask me out.’ Then she sat down. It was like her social life was part performance. I knew better than to ask her out. And anyway, I was in love with her back. What kind of date would it be if I spent the evening sitting behind her. No one would think we were a couple.

The math major stayed away from class for two weeks. He stayed clear of Cybill. She never looked at him. A guy I knew in class said he didn’t think asking someone out on a date was a misdemeanor. He said it was mathematics – the more you ask the better your chances of someone saying ‘Yes.’ – which was something a math major would know. He was convinced that Cybill was going to be famous one day. She made a minor incident the talk of the class. No one talked about Chaucer anymore. They talked about Cybill. He was right.

Hal Sirowitz is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. His first book was Mother Said (Crown). His latest book is Father Said (Soft Skull Press). In between he wrote My Therapist Said, and Before, During & After.