Annie didn’t reveal much about her life. All that we the friends knew was that she lived with her aunt and uncle in Baldwin Harbor. I think she mentioned having a brother, but I wasn’t sure. It never occurred to me to ask her if she had other family, but that was more about my alcoholic family secret thing. I was well trained in the keeping of secrets and turning a blind eye to reality. And, after all, this was suburbia; land of superficiality, where honest questions were rarely posed. And if they were, dodgy answers were the norm.

Turns out, Annie’s mother, Brigid, was a beatnick poet/playwright who lived with her lover, and son, Cado, in a cramped, two room apartment on the fifth floor of 175 Bleecker Street. The reason for our visit was to celebrate Brigid’s birthday. The apartment was packed with some of the strangest people I’d ever met. First off, there was Brigid herself, a very nice looking woman in her forties, with a few missing teeth, a joint in her hand and a tough, bossy way of talking to people. When Annie introduced me to her, she acted like she could have cared less about who I was, which Annie told me wasn’t true. "She treats everyone like that," she said. “And then there was Brigid’s best friend, Jenon, the Gypsy/Playwright/Social Worker from Turkey. Jenon’s lips were purple from drinking wine, her hair was in a wild afro style and when she flashed her eyes on me, I became extremely unsettled and tried to get away from Jenon, but she stood directly in front of me, practically nose to nose and asked me, in a heavily accented dramatic Gypsy dialect, “Ven ver you born?” I answered, “June, 16th,” and she went wild. She grabbed my two hands, pulled me up over to the couch and sat me down. I was so scared, my heart felt like it was nearly beating out of my chest. Jenon looked deeply into my eyes and said, in her gypsy speak, “I must tell you that you are a very high Gemini. James Joyce wrote his masterpiece, Ulysses, about June 16th.” She continued, still staring in my eyes, “You have tremendous energy, sensitivity and awareness. Your soul is on fire with wisdom and light. I know this for I, too, was born on June 16th.”

I managed to get away from Jenon and grabbed a hold of Annie. I was asking her for a joint or some kind of pill when the front door blasted open and in came two scruffy looking men in t-shirts and jeans. One I recognized immediately as Michael J. Pollard; I had just seen him in Bonnie and Clyde. The other curly headed character was introduced to me as Gregory Corso, Annie’s Godfather, who also happened to be, I later learned, an infamous Beat poet who traveled in circles with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Bowles, etc. The two of these guys were both wasted. Gregory went into the living room, laughing and talking some crazy shit while Pollard positioned himself next to the stereo player. He had a Woody Guthrie album under his arm and he put it on the turntable and played it over and over. Every time someone else came into the party, Pollard grabbed them and said, “Hey man, you got to listen to Woody Guthrie, man. He’s a genius, man” and he would drag them over to the stereo and make them listen. Whenever Pollard headed over towards me, I would take him by the shoulder, turn him around, and give a push, and he would walk back to the stereo. Meanwhile, Corso jerked off in the living room, and went wandering around the apartment with a handful of cum. He found Brigid and asked her what he should do with it. “Throw it down the toilet, you asshole.” I smoked a joint, drank some more wine and tried not to listen to the Woody Guthrie album, for the seventh time.

Get me the fuck out of here, I thought, as I moved to the other side of the room and poured myself a glass of wine and lit a cigarette. There was a very pretty woman, with blond curly hair, leaning against the wall by where Brigid kept the wine. She was quietly drinking and eyeballing the crowd. She noticed I was freaking out, and said, “Hi, I’m Jill. Are you Annie’s friend?” “Yes, we go to school together.” I replied. “So, you’re still in high school, huh ? This scene must really be blowing your mind.” “Yeah, kinda,” I said with a deep exhale. The woman introduced herself as Jill Freedman. She told me that she was a photographer and her next project was to travel with a circus. Brigid was riding shotgun as the cook. They were leaving in a few days to catch up to a circus in Philadelphia. The phenomenal document of this experience, Circus Days, was published two years later.

When I returned home late that night, I was amazed as I thought through the wild scene I had witnessed at Brigid's apartment. I may not have been ready to shift into hanging with the crazy, creative, bohemian scene at 175 Bleecker Street just yet, but I was definitely being primed for the journey.

Mary Shanley is a NYC poet/writer who has been reading and performing her work for the past 25 years. She has published: Hobo Code Poems and Mott Street Stories and Las Vegas Stories. Allen Ginsberg suggested she publish her first poems in Long Shot Magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tiffany?”

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

“No, those three witches outside!”

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

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

“But what are they doing out there?”

“Getting some sun on their lunch break.”

“Why?”

“Because they think it looks good.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I think of second-hand books, I think quite literally of anonymous fingers reaching out to me from beyond the grave. I can practically smell the stale breath of the book's past possessor and hear the words pass across his or her lips, buying vicarious intimacy for fifty cents or a dollar a pop. I'm talking about the way things were, when, as a painfully introverted teen in the late 1960's, I did my virgin browsing on Fourth Avenue, and when, unbeknownst to me and itself, this second-hand book Mecca was already on the wane.

Invariably staffed by a wizened old owl, himself hardly visible, perched on a stack of new arrivals (there being no room for table or chair), he might, if you were lucky, help direct you to the right pile, for the arcane inventory was locked in the folds of his brain.

But the secondhand books on my shelf derive from another source. I dug them out of a premature grave.

Down the block from where I have stubbornly plied my literary trade for more years than I care to count, the Eighth Street Bookstore, in its heyday the cherished haunt of aging Beat poets and bibliophiles, went up in flames decades ago, though it feels like the fire was only yesterday.

I happened to be on hand when the demolition men got around to clearing away the debris.

"Watch it, sonny!" one of the workmen muttered, pushing past me a wheelbarrow full of burnt books and broken glass. He dumped the contents into a huge metal garbage container parked just off the curb and broke for the day.

I reached in and plucked out the Complete William Blake.

Seconds later I was up over the edge of that great book coffin, as happy as a boy in a mud puddle, getting litera(aril)ly filthy among burnt books.

I stumbled over jagged sheet metal, former shelves and partitions, amid a hodgepodge of poetry and pornography: Sanskrit erotic verse, Fanny Hill, and Homer. Most of the books were singed but readable, with titles outlined in charcoal and price conveniently obliterated. They cost me nothing more than the effort to dig them out.

Jim, a philosophy grad student who happened by, joined me and together we set about to systematicallystrip-mining the bin.

"Kant here!" I yelled and flung Pure Reason at him.

"You want Williams?" he asked.

"Tennessee or William C.?" I asked.

In the beginning we mercifully glanced at unknowns. But sweat and greed made us choosy. And the obscure poets and thinkers went flying back into oblivion.

When a wall of psychology threatened to cave in on us we deserted the French Surrealists. Breton and Aragon, alas, got buried under Freud and Jung.

"I can tell there are a couple of book lovers here," said a well-dressed old collector with a canny smile. We helped him into the bin. He picked out a few French novels and The Whole Sex Catalogue, "for a friend," and dropped them into his straw basket. "Always find the best things in the trash," he winked, climbed back out and rode off on his bicycle.

"Any occult?" a woman called to us from the sidewalk.

"Come in and look for yourself!" I said.

The passersby got wise. By sundown the bin was as crowded as any bookstore, with browsers demanding: "Where's yoga?" or "How about art books?"

I loaded my haul into a one-wheeled shopping cart and dragged it back to my place. A little girl stopped me on the way.

"What you gonna do with all those books?" she asked.

"Read them," I said.

So the City swallows up its treasure. Life goes on.

After the fire, plywood planks replaced a once book-laden window display. Overnight the new wooden wall was covered with posters announcing upcoming events. The events took place. They too were forgotten.
 

A writer in multiple modes, including fiction (A Modern Way to Die), drama (The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words), and translation (most recently, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist), Peter Wortsman, the recipient of the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award and The Geertje Potash-Suhr Prize of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, was a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. Also a widely published travel writer, his texts have appeared four years in a row in The Best Travel Writing 2008 - 2011. He is also the author of a new series of short e-Books: “The Urban Nomad – Paris” and “The Urban Nomad – Vienna.”

Back in Manhattan my new workplace was called Solidaridad Humana—Human Solidarity. It was a giant shipwreck of a public school on Suffolk and Rivington Streets, long abandoned and vandalized before being commandeered by militants and mural painters with barely enough funds to clean the graffiti. The temperature inside was ridiculous even in March: we had no heat from oil. But there was plenty of heat from enthusiasm. The students were all recent arrivals from the Dominican Republic. Their population in New York was still small then, and they were breathtakingly ambitious. I had the vague sense they worked in shady places for illegal alien wages, and I knew they wanted clean labor in bright offices and big auto repair shops run by Americans. I knew because those were the jobs whose vocabulary I was supposed to teach them. And these were the words we used. We never talked about how they made a living in the meantime.

 I was young and cute with Jewish chick hippie body hair, and the female students kept saying, “Miss! You need to clean your eyebrows!” They didn’t mean it as an insult; the overarching vibe at Solidaridad Human was that everyone was beautiful—and since everyone was so hopped up on the place, that sentiment was heartfelt. The girls were curvy and had names like Leydy. The boys were polite and adorable. Even the old people were sexy, the men in their baggy tango suits on Fridays when we all stayed late and ate big squares of Dominican cornmeal pudding—majarete—and put salsa music on a boom box and danced; the matron-aged, worried women with makeup nonetheless, and heroically bared old cleavage.

 I ran a tight ship but a fun ship. “Teacher,” a student said once when I had them sing Joni Mitchell, “In this class it’s not just about how to work or how to buy a subway token. Teacher you love the English language!” Once during a punch-card lesson, I was thinking about last night with my boyfriend and the students saw my face and started laughing. Then Leydy announced she was marrying Joanny. Maritza started going with Rafy. It was hot in my class—there were even rumors that the hottest girl of all, a gloriously tall, rouged-cheek-boned 22 year old named Altagracia, was very ardent about Elvis and Emmanuel, and the class was so warm and mellow that the guys weren’t fighting over her but instead were sharing. A triangle? “Wow,” I thought, “The Lower East Side is burning!”

 One day in late March I got a new pedagogy idea. I would tape-record some stuff off WNYC, bring it into class, and play it—over and over and over if need be—so the repetition would drum my students with gradual and indelible comprehension.

 We started with the weather. “Blah blah blah blah blah rain blah blah,” I imagined them hearing at first, and I was right. “Rain teacher,” Elvis said. “I hear ‘rain.’

 “Good, class!” I chirped. “Let’s listen again.

 BlahblahblahtodayMarchtwenty-fifthblahblahrain.

“Today, March 25!"

"Good, class! Now let's rewind and replay."

 Blah rain blahblahrainyforty-oneblah blah.

 “Rain today windy forty-one degrees!”

 And so on, through about 14 repetitions, until they had the whole report burned in their brains, complete with grammar points like the future tense and even a few modals such as “should carry your umbrella.”

 “OK, great!” I chirped again. “Now let’s try something more interesting. The news!”

 Blahblahblahblahanniversaryblahblahblah.

 “An anniversary, teacher!”

 “Blahblahwomenblah….”

 “Women in factory, teacher!”

 Blah blah blah.

“Women in factory fell.”

 Blah blah. I was really into it, with my eyes scrunched up, feeling like such a good, innovative teacher. Then I looked. And listened. There was no more English and Altagracia was crying.

 “Ay dios mio todas murieron calcinadas?” she was saying, over and over in Spanish, just as I’d wanted everyone to do in their new language. “They all burned to death? They jumped? They burned! They jumped!”

 Everyone was weeping, and not just from sympathy, I suddenly realized. On the faces of the women I saw stark fear.

 “Teacher,” Altagracia said, and her tears rolled down. “We work in these places. We sew clothes. The doors are still locked! We ask for them to be unlocked and we’re refused!” She broke into sobs.

 Elvis and Emmanuel moved toward her. Till now, whatever they had done to her or with her had been out of class and merely rumored. Now, wanting to comfort her, they risked mutual exposure and their cool. They stared at each other. The class stared at them. Everything felt dampened as it never had before.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling like a terrible teacher and desperately wanting to redeem myself. “Shall we talk about the danger and what to do about it?”

“There is nothing to do,” one of the older women said frostily in Spanish, as though I was a nice teacher but an idiot one. “Nothing except to improve ourselves. No more news tonight. Let’s do the lesson about data-entry words.”

I felt terrible for the duration of the class, and terrible when I walked in next day. The students, though, seemed fine. Leydy and Joanny were planning their wedding, mostly in Spanish but a little in English, too. Maritza was making eyes at Rafy. Altagracia, as usual, was holding court with her flushed cheekbones and smoldering rumors.

Debbie Nathan lives in Upper Manhattan. Her book, Sybil Exposed, about the making of the 1970s bestseller Sybil, is due out in October from Free Press.
 

Mia was an early adopter of different healing modalities. She’d vet the experience first, report back, and then I would give it a go. If I had been a despotic queen, Mia would be my royal food taster to make sure there was no poison in the meal.

“Angels are always watching and protecting,” Mia assured me.

Angel Reading

I typed the words into google, not knowing what to expect.

A universe of 26,500,000 hits came up! “Have I been missing out on something here?” I said aloud.

Doreen Virtue was the expert in the field. Her “Angel Therapy” website sold books and cards, connected to her radio program, and linked to a registration form for International Angel Day. From what I could tell, Virtue’s reputation was stellar. Or at least she had a huge following.

Virtue gave out an “angel therapy practitioner” certificate at weekend workshops. I wasn’t sure what that meant but the air of academia made it sound more legit. That must be the equivalent of the Six Sigma Black Belt people tacked to the end of their business credentials. Something prestigious, but mysterious at the same time.

Besides, I was curious. It must be cool to see angels. Like in the Bible, are people afraid when someone appears? Imagine if Mary screamed and ran out of the room when the Angel Gabriel told her that she’d be Jesus’ mother? There would be no New Testament. Civilizations wouldn’t exist.

Angels must be benevolent. And I thought about Clarence, the angel from the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Clarence was a little inept but finally got the message across to Jimmy Stewart’s George that if he offed himself, George’s lifetime of good deeds wouldn’t have occurred. Who would save George’s kid brother? Who would marry Mary? In the end, George’s life mattered and that touched me every Christmas.

And then I just decided to go, because I realized I should just do it rather than obsess over reasons why or why not. Mia gave me the contact information of the woman she consulted.

On the day of the appointment, I went to the second floor café of the East West bookstore near NYU. The first floor of the store sold books, audios, calendars, yoga mats, crystals, and all things New-Age. Everyone who worked there gave off the energy that they lived the lifestyle and had for a long time. No wonder the store has been a mainstay of the self-help community in New York for more than twenty years.

The café itself was bright and white, smelled of patchouli, and offered an array of tasty organic snacks. The absurdly healthy looking store clerk suggested I try the iced tea because “it was guaranteed to open up the heart chakras.” But I wasn’t so sure the drink would work.

I had arrived a bit early to assess the scene. The angel reader had a makeshift office behind some potted palm trees. I tried to eavesdrop on the conversation, but only heard muffled voices. I moved away from the plants to give the angel reader, her client and the angels some privacy.

The only other person in the waiting area for the divine was a woman with jet-black died hair, probably henna, something natural. Perhaps 50? Or 60? I wasn’t sure because her face was turned away at first, but her hands were vein-y and wrinkled. Her fingers were sausage-like, swollen and misshapen. I tried not to stare.

Right on time, Frances Smith, came from behind the trees and called out my name. As I passed the elderly woman, I realized she had a lazy eye. She gave me a hard look with her good one. I jumped a little.

Frances’ business card described her as an “intuitive healer” and “angel therapist.” She motioned me to sit down. I had fantasized that my conduit to the angels would look ethereal and a bit like the old-school rock chick Stevie Nicks with windblown blond hair, pale skin, and dressed in a flowing gauzy dress. Instead she resembled Cindy Brady. But not Cindy the child actress with the pigtails and braces from the 60s, but the adult actress of the 80s who starred in the in the Brady Bunch reunion movies. She was attractive, blond with a matronly face. And she wore business casual work attire, like this wasn’t her regular job but how she supplemented her day gig as a bookkeeper.

A little hesitant, I asked her, “Have you been certified by Doreen Virtue?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Do you know her work?” Cindy replied.

“Nope, just heard she’s the best. Training with her is like going to Harvard. Is that right?” I queried.

“I wouldn’t put it like that. Shall we start? We only have 20 minutes,” Cindy she was all business. “That’ll be forty dollars,” Cindy said extending her palm. Apparently, the angels had a schedule.

To begin, Cindy asked, “Where do you need help?”

“Career,” I replied.

“Okay. My role is to interpret signs the angels show, like repetitive number sequences, found objects, or tunes hummed. I can’t predict the future. I can validate an answer a person may be struggling to resolve. I won’t tell you anything negative. Remember, the angels are always communicating to you. Sometimes it takes another person to relay the messages.” Cindy told me.

From what Cindy described, I had this image that the angels were just hanging around her. She sounded sincere. If she had a regular time slot at the bookstore, then she must be good.

“What if you don’t see anything?” I prodded.

“I always see or hear something. Sometimes the angels won’t answer a specific question because they don’t want to respond at that time. If I don’t get an answer, I’ll tell you.” Cindy replied. My expression must have turned to a frown, because Cindy reassured, "It’s not a good or bad thing. The angels just don’t think it’s an important enough question to answer. It is very rare that I don’t connect with someone.” I didn’t want the angels to be capricious. If I paid my $40 shouldn’t there me some illumination?

Still, to me, Cindy’s explanation sounded like a disclaimer. It was wrong of me to test Cindy’s credibility. But I couldn’t help myself. And Cindy didn’t do a good job of confidence building. Didn’t my angels tell Cindy that I’m a skeptic?

“Can I take notes?” I asked.

“Of course, let’s begin. There is a lot to do in our twenty minutes.” Cindy was stickler for the schedule. At least she’s a good value, I thought, before the reading began. I noticed that Cindy, unlike other healers, didn’t start out with a blessing or a breathing exercise. Despite the setting, there was no airy-fairy feeling about the interaction. It was a business transaction.

As Cindy spoke, I wondered if the angels nearby could overhear my thoughts.

“The Archangel Gabriel is very strong around you.”

Gabriel? Is he everyone’s angel? Whoa, that’s an important one. Or is Gabriel really Gabrielle? I should look that up.

“You need to focus on your writing. Schedule it in every day.”

Ok, hello angels don’t you see me writing in my journal all the time?

“Calm your mind. Ground it. Meditate.”

Check. I listen to that Buddhist chanting disk. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. I can’t sit in total silence, it makes me sleepy.

“Figure out ways to release your energy. Do you draw? Do you dance?”

Remember that ballet class? It made me so neurotic to look at myself while I exercise. My arms are too long.

“Trust the writing. That’s a big concern for you. Trust it.”

Hmm. Maybe I jinxed myself by questioning her abilities. Ok, calm down. She hasn’t said anything bad.

At the fifteen-minute mark, Cindy shuffled the oracle deck, similar to a tarot card deck but with images of different oracles. She dealt out four cards. The cards were illustrated with fairies, goddesses, angels and other spirit guides. She flipped over each card slowly and deliberately announced their import. At last, we were getting to the important stuff.

The first card, “Ask for what you want”

Is this a trick question?

The second suggested, “Have more fun.”

Easily done.

The third instructed me to “notice a shift in something this summer.”

What does that mean?

And the last was a reiteration of Cindy’s earlier advice, “Trust yourself.”

Didn’t you say that already?

Trusting myself I wondered what was the point of this experience. Nothing Cindy mentioned was very inspiring. Maybe the angels were holding back a response? Because Gabriel was basically telling me to keep on keeping on. I was waiting for an external transcendental moment, but it did not arrive. Did I really expect inspiration to come from angels?

Well, at the very least, I got a good story. Thanks Gabriel.

A lot of people offer advice for a variety of fees. Angel readers, clairvoyants, mediums, and psychics may provide comfort for some. But next time I’ll use my $40 to treat a friend to a drink, a real-life angel who can give me the support I need. I just need to trust myself. Maybe Cindy Brady knew something after all.

Amelia Blanquera is a freelance writer and lawyer. She is a community contributor to the NY Times Local blog and writes regularly for spirituality/creativity site Soulpancake.com, which will release its first book this fall.
 

We’d heard stereotypes about suburban soccer parents too: sports was their life—they pushed their kids into competitive sports and demanding travel teams, whereas we spent our free evenings at the theatre or in book clubs. It turned out we were all more alike than we’d have imagined: some of us lived in houses with basements and backyards, and others lived in high-rise co-ops always short on closet space. But our greatest similarity was the excitement and devotion we felt for our daughters: how we enjoyed the teams’ wins, suffered through their losses, and always brought folding chairs and blankets for inclement weather (a lesson we’d learned from our Westchester opponents).

Years ago, when I first enrolled Amy in a recreational soccer league run by parent volunteers, we emphasized “having fun” and “building skills.” When the score became one-sided, we’d slow down the offense. Our kids attended a Quaker school, where meetings were held to debate whether Quaker values can co-exist with athletic competition.

Eventually our girls wanted a greater challenge. Our solution: forming a tournament team who practiced once a week (if you could make it). Timidly–and naively–we left our cement world and entered our first regional tournament, 30 miles away in Teaneck, New Jersey. We were used to subways and roller-blading as modes of transportation, but we rounded up cars to pool the girls to Soccer Palace, an armory turned into an indoor weekend stadium. There were tanks outside, and a dire sign at the entrance: LEAVE YOUR BODY ARMOR HERE. Military men in camouflage patrolled. Last week our girls had participated in Peace Week at their Quaker school, and here we were in fighting territory.

We knew we were out of our league when the other teams arrived in their snazzy uniforms with matching warm-up suits. We’d avoided the hefty fee to purchase uniforms with each girl’s name on the back, using an extra set leftover from recreational soccer (maroon–the boring color no team had wanted). The sleeves were too long on many girls, and they wore soccer socks in every color of the rainbow. Other teams had cool names, like Torpedoes, emblazoned even on their matching socks! We didn’t even have a name, listed unromantically as DUSC (Downtown United Soccer Club).

I nicknamed them the Rag Tag Team. The Torpedoes jogged into Soccer Palace, two-by-two, in perfectly fit formation. Our girls lazed on the floor, chatting. Cheese dripped from Emma’s mouth as she noshed on a slice of pizza. “Don’t complain to me of a bellyache,” admonished our coach, whom we’d hired just a month ago.

The other teams practiced four times a week on expansive suburban fields, whereas we scrounged around for the few ratty playing fields available in the city. They recruited the oldest and biggest girls within the Under 12 age group. We let anyone play who had a lot of enthusiasm and a moderate amount of skill. Except for Riana, a lanky sixth grader, we were 11- and 10-year-olds plus one tiny but tenacious 9.

We faced our first team, and these giants humiliated us 9-0. “Size doesn’t matter, speed does,” the coach said, but our girls named themselves “The Wee Ones Plus Riana.”

They lost all four games. Our best score was 0-0.

It was painful to watch our daughters get trounced; hadn’t they looked so talented in our little city league? Yet they were undeterred. Lucy summed it up this way: “It gave us a chance to be little kids again.”

Two weeks later, back at Soccer Palace, our girls had only one goal: not to win a game, but to score one goal. Just one. Without a coach. He’d let his vacation schedule interfere with their soccer career; he was in Sweden, leaving us alone in New Jersey. A parent volunteer stepped in. The Wee Ones played their best against formidable opponents in Game 1, losing 2-0. The parents worried how another rout would feel, but our daughters were resilient.

During Game 2, a harrowing alarm penetrated the armory. Should we worry? The military men paraded back and forth, nonchalant. The soccer ball had hit a mat on the side wall, covering the weapons vault; this always triggered the alarm, but the tournament must go on.

Game 2: 0-0. Game 3: 5-0, against another tough–and very tall–team.

Our girls guzzled Gatorade, ate snacks high in trans fats, and returned with heads high for the last match at 9:15 PM. Alice, who claimed she was “pretty tired,” refused to let up. Beckham ran the equivalent of 8.8 miles in every soccer game, but our Alice must have clocked 15. She kept taking shots at the goal...and just missing. Our usually quiet section of the grandstand rooted for Alice and The Wee Ones as if this were a Yankees-Mets subway series.

Alice’s umpteenth attempt. She made the goal! She dove flat onto the field in celebratory relief. Our girls jumped up and down in ecstasy. A girl on the opposing team said, “You’re acting like you never scored a goal before.”

And our team responded in unison: “We haven’t!”

We were winning 1-0--with a long 10 minutes left. My daughter scored the second goal, assisted by one of our smallest players who was celebrating her 10th birthday. I was surprised, and embarrassed, by the tears in my eyes.

Back to the city for an 11:30 PM victory dinner, way past their bedtime (and ours). Over dumplings and lo mein, they made a pact to wear their jerseys to school on Monday.

“My mom’s away this week, and she’s the only one who does laundry in our house,” the birthday girl said.

“Air your jersey out by hanging it out your window tonight,” suggested my daughter.

It was a thrill for underdogs to taste victory, and all week I found myself daydreaming about our entire team wearing matching socks–not with their team name on it or anything...just the same color.

That day has come. The Gotham Girls, appropriately dressed in black uniforms with matching yellow socks, have practiced hard enough to join the Westchester league. When the Westchester teams come to our “home” field, they must be startled to find a large green turf on Pier 40, floating atop the Hudson River—and surrounded by a multi-level parking lot filled with trucks. I happen to prefer our away games, when we car pool north (whereas many of us joke that we avoid going above Fourteenth Street if possible). Grandmothers and aunts who live in neighboring towns come to watch our girls play.

On the sidelines we all look alike—with our containers of thirst-quenching cut-up fruit, biting our nails and trying hard not to behave like folding chair coaches. Our daughters are amazed by the high school fields we play on, which look like college campuses. And real grass! We douse ourselves in sun block and enjoy a few hours in nature’s backyard, where birds sing louder than car horns.

After a close game, we refueled at the infamous 89-year-old Walter’s in Larchmont, the roadside stand under a Chinese pagoda known for hot dogs and curly fries. We always knew great places to have lunch because several parents on our team had grown up in Westchester. A friendly couple ahead of us on line told us they worked in the city. “We play in the suburbs,” we told them. “Reverse commuters.” We never imagined ourselves turning into avid soccer moms and dads—weren’t we city mice, after all? Yes…and no. Next weekend we’re facing the Scarsdale Lightning, and I’m dreaming of getting a double hot dog to go with homemade mustard. The taste might linger until we hit the Triboro Bridge.

Candy Schulman’s essays have appeared in Salon.com, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and many other publications. She is an associate writing professor at The New School and has completed a Young Adult novel.

The day was St. Patrick's Day 2002 and I drove his 1986 baby blue unvacuumed Econo van, with our kids and his ashes, into the Known Center Of The Universe (K.C.U). Whenever Bob Kaiser drew a map for anywhere, he always put a dot where New York City was, even if the map was for Africa, and wrote K.C.U.

It was the year anniversary of my husband's death. His remains sat in the back seat between our children, Rhapsody and Bucky, in a clear giant deli pickle jar that had our bright colored handprints surrounding him. We picked up my best friend Kim who lived on the Upper East Side where she gave me a one-year-death-anniversary gift: matching Patagonia periwinkle pullovers. We each put them on. Then Kim sitting in the passengers co-pilot seat said, “Today, I don’t know if I am helping a friend or a felon -- let’s go.”

I met Bob in 1988 while commuting into Manhattan on the #164 bus from Glen Rock, New Jersey. I was born in 1964. He was born in 1950. He was wearing black, got on the bus ahead of me and sat in the back. This is what he used to tell people when they asked how we met: I saw this vision of white. She had shoulder length blonde hair and a white sweater set welded to her thin body. She had a warm smile. If the bus driver saw out of the corner of his eye her running late for the bus, he would stop and wait for her. There was a whole glow about her. I looked at her and saw, this is the woman I am going to marry.

Bob watched me for two months before making his move. He’d say, “Katie did more things on a bus in an hour than most people did in a day.” I read my New York Times, wrote in my journal, read my book (Bonfire of the Vanities), listened to music, occasionally napped and spoke with my fellow passengers.

I always sat in the front row. I like seeing, and being the youngest of eight I make myself first when I can. This one morning Bob sat in the front row with Bonfire of the Vanities on his lap. Bob was a Broadway scene shop owner for twenty years. He knew what props were and how to use them. I said, “Great book.” Bob replied, “Just got it,” and our thirteen-year dialogue began.

When we arrived at the bus terminal I got off onto the platform and inhaled fumes. Bob was the last passenger to exit. He stood at the top of the bus steps with black bags. He had such a sweet boyish face, little lips that smiled closed, brown eyes and brown hair. The solidness of his body attracted me, his thighs had the density of 100-year-old oak trunks.

Bob carried an IBM portable computer. They weren’t so portable then. He liked being first in technology. As he stepped down the three bus steps, I remember him turning sideways a little to fit himself and his bags. I smiled when we stood side-by-side; blonde and thin, dark-haired and a little hefty. I gave him my home phone number. He said I gave him the wrong number and he found me where I worked, backstage at The Metropolitan Opera.

One sunny spring day I sat by the Lincoln Center fountain waiting for my date. In my periwinkle suit, I watched yellow taxis and black limos pull up. I saw a white van with red lettering, “Rent Me, Rent Me, $19.95 a day!” and immediately I thought, “Please God no, not me, not my date.” It was Bob arriving distinctively.

This next part of the story I like to leave out but Bob always told it. When he opened my car door, he saw the door was covered in vomit. He drove a colleague home the night before who drank too much. I never mention that part; I tell people Bob picked me up, we went to Armstrong’s for dinner and we talked a lot. He thought I was older, I thought he was younger. He was the most engaging man I had ever spoken with. He was smart and he listened to me. He thought I was bright and beautiful.

On St. Patrick’s Day 2002, the one year anniversary of Bob's death had, our first stop in the van, after Starbucks, was Lincoln Center. I scattered some of Bob’s ashes in the fountain of well wishers. Next stop was outside the restaurant Armstrongs, located on the corner of 59th Street and 10th Avenue, where we'd had our first date. Then I drove us downtown to the meatpacking district. This was before the whole gentrification. Bob had introduced me to fresh-killed pigs for our pig roasts here. He'd taught me that a twenty-five-pound pig was $4 a pound, a fifty-pound pig was $2 a pound and a one-hundred-pound pig was $1 a pound, so just buy the hundred-pound pig! So I left some of Bob near the pigs in every size! Then I sprinkled some of his ashes outside Balducci’s where he bought his oversized veal chops and then on the doorsteps of Mario Batali’s restaurant, Babbo. I felt these last sprinklings were a tad cruel on my part; to leave him outside looking in, unable to sniff and taste and snack, ever.

Then I dropped Kim off outside her apartment and drove to Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. When Bob began his Broadway career, in the late 60’s, he built the boulders for that open-air theater and it made tremendous sense to me at the time and karmically proper that Bob’s pebbles be placed there during his close. I sprinkled a handful of him over the wooden fence, but it did not feel very satisfying, so the kids kept watch for cops while I hopped the fence. With each hand holding some of him, I walked onto center stage. In front of me was an empty audience, willing to listen to anything I had to say. Behind me was a pond, swamp grass and castle. I looked forward, closed my eyes and began to spin.

I thought about his twenty-year career on Broadway. I thought about how he used to say, “I got the needle out of my arm,” when he summed up to his scenery buddies why he left Broadway. I thought about all the dinners we used to charge and I did not enjoy because we were always broke and then one day I let go and began to enjoy them because some how, year after year, we made it. As I spun I let his ashes drift in a circle around me, coating me, surrounding me in his dust. He always told me I was one drink shy, but as a widow I was a drunk high without alcohol and I loved being with him and leaving him in this open space. I also loved breaking rules to do it. Before leaving I bowed to the audience and smiled, as I often do, wondering what he’d think.

Kate Kaiser is an artist who loves finding the sounds in poem, prose and song that suit her. Fitting language is like finding a perfectly fitted dress, it's not too big, it's not small and the color illuminates. www.KateofHoboken.com
 

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.
 

Her mail came addressed to two completely different names. Behind her back, everybody called her Bingo. Eventually, she did the same.

Our eight-unit building has two apartments on each landing. Bingo lived across the landing from me. When I first moved in, I tried to be cordial, and she chirped her hellos and told me how happy she was to have me as her new neighbor. She started giving me things. Kitschy fold-up tray tables with faux black marble tops. Little spring-bouquet and cartoon-animal decorated note cards I eventually threw away. Then one day she offered me a knit black vest that reeked so powerfully of bourbon it made my eyes water. I said No Thank You.

Maybe it was then that Bingo’s attitude toward me began to roller-coaster, alternating friendliness and fury for the rest of the time I knew her. It probably would have happened anyway.

Bingo told me she was a hand model for a local art school. Everyone else said she was a retired prostitute. Those letters to the two different names appeared to be earnings statements from financial institutions. So maybe some prostitutes really do save up their money.

The clanging of bottles would herald her arrival. Bingo drank. And when she drank, she fell down. I’d frequently hear the tumbling of Bingo and unknown objects to the floor inside her apartment. When she drank in bars, she’d fall trying to make it back up the stairs to her place. We’d hear that too. One day I found her lying at the bottom of the stairs, rolled up like a little hedgehog in a terribly matted pink fake-fur jacket and wrinkled black miniskirt, dead leaves and twigs stuck all over them. As I helped her up, she mumbled about having fallen down in the park.

We never knew quite what she’d do next, or what would set her off. One afternoon an actor stopped by my apartment to pick up a script. We were both in a hurry, spoke briefly, then he took off. A couple of minutes after he’d gone, Bingo’s screaming voice assaulted my door. “Cunt! Bitch! Bitch! Cunt! Cunt!” and went on for several minutes. I didn’t think this was necessarily a crime, so I didn’t call the cops, but I rang up the landlord for guidance. Held up the phone so he could hear the continuing screams. “Forget it!” he laughed, “She’s harmless.” And that was true. She scared the hell out of me anyway.

Apart from that psychotic dirty look she’d sometimes shoot your way, she never did actually hurt anybody, though sometimes she got into screaming fights with people over nothing. And every now and then she’d do something flat-out insane. One night she stood in the garden, bleating a fractured monologue about how the Catholics were going to get her, but the Russians were going to get them. One day she had her answering service call me to ask what I wanted from her. Her smoke alarm had started chirping as the battery ran out; she had no idea where the sound was coming from, and assumed I was tormenting her. One Christmastime, she ran up and down the stairs ringing a Salvation Army bell. She dropped her underwear onto the tree branches outside the windows of Glen, the cute pastry chef who lived in the apartment below her–apparently unaware that Glen was gay. She also dropped her used tampons into the courtyard below her east window, seriously disconcerting the young couple who found them outside their door.

Every now and then late at night I’d hear her conversing with a fellow barfly at her front door, Bingo murmuring a boozy protest, the guy saying something original like “Come on, baby, you know you want it.” They’d go in, and sometimes a scuffle would ensue. She’d scream for help, knowing I’d call the police. They’d show up, there’d be slurred explanations about Catholic missionaries or something, nobody’d get arrested, and the cops, rolling their eyes, would retreat till the next time.

The end began for Bingo with one of her famous falls. I didn’t know about it till months later when she told me she thought she’d broken her arm, but never went to the doctor. The bone didn’t set properly, so she lost the use of it; it hung stiffly at her side, and she needed help taking care of herself.

I was heading out for a meeting one day when I heard this rhythmic grinding noise coming from the stairway. Some kind of machinery? Hornets? A radio show? The plumbing malfunctioning? Nope. It was a man in a down jacket snoring away on the landing. An acquaintance of Bingo’s with no place else to go.

He moved in and became her “caretaker.” I still heard the falling-down noises every now and then, but he ran all the errands, took in the mail, lugged the groceries. At one point it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Bingo in months.

Bingo’s great luck/bad luck lay in the miniscule rent-controlled rent she paid, a fraction of the fair-market price.

One day a crew of workmen descended on the apartment. They came out rolling their eyes the way the cops did. One of them mentioned to me the irony that the “caretaker” was beating the patient up.

The landlord got her declared incompetent and evicted her.

And so she was gone. Replaced by a parade of attractive, fit, cheerful young career women, Katies and Jennifers and Stephanies. The change reminded me of Times Square. The seamy, dangerous and forbidden giving way to the corporate, bland and clean.

Most of the time I’m consumed by my own work and life. I’d only think about my odd neighbor after one of those episodes with the cops, or some notable screaming/falling/discarding of intimate objects incident. But Bingo did force me to think about her ex-profession. I work in film and TV, where hooker characters abound, as gimmicks, plot conveniences and vehicles for glamorous actresses to dress down and win Oscars. But in reality–john after john after john, violation after violation after violation– Did the terrible routine of her profession shatter her sanity? Was she unhinged to begin with, and the booze and career choice push her over the edge completely? Or did it all mesh together, like Bingo tumbling down the stairs? Why did she think she needed two names? To pretend that one of them wasn’t really her?

Two weeks ago I did something that had never occurred to me before: I Googled Bingo’s two distinct names. One gave up no results whatsoever. The other produced just one little notice–that she died in upstate New York earlier this year.
 

A native of Chicago, Illinois, Christine Nieland graduated from Northwestern University. She has worked as a filmmaker, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and story editor in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.  She currently works as a writer, researcher and story analyst for RHI Entertainment, and in her spare time, she’s a figure skater.

My husband posed this question in an attempt to liven up a rather staid Upper East Side party one night. The gathered Wall Street wizards, lawyers and M.B.A. types thought about it. “Exactly what we’re doing,” most of them concluded. Finally it was my turn. I didn’t hesitate. “I’d like to be a torch singer,” I said.

Even my husband was startled. I don’t know why; he knows all about my years with a singer named John Kuhn.

I first knocked on the door of John’s music room thirty-one years ago, when I was 23. “I understand you perform miracles,” I said by way of introduction, and he laughed heartily.

John still recalls those words to me now, telling me that he was so charmed he immediately agreed to squeeze me in, even though I had not much ability and no professional aspirations at all.

John was a professor of voice at New York University, plying his trade at the piano in a small cubicle in a West 4th Street building with an uncertain elevator. That fall, while I was enrolled in the graduate journalism program, I had also signed up for guitar lessons with an instructor named Mary Roof, who worked patiently with me on chords and fingering. But every time she tried to get me to sing along, I would freeze. “You really need to get over that,” she’d say. I was painfully self-conscious; my voice was small and whispery. Eventually she said, “You ought to see the man next door.”

“It’s hopeless,” I said.

“Oh, you should hear some of the people he gets in there,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I hear them through the wall. You’d be amazed what he can do.”

And that’s why I knocked on John’s door. I was ripe for transformation. I arrived at his doorstep carting my trunkload of emotional baggage, one of the walking wounded. A year before, I’d had a boyfriend, a heartbreaker musician and actor named Kenny with whom I’d lived the last year in college. He would jump out of bed to compose ballads on his guitar, and would stare penetratingly into my eyes when he sang. What his voice lacked in size it made up for in confidence. I was still young and stupid enough to mistake his self-absorption for an artistic temperament. When the group he played with wanted to make a demo tape, I took them to a family friend who was a sound engineer, and for several weeks I listened as they laid down tracks in the studio, an achingly lovely four part polyphony that Kenny had composed. The girl singer, Laura, had a clear, pure voice without vibrato, and I yearned to sound like that. I knew better than to try, however. Once, reading a book, I had dared to hum to myself, and Kenny looked up, startled. “You can carry a tune?” he’d said, his amazement clearly an insult. That summer, he performed at the Village Vanguard and other clubs around town, and I would sit in the front row, a good little girl friend, clutching an extra set of guitar strings in case one snapped. Then one Friday night, Kenny was going to make his acting debut in an off-Broadway production, and arrived to pick me up on his way to the theater. His best friend Mark waited in the car. Kenny seemed excited, glittery-eyed, as he said, “Sit down, we need to talk for a minute.” I waited expectantly, ready to offer the pep talk I thought he wanted. “We always said we’d be honest with each other,” he said, taking my hand. I’ve since learned to hate when people say that. You know you’re about to hear something you’d rather not.

Kenny looked long and hard into my eyes and said, “I’ve met someone else.”

And with that bombshell, he told me that Mark was waiting so we had to hurry, pushed me out the door, and drove to the theater. Chilled and nauseated, I sat through the first act, then spent Acts II and III sobbing on Mark’s shoulder in the front seat of his Trans-Am. Later that evening, in the midst of breaking up with me, and making sure I heard all about the sexy, talented actress who’d snared him, Kenny said, “I forgot to ask, what did you think of my performance tonight?” I stared at him, and finally said, “You mean, ‘aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?’” The truth was, he’d probably been good; Kenny was good at many things, except kindness.

So when I knocked on John’s door a year later, I needed to prove something.

John started me out on scales, of course, and songs. Wonderful songs. Show tunes, pop music, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Stephen Sondheim. Melodies from little known musicals, and poignant songs from World War II that somehow seemed to be about my lost love as well. “I’ll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places…” I would sing. “You have a small voice, but your pitch is professional,” he told me. He taught me breath control by having me blow at a candle without extinguishing it, and showed me how to sing from the diaphragm, supporting my voice from below my rib cage, not from the throat. He demonstrated the difference between chest voice and head voice, showing me how to feel the buzz of sound through my sinus cavities.

John had performed with the NBC Opera company, recording and touring. He was born in Munich, where both his parents had been opera stars. His mother sang with Caruso.

But because he was half-Jewish, he had fled Germany in the thirties. His wife Erica, also German, had been a dancer, though by the time I met her she was a day camp director, big, hale and hearty. They lived on the Upper West Side in a prewar apartment with high ceilings, dark furniture, and Erica’s mother, who would answer the phone in a little girl voice, though she was well past eighty. He and Erica had no children, but John fussed over a terrier that he always referred to as “my little fellow.” He would often invite me for parties, where with very little urging the guests could be persuaded to sing. But never me. And I told no one I was taking lessons, for fear they’d ask me to sing. I did it for love, for the pure pleasure of it, because it was better than therapy, it was therapy, and I felt exhilarated at the end of our sessions, floating along the east end of Washington Square, home to 10th street, where I’d bound up the stairs humming happily. Daily I’d practice my scales in the bathroom, because John said the acoustics from the tiles would amplify my voice pleasingly. I sang even when I had a cold, because John said that the stuffiness gave you more chest resonance.

John was short and ebullient, and when he needed to teach me how a phrase should sound, he would mimic my range by singing in falsetto. But occasionally he would demonstrate a few notes in his own voice, a powerful tenor, which was a joy at such close range, and always so unexpected from this puckish, red-haired man who was a shameless flirt. He was a wonderful teacher, excited, animated, encouraging, and I loved him for it. Often I’d bring him little treats — homemade brownies, or champagne grapes. Because I knew he went long hours without eating, frequently I’d surprise him with coffee and muffins. I’d tell him stories about my boyfriends, or my career in book publishing. I could always make him laugh; he could always coax music out of me.

Whenever he returned from Europe, he would always bring me back a bag of his favorite, cherished nougat cookies. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he said. “It took every ounce of my self-control not to finish them. You are the only woman I share them with.”

“I bet you tell that to all your women,” I said.

Sometimes I’d meet him at the end of his teaching day, and we would go to one of the many overheated coffee shops that ringed the campus, all of them smelling of dog, damp wool and scruffy students. “You shouldn’t drink milk,” he’d tell me. “It gums up the voice.” Always animated, he would order the blue fish platter, and, wiping flecks of food from his chin, regale me with stories about the places he’d sung, the people he’d known.

“You must be bolder,” he’d tell me. “Sing. Emote. You’re too controlled.” I took it metaphorically: I was too tight, too constricted. Life lessons, music lessons, they were one and the same. Take risks, let your voice crack, don’t be embarrassed, it’s only the two of us and the piano, he’d say. And I’d reach for that note, sometimes failing, laughing with embarrassment, and still he’d push me further.

“It’s time you sang in a group,” he told me the summer night he took me to an open sing on 57th street across from Carnegie Hall. One of his students was doing a solo. I couldn’t sight read, but clutching the sheet music they’d passed out at the door, I managed to stumble along beside John as we worked our way through the “Carmina Burana”, a medieval melding of voices and glorious sound.

“You want me to sing what?” I said the time he handed me the music to “Hey Big Spender.” “You need to be looser,” he said. “Oh yeah?” I said. “I suppose you want me to wear a boa and do a bump and grind too.”

“I don’t think my heart could take it,” he said. “Just sing.”

And I sang. I sang all the time. My voice became a small, tuned instrument, a source of pleasure, and healing.

Eventually, I married and moved out of the city, and the lessons tapered off. The last time we met for lunch, I told him my news: I was pregnant with my first child. Today we don’t see each other often, but we talk a few times a year on the phone. “And how is the great American novelist?” he’ll ask. Each May, I remember his birthday, and always send him delicacies at Christmas — Royal Riviera pears, chocolate truffles, linzer tart cookies. Always food. Summers, when he and Erica go to Maine, he visits the Harbor Candy Store I told him about in Ogunquit, and never fails to send me a few pounds of fudge. Our friendship has lasted more than thirty years, forged from love of food and song, contrapuntal sustenance for stomach and soul.

“Sing out, Louise,” the stage mother in Gypsy calls. And I do. John gave me back my voice. I will never be the chanteuse of my fantasies; I still sing sotto voce, low and soft, not meant to be overheard. But still, I sing, trusting that the notes John taught me will be there when I need them.

Liane Kupferberg Carter’s essays, articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times syndicate, McCall’s, Parents, Child, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Newsday, The Westchester Review, Mom Writers Literary Magazine, Memoir(and), Literary Mama, and Writers’ Bloc. She is a 2009 winner of the Memoir Journal Prize for Memoir in Prose.