A Free Evening of Non-Fiction In The Lower East Side.

Reading on September 23 will be:

Rob Williams - Bear Patrol 

Lily Shen - It Is Easy To Speak Chinese

Kenneth P. Nolan - Farrell’s

Nathaniel Page - Spanked 

The host is Connor Gaudet - Hung Out

About The Readers...

Waiting in her car in front of my building was Maggie, 40ish with a bowl cut and oversized glasses. She and I were friends from our jobs at the New York City Public Advocate’s office, where she was Liaison to the Asian Community.

I slipped into the passenger seat.

“What’s a fancy white boy like you living in a dump like this for?” She smiled.

“It’s not that bad.” That was a lie. It was bad. Upstairs was 350-square-feet of misery I called home along with four of my bros from California. Though I shared a mattress with a raging alcoholic, I still had it better than Ben who slept on the padded bench and Chris who paid $75 a month to sleep on a yoga mat on the linoleum floor.

“It’s pretty bad,” Maggie said. “I grew up in Chinatown, and I wouldn’t live here.”

We drove to our first stop, a public elementary school near the Manhattan Bridge that was functioning as a polling place that day. Maggie stayed in the car while I got out, carrying a stack of posters, tape and a stapler. Apparently, we were the last campaign to arrive. Every post on the sidewalk was covered top to bottom with posters from various campaigns. Candidates for city council, judgeships and mayor were all represented on these political totem poles.

For the past year and a half I’d been working for Mark Green’s campaign for mayor. I’d started out as an intern in his government office while still in college and worked my way up to press secretary. That morning Green was the undisputed front runner, due in large part to his adversarial relationship with Rudy Giuliani, whose approval ratings had plummeted in his second term. The winner of that day’s primary was expected to be the next mayor after going through the motions of beating the unknown and un-feared Republican candidate, Michael Bloomberg.

I tacked a Mark Green poster to the one sliver of empty space right above a Fernando Ferrer poster. I took a step back to admire my handiwork in all its glory: forest green and white; bold, persuasive lettering. Nothing but a few inches of blue remained visible from Ferrer’s sign.
I continued on like this for three hours, covering every bare surface we came across, with no help from Maggie.

“I have to watch the car,” she explained. “These Giuliani cops would love to ticket me while I’m hanging Mark Green posters.”

With ten posters left and less than an hour before I was supposed to be at campaign headquarters, I found a telephone pole set back in an alley that I designated the Mark Green post. I taped six vertically and the remaining four flapping off horizontally, like a scarecrow.

At 8:45 my 6 train screeched to a stop at Grand Central and I hustled through the train station to the Graybar Building where I rode the elevator to campaign headquarters. As I approached the door, I braced myself for the election-morning mayhem of staffers and volunteers rushing about with campaign paraphernalia. I yanked the door open a crack and jumped out of the way. Nothing. I opened the door farther and looked in. Nobody. I stepped inside. Everyone was around the corner, back toward the press department. They were just standing there, quiet, huddled around one of the TVs.

I approached to see what they were watching. Smoke billowed out from a top floor of one of the World Trade Center buildings. A small fire that looked containable.

“What’s going on?” I asked the man next to me, a volunteer I’d never seen before.

“A plane crashed into the Trade Center.”

I’d seen this happen before. Two days before Christmas one year when I was a kid, a twin-engine plane crashed into the Macy’s near my home. The plane burst through the wall and sprayed burning fuel on a hundred holiday shoppers.

I poked my head into our opposition research office to say hello to my two friends who spent their days looking through the other candidates’ garbage.

“How’s it looking?”

“Not so good,” Stu said. “It’s gonna be tight.”

“He’s just being pessimistic,” Justin said. “It’ll be tight for sure, but we’ll pull it out.”

A chorus of screams rang out from the group watching TV. I turned around and saw the second tower now on fire. People were shouting.

“Another plane hit!”

“This is terrorism!”

We stared at the screen in silence. Then someone yelled, “Everyone, we need you to come up front to get your assignments. The election is still on as far as we know and we need to act like it.”

I peeled off, but the others who saw the crash stayed behind.

My job that morning was to hustle for votes at the 77th and Lexington subway station and then knock on doors in Lower East Side housing projects in the afternoon. Heading back down to the subway, I realized I’d left my government-issued pager at home, and since I didn’t own a cell phone I was going to need it. I decided to jam downtown, grab it, then rush back to the Upper East Side.

Back at my apartment building, I bounded up the stairs, eager to tell my roommates about the Trade Center. The apartment door was cracked open but no one was home. I climbed the flight of stairs to the roof and pushed the door open, stepping into the sun’s glare. Chris was there with his back to me. There were other people I’d never seen before. Then I noticed there were people on all the surrounding roofs, everyone facing south, staring at an immense cloud of smoke.

“What’s up?” I said.

Chris turned. His face looked blank, as if he were scared to move. “The building just collapsed.”

“What do you mean?” I looked at the buildings again. I could see only one and figured the other was shrouded in the smoke.

“It collapsed,” Chris said again, his voice cold and monotone.

His words hit my forehead and crumbled to the ground. What Chris was saying was impossible. Those buildings were permanent. He may as well have told me the sun burned out.

Chris had quit his job in the collapsed building three days earlier. He was supposed to travel to Italy later that day with his sister Hannah, who I then realized was standing next to him.

“Bombs went off at the bottom and brought the whole thing down” he said.

Bombs. For some reason that made his story believable. I’d seen bombs take down buildings before – on TV at least. My body went cold with fear. Adrenaline took hold. My skin felt electric. I got a rush of energy, but couldn’t move.

“I’m going to turn on the news,” I said. Chris and Hannah followed me downstairs. The image on the TV was a ball of smoke and dust covering everything. The announcer’s voice was frantic.

“The north tower has just collapsed!” she cried. “Both towers have now collapsed!”

Hannah sobbed. She was seated on the padded bench, hugging her knees against her chest. It was her first trip to New York, her first time outside of California.

The phone rang. It was Dave, a friend who had recently moved out of our apartment to live in a residential hotel. “How is everything over there?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“How’s the building. Is it okay? Does it feel safe there?”

“Yeah, the building’s fine. We’re safe.”

“Okay, I think I’m gonna come over. I need to leave midtown. I don’t feel safe here.” He hung up.

It was true that our building was still standing, but for how long I didn’t know. They, whoever they were, had placed bombs in the Trade Center. It was possible there were bombs elsewhere in the city. The TV cut to shots of people streaming out of downtown, out of all of Manhattan. They were heading for the bridges – the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg.

That’s the terrorists’ plan, I thought. They were flushing people out of downtown, out of Manhattan, and then, when the bridges were filled, they’d detonate the bombs, bring down the bridges, killing thousands more. They were going to blow up every place that people were likely to be. Hospitals. That’s where my girlfriend was. She had an appointment at a hospital on First Avenue, near the U.N. building. The U.N. Another target. I called her cell phone. Her voice mail picked up immediately.

“I gotta go get Catherine,” I said to Chris. “She’s at the hospital.”

“Dude, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go anywhere right now,” Chris said. Hannah was in a fetal position on the bench, crying through a phone call to her mom back home.

“I gotta go.” I was in a trance as I bounded down the stairs against my better judgment. Outside, people shoved past my building, shoulder to shoulder, in a lava flow of fear and anxiety stretching all the way from my sidewalk, across two traffic lanes, the wide median, two more traffic lanes, to the sidewalk opposite.

I trudged the half-block north to Delancey Street. It was the same; people covered every inch. I looked east and saw that everyone was headed to the Williamsburg Bridge.

The crush of bodies overwhelmed me. It felt like there was just a matter of time before a fight broke out, then a stampede. Hundreds would be trampled to death. Right then laughter erupted from a group of teenage boys, which sent me over the edge.

I forced my way back to my building and tried to unlock the door. My shaky hands fumbled with the keys. I got the door open, dashed inside, slammed it behind me.

“Dude, I told you,” Chris said as I entered the apartment.

I slumped back into the chair in front of the TV.

Dave walked in a little while later, his face ashen, expressionless. “Hey,” he said, dropping his bag and sitting down next to Hannah on the bench.

“Hey,” we responded then turned back to the news.

A reporter from a local station interviewed a man near City Hall about the extent of the deaths and injuries. “Right now we don’t know,” the man said. “It’s possible that the planes were filled with deadly chemical or biological weapons. If that’s the case, the death total could exceed 100,000.”

“Shut up!” Dave shouted at the TV. “Who the hell is this guy? Why are they letting him talk? He doesn’t know anything. He’s just gonna scare the hell out of everyone.”

He slumped back against the wall, and we continued watching, our hearts beating a little harder.
Hannah finally hung up the phone, and it rang. I grabbed it. “Hello!”

“Sam?”

“Catherine!”

“Why haven’t you called me?” she yelled. “I can’t believe you’re at home. I’ve been calling you over and over! Why didn’t you call me? I thought you might be campaigning near the Trade Center when it fell. Why didn’t you call me?”

She never made it to her doctor’s appointment. Running late, she was still showering when the first plane hit. The brownstone shook. She rushed over to the Brooklyn Heights promenade for its view of downtown Manhattan across the river. As she watched the buildings burn, she noticed the row of women with their kids watching the horror unfold. Catherine walked back to her apartment and spent the next three hours calling me.

We decided on the phone that I would go to her place where it was safer. I waited another couple of hours until the mob had thinned and the police finished their search for bombs on the bridges. There were still no cars on the streets, just a few stragglers in the middle of the road like last-place finishers in a marathon.

The subway car was crowded but no one spoke or made a sound. When the train pulled up to its first stop in Brooklyn, I dashed out of the station and exhaled.

Catherine waited for me on her stoop behind a line of 10 people, some covered in white dust, waiting to use the pay phone outside of her garden apartment.

Not knowing what to do we went for a walk. We passed brownstone after brownstone shaded by elms until we reached Montague Street, the main drag in Brooklyn Heights. It was late afternoon and neither of us had eaten since breakfast. We stepped into an Indian restaurant and took a table next to the front window. The place was empty. We watched paper after paper from the Trade Center float down onto the street outside. It reminded me of jogging through the neighborhood in late October as leaves rained down.

Afterward, we walked a couple of blocks to the video-rental store. It was the most crowded I’d ever seen it and most of the new releases were picked over. We agreed we needed comedy, so I stopped searching when I came to “The Jerk.”

At the checkout counter, I watched the TV that hung from the ceiling just inside the entrance. It usually showed movies chosen by the kids who manned the store, but now it was showing the news. I wondered why the camera was trained on some innocuous office building but then noticed the building swaying back and forth. And then it crumbled. Catherine and I watched as this 47-floor mass of concrete, steel, and glass was reduced to dust in a manner of seconds.

“Is this live or did that happen earlier?” I asked the cashier.

“It’s live. That was World Trade Center 7. That’ll be $3.75.”

Twenty-four hours earlier, the collapse of a major office building in downtown Manhattan would have dominated the news. As it happened, it was the least interesting thing to occur that day. It was hard to believe that the lead story in all the newspapers that morning was the city’s primary election. The event that consumed most of my life for over a year was something I hadn’t thought about since I was on the roof of my apartment building earlier that morning.

Catherine and I never watched “The Jerk” that night. Instead, we flipped back and forth between CNN and Comedy Central, alternating the news with comic relief.

As we headed to bed, my pager vibrated on the kitchen table. I dialed the number. It was my boss. He told me to show up at headquarters in the morning for a staff meeting. The campaign continued.

The usher ripped the ticket with a friendly, “Congrats on your beautiful daughter. Second floor. Elevator for your stroller is to the left.” Father and daughter bought the $8 child’s popcorn-and-soda combo (no symbolic significance, Dad just hates wasting corn), slathered it in Garlic and Parmesan salt, and headed up to theater #2. Father parked the stroller in the wheelchair-friendly back-row, put baby daughter on his lap, and munched popcorn as the lights went down for the afternoon’s movie.

Rabbit Hole.

Father was aware that the film, based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s play, was about Becca and Howie Corbett (deftly played by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart), a wealthy New York City couple attempting to put their life back together eight month’s after the death of their four-year-old son, Danny. Father was unaware that Rabbit Hole is a blunt, clinical, matter-of-fact, almost inert look at what the reality of living through that nightmare would be like. Father still ate all his popcorn. Father laughed when Daughter smiled, stuck out her tongue and gurgled, even though on screen, Becca and Howie were having a knock-down drag-out over her inadvertent erasing of a favored Danny video on his smartphone.

Throughout most of Rabbit Hole, Father didn’t feel the film’s impact. The laughing, crying, bottle-suckling, and no-care-in-the-world cooing of the seven babies in attendance (not too mention the eight caregivers, especially the one who did an impromptu diaper change on the stairs, so as to not miss a key scene) kept the movie strictly in the realm of make-believe. Until it didn’t. Father hugged Daughter that much tighter when Becca was getting rid of her dead son’s toys before an impending home sale.

Rabbit Hole ended and the half-dimmed lights came up. Chatter amongst the adults seemed to prove that many people attend movies without a clue as to their content. A brutal cinematic experience levied only by the notion that the group, and their tiny companions, had endured it together. Laughs were shared at the sheer fact that a row full of babies had indeed fallen down the Rabbit Hole.

Father specifically asked the lone fellow male caregiver/filmgoer what he thought. “We thought we were going to see The Social Network, for some reason...,” said Andres from London, Dad of 6-month-old Rafa. “Rabbit Hole was OK. Not great. Though I missed the end as my son had had enough of waiting for the White Rabbit. I had to take him out and sit with the guy who had fainted during 127 Hours.”

Stroller packed up, children’s combo remnants tossed, Father and Daughter exited the theater. On the way out, Father overheard an usher say, “Showing this movie at Rattle & Reel? That’s messed up.”

Rabbit Hole mercifully over, Father and Daughter ducked into the men’s room for a quick diaper swap. That mission accomplished--even without the benefit of a changing station--Father and Daughter left the Sunshine.

Outside, the sun itself, was still shining.

Patrick J. Sauer is a freelance writer for Fast Company, ESPN, Popular Science, Smith, AOL and Huffington Post Humor. He is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to the American Presidents and is featured in Mr. Beller's anthology Lost and Found. Originally from Billings, Montana, he now lives in Brooklyn where he spends his days following his baby daughter's orders. For more, check out patrickjsauer.com or follow him on Twitter @pjsauer.

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.
 

I don’t go to Dr. Dave for check-ups, just when something goes wrong. And something is wrong today. I suck down the last hit of my cigarette and stub it beside a mural of spray-painted camouflage that covers part of Dr. Dave’s corner office on Clinton and Stanton. A sign—red cross inside a white circle—hovers above the entranceway. All my appointments here begin with me saying something like “Hey Dr. Dave. I’m pretty sure I got bronchitis again.” Or “Hey Dr. Dave. My throat, I think it’s strep, but it might be an STD.” Or “Hey Dr. Dave. You know that lice thing that’s been going around?” Then, typically, Dr. Dave writes me prescriptions, and typically, things get better. But today, I don’t think a prescription will help.

I open the door to Dr. Dave’s clinic, enter the empty waiting room.

I first heard about Dr. Dave after my friend, a train-hopping anarchist who calls a squat on Ninth Street his home base, got surrounded by cops during one of our politically charged street parties. He went out swinging and then went to Dr. Dave to get fixed up. It’s been a year and a half since my friend’s beatdown and almost that long since my first appointment with Dr. Dave, the only doctor I know of who welcomes people even if they don’t have money.

Dr. Dave’s waiting room seats about six, sunlight streams through the generous windows, and on a wall are two paintings with dystopian sci-fi themes, perhaps offered by a patient in exchange for medical services. There’s no receptionist, so Dr. Dave must greet and heal simultaneously. When the sleigh bells on the door ring, he’ll emerge from the exam room to nod at regulars or direct newbies to a stack of admission forms.

I grab a form and then sit. Under “Date,” I write “12/14/01,” under “Payment,” a “0.”

In addition to the paintings, the walls of the waiting room are decorated with several framed news articles. One of them, from the early 90’s, notes that Dr. Dave caters to “anarchists and artists” and administers free health care in sidewalk cafes. The accompanying photo shows him sitting at a table with a cup of espresso and wearing a doctor’s coat, the sleeves ripped off, tattoos coating both of his bare arms. In a more recent photo, he’s older, maybe forty-ish, with a tie, a goatee and doctor’s coat with the sleeves still attached; he stands beside Houston Street with a placard that reads Healthcare Is A Right.

Minutes after my arrival, Dr. Dave escorts a busty transgendered Latina into the waiting room. She thanks him and then struts out into the street, each footfall synchronized to a techno beat that only she hears.

Dr. Dave gestures me into the back room, and I hop up on the examination table, my feet dangling off the edge. He closes the door, thumbs through a file cabinet for my medical records.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“I can’t feel anything down the back of my right leg.”

Last night, lying in bed, suspecting something wasn’t quite right, I’d brushed my fingertips along the back of my right leg, tapped and flicked it, but the hamstring muscles there felt separate from me as they jiggled like Jell-O. I hyperventilated.

“Were you sitting on a hard surface?” Dr. Dave asks.

“Yeah.”

“Was it a bench?”

“It was like a bench.”

“Was it stairs?”

“Yeah, it was kinda like—”

“What exactly were you sitting on?” His eyes search for mine, which, in turn, are searching the floor. “I need to know,” he says.

“A toilet.”

My voice couldn’t be lower, and I feel the cheeky burn of humiliation come on.

To his credit, Dr. Dave doesn’t smirk or give any other indication that what I’ve said is the least bit out of the ordinary. And perhaps for him, after years dedicated to the practice of street medicine on the Lower East Side, my admission is simply mundane. In the most routine manner, he asks me how I’d ended up on a toilet for so long that my leg lost all sensation. And I do my best to explain it to him.

•

My problems began two days earlier, on Saturday, when I’d promised Leigh that she could have the apartment to herself. It’s a studio in the Upper East, the toilet in a closet with no sink, the bathtub elevated behind accordion-folded cabinets. Except for these two nooks and the entranceway, there are no doors in the place, so that means no privacy. It’s our home, but really, it’s hers. She’s the one on the lease, the one with the rent stabilization and the money that, at least for now, her semi-estranged family still sends her way. I’ve had to learn how to shuffle my life around hers, to be there when needed and to disappear, sometimes for months at a time, for the sake of her sanity and mine. The truth is, we’ve maintained our balancing act of communal living and shared responsibilities far longer than either of us initially thought possible, sometimes with a third and even fourth person thrown into the mix. Despite some protracted quarrels, we were friends, maybe even family.

I’d met Leigh in October of 1999, when I first came to New York from western Pennsylvania, to rappel off a six-story building with a banner that decried the city’s use of rainforest wood for benches, boardwalks and subway tracks. She’d worked on the action as well, and, after the arrests, one thing kept leading to the next, until my two-week trip had become five. Then Leigh suggested that I live with her so that we could battle together against earth-raping corporations and their elected enablers. I accepted without hesitation.

Of course I understand why Leigh had wanted me to vacate the premises on Saturday: a night of privacy for her and her girlfriend would be a lovely thing. And so I’d been out that evening until a little after two a.m., when I walked into the foyer of the up-scale co-op on Tenth and University, where my friend Stephen has his apartment. This is my backup home, another place where one-time strangers have become like family.

“Hey Joey,” I said. Joey, who’s Latino and in his late-twenties, sat at the reception desk reading a bible.

“Hey Tim.”

He dialed up to Stephen’s place, but no one answered, so he opened a drawer and thumbed through the little manila envelopes that hold back-up keys to each of the apartments. Joey knew the routine. My name is written on Stephen’s envelope, along with six others, which grants us access whenever he’s not there. Stephen’s place writhes with an ever-shifting cast of boys who crash, converse, lounge and copulate. It’s a makeshift community that rapidly ebbs and flows with the tides of time, ambition and tragedy. Stephen loves us all. He loves to film us even more.

“The key’s not in here,” Joey said. He picked through the manila envelopes again, looking for the back-up set. “The extra’s not here either. I don’t know what to tell you.”

What are the odds that not one but two of the others would walk out with the keys on the same night? I didn’t have my address book and couldn’t recall any phone numbers connected to people who might be able help me out of this situation. I thought about how fucked up my friends were, how flaky, and when I saw them again—I reminded myself to smile, to not make a scene.

“Thanks Joey.”

Cold gusts shoved their way down the streets, and, that time of year, everyone knew the weather would just get worse. I decided to do the ten-minute walk to the Boiler Room, over on Second Avenue and Fourth Street, and use a portion of my last twenty-dollar bill to buy a drink and find someone to go home with. Temporary displacement was providing a perfect rationale for re-labeling as business what I might otherwise have done for kicks. Last call was an hour away.

Inside the Boiler Room, I ordered a glass of red wine and surveyed the crowd—some leather, some queens and way too much Abercrombie and Fitch. But there is a great jukebox. I mean, how many boy bars have an entire Sonic Youth album?

I sat on a couch. I sipped my wine. Two guys beside me were kissing, one sitting in the other’s lap. Men with hungry faces circled the pool table and the bar, searching. Like other people’s luggage on an airport conveyer belt, just when you forgot about them, they came back around again. In the lounge, the crowd moved less. Here, they, we, perched in darkness, and the lit candles and pooling cigarette smoke turned our faces simian.

From a couch ten feet away: a pair of eyes, luminescent like a lit road sign at night. Before they extinguished and I directed my gaze to somewhere less risky, I saw, just barely, the contours of a football-player physique.

I reached for another cigarette. Minutes, maybe only seconds, passed. When I glanced at him again, I caught him staring. Again. He didn’t look away. Neither did I.

In the next half hour, Bill and I drank our second round. We sat on the couch together. From hip to knee, our legs touched.

“I like your dreadlocks,” he said, running his fingers down one of my blonde tendrils.

Bill came from Texas and brought along the vocal twang. He actually did play football in high school—a decade ago by his count. His forehead had some lines, like he’d been weathered from life under open plains or his pack-a-day habit was beginning to show. He’d just moved to New York City and was doing, whatever—it was too boring to remember.

His hand landed in my lap, my lips caressed his face. The bartenders shouted last call at three forty-five.

“What’s next?” I said.

“You, without clothes,” Bill said. “Your place.”

Wrong answer Bill! And only fifteen minutes left until closing time. I told him that half of his proposal wouldn’t work and then listed a couple of the things I’d do with him if we’d go to his place.

“Where I’m stayin’,” Bill said, “we’ve got a problem.”

“Which is?”

“See, I’m not on the lease, and the person who’s loft it is, he’s letting another dude hole up there too. Dude just got in last week, and he’s insane, and I mean flipped the fuck out.” Bill looped his forefinger around his temple.

“So’s everyone else in this city. Come on, me and you Bill.”

“Well… don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Whatever, I thought. It was better than the street, better than dead-ended desire. We stepped outside, exhaling December cold like chainsmokers.

During the cab ride, when I again asked Bill for his name, he pronounced it like “Beale”, the infamous good-time street in Memphis. Then he rubbed me so affectionately in the back seat that he morphed from a strategic fuck into a sweet promise. We got out in Chelsea, bought a six-pack at a deli and took an elevator up seven floors.

Bill opened the door, closed it behind him and, after a minute, re-emerged. “He’s taking a shower.” We went inside hand in hand.

“Um, I really gotta piss,” I said. “How much longer you think he’s gonna be?”

Bill knocked, the unwanted roommate behind the bathroom door shrieked, and I jumped. Then he yelled something about how the gates of hell had swallowed the dance floor, before quieting to a murmur, barely audible above the splash of water.

“Told you,” Bill said.

“He’s certifiable,” I said

“You can piss in the back stairwell.”

“You sure?”

Bill gave me two thumbs up. “Everybody uses the elevator.”

Certifiable growled.

In the back stairwell, Bill said the friend who leases the loft was returning later that morning, and then the two of them were going to do some kind of intervention, maybe get Certifiable hospitalized, but for sure remove him from the space. To me, Certifiable will never have a history, let alone a face or body. But I’m sure his problems began long before I’d heard his ragged voice. In fact, I think of him as Exhibit A for the argument that who we become, we already are. It’s as if we’ve got these fortune cookies interwoven into our DNA, and our brains are just awaiting their marching orders. I want to believe we make choices, significant, life-altering choices about the future, but sometimes the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.

I walked down a flight of iron steps, pissed on a concrete landing and hoped Bill was right about the residents and the elevator. On the landing near Bill’s floor, we sat down, cracked open two beers. We talked and talked and when our mouths ran out of words, we filled them with each other. He gulped my neck, unzipped my pants. He raised his arms above his head, so that I would peel off his t-shirt.

His beefcake pecs, their soft down of blondish-brown.

We cocooned. We swayed like prairie grass. But then everything changed when he said, his warm breath on my ear where his tongue had just been, “You like to party?”

“What do you got?”

He reached for his pile of pants, pulled out a baggie. He dipped a key into it and scooped. Along the stem of the key, an anthill of grayish-white.

“Just a little crystal.”

He leaned over, snorted, and maybe it was only the play of shadows from the exposed bulb dangling above, but his blue eyes melted into black sockets.

The Stairwell

After I tell Dr. Dave about the drug, he scratches his goatee.

“How often do you use crystal meth?”

“I don’t.”

“That’s not what you just said.”

Dr. Dave bumps a rubber mallet against my knee, my foot jumps forward, and I’m relieved to see that certain reflexes survived my bout with the toilet.

He asks me what other drugs I’ve taken, and I list mostly psychedelics: MDMA, MDA, marijuana, mushrooms, LSD. A smattering of coke, which is to say I don’t buy, and I don’t say no. Occasional Xanax and Ritalin. PCP, but exactly once. And an over-the-counter speed, which I took for a six-month spell—it seemed like the only solution to waiting tables at an impossibly busy Perkins Family Restaurant in western Pennsylvania.

The jingling sleigh bells on the main door announce the arrival of another patient, and Dr. Dave excuses himself. Through my partially open door, I watch as he hands an admission form to a mohawked squatter I’ve seen around the neighborhood. I remember a rumor I’d heard, that Dr. Dave had had the letters “MD” tattooed across his entire back. When Dr. Dave pivots from the squatter towards me, I quickly begin an inspection of my nails.

He shuts the door. “How often do you use marijuana? Three times a week? Every day?”

“Three times.” I low-ball my consumption.

“How’d you like to drown in your own snot?”

I look away, brace myself for what I know is coming next.

“That’s what emphysema will do to you. You’ve got access to an oven?” I nod. “Bake pot brownies instead.”

He flicks the cigarette box in my front shirt pocket. “Time to quit. Now. There’s a man, forty-two years old, comes here almost every day to get hooked up to oxygen.” I know this story. The guy had begun smoking at fourteen, and now he can barely walk up a flight of stairs but still fiends for cigarettes.

Despite Dr. Dave’s graphic descriptions, I can’t focus on warnings about pulmonary failure, only on what it’d be like to hobble along the avenues with a walker, the boxy aluminum kind favored by senior citizens.

“Take off your shoes and socks,” Dr. Dave says.

•

When I asked Bill how long he was planning to stay in New York, the question tumbled out, as if I’d spoken one word with many syllables. The zing in my speech also tap-danced through my arteries. I thought about my friends, who maybe weren’t so flaky, who maybe intuitively knew that those two keys would’ve kept me from Bill. And hadn’t Bill just answered my question? About staying in New York to be with me?

In thunderclouds, ions slamdance their way through the sky, searching for displaced protons, searching so intensely that they connect earth and sky in one billion volt-charges that kill more people each year than tornados and hurricanes combined. Your skin may tingle, or hair stand on end as a warning, but typically, you feel nothing until the bolt strikes. And so it is, all too often, with urges.

We were up against a wall of the landing. Or rather Bill was up against me and my back was up against the wall. He thrust his pelvis so that his cock slid along my thighs, caught where they met. I traced the plateaus and ditches of his torso. He buried his face in my armpit, sucking. Then we were down on the floor, a hurricane of limbs ricocheting off walls and knocking over bottles. My cheeks were whisker-burned raw. Our clothes lay crumpled around the landing, soiled by spilled beer and cigarette ashes. We reached for them, untangled pant legs and shirtsleeves. The smell of piss wafted up the stairwell. Bill checked the time on his cell phone. Quarter till eight.

He suggested we get a hotel in the afternoon, after the intervention with Certifiable, and I readily consented. He removed the crinkled baggie from his pants pocket.

“Hang on to this,” he said. “So you can stay awake.”

That hotel would be over six hours away, so drugs or no, I figured I should hop on the uptown train to Leigh’s for at least a little shut-eye. Though dawn had long since bested me to the streets, the sky was still an eye-shadow blue.

Ten subway stops later, I meandered through the Upper East Side—to whittle off another hour, to get the race out of my heart. It was after nine-thirty when I pushed open the apartment door, it’s familiar groan sounding louder than ever.

On the loft bed, Leigh jack-knifed.

“Hey, how are you?” I whispered.

“What the fuck,” she shouted, “are you doing here?” Her girlfriend lay docile beside her, either asleep or doing her best to duck the confrontation.

“I thought it’d be okay to come back now,” I said. “Sorry.”

“I ask for a night. Is that so difficult?”

“I tried, you have no idea how I tried.” The words I spoke skipped ahead of my thoughts.

“One fucking night?” Leigh’s voice got even louder. “You can’t—”

“I don’t have a goddamn home in the world,” I yelled. At least a part of me knew I was being melodramatic, and that, with a little more planning, instead of all this one thing leading to the next to the next, I wouldn’t have been standing in the doorway with all that righteous indignation and what must have been an methamphetamine-tensed jaw.

I tore out of the apartment—but not before grabbing my metal-studded hoody and cramming it into a backpack that already contained a Nalgene bottle, the Village Voice, a couple books and my journal.

I walked the four blocks to Carl Schurz Park. I leaned over the railing there to watch as a tired tugboat pushed cargo up the river towards Hell’s Gate. Then I looked straight down, several stories beneath me, at the four-, five-, six-foot lip of stone that is the last visible layer of Manhattan, a border between solid earth and the churning waters surrounding it. If you fell in, you’d never be able to reach above the sheer stone to save yourself.

I retreated from the railing to a half-circle of semi-secluded benches, and then pulled out the baggie that Bill gave me and the keys to the home I’d claimed not to have. I did another bump.

A forty-year-old man jogged by in a Nike running suit, a German Shepard panting at his side. Morning people. If they weren’t jogging, they were playing hockey on rollerblades. Or sitting on benches, bundled and holding cups of coffee and the Sunday Times. And then there were the families dressed in bright parkas, the mittened hands of parents linked to those of their children like paper doll cutouts.

I smiled, no, I squeezed the sunshine out between my clenched teeth, nodded and waved. Hiya morning people!

My pager vibrated in my left hip pocket, Leigh's number flashing on the screen. She wanted to get in a last word, maybe, or talk things through, but I wasn’t about to find out. Not anymore, I thought. New York sucks. No porches. No porches means no neighbors, no neighbors means no love.

I had to piss. I approached the one-story building that doubles as a tool shed for park maintenance workers and a bathroom for the rest of us, climbed its half-dozen steps, and walked into the men’s side and up to a urinal. Despite the fact that my bladder was full, I couldn’t empty it, no matter how hard I squeezed my abs. If I felt panic, it was more the general idea of it than the emotion itself. Guys came in, used the urinals on either side of me and left. My legs got wobbly.

I thought I might have better luck sitting, and so I settled myself down onto the seat of a toilet in the corner stall. Before trying to urinate again, I brought the key to my nose and finished the last few bumps and then flushed the baggie, the only evidence of criminal activity, down the drain. I envisioned Bill and me under plush blankets in a downtown hotel. My pants were bunched around my ankles. In the not-cold.

 The Toilet

Dr. Dave’s pen makes curlicues above his clipboard as I answer his questions.

“This was the toilet?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“And how long were you there for?”

“About five hours.”

“Five hours?”

“Yeah. And I had my backpack on and it was filled up.” He nods. I congratulate myself for providing Dr Dave with what I believe are the relevant details even as cold perspiration trickles from my armpits.

•

Personal tragedy in New York City often manifests as public display. At almost any given moment, sirens are screaming through the five boroughs, destined for stabbings and heart attacks and psychotic breaks and car crashes and—I’ll never forget this one—the man whose brain I’d seen scattered in chunks across a sidewalk in Bushwick. He’d been pushed from a fourth-floor window in a drug deal gone bad.

I contributed my own shard to this urban mosaic as I sat on the park toilet throughout that Sunday afternoon, convinced that I would unlock my bladder if I could just perform the right sequence of breath. I sucked in air, slowly and deeply, deeper still until I felt each tendon slide along each rib. Veins slithered. The electricity coursing through synapses—tangible, for the first time.

An eyeball up close in the crack between the stall door and the partition. It blinked and spoke in a black voice: “Dread, how you doin’?”

Listen to the sinews, I thought. Not to the voice. Breathe.

Through breath I could move urine, could move it to different organs, could move it up and out of my bladder into whatever is before the bladder, could move it down, way down, to just about—but never a single drop—out of me.

I developed rigorous breathing patterns. For one variation, I inhaled, air filling belly, lifting balls, expanding bladder; and exhaled, squeezing insides till urine stormed the barricade of brick built across my urethra. In another, I inhaled—“huh”—and exhaled—“ooo”—so fast I sounded like a mating baboon. I cavorted along the cusp of discovery, just as so many other explorers had done: Magellan, Cousteau, Neil Armstrong. Me.

The whooshing flush of a toilet from the adjacent stall seized me, sucked me down into pipes—Breathe, I thought—swirling, ricocheting, “ssshhhh” (sound was a form and it filled my head), shot me out with all the refuse into the East River, far beneath the tugboat I’d seen earlier. Blackness. Breathe in. And out.

•

“And you know what else,” I say to Dr Dave. “I thought there was an earthquake, that the walls and floors were shaking, but I just kept doing the breathing thing.”

Dr. Dave jots down another line, then tells me my body had been convulsing.

My stomach sours. Close calls have a way of replaying, of haunting your bedside again and again with worst-case scenarios, and I know that Dr. Dave’s revelation won’t be an exception. Perhaps my respiratory fireworks had prevented the blackness from winning that afternoon.

Dr. Dave asks me to pull down my pants and boxers. I lower them and there it is: a ‘U’, my own scarlet letter, emblazoned on my backside.
“I bet that feels good,” he says.

•

Behind the stall door, the sonorous tones of an old man’s voice began to rouse me from the weakening effects of the drug.

“Time to go,” he said. I went back to breathing.

“You hear me in there? The bathroom is closed.”

“Okay.”

“Hey, I been callin’ you for twenty minutes now. I wanna go home.”

I finally sobered enough to do the math, to wonder why this man hadn't called the cops and, most importantly at that moment, to convince him that he wasn't going to have to.

“Coming,” I said.

My arms retained full but shaky mobility; however, my legs wouldn't budge. With a frantic desire to avoid institutionalization of any kind, I clenched the toilet paper dispenser on the left and, on the right, the metal bar that generally serves the elderly and physically challenged. I pulled myself forward with all my strength, vapor pluming from my mouth, a reminder of the cold I still couldn’t feel.

I opened the stall door and there he was, kind enough to be persistent, to not abandon me to the police or worse: a black man with grey hair, garbed in the greens of Parks Department maintenance.

I tried to walk but could only shuffle my feet forward six inches by six inches. He had plenty of time to stare at me as my dumb and debilitated ass attempted to traverse the bathroom, a feat which, at that moment, seemed not unlike a pilgrimage.

“I’m so sorry,” I said to him. “Thank you for not calling the cops. I don’t usually do this.”

“It’s goin’ catch up with you one of these days,” he said. He shook his head.

I hobbled by the maintenance man and outside to the luminous grey of late winter afternoon. He locked the bathroom door behind us, said goodnight, descended the stairs and exited the park. It would take me ten more minutes to navigate those stairs and considerably longer to walk back to Leigh’s. Leigh and I would work things out, I figured, at least for a while longer. As for Bill: flashbacks of our sex in the stairwell got tangled up with lost time on the toilet. That evening, I’d decline his invitation to the hotel. In fact, I’d never see him again.

The Long Walk Home

“Drunkard’s Palsy,” Dr. Dave says as he taps my right hamstring. “Typically happens when someone passes out or nods off on a curb, a bench, a hard surface of some kind, and compresses one of their sciatic nerves—they run from the center of each of your buttocks, here and here, down your legs. The first thing you lose is feeling or motor skills or both. Do it long enough, you lose a lot more.”

Dr. Dave explains that electrical impulses normally rush from one neuron to the next along the sciatic nerve, as the surrounding muscle tissue communicates with the brain. But cinch this nerve, and these impulses are severed. After a period of time—there is no magic number of hours, though surely it depends upon weight and positioning—the sciatic nerve can become so severely damaged that it stops functioning permanently. Consequently, the gluteal muscles around the nerve atrophy.

“You’d be surprised,” Dr. Dave says, “at the number of drunks and junkies who have only half an ass.”

I imagine myself with one full glute and one deflated glute, and know that such a condition will effectively terminate my sex life. I’m beyond words. Tears flood my eyes.

“You’re lucky,” Dr. Dave says. “I think it highly likely that you’ve only sustained temporary nerve damage. If you don’t feel sensations within a week or two, I’ll take another look.”

I wipe at my eyes and feel a jolt of something coursing through me.

“Yeah?” I say.

I battle my cheek and jaw muscles, trying to keep them clenched in a solemn expression, but they liberate themselves all the same and a grin splits my face wide open.

I thank Dr. Dave and realize, with all the tingling nerves I can still feel in my body, that salvation lies in second chances. That's when you’re between two worlds—catastrophe and the possibility of your life as it was.

Mere minutes after my diagnosis, Dr. Dave is calling in the next patient, the mohawked squatter. And I, I am stepping out into the unseasonably warm weather wearing an ice cream grin. Half a block later, I’m bobbing along to salsa music emanating from a static-y radio on a second story fire escape. And that’s when I promise to never ever do so many things again. But, of course, the hardest part of a promise comes long after it’s made.

Tim Doody's essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail and Brevity. ABC's Nightline included Tim in a national list of "particularly troublesome, even dangerous, anarchists," and Rush Limbaugh made fun of him and his last name on the air. He's online at http://timdoody.me.

Illustrations by Carlo Quispe. Carlo contributes to World War 3 Illustrated, has drawn the Everything Is Okay Comic since 2001 and recently launched the magazine Uranus: Comics from Another Planet (Printed Matter).

I heaved my suitcase over the step. At the train station, a frat boy had tried to help me with it.

“Jesus Christ, how fucking heavy are your curlers? This thing weighs 100 lbs,” he huffed.

“It’s mostly books,” I explained. “I’m moving here.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Too many people in New York already.”

He looked genuinely disappointed when I didn’t turn back but continued down the street, moving like a moth toward the city lights. I had no desire to return to the life I’d left six hours prior but even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t afford the move back. I could barely afford a $15 bed at the White House, the last flophouse on the Bowery.

Once inside, the lobby of the White House wasn’t that bad. Maps covered the walls and a vending machine flickered in the corner. It wasn’t that great either. An old man sat silent at a card table and the register was behind a wall of glass and chicken wire.

The cashier pushed a key through the slot and said, “It’s on the third floor. Sorry about that.”

I thought he was sorry about making me carry my bag three flights. “Oh no, it’s not that heavy,” I lied.

He shook his head. “The third floor has some of our more permanent residents. But you’re going to be here for a little while so…”

Oh.

“Is it safe?” I asked.

“Sure,” he shrugged. “Sometimes they steal stuff but that’s it.”

It was August and my fingers were slick against the handle as I wedged my bag up up up. The staircase was dusty, crumbling where the baseboard met the wall. The grime stuck to me and the sweat running down my neck and legs. I passed a building inspection notice from either 1962 or 1967. I strained to make out the scrawl, as if accuracy mattered.

I pushed open the door to the third floor and walked into another hallway. This hallway was lined with small doors—a set piece for a particularly terrifying nightmare about indecisiveness—doors and doors extending into infinity. My choice had been made for me and I looked at the key in my hand. Number 6.

I opened the small door of Number 6. It was a coffin, albeit one with a cot. I pulled my bag in but then there wasn’t enough room to close the door. I turned my suitcase to push it under the cot but something was moving under there, something small and shiny, so I hoisted it up onto the bed instead.

This is probably upsetting, I thought. I should be upset. Or anxious or something. But I wasn’t feeling anything really. And maybe that absence should have been distressing but all I thought was: I am so sweaty—I should take a shower.

The bathroom was at the end of the Hall of Indecisiveness. There were stalls for the shower but the curtains seemed to have been ripped off, strips still dangling useless. Next to the showers, an old woman was sitting in a plastic lawn chair and I worried that the spray would get her too.

“Will it bother you if I shower?” I asked.

She shook her head no. “That’s why I sit here—cools me down,” she explained.

I undressed and stepped in. The water was cold but it was August so that was fine. There was mold all around me, itchy germs in the broken tiles, but I just closed my eyes. I thought again, this should be upsetting. But the anger was stopped, blocked somehow, vague and gone before it fell to earth, like a rainstorm in the desert —virga.

I looked at my neighbor. If she was enjoying the shower spray or seeing me naked, she didn’t show it, her face blank and fixed on nothing.

I know the feeling, I thought as I dried off.

It was early still; the sun had just set. I decided to go to bed because there was nothing else to do. I curled up against my suitcase and didn’t think about the sheets.

I wasn’t tired yet so I lay there, watching, listening as the floor slowly shut down for the night. Above my cot was a low ceiling made of lattice and higher above that, a real, solid ceiling. It was one big room, I realized, the third floor, into which the labyrinth of tiny cot rooms had been built. And the lattice was not just decorative; it was there to prevent anyone from climbing over the half walls and getting in. Which made sense— murderers and rapists the world over feared the dreaded lattice defense.

It did not keep out noise. Somewhere an air conditioner was banging away and someone was moaning and the two played off each other in a rather dreary duet. I didn’t know how many nights I’d be staying, how long it would take to get some money, a job, a room with a proper ceiling. I should have been upset but I wasn’t—my mind blank and clean in the absence.

But then there was a buzzing around my head—a mosquito—and I felt the first real flash of irritation I’d had since stepping off the train.

I can only ignore mosquitoes when I’m too tired to do otherwise and I wasn’t nearly there. So it was that, that tiny pest, that got me moving, got me pulling on my shoes, clattering down the stairs and out into the night.

I walked up the Bowery, past stacks of melting trash bags and the security gates of closed restaurant supply stores. And then I turned  onto a side street and there were small brick buildings and elegant old townhouses and kids, kids everywhere, about my age, drinking and congregating on the sidewalks. This was the East Side, I realized, the East Village. The first stop for most immigrants, the ones who crowded into rooms, too poor to go back—the lowest rung on the ladder, the first step of so many dreams.

I wanted a beer but I couldn’t afford one so I got a peach instead from a funny little store on the corner that stacked dish soap next to cans of beans and boxes of tampons. I sat on someone’s front steps and watched the parade of people go by.

I didn’t know what would happen next and I had nowhere to return to, except Number 6 at the White House. I should have been upset. I wasn’t. I was thrilled. All day I had kept it quiet, even to myself, as if speaking my relief into reality would frighten it away. But there was no need, I realized—the limitations of my situation cemented my freedom. I wasn’t going back. I had taken the first step.
 

Brea Tremblay has contributed to UGO Networks, Inner Monologues, Lucky and Index Magazine. In 1991, she was the Junior Girls Stilt Walking Champion, Mountain Division.

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.
 

It so happens that I am in a little bit of love with The Lighting Tech (who will herein be called just that), and this makes things even more awkward. I am great at faking bravado – this is my skill set, and, like I said, NOT acting. I have the gift of fraud. Give me a stage and I’ll strut across it, I’ll bend backwards despite my own complete lack of coordination; I’ll pretend I’ve stripped for thousands millions of times and that this isn’t my first terrifying time; I’ll dance and I can’t dance; I’ll flirt and I sure as hell can’t flirt. Especially not here, like this, naked after my bathrobe drops, under hot lights, with The Lighting Tech mere feet away. Instead, I will go home alone, like usual. Like so many new New Yorkers, my early romance with New York is a lonely and deeply imaginary one.

I am new to New York and it is summer, my first New York summer. I am spending my every waking minute on the Lower East Side and eating mostly excitement and possibility, not so much food. Until I find my own place, I am staying with friends of the family in their now-matriculated-to-fancy-college son’s room, the walls a slightly depressing collage mix of Star Trek and Kerouac, and all I have to get by with is my journal, my bike, my imagination, and now this strange naked play, my clandestine debut ball. I may be hibernating in someone else’s childhood lair, but now I have a New York thing, a commitment, this thing that I Do, and my nights feel a little bit more contextualized with that knowing. I get on the train with my headphones on and my jeans cuffed, and even though I’m alone as hell, I feel more alive and a part of the world than I ever have.

This is how I come to know this city. I am young and newly queer in a strange body with strange desires and this is uncharted for me, confusing enough, but suddenly now there are also bridges and oceans and bricks and cats and trucks and bikes and me, the whirring of colors, city like newsprint in the morning, all over my fingers and my face, and I’m completely lost. I take walks, and the quiet in my head grows to be permanent, solid, everlasting, inside the scream of the city. I enjoy this noise-to-quiet contrast while gulping coffee snacking on pastries from Moshe’s bakery on 2nd Avenue. It’s a romance with myself — always out on dates with myself, writing myself feverish love letters, and coming home to myself. I fall asleep with myself, listening to the barely-audible creak sound of the rising moon.

So I don’t know what I’m doing there, but here I am, on scene 5, take number 3, delivering lines, in my bathrobe. It is late at night and I feel that subtle internal shift, what happens to me when I realize it’s night in this city and there is too much life here and too much electric charge to care much for food that isn’t caffeine or raspberry hamentaschen. Instead, I am focused on the task at hand and my racing heart.

We are supposed to test the fade on my final scene now. I walk to the front of the stage in my robe. Outside I can hear truck horns wail-fading by, someone screaming at a wayward biker. The Lighting Tech talks over them, says, can you stand a little stage left, a little shyly. I move, and the lights go on, off, then on, then dim on me. The director says to take off the robe, he laughs a little, knows it’s funny during tech week. Usually it’s a big dramatic scene, big Political Statement where I take the robe off and strip off, layer by layer, the parts of my gender construction. I believe that tomorrow night, when I have an audience, this will beat hard in me, feel important and loud and maybe even a little bit sexy.

Right now, though, it is just time slowing down, a tiny boxy room in a city where I am not hungry, I am alone, and I am about to be very naked in front of someone who has a tiny bit of my secret heart, and all because I felt too awkward to go meet people in this city the Usual Way – the party, the art opening, the subway. So this is how I come to know this city. It is a bizarre paradox, and I know it all too well as I undo the belt on the robe, slide my arms out of its massive sleeves, feel its furry weight as it hangs for one hopeful moment and then falls with a soft thud to the cold stage floor. I dare myself to look at The Lighting Tech right in the eyes, as the room goes dark, and I feel my arms at my sides, my skin still warm from the lights, ready for the cool-down of the bike ride home.

Temim Fruchter plays drums in The Shondes and enjoys little more than a Brooklyn brunch involving lox, pickled turnips, and a veritable vat of iced coffee.

As I walked along East Houston I passed a roped off construction area where just behind it was a man bent at the waist writing something in freshly laid concrete. He was about sixty years old, and he had thin hair, and was dressed in a sports coat. There was nothing outwardly shabby or deranged about him, and in fact he wrote so leisurely that at first I thought he was doing something in an official capacity. In his right hand he held a stick which he was using to intently carve his message.

How unfortunate, I thought as I walked by, that just moments after the city has laid concrete it is being vandalized. And how unfortunate that now for the next thirty, forty, fifty years—how many years before concrete is repaved?—everyone else will have to look at what meaningless message this man has engraved.

A wave of indignity washed over me. I must do something! I thought suddenly. I must stop this criminal act!

But what do I do? How do I stop it? Perhaps the man is deranged, after all, and if I attempt to intercede he will become enraged and murder me.

If you see something say something, came into my head. What was that number that you were supposed to call? I could not remember that number. Then the phrase quality of life appeared before me like a vision, and this phrase was followed by the simple three-digit number that Mayor Bloomberg had so tirelessly promoted.

I took out my cellphone and dialed.

A recording came on. “Verizon Wireless 411 Search,” said the robotic woman’s chipper voice.

Search? The number was wrong. I had misremembered. I hung up quickly and tried to recall Mayor Bloomberg standing at his press conference saying something about reporting quality of life issues, but all that came into my head was 411. As I deliberated I could see the man continuing to write. He might as well been a professor at a chalkboard. Was he writing complete sentences? For the next fifty years we will have to read this insane man’s musings.

So I did the only thing I could do: I dialed 911.

My display screen immediately went red and an image of an ambulance appeared. A moment late a tired, apathetic woman’s voice could be heard asking me with disinterest, “What’s the emergency?”

“Well, it’s not really an emergency,” I began pleasantly and by way of introduction. And just before I could explain what was happening the exhausted, indifferent voice came alive in impatience and alarm.

“Sir!” the voice said. “This is an emergency line, sir! Do you need a police car, ambulance, or fire truck?”

Trying to report a crime I now felt like the criminal. I cringed, I cowered. Perhaps I should hang up. No, the man is continuing to write. “I need a police car!” I said.

“What’s the emergency, sir?” But now the voice had returned to apathy.

“There’s a man,” I said, “there’s a man writing in the sidewalk!” As I said it I felt suddenly like I was back in nursery school tattling on the naughty boy. I also realized the confusing absurdity of the phrase, “writing in the sidewalk.” How will the dispatcher understand what it means to write in the sidewalk? “There’s concrete that has just been laid,” I went on, “and there’s a man who’s writing in it.” What a cumbersome crime! “He’s defacing the sidewalk,” I said resolutely. The word defacing felt right, official sounding. The dispatcher would understand defacing.

“Where are you located?” she asked.

I felt relief. I had made it passed the hurdle. Soon the police would come. Above me the lamppost was clearly marked. “The corner of Bowery and Houston.” That, at least, I could convey with authority.

There was a pause as the coordinates were punched in.

Then the depressed voice asked, “How do you spell Bowery?”

Was this a joke? Shouldn’t every 911 operator know every single street in New York City? Shouldn’t that be basic training? What if I was bleeding to death but needed to spell Bowery before she could summon the ambulance?

“B-o-w-e-r-y,” I said.

Another pause.

“And what’s the cross street?”

“Houston.” Should I spell Houston? Pause.

“Are you on the east side or the west side?” she asked.

At least she knows Houston, I thought.

“I’m on the east side.”

Pause.

“Which borough?”

“Manhattan,” I said with great sorrow.

“And what’s the emergency?” she asked again.

But there was no emergency any longer. The man with the stick was righting himself and moving on. He was done. He had said what he needed to say. Off he went into the night in the direction of Housing Works. I watched him go.

“There’s no emergency any longer,” I said. “It’s too late.”

“You don’t need a police car, sir?”

“No,” I said dejectedly, “I don’t need a police car.”

I hoped she would feel some failing on her part. Perhaps she might even apologize for not knowing how to spell Bowery. But she only confirmed once more that I didn’t need a police car and then the call ended.

The next afternoon I went to Housing Works and sat and drank coffee and read Grapes of Wrath. After that I went to Whole Foods to buy some groceries for dinner and on my way there I passed the spot where the man had been writing the night before.

I looked to see what he had written and this is what I found:

“Roger Yvonne Herbert.”

And to the right of it, spaced just a little further away so that it would stand alone, “Lois.”

And further away from that, “Alden Dennis.”

I bent down and touched the concrete but it was dry now. Hard and solid. Hard and solid for fifty years.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s essays and stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Open City and elsewhere. His memoir about growing up communist in the U.S. will be published by Dial Press in 2009. For more information please visit www.sayrafiezadeh.com.

In Yiddish I call my grandmother “Babbi”. She was born on Pitt and Houston Street in 1932. Her Lower East Side was an Eastern European Shtetl transplant; a small Jewish village. By the time she was born, the Depression was hitting hard. Her grandfather owned a dairy store on Stanton and Rivington, her father a butchery down the street. Exchanging cheeses, eggs and meats for fruits, vegetables and other necessities, got them through hard times.

She couldn’t understand when my bohemian parents decided to buy an old tenement on Eldridge Street between Delancey and Rivington in the 80s with some of their struggling friends. My Babbi worked hard to get out of that neighborhood, becoming a governess at fifteen, struggling through college and finally getting a PhD in child psychology. My dad insisted it was the best business investment of his artist’s career—that one day the Lower East Side would be gentrified and our building worth millions.

My Lower East Side was vibrant with pastel graffiti murals, hydrants blasting jets of water into the streets when it was hot, old Puerto Rican men arguing over Domino games, shoes dangling from street lamps, street walkers in pink spandex, junkies collapsed in pools of cheap liquor. As a child, I thrived on it. The constant energy of New York’s downtown jolted me alive making me feel even more that I lived on an edgy, enchanted Island.

Growing up a middle class white Jew in the Puerto Rican, Dominican and African American dominated Lower East Side of the early 90s was confusing. It gave my childhood an air of displacement. My parents made do, integrating the challenging neighborhood into their lives, hoping like all pioneers that one day their investment would pay off.

My dad picked up garbage, weaving it into his papier-mâché masks. My mom always had her keys in hand a block before she reached our front door for safety and practiced Spanish at the bodegas and restaurants where my early breakfasts were eggs over easy, bacon and home fries orange from Sofrito all for $3.00.

To support his family and his artwork, my dad worked as a social worker at FROSTED a residence on Houston and Allen streets for people who were AIDS and HIV positive. Over dinner he regaled my younger brother and I with stories about his clients tearing up their rooms while on crack and trying to finagle subway tokens from social workers to exchange for drugs.

My Kindergarten playground was a hot bed of AIDS urban legends. One had it that a man went around putting AIDS infected needles in the coin return slots in payphones, another that he left them upturned on movie theatre seats. Instead of being frightened by my surroundings, I was spurred on in my ambitions to seek out a better life than I knew my poverty stricken friends would have.

I made friends easily, but always felt like I was on the verge of being disowned by them for my better circumstances. My best friend in Kindergarten, Eduardo was shocked when my mom took us to eat in a restaurant after school across from Tompkins Square Park.

“You mean I can tell her what I want and she brings it?” He asked, open mouthed, pointing at the waitress.

“Duh.” I replied.

“Two Orange sodas.” He blurted grinning, half unsure whether his request would be granted. Eating out for him was McDonalds, Burger King or other cheap fast food. Eduardo was delighted with waitresses, but there were times he would break my toys in anger not because I had hurt him, but because I had them and he didn’t.

Like my grandmother, I wanted a better life than the Lower East Side could offer. First I majored in visual art at LaGuardia high school on the Upper West Side, and then went to a remote clothing optional liberal arts college in Vermont where I was bored out of my mind—missing the thrum of the city.

By the time I got home the Lower East Side yet again had a changed face. Post 9/11 New Yorkers were fascinated by a neighborhood on the edge of Ground Zero, caught up in its cheap, rough, down and out chic.

Bistros and boutiques lined the streets where I had cautiously trick or treated on long ago Halloweens. Musician Moby’s Teany Café had $5.00 espressos and marked up Vintage Dior sparkled from store windows. The Pentecostal Church on my parents’ street no longer threw block parties in the summer where they blasted Bachata all day and sold arroz con habichuelas with fat chicharones on the side. Drunken frat boys from Idaho wandered the streets and bored trust fund babies spent their time smoking cigarettes outside atmospheric wine bars.

I was surprised, nostalgic and not able to afford anything in the Lower East Side that was such a dysfunctional childhood backdrop. My parents still lived in their tenement, shopping at the Whole Foods on Houston, comfortable that their investment had in fact paid off. I moved to Brooklyn, where I took solace in Bushwick—a ghetto still thriving despite gentrification. It felt like home.

“I don’t belong here anymore.” I said sadly, as my Babbi parked off Kenmare, outside the French restaurant, smells of escargot and red wine wafting towards us through the rolled down car windows. “Zaest Frin an alta shtudt macht a naya shtudt,” she said, patting my knee comfortingly and translating from Yiddish: “From an old city, we make a new one.”

Royal Young was born and fled the Lower East Side. He now resides in Brooklyn making rap music and is a regular contributor to Pomp & Circumstance magazine. He can be reached at myspace.com/therealroyalyoung