We live in the Village, off Christopher Street. The greeting card store has cards with jokes I’m not sure I totally understand and there is a bakery with X-rated cakes. I want Carvel. My mother is experimenting with baklava.

The city is filled with perverts, junkies, pushers, muggers and arsonists but, at the same time, we roam freely. My best friend’s mother has left her conservative husband behind in the suburbs and her boyfriend is bisexual. They live in a loft on the boundary between the West Village and the meatpacking district. It had been the office for a gay magazine and they kept the original bathroom, complete with urinals and a toilet cubicle sporting graffiti with drawings of penises. Their father recalls my friend and her younger sister to the suburbs the next year. The city, clearly, is no place for children to grow up. I missed her.

I am friends with a man who works in a store on Christopher Street called The Soap Opera. He has salt and pepper hair. He goes to drag balls in Alphabet City, which is where he lives. It seems then like a faraway land. He loves the glamor and the illusion. I see how the store itself is like a stage set, with a brocade curtain covering a squalid and miniscule bathroom, a tiny kitchenette, a painted-over window, the shop cat’s box and food. It is the opposite of the boudoir atmosphere of the shop, though its products are destined to sit on the tiled windowsills of so many tenement bathrooms just like it. He sells lip balm that comes in a little tin with a sliding lid and Victorian lettering. They become popular at school and I take orders from friends to buy them, always getting the new flavors as soon as they are in stock.

I had all of this in mind when I wrote Lunch in Brooklyn, a novel of a pre-coming of age in the late 70s, commuting to school, feeling in it and not of it, at the age of extreme social conformity in an era of hedonism. I set the book in my friend’s loft because it expressed that better than our townhouse flat. I loved being on the roof. From the roof, it’s all beautiful and it all makes sense.

...

The Gift of Tongues
I go up to the roof after dinner, after the dishes are done. I tell them I come here to think, which is true, although it’s not the whole truth. My mother thinks it’s important to give me private space. From the roof, which is five stories up, you can see down to the river, although, because of the old West Side Highway, you can’t really see much. This is the edge of Greenwich Village. On one street is a row of little townhouses with planters of ivy spilling down from the window boxes. Around the corner, on Hudson Street, men are carrying in the antiques they had displayed outside their store. They have a cat called Sheba who sleeps in the window.

Across Hudson is the meatpacking district. The street widens for the trucks and the loading docks, where sides of beef are connected to pulleys, and the spaces between the cobblestones shine with blood in the morning. In the evening, when the meat-packers are gone, men dressed as disco queens and Catholic schoolgirls appear. They stand on the corners and stroll down the side streets, swinging their purses by the straps, dragging their satin jackets along the pavement.

From the roof, the loading dock looks more like an abandoned railway station. It feels quiet up here, despite the fact that you can still hear the rattle of trucks and the rush of traffic. An airplane tears slowly across the sky. Down in Corporal Seravalli Playground, the boys play basketball. From here they are graceful and you forget the way they show you their tongues, French kissing the air. Hey baby, come sit on my face.

The sky is a dark, streaky, polluted turquoise. I sit on a wooden crate, like a raft in the curling, blistering, tarpaper sea. My mother used to want to have roof parties until she learned how much it would cost to deck it over. My father has carefully explained to me how the upstairs neighbors will sue us if I walk on the tarpaper and damage the roof and they get a leak.

“They’ve heard you moving around up there,” my father has told me.

“Fred,” my mother says, “Kate is very responsible.”

I started smoking in sixth grade with my friend Stephanie. She lives in New Jersey now. I miss her a lot. Stephanie was my best friend more than Monica was. She used to come over all the time. My mom was happy for me to be “entertaining.” She bought us frozen yogurt bars and didn’t tell us when we had to have lights out. We shaved our legs and practiced with makeup. We read the instruction book that came in Tampax so we would be prepared. We pored over my mother’s Erica Jong books for the sex scenes. Some days, anything made us laugh, especially the recipes for game in The Joy of Cooking:

“Place rabbit on serving dish and pour sauce over it. Serve with: noodles, 213.”

“Use young animals only.”

“After scraping away blood clots...”

“You guys are so sick,” Monica would yell us when we phoned, laughing so hard at first we were just gasping, making her think it was a prank call.

“Singe and clean the insides well: Pigs’ ears,” Stephanie joined in.

“Lucky indeed is the cook with the gift of tongues!” I retorted.

“The testicles of young lambs are a great delicacy. To prepare, first cut into the loose outer skin for entire length of the swelled surface.”

Seventh grade was not as good without her. I had tried to cheer myself up with the notion that I would go back to school a woman of the world and all the cute, new boys would fall in love with me. I was tan and blonde and knew what an erogenous zone was. But there were only the same old boys and it was harder to stay a changed person in your mind when you realized you were still plain old, flat Kate.

This fall, starting eighth grade, I have vowed not to be disappointed. Everyone is ruling the middle school, but if you ask me, it’s a hell of a domain. Sixth graders are practically lower schoolers; seventh graders are either your friends or you ignore them. But at least we no longer have to worry that the eighth graders are having all the fun.

I drop my cigarette into the can with all the others and slosh the liquid around to be sure it’s out. It’s almost dark now. A boy runs through the park. The basketball he is carrying under his arm slips and he swoops down to retrieve it while still running. It is an amazing moment of total coordination. Harry Finch has this grace, flicking his hair over his shoulder, tapping his pencil on the desk in time with whatever music is playing loud in his head. The boys are bigger this year. Maybe, at long last, this will be the year that I find someone. Lucky indeed.

Rebecca Moore blogs at wertis.wordpress.com and is author of Lunch in Brooklyn, (lunchinbrooklyn.wordpress.com)  available on iTunes, Amazon and Smashwords.

Sure, there had previously been a Tintin phase and then a Han Solo period (I was always more a Han man than a Luke), but this was different. Here were Jewish oddballs raised by bohemians who only wanted to be left alone with their punk rock, their Led Zeppelin, their booming beats, Bud tall boys and girls, girls, girls. Just like me, my older brother Asher, and many of our closest friends in our middle class suburb of Baltimore.

And so I bought a Volkswagen medallion in a Fells Point thrift shop and fashioned it into a gaudy necklace. I wore Sharpie-savaged jeans, high-top Adidas, sweatshirts, and—as a committed Oriole fan, this still haunts me—a New York Yankees baseball cap swung sideways.

It was amazing to us that the Beastie Boys were just a few years older than we were. And yet they were already doing exactly what they wanted to do, as they would later declare in a rap. Perhaps one day we, too, could turn our lives into a wild, raunchy goof and call it a career. “My job ain’t a job, it’s a damn good time,” the band chanted and we believed them.

After graduating from high school, Asher moved to northern California to live with our dad. An advanced social creature, he quickly fell in with a roving band of stoners, which led to a gig performing The Rocky Horror Picture Show live every Saturday at midnight at a theater near the Berkley campus. Eventually he found his way to Sonoma State University.

I left Baltimore a few years after my brother and drove straight to New York City to start my freshman year in college. This was the first stop in my accidental trailing of the Beastie Boys. The trio famously grew up prowling Village clubs, collecting sounds and images they’d soon scratch into their own sample-mad, post-modern party jams.

By the time I moved into a dorm overlooking Washington Square Park in 1989, the Beasties’ second album, “Paul’s Boutique,” was my university’s de facto soundtrack. The CD bounced and grinded at parties; the cassette ticked ceaselessly from Walkman headphones. My friends and I banged into packed rooms lustily quoting lyrics: “Hey, ladies!” As another sweaty Saturday night wound down, we’d summon strength echoing the “Paul’s” sample: “Right up to your face and diss you!”

I was deep in a teenage Bukowski funk and I’d wander Manhattan in a tattered sportcoat drinking 40 ounces of Colt 45 until the brown bag was empty. “Paul’s Boutique” was my constant companion: “You know you light up when the lights go down/ Then you read the New York Post, Fulton Street, downtown/ Same faces every day but you don't know their names/ Party people going placed on the D train.”

This educational approach proved fiscally unsustainable so I left New York after one year. Asher convinced me to move to Hollywood to live with our cousin Aaron, take acting lessons and buy a motorcycle. Once he finished school, he’d join us in Los Angeles and together we would become, effectively, the Beastie Boys of the movie business. At the time we were about the same age the Beasties were when they released their first record—so why not?

Coincidentally, the actual Beastie Boys had also recently moved from New York to Los Angeles, shedding the fratty fooling of their early years for a more mature, socially conscious vision. MCA had even discovered Buddhism and become a vegan, while lyrically renouncing the group’s once-perceived misogyny.

And still their songs pumped at parties. I’d ditched my drunken poet pose back East and was once again rocking thrift store jewelry and questionable facial hair. Out West I grooved to the latest funkified iteration of the Beastie Boys.

Asher graduated from college in the spring of 1992 and a week later he pointed his Geo Tracker toward the apartment I shared with Aaron on Detroit Street, not far from the so-called Miracle Mile. There are photographs of us from that time taken at a poolside party in the Valley. Asher, Aaron, and I practically burst from the photos, chutzpah-propelled in outrageous sunglasses, mugging hardcore for the lens.

Then, on June 17, my brother was shot and killed during a botched robbery attempt. He and Aaron had been out that night working on a film script they were writing. After the work session, Asher was parallel parking on Detroit Street when a skinny dude approached the Tracker asking for spare change. My brother went for his wallet, the skinny dude stepped aside and behind him was a guy with a gun.

That fall Aaron and I, shattered, moved to San Francisco to begin putting our lives back together.

Among the many samples on “Paul’s Boutique” is one from the 1971 R&B hit “Mr. Big Stuff,” asking: “Who do you think you are?” The Beastie Boys’ MCA died of cancer in early May at 47 years of age. Asher would’ve turned 44 this month. I'm now married with two young daughters, living in Brooklyn where I sometimes play the Beasties while running Prospect Park's loop.

On one of the Beasties’ early hits, “Brass Monkey,” MCA told us in his deep bark: “I’ve got a castle in Brooklyn and that’s where I dwell.” While I hardly live in a castle, it is a 3-bedroom apartment that’s quite large by New York City standards. But any sense of modern royalty I have is not due to where I live, what I do, or the music I listen to—though all those things certainly make life more appealing. No, the feeling that I have led a rich life to this point is most poignantly due to the people I’ve known, whether intimately as in the case of my brother or distantly as with MCA and the Beastie Boys. Asher and MCA both died far too young, but not before discovering precisely who they were, and helping me figure out what kind of person I want to be.

Maccabee lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife and two kids. He is the author of Jetpack Dreams, the editor of Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader, and he has written for the New York Times, New York magazine and Salon, among others. He is a News Editor for Fastcompany.com and at work on a screenplay, a coming of age story fueled by sex, drugs, rock n roll and Edgar Allan Poe.

On the East you could have Jonathan Ames at shooting guard, once he shakes off the rust. For the point position, we could inquire as to weather Wesley Yang has some game. We could have Leonard Michaels - Godfather of the angry New York Jewish writers taking out the day's frustrations on the court and bragging about it in print - on our jerseys. Marv Albert could call the game. (Is it absurd to state that Marv Albert has a certain literary quality to his announcing style? Or am I just conflating a slight New York City edge with literary? And is this a valid conflation? Howard Cosell also seems literary. His sense of the absurd was literary.)

Where are all the ball playing New York writers? To my chagrin they are probably playing softball.

I have always wished there was a basketball version of the softball teams that all the literary magazines put forth every summer. A three on three version of Paris Review and The New Yorker, etc. Those summer softball pastorals are very nice, I'm told, but, in basketball parlance, softball is weak! And New York is a basketball town. Surely there are some writers who are athletes, too. My fantasy is for a 1,000 dollar buy-in charity league that plays a tournament at the end of the season, winner take all. Proceeds go to the charity of the winner's choice. Given that many of the league's publications would be 501c's, this would be an excellent fund-raising opportunity for small presses. A Hunger Games for non-profits. Random House, Tin House, everyone could have a team. The only criterion to play, as with softball, would be an affiliation with the magazine or publisher.

Please volunteer your organization!

What bothers me is when they leave and I see their tip.

Hordes of European and South American tourists come through the restaurant and leave paltry tips or none at all, unless we add it to their bills. Just last week a family of eight from Colombia spent a hundred and twenty dollars on dinner and left a ten dollar tip. They waved at me when they left, thinking we were best friends because I spoke to them in Spanish, have a friend living in their hometown and plan on traveling to their country soon. I felt bad for resenting them, but it was a slow night and I needed all the tips I could get.

It’s not their fault they’re unfamiliar with our tipping system. They don’t know that, as a waitress, my hourly wage is less than the Mexican dishwasher’s. But fortunately it’s not the restaurant that pays most our check—it’s the customers and their tips.

The West Village restaurant I’ve been working at for four months serves Balkan and Mediterranean cuisine. We also have a wine bar, and though we do have wine from Italy, France, and Spain, many of the regulars come here to try our wine from the Balkans—stuff they can’t really find at other restaurants. But the French are different. They come here to drink Bordeaux.

On slow nights we pass out wine coupons. A customer with a coupon gets a free glass of our house wine. Usually when people get free wine, they feel inclined to order food, drink more wine, or at least leave a cash tip. It’s because of the coupons that a young French couple ended up at the bar.

Though they finish their glasses of our house red—a Pinot Noir from Italy, they make it known that it had not met their expectations. It is not my favorite either, but I’ve never complained about a free glass of wine. At least our coupon ploy worked because they decided to buy two more glasses of wine, and because they are French they felt entitled to sample over half our wine list.

Most customers, when they dislike a wine, will politely ask to sample something else, but this French couple made a histrionic show of their disapproval. Their lips, which arched and curved gracefully when speaking to each other in French, puckered grotesquely and they vigorously shook their heads at every wine they tried until they finally settled on two glasses of Bordeaux.

“Eet reminds us of home,” they said, and ordered some meats and cheeses to accompany their wine. Their cheeks got rosy as they imbibed and spoke softly. If they were bitching about our wine selection I would not have been able to tell by their tone since the French language seems to be devoid of hard consonants. They could have been comparing the Tempranillo to horse piss and it would have all sounded like docile cooing to me. There are some moments when I almost thought the French couple was cute, but I always managed to recover my senses.

After sipping the same glasses of Bordeaux for two hours they finally requested the bill twenty minutes after we were supposed to close. The man left a tip of one dollar and twenty cents after spending over twenty dollars. He smiled at me as they grabbed their coats to go, as if the experience had been equally endearing for both parties.

A buck twenty? Oh no, buddy. You can keep your smile.

With that smile he is in the same club as the Colombians and numerous other international visitors. The whole herd of them will have grinned and waved their way through countless New York City restaurants by now, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are a waitress’s worst nightmare. The Colombians were a lost cause, but it was not too late to reach this Frenchman. It was not about the money. It’s not like a bill of twenty-something dollars will ever fetch a large tip. It’s just hard for me to let bygones be bygones.

For my mission to be successful I had to quickly engage the French couple in this small talk before they left, and I had to do it with a smile—though all I really wanted to do is fling a glass of Bordeaux in their faces.

“So, how long have you been here?” I asked, trying to look casual with my elbows on the bar.

“Oh, I hev been here fur a monz,” explains the girl. “I hev an intairnsheep,” she added. “He eez my friend. He eez visiting for a week,” she said of her male companion, who offered another ridiculous smile.

“Okay!” I said, hoping the foreigners would not detect my false enthusiasm. “And how long will you be staying in New York?”

“Fur two more weeks,” replied the guy. I didn’t know about the girl, but estimated that since he was a tourist he would probably eat out every meal, which meant that there were at least forty-two different waitresses he would be shortchanging.

“Hmmm, okay….that’s great!” I gushed, causing the French man to look at me expectantly, perhaps thinking I would tell him some important insider information. Like where all the actors hang out. The girl, on the other hand, had already put her jacket on. That was my cue to hurry up and stop beating around the bush.

For dramatic effect I quickly dropped my smile and peered straight into the Frenchman’s pupils. “Well, since you’ll be here for a while you might as well know that in New York City you are supposed to leave at least a fifteen percent tip.”

I guess my affectations worked because the girl suddenly started to get anxious.

“Ow much did you leave?” She asked her compatriot, her face beet red instead of cute red. In the time that she’d been here she already figured out about gratuity, but it didn’t matter what she knew if she wasn’t paying the bill.

The guy looked at me for an answer. He hadn’t even looked at the bill when he put down his cash.

“You left one dollar and twenty cents,” I said.

Words were exchanged in rapid French. The man blushed. I wish I could have sugar coated this learning experience for him, and perhaps it was bad form to educate him in front of his female companion, but as most Americans know, getting schooled on another country’s dining etiquette while abroad is hardly ever a graceful experience.

Most people react by getting defensive or repeating the obvious. “Well, it’s not like that in my country,” they say before expounding on the virtues of their way of doing things. I waited for the Frenchman’s rebuttal, but never got one.

“I’m sorry, I deed not know,” he said, which surprised me.

The man seemed so genuinely remorseful I felt obliged to dish out some good old American optimism. “Well, it’s okay, because now you know!”

He put two more dollars on the bar, which I did not expect him to do. Now it was my turn to feel remorseful. I decided to appeal to the French’s sense of patriotism in an attempt to uplift his spirits and quell an impending sense of guilt.

“Yeah, things are different in France. In France your waitresses get a wage …and….and…gratuity is included in the bill…” My discourse devolved into babble about living wages, vacation time and health care, until eventually the Frenchman’s smile crept back onto his face before the couple left.

“Good bye! Come back again!” I said out of habit, knowing they wouldn’t.

Robin Kilmer graduated from Bard College in 2007 and worked for three years at a public school in the Bronx. She hopes to one day successfully converge two diametrically opposing forces: writing and making a living. Until that day she is working as a nanny (and a waitress).

I contemplated this as the plane bisected the isle of Manhattan. For the first and only time in my life, the airplane went on a daring and gorgeous deviation from her normal path to LaGuardia, flying so close to the Twin Towers I felt I could reach out and answer a buzzing phone in one of the offices.

To be honest, I felt uneasy about being so close to the buildings. I felt like we were tempting fate. I felt like we could crash.

This was one week before 9/11. In the movie of my life, this was foreshadowing.

In my unemployed haze, I’d fallen into the bad habit of sleeping late. This was true that fateful morning when I, once again, smacked my alarm clock into submission over and over: September 11th, 2001. I was supposed to walk the ¾ mile down to the base of the Twin Towers where one of the city’s unemployment offices was located. I had a 9:00 a.m. appointment to scour their databases for a job that might work for a French/Drama double major who’d been laid off from a cushy internet job, and blew all her money doing theater. That morning, though, bed was calling, and I figured I’d move back to Kentucky within a couple of weeks anyway. Who needed this crazy, expensive city? Who needed a job? Not when I could stay under my comforter, the first rays of sunlight raining down on me.

I heard a huge bang, and found myself annoyed at the delivery trucks. How could they constantly forget where the potholes were, day after day?

I heard a barrage of sirens screaming down the street. New York City living up to its noisy, dangerous stereotype.

I heard my cell phone ring and ring. Probably someone from the unemployment office, wondering where I was, dying to give me grief for my lack of motivation.

But then I heard my landline AND my cell phone ring – simultaneously. Something was wrong.

“THANK GOD YOU’RE OK! YOU ARE OK, RIGHT? ARE YOU OK? WHERE ARE YOU?” Mom was hysterical.

“Mom, what’s going on?”

“You haven’t been watching the news? A plane flew into the Twin Towers. Turn on the TV.”

I turned on the TV just in time to see the second plane hit. My knees gave out on me. Suddenly, my debate about whether or not to live in New York City was moot. I was going to die here.

I sat down on the dirty, hardwood floor, sandwiched between the tiny, street-found couch and our Ikea kitchen isle. Two planes within moments of each other? My brain couldn’t make sense of it. All the rules of our universe were suspended.

The word “terrorism” floated in the air, spoken from an immaculate newscaster. I definitely wasn’t surprised to hear the word. But it was the final stone in my sinking stomach.

I didn’t know what to do. My mother was saying something in the phone, but I didn’t hear her. Less than a mile from me, people were dying. People were burning. Less than a mile from me the world was ending.

I walked to my roommate’s door, and knocked. When there was no answer, I opened it to a neatly made bed. Not home. I had hated her guts and dreamed up any number of evil plots against her, yet, at the moment, I found myself praying to God she was alive.

The TV screamed at me that more planes were down, the Pentagon, Pennsylvania. This was just the beginning. What was going to explode next?

Mom was still on the phone. “What are you going to do? You can’t stay there. Where are you going to go?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t want to leave my apartment. I figured more planes would fly overhead, bombs obliterating everyone in their path. How could any plan matter now?

I told my mom I had to let her go to check on my friends and figure out what to do. She didn’t want to sever the connection. Now that I’m a mom, I get it. That was, literally, her lifeline. She made me swear to call her as often as possible.

My hands shook so drastically I couldn’t shut off the phone until the third try. I started to pray, but I didn’t know what to say. How could I ask God to spare me when any number of people were already dead? I simply prayed that I make the right decisions.

But that was the problem. I felt underwater, struggling for air. I had no clue what decisions to make.

I called my best friend, Alex. Somehow, she sounded normal.

“Randi, it’s going to be okay. We’re going to get out of the city. I’ll figure something out. I’ll walk to you from work and we’ll go from there. Do you want to buy some food? It’s probably a good idea for us to stock up on canned goods.”

Yes. Go to the store, and buy food. It would mean walking outside, but at least I would be doing something, rather than just sitting here, shaking and barely breathing.

I stepped outside to one of the most truly perfect autumn days I’d ever witnessed. The sky was a bright azure, not a cloud to be found. The temperature was perfect – eighty degrees – the kind of day that used to make me feel optimistic.

I looked up and saw the Towers – high and gray and enflamed. Around me, New Yorkers simply stood and stared. To my right was the local laundromat owner, a notoriously cranky and disgruntled Chinese woman who was the bane of my existence. She sobbed. “This is…this is…I can’t believe it,” she said, as her body shook.

“Yes,” was all I could manage.

I walked two blocks to the local store and traveled the aisles. Other people walked beside me in similarly confused dazes. I picked up a few items and got in line. A woman ran up behind me and asked to go ahead. She had on an FDNY uniform and was purchasing first aid items.

“Of course,” I said. This was the first time since moving to New York that I let someone go ahead of me in line. New Yorkers do not do that sort of thing.

I walked home, my eyes glued to the Towers. I couldn’t shake the feeling of watching a movie. I could not accept this was real life.

At home I pulled out a knapsack and threw in some clothes. When I started to pack the food I realized I’d bought ten cans of chickpeas and little else.

And that’s when the building shook. I flipped on the TV to see one of the Towers collapsing, debris exploding into the air.

Newscasters were screaming, people outside were screaming. I crouched, holding my head, certain my old, decrepit building would also collapse. When it didn’t, I stood up and went to my window. My tiny, expensive West Village apartment literally had a view of a building five feet away, but I figured if I couldn’t see that building, things were bad. I could see the building, so that was something.

I went back downstairs and opened the door to the impossible sight of one Tower, standing alone on the horizon, still burning. A black cloud floated up around it and the air smelled like singed hair.

And that’s when I saw them. Walking slowly, somberly, a brigade of soldiers in three-piece suits, covered head-to-toe in ash. Silence, heavy and sickening, engulfed us all. Looking back at this moment, I feel disgusted at myself. I should have brought down a jug of water and some mugs. I should have offered them a drink or a shower or some food. Instead, I stood and gawked.

Alex arrived, the opposite of me – a woman of action, competent and energetic. “Honey,” she said, looking at me as if she were looking at a child, “you’re still in your pajamas.”

I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but she was right. We hugged – hard – and I changed clothes. Alex guided me to pack my cell phone and even took a few moments to laugh at my purchase of chickpeas.

“I found out there are some ferries running to New Jersey. I’m not sure where they land, but when we get there, we can call Don and he can take us to Hoboken.” Don was her boyfriend. Hoboken was the location of her apartment. Alex was my angel.

As we walked up 6th Avenue, Alex said we should take pictures. I’m not great at remembering to take pictures on a good day, but it certainly never occurs to me when times are bad. “Randi, this is a day we’ll never forget. And who knows how long THAT Tower will stand? We should document this.”

It never occurred to me that the second Tower could fall. New York City with no Twin Towers? It just seemed so disturbing. I snapped a couple of pictures of the single, burning tower, then turned away from it, for the last time.

We passed a church and Alex asked if we should go in. I said yes. We settled into a pew and prayed together, out loud, for the first and only time. We held hands so tightly our knuckles were white.

We walked onto the ferry and I called Mom. She was so relieved that I was getting out of New York that the change in her voice was palpable. I paced up and down the aisles of the ferry, thinking about how expensive a boat ride like this could be under different circumstances.

Don was waiting at the dock, and he and Alex held each other tenderly. I realized then I had a built a nearly solitary life, no person to call home, no foundation. I was always so afraid of rejection. Now that fear seemed so small, so needless.

We went back to Alex’s apartment. Her roommates, people we knew from the theater world, sat chain-smoking. We hugged and repeated endlessly, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.”

I assume we ate, I’m sure we did, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. The TV remained on, a constant influx of horrible news. The second Tower fell, and all we could do was cry. I kept praying for survivors, somehow survivors.

I slept in the living room, tried to ignore the persistent clouds of smoke and refused to turn off the TV. I drifted off to a newscaster repeating, “It’s just incredulous, totally incredulous,” and cursed her bad English, before realizing how silly I was.

The next day, Alex and I traveled back into the city via the PATH train to give blood. I expected the train to explode at any moment, but I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit in Hoboken while people lay buried under ash.

We went to a few different Red Cross centers, but nobody needed our blood. None of the bodies they rescued were alive.

All available spaces – lampposts, sides of buildings, trees, parked cars – were covered with homemade signs. Pictures of husbands, wives, fiancés, mothers, fathers, adult children accompanied desperate pleas for any information about their whereabouts. I couldn’t shake the thought that had I gone to my meeting, my picture would be up there, too.

I tried to go back to my apartment to pack up more things, but that section of Manhattan was closed, a barricade of silent, frowning cops blocking the way. I had no idea what condition my apartment would be in when I could return.

We returned to Hoboken and I called every person I’d ever cared about who lived in the city – my selfish roommate, the ex-coworker on whom I had an unrequited crush, the boy with whom I’d had one failed date, college friends who lived in the city whom I hadn’t seen in too long. I sighed deeper with each living, breathing voice who answered the phone.

My mother begged me to come home to Kentucky and I relented. Flights were impossible, of course, so I took a Greyhound from Newark. It was an epic, two-day hell-hole of a ride, of which all I can really remember is sleeping on my sweatshirt and buying junk food at rest stops.

My mom looked at me like I was a corpse. She ordered me to strip off my clothes so she could wash them. I hadn’t noticed, but she said they were ashy.

We attended a memorial service in a small, rural town. The people were sweet and sad, but I felt I didn’t belong. They were mourning something they saw on TV. They hadn’t breathed in the ash of burning buildings and bodies. They hadn’t heard the screaming. They didn’t have to live with the fact that it could have been them. I resented them.

My sister and her boyfriend took me to a haunted forest attraction in the woods outside of Louisville to lift my spirits. I’ve always loved horror movies and Halloween-themed events, but this night felt uncomfortable and inappropriate. Looking at actors bathed in corn-syrup blood and being chased by men with chain-less chainsaws felt cartoonish and silly. I’d seen actual death. This could not scare me.

I broke my mother’s heart a few days later when I told her I had to return. Watching the footage of New Yorkers pulling together settled the argument in my heart – I was a part of all that. I belonged there. I had to help rebuild.

I repeated the Greyhound trip in reverse, feeling better this time, less like a run-away. The debate in my head was settled. For the time being, at least, New York was worth the expense and the craziness. New York needed me.

In the year that followed, I found the man that would be my husband and father of our daughter. I became a public school teacher and found the career that would fulfill me and possibly change the world. I learned not to fear life because death could be lurking around the corner. And I learned that we can heal from almost anything.

The weather is glorious. The air is crisp. The sky, tranquil. I am walking downtown en route to a trendy West Village bistro. As I approach the corner of East 10th Street I come to an abrupt stop ...

“I never realized how clearly you can see the towers from here,” I say to my partner, Hugh, who is standing beside me. “Just look at them, lit up. They’re stunning.”

In the past, I have made conscious efforts to avoid most things iconic in New York City. I’m not sure why. I mean, really, it’s not as though I lack an appreciation for the city’s history or its exceptional architecture. Quite the contrary. But, for some unknown reason, I experience great resistance when confronted by Manhattan’s compelling complex skyline.

Maybe it stems from a fear of reprisal. A certain unease that washes over me whenever I attempt to express genuine gratitude for things like the Chrysler Building, or say the Statue of Liberty. For this New Yorker, an unexpected anxiety always arises every time I try to acknowledge these structures in a meaningful way. As if the mere act of admiration alone could cast me back into that contemptible category of being an out-of-towner. An unsophisticated tourist. A wannabe.

On the eve of September 11th I find myself dining among a diverse group of quintessential Manhattanites: visual artists, photographers, graphic designers ... A few of them sip fancy cocktails. Others don expensive eyewear. All partake in witty conversations about foreign film, current MoMA exhibitions, and the opera. Contrite, I sit at the end of the table waiting for my grand opportunity to chime in about something, anything, that can be considered remotely Manhattan-ish. Alas, I am at a loss for words. The situation is vexing and echoes one of those The New Yorker magazine contests where the reader considers a cartoon and is then challenged to come up with a clever caption for it. Again, I have nothing to contribute.

Truth be told, I feel like a fraud. Even though I have been a New York City resident for nearly thirteen years, it has literally been months since I have actually “lived” in the borough of Manhattan (at this time, my Union Square Park apartment is rented out and there are still four months remaining on the lease).

At the end of the meal, I leave the bistro and drive back with Hugh to Connecticut. Though I feel blessed for having a lovely home to go to, I can’t help but feel lonesome for my beloved 650 square foot walk-up apartment on East 16th Street. I miss it terribly.

September 11th, 2001. 9:15 AM.
New Milford, Connecticut.

The weather is glorious. The air is crisp. The sky, tranquil. I am outside and the telephone rings. Hugh answers. The world stops. From this point on nothing will ever be the same again. (I will not repeat the things overheard on the phone. Revealing these details would seem superfluous, perhaps even insensitive.) From this remote distance, my 9/11 experience as a New Yorker oddly becomes an intangible one. Out of reach. I do not see the first plane hit 1WTC in real time, nor do I come out of a subway station to discover total pandemonium accompanied by foreboding plumes of black smoke. I am not among the massive herds of terrified citizens running frantically uptown as the North Tower implodes and collapses to the ground. Rather I am safe, out of harm’s way, in Litchfield County Connecticut no less, watching all the horror unfold on TV.

I become increasingly removed during the ensuing weeks. While thousands of New Yorkers deal with real tragedy, loss, and the unthinkable, my conflict centers on being absent from my city--being away from my home. I feel like someone who has just jumped ship. A shameful deserter.

A Judas.

September 1st, 2011. 8:46 AM.
The corner of 16th Street and Fifth Avenue.

The weather is glorious. The air is crisp. The sky, tranquil. I look down Fifth Avenue and take in the new construction of One World Trade Center. At the moment steel has risen to the 78th floor. Installation of a glass curtain wall has reached the 49th floor. An elephantine crane looms ominously in the background. To gain a better vantage point, I step into a bike lane ...

“I didn’t realize that the new tower was so far along” I say to myself as I am clipped by clusters of frenetic text-messaging pedestrians. “It took so long to break ground and now it feels like it’s all going up overnight.”

Again, there is a disconnect.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to wrap my arms around this new almighty tower. While I do admire its preeminence, and its structural engineering, I question its significance. What exactly will this new high-rise mean to New York City?

What will it mean to me?

I do my best to drum up some enthusiasm for One World Trade Center but I find it difficult to embrace this New York icon in the making. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, it seems to pale by comparison. Perhaps, with time, I’ll begin to feel differently about it ...

E.B. White once wrote: “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” Looking down Fifth Avenue on this beautiful September day, I consider these words and then contemplate the upcoming anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I reflect upon the 2,753 victims who pointlessly died that day. I think about their loving families and how they are coping, ten years later, and it is in this New York minute that I am humbled and realize just how lucky I really am.

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.”

Internal Affairs arrested 2 cops from the 9th precinct, a sanitation cop, a bag man for the fire department, two transvestites, a circus clown, two barboys, three female bartenders, and me. The sanitation cop put up a struggle. The cops hauled him into the back bedroom and broke his leg with a baseball bat.

"Anyone else want some." A plain-clothed officer shook the baseball bat at us.

We shook our heads.

After 30 minutes an ambulance arrived for the injured cop and the officers led the other arrestees into a paddy wagon. We were arraigned in the morning and released without bail. Arthur and Scottie met me later that night at the Ritz. Arthur was wearing sunglasses and as nervous as a fugitive.

"What did Internal Affairs say?" Arthur had been visited by a psycho cop. A double blast from a shotgun was the 9th Precinct's warning to keep his mouth shut. He was hoping that we had done the same.

"Nothing. They didn't ask us anything."

"No names?" Scottie wore the same jeans, shirt, and jacket as the night before. His hair stuck straight up in the air as if he had standing on his feet and in his unshaven state he looked like Charles Manson's illegitimate nephew on the run.

"None. They booked us, arraigned us, and cut us loose."

"Cool." Arthur was relieved that none of us were in trouble. Not that he could do anything to help us.

The Jefferson closed its doors forever. I paid three months rent in advance. We never went to trial for the Jefferson. The story never made the papers. None of us had jobs. We didn't deal drugs. We only did them. Mostly cocaine. Within a month we were broke. Arthur kept talking about opening another place. His wife thought he was crazy, but agreed to decorate the next venue.

"Think about how we can do if it was bigger," Arthur told Scottie and me. Bigger meant more money. Investors thought the same thing and in the summer of 1981 Arthur found an abandoned garage on West 25th Street. He told the landlord that it was going to be an art gallery.

"It just needs a little work." The floors were caked with oil. The walls sagged with mildew, and the ceiling panels hung down like limp tongues. "We don't have to make it livable. Only good enough to serve drinks. We can open by Labor Day."

"Who's going to do the work?" I wondered. Scottie was a bartender. I was a doorman. The only time we used a hammer was to chip the ice out of the freezer.

"You guys and your friends." Arthur said without saying how. "I'm no contractor."

"How much are you going to pay?" I was only interested in money.

"Not much." Arthur was living on the skinny edge of life same as us. “But you'll have a job at the end of it."

"Throw in lunch and you got a deal."

"Deal." Arthur’s word was good enough for Scottie, myself, and several friends.

Werthel, a lanky 19 year-old cokehead from the Five Towns, also wanted to join the work crew. During the last months of the Jefferson his use had gone from daily to hourly.

"Why don't you go to rehab?" Scottie asked at the apartment that Werthel shared with our mutual friend, Richie Boy. "Your father has money."

"I don't want him to know about it." Werthel was swearing off blow forever. He gave us the last of his stash. "Have a party," he said.

"You mind if I take some change too." Scottie was staring at the bowl of coins on a glass table. It was filled to the brink with quarters.

"Sure, but only as much as you can grab with one hand."

Scottie snatched a handful and Werthel grabbed his wrist, shaking it so hard that Scottie's take was decreased by half.

"You're the meanest man in the world," Richie Boy declared from the sofa. Richie was Werthel's schoolmate from kindergarten. No one knew him better.

"What you mean by that?"

"If you have to ask, then what the use of explaining."

"Do you guys think I'm mean?"

"I won't if you let me take another handful." Scottie was ready to go double or nothing.

"Get out of here."

The coins covered a sandwich at the nearest deli. The cocaine went fast at AM-PM, an after-hours club abutting the exit for the Holland Tunnel. Free cocaine always had a funny way of making you too many new friends.

On Monday we showed up to West 25th Street at 9am. The street was shimmering with heat. Arthur’s craggy-faced partner was waiting for us. We all recognized him as the coverboy for a Time Magazine article on Herpes. We called him HP.

"You were supposed to be here at 8." HP was standing with his twin brother and a friend. The brother wasn't as craggy and the friend was wearing a very professional carpenter belt. It was leather. "Any of you have tools?"

"Tools?"

"I'll take that as a no." HP gave the carpenter friend $40. "Go get some hammers and shit. The rest of you I don't want talking to anyone about what we're doing. Nothing. I want you here on time. 8am. We finish when we finish. No overtime."

"What an asshole," Werthel muttered under his breath.

"As long as we get paid I don't give a shit." Scottie’s definition of paradise was a joint and Chinese take-out.

"Yeah, but he's still an asshole."

Within 30 minutes we were tearing down the walls. Scottie and I loaded up metal in a trolley. Werthel commandeered the sledge hammer and pounded the walls with a fury confirmed his status as the meanest man in the world. Decades old dust covered our bodies and sweat wet our skin. Arthur showed up at noon.

"Good work, guys. You look like coalminers."

"Looks like lunch time." Scottie was exhausted from the first physical work he had done in his life. I was out of shape. Only Werthel was ready for more, because his system was running on cocaine fumes.

"Who said," HP countermanded Scottie's suggestion. "It's lunch when I say it's lunch."

"Who elected you god?" Arthur snidely demanded in our defense.

"I'm paying for this. I'll tell them what to do." HP was approaching the first stages of apoplexy.

"Shut up already. Don't be such an asshole." Arthur was our union rep. "Lunchtime, guys. Cough up."

"Cough up what?"

"Lunch money." Arthur had as little money as we did i.e. nothing.

"I never said anything about paying for lunch.” HP was as stingy as a 13 year-old boy on his first date. “These guys are on their own. You have thirty minutes."

Werthel, Scottie, and I muttered "asshole" under our breath and Arthur rolled his eyes as if to apologize. Arthur and Scottie looked at the scrap metal. There was a junk dealer on 28th Street. The metal had to be worth something.

"We'll get rid of the metal and be right back."

Arthur and Scottie rolled the trolley onto West 25th Street. The temperature would have been 95 in the shade if there were any trees. The trip took them 20 minutes. They came back with two sandwiches. The junk dealer had given them $8. Arthur split the sandwich four ways.

“You done her.” HP was complaining about us taking too much time.

"I'll talk to him." Arthur was good with people, only HP wasn't listening to anything Arthur had to say. He knew it all. By week's end we wanted to quit. Arthur begged us to reconsider.

"This guy won't hire you, if you do." Arthur was powerless to stop HP from being an asshole, but we knew once the club opened we'd get our reward one way or the other and we stayed on the job.

Werthel was the only one who didn't mind not having any money for lunch. His mother thought that he was in summer school and gave him a weekly stipend. Every lunch he'd get himself a good sandwich, while Scottie and I ate a $1 slice of pizza. Scottie and I were losing weight. Werthel was getting stronger. We tried to schnorr extra food. He would throw the half-eaten sandwich in the trash. Scottie and I were too proud to dig out his scraps. He didn't deserve it, but we transferred our hatred from HP to Werthel.

The demolition got harder and dirtier. Things should have improved once we started construction, except none of us knew what we were doing. Werthel fell off the ladder and I smashed my thumb with a hammer. Arthur suggested that I should go see a doctor. HP wouldn't pay for the visit, so I wrapped my thumb with a torn tee-shirt.

One day Scottie and I were starving and Werthel said, "I'll race you for a sandwich."

"Me?" Scottie was short, but very fast.

"No, you." He pointed to me.

"Me." I had been a cross-country runner in high school in 1969. My finishes were never in the top 5.

"Yeah." Werthel was younger and taller. “You’re not hungry?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Then race me?”

“Werthel, just give us the money for a sandwich.” The previous night I drank until dawn with Richie Boy. My skin was sweating vodka.

“You want it. Run for it.”

HP and the rest of the crew stopped working. Arthur and Colleen got out of a cab.

“What’s the wager?” My stomach was growling from the lack of food.

"Okay, two sandwiches versus you being my slave for a day." Werthel was wearing sneakers.

"One day." I had on cheap work boots.

"I'll take some of that bet." HP yelled to Arthur from the loading platform. "But you have nothing to bet."

"I do." Arthur pulled $100 from his pocket. Colleen slapped his hand. The money was probably for an over-due bill.

"Straight up." HP was giving no odds.

"Straight up." Arthur looked at me. "You can do it, kid?"

"No problem." Arthur was 35. I was almost 30. His saying 'kid' made me feel younger. "The bet's on."

"Scottie, you hold the money." Arthur handed his c-note to Scottie. HP did the same and stared at Werthel. "If you throw the race, I'll welsh on the bet."

"I'm not throwing any bet. I'm the meanest man in the world." Werthel threw his sandwich in the trash. This race was a test of his drug treatment. "You ready?"

"100 yards." He was definitely faster than me for 50.

"100 yards." Werthel dropped his tools. Colleen was berating Arthur. Scottie was the referee. Werthel and I walked off the distance in the middle of the street. Workers from the rest of the street stopped what they were doing.

"You know we don't have to do this. You could give me the money for the sandwiches and I'll be your slave." I was more hungry than proud.

"No, this is a race." Werthel stopped at a manhole cover. "This 100?"

I nodded yes. He crouched like Jesse Owens and I stood at ease, both arms at my side.

Scottie shouted from the finish line. "On your marks. Get set. Go."

Werthel and I burst down the street. He pulled ahead instantly. One yard. Two yards. I dropped my head and pushed harder. My feet slapped onto the hot pavement. Shouts filled my ears. We were neck and neck. Scottie was only ten yards away. I leaned forward and beat Werthel across the line by a foot. Colleen screamed with delight and HP called for a rematch. Arthur grabbed the 2 $100 bills.

"No rematch. He won fair and square."

I thought so too, then he winked at Werthel. I turned to him and he said, "What? You won your sandwich. Enjoy."

Arthur gave Scottie and me $20 each. The sandwiches from the closest deli were terrible, but victory was a tasty condiment. That Friday HP said he'd pay us at his apartment. We went to One 5th Avenue. The doorman told us that he had flown to Paris to shoot a commercial about acne. We didn't see him till the following week. After HP paid us, Werthel called him an asshole.

"I don't need to hear that. You're fired."

"You can't fire me. I quit." Werthel chucked a hammer at HP. It travelled too fast for him to duck, but Werthel's aim was off. The hammer quivered in the wall. Werthel stomped off the site and HP said, "Don't even try to come to this club."

"Asshole," Arthur muttered.

He was a good judge of character. Later that night we went to see Werthel at his apartment. Richie Boy had a good laugh at everyone’s version of the story and Scottie asked, “Werthel, how it feel to lose to an old man?”

I might be beat up for my age, but not old, but before I could say anything, Werthel put down his Diet-Coke. It was the drink of recovering cokeheads. "I didn’t lose. I threw it."

“You don’t like losing at anything. Even checkers when we were kids.” Richie Boy had all the answers.

“I made it look like he won.” Werthel folded his arms across his chest.

“Shut up already,” Arthur sat forward on the sofa. “I saw your face. You wanted to win and thought you could win against a drunk and maybe if you hadn’t eaten your sandwich before the race you could have beaten him, but not on a full stomach. He won, because he was faster.”

“I could beat him now.”

Werthel was right. I had already drunk 5 beers. My feet and legs and heart were out of the competition.

“Maybe.” Arthur wasn’t letting Werthel slide. “But not then. Who was faster? Tell the truth?”

Werthel waited several seconds and grunted with an off-center smile.

“I have a good eye for winners.” Arthur was looking at Werthel with a sly grin. “And an even better for losers and no one’s as big a loser as HP.”

“Asshole.” We clinked glasses and drained our drinks.

"But not Werthel.” Arthur added, because where Werthel might be the meanest man in the world to his friends but he would always be one of us and to this Werthel had nothing to say. He could only smile.

Peter Nolan Smith left New England in 1976 for the East Village. The nightlife became his vehicle for traveling the world; Paris, Hamburg, Nice, and London. His career ended at the Milk Bar in Beverly Hills in 1995 and devoted his years to traveling in the Orient, supporting by his new profession as diamantaire. Most of his 21st Century has been spent in Thailand, although economics forced his return to the USA in 2008. Peter NolanSmith currently lives in Brooklyn and Sriracha, Thailand. He is the editor and writer of www.mangozeen.com.

When she achieved whatever she’d wanted to achieve, she put the Twinkies in the other bag. She remained motionless for a while. Then, as if she had just remembered something, she opened the first bag again and took out another pack of Twinkies. She rubbed it fervently; then she mumbled something and tossed it in the other bag. She relaxed for a moment, and I relaxed too. Not for long. A third pack of Twinkies was to follow, then a fourth, and after that I stopped counting. When all the Twinkies had been successfully transferred to the second bag, the process was reversed, and it became clear that there was going to be no end to this.

The thought of changing cars did cross my mind, but whenever the train reached the next stop I remained seated. None of the other passengers seemed to mind the rattling cellophane noise. They continued looking straight ahead, at nothing in particular, at anything but the crazy person. So I did the same, following their example, and I was fine with the arrangement until she yelled, “Miss!” and pointed at me.

In those first two weeks in New York I had already come across a surprising number of crazy people, and I’d come to accept them as part of the New York experience—much like the mice in my apartment. They were usually homeless, with the exception of the ones who actually lived in my building. Their madness was of the obvious and not dangerous kind and they mostly kept to themselves, though I couldn’t help but find some of them disturbing—like the old lady who occupied the apartment below mine and would yell profanities at someone in the middle of the night.

I told myself it would just take some getting used to. The places I’d spent time in before—the little town of Princeton, the larger town of Boston, the big cities of London and Athens—did not have that many crazy people, or if they did, they hid them and hid them well. But New York seemed to breed them.

“Miss!” the woman with the Twinkies repeated, and I could feel the discreetly curious eyes of everyone in the car were now on me.

“I think she’s talking to you,” whispered the girl next to me.

“Oh,” I said, and looked at the woman.

“Hold this for me,” she said, lifting one of the two Twinkie bags, in a way that deprived me of the right to refuse her. I looked at the bag but did not move, as if the woman had spoken to me in a language I did not understand. There was something off about what was happening, something extraordinary, so extraordinary in fact, that my mind could not immediately process it.

The mad can coexist with the sane as long as they don’t interact with them. That was the deal. But she had broken that rule and was now asking me to hold the Twinkie bag and I did not know what was right and what was wrong anymore. I was aware of the others around us, watching us, and wondered what they’d think if I did not help her. Would it be rude? Inconsiderate? There was no other obvious reason for not holding the bag for her, other than my prejudice. And then I became aware of the seconds passing, of my not moving, of the bag dangling under the woman’s fingers, waiting for me. So I reached out and grabbed it. Its handles felt greasy under my fingers—Twinkie residue, I told myself.

The train reached a stop and the girl who was sitting next to me jumped out of her seat and out of the car. I thought about doing the same. The Twinkie woman had been trying to reach a plastic bag that was under her seat and contained some thick, liquid substance of questionable nature.

“I’ll just tell her it’s my stop,” I thought, “the moment she rises back up,” but the doors closed and we were on our way again. Her chubby fingers danced only inches away from where the bag lay, but after one last stretch, she gave up.

“You get that bag for me,” she said.

I looked around me and the other passengers immediately looked away.

“Well I can’t get to it!” she said, aggravated. “You have to help me.”

I wanted to cry. By agreeing to hold the bag for her, I had agreed to so much more.

“You have to help me!” she yelled. I panicked. I kneeled before her and I reached between her legs, which she had kindly parted for me.

“Pardon me,” I said.

The air around her had absorbed her smell. It was an old-lady smell but there was something funky about it, something sour. I pinched the bag and raised it to her face.

“Here you go.”

But she didn’t take it. She opened it and looked inside, and as she did, a foul smell rose out of it.

“No, this won’t do,” she said.

She looked lost for a moment; then she took out a pack of Twinkies and started rubbing it.

I left the bag by her feet and returned to my seat. I would get off at the next stop. I’d be home soon.

My apartment in New York was smaller than what I was used to. Both in Boston and in Princeton I had had bigger places. It was still unfurnished, except a cheap red futon and a bulky TV set that rested on one of the empty moving boxes. I’d gotten rid of my queen-size bed when I moved, it was too big for the apartment; the futon was only a temporary solution. I’d sit on it and look at the space around me, imagined what would go where: a coffee table in the middle, maybe a floor lamp, a fat leather armchair by the window where I could read.
At work I spent hours browsing furniture store websites.

I was new at the job and didn’t have much else to do anyway, though I was beginning to suspect that that stagnation would be permanent. I worked as an associate editor at Bloomberg Press, which was a step up from the editorial assistant position I’d left at Princeton University Press, but I now had fewer responsibilities. Bloomberg Press was a very small part of the Bloomberg financial corporation and no one paid attention to our staff of ten. There were no books coming in and no books going out, but when I raised a question about it, I was instructed to keep my mouth shut.

IKEA, Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn—their websites were my new best friends. I’d dive into pictures of rugs and cushions, quilts and coverlets, match them to flowery bed skirts. I’d add things to my virtual shopping basket, save them for later, when I’d be settled.

On my way home I’d always stop for roast chicken. Spiced with rosemary and lemon, it was a simple meal, always warm, and I liked its smell—it reminded me of something, what, I wasn’t sure. I’d go home and sit on the red futon, the roast chicken on my lap, and turn on the TV. And so my first few months in New York passed.

From time to time I would receive a “Happy Hour” email from the younger people in the office. I went out with them once or twice for drinks. They asked me where I was from and how I’d ended up in New York and I gave them the short version. They pretended it was interesting though I knew it was not. I did not care to find out anything about them—they seemed nice, a bit boring, and I was not interested to get to know them better. I could not start over just yet. I had left my friends in Princeton, I had left my friends in Boston, I had left my friends in London, my friends in Athens before that. And I was going to leave New York, too, one day. When they invited me to go out with them again, I told them I was busy. After some time I’d open and read their emails but would never respond.

One day, in the ladies room, I heard the woman in the next stall crying. It was Dru, the copyeditor. She was in her mid-fifties, a stage actress turned copyeditor, who lived alone in an apartment in the East Village that was even smaller than mine.

“My shower is in my kitchen and my couch is also my bed,” she had told me. We had adjacent desks—the Bloomberg office was like a trading floor and we all sat next to each other in rows that looked like human row-crops, and, inevitably, we’d learn things about each other; also, Dru could talk.

She was sobbing and I thought about asking what was wrong—she had seen me walk in with her, so she must’ve known that I was there. I decided not to. I did not have the energy for someone else’s problems. I left the bathroom and when Dru returned to her seat, eyes swollen, nose runny, I pretended not to notice.

New Village Nails was a nail salon I went to every Saturday. I found it a few days after I’d moved into the neighborhood, and I soon realized it was one of the cheapest ones in the Village. Its last renovation had been done sometime in the early ‘90s and the turquoise pedicure chairs looked as tired as the women who worked there: Lucy, Fanny, Vivian, Betty, Rachel, Sharon, all from Tibet. After my first few visits they gave me my own supply box; it had my name printed on it—misspelled—and contained tools that they’d use only on my feet and no one else’s. I’d always pick “Package 2”: manicure, pedicure, 10-minute foot massage, 10-minute shoulder massage. Every Saturday afternoon I soaked my feet in hot water for an hour and a half, inhaling the rising steam—a medley of bath salts and cucumber cream.

“Would you like a magazine, Miss?” the Tibetan women would ask and I’d wave “No.” I’d watch them apply thick layers of red polish to my nails and toenails and it soothed me. Then I’d sit by the window under the green New Village Nails neon sign, bring my hands to the drier and watch all the Saturday people walk by in their coats and scarves.

One December night like all other nights, I was resting on my futon when the phone rang.

“Why don’t you come down this weekend?” my friend Lea asked.

I hadn’t been back to Princeton since I’d moved. It was still too soon I’d tell my friends, though it had been months.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Come, we all miss you! It will be so nice, we’ll build a fire, have some wine, it’ll be like you never left.”

“But I did leave.”

“What?”

“I can’t, I’m busy,” I said louder. I sounded guilty.

“You’re busy doing what?”

“I have to get my nails done.”

“Your nails.”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said and as I said it my eyes filled with tears. I thought of red nail polish, of bath salts and cucumber cream.

“Okay, I guess. Let me know if you change your mind.”
I returned to my red futon and lay on it like a dead fly and waited for something to happen—for someone else to call, for someone to knock at my door, but no one did.

“You have to help me!” the Twinkie-woman’s plea turned inside my head like a shark. It was not crazy people that New York was breeding, after all. It was loneliness.

Sophia Efthimiatou is originally from Athens, Greece, and now lives in New York City. She is currently pursuing an MFA degree in creative nonfiction at Columbia University, and working on a collection of humorous essays on the hidden persistence of loneliness in daily life.

I’ve spent the last ten years of my life in the East Village of Manhattan, movin’ on up Avenue B. Quite literally: I first lived at 4th and B, then briefly moved to 6th between B and C, ending up on 13th and B. I lived in a shoebox of an apartment—sans a single closet or cupboard, with a bedroom that, true to its name, was the size of a bed without an inch to spare, and a bathroom containing a toilet but no room for one’s knees. Despite the snug, sagging apartment, I’ve always enjoyed the quirky neighborhood, and specifically Avenue B.

My beautiful B!

Blasting bass from car stereos and drum beats in summer heat. Burning, baking streets. The blood and blossoms of Tompkins Square. Puerto Rican children bouncing through fire hydrants’ spray. Ancient Dominicans playing dominoes on stoops. Cubans, Haitians, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans. Hipsters, mobsters, punk and grunge. Has-been artists and aspiring musicians. Babies in buggies, French bulldogs in boots. Buzzing B. Bars, bouncers and beer. The B-side, Rue B, Boxcar Lounge, Barbone, Back Forty and B-Cup. Mexican bakeries, crowded bus stops. Bagels and lox, cool coffee shops. Bridge and tunnel barhopping. Bicycles with boomboxes in baskets. Taking care of business, trading paper bags. Babby-daddies and hootchie mamas. Baggy pants, boxers and bling. Bums and beggers, hunks and hippies. Beloved B. Between A and C, B is brighter, B is breezier.

And for me, B was belonging.

I had absolutely no intentions of leaving the area. What force was it, then, that ripped me out of my cozy comfort zone and landed me way out west, on the opposite side of Manhattan, transplanting me from near the East River to an apartment just shy of the Hudson? A very blonde Swede named Niklas Andersson. When we decided to cohabitate after dating long-distance, moving from the East Village to the West Village was his suggestion, so we could explore our new world together. We’d both be moving west—him to a new continent and me to a new neighborhood. Though he’d be transporting himself 3,938 miles across an ocean, and I was moving only 1.8 miles away across eight Avenues, I wasn’t sure who’d be making the more dramatic change.

New Yorkers are extremely neighborhood-centric—perhaps since people are on top of each other, fighting for a space to call their own, then required to pay exorbitant rents for it—they force themselves to believe, and then force that belief on others, that their chosen area of residence is far better than anything surrounding it. The Brooklyn versus Manhattan debate has crept into conversation at least once at every single gathering and dinner party I’ve attended over the past decade. And within each borough, the neighborhoods themselves have to be defended, analyzed, and scrutinized until people begin to leave in a huff, not budging, holding on to their loyalties as they head toward home. So, around here, changing neighborhoods is not to be taken lightly.

I was pleasantly surprised when Niklas befriended me on Facebook—ten years after we initially hooked up while backpacking. Now both in our thirties, both relatively content with our lives but becoming a bit complacent, we were both ready for this new adventure and open to each other. I never expected last year, that this year, I would be standing at City Hall with him, this beautiful boy—my gorgeous groom—getting married on a Monday morning.

I never imagined we’d be taking a number to wait our turn to see the priest, or minister, or government employee—whatever he was, surrounded by other brides of all colors and ages, some wearing gaudy white gowns, others in trendy spring fashions. One woman sported a full-grown mustache, groomed in the same fashion as her husband’s; perhaps, we thought, it was planned in that matchy-matchy kind of way. Dressed to the nines, their bright, wide smiles under the stubble made them quite the dashing couple, facial hairstyle and all. After the nuptials, looking for an apartment seemed the next logical step.

Moving can be a change, and change can be incredibly moving. Though initially unsure about leaving Avenue B, I warmed to the notion—after all, the West Village is one of New York’s most historic neighborhoods, nicknamed Little Bohemia in the early 1900s, and has been a haven for writers, artists, poets, and musicians for two centuries. I liked the idea of getting lost on the same streets tread by Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, EE Cummings, Norman Mailer, and Bob Dylan.

Getting lost was highly likely as its streets are set at an angle to the others in Manhattan. The west side seen from above is a cracked mirror, a cluster of acute triangles and intersections made of apexes, mixed with bending lanes and meandering mews that end unexpectedly. These cobblestone streets were laid out long before the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which created the main grid plan for the city, due to a yellow fever and cholera epidemic infesting the area. No one dared enter due to disease; I wondered whether I dare enter due to my bad sense of direction. Used to numbered streets and lettered avenues, I was afraid I’d be in a constant state of confusion with streets named Jane, Horatio, Charles, and Christopher—like a clique of prep school kids, they seemed hard to get to know. I was shocked to learn that Bleecker was only one block away from me; what the heck is it doing way up here? I thought to myself. Not a map person, I knew I’d be constantly disoriented, especially where West 4th Street crosses West 10th Street. That would never happen in the East Village.

Ironically, we found a charming railroad apartment on that very intersection, and my anticipation grew. But when telling an East Villager you’re moving to the West Village, don’t expect hugs and congratulatory smiles. Don’t tell them with too much enthusiasm; break it to them gently, let it soak in slowly. It’s like telling them you’re moving to live in a crater on the surface of the moon. Expect raised eyebrows. Shock. Confusion. Faked incomprehension. Even anger. Us and them accusations. Followed by an argumentative diatribe and lengthy closing statement explaining why it’s a bad idea.

Crime. That’s what I’ve heard, of all things. Watch yourself. Punks from Jersey hang out there. Please. This, coming from a neighborhood where tiny cocaine bags line the sidewalk where leaves should be. A neigborhood where people are shot for wearing the wrong expression. A neighborhood where there are thugs, and then there are the thugs’ thugs. A place where it’s not uncommon to overhear things like, I took that mother-fucker out and not in reference to a restaurant.

But now, after a twelve-hour move up a five-story walk up apartment, I’m in the West Village, and my more pressing concern is how I will fit in. I don’t know the culture here. Out west does one have to dress up and put on makeup just to go to the corner deli? In the E.V. a person can wear pajamas and army boots with curlers in a hot pink wig to the deli without so much as turning a head. Will the bars here be stuffy and the restaurants pretentious? In the E.V., I once saw a manly-looking man walk into an Irish bar wearing pink lipstick and a bra outside his clothes stuffed with two double-D water balloons and order a beer. I once saw a college student sitting at a bar French kissing his almost hairless parrot. I once saw a wild-haired man push a piano down the middle of the avenue into the park, where he proceeded to stand on it, using it as a pulpit to preach to the squirrels and rats. Oh, how I will miss, the wild, wild East.

With Niklas was back in Sweden wrapping things up for his big move, I was one in an apartment meant for two. Friends don’t return calls on moving day, I found out. I’ve never felt so alone as I did spending the first evening in a new apartment, which didn’t feel like home. Buried in boxes, after the exhaustion of days of packing along with the knowledge of the inevitable days of unpacking that would follow, I feared the “new” in every fiber of my sweat-soaked being. Weak with hunger and on the verge of tears, I wanted to call my new husband, but I couldn’t find my phone. I wanted to eat, but I couldn’t find a fork. Even if I could find the phone and the fork, I didn’t know who to call for take out. I didn’t even know the nearest deli and I most certainly didn’t know the cashier of that deli. I pictured the Pakistani at my deli on 13th and Avenue B and remembered him saying how sad he was that I was leaving in his sing-song voice. The tears came.

When I finally mustered the strength to venture to a corner store for a snack, I crossed the zig-zagging intersection, narrowly escaping a surge of honking cabs. Searching for landmarks like crumbs to find my way back, I stumbled into a dumpy deli. There I saw the Jersey crowd my old neighbors had warned me about, packed into the small space, yelling at the cashier and at each other, even out-blinging the boys on Avenue B. A tall, preppy over-dressed group spilled in to buy beer. I felt even more isolated in the crowd, which over-flowed onto the street.

Later that night I lay in bed, heavily fatigued. A steady stream of horns from Seventh Avenue created a most hateful harmony, blasting through my windows until dawn. As my mind raced along with the traffic—as congested as the streets—I understood that sleep wasn’t going to be an option. Perhaps marrying and finding an apartment within three weeks—in an area where I have only and exactly one friend—was a ridiculous idea. Feeling displaced and alone, I wanted nothing more than to be in my old room. There was something oddly comforting about the tightness of the walls, like a cave or cubbyhole. Or like a womb. I questioned the move, questioned the timing of the move, and above all, questioned the location of the move.

There is a place for change, and change takes you places. And that change, I soon realized, can allow you to stumble into something altogether more interesting. I’ve stumbled into a pile of horse poop, for example, because police here patrol on horseback instead of behind bullet-proof glass. I’ve blundered into bars boasting live jazz music that echoes in the street. I’ve found myself in flea markets and fallen upon enchanted church courtyards. I’ve bumped into boutiques and chanced upon fine chocolate shops. And I lost myself for hours last Sunday on a gorgeous grass-covered pier.

The West Village is wonderful, wonderment.

What better than the waiting and anticipating? Post-wedding; pre-life. The who to the what to the where to the when. The wanderlust! Our wonderland! An awakening! Walking aimlessly, whistling, wind in hair. Exploring the wilderness. A home, our world of warmth. A wink. Wanting. On a whim. Wherever, whenever. Whispering. Willing. His wife. Our west. Winged things. People-watching out our window. A drink at the White Horse Tavern, with my prince. A wish within a well. Near water—complete with waves. Waxing, widening, rising and swelling. Winding up in a whirlwind. Welcoming like a wrapped gift.

For me, the West Village is whispering, waiting.

Christie Grotheim is currently in the process of writing and publishing a series of humorous autobiographical essays. With a background of over fifteen years of creating award-winning graphic design and copywriting, she moved from Texas to Manhattan in the year 2000, where she runs her own graphic design studio in the West Village.