“You speak English?” Rob asked, forgoing the translation.

“Un poco.” One answered.

“He speaks a little.” Rob told me unnecessarily. Across the street several other workers started to make their way towards the van to make a bid. One bearded guy was crouched in a position like a child playing jacks. He rose slowly and raised his hand as he walked over. At first he looked a bit menacing but as he got closer he seemed to shrink a little. His clothes were oversized and billowed with the wind and gave a false declaration of size. The polo shirt he wore hung down to mid thigh like a hand-me-down worn by a kid.

“We need someone who speaks English.” Rob and I continued to instruct in alternating turns. The different men all took shots at convincing us of their fluency but most could not do more than point to themselves and offer ‘I speak.’ The bearded guy pushed his way through the crowd with an urgent and fearful disregard like a child who’d lost his mother in a grocery store and he was met with little resistance. When he reached the van his arm was still raised and his facial expression was one of terror. His eyes bulged wide from their sockets and his exposed upper teeth gnawed at his surrendering jaw. His raised hand dove finger first to his chest.

“I’m speaking English.” He said.

“Yeah.” I agreed, tired of the interview process.

“Yeah.” He continued while his eyes darted around. “I speak Eng…” He trailed off. The other men had resigned now to patting the bearded guy’s back in congratulation. Some of the other men rubbed his shoulders like a boxing coach would do in the hopes of psyching up a fighter for battle. But the guy still looked uneasy, like he had been trapped by his good fortune.

“Hop in.” Rob and I overlapped. The sliding door opened and some supplies rolled out as the guy scrambled in laboriously.

“Let’s go.” His ‘t’ silent. “I can smoke in here?” He dug into a pouch of tobacco before anyone answered.

“What’s your name?”

“Honres.” He mumbled, his tongue involved with a rolling paper.

“Henry?”

“Amdes.” He corrected

“Am-dez?” I slowed the vehicle to turn around in my chair.

“Eh.”

“Andre?” Rob guessed correctly.

“Yeah.” Andre answered and lit up his rolled cigarette.

“Where are you from?” I asked without thinking. I regretted asking the question. I knew that I’d initiated a second strained conversation for an answer that I didn’t really need. We stumbled back and forth with Andre’s answer a couple of times before Rob heard Puerto Rico. I pulled to a stop in front of Rob’s building and he got out.

“Good luck, let me know how it goes, tell the judge that it wasn’t public urination, you were passing a kidney stone.” I said and then wondered if Rob knew that kidney stones pass out of the same route as piss. He smiled and left.

“C’mon up front.” I told Andre and he crawled over the rear of the passenger seat, his small khaki covered legs kicking around in the air. Now with just the two of us I felt that the void was too great to not fill with talk.

“So.” I began. “How long you stand out there…for work?” His answer was mumbled and I couldn’t understand it at all. I continued to ask small-talk types of questions and got answers that I could only respond to by nodding. Andre chain rolled cigarette after cigarette and never stopped smoking and I assumed it was his method to avoid talking. At a red light I rolled a smoke from my own pouch of tobacco and attempted to bridge the language gap.

“Fuego?”

“Tha lighter.” Andre handed me his lighter and started on another cigarette himself. His watch featured a giant plastic diamond mounted over the numbers.

“I like your watch.” I was truthful.

“Mywrendgimewhasz.” He told me. We rode in silence for a while on the way to the job.

The streets of Midwood swarmed with Hasidic Jews celebrating the holiday. We arrived at the home of a couple that was waiting for their table in order to entertain guests.

“Oh, here it is at last.” The woman answered the door as though the table had arrived on its own.

“You’re a beast!” I told Andre after we had set down the massive piece. He smiled in bewilderment.

“This is as big as it gets?” The woman asked her husband twice before he relayed the question to me. I told him that it extended further out with the help of table leaves. They waited unhappily for the table to extend itself. I offered that I could extend the tabletop and the wife’s glance told the husband to tell me that that would be best. When the furniture was at last placed to their satisfaction I announced that the transaction had come to an end and the time of payment was upon us. The woman wrote a check from a small table by the front door. As usual I stood to a side and feigned interest in some piece of household ornament as though I were oblivious to what I was about to receive. Apart from the check the woman also plucked a twenty-dollar bill from her purse and held it out. I smiled and moved toward her and the money and the door. At the last minute it seemed to dawn on her that the bill might have acted as a conductor for my filthy commonality and she swatted it down to the surface of the table.

“Thank you.” I said.

“Oh, it’s not even our house.” The words sprinted from her with clumsy uncertainty.

“It’s very nice.” I responded without processing her statement, I’d heard the word house. We both grinned awkwardly. I assumed that we realized at once our mutual disinterest in what the other had said, and then realized that the other had also come to this conclusion.

“Let’s go Andre.” I said. He’d been as still as a cigar store Indian propped in the corner but when I said his name he reanimated. Swathed in moving quilts that flowed from his shoulders to the ground and covered most of his head, he looked like a mummified prince awakened for the sake of fulfilling a curse. He strode between the woman and me and then down the steps.

“Thanks again.” I gave as I stepped out the door. Her mouth seemed to start to form into the origins of a word but the door closed between us before any sound could escape.

Before our next job I stopped at a bodega to get some water. I asked Andre if he would like something to drink.

“Water, juice, soda…?”

“Coca-Cola.” He answered.

“Coke?”

“The can of.” He held his hands several inches apart from one another to signify the size of a can and I nodded. The store carried only twenty ounce bottles of soft drink and when I returned to Andre with more Coke than he had expected he smiled like I had just called him a beast again. He was smoking a rolled cigarette and I rolled another of my own to keep up.

“You got the lighter?” I asked when I was ready to light up. He reached in his pocket and handed the lighter to me without looking over.

At the next job a young lady was waiting for us at the foot of her apartment steps.

“Come on up.” She was friendly. “I’m sorry, there’s…no smoking.”
I turned to match her gaze and saw Andre coming up the steps with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

“Andre.” I immediately felt embarrassed by my parental tone but I had to finish what I’d started. “You can’t smoke that inside.” I ended with a more employer-ish type of inflection. Andre looked a bit betrayed, like I had switched sides.

“I finish the smoking.” He pinched through his dusty teeth. Upstairs we were shown what was to be moved and then left to our own devices. The apartment was on the third floor and I could see that Andre’s legs were growing tired inside of his baggy pants. With each trip his look of fear became more amplified and he started to mutter curses under his shortened breath. I would ask him if he was okay and he would look to me and say something undecipherable and start laughing in a strained rhythm. Sometimes I would join in the laughter so he would think I was savvy to the joke, sometimes I would pat his back for added confirmation. After a while we took a water break. He removed his cap for the first time to wipe his brow. I’d been wondering if he was bald under the hat but in fact he had an admirable, sweat soaked mane. At that moment I recalled something that Rob had said to me at some time earlier, ‘Mexicans don’t really lose a lot of hair, sometimes you see old ones with big, beautiful heads of hair.’ I started to laugh; Andre smoked and laughed along nervously.

“More working?” Andre asked after lunch and I said yes. I’d gotten a text message about a third job and we headed deeper into Brooklyn. We arrived at an apartment shared by two young guys.

“Hans.” The first guy introduced himself. The second little guy only nodded at us.

“I’m Granger, this is Andre.” I turned to point at a bare wall. I kept my gaze and my finger trained on the spot where I’d gestured toward so as not to look foolish. We all stared at the wall for a moment before Andre trudged inside and filled his rightful place. Hans and friend had only Ikea furniture and Andre and I carried it easily. In the lobby an old woman had taken a perch by the front vestibule.

“You must remove.” She spoke with an Eastern European accent and pointed at a stack of phonebooks that I had propped the door open with. After a moment's thought she smiled and qualified her statement. “When you are done.” One of her slippers had dropped to the tile floor and her naked toes wiggled feverishly. I laughed and said that I would remove the books.

On my next trip up to the apartment I found Hans’s little friend firmly rooted in an air guitar solo to a System Of A Down song. Hans stood nearby participating with what was either approving nods or stifled head banging. The little friend looked up at me and halted in embarrassment, thought and then continued. He probably figured that I’d seen a decent enough amount of his performance that to stop now would be a more damning indictment of his behavior. He finished the song strong but I can’t help but feel that his show was compromised at some level by self-consciousness. As the tune died I surveyed the room for what I would carry next and my eyes fell on an open box. There, resting atop the other loosely placed items was a large purple dildo. I looked up quickly so the others would not see what I’d discovered but Hans and his friend were performing showy but mitigated rock maneuvers. I figured Andre would be not far behind me so I lingered near the dildo. I wanted to point it out to Andre so he wouldn’t make the horrific discovery alone. I waited by the box and contents as long as I could for Andre but when Hans looked questioningly toward me I had to continue working.

“A lot?” The elderly woman asked of me as I walked through the lobby. I said that there was not much more and she looked comforted. While I loaded boxes into the van Hans’s little friend came downstairs to talk to me.

“So.” He began. “I have this other mattress that I need to go to Manhattan.” He looked around and shuffled his feet like a nervous kid asking for a date to the prom. I told him that I would take his mattress but it would cost him extra money. The prospect of more money dissuaded him but he slunk around while I worked like he thought his presence would change my mind. I imagined he thought that since I’d seen his vulnerability at his guitar mime act that there was a connection between us. After a few minutes Andre came down with a box and disrupted the stand-off, his face was in its normal posture of angst and I could only guess if he had seen the dildo.

On the final trip the woman in the lobby smiled and nodded at the stacked phonebooks. I nodded in return and moved the books from the door.

“I’m sorry.” She said. “I am old.”

Unable to deny her statement I presented her with a smile that was hers to interpret. “God bless you.” She followed up. Without thinking I mimicked her words.

“God bless you.” I sounded strange to my own ears. I don’t remember ever saying that to anyone before.

I got into the vehicle’s cab a moment before Andre and when he climbed in he had a weird little grin.

“Wha you think of those guys?” He asked as we readied for departure.

“I don’t know, they’re alright.” At my answer his face grew more grotesque, a mixture of delight and disgust. “Why? What do you think?”

“They are funny.”

I knew what he meant by ‘funny’ but I asked him what he meant anyway.

“They have ses.” He told me.

“Oh, you think they are gay?”

He shook his head up and down. I rolled up a smoke from my pouch to end the discussion. When I put the cigarette to my lips Andre held his lighter out to me without me asking. I put the van in gear and accelerated. The boxes I’d stacked in back shook and stumbled a bit, and then everything settled into its place as I drove away.

 Granger Greenbaum owns a moving company in Brooklyn, www.greenbaumexpertmoving.com. He doesn't have time to write anymore cause he's always lifting people's crappy ikea stuff.

Glance fixed to the dark stained gray pavement, I look up and see reddish brown patches and dark streaks staining the lower two surfaces of the stone wall. Grabbing hold of my sleeve, Priscilla pulls me back across the street, excitedly urging me to look here, now look there, as she points to clues all the way up the stoop. Breathlessly she pushes hard to open the front door into the vestibule of row house apartment building number 872. Pointing to a cramped corner between a stack of old Daily News and crumbling wall paper, beneath a scarred, discolored brass plate of round, black door buzzers, Priscilla wails, "She died here!"

Later, playing the scene in my seven-year old mind, I imagine a young woman beaten and stabbed. I imagine her, with brown curly hair fallen over her face, lying in a puddle of blood, too weak to yell out for help. She crawls her way to the other side of Madison Street, lugs her weakened body up the steps, and pushes open the entry door.

Lying on the cold tiled vestibule floor, with one hand clenching the edge of the stack of newspapers, she pushes herself up, extending her right arm. Soiled hands bloody the wall as she stretches toward the row of black plastic buttons that buzz tenants in each apartment to announce someone is there.

Wearing one black patent leather shoe, she cries, wiping her nose on her torn floral corduroy jacket. Over and over again, fingers push then slip beneath each one of the tiny buttons that never ring in anybody’s apartment – just like they don’t in mine.

Flo Gelo was born in Brooklyn, where she lived until her early teens. She's published numerous articles in professional literature about illness, death and dying. This story is one in a series about her life on Madison Street.
 

The Haters.

I was captivated the team’s heart and soul, Colin, a profane ball of sweat, energy and fury. From deep in centerfield, Colin implored his fellow Haters, “You guys fucking disgust me! Would somebody please make a fucking play!”

I positioned myself behind the fence between home and first, right behind the Haters dugout. Across the diamond was a team I’ll call the Lovers. They have matching team shirts and caps, hipster facial hair, Nike gear, a handful of female fans in the vintage-sundress-oversized-sunglasses-sleeve-of-colorful-ink, and a sense of joie de vivre. And decorum. The Lovers look like Billyburg, at least the Pete’s Candy Store version of it.

The Haters are a different breed.

They aren’t white-collar. They might not even be blue-collar. They’re a collection of what used to be known as working guys, thick with outer borough accents, reeking of last night’s beer and this afternoon’s salty recovery. They were a team of Tommys, Paulies, Johnnies, Sals, Hectors and Miguels, a team that smoked Newports on the bench and broke out the Coronas with the first pitch.

The Haters didn’t match. Some had jerseys. Others wore muscles tees or homemade tank-tops, and one Latino dude in loud orange leggings had a beef with the 350-lb. ump enforcing the ASA rule that a shirt be worn in the first place. Some had “Haters” on their front, others had “Hater Nation” on their back, and a number of them had no outward team affiliation at all. They don’t have ink, or tats, or skin art. They have tattoos. One large laconic man, El Jeffe perhaps, sports a large gray replica of the Twin Towers encircled in clouds on his left leg, as dark and grey as the canyon dust itself.

This isn’t “here to have fun” softball played in Central Park. Hell, it isn’t even the competitive suburban bust-your-ass leagues where guys ultimately laugh it all off after a few post-game cold ones. This is scraggly urban softball, played not on soothing grass and dirt, but out on hard baking asphalt where joints go to die.

For the Haters, it wasn’t softball. It was bloodsport.

An extra ump biding time as a spectator informed me that it was 7-1 as the Haters got their third out. He said this was the playoffs, whichever team won the best-of-three that afternoon moved on. Considering the palpable tension surrounding the Haters, I asked if they were about to be eliminated.

“No, it’s only the first game.”

“Oh, they’re awfully fired up,” I replied.

“Yeah, that’s what they do.”

“So what time’s the next game start,” I asked.

“Not for awhile. It’s only the second inning.”

Down 7-1, Colin ran over to give the 60-something pitcher Tommy a pep talk that would do Billy Martin proud. “If you walk one more fucking batter, I will take your old wooden bat and shove it so far up your ass, you’ll be shitting splinters for a week.”

Colin stormed off, but not before excoriating the dugout: “Stop fucking laughing! This shit ain’t funny!”

Tommy, soaking through his Wrangler jean shorts and non-ironic mesh cap with and American flag and a bald eagle that read “Don’t Ruffle My Feathers,” turned to El Jeffe and muttered, “This carried over from last week. Fuck! I don’t need this. I won’t be fucking back next year, that’s for sure.”

Tommy then turned in the direction of Colin and announced, “Maybe if we didn’t make so many fucking errors—”

“Shut the fuck up, Tommy! We only made one fucking error last inning! Quit saying they scored their runs on errors! I got the fucking book right here!” From the dugout came a burst of expletives out of the roaring mouth of a stocky woman doing the hot-blooded Latina stereotype no favors. The Haters official scorekeeper, she wasn’t about to have her rulings questioned. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Tommy! Shut the fuck up and throw strikes!”

By the time the exchange was over, the Haters were done at bat.

In the third, the Haters “misplayed” a few more balls (No way am I labeling the mishaps “errors” without hearing from the official scorer), which gave the Lovers a 10-1 lead. This led to Colin spiking his mitt on the ground, kicking it, throwing his arms up in the air, turning his back to the rest of the Haters and then getting in a shouting match…with a guy playing in the other softball game taking place.

Mercifully, the inning ended. Colin began his pep talk while still running in from the outfield. “You all fucking know my mouth. Everybody in this league knows this is my fucking mouth. When I yell and scream it’s not because I’m an asshole, it’s because I fucking care. I care about this fucking team and care about winning. So let’s fucking start hitting and win this fucking game.”

The Haters were making the ’77 Yankees look like the ’99 Women’s World Cup Soccer Champions.

Colin’s motivation wasn’t strictly verbal. He offered the skinny young kid at second base a gift if he got a hit. It appeared to be a free coupon to a neighborhood tittie bar. He walked, so the freebie remained stuck to the fence behind home plate. Not sure if the base on balls earned him some boobs, but either way, it was to no avail. The Haters went down quietly.

The Haters would hold serve, giving up a couple of meaningless hits that lead to no runs. At some point during that half inning, things took a turn on the Haters bench. A random guy whom I’d hadn’t noticed up until this point, a dead ringer for Joe the Plumber twenty years from now, stood up and got into an argument with the scorekeeper. She of course told him, “Fuck you. Get the fuck off our bench."

He obliged, but not before he started screaming at one of the Haters in the game. Joe the Plumber was incensed at the shortstop and wanted everyone to know it. What set him off remains a mystery, but unlike Colin, Joe the Plumber was angry with more than the Haters bumbling softball effort.

“You’re a fucking disgrace. You’re a fucking cokehead. Fuck you. FUCK YOU!”

As Joe the Plumber made his way down the first base line, headed to the cooler out by the street, El Jeffe tried calming him down. “That’s your son, man. That’s your fucking son. You gonna’ air all your fucking family business out there in front of all these people?” It didn’t take. Joe the Plumber just got louder. “He fucking stole $2,500 from my ex-wife, he’s a fucking disgrace. You’re a cokehead. You’re no good. You ruin everybody’s fucking life!”

By this point, the shortstop was fuming. After snaring a line drive for the third out, he sprinted at Joe the Plumber in a ferocious full-blooded fever pitch. He got right in his face.

“You’re fucking dead to me! You’re gonna’ tell my business to the whole world out here? Fuck you! You’re not my father! You’re dead to me. Fucking dead!”

Another brother raced in from left field and got between them. He demanded that Joe the Plumber “get on the other side of the fucking fence.”

Joe the Plumber ended up taking his complaints to a neighborhood friend watching the Haters near where I stood. His boy wasn’t interested when Joe the Plumber started in again, “He’s a fucking cokehead—“

“Who the hell ain’t?”

It was the line of the day, but by then, I’d grown weary of the rough-edged street charms of the angriest softball team in the city. An uneasy feeling was settling in my stomach. Maybe it was a sun-induced mirage but I saw the combination of hot tempers, the 100-degree heat index, aluminum bats, free-flowing beers, possible cocaine usage, testosterone, a playoff loss, and a father-son meltdown turning into some violent mishmash of Death of A Salesman, The Warriors and Do the Right Thing.
I saw blood being spilled.

I felt bad for the team. I felt bad for the son. I even felt a little bad for Joe the Plumber. But more than that, I felt like getting out of there.

The Haters were no longer entertaining in a gritty foul-mouthed sort of way.

It was hot and I wanted to go home because for at least some of the Haters, the rage was as real as the team name.

As I walked on past the outfield, a guy in a Yankees cap waiting for his game to start passed by and said with astonishment, “Can you believe this shit? It’s not even three o’clock yet.”

I have no idea why that was the witching hour, but no way was I going to find out.

I headed down the next block and still heard Colin exclaim:

“Let’s go, Haters. We need to get some fucking runs!”

Raised in Billings, Montana, Patrick Sauer now lives in Greenwich Village. A reporter at hotel review website Oyster.com, a senior editor at www.TheDailyTube.com and a contributing editor at Inc., Sauer has also written for ESPN.com, the Huffington Post comedy page 23/6, Popular Science, Fast Company, Details, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and Smith. He is included in Lost and Found and is the author of the Complete Idiot’s Guide to the American Presidents. Read more at his website: patricksauer.com

I reluctantly agreed to play with Susie, believing I might stay for lunch and if lucky, enjoy the toasted cheese sandwiches I knew were Susie’s favorite. Instead she insisted on dressing her small schnauzer in the glamorous clothes of her Revlon doll. When the dog lashed out, it was my hand he bit.

Shortly after this incident, further proof that our friendship was ill-fated occurred one day after a rare snowstorm. An unusual storm, snowplows moved waist-high snow, trapping cars at their curbs. Mounds of snow separated one parked car from another. I stood on the curb watching all the kids sledding on shiny garbage can covers. One of the teenage boys, hacking into a mound of snow between two cars, created a cave. Curious about what the inside of this snow cave looked like, I moved the abandoned shovel aside, knelt down, and crawled into the opening. But my timing was wrong. I had just had an argument with the policewoman’s daughter who often got herself into messes by always wanting things her way. As I entered the cave, she began to pound on the roof. Not being very agile, I was unable to back out before the snow began to cave in around me. At first I was terrified. I crawled backwards inch-by-inch, and eventually emerged – but I was packed in fallen snow. And then I was angry. I ran toward Susie, who hadn’t had sense enough to run, and punched her in the nose. The blood gushed. She ran home, screaming, her bloodstained gloves covering her spoon-shaped face. I ran the other way sure that Susie’s mother would arrest me and that I would spend the rest of my life in reform school, a delinquent, sharing a cell with teenage girls with bleached blond hair.

Flo Gelo was born in Brooklyn, where she lived until her early teens. She’s published numerous articles in professional literature about illness, death and dying. This story is one in a series about her life on Madison Street.

I had to use my Firm Resolution not to bore these beautiful strangers to death with first-settler stories of back in the day.

The day being the late 1970s, under very different conditions in Williamsburg, when I lived in a second-floor apartment overlooking the diner from across Broadway. I owned an indestructible 69 Dodge Dart which usually slept quietly, unmolested, somewhere in New Jersey. Once in a while (rarely, trepidatiously) I did park that car in my Williamsburg nabe, where the local thieves were so very dexterous that they managed to use an inch of play in the chain that locked my hood to walk the battery all the way over the engine block and drop it out on the other side. From this experience I learned to take the battery up to the apartment whenever I left the car—a bit of trouble but it did make for a surer start on cold mornings.

The diner was open then, under previous management, with no arugula or anything like it—you could get fried eggs and hash browns there, and strikingly lousy coffee. It was cheap! No customers though. The owner-operator-cook had the look of a recently retired All-Star wrestler—styled long hair and a brown Van Dyke, his bull neck festooned in gold chains. Despite his powerful build he always closed up and left the area before dark. There were no white people living around there then (okay, me, my roommates and one other 20-something boho I tried to follow home, out of harmless curiosity, the night I saw him get off at the same subway stop as me. The other guy grew ill at ease, picked up his pace, eventually climbed atop a dumpster. I passed by without attempting any conversation….)

The diner guy was a shade of pale that probably commuted from Bensonhurst. Or maybe once upon a time Williamsburg had been more like Bensonhurst than what it had become at the time that I lived there. Back when a tree grew in Brooklyn. Indeed the same indestructible acanthus that gave that novel its title were still omnipresent, seeming to nourish themselves on root-crumbled cement. The diner guy fried eggs and slopped coffee, and appeared to be waiting for the fog to clear and the planet he came from to reconstitute itself under his size-eleven feet.

So one day around dusk I happened to be looking out the window and out comes the guy—he inserts his bulk into this hulking yacht of a beat-up seventies sedan, then presumably turns the key. Nothing. Out he gets, pops his hood, guess what?

The guy stands for a moment between his vehicle and his enterprise, staring down, ham fists cocked on his meaty hips. Then he shrugs, goes to the car that’s parked behind him, steals that battery, installs same into his automobile, and off he goes into the gathering night. I’ll vouch for it.

The beautiful simplicity of this solution improved on an idea I’d had earlier—to wit, I could probably have bought the batteries I’d lost back from the guys who stole them at half price, probably more than they’d get from fencing them anyway. But now I realized: this neighborhood didn’t need all its batteries all the time anyway! Hell, it probably didn’t need half of them. And we could have put the rest into a fund to support the arts, or maybe educate a few children….

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels. His most recent book, Toussaint Louverture A Biography was published by Pantheon in 2007.

On a cold, windy night in mid-January (a few years after my discovery about tigers) I left work and started the commute from Manhattan to Williamsburg. I wanted to drink myself into a stupor, with the intention of forgetting the past week. Whether alone or with company– an escape to Brooklyn was necessary. I weaved in and out skillfully through the herd of New Yorkers leaving work with the hope of a fulfilling weekend. I stood on the platform at 86th and Lexington and thought of going to ‘Snacky,’ a little Chinese joint on Grand St. between Driggs and Bedford, where a single guy with small pockets can get a beer, a shot of sake and a plate of sesame noodles for seven dollars. For many people it can be a tough decision to drink alone, however I found it rather simple.

Two trains passed, both filled to the corners with people. I stood close to the edge in order to get onto the third train, a 4 express. I reached the Union Square stop, after the short, claustrophobic ride, in order to transfer for the L to Bedford Avenue. The doors opened and the flood was released. People scattered like roaches over the platform towards the staircase. Again, I slipped in and out of the crowd, bent on getting onto the L before it left the station. I was successful and hopped into the one car with the only door open. So did everybody else. The thought of switching to the next car to avoid the overabundance of bodies never occurred to me. I leaned against the door, made a mental note of all the pretty girls and enjoyed the ride towards tranquility.

After a few stops I reached Bedford Ave and exited the station. I slipped my hands into the pockets of my coat and aligned my arms against the side in order to avoid the cold wind filtering up my sleeves. I reached ‘Snacky,’ walked in and sat at the bar without forgetting to signal over Asako, the waitress. After a quick food service exchange, Asako put in my order and the night began.

An hour later, I swallowed the last gulp of beer and rolled back the last shot of sake that I’d drink by myself for the evening. A woman walked over and sat two stools over to the right. We exchanged a glance and a half-smile. I jerked my head back quickly to invite her to the stool next to me. I felt I had met her before.

“Hi, name is Kate,” she said.

“Joe,” I shook her hand and both of us held the position for too long.

“Did you just ride the L over here, about an hour ago?”

Now I remembered — I had seen her on the train ride over! She was wearing a scarf that had pills and it may have been orange, but I couldn’t be sure. “Yes, I knew you looked familiar,” I said. I sat up straight and I accepted, into the night, her company.

“I’m surprised, you really didn’t notice me much,” she said.

“You want another drink?” I asked to hastily change the subject.

She shook her head in a vertical motion, “whatever you’re having,” she said.

I pointed to the sky, signaled over Asako and ordered two more specials.

“So, Kate what brings you here?” I asked, partly interested.

“A few friends sitting over at that table,” she said and pointed to the group.

“Oh, are they going to miss you?”

“Why do you ask? You thinking about keeping me to yourself?” and she smirked.

“So what’s your story, Kate?”

“School and work, yourself?”

“The same.”

The mundane conversation continued until our sixth round of drinks. That is where time stopped being relevant and we knew the night wouldn’t end without a few cheap thrills. “…So I said to the asshole, why else would I tell you that?” I slurred. Kate laughed with a hideous snort, fortunately for her I did the same. After the laughter teetered out we smiled at each other, her hand was on my leg and I didn’t mind.

“How about another round and we’ll get moving,” she suggested.

I signaled Asako over, again and she let out a sigh and rolled her eyes but I didn’t care at the time.

“She doesn’t like you, Joe.”

“Yes, I know, it’s probably because last week while hitting on her I spilled a bottle of beer,” I admitted.

“You jerk,” she said between a giggle and a breath.

It had to be about six hours since I entered the bar. We finished off the last of our drinks and I paid the bill. I wasn’t expecting to pay for two, so the tip was a little short. I looked at Kate and stared her down.

“You ready?”

“I sure am,” she answered.

We stumbled out and forgot to close the door. Somehow we made our way to the L train. We rode the train to Union Square and exchanged a few false grins of affection. She lived on 11th street between 2nd and 3rd avenue and in my mind, among other things I’d get to see her apartment.

From the park to the stoop of her building we walked over and talked about nothing of relevance. She mentioned getting something to eat, but decided against it. I had one thought and it didn’t involve food. We stood at the door of the apartment building and began to kiss with a sloppy exchange of saliva.

She pulled her head back, “You have any plans tonight?” she said with a hint of suggestiveness.

“It depends,” I said, “You free?”

We locked our dry lips together and made them wet again with spit. My chin was numb and the saliva on our faces froze from the cold; however, my hands were warm tucked under her shirt. We had disengaged and she looked at me with intent.

“All right, Joe,” she said, “You can come up and we can have a good time, but you have to answer one question.”

“Sure,” I said with confidence.

“Close your eyes,” she demanded.

I closed them tightly and tried to keep my balance. “What’s the question?”

“My eyes, what color are they?” she asked.

My brain froze and my stomach gurgled. She doesn’t know about my color problem I told myself. However, I remembered a piece of advice my friend, Ali told me. He told me that if a girl ever asks you what color her eyes are just say hazel and that most chicks will accept it because they think it’s a pretty color or some shit.

“Hazel,” I said with more confidence.

“Brown, they’re brown,” she stated flatly.

I opened my eyes and said with a slur, “Here’s the thing, I have a color deficiency.” After I heard it out loud it sounded like a lie.

“I’m sure you do, Joe,” she said with doubt and turned to the door.

“Wait, come on. I’m serious, I can’t see colors correctly.”

“Goodnight,”

“Oh, come on!”

“Go home,” she suggested.

There I was left in the cold, the mouth juice frozen to my face. My head was in a whirlwind and my hands were numb. Back to the 4 train, I thought. That’s the green line, right?

Joseph Benincase lives in Manhattan and attends classes at the City University of New York. He has an obsession with food and enjoys writing short stories. As far as he knows, his favorite color is blue.

Dylan and I went out three times the first week we met. We had a deep chemistry and a bond which I wouldn’t understand until much later. On our second date we were hiking when he told me he used to work in the Trade Center. My heart stopped. “Were you there?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “I was on the 83rd floor.” I asked him question after question, without giving away my own story. I asked him when he thought he would die. And what it was like to walk down in the darkness. Question after question.

He answered them all. I felt relief somehow hearing him talk about surviving. Later that day I told him about my husband. Dylan said the questions I asked were not like ones anyone had ever asked him before.

Last night for some reason we were talking about 9/11 again. We don’t often. I got really frustrated because I felt like Dylan has this huge disconnect with it. He hasn’t dealt with it at all. Like he doesn’t think it meant anything to him. His life doesn’t seem very important to him. I get that it wasn’t a big deal whether he lived or died, but to smell burning flesh, and be around so many dead people, I have to think that he is disassociating from reality.

We talked about that too. He asked me if I tell people when I meet them about my husband. I said sometimes. I don’t want to. I never lie. If someone asks, I will be open. It comes up more for me than for Dylan. I was in a twelve year relationship so when a new man asks my history sometimes it’s hard to get out of it. For Dylan it’s much easier. he thinks what happened to him is so much less than what happened to me. And that too makes me sad. Because one can’t compare. I lost my soul mate. I have demons dancing in my head. But Dylan, he lived through something I can’t even imagine.

Erika is a professional chef and writer living in Brooklyn with her cat and various thoughts–she is obsessed with Oscar Wilde at the moment.

Then who were those teenage goons sent to frighten us wee children back in grade school with tales of life-ending catastrophe and humbling community service hours spent plucking trash–orange vested–from interstate on-ramps as a result of being tempted by that white-powdered dragon? Were they genuine drug casualties or had they merely gotten caught? Rumors circulated through junior high that with one snort you were addicted for life. One snort and your heart could explode.

As a twelve year old my world revolved around action figures, comic books and video games and the thought of my heart exploding was, to say the least, unattractive. The thought of snorting white, crystalline powder into my nasal cavity was repulsive bordering on absurd. I had no problem telling my mother, grandmother and grandfather–all eager to secure my assurance–that I would never, under any circumstances, try cocaine, no matter how intense the peer pressure to do it. But like all oaths sworn by young children to their over-anxious parents mine was non-binding, a contract signed by a minor under severe emotional duress.

Many years later, I moved to New York to go to Bard College–alma mater to such seminal cocaine enthusiasts as Chevy Chase, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker–and, soon after, I tried cocaine for the first time with a small, shifty Literature major named Ted who had massive black circles beneath each eye. Ted and I met when, one day after Proust class, we followed our professor, a noted Proustian, into the stairwell of the humanities building and both surprised and wowed him with our unscripted, simultaneous enthusiasm for and knowledge of the somewhat obscure yet highly regarded Polish writer, Bruno Schulz.

Our mutual literary interest sparked a friendship and one night Ted invited me over. We sat in his dilapidated, poorly lit basement dorm room listening to some abrasive jazz albums he had on vinyl. I was still at that point in my life when I thought jazz held some deep and unseen meaning and if I only listened to it long enough–accompanied by the correct dosage of substance–I was bound to uncover its soul-piercing riddle.

“Do you want some coke?” he asked in a voice so nonchalant he may as well have been asking if I wanted ginger ale.

I was surprised but acted like I wasn’t. Ted didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d snort cocaine–he seemed more like a Hudson Valley antiquarian bookseller, a young man who’d already begun to take on the rickety shades of his future, elderly self. Besides, jazz never struck me as good coke-snorting music anyway. Nothing about the moment seemed right.

I said, “Sure,” anyway, more interested then in racking up Life Experience than in staying healthy and Doing The Right Thing–though at the time it seemed like, racking up Life Experience was Doing The Right Thing.

As I leaned down over that first chopped up line of white crystal I thought of my younger self, my mom and my grandparents and how appalled and disappointed they would have been knowing what the older Shawn was about to do and how this was just like one of those after-school specials aimed specifically at kids my age in the 1980’s depicting a good, prospect-rich young man turning lecherously to the Dark Side, his first step on a path leading irreversibly to a fate much worse than death. I placed a rolled up one dollar bill in my nose, said goodbye to my former self, and quickly snorted the line. I paused to observe my potentially exploding heart. Nothing happened. I sat back and tried to gauge if I was instantly addicted. I was not. I barely felt anything though a few seconds later I had an overwhelmingly metallic taste in my mouth – what I would call “Hospital Flavor” — and I could feel a point in the center of my skull I hadn’t yet known existed.

“That’s it?” I thought.

Like most transgressive behavior–smoking, drinking, sex, drugs–which is culturally frowned upon one moment and wildly glorified the next in a pendulum swing that makes manic depression seem mild by comparison my first experience with each was distorted, pre-empted and in a way nullified by the hype and advertisement accompanying them. Cocaine was no different. It was nothing like what I expected. I actually didn’t know what I expected but the dull, numbing feeling I had in my head was nothing like what I associated images of cocaine use with in movies such as “Scarface” or “Wall Street” or in TV shows like “Miami Vice” or in the massive news coverage devoted to the Central and South American drug cartels targeted in America’s War on Drugs throughout the 1980’s. This was what all the fuss was about? This was what America was up in arms about? It made no sense.

Later that evening Ted and I walked to a nearby dorm to visit a friend of his, a small eastern European girl who showed us her collection of wooden hand puppets and who herself looked somewhat like a small wooden hand puppet, her face a smooth, pale, creaseless orb. We sat in her tiny dark wooded room in a beautiful centuries old manor for half an hour engaged in polite, barren conversation. I was dying to get out of there and, after waiting far too long to make my exit, I finally excused myself and headed back to my room. Hardly, a sexy evening. I got a sinus infection the next day to boot, a souvenir of my virginal experience.

I didn’t do cocaine again for several years. I wasn’t tempted. Sex and food were my vices of choice if you can even call sex and food vices (that’s almost like saying a bowel movement is a vice…). Several years later, post-college, while I was living with several band members in a two-story apartment building in Williamsburg situated over a real, honest-to-god biker bar it seemed that cocaine was everywhere. There was even a nearby bar named (obviously) Cokies just off Metropolitan Ave. where, late at night, you could enter a small curtained space no larger than a department store changing room at the rear of the bar and there, huddled next to three or four sweaty partygoers, you could purchase and snort tiny bags of very poor quality cocaine.

I did just that several times the summer of 2000 and, once I got past the self-revulsion I felt (or felt like I needed to feel) for spending time at such a blatantly seedy establishment I actually grew to like the place. It’s still the only bar I’ve ever been to in New York that had such a culturally, economically and age-diversified clientele. Fifty year-old black men danced with young Latina girls while white businessmen cavorted over the bar with the occasional post-college hipster and random middle-aged woman sprinkled in for good effect. Like any ubiquitous, massively successful product cocaine’s demographic is as wide as the ocean–young, old, rich, poor, black, Asian, Arab, Jew. Come one, come all. If you’ve got a nose you are qualified. Cokie’s was a great bar because its demographic reflected this–it was in a way the iPod of bars, its clientele set to shuffle. I didn’t realize at the time, however, how crappy their cocaine was. I didn’t know any better. I’d never had good stuff.

That changed a few months later when I met three friends at a huge late-night party in Soho in a loft that was said to be a very recently converted whorehouse. Each bedroom was decorated in the theme of a different prostitute–frillies and lace in one room, whips and chains in the next. There were hundreds of people lining the hallways, bouncing on the dance floor, hanging out of windows. It seemed like a fashion / art / young Hollywood scene. There were a lot of impossibly beautiful girls of unknown Eastern European / Russian descent, skinny boys with asymmetric haircuts and loads of designer clothes. It was summertime and my friends and I had been going to a lot of parties and none of us felt like we needed to stay particularly long at this one. Our ringleader, G, and the reason we were at the party in the first place, bought some cocaine and invited us back to her godmother’s Soho loft.

Her godmother, a famous contemporary artist, lived in a massive, luxurious space, larger than twenty average Manhattan apartments put together. I’d been there before and spent the night a couple of times and always enjoyed myself. It was like staying at a spa privately owned and operated by one of the world’s most famous living artists.

None of us were particularly rambunctious that night and when we got back to G’s godmother’s loft we sat around on the couch watching cable TV, content with rock videos and sitcom reruns. None of us touched the considerable little white mountain on the coffee table and it seemed as if we were all seconds from calling it quits and having a good night’s sleep.

Instead, for some reason, I said, “Come on,” my inner-cheerleader making a rare appearance, “Let’s do this.”

I grabbed the bag and divided it up into four more-or-less equal piles, giving myself a slightly larger pile. I was starting to feel somewhat experienced doing cocaine from my various visits to Cokie’s and I felt my user status had been upgraded from Novice to Intermediate–an asinine conclusion, in hindsight. After a quick glance around the coffee table in which we all exchanged trepidatious-yet-excited glances–glances that said both hello and goodbye–I leaned over and immediately vacuumed the considerable white slug from the plastic CD case before me.

This was immediately different than all my previous experiences. I was instantly high and I sat back deep into the couch not so much out of choice but because I had to. I was no longer sitting in a room with three of my friends but I was, rather, thirty thousand feet up in the cloud-dappled blue heavens as if having just stepped from the hull of an aircraft. I thought of the Tom Petty song “Into the Great Wide Open.” My entire body chimed with a hypersensitive wavelike tingle. Then, without warning, I began to fall hard and fast. I moved from couch to floor feeling as if I weighed a thousand tons, falling rapidly, faster and faster, towards the earth. I closed my eyes and told myself that it was just the drug working its effect on my brain and that it would soon be over. After some time my frighteningly meteoric descent began to slow and the full-body tingle that lapped in waves over my body began to cease. I took a series of deep-breaths, grateful that the high was coming to an end.

Joseph Stalin, after seeing the Swiss Alps in person for the first time, is claimed to have said: “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I never want to see it again.” I feel similarly about cocaine. That high was the highest high I’d ever had and I have no desire to feel it again. Maybe that’s the difference between someone who has an addictive personality and someone who doesn’t. If the dictionary definition of the word snort means “to express contempt, indignation etc.” it’s easy for me to imagine snorting cocaine as one’s expression of contempt and having indignation for one’s normal state of being as if some other, better, heightened sensory awareness were achievable and through it a way of being in the world preferable to the one we’ve already got. At this point, I’d rather stick to the awareness I’ve got.

He snatched the money out of my hand. Then he asked me for my phone number, my home and work addresses, my e-mail address, and two current photos—all of which another player would use to hunt me down like a predator. I’d come prepared with this information, but the notion of giving it to a man double parked in the Meatpacking District didn’t feel right. I gazed out the truck’s tinted window, evaluating my situation while a pack of whooping frat boys disappeared into Hogs and Heifers. Relishing the slim possibility that one of them might be in the tournament, I gave him everything I had.

As it turned out, my target was a sun-kissed, twenty-four-year old Hawaiian paralegal. K lived in a five-story walk-up in the east 30′s, and worked an evening shift in the Conde Nast building in Times Square. As far as I could tell from the Polaroids, her skin was as smooth as a sea stone. In one picture she wore a sun dress with frayed spaghetti straps; in the other a faded lacrosse uniform that hung over her like a sheet. In both her eyes seemed to well with hope.

The man told me I’d have to soak her by the end of the first week in order to advance. Then he said that if my assassin (whom I would not be given a photo of) nailed me, I’d have to surrender K’s information and forfeit the contest. We shook hands like old associates before I hopped out of the truck, onto a street that teemed with drunk people strutting like roosters from restaurants and bars.

For the first time since I’d moved to New York, I studied each of them.

*

I hadn’t done anything like this since my first attempt at college. About ten years ago, I fell for a girl in an early morning general requirement class called “The Experience of Music.” The little I knew about Barbara was that she looked like a cheetah, drank a case of Cherry Coke every week, and majored in Human Nutrition. “A fine major,” I muttered as I bent down below the kitchen sink, lugging out the White Pages to find out where she lived. Minutes later I was on the road.

I constantly assured myself that I wasn’t stalking her, even as I raced through a red light and slammed into a cab, which was stunningly more battered than my ’90 Tempo. The cabbie poked his head of out the window as if he were an ancient mud turtle looking for food. We exchanged personal information and clattered off on our respective journeys. I eventually made it to Barbara’s house, a tiny Chicago bungalow strangled with Christmas lights, but I never left my car. A week later our music teacher said we’d be taking a closer look at the songwriting in “Muppets Take Manhattan”, at which point Barbara grabbed her book bag and her soda can and walked out the door.

She never came back.

The e-mail I sent K mostly conveyed a hope that one day I’d get to see her, preferably while discharging a hard, pencil-thin stream of sink water onto her chest. She responded almost instantly, confessing that I’d made her laugh in her cubicle. She sounded almost desperate in her response, concluding her email with a plea for my spray. This was not the response I was shooting for. I’d tried to rattle her cage by invoking the voice of a stalker; instead she responded like someone who’d paid ten dollars to get stalked.

I, on the other hand, was trying to avoid my assassin at all costs. To get into work I’d sneak in through my building’s rarely used freight entrance. The freight elevator had been out of service for years, owing its disrepair to a pair of brawling bootleggers who inadvertently knocked the shoddy door back and plunged four stories through the shaft. Both men died on impact with the lift car. Firefighters used saber saws to deliver the bodies from the steel.

Nights I spent at my girlfriend’s apartment. I did this because no one affiliated with the tournament had her address. But after three days without so much as a phone call or an email, I wondered whether the extreme efforts I was taking to avert my assassin were even necessary.

“Why isn’t anyone trying to stalk me?” I asked my girlfriend.

“Sweetheart,” she said, slapping a nicotine patch on her thigh, “not everyone is going to be as into this thing as your desperate Hawaiian girl.”

*

It isn’t easy to keep a low profile in New York while trotting with a plastic bazooka the color of rainbow sherbet. Oftentimes I had no choice. Even though I tried to keep my gun wrapped in plastic in my book bag, it still leaked through the bag and soaked my books. This pretty much summarized the effect that Street Wars took on my life. I was getting up early, jogging backwards to the subway with my hand on the pump. I was dozing off at work and school after lengthy evening stakeouts. I took cabs during my lunch break to K’s Murray Hill apartment, hoping to catch her on her way to work. I even had friends from across the country call her around the clock, to warn her of impending rains. She flirted with one of them to the extent that he actually considered leaving both his wife and his Irish wolfhound to move to New York.

“Do you think she really likes me, or is she just playing games?” he asked during one of our late night strategy sessions.

Three straight nights I raced out of class to stake out K’s crummy building. As I inevitably tired, I’d dart into a nearby McDonald’s for coffee. By the knowing looks of the other skittish, coffee-sipping men in the fast food dive, I wondered if I’d stumbled into some kind of stalker headquarters. Were they playing in this tournament too? Or were they waiting people out the old fashioned, socially-unacceptable way—with their hands resting calmly on the napkins placed beneath their cups? Who were they waiting for? What were they waiting for?

I realized I blended in with this scene the moment I walked into the bathroom to splash some water on my face, because the man I glimpsed in the bathroom mirror looked like a stalker straight out of central casting: the dingy Mets cap, the erratic beard, the timeless sporty windbreaker with upturned collar… I looked like a maniac. And on Day Four of the tournament I walked out of that McDonald’s only to find K slithering out of a taxi and into her building before I could pump off a round.

I stared at her from the other side of the glass door. She winked at me and smiled, not looking nearly as wholesome in 3-D as she did in the photos, clomping up her building’s stairs while throwing her head back in a burst of giddy laughter.

The only things missing from this scene were the life lesson subtitles: you cannot wedge stalking into your life as if it were just another obligation. It’s not about you—it’s about them. If you are to have any success, you need to devote yourself to the truth that another human being is actually alive, that she can take herself away from the world as easily as she can plunge herself into it, independently of your plans, or the density of the corporate hedge plant you’ve been hiding behind for the past two hours.

I was furious, and instead of retreating back to my girlfriend’s apartment, I went back to my own place. I wanted to sleep in my own bed. I wanted to breathe my own air. I had an eighteen-pound cat that I hadn’t fed in three days. I got to my place and managed to do all of these things. I turned off the lights and fell asleep. Moments later I received a pair of text messages, but since my phone’s ringer was set to silent (stalkers must remain silent at all times) I didn’t get to read them until it was too late. The first one said, “I see you just turned out your lights.”

The other one said, simply, “The Water Wolf.”

Early in the morning I jogged up to the roof, where I cased out the scene on the ground for any suspicious activity. I quickly spotted a man dressed in lavender tie-dye watering the sidewalk with a garden hose. This seemed rather peculiar, as I’d never seen anyone water anything in Bushwick. Convinced he was there to make a “bitch hit,” (an attempt on my tourney life with a modified civilian water device) I walked back across the roof and towards the stairwell, ready for an encounter. I walked straight into a blast of water. My assassin, a dead ringer for Kato Kaelin, howled triumphantly in the doorway, waggling a tiny pink pistol in the air.

It was eight in the morning.

He was wearing a black t-shirt that said “Israel.”

I screamed, too, after the shock subsided, creating this sort of chilling, two-part harmony of yowling, exhausted men.

On the subway to Manhattan, he told me everything: how he spent almost the entire night on a lawn chair in my building’s elevator, waiting for me to emerge from my apartment for another day of work; how he drank from his gun as he grew thirsty in the night; and how his gun had leaked itself into his crotch as he slept, forming a conspicuous wet spot that hinted, if nothing else, that he was in the throes of something getting the best of him.

“Have you heard of Street Wars?” he asked my neighbors as they entered the elevator in the morning, attempting to explain the pistol in his hand and the wetness on his lap.

“I’m just waiting for someone,” he told them.

Apparently most of my neighbors simply ignored him as they got on the elevator. But the Water Wolf told me that not everyone did. There were a few people who got on and, taking in the scene, simply couldn’t hide the glimmer of recognition in their eyes; who smiled widely or laughed as they pressed down on the button that brought the shaft to the ground.

It was too gorgeous not to be a part of it. It was too gorgeous to stay inside the smoky apartment so slanted that everything on the one side of the rooms had to be propped with cardboard from the moving boxes. Sure, I could have sawed the legs on all the furniture to balance, but I knew I wasn’t staying long. This stay on Skillman was just a stop. I was going somewhere. Soon.

I had finished one of the Harry Potter books by 2 am, shutting it with a satisfying thud. We had watched all of the first season of The Kingdom, Lars von Trier’s original, that we had gotten from Kim’s Mondo Video on St. Marks. We had played cards until I had the suits dancing through my head. We had finished 2 bottles of Maker’s Mark. We had smoked far too many cigarettes. We were out. We needed more. And we wanted fried clams.

Up Union, right by the L train Lorimer stop, is Kellogg’s 24 hour diner. Gorgeous pink neon sign. Dirty walls. ATM in the vestibule. Powdered donuts in boxes near the counter. Terrible coffee. Sour waitresses with paper hats. I’d never eaten there, but I’d heard. I’d always wanted to eat there, but I was still too timid, still too new to New York, to venture by myself. Years later I would walk past Kellogg’s and think ‘no thank you’ but not out of timidity. Out of taste. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

We were headed to Kellogg’s. They, we were certain, would have fried clams. And they sold cigarettes by the boatload from the register.

We shot out of the apartment building onto the sidewalk, still cool from the night. 24 Skillman. Pockmarked by air-conditioners built into the apartments. Air conditioners that would blow the revamped fuses and outlets of the apartments should they be plugged in. They’re still there. You can see the building from the BQE. Drive by. It’s the vinyl-sided one, the khaki colored one. Look towards the city. Enjoy the view. Make sure it’s early morning and watch the sun drops scism off the buildings. It’s what you dream of when you don’t live here.

It’s never quiet there, at the oddly triangular intersection of Meeker, Skillman and Union. But it was that morning. It was early. The day was new. And sound hadn’t started yet. We hushed our smoke-strained, whiskey-soaked voices to melt into the surroundings. Nobody was out. The streets were empty. It was spooky. It was surreal. I expected mist to circle us, for haunting music to rain softly from the clouds. Our footsteps seemed too loud.

Kellogg’s seemed like a trailer that morning. Like an air-stream trailer parked on a corner 30 years ago that just never got back onto the open road. The windows glowed and warmed us in the chilled air. I was wearing flip flops and my brother’s jeans that dragged ragged around my feet. I could almost taste the tartar sauce, the breading, the chewy clams. I wanted a coke. I was half drunk on whiskey, half drunk on lack of sleep. We salivated at the donuts through the windows.

They were mopping the floors when we entered. Two busboys grimacing at the floor while they swirled bleach around with dirty mops. Everything inside seemed grey. We were told that they were closed. That they were closed from 3 am to 5 am every night. That’s not 24 hours, we said. We protested, your sign says open 24 hours. The fat greasy man behind the counter shook his head. We need to clean, he said. We need to take inventory. He said, we’re closed every night for 2 hours. That’s not 24 hours, we said as we trudged down the stairs. No, we couldn’t wait another 45 minutes. No, we’d go.

The only place still open was a closet-sized bodega down Metropolitan near Graham that smelled like cat pee and stale beer. We bought more cigarettes, milk that we prayed was still good, a box of powdered donuts that seemed almost as good as the ones at Kellogg’s. We barely spoke as we turned down Lorimer to head back to an apartment that was canted severely, smelled of smoke, and was not as pretty as any of the buildings on the street.

But it was New York. The sun was lighting the sky, the cars, the water, the BQE, the Empire State Building. Our footsteps brought in the noise – the cars, the garbage trucks, the early alarm clocks, the crying babies, the boats, the people, the city breathing and pulsing. We lived here. We smoke and drank and ate and didn’t sleep here.

I ate my share of the donuts sitting on the bed, watching the sun light the city, straining to see around the trucks stuck in the morning traffic jams on the overpass. Sometimes you can only appreciate where you live when you see it from afar. No donut has ever been as good. No view has ever tasted as sweet.