New York is now a blanket of white. These are days when I should probably stay in the house, drink spiked cider, watch Hitchcock movies, but this is my one day off from work and I’m restless. I phone a friend that bought me a dinner a few weeks back and tell her I’m craving sushi, my treat. She asks if I really want to come from Brooklyn into Manhattan on a night like this, but I say, yeah, no problem.

After getting on the subway at Smith and 9th the train makes it two stops to Bergen St. when the voice on the loud speakers which is hardly audible - we all know this voice, the one that, despite millions of dollars in MTA upgrades, still sounds like an eighty-year-old wino with his hands over his mouth yelling through a forty-year-old blow horn. Following this announcement there’s the questioning look and raised eyebrows of all the passengers looking to one another. "What the hell did he just say?" Before anyone has any time to think the doors close and the train continues on.

It turns out there's a power outtage in Manhattan, and now this train is staying in Brooklyn. It’s running on the G line. Suddenly I’m on the platform at Hoyt-Schemerhorn racing towards the map, looking for another route. I take the A-train, briefly whistle some Ellington, and sit in the same spot without moving for about twenty minutes. I’m beyond late at this point. My fellow passengers are starting to huff and puff and in the far corner of the car I can hear the moaning snores of a chalk-legged homeless man from underneath an oversized jacket. Then the wino’s back on the speakers. He seems to have hijacked our conductor.

“The F train is not running due to a tree falling on the tracks at Rockefeller Center.”

All right, I know there’s a snowstorm out there, but I’m trying to picture exactly how a tree has managed to plunge three or four stories through thick concrete. It’s baffling, but then again this is New York. Stranger things have happened. After much confusion, it turns out we’ve all mistaken tree for debris, and suddenly I feel a little more relieved.

Eventually the train proceeds to go one stop and somehow miraculously now the F train is running once again, slowly, but it's plodding along. I can't use my phone underground and an hour later I'm thinking maybe I should just get out and walk from 6th Ave. to 1st Ave. and everyone's a little frustrated and late for whatever engagements we have or pretend to have, and I shouldn’t be up in arms; it’s to be expected in this sort of weather, but their agitation and grumbling is contagious and I find myself cursing under my breath, muttering like an old woman, “This is just ri-diculous. I mean, really.”

We're racing down the mezzanine of the 14th Ave. station like a hoard of suburban soccer moms power-walking and then I get down the stairs and I hear music blasting and echoing against the walls down at the bottom platform. It sounds like a Motown group down there. I follow the music, thinking, wow, amongst this madness the Four-Tops are hanging out giving a little winter concert. But when I get to where the music is coming from all I see is a fat, chubby-faced, raggedly dressed older man sitting on a bench. He’s got his Yankee hat on sideways and has a huge p.a. speaker next to him and a little portable cd player on top of it. My Girl is blaring throughout the tunnel.

I've seen this type of thing before, the whole karaoke deal, or with the fella trying to sing a cappella on the train, but usually it’s just some guy that can't sing at all. The difference this time is that this guy's good, really good. He has a high soul voice, like Sam Cooke, smooth and soulful like Smokey Robinson, and he's singing along with The Temptations, but off the vocals, ad libbing in an Otis Redding gospel style. His lips are pursed to the side, smiling, shaking around, nodding his head with a little wink of the eye, doing a little shimmy shuffle, moving his hips and arms around. A big crowd is forming around him, transfixed.

Amongst us sits this Laughing Buddha, singing away, having a ball, feeling it. Even the rats along the tracks have stopped to watch. He gets to the last verse of the song in which The Temptations sing "I don't need your money..." but instead he throws in his own words, "That's not true, I need your money, ooh yeah!" In a matter of seconds this man and his music has managed to transform a crowd of frantic subway riders into one filled with beauty and love and laughter and everything that’s great in life, everything that’s magical about New York.

A guy who looks to be in his late twenties next to me takes off his earphones as tears fall from his eyes and down his cheeks.

A girl next to him says, "My god, you're crying,"

He smiles big and wide. "I don't know, it's really beautiful, isn’t it?"

She laughs and places her hand on his shoulder and agrees it truly is and I’m standing there, thinking how quick the human emotion can change, how trivial our idea of time is, but before I can form any deep, profound thoughts the L train comes along, "Next stop 3rd Ave.!"

So we leave our soul man all to himself, still singing his heart away, music blaring above the sounds of trains. The doors close and we're all shaking our heads and a woman with an accent miles away from New York says aloud to whoever's listening, "Gotta’ giv’ it to him. He sho’ do bring a smile to yo’ face." A minute later the laughter subsides, headphones back on, books and newspapers out, eyes close, and a strange, yet familiar silence fills the car.

I get out at 1st Ave., walk up the slushy stairs and now on the streets I’m greeted with the loud sounds of sirens and honking horns and taxi cabs and finally I get to the sushi restaurant over on 18th St. My friend's back at a booth completely complacent and sipping on some martini with a fancy name and some weird fruit inside of it that looks like a yellow slug, so of course, I order one too and then tell her, "I know I'm late, but I swear, I got a good story for you."

Seth Swaaley currently lives in Brooklyn. He writes a column for Razorcake magazine and more of his writing can be found at www.talesfromthetunnelny.blogspot.com.

It wasn’t long before my jealousy got the best of me and I had to run back home to change into my workout clothes so that I too could be lavished with praise and attention–just for running.

Without bothering to stretch or warm up, I ran down St. Mark’s and hit 4th Ave. at a good clip. It was easy enough slipping through the crowd at the bottom of the street and there I was amid the herd, just another salmon swimming upstream to the cheers and applause of all of New York. Adrenaline pumping, I grabbed a Gatorade cup from a volunteer and smiling idiotically, doused my head with it, shaking out my hair like a model in a Pert Plus commercial.

I had snuck in at about the 7-mile marker and with 2 hours having already elapsed since the start of the race, it wasn’t exactly the cream of the crop I was competing against. For one thing they were 7 miles more weary than I was. For another, it had taken them over 2 hours to run those 7 miles. That’s like a 17-minute mile. I was weaving and bebopping in and out of them like a fish through coral. Most runners had their names written on their shirt or shorts so people could give them a personal cheer and push them on. I didn’t have anything with my moniker so I was wearing my Obama shirt much to the excitement of the Brooklynites lining the sidewalks.

“Yeah, Obama! Yes You Can!” they shouted.

“November 4th, two more days baby! Wooooo!” I would reply to more enthusiastic applause.

I was really looking forward to running over the Brooklyn Bridge – to be part of that aerial shot of colorful shirts streaming from one end to the other. It had been playing out in my mind like a Lifetime original movie. A close-up on my face–a look of grim determination, running in slow motion. Slowly, the camera pulls back in a glorious swooping crane shot revealing around me the river of people that I am to defeat against all odds.

Imagine my disappointment then, when we turned off Flatbush and started north away from the Bridges. “What the fuck!” I thought, “I want my bridge moment. When do we go to Manhattan?” Of course, I didn’t want to appear to be the rube who forgot his map, so I just followed the crowd through Fort Greene and into Williamsburg.

The crowds varied from neighborhood to neighborhood, but there was a sizable turnout on pretty much every corner. In Williamsburg where even the hipsters were not pretending to not care about the event, I noticed the spectators were bringing out paper towels, orange slices, and bananas for runners to take as they went by, as well as Twizzlers, chocolate and other various leftover Halloween candy. The bananas struck me as odd though. I understand they’re to keep potassium levels up, but it just seems like the last place you want to have hundreds of discarded banana peels is in the path of 30,000 runners.

After a while I began to notice that there is a certain arrogance among marathon runners. For the most part they pretend to ignore the crowds and just grab things out of people’s hands. There was no “thank you,” not even a nod of recognition as they snatched a water or banana from the eager-to-please spectators. Like greedy little goats at a petting zoo, they shoved their snouts into the palms of children until they were licked clean, then sought out the next hand of grain.

It also became apparent that they took public urination to be one of their inalienable rights and would drop trow at any unclaimed loading dock or chain link fence. They were literally pissing ON Porta-potties while standing in line to use them, I kid you not.

Around my 7th mile I started looking for a good place to sneak off the course, but I hadn’t realized how solid the crowds would be. I didn’t want to be observed and branded a phony or a coward or worse still a cheater taking a short cut- especially while representing Obama. I was starting to feel a bit fatigued but I also still hadn’t had my bridge moment and was wondering when we were going to cross the river. It was at this moment while adjusting myself as I ran that I noticed that somehow during the course of events one of my testicles had disappeared into my body. I realize that the sight of a man running through Queens with both hands groping around in his shorts and a look of panicked desperation on his face might be a common sight on any given day of the week, but for me it was quite unusual. I came to a chain-link fence that wasn’t currently being urinated upon and under the guise of doing some hamstring stretches I frantically searched for my ascended gonad.

Thank God he hadn’t wandered far, just a little off the reservation. I vaguely recalled hearing something about the body doing this to keep warm and conserve energy in times of physical duress. I tried to coax him back out, but he wasn’t having it, so I figured, fine! I’d let him have his way and I’d have mine. He could sit in his room and sulk! One ball or two, I was crossing that goddamn river! I bade the men who had begun to urinate next to me a good race and off I went again.

I didn’t have to wait very long for my bridge moment, unfortunately it was more inglorious than I had hoped for. We ran on the lower level of the 59th Street Bridge, frankly one of the city’s douchier bridges, choked with exhaust fumes from the cars and trucks driving just a few yards over our heads. If there were helicopters with cameras to capture events, they’d more likely be reporting on the gridlock caused by the Marathon on the upper level, rather than the pathetic chuds limping along through the dimly lit bowels of the lower. The wretched refuse of the teeming shore, bringing up the rear– hours after the frontrunners had crossed the finish line. Running a marathon takes a dedication to personal excellence, tremendous determination, and a fierce power of the will to push you to the finish line. For me it took a series of escalating whims.

I had finally attained my completely arbitrary goal of reaching Manhattan and in so doing, I claimed my 9th mile. Though slightly weary after 2 boroughs, I figured I might as well make it an even 10 miles. Because there’s nothing exciting about 9. Besides, if I had stopped running then, I would have had the entire afternoon to kill and with nothing more pressing, probably would have just gone home and masturbated. There would be plenty of time for that later. Whim number 1.

I met my 10th mile on 1st Avenue somewhere around 80th street. I had just slathered my raw and burning nipples with Vaseline given to me on a wide wooden tongue depressor and was feeling a second wind coming. The sidewalks were packed with spectators, so I decided to keep going to the Bronx where the crowd would be thinner and take the subway from there. Whim number 2.

The crowd in the Bronx was very animated, with bands and dancers on every corner. There was a slight undercurrent of cynicism in the crowd there however. They were all quite friendly and happy to have us, but knew we wouldn’t soon be back. One sign summed it up, “Welcome to the Bronx! See you next year…” Ahh, the Bronx. The forgotten borough. The pity mile.

I saw a 6 Train Subway station, but realized I had nearly run 13 miles–a full half marathon, and thought I may as just do that much before bowing out. Whim number 3.

My 13th mile was just over Madison Bridge back in Manhattan. I had run a half marathon! Feeling very proud of myself, I began looking for a safe place to vomit. I could feel the salty saliva rapidly lubricating my mouth and knew that it was only a matter of time. Not having planned to run a marathon when I got up that morning, bleary-eyed and slightly hung-over, I had consumed a large breakfast burrito and piping hot cup of black coffee. How I had not shit my pants already was beyond the realm of my understanding.

I slowed to a walk by Marcus Garvey Park and went to the sidewalk behind the crowd to stretch my leg on the fence. I was preparing to regurgitate my breakfast and several gallons of Gatorade when I heard it. I don’t know where it came from, or even if it was directed at me, but someone within my earshot uttered a disparaging remark and I took it personally. “Looks like someone didn’t train!”

Oh really! Oh really!!? Of course it was true, but that didn’t make it sting any less. No! In fact, I hadn’t trained, nor had I stretched or eaten pasta or oats or whatever the hell you’re supposed to eat before running a fucking marathon. Frankly, I thought that made it all the more impressive that I had made it as far as I had. And if she’s got enough breath in her lungs to make smart ass remarks, then she sure as hell isn’t running any marathons! Well I’d show ‘em! I’d show all of ‘em! Whim number 4.

I swallowed my vomit-precursing saliva along with my suppressed rage and forced down whatever had been working its way up. On my feet and fueled by absolutely misplaced indignation and a desperate desire to save my pride from further mild bruising, I dragged myself to my feet and fell back in line with the other runners down 5th Avenue.

The next several miles are a bit of blur but I remember a sudden moment of clarity when my actions of the day became crystallized before my eyes and I was able to kind of leave myself and look at them as though through the eyes of another, more rational person. As I quietly observed myself bounding and heaving up and down the streets of New York, I had to wonder, What the fuck–is wrong with me?

With zero training and a bad back due to childhood scoliosis, I was practically guaranteeing myself serious injury at a time when I have no health insurance, no job, and no money. So why was I running? Pride? Boredom? To have a story to tell? Maybe it was a bit of all these things, the whole reason being something greater than the sum of its parts. Frustrated and bored, unemployed and with little direction in my life, I think I needed to accomplish something, to challenge myself and succeed.

Keeping this in mind, and convincing myself that if walking on my knee hurts it, then running must be good for it, I continued on at kind of a heaving canter all the way to the end. Or at least nearly. I didn’t cross the finish line, but left the track about 300 yards from the end, staggered through a hole in the fence, and wandered into Central Park. It’s one thing to allow people to cheer for you for running, but another entirely to allow them to cheer for you for winning, or even finishing the race.

I hadn’t run for recognition, or to get a participatory medal or space blanket I didn’t deserve–and I wasn’t looking to deceive anyone. If I had crossed the finish line, it only would have detracted from the value of what I had actually accomplished.

I began to meander aimlessly, like a shock victim away from a crash, not knowing where to tell my legs to take me. It was about 3 PM. I had been running for over three hours and had gone about 19 miles. I couldn’t stop moving though, I was stuck on autopilot. I knew that my time with the other runners had come to an end when they crossed the finish line and became something I was not. So having no one left to run with, nowhere left to run too, I crossed under a bridge and finally found that Brooklyn-bound train.

Connor Gaudet is an unemployed, 27-year-old writer/musician, living in Brooklyn and surviving on government assistance. He keeps track of his triumphs and humiliations at thedailyhell. This is his second story to be featured on Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

Once I met a man I thought would be amazing. We could barely converse for 45 minutes. I’ve had a few one-night stands that I regretted, but for the most part I have been happy with the experience of on-line dating.

I always preferred Craigslist because it’s the ultimate grocery store where everything is at your fingertips. Want a tall slender type with a big cock? Or a man who will be your slave? Or looking for a threesome? Craigslist has it all while other sites tend to be tame, and those geared toward S&M seem to attract freaky folks.

I met a man with whom I had an intense week of total submission through Craigslist. The first night was just coffee. Two nights later we went for a walk around the river, then back to my place for a little more talking and getting to know one another. Two nights later he told me to be at his place at exactly 8:30. He told me what to wear, how long I would stay, what to bring. He tied me up and blindfolded me after stripping me naked. It took him thirty seconds to hogtie me. What followed was total submission and trust on my part with a man I barely knew. His home smelled of gasoline, which he later told me was eucalyptus (I did not believe him). At one point, I thought he was going to cut off my tongue, when he told me to stick it out. He put something on it that tasted like rich yogurt, told me to keep my tongue there, he grabbed my tongue with his, licked the substance off and did it again; all the while telling me not to move my tongue. It was actually whipped cream he whipped himself, which I found endearing as he did not cook.

Although I had no control, I was not worried in the least. Part of the thrill was not knowing where this would go. He could have done anything, and I could not have stopped him. I have always trusted my gut, and this was no exception. We never met again, though kept in touch over email for a bit. I see him every now and again in the neighborhood, but we do not say hello.

Another time I went on a date with a woman because I was curious. Lucy and I spent three hours talking, she seemed to like me; then proceeded to tell me as we were walking out of the coffee shop that I was too straight (mind you, she had a boyfriend). I really liked her but felt something was off. A few years later she and her man met another couple with whom I am extremely close (I met the guy on Nerve, one of the only times I allowed someone over without meeting first, we had quick fling, and now his girlfriend and I are close friends, in fact, I consider her one of my best friends). Lucy and Brendan met my friends, Marcy and Jake at a party and proceeded to have another date. When Marcy told me about Lucy and Brendan I knew right away who she was talking about. They had an extreme relationship. He branded her, she was arrogant but beautiful. She had told me she lived The Story of O, and made it seem like anyone who did not follow her path was mediocre. The relationship with the two couples turned strange and it ended quickly. My point is that I knew, because I trust myself, that something was off with Lucy.

I don’t need the Internet for dating any longer, because I hope to spend my life with my partner. I have used Craigslist to get rid of cat furniture, look for an editor, and find sex parties, among many other things.

But I have friends for whom the Internet provides them with potentially dangerous work. A close friend does tantric work, while another does happy endings, and cleans houses in the nude in her spare time from being a professional dominatrix. I worry constantly about them. It’s not a matter of judgment, hell I have done my fair share of unsavory things. I worry because they don’t know these men, enter their homes or rented hotel rooms, in some cases, even the girls’ own places. I have asked them to tell me the addresses of where they are going and keep their phones on. They simply won’t do it. My friend Amber gave a happy ending once to a guy I had dated. Somehow that came up. He was extremely beautiful, smart, and sadistic. When I went out with him, I knew something was off. I had met another girl who had a breakfast date with him, and did not want to see him again, because she too, knew something was wrong. When Amber saw him, his girlfriend was expecting their child. He actually asked Amber if we could have a threesome! He had dated another friend of mine, and was cruel to her; doing things like putting an ad on Craigslist for another guy, making her fuck the guy in front of him, then the guy would throw hundreds of dollars at her like she was a piece of trash.

I am not sure what rules apply to the Internet. What is a calculated risk versus potential suicide? I have joined activity groups through Craigslist and plan on continuing to do so. I’ve been lucky. Julissa was not. How can one know where the line is?

Daphne currently lives in Brooklyn. She is pursuing an MFA in poetry while tending to her tomato garden, keeping her boyfriend and their three cats happy while dreaming of writing like Wislawa Szymborska, Bonobo’s, and a cabin in Maine.

The first year I lived here, in 1993-94 was a blur: an apartment in the Bronx, working with kids at a neighborhood center, $10 all-you-could-drink Saturday nights at Rockridge on Bleecker, 6 a.m. 4-train rides home, and smoking blunts with the janitor who also dealt crack and “managed” the immortal hip-hop trio You may remember them; the DJ was the only one who wore a hat. I was broke, the city was cheap, and it was glorious. The second time I lived here, the spring and summer of 1995, was more of a slog: a free 8×8 room in a Jesuit retreat house on Staten Island, a job as a day laborer and an endless stream of “hey college boy, you fuckin’ worthless college boy, can’t even mix cement, fuckin’ college boy,” of carrying a suit in the trunk of my car for all the job interviews I didn’t get, of hauling pallet of sheetrock down stairs, by myself, on 100-degree day at an empty Queens bank while the truck driver sat and watched because its against “union rules” and he could lose his job by helping me, and of ultimately getting loaded on my friend Eric’s expense account, waking up at his hotel, quitting the construction business and leaving New York until it had something to offer me…or until I had something to offer it.

I returned in 1999, this time with a piece of paper declaring that I am a professional writer, make that, a master of professional writing. I also returned with a roommate, Kim, a girlfriend of eight years who had built a career in the midwest while I credentialed myself on the west coast.

I was ready to return.

It’s a funny thing about ten years, it’s a significant length of time, but it’s either too long or too short, or maybe neither, or maybe both. By actuarial tables, I have two more years before my life is half over, so ten years means little. By the fact that nobody says “your young, you’ve got all the time in the world” anymore, ten years means a lot.

Ten years does mean I’ve spent a quarter of my life in this town of New York City, more than anywhere else except my hometown of Billings Montana, and it won’t be that long now. A decade is more than enough time to collect a lot of stories, but too much time to remember the exact details, the days, hours, people, places and things that make living in Metropolis and endless source of anecdotes, a sort of currency for all that is given up in this crowded, expensive, loud, rude, smelly polyglot of bodies, buildings and broken dreams.

Oh, but there are stories, the stories we can live here to tell:

1. It is my first night back. My brother Daniel comes to help me move in, which takes all of twenty minutes. We hit an Irish dive on Third Avenue whose name I’ve forgotten, but still recall they had a $4 Bud bottle and shot of Jameson special that I would indulge later that summer when I finished my first book around 3 a.m. That night, Daniel and I do longshoreman’s work on the $4 special. On the way home, we find an off-white leather loveseat, no holes, solid padding. It’s small, barely fits Kim and I, but all it needed was a coating of Murphy’s oil soap and some tender love-seating care. I will be hanging my legs over the side of that particular piece of street furniture for the next seven years.
2. I am laying on that loveseat watching television, thinking I could use a cold drink, which wouldn’t require moving since the fridge was within reaching distance. But it would require sitting up….when a pounding on the door and an angry “NYPD OPEN UP!” gets me right up off the couch. There’s a moustache, a trenchcoat, a badge, a belly, a living breathing Andy Sipowicz. “You hear any fighting yesterday night?” “No.” “You didn’t hear a guy get thrown off the roof last night?” “No…is he dead?” “He got thrown off the roof, what the fuck do you think?” “Oh. Who was he?” “He was a fucking drug dealer that’s who. Here’s my card, call me if you hear anything.” Then onto the next door…BAM! BAM! BAM! Later, I went up to the roof to check it out. See my very own cop show crime scene….Nothing. I never hear anything about any drug dealer getting thrown off the roof.
3. People don’t ask as much as they used to, but sure, I remember where I was when I first heard. I was half-asleep. It was quarter to nine in the morning. My radio alarm had gone off and someone on WNYC , if memory serves Brian Lehrer , was reporting that it was a news helicopter that crashed into the building. Then the phone rang. It was Daniel, “Dude, turn on CNN…”
4. My 30th birthday, a surprise party, a bunch of people hiding in the stairwell at Grand Central Station. Surprise! We’re going to a Mets game! Alas, it was cold, the stadium was mostly empty and the Mets got clobbered. However, Kim did come running back to the seats at one point to excitedly tell me that one of the couples in our little group was in a stall together. And one of them was on their knees. But not the one you’re thinking of. The best birthday present I got that year was having a friend go down on his best girl in the best upper deck bathroom stall at Shea Stadium. A memorable game, no. A memorable afternoon…Lets Go Mets!
5. On the afternoon of my wedding, I walked to the church, trying desperately not to scuff my shoes between our digs on Christopher St. and St. Xavier Church on 16th. Somehow, I managed, but also managed to be way out of character by showing up 45 minutes early. That was entirely too much time to stand around obsessing about whether I was sweating too much. A homeless woman struck up a conversation about the impending nuptials and when I started fidgeting with my tie, she slapped my hand. “It looks good, leave it alone!” She was right. I exhaled and stopped sweating.

6. It’s the day after Thanksgiving and a family argument breaks out over the best route from the Upper West Side bar where we we’re enjoying happy hours to Daniel’s apartment in Ft. Greene. A wager is made. Daniel and the three sisters-in-law will hop on the 1-train and transfer, whereas I will walk with my brother Brian, in from San Francisco, down to 59th and hop the A-train all the way to Atlantic. Losers have to serve the Thanksgiving leftovers and do the still “soaking” dishes. I am so certain we will win, we stop to have a beer, only to get to Brooklyn to find them all smiling and waiting on the stoop. Daniel is a chef, so the dishes end up taking two hours. Years later, after he’s long left Brooklyn, he confesses that they took a cab. The brazen cheating, especially by my wife, appalls me, but I take solace in knowing my train route would have won without their performance-enhancing taxi ride.

7. My friend Eric and I volunteer to run a weekend gym class at the Yung Wing School down in Chinatown. All of the kids are of Asian descent, minus the one black kid who had no desire to do anything but shoot one jump shot after another. With this group, we try dodgeball. We try basketball. We try flag football. We try wiffleball. We try soccer. We try games without a point that get the kids moving around. We try jumping jacks. The boys play along, but with all of the joy of Oliver Twist being marched into the workhouse. We make an arrangement. Fifteen minutes of freeze tag then we can play the game they want to play. That afternoon, Eric and I learn how to play Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Physical fitness be damned, the kids are having fun. I wonder if Eric will teach his young kids Yu-Gi-Oh cards back in Chicago. I hope not, it’s nowhere near as fun as freeze tag.
8. If I had to pick one person to stand in for the city, I’m going with my barber Frankie at Anthony’s on 26th and Third. A Sicily native, he’s always got stories of his island youth, of the best place in Queens for German food, of 9/11 possibly being an inside job, and of what drives hot ladies to lesbianism. I started going to him the first month, will go to him until I die. Or move away. Whichever comes first. He’s a haircutter extraordinaire, a homemade vintner, and a raconteur of the first order. One visit, he shared a glass of his new batch of red wine with me while we discussed Italian movies and he offered the single greatest piece of film criticism this side of Pauline Kael. “Last Tango in Paris…that movie really got a lot of people into ass-fucking.” I am quite certain I would not get an insight like that at Supercuts.
9. It was the day we started dropping bombs on the Taliban. It was cold and Kim had made chili. We’d watched some football in a bar, so maybe there was some liquid courage. Kim saw them first. Huddled in a doorway. They each couldn’t have been more than twenty, shivering without coats and a pathetic change cup that they weren’t even paying attention to. He worked off-the-books at the Fulton fish market, but it was still shut down, so they had to give up the room at the pay-by-the-week hotel. Her folks lived on Staten Island, she’d called and told them she was alive, but they hated him, so she stayed with the freelance fishmonger. Love won out over shelter. The only thing he seemed to be carrying was the Kurt Cobain Diairies. They enjoyed the chili, ate a ton of it, and both of them managed to sleep on the loveseat. They left at dawn. Maybe Kurt’s right that all alone is all we are….but not being alone sure helped those few months afterward.
10. It’s February 2009, and the news today…oh boy. I’ve come full circle, ten years to get back to where I started. At least the piece of paper still says I’m a professional writer. It’s been said, in the first Great Depression, that the movie industry boomed because people wanted to escape. On a Tuesday, Kim and I became those people, blowing off responsibilities, or lack of anything better to do, to take in a matinee at the Ziegfeld Theater, the massive midtown movie palace with plush red seats, ornate design and a ticket-taker who wished everyone “the best of times right here at the Ziegfeld Theater.” Before the show we wonder if the guy in the suit is lying to his wife about being at work. We start to write his story …but then the lights go down, projectionist starts up the film, the palace goes dark, we don our 3-D glasses and lose ourselves in the dark heart of the warm city.

What the hell…We sign the lease.

The next ten years begin.

Raised in Billings, Montana, Patrick Sauer now lives in Greenwich Village. A senior editor at www.TheDailyTube.com and a contributing editor at Inc., Sauer has also written for Fast Company, City, Details, Desert Living, Success, Essence, Time Out New York, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and Smith. He is the author of Court TV Presents: You Be the Judge and the Complete Idiot’s Guide to the American Presidents. Read more at his website: patricksauer.com

The independence, gained almost a decade later, came at a cost.

For Florim Lajqi (pronounced Lie-chee), 30, of the Bronx, it meant friends he’d lost in the war “would be given a proper peace.”

Lajqi was among thousands who fought with Albanian guerrillas in 1999 to win Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. They called themselves the Kosovo Liberation Army. Lajqi was 21, a student of criminal justice at John Jay University in New York. Though he’d immigrated to the United States at age three, he frequently returned to visit his family’s hometown near Peja, in western Kosovo. By 1999, tensions in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia and before that of Yugoslavia, were rising. Ethnic Albanians made up about 90 percent of the province’s population, but were losing their jobs to Serbs, and most Albanian media had been banned.

Killings and massacres between the two groups escalated, but the international community did not intervene. As Kosovo slid toward civil war, Lajqi religiously attended every Albanian demonstration in New York, hoping he’d be called up to join the KLA.

“The war in Kosovo started in ’98, I was 20 at that time, but as soon as it started I was like…perfect, this is perfect, perfect…I was going to drop everything, drop all my friends, girlfriends, school…everything, I’m going to fight.”

He soon got his wish.

He traveled to the front lines with the Atlantic Battalion, a unit of 100 men and one woman, all from the suburbs north of New York City. Most knew one another, as neighbors and friends. Lajqi was one of the youngest.

The war ended after three months, and most of the Atlantic Battalion returned home to New York. But the Kosovar Albanians felt left in an unsatisfying limbo. The United Nations was administering Kosovo, but it was still part of Serbia. To Lajqi, too, the mission felt unfinished.

When Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence in February 2008, he bought a ticket to the capital, Pristina, so he could witness the country’s birth firsthand. By then he was married. His wife Kaltrina and friend Valon took him to the airport. It was a moment he’d fought for, he said. He planned to go to Prizren, a town near the front line that his battalion had defended. He would bring back a handful of soil, the earth of a liberated Kosovo, to place on the graves of three of his close friends — young brothers who had sacrificed their lives for it.

Lajqi had grown close to the three brothers of the Bytyqi (Bu-tu-chi) family, from Yonkers, New York. Yll (Youl), 24, Agron, 23 and Mehmet, 21, had been assigned to different locations on the front, so they wouldn’t run the risk of being killed in the same attack. Lajqi said he was closest to Yll, “the quiet one.”

After 11 weeks of NATO bombing, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovic withdrew his Serbian forces from Kosovo. The war was over. Despite some serious injuries, no one in the battalion had been killed. Everyone headed home.

Everyone except the Bytyqi brothers. They were thought to have been assisting a group of Roma men, who helped protect their mother and two other siblings during the war, flee to greater Serbia to avoid being attacked by returning Albanians. There, the brothers were arrested by Serb police, who charged them with being in the country illegally. They were briefly imprisoned, then handed over to Serb paramilitary forces. Their remains were found two years later, in a mass grave.

“They were tortured, beaten, and then executed and dumped in a mass grave in a national park next to Belgrade,” along with 71 other bodies, Lajqi said, citing the findings to the Albanian American Civic League. An investigation into what happened to them is still in progress.

“These three brothers were on top of the grave when they excavated,” Lajqi said. They were found with canvas bags pulled over their heads, bullet wounds to the skull, barbed wire around their torsos, hands tied behind their backs. They could only be identified by the New York State drivers’ licenses in their pockets. All three had been born in the United States.

As Lajqi finished his story, he joined a procession of cars pulling into St. Mary’s cemetery in Yonkers. There, tombstones bearing the double-headed eagle insignia of both the KLA and the Albanian flag marked the Bytyqi brothers’ graves.

Lajqi ’s long black coat shivered in the light wind over his broad frame. The men greeted one another with solid handshakes and warm embraces.

Their former commander, Gani Shehu, spoke before the graves, with his men facing him in formation. He signaled Lajqi, who took from his coat pocket the soil of their independent Kosovo. Each man took a small handful of dirt and placed it on the graves.

“Lavdi!” the men saluted in unison –Albanian for “glory.”

Each man then went alone to the tombstones to pay his respects.

Nicole Tung studies Journalism and History at NYU. She freelances in photography and writing, and her website can be viewed here: nicoletung.wordpress.com

In “Here is New York” E.B. White described three New Yorks: one for those who were born here, one for those who commute here, and one for those who moved here seeking something. I live in the first one and my students in the third. The third, he wrote, is the best: the city as “final destination.” I may give the city “continuity,” but they give it “passion.” I accept its idiosyncrasies as natural, but they see it with “fresh eyes.” Sometimes, though, walking over the bridge can make me feel like both kinds of New Yorkers at once.

To walk over the bridge is to pass faux lanterns, to glimpse rough waters underneath your feet, to follow the weaving path of bolts that look like they were hammered in by hand. On the other side is aspirational Manhattan: corporate headquarters greet you as you step onto concrete. Over the winter the walk was blustery and cold. Hands in pockets, I would hunch against the wind. The bridge fit into this setting: steel gray, pale stone, the water below dark and fierce. Its arches reach up to the sky like trees, but foreshadow the buildings to come. They form two narrow doorways to the city ahead, pointing upward and dangerously high and sharp. A metaphor.

I walked rain or shine. Once I walked across with my umbrella until I realized it wasn’t really raining at all. I noticed that the bridge’s beams were really a pinkish beige like sea shells and it was the water that looked like steel. I put away my umbrella and was overwhelmed with silvery sky, wide, open vistas of air and space. Mid-semester, slumped in their seats, my students were tired of unifying imagery and hot words and endings-that-brought-their-beginnings-to-a-new-place. I told them about walking over the bridge that morning and the awe of the open sky above. “Look up!” I told them. “Look for the big picture. Bring some blue sky into your writing.” I’ll say it again.

They do look. One student wrote that in his essays White used the passing of time in nature to illuminate the passing of generations. A dragonfly still hovers over the rowboat White shares with his son, and he had once shared with his father, in “Once More to the Lake,” so that “there had been no years.” Father and son fish together, but White is not sure who is holding the rod: which father? Which son? White’s city was before me, the same and different, old and new. Who is holding this pen?

Today, the bridge exceeds any lifespan. At 125 years, it is older than my students, older than me, older than White. There will be other students, other eyes. White had nature to show how change happens –to us, through us, despite us. We New Yorkers have a bridge: a mountain of stone rooted in earth and directing our eyes upward, a web of steel reaching backwards and forwards. Right now there is another solid blue, cloudless sky over the bridge. Go look.

Victoria Olsen teaches expository writing at New York University.

I started with a skeleton of a full story, developed the characters, filled in the blank plot lines, and tried to add as much substance and familiarity as possible. I walked around with a voice-recorder, dictated lines of dialogue, scene settings, and sequences. After a few months, I was ready and started writing the actual script. The next day, Newman retired from acting. Of course it was a huge blow, but I persuaded myself there was still enough glint in his eye to be convinced otherwise. He always said he wanted to do one more film with Redford, and to add his wife to the mix, I felt was the final sell.

I finished the script – the first feature-length I had written – and immediately gave it to friends to read. I was, after all, racing against time. It was a first draft, and, of course, needed re-writes. I worked on that the next few months, and continued to hear reports of Newman possibly being sick – though no one knew for sure.

The film was obviously never realized. I lacked confidence in my script, and the logistics seemed far too daunting for me who had very little experience and pull. Newman’s health also seemed to be deteriorating. I tried not to think of my failed project, but was, of course, reminded when I heard that Newman died. Working with Paul was such a dream of mine, and it’s always terrible to see one become a closed book.

I wanted to honor Paul in some way. My journey started at Grand Central Station where I took the North-Metro rail up to Westport, CT. It was a far-cry from a traditional pilgrimage, like the one Dylan had made for Woody Guthrie. I road on a train to a stop that several thousand people took each day. When I arrived at the station, I took a cab to Newman’s house to get there as soon as I could.

I gave the driver the address and confirmed it was Newman’s home. We started talking about Paul, and the driver revealed he once lived in a homeless shelter that received funding from Newman’s foundation. He told similar stories of seeing Paul around town, and always seeming like a normal guy. The cab driver took me to a florist, where I quickly bought some flowers, and we continued on.

When I arrived at the house, there were two people in plain clothes: a security guard, and a photographer. They appeared to be working together, though seemed like an unlikely pair. The driver pulled up just past the corner, both of us being confused about what exactly to do. I heard people had been dropping off flowers, but the small section of the driveway before the secured wall showed no signs of a memoriam.

The security guard approached the cab, making no effort to hide the gun attached to his side. I told him I had flowers to drop off and wanted pay my respect. He asked me (in a way that was, of course, telling me) if I was going to drop them off and then immediately get back into the cab. I did just that.

I brought my script to leave with the flowers. I wrote a note on it that said: “Written with the hope and intention that Paul could act with Joanne and Robert. A kid can dream. Paul, you will be greatly missed. With admiration and respect, Craig.” I placed them in front of the mailbox, didn’t notice whether or not the photographer took a photo, quickly got into the cab, and left. I told the cab driver that it was a bit awkward, and he said the security guard definitely “wasn’t fucking around.” I told the driver to drop me off at Newman’s restaurant, the Dressing Room.

I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. It felt like the last thing I should do before leaving town. Like at his home, I didn’t expect much, and just wanted to at least pay my respects somehow. It was an unremarkable homage to an otherwise extraordinary person, but there was a quietude to it that felt right. I dressed up for the occasion, wearing a button down shirt, tie, and sports jacket. I always look awkward in formal attire, and I think the staff at the restaurant knew what I was doing. I didn’t attempt to talk, recall or hear stories about Newman. Maybe it was more pure to have inside you a deep admiration for an individual that could only be muddied by words and explanations.

The restaurant received a call from a Florida woman who wanted to know if the place was still in business now that Paul had died. The maitre d’ kindly responded that it still operated. He told the rest of the staff that she was from Florida, adding to the list of people nationwide who wanted to connect with the spirit Newman spread so well.

I finished my beer and there was nothing left to do but walk to the train station and say farewell. I grabbed the local paper on the way, which had, among several articles about Newman, his official obituary. Westport is like many other affluent Connecticut towns. Everything feels calm and perfect, but there’s bound to be much anxiety behind the utopian appearance. It will continue to flourish without Paul, but I hope it looks to Paul’s humility and humor when dealing with everyday life.

I strolled with the watery eyes of a post-yawn. I made eye-contact with several locals, always being greeted with a pleasant smile. Maybe they knew, and perhaps they didn’t. Either way, I felt encouraged. I was interrupted, while deep in thought, when I heard a honk, and looked up to see my cab driver speeding off in the other direction. It added bookends to my visit, which was now witnessed by another living being.

I thought about what Newman meant to me and why I considered him not only my favorite actor, but my idol. There were the obvious immediate stories of his talent, philanthropy, humor, and dedication. However, like many people who lose their father at a young age, Newman was a man to look up to, and I needed one. He was out there, he was consistent, and he provided the sacred guidance that only a good soul could.

He wasn’t a replacement for my father, but he reminded me of him in several ways. I think Newman was the crucial invisible hand that lead me to my passion for film. It gave me meaning in a time of uncertainty, and Paul’s compassion served as a quiet whisper that assured me it was all right for a country boy to try and work in a difficult industry.

I returned to Grand Central, weaving my way through the thousands going in every direction. I was among them, now continuing on my path, just like we all need to do. My idol had died, and wasn’t soon to be replaced. I felt the normal sentiments of losing a part of your world-view, however unfounded the significance of a person who I never met was. I felt fortunate that my sadness was coupled with an overwhelming fulfillment – at least there was one.

Craig Charland lives in Brooklyn and works as a freelance script reader. He is currently writing a screenplay, as well as short stories.

But something about the ads in that clean modern subway car struck a discordant note. I fixed on a poster that jointly advertised the services of a neurologist and a podiatrist, which struck me as a strange juxtaposition of medical specialties. “PAIN?” read the heading of the neurologist’s ad, while the podiatrist’s side of the poster read “FOOT PAIN?” Pain from head to toe.

So I perused the other posters in the car, and noticed that nearly all the advertising unambiguously addressed physical discomfort. There were other ads promising relief from soreness of the back and feet, others that hawked painful medical procedures such as abortions, orthodontics, an eyeball operation called a radial keratotomy that I imagined was right out of Un Chien Andalou, and the dermatological treatment of warts, psoriasis, moles, rashes, tumors, and growths. Another poster read “Get Ahead of Lead,” a snappy motto exhorting subway riders to, come on folks, at least try to keep the kids from poisoning themselves. Near that, I saw an ad for lawyers who would get you cash money if lead poisoning had scrambled your children’s brains. Then there was an announcement from New York City Transit, incorporating photographs of happy youngsters and the words “Stroller Safety,” which had me imagining the unhappy convergence of smiling tykes, stroller-pushing bumblers, and the hurtling locomotives of New York City Transit.

This seemed like an awful lot of pain for just one subway car.

The sole counterpoints to the pain advertisements were those that revolved around failure – ads for vocational schools, government assistance programs, drug rehab, and so forth, all targeted at the struggling and/or discontented.

Finally, there was the one ad in the corner that promised relief from it all – a drawing of a Cossack, the face of rotgut Georgi Vodka. Ubiquitous on the subway, he winked conspiratorially the subway rider, as if to tell us: “You know you’re getting drunk alone tonight, so why not give yourself a big Kennedy pour of Georgi – the cheapest!”

Pain and failure – this seemed to be all subway advertising was about, as if there was no point in trying to reach the subway rider about any other topic. After my epiphany, I started viewing all subway advertising through that lens, and even developed a standard to guide my observations and give them a pseudo-anthropological sheen. Pain would encompass a subway ad about any of the following:

• Injury
• Illness
• Medical procedures
• Booze
• Poetry in Motion

Failure I defined as:

• Booze
• Treatment programs for drinking too much booze
• Vocational schools
• Government assistance programs
• Posters publicizing events that have already taken place
• Any New York City Transit promotion that encourages more riding of the subways.

By using this (admittedly flexible) system, I found I could classify 90 percent of all subway advertisements as being about either pain or failure. I even turned it into a game I could play with friends, kind of like the family car trip classic of trying to spot out-of-state license plates – except with the Subway Game you try to find the ads that are not about either discomfort or dissipation.

In the last decade or so, much happened to alter the subway experience – the Metrocard, investment in equipment and infrastructure, the fruits of “broken windows” policing, and the palpable fear of terrorist mass murder. During that time, someone else obviously noticed that nearly all advertisements focused on pain and failure, someone with big ideas and clout. This utopian tried to revamp the status quo by introducing colorful banner advertising, with snappy copy and eye-catching graphics that would lift a captive audience of subway riders out of their torpor.

Tellingly, the first campaign that really seemed to capture the public imagination advertised antibacterial formula Tide. The vibrant posters alerted the inveterate subway rider to the presence of the invertebrate subway rider – millions and millions of microbes swarming all over the clackety-clacking petri dishes of New York City Transit. And if our subway friend, the peripatetic Mr. Shabby, happened to be riding in the same car, for the people at Proctor & Gamble the only advertising ploy as effective would be lobbing rancid polecats into people’s apartments while Tide television commercials played on every channel.

For a few years, the marketing folks at New York City Transit seemed determined not to let old advertising reclaim the subway the way the Central American jungle overgrew Copan. During that time, one might have never been aware, for example, that torn ear lobes remained a big problem in this city. Even those ads that dealt with subway staples like pain-numbing booze were sanitized – banished was the winking Georgi Cossack, replaced by smiling, healthy-looking urbanites with 80s hair and clothes drinking top-shelf liquor in social settings, instead of alone from a shatterproof plastic bottle at a kitchen table beneath a naked light bulb.

Retailers like Target came on board, as did auto manufacturers, designers, and tourist boards eager to tell you that there were nicer places to be than on the subway. Our Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire, takes the train to work. True, advertisements from various social service agencies did touch on subterranean perennials such as drug abuse, violent crime, STDs, homelessness, domestic violence, lead paint snack chips, and other sundry Gotham vexations – but they did so in a way that implied that a positive resolution to these catastrophes could comprise something other than legal action undertaken on the victim’s behalf by an attorney named Shaevitz.

Though New York City Transit has tried to keep up with its program of upscaling its advertising, clearly there has been some backsliding over the last few years. Nowadays, despite years of bold advertising campaigns, you’re likely as not to find yourself in a subway car where photocopied flyers for a psychic in Bushwick are wedged in the sad gaps between ads for vocational schools and already-canceled television programs. Marketing glitz seems to have been a puny weapon with which fight the immutable Stygian spirit of the subways.

What, I wondered, had started the return to a state of nature? The more I thought about it, I became certain that it could only have been this 9/11 message to New York: “Doctor and Mrs. Zizmor Salute New Yorkers for Their Strength and Courage.” I know – lazy writers have counted on getting laughs simply by typing the name ‘Zizmor,’ the way comics once banked on getting laughs by saying ‘airline food.’ But think about it for a moment. You want pain? The ad was from a pimple squeezer commemorating 9/11, the most painful day in New York history. You want failure? The ad first appeared 21 months after the 9/11 attacks, and replaced the twin towers on the skyline with a dermatologist who looks like a naked mole rat and his wraithlike wife wearing a wide-brimmed hat that looked like a mushroom cloud over Lower Manhattan. You want a little more failure? The ad remained on display long after Dr. Zizmor’s widely-publicized indictment for billing irregularities.

If that ad was the equivalent of giving a recovering alcoholic the shot of whiskey that starts the downward spiral to the gutter, I’ll tell you the moment I realized that the battle had been lost. Last summer, I was sitting on the R train and noticed two banners featuring little men.

The first little man was featured in the message from New York City Transit regarding subway evacuation, which, after the bombings in London, Madrid, and Bombay, is ever on the mind of the average subway rider. What makes it special is that New York City Transit has come up with its own “Little Subway Evacuation Man” logo – a stick figure fleeing in terror as cartoon flames lap against his ass. If the logo of a little man on the men’s room door replaces the word “MEN’S,” what does the Little Subway Evacuation Man logo replace – the words “IF BATSHIT CRAZY TERRORISTS BLOW THE ROOF OFF THIS MOTHERSUCKER AND YOU’RE LEFT STANDING, RUN FOR YOUR LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE!”? To add insult to the specter of death, Little Subway Evacuation Man even occupies the place of honor at the end of each car once held by the winking Georgi Cossack, whose friendly invitation to cirrhosis now seems a relic of a bygone era.

But it was the second little man that really got me. He appeared in an ad for the Bodies show at South Street Seaport, the popular exhibition of pickled corpses obtained in the People’s Republic of China. For a second, forget the possibility that the corpse in the picture might be the remains of the guy who stood in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square, put on display by the Red Chinese as a warning against political dissent. Focus instead on the simple fact that this was an image of a skinned and gutted human being – on display not as science, but as entertainment for the masses or maybe porno for serial killers, or maybe to remind you how you might look if you don’t run as fast as Little Subway Evacuation Man during an emergency. Not only that, there was a promotional tie-in with New York City Transit: reduced admission if you show your Metrocard!

This had to be the ultimate underground ad of all time: take the subway to see cadavers, with a discount for the working stiffs who ride the rails. In my pantheon of effective, site-appropriate marketing, it replaced the subway banner I believed would never be topped – the mid-80s roach motel ad that showed a heavyset Latina, her face contorted with surprise and disgust as she realized that cucarachas had nestled between the bristles of her toothbrush in the middle of the night.

The advertising on the subways seems more and more like a larger failure on the part of the ridership as a whole. We should be able to expect more while taking the train. Granted, the defining subway experience is being on a local train as it enters the station and seeing the waiting express train shut its doors and lumber away. The subway is a place where triumph is defined as being on the express train as it pulls away, not on the local. Where sensual pleasure is the feeling when, as you stand on a sweltering underground platform, you feel the first wisps of air stirred by an approaching train, cool on your clammy crotch sweat, and experience it as refreshing instead of the foul sirocco of PCBs and rat farts that it is in fact.

Although the subway is a place of meager pleasures, an advertiser still has a captive audience composed of millions of people from virtually every ethnic background and socioeconomic class. And yet, New York City Transit can’t sell enough positive advertising on its subways. Advertisers have largely given up on reaching this audience whose entire consciousness is focused on its own agony and shortcomings. We subway riders are people whose feet hurt, heads ache, are depressed, who have torn earlobes, thinning hair, unsightly blemishes, drinking problems, and financial difficulties, who watch too much bad television and try to sleep on sofabeds in cramped apartments.

That’s all we know on Earth and, in the opinion of advertisers, all we need to know.

Albert Stern lives in Brooklyn and performs monologues at venues such Speakeasy Stories. His previous essay on this site, The Circle Be Unbroken, was about Adam Purple and enlightenment.

“Oh my god! How the hell did you know!”

I wanted to say, it’s really not that difficult when you date someone for nearly a year. And we did meet through craigslist ourselves. His words got me everytime. Even when placing an ad for a trannie or a woman with a strap-on. I knew it was Luke. And this made him cry. Because we couldn’t make it work between us. He hasn’t come to terms with his sexuality yet. Doesn’t want to deal with his “heteroflexibility” as he likes to call it which I think is really a cop out.

In any case, he is this amazing guy, who dates great women like me, gets bored, ruins the relationship–and goes for these people men, women, somewhere in between, that are after money, a place to stay, not a relationship, not even sex or friendship. He has to double check each time he has a date from craigslist, to make sure that the date isn’t an escort-referencing the escort services section! Half the time they are.

When we first met, his “assistant” was a trannie named Layla. She had nowhere to stay so he took her in after their craigslist fuck. When I came into the picture, she had been around about a month. She stayed another month or so. Free room and bored. MetroCard and lunch money. I was sure she was planning to run a bordello out of his apartment. She tried to break us up from the start. I wanted to feel sorry for her because I knew it wasn’t easy living in transition; between two genders. She made this impossible. She was a pathological liar. Taking and taking and basically feeling it was her right to do so. I spotted her lies the first day. It took Luke much longer. I guess he needs to see the good in people while I see them for what they are.

I still troll craiglist once in awhile–it’s like watching soap operas. Mindless entertainment. I will always be able to pick out Luke’s ads because he writes a certain way and I doubt he will change his character or his desires. I know I freaked him out by picking his ad out so easily, but after all, I chose his ad out of over two hundred when we first met. Words get me everytime.

Lunchtime. I find my way into one of the faculty men’s rooms, a police officer’s cap resting on a windowsill, its owner inside one of the stalls, making and taking phone calls like the commissioner himself. In the library, where I go to grade papers, yet another officer. I ignore him, he ignores me, two separate entities here for completely different reasons. I grade my quizzes. He makes his phone calls. Apparently that big sign on the door with the red slash across a cell phone no longer applies. I leave a bit early to beat the rush, an officer on the second floor sees me and bows into a wall, as if in prayer, only he calls the wall, “Sweetie,” so I assume he’s not speaking to his respective deity.

It’s not so much the constant cell phone use, the squinting, dirty looks as I enter a corridor, or the fact that no one notified the faculty of a police presence in the building. It’s those Glocks in their holsters, the “hand cannons” at their hips. It simply looks obscene in the halls outside my classroom. This is supposed to be a sanctuary. Any literature teacher in the city will tell you, a few well placed props changes the entire setting of a location. I wouldn’t dream of teaching a lesson on Macbeth from the backseat of a squad car. What in the world are these people doing with loaded weapons in our halls? It’s just no way for a kid to go to school.

Last semester I had an opportunity to experience what the students go through. While snapping photos of the building to display in the school’s literary magazine, I inadvertently stepped off campus. An NYPD van immediately rolled up and demanded identification. I didn’t have any. Then who was I? Terms like “pedophile” and “terrorist” were used as casually as one might order up, say, a box of doughnuts. Terms like “overkill” and “police state” were hurled back at them. The conversation went downhill from there.

Yet this is the way that many of the city’s teenagers attend high school each day. Instead of using the auditorium for assemblies and school plays, it’s been turned into a weigh station for students to adjust their backpacks and redo their belts after removing them for the metal detectors twice a week. Maybe this type of indignity is worth the trouble at the airport, on your way to vacation in the islands, but to gym class? My first year in the building the assistant principal of security would prove to the students how effective the scanners were by pressing one against the fillings in his teeth. Definitely a yearbook moment, boys and girls.

You see, once a building has been labeled an “Impact School” the police arrive. Once the police arrive, negative publicity ensues. Negative publicity results in a failure to attract good students and low test scores are right around the corner. Low test scores simply mean that your school building is doomed. In order to avoid this nightmare, many schools fail to report the petty crimes in their buildings. My building, however, was recently praised for a policy of ‘zero tolerance’, everything from cell phone theft to verbal harassment was reported in good faith. Nothing was swept under the proverbial rug, and now the place is surrounded. Catch-22, anyone? The end of the day. My girlfriend, who also teaches in the building, likes to give me the day’s news. Since the matter has never been addressed by administration, all the faculty has to go on is hearsay, nothing more than ridiculous trench coat meetings in hallways outside of classrooms. She tells me that police guns were pulled on two students today. “ ‘If I tell you to do something, you better do it,’ ” was the cop’s explanation before bragging how, in a separate incident, a Muslim student attempted to enter the building using another student’s i.d. and the terrorist unit was called in. Then the officer asked my girlfriend out to dinner. “Well, did you feel a whole lot safer afterwards?” is all I have to say.

This fall, to pound the student body’s collective esteem further into the ground, a Daily News sports reporter covered one of our home football games. The article made its way throughout the school, passed from hand to student hand until a tattered copy reached my desk. For some reason, the reporter’s article got personal. He ridiculed our field, mocked the students who showed up to watch, even jeered the parents who cooked the hot dogs. He questioned our school’s heart, never bothering to wonder if other factors for a lackluster season might be at play. Though, in the reporter’s quest to deride the school, he got our nickname incorrect. For the record, we are the Beavers, sir, the Fightin’ Beavers, and don’t you forget it.

All it takes is for one student to have a bad morning, to carry that burden to school with him and then to act out on it, something that occurs in countless variations throughout schools nationwide. Instead of a routine suspension and a call to Mom, Dad, or even Grandmama, with the NYPD presence inside a school the end result could be a world of hurt that no one ever imagined.

On our way out of the building, we pass one of the flyers some of the students have taped to the walls in an effort to win back their school. It shows a graphic with a pair of young hands gripping steel bars. This is not a penitentiary, it says. We are students, not inmates… If tales of danger are truly what you seek, dear reader, I’m writing this essay during the first semester of my tenure year. Now that is truly frightening.

________________________________________

JB McGeever teaches writing and literature in a public high school in New York City.