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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Use young animals only.”

“After scraping away blood clots...”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My tastes were different, though I was no musician. I went for punk, mostly. Plug-and-play music, the scruffier and angstier the better. Prince’s music was about the only thing Flip and I could agree on. But somehow, as friends, we clicked.

My friendship with Flip had started in upstate New York where life was slow and attitudes were conservative. If you were a kid with any sort of ambition or dream for yourself then it was a place you knew you had to get out of as soon as possible. While Flip always prepped his thick brown hair and checked his look before making a move – even if we were just going to the Price Chopper to buy cigarettes – I was a perpetual slob in jeans, sneakers, T-shirts, and distressingly thinning black hair. Flip wanted to make it as a musician, which also meant he wanted to be famous and have money and any woman he wanted. He never had a problem attracting women and, though he was self-taught as a piano player, he had a lot of ideas about music. So, after a few years of living in Albany and not finding any good reason to stay, he figured he was ready. He made his move with a couple of friends to New York City.

I had nothing – no money, no ambition, no desire. I didn’t burn and seethe. I just imploded and drank too much. Further aspects of my larger problem. I knew I had to get out of Albany but didn’t know how. About a year after Flip moved, I wound up in New York accidentally, like a package mailed to the wrong address.

Once we reconnected in the city of dreams, Flip was always trying to put a fire under me, to get me excited about something. I think my directionless, lazy, time-wasting ways – which had survived the move completely intact – pissed him off and worried him. Here I was in New York City and what was I doing? Reading in the park. Reading in bars. Reading at home. I was still the same naked mole rat, sniffing and shuffling my way through a series of dumpy underground tunnels when mere inches away was nirvana.

What I could never explain to Flip, though I had tried, was that reading was a form of writing to me, a substitute for the writing I was eventually going to get down to doing myself. What I couldn’t explain to myself was that reading was not only an escape from the writing I wasn’t doing, it was also part of a larger delusion I had which was this: by immersing myself in a book, I was somehow slowing down time. And each new book I picked up carried with it a guarantee that there would be time in my future to sit and read it.

“At some point, you’re going to have to get really selfish if you want to do anything with your life,” Flip would say.

And I’d always tell him, “I know. It’s cool. You do what you need to do. I can take care of myself.”

I was waiting. I wanted to see him become famous and have all of his women because, in my life, I’d never seen anyone do anything before. I wanted to know it was possible that someone could get what they wanted – even if I thought what they wanted was dumb – before I stepped out and tried it myself. He was my test case, my surrogate, and I was his loyal audience. We used each other, but neither one of us was aware of that.

We were having a coffee and a cigarette one yawning Saturday afternoon when Flip said he wanted to check in on Shane, another musician friend I’d met a few times before, to see if he’d made a decision about playing in a band with him. Flip was anxious to snag him before anyone else did.

Shane had lived in the East Village since the mid ’70s. (“You have no idea,” was all he would say about that era.) He’d played with glam New York Dolls-types of bands that went nowhere. He’d played in rock bands that went nowhere. He’d played in a couple of quick, three-chord punk bands that went nowhere. He had opened for some big bands. He had a reputation. Somewhere in the midst of almost making it, he’d become a junkie, but he’d eventually managed to pull himself out. By the time I first met him in 1985, he’d been clean for six years.

Being in his mid-thirties, Shane seemed old to the early-twenties me. That he didn’t drink or do drugs of any kind made him seem even older. Like the other junkies in my neighborhood, Shane looked bloodless, his skull shrink-wrapped in a thin tissue of near-gray flesh, his mouth a mobile fissure outlined with weirdly purple lips. Yet, unlike the other junkies, his eyes shone like bright green suns surrounded by whites as bright as chalk. He also didn’t have the zero-body-fat, pure-muscle physique of a junkie. Shane, in fact, was a little paunchy, and wore his shirts untucked to disguise that fact. He was irreversibly healthy now.

And it was this healthiness, and the fact that he had no visible style or edge beyond another version of the same black leather jacket that everybody else had, that made me wonder what Flip was after in Shane.

We walked to his building on Second Avenue and hauled it upstairs.

Aside from a few guitars sitting out in stands, a twin bed, and a couple of bookshelves he’d taken in off the street, Shane’s place was empty. It echoed when you walked through it. The walls were rag-painted a buzzing sea green, and the windowsills, doors, and molding were the high-gloss black of fingernail polish. Shane liked to burn a brand of incense that always smelled like soap to me. He said it calmed him.

Shane had told us that the stuff he used to have had either been stolen and he never had the money to replace it, or he’d sold it to buy drugs. Once he got clean, he said, he realized that most of the stuff he owned had been garbage to begin with. Crap that a consumer culture wanted you to think was your reward for giving your life away to your job. Heroin, which he’d thought would lead him to some deeper, soulful reservoir of feeling and lift his talent to another level, nearly killed him. But getting clean helped him admit to himself that the only thing that might get him to that musical oasis was discipline and hard work. There could be no other way. He played every day, he said, every day.

After the usual heys and what’s ups (no handshakes – Shane didn’t like to shake hands with anyone if he didn’t have to), I asked Shane if it was okay if I looked at his books.

“Sure,” he said. “Just be careful you don’t get burned.” He held my look for a beat to see if I understood him, and then turned back to Flip.

Aside from some pocket paperback, sci-fi stuff – all of it arranged alphabetically and pushed flush to the very edge of the shelf – Shane read Western philosophy, from Socrates to Nietzsche to Sartre, and Eastern spirituality, from Vedic and Hindu texts that I barely recognized to the Hare Krishna books that its freaky disciples would thrust at anyone who looked at them. I’d only just started moving in these sorts of directions myself – part of some idea I had then that maybe philosophy or religion could help me figure out what to do with my life – so I was happy to quit trying to act cool, and disappear into my usual withdrawn state.

The religion and philosophy books were in rough shape: blown-out, battered, the spines nearly unreadable from the deep cracks running through them. Shane had wrestled with these things and they’d fought back. I saw that he had the same Vintage paperback copy of The Gay Science that I had, and pulled it out.

As I sat on the floor pondering all those Nietzschean exclamation points, Shane came over and asked what I was looking at. I held the cover up to him and he took the book from my hand, keeping it open to the page I’d been reading, a page the book had automatically fallen open to.

“I told you to be careful,” he said, and began to read the same page.

The last thing I’d read had been this:

“The strongest ideas and passions brought before those who are not capable of ideas and passions but only of intoxication! And here they are employed as a means to produce intoxication! Theater and music as the hashish-smoking and betel-chewing of the European! Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? – It is almost the history of ‘culture,’ of our so-called higher culture.”

The lines were underlined in red felt-tip pen.

A long, quiet minute passed while Flip and I watched Shane read. I looked over at Flip and he made an annoyed face.

“Yeah, that’s it, man,” Shane said, handing the book back to me. “People don’t get it, only the artists. Everyone else is like some sick junkie, looking for a distraction from reality, which nobody wants to deal with because nobody knows how. They aren’t up to it.”

I nodded, knowing he wouldn’t listen to anything I might have to say, and turned back to the book.

Flip and Shane resumed their conversation but the mood was off now.

Things stood this way – Flip was acting like he had an offer that Shane should seriously consider (with the implicit suggestion that it might be the best he could expect for someone of his age), while Shane seemed to be insulted by Flip’s condescension, seeing him as just another kid with too much attitude in a neighborhood lousy with them.

A deeper problem that hadn’t come up yet was the fact that Flip and Alex, the other guy in this band-to-be, hadn’t really written any songs. Though they had one that had a “killer” guitar part and a chorus of:
Get Busy
Get Busy
Get Busy
Get Def

Flip had told me about this fragment a number of times. I was embarrassed for him but never said a word.

At least he’s doing something, I thought.

Bored, Flip walked over to one of Shane’s guitars, picked it up, and hit one of the few chords he knew. Flip had been trying to teach himself how to play guitar because it made for a cooler profile on stage; definitely cooler than keyboards.

Shane’s eyes went wide the moment Flip grabbed his guitar. He reached out to stop him, started to make some kind of sound but shut himself off and shoved his hand in his pocket instead. Flip, not seeing this at all, attempted to tune the strings but – Shane being Shane – they were already tuned.

Flip hit another chord a little less successfully than the first.

“So, what do you think?” he said. “We’re gonna start rehearsing tomorrow. You wanna come by?”

The cigarette artfully dangling from the corner of Flip’s mouth was curling smoke into his eyes so he stuck it, like he’d seen other guitar players do, on the end of one of the guitar’s trimmed strings.

Shane lurched forward, plucked the cigarette off the string with his precise daddy-longlegs fingers, and threw it on the floor. He pulled the guitar from Flip’s hands and stomped to a case lying on the floor by his bed.

Flip laughed out an offended, “Whoa!”

Shane was on his knees with the guitar flat across his thighs, his back turned slightly as if he were shielding it from us. He was breathing deeply and running a cotton cloth up and down the strings.

“Look, man,” he said, “I’m sorry. I just I hate it when other people play my guitars.”

“Yeah,” Flip said. “No shit.”

“It’s just that the strings get dirty so easily and when the strings get dirty the sound dies.” He ran the cloth up and down each string, stopping to examine first the string and then the dirt captured on the cloth after each pass. Then he folded the cloth over to a clean patch and made another pass. “That’s why I keep the action high, too. I like that clean ring. It’s a whole aesthetic, you know, I’m not just fucking around.”

Flip gave me a look that said, Can you believe this guy is explaining music to me?

“It’s harder that way,” he said, “but that’s what I want. It strengthens my hands. Keeps me aware.”

He held his right hand out to Flip like a claw. “Check out my callouses. I play every day for about an hour then I clean the strings and play for another hour. And I just keep going like that.”

Between the explaining and the cleaning, Shane seemed to be talking himself back down. “I wash my hands all the time,” he said softly. “Ten, twenty times a day. Before I play and after. Everything just feels better that way.”

When he was finished, he laid the guitar down in the case, closed it, and slid it under his bed. He knew he’d fucked up the gig with Flip but he seemed relieved about it.

For some reason he turned to me and said, “I’ve done the Dionysian stuff, you know? I’m in a more Apollonian phase. Cleaner, you know? More pure.”

I nodded again.

He looked at me like I was everybody else and said, “Never mind.”

Flip and I left soon after.

I understood something about Shane only later: surviving had ruined him. I would see him a few more times after that. Sometimes his hair was blond, sometimes it was brown. Once it was green. For a year or two he had a girlfriend. Once, when we actually spoke, he told me that he wasn’t playing so much any more. He didn’t give a reason why beyond a secretive shrug. After a while we both stopped saying hello.

I saw Flip last year in a comic book shop, though he didn’t see me. We’d drifted apart and I hadn’t spent time with him in many years. I was surprised to see he had a little girl with him, clutching his pant leg while he walked down an aisle, looking at comics but not picking anything up. He moved slowly, with an adult exhaustion and sorrow that was unfamiliar to me. His daughter looked bored, like she just wanted to go home.

I’d heard Flip was married and was part owner of an art moving company. Now I knew he had a child.

I don’t usually go into comics shops. I’d stopped in because I wasn’t ready to go home yet, to go and sit back down at my desk and write. I was wasting time I had no business wasting. But I needed to believe that I still had time to waste. I still need to believe it.

I held my breath and watched Flip walk by me. Then – and I still haven’t forgiven myself for this – I slipped out and went home.

Damian Van Denburgh is a 2011 fellow in Non-Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has had residencies at the Millay Colony and the MacDowell Colony, and his work has been published in Knee-Jerk and Fourth Genre. His essay, “The Spell of My Father’s Wedding Ring,” ran in the Modern Love column in the New York Times this past February. He works as a freelance writer in New York City.

After that, he was around more, saying “Hello, how are you?” with his shock of platinum-white hair, much more often. He frightened my children while they were in high school—“Is something wrong with him?”—but I told them it was just his way of being polite and friendly, that they should politely return the greeting. It was hard not to, when we met him on the elevator. He lived on fourteen, we lived on ten.

I liked his cheerful ways. I suspected they were meant to cheer himself, but often they ended by cheering me. I felt a kinship with his efforts to put on a good front, to remain cordial and upbeat, to walk briskly down the street alone, even if he didn’t really need to go anywhere. This was especially true in the last six months, when he was no longer supposed to go out alone; when he couldn’t find his way home; when he got lost only a few yard down our block. But he still and always tried to greet me, even though I thought he no longer knew my name—and I saw the lost, desperate look in his wife’s kind blue eyes.

And so, more than ever, I made it a point to address him the minute I got into the elevator and saw him there, uncertain whether to speak to me or not. “Good morning,” I’d say, “I’m so glad to see you.” And a genuine smile would light his eyes, his face, and he would feel himself rise, I think, and he’d pump my hand and say, “Glad to see you, too, how are you today?” And we’d enjoy a few moments of upbeat conversation until we came to the lobby and his wife guided him toward the street.

And then he died.

But—before that, was something else.

One night, he became violent with his wife. It was the first time. She was along with him. It frightened her, and she called the police.

A substantial number of them—I heard eight or ten—showed up at their apartment, not knowing what to expect. They were to take him—well, I don’t know where, but I expect some psychiatric hospital. By the time they arrived, he had settled down. They asked him to come with them, and he was frightened. He didn’t want to go.

But he said, “Fine, all right, I’d do what you want—if you’ll let me play the piano first.”

He asked them to sit down in his living room and listen. And they did.

They sat, he played, and they listened.

I don’t know what music, or how long it lasted. But the big burly men in their heavy, dark blue uniforms sat, patiently or impatiently, I don’t know.

Then, when he was finished, he got up and did what his wife told him, and they both went away.

He never came back.

Ellen Schecter has been widely published in print and online. Her first novel won the Amérigas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature. Ellen Schecter’s memoir, Fierce Joy, is being published by Greenpoint Press, on June 1, 2012. It will be available as a paperback and e-book from Amazon.com, B&N.com, and from greenpointpress.org. A long-time Upper West Sider, her summer story, Chilling Out on the M5, appeared years ago on Mr. Beller's Neighborhood and she was privileged to read at the MBN Reading Series at Happy Ending along with Patrick Gallagher way back when she was just beginning her memoir.

The tenant, a clammy, heavyset woman in her thirties, bustled through an obstacle course of whirring floor fans that seemed to do little to mitigate her harried, overheated condition. She pointed to light fixtures and patches of wall in need of minor repairs, and spoke highly of the time she and her husband had spent in the apartment. She emphasized that though they were breaking their lease, they were by no means fleeing. The couple had unexpectedly purchased a home elsewhere in Brooklyn and felt eager to occupy it. “I don’t think I’ve seen a single funeral the whole time we’ve been here,” she told us for the second or third time.

The apartment, I had to acknowledge, was well suited to us. It had a comfortable living room and a large bedroom with a nook that would make for me a practical workspace. It possessed certain old-world details: pressed-tin ceilings in the kitchen and living room, and crown molding throughout. Even the oddly tilted hardwood floors proffered a bit of charming whimsy. Rent was modest and the building much nearer the subway than any property we’d seen in the preceding weeks. Once I’d accepted that we would enjoy no convenient baklava, no spanakopita or stuffed grape leaves—that any fringe benefits we might incur as a result of our relationship with the landlord lay with any luck in the very distant future—the woman’s assurances about the business’s fallow state began to sound comforting. The facility below was no workshop of ghastly human taxidermy, merely a quiet office in a retired state of final dormancy. An ex-beast gone blind and toothless with age. After a brief caucus in the privacy of the bathroom, Jenna and I emerged resolved: We would take it.

Prior to attending college outside Boston, I had lived the whole of my life on one block of a tiny colonial town a few miles from Philadelphia. The summer before I entered kindergarten, my family moved from one side of the Hluchan’s immaculate redbrick home to the other, into an imposing stucco affair that proved, over the years, to require literally inexhaustible repairs. Floors were refinished and, some years later, replaced. Walls were painted and shingles flung from the rooftop. After years of carrying buckets of muddy water from the basement in the wake of thunderstorms, my father commissioned the installation of waterproof lining and a sump pump. Long before my parents became aware of the necessity for any of these projects, however, during their days of house hunting, my father felt drawn again and again to a particular sort of home.

Several were scattered about the area. Each built of clean, precise brick, with tasteful, white-pillared porticoes and mullioned windows. The owners seemed to share a landscaper; for each lawn presented martial trimness and their hedges appeared plastic in their perfectness. Lights rarely brightened these interiors, at least not in any way visible from the street, and an unnatural serenity seemed to pervade the properties. These were hushed and leafless grounds. To my father, for whom cleanliness and quietude know few superiors, they seemed ideal locales. “Here is nice house,” he would say driving through town, dropping the article in his characteristic eastern European fashion.

At some point early in my childhood, my father began to do the family’s grocery shopping, and he quickly acquired a reputation for not reading labels. As a result, our pantry often held jars of saltless peanut butter and tins of anchovies he had mistaken for sardines, and which, in due course, found their way to food drives. This ignorance of labels and signs assured his repeated disappointment in finding that each winsome home he identified from the car was, of course, a funeral parlor. Perhaps I inherited something of this trait, if such a thing is heritable, for I too neglected at first to notice the abundant signage that tags my building as a mortuary. It seems fitting, though, that some 20 years after my father coveted the funeral facilities in my hometown, I managed to locate a building in Brooklyn in which, despite its funereal purpose, I am welcome to stay.

Mr. Cusimano—that is, Dominic J., my landlord—has a son, Robert, a managing director at an investment bank, who describes his father as “the last of the Mohicans.” The lone remaining practitioner of a business that once sustained several branches of the family. Mr. Cusimano’s grandfather arrived in Brooklyn from Sicily in 1929 with his wife and a three-year-old boy who would grow to become Mr. Cusimano’s father. The couple established their first storefront mortuary on Kane Street, in modern day Cobble Hill. Sacred Hearts Catholic Church stood just across the street, and its congregants supplied a natural customer base until progress intruded some 12 years later in the form of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, whose advance saw the demolition of both buildings. The Cusimanos re-established themselves a few blocks away at the corner of Court and Baltic Streets, in a building that has served for subsequent generations as a place of both business and residence.

His grandparents, Mr. Cusimano tells me one morning in his funeral home’s front parlor—known formerly as the smoking room— ministered to a community of factory workers and longshoremen so overwhelmingly Italian that the couple’s deeply broken English represented no impediment to commerce. “We were part of the neighborhood,” he says. “We shopped in the stores. We treated people right and when they had a need they would call us.” During World War Two, his father’s bilingualism proved a boon to the neighborhood and served to further establish the business at the heart of the community. Italian immigrants, especially mothers desperate for contact with sons away at distant fronts, arrived in the foyer almost daily to enlist the teenager’s aid in translating and transcribing correspondence. “There were some Saving Private Ryan type situations,” Mr. Cusimano says with evident pride.

In those days, and during the years his father and two uncles ran things, several funerals a week represented the standard pace of business. “We used to get a couple hundred people in here,” he says, indicating the room’s cramped, dingy spread, and the small chapel toward the building’s rear, where bodies are laid for viewing. For decades, whole extended families and networks of friends and their children from the old country and new lived on the surrounding blocks. When a member of the community passed, they often turned up at the Cusimano home for 72-hour wakes that culminated in floral crescendos with a funeral on the fourth day. “It’d be standing room only,” Mr. Cusimano says wistfully.

Since taking the helm some three decades ago he has seen business slow nearly to standstill. Two satellite locations have shuttered and sold. The Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home hosts few services and almost no wakes. The funerals it does perform last only a day. On a good week, it will have one. Mr. Cusimano does not blame death industry conglomerates that have claimed a great portion of the market, or the increased preference of the public for cremation. He does not blame the five other local funeral directors, some of whom, he says, employ underhanded tactics to attract the patronage of the bereaved. “The neighborhood is just entirely different,” he says. “Go out on the street and you hardly see anyone over 50.”

It’s true. On the sidewalk beneath our living room windows, Bugaboos far outnumber Rascals. Where Sicilian stevedores and their families once shopped and gathered, young couples steer scooter-borne progeny around labradoodles and sidewalk antique galleries, fair-trade cappuccinos in hand. The odd pork store or bakery remains, but other storefronts—the cobblers, tailors, butchers and fishmongers that once catered to fervent old-world demand—have largely dissipated. It is not gentrification as such, however, that has sapped Mr. Cusimano’s business.

“Everybody’s all over the place,” he tells me, meaning families formerly resident to the neighborhood, many of which have relocated to the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, to Arizona and Florida. The corner of Court and Baltic no longer represents a nexus for newly immigrated Italians and their children; it has not for some time. Mr. Cusimano estimates the exodus began in earnest in the 1950s. Descendants of the family’s first customers have spread across the country and beyond, and increasingly few hearken to traditional loyalties when the time comes to make final arrangements. “The children don’t know who to call, so they use someone local,” Mr. Cusimano says. “Or they say, ‘Why should we call Cusimano?’” Still, he does not begrudge these flouting offspring, who are likely merely ignorant or practical, or simply see no reason to return to Brooklyn to bury their dead, to do as those that came before had done. Mr. Cusimano’s daughters, after all, are lawyers, and his son the aforementioned financier.

We did not observe a single funeral in our first months living above the Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home. I went frequently to the mortuary’s office to speak with John, the superintendent—an enormous, cloudy-eyed man who received packages for us in our absence—and could not imagine, based on the facility’s interior condition, that anyone would hire the venue. The parlor was a dim, musty room, outfitted with gray industrial carpeting and mismatched yard sale furniture. Crooked family pictures from a variety of eras hung from the walls, and odd luggage pieces and half-opened Fed Ex packages lay strewn haphazardly about. In one corner, a sprawling model trainscape presided with a somehow proprietary air. A yellowed and claustrophobic alcove, which passed for a front office, stood behind a sliding glass window with a metal shelf, as can often be seen at ticket counters. The overall effect was of a rail station in desuetude. In its apparent ineligibility to host funerals, this tableau provided some reassurance. John insisted, however, that Mr. Cusimano had an active business, and that things had merely gotten a little quiet for the moment.

Quiet, near silent, they remained for many weeks. Though returning at each day’s end to a mortuary proved at first an eerie experience, a memento mori in constant refrain, the structure’s disuse began to take on a semi-comic quality. Here was this big old creaking building dedicated to stuffing and painting corpses that seemed never to arrive, to be altogether in short supply. A hearse came and went but ferried only the living. The streets were full of the chatter of new parents, the squeak of stroller wheels. In Cobble Hill, it seemed, the mortician had with the VCR repairman joined the ranks of technicians whose services had lurched into irrelevancy. Death had become somehow rare, incongruous with the present community. Like an outbreak of bubonic plague in the American West, something very nearly amusing in its outrageous anachronism. A line from a Hemingway story looped in my head: “(Nick) felt quite sure he would never die.”

Downstairs, though, the local cessation of human demise itself represented a fatal portent. Sitting on a worn velvet sofa in the old smoking room in a preppy salmon-colored oxford shirt and olive cords that belie his gruff local accent, Mr. Cusimano, gray and in his sixties, expresses an irremediable sort of regret. He mourns the passage of time. His family, he estimates, has hosted more than 10,000 funerals since 1929. “We got to know thousands of people,” he says with a look that is at once warm and distant. “Wherever we go, anywhere in the world, we run into them.” It is their absence he laments, that they have passed on to whatever their futures held, and that they will not return to him. He misses the camaraderie of the old neighborhood, the community of immigrants and their children that greeted on another by name in the street.

I get the impression he misses the bustle and call of Italian women through the parlor—after his young father to translate their letters—long before he was ever born. Profits are way off, but they concern him little, and he makes limited efforts to attract new business. It would only be strangers, after all. The property is worth a small fortune and Mr. Cusimano receives offers almost every week. But great sentiment attaches to the dank old place, and he is reluctant to sell. He remembers when this part of Brooklyn had residents old enough to die. He remembers the children who grew up and fled to the suburbs, where they lay their dead in neat brick houses with white columns. Soon, he seems to think, he too will take his leave.

This funeral parlor, it appears to me after six months in residence, was never any ghastly workshop after all. Many have laid below at their final rest, it’s true. But funerals, as my mother told me many years ago, are for the survivors. The places where they take place must be too. And who are the survivors, but all of us? I cannot wish for people to die, but they are dying, of course. Somewhere, if not in Cobble Hill. Maybe it would be possible to route a few bodies to the Dominic J. Cusimano Court Street Funeral Home. Maybe a little upswing would inspire Mr. Cusimano to clear out the clutter and straighten family portraits. Maybe the business could regain its footing, though it wouldn’t be the same, I know. I almost wish I could see it working now, in the clamor of the old neighborhood. I wouldn’t even mind sharing real estate with the bodies. I just know it’d be something to see it humming along in the infancy of the Cusimanos’ faded and repurposed world. A crossroads and a meeting place, amidst all the living and the dead.

When I was ten and living on the top floor of a building in the New York City Housing Project called Pomonok -- a word the Algonquin Indians used for Long Island -- I dreamed of stabling my horse in that elevator. The fantasy of actually having my own bay mare, white blaze down the middle of her face flanked by nostrils that would flare with joy at the sight of me each morning, lulled me to sleep at night. I had given up as childish the habit of clutching in my fist each night a plastic horse that I told my mother galloped me off to miraculous adventures, but truly, I half believed that a way could be found to accomodate both the relatively simple needs of my mare and the requirements of the other residents of the seven story building. I never claimed to be a very realistic child.

But now I was an grown-up. Of a certain age. Now, my parents were both gone, I was the mother of a young adult and I was back to visit the 93-year-old last remaining friend of the family -- the woman I had grown up calling Aunt Sylvia despite the lack of any common blood between us. The woman who always recalled me as the most beautiful baby she had ever seen. After a hiatus of more than four decades I was once again pressing the bulbous brass button in the shabby lobby and waiting for the elevator to arrive.

The elevator arrived -- no bell to mark its appearance but a light behind the wired glass window where there had previously been only darkness -- and I pulled open the heavy metal door and stepped inside as I had perhaps thousands of times before. But where there had once been space for hay, oats, a water bucket and a 16-hands-tall mare, was now barely room for me and the appliance repairman who had been waiting behind me.

I know people always talk about how the summers were hotter, the winter snows deeper, the waves at the beach wilder in their youth, but to my knowledge, no one has ever been gob-smacked by the sad reality of a shrunken elevator. I pushed the button labeled 6 and leaned deep into a corner, squinting a little, hoping to recover the original propotions. The repairman pushed 3 and in a moment got out. Even without his presence, there was barely room for me and a good-sized Bernese Mountain dog, and I know good-sized Bernese Mountain dogs, believe me.

The elevator reached my floor and I got out, turned right and walked to the end of the hallway, which -- surprise, surprise -- had also shrunk. As had Aunt Sylvia. But here's the magic part: in the six or so weeks since that visit, everything has once again regained its former glory. Thank goodness.

Ellen Greenfield is a poet and novelist living in Brooklyn and Jefferson, NY with her husband and two extremely loving and wayward Bernese Mountain Dogs. Her novel, Come From Nowhere, has recently been published by 3Ring Press.

First we all ignored him, shifting uneasily in our seats. If you looked, he’d jiggle the Styrofoam cup that held his wages at you, as if toasting, and wink. Then we read and reread the advertisements for “The Vampire Diaries” and Brooklyn law offices lining the paneling overhead. When The Beggar stood up clumsily, as the train rocked along its icy rails, some of us tensed our jaws and shut our lids in mock sleep —as one does when avoiding guilt for not feeling like rummaging through pockets and purses for spare change. Our noses prickled as the soiled, old man shuffled nearer, chewing on his empty gums. The folks closest to him stood up from their seats and sat further away, or turned their body toward the window. The rest of us turned up the volume on our iPods and fixed our expressions to neutral aloofness.

Despite this, we heard—

“Don’t worry. I ain’t gonna inconvenience yous tree-scum schmucks. I’m off duty!” followed by hoarse chuckles. “Yous thinking yous the shits of the shit, yea-ah? Sittin’ there, worryin’ about those bills …that leave yous too spent to enjoy all the big things yous worked for at that big ol'job that makes yous too tired to enjoy them anyways! know what I got? I got free seatin,’ free heatin,’ all around views. Not much money to spend. But no bills to pay. Yea-ah! I’m as good as better. Look at yous, sorry ass people. Frowni-frown- frownin’. Yous all sittin’ on MY bed. Yous in my LIVING room. Yea-ah! That's right. Stop pretendin’ like yous don’t know it... ”

And with that, he began hooting so hard it flanked our ear-drums. And those of us with our eyes sealed were forced to open them to The Beggar of Brighton 5th street— who stood in the middle of the train, empty, pastel-blue seating along each side. The pom- pom bounced in animated circles over his forehead as he slapped his knee with his left hand, and with the other jutted at us a long, nicotine-stained expletive with a pitted nail.

Glora Manuilova lives in Brooklyn's bootleg Soviet Russia-- Brighton Beach (or "Little Odessa," as some call it). She teaches World Humanities at The City College of New York, where she's also an MFA candidate. Website: http://amerikanish.tumblr.com/

There is a glass of water sitting on the coffee table. It has been sitting there for three days. There are specks of something floating near the top of the water.There is a vase of dried brown flowers next to the glass. The water in the vase is cloudy.A hissing noise is coming from the heater. It hisses for a few minutes and then it stops hissing. I am reading a book. I have been reading the same two pages for the past nineteen minutes. I look out the window. The dog is barking at a squirrel in a tree. The squirrel is chasing another squirrel. I can't tell if they are in love or if they hate each other.

I open my laptop. The tabs for Gmail and The New York Times and Facebook are open. There are no new emails in my inbox. I refresh it twice to make sure. I click on The New York Times. I light a cigarette and stare at the headlines. I click on Facebook and scroll down the news feed. I close my computer. I wish someone was watching me through a camera in my apartment. I have total privacy and freedom to do anything I want and I am not doing anything. If someone was watching me I think it could give me ambition. There are too many options to choose from and too few options that seem worth choosing. I want to fight something concrete but I wouldn't want to follow orders but I would have to follow orders because I wouldn't be able to decide on my own what to do. I would be willing to kill. Who would I kill? I don't think I will ever kill anyone. Technology has stripped us of that obligation. This should make me more uncomfortable than it does.

I walk out of my apartment building. I walk down Lafayette Avenue towards the bodega. The sun is out but there is a bit of an overcast. Some kids are smashing bottles in empty lot across the street. A couple of old ladies pushing carts are walking down the sidewalk towards me. I turn the corner. A couple of middle-aged men are standing at the corner. One of them has his back turned and then he turns in my direction. I run into him and a plastic bag he is carrying falls to the ground and I hear a glass bottle break inside it. I see it was a bottle of Bailey's. The two men shake their heads and say that it sucks. I apologize and offer to pay them back for it. I can't remember how much a bottle of Bailey's costs. I don't even want to pay him. He ran into me. He puts his palm near my chest. I take the thirty dollars in my wallet and give it to him. I tell him that is all I have. I feel afraid of him because he is bigger than me. I turn and walk away. I could have easily just run away from them and not given them the money. I don't have any money left to buy anything from the bodega. I walk back to my apartment.

Andrew Worthington lives in Harlem, where he teaches at the City College of New York. He has a short fiction e-book (PangurBanParty.com), a magazine (KeepThisBagAwayFromChildren.com), and a blog (FuckingBigThoughts.blogspot.com). He is 24, and he probably has most of his life ahead of him.

“What?” I squawked, genuinely surprised. It was the week of Thanksgiving. We were meant to be discussing favorite trimmings alongside the turkey, not armed robbery. “So you've lost everything. Keys, wallet, phone, etc?”

“No, he just took the phone. He said give me your phone or I'll shoot you.”

In his mind the story ended here, but for me it fell short of so much. “Tell me every detail. It’s the most exciting thing you've said in weeks!” Realizing my voyeuristic delight had unsubtly revealed itself, I added: “Exciting in a bad way, obviously.”

He obliged me. “I was listening to music. I opened my gate, went to the mailbox, heard it close again, looked up, the guy goes "give me your phone I'll shoot you." I said "pardon". I was stunned so he said it again. I'm like "fine" and took it out and he kind of ripped it from me. Then he was gone.”

I was amazed. I had never felt unsafe in his neighborhood or in its surrounding areas. He lives in Bed-Stuy. His nearest subway stop is Nostrand Avenue where the food choices are a fried chicken lover’s delight and the vibe is jostling and purposeful. There’s nothing particularly endearing about this strip of fried food joints, the Laundromat, the tired-looking liquor store and the stream of pedestrians and traffic, but I was fond of the streets further north where his apartment is snugly nestled. Stray in that direction and you’ll find the mood changes; it grows sedate, relaxed and more salubrious. The streets are broad and exquisitely sleepy. The neighborhood is gloriously settled and at ease with itself. Somehow it feels less gimmicky than Manhattan. Even the trees ooze age and wisdom. In the past I had wanted to perch on a step, sip my coffee and become a part of the scenery, although perhaps that wasn’t so wise hearing his story.

“I don't think he ran away fast,” my ex was saying.

“Thank god he didn’t want your wallet too,” I was trying to console him, but he was still stuck on pace.

“He must have walked fast.”

“Where’s the mailbox?” I was trying to picture the scene with limited success. I lived more centrally and I didn’t own two cats that liked to jump on people while they were sleeping, so we had almost always stayed at mine while we dated.

“Right in front of the apartment.”

“Did he walk up the steps?”

“No, it's before the steps.” He explained the set-up. “The landlord used to have a slot for everyone by the top of the steps, but now there are separate slots for all three of us at the bottom.”

“So did you have any mail?”

“No, if I hadn’t gone to the mailbox this wouldn’t have happened.” He paused for a moment before adding:
“You're the first person to ask me that question, it's a good one.”

“Well it adds a whole new layer of pathos to your story.”

It was too bleak a thought to linger over so we discussed whether he should move neighborhoods and if so, where? We drifted on to more random topics. We were flitting all over the place, discussing work, weather, whether it’s ever acceptable to wear socks during sex. And because he was no longer talking about it, not wanting to dwell on it, I was certain that he would move.
 

Our paths intersect just west of the median. My cellphone is glued to my right ear, and I continue chattering because if I pretend not to notice Tim Gunn, perhaps I will actually be invisible to one of the world’s best-known authorities on fashion and possibly Heidi Klum’s BFF. But I can’t resist; I look up. Our eyes meet. I see his glance flicker to my flip flops and my sincerely unmanicured, unwinterized toes. His examination is similar to that of one who involuntary swivels to check out a roadside accident when the traffic slows and you see the flashing lights of the highway police at the scene - but quickly checks himself. For a second -- do I really see it? -- a scintilla of a shadow of a moue crosses his elegant face, and then it’s gone. I almost expect him to tell me that I’m so deliciously low, so horribly dirty; would that he were the Higgins to my Eliza.

I should have known; looking that unkempt, I was bound to cross paths with Tim Gunn. Ever since he moved to the Upper West Side maybe a year ago, he’s classed up the place just by being here, but I seem to never see him when I look good. I actually spoke to him the first time I saw him; it seemed so unlikely that I would ever see him in person again, having never seen him around before, that I thought it would be ok to gush a bit. He was shlepping a massive laundry bag, which proved to me that (1) despite his godlike looks, he’s human and (2) he looks godlike even shlepping a massive laundry bag. As I confessed my admiration, I remember a voice in my head saying, “Let. Him. Do. His. Laundry.” When I finally, reluctantly, tore myself away, Leo, seven at the time, asked me who the man was. I giggled, “I know who he is because he’s on TV but he doesn’t know who I am.”

“So he’s a stranger?”

“Yes. He’s a stranger. I was talking to a stranger. You still can’t.”

It’s not like I haven’t been cautioned since I was at my mother’s knee to look good when I left the house. The first iteration of the rule was rather obvious: you never knew who would see you outside, which, when I came of marriageable age, emphatically included possible suitors who might somehow apparate onto Main Street, Harry-Potter like, just in time to check me out. That morphed into the more sinister, if slightly unlikely rule that if you left the house looking bad, you would of necessity encounter someone important, like the aforementioned phantom suitor or one of my mother’s friends. This latter rule seemed akin to the one that leaving the house without an umbrella would guarantee rain. I never completely understood the causal relationship at work here, but apparently, leaving the house bare-faced caused the planets to subtly realign so that when the shifting slowed to a stop, there was Mrs. Englehoffer, staring at me disapprovingly.

These thoughts were in part prompted by reports of a recently released study which found that a woman who wears makeup is perceived as more likable, competent and provided she doesn’t overdo it, more trustworthy. Researchers at Harvard were among those who designed the study, which was paid for by Proctor and Gamble, makers of among a billion other things, makeup. Their sponsorship of the study leads me to wonder, perhaps uncharitably, whether the study would have seen the light of day had it concluded that makeup makes no difference in the perception of one’s abilities. But the findings shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Certainly, the idea that makeup can make you look better isn’t new (that’s why you buy it), and studies have found that more attractive people get better jobs and earn higher lifetime salaries (see, for example, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, by the economist Daniel Hamermesh). This study just connects the dots: if (1) makeup makes one more attractive, and (2) attractive people are considered more employable and, implicitly, more competent, then (3) a bit of artful shading and contouring should cause you to be perceived as more competent. I confess that the fact that you can paint on a face and be thought of as actually better than one who doesn't, is kind of mind-spinning to me. I’ve never been completely comfortable wearing makeup. But maybe that’s just a vestige of the child in me who was distinctly unhappy with her looks and believed that brains could combat plainness (as Jane Austen might have called it) and were therefore, somehow incompatible with beauty.

The P&G study does make me wonder if I’m short-changing myself when I walk out of the house without so much as a smear of lipstick. One day last week, on impulse, I tried on some cheapie drugstore makeup I'd recently bought. Then, of course, since a made-up face demands commensurate accoutrements, I put on my black leather jacket and heels, fluffed my hair and walked out of the house. I felt great, if a bit conspicuous. I heard someone call my name. It was my friend Karen, who looked me over quizzically as she walked toward me. Finally she carefully told me that I looked good. Knowing her, I’m pretty sure she tread lightly because to squeal “You’re wearing makeup! You look great!” is to imply, “You know, when you don’t wear makeup you look sooooo awful.” But as we spoke about the usual stuff, in her eyes was the unasked question: Why? And in my own mind, I’m still not sure if the answer is that I’m selling out or being smart enough to accept reality. Maybe I’m just doing my part to spruce up the neighborhood for Tim.

Sharon Silver is a wife, mother, lapsed lawyer and aspiring writer.

I went to the open house and found a long line of girls waiting to see the space. There was no “sleeping loft.” What I was shown instead was a dark, windowless cubicle along one wall that was the shape and size of a low-ceilinged closet. The bed was a cot and there was just enough room for a small end table. There was no bureau – I was expected to keep my clothing neatly folded in plastic bins under the cot. There were three other cubicles, all already rented to other girls. It was in a giant room that was very clean and completely free of furniture and had the shiny floors you would expect in a yoga studio.

The owner of the studio was a wiry, little man named Avi who also owned a fresh juice shop in the neighborhood. I was the only one in a suit (I had an interview later that day at a law firm) and this is, I believe, why he offered the cubicle to me. Avi liked that I was looking for a “serious” job and was thinking about law school. When he asked why I wanted to go to law school, I told him I had studied Comparative Literature and Philosophy as an undergrad and now wanted to understand the world from a different perspective.

“You want to understand power.” His eyes glittered. He told me he had served in the Israeli military and so it was something he was interested in also.

Three days later, I moved in and met the other girls that night. All of us were in our early 20s. One was a yoga instructor and had the ropey, veiny body and serene expression that comes from years of self-deprivation, another was a graduate student in social work and the third was an aspiring photographer. She was six-feet tall and big-boned and lived in the cubicle directly above me. We took an instant dislike to each other. It began because of my dot-matrix printer – she hated the ticky-tacky sounds it made. I was still looking for a job and so had my laptop and printer with me and had been printing out resumes and cover letters by the dozen. I began only using the printer when she wasn’t around but, for whatever reason, this did not assuage her. She began to look for other reasons to be pissed off.

“What the fuck? Claudette, can you clean up all that toilet paper you left on the floor in the bathroom?”

“It wasn’t me. I haven’t used the bathroom today.”

“Then who was it?”

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t me.”

A few weeks into my stay, I still did not have a job but I had developed an interest in collecting things from the various flea markets around the city for the new apartment I planned to get when I found my job. It was an escape, a way to aspire. The first things I bought were four beautiful little magnets for my future refrigerator, clothespins carved to look like men and women in Victorian dress.

The next thing I brought home was a many-colored globe made from blown glass. I had meant to give it to my mother as a gift but, when I hung it from a slat on my bunk, it became a sort of pet, a round comfort like a ripe fruit (one that would not rot) or a fat child (one that would not require anything of me).

I brought home other things – some antique, painted tiles from Florence that I planned to use as coasters, a complete set of Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu,” a set of painted Russian nesting dolls, a carved lace mahogany box I planned to use for paper clips and pens.

I really shouldn’t have been using my precious savings to buy things but I couldn’t stop. I grew bolder in my choices. A colorful rug woven by Turkish nomads. A three-legged table with panther feet. One day, on my way home from yet another job interview, I stopped at an antique store down the street. There, in the window, were two giant wrought-iron candelabras, one that came to my shoulders, the other that just cleared my head. I don’t know what came over me. I suppose I must have imagined a future apartment with high ceilings, and maybe a baby grand piano, marble floors and a vampire crypt in the basement. I bought the candelabras and carried them back to my bunk, first the small one, then went back for the bigger one.

I arranged the candelabras at the foot of my cot. I lamented that I did not yet have candles to try them out. The other girls came into my bunk to admire them, except for the photographer who had, by then, for whatever reason, stopped talking to me completely. One night, when I was home sitting on my cot, printing out more resumes and cover letters, I heard a key in the front door lock. It was the photographer. Instead of closing up my computer, as I usually did when she came home, I kept printing. When she came toward me, I looked straight at her. She avoided my look and climbed the five-wrung ladder to her bunk. I kept printing for another hour. I could hear her for awhile typing away on her own computer but then she shut out the light and I heard nothing more that night but the ticky-tacky sounds of my longed-for escape.

Claudette Bakhtiar is a writer and part-time attorney living in Manhattan with her husband and two children. She holds a MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts and her writing has appeared in The L Magazine, Gigantic, Literary New York and Time Out NY.