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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I replayed the last few moments in my head. When I arrived at the City Hall station the place was buzzing with bodies: focused business suits seamlessly weaving through crowds of lollygagging tourists, who stopped to watch street performers dance for a large group of children wearing matching summer camp t-shirts. I was running late for dinner with a friend uptown, so upon hearing an idling 6 train at the track, I quickly swiped my card at the turnstile, flew down the stairs and leapt in just as the doors were closing.

At first I silently congratulated myself for catching the train. Then I noticed that I was the only one on board. As the train started moving, I heard the muffled, crackly sound of the car’s speakers.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a deep, male voice announced. “This is a train with no destination. If you are on this train - you should not be.”

I almost peed. This is not what one typically hears upon boarding a New York City subway car.

“Hello?” I called out, and then quickly realized that the speaker is a speaker, and not a microphone.

Feeling lightheaded, I sat down on the shiny blue bench.

“A train with no destination,” I whispered, hoping that saying it aloud would somehow make the vague declaration more understandable. How could an object have no destination when it’s presumably moving away from one thing and toward another? I thought of the school buses I rode in junior high school. Upon dropping off the last group of kids, the drivers would park each bus in an abandoned lot on the edge of town and take their own vehicles home for the night. Had this train just clocked out for the day? If so, was it going to park deep underground until its next shift? Would the conductor take a secret, password-protected freight elevator back to civilization and leave me behind? Would the Mole people discover me? Would ashen men named Rascal and Cooter take me under their wing and teach me to spit-roast sewer rats over trash can fires?

I decided to go in search of the conductor. I’d apologize for somehow boarding his weird train to nowhere and ask that he please take me back to the station. I made my way toward the end of the car and opened the heavy steel door. I looked down at the point where my car ended and the next began. The two cars were gently swaying in opposite directions, held together by giant coils on either side. I tightened my body’s core and took a long, swift stride from one car to the next. I was Indiana Jones, but with breasts. I had just made my way into the second car when the conductor’s voice returned.

“Ladies and gentleman,” he said once again. His cadence was precise and emotionless. Like a serial killer, I thought. “I want to remind you again that this is a train with no destination. But since I know that no one is on this train right now…”

“I’m on the train!” I shouted.

There was a long, pregnant pause. I held my breath. A moment later the conductor returned. But the deep, calculated voice had been replaced with a high-pitched falsetto.

“I love you,” he sang. “I honestly love you.”

This, I was not expecting.

In an instant I was taken back to 1988. It was summer, and I was riding in the backseat of my mom’s station wagon. We were listening to Magic 106.7 when a slow, country ballad came on the radio. My mother turned up the volume so that she could sing along. The song was Olivia Newton John’s “I Honestly Love You,” and I hadn’t heard it since that day.

Until now.

“You don’t have to answer,” he continued. “I see it in your eyes. Maybe it was better left unsaid. But this is pure and simple, and you must realize that it’s coming from my heart and not myyyyyy heaaaaaaadddddd…”

Though some of his notes were off-key and he sang with a shaky, forced vibrato, I could feel a real sense of longing in the invisible man’s voice. The conductor was singing from somewhere deep within. He loved someone. He honestly loved someone. Was that someone me?

I don’t know why what happened next happened. In retrospect, I should have continued on with my search of the conductor. I still had no idea where the train was headed, but there was something so strange and fascinating about the events unfolding. Maybe I stayed because the song ignited a sense of nostalgia. Maybe it was because I’d just moved to the city from the quiet south and was anxious to experience my very first “Only in New York” moment, even if the consequences were disastrous. Maybe it was because my parents taught me to always be polite during someone else’s performance. Whatever the reason, I wanted to savor the moment.

So I danced.

As the conductor continued crooning, I glided through the car with my arms raised, like a ballerina. I grabbed a pole, swung around it and used the momentum to propel my body from one to the next. I flipped through my Rolodex of dance moves and, in no particular order, performed every single one. I raised and locked my arms in a way that created an invisible dance partner, something I learned from watching Dirty Dancing. I waltzed from one end of the car to the other. I resurrected a few of the zombified “Thriller” dance moves that my mom made me learn and teach the rest of the bridal party at my sister’s wedding. I salsaed, sashayed and pas-de-bourréed. I spun in circles, letting my arms flail, carefree and wildly, in every direction.

“I love you,” the conductor sang, and though I know he couldn’t hear me, I sang back, loudly, “I honestly love you!”

Light suddenly filled the car. The subway platform appeared through the windows, and standing atop it were the same business suits and lollygagging tourists I’d rushed past in the subway station. I halted in mid-spin and peered out a window. I was back on the uptown side of the track at the City Hall station, which is where I’d boarded less than ten minutes earlier. The train stopped and opened its doors, inviting a sea of people into my personal dance space. Flabbergasted, I sat down on the bench as the car filled to capacity. The crackly speaker turned on once again, but this time the voice assumed the frumpy, almost inaudible characterless, monotone I was accustomed to hearing.

“This is an uptown 6 train,” the conductor mumbled. The emotion had completely drained from his voice. “Next stop is Canal Street. Stand clear of the closing doors.”

Bing bong. The doors closed, and the train started moving. The people in the car carried on conversations, read books and fiddled with their smartphones. They were completely unaware of what had just transpired. The moment was a lingering ghost, and they the new occupants of the house it had died in.

A man sat down beside me. He had long hair and, despite the July heat, was wearing a thick, tweed jacket. He reminded me of Lindsay Weir’s math teacher on Freaks & Geeks. We locked eyes and he leaned in close. “I saw you on the train when it came up,” he said. “Did you just ride the loop?”

I furrowed my eyebrows. “The what?”

“The loop,” he repeated. “When the downtown 6 train reaches City Hall they kick everyone off the train and it makes a giant loop underground and comes around on the uptown side of the track. But it’s illegal for anyone other than the conductor to ride it.”

And just like that, most of the puzzle was pieced together. In my ninja-like feat of agility, I must have accidentally jumped into the train after they’d already checked to make sure no one was on board. The conductor thought he was alone. While the excitement of the unknown began to fade, there was something so thrilling about being an illegal, voyeuristic fly on the wall during someone else’s private moment. Here is a man who gets five-minute windows of solitude between schlepping thousands of New Yorkers up and down the east side of Manhattan, and he uses the time to sing his heart out.

When the train stopped at Union Square I got off and stood on the platform. Commuters angrily brushed past but I didn’t care. I needed to see the conductor. I had to catch his eye and perhaps nod, as if to say, “I get it,” because I’ve loved someone that much, too.

As the cars moved past I tried best to focus my eyes on the moving cars, but I couldn’t find him. The train sped up and soon everyone inside melded together to create one giant, colorful New Yorker. Then, whoosh, the train was gone. To this day, the singing conductor’s identity has remained a mystery.

I watched the red taillights of the train get smaller, until they disappeared around a corner. With that, I climbed the stairs to the busy street above and made my way toward the restaurant.

Kerri Doherty is a Brooklyn-based humor writer and storyteller. She's been a featured performer at storytelling shows all around New York City, and once came clean about her chapstick addiction on Kevin Allison's popular Risk! podcast. She currently hosts a monthly storySLAM in Park Slope called I Like You, Maude and is working on her first book of humor essays. You can read way more about her at kerridoherty.com.

The door is windowless and made of sheet metal and houses a 20-by-30-by-one-quarter-inch Plexiglas shell. In it at the moment is a geometric print by Christopher Watts, an artist based in Pullman, Washington.

Behind the door is the only firm in New York that delivers fresh-made bento-box lunches. The company, Fuji Catering, (www.fuji-catering.com/) is owned by Toru Furokowa, a thirty-two-year-old Tokyo native who wears black-rimmed glasses and, during working hours, usually has on a Fuji Catering t-shirt, black rubber boots, black leggings under shorts, and a black do-rag. Ten years ago, as an exchange student in Portland, he stayed in Charles’ basement and they got to be close friends.

Back in Tokyo, Toru worked for Azuma, a bento-catering company that had been started by his grandfather in the early 1960s. In Japan, the bento—a boxed meal, comprising many variations—has a tradition stretching back roughly a thousand years and is the predominant form that lunch takes. Azuma is one of dozens of companies that prepare and construct bento and delivery them to the desks of salary men and women throughout the city.

One day about five years ago, Toru was watching a travel documentary on television. It featured the owner of a New York bento company. Toru decided he wanted to work for the company, Fuji Catering, and came to New York with that goal in mind. He made his way to Ludlow Street and met the owner of the company, a Chinese man, who hired him.

“After two or three weeks passed,” Toru says, “the owner told me he wanted to retire and he wanted me to take over the business.” Within months, Toru bought the company, with the help of loans from his family.

He had six competitors at the time, but now he’s got the only bento-delivery game in town. This is mainly because of a drop in demand, he says. The market for delivered bento is made up almost entirely of Japanese expatriates, and when the Japanese economy began to perform poorly, many companies brought their workers back home. Also, he says, “We make a better product.”

Over the years, Charles and Toru maintained contact, visiting each other in their respective cities whenever possible. Last year, Charles says, “I was thinking of how I could expand experiences with art, and have a presence in New York. New York has location. I knew Toru didn’t have customers come to his door, so I asked if I could install a display case. He said, ‘Yeah, go for it.’”

The idea was that Charles would solicit work from artists all over the country. Each month he would select one to display on the door, after which that artist could say he or she had shown in New York.

In August 2010, Charles came to Ludlow Street to mount the housing to the door. “I was drilling at one in the morning,” he says. “An anti-graffiti van came by and the guys said, ‘We’re going to paint over that.’ I said, ‘I’m trying to make some art here.’ They said, ‘OK, we don’t paint over art.’”

At the beginning of each month, Toru unbolts the display, removes the top sheet of Plexiglas, slips the old piece out, puts the new one in, and secures it. Toru tweets an announcement of the new piece; there is a place on the door where the artist can leave business cards. To date, no piece on the door has sold as a result of being on the door. However, early on, one was stolen.

“That was lame,” Charles says. After that, he had a video camera installed to monitor activities near the door. There haven’t been any further incidents.

Despite the lack of competition, the bento business is not where Toru would like it to be. The problem, specifically, is the American market, which he has not been able to penetrate. Every weekday he offers three different bento combinations, descriptions and photos of which are on Fuji Catering’s website. Each contains fish; beef, chicken or pork; rice or noodles; and several side dishes. Customers can place orders, online or by telephone, up until 10 o’clock in the morning. (There is no walk-in trade.)

The bento are fresh, tasty, nutritious, substantial, and affordable: .50 to .00 per box, delivery included. Yet although Toru—who creates all the recipes himself and designs each bento according to both culinary and aesthetic principles—has made accommodations to American tastes, offering, for example, meat loaf and potato salad, the bento, with such sides as “grilled bread Erengi,” “Vinegared seaweed, beansprout,” and “Veg and pork wrapped in tofu skin,” still have an exotic feel.

Then there is the temperature issue. “Americans want either cold or hot,” Charles says. “Not lukewarm.”

The resistance is especially frustrating because glitzier, generally less authentic, versions of bento are hard to escape these days. Sister, a new place on lower Madison, features the “Lunch Box”—basically an Americanized take on the form. One variety has crab cake, fried calamari salad, and seared tuna for . Sylvan Mishima Brackett, the former creative director of Chez Panisse, offers seasonal bento at his Bay Area caterer Peko-Peko, delivered in bamboo husk boxes; currently on offer is “Fall Chestnut Rice and Minced Cutlet,” at .50 a box. The minimum order is $75.

Even Starbucks has gotten into the act. Since the summer, a lunchtime feature at the chain has been “Bistro Boxes,” and you don’t need the alliteration to figure out which ancient Japanese tradition is being coopted. I asked Toru, by e-mail, what he thought of this innovation. “It has same concept of Bento but much worse than our bento!” he replied. He concluded—and I could almost see him raising his eyebrows over the information superhighway—“That was just salad combo meal.”

About 8:30 on a Monday morning recently, there was steady activity inside 27 Ludlow Street. A couple of dozen dishes, for three separate bento, had already been prepared in the kitchen, which is in the basement. Bento were being put together, on the ground floor, by twelve employees stationed at a twenty-six-foot conveyor belt, which was custom-built last year to Toru’s specification by a company in Texas. Its pace allowed for the assembly of ten bento per minute.

Toru stood at the end of the belt, inspecting each box, adding additional toasted sesame seed if he deemed it necessary, then putting a clear top on each black plastic container and securing it with a red rubber band.

“Human robot,” said a deliveryman who was standing nearby. All of Fuji’s employees are either Japanese expatriates, like the deliverymen, or Hispanic.

At one point, noting that the potato salad portions had become slightly too big, Toru directed a comment toward one of the workers in the middle of the line: “Pancho, pocito menos.”

Toru piled the completed bento on a big table. Deliverymen claimed them, loaded them into giant blue Ikea bags, and over the course of the morning conveyed them, by bicycle, pushcart, subway and car, to 940 customers, most in Manhattan, but also in the outer boroughs, New Jersey, and Long Island.

Presumably, Fuji has fully cornered the Japanese market for bento delivery in New York. But the indifference of the American consumer gnaws at Toru. He lives three doors down from Fuji, with his wife and young child, and spends nearly all his waking hours on bento. One day in September, he went to midtown and handed out brochures. This did not yield dramatic results, but he presses on. Through a venture with a charitable organization called Table for Two, he supplies bento to a restaurant and bakery called Café Zaiya, which has three locations in Manhattan; for each one sold, twenty-five cents go toward feeding children in underdeveloped countries. Today, for the first time, Toru was providing six Table for Two bento to a Columbia University cafeteria.

The educational market is capacious, but six bento are six bento. New inroads are required and Toru is intent on carving them out. “I’ve been trying to contact Michelle Obama,” he said. “The new ‘My Plate’ icon looks like a bento box. Do you know how to reach her?”

Ben Yagoda (www.benyagoda.com) is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of Memoir: A History, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, and other books. He blogs at britishisms.wordpress.com.

Annie didn’t reveal much about her life. All that we the friends knew was that she lived with her aunt and uncle in Baldwin Harbor. I think she mentioned having a brother, but I wasn’t sure. It never occurred to me to ask her if she had other family, but that was more about my alcoholic family secret thing. I was well trained in the keeping of secrets and turning a blind eye to reality. And, after all, this was suburbia; land of superficiality, where honest questions were rarely posed. And if they were, dodgy answers were the norm.

Turns out, Annie’s mother, Brigid, was a beatnick poet/playwright who lived with her lover, and son, Cado, in a cramped, two room apartment on the fifth floor of 175 Bleecker Street. The reason for our visit was to celebrate Brigid’s birthday. The apartment was packed with some of the strangest people I’d ever met. First off, there was Brigid herself, a very nice looking woman in her forties, with a few missing teeth, a joint in her hand and a tough, bossy way of talking to people. When Annie introduced me to her, she acted like she could have cared less about who I was, which Annie told me wasn’t true. "She treats everyone like that," she said. “And then there was Brigid’s best friend, Jenon, the Gypsy/Playwright/Social Worker from Turkey. Jenon’s lips were purple from drinking wine, her hair was in a wild afro style and when she flashed her eyes on me, I became extremely unsettled and tried to get away from Jenon, but she stood directly in front of me, practically nose to nose and asked me, in a heavily accented dramatic Gypsy dialect, “Ven ver you born?” I answered, “June, 16th,” and she went wild. She grabbed my two hands, pulled me up over to the couch and sat me down. I was so scared, my heart felt like it was nearly beating out of my chest. Jenon looked deeply into my eyes and said, in her gypsy speak, “I must tell you that you are a very high Gemini. James Joyce wrote his masterpiece, Ulysses, about June 16th.” She continued, still staring in my eyes, “You have tremendous energy, sensitivity and awareness. Your soul is on fire with wisdom and light. I know this for I, too, was born on June 16th.”

I managed to get away from Jenon and grabbed a hold of Annie. I was asking her for a joint or some kind of pill when the front door blasted open and in came two scruffy looking men in t-shirts and jeans. One I recognized immediately as Michael J. Pollard; I had just seen him in Bonnie and Clyde. The other curly headed character was introduced to me as Gregory Corso, Annie’s Godfather, who also happened to be, I later learned, an infamous Beat poet who traveled in circles with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Bowles, etc. The two of these guys were both wasted. Gregory went into the living room, laughing and talking some crazy shit while Pollard positioned himself next to the stereo player. He had a Woody Guthrie album under his arm and he put it on the turntable and played it over and over. Every time someone else came into the party, Pollard grabbed them and said, “Hey man, you got to listen to Woody Guthrie, man. He’s a genius, man” and he would drag them over to the stereo and make them listen. Whenever Pollard headed over towards me, I would take him by the shoulder, turn him around, and give a push, and he would walk back to the stereo. Meanwhile, Corso jerked off in the living room, and went wandering around the apartment with a handful of cum. He found Brigid and asked her what he should do with it. “Throw it down the toilet, you asshole.” I smoked a joint, drank some more wine and tried not to listen to the Woody Guthrie album, for the seventh time.

Get me the fuck out of here, I thought, as I moved to the other side of the room and poured myself a glass of wine and lit a cigarette. There was a very pretty woman, with blond curly hair, leaning against the wall by where Brigid kept the wine. She was quietly drinking and eyeballing the crowd. She noticed I was freaking out, and said, “Hi, I’m Jill. Are you Annie’s friend?” “Yes, we go to school together.” I replied. “So, you’re still in high school, huh ? This scene must really be blowing your mind.” “Yeah, kinda,” I said with a deep exhale. The woman introduced herself as Jill Freedman. She told me that she was a photographer and her next project was to travel with a circus. Brigid was riding shotgun as the cook. They were leaving in a few days to catch up to a circus in Philadelphia. The phenomenal document of this experience, Circus Days, was published two years later.

When I returned home late that night, I was amazed as I thought through the wild scene I had witnessed at Brigid's apartment. I may not have been ready to shift into hanging with the crazy, creative, bohemian scene at 175 Bleecker Street just yet, but I was definitely being primed for the journey.

Mary Shanley is a NYC poet/writer who has been reading and performing her work for the past 25 years. She has published: Hobo Code Poems and Mott Street Stories and Las Vegas Stories. Allen Ginsberg suggested she publish her first poems in Long Shot Magazine.

A Barney's window display of Lady Gaga's work has legendary multi-media performance artist Colette's notorious creations written all over it.

Colette, whose seminal performance art and multi-media installations originated out of New York City's vibrant art scene in the 1970's has traveled to museums and galleries all over the world; including the Guggenheim; MOMA; and The Whitney.

Upon seeing Barney's Lady Gaga window display in midtown, Colette takes to the streets in protest to send a clear message to the Gaga camp that Colette is standing outside the door and must be invited in and given proper respect.

While the maitre d’ was escorting us to our table, Barbara gave my arm an annoying pinch while gasping wide-eyed that Jolie Gabor, mother to Magda, the infamous Zsa Zsa, and Eva was sitting at a table in the center. I had noticed the large jovial group and some of the women bejeweled.

 During the course of our dinner, Barbara began to complain how it was like pulling teeth to get any one of her males to volunteer to help wallpaper her kitchen. I think I saw tears well up in her mink-lashed cocker spaniel eyes when she switched her tone from being pissed off to heartbreakingly lonely. The topic of women’s lib and its pros and cons arose and suddenly, perhaps under the influence of her third glass of white wine, Amy, who believed and rightfully so that we were still too young to concern ourselves with men or kitchens, began to ululate like Tarzan.

I noticed a man seated across the room at the Jolie Gabor table cock an ear. Then without the slightest hesitation, he got up to make his way over to us.

“It’s Tarzan!”Amy shrieked.

It was Tarzan. But in my eyes he was Johnny Weissmuller, five time Olympic gold medalist swimmer and one time bronze.

“That’s not the way to do it,” he said annoyed, all 6 ft. 3 of him.

A waiter appeared like a miracle from out of nowhere to swiftly and graciously slide a chair under Mr. Weissmuller’s rear, I think preventing him from putting it into reverse and careening through the swinging kitchen door.

He was still handsome decked out in his well-tailored tuxedo. The cuffs of his starched white ruffled shirt revealed embroidered initials that repeated themselves as ornate gold and diamond links, and around his neck hung his medals.

The others sort of sat there with ridiculous grins on their faces but I, a swimmer for all my life, looked upon him in awe.

“I’m a swimmer,” I said, rather like an idiot.

After a few minutes of cordial chat, this absolute sweetheart of a man rose from our table, almost taking all of it with him. Later I read somewhere that he'd recently had hip surgery and a broken leg.

Denise Falcone is a writer who lives in New York City. Her New York stories have appeared in J Journal, Antique Children, Kerouac's Dog, and others.

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

Reading on September 23 will be:

Rob Williams - Bear Patrol 

Lily Shen - It Is Easy To Speak Chinese

Kenneth P. Nolan - Farrell’s

Nathaniel Page - Spanked 

The host is Connor Gaudet - Hung Out

About The Readers...

“Let them see that big yellow head of yours,” Tiffany would say. We broke tradition only once, separating at a corner during a light summer rain in Greenwich Village. The ugly truth left me stunned and incensed. The cab, a canary yellow mini-van with sliding doors, slowed to a crawl. Tiffany reached for its handle just before the driver gunned his engine, bolting past her for a white couple thirty feet away.

We started taking cabs back to Brooklyn from Manhattan because, as Tiffany explained, I stared too much on the subway. If a father trained his son to do cartwheels for change on the Q train, I stared. If a man spoke to his wife in Russian while casually shaving his neck in the reflection of her compact, I was mesmerized.

I grew up in a suburb where everyone drove. Tiffany said my gaze wandered too much. I didn’t have my ‘train eyes’ yet. The two of us always enjoyed a healthy rivalry when it came to our respective upbringings yet it was the interracial aspect of our relationship, the burden and beauty it supplied, that needed to soak into our pores over a stretch of time. Regardless of how well my train eyes developed, I would never truly know what it meant to be black in America, but I was now part of a team that did.

We both taught English at a large high school in New York City under Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral control. When the Department of Education declared the building unsafe and its students failing, we vehemently disagreed with city politics and got to know each other better. Every year the building lost another wing to a trendy boutique academy and every year Tiffany and I grew closer. By the time there was nothing left of the place and our classroom belongings had all been packed, my ring was on her finger.

Initially, I just wanted to know the beautiful teacher who shared my classroom a little better. Yet when things progressed and it was time for Tiffany to inform her parents of the new boyfriend, she made a conscious decision to do it in stages. First there was a new man in her life, and his name was James. It wasn’t exactly a lie. James was indeed my first name. I just rarely used it, opting for my middle name instead. So now I was James on my birth certificate, James on my taxes, and apparently James to a loving couple in Brooklyn with strong Southern roots whom I never actually met. It was simply an easier crossover name than Bryan, which served Tiffany well until her parents demanded to know who this James character was exactly.

“You’ve been dating this guy for months now,” her mother finally said. “How come we’ve never met him?”

“Well, James lives very far. Way out on the Island.”

“Tiffany?”

“Yes?”

“Is James white, by any chance? Because you know that’s perfectly fine.”

Back in our respective classrooms, diversity was never handled quite so delicately. The students simply had no use for political correctness of any kind, producing an atmosphere of equal parts honesty and madness. Moments of tolerance could turn ugly and raw in a New York minute, occasionally taking precedence over a lesson.

“Okay, who can tell me why Macbeth wants Duncan dead..?”

“Hey, Mister, what are those white ladies doing?”
I peered down at my book. “What ladies, the witches from the opening scene?”

“No, those three witches outside!”

Heads turned. Desks and chairs groaned across the floor. Deep inside our texts, Macbeth waited patiently inside Duncan’s chambers, dagger in hand, for the twenty-first century to get back to him.

“Those aren’t witches, Tyrell. Those are secretaries and you know it.”

“But what are they doing out there?”

“Getting some sun on their lunch break.”

“Why?”

“Because they think it looks good.”

My answer was greeted with snickers and smirks. Someone said something about white ladies and wrinkles. Someone reminded the rest of us that ‘black don’t crack,’ then thankfully we were allowed to return to the much easier topic of Macbeth’s ambitious mayhem.

For the most part, my relationship with Tiffany or ‘Miss Young’ was greeted as a fun novelty item by the students. Although the union was never confirmed or denied, each year graduating seniors gleefully awaited their wedding invitations in the mail or demanded we start producing as many ‘Obama kids’ and pretty ‘Derek Jeter babies’ as possible. Light heartedness aside, Tiffany and I did plan on having children one day yet I still had much to learn about race relations. After seven years of teaching in New York City, I could not produce a suitable response whenever a student informed me that I was a ‘good white man.’

The death of a New York City high school turned out to be a long drawn out process. Once a building was declared ill there was nowhere to go for a second opinion. As the years wore on, the school’s troubles only increased. The population took its final plummet once the faculty was required to pass out flyers to students stating that we were a dangerous, failing institution and it would be best if they transferred immediately. For Tiffany and me, it was akin to studying for years to be gourmet chefs, landing dream jobs in a wonderfully diverse restaurant, then being forced to hand out leaflets saying PLEASE DON’T EAT HERE. Our student body changed dramatically. It was simply no longer the same place and it broke our hearts.

We received our letters of excess at the same time. The school where we found each other would close its doors for good in three years, operating with a small skeleton staff until that time. It was now a matter of finishing up the school year with dignity, to not let feelings of confusion and resentment filter into the classroom. Frankly, it was exhausting.

To offset the final months of our teaching time together, we began to see a lot of theater on the weekends. Here again was another lesson to be learned. Even the plays I selected for us needed to be done with an awareness I had never considered before. Tiffany had no problem sighting performances, even audiences themselves for a lack of true diversity.

She did have a valid argument. Just this past June we saw a performance of Larry Kramer’s 1985 drama, The Normal Heart, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, less than twenty-four hours after New York lawmakers voted to legalize same-sex marriage. The audience that evening was so eclectic and charged with victory that when a wedding ceremony took place in the final act the house broke down and sobbed as one entity.

It would be foolish to deny ourselves similar experiences on a stage or even in our teaching lives. We’ve since made a point to seek out theater that will enrich our relationship, as well as our careers. It was at a recent performance of an August Wilson play, an author both of us have taught for years, where the audience mix was as interesting as the performance.

“Oh, Mom,” Tiffany said, making a quick phone call in the lobby. “You should see this. We’re out in full force tonight!”

So it was on that wet little corner of Greenwich Village where I suffered a momentary setback. As I watched the driver pull away, stopping quickly to retrieve his desired passengers, my immediate response was frustrated rage. It was our last weekend together as teaching colleagues. Rather than celebrating a job well done and looking forward to our future, I instead discovered the true nun-chuck capabilities of a closed umbrella. It bounced off the cab’s back window, skidding harmlessly into traffic. I haven’t thrown anything that hard since the little league all-star game.

My reaction was immature and slightly insane, and in the end only made me feel worse. I wasn’t the one the driver elected to pass by. Mine was anger by association, something I would simply have to process better in the future, especially once children were involved. I should have realized that Tiffany and I had long since formed a unit by then. We needn’t be concerned with foolish cabbie stereotypes or Department of Education numbers games for that matter. We didn’t have to teach together in order to stay together. And as I went through all the machinations of the angry male, the huffing and puffing, the bleating heart and racing adrenaline, a tiny hand rubbed the nape of my neck until I was normal again.

“What exactly did you think you were doing?” she said, smiling up at me. “That guy has nothing to do with us. You know that… Come on. We’ll take the train home tonight. Try not to stare, okay?”

J. Bryan McGeever’s essays have appeared in Thomas Beller’s Lost and Found: Stories from New York. He lives in Brooklyn.