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.

The first time I tired to pass as a senior I told the young man at Paragon Sporting Goods that I was 62. He asked me for ID. I said I didn’t have any on me. He asked me what year I was born. This is where my math skills messed me up. Even though I’d prepared for this question with a pen and paper before I’d gone to the store to try to save on my tennis permit by adding five years to my age, I gave him the wrong answer.

I said I was born in 1950. He punched a few keys on his computer and looked puzzled at the result. “It says you’re only 61,” he said.

I was sweating already because I’m out of practice lying to authorities. True, it wasn’t like lying to the IRS or unemployment, but still I was out of practice.

“Oh, so I’m too young? I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

My friend Trevor from the East River Park courts told me about the scam and said it was easy to pull off because you didn’t have to show any id. Plus the Paragon clerks who you have to fool didn’t care much one way or the other. The other thing that made it such an easy hustle, although I’d just blown it, was that for anyone in their teens or twenties, the difference in looks between anyone over 45 and a tennis player who has reached the magic age of 62 is indistinguishable.

I knew I’d never be as cool as my 57-year old English buddy, Trevor, from the courts under the Williamsburg Bridge. He is the charming scoundrel type of sometime painter, sometime photographer, sleazy in the best way, émigré artist type of New Yorker who’s scraped out a living in the city for the last few decades. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel, dated Madonna before her career got off the ground, and won a huge settlement from his landlord after not paying rent for years.

Now he works as a bartender at the hottest restaurant in the West Village, runs an antique lingerie web site and spends a few hours in the middle of most days at the East River Park tennis courts, or as he calls it, the East Village Country Club.

I think he is impressive in his way. And it is an approach that as we boomers get closer and closer, some of us are already there, to not having to scam for the geezer version of the city’s tennis license, that is disappearing. Trevor is a throwback to the Max’s Kansas City era and some of the more glamourous scenes from the city’s past. Plus he’s an expat who stayed, which to someone like me, who barely made it out of Jersey, also has a kind of allure

One of the things about aging is if you miss that chance to date Madonna in the 70's or to play in the NFL, Brett Favre aside, the opportunity, like all the years that add up to only having to pay $20 for your permit, is gone.

So while some of Trevor’s accomplishments are out of reach, no matter how much I might want to emulate his sleazy brand of cool, his reinvention of himself as a sophisticated, expat New Yorker, I thought, couldn’t I at least pull off his tennis permit ruse?

I did the math again. If I was going to be 62 in May 2011, I would have to be born in 1949.

This time at Paragon, there was a young woman running the permit desk. I said I wanted to buy a senior tennis permit. She asked me for ID. I said I didn’t have any on me. She asked me to spell out my name. She asked me when my birthday was. “November 2, 1949"

After some more clicks on her computer, she asked me to take three steps to the left and stand on the red line so she could take my picture for the permit.

A few days later I ran into Trevor at the courts. I showed him the plastic id-like card. It wasn’t as good as dating Madonna. It wasn’t as good as running an antique lingerie web site. But it was OK for me, a guy from Jersey who passed for 62 on only his second try.

Brent Shearer is the book critic for Long Island Tennis Magazine. He is the only reporter to have been kicked out of the 2008 U.S. Open.

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.

When the company needed a production assistant, they hired one of my musician friends, a handsome Texan who went on to become so famous that years later, I learned about his death from an obituary on the front page of the New York Times. He’d played with everyone from Yoko Ono to Judy Collins, Bette Midler to the Talking Heads. But that was later. Back then, he needed a day job and we worked together in the studio, saw each other in the same West Village bars at night. It was a cash economy, before credit cards and ATMs, five and ten dollar bills passing from hand to hand.

One evening, as Don and I rode the elevator heading to the southbound 8th Avenue subway, I handed him the $5 I had borrowed the night before. He grinned and said, in his Texas drawl, “I may not be free, but I am extremely reasonable.”

And the elevator full of stone-faced New Yorkers laughed aloud.

Sunday afternoon, hours before the play begins, Chola leaves church at the end of the Mass. She has received communion and now walks with her teacher, Sister Ramona, to the Dominican Sisters' convent which is to the left of the old grey-stone church built in 1886. In the role of the parish school principal she will dress in a set of garments, a costume that looks very similar to the holy habit worn by Dominican Sisters for hundreds of years.

Chola will be dressed by Sister Ramona and Sister Anthony in the common room in the convent. I wait for her in the school auditorium for over an hour before the play, eyes fixed, heart beating with great expectation. When Chola enters the auditorium she wears a black cotton tunic, the holy habit, that covers her body and falls to her ankles. A round shaped stiff white collar, a gimp, surrounds her neck and shoulders. It is heavily starched and extends outward and away from her body. A belt made of woven black wool tightens the habit around her waist. Wooden rosary beads, large and small, hang from her belt to help her count her prayers. A large silver cross hangs from a black cord around Chola 's waist. Jesus hangs from the cross. His head is down so I know he is dead.

Chola 's arms are fully covered. I can see both long and three-quarter sleeves, the one flaring out over the other. Chola neatly folds the longer sleeves up from her wrist. I curiously touch the sleeve as she folds it back noticing its smooth texture, but Chola taps my hand, like Sister Jean often does, and says, "You can't touch." That's when I notice a wedding ring on her finger: did she get married in the convent? I panic. Then I remember that Sister Jean also wears a wedding ring, and so does Sister Ramona, Sister Anthony and all the Sisters at Our Lady of Good Counsel. When I once asked Sister Jean who she was married to, she said she was the bride of Jesus. I start to think. When Jesus came back from the dead, did he marry all these Sisters? I asked my dad how many wives a man could have. He said only one and if you have more than one wife you can go to jail. Now I’m worried. I can't let Chola marry Jesus and raise her children as a single parent. I want to solve this mystery just like Trixie Belden in the Black Jacket Mystery.

Chola's dress is mysterious, just like Sister Jean's, my 5th grade teacher. I search for clues and ask Chola about her habit, and she tells me she can't talk about how Sister Ramona and Sister Anthony dressed her or what clothing she wears underneath. What happened to Chola has never happened before -- to be dressed as a Sister and told not to tell anyone how she was dressed or what she is wearing underneath. This is her secret. When Chola walks on to the stage I peek for a glimpse of her underskirts. Her holy habit is a sign she will live her life for Jesus. She will take a vow of poverty and share everything that she has. I wonder if, last week, when Chola gave me half of her package of Twinkies, she had already been practicing her vow. Later that same day Chola gave me a set of three baseball cards from her bubble gum package. One card was a big surprise: "Campy" Roy Campanella, the catcher on my favorite baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. I hope that maybe next week she will give me the baseball cards packaged in her favorite potato chips.

I briefly imagine I would be happy for Chola 's vow of poverty if she joined the community of Dominicans. Maybe then she will have good luck. God will give her, and she will give me, the Mickey Mantle and Pee Wee Reese baseball cards that I've been searching for in every nickel package of Bubble Gum. I imagine the sun-filled day of her consecration. Chola gives me a special part in the ceremony that sets her apart to serve God. She asks me to recite the Lord's Prayer, a prayer I know by heart. I imagine the Dominican Sisters will serve my favorite foods from the school cafeteria for the celebration lunch: macaroni and cheese, slices of pepperoni pizza, and hamburgers with ketchup and sliced pickles.

Standing beside Chola after the play is over, I see her white coif, a headpiece that covers her neck and chin. A thin black veil is pinned over the coif and I remember how Sister Jean, sometimes at Mass, wore the veil down to cover her face. I don't like that I can’t see her soft brown hair beneath her cap. I am afraid that her face hurts, crunched in a moon circle, skin puffing out along the pressed edges of her starched coif. Chola doesn't want me to hug her now; she doesn't laugh when I try to be silly. I'm worried. If she is consecrated a Dominican Sister, she will change her name. She will no longer be Chola, and the tomato sauce stained apron that she now wears when she helps our Mom make delicious lasagna, cooked with sausage, ground beef and three types of cheese, will be replaced by a stiff white apron to protect the front and back of her habit when she works in the convent.

I walk out of the church and down the street. I know I am not allowed to cross Broadway alone. My Mom tells me all the time that she doesn’t want me to get hit by the Pesto Cheese Company truck, just like the one that hit Aunt Mary and broke both of her legs last year. But I’m sad and mad and feel like crossing the avenue on purpose. So I do. When I get home to my house on Madison Street, I go to Grandma’s apartment, turn on the television and watch Hector the Bulldog protect Tweety from Sylvester for the hundredth time.

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

Joey Arias was the store manager in the summer of 1977 and the part-time singer featured a gold lame Elvis suit in the front window. I wanted it bad. The price was $300. Almost a week’s wages at Hurrah where I worked as a doorman. I tried to bargain him down by offering him free entrance to club.

“I already get in for free.” Joey was persona gratis everywhere.

“What about 20% off the suit?” That price was still beyond my finances.

“No way.” Joey walked off to get an expresso and I went over to talk with Matt, the dweebish store manager. He said he might lower the price if I went into the backroom with him.

“No, but thanks anyway.” I was no hustler on the corner of 53rd and 3rd. I had a girlfriend. I was straight, although 50% of the men on the night scene were playing for the other team. My friends at Serendipity 3 and seemingly many of the punks at CBGBs. Most of them considered themselves straight as long as they got paid for it. 15 tricks and the suit was mine. I had my dignity and resigned myself to torn jeans and a black t-shirt. As a punk I got in everywhere too.

July was hot that summer. Lightning rocked the skies without rain. On the 13th I was finishing an acting class at Hunter. I was seeing an actress in the troupe. Carla and I were practicing a scene from STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. I was playing Mitch. Her estranged husband was in the role on Stanley. The coach thought the inner tensions strengthened our personae, but before the three of us could move onto the next scene, the lights went out.

All over New York.

It was a blackout.

Escaping the darkened building took the better part of a half-hour. The chaos of Lexington Avenue revealed the extent of the outage. Cars were stalled at the traffic lights. Several people were directing traffic. I asked Carla, “You want to come home with me?”

“No.” She wasn’t walking to Park Slope and looked over to her estranged husband. He was handsome and his family owned a meat-packing company in the Midwest. They linked arms and strolled into Central Park. He had a penthouse on West End Avenue. She had told me about the view from the terrace many times.

I headed over to Serendipity 3. My friends were upstairs at their apartment. They had run out of ice for their vodka tonics.

“There’s no ice anywhere.” Tim complained bitterly with a southern accent. He had studied ballet In North Carolina. His good friend Andy was in the ballet corps. He was already drunk.

“I want ice.”

“Maybe the Plaza has some.” I suggested since the hotel was the epitome of elegance. It had to have an emergency generator. Ice was less than five blocks away.

“Let’s go.” Andy and I hurried through the streets. People were talking about looting going on in Harlem.
They looked to the north. A radio said Flatbush was under siege. There were no police in sight. City dwellers were marching home. Some said they had been in the subway for hours. The usual light canyon of Park Avenue was without illumination. Andy pointed to the sky.

“I can see stars.”

“Orion.”

“Also the Big Dipper and the Bear.” He drew Ursa Major in the night. I saw it as a hog. We turned the corner at 59th and 5th. I stopped in shock. The Plaza was pitch-black. We were back in the Stone Age. Ice only came in season. For some reason this new truth angered me and I said to Andy, “Let’s go to Fiorucci.”

“They won’t have ice.”

“No, but they do have a gold Elvis suit.”

“No one will be working there now.” It was past 11.

“Exactly.” I picked up a cinder block from a work site. “I’m shopping the old-fashioned way.”

“That’s looting.” Andy was wild, but never violent.

“Just like the Huns.” I had Pictish blood in me. We were an old tribe before the 10th Commandments were etched in stone by a bearded god. I strode up to Fiorucci. The gold lame suit shone even in the black of anarchy. 54 was at my fingertips. I wouldn’t be Mitch in the next acting class. I’d be a star.

“Stand back.” I warned Andy and then heaved the cinder block at the window. The missile struck the plate glass and bounced right back, narrowly missing my skull. Several guards pointed at me. I hadn’t seen them in the murk. They chased us to the Subway Inn and we lost them in the crowd in the dubious establishment. When we arrived back at the apartment above Serendipity 3 the boys were entertained by my attempt at communal confiscation.

“I didn’t get anything.”

“But you tried and that’s the key to triumph. The first syllable.” Tim was proud of his knowledge of Salada Tea sentiment and I guess I was proud to be an outlaw, although the next day when I tried to go to Fiorucci, Joey Arias ordered the security to refuse me entry into the store.

“We don’t accept thieves as customers.” The boys above Serendipity 3 had snitched out my
failed trashing of Fioruuci’s window

“At these prices I don’t know who’s the real thief.” It was the best riposte I could come up with, hung-over.

Fiorucci closed several years later. I bought the dusty Elvis suit through Matt. It was two size too small. My girlfriend at the time was a tall model from Baltimore. She loved it. It got her into everywhere. I was not so lucky. I only went places where I knew the door. That was everywhere too, but I really wished I could have been wearing the Elvis suit.

Some things just aren’t meant to be.

Especially Elvis Suits for men who are not Elvis.

Peter Nolan Smith left New England in 1976 for the East Village. The nightlife became his vehicle for traveling the world; Paris, Hamburg, Nice, and London. His career ended at the Milk Bar in Beverly Hills in 1995 and he split the following years working as a diamantaire in Manhattan's Diamond District and traveling through the Orient. Most of his 21st Century has been spent in Thailand, although economics forced his return to 47th Street in 2008. Peter NolanSmith currently lives in Brooklyn and Sriracha, Thailand. He is the editor and writer of www.mangozeen.com and has recently been named writer-in-residence at a foreign embassy in Mittel Europe.
 

She asked if she could talk to me, was pretty, had eyes that were open and interested. Our faces nearly touched. Hers filled my vision completely, as though in an effort to block out all thought of the thriving city around us. She spoke fast. Her lips frothed with stats that I could barely hear, stats that meant nothing at all but SADNESS, though of course my head was nodding and—I discovered, hearing myself—I was making mm-hm sounds and even, on occasion, whenever the music of our exchange required it, saying the word "wow." I volleyed with her that way for an amount of time that felt significantly longer than any exchange in recent memory.

The clipboard that suddenly appeared in her hands was covered in stickers for her organization and cause. She was circling dollar amounts. I took it that these were my options.

When she stopped speaking her pen was resting on the smallest amount, the amount she said I could just give—as opposed to the higher amounts, which, if chosen, constituted an unqualified and fuller kind of giving. I then realized with not a little dread that she had mistook the sounds I had been making and the motion of my head as indicators of real interest, of sympathy or willingness, or—her eyes widening further—that I was a person on whom her words had had impact, a good person.

Now came the feeling that I had often felt before, one that I built my life, largely, to avoid—that I had committed myself falsely, that I had made promises I could not keep. It was a feeling, the fear of which had kept me from ever having once responded, either in the positive or negative, to a single e-vite. I did not know what I was going to do and liked very much to keep it that way.

How wretched and embarrassing it was for both of us that she had read me so closely and not taken heed of a person’s natural inclination to nod thoughtlessly to the tune of another’s speech. My head began to move the other way now, laterally, the side-to-side direction of no progress at all, a movement of the head that could have worked well in a modern art museum as a performance piece called Status Quo Keeping.

Still our faces were near touching—the distance at which people stand at the end of a date, when the walk home has come to its inevitable end. I told her this was not the way I wanted to do this, that it had no value, now, except as the submission of one person to the persuasiveness of another, that it could constitute nothing but my own weakness, that this wasn’t at all about children who are hungry—it was about her and I and the erasure of one another’s personal space. I told her that she was a woman and that I was a man. I suggested, unattractively, that these things were not coincidental but essential reasons for what was happening, for the closeness of her eyes to mine. Her pen waited there, still, on the brink, possibly, of her daily quota.

She said she was good at what she did and that because of this goodness she would try not to be offended by what I was suggesting and I had the feeling that this was something for which I was meant to be grateful. She said that she was an actress and that she could have done something more lucrative to support herself while pursuing her craft but this was what called out to her as needing more than anything else to be done.

I told her that if I gave her my credit card number—which I seemed already to be in the process of doing, my hand entering my pocket—it would not be for any child in any country anywhere, but for her. And if that was the case, I asked, did she still want it? Her eyes blinked. She stepped back.

After a moment, she said, well, I think you’ll be happy once you’ve done it, that you’ve made a difference.

I said, no, I won’t, I will feel like a person who has caved in to carefully applied pressure—that, in fact, by taking my money then, she was depriving me of the good feeling that might have come from going home and making an online donation on my own initiative. But then I realized she was busily copying my credit card number onto her form—not really listening anymore, just nodding.

A couple weeks later another young woman stops me—this one with beautiful tattooed trees climbing up her arm. I tell her that I have already been got and she says, “you’re awesome! High five!” Walking on toward the train, I do not feel awesome, but I do feel satisfied at having solved the problem of how to deal with these people: give them what they want. If you do, some kid somewhere might even get to eat, and a struggling actress too. I wonder how she’s doing.

Mac Barrett's fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in Salt Hill Review, Hanging Loose, The Brooklyn Rail, on Anderbo.com, Salon.com, and on the radio for WBAI. He works at CUNY TV as a producer of book-related programming.

We had just left Chinatown and were cruising north, along the Hudson River, to sleep-away camp in upstate New York. My fellow 10-year-olds caught up with each other and rapped about last year but I was the rookie. They were all from the gritty NYC boroughs where they attended urban schools with cool prison names like P.S. 52 and P.S. 136. I had just come from Rainbow Vagina Academy in the suburbs.

Less than a week before, I sat in class on my last day of fifth grade and applauded myself. I had gone the entire year without blowing my cover address, which I used to protect the secret location of my apartment, in a nearby, shoddier neighborhood. It was a covert operation in order to keep me in the more expensive and esteemed school district. In our upper middle-class Jewish bubble, I felt like the poor kid. When I asked my Phys Ed partner about the logo on his new designer t-shirt, he heckled, “You don’t even know what O.P. stands for?” I gazed into the stitched California waves on his Ocean Pacific polo and imagined sailing far away from my privileged Elementary school.

My mother found a nonprofit subsidized camp for me to attend in the summer. The admission fees ran on a “sliding scale,” so we paid only what we could afford—about 300 bucks for the entire season. I looked forward to reinventing myself as an equal among a clean batch. Yet these inner-city kids had me pegged for a sheltered rich boy before I ever had a shot.

Upon arrival at our destination, a used up army barracks in the mountains, I found my trunk of clothes and followed the group to our moldy bunk house. I picked out a rusty tetanus trap of a bed and passed out for the rest of the afternoon. I thought I was pretty slick in “calling” a top bed, until it rained later that night and brown sludge speckled my face from the cracked roof above.

The next morning I had to go to the bathroom so bad that I fell onto the floor and got a splinter in my butt. A fruit bat stared me down and chased me all the way up a steep slope to our outhouse latrines. Unable to pee, I taunted myself by imagining home friends gloat about their own camp amenities, like hot showers and flush toilets. When I made the mistake of complaining to my counselor Rob, he told the rest of my bunk-mates, “Aw… Ahron wants to go to Camp Rich.” I would have been satisfied with a roll of toilet paper but I could feel their looks. “What a wuss!”

On Long Island I was too ashamed of my apartment, with its ripped pleather couches and termite outbreaks, to invite anyone over for a play date. If I asked my mom, whether a friend’s family was rich, she always said, “They're comfortable.” I decided that we were uncomfortable. But compared to my new quarters—and the broken metal springs of my bed jabbing me in the back— my mom’s place seemed like a decent resort. I promised myself never to fuss about it again, assuming I could be teleported back there right away.

A few days later, we rounded up for our first Instructional Swim lesson on a crippled dock at the bottom of a hill. I combed the area for a gleaming underground pool—like the ones I was jealous of in my friends’ backyards—but there was none. Our swim instructor led us into a sectioned off area of a polluted lake to demonstrate our skills. I jumped in and heard, “You! Get over there, with the other Advanced Beginners.” I trudged through a foot of slime to join Felix, a soft-boiled egg of a child, who refused to go into the water.

At 9 years of age, Felix moved like a sluggish 60-year-old man who seemed tired from all the years he had put into making sure his children would have a better life. As a rule, his face said, “I'd really prefer to just not do whatever it is you would like me to do." He grimaced about having to find the strength to complain aloud.

The absence of a Beginner swimmer group let everyone know that the staff added “Advanced” to our label in order to save us some embarrassment. And the fact that we all knew this also let everyone know that we were, indeed, “Advanced Rejects.” My swim coach tried to teach me the back float and carried me like an infant bathed in the kitchen sink, along the blue partition rope that quarantined us from the others. Felix shook his head from the sides. I imagined Jason, from Friday the 13th, struggling to break loose beneath. If the killer surfaced, he would see the Intermediates swim the butterfly like dolphins at Sea World, then spot me, the pathetic target, as I tried to back float away to safety. Maybe Felix was onto something.

My head counselor Rob said, “That’s enough,” and granted us refuge back on dry land. Rob was 17, but he might as well have been a seasoned Vietnam veteran to us campers. He had a tattoo of a mangled fist on his shoulder and wore a fleshy scar across his back. I assumed that he was serving a community service sentence for whatever he had done to the person on the other end of his wound. If any of us young punks started to argue with each other, he’d put us in check, jabbing, “Youse wanna’ fight? Then youse are gonna fight. Right now.”

Back at my playgrounds, in the ‘burbs, there weren’t many fist fights. The violence was mental. After winter break, children compared the number of Vermont ski lift tickets on their state of the art snow jackets and mocked each other for missing out on a new addition to Disney World. Adam, who sat next to me in fifth grade, could tell you how much the best Tennis racket in the world sold for and why the leather stripping on my Air Jordan sneakers outed them as obvious knock-offs—“It’s just all wrong.”

When Rob used his “Youse wanna fight?” technique to push me into a scuffle with Boris, a recent Russian transplant who hailed from a Brooklyn project, I laughed off the tension before we made it to the front of our bunk. Rob consoled me, whispering, “Boris’s father was a boxer in Russia you know, his little sister can probably beat you up.” I prayed he wouldn’t make me fight her in the rematch. I was too feeble to rumble with Boris, yet I was too Philistine to dispute name brand clothes with Adam at school. I was stuck in some kind of defenseless limbo, unarmed in all forms of warfare.

Just before dawn broke on our first Saturday, Freddy, who slept underneath me in a bottom bed, shook me up and yelled, “Yo, Get up man. Donut time!” A musty recreational hall hosted 7AM, Saturday morning Shabbat prayers, with a bonus. Anyone willing to get their asses up and off to services earned themselves a free Dunkin’ donut, two or three if they were one of the first few to arrive—Freddy bolted.

Apparently, back in the day, the camp was formally a Jewish institution, but there had been a drastic shift in demographics since its founding. Besides a few Soviet refuges that had recently made their way to the shores of Brooklyn, like Boris, most of the kids weren’t Jewish.

I hadn’t been to Hebrew school, the after-school program, in two years because my parents owed thousands in late dues. To the rest of the student body I was an irreverent dropout. But here, since I was one of the only kids to have ever been to a synagogue, I felt like a learned rabbinical scholar. Without any explanation for the rituals, my Black and Puerto Rican friends had no idea why chanting phlegmy sounds bought them free junk food—but no one asked questions. It was a simple quid pro quo: say the lines and get the goods. The holy prayer words evolved into a camp slang. If someone kicked a home run during kickball, Martel—a Baptist from The Bronx— yelled, “Shema Yisrael…Bitches!”

During the next few weeks I tiptoed behind my comrades and sponged up some street wisdom. I learned the lyrics to Kool Moe Dee’s Bad Mutha, how to pop lock like a b-boy—sort of, and chimed in on late night Yo Mamma battles— “Yo mamma’s like a bowling ball. She gets picked up, felt up, thrown in the alley. And then she comes back for more!” Just as I started to feel like I was on my way to becoming a made man, Parents Day arrived.

As families began to show up, my father, a mechanic from Israel, cruised into the middle of the parking field in his customer’s shiny white Rolls Royce, blasting Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling. I sprinted over to him, terrified, and whispered, “Whose car is this?!”

He smiled, certain he had just done me a huge favor. His eyes said, “You’re welcome.”

By dinner time, all the parents had left and a lucky few scarfed down treats brought for them from the real world, like Fruity Pebbles and blue Gatorade. I pleaded my case, “It’s not my Rolls Royce. My dad is just the shady repairman!” But no one believed me. I peered into their heads and saw myself escorted past millionaire estates in the Rolls—or maybe it was our Bentley, that we reserved for weekend cruises—until an English chauffeur opened the door with a glass of cold lemonade in hand.

As we changed into our bathing suits for our nightly “twilight” swim session, Danny called our attention away from Parents Day and over to a more important discovery. He pointed under Felix’s mushy belly and yelled, "What is going on down there Felix? It goes in!" Felix then replied with what was, perhaps, the weakest comeback in history: "It comes out sometimes!"

As August trickled by, I played aloof but plotted an escape in my mind. I would trek to the highway, and then hitchhike downstate to the first supermarket I could find. There, I would bask in the icy Air Conditioning and live off the truckload of dried breakfast cereal on Aisle 7.

As my clandestine prison break drew near one shweaty night, our counselors ran into our bunk and woke us up. They yelled, “Surprise trip. We’re all going to see Coming to America with Eddie Murphy!” Everyone gasped. We were Korean War soldiers and Marilyn Monroe was on her way to greet us. On the way into town the driver told us to take deep breaths so we wouldn’t hyperventilate and end up in the Emergency Room—and miss the movie.

During the film, my eyes watered in gratitude for our salvation and Eddie Murphy. When the credits rolled I snuck into another showing. I left to use the marble restrooms and flushed a high pressure toilet. Then I flushed it again just to hear that swoosh of civilization one more time. The doors flew open and Rob dragged me back to our bus, now full of angry youths and staff waiting for someone to find me. A 9 year-old girl yelled, “Dock him from Canteen!” and Rob smiled. “Two weeks." I dropped my head in defeat.

Canteen, the candy store, was our opium den. During our regular meals in the open-air cafeteria, we ate cold oatmeal, stale tuna sandwiches and watered-down, purple Bug juice. But in Canteen, the camp granted us each a credit of $2.65, as our dealer behind a counter—the same guy who played “Rabbi” at Shabbat services, only now in a dirty painter’s smock—served up packets of Fun Dip, tangy Nerds, and Type-2 Diabetes.

As dawn broke, a few days into my sugar withdrawal, I woke up shivering and wet. Then I breathed in a most humbling fragrance, of a blanket—my blanket—soaked in pee. I sprung up like a ninja who had overslept and ran the soiled evidence across our campgrounds into a dumpster. I considered finding a match, and maybe some gasoline, but I had to get back. When I arrived in the bunk, out of breath, everyone had just begun to wake but they were too groggy to notice me.

I deflated on my bed, dog-tired, and staggered from the mental smackdown I had dodged. My scare swept every other concern off the filthy shelf in my head. And I couldn’t care less about passing for a fresh city kid or a country club suburbanite but I continued to hang with both of them from a fitted spot somewhere in between.

Camp ended a few days later. I went home, flushed my toilet and braced myself for the next battle—junior high.

Ahron Yeshaiek lives in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in the anthology One for the Road, New York Press, and The New York Times. His screenplay, Miles in Time, is an official selection at the Kids First Film festival. He is currently writing a comedy set during the dot-com bubble.

Everybody wants to be in the spotlight nowadays.

If only he’d shut up and let me flirt with the bookish bespectacled beauty to my left.

Little by little, the hall fills up. Coughs and whispers proliferate. Legs are crossed and uncrossed. I crane my neck, scanning the crowd. “Where is Singer?” I wonder aloud, glancing repeatedly at my watch.

“That ganef is always late!” the old man shakes his head with a tisk of disapproval and a rakish wink at the girl, fingering the books in his bag, purchased second-hand for signing, I assume.

The M.C. steps up to the mike. “It is my very great honor…etc.”

But where is Singer?

“Excuse me,” the old man rises with a mischievous grin, having managed in the mean time to get the girl’s number.—“I think I’m wanted on stage!”

A writer in multiple modes, including fiction (A Modern Way To Die), drama (The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words) and translation (most recently, Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine), Peter Wortsman is the recipient of the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award and The Geertje Potash-Suhr Prize of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German. Also a widely published travel writer, his texts have appeared in The Best Travel Writing 2008 and 2009.