“Can I pull out the tulips?” I said to Richard. “ My knees are in bad shape and I’m afraid of making them worse by kneeling on them.” He replied, “Sure, do what’s best for you, no need to hurt yourself.” It began to pour as I walked over to the shocking pink and red tulips that were in the main garden. Richard said, “you don’t have to work in the rain, go home.” I said, “Richard, rain won’t hurt me.” I proceeded with my job of pulling up the tulips and I loved working in the rain and there was a perk in taking home as many tulips as I could carry. While I was knee deep in dirt, I briefly looked up at the tall buildings surrounding the park and was amazed at the contrast.

Just then the wind began to blow, and many of the pink cherry blossoms floated off the trees into the air and fell to the ground. I stood there feeling I was in the middle of pink snow. The blossoms covered everything including me, and I felt like a fairy princess. The garden maintenance workers were hurrying like crazy to clean up the blossoms, but they finally gave up because there were so many of them and they just kept coming. They were just trying to do their job, and I was loving the pink snow.

I proceeded with trying to get the bulbs out along with the tulips, but those bulbs wanted to stay in the ground. They were giving me a real hard time and not coming out so easily. Just then a man by the name of Rodrigo walked by and said, “may I have some of the tulips?” I said, “sure take as many as you like.” He told me that it was for his garden in Brooklyn and he said “I wasn’t even planning to walk through the park, but I decided it was shorter and here I am and look what I’ve found.” I asked him “do you work in the City?” He said, “no, but I used to. I worked at the World Trade Center. I was on the 27th floor when the attack happened.” There was silence. We looked into each other’s eyes. Just then the gardener walked over and began talking to Rodrigo and me. I shared with them that I was a healer and that I worked with a modality called Plant Spirit Healing and that I was totally in my element. Richard said, “you need to read The Magic Life of Plants. I’ll bring the book for you the next time we meet.” Richard showed me a piece of soil that was leftover from 9/ll, covered with dust and the dirt crumbling into more dust. Richard said, “I lost a lot of people in the WTC. There used to be a woman that would visit me frequently in the park. I would give her flowers from the garden. After the attack I stopped seeing her, and then her friend came by one day, and I asked her friend ‘where is your other friend?’ She said, ’she was lost in the WTC.’" Chills ran up my spine and I looked into Richard’s eyes and there was more silence. He went off to do more gardening and I continued on with the tulips.

Just then a young couple came by on their bicycles. They spoke in a language I didn’t understand and they told me it was Czechoslovakian. They wanted some flowers for their garden in Long Island, so I asked them to join me in the garden and whatever bulbs they were able to root out, they could take home with them. They said “we came into NYC to go on the bike tour that is happening today, but we were stopped in the beginning of the tour because we weren’t wearing our helmets, so we decided not to waste the day and do some sightseeing on our bikes.” I said to them “this is the magic of the City. They smiled in full agreement and we continued on our work together. They stayed in the garden with me for an hour and then went on their way. Many more tourists came over to me. Some couldn’t speak English, but I knew what they wanted, and when I gave them some tulips their faces would light up. The entire park was lit up with these happy faces that had received the gift of flowers.

I worked in the garden for 3 hours and then it was time to leave. I exchanged good-byes, feeling exhausted, happy and full of joy. I came up to my apartment, dumped all of my dirty clothes in a pile, jumped into a hot shower, fell into bed and slept for 4 hours. When I awoke it was 4:30pm and I couldn’t believe how long I had slept, but my body felt rested and I got dressed and walked outside deciding what to eat for dinner.

Sherri Rosen has had her own publicity business in NYC for ll years. She’s a mom, writer, performer, interfaith minister, and singer. She’s missed City Hall Park since she moved to Harlem a year ago.

The second answer is: On our birthdays my sisters and I were given pieces of silverware from a prestigious German manufactory that names its models after big cities. My sisters’ models were called Stockholm and Helsinki. Mine was New York.

My destination was clear. At 26, I flew to New York. What followed was a seven-year journey that included a terrible marriage, Byzantine immigration procedures and a divorce. Eventually I found love again. Now settled, I could afford to worry about other things. My frustration over not being able to participate in the political process grew. It was time to become an American citizen.

The long line at the Department of Homeland Security in front of 1 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan was a condensed version of a city that never fails to astound me. A wrinkled Hispanic mother gently guided her adult son with Down Syndrome. An Asian woman put on lipstick using a compact mirror. A Caucasian businesswoman rolled her eyes while texting compulsively. The line crept toward the checkpoint like a snake cut into pieces, its parts haphazardly reattached.

According to my appointment letter, my citizenship test and interview were scheduled for 12:05 pm. The specificity of the time made me believe this would be a relatively fast procedure. After the first two hours of waiting it became clear this was not the case.

I looked at the 200-odd people around me. We were all so tired. The years leading up to this appointment had been filled with mounds of paperwork repeating the same questions. How many times can you attest that you have never been part of a terrorist organization? At what point do you crack when asked whether you had ever been a member of the Nazi party? How on earth would they find out if you were a habitual drunkard or prostitute? And who had a clear conscience when asked whether she had ever committed an offense?

Except for the flags and the yellowed photos of Peter Jennings and Ivana Trump proudly presenting their citizenship certificates to an apparently cheap camera, the waiting room resembled an ER. Burgundy plastic chairs connected at the joints bounced you along with your pained neighbors.

Announcers called out names through two speakers. They sometimes overlapped and we would hear only muddled syllables. I considered my name’s possible pronunciations. Sab-eyen Heen-leen? Say-been Heyen-lin? Sa-bin Hin-lin?

After five hours of bursts of cursing from my fidgety neighbor, my name was finally called. To my surprise the caller didn’t even forget the e at the end of Sabine.

Smirking from behind a big pile of files, the immigration officer started the routine. Was I a prostitute? A drunkard? A member of the Nazi party? Or of the Greenpoint YMCA? (I had dutifully noted my membership when asked what associations I was part of.) Had I committed any crimes since I mailed these forms? I shook my head.

Had I really been out of the country only once in the last couple of years? I said that when I got remarried we went to Puerto Rico. But that didn’t count.

The officer handed me a form and told me to read a sentence from it. “Alright,” he interrupted me before I could finish. “Now write: ‘I honeymooned in Puerto Rico.’ ” He caught himself. “ ‘Honeymooned’ isn’t a real verb, but write it anyway.” I did and we both chuckled.

Angela, the woman who owns my local laundromat on Greenpoint’s Manhattan Avenue, once told me how she applied for citizenship in 1977, after having spent several years in the U.S. illegally. Back then illegal immigrants could become citizens if they had given birth on American soil. Her officer told her to write, “I love New York.” She still cracks up remembering her response. She wrote, “I ♥ NY.” In fact, Angela ♥s NY so much that she moved her entire family from Nicaragua.

Testing my patience over a five-hour stretch was far more painful than testing my knowledge of American history. Why do we celebrate the 4th of July? What do the stripes on the flag represent? What is the name of the ship that brought the pilgrims to America? Piece of cake. The officer left out the more difficult questions: How many amendments to the Constitution are there? Name those that address voting rights. Who said, “Give me liberty or give me death?”

Four weeks later I was invited to the naturalization ceremony at a courthouse in downtown Brooklyn. To my German eyes, incurably attuned to efficiency and order, the event seemed chaotic and ludicrous.

An exasperated officer was trying to arrange the tide of people flooding the foyer into an orderly line. Many of the 300 soon-to-be citizens had brought their entire extended families. The wobbly line inched to the checkpoint. Trying to stay calm, I reminded myself that this is also why I wanted to be part of this country; whenever you think you know what to expect, you fall right back down the rabbit hole.

In the courtroom the New York narrative continued. The woman in charge was munching on Cheetos and the background echoed with the question, “Where are you from?” In the front row sat the tired, the pregnant, the limping, the old. One at a time, we were called to hand in yet another sheet of questions. Prostitute? Drunkard? Communist? Polygamist?

The hours passed like a dense fog. Eventually, the Cheetos lady explained that when she knocked three times it meant the judge was about to arrive and we were to rise.

We heard three knocks and all rose in unison. False alarm. A child was amusing herself by knocking on wooden pews.

Finally the appropriately named Judge Go arrived. We faced the American flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. I had goose bumps.

I grew up believing that gestures and symbols of national pride were a recipe for disaster and that I could only be proud of my own choices and achievements. I chose to move to New York. I traded a rather rigid and homogeneous society for one that is utterly diverse and remarkably flexible. I traded bike rides through parks for an uncomfortable commute in a sticky and crowded subway car. I traded blinders for a 360-degree panoramic view. But most importantly, I survived years of ups and downs in New York. That’s what I’m proud of.

Judge Go interrupted my thoughts. She encouraged us to vote and said that in other countries people walk barefoot for miles to execute that right. She told us that she arrived as a child on a boat from China into the chilly morning mist enveloping the Golden Gate Bridge. For a long time she doubted that she would ever be as successful as the natives. Now she was a judge.

“It is only in America that this can happen,” she said. “Tomorrow you will have a child that can become President of the United States.”

I was giddy on my way home. What was this new hungry citizen to do? My new husband, a Mexican immigrant, had left me a surprise in the fridge: a cupcake from a Polish bakery in Greenpoint adorned with an American flag from a 99-cent store run by Arabs. This is why I came to New York and this is why I wanted to be an American. I took my first bite.

Sabine Heinlein is a contributing writer to the Brooklyn Rail and a podcast producer for Artinfo.com. Her feature articles have been published in national German newspapers, including Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was awarded a Sidney Gross Memorial Award for Investigative Reporting (2007), an Artcroft residency (2008), a Yaddo residency and fellowship (2009) and a NYFA fellowship for nonfiction literature (2009).

One night as I prepared to depart for the city I sat in a Panera and ate soup while I reviewed my travel plans. I would ride into Penn, take the A C E to the F train and then get off at the East Broadway stop and find the 169 Bar, the evening’s venue. I smiled, proud of myself for remembering all those tricky letters and whatnot, and surveyed my plate. I’d been given a liberal hunk of bread with my soup, but hadn’t touched it. I had to leave to catch my train and I was concerned that I’d get hungry again shortly. I decided to wrap the thing in a napkin and jam it in my pocket, figuring that if I didn’t eat it on the train I could toss it when I got to Penn. I met up with a friend, we boarded our train, and we were off.

As I sat on the train the soup settled firmly in my stomach and I decided that I wouldn’t be needing the bread in my pocket after all. While the train clacked ever closer to the city, I came to a decision. One of the more unsettling things a bridge and tunnel guy like me tends to meet in his journeys is the homeless. They ask you for your money and then you feel terribly guilty for saying no or ignoring them. Furthermore, there’s that nagging doubt that these people don’t actually want money for food, they want booze or drugs. Well, I proclaimed, now I can give them the food straight away and cut out Washington and Lincoln as the middlemen. A perfect plan. I explained the plan to my companion and, as she got over the shock of me pulling a loaf of bread out of my pocket, she agreed that yeah, maybe it would be an okay idea.

Of course we didn’t see a single homeless person when we got off the train. Even the thin lady who sits on the ramp down to the downtown subways was missing, though some of her effects were there. No one approached us on the A train. No one was hungry when we transferred at West 4th. Everyone around the East Broadway stop had everything they needed. And so I showed up to a gig with a solid length of bread nestled safely (and increasingly warmer) in the pocket of my hoodie.

After the show and a few beers I left with the same friend I’d come in with. We B&T folk stick together, you know. Our return trip had the same air of we-need-nothing Zen that the ride in suffered from. Finally, as we walked along the street towards Penn, we found a man who hadn’t been stricken with the recent outbreak of nirvana. He was a large man in a wheelchair, propelling himself backwards up the sidewalk and shouting out, almost happily. He needed, or wanted, money. Since his back had been to me as he rolled towards me, I couldn’t understand him. By the time it was clear he was asking for anything at all, he’d already passed us and was quickly moving away.

“Go ahead,” my friend said. “See if he wants your bread.” I anxiously glanced at the figure rolling away into the night. What was I supposed to do? Sprint after the wheeled vagrant and thrust my bread out at him? Would he appreciate it? Would he take it as some sort of doughy insult? The choice was made for me as he spun off into the dark. I turned and kept walking the way we came; chucking the bread into a trash can outside the station. I was annoyed, but it was hard to say if I was mad at myself or frustrated with the failed attempt at charity.

I could have fed someone. But apparently they had to ask me for help directly.

Jeff Kyle, Jr. is a Jersey-born bridge-and-tunneler. His website is separatedchaff.com.

“Check it out,” my friend Neal said, interrupting my budding frustration. I looked over and noticed he was pointing a cluster of giant red “ornaments” cordoned off behind wooden police lines. “We should get a picture in front of that!”

“Do we need another picture?” I was too cold to hide my irritation.

“Dude,” Neal, whispered. Then, after making sure Dana wasn’t looking, he nodded in her direction.

“Let’s take a picture!” I said.

Dana was the one girl we convinced to come out with us that night. Or rather Neal convinced—mainly by promising her a chance to see the tree lighting. But our little group of college freshmen had gotten caught downtown trying (and failing) to buy beer, meaning we missed the actual lighting ceremony by about half an hour. When she realized our miscalculation, Dana almost bailed on the spot. Without her, we’d just be five eighteen-year-old guys roaming Manhattan—which even we knew would look pathetic. So Neal had taken it upon himself to keep Dana entertained. Which meant a lot of posing for photos.

“You have got to be kidding! Enough pictures!” Unfortunately, Dana was just as sick of Neal’s photography as I was.

“Okay,” Neal said. “No pictures.” He laughed, but I could see his eyes dart around for an alternative. That’s when he spotted him: There in the middle of the sidewalk danced none other than Barney, the then-ubiquitous purple dinosaur of PBS fame. Or at least, some intern in a Barney costume. He kept bouncing up and down in seizure-like fits.

“Oh my God!” Neal called. “It’s Barney—and he’s pogoing!”

A quick word about Neal—of all my freshman-year friends he was the best at salvaging a disastrous Manhattan outing by making a pest of himself—most notably when he “introduced” himself to Ethan Hawke during a class trip to the Met. So I understood Barney’s famously sunny disposition was about to be tested.

Hi Barney!” Neal said, bounding over with exaggerated glee.

Barney knew enough to turn and start bouncing in the other direction.

“Wait—” Neal scurried after him.

As a budding writer, I’d already perfected the art of trailing my more impulsive friends at a safe distance without missing any of their antics, so I quickly staked out a view of both dinosaur and pursuer. Neal lagged a step behind his prey, just close enough to grab the costume’s wobbling tail. In an effort to entertain Dana, who’d just about caught up to us by now, he reached out and gave the appendage a gentle tug. And maybe a shake or two.

“Hey! Don’t do that!” Out of nowhere, this pudgy guy came running over.

“Dude,” Neal said, turning to me, “Barney’s got a bodyguard!”

If true, PBS needed a better security budget. Barney’s helper looked like a jewelry store clerk, with his thinning hair, old-man glasses, and hideous beige slacks.

“Please don’t do that, sir,” the bodyguard requested over Barney’s shoulder. He made sure to keep his purple friend safely between himself and Neal.

“I’m not doing anything, I just want to see Barney” Neal replied. “Hey Barney! I love you Barney! I love you!” If he knew the rest of the Barney I-love-you-you-love-me song, I’m sure he would’ve broken it out, but that’s all he could manage. “Look everyone! It’s Barney! I love you Barney!”

“Barney doesn’t seem to love you back,” I said.

People ignored us, streaming past on both sides. Neal kept at it, but after a couple seconds even he started getting bored with the whole encounter. My eyes drifted, settling on this kid walking towards us, who looked to be about our age. I noticed him because he wore his Yankees hat sideways, which at the time was still novel enough to seem cool. I watched him come closer, his head bobbing up and down to an imaginary boom box. Then, without stopping, speaking, or even breaking stride, the kid in the ball cap suddenly decked Barney right on the side of he head with a left hook. The purple guy collapsed like a punctured float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, his entire fluffy body hitting the pavement at the same time.

As soon as the assailant was gone, Barney’s security detail sprang back into action. “Oh my God! What did you do?” the bodyguard asked, looking at Neal.

My friend stood openmouthed, limp tail still hanging from his fingers and a crumpled children’s icon twitching at his feet. The bodyguard eventually forgave us with an exasperated wave and turned his attention to the victim. Everyone else kept pushing by the same as before, more annoyed than concerned with the dinosaur’s plight. Aside from this one six year old who looked like someone had just told him his parents were dead, Neal was the only one who grasped the magnitude of the event. He looked right at me, his face filled with the awe of a man contemplating his newborn son for the first time.

“Dude,” Neal said. “Someone snuck Barney.” He finally dropped the tail. “This is such a great night.”

Guy Patrick Cunningham is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York.

“So why didn’t you take the necklace?” my mom me asked a few days later. The boy was the son of a popular Congressman and from a well-respected family. I didn’t answer. I knew she was fishing to see who my “somebody else” was. She said the boy’s mom had told the other mothers at the neighborhood association meeting that he had asked her for the pendant, and my aunt, who also lived in our subdivision, had heard about it and passed along the news to my mom.

When I think about all the reasons I ended up living in New York City rather than the comfortable, close-knit neighborhood I grew up in, this is one incident that stands out. It is said that the Philippine upper class is made of a hundred families who are related or went to school together. My parents’ neighborhood is a quintessential example. My mother’s sister and her husband live around the corner from my parents. My dad has former schoolmates at almost every street in the subdivision. The Vice President of the bank from where my parents got their mortgage lives next to my aunt and uncle. She is also my godmother.

Growing up, I was always hearing “You should set a good example!” and “You are a reflection of our family!” I am the oldest of four girls and as is standard in Filipino families, my parents kept tabs on me the most. The thinking is if the oldest is well-disciplined the rest of the children will follow. I left the role I was born into when I moved to New York.

In my early 20s, I was accepted to grad school at NYU and found myself in an apartment building on West 56th Street and Broadway, where I didn’t know my neighbors and the faces of people on the street hurrying to the theater changed every night. I felt that I could breathe easier.

I could have dinner and drinks and return any time I wanted. I could run in Central Park in a tattered t-shirt and no one would care. I could skip church on Sundays and not be reminded that I had added another day to my stay in purgatory. My roommate and I exchanged pleasantries once in a while but for the most part I came and went as I pleased. Sure, my parents and my sisters from Manila called and visited. But most of the time they were 10,000 miles away.

Shortly after graduate school, I married my American boyfriend who I met at school. It was a bittersweet moment. Now the distance I had put between me and my family, cousins, and the friends I had known all my life was permanent.

A job in New Jersey and the strong desire to remain in New York City led us to move to Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan and a short drive away from Mahwah, New Jersey by car. Inwood consists mostly of six and seven storey, pre-war buildings. Formerly an Irish, working-class neighborhood, Inwood is now populated mostly by Dominicans and former residents of the Upper West Side and Park Slope, who were driven uptown by the high rents and co-op costs.

Inwood is also known for Inwood Hill Park which has almost 200 acres of hills, baseball fields, and walking trails. In the middle of the park is Shorakapok Rock which marks the spot where the Dutch “bought” Manhattan from the Native Americans.

When we first moved to Inwood, my husband and I didn’t make much use of these amenities; since we had no friends in Northern Manhattan. We spent most of our leisure time eating at restaurants on the Upper West Side and watching movies and performances at Lincoln Center. Then I got pregnant.

A neighbor in my building noticed my growing belly and gave me her son’s bathing tub. She also invited me to join her mothers group. After our son was born, whenever my husband and I took him to the park to feed the ducks or pushed him on the swings in the playground we met parents with kids the same age, and they soon became our friends. Now that our kids are older, we walk to the park most summer evenings and share a picnic dinner with other families. While the parents drink wine and exchange stories, our kids catch bugs and climb trees.

Like most New Yorkers, my fellow Inwoodians are “immigrants” as well. They come from all over the US, and in our immediate circle, from 16 different countries. And because our own families and friends are so far away, we have become each other’s surrogate siblings and “best friends.”

This was vividly brought home to me a few weeks ago. I was in our kitchen making Kaldereta (beef stew) for dinner when my husband and our son, now 4, came home from the park. While our boy was washing up in the bathroom, my husband told me that one of the mothers of was complaining in the park that she hears the couple upstairs from her having sex—everyday.

“But we know them!” I replied in shock. I couldn’t believe I knew something that intimate about our son’s buddy’s parents. (Not to mention that a couple with children had sex everyday! Where do they get the energy?)

That night, after our son went to bed, my husband and I talked about the other intimacies we’ve learned about our neighbors over the years: what they wear to sleep, their Zoloft dosage, the homework assigned by their couples’ therapist. As we spoke, I had a chilling yet also strangely comforting sense of déjà vu. I felt that fate had given me another gem signifying the treasure of extended family ties. This time, I am not giving it back.

Tricia Capistrano is a writer living in Manhattan. This article originally appeared on Hybridmom.com.

“It’s bullshit, of course,” José says, holding up the bottle in the afternoon sunlight.

Hidden beneath his low-pulled black hat, his eyes look tired. José worked a double yesterday, from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., and another shift today, Saturday, on four hours of sleep. He is one of the most active members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB), a controversial group of Mexican immigrant activists that applies Zapatista-inspired methods of grassroots organizing in Spanish Harlem, also known as “El Barrio.” He lives in Queens and commutes 45 minutes six days a week to the Deli in lower Manhattan where he has worked for seven years. All in all, he works almost 70 hours a week. He is 27 years old, “illegal,” and angry.

Like other MJB members, José refuses to keep quiet, to be silenced by fear of deportation or imprisonment. He is one of a growing number of Mexican immigrants that reject the role of voiceless victim. Despite never going to college, having left Mexico for the U.S. at age 19, José understands perfectly well the forces driving Mexicans to the United States, the way the system handicaps immigrants once they arrive, and the dangers of raising his voice and fighting back.

“In Puebla, my family, we used to grow maize, beans, vegetables,” he says in Spanish. “But the big corporations changed everything.” They bought up the land, freeze-dried goods and pasteurized milk, and outsold small farmers like his father. “We had a couple of cows, but we had to sell the milk fresh everyday, understand? How can we compete with milk that lasts for two, three, four weeks in a carton?”

“It’s the same thing that goes on here,” he says, gesturing to the billboards and signs around Union Square, “or in El Barrio. Corporations sell cheaply to eliminate the competition. Then they raise their prices.”

Unlike Ecuadorians and other Hispanic immigrants, Mexicans come to the U.S. with plans to make a quick buck and return, he says. “‘Two years here and then I’ll go back,’ they say to themselves. But it’s always one more year, one more year.” Rarely do they go to school or learn the language, he says, because they always plan to return to Mexico.

“They spend their lives dreaming,” José says, his mouth caught somewhere between a sneer and sad smile. But between their illegally-low wages—when José started at the Deli he got paid only $3.50 an hour—and remitting money back home, they leave their children with nothing except debt and misfortune.

José uses the word “sistema” over and over, as he does when speaking for MJB. Like others in the organization, he sees NAFTA as a pillar of an economic system that strips Mexicans of their farmland and pulls them to the U.S., only to be labeled “illegal” and discriminated against. He speaks in different registers to different audiences, deriding “gentrification” to activists and journalists during a speech at City Hall, criticizing “gente con dinero” and “evictions” to community members in neighborhood meetings.

For some Americans, José is a nightmare come true: an “illegal” immigrant who, far from hiding in the shadows, spends what little time he has free from work criticizing conditions here in the U.S.

The fear and anger towards “illegal” immigrants falls most heavily on the few immigrants’ rights organizations whose members do speak out, staging protests and, in the case of MJB, filing lawsuits against abusive landlords. Even in New York, where undocumented immigrants have long found refuge from American xenophobia, activists like José are increasingly at risk of deportation.

“If they are caught demonstrating, the thing that ICE should do is ask them for their ID. If they don’t have ID, they should be investigated,” a Minutemen spokesman recently told me over the phone. His high-pitched voice quivered as he grew angrier and angrier. “If a man doesn’t got an ID, he’s got a problem.”

But perched atop a handrail in the park, José doesn’t look worried about being approached by the Feds or asked for ID. Instead, he worries that MJB is misunderstood by the public, by its activist supporters and by some of its own members.

“The media and activists like to hear about defeating Steven Kessner, about a victory over one landlord,” he says, referring to the landlord MJB pressured to leave El Barrio. “But, for us, it’s more important that the community is growing in confidence,” José says. Small scars dot his hands and forearms. He speaks quickly and passionately, words pouring quickly from his barrel chest.

When I ask José what the future holds for MJB, he pauses. Kessner sold his 47 buildings to Dawnay, Day, a $4 billion international corporation with property on five continents. Since then, little has improved for the hundreds of MJB members living in what are now Dawnay-owned apartment buildings. Mysterious fines continue to pile-up, crumbling walls and ceilings go unfixed, and misleading letters urging tenants to take cash settlements and move out are slipped under creaky doors.

“Things aren’t going to change here in El Barrio just because people agree with us,” José says. But when immigrants get up and speak in front like they did at City Hall, it means something. “When they chanted ‘Sí se puede,’ their children were there. They heard them, and now they’ll grow up thinking that they can change things.”

MJB has grown bolder in its criticism of city government officials—particularly East Harlem Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito—and offices, like HPD, which it considers complicit in landlord abuses. Meanwhile, a new “International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio,” including trips overseas by MJB members, provides “insurance” against the growing list of enemies the group has made in New York, José says.

It is only when speaking to José that MJB truly begins to make sense, that I begin to understand how a tenants’ rights organization could have taken up Zapatismo, filed a lawsuit against a billionaire international corporation, and protested on the steps of City Hall.

But there is a flip side to this success. The louder their stories, the more likely MJB members are to be harassed or, worse, deported. When José and another MJB member attended a public meeting on Columbia University’s expansion into West Harlem last year, he got up and asked Mark-Viverito why she had “betrayed” the community and reneged on her promise to vote against the plan.

“Her people approached us afterwards. They asked why I said ‘betrayed,’ saying that it was too strong a word to use in front of the community,” José says. “But I told them it was the right word to use, because that’s what she had done. Then they invited us to a ‘private meeting,’ but we said ‘no thanks’ and left.”

When I mention the risk of deportation, José pauses again. The sounds of Union Square wash back over our conversation, a thousand footsteps shuffling past us.

Yes, he says, he worries that things will get more dangerous for him and other MJB members in the months to come, as the organization shifts its criticism from landlords to the city that fails to regulate them.

In the end, something has to give, both in the U.S. and in Mexico, José says. The people will organize, from El Barrio to the factories in Tijuana and the farmlands in Puebla.

By the end of our conversation, José has torn the orange juice label to pieces. The idyllic farmland, the corporate logo, the friendly face of all that José sees wrong in the U.S. and Mexico, lies in tatters on the ground. Just then, a man in a green jump suit comes by and silently sweeps it up into the trash.

It was sweltering that day—the first day of summer—and even though it wasn’t the most practical choice for moving day, I wore one of those tank tops with the built-in bras. Horrified, I thought I must have popped out of my top picking up a box. Why else would an 8-year-old boy stare at me like that?

I looked at myself, then at him again. I was decent but he was still staring. I looked again and it became clear. I was a white lady moving into this Dominican kid’s home. I made eye contact with him and I smiled a little, as if to say: Sorry, kid, it’s true. I live here now.

Choosing to live in Washington Heights had been easy: it was in Manhattan, along with my husband’s new job, and we could afford a two-bedroom apartment so our 3-year-old daughter could finally have her own room. While I packed up my old apartment in Boston, I read everything I could about Washington Heights, wanting to plunge in and immediately feel it was my home. I learned the neighborhood had been a refuge for European Jews in the 1930s and ’40s, only to be displaced by so many Greeks, by the 1960s the neighborhood was “the Astoria of Manhattan.” The Greeks left the neighborhood to the Dominicans—the largest population outside the Dominican Republic, in fact. I filed this away as merely another neat little fact, like how Harry Belafonte, Henry Kissinger, and Red Sox left-fielder Manny Ramírez had each attended George Washington High at the end of my new street.

If I hadn’t been welcomed to the neighborhood by a gawking kid, maybe I wouldn’t have thought it, but everywhere I went, I felt people looking at me. The first neighbor to actually speak to us was a young, beautiful Dominican woman who passed my husband in the building lobby.

She addressed him in Spanish at first, but he shrugged and said he didn’t understand.

“You live here?” the woman asked, heading towards the door.

My husband nodded. “We moved in a couple days ago.”

The woman shook her head and smiled as she opened the door.

“Now I’ve seen everything!” she laughed, and slipped away.

What had she meant? Were we a sign the neighborhood was improving or were we crazy white folk, intruding into a community that didn’t want us? Every conversation my husband and I had about the neighborhood or our neighbors went like that, questioning what people meant, whether or not they were looking at us as much as it felt like they were, and everything became a debate. One noisy neighbor would turn into a 45-minute discussion on race and class: were we doing what anyone would do, or were we being intolerant if we called 311 when their party woke us up at 4:30 a.m.? Did our neighbors see us, pale as coconut among their chocolates and cinnamons, as just another neighbor? Or were we viewed as the crest of a gentrification wave, poised to wash away another old neighborhood, leaving nothing but Starbucks and higher rents in our wake?

We could have just moved—after all, our things were still in boxes—but we were already in love with this loud, strange neighborhood. As the sun set, my husband and I would drop the kid into her new Maclaren and walk along St. Nicholas Avenue, from 191st Street to 168th and back again, just to be out in the streets to watch the night unfurl. Tall, tough-looking teenage boys would stoop to greet tiny grandmothers with a kiss. Old men set up their domino tables on the sidewalks, wearing their Cuban-style shirts and smoking cigars, their laughter heard half a block away. Every couple of blocks, the frío frío man stood with his huge block of ice, rasping it into shavings to be soaked with sugary syrups.

On these walks, I started collecting moments I felt I was being accepted, turning them over and over in my mind, until the details blurred to nothing but a warm glow. The day the Mister Softee woman smiled and handed over my cone saying, “Here you go, mami.” The girls at the playground who immediately accepted my blonde, blue-eyed daughter as one of their own. The elderly neighbor who thanked me in Spanish for taking her garbage out after I gestured wordlessly: Me? Bag? Take over there?

One Saturday morning, a month after I arrived, I stepped out to get a newspaper to find a neighborhood completely transformed for the annual Dominican Day Festival. Unable to go anywhere else, I stood and peered over the police barricades, craning to see the parade that was still just a distant din, until at last, the parade strutted and swaggered down St. Nicholas Avenue.

Masked red devils ran up and leered at small kids in the crowds. Girls in towering feathered headpieces wore sequined dresses and glinted in the sun like fresh fish. Behind a pair of gigantic fake breasts, a man in a dress and wig hid behind his parasol and shook his equally enormous fake behind at the delighted crowd.

It was like Mardi Gras and Christmas and the Fourth of July all at once, and this feeling of undaunted joy rose up from the sidewalks like the shimmering August heat. And suddenly, I started to cry. Everyone around me cheering, laughing, waving flags… and I would never genuinely be a part of that. I knew I would always be on one side of the barricade, my neighbors on the other.

I also began to understand something else: I am a complete idiot.

I was never going to be and could never even pretend to be from the same half of one small Caribbean island like almost all of my neighbors. And there would be times where people would stare and wonder what I was doing in that part of town, but I wasn’t a kid trying to fit into a new school—I was in New York City, a city based largely on the premise that no one really gives a damn where you’re from, and whatever divides us, there are many more things everyone can agree on: a sugary ice is good on a hot day; teenagers should show respect to old people, and, today, I knew a guy wearing a big fake ass is far funnier than it ought to be.

I returned home, still smiling, and entered the small concrete courtyard in front of my building where a pair of boys tossed a baseball between them. As I passed, I heard it. One of the boys speaking to the other: something something gringa something estúpido something, finishing with a snort.

My heart sank. As I fumbled for my keys, I looked back and saw the same kid who stood and stared at me the day I moved in. He looked away, then at his friend. He sucked his teeth, disgusted.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked the name-calling kid. “Why you gotta be so fucking racist all the time?”

Turning away, I swung open the front door and went home.

As an eleven year old, I’d never seen a naked woman. This was 1974. Before cable reached us. Before the internet. Before DVD. Before VHS, even. Being an only child, I had no brother to teach me, and no sister to spy on. The closest I’d come, was a series of drawings of topless women that my friend Dennis’ older brother, Gary, had hung on his bedroom wall. The drawings, done with magic marker, in psychedelic colors, featured several well endowed – fantastically endowed, actually – women. Dennis and I made regular, carefully orchestrated trips to Gary’s gallery, where a collection of Picassos could not have inspired more awe.

Given this general state of curiosity, and boredom, a trip to Chinatown held about as much anticipation as a trip to China. This was in the wake of Nixon’s visit to China, so it was a hot button topic. Ping pong was all the rage. Second only to, perhaps, panda bears. Much of our curriculum, or at least extra-curricular activities, concerned that which was Chinese. Hanging over our heads all year, was the threat of the trip being cancelled should we not behave like the young ladies and gentlemen we were expected to be. It was a crisis when one of the parent chaperones dropped out the week before. As the days counted down, there were release forms to sign, and fees to pay, and an address by the principal that included the admonition, “Anything purchased in Chinatown must first meet the approval of a chaperone.” The morning of the big day, in some sort of candy apple version of temptation, my mother and father provided me with a five dollar bill in “spending money.”

Essentially, the trip consisted of walking through Chinatown, en route to a pre-fixe dinner. Folded in half, and then folded again, my five dollar bill remained safely tucked away in my jeans’ pocket while other kids spent freely, mobbing magazine kiosks and gorging on candy, and swarming the bins outside Chinese chachki shops, grabbing up imitation jade jewelry, Chinese coins worn down to slugs, and polished stones like they’d discovered treasure. Someone’s newest prized possession Chinese handcuffs wowed a crowd for the ephemeral minutes before it was broken. One boy bought a turtle in a plastic tank, smaller than a lunchbox, that he joyously swung by the handle, until it finally drew the attention of a teacher, abruptly ending the shopping spree.

The restaurant was one of the more touristy places on Mott Street, not too unlike any Chinese restaurant you could visit on Staten Island. Much to everyone’s delight, pitchers of Coke were placed on the tables and quickly refilled once empty. Dinner was a chaotic affair, with thirty or so pre-teens wired on sugar and caffeine, and more interested in commenting on the food than eating. By chance, I was seated at a large round table with, among others long forgotten, Kevin McDonald and Roy Foxx. Kevin and Roy were best friends, and the biggest delinquents in the class. They both smoked, and would prove it by lighting up at an after school rendezvous when challenged. But what they were most infamous for was terrorizing the school over a several month period with Chinese Stingers – bobby pins, coiled like a ram’s horns, so that upon prodding, they would spring, or “sting.” (It’s doubtful whether “Chinese Stingers” were actually imported from China, but the nomenclature was yet another indication of the Chinese craze.)

Kevin and Roy were two characters with whom I didn’t readily associate. So, instead of joining in the “dinner conversation,” I fondled my five dollar bill, wrestling with the moral dilemma of whether to return it to my parents, hence, proving to them my prudence, or declaring it spent, and adding to my nest egg. At some point I sensed a commotion, and turned to see Kevin holding a magazine open on his lap under the table, while Roy served as lookout. It took a minute for the image on the page to come into focus, more a consequence of my mind than my eyes, but when it did, I saw my first naked woman. Asian, breasts supple, squatting power-lifter style and peeing into a wine glass. The world would never be the same. Even if it proceeded without so much as a waver.

Following dinner, the tour continued as we made our way back to the subway. The shopping also resumed, albeit under stricter supervision. With a teacher at my side, I purchased a “Chinatown” magnet, its Roman alphabet letters scripted in faux Chinese and guarded by a dragon. Capping off the day, we paid an impromptu visit to an arcade where the highlight was a live blue chicken encaged in a tic-tac-toe machine that, for a quarter, would meet all challengers. Offering the best bang for an eleven year old’s buck – ever! – this had them lining up. The chicken hustled me for the last of my money.

I proudly presented the “Chinatown” magnet to my parents as a souvenir, and they hung it on our refrigerator, where it remained on display for years. During puberty, I had a recurring nightmare about being pursued through the streets of Chinatown by an Asian woman with long red fingernails. It’s night, and I’m running, gasping for breath as I look over my shoulder. I duck into a doorway to hide, but her hand tauntingly reaches around the corner, fingernails flashing like knifes, and I take off running again. It wasn’t until adulthood that I made the connection between the trip and the dream. To this day, I have a thing for Asian women.

Tom Diriwachter has worked as a playwright in New York for over a decade. He is currently at work on a book of non-fiction.

“Hello,” I said, half asleep.

I heard an irritating crinkling sound.

“Who is this?” I asked.

I recognized the sound. Cellophane was being unwrapped from a piece of hard candy.

“Do you remember me?” a man said in a thick brogue.

“Why are you calling?” I asked.

“Listen to this.”

I winced at the sound and held the receiver at arm’s length. Crinkling cellophane triggers a visceral reaction in me. I sweat. I get anxious. This usually happens to me in the theater, and usually at end of the first act. Somebody in the audience feels a need to relieve the dramatic tension by sucking candy. They take out a sweat and carefully unwrap the cellophane thinking that the slow unwrap hides the sound. In fact, the slowness prolongs the agony. These inconsiderate eaters think they can’t be heard. Well, they can.

“Who was that,” Linda asked after I hung up.

“The Irishman from the Booth,” I said.

Here’s how it started. We were seated in D110 and D111 four rows back in the center orchestra. We always arrive at the theater early so that we don’t have to climb over already seated customers. I don’t like to step over people whose half retracted legs are tripping hazards. So, we sit first. I politely allow people to crawl over me and, yes, I do make an effort to retract my legs fully. I’m not tall, just five foot eight give or take, so it’s not hard to make room. But, that’s not the point, is it? The point is that I am considerate of my fellow theater goers. The point is I’m looking out for others, and isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Isn’t that what makes us the higher form of life?

A few minutes before the house lights dimmed a gay couple arrived on the aisle and moved down their row. They took the two empty seats directly in front of ours. Everyone else was seated. The hush that preceded the curtain rising had already fallen on the house.

One was tall and large, not fat — gay men don’t get fat like straight men – square-shouldered, clean shaven and young. His yellow bow tie set off the baby blue of his sweater. The older one — maybe twenty years older — was completely bald, short and chunky and wore a zippered biker jacket, steel-toed boots and one dangling crucifix ear ring.

The two men went through an elaborate sitting process. They removed their jackets, folded their scarves over their arms, shut down their matching cell phones and leisurely glanced around to see who they knew, or who knew them. The bald one looked at Linda and then he looked at me, but his eyes landed and left as if we were antique shop bric-a-brac that you look past. The tall one’s head blocked part of our view of center stage. These things happen. Our rotten luck. We felt a little cheated.

There was a wonderful scene in the middle of the first act of “The Seafarer” when Sharkey, the play’s alcoholic protagonist, discovers he’s talking to the devil. That’s when I heard the unwrapping start. It was a single distinct crackle, like a run down smoke alarm. I heard it, waited, and then the man in C111 resumed untwisting the cellophane. I knew that other people in the immediate vicinity heard what I heard and I waited for one of these other people to scold. I waited for the crinkling to end. But it didn’t end and no one intervened. I couldn’t concentrate on the play. My face flushed and I felt a flash of anger. I leaned forward. My mind said to be polite. I put my finger to my lips, “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

The sound stopped. I was a silent hero to the strangers in whose midst we sat. The first act ended on a dark note in the intensely shabby Dublin apartment stage set. When the intermission lights went up the bald one in C111 turned around.

“You got some bloody cheek in you.”

“Open your candy before the play starts,” I said. “That’s the polite thing to do.”

“I’ll blow a bloody fart on you to be bloody polite.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Blow a bloody Irish fart on you.”

“Read the signs,” I said. “No eating in the seats.” I knew I should keep my emotion in check. I knew that words could be tactical weapons. But, even as I knew this, my irritation hijacked my tongue. I blurted out, “Dick head.”

“Blow me,” he said. He unwrapped a candy in my face.

Linda prudently grabbed my hand. “Don’t respond to him.”

* * *

The telephone by our bed rang again. I didn’t reach for it. I looked at the ringing black receiver, then at Linda, then back at the receiver. I knew nothing good could come from speaking to the Irishman again. On the fourth ring I removed the receiver, depressed the plastic button that clears the line, and set it aside until it hummed dead.

“You shouldn’t have thrown the candy wrapper back at him,” Linda said.

“I didn’t expect him to climb over the seat,” I replied. “How could I know that when I ducked his fist would hit the old lady in the ear?”

“How do you think he got our number?” Linda asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he followed us home.”

I walked across the dark bedroom and peeked around the drawn curtain onto Spring Street. There were no cars parked in my angle of sight but that didn’t mean he wasn’t around the corner on his cell phone. The thuggish Irishman had been escorted out of the theater and his gay partner tried valiantly to explain that the contretemps was a silly misunderstanding; his partner had fallen and his hand touched the old woman quite by accident. It was a complete lie. The man had tried to knock me out. Instead he broke the woman’s glasses.

Linda and I stayed through the end of the play. That allowed us to recover some of the evening. We spent our dinner at Balthazar hashing over what he’d done, why I’d responded and who was more in the wrong. I didn’t defend myself. I should’ve turned the other cheek, but the truth is, anger is more satisfying. My mistake was that I chose to confront a psycho. How was I to know?

My day was ruined. I saw, or thought I saw, the Irishman on the street corner when I left for the office at 8 am. I saw, or thought I saw, him again when I looked back down into the subway station at 53rd and Lexington. I saw, or thought I saw, him outside Milos where I had lunch and again on 50th Street near St Patrick’s Cathedral. I was unsettled most of the day. I realized that I’d lost the feeling that I was safe in the world. I didn’t know how important that feeling was until it was gone.

We went forward with our evening plans to see the 8 p.m. performance of “Curtains” at the Al Hirschfield Theater. We agreed that we’d be conceding defeat if we locked ourselves in our loft and lived in fear. We thought that a comedy whodunit was just the thing to take our minds off the Irish stalker.

We were in the middle of the first act when I heard it. The distinct sound of cellophane. Someone two rows in front removed a candy wrapper. It wasn’t the Irishman. Too much hair. Someone else with a sweet tooth. I waited for it to end, but it didn’t end. I waited for someone to intervene, but no one did. I began to sweat. I felt anxious. I balled a page of the program to throw. Then, I thought of all the good reasons to be tolerant, to sit quietly and let the aggravation pass without putting Linda and I in jeopardy again. I reminded myself that going to the theater is a test, a test of our tolerance, a test of our ability to rise above our animal natures, a test of our ability to put up with the loud and inconsiderate of which, unfortunately, there are too many in the world.

Paul is a short story writer whose work has appeared in Fictionwarehouse, Wordriot, Skive Magazine, Wheelhouse Magazine, Crime Scene Scotland, Electron Press, Darkmoonrising and The Rose and The Thorn. He sits on the board of Poets and Writers, has attended the Wesleyan Writers conference and is matriculated at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program in creative writing. He lives in lower Manhattan.

After coming from a long twenty-four hour bus ride across Middle America in order to sight see and learn what it means to travel on a budget. I was fortunate enough to stay with friends in Manhattan. You can’t get any better than that.

My friend Dana, who used to be my co-worker years ago, would be out of town with her children (a “mini vakay,” as she would say) but her husband would be home, within reason, after working at the office. “He’s a lawyer, you know, he’s not home much. You and Jay will practically have the whole place to yourself. The only catch,” she warned, as she gulped loudly into the phone, “is that Ryan is really anal and really O.C.D but he is also a lot of fun.”

Anal and O.C.D? Those are the only two things we’d have to worry about? For a free place to stay in Manhattan for two full weeks, with no nagging and annoying kids running around, and no one to answer to but a somewhat anal and O.C.D lawyer? Wow! We had it made.

“Ryan will be there to let you in and show you around. He’ll give you our spare key so you guys can come and go as you please. Just make sure, above all else, anything he may tell you, take care of the cats.”

“Cats? No problem,” I assured her even though I never had a pet in my life, I liked cats. I liked pets, I just never had one. Coming from a military upbringing, all the constant traveling and moving, pets were a luxury and my mom never allowed them in the house. She was afraid we wouldn’t be able to give them all the love and proper attention they deserved. She’d always say, “If you love the pets so much, love them at a distance. They don’t need the turmoil of moving constantly. We don’t want the dogs chained the fence or the cat locked in the bathroom all day.”

***

The day of our visit Ryan was busy at work and texted a message that he wouldn’t be home to show us around but he left a key with the super and a list of instructions on the coffee table.

We arrived to apartment of sticky notes. It was a monochromatic collage of confetti, “Do not answer the phone.” “Let the fax run.” “Bagels are in the bread box” and a particularly odd one in bold, blocked letters, “CATS ARE PRISIONERS.”

The two little fur balls that I assumed would be no problem were not your average cat. They were huge like Mancoons. They looked to be about twenty to thirty pounds each and were full of hair and very active. As soon as we entered the apartment, the cats rushed over to greet us. They jumped on us, smelled us and purred as we petted them. “Nice cats” I said to them. “Very nice cats.”

We made ourselves comfortable, unpacked our clothes, and followed the instructions that were placed on the coffee table; READ ALL THE STICKY NOTES. We grabbed a bagel, made a pot of coffee, and fed the cats. Both of the cats’ bowls had sticky notes with their name and type of food preference; Binky: Wet food; Science Diet, Slim: Dry; Physician’s choice. I didn’t know what to think, for a minute I realized I had to figure out which cat was which and have them adhere to their strict dietary guidelines. I hoped for just a minute that the cats could read the sticky notes and eat accordingly.

I looked for a name tag collar on the cats and only found that they had been monitored for rabies, neither of them had their name on their collar. They were both boys, both furry and both trying to eat each other’s food. “They’re gay cats,” I remember Dana saying, “Very close.”

We decided we wanted to explore the city. Having fed the mancoon-like cats without adhering to their dietary needs (we couldn’t figure out which was which), we opened the blinds as indicated by a sticky, “Please open the blinds for the cats when you leave.” And when we got ready to leave, the door had a sticky note that read, “Remember-CATS ARE PRISIONERS,” and another sticky note underneath, “They must never get out,” and yet another, “EVER.”

I rushed around the apartment trying to find them and found them nestled in their large five foot kitty condo. Perfect timing, I thought. We opened the door and as soon as the door opened, the cats bolted out the door like jack rabbits in the wild.

‘No problem, I can handle this,’ I thought to myself. There is a main door and they won’t get outside, if I can just catch them at the building entrance everything will be fine and Ryan and Dana will never know.

A large shipment was coming in; the main door was propped open with a tiny rubber door jam. The cats maneuvered themselves around the assortment of boxes, the dolly and the delivery man. They got outside and ran around aimlessly. They were free. No longer imprisoned by the anal lawyer and his obsession with sticky notes.

At some point I thought I spotted one of them. But it was a stray, a skinny gray homely looking cat with a persistent meow. Poor thing looked homeless and hungry. I walked up and down East 87th street. I looked in and out of the dry cleaners, laundry mats, door crevices and even panicked and started looking under cars and behind planters.

After a two hour search of the area, we decided to go back to the apartment. As we walked back, we thought of a variety of excuses “the super let us in and the door stayed open” or “the door was open when we arrived.” All the excuses, weak and unacceptable and we were left to face our fate.

We got back to the apartment, opened the main door and saw two large fluffy cats lying in front of the apartment door. Blinky and Slim looked tired and worn as they had their adventure in the city too. We quickly unlocked the apartment, shooed them in and decided to call for take out. Ryan may never know the cats had their day in the city, and we would never tell…but it would rest easier on our conscience if we could at least have dinner waiting for him when he arrived home.

Lesley Clark, author of The Absence of Colour, is obsessed with reruns of Seinfeld and all things New York. She is currently at work on a novel.