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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Bay Ridge, I studied the diplomas that hung in a home office. In Prospect Lefferts Gardens, I thumbed a young couple’s bedside reading. In Sunset Park, I cracked open the refrigerator and looked at last night’s leftovers.

I’m on the prowl for a new place to live, a job that takes me deep into Brooklyn for open houses across the borough. Veteran house hunters know the routine: the signing of a guest list, the pitch about original floors and century-old moldings, and the questions about the boiler, the windows, and the taxes. Lines of people march through the house, looking to buy property while someone else is still using it. We’re expected to picture the place empty, to imagine what it might be like if we lived there—where our sofa would go, how the space might fit a growing family—and to ignore the current arrangement of armchairs or the mold on the shower curtain.

It’s a tough job, difficult not to see what’s right in front of us. We’re there to study the layout and condition of the house, and yet I can’t avoid noticing how its owners live within it—the mismatched furniture, the acrid smell of cat litter, the vintage exercise bike in the basement. While the real estate agents yammer on about the house’s “good bones,” I excavate clues about its owners and their lives.

At one place, I lingered over the family photos in a hallway, the shots of dated perms and feathered bangs stealing more of my attention than the stained-glass skylight that illuminated them. At another, I noticed stacks of cards for several different businesses and knew we were in the home of a graphic designer. Two weekends ago, I stood in the bedroom of a teenage boy, gaping at the topless girl in the poster thumb-tacked above his dresser. “My mother would not have approved of this decoration,” I told the guy next to me, a man who came to this open house wearing a tool belt. He ignored the poster and me, shuffling off to inspect the copper wiring and the pitch of the waste pipes, I’m sure.

After twelve open houses, I felt like a voyeur. Then, last weekend in Dyker Heights, I spotted a comrade. Three couples meandered around a townhouse, shaking banisters and counting electrical outlets. Wandering a bit, I found myself in the large master bedroom with a stranger, a woman who seemed every bit as curious about the sellers as she did about their house.

While I pretended to inspect the new windows, I watched her glance at a young child’s drawings framed on the dresser, fan the magazines on a stool in the bedroom’s corner, and wipe dust from the wooden headboard—exactly the kind of things I’d done at previous open houses. I continued watching her as she knelt to smell the flowers on the nightstand and made her way to the walk-in closet at the far end of the bedroom. She opened the couple’s closet door, admired its sizable dimensions, and paused for perhaps a second too long at the sight of the clothes inside. Then, with no evident self-consciousness, she reached for one of the shirts—the shirt of a total stranger—and rubbed its fabric between her thumb and forefinger, a gesture usually reserved for racks at department stores or thrift shops. I smiled at the boldness of this woman’s act, admiring her impropriety. Here we were, attending an open house, and she was examining clothes she’d never wear.

I didn’t stay to see if she checked the size of the shirt or held it up to her torso in the mirror. Not wanting to interrupt, I left the woman alone in the bedroom and went downstairs to inspect the wiring and ask about the waste pipes.

Nicholas Soodik is a high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

When I think of second-hand books, I think quite literally of anonymous fingers reaching out to me from beyond the grave. I can practically smell the stale breath of the book's past possessor and hear the words pass across his or her lips, buying vicarious intimacy for fifty cents or a dollar a pop. I'm talking about the way things were, when, as a painfully introverted teen in the late 1960's, I did my virgin browsing on Fourth Avenue, and when, unbeknownst to me and itself, this second-hand book Mecca was already on the wane.

Invariably staffed by a wizened old owl, himself hardly visible, perched on a stack of new arrivals (there being no room for table or chair), he might, if you were lucky, help direct you to the right pile, for the arcane inventory was locked in the folds of his brain.

But the secondhand books on my shelf derive from another source. I dug them out of a premature grave.

Down the block from where I have stubbornly plied my literary trade for more years than I care to count, the Eighth Street Bookstore, in its heyday the cherished haunt of aging Beat poets and bibliophiles, went up in flames decades ago, though it feels like the fire was only yesterday.

I happened to be on hand when the demolition men got around to clearing away the debris.

"Watch it, sonny!" one of the workmen muttered, pushing past me a wheelbarrow full of burnt books and broken glass. He dumped the contents into a huge metal garbage container parked just off the curb and broke for the day.

I reached in and plucked out the Complete William Blake.

Seconds later I was up over the edge of that great book coffin, as happy as a boy in a mud puddle, getting litera(aril)ly filthy among burnt books.

I stumbled over jagged sheet metal, former shelves and partitions, amid a hodgepodge of poetry and pornography: Sanskrit erotic verse, Fanny Hill, and Homer. Most of the books were singed but readable, with titles outlined in charcoal and price conveniently obliterated. They cost me nothing more than the effort to dig them out.

Jim, a philosophy grad student who happened by, joined me and together we set about to systematicallystrip-mining the bin.

"Kant here!" I yelled and flung Pure Reason at him.

"You want Williams?" he asked.

"Tennessee or William C.?" I asked.

In the beginning we mercifully glanced at unknowns. But sweat and greed made us choosy. And the obscure poets and thinkers went flying back into oblivion.

When a wall of psychology threatened to cave in on us we deserted the French Surrealists. Breton and Aragon, alas, got buried under Freud and Jung.

"I can tell there are a couple of book lovers here," said a well-dressed old collector with a canny smile. We helped him into the bin. He picked out a few French novels and The Whole Sex Catalogue, "for a friend," and dropped them into his straw basket. "Always find the best things in the trash," he winked, climbed back out and rode off on his bicycle.

"Any occult?" a woman called to us from the sidewalk.

"Come in and look for yourself!" I said.

The passersby got wise. By sundown the bin was as crowded as any bookstore, with browsers demanding: "Where's yoga?" or "How about art books?"

I loaded my haul into a one-wheeled shopping cart and dragged it back to my place. A little girl stopped me on the way.

"What you gonna do with all those books?" she asked.

"Read them," I said.

So the City swallows up its treasure. Life goes on.

After the fire, plywood planks replaced a once book-laden window display. Overnight the new wooden wall was covered with posters announcing upcoming events. The events took place. They too were forgotten.
 

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, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist), Peter Wortsman, 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, was a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. Also a widely published travel writer, his texts have appeared four years in a row in The Best Travel Writing 2008 - 2011. He is also the author of a new series of short e-Books: “The Urban Nomad – Paris” and “The Urban Nomad – Vienna.”

“Damn it,” Mother says still watching the blinking sign, “we’re never going to find the Mennonite Church before dark.”

I remind mother that the lady who handed out the flyers on Fifth Avenue said it is on 15th Street. Mother doesn’t hear me. Instead she walks into the street. A truck slams on its brakes and barely misses her.

“Come on girls. Cross the street,” mother says.

I grab Heidi’s hand and feel the man on stilts looking down at us. Way down. Mother then hits the truck a few times with her hand and yells words we are not allowed to say. The men in the truck ignore her but I can’t. Her blue eyes shine against her high cheekbones and platinum blond hair which is down to her waist, and tied in a braid. Steam comes out of the manhole and Mother stands in the center of it all like an angel, rising out of the mist. My family and I cross to the sidewalk and the druggie girl peeks an eye open. I bet she sees a blur of us. Mother tells us to keep walking. Inside a gate, there is a garden trying to survive in the winter wind. Piles of trash rest next to bag of unopened fertilizer. Religious statuary, a Raggedy Anne doll, stuffed animals, scraps of electronics, are piled onto a rectangular wooden base form. It’s like a forty foot toy tower.

“Think the Swiss Family Robinson lives there?” Heidi says.

“It looks like the Tower of Babel from the Bible.” Mother says.

Through the barren trees, a skinny man builds the sculpture. He looks at me for a moment. Then he climbs up on the structure like an acrobat. Picking up a piece of rock with silver flecks, I tuck my new found treasure inside my jeans. This is the first time I have done something meaningful for a long time. As we walk to the end of the block, I look back and promise to return to my secret city garden.

Before writing for Glamour, Huffington Post, Narrative, New York Press, St. Petersburg Times, Smith, and Slate, Heather Kristin was home-schooled with her twin sister in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. Her unpublished novel BROOKLYN TO BOMBAY was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. An essay she wrote appears in the anthology LIVE AND LET LOVE which was featured on Good Morning America and The Chelsea Lately Show. Recently she was honored by the State of New Jersey General Assembly for her dedication on women’s issues and is thrilled to be returning for her fourth year as a mentor for an at-risk teen at Girls Write Now. Heather is currently writing a memoir.
 

Mia was an early adopter of different healing modalities. She’d vet the experience first, report back, and then I would give it a go. If I had been a despotic queen, Mia would be my royal food taster to make sure there was no poison in the meal.

“Angels are always watching and protecting,” Mia assured me.

Angel Reading

I typed the words into google, not knowing what to expect.

A universe of 26,500,000 hits came up! “Have I been missing out on something here?” I said aloud.

Doreen Virtue was the expert in the field. Her “Angel Therapy” website sold books and cards, connected to her radio program, and linked to a registration form for International Angel Day. From what I could tell, Virtue’s reputation was stellar. Or at least she had a huge following.

Virtue gave out an “angel therapy practitioner” certificate at weekend workshops. I wasn’t sure what that meant but the air of academia made it sound more legit. That must be the equivalent of the Six Sigma Black Belt people tacked to the end of their business credentials. Something prestigious, but mysterious at the same time.

Besides, I was curious. It must be cool to see angels. Like in the Bible, are people afraid when someone appears? Imagine if Mary screamed and ran out of the room when the Angel Gabriel told her that she’d be Jesus’ mother? There would be no New Testament. Civilizations wouldn’t exist.

Angels must be benevolent. And I thought about Clarence, the angel from the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Clarence was a little inept but finally got the message across to Jimmy Stewart’s George that if he offed himself, George’s lifetime of good deeds wouldn’t have occurred. Who would save George’s kid brother? Who would marry Mary? In the end, George’s life mattered and that touched me every Christmas.

And then I just decided to go, because I realized I should just do it rather than obsess over reasons why or why not. Mia gave me the contact information of the woman she consulted.

On the day of the appointment, I went to the second floor café of the East West bookstore near NYU. The first floor of the store sold books, audios, calendars, yoga mats, crystals, and all things New-Age. Everyone who worked there gave off the energy that they lived the lifestyle and had for a long time. No wonder the store has been a mainstay of the self-help community in New York for more than twenty years.

The café itself was bright and white, smelled of patchouli, and offered an array of tasty organic snacks. The absurdly healthy looking store clerk suggested I try the iced tea because “it was guaranteed to open up the heart chakras.” But I wasn’t so sure the drink would work.

I had arrived a bit early to assess the scene. The angel reader had a makeshift office behind some potted palm trees. I tried to eavesdrop on the conversation, but only heard muffled voices. I moved away from the plants to give the angel reader, her client and the angels some privacy.

The only other person in the waiting area for the divine was a woman with jet-black died hair, probably henna, something natural. Perhaps 50? Or 60? I wasn’t sure because her face was turned away at first, but her hands were vein-y and wrinkled. Her fingers were sausage-like, swollen and misshapen. I tried not to stare.

Right on time, Frances Smith, came from behind the trees and called out my name. As I passed the elderly woman, I realized she had a lazy eye. She gave me a hard look with her good one. I jumped a little.

Frances’ business card described her as an “intuitive healer” and “angel therapist.” She motioned me to sit down. I had fantasized that my conduit to the angels would look ethereal and a bit like the old-school rock chick Stevie Nicks with windblown blond hair, pale skin, and dressed in a flowing gauzy dress. Instead she resembled Cindy Brady. But not Cindy the child actress with the pigtails and braces from the 60s, but the adult actress of the 80s who starred in the in the Brady Bunch reunion movies. She was attractive, blond with a matronly face. And she wore business casual work attire, like this wasn’t her regular job but how she supplemented her day gig as a bookkeeper.

A little hesitant, I asked her, “Have you been certified by Doreen Virtue?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Do you know her work?” Cindy replied.

“Nope, just heard she’s the best. Training with her is like going to Harvard. Is that right?” I queried.

“I wouldn’t put it like that. Shall we start? We only have 20 minutes,” Cindy she was all business. “That’ll be forty dollars,” Cindy said extending her palm. Apparently, the angels had a schedule.

To begin, Cindy asked, “Where do you need help?”

“Career,” I replied.

“Okay. My role is to interpret signs the angels show, like repetitive number sequences, found objects, or tunes hummed. I can’t predict the future. I can validate an answer a person may be struggling to resolve. I won’t tell you anything negative. Remember, the angels are always communicating to you. Sometimes it takes another person to relay the messages.” Cindy told me.

From what Cindy described, I had this image that the angels were just hanging around her. She sounded sincere. If she had a regular time slot at the bookstore, then she must be good.

“What if you don’t see anything?” I prodded.

“I always see or hear something. Sometimes the angels won’t answer a specific question because they don’t want to respond at that time. If I don’t get an answer, I’ll tell you.” Cindy replied. My expression must have turned to a frown, because Cindy reassured, "It’s not a good or bad thing. The angels just don’t think it’s an important enough question to answer. It is very rare that I don’t connect with someone.” I didn’t want the angels to be capricious. If I paid my $40 shouldn’t there me some illumination?

Still, to me, Cindy’s explanation sounded like a disclaimer. It was wrong of me to test Cindy’s credibility. But I couldn’t help myself. And Cindy didn’t do a good job of confidence building. Didn’t my angels tell Cindy that I’m a skeptic?

“Can I take notes?” I asked.

“Of course, let’s begin. There is a lot to do in our twenty minutes.” Cindy was stickler for the schedule. At least she’s a good value, I thought, before the reading began. I noticed that Cindy, unlike other healers, didn’t start out with a blessing or a breathing exercise. Despite the setting, there was no airy-fairy feeling about the interaction. It was a business transaction.

As Cindy spoke, I wondered if the angels nearby could overhear my thoughts.

“The Archangel Gabriel is very strong around you.”

Gabriel? Is he everyone’s angel? Whoa, that’s an important one. Or is Gabriel really Gabrielle? I should look that up.

“You need to focus on your writing. Schedule it in every day.”

Ok, hello angels don’t you see me writing in my journal all the time?

“Calm your mind. Ground it. Meditate.”

Check. I listen to that Buddhist chanting disk. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. I can’t sit in total silence, it makes me sleepy.

“Figure out ways to release your energy. Do you draw? Do you dance?”

Remember that ballet class? It made me so neurotic to look at myself while I exercise. My arms are too long.

“Trust the writing. That’s a big concern for you. Trust it.”

Hmm. Maybe I jinxed myself by questioning her abilities. Ok, calm down. She hasn’t said anything bad.

At the fifteen-minute mark, Cindy shuffled the oracle deck, similar to a tarot card deck but with images of different oracles. She dealt out four cards. The cards were illustrated with fairies, goddesses, angels and other spirit guides. She flipped over each card slowly and deliberately announced their import. At last, we were getting to the important stuff.

The first card, “Ask for what you want”

Is this a trick question?

The second suggested, “Have more fun.”

Easily done.

The third instructed me to “notice a shift in something this summer.”

What does that mean?

And the last was a reiteration of Cindy’s earlier advice, “Trust yourself.”

Didn’t you say that already?

Trusting myself I wondered what was the point of this experience. Nothing Cindy mentioned was very inspiring. Maybe the angels were holding back a response? Because Gabriel was basically telling me to keep on keeping on. I was waiting for an external transcendental moment, but it did not arrive. Did I really expect inspiration to come from angels?

Well, at the very least, I got a good story. Thanks Gabriel.

A lot of people offer advice for a variety of fees. Angel readers, clairvoyants, mediums, and psychics may provide comfort for some. But next time I’ll use my $40 to treat a friend to a drink, a real-life angel who can give me the support I need. I just need to trust myself. Maybe Cindy Brady knew something after all.

Amelia Blanquera is a freelance writer and lawyer. She is a community contributor to the NY Times Local blog and writes regularly for spirituality/creativity site Soulpancake.com, which will release its first book this fall.
 

I arrive at the main restaurant at 4 AM to pick up the baked goods and pastries, which I have never tasted but hear are delicious, and bring them to the several other locations around Brooklyn and Manhattan, where hungry and hurried commuters will buy them on their way to jobs they can’t quite explain why they’re in such a rush to get to.

I return home from the pre-Rush Hour deliveries at about 5:45 AM, where I sleep until about 7:15 AM, when I awake, shower, and go back to the main location to pick up and deliver the prepped food to one of the satellite locations.

The company owns two vans. One is a fancy new freightliner; shiny grey paint, tall proud windshield, and side-view mirrors that are not cracked, chipped, or missing. The other van is an old, dying, beat up, graffitied Ford, which cost $300 and is lovingly referred to as “The Crack Van.” When I describe this vehicle as “beat-up,” you must understand, I am actually being quite charitable.

It was called Crack Van before I came to be working for the restaurant, leaving me to speculate on the origins of the name. There are several that I have hypothesized, and I imagine that one, if not all of them are probably correct.

One reason the Crack Van is so named, might be that it looks like a van in which a crackhead might live or at least sleep or urinate. It looks quite abandoned any time it is parked. And when it is in use on the roads, it just looks like someone is driving an abandoned van. Another reason, could be that it looks like a suitable if not designated location for a woman (or man for that matter) to perform sexual acts on a person or themselves in exchange for crack. The final possible reason is that if vans were drugs, this van would most certainly be crack.

It was once white, but not since long before I came into contact with it. Years of outer borough grime and graffiti, winters of over-salted roads, and streaks of other cars paint has left her freckled and muddled into a dull and ugly gray.

Outsiders who don’t know or care for the vehicle as I have come to, sometimes mistake it for something else and refer to it as a “Rape Van.” In fact, more than once, I have arrived at a catering job and been told by an aghast British doorman that he would, “sooner expect to be abducted in such a vehicle than be delivered lunch by it.” Well, theirs are clearly plebian eyes, for anyone who truly knows the Crack Van knows that it is unmistakably and uniquely a Crack Van.

The sliding side door only opens from the inside, and even then only half way and with great difficulty, thus eliminating any need to ever lock it. The back doors can only be unlocked from the inside, but only opened from the outside (and even then it’s tricky). In order to load the van with pastries (or conduct any kind of kidnapping) one must climb back over the unattached mini-van bench seat, which I will momentarily explain, unlock the back door, force open and exit through the sliding side door, walk around to the back door and push it in while pulling the handle on its axis in order to gain entry- thus eliminating any element of surprise you would need to carry out your kidnapping, rape, or delivery of baked goods.

For the peculiarity of the mini-van seat to be fully understood, you must first understand that this is not a mini-van. This is a commercial delivery van in every sense of the word. However, this commercial delivery van does not have commercial license plates. It has regular passenger plates. The reason for this is for the company to avoid higher insurance rates on the van and to allow us the use of restricted roadways such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the FDR, which prohibits all commercial traffic. Though the seat is not secured by anything more than milk crates wedged up behind it causing it humorously tip over backwards anytime I accelerate, by its very presence the Crack Van is technically a passenger vehicle, and makes this irregularity of licensing completely legal.

It should also be noted that the passenger license plates are from Michigan, despite the van’s obvious New York origins (You can tell by its accent). Anyone who has seen the Crack Van or been within a two block radius of it while its engine is running will know that it would never pass a state inspection or emissions test in any state that requires one. As Michigan is one of the few states that do not require a vehicle to be in compliance with Federal Emissions standards, we are free to continue choking the air with exhaust and CFCs completely unchecked, all while following the letter of the law.

The needle that indicates what gear you’re in usually points to “Park,” even when zipping along the highway at 40 miles per hour. When I actually do want to put it into park, it generally goes into reverse, the shifter perhaps prevented from falling into place by that stuck indicator needle. I initially tried to overcome the problem by setting the emergency brake when I parked, but found the emergency brake pedal to be only that- just a springy pedal with no actual connection to the brake itself. So now, the lever must be forced with all one’s might, in order to actually park it.

There is no clock. Just a radio/tape-deck. I did not realize they made car radio/tape decks without clocks since the advent of the digital LCD faceplate.

In order to use the Hazard Lights, the key must be in the ignition with the battery engaged. This is frequently necessary for double parking during delivery and often drains the battery, necessitating a jumpstart.

If I attempt to start the engine with the brake depressed, something in the battery shorts and I have to pop the hood and physically jiggle the battery connector cable until I see it emitting sparks. This disconnection in turn causes the non-clock radio/tape deck to reset itself to 530 AM (the station, not the time obviously) and erases all my present stations, so I have to find WNYC and WQXR and reprogram them frequently.

I enjoy listening to classical music while I drive the Crack Van because I enjoy classical music. It relaxes me. I also enjoy the comical disparity of classical music being played in such a vehicle and hope I give a laugh to any observant person who might notice it. This would not be unlikely, as I have to turn it up very loudly whenever I drive on the BQE or over a bridge because it sounds like a lawn mower traversing a gravel driveway when I accelerate past 35 miles per hour.

There were once features like heat and Air Conditioning and a Defroster, but these were gone long before I sat behind the wheel. In winter months, I would see my breath in a fog before me all day, forming a condensation on the windshield and then freezing into a layer of frost- necessitating an ice-scraper on the inside of the windows as well as the out.

The right side-view mirror, like a battered medieval jouster of yore, is cracked in many places, from countless encounters with other side-view mirrors. The left side-view mirror used to be taped into the plastic mount until February of this year, when someone scraped most of the tape away along with the ice and it flew off one morning, presumably to shatter into hundreds of tiny shards as I drove South on the FDR.

The Crack Van lists violently to the right, especially when braking. This caused me to destroy the side-view mirrors of at least three vehicles during my first week. As a result I’m not allowed to drive the fancy new Freightliner. The other driver- hired just last week- isn’t allowed to drive the Crack Van as he is unaccustomed to its many unique quirks, and would doubtless be killed on his first time out.

The irony of this is not lost on me, even if it is lost on my employers. The Crack Van has been deemed too dangerous to be driven by anyone but me and I have been deemed too dangerous to drive anything but the Crack Van.

Like some kind of antithesis of The Lone Ranger and Silver or Batman and his Mobile, we rove the streets of New York, bringing pastries to the masses and making these dangerous streets just a little less safe for everyone.

Post-Script

On April 10, 2010 the crack van expired. The engine revved, a piston shot clean through the bottom of the chassis and into the pavement, and oil bled into the street. By the time the tow-truck got there, it was too late. The crack van was just too old and had lost too much oil. Its time had come. It will be missed.

Connor Gaudet is an unemployed, 27-year-old writer/musician, living in Brooklyn and surviving on government assistance. He keeps track of his triumphs and humiliations at thedailyhell. He also runs the Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood reading series.

I turned it on. My father had mentioned my half-sister, Sylvia, many times over the years. When he was away on “trips”–which meant he was running from Mafia goons or the IRS–she was the one he always stayed with in L.A. Or so he said. Many years later, I discovered this was a lie. He never stayed with her. Never.

It was 1957. My father was sixty-one. I was twelve.

The money Groucho Marx gave away on his program, You Bet Your Life, was meager in this era of big money quiz shows. The guests were mostly foils for his wit. That night while I listened to Groucho’s jokes, waiting for him to interview Sylvia Baron, who was one of the contestants, I didn’t know what to expect.

My first thought when she walked on stage was: She can’t be my half-sister! I glanced at my father who was smiling proudly, nodding as he watched her speak. NO! I thought. She’s not his daughter!

It’s true I wanted to be my father’s only daughter. But that was just part of my shock. How can she be so old? I wondered. I’d been told she was only four years younger than my mother who was forty-five. Though I knew she was the child of his first marriage, I never expected her to look so old! Sylvia’s age would’ve been enough to shock me. But she was also fat! And I mean fat! Worse, on our black and white TV, I could see her dark roots; her hair was dyed blonde. And the heavy make-up she wore! She even had a heart-shaped lip she’d drawn way above her lip line.

“So, Sylvia, are you married?” Groucho asked, puffing on his cigar.

“Yes,” she said. “I have two children, Richard and Marsha.”

She has a family! I thought in amazement.

Groucho’s trademark brows went up and down briskly and he made a few jokes–they weren’t funny–before he asked, “How old are your children?”

I heard a hint of Brooklyn in her voice when she said her son was eleven. Marsha, however, was fifteen! How can my half-sister have a daughter three years older than me? I glanced at my father. He didn’t seem surprised.

“So what do you do, Sylvia?” Groucho asked between jokes.

“I cater parties,” she said.

“And who are your clients?” he asked.

She mentioned a bunch of names. The only ones I recall are Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Dean Martin.

I have a half-sister who caters parties for Hollywood stars! I thought. More shock. I’d seen her business card. My father had shown it to me but it didn’t register until I saw her on Groucho. Parties by Sylvia, the card said in swirling pink script.

My father, who listened intently, didn’t look the least bit upset when she answered every question wrong. He was, in fact, still smiling proudly. She’s not even smart! How can my father be her father? I wondered. I looked at him. He suddenly seemed like a stranger. I thought, Maybe he’s not my father after all.

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books and a visual artist who has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Met. Allen has just completed a memoir about her
family called DIRTY GIRL. She also teaches Micro Memoirs at The New School and conducts private writing workshops. Her website is robertaallen.com.

As we got older, Mirna would share more "Cuban" secrets with us, detailing some easy-to-use brujeria (witchcraft) that could be used for personal gain or to thwart the attempts of enemies.

Marly thought her mother was nuts, but I was fascinated. One day I went over and there were three platanos (green bananas) on her welcome mat. Upon entering I asked Mirna why she put them there. She said that they were there in the morning when she woke up and suspected that a neighbor left them there to put an evil spell on her. No matter, Mirna, explained. She knew how to combat that magic.

Marly sat on the couch rolling her eyes.

"Why not just pick them up and throw them away?" I asked, naively.

"Get this," Marly warned, before Mirna went on to explain.

Mirna said to diffuse the spell the neighbor had set to cast on her it required one to urinate on the neighbor’s doormat.

"Wait! You squatted on her doormat this morning?" I asked, incredulous.

"No, mi Niña," she replied. "I peed in a cup and then poured it there.

Well, of course.

This should have probably been enough about brujeria to last me a lifetime, but I was intrigued.

Mirna would often go to tarot card readers, and "seers."

One in particular stood out.

Marly was going through a divorce and had moved back to New Jersey to stay with her mom while she was getting back on her feet. Her mother wanted to help her get out of her funk and knew of just the person who could: A psychic named Umberto! He’d tell her what to do to make things better!

She said it takes at least six months to get an appointment, but she called in some favors so she was taking Marly next Saturday. I asked her if I was willing to pay the $60 for a reading, if Umberto would fit me in.

"Claro," Mirna said, the plan set.

Umberto lived in East Harlem so after getting café con leches for the road, we huddled into the car for the long ride.

We finally pulled up to a generic apartment building in an urban area. Kids screamed and played in the street and as we entered, the smell of mojito and lechon permeated the building.

Mirna walked through the open apartment door and quietly sat on a couch as if entering a church. Marly and I followed, squishing in together to fit. There were two other older Hispanic women–viejas–sitting on chairs across from us, one holding a huge box that appeared to move on it’s own. It’d inch it’s way a few inches to the left and the woman would kick it back.

Beyond that, there was a lot to take in.

There was a huge parrot, sitting cageless in the middle of the room, shitting on everything. The couch was covered in birdshit and the smell in the place nauseated me.

The worst part were the hundreds of roaches crawling everywhere. A huge one scurried up the back wall behind the sofa. A few smaller ones scuttled past the parrot who cawed loudly. I kept my purse in my lap and my flip flopped feet off the floor as much as I could.

"What the fuck?" I whispered to Marly.

"You wanted to come…" she replied.

Mirna acted like nothing was wrong. The smell of death, urine and garbage didn’t affect her at all, and I was mortified.

It would be a long wait, Mirna explained, the older women were next and were there for a very serious matter. So serious, they were required to bring a live chicken–that was clearly not happy to be in that box–to sacrifice.

"You have to be kidding me?" I asked.

Marly just shook her head, welcoming me to her world.

I could see Umberto, turbaned, wearing a dirty wife beater and boxer shorts, sitting at a table in the kitchen. Umberto was gesticulating frantically and it was apparent he was a very flamboyant gay man. (Mirna explained later he only dated overweight white men.)

A woman sat across from him. He laid tarot cards on the table and spoke to her in hushed tones. I could see roaches crawling all over the kitchen floor and over the woman’s shoe.

I started scratching and getting some hives from panic. I could not sit here amidst bugs and chicken killing.

Mirna started speaking in Spanish to the two old women and they explained that she was next for her reading and that they were to kill the chicken in the bathtub after we leave.

It was kind of a relief knowing I wouldn’t have to be around for the slaughter and that I’d get my fortune read quicker than I expected, but still, the roaches were crawling way too close for comfort–one got on the couch and burrowed under the cushions we were sitting on—and I jumped up and decided pacing was a better use of my time.

Mirna gave besitos (kisses) to Umberto and listened to him list all his problems before they settled down to the reading. He wouldn’t allow us to sit in the kitchen with her, so Marly and I paced in the living room trying to avoid the hundreds of roaches (and other assorted bugs) in the room.

I really had to use the bathroom and so did Marly. It had been a long ride and those cafe con leches were grande. We walked through the living room, the parrot chasing after us screeching, and discovered the bathroom had no door!

The bigger problem was that there were roaches on the ceiling that kept falling down. There was no way either of us were going to drop our pants in front of everyone else in the apartment and risk having roaches land on us. Still, nature was calling and was just getting louder and louder.

Finally Marly told her mother she was going out for a few minutes to smoke a cigarette. We went into the alley adjacent to the building and Marly asked me to be the lookout so she could pee.

Normally I’d be appalled, but I did so gladly, knowing she’d do the same for me in a few minutes.

I couldn’t believe I was about to take my pants down in broad daylight with playing children just a few feet away. On top of that, the building that faced the alley had open, mainly curtain less windows.

I finally squatted, bare-assed and let loose. The urine got on my flip flopped feet, but I knew there was no way I could go back into that bathroom.

By the time we got back into the apartment it was Marly’s turn to go. She laid her $60 down and Umberto started chanting.

Mirna plopped back on the sofa, no doubt killing a few hundred roaches that had set up camp there, and told me about how Umberto was known to speak in tongues.

At this point I was beyond traumatized. The chicken in the box was unrelenting and was trying to peck its way out.

There were little holes in the cardboard now, and every now and then I’d see a beak. The parrot was also pecking feverishly at the outside of the box trying to get in, in what was either a show of solidarity with the other bird or a way to add insult to injury to it.

Mirna went on to tell me that Umberto was always very special and always had visions.

I asked her about the roaches and she said he has his eyes trained on the future and not the present. That mundane tasks like cleaning and bug-killing were not of any concern.

I couldn’t believe I was trapped here and wanted to leave more than anything, but I had tagged along and it would have been rude of me to insist we leave, when Mirna had so graciously allowed me to join.

Meanwhile, it was clear Marly was moved by what Umberto was telling her. She had tears in her eyes as she flipped cards over. He started shouting and even though I speak Spanish, I couldn’t understand.

Mirna explained he was warding off a spirit that was threatening to take over his body.

Finally Marly’s reading was over and before she could tell me what she was told, I was summoned. In broken English Umberto commanded me to cut the cards. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tell him the reason I was there or explain what exactly I was hoping to know about my future, but Umberto didn’t seem to want to know.

As he began laying down cards, eyebrows raised, roaches crawled on the table and over them. I stood up and started screaming and he looked at me like I was crazy. He flicked them off the table—mere inches away from me–and told me to sit and stop being silly. That they were there to protect us.

"The parrot too?" I asked.

"No, she is the Devil, but we must know the Devil in order to recognize God."

Deep!

As he turned over cards he explained to me that the big problem was my mother. That a darkness had overtaken her.

He had no idea who I was or anything about my family. Yet I was pretty surprised when he explained my mother’s schizophrenia very accurately.

He went on to tell me that when women become pregnant they are very vulnerable because they open in a way to allow another soul to infiltrate them. And while my soul was good and normal, another evil soul also entered my mother and from the time she became pregnant she began to be what doctors would describe as mentally ill.

He said that was the ignorant’s explanation, but in reality she was overtaken by a demon and would have that demon in her for life. No amount of sacrificed animals would release her from its grasp, but that I could cleanse myself of the effects if I wanted to.

I was very surprised at how spot on he was in his assessment, especially because there was no way he could have known anything about my upbringing.

He said I was prone to dark moods, not because of a spell or bad spirits, but because of empathy from seeing my mother overcome by the evil one.

Sounded right to me.

He said I should get a big raw steak and wash myself from head to toe making sure there was blood touching every bit of me. He said to stand like this until the blood dried on my skin and into my hair.

I asked if there was another way. The thought of raw meat and blood touching me was nauseating.

He gave me a firm no, took my $60 and told me it’d be a hard life if I didn’t. Further, he said that if I didn’t do it now, the sadness would be forever ingrained in me.

Shaken from his words, the filth and smell, I nearly collapsed, drained, into the back seat of the car as we made our way home.

Marly explained that Umberto was on the mark about a pregnancy she had had and terminated years before and it made her very sad. He said the spirit was now still amongst us on Earth but tortured.

He told her in order to release it she must bring a chicken and be prepared to slit it’s throat in his bathroom and smear its blood on herself.

A vegetarian, she knew she couldn’t do this.

Mirna said she had to pee again on the neighbor’s welcome mat to offensively block any other displays of aggression the neighbor might be contemplating.

I never did rub that raw steak on myself, and on days of tears and ennui, I often wonder if my life would be different if I had.

Kelly Kreth is best known for being fired quite publicly for keeping a *gasp* blog. She chronicles the mishaps and woes of a single woman trying to get and keep the Big Three in NYC: a job, an apartment and a relationship. Kreth has also written a Sex/Relationship column for the New York Press aptly called, "Outside the Box." She is a frequent guest blogger at www.mikealvear.com. She was a 2009 Moth GrandSlam Storytelling competition finalist and often feels trapped in a Seinfeldian Hell.

The man in the wheelchair shifted slightly toward me, and I gasped. Oh, my God, I thought, they’ve finally cut Eggy in half.

Because of the cap and the hoodie, I couldn’t be certain, but the guy in the wheelchair sure looked like Eggy, the paraplegic who lived with his mother around the corner from my old apartment on Hoyt Street. After Clayton, my landlord’s former worker, was no longer permitted to roam freely through the streets of Brooklyn, Eggy assumed the job of sweeping up in front of my neighbors’ townhouses and moving the recycling to the curb every Friday evening. He performed his duties assiduously in all weather, and starting about one hour after he finished, he was likely to be rolling through the neighborhood thoroughly buzzed on something.

Eggy was a wraithlike presence in the neighborhood, materializing with a startling “How you doin’, Pops” to let you know he was lurking. He was prone to surprising me late at night during steamy negotiations on my front stoop with women I’d taken to the Brooklyn Inn, his sudden appearances helping them make up their minds to just go home. Once, after Eggy and I together watched a woman with whom I had been making out hail a taxi cab and leave, I asked how much of the proceedings he had witnessed. “I saw a lot, Pops,” he said. “A lot.”

My understanding is that a drug deal arranged by his brother had gone bad, and Eggy tried to protect his sibling by stepping between him and a gunman who was seeking redress. The bullet severed Eggy’s spinal cord and left him paralyzed below the waist. Because of the protective impulse that cost him so much and his slightly addled demeanor, I judged him to be at heart a gentle soul, but maybe I’m condescending to his handicap. Certainly, he could be aggressive if he wanted you to give him a few dollars and was snappish when he was drunk, especially when he and his brother hung out on their front stoop with their boisterous thug buddies, their intoxicated swagger shabby and toothless in our now thoroughly gentrified neighborhood. The young men, at least, treated Eggy with deference, which was kind of nice to see because they were the only ones who did.

Eggy never appeared healthy. His skin tone tended to be either ashen or green-hued and sometimes he seemed close to death, very frail with ugly sores on his arms, face, and head. When I’d bring him out a beer while he was sweeping up or when he’d enlist me to haul him in his wheelchair up the three front steps to his building’s vestibule, I would ask how he was doing. “Not too good, Pops,” he’d usually say. From what he told me and what I surmised, his life cycled through periods of substance abuse, illness, hospitalization, recovery, and relapse. Cruel as it sounds, the way Eggy held on made me think of a distressed plant in a college friend’s dorm room, noticed only when it seemed just about to die, and then nourished with water that did nothing but prolong its slow demise.

I was afraid for Eggy, because I had a perhaps overheated idea of how his prospects might get worse. Anyone who rode the subways regularly in the 1990s is likely to remember the man missing his entire body below his waist who rolled through the train on a skateboard. He could open the heavy doors between the moving cars, and when he entered, he’d croak: “Help. Help. Help.” It was unsettling to watch: People who recognized the voice girded themselves, while people who didn’t would first look around to see where the voice was coming from, and then look down, then look down further until their faces twisted with horror when they first apprehended and then made space for this animate torso skating by. No other spiel was required and the straphangers grabbed for their billfolds so decisively you’d think the money was on fire in their pants. It wasn’t just the testament in flesh of unspeakable pain they responded to, or the plain pathos of the beggar’s supreme degradation – it was that the sight of this half man stretched their conception of what is possible in this world. Before seeing him, I could not have conceived that a human being existed in such a state, and probably would not have believed it had I been told.

I asked a friend of mine then in medical school for an explanation of how someone could live through such injury. He chuckled at my incomprehension, and with relish related – in that cocky, shock-the-civilians med student kind of way – the grim facts of what had probably happened to the man.

Paraplegics have to be careful. Since they can’t feel anything, they don’t necessarily know if they have an infection or an abscess. If they’re on drugs, they may not care that they have a problem. What may happen is that their lower bodies begin to decay almost as if they were already dead.

My friend had encountered such a patient during his emergency room rotation, her body so rotted through that when they cut away the gangrenous flesh and cleaned her, her pubic bone was exposed. The stench, he added, was hellish. Doctors might be able to preserve vital organs if they’re intact, cutting away the lower body above the hips, shoving necessary working parts up into the abdomen, inserting a shunt of some sort to expel waste, and then closing it all up. During rehabilitation, the patient is fitted with a prosthetic device.

“And then, apparently, they give him a skateboard and a subway token,” I said.

My friend snorted, and said that if that’s how he was living, the man would soon die. “The operation is called a hemicorporectomy,” he said, explaining that it was radical, but not exactly brain surgery in its surgical complexity, more just a matter of reconfiguring the working parts. With a smirk, he added: “We’re just meat, you know.”

Maybe it sounds naïve, but I didn’t know. I didn’t even suspect. Until I found out about hemicorporectomies, the deepest thought I had given to paraplegia was during stoned, squirm-inducing late night bull sessions during my student days, when some jackass would ask which handicap I’d wish least to have. Learning about hemicorporectomies added a dimension of awfulness to my conception, as did the epidural anesthetic I received during surgery on my left knee and foot. I felt what it’s like to lose all mobility below the waist, and also heard the sound of my bones being cut through with a power saw while feeling nothing. Did the epidural experience give me any insight into the lot of someone who is permanently paralyzed? I realize it wasn’t exactly The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, so I will leave it at this – for several disconcerting hours I was unable to move my legs even with a supreme exertion of effort, and just as bad was that when I touched my cock, it felt like a measly wattle of flesh instead of what it normally feels like: the red hot epicenter of the entire universe.

When the traffic light changed, I crossed Atlantic and followed the three men, shadowing them from the other side of Bond Street. I tried to conclusively discern the identity of the one in the wheelchair. I still couldn’t quite make out his face, and wasn’t certain it was Eggy. Whatever had happened to this person, it was the worst thing I could imagine a human being who had once been whole living through. On the one hand, I liked Eggy, and if this terrible fate had befallen him, I wanted to connect. Tell him I’m sorry about what happened, or something. But what was he going to answer? “It’s okay, Pops – it wasn’t all your fault.” I was convinced I was just a few steps away from encountering someone I knew who had had the lower half of his body cut away and discarded and I was going to have to make small talk.

I was only a block from home, and wondered if I should just turn around and hide in my apartment for ten minutes. The traffic lights would change a few times, pedestrians would move along, the streetscape would recalibrate, and there wouldn’t be anyone around I knew who had been cut in half. The prospect of never seeing Eggy again, despite the proximity of his abode to mine, was not so farfetched – New York dematerializes people like that. I know, because for more than a decade I lived a block away from someone whom I dreaded encountering; yet in all that time, I never so much as glimpsed him on the street. The rub was that every time I walked past his block, I would concoct scenarios in which we met and then rehearse the withering remarks I’d prepared about our conflict. As time passed, our imagined encounter ossified into a sequence of fantasy as delineated as the memory of an actual experience. Because our meeting never transpired, to this day every time I pass his block it seems as if it is about to, which never fails to make me feel a bit ridiculous.

By not saying hello to Eggy here and now, I would be turning the streets around my old apartment into another fantasy haunted locale. Every time I passed by Hoyt and Wyckoff streets, I would imagine I was about to meet Eggy in his wheelchair with a hemicorporectomy and would worry about what I was going to say. I am, I wanted to believe, too evolved to let that happen at this point in my life. So I resolved to get the deed over with, to cross Bond Street and offer my hand to Eggy. I reminded myself that I’ve traveled in the Third World, that I have seen horribly damaged people in hospitals and nursing homes, that I have seen enough pain and suffering to prepare me for this moment. But what do you say to someone who has been cut in half?

Still wavering when I reached the corner of Pacific Street, I tried to urge myself into the crosswalk. Just then, the man in the wheelchair faced me and adjusted his iPod. He wasn’t Eggy! He looked like a lot like Eggy, but he wasn’t Eggy. God hears from me infrequently, but I never neglect to express gratitude for benign anticlimaxes, and as I thanked the deity, I felt my pelvic floor muscles unclench and my body start to tremble slightly.

I turned left when I reached Dean Street. What luck, I thought, that it wasn’t Eggy. Now I could just feel bad for the guy in the wheelchair, like a good New Yorker convey some noncommittal compassion telepathically in his direction, and be done with it.

Then something occurred to me: Maybe Eggy is dead. Why not? I would have to ask one of my former neighbors if anything had happened to him, and began to imagine what I might find out – certainly nothing good.

As I walked, I remembered the last time I had seen Eggy. It had been about a year ago, after he’d materialized behind me on Wyckoff Street and asked for help up his front stairs. He looked awful. We exchanged long time/no sees, and I caught him up on my life – I’d moved out of my Hoyt Street apartment to live with my girlfriend on Atlantic Avenue a few years earlier. We got married. We have a son now, and I’m very, very happy being a family man – the old days sure seem like a long time ago.

Eggy congratulated me, and without smiling said: “Surprises me, though. You always was a loner, Pops.”

That was a blunt distillation of my essence more fundamental and incisive than anything that had been mentioned by the many dear friends who had toasted me at my wedding. I hauled Eggy up the stairs, then maneuvered around him and back onto the sidewalk. When I looked, he was smiling, but just a little. I told him to be well, and held back my own smile until I was down the block. My bemusement changed into something else after I rounded the corner of Hoyt Street, passed my old apartment, and started thinking of the past. Gotcha, Pops, I could imagine him thinking.

Apparently, he saw a lot.

Albert Stern has told stories at spoken word venues such as Speakeasy, LES Stories, and The Liar Show. He has published two essays on this site, The Circle Be Unbroken and The Subway Game; his writing has also appeared on Nerve and Fresh Yarn. His third one-person show, Benefit of the Doubt, debuted at the Berkshires Storytelling Festival and will appear in New York in this winter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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