My exoticism does not go unnoticed. A doorman on Dean Street gives me a consistent greeting. "Shyaaan Weiyte," he says, alluding to the famous red-headed snowboarder. The words drift slowly past his sparkling grill on a soft Jamaican accent. He once had me pose for a few iPhone snapshots so he could show his friends.

Near dusk, I lock my bike to a fence outside of a large, old apartment building on St. Johns Place. In the lobby three men at the end of middle age are horsing around. As I pass by them on my way to the stairs I slowly realize that the sudden shouts of "Faybio, Faybio, Faybio!" are being directed at me. I turn around. "Fabio?" I chuckle. The three explode with laughter and literal knee slapping. "Fabio! He looks like Fabio!" Says one to the others with a swaying arm stretched out in my direction. "You're delivering food? I live on the other side of the building in 3D," he says proudly. Another says, "I dunno man, to me he looks like a guy who..." he puts his weight on his back foot executes a series of arm flourishes against strategic points on his friend's body. "I look like I know Ninjutsu?" Again they burst into a jovial frenzy. "Have a good night guys," I say as I slip up the stairs. When I return, the mood has changed. They are gathered around the doorway inexplicably hushed and serious. I slip through without a word, which seems to suit them.

I climb three flights of stairs in a brownstone on Prospect Place to be greeted by a mother and her two children. One of the children, a little girl no more than 6, asks me if I am a boy or a girl. I tell her I am a boy, but I have long hair the way a lot of girls do. Her mother tells her that when she met her father he had long hair like mine. Father's head appears around the door frame to appraise his wife's comparison and we share a brief smile. The little girl is unconvinced. "You look like a girl," she says. "Some people make a good living that way," I want to say, but think it might be rude putting her parents in the tight spot of explaining to her what I mean. She asks me my name and I tell her, setting the record straight. Her younger brother had greeted me by exclaiming "Hello, Pizza!" He now asks why my delivery bag is red. I pause my bill counting. "Good question" I say. I've never wondered about this before, and I tell him so.

Ernest Merrimont is a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College where he studied writing and theatre. He lives in Bushwick, where he copes with the tribulations of being a young, white, educated male. Non-fiction poetry comes out of his phone and goes into the internet here: http://txtmuseum.blogspot.com/.

Signs of the café’s demise were written everywhere, literally. Last July, a chalkboard appeared in the Smith Street window inviting passersby to a closing party. Five months later, The Fall Café was still steaming scrambled eggs and wrapping breakfast burritos, but customers knew the end was near. For one thing, the chalkboard remained in the window. Similarly, the art on the wall, a rotating assortment of amateur collages, non-representational portraits, and dreary urban landscapes, hadn’t changed in a year, and for the final few months of 2011, there were never paper towels in the bathroom. Instead, a message, scrawled in red on a sheet of loose-leaf, chastised customers for flushing them. “If you want dry hands, use your pants,” the note read.

I knew the owner only as Henry, and he reminded me of those old men Woody Allen describes at the beginning of Annie Hall—the guys who wander into cafeterias dribbling saliva and screaming about socialism. Five foot nothing and whippet thin, Henry had the body of an ex-jockey, his neck, arms, and legs a spidery map of veins and tendons. His movements were strange and spastic, and I liked to watch him dart around the café, arranging tables and chairs in a pattern only he could see. He moved like a bee and had a voice like one too, nasal and slightly swallowed. Customers heard his high-pitched murmuring as he tidied, his squeaky rants about the news as he scanned the papers. We laptop users rolled our eyes at his distracting antics, but they were also why we kept coming back.

The Fall Café became mine in 2005 when I started dating a girl who lived on Smith and Douglass, just a few blocks away. I was a grad student upstate at the time and I’d visit for four-day weekends as often as I could. Her apartment was small, poorly lit, and she had a roommate, as well as cats—all of them, roommate and cats alike, ornery and peevish. When my girlfriend went to work on Mondays or Fridays, I’d escape with my books to the coffee shop, order an endless mug, and sit near the window for a few hours, gazing blankly at the passing strollers, truant teenagers, and local Cobble Hill culture.

I began to recognize the regulars, and though I never talked much to anyone, I eavesdropped with abandon and picked up their names when the baristas would call out orders. There was Stan, a stocky Japanese gent who liked English muffins and rolled his own smokes after eating; Sanjay, an amateur economist of some sort, who loved the merits of free markets and machiattos; and Ali, a Yale professor, whose essay on Melville’s poetry I found online and once read in a pause before a refill. I learned the names of employees, too: Rachel; the two musicians, both named Chris; Becky; Scott; and Jerry, Henry’s muscle, the strongman who hauled in supplies from the beverage depot and left, I suppose, with beans. The Fall Café was a place where no one knew my name, I knew theirs, and free Wi-Fi allowed me to google their lives.

Even when graduate school ended and the girlfriend became my wife, I remained among The Fall Café’s faithful. The wife and I established our domestic lives together, bought furniture and kitchen utensils, a coffeemaker and a teapot. We were equipped to brew our own and did; yet, most Saturday mornings and every snow day I made my way to sip from Henry’s cups.

The coffee, though, was never what drew me there. Baggy and flat, the brew tasted like it was left out overnight to thaw. I wasn’t there for the food either. The place sold oatmeal and muffins, soups and shrink-wrapped baked goods. The food was meant to keep coffee drinkers from burning holes in their stomach, not for savoring or making the neighborhood’s “best of” list.

I came back for the down-at-the-heels nobility of Henry’s establishment. I liked the signs near the door ordering customers to bus their own tables. I liked the music played by the people who worked there—Pavement and Sonic Youth one day, bluegrass, nineties hip-hop, or Motown the next. I liked that the scuffed wood floors had blurry imprints of fallen leaves, which might have been an aesthetic choice but, just as easily, might have been from a failure to sweep. I liked that on two different occasions a stranger asked to borrow my computer to hold a conversation on Skype.

Near the door, there was an often-occupied velvet couch, a secondhand find that coughed out dust whenever anyone sat down. On rainy days, a street person might rest there for a spell, drying out the dirty contents of his plastic shopping bags. Then, as soon as he’d leave, a customer at one of the tables, someone who’d been there the whole time, would move to the couch and feel grateful for the chance to recline. I liked that, too.

Like me, Stan, Sanjay, and the others never left, but the crowd at The Fall Café thinned over the years as the neighborhood changed. Trendier spots opened nearby, places that advertised organic joe and vegan scones. There were probably paper towels in the bathrooms as well. Smith Street more and more resembled an eastern outpost of Manhattan, and from inside the café, I’d watch couples peer into the window before moving on to someplace Zagat-rated. Maybe they didn’t want to bus their own table; perhaps they’d seen the wood floors and the couch and opted for something cleaner. Their loss, I’d think, flicking an ant away from my breakfast.

Several Saturdays ago, after a weekend away, I walked to The Fall Café, hoping to get through a stack of students’ essays. The place was shuttered. A work order adhered to the window, and renovations were already underway for a new place called Trattoria, a name I have trouble pronouncing.

Nothing of Henry’s was visible from the street. I looked for a note, an explanation of what happened to the café. I knew, of course, but part of me wanted a good-bye, a thank-you for all the years of loyalty. The window chalkboard was gone, and the only words on the shutters were inked in graffiti. The Fall Café closed, and no sign, no story, no paper towel, told what happened.

Nicholas Soodik is a high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What bothers me is when they leave and I see their tip.

Hordes of European and South American tourists come through the restaurant and leave paltry tips or none at all, unless we add it to their bills. Just last week a family of eight from Colombia spent a hundred and twenty dollars on dinner and left a ten dollar tip. They waved at me when they left, thinking we were best friends because I spoke to them in Spanish, have a friend living in their hometown and plan on traveling to their country soon. I felt bad for resenting them, but it was a slow night and I needed all the tips I could get.

It’s not their fault they’re unfamiliar with our tipping system. They don’t know that, as a waitress, my hourly wage is less than the Mexican dishwasher’s. But fortunately it’s not the restaurant that pays most our check—it’s the customers and their tips.

The West Village restaurant I’ve been working at for four months serves Balkan and Mediterranean cuisine. We also have a wine bar, and though we do have wine from Italy, France, and Spain, many of the regulars come here to try our wine from the Balkans—stuff they can’t really find at other restaurants. But the French are different. They come here to drink Bordeaux.

On slow nights we pass out wine coupons. A customer with a coupon gets a free glass of our house wine. Usually when people get free wine, they feel inclined to order food, drink more wine, or at least leave a cash tip. It’s because of the coupons that a young French couple ended up at the bar.

Though they finish their glasses of our house red—a Pinot Noir from Italy, they make it known that it had not met their expectations. It is not my favorite either, but I’ve never complained about a free glass of wine. At least our coupon ploy worked because they decided to buy two more glasses of wine, and because they are French they felt entitled to sample over half our wine list.

Most customers, when they dislike a wine, will politely ask to sample something else, but this French couple made a histrionic show of their disapproval. Their lips, which arched and curved gracefully when speaking to each other in French, puckered grotesquely and they vigorously shook their heads at every wine they tried until they finally settled on two glasses of Bordeaux.

“Eet reminds us of home,” they said, and ordered some meats and cheeses to accompany their wine. Their cheeks got rosy as they imbibed and spoke softly. If they were bitching about our wine selection I would not have been able to tell by their tone since the French language seems to be devoid of hard consonants. They could have been comparing the Tempranillo to horse piss and it would have all sounded like docile cooing to me. There are some moments when I almost thought the French couple was cute, but I always managed to recover my senses.

After sipping the same glasses of Bordeaux for two hours they finally requested the bill twenty minutes after we were supposed to close. The man left a tip of one dollar and twenty cents after spending over twenty dollars. He smiled at me as they grabbed their coats to go, as if the experience had been equally endearing for both parties.

A buck twenty? Oh no, buddy. You can keep your smile.

With that smile he is in the same club as the Colombians and numerous other international visitors. The whole herd of them will have grinned and waved their way through countless New York City restaurants by now, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are a waitress’s worst nightmare. The Colombians were a lost cause, but it was not too late to reach this Frenchman. It was not about the money. It’s not like a bill of twenty-something dollars will ever fetch a large tip. It’s just hard for me to let bygones be bygones.

For my mission to be successful I had to quickly engage the French couple in this small talk before they left, and I had to do it with a smile—though all I really wanted to do is fling a glass of Bordeaux in their faces.

“So, how long have you been here?” I asked, trying to look casual with my elbows on the bar.

“Oh, I hev been here fur a monz,” explains the girl. “I hev an intairnsheep,” she added. “He eez my friend. He eez visiting for a week,” she said of her male companion, who offered another ridiculous smile.

“Okay!” I said, hoping the foreigners would not detect my false enthusiasm. “And how long will you be staying in New York?”

“Fur two more weeks,” replied the guy. I didn’t know about the girl, but estimated that since he was a tourist he would probably eat out every meal, which meant that there were at least forty-two different waitresses he would be shortchanging.

“Hmmm, okay….that’s great!” I gushed, causing the French man to look at me expectantly, perhaps thinking I would tell him some important insider information. Like where all the actors hang out. The girl, on the other hand, had already put her jacket on. That was my cue to hurry up and stop beating around the bush.

For dramatic effect I quickly dropped my smile and peered straight into the Frenchman’s pupils. “Well, since you’ll be here for a while you might as well know that in New York City you are supposed to leave at least a fifteen percent tip.”

I guess my affectations worked because the girl suddenly started to get anxious.

“Ow much did you leave?” She asked her compatriot, her face beet red instead of cute red. In the time that she’d been here she already figured out about gratuity, but it didn’t matter what she knew if she wasn’t paying the bill.

The guy looked at me for an answer. He hadn’t even looked at the bill when he put down his cash.

“You left one dollar and twenty cents,” I said.

Words were exchanged in rapid French. The man blushed. I wish I could have sugar coated this learning experience for him, and perhaps it was bad form to educate him in front of his female companion, but as most Americans know, getting schooled on another country’s dining etiquette while abroad is hardly ever a graceful experience.

Most people react by getting defensive or repeating the obvious. “Well, it’s not like that in my country,” they say before expounding on the virtues of their way of doing things. I waited for the Frenchman’s rebuttal, but never got one.

“I’m sorry, I deed not know,” he said, which surprised me.

The man seemed so genuinely remorseful I felt obliged to dish out some good old American optimism. “Well, it’s okay, because now you know!”

He put two more dollars on the bar, which I did not expect him to do. Now it was my turn to feel remorseful. I decided to appeal to the French’s sense of patriotism in an attempt to uplift his spirits and quell an impending sense of guilt.

“Yeah, things are different in France. In France your waitresses get a wage …and….and…gratuity is included in the bill…” My discourse devolved into babble about living wages, vacation time and health care, until eventually the Frenchman’s smile crept back onto his face before the couple left.

“Good bye! Come back again!” I said out of habit, knowing they wouldn’t.

Robin Kilmer graduated from Bard College in 2007 and worked for three years at a public school in the Bronx. She hopes to one day successfully converge two diametrically opposing forces: writing and making a living. Until that day she is working as a nanny (and a waitress).

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

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

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

“It’s Tarzan!”Amy shrieked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading on September 23 will be:

Rob Williams - Bear Patrol 

Lily Shen - It Is Easy To Speak Chinese

Kenneth P. Nolan - Farrell’s

Nathaniel Page - Spanked 

The host is Connor Gaudet - Hung Out

About The Readers...

I got a beer, walked into a corner and rested against a broken office chair. The Lower East Side looked like a bunch of moving lights from the opaque glass in the windows. The ceiling used to be white at some point but had now turned brownish grey. Words and shapes were drawn all over it. It looked like a used piece of paper that had been flying out in the wind for too long, from one garbage heap to the other. Behind the bartender, the wall was filled with all sorts of stickers and tags: some ironic, some radical and some obscene. The bar was packed. Every stool around the bar table was taken. Those standing made a parallel line near the glass windows, leaving hardly a foot’s space to walk between them and the people sitting. But no one was doing too much walking that night. Everyone just drank and talked to their companions. Every once in a while, someone started talking to the group next to them and formed another group.

A middle-aged woman sat across from me and sipped her drink. Someone came from behind her and spanked her hard on her large buttocks. The slap made her rise up a little from her stool. She looked at the person behind her, recognized him and gave him an affectionate hug. They must have held each other for at least a minute, after which he spanked her again a few times and then went across the bar to meet other people. A few minutes later an older man walked in and caressed the woman’s hair. She kissed him. They sat together and made out for the next hour or so.

A few skateboarders stood against the wall next to me. Their group kept changing as new people came in and some people left. A beautiful black woman with a mohawk sat on a windowsill, her arms wrapped around a girlfriend, as she chatted with the skateboarders.

I sipped my beer and talked to the woman standing on the other side of me. She was a music journalist from San Francisco and told me that it was hard for her believe New York had legalized gay marriage before California. She was at Mars Bar because she wanted to sit somewhere and think things through. She didn’t want to say which things. As we talked more she told me about finding a broken flip phone in the middle of road. Who uses a flip phone these days?, she asked me. And how would a phone be in the middle of the road like that? “Maybe some stupid hipster thought it was ironic to still use a flip phone and dropped it while speeding on his fixie?” I said. “I have a fixie.” she said. A few minutes later she left and I got my second beer.

Seven years ago, my first year in New York, I tried to go to CBGB one Friday night. It was the last sign of the edgy punk days of the Lower East Side, I had heard. When I got to the door they asked me for a twenty-five-buck cover. The neighborhood had gentrified so much, apparently, that even the temple of un-gentrified times was charging heavy money. I didn’t pay it. CBGB closed down and was replaced by a John Varvatos store, where you can pay a lot of money to buy clothes that remind you of artists that didn’t have a lot of money. A very fitting tribute, I feel.

East Village and Lower East Side dive bars weren’t like that. They remained cheap and they remained dirty even as the neighborhood around them cleaned up. Mars Bar had been one of those places. But instead of being dirty, relaxed, and lazy like some others, say Holiday Cocktail Lounge, it was dirty, edgy and alive.

On a New Year’s Eve, six years ago, I sat there and sipped my last whiskey of the night. It was about 3:30 in the morning. The man in the next seat had flopped down on the bar table and was snoring. He woke up, grabbed my shoulder and said, “You think this is cold? Vermont is cold.” I wished him a Happy New Year and he went back to sleep.

During my first four years in the city I went to Mars Bar quite often for their four-buck shots of Jack Daniels. It reminded me of another time: not of New York City — I didn’t live here in that another time — but of bars, when bars were simply places you went to meet people you knew and drink or to hide away from people you knew and drink. No big-screen TVs, no bouncers. There was also the beauty of my own hypocrisy; I loved to be around a rough-edged group of young semi-punks and older crusties, drink cheap drinks, and then take a cab back to my luxury apartment 10 minutes away. As time passed, Mars Bar got into more tourist guidebooks, blogs and best-of lists. Slowly more people like me started showing up. They were happy to be in a seedy dive bar like they would have been in a zoo. I stopped going.

When I heard it was closing, I wanted to go there at least once more. So there I was. There was a constant flow of people coming in. Some stayed- but most came in, took a look, and left. A couple wearing small backpacks walked in. The woman had a New York tourist guidebook in her hand. They discussed, deliberated for a moment and decided to stay. He went to the bar to get drinks and she put their backpacks in a corner.

A few minutes later, a man from the other side of the bar decided to walk on the bar table. People cheered and clapped. He put his hands up and touched the ceiling and walked a couple of times back and forth while pushing up against the ceiling. The crowd shook their beer bottles and sprayed them on him as he strutted past them. He looked around the crowd as if for a signal. The crowd cheered. He unzipped his trousers and shook his penis around. Then he proceeded to do a few pushups on the bar table before zipping himself back up and going back to the corner he had come from. People went back to their conversation. I looked for the couple with the guidebook. They had left.

I left after one more drink. That stretch of Second Avenue was bustling. Beefed-up gay dudes in yuppie clothes stood outside Urge Bar, and a few guys in tight undies and wife-beaters stood outside Cock Bar. A flock of pretty girls in short black dresses shuffled around on the road and tried to flag down cabs that were off duty or taken. I walked towards the Pak Punjab deli for a samosa chaat, got it to go, and jumped in a livery cab.

Mars Bar closed down this week, for good.
 

Another man said, “Well, the world ends every day.”

“And it begins every day!” I said. I’m usually the optimistic one in a crowd. I also believe in everything: ghosts, King Arthur, Robin Hood, the Loch Ness Monster, conspiracy theories and true love, amongst other things. So May 21st was a challenge as it’s hard to be an optimist on a day you believe the world could end. There’s no denying the world can end on any given day, but I would much rather it be a surprise. I must admit that when I found out about the world ending in May of 2011 I felt a little gypped, as I had expected to enjoy a whole year of my life before having to worry about the world ending in 2012.

Of course, the End of the World is a common theme in humanity’s collective memory. We are obsessed with our own demise and our collective ego does not allow us to separate our fate with that of the Earth’s. So, naturally, during catastrophes like the Black Death we assumed the world was ending. In reaction to the forecasted doom, many practiced extreme penitence and flogged themselves. These flagellants rolled into towns carrying the plague with them. Since misery loves company, the flagellants claimed they could cure plague victims and perform miracles in an effort to persuade others to join them. Some people, seeing that the plague did not discriminate between sinner or saint, resorted to hedonism and debauchery so they could at least go out with a bang. Though the Earth has continued to continue, the world has ended in many ways already. The world as the Native Americans knew it, for example, ended the day Columbus landed on Hispaniola.

The first time I heard about the end of the world was in 2007. There was a special about Nostradamus on the History Channel and he predicted that the world would end in 2012. I found out the day before a test for grad school. I was a New York City Teaching Fellow getting my Masters in Teaching while working full time as a classroom teacher. To prepare for the test I was diligently Googling all the names and theories and laws that I had failed to pay attention to in class. After learning that the world might end in five years I saw the test not as a step towards my future, but as an obstacle preventing me from relishing every last moment of my life on Earth. I found my way to the nearest bodega and got some beer.

At the bodega a funny thing happened. The sliding glass door guarding the beer looked innocuous and the handle felt normal when I gripped it hard with all the weight of my new knowledge, but as I pulled it, instead of sliding obligingly to the right the door started keeling over right on top of me and I thought I would be one of the lucky ones to die before shit hit the fan. Though it would have been painful to be impaled by hundreds of glass shards, at least there would still be people around to mourn my passing.

The door fell on top of me knocking me against a shelf. But it bounced off my body as if I was made of plush before tossing itself to the floor and smashing into a thousand pieces; none of which touched me. Was it a miracle or was I just lucky? At any rate I was comforted by the fortunate outcome of this near death experience and took it as a sign that I shouldn't so readily believe in the worst.

Three years later, when I was still a teacher in the Bronx, I was in my classroom proctoring a state-mandated practice test. My students had already taken at least ten such practice tests in different subjects. This test came on the heels of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Some of my students, who didn’t have younger siblings or cousins, had been bringing used clothes to class to send to Haiti. My students were quite the humanitarians, but there isn’t a state-mandated test that measures that.

Five minutes after I had distributed the test booklets, one of my students, Eladio, turned to me and said, "Ms. Kilmer, maybe 2012 will happen."

It was not unlikely that my students equated all of these tests with the death of a certain part of their soul, and that perhaps Eladio was using a clever metaphor to express his feelings regarding all of this testing. But I wasn't sure.

"Why do you say that?" Though Eladio was taking a test and as the proctor I should have scolded him for talking, this was a matter of tantamount importance. After all, I know how hard it is to take a test while the end of the world is on your mind.

"Well, first there was an earthquake in Haiti, then there was an earthquake in Chile, and this morning there was an earthquake in some place called...Turkey?"

Eladio was one of the first students to know about the earthquake in Haiti and one of the first to vocalize his desire to help. He loved watching the news and telling me about it, and now he was informing me about this earthquake that I was not even aware of.

I told Eladio that many scientists say that 2012 is not going to happen. It was the least I could do. In retrospect, I should have told him that yes, 2012 will happen, right after 2011, and right before 2013. Not sure if his fear had been dispelled, I wondered if he was thinking of five thousand and one better things he could be doing with his limited time than taking that practice test.

In the hours that led up to the projected end of the world this May, I found myself wondering how I should spend my time before the apocalypse commenced. Believers quit their jobs and spent what they thought would be their last days at Columbus Circle passing out flyers. I, on the other hand, wanted to make sure I was at least enjoying myself. Conveniently, it was a Saturday, a day on which I tend to enjoy myself anyway.

My friend and I ended up spending the whole day walking along the Hudson River and working up an appetite. We decided to get pizza at an Italian restaurant. I’ve been trying to mind my budget, so I was going to pass on ordering wine. I explained this to the waiter since he looked offended when I declined to look at the wine menu.

“Ha!” He mocked my logic. “The world is going to end, so if I were you I would just buy wine and forget about the food!” My friend and I laughed and decided that, what the heck, we might as well get both.

As the day progressed I started using the Apocalypse as an excuse for mild misconduct. My friend and I left a bar without paying for our drinks, bought more beer at a bodega and drank it on a stoop. We saw people fighting, boozing, carousing and canoodling on the street. But then again, if there hadn’t been fighting, boozing, carousing and canoodling on the streets of New York City I might have been more likely to believe the end was near. And because this is New York City, where anything can happen, it was strange, but not too strange that I ended up sitting next to a white man in a Native American headdress after the deadline for the end of the world.

The man in the headdress confessed that he was an alcoholic. I wondered if alcoholism is another form of flagellation. Standing outside Columbus Circle all day passing out flyers certainly is, and debauchery is rampant in New York City on any given day. In some ways not much has changed since the Black Death. I thought about Eladio and what he might have done on May 21st. It was a comfort to know that since it was a Saturday he couldn’t have possibly been taking a test.

“Mickey Skin,” he said. He ran his hand over his scalp, then held his fist in Henry’s face, knuckles tattooed “SKIN.”

Henry nodded, feigning appreciation. “Henry,” he said. They shook.

“Hank,” Skin said, “This is a cool joint, but there’s too many fags.”

Henry usually smiled and nodded with most of the sentiments offered in a conversation, whether he agreed with them or not, simply out of convenience, but he did not smile or nod at this. He stalled, wanting neither to concur, nor to rile up the short, muscular skinhead. Henry figured his Doc Martin’s had probably kicked their share of shit.

“This music’s gay,” Skin said. The bar was called Mix-Tape and the jukebox was loaded with garage rock and new wave. Hip, but not excessively so for the Lower East Side.

“I like it,” Henry shrugged, quietly rebelling against Skin’s prejudice. He wanted to escape but figured since the guy had bought him a beer he owed him a few minutes of conversation. He didn’t really have anyone else to talk to either, and part of the reason for being in New York was to experience new things. Conversing with a skinhead was certainly new to Henry.

“I’m going to this party in BK,” Skin said, “Wanna come?”

“BK? Brooklyn? I’m supposed to meet some friends here in a bit,” Henry said. A lie. He had no friends in this place.

Skin rolled his eyes. He was wearing a yellow backpack with a cell phone slung between the straps. He whipped the phone open and held it away from his face like a tape recorder. “Yo, where you at?” There was no reply. “Fuckin’ thing.”

“Why don’t you text them?” Henry said, pressing mime buttons with his thumb.

“I don’t know how to do that shit,” Skin holstered the phone.

The two men stood there, out of things to talk about. Henry sipped his beer to camouflage the silence. Two black girls passed and stood at the bar.

Skin nudged Henry and mumbled. “Why don’t you get on that?” Shyness and desire hid behind his mask of aggression.

Henry was surprised at his choice of women. “Me? I never know what to say.”

“Yeah, me neither man. That’s always my problem,” Skin said. The conversation sprung into momentum.

“You just gotta go talk to them. The more you stand around thinking about it, the more nervous you’re gonna get. You just gotta turn off your brain and go.”

“So do it.”

“I'm not the one who likes them," Henry said.

"That's why you should go. Set me up."

Henry sipped his beer. A guy with dark hair splayed on his scalp like a banana peel started talking to Skin.

Henry was suddenly struck with paranoia that Skin had put something in his drink; some kind of drug or poison. He pretended to sip it while he looked around the bar, then he slipped into the bathroom and dumped it down the sink. He looked at himself in the mirror while he peed, his face lazy with drink. He laughed at the absurdity of the situation, his paranoia. He went back into the bar and saw Skin pretending to punch the banana-haired man in slow motion. Henry thought he should try to find an exit out the back so he wouldn’t have to walk past Skin on his way out. He sifted through the pages of the jukebox, stalling for time, and decided, finally, that the bouncer, a large black man, would probably take his side if Skin attacked him, so he headed out the front door. He checked over his shoulder a couple of times as he went down the street, but Mickey Skin wasn’t following him.