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Dental Cares
by Daniel Menaker 02/26/2010Neighborhood: Featured, Upper East Side
I have had a lot of trouble with my teeth, having been born with weak enamel in store in my childhood, a nutritional illness that almost killed me as an infant, and then a horribly incompetent dentist during my adolescence. Norbert Vaughan, who sadly encouraged his patients, even his teen-aged patients, to call [...]
Nina’s Wedding
by Marilyn Horan 02/12/2010Neighborhood: Park Slope
If my twenty-year-old sister Janet not been maid of honor, I would not even have been invited to my neighbor Nina Milano’s wedding. Nina was 18, one year younger than I, and her fiancé Larry was just 21 on their wedding day, not that unusual in 1969, when many young men, Larry included, were [...]
And Bingo Was Her Name
by Christine Nieland 02/06/2010Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, West Village
She looked like a collection of spheres stuck together to represent the female body. Round little torso, round little head, protruding chipmunk cheeks like those on the marionettes on that TV show “Spitting Image.” Dark little eyes that glared from some bottomless well of anger and pain. Her mail came addressed to two completely different names. [...]
Under Jimmy’s Awning
by Brendan Patrick Hughes 08/22/2009Neighborhood: Times Square
Jimmy’s Corner isn’t like other Times Square bars–those oversized Irish pubs made of dark, polished wood or the theater-crowd cocktail lounges with big windows, people inside looking like they’re drinking in a department store display case. Jimmy’s is a dim, narrow cave of a bar, a hunk of coal in a glittering craton. Late in [...]
Undertow of Summer
by Justine Blau 08/05/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
My radiant, delusional mother, my two older brothers, and I lived in second-rate hotels and one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan from 1961, when I was five, until 1967. We’d sporadically get locked out of wherever we were staying for not keeping up with the rent, have our possessions confiscated, and spend the night sleeping in Central [...]
Madame Butterfly Goes Down
by Thomas R. Pryor 05/04/2008Neighborhood: All Over, Manhattan
Saturday night, I had smelly cheese, cashews, black bean dip, spooned Hellmann’s and three Coronas for dinner. I over-bought crap for company, it’s causing me stomach problems, but I have to finish the stuff. Sunday morning, I met a writing editor on Cathedral Parkway who took too much money to tell me too little about my [...]
Kill Whitey Day
by Michele Carlo 04/27/2008Neighborhood: Bronx, East Bronx
I was standing in the basement of Macy’s Parkchester in The Bronx, in a line of what seemed like a thousand teenagers, smoking both cigarettes and weed, chanting and cheering and waiting for Ticketmaster to open. Adult shoppers were non-existent and salespeople had abandoned their posts either in foreknowledge or in fear, except the lone [...]
Naughty and Not Nice on Craigslist
by Daphne 12/15/2007Neighborhood: Midtown
As always when I break up with a boyfriend, I go back to trusted Craigslist. There’s something comforting about shopping for sex on the internet. Safety behind the screen. This time, I was more daring. I wanted a dominant man. This much I knew for sure. I’ve had a lot of mediocre sex in my [...]
Jeremy the Liar
by Alia Akkam 11/04/2007Neighborhood: SoHo
“No, it should be to your left,” I whispered into my cell, trying not to disrupt the hushed conversations of the infatuated couples around me. Jeremy couldn’t find the bar, it was tucked away upstairs from a bakery, so I guided him to it over the phone. With each direction I spouted out, I grew giddier, [...]
Blood Brothers
by Evan Ginzburg 08/24/2006Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Flatbush
Edgar was a nice kid. He was soft-spoken and respectful and called my mom “Ma’am.” (I had never called anyone “Ma’am” in my life.) Edgar had to be coaxed over and over before he relented and agreed to call my dad “Artie” like the rest of the kids did. Edgar wasn’t handsome like Peter, or stocky [...]
I Lose My Cherry
by Thomas R. Ziegler 08/10/2006Neighborhood: East Harlem
It’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday in April 1973, and my first-day tour on the job, when that seminal alarm sounds. The disembodied voice of the dispatcher booms from loudspeakers throughout the firehouse, “Attention the following units…Engines 83, 60, 41-1 Ladders 29, 17-2 Battalion 14…Respond to…” The box number and address are given, and then the dispatcher adds, [...]
Platza at the Russian Baths
by Thomas Beller 06/04/2006Neighborhood: Lower East Side
This passage appears in the novel, The Sleep-Over Artist. Alex hadn’t really believed that Katrina would agree to visit him in New York, and so he threw himself into the task of convincing her with a kind of easy abandon, as though it were a joke really, and he was teasing her. She had children, after [...]
