First we all ignored him, shifting uneasily in our seats. If you looked, he’d jiggle the Styrofoam cup that held his wages at you, as if toasting, and wink. Then we read and reread the advertisements for “The Vampire Diaries” and Brooklyn law offices lining the paneling overhead. When The Beggar stood up clumsily, as the train rocked along its icy rails, some of us tensed our jaws and shut our lids in mock sleep —as one does when avoiding guilt for not feeling like rummaging through pockets and purses for spare change. Our noses prickled as the soiled, old man shuffled nearer, chewing on his empty gums. The folks closest to him stood up from their seats and sat further away, or turned their body toward the window. The rest of us turned up the volume on our iPods and fixed our expressions to neutral aloofness.

Despite this, we heard—

“Don’t worry. I ain’t gonna inconvenience yous tree-scum schmucks. I’m off duty!” followed by hoarse chuckles. “Yous thinking yous the shits of the shit, yea-ah? Sittin’ there, worryin’ about those bills …that leave yous too spent to enjoy all the big things yous worked for at that big ol'job that makes yous too tired to enjoy them anyways! know what I got? I got free seatin,’ free heatin,’ all around views. Not much money to spend. But no bills to pay. Yea-ah! I’m as good as better. Look at yous, sorry ass people. Frowni-frown- frownin’. Yous all sittin’ on MY bed. Yous in my LIVING room. Yea-ah! That's right. Stop pretendin’ like yous don’t know it... ”

And with that, he began hooting so hard it flanked our ear-drums. And those of us with our eyes sealed were forced to open them to The Beggar of Brighton 5th street— who stood in the middle of the train, empty, pastel-blue seating along each side. The pom- pom bounced in animated circles over his forehead as he slapped his knee with his left hand, and with the other jutted at us a long, nicotine-stained expletive with a pitted nail.

Glora Manuilova lives in Brooklyn's bootleg Soviet Russia-- Brighton Beach (or "Little Odessa," as some call it). She teaches World Humanities at The City College of New York, where she's also an MFA candidate. Website: http://amerikanish.tumblr.com/

It is not every day that one visits an Ashram for yoga and encounters a “retired” Mafia soldier, adrift there because of illness and poverty. From my end, I envisioned a documentary film covering his faded world; however, for his own security - though the events occurred many years ago - he wished to limit his exposure to the following narrative.

If you travel on the Cross Bay Parkway, past what is called Howard Beach, you probably would not give it much of a glance. More likely you are traveling through the Ozone Park district to the Rockaways. But if you look to the right, you would notice a strip of non-descript stores and located behind them, ordinary, single-family homes. Howard Beach’s claim to fame was via its most famous resident - the now deceased, "Dapper Don” John Gotti. It was there that plans were made to develop, expand and make profitable various criminal enterprises that would make him infamous. This is the story of Johnny.  He was only one of the minor minions but in speaking with him, he was quite open in his respect for Gotti and proud to describe his path to the mob.

Johnny is tall and gaunt with a wide, open face marked by a certain sensuality that shapes the contours of his mouth. His language is marked with “rough” talk, but a beguiling smile belies his claim to be a “stand up guy." You cannot help noticing the shadow of a one time “tough guy,” but now a relic; ravished by time and cancer. He proudly defines himself as gangster; actually a Mafia foot soldier...

First, I want you to know that I was always a stand up guy. Personality doesn’t change. I was from a large family and we were all different in our ways. I respected my father, but he was distant like many men of his generation. A World War II veteran, he would never talk about his experiences. He was a hard, adventuresome man and in his youth even acted as a guide for hunters in Maine. Eventually he made his way to Long Island after marrying my mom and became a truck driver then later a fisherman. Myself, I didn’t like fishing. I didn’t like studying. I was always a person of action.

I would say my family was very straight but it wasn’t “Ozzie and Harriet”. Father was a driven guy and mother was overwhelmed with seven of us. They did their best but couldn’t do much with such a large brood. We were left on our own. In contrast to my brothers and sister who were into education, I liked the active, more physical world and hung around with older, hard guys. Since I was big and strong for a teenager, they accepted me. As for my own large family, I only ever had a connection with my brother John. He never made “judgments” but we still saw the world differently. He was interested in saving humanity and I, in making it in the world the best way possible. The family ignored me and with my negative attitude toward school, assumed I was “going to fall on my face”. For a while I worked in the family business and I learned early to play two types of lives; the “knock around life style”, where one lives for the excitement of the moment”; and the straight life, which I found to be mostly a pain with its predictable hills and valleys. But even with these two kinds of lives, I was a family man; the kids came first.

There were always challenges, but I was an optimist with a faith that ultimately life is run by the angels. I believed whatever the adversity, one should figure how to make it the best way possible . In my first marriage, our new born was lethargic and had difficulty breathing. They could not handle him at the local clinic and urged us to rush him to the hospital. But there is no hospital in Howard Beach. So there I was on Cross Bay Boulevard and my car broke down. Jumping out onto the road, I tried to flag down help but no one would stop. In desperation I scooped him up in my arms and ran and ran until finally some cop picked me and brought me to the hospital. Staggering into the emergency room I screamed for a doctor. They immediately attempted to revive him but it was too late. Only years later I learned about the diagnosis of “sudden infant death syndrome". I didn’t feel anger; not at the drivers who passed me by or the failure of the doctors. I believe that when things happen, they are ordained to happen. In a way I am a religious person marked by a certain fatalism; “God chooses when to pick the flowers”.

Through a friend, I was recommended to join Gotti’s crew where I could make real money. I was invited, but not as a made man; more like a stand-in for different jobs. “When they called, I went.” I was a part time member of a crew and I knew where I stood in the pecking order. If I wanted to score in the territory of another family, I would send out feelers to learn how much it would cost to work a job on their turf. Meanwhile I was a craftsman and maintained a legitimate contracting business. I knew if I was picked up and did not have a “real job” the IRS or the cops would pounce.

Why did they let me join even though I was not Italian? Well in the straight world, you go for an interview. In that world, you need someone to vouch for you. They would tell the boss or maybe it would be a crew leader, “he can be relied on; a knock around guy, give him a shot”. We mostly functioned like a regular business. Profit was always the motive and we tried to bring in more each year. It was like a corporation with a pecking order from the top on down; and the bottom line was paramount. We were no different than the corporate raiders, except we were more likely to go to jail. We had meetings just like them. There were even family barbecues to keep us together. Anyhow it was more comfortable to socialize with the other gangsters and their families than with neighbors; we didn’t have to hide our line of work from each other since we all knew the score.

As for working for Gotti, a lieutenant vouched for me; “this guy can do the job”. I rarely interacted with him except on social occasions. He was a pleasant enough guy. Most of the time I was used as a collector or helped work the gambling weekends for high rollers. I am big and can look fierce so they used me as security, which meant keeping things peaceful and safe. The gambling crew would rent a floor in a shabby motel for the weekend and there we would set up the game tables and provide food and even women. The crew would rake in a 20% take from the gambling and, of course I would get a small piece - but it might amount to as much as two or three thousand cash for that weekend. I also had a collection route for the “numbers racket” but never prostitution or drugs. I identified with the “old timers” and they were not interested in going there.

Over the years I kept my head down and maybe I was just lucky, but I was never busted. Even if it would have happened, I was confident that someone would contact me with legal and financial support. My view was that it was important to get all my ducks in a row and if I would be hit, then I would look for the least amount of time for vacation (jail). When busted, a lawyer would probably be sent out who would suggest that should the “ducks fall” (which means convicted and go to jail), I should behave myself and keep my mouth shut. It was understood when I got out, money would be waiting for me. This made good, business sense.

For a while I served as a "bag man" but to the outside world I described myself as a “financial facilitator”. The mob trusted me to transfer their "bundles". Piles of cash were tied into blocks, fitted into garbage bags and taped up nice and neat. Money came in from various ventures but I didn’t speculate about the source just so long as I was taken care of. How they distributed it or where it was invested, I have no idea. My job was just to transfer the cash and at that time it was usually to Las Vegas; my favorite city.

One trip stands out. I was taking the back roads through Tennessee at 2:00 AM, going about four thousand miles per hour. I'mrelaxed, listening to music, I notice lights flashing behind me. The cop pulls me over and asks why am I traveling so fast on his road? I try to be cool and friendly. I explain that I am off to Las Vegas and suggest we go for a beer. I'm casual with him, though I admit my heart is pumping away. On the floor of the backseat and in the trunk, I have a few "bundles”.  He points to them but I explain, “no need to go there” and reach into my jacket. I say, “I have an envelope here that will convince you to go somewhere else. It is my intended gambling money of $15,000 and it is now yours”. This might sound cynical but wherever you are, the city or the sticks, all cops want to supplement their salary.

Finally I arrive in the City of Lights and make my way to our meeting place; not only me but “carriers” from all over. The bundles are emptied and then both are hand and machine counted. The other guys  and I wait to be rewarded, but instead of sending us out to the Strip to enjoy ourselves, they drive us out to the desert. We all get out of the limo and these bruisers who are packing order us to kneel down. I am fatalistic -“what is gong to happen is going to happen”. After several minutes of agony, they tell me, “my cards are good” and I am sent back to Vegas. Some of the guys are made to stay because they were caught short bagging. I never saw them again and I assume they found their burial plots out there in the sand. Why they'd take such a chance, I have no idea; maybe just plain stupid. If we don’t have trust, even amongst gangsters, what do we have?

To be part of that life, you need a tough temperament. Charlie, who is now on “life vacation,” was my early mentor. I met him as a kid when I joined a motorcycle gang. He taught me how to handle myself in intense situations. I learned that in this business the key is to get results with the least amount of physicality. Before sponsoring me, he arranged for a test. I guess it was like trying to get into school, but this was Mafia college. He gave me information on a guy who owed him money and was “reluctant to pay up”. I was instructed to convince him that it would be in his best interest to meet his obligation. I was given a background story, included the fact that he is a “tough son of a bitch” and two previous attempts to retrieve the debt had failed. My job was to go in with as little fan fair as possible and collect.

When I arrived at the deadbeat's deli, the first thing I did, without a word said, was to knock down the glass shelves. This was my wake-up message to remind him to meet his fiduciary responsibilities. Nobody likes to pay up to the shylock, but if you make the contract, you have to stick to the deal or there are consequences. My mentor watched my back and at the same time observed how I operated. I was successful and from then on when they needed a collector, I was the man.

It was not always so simple; sometimes there would be a fight and a few times, I got my teeth knocked out. I proved myself at the job though. In the regular world, you need to pass an exam. This was tougher. But once vouched for, there was no turning back. As a reward there was exciting, lucrative work. The word would be out, “he is a knock around guy and effective”; “give him a shot”. For example, if there was to be a truck hijacking and an additional crew member was needed, I was invited to join. They knew I would keep my head and could be counted on. Over time I became more trusted and was invited to more lucrative jobs. Like in the straight world; you do a good job and are promoted.

I am proud to say, I never needed to pack a gun because I was confident I could take care of every situation. My cue was a rage button. It was a felt sense of a rumbling fury. There would first be a “baby cry” in my voice that would build momentum until there was an explosion. The message is, “don’t be around me when I am this way.” It was a controlled anger and ended when I got my way. In many ways it was easy, I just needed to play the part of a scary gangster.

As for my family, my wife was not happy with the life. She loved the perks, but the fear of my being busted was too nerve-racking for her and it eventually broke up the marriage. My son looked at it differently.

When he finished high school he asked if he could join a crew. For him, it would be big money. I felt it was his decision to choose his life, but just as I was tested, he needed to pass and learn if there was a fit. He was big and brawny and could be physically imposing. Like how Charlie had sent me out when I was a kid, I put him to the test with a collection job - though it was actually a set-up. I instructed my pals to play act by muscling him when he arrived but not too badly as to do him harm. Well they gave him a black eye, kicked him out the door and that was the end of his career. He decided he didn’t have it in him and now has a real profession; a cop.

Do I or those “wise guys” have a conscience? I believe everyone has one. Look, I even went to Confession. The priest would tell me that he was shocked at my behavior and suggest that I do “hail Marys” and take the straight path. I knew where to draw a line. No problem for me to break someone’s thumb, but never to kill. There would be no amount of money that I would accept for that. We all have our own rules. Mine allowed me to crack some limbs but not murder.

How did I get out of this line of work? “Well, it is not like a job, where you just quit. You know too much. My cancer, which occurred a decade ago, was the “big casino” and that was my ticket out. First there was colon and then prostate cancer. The first time, I got fixed up and tried to stay healthy. The more recent bout was more difficult. First, since I had no health insurance, I went through almost two million dollars; essentially the medical costs brought me down. Once the private hospital had all of my money, it was “goodbye Charlie”. Who is the real gangster here?

Broke, it looked like the end of the rope, but I knew a lot of doctors. They taught me how to play the innocent and get medical service without paying. I kept my head straight and suffered it all; from the loss of my testicles to facing a life of homelessness. Look, all my plumbing is gone but I stay tough. Admittedly, I thought of giving up but at that time, my grandson was born and I made the decision to be around to see him grow up.

After the first bout, it was important to regain my strength but also my finances; so I returned to my favorite place, Las Vegas. I am a good gambler but I am also a guy who enjoys going to the edge. Teaming up with a friend, we decided to cheat the House. We used a number of tricks and were successful, but eventually we were caught flipping chips in a grade B casino. Four husky guys came up behind me and another four surrounded my partner. They quietly escorted us to the parking garage. There, we were given a choice; a one way trip to the desert or the cinder block routine. It was a no-brainier and I just asked them to get it over with. They placed my arm between the blocks, and broke it with a bat. For my friend, they chose to break his legs. They were gentlemen and dropped us off at the nearest emergency room. “I was not angry; to me, they were doing their job.”

I wondered to myself, why I took the risk since I could make money by legitimate gambling. For me it was the excitement of the score; the juice high. It was the same feeling when I did collections; it was not just about money but the “juice” flowing through the veins.

Now I make do in a totally different world; an Ashram, a million miles away from Howard Beach. Almost homeless and without resources, I came at my brother’s invitation. In contrast to the Mafia guys who have no illusions, here I think most of the people are full of shit and play holy. I openly tell them I used to be a gangster and that seems to be okay with them and ensures they don’t mess with me. Meanwhile I help out and my mechanical skills save the Ashram a shit load of money. In turn I found a temporary home.

In the end, the issue has never been one of conscience for the life I chose, but regrets. I failed to do more to help myself in this life. Meanwhile I am a survivor and wait to see what the angels will bring. 

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.

A Barney's window display of Lady Gaga's work has legendary multi-media performance artist Colette's notorious creations written all over it.

Colette, whose seminal performance art and multi-media installations originated out of New York City's vibrant art scene in the 1970's has traveled to museums and galleries all over the world; including the Guggenheim; MOMA; and The Whitney.

Upon seeing Barney's Lady Gaga window display in midtown, Colette takes to the streets in protest to send a clear message to the Gaga camp that Colette is standing outside the door and must be invited in and given proper respect.

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in Manhattan my new workplace was called Solidaridad Humana—Human Solidarity. It was a giant shipwreck of a public school on Suffolk and Rivington Streets, long abandoned and vandalized before being commandeered by militants and mural painters with barely enough funds to clean the graffiti. The temperature inside was ridiculous even in March: we had no heat from oil. But there was plenty of heat from enthusiasm. The students were all recent arrivals from the Dominican Republic. Their population in New York was still small then, and they were breathtakingly ambitious. I had the vague sense they worked in shady places for illegal alien wages, and I knew they wanted clean labor in bright offices and big auto repair shops run by Americans. I knew because those were the jobs whose vocabulary I was supposed to teach them. And these were the words we used. We never talked about how they made a living in the meantime.

 I was young and cute with Jewish chick hippie body hair, and the female students kept saying, “Miss! You need to clean your eyebrows!” They didn’t mean it as an insult; the overarching vibe at Solidaridad Human was that everyone was beautiful—and since everyone was so hopped up on the place, that sentiment was heartfelt. The girls were curvy and had names like Leydy. The boys were polite and adorable. Even the old people were sexy, the men in their baggy tango suits on Fridays when we all stayed late and ate big squares of Dominican cornmeal pudding—majarete—and put salsa music on a boom box and danced; the matron-aged, worried women with makeup nonetheless, and heroically bared old cleavage.

 I ran a tight ship but a fun ship. “Teacher,” a student said once when I had them sing Joni Mitchell, “In this class it’s not just about how to work or how to buy a subway token. Teacher you love the English language!” Once during a punch-card lesson, I was thinking about last night with my boyfriend and the students saw my face and started laughing. Then Leydy announced she was marrying Joanny. Maritza started going with Rafy. It was hot in my class—there were even rumors that the hottest girl of all, a gloriously tall, rouged-cheek-boned 22 year old named Altagracia, was very ardent about Elvis and Emmanuel, and the class was so warm and mellow that the guys weren’t fighting over her but instead were sharing. A triangle? “Wow,” I thought, “The Lower East Side is burning!”

 One day in late March I got a new pedagogy idea. I would tape-record some stuff off WNYC, bring it into class, and play it—over and over and over if need be—so the repetition would drum my students with gradual and indelible comprehension.

 We started with the weather. “Blah blah blah blah blah rain blah blah,” I imagined them hearing at first, and I was right. “Rain teacher,” Elvis said. “I hear ‘rain.’

 “Good, class!” I chirped. “Let’s listen again.

 BlahblahblahtodayMarchtwenty-fifthblahblahrain.

“Today, March 25!"

"Good, class! Now let's rewind and replay."

 Blah rain blahblahrainyforty-oneblah blah.

 “Rain today windy forty-one degrees!”

 And so on, through about 14 repetitions, until they had the whole report burned in their brains, complete with grammar points like the future tense and even a few modals such as “should carry your umbrella.”

 “OK, great!” I chirped again. “Now let’s try something more interesting. The news!”

 Blahblahblahblahanniversaryblahblahblah.

 “An anniversary, teacher!”

 “Blahblahwomenblah….”

 “Women in factory, teacher!”

 Blah blah blah.

“Women in factory fell.”

 Blah blah. I was really into it, with my eyes scrunched up, feeling like such a good, innovative teacher. Then I looked. And listened. There was no more English and Altagracia was crying.

 “Ay dios mio todas murieron calcinadas?” she was saying, over and over in Spanish, just as I’d wanted everyone to do in their new language. “They all burned to death? They jumped? They burned! They jumped!”

 Everyone was weeping, and not just from sympathy, I suddenly realized. On the faces of the women I saw stark fear.

 “Teacher,” Altagracia said, and her tears rolled down. “We work in these places. We sew clothes. The doors are still locked! We ask for them to be unlocked and we’re refused!” She broke into sobs.

 Elvis and Emmanuel moved toward her. Till now, whatever they had done to her or with her had been out of class and merely rumored. Now, wanting to comfort her, they risked mutual exposure and their cool. They stared at each other. The class stared at them. Everything felt dampened as it never had before.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling like a terrible teacher and desperately wanting to redeem myself. “Shall we talk about the danger and what to do about it?”

“There is nothing to do,” one of the older women said frostily in Spanish, as though I was a nice teacher but an idiot one. “Nothing except to improve ourselves. No more news tonight. Let’s do the lesson about data-entry words.”

I felt terrible for the duration of the class, and terrible when I walked in next day. The students, though, seemed fine. Leydy and Joanny were planning their wedding, mostly in Spanish but a little in English, too. Maritza was making eyes at Rafy. Altagracia, as usual, was holding court with her flushed cheekbones and smoldering rumors.

Debbie Nathan lives in Upper Manhattan. Her book, Sybil Exposed, about the making of the 1970s bestseller Sybil, is due out in October from Free Press.
 

The Roots drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson cuts through the crowd, trailing a small posse of +1s and scampering paparazzo with their flashing bulbs, and somebody carrying a walkie-talkie whispers, “I think there are models here,” to another carrying the same. Then, the music cuts out at the DJ platform––which is next to the open-bar and above the hopscotch and four-square grids––and the Hollywood humanitarian hyphenate Rosie Perez mounts the stage.

She wears a pair of wide-legged black trousers, a slim-fitting white blouse and teeters on high, leather pumps. Her skin is bright and whiskey-colored, and the expression Rosie broadcasts to the crowd posturing before her belies a concomitant reticence and rehearsedness.

“There are people out there who actually believe that the education system in America is working,” she begins. “But I ask, for whom?”

Rosie is a co-founder of the Urban Arts Partnership, a New York based initiative working to close the intellectual, social and artistic achievement gaps of underserved public school students through arts-integrated education programs. She is here to celebrate the opening of RE:FORM SCHOOL, the weekend-long pop-up contemporary art gallery-come-education reform festival––proceeds payable to the UAP––taking place at 233 Mott Street, in what was, until shuttering at the end of the ’09/’10 school year, New York City’s oldest operating parochial day-school.

Huddled figures loom from the propped-open windows that face the yard, their backlit silhouettes still and silent, pausing to hear Rosie deliver her rhetoric: “There is a disgusting and shameful prejudice, here in America, that if you are born into poverty, you must be stupid, you must have a lower capacity to learn,” she says. “I was one of those kids that they discounted. Just because I was poor and I was on welfare, no one took the time to realize that I was extremely intelligent––thank you very much.”

Rosie says this with a precocious sass in her punchy Latin accent; it’s meant to offer a bit of comic relief, but the crowd hesitates out of a practiced “post-racial” politesse.

“And what changed my mind––because I was a pissed-off young person––was that, one day, there was a special trip to see a performance of The Wiz. And when I saw this young, black girl up there, singing ‘When I think of home, I think of a place / Where there’s love overflowing’; me, the tough kid; me, the kid that used to beat up little boys––who was really, inside, a nerd, a smart nerd, who just wanted people to like me––cried like a bitch. Like a bitch.”

The crowd perks up to the profanity, taking this as its queue to cut loose a little. Of course, anyone with a pulse would see the irony here: Rosie, at her most sentimental, wasn’t looking for a laugh.

“Seeing art, live, up there, on the stage, changed me as a person. That’s why I’m part of Urban Arts Partnership. There’s a new way to teach kids, and the arts is a big part of that. I hope that tonight you reach into your hearts, but more important, I hope that you reach into your pockets and buy some of the art that’s here. Because every drop in the bucket counts, because someone’s drop in the bucket changed me for the better. Thank you.”

Beside me, a slim young man in a well-tailored pantsuit says to a leggy blonde fingering her iPhone, “So, I guess there’s art inside?” They share a mutual shrug.

* * *

The school’s interior, once populated by the bags and books and buoyancy of the student-body whose thinning number necessitated its closing, has metamorphosed into a three-story, goodwill gallery displaying work from over 150 of the country’s more prominent––publicity hungry?––contemporary artists.

The men and women milling about the halls and classrooms are a very different breed from those outside, who are mainly interested in playing catch-up and parsing party turnout. These are the collectors and gallerists and, conceivably, some are the artists.

In a cramped, coat closet-sized ex-classroom, a small audience has gathered to watch a somber man with chin-length hair play improvised cello suites––the pitch and tone of which send droplets of water leaping into the air from the two, shallow, rectangular troughs positioned on either side of the behemoth instrument. This is one of several “pieces” contributed by Michael Murphy, an artist and teacher based in Milledgeville, GA, who flew in a group of his students to help set up his super-sized installation art. The cellist was sourced and hired via Craigslist, several days prior.

Murphy’s “USA Pencil Install” is a divisive three-dimensional info-graphic comprised entirely of #2 pencils––which are wood with a black-paint coating, and capped with eraser-heads of either neon pink, green, orange or yellow rubber––and negative space. Into the clean white plaster of a high-ceilinged wall, a dot-dash system of holes has been drilled to form an outline of the United States, with like holes plotted within every square inch of the interior surface area of the nation. The pattern in which the pencils have been plugged into these holes is such that each of the fifty states is identifiable by not only its designated neon hue, but also its percentile average of high school graduates.

Beside this America, a key––written in pencil and coded with eraser-cap clusters––elucidates the value represented by each of the four colors. For the states with the fewest issued diplomas––California, Florida, and Texas, among others––the holes are left empty, bald and gaping, within the neon-orange rubber outlines of their intranational borders.

Murphy’s art is technically precise and of exceptional design; but, being location-bound––or, in the case of the cellist, human––none of it is for sale. Art über alles.

Upstairs, in a long, window-lit room with a particleboard partition situated at its center to create an ad hoc perambulate path of floorspace, framed mix-media pieces occupy just about every spare scrap of blackboard and wall. (The art here in particular, and throughout the entirety of the campus in theory, takes its inspiration from the sanctioned themes of the event––namely, Knowledge, Community, Creativity & Inspiration, and Teachers Who Inspire.)

Two art-rich seeming men in sunglasses and suit-jackets glide over to a set of framed woodcuts by the artist Scott Albrecht. One piece displays the message DON’T GIVE UP in primary colors, the other reads EVERY DAY IS A NEW DAY. They are, for a brief moment, quiet and contemplative, then one man says to the other, “I like these,” and a volunteer swoops in to inform the man that “they are $300 a piece.” “I want ‘em,” he says. The woman asks which, and Mr. Impulsive says he’ll take the pair. Purple dots are then placed beside each; they have been sold in under four seconds.

* * *

More art sells––most, in fact. Or at least that which is mobile and amenable to transit. There is live music on the blacktop, and, to the displeasure of the many parched patrons, little booze left in the ice buckets. One woman, whose skirt skims her knickers, with a neckline south of her navel, expresses audible resentment when someone luckier than she plucks a solitary cup of cabernet from within the sea of drained bottles and dropped dollar-bills.

The temporary step-and-repeat––which has been erected in the concrete alleyway between the playground and the curb––is plugged by a swell of artist-parents with babies Bjorn-swaddled to their chests; their older children zip around the playground’s perimeter on collapsable steel scooters. The party is not yet over, but it might as well be, and these children seem an odd late-addition to the after-school affair.

Curbside, at the school’s Prince Street exit, a broken-down school-bus rests upon cinderblock supports where its wheels ought to be. Layers of aerosol paint have been spritzed on its cheddar-colored body, cartoonish clouds of magenta, grape, baby-blue and silver; and for each smashed-in window, there is an open socket and a web of tempered glass that sags like twinkling lace. Above the windshield and the rear exit, and along the length of each side of its middle, a supplemental ‘T’ has been tacked onto the chains of decal-lettering; the text reads PUBLIC SCHOOL BUST in a bold, black font.

A troupe of four girls in their mid-teens swirls from around the corner at Mott and heads up Prince, toward the bus. They are shrill and sing-songy, and it looks like they are dancing even though they are not. They pause at the bus, unsure of what is before them, then move in concentric circles around its wide berth. “Fifty-four percent of dropouts ages sixteen to twenty-four are jobless?” one reads aloud, disbelieving, from the decal beside the door. Then: “High school drop outs have a life expectancy 9.2 years shorter than high school graduates?” She and her friends agree that it’s Gotta be a joke and Nuh-uh, not for real. And just as quick as they’d come, the girls again bob down the street, away from St. Patrick’s, cheeks fat from laughter, divorced from the four near-empty backpacks that flap and kick at their shoulders.

Molly Oswaks is a freelance writer and editor living in Manhattan's West Village. This is her first story to appear on the site.

A 1950’s Sunset Appetizer Book inspired the retro nibbles, including deviled eggs arranged on Tupperware’s Eggs-ceptional Server Set which, incidentally, fits into the Round Cake Taker, for easier transport, and also inverts to make a cake stand. There were classic pigs in a blanket, as well as ham and cream cheese cubes, chosen for Sunset’s pithy description: “These delectable appetizers have gay colors and the stripes of a peppermint stick.” Chicken salad, among other time-tested goodies, was served on white bread rounds cut from an old-fashioned biscuit cutter and placed on Tupperware’s spring colored containers, based on a 1950’s photo of an appetizer spread.

Gone was the angst of Tupperware parties past, the pressure I remember my own mother feeling, the result, most likely, of the conventional Greenwich housewife protocol that if you attended a Tupperware party, you were expected to return the favor and host one. (You can now buy Tupperware online and in malls).

With a nod to this kind of obsessive 1950’s entertaining, an oversized movie screen bore the silent projection of Rock Hudson and Doris Day’s Pillow Talk. That and the musical compilation, Martini Madness, provided the final touches of archness that kept the party attendees from taking the proceedings—or themselves—too seriously. The point of this Tupperware party was simple fun: see friends, eat, drink, maybe go home with a container or two. “Everyone’s thinking about the war,” said Young, appropriately clad in a red wool dress straight out of I Love Lucy (though she prefers to think of it as her Roman Holiday dress, a la Audrey Hepburn). “With all our friends attending peace marches, it seemed important to bring everyone together. To have a break,” she said. “The thought of doing a European-inspired dinner,” she added (the parties in her book all took place in Europe), “seemed completely ridiculous. Tupperware sort of follows my book into America after the war.”

Indeed Tupperware’s connection to World War II extends beyond mere timing. Earl Tupper, a freelance inventor, worked for Dupont in the1940’s, using polyetheline plastic to make gas masks and windshields for B52 bombers. In 1947, looking for domestic uses for this plastic, Tupper designed a line of high-end dinner plates, hoping they would find their way into the dining rooms of 5th Avenue.

When this venture lagged, Tupper turned his attentions further inward, that is, toward refrigerators and cupboards. Sales were modest until Tupper’s discovery of Brownie Wise, a divorcée from Detroit, who was, apparently, buying Tupperware by the hamperful. According to Young, “Tupper called Wise up. He was like, ‘Wow, how are you selling so much?’ only to realize Brownie was inviting women over to her house and giving them demonstrations, the better to sell his products. Door to door sales had been a big source of employment since the Depression,” Young continued. “This type of sale—probably why your mom felt so much pressure—was more community-based, involving people you would normally interact with socially.” In 1956, because of their balance of Bauhaus ideals of form and function on a Post-war industrial scale, Tupperware was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection, thanks to design curator Arthur Drexler.

No Tupperware party would be complete without a demonstration, of course, so as the cocktail banter began to dwindle, our evening’s representative, Nellie O’Brien, formerly a TV anchor for local stations in New York and Connecticut, took her place at the head of the Tupperware display. Wearing what looked like a white lab coat, the perky blonde confessed with a sigh, “I was organizationally challenged.” Now a self-proclaimed “organizational expert,” O’Brien’s tone was part ironic, part Born-Again preacher. “Let’s face it,” she continued, “bugs love the glue that holds bags and boxes together.” Against a chorus of groans, O’Brien recounted her personal discovery of Tupperware’s moisture-free containers, Modular Mates, one fateful night at a friend’s party. After Tupperizing her cupboards, she moved on to a more formidable concern: her refrigerator. “My freezer used to be a frozen tundra,” she admitted, wide-eyed. “It was full of UFO’s—unidentified frozen objects. There were chicken breasts frozen to the walls.” Her refrigerator was no better. “My broccoli,” she said, disgustedly. “Ugh! What nobody knows, what I didn’t know, is that food breathes at different rates.” Pausing a moment, for the weight of this to sink in, she held up a FridgeSmart container and added: “Now my broccoli stays fresh and green and crisp for five weeks.”

After a series of hoots and applause, and the demonstration of an ice cube melting with great speed in a Tupperware Ice Cream Scoop, the rapt audience reverted to Jello shots. O’Brien graciously took her cue. “If you have any further questions,” she shouted over the mounting din, “feel free to ask me. But not until I’ve had my vodka and tonic.”

Someone turned up the music. People rushed to the demonstration area for order forms and catalogues. A tall, handsome man clutching a Tupperware spatula, let out a groan. “Everyone must hold a spatula before they go,” he insisted. Across the room, a goateed man in black leather spoke excitedly into his cell phone. “Honey, have you ever heard of Tupperware?”