I like to think I have the final say on these matters, but Ernesto is already out of his seat and calling the man sir. His normal slouch has been corrected and a hand keeps his baggy jeans from falling below the waist. They shake hands and a heartbreaking gleam of admiration washes across the boy’s features. I quietly close the door while they confer in the hallway.

My respect for the military is boundless. The pride of belonging to a military family for generations is an integral part of who I am, yet I would be lying if I didn’t admit to seeing these recruiters as somewhat of a threat to New York City schools. A salesman in a crisp uniform is still a salesman with a quota to make, be it used cars or young, beating hearts.

I realize these people are simply doing their job and that Ernesto is also looking out for himself. Next year he’ll have housing and benefits. He’ll practice teamwork and the art of discipline, something he’s sorely in need of learning. Yet I also know that Ernesto doesn’t have a father in his life. His mother works tirelessly to support him, and perhaps if family dinners were eaten at home, business at the local recruitment center would not be quite as good. Suddenly there’s this man in uniform, this really cool guy who knows exactly where he stands in an uncertain world, and he’s waiting in the hall, the lobby, the school library, because he really wants to talk to you.

More often than not, it’s the quiet ones who return to show off their own uniform, peeking clean shaven cheeks and bristly heads into the doorway. The faculty always stops to make a very big deal: How’s it going? We miss you around here. Do you have any idea how proud we are?

When Ernesto’s time comes he simply can’t wait. He’s finally done with this place. Out of here, man! But did his recruiter somehow beat me? Did I fail Ernesto by not steering him in another direction? It bothers me every time it happens, seven years worth now.

“Look, Ernie, you take care of yourself, okay? Make sure you visit after boot camp.”

And then…

“Ernesto, don’t be a hero, okay? If it happens it happens, but don’t you go looking for it, alright?”

I get a great big smile and one last fist bump. Then it’s up the hall, down the steps, and straight out the door.

JB McGeever, a graduate of Stony Brook-Southampton’s MFA program, teaches Writing and Literature in NYC public schools. His stories and essays have appeared in Hampton Shorts, The Southampton Review, Newsday, and Thomas Beller’s Lost and Found: Stories from New York. The student in this essay appears under a pseudonym.

Annie didn’t reveal much about her life. All that we the friends knew was that she lived with her aunt and uncle in Baldwin Harbor. I think she mentioned having a brother, but I wasn’t sure. It never occurred to me to ask her if she had other family, but that was more about my alcoholic family secret thing. I was well trained in the keeping of secrets and turning a blind eye to reality. And, after all, this was suburbia; land of superficiality, where honest questions were rarely posed. And if they were, dodgy answers were the norm.

Turns out, Annie’s mother, Brigid, was a beatnick poet/playwright who lived with her lover, and son, Cado, in a cramped, two room apartment on the fifth floor of 175 Bleecker Street. The reason for our visit was to celebrate Brigid’s birthday. The apartment was packed with some of the strangest people I’d ever met. First off, there was Brigid herself, a very nice looking woman in her forties, with a few missing teeth, a joint in her hand and a tough, bossy way of talking to people. When Annie introduced me to her, she acted like she could have cared less about who I was, which Annie told me wasn’t true. "She treats everyone like that," she said. “And then there was Brigid’s best friend, Jenon, the Gypsy/Playwright/Social Worker from Turkey. Jenon’s lips were purple from drinking wine, her hair was in a wild afro style and when she flashed her eyes on me, I became extremely unsettled and tried to get away from Jenon, but she stood directly in front of me, practically nose to nose and asked me, in a heavily accented dramatic Gypsy dialect, “Ven ver you born?” I answered, “June, 16th,” and she went wild. She grabbed my two hands, pulled me up over to the couch and sat me down. I was so scared, my heart felt like it was nearly beating out of my chest. Jenon looked deeply into my eyes and said, in her gypsy speak, “I must tell you that you are a very high Gemini. James Joyce wrote his masterpiece, Ulysses, about June 16th.” She continued, still staring in my eyes, “You have tremendous energy, sensitivity and awareness. Your soul is on fire with wisdom and light. I know this for I, too, was born on June 16th.”

I managed to get away from Jenon and grabbed a hold of Annie. I was asking her for a joint or some kind of pill when the front door blasted open and in came two scruffy looking men in t-shirts and jeans. One I recognized immediately as Michael J. Pollard; I had just seen him in Bonnie and Clyde. The other curly headed character was introduced to me as Gregory Corso, Annie’s Godfather, who also happened to be, I later learned, an infamous Beat poet who traveled in circles with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Bowles, etc. The two of these guys were both wasted. Gregory went into the living room, laughing and talking some crazy shit while Pollard positioned himself next to the stereo player. He had a Woody Guthrie album under his arm and he put it on the turntable and played it over and over. Every time someone else came into the party, Pollard grabbed them and said, “Hey man, you got to listen to Woody Guthrie, man. He’s a genius, man” and he would drag them over to the stereo and make them listen. Whenever Pollard headed over towards me, I would take him by the shoulder, turn him around, and give a push, and he would walk back to the stereo. Meanwhile, Corso jerked off in the living room, and went wandering around the apartment with a handful of cum. He found Brigid and asked her what he should do with it. “Throw it down the toilet, you asshole.” I smoked a joint, drank some more wine and tried not to listen to the Woody Guthrie album, for the seventh time.

Get me the fuck out of here, I thought, as I moved to the other side of the room and poured myself a glass of wine and lit a cigarette. There was a very pretty woman, with blond curly hair, leaning against the wall by where Brigid kept the wine. She was quietly drinking and eyeballing the crowd. She noticed I was freaking out, and said, “Hi, I’m Jill. Are you Annie’s friend?” “Yes, we go to school together.” I replied. “So, you’re still in high school, huh ? This scene must really be blowing your mind.” “Yeah, kinda,” I said with a deep exhale. The woman introduced herself as Jill Freedman. She told me that she was a photographer and her next project was to travel with a circus. Brigid was riding shotgun as the cook. They were leaving in a few days to catch up to a circus in Philadelphia. The phenomenal document of this experience, Circus Days, was published two years later.

When I returned home late that night, I was amazed as I thought through the wild scene I had witnessed at Brigid's apartment. I may not have been ready to shift into hanging with the crazy, creative, bohemian scene at 175 Bleecker Street just yet, but I was definitely being primed for the journey.

Mary Shanley is a NYC poet/writer who has been reading and performing her work for the past 25 years. She has published: Hobo Code Poems and Mott Street Stories and Las Vegas Stories. Allen Ginsberg suggested she publish her first poems in Long Shot Magazine.

As I went to cross the last street before my door, I heard voices shouting “Shana tova!” Happy new year. I turned my head to see two young Hasidic Jewish men running across the opposite street, directly towards me. They kept shouting at me, “Shana tova!” So I said “Thanks, happy new year to you, too.” I put my foot into the road when they came right up and stopped me. “Have you heard the shofar today?” they asked me. I felt instantly embarrassed. I don’t go to temple, but they didn’t need to know that. So I told them that no, not yet, I’m going tonight… One of them smiled at me and suggested that they play it for me now. I put my bags down at that point. This was going to be way better than real temple.

The smiling man reached into his coat (he must have been so warm, I kept thinking) and pulled out a ram’s horn (the shofar). The other gentleman reached into his own coat and pulled out the book. Shofar explained to me that he would play and the other guy would read, and when he said Amen, I was to repeat it. OK. I can do that. Then he started playing and the other guy started reading, and I got really quiet. People were walking by and looking at us, confused. This was not, to be clear, a Jewish neighborhood. The corner we were on was at the intersection of three hipster bars and a blue-collar block of mostly black people. This was not Torah-land.

I was unsure where to look. Do I stare at the man reading, making sure to hear the Amens? Do I stare at the man blowing into the horn? Do I give them each equal eye time? It ended up equal, and I got all the Amens correctly. During the reading, I tried to remember the last time I had uttered “amen,” and was pretty confident that I never had before. Perhaps I’d mouthed it a few times at dinners with my father’s family, but the word felt funny in my mouth, like it didn’t belong, like I was stealing it from someone. But I wanted to feel something this time, so I concentrated so hard on saying it right and at the right time. Still nothing. But I was falling in love with my new companions a little.

After a couple of minutes, Shofar looked up from the horn, smiled at me again and said “Just one more minute, ok?” OK. He went back to the horn, and the reading kept up, two more Amens. Then it was done. “Shana tova,” they said again, and went to leave. “Wait a minute, let me ask you something,” I said. They turned and waited for my question. “How did you know I was Jewish?” Now their facial expressions changed from curious to amused. Shofar looked at me and said “Because of your face.” Oh. “Well, that’s funny, since my mother always says I’m the waspiest looking Jew she’s ever met,” I explained. “She’s wrong. Tell her we know better,” said Shofar. And then they left.

Simone grew up in Manhattan but has since become a dedicated Brooklyn transplant. She writes when she can, but in real life she works in TV. When really inspired, she reviews movies and TV at moniemovies.blogspot.com.

It took me a few moments to make sense of the situation. The man on the steps was a puppet-maker, and he was presenting a proposal to spend about $1,500 of the movement’s money on art supplies for the construction of large puppets. These puppets, he explained, would join the occupiers’ upcoming march on Times Square. Behind him, a ghostly puppet of the statue of liberty stood about 7 feet high, head and hands made of paper mache, body made of sheets. Many members of the crowd wiggled their fingers to show their approval of the plan.

“As an artist,” said a voice without a body. "AS AN ARTIST!" shouted the crowd. “I respect this proposal.” (I RESPECT THIS PROPOSAL!) “But as an activist” (BUT AS AN ACTIVIST!) “I can’t forget” (I CAN’T FORGET!) “That people are starving here.” (THAT PEOPLE ARE STARVING HERE!)

The puppet maker nodded sympathetically before responding. “But if we do not fund the arts” (BUT IF WE DO NOT FUND THE ARTS!) “my concern is” (MY CONCERN IS!) “who will?” (WHO WILL!?)

This was the human microphone, also known as “the people’s microphone”. One person speaks, and the surrounding people echo in unison; the crowd functions as a bullhorn for the individual.

The human mic imposes a set of formal limitations that shape the way communication is happening within the movement. If you want to say something, you have to know exactly what you are going to say and how you are going to say it before you open your mouth. That may sound, initially, like a self-evident prerequisite of speech. But think about all the particles and modifiers and interjections and digressions that normally punctuate improvisatory human speech: um, like, so anyway, whatever, uh, yeah, hmm, by the way, which reminds me, etc. There is no room for these at the General Assembly. You have to minimize waste and maximize content. You have to economize.

You also have to impose line breaks. The people (your microphone) can’t parrot more than a few iambs of unmemorized speech, so you must staccato-cize your sentences, pausing after each fragment for the crowd’s echo. The result is poetry. Witness the following stanza, extemporized by an anonymous woman:

As someone who used to work
In Times Square
I happen to know they have
A lot of horse cops.

Or this, spoken by a frustrated young man standing on a table:

I’m waiting for something to happen
And when that thing doesn’t happen
I’m disappointed.

At Occupy Wall Street, it’s hard to distinguish between functional and performative speech. If you close your eyes, a General Assembly can pass for a poetry reading, like the one I attended at the park on October 14th. The reading was organized exactly like a GA meeting: Anyone could stand up and read, and the surrounding audience repeated each line. Eileen Myles, former director of the St. Marks Poetry Project, performed a poem called “Anonymous”:

No I’m the poet
No you’re the poet
No he’s the poet
No they’re the poet
No she’s the poet
No that’s the poet
No this is the poet
No I’m the poet
(repeat)

Myles repeated this sequence several times over, and by the end she was jumping excitedly at each emphasized pronoun, and the audience was also jumping and shouting each line back to her, echoing her hoarse fervor.

She told me afterwards that she had written “Anonymous” specifically for this forum. “I was compelled by the human microphone as an incredible medium for writing for the group,” said Myles. “It’s kind of very ancient, to assume you have a chorus to read your lines. [Occupy Wall Street] is the first real talking back in a long and awful growing silence. So to be a poet writing into that space is to really have a job, and to have an audience that is the voice for the work as well.”

So in one sense, the human microphone is a crude, makeshift tool born of necessity: In New York City you need a permit to amplify sound electronically. In another sense it is an immensely powerful and multifarious metaphor. It is a metaphor for the vision of this movement, a governmental body that transforms the “I” of the individual into a larger, collective “I”. But even as it embodies the project of democracy, the human mic throws into relief the difficulties that plague its practice. Sometimes the individual “I” is  at odds with the collective.

From its beginnings in early September, the Occupy movement has been trying to model direct democracy, a form of government in which “the people” speak and decide for themselves, rather than appointing substitutes – congressmen, senators, lobbyists, commanders-in-chief - to speak and decide for them. Anyone can participate in the General Assembly, wherever it is being held; anyone can present a proposal and anyone can block a proposal, forcing the assembly to postpone a decision.

After about twenty minutes of redundant dialogue between the puppet-maker and the crowd, a man in a baseball hat suddenly leapt onto a chair and began yelling. “People are homeless! Do something substantial with the money, something that’s actually symbolic!”

For some reason the crowd did not repeat these words, maybe because his speech was too fast and passionate; he was not pausing to allow for echoes. “Let this man speak,” someone yelled, “he has something to say!”

Just like that, the order dissolved. The crowd was shifting and murmuring; strings of words, rather than being amplified and heard, were proliferating in distinct pockets. No one held the strings; the puppet was being pulled in many directions, about to be torn apart. “Mic check,” someone screamed. MIC CHECK! screamed the crowd.

Here was an ideologically diverse community of thousands, all with separate complaints, congregated in 33,000 square feet of park, the buzz of anger hovering in the atmosphere like charged particles after a big bang of creation. And this place was loud: Cars were honking, a jackhammer was hammering, there was a drum circle on the western steps. And you have a governmental model in which every voice counts equally. Abstracted, direct democracy is a breathtakingly simple idea. Standing on the corner of Broadway and Liberty, it was a logistical nightmare.

The facilitator of the meeting, a young black woman wearing an oversized striped sweater, spoke: “I personally respect this process!”

“That’s because it benefits you!” These words came from the center of the crowd. The boy (or man) was in his late teens or early twenties. He was thin but strong-looking, with a ruffled brown mohawk and a raspy voice. He had been sitting on the ground, but he now stood up. “You are an academic,” he said.

Mohawk boy: I do not respect the mob.
Crowd: I DO NOT RESPECT THE MOB!
Mohawk boy: My humble request is that you stop speaking for me.
Crowd: STOP SPEAKING FOR ME!
Mohawk boy: Please stop.
Crowd: PLEASE STOP!

“Respectfully,” said the facilitator, “this is not the time/ to make proposals. This is the time / for clarifying questions / related to this proposal.” The puppet-maker nodded his approval.

The puppet-maker nodded his approval.

“There is never a time for love in this community,” cried the boy with the mohawk. A space had cleared around him, and he was swiveling in it, appealing to those nearby. No one repeated is words. “There is only a time for agendas. It’s an insiders' group,” he roared, as though he was going to cry.

“It’s open to anyone,” said the facilitator. IT’S OPEN TO ANYONE! echoed the crowd. “Lies!” screamed the mohawk boy. “Forgive my passion! Lies! Forgive me. Forgive me.” Then he headed for the periphery of the circle, where a young woman was waiting to give him a hug. After the hug he began talking heatedly to a tall blonde wearing a leather jacket.

The facilitator leaned forward and clasped her hands. “This is what / direct democracy looks like. / It’s not always easy, / it’s not always comfortable, / but right now/ it sure looks beautiful. / So thanks for sticking with it.”

“I’m still here,” said the boy with the mohawk, now standing at the edge of the crowd.

“And we love you for it!” said someone. Everyone echoed.

Jean Garnett lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up. She works at a literary agency and is pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction at The New School.

The first time I tired to pass as a senior I told the young man at Paragon Sporting Goods that I was 62. He asked me for ID. I said I didn’t have any on me. He asked me what year I was born. This is where my math skills messed me up. Even though I’d prepared for this question with a pen and paper before I’d gone to the store to try to save on my tennis permit by adding five years to my age, I gave him the wrong answer.

I said I was born in 1950. He punched a few keys on his computer and looked puzzled at the result. “It says you’re only 61,” he said.

I was sweating already because I’m out of practice lying to authorities. True, it wasn’t like lying to the IRS or unemployment, but still I was out of practice.

“Oh, so I’m too young? I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

My friend Trevor from the East River Park courts told me about the scam and said it was easy to pull off because you didn’t have to show any id. Plus the Paragon clerks who you have to fool didn’t care much one way or the other. The other thing that made it such an easy hustle, although I’d just blown it, was that for anyone in their teens or twenties, the difference in looks between anyone over 45 and a tennis player who has reached the magic age of 62 is indistinguishable.

I knew I’d never be as cool as my 57-year old English buddy, Trevor, from the courts under the Williamsburg Bridge. He is the charming scoundrel type of sometime painter, sometime photographer, sleazy in the best way, émigré artist type of New Yorker who’s scraped out a living in the city for the last few decades. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel, dated Madonna before her career got off the ground, and won a huge settlement from his landlord after not paying rent for years.

Now he works as a bartender at the hottest restaurant in the West Village, runs an antique lingerie web site and spends a few hours in the middle of most days at the East River Park tennis courts, or as he calls it, the East Village Country Club.

I think he is impressive in his way. And it is an approach that as we boomers get closer and closer, some of us are already there, to not having to scam for the geezer version of the city’s tennis license, that is disappearing. Trevor is a throwback to the Max’s Kansas City era and some of the more glamourous scenes from the city’s past. Plus he’s an expat who stayed, which to someone like me, who barely made it out of Jersey, also has a kind of allure

One of the things about aging is if you miss that chance to date Madonna in the 70's or to play in the NFL, Brett Favre aside, the opportunity, like all the years that add up to only having to pay $20 for your permit, is gone.

So while some of Trevor’s accomplishments are out of reach, no matter how much I might want to emulate his sleazy brand of cool, his reinvention of himself as a sophisticated, expat New Yorker, I thought, couldn’t I at least pull off his tennis permit ruse?

I did the math again. If I was going to be 62 in May 2011, I would have to be born in 1949.

This time at Paragon, there was a young woman running the permit desk. I said I wanted to buy a senior tennis permit. She asked me for ID. I said I didn’t have any on me. She asked me to spell out my name. She asked me when my birthday was. “November 2, 1949"

After some more clicks on her computer, she asked me to take three steps to the left and stand on the red line so she could take my picture for the permit.

A few days later I ran into Trevor at the courts. I showed him the plastic id-like card. It wasn’t as good as dating Madonna. It wasn’t as good as running an antique lingerie web site. But it was OK for me, a guy from Jersey who passed for 62 on only his second try.

Brent Shearer is the book critic for Long Island Tennis Magazine. He is the only reporter to have been kicked out of the 2008 U.S. Open.

By the 2nd Grade in New York, surrounded by Jews of every degree of enlightenment and gentiles with their kaleidoscope of religious beliefs, I became ever more resistant to what seemed to me to be the senseless sacrifices I was forced to endure to my mothers increasing piety.

We lived on the upper west side of Manhattan where there were few other Orthodox German Jewish refugees. Most of the indigenous Jews were Conservative (they wore Yarmulkes in Synagogue) or Reformed (Yarmulkes were optional). My mothers’ extended family, who began arriving a year or two after us, had all settled further north in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, which became a major German Jewish Refugee enclave. There, the Jews were classified according to the Rabbis who led the Synagogues that they attended. There were (Rabbi) Breuers’, (Rabbi) Jungs’, and (Rabbi)Sterns’, the three most prominent Congregations all German and all Orthodox. My Mothers relatives belonged to Rabbi Breuers congregation. They were as clannish as Hatfields and McCoys. They too, grew more religious as the times grew more perilous, the headlines more horrific.

They sensed my apostasy and looked at me as a dangerously aberrant infidel even at the tender age of seven. For my part, I couldn’t accept their unquestioning fanaticism, the men’s black hats, the constant prayers, or the traditional sheidels (wigs) worn by the married women. Fortunately we were separated by the geography of Manhattan Island and the restriction against travel on the Sabbath. Thankfully, the two branches of my mothers family only got together on Holy days or for occasions like weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. I hated those events even more than Saturdays.

Removed from this intensely conformist culture I soon began to rebel at what I felt were the onerous Sabbath taboos. Riding in an elevators was proscribed although we lived on the fifth floor. Lights were left on from Friday night until sundown Saturday. The same for the stove. The light in the refrigerator was even removed because it went on when the door was opened. Carrying money was forbidden. You couldn’t even carry keys in your pocket although, arguable, it was permissible to pin them to your clothes. It was a sin to tear a piece of paper even by accident, so the Sabbath toilet paper supply was prepared in advance. The pay telephone that was downstairs in the hall was off limits. The usual reply to my impertinent questions about the paradoxes of these rules was that “these are the rules set down in the Bible and the Talmud and if you break these rules God will curse you.” I didn’t buy these less than factual answers, I couldn’t see the analogy between modern electricity and Biblical camp fires. Nor could I find where work was involved in dialing a telephone or pressing a button. Tearing papyrus was different from tearing toilet paper, and how could riding in a car or subway be forbidden ex post facto?

Most of every Saturday was spent inside a dimly lit apartment converted into a Synagogue, chanting prayers in Hebrew which I did not understand, and listening to interminable sermons in German that I didn’t understand either. To my mind the boredom was another level of torture. Here I was confined in an expatriate German Orthodox Synagogue. I stood and sat in unison with the congregation while inwardly I seethed with anger. My thoughts were with my neighborhood friends and non-refugee contemporaries who were playing stickball and baseball or street hockey on those warm summer Saturdays or ice skating and sledding in Riverside Park in the winter snows.

I wanted badly to be an American, to be like my American friends. Their parents spoke unaccented English and didn’t worship in two foreign languages. And, oh yes, when our histrionic Rabbi grew particularly intense during his sermons he sprayed spittle over me and the congregation.
In stark contrast to the Saturdays, our Sundays were often wonderful. We would go on outings. In the summer the whole family would go to Coney Island. We’d ride in the first car of the IRT with our noses pressed against the front door watching the endless ribbon of track streaming towards us out of the dark tunnel and disappearing under the train. Once there, at the crowded beach, we’d claim a blanket's worth of sand and have a picnic. After the obligatory one hour cramp wait, we’d swim in the murky salt water, jumping up and down in the weak surf.

My brother and I would often explore the cool, damp sand under the boardwalk, crisscrossed by thin lines of sunlight through the shadows, looking for dropped coins and other lost treasures. We’d press up against a fence to watch the rolling Steeplechase ponies carry their riders to the finish line. We watched as white captive silken parachutes slowly carried young couples up cables to the cupola at the top of the huge tower, where, with a snap, they would be released, the canopy filling and the passengers descending, screaming into earshot as they floated back to earth. My father would give us a few coins and we’d go to the penny arcade.  I loved the machine gun device there, fantasizing that I was a fighter pilot shooting at planes on the screen inside. I also liked the mechanical boxing ring, where I controlled one of the two robotic figures, flailing steel arms against my brother's boxer without the peril of a bloody nose and working off some of my accumulated anger.

Another favorite excursion was a subway ride to South Ferry. We’d take the Staten Island Ferry and a bus to Silver Lake Park. Before the bridge was built Staten Island was a completely rural enclave. The bus went past working farms before reaching the small lake that was as pure and clean as a beer commercial. My father would cut a woody stem from the shore of the lake with his penknife. Then he would loosen and remove the intact tube of bark. Part way down the core of wood he’d cut a half moon notch, and above this he flattened about an inch of the core to the end. When he put the bark back on it became a tunable whistle that we would blow on for hours until it finally dried out and split.

In winter, we would go to Central Park and ice skate on the lake underneath the Belvedere Castle. Sometimes we’d explore the still raw Hudson River shore where Robert Moses was building his Riverside Park and West Side Highway.

When the weather was bad we’d go to one of the City’s many Museums all of which were free. For us, the Museum of Natural History was a regular stop on rainy days as well as an after school hangout. Nearby, the Museum of the City of New York featured real antique fire engines, Currier and Ives prints and life-size dioramas of early New York and Nieuw Amsterdam.

However, what excited us more than any other museum was the Museum of Science and Industry, at Rockefeller Center. The industrial displays of this unique museum were like magic. I didn’t understand all that I was seeing, so the actions and effects seemed even more amazing. I would stand transfixed in front of an exhibit that featured ball bearings being tested. The shiny metal balls would pop out of a slot one after another, onto a flat steel plate, ball bearing after ball bearing, bouncing high and true in endless perfect arcs and out through a small exit hole. There were displays of things that belched smoke. There were working models of steam engines and gasoline engines. There were arc lights and wire recorders and radios and all kinds of operational displays that showed how a watch or a toaster worked.

Even though we were young kids, we were well aware that the world was heading down the greased path of crisis. The tension of the gathering omens war preoccupied our parents and teachers and filtered down to my brother and me with a sense of impending doom. We heard the names Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, and Churchill; we knew who the good guys were and hated the villains. We sensed that the world was sliding headlong into an awfulness that could not be prevented.

One cold dreary Sunday early in December, when I was seven and a half, my father, my brother and I went to the Museum of the American Indian. It was in a building on the West Side near Columbia University, a long walk from our apartment. There is something about the American aborigine that is endlessly fascinating to anyone from Germany and there is no better market for the prototypical American Western Film. Having been born German, my brother and I were infected with this obsession, and we lost ourselves in the artifacts that had been stolen from the proud native tribes of North America and deposited in a huge incongruous Greek Temple. There were peace pipes, moccasins and wampum. Feathered headdresses, rugs and blankets. Tomahawks, papooses, buckskins and bows and arrows. Beautiful things that even someone as young as I was able to appreciate.

Stimulated by the beauty of the artifacts, we walked home along West End Avenue. As we passed the Tennis Courts that used to occupy the block between 95th and 94th a boy about 10 years old came running up to us breathlessly.

“The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor,” he shouted at us and then spread his news to some other people across the street. It meant nothing to us. We had never heard of Pearl Harbor. We shrugged and kidded about his excitement. A twin engine plane heading east flew overhead. “Maybe that’s the Japanese bombing New York,” we joked.

We lived on 93rd near an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc that sat on a land island park off Riverside Drive. We were home in a few minutes and my father turned on the radio. There were news bulletins on every station affirming the now-terrifying news. Did this mean that Hitler and the Nazis were on their way to invade New York? Frightened, I sat on my father’s lap as he tried to reassure us that the real danger was still thousands of miles away far across the wide Atlantic. We looked up Pearl Harbor in the Atlas and learned that it was in the middle of the Pacific and that Japan was many thousands of miles from the US. We weren’t reassured because, somehow, they had managed to attack it. We knew planes could cross the Atlantic in hours- hadn’t Lindbergh proved that? Was Hitler, the monster scourge, following us to America? Was there no place to hide, no escape? I remember the sheer, trembling terror.

Over the next weeks, months and years the world assumed a feverish pace. War was declared. We were issued small cream colored plastic ID tags that we wore on a chain around our necks. Rationing was imposed on almost everything. Gasoline was hard to get. Norman Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms. My male cousins began disappearing into the Army. We collected paper, tin foil, even donated our prized cast iron toys to the incessant scrap metal drives. We started collecting posters of Air Force planes. Because we were of German origin my father had to have the short wave section of his Grundig Console radio disconnected.  But every day, that AM radio brought us news of the Allied victories in Africa, the battle for Italy, the D-Day invasion, the shock of FDR's sudden death and at last, the ecstatic joy of victory over the Nazi scourge.

Fred Abrahams has had an interesting life. Fleeing Germany just before the Holocaust, he spent his childhood on the upper west side of Manhattan. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School and the University of Pennsylvania before serving a tour of duty with the US Army in Germany. A career in marketing grew into a stint as a writer/producer of TV Infomercials. A quad bypass started him writing about his experiences, including; travels in post-war Europe; partying with the abstract expressionist painters of the Chelsea school; his 270 minutes of fame as a champion on a TV Quiz show; visits to the original Studio 54; co-founding The Improv comedy club and the interesting people he's met along the way.An avid skier and amateur photographer he now lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.

When the company needed a production assistant, they hired one of my musician friends, a handsome Texan who went on to become so famous that years later, I learned about his death from an obituary on the front page of the New York Times. He’d played with everyone from Yoko Ono to Judy Collins, Bette Midler to the Talking Heads. But that was later. Back then, he needed a day job and we worked together in the studio, saw each other in the same West Village bars at night. It was a cash economy, before credit cards and ATMs, five and ten dollar bills passing from hand to hand.

One evening, as Don and I rode the elevator heading to the southbound 8th Avenue subway, I handed him the $5 I had borrowed the night before. He grinned and said, in his Texas drawl, “I may not be free, but I am extremely reasonable.”

And the elevator full of stone-faced New Yorkers laughed aloud.

During the years I worked on West 57th Street, I would sometimes browse in Daffy's, a discount department store. I grew to expect to see (and hear) a certain salesperson who roamed the women's shoe department, intoning, "Doctor Shoe here! Doctor Shoe is in the house! We've
got your sandals, your pumps, your mules, your boots! If you don't see it, come see Doctor Shoe."

At some point I realized I hadn't seen him in a while. In his continuing absence, silence in the shoe aisles replaced his litany. Had he been laid off? transferred to a different... clinic?

One morning, walking to work, I reached the corner of 96th Street and Central Park West and
waited a moment for the light to change. I didn't so much as glance at the man who stood nearby, handing out flyers for a local mini-storage company. But as the light changed and I proceeded, a familiar voice rang out, "Doctor Storage is in the house!"

Lisa Bergtraum is a New Yorker, a would-be writer and artist, working as an information specialist (librarian/researcher, whathaveyou). She also likes to run ( 5-time finisher of the NYC Marathon) and bake.

Though there was hardcore action, too, as I did raid a crack house in the Bronx with Curtis and a group of reporters from the Washington Times. After scaling a ten-foot wall and entering thru the back door, Curtis threw me a pillow and instructed me to wrap it around my right arm. “For the pitbull!” he yelled.

It was Joe Allen who invited us to Restaurant Row and housed us in an abandoned restaurant he owned next door – Broadway Pasta, now a swanky restaurant called Brazil Brazil. For every four-hour patrol of the street and neighboring parks, we were rewarded with a family meal from one of ten restaurants on the Row. I have been in every one of those kitchens.

If the meal was fish, Joe Allen would personally deliver a burger to me, as I am allergic to seafood. That’s the kind of guy he is! In those days he wore golf shirts and always appeared tan, like he just returned from Florida, or Palm Springs. He had a famous girlfriend, too -- Chita Rivera. Chita would call out to the patrol from across the street and yell, “Hola, Fellas!” One time she hiked up her skirt outside the restaurant and danced a minute or two of Jerome Robbins’ choreography from “West Side Story.” I used to think she was mocking us, but I now suspect she was merely reliving her life with a different gang from the West Side. Another story.

There's little need for Angels in post-Guiliani New York. Joe Allen now has restaurants all over the world. Lisa and Curtis are radio personalities. Chita Rivera went on to win yet another Tony Award. And me, well, sometimes I awake from a bad dream in the dark hours of the morning wrapping a pillow around my arm; but then, more often than not I'm sweetly comforted by the haunting echoes of a woman singing -- “I like to live in America!”

John Quilty is a writer who lives in New York City.

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.