You are currently viewing the stories for “January 2001.”
The brass-plated elevator door opens, revealing it's operator, a man named Kenny Coleman. A horde of cops, assistant district attorneys, and clerical workers bustle inside as if they're heading to a sale at Macy's rather than for work at the state court building at 80 Centre St. In his mid-40s, thin-faced and short, and wearing a fedora, a Western string [...]
So such of my life then was seasonal. As kids we had yo-yos, marbles, water pistols, pea shooters and box scooters, and appeared in the street with whatever the change of weather called for. Now it was carpet gun time. I was the best carpet gun maker on the block -- in the whole neighborhood -- except maybe for Frank [...]
I wanted to be a writer for The Jon Stewart Show and figured that sending them a resume would be like sending junk mail; it would get tossed. I needed to do something with impact. So I did the logical thing. I bought a pair of white jockey shorts (size large, so there would be ample space for me to [...]
When I left the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1996, the stores on either side of my building included a bodega that sold heroin out the back and an empty, bombed-out hole. Today, a "funky" bridal shop and a tattoo parlor stand in their places. When a tattoo parlor is a sign of urban renewal, you know the neighborhood [...]
It was around 5 p.m. and I was on my way home. It was hot. I was tired. Feet hurt, and that's not all. Spent all day standing in a heated sardine can courtroom in Housing Court. My back hurt. And my ego - after dumbass judge beat up on me for something I had no control over - as [...]
I'm at my folks house in Beverly Hills. It is a fresh, clean, much needed change of place from my usual East 6th Street digs. It's a lazy Thursday afternoon, the 21st of December, I am lounging about in a Champion sweatsuit, and hanging a few ornaments on our Jewish Christmas tree, which stands 11 feet tall in our vaulted-ceiling-and-skylights [...]
"Have you thought about what your Parks nickname should be?" Parks Commissioner Henry Stern asks me. He sits hunched over on a couch at his office inside a turret at the Arsenal, a red brick castle overlooking Central Park that for years was a military base and now serves as headquarters for the New York City Parks Dept. Dressed in [...]
There’s a cult of the Independent Bookstore, and Three Lives & Company, a small bookstore in the West Village, is one of its temples. Anne Roiphe proselytizes in the New York Times: "Three Lives feels like a personal library. You know that ideas and words matter here, that someone has handled each book and knows its contents; that you, too, [...]
It never occurred to me that Norman would chicken out and become a stool pigeon. He was aggressive, a good athlete, a gambler, (for baseball cards and streetcar transfers), a veteran explorer of our neighborhood and Crotona Park. He was a very persuasive talker, a take-over guy and besides, he loved banana and mustard sandwiches. It was his idea that [...]
Two articles about the site that appeared in the paper of record. December 3, 2000 CITY LORE; A Web Site Reverberates With the Din of Urban Life By JIM O'GRADY I SEE it as a bizarre, sprawling narrative connected to the city.'' The speaker, Thomas Beller, 35, paced his apartment on West 11th Street, a book-crammed Zeus' brow from which [...]
Since last April I've been living in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and managing a pet shop which is part of a five store chain. A lady and a gentleman came into my store the other day to buy dog food and it was obvious that they'd been arguing. They continued the argument while they shopped, with the lady getting louder and angrier [...]
There were strong reasons for thinking this, because she not only met her future husband in Houston, Texas, the city that pioneered the breast transplant, but she did so as a stripper in Rick's Cabaret, the most famous topless bar in Houston. Everything I know about Rick's comes from an enormously long article, which I read five years ago in [...]
I used to gloat about it. Somebody would ask for my work mailing address and I’d reply slowly, evenly, Two-World-Trade-Center. And then pause a beat, just for effect – seventieth floor. Seven –zero. That’s right. There’d often be a comment, sometimes even a gentle, "wow." My reply varied depending on circumstance or mood. Occasionally, however, I was dead honest. It’s [...]
It’s after five on Friday and I have pleasing, twenty-something plans for the evening. Judging from the look of Larry, a diminutive agent at the literary agency where I am director of operations, he does too. A tanned, old-school publishing guy, he’s a middle-aged romantic, known to still hold his handsome wife’s hand in public. We arrive at the elevator [...]
She listens to me. She comforts me. She keeps all my secrets. She knows me inside out. She is not my mother. She is…my therapist. The note sat on top of the July issue of Vanity Fair in her waiting room: “I will be on vacation from July 27-September 5th.” “Where are you going?” I demanded as soon as our [...]
He looks like someone's grandfather. We are, after all, in Washington Square Park, in a playground fueled by the energy of cooped-up city kids desperate to climb plastic treehouses, while their parents, grandparents, and nannies watch on. Slightly stooped in a well-worn but tidy blue blazer, he smiles as he admires the children. My five-year-old daughter likes him. So does [...]
I tried to break into the Marble Cemetery . One Tuesday, towards midnight, I changed out of my office clothes into jeans, a sweater, and narrow-toed tennis shoes, because I would have to climb a chain-link fence entwined with barbed wire. I gathered up supplies--a bottle of Poland Spring water, a Power Bar, and a flashlight--rejecting the Swiss Army knife [...]
It was just after 2 am on Tuesday, December 5, 2000 at Key Food on the corner of 4th and Avenue A in the East Village. I felt the sudden urge for some Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. After removing a box of Spirals from the top shelf, I proceeded to the check-out. There were a few neighborhood boys hanging around [...]
"Congratulations!" read the subject heading of the e-mail. But no, I hadn’t won a free cruise, or a much larger penis. My short novel, Northern Gothic had made the final ballot for the Bram Stoker Award. The Stokers, managed by the Horror Writers Association, celebrate horror fiction, poetry, comics and "alternative media" by holding a banquet and giving out statuettes [...]
When the car nipped at my bike tire it made a ‘zzzzow’ sound like a mosquito on uppers buzzing in my ear. The muscles in my arms and legs got tense at once and that’s probably why I didn’t tip over. City sounds sang out in a cacophony of car horns and screaming pedestrians. Potholes dropped the earth out from [...]
I am--and I do not necessarily advise this--walking through the meatpacking district in a miniskirt. Pastis and co. not- withstanding, this area is one of my favorites in the city—- one of the only remaining places where, when the clubsters hail their last cab, the trucks still rumble up and haul in their real, tangible, old-fashioned, actual blood-and-guts commerce. At [...]
The night was thick and hot and I was done playing, ready to go home, but Dan persuaded me to have one more beer with him. He looked like a cartoon character: large head, square matinee-idol hair and perfect shiny teeth. I had lost my match; he had won. Dan was bright and funny and he was feeling garrulous, as [...]
I was born in a moviehouse in Brooklyn, New York in the middle of the 20th century. I can swear only to the Brooklyn and 20th century parts. But whatever hospital records say, the moviehouse part seems equally likely because I grew up with all the common symptoms of placental exposure to such places. That is to say, I was [...]
Ê To members of the snoopy national media who still call to inquire, Brian Brown, a junior at Wesleyan University, insists, at articulate length, that he is no aspiring porno king. His favorite book is Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire", and he is currently immersed in the films of avant-garde German directors like Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders, part of a [...]
There were police all around the fruit man. He stood there next to his fruit. His stand is on the North East corner of 87th and Lexington, across from Starbucks, and whenever I pass by I buy an apple for fifty cents. Or sometimes bannanes. He is a gracious guy, am immigrant, his softness of manner has made him many [...]
I have been flirting with the coffee man for about three weeks now. Every morning, as I am about to round the corner into the construction site I work near, I ask him for a large coffee, skim no sugar three Equals. The first time I went to him, he asked me how many sugars I wanted. “No sugar,” I [...]
These days, it is she who gets on her tip toes when we greet each other or say good-bye. But she still wears that same perfume for special evenings, and when I smell it I’m transported, without even being aware of it, not so much to a particular time, but to a feeling, that wondrous, excited, slightly worried feeling that [...]
Not until we took custody of Molly, seven years old more or less, more or less cocker spaniel, did I become aware how bountiful were the sidewalks of New York, at least along the several Upper West Side blocks Molly now calls home. It’s no surprise that New Yorkers litter the streets with their candy wrappers and matchbooks and newspapers, [...]
It was a quiet block. Then one cold March day in 1971 a house blew up. It was a bomb. When it came to light that it had been the (accidental) work of the Weathermen Undergound, it changed the face of radical politics on a national scale. More locally, the explosion set off a wave of bomb scares throughout the [...]
This essay appears in "How To Be a Man: Scenes From A Protracted Boyhood." For more information about the book, click here. Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Books were stacked in piles around my new apartment, looming like weird stalagmites in a cave. They were encroaching from all directions. A bookcase was badly in need, and yet months slid by without [...]
