You are currently viewing the stories for “January 2002.”
If I leave the windows open in my classroom, I can hear the endless hum of traffic coming from the Long Island Expressway. There's a certain degree of wonder in its sound. So many people, an endless whoosh of thoughts and dreams whipping past me like rush hour- forever. There's this postcard I keep in my classroom that reminds me [...]
There were a lot of things that should have been taken into account before our plane even touched the ground, but they were not taken, and we just kind of sat there. It rained all week. I'd come about three days earlier and Travis showed up later, his plane was a little delayed. I'd been highlighting things in the back [...]
During the summer, approximately 25 to 35 students occupy the brownstone at 305 W. 29th St. and Eighth Avenue, a few blocks from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. I’m living on the third floor, flanked by the kitchen and the staircase; paying a weekly rent of about $200 for a single room with a view of the cigarette butts [...]
Allison and I met on the dance floor at Sway. The sign on the wall indicated "NO DANCING" but defiance was in the air that night, and what's wrong with a little good time anyway? I felt like partying, was out to meet somebody, and always loosen up when dancing. I was wearing my Mariachi-inspired studded black jeans, which I [...]
I hadn't thought of Tiny Teeth in years. But there he was, invoked I guess, by my having told Tom (the manager of the small bookstore I own on the Upper West Side) about him earlier in the day. We don't really hire high school kids, but I'd taken Tiny Teeth on about 10 years ago as a favor to [...]
There is a man who looks just like Hemingway who lives on India Street in Brooklyn in a building called the Astral, a dismal place with huge arching windows to remind you of its past glamour as an apartment building for international sailors (Mae West is said to have been born there). He lives right above a woman named Maria [...]
Brother Theodore astonishes David Letterman Brother Theodore was always a ghost to me. When I returned to Manhattan in the early 1990s, Theodore was a specter haunting downtown. His one-man show, terrible and comic all at once, was still running on 13th Street, and posters boosting the show were everywhere. I saw them at the buildings at the New School [...]
The play was going to be close. The runner, my best friend Sam, was trying to go from first to third on a ball lined into the gap in right center field. But the guy in right had jumped off with the bat-crack and knifed in smoothly. He’d gloved the ball and was launching a low hard wicked throw to [...]
I met the homeless man during a late night cigarette break on my apartment's stoop. He was a black man wearing a tan barn jacket in the dead of winter; it was stained and full of holes. The man was friendly, though, and he smiled at me with a toothy, unshaven face. He pointed at my pack of Winston's and [...]
During my junior year of high school my mother announced to me that I was unfit to be lived with. I was rude, obnoxious, wild, irritating, irresponsible, undisciplined, unpleasant, and ungrateful. I was therefore to make arrangements to move in with my father and his new wife at the soonest possible date. I was being released from my mother's sprawling [...]
I saw it all from a bench in the park, sitting next to some gathered pigeons and a pile of peanut shells. And nearby, across the street, a statue and an American flag. The man with the black hat and the enormous red-shirted gut was sprawled out on a bench and he appeared to be dead. Perhaps he was. A [...]
The elevator doors open and all I see is pasta drying on cardboard tubes. Multi-colored striped pasta, as if the most important costume from a prep school’s production of Sondheim’s Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat had been passed through some improbably large papershredder. Lasagne sheets from the kitchen of Mimi Oka and Doug Fitch, co-founders of OrphiCorp, co-creators and [...]
I do not generally travel by limousine. When the long sleek cars drive by in the mad tangle of traffic I peer curiously at the tinted windows with the rest of the masses, hoping for an elusive glimpse of fame and wealth, Madonna going to the Grammy’s perhaps, or Bono on his way to his Upper East Side apartment. They [...]
Over the Internet came the call for help: my expatriate Upper West Side sister, living now for twenty years in a European capital, was soon to cook a Mexican meal. All the ingredients were to be had in the vast marketplaces of Amsterdam, all except the peppers. Not being one to leave a sister in the lurch, I took a [...]
Last Friday the weather beckoned for some ice cream. I got a scoop (caveat: I am a messy eater. Caveat: I hate the word caveat) and walked down Ditmars, taking in the sights and sounds of my part of Queens. There were a lot of men out in muscle tee's talkin' tough and gesturing wildly w/their hands. Machismo overflowed like [...]
In 1992, I attended a reading in celebration of the publication by Leon Forrest of his fifth novel, the 1,135-page "Divine Days," at the long since closed Brentano's on 53rd Street in Hyde Park, Chicago. I took along my former girlfriend, a quiet, awkward jazz DJ with whom I'd had trouble separating. The crowd that night was made up of [...]
1. Lasker Rink: Central Park at 108th St. "I can shoot better than you," this six-year-old boy is taunting as we're slapping pucks against the boards. He's referring to the wrist shot technique I'm trying to demonstrate which apparently he finds unimpressive, and I have to admit I don't blame him, though the sting of his jab is lessened by [...]
The good old days: when you could look to farthest downtown Manhattan and see nothing but open sky and the grand old buildings of another age; when urban blight—the abandoned or bustling warehouses and factories, the vacant lots, the decaying piers, the alleys, the child’s endless treasure-trove of it all—was as romantic and magical as any enchanted woods in a [...]
Across the street from the MOMA’s big, new, blue home is The Factory, a mall/office space building unremarkable for its commerce—but more than remarkable for its sculpture. The 5,000 square feet of floor, wall, and ceiling were, until recently, covered in a dense and quirky collage, made from fifty tons of recycled industrial garbage: bathtubs, water pipes, rebar, boilers, cogs [...]
Several months ago I was stuck in a rut. You know, drinking at the same tired bars, hanging with all-too familiar friends, masturbating in the same routine sock. So in my grand tradition of superficial alterations-buying new shoes, switching from contacts to glasses, wearing headbands instead of hats-I buzzed my skull. And now, several months later, the result was scraggly [...]
"America. Boom. America. Boom. Boeki Centaa. Boom." During my time in Japan, I had grown quite used to not understanding what the hell people were trying to tell me. But this was a new one. Usually you can decipher the broken English of the Japanese by taking an abstract view of the words and changing a few L's and R's [...]
There is the sense that we are doing something wrong, Diana Wall and I, as we walk south from Franklin Street toward what is arguably Manhattan’s most compelling dig site, the hill of rubble that was, until recently, the World Trade Center. Wall is a New York-based archaeologist, whose book, "Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York," co-authored with Anne-Marie [...]
He was walking along Broadway passing in front of Macy's without lifting his head to glance at the windows. I was a few steps behind, slowing my usual frenetic pace so as not to catch up to him. I didn't feel like schmoozing, something that was tough to avoid when you ran into Jack. Jack. After twenty years, I still [...]
This was late on a Saturday afternoon, in the half gloom of the subway station at Times Square. W and N and R trains were barreling through, and the girls stood on either side of the platform, each guarded by a patrolman, looking bored and despairing. They were just mestizas, the kind who were raised in their own big cities [...]
I was a regular at the Café Feenjon, on MacDougal Street, in the West Village in the early '70s. I was in my mid-twenties then and my older sister and I frequented the spot at least once a week. The club showcased Middle-Eastern Music: Israeli, Arabic and Greek. The menu featured non-Kosher Middle-Eastern food, which I couldn't eat. But it [...]
Matt worked on the 43rd floor of a building one block from Grand Central. When people came to visit, we took them up to the 46th floor conference room and let them look out the windows at the rooftop gardens and into other office windows and down Park Avenue, stretching away below in orderly blocks. Paint lines on the pavement, [...]
The House of Xtravaganza, like the House of Corey and the other houses, consists of a mother and a father and a big raucous band of "children": drag queens, butch queens (gay men who dress like men), transsexuals, a few real girls and one or two straight guys. The smattering of girls and straight guys notwithstanding, the houses are, essentially, [...]
Angie Xtravaganza This is the story of Angel Segarra, a Puerto Rican kid from the South Bronx who became Angie Xtravaganza, doyenne of the drag world made briefy famous by Jennie Livingston’s acclaimed 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning. Angel, neé Angie, died in New York City on April 6, 1993, at the age of 27. She died of complications from [...]
Part One Distinguishing true from harassing reports - some days, one in four - looms large for Emergency Children's Services (ECS), the city office that responds to child abuse and neglect throughout the five boroughs during the night, and on weekends and holidays. Fake reports are less of a problem for the weekday nine-to-fivers. But nights or weekends, people have [...]
I have been in psychotherapy just over a year, and the whole experience at this point boils down to the single image of a young private school girl sitting two seats down from me on the cross town bus. She is accompanied by her Dominican nanny, who gazes absently out the bus window on to 96th Street as it crosses [...]
I had just gotten my hair cut and in reapplying lipstick in the dressing room afterward found that the only color I happened to have in my purse was slightly too bright, and a little bit orange--not harmonious at all. So I put on lots, blotted it, and put on more, figuring that one might as well be brazen. Then [...]
Once a month, I take the downtown number 6 train to Astor Place for an $11 buzz cut. Near the corner of Broadway, a red and white awning urges me to Beware of Imitators as dozens of celebrity snapshots are exhibited in the storefront window — Judd Nelson, Susan Sarandon, Rosie O’Donnell, Yannick Noah . . . Inside, a man [...]
1. So my doctor said it is true: You can get AIDS just from snorting cocaine. I decided to visit my doctor’s after I was unable to donate my vital juices at the Port Authority Blood Drive in the fall of 2000. I left without getting the needle after reading a form given to all potential donors that said anyone [...]
When I first heard the rumor several months ago, it seemed absurd. Someone in my neighborhood said she’d heard that Broadway Farm, the poor man’s Fairway that had been anchoring the southwest corner of 85th street for a decade, was going to shut down to make way for a Victoria’s Secret. How could this be? I’m as big a supporter [...]
Fedora is a few steps below street level-- one steps down and pushes open the door into a red hued room that feels like another world, or at least another time: warm, unpretentious, exciting, wonderful. Photographs by Josh Gilbert, who has a story of his own Alfred H. Lane passed away on March 20th, 2002, at age 85. More here. [...]
Proposals of marriage are becoming the most public moment of people's private lives. By Meghan Daum Every Sunday the local newspaper in the midwestern town where I live prints engagement and wedding announcements that look like the pages of a high school yearbook. The faces are fair skinned and robust, some still marked with acne. Their pictures are taken at [...]
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