You are currently viewing the stories for January, 2002

A Rhythm of Sounds

by 01/27/2002
Neighborhood: Outer Boroughs

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 […]

The Brie Burger

by 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: West Village

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 […]

The Doctor From Norfolk, Virginia

by 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: Clinton

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 […]

Hungry Like the Wolf

by 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: East Village

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 […]

Behind the Counter at Ivy’s Books

by 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

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 […]

Trash Like White Elephants

by 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Greenpoint

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 […]

Brother Theodore is Dead

by 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: West Village

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 […]

The Intervention

by Jim O'Grady 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: West Village

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 […]

A Tale of Two Coats

by 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: West Village

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 […]

Village Cowboys

by 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: West Village

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 […]

July, My Love

by 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: All Over, Manhattan

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 […]

Pasta Peculiar

by 01/20/2002
Neighborhood: SoHo

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, […]