You are currently viewing the stories for “April 2002.”
It begins with a button marked Brass Lab. I press it and there is no answer and behind me groups of men in tank-tops work in automotive repair shops and listen to to Spanish music on mini-stereos set up next to the cars. Finally, a voice from above bellows, "It's open!" and I look up to a bald man who [...]
My life lies in piles around my feet. It is mostly paper things; boxes of musical scores, boxes marked STORAGE and HOME. Why does the Rilke go to STORAGE and the Hesiod makes it to HOME? Who knows? I take the G train to my studio at the Classon stop in central Brooklyn. The G train is mired in the [...]
Ariel was convulsing. I had been trained in CPR, but couldn’t remember how to do it. The patient telephone was sitting by her side and a loud dial tone rang out. She was a bouncing fish on the stool, spewing foam from her mouth. I held her head so it wouldn’t rap against the wall. Her eyes rolled back. I [...]
When U.S. soldiers came back from Vietnam they claimed to have been greeted at airports by hippies who spat at them and called them baby-killers. Recently historians have done research on this, the results of which have been: no evidence to support the spitting allegations, nothing, not one incident, zip. They forgot to talk to me. Not that I hunked [...]
After 9/11, I stepped into the Williamsburg bodega that I've been going to for years. Some of the workers I know by name, others are just familiar faces. We've mentioned our Middle Eastern backgrounds to each other. "She's Egyptian," said the Palestinian woman behind the counter, gesturing towards me. But her co-worker already knew. "Don't say it too loud," I [...]
Over the years, Kathy and I have spent weekends in Manhattan, taking advantage of lower hotel room rates and exploring the neighborhoods. One of the places we liked was the Marriott at the World Financial Center. It isn't there anymore. And we thought it was time to visit … we wanted to see the Columns of Memorial light for ourselves. [...]
After the World Trade Center is destroyed, I get drunk and seek comfort in the arms of an Orthodox Jewish friend. He is gentle. “I don’t have sex,” he says, and that is fine with me, although the distinction between intercourse and what we are doing seems non-existent. He is warm, and soft, and tentative, and I feel good about [...]
The city was crawling with carpet salesmen and industrial designers and Formica representatives and stadium planners, and no one outside of the Javits Center even noticed. I wouldn’t have noticed either if it hadn’t been for my friend Amy, who had flown into New York from East Lansing, Michigan, to attend the NeoCon Interior Design Conference, New York’s largest interior [...]
World Gym, upstairs, is fresh with creamy white paint and music, while beat-driven, played at an appropriate level. There are the requisite scantily clad Spandexed women and the scantilier clad hyper-muscled men. But there is a civility, a sense of propriety, a lovely calm to this gym that the trendy joints are lacking. Downstairs, however, the music from the boxing [...]
I’ve been out of work for a month. My life is my own. No longer must I force myself through the routine of setting my alarm, waking up, dragging my tired body out of bed, taking a too-short shower, brewing coffee, forgetting to drink half of it, deciding what to wear, taking the subway, taking the elevator, saying "Hi, how [...]
The summer of 1952 I was ten, and the center of my universe was Brooklyn. The Dodgers were still Brooklyn's team, and Ebbets Field was where they played baseball and not a hous ing project. Everyone hated the Yankees. With the end of school still close, the pinch of freedom felt as unnatural as the stiff pair of dungarees my [...]
So then we had enough for a full court and in the April heat we wandered over to the full court where they often fence the whole thing off to shoot commercials because of the way that building rises dramatically up above it, the massive open space of all that asphalt the smack of a softball, your head jerking up [...]
Charles Boromeo Eder (Charlie) and Hermine Fleckenstein (Minnie) were immigrants, Charlie from Vienna, Minnie from Habichstal (a 300 person farm village about 80 kms. east of Frankfurt). Both had immigrated to New York City in the late 1920s. Charlie, a waiter at the Essex House met Minnie one afternoon in Central Park, as she was nannying. After a three year [...]
Mara from upstairs, who lives off flute lessons in her dining room and touch-and-go pit orchestra gigs on Broadway, knocked on my door and everyone's door, begging us to start a tenant's union. We each had a reason. I was terrified of the dawn in July when half the sixth floor burned and everyone was out on the street in [...]
