You are currently viewing the stories for “July 2002.”
Le Parker Meridien on West 57th is not the type of hotel where my parents took my siblings and me when we weren't camping or staying with relatives. It wasn't in my budget during the winter of 2000 either. At the time I felt self-conscious of each cold step taken across the hard marble floors. I looked furtively at my [...]
Claude was smart and talented and I was beautiful but both of us were too boring to hang around with. That was what they thought at the Playhouse of the Ridiculous where we were each featured members of the chorus in a play called, "The Moke Eater" that ran most midnights at Max's Kansas City. I suppose we were boring [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper We all need a mortal enemy the way that we need true love. True love is love that will sweep us off our feet. We'll live our life happily ever after if we find it: we won't need to pay bills, we won't have a cold or any illness, we'll never have to take the F [...]
Manhattan just doesn’t make for good redneck living. You can't bag a 12-point buck, park a Ford F250, get a gun permit, or buy a tin of Skol in this city. If you like Nascar racing, the N.R.A., Rush Limbaugh, and personalized bug-deflectors, finding like-minded friends won’t be any easier. Worst of all, as far as redneck bars go, the [...]
Lisandra and I both graduated from the same college with writing degrees and hopes of being comedy writers, but after graduation, neither one of us had a job. When I met Lisandra, she was a grad student with a cushy part-time assistant job. She spent her days trolling for MP3s, making copies, and listening to her boss complain, which was [...]
I was sitting on a green bench outside of a cafe on Irving Place, on a hot day with a blaring sun. I was in one of those moods where I was thinking of everything bad that had ever happened to me. I noticed a huge bagel on the edge of the sidewalk. It was one of those modern bagels [...]
Several summers ago, my central air conditioning let loose. A fast drip became a flood. My daughter discovered the problem during the eleven o’clock news, walking around in socks that became cold and wet. I called the doorman, requesting that the superintendent come immediately. Often surly, Ely intimidates many residents in the building, who naturally resent him. We live in [...]
It was the beginning of summer and my two young sons had taken to counting Jaguars. “There’s one!” Alex, then eight, would cry, elated, from the backseat of the car. “Oh, there’s another one.” “Look over there—there’s two more!” five-year-old Ferran would trill. Anyone unfamiliar with the Hamptons might have assumed we were on a safari, mistaking my sons’ enthusiasm [...]
Through four years of college Louise Holmes was always in my dreams and always out of my reach. So you might imagine the huge surge of adrenaline when one Friday afternoon, two years after graduation, I obeyed the DON'T WALK sign at 53nd and Broadway, looked to my left and discovered she was standing next to me, little changed. "Hi," [...]
Most evenings will find Michael Johnson, a New York City Police Officer, sitting at home alone in front of his TV with a bottle of Hennessy near by. Hennessy is top shelf he says. It doesn't leave you with a hangover. Michael doesn't drink every night to get drunk, according to Michael. He doesn't even drink to unwind from a [...]
The Great London Terrace Rent Strike began in the Fall of 1992 over the swimming pool. Once billed as "the largest apartment complex in the world," London Terrace occupies an entire square city block on the north side of 23rd street between Ninth and 10th avenues. The "Great Briton in Manhattan" opened in 1929 with elegant dining rooms, stores, London [...]
There were no rollerblades in those days. We wore our roller skates on our shoes. The skates had straps that buckled across the instep -- clamps, also referred to as "clams," that we tightened with the all-important skate key we wore on a string around our necks. The wheels themselves were ball bearings; in fact, we referred to our skates [...]
The doorman doesn't ask , but he knows where we are going. The guy at the front desk seems wise to what floor two female twentysomethings are headed for. The buildings Super, who shares our elevator, is all too aware of why we pushed button #12 and me and my gal pal snicker in the awkward silence. The Super gets [...]
Nearly every day the homeless men who hang around the front steps of St. John the Divine are keeping tradition alive. The tours they give of the cathedral’s western façade and the Peace Fountain are one part hallowed and one part hustle, and they’ve been going on, in one form or another, for ten years. At a world famous cathedral [...]
Friday, June 22, 1956…one day out of Rice High School and just seventeen years old … the first day in what my yearbook identified as my career - advertising. And what more appropriate place to start? At the bottom of the (at-the-time), worlds' biggest advertising agency, the mailroom of the J. Walter Thompson Company. JWT had billings of over $370 [...]
It’s a friday night in July. Two women are sitting across from each other on a train bound for the Hamptons. About 30 minutes out of Penn Station, the women who has been doing most of the talking says to her less attractive friend; “I was talking about Sharon’s boyfriend and he said, ‘can I tell her you said that?’” [...]
The A train rattles through the tunnel underneath the East River. It’s late on a Sunday night and the train is not very crowded. About ten customers are spaced equidistant on the seats. They stare up at the ceiling or down at the their feet. Doors at the end of the car click and slide open. A woman shuffles quickly [...]
The Dakota. It’s not simply a brown building. On the northeast corner of 72nd and Central Park West, it stands like a fortress. It has the soothing color of earth. Near the entrance to the park, a hot dog vendor sells an abundance of meat and buns. Multicolored balloons hang from a tree. A guy with muscular legs skates south, [...]
