You are currently viewing the stories for “November 2002.”
In the autumn of 1991 I came to New York to take a fiction writing class. I was 23, fresh out of graduate school, with no savings and little work experience save for two summers clerking in a bookstore in the Maryland suburbs. I wanted to be close to the rarefied air of New York publishing. Inspired by movies like [...]
I don’t like show tunes and don’t really understand how any one does. But the idea of piano bars intrigues me the same way pick-up basketball games and gay sex clubs do, as a place where men get to play with strangers. So when my mus ical theater friends Jim and Andy invited me to Marie’s Crisis, I went along [...]
I was waiting for the elevator on my floor when I saw a sign on the bulletin board that an elderly painter was going into a nursing home and her work was in the basement, free to residents. I live in Westbeth Artists Housing in the far West Village; the note was from the management office and it said something [...]
Ask Bronx resident Keshauna Sanders, 12, what the most remarkable thing about Finland is and she’ll tell you: it’s the pizza. "They put ham on it!" she says. "And pineapple!" Her classmate Priscilla Mercedes concurs. "The food is real weird there," she says. "But the people are so sweet. When you’re in Finland, you get hungry at twelve o’clock at [...]
Blind Accordion Player Guy Who Bumps into Poles on Purpose, Angry Mute Midget, Classical Opera Whistler Dude, Man Who Imitates The Sound of Closing Doors, and Dirty Shoeless Guy Dressed in Rags That Crawls on the Floor. Each of these beggars (should I say Entrepreneurs?) preys on different emotions. For Blind Accordion, it’s sympathy--he’s driven to play accordion to “try [...]
The first time I saw Billy Brooks he was riding around Ojo Sarco, a sparse village of yellow adobe huts and longhouses grouped on either side of a ravine. It was 1971. Billy was on a tall horse the color of city mud and surrounded by varmints waving rifles like the banditos in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre". Among them [...]
Late last year the 78-year-old filmmaker and archivist Jonas Mekas debuted his new diary film. The title, awkward but precise, is, "As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty." Its running time is around five hours, so it can only play once in an evening. On the first night of its run, Mekas held a little [...]
Last August, when the Russian woman who waxes my legs in Brooklyn went on vacation, I made an appointment at a spa in SoHo. I'd actually been meaning to switch for some time. It wasn't that I didn't like Vicki—I did. She was dirt cheap, and we shared an interest in politics. Even though her accent was kind of thick, [...]
Continued from Part One It's tough playing to a half-empty house, but there is some consolation if the house you're playing holds 60,000 people. It's been a beautiful day in Oakland, and now, in the cool blue dusk, the crowd upfront is getting seriously pumped. As usual, Oasis are immobile. Arthurs is, for reasons no one can fathom, the recipient [...]
Men will ruin $500 suits scrambling for a $5 baseball. It’s an adage as old as the idea of men wearing suits to a ball game. It also happens to be true. Every person attending a major league baseball game -- from the youngest child being indoctrinated into the ritualistic church of Baseball at the shrine known as the Ballpark [...]
I was waiting at the doorstep of the Ranger station in Van Cortlandt Park, the Bronx. I had been an Urban Park Ranger for about three months now, and this was going to be my first tour of the Croton Aqueduct Trail. I was leading the tour with my fellow Ranger, Rich, who was a neatly groomed man with sharp [...]
We met by way of the New York City Marathon; the roller skating marathon. It is little known Big Apple trivia, but in the Fall of 1980, there was a roller-skating marathon that covered the same mileage and territory throughout the five boroughs. One of the participants was my boyfriend T.J. A draft resister who had lived in Europe during [...]
A glass came flying through the air and smashed against the wall behind me. It appeared to be aimed at the DJ. He was standing next to me at the end of the bar. The guy who threw it was part of a group of men, slightly foreign, drunk, eccentric, who I had imagined, because of their accents, to be [...]
My first job in Midtown Manhattan was as a clerical assistant in a large law firm on Fifth Avenue. It’s the building of the beast with the illuminated neon red 666 emblazoned across the top of the structure. It wasn’t glamorous work, but I made the best of my surroundings by exploring the neighborhood during my lunch break. My other [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper I recently spent an afternoon watching a guy entertaining three of New York's finest on the eastern parapet of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was wearing what looked like a green track suit. "Jumper!" the call went up in the office. The view here is extraordinary: the Brooklyn Bridge, the World Trade Towers, the financial district, the [...]
I choose what I’m wearing carefully on Tuesdays. I like to show a little midriff, some shoulder. In a bar, before I play, I look around and notice other people’s midriffs and shoulders. I look at the curve of bodies bending across tables and feel my own. I want to laugh the throaty laugh of a James Bond ingenue. I [...]
Roberta Guaspar Tsavaras purchased fifty violins in 1978, while married to a naval officer stationed in Greece. She assembled her collection piecemeal, from stores in Athens and neighboring towns. "The idea was that I would teach violin at schools and when he was transferred to a new base, I would take the violins, show up at the next school, and [...]
The average Special Education teacher's career lasts a grand total of approximately two years. It's the one fact I remember on the road to my Master's Degree. Actually, remember two. I also remember that teaching in the inner city is the second most stressful job in these United States, next to being an inner city cop. And of course, cops [...]
"Excuse me, are you from Denmark?" What a line. Yeah, I decide, he looks a little slick, but he’s safe enough. "From Iowa! But what are you doing in the city?" He knows he is charming. He is fortyish, but has smooth brown skin, a Latin accent, and white linen shoes. White linen shoes in this dirt-dusted city, now that [...]
illustrations: Steve Brodner; Since 1892 New Yorkers have been flocking to The Tenth Street Bath on 10th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A to shvitz, to sweat out the gunk that clogs the pores and clouds the spirit. In the city, we have a fine selection of toxins to choose from: subway juice (that mysterious thick liquid that seeps [...]
There are some songs that if heard in the right situation might push you to the brink of something horrid. Some of these situations are real, some are fiction. D.C. Berman: "Rain" by Blind Melon, through the ceiling of a Married Student Housing apartment while you're bidding for '70s cereal boxes on eBay against a guy named Ratbrain. Mike Fellows: [...]
When you walked through the door that first time in September, you became a Riceman …always a Riceman … never a boy, kid, lad, young guy … just a Riceman. Founded in 1938, and in 1940 relocated to a six story red brick building on the corner of what was Lenox Avenue and 124th Street, it was, and is, an [...]
Most of the time, I find that living in a doorman building is like having all the perks of living with my parents, but without any of the frustration. The doormen in my building are wonderful -- in the morning, the daytime doorman tells me that I look nice and then orders me to have a good day, just like [...]
Angela and I stopped to investigate the South Williamsburg street. We lived in Queens (not together, mind you – the sexual need between this former cheerleader and me had long since expired) and were exploring a new locale. Neighborhood pride and a grass-isn't-greener mentality often create a chasm between boroughs, but we'd scoured most of our Greek neighborhood and craved [...]
The New York City Marathon is fun to watch for several reasons. The leaves in Central Park are beautiful--still on the trees but fragile and colorful. It's moving to see the look of physical pain on the runner's faces. It's moving to see that zoned out, exultant look on the runner's faces. It's interesting to watch everyone watching these looks [...]
There are some songs that if heard in the right situation might push you to the brink of something horrid. Some of these situations are real, some are fiction. Tim Rutili: 1."Whoop There it is," rapped over by a Melrose Park wedding DJ with a cordless mic as the dance floor was heating up at my cousin's wedding. 2. "Summer [...]
