You are currently viewing the stories for “January 2003.”
A guy with his earlobes stretched around bingo chips and a bullring through his septum pulled a box of nose studs from the glass case. “How do they stay in?” I asked. “It’s a coil and it rests against the outside of your nostril,” he said, making a swirling motion with his finger. I chose the smallest silver stud, trying [...]
I've been dating a Mid-western man for the past two months. Well, it's actually been one month that I've been dating him, and one month that he's been away in Florida "visiting his mother." This man happens to be the oldest I have ever dated--41--ten years my senior. Perfect, I thought. Older, more mature, has his act together, money in [...]
Along about now, dozens of shaggy guys prowl the streets of New York, looking for a new barber, wondering where and from whose hands their next haircut and a shave are going to come now that the State Barber Shop has closed and Giorgio Campli retired. George left for Italy a few weeks back. There, he’ll live off his social [...]
1. Flood-Tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high--I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the unusual cos- tumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than [...]
For the last two years Nina Talbot has been photographing people at her local ShopRite in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and painting their portraits. Or, more accurately, she's been painting portraits of the store. "I look for subjects that are close to home," she says. "Whenever I shop I take my camera. I tell them I'm a painter and [...]
P> My boiler broke in February, after the pedestal sink on the second floor of my home gave way and tipped over, thanks to an aging sixpenny nail. The upstairs bathroom quickly filled with water and began seeping through the gaps in the floor’s tile grout. The ceiling of my kitchen, on the first floor, starting leaking in spots where [...]
In 1991, I was a student at New York University, working at a bookstore, and this woman came up to me out of nowhere and basically asked me to come audition for her film. She was a casting director for this PBS Masterpiece Theater thing. The part was for a quote-unquote "little person." I'm four foot six, and they were [...]
Wonders of Modern Commuting, Part 1: At around 8:25 every day, Mr. Impatient’s train pulls up to the Greenpoint platform. Mr. Impatient is a G(1) train conductor who is always in a very big hurry to get the train where it’s going. I have yet to get a glimpse of him, but I can hear him, and from the anxiously [...]
Quality of life during my ten-year stay in London Terrace Gardens (the ten-building brick behemoth spanning an entire square block at Ninth avenue and 23rd Street) was greatly enhanced by the presence of elevator men. These were resourceful men, mostly of Hispanic descent who grew up in Chelsea, who kept watch over the building, picked up your UPS packages, and [...]
I just got back from Uncle Dick's funeral service out in Cortez, Colorado. I didn't know Dick alive, but I got to know him pretty well during his memorial service, and then later staying at his house while Cheryl’s mother tied up some of his personal affairs. From all traces Dick was an authentic man’s man; he grew wheat and [...]
Paul Simon did not wear a tux. He sat by the fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center, a photographer by his side, and another guy, a journalist? Several people wandered up to him. He seemed very approachable, as though he wanted to chat in the pleasant evening light. He wore a tweed jacket and a blue baseball cap. His [...]
I arrived in New York during the summer of 2000 from somewhere else. It doesn't matter where because nowhere else is like New York. Like most newcomers I was awed by the spectacle. I stole glances at the sky from the sidewalk while I tried to keep pace with other pedestrians. I walked the streets as a stranger. I thought [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper 1971. When I was still a student and first visited New York City, the couple at whose place I was staying suggested we take a walk to the piers near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. While we were crossing the roadway there, where the signs clearly prohibit pedestrians from crossing, a policemen who saw us [...]
When Regina Moss no longer resembled the sincere sandy-haired gentleman on his driver's license, job-hunting threatened to become Grand Guignol. The Taxi-Limousine Commission (the least friendly form of TLC) confiscated his doctored I.D., making destitution natural as sunrise -- not hours away but close enough. Bi-weekly female hormone shots had to be paid for as well as an on-going wardrobe [...]
If you live toward the southern tip of Manhattan, and you can't sleep, look to the northeast and try to locate the big Tudor building on East 42d Street. You might see a light on about half way up, and there's a decent chance that it's shining in my wonderful, cozy apartment. I'm not an insomniac, but, occasionally, I do [...]
Writing you from the 'monsen memorial public library' in Naknek, Alaska. Fantastic little joint--the librarian is a long black-haired tlingit (pronounced 'klink-it') woman who just let me use her computer. there are about five other patrons in the stacks, among them, a longshoreman whom i know named 'al'. Outside, the fine smell of salty air and wet tundra is fighting [...]
My brother was thirteen years older than me. We had different values, he having grown up in a repectable working class slum and me, from age seven to seventeen, in a fancy suburb west of Boston. I took a lot of things for granted. But he had bought the American Dream, maybe because our mother was an Armenian immigrant fleeing [...]
Among the stories I have either heard or read about the Villard Houses, my favorite is one about William Faulkner. Between 1949 and 1969 Bennet Cerf's Random House occupied the north wing of the stately brownstone that takes up the entire block between 50th and 51st on Madison Avenue. During those years Faulkner divided his time between Oxford, Mississippi and [...]
Photo by Morris Engel McNulty, with cigarette, in his element. This drunk came down the street, walking in the gutter instead of the sidewalk, and a truck hit him and knocked him down. It was a busy corner there at Forty-second Street and Second Avenue, in front of the Shanty, and there's a hack line there. Naturally, a little crowd [...]
There’s a cult of the Independent Bookstore, and Three Lives & Company, a small bookstore in the West Village, is one of its temples. Anne Roiphe proselytizes in the New York Times: "Three Lives feels like a personal library. You know that ideas and words matter here, that someone has handled each book and knows its contents; that you, too, [...]
Evan Krasnik is a 59 year-old man who wakes up at 6 AM most mornings. He scuttles toward the shared bathroom in his pajamas and sandals and bangs on the door. “Jim, when are you going to get out of the bathroom? What if you never get out of the bathroom?” Afterwards, he eats a bowl of cereal, using a [...]
Pregnant and nauseous, I slid over and rolled down the window. Risa and I had gotten into a cab that smelled of cherry-scented cleaning fluid. I rolled the window fully open and a big fat raindrop splashed me on the forehead. It was one of those wet November days, too dark for normal. At home, we had to turn on [...]
Having lived in Manhattan for most of my life, I saw a move to Brooklyn as a giant step in the wrong direction. And Greenpoint, well, Greenpoint was a digression I wasn’t sure I could handle. I was thirty-six years old and by god, I had standards. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the bank account to afford them. So when my [...]
First came the mice. It was early winter when I heard them scratching their way across the long wall of my studio, setting up camp in the wall behind my bed. At first, I thought knocking for minutes at a time could scare them away. When that didn't work, I tried banging the wall with a hammer and later, blasting [...]
It had been a shitty summer. I left a miserable job for another, better one that paid me a lot less. To save money I moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a studio across the hall. The dead bolt on my new door was tricky, and so it slammed on my hand one day, leaving me with a broken middle [...]
He is a pop artist of modest fame. I know he once designed a Barneys window display, and I think he paints murals for Unicef. Beyond that, I know very little about him. Aside from what he looks like naked. It began innocently enough: I was stumbling home in an uncomfortable pair of shoes when he approached me from behind, [...]
Saturday, September 21, 2002 1100 Student Aide Dewey opens courts. On duty. Graffiti spotted on southern fencepost, third from Amsterdam Avenue. 1218 Supervisor Pavi visits, informed of graffiti. 1430 S/A Krauss relieves Dewey for meal break. 1531 S/A Dewy returns from meal, relieves Krauss. 1800 SA Dewey off duty. Courts close Sunday 22 2002 1106 S/A Dewey opens courts. On [...]
At the time I was working at Brooklyn Academy of Music (still am, actually). I was 26 and living with my now ex-wife in the Bronx, in a place called Co-Op City. Co-Op City is a place just like all the other "Co-Op Cities"; a bunch of highrise type buildings built outside of the "ghetto" neighborhoods. They were built for [...]
My brother is a twenty-eight-year-old millionaire living in Greenwich Village. He drives a Boxster, owns a beach house in East Hampton, and recently bought an original one-sheet of Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the bargain price of twenty thousand dollars. Sometimes he asks me, his older and poorer sister, what I want or could use—cable TV, a new set of bike [...]
