You are currently viewing the stories for “February 2003.”
In 1971 the man who ran me over with his car moved to Brooklyn Heights. My family had moved there earlier–in 1966–and so I spent my first birthday and the subsequent seventeen ones on Grace Court. My father, Brooklyn born and raised, had decided, not unreasonably, that a one-bedroom on West 10th Street was cramped for three. My mother, Boston [...]
There are some guys whose pattern is to realize a supposed deep love once they know a woman doesn’t want them. Maybe that explains me and Cristina. Maybe guys like me can't love at all, so we mask our loveless souls with occasional dream loves, pure in their unobtainability. We safely suffer limited devotions at the alters of impossible bitches. [...]
We were natives. We were cool, urban sophisticates who would never admit to being otherwise. If anyone asked, we were from New York City, even though we’d been raised in the suburban sprawl—my cousin was from Jersey and I was from the Island. He and I had legitimized ourselves as New Yorkers by boasting we’d never been to any tourist [...]
Jason knew that some kind of incident was imminent the moment the tattooed monster crossed the threshold into the small space in front of the counter. The other customers shrank away as the monster ordered his food. He was overconfident, full of bluster, and trying desperately to project toughness and hardness. Even though it was a laughable display it was [...]
One of the sayings where I work is that we see them all. Creaky old dope fiends with nine lives and wrecked veins, skinny young Africans with silky French accents, and lots of distracted crack smokers with rattling lungs. We also see the occasional sweet matronly mami from Puerto Rico or a doe-eyed young innocent from Harlem. But for the [...]
The cold wreaked transformation: bone chilling and serious, the kind that keeps people home, yet here we were, all of us, shivering, waving signs, gleeful. Maybe half a million, and if the media says otherwise don’t believe it. Half a million! Could we really stop a war? At times like this, people change. I saw possible proof by the curb. [...]
Barbès Reading Series presents a mrbellersneighborhood.com Reading Featuring: Elizabeth Manus Fran Giuffre Elizabeth Grove Bryan Charles Thomas Beller and others followed by music of Chris Raef (Church of Betty) & Don Rauf (Life in a Blender) Sunday, February 16th at 6pm mrbellersneighborhood.com is a well-acclaimed literary website of vignettes, reportage, photo essays, and personal essays about life in New York [...]
I took two of my kids to see the new Adam Sandler picture, “Little Nicky,” and there it was again, behind Sandler as he sniffed some flowers: Tom’s Restaurant at 112th and Broadway. When I was at Columbia College, in the gray and bankrupt and crumbling 1970s, my friends and I had a joke that someday, older and successful, we’d [...]
As far back as seventh grade, when I got grounded for talking back to my dad and couldn't go to my best friend Kirsten's party--where her mom was going to give us a little champagne up front and her older brother was going to hide a bottle of vodka for us in the basement bathroom--New Year's Eve has sucked. (more…)
It was a big mistake inviting her, a big mistake. She wasn't worth all the fuss I'd made. I hadn't seen her in a year and time is rarely kind; she was only twenty- eight but it seemed she'd already been launched into her prime and was now backsliding into the uncomfortable stages of bad skin and poor posture (all [...]
Your books were a little bit strange, and that ended up working in your favor since none of us wanted them at first glance. Stuff about yoga and spiritual exercise, something about linguistics, and a medieval text. There were five of them in the bag, complete with your credit card receipt from the Barnes & Noble, with a couple of [...]
I went to Penn Station to snap a picture or two and perhaps in the process imbibe a feeling for my grandmother, Bubby, who went there ten years ago (this month) to catch a train... I didn't know Bubby growing up. She and my dad had a fight when I was 2 and didn't speak for the next 15 years. [...]
We're walking through the Village, it's freezing, and we're trying to find a place that has both good hot chocolate and is a good place to breast-feed. It's not easy. I have nothing to do with the breast-feeding (having no breasts), but I feel responsible for finding the location to do it in. The place should be warm, with comfortable [...]
Part III. Rough diamonds are mined from volcanic vents in Africa. They're separated into parcels for the London sight-holders who have the stones cut in Antwerp, Israel, or India. The finished products are divvied out to various diamond brokers and then brought over to New York. Over 80% of the diamonds sold in the USA pass through 47th Street, making [...]
Like most martial artists of my generation, I dreamt of being the next Bruce Lee--or in my case, the "white Bruce Lee." The difference is I went out and did something about it. As a result, I've actually performed in a dozen or so films (yes, I use that term loosely). The first chop-socky flick I ever did was called [...]
I found "Timmy's Potty" laying on the carpet beneath our bed this morning. It's a toilet training video that my wife purchased for our son about a month ago. It was odd to see it again. I remember the day my wife brought it home from the hippie bookstore. More specifically, I remember how she and I watched it together [...]
"I want to crawl head first into a small cave and curl up into a fetal position." -From Tanya Corrin's journal, February 7, 2001 Tanya Corrin and I are having brunch in Little Italy and discussing reality TV shows like 'Survivor' and 'The Real World.' She's saying that she doesn't think that they're real at all, that they're almost comletely [...]
I wasn’t always a compulsive cleaner. Quite the contrary: I was once slovenly and slothful– an unmitigated slob. The cleaning disease crept up on me over the years like a bad case of the measles; until, lo and behold, I’d become a fullblown clean freak. The kind who, at 6:00pm, reaches for the Fantastik with a couple of paper towels [...]
I found a man in Central park. I’d been running around the reservoir on a weekend and needed to get home and shower. I wiped my T-shirt on my face, and bent down to tie a lace, and I heard a man telling a joke. I heard him telling the back-story about how this certain celebrity and his boring wife [...]
Neighborhood maps of Brooklyn have recently been added to this web site. If you visit them you will immediately notice a problem. The problem, I suppose, has to do with the ambition on the site, which is to have maps covered with red dots each linking to a story that relates in some way to that particular place on the [...]
For a few months while I was writing my graduate thesis, I was a classroom instructor at an after-school program at P.S. 2, on the northeastern edge of Chinatown. From my apartment on the lower East side, I would walk south on Essex Street to go to work. It was a walk through New York’s immigrant cultures and palimpsestic history--an [...]
