You are currently viewing the stories for February, 2003

The Man Who Ran Me Over with His Car is Dying

by 02/18/2003
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights

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 […]

Cristina

by 02/17/2003
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

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 […]

More Than A Woman

by 02/17/2003
Neighborhood: Across the River, Letter From Abroad

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 […]

Burrito

by 02/17/2003
Neighborhood: West Village

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 […]

The Prescription Scam Investigation

by 02/17/2003
Neighborhood: Midtown

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 […]

Ladies & Gentlemen at the Rally

by 02/16/2003
Neighborhood: Midtown

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 […]

Reading This Sunday

by 02/13/2003
Neighborhood: Brooklyn

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 […]

Tom’s Restaurant

by 02/13/2003
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights

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 […]

French Kissing The Cab Driver

by 02/12/2003
Neighborhood: Uncategorized

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 […]

A Small Price to Pay

by 02/12/2003
Neighborhood: Astoria, Queens

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 […]

To the Man Who Forgot his New Books on the Subway Platform at Lincoln Center

by 02/12/2003
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

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 & […]

Bubby’s Departure

by 02/11/2003
Neighborhood: All Over, Brooklyn, Multiple, West Village

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 […]