You are currently viewing the stories for “March 2003.”
Day three 1,300 cruise missiles and bombs hit Baghdad. At work I have to use the freight elevator to bring my bicycle into the office. The elevator’s operated by an older Eastern European man with a deeply lined face and thinning hair. He dresses in the company uniform and a pair of beaten Air Jordans. It’s always seemed to me [...]
A flaming sunset in western Cambodia, in the middle of 1972. I was coming back from my uncle's house. I was about 500 meters from my house, when there were suddenly terrific sounds, like thunderclaps, "Boom! Boom! Boom!" Immediately, I saw the spark and the firelight emerging into the flaming sky. I was very frightened and scared and ran very [...]
The late great comic Bill Hicks once said, famously, apropos the first gulf war: "I find myself in the unenviable position of being for the war -- but against the troops." Nobody that I've heard has come up with a similar corker this time around, a line which can sum up the personal confusion and official hypocrisy so succinctly. There [...]
At about quarter to five this past Thursday I got into a cab at 56th and Broadway; my destination was the Port Authority and the Short Line Bus to my home in Orange County. It was a rainy, miserable day and I was damned glad to get the cab. My driver was relievedly Haitian -- one checks these days. As [...]
I took a taxi to the peace rally. My driver was a Puerto Rican guy playing loud salsa music. There was no partition. Some post cards were taped to his dash. He sat in the driver's seat with pride of ownership. It was his cab, I was his guest. He had the window down and an elbow out the window, [...]
I had just completed my freshman year at Cornell University, where I was majoring in Functional Apparel Design. The program focused on designing clothes for people with specific needs. My degree would be nothing like those awarded to fashion design students at F.I.T. No, nothing frivolous for me. But what I didn’t realize when I began this course of study [...]
The staff of Murder Ink are always answering questions. People want book recomendations. They want to know when their favorite author has another title coming out. Sometimes they bring in a stack of books and ask how much money they can get for them. But the most frequently asked question, always over the phone, goes something like this: "Yo. Can [...]
Tuesday night some friends and I were sitting on a bench in Union Square, talking about the new game shows and dating shows and how there were so many hyped-up programs these days that were really just Candid Camera remakes. If you live long enough you see everything twice. Then we kind of ran out of material and fell into [...]
I first came to Williamsburg in 1992 , to visit a painter friend’s studio. He would travel there every day from the Upper West Side, a long but worthwhile trip because the studio space was so cheap. Back then, the crowd of people that got off with us at the Bedford Avenue L stop disappeared quickly and mysteriously, and we [...]
Late last year, the young Chinese couple who ran the Szechuan D'Or restaurant on East 40th Street were murdered. The incident sparked fear that the crime which had riddled Chinatown was moving uptown. Police launched a citywide campaign to wipe it out. The crackdown played havoc with established vice in Chinatown. Youth gangs, foot soldiers of neighborhood crime, were forced [...]
On Saturday, February 15th, I woke up at my usual time, and as I pattered around the apartment, I glanced out of my window to check the weather. It was bleak, only twenty-five degrees, with blistering winds, and on 47th Street there were at least twenty police vehicles lining the sidewalks. I started to pick up the sounds around me, [...]
The real estate maxim "location, location, location" dictates that just building it won't make them come, you have to build it under their noses. While this may hold for the surfeit of restaurants and Starbucks in New York City, the exact opposite is true for laundromats. Wherever, and however shoddily they are built, people come, even those who aren't using [...]
From the desk of Dave Prager, a slight shift of the head is all that’s required to look out the bedroom window. Following such a shift, one’s view is then dominated by a picturesque cement wall — a sideways monolith, capped by chain link fence, five feet past the bedroom wall, separating Dave’s property from the wilds beyond: a sliver [...]
The beers cost seven dollars and the DJ had A.D.D. He kept stopping the tracks midway through, throwing the girls off. There were two rooms, and opposite the bar in each room was a stage. The stage in the front room had a baby-blue wooden banister cordoning it off from the bar, and a sign in magic marker on poster [...]
