You are currently viewing the stories for “January 2004.”
A slightly built African-American man in a standard-issue beige trenchcoat murmured as we passed on the street. "Say, you wouldn't mind giving the time of day to a Black man?" "What can I do for you?" "Well, I'm just here at St. Luke's, you see, for the methadone program, and I have to get home, and the buses, they require [...]
It was 1969 and cats were everywhere in Morningside Heights. Multitudes of feral alley prowlers, storefront dozers, and the gray cat who was allowed to sit in the open, unscreened window of the fourth floor apartment across the street. He was always reaching toward pigeons with a wistful paw, even though the pigeons were never anywhere close. Whenever I returned [...]
Twenty-one children (the first of whom were triplets), and twenty-one grandchildren. And two wives, if you're wondering. Thirteen with the first wife, nine with the next. He's not married anymore. He grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, when it was still Brownsville, Brooklyn. Now he lives in Springfield Gardens, Queens. On public transportation it takes him two and a half hours [...]
Michael had long used us as a test audience for his trendy nihilism, togging up in punk, new wave and goth to suit his status as a Parsons grad student. We, his undergrad pals from Syracuse, continued to feign shock, through ten shades of hair color, safety pins inserted in various extremities, kilts, bondage pants and all-black wardrobes. But there [...]
Melting orange popsicles, dripping ice cream cones, slushy cherry ices and candy all day long--all reminders of lazy summer days spent growing up in Harlem. A day that began for me not long after dawn. Peering out of my living room window, I see that the Harlem world is just beginning to stir, but I am wide awake and bursting [...]
Eliot Majors, age 9, slides his queen diagonally across the chessboard, then inexplicably halts one square short. Check. Several watching youngsters groan. "Nooo!" cries one, clutching his chest, and falls to the ground in dramatic disbelief. Maurice Ashley, age 34, removes his dark sun glasses and his leather jacket. "You sure you want to do that?" he says. It doesn't [...]
Manhattan is the capitol of the unexpected encounter. There are no dogs barking to warn you of the unexpected, no dust being kicked up on a long curving dirt road as a stranger approaches. So it was that I found myself standing in Nussbaum & Wu, wishing that her presence had kicked up a little more dust. Here before me, [...]
I sit in a tree with pen and paper in hand, planning to writing a letter. The branches under me are smooth and rough in patches, warped like an elephant's trunk. The shade of the tree, the cool breeze and warm sun make me feel good, and calm, and in control. An elderly man stands some ways off, smoking a [...]
The garden in Riverside Park is fragrant and full of kids playing, but only several hundred yards away Grant's Tomb maintains its atmosphere of austerity and stillness. The sign on the plaza outside the Tomb, under the sycamores, reads NO ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES. And immediately one thinks of whiskey and of the General in his Union-blue private's coat and of the [...]
Thursday morning was many different mornings, just as the night without lights had been many different nights. One woman, rising before the sun, stuck her head out of her bedroom window. Never before, she said, had the street been so quiet. Nor the sky—in Queens!—so full of stars. A twenty-two-year-old who hadn’t been to bed decided the best way to [...]
Having finished the Blue-plate Special And reached the coffee stage, Stirring her cup she sat, A somewhat shapeless figure Of indeterminate age In an undistinguished hat. When she lifted her eyes it was plain That our globular furore, Our international rout Of sin and apparatus And dying men galore, Was not being bothered about. Which of the seven heavens Was [...]
In his long running quest to be a perpetual house guest, Sherban had developed a new strategy: balconies. Something about a balcony reassured apartment owners that one's presence was only temporary, enjoyable almost. And life on a balcony turned out to be refreshingly casual, al fresco. By contrast to a "spare room" or fold-out sofa, one could be proud of [...]
I immediately rediscovered my stance - Kruger's signature red boxes, the bold typed messages upon entrance erased the damage the glossy magazine had done. I remembered whose side I was on when viewing Kruger's commands: "you are a captive audience", "your body is a battleground", "we are your elaborate holes", "your comfort is my silence." Every picture and its copy [...]
Julio, a boyish thirty-one, has difficulty not smirking when admitting to having slept with over seventy-five females. The majority were what Julio dubs "Barnard floozies": white, rich undergraduates at Columbia University or Barnard College. Julio can list most of their names on a napkin. Those whose names he can't recall, he can usually remember something about them, like the one [...]
Phoebe’s is the local coffee shop, and it isn’t a bad place to be in the summer. The patio in the back hosts a leafy tree that sprawls between the fire escape above and the duplex behind, shading the tables and chairs and making it cool. A rusted watering can props open the screen door. There is a sink off [...]
Dear Diary, Having just dropped towel in the men’s locker room of one of the numerous branches of the Union Square-area New York Sports Clubs, I bent over to slip my leg into my underwear (charcoal gray boxer briefs, from Bloomies, of course!) when I noticed out of the corner of my right eye that someone had moved inappropriately close [...]
It is 7:00pm, and I look down at my vibrating phone. It’s from Mr. Cheese. Interesting. I had met him awhile back, and he seemed nice enough, so we exchanged numbers. But I rarely hear from him, and have never had more than a 5 minute conversation with the guy. Hm. I wonder what the occasion is. “Diedre? Hi, this [...]
Illustration by Elisha Cooper I was married and she was married and we probably shouldn't have been doing what we were doing, especially where we were doing it. But there we were, late winter, 2002, at 57th and Broadway, a spot that, at least to an out-of-towner like me, signified something important. I read once that that intersection was the [...]
Our company president paced before us in miniature Ferragamo shoes, her furrowed brow crowned by a platinum beehive. With her short, tyrannical stature she smacked of Kim Jong II preparing to invade Madison Avenue. She had called us junior PR flacks into her office for a rousing speech. "You’re the best of the agency and that’s why we have you [...]
Merchants and police had the first say, but in no time, countless others got into the fray. “They are jackals, that’s why,” said a city councilman who represented a heavily looted Brooklyn neighborhood. “Jackals who took advantages of the darkness to destroy our stores and services.” “Why do they do it?” asked an eighteen-year-old, as if the answer were obvious. [...]
