You are currently viewing the stories for “February 2005.”
Even though I've trained myself in hand-to-hand combat, I've never been eager to fight and I always surprise myself if I do something brave in that area. One of my proudest moments came when I was about 18. My friend Angelo was dating a girl Gina who had been seeing this other guy from another neighborhood. We'd regularly hang out [...]
"And three weeks later I found him dead in his apartment," I overhear an old man say to his friend as I pass them on a street in the West Village. It's all I get--the one, disembodied line. Another day, another street. I pass a man and a woman, and at that instant the man says: "I LIKE eating raw [...]
This essay appears in the just released book, "Lost and Found: Stories From New York." 1. Rage Reacclimation: Waiting in line for a press credential At the southwest corner of "The Big Tent" in Bryant Park, a snaking, huddled mass of photographers gathers in the cold, waiting for access to the warm, partitioned press cell within. Fashion Week has arrived [...]
Central Park exists because of two writers who cared about the well-being of New York City, including all its people: the poet William Cullen ("Thanatopsis") Bryant, who proposed his idea for the park when he was still studying at Yale and also editing a periodical called the "Evening Post," and to the landscaper and editor of "The Horticulturalist," Andrew Jackson [...]
The dark woman hated me because I listened to Wagner without guilt or regret. She said that she could never understand how I could enjoy the work of such a fierce anti-Semite. I told her that was not a problem; I had learned to separate the music from the composer, and, besides, Wagner pretty much hated everybody. She said that [...]
The rainbow lights coming from the floor below. It's the summer of 1999. A girl with long brown hair is dancing close with a boy. Lights from the floor pulsing to the beat. The girl is bent backwards on the floor while the boy gyrates above her. A crowd looks on. The, she removes her hair - it's a wig! [...]
The introduction to this column, and its first episode, can be read here. ** I am here less than an hour before I slice my finger with a box cutter while breaking down some boxes 8B left in the hallway—her weekly fix from the Home Shopping Network. I should probably put a bandage on it, but the boss is bellowing [...]
Two men on the 1/9 train, heading downtown at night. One of them has a head of wild brown curls that are pushed off his forehead by a headband. The look is part hoodlum, part Jean Michelle Basquiat. His eyes are bloodshot. His body, buried beneath a hugely puffy down jacket, radiates a tense poise. He sits with elbows on [...]
I was riding downtown on a 1 train after basketball with two of the players from the game, Nick and Tom. Tom and I are both 6-6 and had spent the previous ninety minutes beating the crap out of each other on the basketball court. We were much like the fox and the sheepdog in those great old Warner Brothers [...]
The introduction to this column, and its first episode, can be read here. ** Episode #2: I expected freaky racial—and class—‘episodes’, which are inevitably intertwined, when Brookti touched down. I knew the most common ones to expect and assumed I’d easily brush them off. What I didn’t expect: how intricate the race/class hiearchys are (I did expect the level of [...]
THE GOD OF HIGH SCHOOL by Rachel Cline ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF NOT SEEING HER AGAIN by Alex Jablonski CHRISTINA by Snooder Greenberg WEDDING PROPOSAL AT CAFE LOUP by Meghan Daum and Thomas Beller MAKING IT by Kendra Hurley THE KEPT BOY by John Epperson SEGWAY SIGHTINGS by Maud Newton BUTCH & NANCY by Jenni Olson THE JEWISH HOLLY-GO-LIGHTLY by [...]
In a city that purportedly never sleeps (but does take frequent disco naps), there is a population of workers who must keep the place running while most inhabitants are in fact snoozing. Our commute begins as most are bedding down with Letterman or curling into a vodka-drenched stranger. We are the skeleton crew operating the machine while the rest of [...]
Allie once told me that if two people meet on a bridge, they will almost always fall in love. "I read it in my psychology textbook," she said. "They have to meet on a bridge." I glanced across the river at the orange lights of the Williamsburg Bridge and imagined myself flagging down the next available bike messenger as he [...]
I knew I was in trouble when I had to walk through a taupe brocade curtain. The walls were freshly painted and textured, there was abstract art on the wall, a flat screen tv was showing a tennis match and there was a chaise lounge next to the hostess station. I was in the Kiev Diner? Ironically, I had just [...]
I decide to slip out of the office to see the sun set. I look at my watch. It is a ten minute walk from my office to the west side highway. My heels slip off my feet as I put on a pair of winter boots and fetch my coat and earmuffs from the employee closet. I am missing [...]
