You are currently viewing the stories for “April 2005.”
An urgent tapping sent me scurrying to the front window of my brownstone garden-floor apartment located in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I peeped through slats of the wooden shutters and saw two T-shirt clad white men with badges hanging around their necks. “Yes?” I inquired. “Police,” they called out authoritatively. “Someone upstairs must have called for you” I yelled through the slats. “We [...]
I woke up feeling cold this morning and the clouds were fighting their way in between the bedroom blinds that were left open in the middle of the night. I found my body naked and bent and I thought about Nicole Du Fresne and her star quality blonde hair and blue eyes and perfect teeth and I wondered how her [...]
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer in May of 1996, she was sent for treatment at the Hospital for Special Surgery. This gave my father and I a reason to trek to NYC almost every night to pay her a visit. I was thirteen and considerably naive at the time. Yet, now almost ten years later, I vividly recall [...]
While walking down Columbus Avenue by the Planetarium one day I saw a man on his hands and knees, pulling weeds under a big tree in Theodore Roosevelt Park. He looked like he might have the lowdown on the area—and whether it was pigeon-friendly. “Why do you ask?” he asked. I told him that my friend and I have rehabilitated [...]
The rain smelled like spring. It was different than winter rain. We got caught in it, my friend Sharon and I. She asked the guy at the counter to taste a falafel to see if it was good enough. She had just been to Israel and knew her falafel from her ass, she told me. He had trouble understanding. “Taste?” [...]
So you’re teaching again. No, not the cushy adjunct work at the college where you got the MFA. This will be the crack your knuckles, roll up your sleeves type of teaching that New York City has to offer. Once you realized that The New Yorker was just as happy to ignore you with or without those precious writing awards [...]
Across the street from my apartment is a vacant building known as the Northern Dispensary. Founded as a hospice for the poor in 1827, this wedge-shaped landmark is a West Village oddity situated at the oddest of intersections: the point at which two branches of Waverly Place come together, and where Christopher Street and Grove Street diverge off Christopher Park. [...]
I saw Ed in the shadows on Perry street. A streelamp must have gone out because it was very dark. There was a helicopter circling the neighborhood, it's spotlight straffing. "A sign of things to come," he said, as though they were looking for him. A couple of houses down from where Ed sat there was a thickly planted bed [...]
In 1978 I had the only blue record album in the Berkeley Townhouse apartment building, on 35th Avenue, and probably in all of Flushing. It was the age of disco and Cheryl and I, the founding—and only—members of the Funseekers Club, (co-presidents of the Queens headquarters) were about to outgrow the unruly, shag rug in my parents' living room, and [...]
On our weekly descent into hell last night, we stopped at Nino’s for a slice. You can tell the New Yorkers from the By-Way-Of’s through a brief surveying of pizza eating technique; New Yorkers fold. You learn this at a young age. Hopefully, someone at some point in your upbringing takes you aside and shows you how. Or else you [...]
I’m not the first nor will I be the last writer to wait tables. More illustrious authors in this category include Tennessee Williams, Michael Cunningham, who tended bar before he penned The Hours, and Cynthia Huntington (who was once told by her boss that she was the ‘best-educated barkeep in New York.’) While I don’t aspire to become what Anthony [...]
I'm sitting in an upholstered armchair Jerry reserves for his clients, worrying the gray rubber brain from his collection of stress toys - the same ones I fiddle with while waiting to hear the size of my refund. But it's November - too early for my annual pre-April 15th appointment. In a few minutes, when Edward arrives, we'll discuss record [...]
Eventually everything is history - even one's own life. I once caught a glimpse of President John F. Kennedy in the flesh - and that image, so radiant and energizing - has stayed with me for over 40 years. I saw him when I was an actress playing in a comedy called Mary, Mary on Broadway. Next door to my [...]
