You are currently viewing the stories for “March 2006.”
Jimmy, the boss, and I are in the basement still mourning the passing of 16A, when the passenger car opens and a white envelope dances out of the elevator. The white rectangle shimmies and gyrates obscenely, beckoning us. We are powerless to resist. As we near the object of our desire, the envelope, and the hand to which it is [...]
Inside the firehouse, sweeping floors, cooking meals and maintaining equipment are routine parts of the job. However when the doors go up and the rigs go out you have to be as flexible as Gumby, because you do not know what you are going to be faced with next. While responding to alarms, we always scan the sky for smoke [...]
When I walk through Midtown Manhattan, I think of The Jetsons. One episode in particular, where George and Co. bought a new apartment, and that apartment was taken up by a big space-age crane and placed in an empty hole in an apartment building, thus making it full and round. That’s how I think of the offices in those huge [...]
So I fell in love with this girl named Kate. And all that remains is this sordid little correspondence that I have left from the beginning our affair. I wish it included all the walks we took on the snowy streets of Detroit or the hours we spent laying in bed daydreaming about tomorrow. But it doesn’t, it’s just a [...]
"Philadelphia is nobody's sixth borough," proclaimed the heading of a column in one of Philly's daily newspapers. "Especially not New York's," the column went on to say. The writer was responding to a New York Times article chronicling the migration of New Yorkers to Philadelphia. It noted that Philadelphians themselves occasionally referred to their city as New York's sixth borough. [...]
If you are of the runty persuasion (for our purposes let’s say 5' 2" or shorter – ceiling-skimming 5' 3ers need not apply) you likely know the terror that is the general admission rock show. You may – as I did for years – swear off the concert hall forever, foregoing its unforgiving expanses for the more amenable terrain of [...]
The world of magazine publishing in New York is extremely competitive. No matter how talented one is an editor or a writer, one must have contacts in the industry to obtain that first, entry-level job. Mrs. Carpati, my landlady, happened to work at Cosmopolitan in ad sales, and she was glad to introduce me to Hearst Magazines. I got lucky [...]
On a summer evening in 2001, after work and after grilled cheese in the Greek diner on Amsterdam, Jeremy and I are walking through Verdi square, past the 72nd Street station on the 1 and 9, the most treacherously narrow subway platform in all of Manhattan, forever poised on the precipice of disaster. The streets are packed with nervous life [...]
I teach race and ethnic relations at a college to a genuinely diverse (racially, ethnically, economically) student body in Brooklyn. I am particularly fortunate because the students I teach are more than comfortable about speaking out and sharing their own experiences. I enjoy seeing the dynamics between the different groups in the class; they self-divide along friendly – even cheerful [...]
At the beginning of February, the city was overrun by rabid sports fans. I went downtown about 9 days before the big foosball game. Streets were barricaded and blocked off. Downtown Detroit had a different type of buzz. Metro Detroiters were excited because so many people would be in town. Here in the Midwest, we suffer from big big city [...]
She was an old lady and for a moment I wanted to kill her. We were at the grocer, and she was taking an inordinate amount of time paying. After a long time spent peering into her purse she handed over a few dollars, and a couple of quarters, and a dime and a nickel, and was now very carefully [...]
In April, 1992, I was in Los Angeles preparing to go to the Academy awards as the date of someone who had been nominated for an Oscar--my mother. The Oscars are about Hollywood, about bright, ephemeral glamour, about surfaces that reflect. My mother is not about these things. Yet there we were, an unlikely pair, preparing for our big night. [...]
I had been living in New York for three years before I saw my first dead body. Sure, there were those moments of uncertainty all New Yorkers experience, when stepping into an empty train car and seeing a body splayed out, usually a poor homeless person who certainly smelled like death; but you were never sure. I even played a [...]
I met him in Starbucks while drinking a cup of coffee. He didn’t look like the kind of man that frequented Starbucks. He was reading a newspaper and I sat down at the table and chairs next to him. Even sitting down he seemed very tall; his hair was neatly shaved off his head, and he had a small graying [...]
The old lady thrust her flabby arms toward me and yelled, “She’s a man!” I fixated on the waddle of skin beneath her chin. With her arms flapping and her waddle shaking, she looked like a turkey. “You’re sure Raven is a man?” Maury Povich cheerfully asked. I awaited gender judgment, posing in my seven-inch, black patent leather, come-fuck-me-but-please-don’t-make-me-walk-in-these heels, [...]
