You are currently viewing the stories for “May 2006.”
The organizers of Erotica USA threw a party recently at a place called Club New York, and all the exhibitors and exhibitionists who will shortly be filling up the Javitz center for the four-day Sex Expo were invited. The evening began with a sort of Freudian slip--the address on the invitation, "225 West 43rd Street"--did not exist. So many of [...]
In the spring of 1902, the lawman swung down from the train. He was nearly fifty and a trifle stocky now. But he had worked for Wyatt Earp and known Doc Holliday, he had upheld the law in Dodge City and kept the peace in Tombstone. His shooting hand had lost none of its cunning, the .45 still swung on [...]
Patricia Bosworth, the author of biographies of Montgomery Clift and Diane Arbus and who has been at work on a biography of her father, Bartley Crumb, for the last 10 years, recently had the idea that it might be nice if a group of biographers could gather now and then and commiserate, perhaps over lunch at the China Bowl, a [...]
Here is a note Isaac Mizrahi wrote to Grace Mirabella shortly after she was replaced by Anna Wintour as the Editor of Vogue Magazine.
I call myself a security consultant because it sounds better than salesman but, essentially, I'm a salesman. I sell security products, primarily safes. My dad preceded me in this. He was with the Mosler Safe Company starting around 1948 and, quite frankly, as a kid, the work sounded very dull to me. I wanted to be a playboy of the [...]
My dad worked in midtown at an advertising agency and for years as a young kid I would go to work with my him in the summers, just as a way to stay out of trouble. We would always take the same route and on the way we would pass an old decrepit building sandwiched between two large contemporary buildings. [...]
My story is true. Every detail I will relate is exactly as it happened on a beautiful spring day, May 16, 2000. This story starts in Kingston, NY, where four co-workers from the Ulster County Department Of Social Services prepare for a wonderful, exciting day in New York City. At 6:30 a.m. all four women, Janet, Sue, Gloria and Reine [...]
One of the first things a new visitor to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is likely to notice is how well dressed most of the men are. Monsoon rains may turn the streets into shallow lakes, the electricity may be erratic, but the men are fairly consistent in their outfit--a pair of slacks and a neat button down short sleeve shirt. The [...]
The strange twinge that often comes when I leave work and head west on 56th Street is, oddly, much like the same thing that hit the center of my gut when, at 13, I rode a bike to a movie theater in South Jersey and, with my school buddies, went to see my first R-rated movie. It's as if, confronting [...]
1993 Like most of the people who haunt Shea Stadium these days, Steve Calandro is a diehard Mets fan. He's also a vendor, and the vendors, like the Mets, aren't having a terribly good year. The vendors work for the Harry M. Stevens Corporation, and when things are slow, as they have been this season, who gets to work is [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut: a masterpiece or utter crap? My own impression was that it was utter crap when I saw it a little over a year ago, though I did enjoy the movie in certain ways, none of them, I felt at the time, intended. Since then I watched Kubrick's Lolita again and was [...]
Manhattan is shaped like an ocean liner or like a lozenge or like a paramecium (the protruding piers its cilia) or like a gourd or like some kind of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere. The Japanese of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had a word, ukiyo, [...]
It was an unseasonably cool Sunday evening in July, and, like the weather, I was feeling a bit out of sorts. I was looking for a new job and getting used to the pressures and angst of being in my first serious relationship. Walking on 78th Street between First and York, heading to the subway station after spending the weekend [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper In the sixties and seventies watching the balloons being blown up wasn't such a big NY "happening" and the only people their were residents of the neighborhood, building and neighborhood employees and business owners, the volunteers who inflated and walked the balloons, and the police. The street was closed at around dusk the night before the [...]
It started in a house. A bunch of guys playing music. It turned into a rambling, on again off again musical adventure, with numerous incarnations. The band's only record, Hell House, was released in 1997 by Grand Royal Records, thirteen years after most of the material that appears on it was recorded. John Berry, an original member of The Beastie [...]
I can't help but think about The O'Jays when I ride the C train. And not just because I used to commute back and forth from my boyfriend's place on 105th and Manhattan to my studio on Suffolk and Houston. The C train officially became the Love Train one day four years ago somewhere between Manhattan Valley and the Lower [...]
For three years my girlfriend, Erin, lived in Dakar, Senegal, and though I never even made the trip there, I developed an attachment to Africa. There was something in knowing, truly knowing of her life there that became a part of my own life--acquiring not a working knowledge of Wolof (the language native to Dakar) but an understanding simply of [...]
When I take the subway I like to stand in the front car and look out the window. The window is long and narrow and through it I begin to watch the moving narrative of traveling through the underground on my way to wherever it is I want to go. I must keep my balance standing or else sit with [...]
"Chef!" The word rings out over the din of the vast kitchen, swirling in heat and motion, as 62 men and women in white smocks and white chef's hats go about the business of making dinner for the eight O'clock seating. "Chef!" The eight o'clock seating at Le Cirque is not to be taken lightly. The New York Times has [...]
The Museum of Modern Art on West Fifty-third Street Is interested only in the flower not the bulb. After the Dutch tulips finished blooming in the garden last year, They pulled them up and threw them away--that place has no heart. Some fortunately were rescued and came into my possession. I kept them all winter in a paper bag from [...]
I was reading the fall issue of Esquire Gentleman recently, experiencing the slightly pleasing, slightly lulling sensation of an American fashion magazine, when I came across a photo of Adolf Hitler in a pin-striped suit. It was part of an article on old-fashioned pin-stripe suits, like the ones worn by the Duke of Windsor or Al Capone, who were also [...]
The flat palm of my hand slammed into the steering wheel again and again. "Fuck me, fuck me, fuck ME!" Yes, I was being vulgar -- and a bad driver -- but it had taken more like five or six hour to get from Washington, D.C. to New York, and now it was going to take another hour before we [...]
It was 1978 and I was in sixth grade at public school I.S. 44 on the Upper West Side. A group of boys robbed me- daily. Tyrone, a mean little black kid in a blue down coat, which he wore regardless of whether it was summer or winter, grew up in the projects just a few blocks north of where [...]
My writing teacher Sue said getting published would change my life. But as I prepared to dart past the security guard at the library, a stolen copy of The New York Post hidden in my parka, I sensed this wasn't what she had in mind. Only a month ago, everything had seemed so promising. An editor from The Post had [...]
This essay appears in Thomas Beller’s essay collection, “How To Be a Man.” * There are those for whom a T-shirt is just another name for an undershirt, the sort of thing that never sees the light of day. But for others, myself included, T-shirts often are the main event, and the arrival of spring has prompted me to reconsider [...]
The Joan of Arc Junior High school had just let out across the street and a crowd gathered right away. The man in the headlock, the captured man, was impossibly skinny, and wore faded jeans that were a bit too short, and sneakers. He had a beard and shaggy brown hair. He could have been a progressive librarian or mentally [...]
It's 10:20 p.m. on a Tuesday, and the air is filled with the unmistakable sound of coins hitting metal. The multi-colored machine generating all the noise stands almost six feet tall and looks like a cross between an oversized Lego kit and something that toddlers would be crawling over at Playspace. The high tech liquid crystal display on the front [...]
I had come to New York for spring break in search of fixing a broken heart. Probably a silly reason, but the cause and focus of that broken heart was spending the semester in New York at the Hotel Windermere with other theater students from my college in Indiana. Why I thought I could patch things up I'll never know. [...]
La Tacita De Oro, the Chinese-Cuban restaurant on 99th and Broadway has a roast chicken special: One-half chicken (breast, thigh, back and wing) is served with yellow rice and black beans, or salad and fried plantains, for $4.85. I've come to learn that a small population of Chinese migrated to Cuba in the 1930s and then eventually came to America [...]
Of the big five, our sense of smell is supposedly the one most closely associated with our memories. And I buy that, because I’m always a little turned on when I smell Burberry perfume. I can’t really describe it, but I can always identify it when I smell it. My first college girlfriend wore Burberry perfume. And the sensation associated [...]
In October of 1960, Mom was pulling for Kennedy and Dad was rooting for Nixon. I couldn't have cared less one way or the other—my thoughts were on baseball. The Pittsburgh Pirates had just crushed my heart by beating the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series (to this day, I still wonder if Mickey Mantle cried as [...]
I was bounding down the stairs into the subway, three steps at a time, hoping to make the train. The stairs were wet. The air was cold. It was a day of harsh weather, a gusting snowstorm, but I had my iPod and was experiencing everything dreamily. To say it was a new iPod was only half of it. I [...]
What if books are the new crack? In the 80's, Bed-Stuy had crack. Now, we've got literature. The New York Times publishes plenty of articles on the fluctuations in Bed-Stuy's crime rate, and on the neighborhood's gentrification, but they are not reporting on this: literature. Perhaps it's not fit to print. I make my modest, recent-college-grad home in good old [...]
Every year on March 30th, Brooke Astor’s birthday, I think about the time I killed her. Here is how it happened: In 2000, Brooke Astor kindly lent her name to the Gotham Center for New York City History. Mike Wallace (the historian, not the reporter) was starting up a center at the CUNY Graduate Center to celebrate New York City [...]
Heather stopped and pulled down her pants. Adam and I stood in the shadow of a large building on the still Brooklyn street, allowing no person to see. Urine trickled down the contaminated sidewalk as we left. The journey commenced, and on we walked to the worst place in New York to buy coke, Kokies. After being permitted to enter [...]
At the height of the scandal over the inventions in James Frey's “A Million Little Pieces,” I was thinking about “Westchester Burning” by Amina Wefali. “A Million Little Pieces” is about a man and his addiction. “Westchester Burning” is about a woman and her marriage. Any resemblance between these two very different books is limited to whatever slim overlap there [...]
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