You are currently viewing the stories for “June 2007.”
I took the subway uptown to stop by my old boss’s townhouse. Drop by any time, she’d said. Just ring the bell. We were on good terms. I had quit that job to take something downtown. The new job paid a little bit more, but it hadn’t worked out. Now I was back working as a waitress. My old boss [...]
Every Tuesday when I was a small boy my mother would take me to visit a statue of Saint Anthony in Saint Francis Church on 31st Street in Manhattan. Saint Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of the poor. Curiously, he is invoked by those looking for lost things. Along with Saint Jude he is also sometimes called the [...]
Climbing the steps of the Chelsea townhouse, I hoped the guy who opened the door would be a stud. I found him on Craigslist, in the rideshare section. He was headed to L.A. via Omaha, where I was getting off. Nine days had passed since I answered his cross-country-in-a-cargo-van ad. In that time he assured me I was going, then [...]
On a damp Saturday afternoon, in the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, my boyfriend, Ben, is attacked. We share a table on the second floor—I study, Ben reads—when a pale, rangy teenager approaches us. He pauses, then begins to slam Ben’s face with a volume of Compton’s Encyclopedia. “Stop being condescending,” the boy hisses in between each swipe. [...]
At the risk of sounding insensitive - I normally have zero patience for whining panhandlers. I had an unpleasant experience a couple of years ago when I bought a homeless guy a slice of pizza. He then showed up five minutes later, with his friend, asking if I could buy them both a beef patty. Another source of my harbored [...]
On May 20th, while most of the city was watching the Yankees and Mets slug it out for "Best Team in New York Baseball" bragging rights, just beneath their feet, a different sort of battle was being contested inside the Brooklyn-bound J train. The whole car, even when stationary with its doors open onto a platform, was rattling from the [...]
One Halloween, I decided to wear something different than my usual orange shirt from the 1989 Westchester Girl Scouts Jamboree. On the evening of disguises, I tried on a very local one. I dressed as a stereotypical “Murray Hill” Girl, a costume that required an explanation and a bibliography. The costume evoked a particular New York Observer news article written [...]
Nicola is a lively twenty-year-old girl of Thai and Italian descent, born and raised on the Upper East Side. She has been my roommate on East 4th Street for four months, since I answered her apartment ad on Craigslist, and she works as a cocktail waitress at Thor—a fashionable nightclub in the Lower East Side—until 4:00 a.m. most nights. The [...]
The middle of May holds much promise for the North Fork surfcaster, or fly fisherman. By that time the striped bass have moved up into the shallow flats and bays around Orient and the water has warmed enough so that the bass have begun to feed with a good deal of purpose. In mid-May the bay waters are clear and [...]
Madison Square Park confirms New York as civilized city. The park is a cultured green in Manhattan's punishing grid: the Flatiron Building to its southwest, Broadway to the west, the century-old architecture, the clock tower to the east, buildings that house Credit Suisse First Boston and some of the globe's most powerful corporations, America's wealth, New York's wealth, and the [...]
