You are currently viewing the stories for “February 2008.”
There is nothing more terrifying than finding a well-fed bedbug in your bed at 1 a.m. It’s even more of a rude awakening if the source of this bedbug can be traced back to a one-week stand you met through an online dating site. It all began last spring when I turned my attention to a new phenomenon for me: [...]
Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? --William Blake For years he sailed around the city, his effigy an urban fixture beaming from the side of a bus, the prototypical comic book superhero, blond, blue-eyed and brawny, toying with the tail [...]
In 1963, the year my father killed himself, I was obsessed with Bob A. I was crazy about him. My father hated Bob A. and flew into a fury whenever he heard his name. In Bob A., my father recognized himself, especially when he was young. Though Bob A. was not, as far as I know, a gambler like my [...]
Even the janitor’s wife has a perfectly good love life and here am I, facing tomorrow, alone with my sorrow, down in the depths of the 90th floor.  --Cole Porter It may not have been the 90th floor, perhaps the 30th or 40th. The exact number is foggy in my memory, but the rest of this “strange interlude” dances before [...]
I went out with my friend Dylan last night. We met in 2003 on the internet. Tried dating, but were better friends than anything. He was the first person I met when I moved back to New York and looking to date. I had left because my husband was killed in the World Trade Center. Dylan and I went out [...]
Feraz and I are on the prowl in Red Hook. We drive slowly over wet cobblestone streets by the old wharves, past crumbling warehouses and parks bright with new grass over to Beard Street, where the silver frame of a new IKEA is going up. Two construction workers wave us over. “Have you caught ‘em yet?” the stocky one asks. [...]
We had already lived in New York for a year when we discovered the park. A year since my husband and I moved from New Jersey to Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, a year since the most awfully timed disaster of the loss of a family member to brain cancer. That the family member was a dog, my best friend and [...]
Through the cinder-block walls of the roller rink, the beat leaks out onto Empire Boulevard. Inside, it’s two steps from the door to the rail of the rink where the skaters sail towards you, past you, and away, rounding the curve and bouncing to the beat; as they cruise down the far straightaway there is a sign: Empire #1 Birthplace [...]
[For earlier Brookti & Me, check here and here . --eds.] ** I’ve been reading a lot recently about our new “post-racial” world, where we have “transcended race,” where a black man is running for president and white people are actually voting for him. I’m wondering, if we have transcended race so successfully, why are we reading so much about [...]
It was Richard M. Nixon who said it best when he uttered those immortal words: “I am not a crook!” For the record, he also said, “I have never been a quitter,” just before he resigned the presidency back in 1973. So go figure. I have always thought of crooks as cartoon burglars wearing Lone Ranger masks breaking into places [...]
Living in Manhattan and dwelling in an apartment depletes a person of standard, taken- for-granted privacies and idiosyncrasies that I believe every person and family exhibits. Here, on this grittiest of islands, we are intimate and strangers. Think of all of the people you comfortably smile at and gossip with, not knowing (or caring) about the intimate details of their [...]
Every weekday and many weekend afternoons at around 12:30, I prepare a light lunch, sit down at the dining room table, and read The New York Times sports section. Which used to sort of surprise me, because I’m not that much of a sports fan. I go to a few baseball games a year. I’ve attended some of my younger [...]
We went into Calypso, on Madison Avenue and 69th Street. The first thing I noticed upon entering the store was a young woman paying for something at the register while she distractedly texted. Then, as she texted, she got an actual phone call. She picked up and announced her coordinates and her purchase, “A gray cashmere sweater!” And then a [...]
“I don’t know their names, but I know them by voice,” said Galo Cardenas, proprietor of GC Snax, located on the ground floor of the New York Supreme Court building at 60 Centre Street. And if Mr. Cardenas looks at his customers askance, it’s because sideways is the only way he can see them -- he’s legally blind, and only [...]
