You are currently viewing the stories for April, 2008
Kill Whitey Day
by Michele Carlo 04/27/2008Neighborhood: Bronx, East Bronx
I was standing in the basement of Macy’s Parkchester in The Bronx, in a line of what seemed like a thousand teenagers, smoking both cigarettes and weed, chanting and cheering and waiting for Ticketmaster to open. Adult shoppers were non-existent and salespeople had abandoned their posts either in foreknowledge or in fear, except the lone […]
What Can Do
by Granger Greenbaum 04/27/2008Neighborhood: Across the River, Brooklyn
My landlord George fled communist Armenia at a young age. Whenever I have occasion to talk with him in the hall he is infallibly cheerful and quick to offer words of encouragement. “How a you doing?” he asks me, “is beautiful day but must still be working, what can do.” He shrugs at the day’s […]
Detroiters Make Citizen’s Arrest, Save Starbucks CDs
by Eric C. Novack 04/27/2008Neighborhood: Across the River, Letter From Abroad
It was Tuesday and I held the door for a well-dressed black woman on my way into Starbucks at Mack and Woodward. She thanked me and I thought of my mother who had taught me to be a gentleman. I followed her up to the counter where four or five more people were waiting to […]
Meet Your Match on Craigslist–by a Victorious Veteran
by Prof Barbara Foster 04/20/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
As the New Years Eve hullabaloo in Times Square exploded, I followed suit with a cataclysmic orgasm. That was the good news! Then things became Byzantine! Did complications arise because I met Desmond on Craigslist, where a dizzying succession of weirdoes and losers answered my ad? Since that New Years, I’ve evolved a strategy, plus […]
Lower Torso Must be Covered in Food Area
by Kelly Kreth 04/20/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
I’ll admit it, I was uptight. I didn’t know what to expect and tend to have social anxiety in big groups, even when the folks that comprise them are fully clothed. I sat uncomfortably in the Beamer, cruising down 2nd. Still, I don’t consider myself a prude and the opportunity to go and view seemed […]
Dirty Magazines
by Roberta Allen 04/20/2008Neighborhood: Upper West Side
When Doree Gottlieb, a girl in my second grade class at P.S. 87, invites me over to her house after school, I beg my mother to let me go. She finally says okay though my grandmother is still against it. Doree Gottlieb lives at 135 Central Park West. A big, impressive pre-war building between 74th […]
From Kobe, Japan to New York City (and Back Again)
by Meakin Armstrong 04/11/2008Neighborhood: East Village
I watched it from a high floor of our apartment building: a confusion of spotlights, protesters, and riot police. Some two thousand people that night were lunging toward our compound wall, shouting “Yankee, Go home!” Through a bullhorn, someone called us gaijin, which technically meant foreigner, but was in actuality, closer to “gringo.” While the […]
Not That Christ is Funny
by Stephanie Anagnoson 04/11/2008Neighborhood: Washington Heights
My friend John promised a world away from the gray of Boston, but the Cloisters seemed equally cold and dim when we paid our admission fee (ahem, suggested $20 donation). The cold from the stone floor seeped upward through my shoes as we began to wander around, approaching the tapestry in which the unicorn sits […]
Walk Like a Woman
by peter nolan smith 04/11/2008Neighborhood: East Village
I always thought Billy Wilder’s film SOME LIKE IT HOT was funny, until my next-door neighbor asked in his basement, “Who you think is prettier as a woman? Jack Lemmon or Tony Curtis?” “Neither.” This was 1964 and men in dresses weren’t supposed to be funny to 11 year-old boys on the South Shore of […]
Daydreaming on the Q
by Amanda McCormick 04/11/2008Neighborhood: Lower East Side
On the train on the way home, I scan the occupants of the car, playing Wildly Inappropriate Matchmaker, my favorite daydream. For the purposes of this exercise, I settle on a tall woman with black hair tied back tight, librarian glasses slipping down her nose as she reads a copy of Finnegans Wake. I want […]
Small Claims is a War of Attrition
by Sarah Miller-Davenport 04/06/2008Neighborhood: Lower East Side
It is a cool, dry August evening and I am in a windowless room at 111 Centre Street. I leave New York, the city of my birth, in less than a week. Yet, through a series of escalating events, I choose to be here, stubbornly clinging to the dream of winning back a minor sum […]
Where We’re From
by Jeanette Thornton 04/06/2008Neighborhood: Upper West Side
It is rare, in New York, so I’ve noticed, that conversations pop up with strangers but I have experienced a few. I was in the bakery down the street from my apartment on the Upper West Side, the one with only two tables and a line out the door, and I was searching for the […]