You are currently viewing the stories for “September 2008.”
We went to the movies and it was Woody Allen’s latest, about realistic murder, the first time in his career I think the man has been honest or real about anything and I wanted to kill Edward the entire time we were in there. “Honey put your coat on your seat, you can’t see.” He said, five hundred times. There [...]
Hey man, do you have a cigarette?” A man asked me out of nowhere. I didn’t see him creeping up to me, usually I am aware of my surroundings but he was soundless in his approach. “Naw, sorry, I bummed this from someone.” Which was true, I did bum the smoke from my friend still in the diner. “Do you [...]
East 11th Street between Avenue B and C on the Lower East Side of New York was hot for drugs the summer of 1986. The tenement building on the corner of Avenue B was called ‘the Rock.’ Teenage look-outs steered cokeheads into the tenement. The metal apartment doors were welded shut. A spy hole allowed the dealers to see their [...]
“You’re blocking the whole fucking street, you’re a total asshole!” The woman in the road screamed at me. But she only knew one of my attributes and that hardly qualified her to give a generalizing narrative to all of the other onlookers. I agreed to move my vehicle but she was the bitter, lingering sort. I wasn’t sure if she [...]
As he sits on the railing in Union Square Park, surrounded by hundreds of young men and women absorbing the first warm day of the year, José’s hands move nervously over a bottle of orange juice. On the label is an idyllic American farm, no doubt in some far-off corner of the country, where the grass never goes brown, the [...]
It’s 31 degrees on the third Saturday in February and I’m ignoring everyone on 9th Avenue. I am not a native and my ability to ignore is still a blunt instrument, numbing when engaged, so that walking down the street feels a bit like being led by a string out of a dark tunnel into the bright lights of the [...]
