You are currently viewing the stories for August, 2009

My Family’s Fatal Relationship With Public Transportation

by 08/22/2009
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

My family has a particular vulnerability, a fatal relationship really, with public transportation. Aunt Aneila, running to catch a bus, was hit and killed by a post office truck on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn long before I was born. “Mowed down like a dog,” my mother used to say. Uncle Donald had a heart attack […]

Under Jimmy’s Awning

by 08/22/2009
Neighborhood: Times Square

Jimmy’s Corner isn’t like other Times Square bars–those oversized Irish pubs made of dark, polished wood or the theater-crowd cocktail lounges with big windows, people inside looking like they’re drinking in a department store display case. Jimmy’s is a dim, narrow cave of a bar, a hunk of coal in a glittering craton. Late in […]

Waking up at Bellevue

by 08/22/2009
Neighborhood: Midtown

When I woke up that morning, I thought we were in my East Village apartment sleeping in my bed. I thought we had fallen in love. It was the sound of his voice that convinced me, soothing and sexy, masculine and raw. His words were unintelligible as they crept through the dark. I liked the […]

Opera for the Poor, Cheap and Masochistic

by 08/16/2009
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

I’m Number 28 in line for rush tickets at the Metropolitan Opera. Today there was a ripple in the curvature of the space-time continuum: they moved the rush ticket waiting line upstairs. Ongoing construction forced everybody out of the usual spot. This means that instead of waiting in the hyperborean dungeon beneath the main level […]

The Funny Company

by 08/16/2009
Neighborhood: Midtown

Morty Gunty grew up in my neighborhood. Morty Gunty was a two-bit standup comic. Morty Gunty played himself in Woody Allen’s film “Broadway Danny Rose.” Both Morty and Woody went to my high school, Midwood High, but Morty doesn’t rate a Wikipedia mention. Perhaps his greatest exposure was as the backup host for the Cerebal […]

Turds Fall Within Pepe’s Bailiwick

by 08/16/2009
Neighborhood: Across the River, Bronx

Someone pooped in the cabinet today. It wasn’t the first time the staff bathroom had been despoiled. It happened once before but I’d completely forgotten about it in the general whoosh of activity around the clinic. The bad part is we don’t know if it was a patient passing by or a staff person. That […]

Street Ball

by Thomas Beller 08/09/2009
Neighborhood: West Village

Poke, poke, poke went his finger against my head. I was playing basketball at my local basketball court and some static had developed between me and a guy nicknamed Homicide. I stared straight ahead, trying to ignore his jabbing finger. “You stink!” he yelled, barking right into my face. “You know that?” He was six […]

Crazy But True

by 08/09/2009
Neighborhood: Upper East Side

At 4 a.m. on a Saturday night in May, I was suddenly trapped in my own bedroom with no likely route to freedom. I had just turned out the light and pulled the covers when a strong draft slammed the bedroom door shut. This had happened before, but the door had never locked. The problem […]

The Searchers

by 08/09/2009
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope

We weren’t exactly seasoned foragers. I had only been foraging in the city a few months before I met Neil, who lucked into it the Saturday he rode his bicycle in Prospect Park and found our group picking field greens. But we had come into it in the same way—we were both dealing with break-ups […]