You are currently viewing the stories for “March 2010.”
The sidewalk in front of my apartment building was wrapped in crime tape. An ambulance waited idly on East 10th Street. Policemen strode in and out of the lobby. It was a mild winter Saturday afternoon, and I’d come downstairs for my mail. My doorman looked ashen. “A woman jumped,” he said. “18G.” He was the second person to see [...]
What I like most about Law & Order is that it’s always on. For a long time I didn’t watch Law & Order, and then one day I did. I used to turn the TV on, flick around for something to watch, and on nearly every other channel find Law & Order reruns featuring either the first cast, the previous [...]
It was a lousy and bleak first Sunday in May. I walked into City Hall Park, in my neighborhood, and Richard the gardener greeted me and introduced me to the other volunteers. “Can I pull out the tulips?” I said to Richard. “ My knees are in bad shape and I'm afraid of making them worse by kneeling on them.” [...]
Walking the streets on St. Patrick’s Day in New York City is akin to walking into an insane asylum in which all the inmates have been starved for days, denied all their medications, punched about the head a few times, then painted green and released from their cells. Also, someone has pissed in all the corners. One memorably chaotic St. [...]
So you’ve got the wife and the kids. You’ve got and are just barely hanging onto, the co-op in the chic enclave, you’re so middle-aged. Some men, finding themselves adrift in a wood in their middle years, go to the gym: I troll whores for coke. After you’ve seen the horrors of Chelsea Pier’s ice rink on a weekend afternoon, [...]
In Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, 19-year-old Alice – played by Mia Wasikowska – returns to Wonderland, 10 years after her last visit there, to rescue it from the Red Queen. At 26, two decades since my last trip to the rabbit hole, I can only say I envy her. I was six years old in 1990 when my dad [...]
My partner and I found an apartment with one bedroom—one more bedroom than either of us had in our old places. The new residence did not, however, have a bathtub. The bathroom—an extension of a hallway that also served as the kitchen—was too small for a tub. The space left for a tub measured about three feet by three feet. [...]
As a teenager, I lived with my dysfunctional family in a modest but comfortable apartment in Beechurst, Queens. One Saturday morning, too fried to suffer any longer the slings and arrows of my sorry-assed teenage life, I decided to run away from home. I told my mother I was going into Manhattan to spend the day at the New York [...]