You are currently viewing the stories for March, 2019

The Tax Man

by 03/31/2019
Neighborhood: Bowery, Upper West Side

  It was tax time, April 1989, the cold and merciless spring a further insult to what had been a turbulent year for me. I’d been struggling with sobriety and was trying to bounce back from a failed romance. Some days, I felt like I walked through the world with my skin turned inside out, […]

Work Song #10 (Spirit Ties)

by 03/24/2019
Neighborhood: Tribeca

  Because I sat around Reading Joyce and Wallace Stevens and Shakespeare and spent Time checking out Museum shows and Galleries and walking Up and down the streets Of the city I had A superior attitude And even thought I was hot shit Compared to pawns And poor assholes Who had to wear Suits and […]

On Etan Patz and Walking to School

by 03/17/2019
Neighborhood: East Village

Etan Patz disappeared forty years ago, on May 25, 1979. I was seven then, in second grade, and right around that time, perhaps even that same month, is when I started walking home from school on my own. We lived on 4th Street and Avenue A, maybe three quarters of a mile from Grace Church […]

The Sultry Scent of Formaldehyde

by 03/10/2019
Neighborhood: East Village, Queens

My memories of high school are burdened by two deciding factors: the absence of girls and my aversion to math and science, both regrettable, given the fact that the prestigious institution I attended, Stuyvesant High School—then still in its old digs, a venerable building on East 15th Street—was all boys and all about math and […]

The Ohio Convention

by 03/03/2019
Neighborhood: Greenpoint, Port Authority, Woodside

I ran into Dad’s room after hearing my name called. “Take off your shoes,“ he said. I wondered what the heck was going to happen now. That morning my mom had told me that I would be going to Akron, Ohio with Dad to see the people who caused his nightmares and screaming. His war […]