You are currently viewing the stories for “December 2021.”
During the summer of 1978 I worked as a Good Humor man. I would push a cart from the Good Humor depot, located at 3rd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue, on the Lower East Side, to Exchange Place in the financial district of lower Manhattan, where I would sell the company’s offerings to traders, office workers, messengers, or anyone [...]
On April 7, 1972, New York mobster, Joey Gallo, was murdered while having a celebratory late night dinner at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. It was his birthday. On July 13, 1977, three friends and myself made the trek from the Upper East Side down to Umberto’s. We all craved what was widely known as the best spaghetti and [...]
As the token reverberates in the machine and the creaking panel slowly begins to lift, we awake from our stupors, throw down our magazines, and thrust forward our best commercial assets. Desperation sets in as the panel creeps up to unveil the face of a homely, unwashed, acne-laden man. Why do so many of them look like this? My competition, [...]
I first tried cocaine off of a chessboard, while listening to Lou Reed in my West Village studio apartment with a girl named after the Central American country in which she was conceived. I remember thinking that for brief moments life really could be a movie if you made it one. The girl and I were in the same cosmology [...]
