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In my downtown Brooklyn neighborhood were raised a breed of men who are check thieves. A rare breed of men who are slowly becoming extinct. Their turf is Court Street to Smith, Degraw Street to President. These are the sons of the older generation men, who would never let a woman pay for a check. And, who consider it right [...]
It’s all taken on a certain familiarity. I unlock the door, turn on the light, drop my bag at the foot of the bed, and move towards the kitchen. With a flick of the light, there is the scurry of roaches and waterbugs across the tile and under the counter. Like clockwork, I begin to yell obscenities, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, [...]
On a damp Saturday afternoon, in the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, my boyfriend, Ben, is attacked. We share a table on the second floor—I study, Ben reads—when a pale, rangy teenager approaches us. He pauses, then begins to slam Ben’s face with a volume of Compton’s Encyclopedia. “Stop being condescending,” the boy hisses in between each swipe. [...]
My parents and I live in a dangerous neighborhood. It started getting dicey in 1989 when my father got mugged. One night, a man put a gun to his head. My dad foolishly used a dangerous shortcut. It was an error he would not make twice. If my mother didn’t realize it before, she now knew she couldn’t walk around [...]
[The following is the second of two responses to "Confronting the Park Slope Food Coop", Fran Giuffre's blistering assault on the beloved Brooklyn institution, that has resulted in virtually nonstop Park Slope controversy for the last five years. In addition to Giuffre's historic polemic, another defense of the Coop, by the enigmatic "Dina", is also available on the Neighborhood. --Ed.] [...]
I hesitated before walking through the alleyway that led to my old backyard. I could see that my mother and father’s old fig tree was still there in the yard. It was late summer and there had just been a light rain. This would have been prime fig picking time back in the old days. I remembered that after a [...]
“Those Goddamn kids! I swear to God I can’t take it anymore. I can’t even get coffee without running into a giant mass of those little bastards at the Starbucks. It’s like a fucking daycare center in there during the mornings.” I looked up from the book I was reading at my brother, who had just returned to his apartment [...]
In Park Slope, Brooklyn, on a week-day afternoon a woman was trying to sell her iguana for twenty-five dollars. She was giving it up for a more traditional pet, like a cat who didn’t need to be constantly put out in the sun to digest its meal but could do so underneath the bed. "It tastes even better than chicken," [...]
“What should we serve for dinner?” often translates, for me, into, “What should we speak at dinner?” My household is the confluence of five languages. I’m French and my husband is Haitian and Italian. Our older son married a young woman from Taiwan while our younger son’s fiancée is from Trinidad. This mélange of native tongues can make the most [...]
“It’s not like I am going to die or anything.” My ten-year-old daughter Liza is begging me to let her walk alone to her school bus stop three streets from our Brooklyn apartment. She is as persistent as a lawyer in court, who, sensing that victory is at hand, refuses to let up on the line of questioning despite repeated [...]
There was once, just a few weeks ago, a tree outside of my bedroom window. I am not even sure what kind it was – maybe Oak, maybe Maple. (In New York you don’t really bother to know the names of trees, birds, and flowers, and it issomething you feel guilty about.) I liked this tree. It’s not that I [...]
(The original title "Time is Money" was shortened in the interest of saving both time and money.) "Time is money," my ex-wife used to say. Of course she said it mostly when she wanted me to go out and get a second job, and she said it usually from a reclining position on the couch or in the hammock while [...]
After my daughter was born, I spent part of each day on the balcony of our third-floor apartment in Sheepshead Bay, rocking her in her stroller. Even when chilly, we’d sit out. Just like her mama and papa when they were little in St. Petersburg, Russia, Sasha has spent much of her first year wrapped in blankets on the balcony. [...]
[Here it is: The moment Fran Giuffre Fran Giuffre first realized that war was at hand. The first of countless responses to Giuffre's critical evisceration of the Park Slope Food Coop, it was followed, many long and difficult years later, by Erica Weitzman's similarly devastating counterattack. --Ed.] Dear Fran, I read your horror story about Park Slope Food Coop. I [...]
[Since its initial publication on Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, this piece has unleashed a firestorm of debate so fierce, and so utterly acrimonious, that it is easily the most controversial piece in the history of this website. Of the many responses that we received, the two that we are legally permitted to publish are by Erica Weitzman and Dina. --Ed.] I [...]
The story starts with two things about me. First thing: I love coffee. I drink coffee every morning. When I gave up caffeine for several months last year, I brewed myself a mug of decaf every morning and called it my "coffee." Second thing: I habitually run late. Not catastrophically late, just late enough to feel a little pressured. These [...]
Edgar was a nice kid. He was soft-spoken and respectful and called my mom “Ma'am.” (I had never called anyone “Ma'am” in my life.) Edgar had to be coaxed over and over before he relented and agreed to call my dad “Artie” like the rest of the kids did. Edgar wasn't handsome like Peter, or stocky like Mark, the freshman [...]
I was walking my boyfriend, Frank, to the Target near our house. We were out of paper towels and Diet Coke, and it was his turn to do the shopping. A few blocks away, he closed his eyes, and began breathing deeply, in and out. I grabbed his arm and steered him gently away from a stoop. “What are you [...]
In the past decade, many attempts have been made to assist women in our efforts to meet a significant other. Self-help books with titles like The Rules or He’s Just Not That Into You proliferated, but instead of providing a sense of relief or assurance, they seemed only to add to the mass hysteria. Well, now we can all wipe [...]
I was riding in our friend’s red, rattling car. The car that had been filled with balloons to celebrate my last birthday—the time we traveled to visit Mom. Now my wife and I were going to inform my forty-five year old brother of her death. To inform, support, and console my kid brother—the brother who relied so heavily on Mom [...]
Last July, a friend of mine called to tip me off about an upcoming water gun assassination tournament. I was swamped at work when he called, crimping duvets for a big Neiman Marcus order—but seconds later I was on the tournament's website, reading the requirements for entry. By midnight I was in the back of a GMC Envoy, paying my [...]
June 14th 2006 3:30 pm Philadelphia "Who are these fucking people? They've been following me for years. Why the hell are they bent on exposing me as goddamned fraud?" I did a little research of my own and was disturbed to find that they were not only my closest friends, but my family as well. I called New York from [...]
Sitting in my first floor apartment window, people watching, it hits me (hard) that three out of the last five people who had just passed by were white. "When did this happen?" my daughter who had been out of the country for over a year asked in astonishment. It was her second day back in the states and in Brooklyn. [...]
What if books are the new crack? In the 80's, Bed-Stuy had crack. Now, we've got literature. The New York Times publishes plenty of articles on the fluctuations in Bed-Stuy's crime rate, and on the neighborhood's gentrification, but they are not reporting on this: literature. Perhaps it's not fit to print. I make my modest, recent-college-grad home in good old [...]
Heather stopped and pulled down her pants. Adam and I stood in the shadow of a large building on the still Brooklyn street, allowing no person to see. Urine trickled down the contaminated sidewalk as we left. The journey commenced, and on we walked to the worst place in New York to buy coke, Kokies. After being permitted to enter [...]
It was 4 am. Maybe 4:30. The sun was just coming out, shading the city gorgeous cool oranges and blues and pinks and yellows. It was late spring, early summer. We had been up all night listening to Johnny Cash, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey. We were on Skillman Avenue, Brooklyn, in my canted railroad apartment that had big picture [...]
I teach race and ethnic relations at a college to a genuinely diverse (racially, ethnically, economically) student body in Brooklyn. I am particularly fortunate because the students I teach are more than comfortable about speaking out and sharing their own experiences. I enjoy seeing the dynamics between the different groups in the class; they self-divide along friendly – even cheerful [...]
I have found that the tedium of flying is exceeded only by the greater tedium of waiting to fly — of arriving at the airport hours before takeoff, inching slowly along serpentine lines with the hoards of other bored or frightened fliers, waiting to have my Nikes examined by shoe-sniffing dogs and a magic wand passed over my privates by [...]
It’s January 2, 1997. I head out to the corner bodega to buy coffee and a New York Times. I wear a robe and slippers. I am still hung over from New Year’s Eve. It is the time of year when the frozen ground in Williamsburg forms an admixture of leftover snow and dog turd matter. I say this because [...]
We had arrived a little late to the Soapbox Car Derby, and the races were already in progress. Hot Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn, occasional wafts of East-River-in-July. First concern, identifying the car of our friend. (It was, without any bias, certainly the best-looking of the cars: a sleek wheeled coffin with a little cockpit for the driver, complete with roses [...]
They say she’s holed up like a squirrel, nuts to last the winter, glimpses of green bath- robe when she shuffles down the hill to her mailbox to collect more rejection. People start laying bets, perhaps she has a corpse hidden like, what’s her name, was it Emily? Maybe she’s taken a bad spell, some female kind of thing. No, [...]
My cat Pancho had been throwing up for two weeks and my dog Mack was still scratching his ears after the ear mite treatment, so, in search of a new brand of cat food and some anti-itch supplements, I ended up at the local pet store just across from Prospect Park on the Southwest side. I was rung up by [...]
Oyster crackers lump like floating islands in blood. Tomato soup looks like that when Father wears big boxers at the beach, and we stroll the boardwalk hanging onto my brother who wiggles the way that worms try to—away. I could never wait to get there, once peed my pants in the car the line was so long, and tomato soup [...]
9/3/05 7:51 PM Whenever I feel melancholy I like to find the nearest basketball court and play until I sweat and my knees buckle. I have kept up this habit for about three years, during which I have lived in five neighborhoods, playing in about as many courts. I played on a strip of black tar in Bushwick that lay [...]
1973. Marvin was the photo editor at the Brooklyn College student newspaper. I liked him a lot, and when, in 1997, after I had an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, he saw it, and trying to locate me, called my mother, he described himself as an “old friend.” Yet I recall hanging out with him only in [...]
Last August, I lived with my ex-boyfriend in my ex-neighborhood of Brooklyn, neither of which could I find my way around. Coming back from the city late one night -- I remember it being very hot and damp out -- I exited the G's Metropolitan stop around 2 a.m. and halted at the top of the steps, utterly baffled. I [...]
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