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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 [...]
I grew up in Windsor Terrace, a fan-shaped neighborhood hinged on a verdant traffic circle near Prospect Park. The circle was a lowlife Mecca, a point of convergence for the neighborhood’s various derelicts, criminals, drunks, addicts, lunatics, loners, vagabonds, and weirdoes. In the summer of my sixteenth year I took a job that occasioned my getting to know a number [...]
The F train hurtles through the tunnel and suddenly we’re above ground. Lower Manhattan twinkles in the distance. I gaze at the view and for a second my anxiety has disappeared. As the skyline recedes, my stomach muscles return to the knotted state they’ve been in since this afternoon, when I made the appointment to look at the sublet. Even [...]
I wanted to buy a book the other night. I had read an old review of “The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break” and wanted to pick up a copy. So on my way home, I decided to stop at the Court Street Barnes & Noble. Things were fine when I got off the subway. I was two blocks away from [...]
I have lived in Brooklyn my entire life, but my name and number appear on little black books of matches all across the city. No, I'm not a slinky sultry hot babe whose name and number decorate bathroom walls and little match books in bars. You don't "Call Sairy for a Good Time." On the contrary, these little books belong [...]
Mark is a sweet loser, Mark is a horny loner, Mark always complains about life. Mark is an artist who hates to draw. Mark likes women and is hurt by their coldness. Till late 90's he would wear Miami-style printed shirts, his hair was long and wavy. Back in those years he had sharp-toed pleated white Italian shoes and linen [...]
I should have made a film about my landlords. A documentary. A document. It would have started in darkness. You’d hear an odd skrik...skrik...skrik. Fade in on the inside of a window; zoom close to peer down into a backyard. A man pushes a hand mower across a tiny lawn. Words appear: Brooklyn. 1990s. The man hitches up his pants, [...]
My father was a man of few words. Not because he was the strong silent type, but rather because, in the twenty-three years that we spent together, it was my mother who did most of the talking. He had few opinions, my father, which he mostly kept to himself, and my life was too full of other things to be [...]
My girlfriend, with whom I live in Brooklyn, was going to be out of town for a few days. And so it happened that I found myself in a grocery store, alone, deliberating between the advantages of a Swanson Hungry Man fried chicken dinner and a Banquet Salisbury steak. Each came with corn and mashed potatoes, but only the Hungry [...]
A good map will not only show where you are, it can also tell which way you’re headed. I’ve always resented the way New York City claims such a large portion of Long Island, its landscape and culture, the layers of people and the stories they keep. Does Queens have anything to do with Montauk? Does Brooklyn even know the [...]
An urgent tapping sent me scurrying to the front window of my brownstone garden-floor apartment located in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I peeped through slats of the wooden shutters and saw two T-shirt clad white men with badges hanging around their necks. “Yes?” I inquired. “Police,” they called out authoritatively. “Someone upstairs must have called for you” I yelled through the slats. “We [...]
In today's times of rapid change and major chains, it is a comfort to walk to the shopping area of my neighborhood, Court Street, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and see my four favorite stories still doing business in this highly competitive market. I have lived here over fifty years, and these stores remain intact with little interior and exterior change. The [...]
The rainbow lights coming from the floor below. It's the summer of 1999. A girl with long brown hair is dancing close with a boy. Lights from the floor pulsing to the beat. The girl is bent backwards on the floor while the boy gyrates above her. A crowd looks on. The, she removes her hair - it's a wig! [...]
Allie once told me that if two people meet on a bridge, they will almost always fall in love. "I read it in my psychology textbook," she said. "They have to meet on a bridge." I glanced across the river at the orange lights of the Williamsburg Bridge and imagined myself flagging down the next available bike messenger as he [...]
The thought that we were doing something illegal had not crossed my mind. I was simply doing a little act of kindness for this man - let’s call him Joe - who was looking so forlorn on a hot July morning, standing beside the turnstyles. A bad Metrocard swipe had gotten him a "Just Used" message, and so I offered [...]
I imagine that grass-roots recycling for reuse and income must happen in every big city, but I’d never been aware of it at the constant and hyper-efficient level I’ve seen here in New York. In the university town where I used to live, students would discard their unwanted couches, lamps, microwaves and short-lived artifacts of college life every semester. And [...]
Twenty years ago, almost to this very day, my tenth-grade history teacher, Mrs. Alexander, decided it would be an important lesson for us students if our class was to conduct a mock vote for president. And without further ado, slips of paper containing the names of the candidates and their running-mates were distributed throughout the class, and Mrs. Alexander magnanimously [...]
"We're out of luck," Steve said one Saturday afternoon as I returned to our apartment from doing my weekend errands. "The dryer just died. I have a load of whites in the washer and now I can't dry them." We were one of the fortunate people who actually had a washer and dryer in their apartment. Steve and his ex-girlfriend [...]
Another gourmet bakery opened on Court Street in Cobble Hill; the old sheet music shop was replaced by a cell phone store; the bodega next door went out of business last week, and today the new owners are gutting it and lining the walls with shelving made of a thick, smoked glass. It seems that everything is new on this [...]
I do okay for a while. I’m good, I go to therapy, I dutifully make the bi-monthly trek to my psychiatrist for drugs. I ride the Q train from Brooklyn to Central Park West, a trip that takes over an hour, and he always meets me at the door. He has unnaturally dark hair that smacks of the Hair Club [...]
Auggie works in a nightclub called Spectrum, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, made famous in the film Saturday Night Fever. Since the days Tony Manero strode across the lit floor in his white suit, the club converted into a gay club, and changed its original name. It’s been Spectrum ever since. Saturday nights at Spectrum are go-go boy [...]
It’s 12 degrees outside and I am standing at the corner of Flatbush and Glenwood Avenues waiting for the bus. It’s dark already on this gloomy January day and the wind gusts feel like razor blades on my face. There are about fifty other people waiting at the bus stop. We are all weighted down with winter gear – coats, [...]
On a day of contradiction last February, my wife Kim and I test drove a mini-SUV through a few of the less heralded 'hoods. The sun was brilliant, cutting through the brutal cold and lighting up the harbor with an intense glare off the snow and the ice floes, a simultaneously bone-chilling and body-warming type of day. It was one [...]
Wednesday 28 August, 7:30pm I sit on a folding chair in a circle of would-be members, sneaking handfuls of free whole-wheat pretzels as I wait my turn to speak. The twenty-three other people at the orientation with me are fresh-faced and earnest, dressed in shades of Lands End and L.L. Bean. When asked their reasons for joining, they mention things [...]
The wind blew the first raindrops of the cold front against my back. Iris was late. I couldn’t believe I was standing out there under the street lamp in Kensington, Brooklyn waiting for her. But I was curious. I wanted to see what she had. I had never met her and I didn’t know what she drove. She wanted to [...]
The firemen came when I was six years old. Sirens screaming, bells clanging, the big red fire engine parked right in front of our house at 1051-46th Street in Boro Park, Brooklyn. They entered wearing their yellow rubber coats, red helmets and tall black shiny boots. So many of them in our tiny apartment. They overwhelmed me. I was a [...]
First it was the remote control. Then it was a pill bottle, which jingled some before its contents spilled out, and last, a Yellow Delicious apple—boom! It is four o’clock in the morning and my cat, Alabama, has been knocking things around, dropping them to the floor from their perches, trying to jolt me out of sleep with every rattle [...]
The Greenpoint where I live is separated from Long Island City by a slough named the Newtown Creek. Its western boundary is the East River. East is Ridgewood and South is Williamsburg. Manhattan Avenue, Ash, and Commercial streets intersect a block away from the Brooklyn shore of the creek. In the space between the creek and the intersection there is [...]
Phoebe’s is the local coffee shop, and it isn’t a bad place to be in the summer. The patio in the back hosts a leafy tree that sprawls between the fire escape above and the duplex behind, shading the tables and chairs and making it cool. A rusted watering can props open the screen door. There is a sink off [...]
Dear Muze.com, I was out on the front stoop today, where I have to smoke now that the super of my building has declared the fire escape off limits, on account of he found a few cigarette butts on the pavement underneath. There’s a whole funny story about this, actually, considering my roommate begins tearing his hair out at the [...]
Anyone who passed by the intersection of Adams and Plymouth on the summer evening of August 9th must’ve been confused—violent splashes of every color imaginable had turned a dull concrete lot under the Manhattan Bridge into a gargantuan Jackson Pollock painting. Not that shocking in artsy DUMBO, but closer inspection revealed that this was no street painting. In fact, the [...]
(A Memnoir) In the late 1960's, when I was a little boy, I used to go to Boro Park to visit my grandparents. I was six when they moved from there, so I don't remember too much of the neighborhood or their apartment, and to make things worse my real memories are tangled with memories of photos which I haven't [...]
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