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When I was fifteen years old I went to Camp Camelot, a romantic name for a Fat Camp. My family had always called me "big boned." My classmates had other terms for me, and they certainly were not half as nice. In my elementary school gym class there was one record used for special occasions to humiliate the fat kids [...]
I met her on the Brooklyn Heights promenade the day I turned thirty. "Pardon me, but would’ja help me up?" she said, holding out a gloved hand. The stains on the polyester were yellow, the rest of the glove so white it was vein-blue, the color of cheap wedding dresses. I rose from the bench I’d been sitting on for [...]
One American flag pin is not enough for the woman across the aisle from me on the L train to Brooklyn. She wears one on her lapel, one on her coat, one on the front of her Le Sportsac bag. All are bejeweled. Her eyes are closed; her head falls to the side. She has blonde hair, blonder highlights. She [...]
Several years ago, in the Spring of 2003, I endured one of those moderately shattering moments of identity crisis – a break-up – and resorted to drugs to ameliorate its effects. Included among the expected substances and liquids was the powerful drug of technology, specifically a new gadget, even more specifically a neat-o cool-o camera attachment that allowed you to [...]
It was late 1979 -- high point of the Iranian revolution -- and the Immigration and Naturalization Service had just announced its nationwide dragnet. I was teaching ESL at Brooklyn College and had just confiscated the vocabulary test of one of the eighteen Iranian Jews in my beginners class. Cheating had increased since the INS news. Maybe the Iranians were [...]
I had just completed my freshman year at Cornell University, where I was majoring in Functional Apparel Design. The program focused on designing clothes for people with specific needs. My degree would be nothing like those awarded to fashion design students at F.I.T. No, nothing frivolous for me. But what I didn’t realize when I began this course of study [...]
I first came to Williamsburg in 1992 , to visit a painter friend’s studio. He would travel there every day from the Upper West Side, a long but worthwhile trip because the studio space was so cheap. Back then, the crowd of people that got off with us at the Bedford Avenue L stop disappeared quickly and mysteriously, and we [...]
From the desk of Dave Prager, a slight shift of the head is all that’s required to look out the bedroom window. Following such a shift, one’s view is then dominated by a picturesque cement wall — a sideways monolith, capped by chain link fence, five feet past the bedroom wall, separating Dave’s property from the wilds beyond: a sliver [...]
The real estate maxim "location, location, location" dictates that just building it won't make them come, you have to build it under their noses. While this may hold for the surfeit of restaurants and Starbucks in New York City, the exact opposite is true for laundromats. Wherever, and however shoddily they are built, people come, even those who aren't using [...]
In 1971 the man who ran me over with his car moved to Brooklyn Heights. My family had moved there earlier–in 1966–and so I spent my first birthday and the subsequent seventeen ones on Grace Court. My father, Brooklyn born and raised, had decided, not unreasonably, that a one-bedroom on West 10th Street was cramped for three. My mother, Boston [...]
Barbès Reading Series presents a mrbellersneighborhood.com Reading Featuring: Elizabeth Manus Fran Giuffre Elizabeth Grove Bryan Charles Thomas Beller and others followed by music of Chris Raef (Church of Betty) & Don Rauf (Life in a Blender) Sunday, February 16th at 6pm mrbellersneighborhood.com is a well-acclaimed literary website of vignettes, reportage, photo essays, and personal essays about life in New York [...]
I went to Penn Station to snap a picture or two and perhaps in the process imbibe a feeling for my grandmother, Bubby, who went there ten years ago (this month) to catch a train... I didn't know Bubby growing up. She and my dad had a fight when I was 2 and didn't speak for the next 15 years. [...]
Like most martial artists of my generation, I dreamt of being the next Bruce Lee--or in my case, the "white Bruce Lee." The difference is I went out and did something about it. As a result, I've actually performed in a dozen or so films (yes, I use that term loosely). The first chop-socky flick I ever did was called [...]
I've been dating a Mid-western man for the past two months. Well, it's actually been one month that I've been dating him, and one month that he's been away in Florida "visiting his mother." This man happens to be the oldest I have ever dated--41--ten years my senior. Perfect, I thought. Older, more mature, has his act together, money in [...]
For the last two years Nina Talbot has been photographing people at her local ShopRite in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and painting their portraits. Or, more accurately, she's been painting portraits of the store. "I look for subjects that are close to home," she says. "Whenever I shop I take my camera. I tell them I'm a painter and [...]
1. Flood-Tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high--I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the unusual cos- tumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than [...]
Wonders of Modern Commuting, Part 1: At around 8:25 every day, Mr. Impatient’s train pulls up to the Greenpoint platform. Mr. Impatient is a G(1) train conductor who is always in a very big hurry to get the train where it’s going. I have yet to get a glimpse of him, but I can hear him, and from the anxiously [...]
First came the mice. It was early winter when I heard them scratching their way across the long wall of my studio, setting up camp in the wall behind my bed. At first, I thought knocking for minutes at a time could scare them away. When that didn't work, I tried banging the wall with a hammer and later, blasting [...]
Having lived in Manhattan for most of my life, I saw a move to Brooklyn as a giant step in the wrong direction. And Greenpoint, well, Greenpoint was a digression I wasn’t sure I could handle. I was thirty-six years old and by god, I had standards. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the bank account to afford them. So when my [...]
It had been a shitty summer. I left a miserable job for another, better one that paid me a lot less. To save money I moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a studio across the hall. The dead bolt on my new door was tricky, and so it slammed on my hand one day, leaving me with a broken middle [...]
Something like ten years ago, I was walking with a friend of mine down Westnedge Avenue, in Kalamazoo, MI. We were talking about rock music, and my friend, who’s about as brainy as they come, got onto the subject of the band Pavement. More specifically, he began deconstructing what he perceived to be the average Pavement fan. "College student," he [...]
It’s frustrating being over two thousand miles away from home and hearing about the death of the great Joe Strummer, the Clash singer, guitarist. As I read his obituary in the LA Times (on page 1 – nice to see he got the respect he deserves) all I want to do his to listen to his music, but I’m at [...]
"S-s-s-s-h-h-h-t. I love that sound," says the second-generation seltzer man Barry Walpow. He's at the Seaview Diner in Canarsie, simulating the joyful noise of seltzer squirting from a glass siphon bottle, before heading off to make an end-of-the-day delivery in Williamsburg. The tall 51-year-old, wearing a battered black baseball hat and glasses as thick as the bottoms of the seltzer [...]
When my husband Ted and I bought the parlor floor apartment in a 4-family co-op in Brooklyn, we developed an amicable relationship with Sharon, who lived with her cat in the basement apartment below us. We watched as she transformed herself from a 300 lb., caftan-wearing woman, to half that size in a matter of months. She was shrinking before [...]
The building, Morgan described, was a monolith of brick with a flat, black hole blasted out of the side. Standing at the edge of the entrance, he peered inside and swore that he saw someone moving. He shivered and stumbled to the curb, then quickly retraced his footsteps back up First Avenue, skirting the fringe of industrial Sunset Park, passing [...]
Men will ruin $500 suits scrambling for a $5 baseball. It’s an adage as old as the idea of men wearing suits to a ball game. It also happens to be true. Every person attending a major league baseball game -- from the youngest child being indoctrinated into the ritualistic church of Baseball at the shrine known as the Ballpark [...]
Angela and I stopped to investigate the South Williamsburg street. We lived in Queens (not together, mind you – the sexual need between this former cheerleader and me had long since expired) and were exploring a new locale. Neighborhood pride and a grass-isn't-greener mentality often create a chasm between boroughs, but we'd scoured most of our Greek neighborhood and craved [...]
A photo is due soon of this basketball court, along with some anecdotes, the usual bloody minded gasping for words to explain basketball prose to be found on this site and http://www.thebasketballdiaries.net
The summer of 1957 left-hooked me. I should have seen it coming. Dad left on suspiciously extended business trips. Strange excursions, given his sedentary and lackluster job as an advertising sales agent for RH Donnelly. One day he even appeared outside our Flatlands apartment in a shiny cherry red Triumph, offering to take my girlfriends and me for a spin. [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper We all need a mortal enemy the way that we need true love. True love is love that will sweep us off our feet. We'll live our life happily ever after if we find it: we won't need to pay bills, we won't have a cold or any illness, we'll never have to take the F [...]
It was the beginning of summer and my two young sons had taken to counting Jaguars. “There’s one!” Alex, then eight, would cry, elated, from the backseat of the car. “Oh, there’s another one.” “Look over there—there’s two more!” five-year-old Ferran would trill. Anyone unfamiliar with the Hamptons might have assumed we were on a safari, mistaking my sons’ enthusiasm [...]
My life lies in piles around my feet. It is mostly paper things; boxes of musical scores, boxes marked STORAGE and HOME. Why does the Rilke go to STORAGE and the Hesiod makes it to HOME? Who knows? I take the G train to my studio at the Classon stop in central Brooklyn. The G train is mired in the [...]
After 9/11, I stepped into the Williamsburg bodega that I've been going to for years. Some of the workers I know by name, others are just familiar faces. We've mentioned our Middle Eastern backgrounds to each other. "She's Egyptian," said the Palestinian woman behind the counter, gesturing towards me. But her co-worker already knew. "Don't say it too loud," I [...]
The summer of 1952 I was ten, and the center of my universe was Brooklyn. The Dodgers were still Brooklyn's team, and Ebbets Field was where they played baseball and not a hous ing project. Everyone hated the Yankees. With the end of school still close, the pinch of freedom felt as unnatural as the stiff pair of dungarees my [...]
It was my first official piece of furniture purchased for my new apartment in Park Slope. Two overweight deliverymen, breathing and sweating heavily, carried it up the four flights to my apartment on the top floor of the Brooklyn brownstone. That's when they found that the angle of the doorway and the large wooden banister, made it impossible to get [...]
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