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She looked like a collection of spheres stuck together to represent the female body. Round little torso, round little head, protruding chipmunk cheeks like those on the marionettes on that TV show “Spitting Image.” Dark little eyes that glared from some bottomless well of anger and pain. Her mail came addressed to two completely different names. Behind her back, everybody [...]
"THE first thing I did when I got off at Penn Station, I went into this phone booth. I felt like giving somebody a buzz. I left my bags right outside the booth so I could watch them, but as soon as I was inside, I couldn't think of anybody to call up.'' So begins the New York adventure of [...]
There are secret portals all over New York City, and without warning you can get sucked into one. I fell down one of those rabbit holes myself in the last icy days of winter and, after the briefest of wonderland experiences, was unceremoniously coughed back up and spat out again. One of my loftier 2009 New Year’s Resolutions was, whenever [...]
By the third day of working on the case with Ray we were comfortable enough around each other to drop our professional facades and start slacking off a little. At first neither one of us knew how career-minded the other guy was so we kept using industry terminology relevant to the case. It was really tiring; I was so pleased [...]
When I was growing up in the west of Ireland in the fifties my grandfather gifted me with stories about Samhain, (pronounced, SOW-in) now known as All Hallows Eve or Halloween. Samhain, a Gaelic word, meaning “end of summer,” signaled the coming of winter and the beginning of the Celtic New Year. “In the olden days, this was a mighty [...]
Last August, on a brutally hot Sunday afternoon, after a debilitating outdoor 90-degree basketball game courtesy of The Word bookstore league, I was shuffling along the sidewalks from Greenpoint to the Bedford L stop trying to bring my core temperature below triple-digits. Needing a respite, I stopped to watch a softball game on a playground diamond across from McCarren Park [...]
“If you could be anything in the world and talent and money weren’t an issue, would you still be doing what you do, or something else?” My husband posed this question in an attempt to liven up a rather staid Upper East Side party one night. The gathered Wall Street wizards, lawyers and M.B.A. types thought about it. “Exactly what [...]
I moved into Gramercy Park through sheer dumb luck. I didn’t discover Eden with my own bumpkin nose; I had help in the form a lanky, soft-spoken boy who was returning home after living as a piste-addicted ex-pat. I met him after some of my own colossally unproductive post-college years in Colorado. We had in common a faux-elitist notion that [...]
A tree grows in Brooklyn, and snow falls. Both are scarce, as were friendships on Madison Street. My only friend was a girl my age whose single mother was a police officer. Only once was I invited to her house to play. It was a row house like mine with three long rooms: windows in the front and a fire [...]
Thursday, Sept 10th: The St. Mark's Books Reading Series presents a reading from "Lost and Found: Stories From New York," featuring Sam Lipsyte, Bryan Charles, Betsy Berne, Debbie Nathan, Courtney Coveney, and Thomas Beller. @ Solas Bar 232 E. 9th Street (between 3rd and 2nd Aves) 7:30PM sharp ** Monday, Sept 14th: The Saint Ann’s Review Reading Thomas Beller and [...]
There’s a low of five degrees today, and a woman gets off the 2 train with no hat, gloves, or scarf. An older man offers her some space under his umbrella, and she graciously accepts. I walk ahead of them, keeping my eyes down and forward to keep from slipping. Having underestimated the snow, I left my boots at home [...]
When I woke up that morning, I thought we were in my East Village apartment sleeping in my bed. I thought we had fallen in love. It was the sound of his voice that convinced me, soothing and sexy, masculine and raw. His words were unintelligible as they crept through the dark. I liked the sound of my name on [...]
Jimmy’s Corner isn’t like other Times Square bars--those oversized Irish pubs made of dark, polished wood or the theater-crowd cocktail lounges with big windows, people inside looking like they’re drinking in a department store display case. Jimmy’s is a dim, narrow cave of a bar, a hunk of coal in a glittering craton. Late in the afternoon and into the [...]
I’m Number 28 in line for rush tickets at the Metropolitan Opera. Today there was a ripple in the curvature of the space-time continuum: they moved the rush ticket waiting line upstairs. Ongoing construction forced everybody out of the usual spot. This means that instead of waiting in the hyperborean dungeon beneath the main level for $20 tickets, we are [...]
Morty Gunty grew up in my neighborhood. Morty Gunty was a two-bit standup comic. Morty Gunty played himself in Woody Allen’s film “Broadway Danny Rose.” Both Morty and Woody went to my high school, Midwood High, but Morty doesn’t rate a Wikipedia mention. Perhaps his greatest exposure was as the backup host for the Cerebal Palsy Telethon. When Dennis James [...]
At 4 a.m. on a Saturday night in May, I was suddenly trapped in my own bedroom with no likely route to freedom. I had just turned out the light and pulled the covers when a strong draft slammed the bedroom door shut. This had happened before, but the door had never locked. The problem with my bedroom door (as [...]
Poke, poke, poke went his finger against my head. I was playing basketball at my local basketball court and some static had developed between me and a guy nicknamed Homicide. I stared straight ahead, trying to ignore his jabbing finger. “You stink!” he yelled, barking right into my face. “You know that?” He was six three, not as tall as [...]
Sometimes I sit in the lunchroom of the Guggenheim Museum and write. If I can, I sit at the rear wall, where there are many framed black and white photographs of the museum’s benefactors, artists, and scenes of the museum’s construction. A bearded Brancusi sits with his dog; they resemble one another, both smiling. Thomas Messer, the museum’s first director, [...]
Please join us for our upcoming readings: Wednesday, July 8th 12:30pm Bryant Park: Bryant Park Reading Room Thomas Beller will moderate a panel discussion on writing in New York, with Joseph O'Neill (Netherland), Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin), Jonathan Ames (The Double Life Is Twice as Good) and Alice Mattison (Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn). They will [...]
My primary focus in grammar school was scheming ways to get out of class. At the start of seventh grade, I weighed my options. The parish claimed it needed money all the time. It ran fifty/fifty clubs, cake sales, bingo, casino nights, you name it. The low earner on the ledger was the religious article store in the rear of [...]
“I like being pastor of a church that is being disciplined for its positions,” Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis recently announced from the pulpit of Middle Collegiate Church. The minister was referring to the fact her congregation was under fire from members of its parent denomination, the Reformed Church of America, because it came out publicly in support of gay marriage [...]
That morning in 1949 begins innocently enough in our one-room apartment in the Ansonia Hotel. I am four. My father gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom. I go over to the bathroom door. The keyhole is just the right height. Curious, I peer through it and see my father. I can hardly believe my eyes. Daddy has [...]
I live in New Jersey. That means that I have been known to frequent Manhattan as a somewhat out of place and bemused bridge and tunneler. A friend of mine is a rising star in the New York music scene. (This means that she occasionally gets a free beer and sometimes she even gets paid!) As a result, I find [...]
Tompkins Square Park had basketball courts. Full-court games were played close to Avenue B. Half-court was against the fences of the asphalt baseball field on Avenue A. Players were 50% neighborhood and 50% from the rest of the city. The quality of the competition was not up to West 4th Street or 125th Street, but a total stranger could walk [...]
In 1971 I took a class taught by Ralph Ellison, author of ‘The Invisible Man.’ It was my last year at the Washington Square Campus of New York University. In those days there was also a Bronx campus. Wannabe hippies, like me, went downtown. I was a little nervous about graduating, because most of the famous people who went to [...]
It was the third week of what was to become my first real job, at Irving Plaza, the club in Union Square. I was working three days a week after school, doing odd jobs around the venue. Basically whatever tedious tasks they needed me to do. I was a junior that year, and took the minimum amount of classes, so [...]
The Diner in Williamsburg is a 21st century institution now, I guess (just celebrated its tenth anniversary)—you can get arugula there! And the rest of their food is good too. It’s pleasant at their sidewalk tables if the weather’s fine, though you have to watch your step if you don’t want to trip over two dozen artists. Me and Jean [...]
“You can’t walk around here! They steal young girls and sell them as slaves.” Grandma’s voice hit a higher pitch with each syllable, her blue eyes sparking with agitation behind the dark rims of her glasses. I was momentarily stunned by her vehemence as much as by her words. We were in the backseat of the family Chevy, a sturdy [...]
The old man seated beside me awaiting the appearance of the celebrated Isaac Bashevis Singer at The Workman’s Circle Auditorium is becoming a pest. From a rumpled brown shopping bag he pulls out and shamelessly shows off photographs of his grandchildren to which I offer the obligatory compliments. Light and sound technicians, meanwhile, test the mike and spot, inadvertently knocking [...]
The Dallas Cowboys losing -- my number #1 Schadenfreude trigger. As you get older the word hate drifts from your conversation. It’s a bad word, and a silly emotion to hang onto. Life’s too short. If you’re lucky, you lose it all together. If you’re really lucky, you save it for one person, one particular thing, or in my case, [...]
Some people take their High School Senior Superlatives a bit too seriously. No, I’m not talking about Mary, my class’s “Worst Driver,” devoting her life to turning over a new leaf as a professional chauffer. I’m talking about my very own "Class Clown" award spurring my standup comedy career. Ever since my first time performing comedy at age 18--shortly after [...]
My legs ached, but we had nothing else to do so we kept circling the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree over and over again. All I had on was this long brown jacket that looked like a cross between a trench coat and a windbreaker. It provided no warmth at all, but I was convinced it was the coolest thing ever, [...]
Shortly after noon on October 7, a Harpo Marx horn was blown four times and the monthly Madison Avenue Sports Car Driving and Chowder Society meeting came to order. Founded in 1957 by CBS Radio executive Art Peck and advertising executive King Moore to generate media for car enthusiasts, the Society meets monthly to talk auto shop. Original members included [...]
He was puckish and presumptuous, impudent and ebullient; a bantam and bumptious, dastardly and delirious hand-out seeking hotdogger with a bare head, bushy beard, and bushels of personality. On many nights he could be found fast asleep on a bench in Washington Square Park, his belly careening with gin and ale that he had bamboozled tourists into buying him. Born [...]
When I was 14, and living in an affluent, gated community in Manila, a handsome young boy from our neighborhood gave me a sapphire pendant. We were both members of a church youth group and were attending a party for new members. It was early evening. As our friends ate pork kabobs by the pool, the young boy asked me [...]
Yesterday I left for work without having eaten anything all morning. For a person with a normal schedule this would be no problem, but I start work at 12:30 PM and don’t take “lunch” until about 5:00 PM. My office is on Hudson and King Streets and I take the C train to the Spring Street Station. It’s only a [...]
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