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Somewhere, over the din, a thin voice called out, “Open!” I darted around, swaying from one foot to another, but before I could realize what had happened the elderly woman in line behind me had already scampered around to the newly opened lane. In her shamrock green coat and stiff knit hat, she leaned over carefully to begin taking out [...]
In the mid 1960’s it wasn’t easy for multi-sibling families like mine to get along well financially, but somehow my Mom and Dad made it work on the salary of my Dad, which wasn’t much. But there were times where budget cutting ideas may have went a little too far, like the "Save money on haircuts by doing it ourselves"initiative [...]
One thing Sambath Suen can’t abide is the cold. Until four years ago, Suen lived in Kandal, a Cambodian province that borders on Vietnam. Before that, he lived in Vietnam, where he earned his diploma, and before that he had lived in his native village, about thirty knots downriver from Phnom Penh, where he spent what Cambodians call “The Time [...]
Early March 1954, in a Woodside apartment overlooking the # 7 Subway El and the Long Island Railroad station below it, two express trains crisscrossed, one rattling over the other. “Bob, please get me some food.” Patricia pleaded from the kitchen to the living room. “There’s plenty of food,” Bob answered as he played with the bunny ears antenna on [...]
The job sounded perfect: bartending a gay sex party in a private loft in Tribeca. If I had to be stuck in New York for New Year’s Eve – a very depressing thought after having spent four New Year’s Eves in Cape Town - then I might as well work, earn some money, and just maybe have some fun. There [...]
When you buy a secondhand coat, you never really know what you’re getting into. The lining was a little ripped but something about this vintage coat spoke to me, though I couldn’t tell you what. This coat, with its uncelebrated designer, I found at Legacy on Thompson Street in SoHo. It is fitted on top, cinched at the waist, before [...]
[When the site first published Ennis Smith's "The Super With The Toy Face," its impact was felt immediately--not just on the site, but on the literary history of the United States. Smith has sent us a revised version of the piece, which we are happy to publish below. We're going to keep the original up, though, in order to see [...]
Last year, after the indictment of Dick Cheney’s chief-of-staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Maureen Dowd wrote a column praising the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. “It was bracing to see the son of a New York doorman open the door on the mendacious Washington lair of the Lord of the Underground.” At first, I was gratified to see Ms. Dowd recognize [...]
I had watched it dozens of times on TV. At midnight, on New Year’s Eve, the buildings spew out tons of confetti, littering the streets and crowds below, as if by magic, with no human interference, celebration spontaneously erupting from the city itself. Unbeknownst to me, there were people who chose to spend the night hanging around in empty office [...]
Of the millions of New York City’s undomesticated rodents, only one has caused me grief. I was raised in suburban Los Angeles, and so pre-war apartment living with pre-war apartment problems are new to me—and mice, specifically, have never threatened to pester me in my home. As summer turned to fall, however, my roommates and I began to notice tiny [...]
They have never heard of the Sturgeon King, even though they might easily visit this small slice of piscean royalty for a lunch—excuse me, an appetizer—of an individual can of salmon or individual can of solid white tuna. It’s quaint, it’s charmingly atavistic, who the hell orders an individual can of salmon but a cat? Yet the menu items persist [...]
Monday Night Football and the Greenwich Village Packer haunt, the Kettle of Fish, is heaving. There are orgasmic spurts of happiness as the Packers recover four interceptions in the first half. Seattle’s fair weather fans are distraught as the Pack dominates in the heavy snowfall. Brett wants this one. You can see the fire burning in his eyes. And he [...]
One of the oddities of growing up in a big city like New York is that the discussion and anticipation of crime enters into everyday childhood rather unremarkably. In many ways it is the first real adult problem children are asked to deal with and conversation about murders in general were, by necessity, exceptionally frequent in my childhood, New York [...]
It was 60 degrees this morning so I decided to do some of my work in City Hall Park. The park was relatively empty. I was reading my magazines and enjoying the outdoors when I began to hear this loud screaming. Living in NYC, you get used to this kind of sound, so I continued on with my reading, but [...]
The first time I was interviewed by a child was in the dotcom era. The spiky-haired, droopy-butted-jeans wearing creative director greeted me when I got off the elevator in the loft-like Chelsea space. “Great . . . Wow,” I said, feigning interest in the “hang out” room and basketball hoops he mumbled on about as he gave me a tour [...]
On Election Night two weeks ago, I was laying on my couch whiling away the hours, aiming to stay awake until I could officially note that my homestate was instrumental in saving the State of the Union. (I made it to 3 a.m., but it wasn’t Rocky Mountain solid until the next afternoon anyway. Give ‘em hell, Senator Seven-Digits!) I [...]
Mohammad B. Miah is a small man. He stands about five feet tall with his red and white and black leather hi-top sneakers on. He lives in Astoria, Queens, and he wants to know whether I work for the city. He motions in the direction of City Hall. “You have a job?” he asks. “I’m a writer,” I say, waving [...]
I've always preferred to do things the hard way, without anybody's help. For the first five years my husband and I lived in New York, half our things were in storage. The other half were crammed into a 280-square foot apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement building overlooking the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. The place was short on closet space, [...]
Four of us had gathered for dinner in a room above a popular bar on University Place on a swampy and airless Manhattan night. We were all twentysomething professionals, friends from the business side of the music business. Hannah worked for a British artist management firm, and Dina managed PR for a small American record label. Sally was with an [...]
I scrolled through last Saturday’s call log on my cell phone to find his number. I hadn’t saved it on purpose, never thought I’d be dialing it. Weird, I couldn’t stop thinking about this guy. It wasn’t a crush or anything (the thought of romance with anyone Y-chromosomed made my stomach turn), but I had to admit, his charisma had [...]
So I found myself on the corner of 45th St and 8th Ave, having arrived ten minutes ago in New York City, October 4th, 1986. I was pretty much sitting in the center of the biggest glut of seed you could find per square inch in any city in the world. Wide-eyed crack heads floated past after scoring at local [...]
MR. BELLER’S NEIGHBORHOOD READING SERIES CONTINUING MARCH 11 AT MO PITKIN’S HOUSE OF SATSIFACTION! The Webby Award-nominated website Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood has published stories with an autobiographical as well as geographical focus since 2000. In that spirit, the site takes over a space at Mo Pitkin’s the 2nd Sunday of every month. Readers on March 11 are Kate Angus, Denise [...]
If you find yourself awakened by an eccentric, foul-tempered neighbor called el Jefe in the hallway of an apartment building known for its vermin while fully installed with a vodka hangover and reeking of pizza-flavored snack treats, be as pleasant as possible. Especially if you are seeking assistance in the forcible entry of your own apartment. Especially if it is [...]
I am not expecting it to be so pink. The floor is tiled light mauve-ish, though it’s having a brown sort of day, what with the rain and the customers tracking in the muck from outside. The counters and tables are a marbleized pink and the occasional wall panel is deep purple. I had been expecting a lot more bright [...]
It’s snowing when our plane touches down in Washington, D.C. Christmas morning, cold and dark. The terminal doors slide open and we are hit with a blast of bitter air. We bundle the girl in blankets and she stares through the car windows at the falling flakes of snow. The wipers beat back and forth and the tires hiss through [...]
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. [...]
[A few months after this piece was originally published, Ennis Smith sent us a revision which we have also published here. Look at the two versions side by side and see if you learn anything about how revision figures in the writing process. --Ed.] They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the super of the building on the corner [...]
I have just taken over the passenger car from Roberto. There are three tenants in the elevator and they are discussing their vacation plans. 3A and her family will be hitting the slopes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; 5C is going to work on his tan and try his luck at the blackjack tables in Aruba; and 12B and his girlfriend [...]
I’m at the opening of Least Wanted, a collection of mugshots, many of them enlarged, from the 1930's through the early 70's. The young and the bad are beautifully indignant in black and white, and I could stare for hours at the badass mug of a 17 year old boy caught rioting on the streets of Denver. His hair splays [...]
Golden slumbers. I slept like an heir apparent, drifting in satin oblivion from Sunday to Monday. I had been away for the weekend. I had visited my family: my nieces and nephews, my successful older siblings, my mother and father. We did wholesome things as sign of our shared familial concern and love. And for once, in a surprising four [...]
The bouncer pulled the door. Daylight, quite a shock. How long were we unconscious, the Important Visiting Friend and I? We squinted our way out into the day, me very reluctantly, him, I recall, more bravely. He wanted to see a movie, as usual. Had he planned to see this film, memorized the location and times the day before? Or [...]
Rada told me to be at the broker's office at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday. I showed up eating the last of my sublet's granola bars. Abandoned desks sat side by side without cubicle separators; it was like the newsroom of the Daily Planet. The receptionist seated me, then quickly disappeared into the bathroom. She did not return. Rada materialized at [...]
Day talked about those skintight hologram jeans for weeks. It was 1978, and they'd look nice for shooting heroin in the basement lavatory at CBGB, especially in the snazzy lilac color with the lime iridescent overlay, and they'd look nice later--complementary--when she turned blue outside on the sidewalk. The jeans cost $65.00, a considerable sum for 1978, and they were [...]
People. What can I say. Are unpredictable. Quite. It's approaching four years since we first met at Bar 13 downtown while listening to some of the dopest spoken word artists. Most notable was Bonafide, Puerto Rican kid, Columbia guy. We both were given to the electronic medium of connecting, given that substantive "real-time" connections were elusive. I wrote an original [...]
On a recent Tuesday morning, at exactly 9:32 AM, Suzanne Seggerman pulled her white, full-sized van, a Chevrolet Gladiator she affectionately refers to as The Gladiator, into a choice parking spot on Bleecker Street near the NYU gym. She was fresh on the heels of the street-cleaning vehicle assigned to this block every Tuesday and Friday between 9:30 and 11:00 [...]
The sex club looked more like a cheesy New Jersey club than a happening orgy fest. There were balloons on the ceiling and people dancing to seventies music. Most of the people were not very attractive. The women were bleached blondes with frizzy hair and a bit dumpy or with fake boobs. The men had beer guts and receding hairlines. [...]
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