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Take one large city already threatened into a constant state of low-level nervous breakdown with terrorism jitters and a rockpile of an economy. Scare away a large percentage of the population by placing a Republican Convention in the city’s center. Pour in 5,000 delegates, half a million protesters, seven billion journalists and a concentration of cops greater than the entire [...]
One morning last August, a week before the Republican National Convention, I took a cab to my studio in the Film Center Building on 45th and 9th. My cabdriver was wearing a natty chauffeur’s uniform, cap and all. Once we got going, he smiled at me in the rearview mirror and said, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m all dressed [...]
(Following is an excerpt from “Chapter 15: Prelude to Battle” of "Now is Not a Good Time," a book-in-progress about (among other things) progressive patriotism, the antiwar movement during the first term of the Bush administration, and one woman’s attempt to learn to love her country and its people—if not its government—in complicated and troubling times. The setting is a [...]
Senator Wellstone: I will not go on about the curious timing of your death. People are very impatient with conspiracy theories these days, even when past theories have revealed conspiracies. Still, I read with weary cynicism that you spoke to a meeting of war veterans in Willmar, Minnesota in October 2002 and told them that Dick Cheney said to you, [...]
On the far Northern side of a vast concrete enclosure, we had been divided up into two parallel rows at either side of a narrow barricaded space and Jason, our Arresting Officer, stood between the two rows talking about sports, TV, and how he was looking forward to his retirement. Jason was a 23 year old beat cop from Staten [...]
Have you ever had a great experience or adventure and you want to share it with every one you know, but you just don't know where to begin? Well, that seems to be my particular problem right now. I've been staring at my laptop for at least an hour and I still can't seem to figure out where to start. [...]
The model boat pond in Central Park is often the scene of fierce competition, but on a recent sunny afternoon I witnessed a real life-or-death struggle. A yellow retriever named Sam bounded away from his owners and plunged into the water to chase the pond’s resident ducks. At first only a few passersby noticed what was going on, but the [...]
My first after-school job was delivering the long-defunct Long Island Press but I really entered the working world when, at the age of seventeen, I started as a temporary summer worker at Gimbel's department store (my Dad knew someone there...lucky me). I eased my way into the good graces of the bosses until I got into the union. Ultimately, I [...]
It happened on an unseasonably mild February night around 9:30 between 23rd and Christopher Streets on the No. 1 train: I fell in love all over again on the New York City subway. I was on my way home from seeing a movie alone in Times Square, a depressing Oscar-nominated flick about a woman stuck in a vicious cycle of [...]
It had been quite a long time since I’d last visited the Anthology Film Archives, that temple of avant-garde and everything cinema in the East Village. Last night, however, I lost my own personal battle with the heat and decided, fatigued and irritated, that a movie in the dark and cool of a film theater would be just the thing [...]
12:15: Heading downtown in car for two o'clock appointment with lawyer. Half-listening to Leonard Lopate on WNYC. Callers telling stories of bizarre summonses for unfair parking tickets. Mentally pat self on back for six months ticket-free. Cop calls in. Defensive. Won't give name. Claims cops have no ticket "quotas" to meet, just "production goals." Claims he's "just following orders." Sounds [...]
I go in the afternoon, before the hordes set in and children are let out from school. Your Fairway, my speedway, basket in hand, I dash past soft, yielding cheese;/crisp baguettes and spears of tender green, fast as I can. Racing through the crowded market, I avoid the stew of white-haired ladies with heavily laden carts/ and elbows, pointy and [...]
I stink. It’s not a good stink, musky, that hints of a hard workout but doesn’t offend. I’m offensive. I’ve been in New York for a month-and-a-half. I still haven’t done laundry. The one suitcase I brought held seven shirts, six pairs of boxers, four pairs of pants (one pair only for occasions), two pairs of shorts, and three pairs [...]
Emil Schupp always sat on the same stool at the end of the counter in Artie's Luncheonette at 223 West 14th Street. Artie was my father and he let me help out at the grill one summer. Every morning, same time, same stool, same toast and tea and tomato juice, Emil sat there for exactly an hour, calculating bowling averages. [...]
For 10 years I lived in New York City in the House of Carpati. Moving to New York after college was an ideal next step for a person who wanted to be a magazine editor, so that’s what I did. After spending the summer post-grad as a nanny in Scarsdale, and then six weeks house sitting for friends of the [...]
I’m in the McDonald’s on Broadway and 82nd one morning, walking towards the counter, about to order a Sausage McMuffin with Egg: a special breakfast vice that I allow myself in exchange for having given up cigarettes, which makes two breakfast vices now that I’ve started smoking again. Floating in a compact mirror above a table, turning pink to red [...]
I hadn't planned on adopting a piano. Long ago I sold my family piano to a neighbor; I rarely touched it and like most New Yorkers, we needed the space. Young and eager for cash, I never predicted I'd later feel guilty. Besides, a piano tuner called my spinet, whose keys my mother's and brother's fingers had caressed, a cheese [...]
It was the Friday before Father's Day and I still had shopping to do. I wanted to get a little something for my boyfriend, Steve. I didn't normally get him a gift for this occasion, but now that his son was 21, fully grown by most standards and away at college, he no longer bought his dad a gift for [...]
Most of their music is on CD's but in the back of the store there is a wide selection of movie soundtracks, and these are mostly on vinyl. Most are old soundtracks, and therefore the back of Footlights doubles as record store and design showcase, because the cover art for these records invariably calls upon the poster art for the [...]
I used to see her in the elevator. She was finely dressed, her white hair piled high, her dark red lipstick ennobling her mouth. In those early years she'd be with her husband, a kind-looking gentleman in a wheelchair—the result, I later learned, of the beating his knees took as an Olympic runner. He’d won a gold and two silver [...]
I'm sitting in the essay aisle at Barnes & Noble trying to change my socks. I don't have an apartment anymore so this is my pit-stop, Broadway and 83rd. On one side of me is Vivian Gornick's "At Eye Level," and on the other the complete essays of Montaigne. I'm planning to take a look at both, but first things [...]
Seventy-five degrees, August, Sunday evening, Manhattan, yet no one is out on the street except for your neighbor and his geriatric Maltese. On nights like these you can’t help but wonder if you’re missing something; maybe everyone you want to be with is just around the corner jammed into a block of bars, restaurants, delis, while you sit on a [...]
A Goat walks in with a camera, wants to document me, the Best Administrative Assistant in the World, diligently at work. I turn off the Atari emulator on my computer, open up a word processing document, and get to my Work, processing, retrieving, shrugging off calls in triplicate. Each call and customer needs to feel like they are wanted, even [...]
A new customer took the stool next to me at the Morningstar Diner on 59th and 9th on the West Side. His name was Rich, a thin, white, middle-aged man carrying a plastic Gristede’s grocery bag that must have contained books. He took a seat, ordered a coffee to go, and I asked him about how the Chelsea/Hell’s Kitchen/Jetlandia neighborhood [...]
I have given my neighborhood a trendy new name. TuCan. What does it mean? Too Close to Canal Street. My windows are over Canal Street, but my street is named “Lispenard.” Have you heard of it? Neither has any cab driver in New York City. Every day, I attempt to direct them to it. They invariably take offense and say [...]
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 [...]
Apartment hunting in New York City is like dating: in the search for the One, you’ll inevitably run into countless disasters along the way. While my romantic relationship has been the model of stability for once, buying my first Manhattan apartment was like looking for love all over again. The idea of settling down gave me the chills, but after [...]
On a cold icy Thursday in a duplex on the Upper East Side with high windows: well cared-for plants and a spiral staircase lead to a mirrored room. There stands an erect youthful female figure, reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn, with a dancer's sillhouette. Her name is Anita Koffler. She awaits her devoted exercise participants and fellow exercise pupils who have [...]
This is the first chapter of "How To Be a Man: Scenes From A Protracted Boyhood." (W.W. Norton) [35 years old] A little while ago I went to get my car and found that it was not where I had left it. The car is, or was, a huge, mint green 1977 Thunderbird; almost half of the car's considerable length [...]
I woke up feeling cold this morning and the clouds were fighting their way in between the bedroom blinds that were left open in the middle of the night. I found my body naked and bent and I thought about Nicole Du Fresne and her star quality blonde hair and blue eyes and perfect teeth and I wondered how her [...]
While walking down Columbus Avenue by the Planetarium one day I saw a man on his hands and knees, pulling weeds under a big tree in Theodore Roosevelt Park. He looked like he might have the lowdown on the area—and whether it was pigeon-friendly. “Why do you ask?” he asked. I told him that my friend and I have rehabilitated [...]
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer in May of 1996, she was sent for treatment at the Hospital for Special Surgery. This gave my father and I a reason to trek to NYC almost every night to pay her a visit. I was thirteen and considerably naive at the time. Yet, now almost ten years later, I vividly recall [...]
So you’re teaching again. No, not the cushy adjunct work at the college where you got the MFA. This will be the crack your knuckles, roll up your sleeves type of teaching that New York City has to offer. Once you realized that The New Yorker was just as happy to ignore you with or without those precious writing awards [...]
The rain smelled like spring. It was different than winter rain. We got caught in it, my friend Sharon and I. She asked the guy at the counter to taste a falafel to see if it was good enough. She had just been to Israel and knew her falafel from her ass, she told me. He had trouble understanding. “Taste?” [...]
I saw Ed in the shadows on Perry street. A streelamp must have gone out because it was very dark. There was a helicopter circling the neighborhood, it's spotlight straffing. "A sign of things to come," he said, as though they were looking for him. A couple of houses down from where Ed sat there was a thickly planted bed [...]
Across the street from my apartment is a vacant building known as the Northern Dispensary. Founded as a hospice for the poor in 1827, this wedge-shaped landmark is a West Village oddity situated at the oddest of intersections: the point at which two branches of Waverly Place come together, and where Christopher Street and Grove Street diverge off Christopher Park. [...]
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