You are currently browsing the stories about the “Manhattan” neighborhood.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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?” [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
I’m not the first nor will I be the last writer to wait tables. More illustrious authors in this category include Tennessee Williams, Michael Cunningham, who tended bar before he penned The Hours, and Cynthia Huntington (who was once told by her boss that she was the ‘best-educated barkeep in New York.’) While I don’t aspire to become what Anthony [...]
On our weekly descent into hell last night, we stopped at Nino’s for a slice. You can tell the New Yorkers from the By-Way-Of’s through a brief surveying of pizza eating technique; New Yorkers fold. You learn this at a young age. Hopefully, someone at some point in your upbringing takes you aside and shows you how. Or else you [...]
In 1978 I had the only blue record album in the Berkeley Townhouse apartment building, on 35th Avenue, and probably in all of Flushing. It was the age of disco and Cheryl and I, the founding—and only—members of the Funseekers Club, (co-presidents of the Queens headquarters) were about to outgrow the unruly, shag rug in my parents' living room, and [...]
I'm sitting in an upholstered armchair Jerry reserves for his clients, worrying the gray rubber brain from his collection of stress toys - the same ones I fiddle with while waiting to hear the size of my refund. But it's November - too early for my annual pre-April 15th appointment. In a few minutes, when Edward arrives, we'll discuss record [...]
Eventually everything is history - even one's own life. I once caught a glimpse of President John F. Kennedy in the flesh - and that image, so radiant and energizing - has stayed with me for over 40 years. I saw him when I was an actress playing in a comedy called Mary, Mary on Broadway. Next door to my [...]
I felt a little nostalgic as my W2 slips started arriving in the mail. For the first time in two decades I did not receive the form letter from Sheldon, my long term accountant. His annual reminder always opened with the awkward phrasing: "Winter is here and with it the knowledge that April 15 will soon be here." That stilted [...]
I sent a valentine to Richie but the mailman brought it back. I have sent valentines to Richie every year since 1985, but I knew this day eventually would come: the valentine would be there, but Richie would be gone. Richie ran the news and candy shop on Sullivan Street in SoHo, just a few steps south of Houston. [...]
A ten-foot painted head bobs down Grand Street, feet furiously shuffling from below the neck. Close on his heels are three metallic-haired 20-year-olds dressed in flimsy black sheets, cinched in a manner that make them look like punk Roman centurions. I can tell I’m getting close. Destination: Deitch Projects gallery in SoHo. A few days earlier I had RSVP’d for [...]
Ladies! Who are suffering from terrible and terrible hair days all the time. Who always get out of your house in such pissed off mood because your hair is not shaped the way you want. Who must get up earlier than others to calm your hair down and end up dozing off at work Who are just simply dissatisfied with [...]
It was the middle of a heavy, overcast day. I was eating lunch in Greenacre Park. Most of the patio chairs were leaning against the tables, draining off the earlier rainfall. Usually this vest-pocket park on 51st Street between Third and Second Avenues is Standing Room Only at lunchtime. But the weather had scared away the usual crowd. So there [...]
Living on the first floor of a tenement can have its advantages—no multiple flights to walk up at the end of a tiring day, or to stumble up after a long night. During the summer, the first floor always remains the coolest, so I don’t feel like I will die a broiling, stuffy death unless I install and run an [...]
October 23 is a cold, gray Saturday. I get off the train F train at Rockefeller Center and step out onto Sixth Avenue, underneath Radio City Music Hall. There is a film crew set up on the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 51st Street. A white light fills the corner. At the center of the light, a dark bearded [...]
"Different day, same shit, old mac, new clip Thirty two hollow tips, gloves, no rubber grip…" The reporter and I stand quietly in the underground garage. We don't want to look like we're interested in shooting anyone, in any sense of that word. Two minutes earlier the reporter received a call in the deli across the street. His desk told [...]
We are in Chinatown looking for a good price on a Zippo lighter. My son wants one with with no logo, no Elvis face, no Mets, no #1 Stunner in fancy script. Just plain silver, the size of a matchbox, when matchboxes were the size of matchboxes. He's fourteen and still looks nervous striking a match, like he's afraid it'll [...]
Gooning / n. / the random beating of an unsuspecting victim, usually by a goon gang Usually when I cross the Williamsburg Bridge this late at night I'm thinking, “This would be the perfect place for a random act of violence.” But this particular time the thought didn't occur because I was engrossed in a cell phone conversation—that is, an [...]
It was a muggy Manhattan afternoon in August, and I was between movies. Not because I didn’t have air conditioning, but because I needed to distract my angry, heartbroken self, and movies, carefully spaced, were my drug of choice. I had seen La Ultima Baci at the Sunshine on Houston Street and was on my way to whatever was playing [...]
This essay appears in the just released book, "Lost and Found: Stories From New York." 1. Rage Reacclimation: Waiting in line for a press credential At the southwest corner of "The Big Tent" in Bryant Park, a snaking, huddled mass of photographers gathers in the cold, waiting for access to the warm, partitioned press cell within. Fashion Week has arrived [...]
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