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There are some guys whose pattern is to realize a supposed deep love once they know a woman doesn’t want them. Maybe that explains me and Cristina. Maybe guys like me can't love at all, so we mask our loveless souls with occasional dream loves, pure in their unobtainability. We safely suffer limited devotions at the alters of impossible bitches. [...]
The cold wreaked transformation: bone chilling and serious, the kind that keeps people home, yet here we were, all of us, shivering, waving signs, gleeful. Maybe half a million, and if the media says otherwise don’t believe it. Half a million! Could we really stop a war? At times like this, people change. I saw possible proof by the curb. [...]
I took two of my kids to see the new Adam Sandler picture, “Little Nicky,” and there it was again, behind Sandler as he sniffed some flowers: Tom’s Restaurant at 112th and Broadway. When I was at Columbia College, in the gray and bankrupt and crumbling 1970s, my friends and I had a joke that someday, older and successful, we’d [...]
Your books were a little bit strange, and that ended up working in your favor since none of us wanted them at first glance. Stuff about yoga and spiritual exercise, something about linguistics, and a medieval text. There were five of them in the bag, complete with your credit card receipt from the Barnes & Noble, with a couple of [...]
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. [...]
We're walking through the Village, it's freezing, and we're trying to find a place that has both good hot chocolate and is a good place to breast-feed. It's not easy. I have nothing to do with the breast-feeding (having no breasts), but I feel responsible for finding the location to do it in. The place should be warm, with comfortable [...]
Part III. Rough diamonds are mined from volcanic vents in Africa. They're separated into parcels for the London sight-holders who have the stones cut in Antwerp, Israel, or India. The finished products are divvied out to various diamond brokers and then brought over to New York. Over 80% of the diamonds sold in the USA pass through 47th Street, making [...]
I wasn’t always a compulsive cleaner. Quite the contrary: I was once slovenly and slothful– an unmitigated slob. The cleaning disease crept up on me over the years like a bad case of the measles; until, lo and behold, I’d become a fullblown clean freak. The kind who, at 6:00pm, reaches for the Fantastik with a couple of paper towels [...]
"I want to crawl head first into a small cave and curl up into a fetal position." -From Tanya Corrin's journal, February 7, 2001 Tanya Corrin and I are having brunch in Little Italy and discussing reality TV shows like 'Survivor' and 'The Real World.' She's saying that she doesn't think that they're real at all, that they're almost comletely [...]
I found a man in Central park. I’d been running around the reservoir on a weekend and needed to get home and shower. I wiped my T-shirt on my face, and bent down to tie a lace, and I heard a man telling a joke. I heard him telling the back-story about how this certain celebrity and his boring wife [...]
For a few months while I was writing my graduate thesis, I was a classroom instructor at an after-school program at P.S. 2, on the northeastern edge of Chinatown. From my apartment on the lower East side, I would walk south on Essex Street to go to work. It was a walk through New York’s immigrant cultures and palimpsestic history--an [...]
A guy with his earlobes stretched around bingo chips and a bullring through his septum pulled a box of nose studs from the glass case. “How do they stay in?” I asked. “It’s a coil and it rests against the outside of your nostril,” he said, making a swirling motion with his finger. I chose the smallest silver stud, trying [...]
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 [...]
Along about now, dozens of shaggy guys prowl the streets of New York, looking for a new barber, wondering where and from whose hands their next haircut and a shave are going to come now that the State Barber Shop has closed and Giorgio Campli retired. George left for Italy a few weeks back. There, he’ll live off his social [...]
Paul Simon did not wear a tux. He sat by the fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center, a photographer by his side, and another guy, a journalist? Several people wandered up to him. He seemed very approachable, as though he wanted to chat in the pleasant evening light. He wore a tweed jacket and a blue baseball cap. His [...]
Quality of life during my ten-year stay in London Terrace Gardens (the ten-building brick behemoth spanning an entire square block at Ninth avenue and 23rd Street) was greatly enhanced by the presence of elevator men. These were resourceful men, mostly of Hispanic descent who grew up in Chelsea, who kept watch over the building, picked up your UPS packages, and [...]
In 1991, I was a student at New York University, working at a bookstore, and this woman came up to me out of nowhere and basically asked me to come audition for her film. She was a casting director for this PBS Masterpiece Theater thing. The part was for a quote-unquote "little person." I'm four foot six, and they were [...]
When Regina Moss no longer resembled the sincere sandy-haired gentleman on his driver's license, job-hunting threatened to become Grand Guignol. The Taxi-Limousine Commission (the least friendly form of TLC) confiscated his doctored I.D., making destitution natural as sunrise -- not hours away but close enough. Bi-weekly female hormone shots had to be paid for as well as an on-going wardrobe [...]
I arrived in New York during the summer of 2000 from somewhere else. It doesn't matter where because nowhere else is like New York. Like most newcomers I was awed by the spectacle. I stole glances at the sky from the sidewalk while I tried to keep pace with other pedestrians. I walked the streets as a stranger. I thought [...]
If you live toward the southern tip of Manhattan, and you can't sleep, look to the northeast and try to locate the big Tudor building on East 42d Street. You might see a light on about half way up, and there's a decent chance that it's shining in my wonderful, cozy apartment. I'm not an insomniac, but, occasionally, I do [...]
Photo by Morris Engel McNulty, with cigarette, in his element. This drunk came down the street, walking in the gutter instead of the sidewalk, and a truck hit him and knocked him down. It was a busy corner there at Forty-second Street and Second Avenue, in front of the Shanty, and there's a hack line there. Naturally, a little crowd [...]
Among the stories I have either heard or read about the Villard Houses, my favorite is one about William Faulkner. Between 1949 and 1969 Bennet Cerf's Random House occupied the north wing of the stately brownstone that takes up the entire block between 50th and 51st on Madison Avenue. During those years Faulkner divided his time between Oxford, Mississippi and [...]
My brother was thirteen years older than me. We had different values, he having grown up in a repectable working class slum and me, from age seven to seventeen, in a fancy suburb west of Boston. I took a lot of things for granted. But he had bought the American Dream, maybe because our mother was an Armenian immigrant fleeing [...]
There’s a cult of the Independent Bookstore, and Three Lives & Company, a small bookstore in the West Village, is one of its temples. Anne Roiphe proselytizes in the New York Times: "Three Lives feels like a personal library. You know that ideas and words matter here, that someone has handled each book and knows its contents; that you, too, [...]
Pregnant and nauseous, I slid over and rolled down the window. Risa and I had gotten into a cab that smelled of cherry-scented cleaning fluid. I rolled the window fully open and a big fat raindrop splashed me on the forehead. It was one of those wet November days, too dark for normal. At home, we had to turn on [...]
Evan Krasnik is a 59 year-old man who wakes up at 6 AM most mornings. He scuttles toward the shared bathroom in his pajamas and sandals and bangs on the door. “Jim, when are you going to get out of the bathroom? What if you never get out of the bathroom?” Afterwards, he eats a bowl of cereal, using a [...]
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 [...]
He is a pop artist of modest fame. I know he once designed a Barneys window display, and I think he paints murals for Unicef. Beyond that, I know very little about him. Aside from what he looks like naked. It began innocently enough: I was stumbling home in an uncomfortable pair of shoes when he approached me from behind, [...]
My brother is a twenty-eight-year-old millionaire living in Greenwich Village. He drives a Boxster, owns a beach house in East Hampton, and recently bought an original one-sheet of Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the bargain price of twenty thousand dollars. Sometimes he asks me, his older and poorer sister, what I want or could use—cable TV, a new set of bike [...]
Saturday, September 21, 2002 1100 Student Aide Dewey opens courts. On duty. Graffiti spotted on southern fencepost, third from Amsterdam Avenue. 1218 Supervisor Pavi visits, informed of graffiti. 1430 S/A Krauss relieves Dewey for meal break. 1531 S/A Dewy returns from meal, relieves Krauss. 1800 SA Dewey off duty. Courts close Sunday 22 2002 1106 S/A Dewey opens courts. On [...]
Most parents have to be repeatedly prodded, coaxed and cajoled into attending any school meeting. Parents of Emotionally Disturbed Special Ed. students are required to attend annual meetings to evaluate their child's individual program and progress, or lack thereof. It is therefore no surprise that voluntary meetings, such as Open School Night, can be notorious for lack of parental attendance. [...]
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 [...]
The View From the Seventieth Floor by Sandy Gelpieryn Death Masks at Ground Zero by Kendra Hurley The Numbers by Bryan Charles The View From Silver Lake Park by Gabrielle Walter Don't Look Back by Kevin McLeod Scenes From The Brooklyn Bridge by Jim Merlis The View From Long Island Part Ii by Adam Baer Ob Gyn Wtc by [...]
"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 [...]
It's been ten years, but I still keep it on the resume. I would venture to say it's gotten me every job I've had since college, not to mention a book deal and more than a few birds to die for--one of whom is currently on her third Cosmo and showing no signs of slowing down. "You were really good," [...]
It was 1985 at the original Ritz (East 11th Street; now it's Webster Hall), NYC's greatest-ever rock club. Blind Dates, my big haired happy-go-pop band, was the opening act for the then-popular Aussie group Eurogliders. The place was sold out and teeming with what we called "festive new wave nubiles"--the Rat Pack would have called them "hot chicks." My Grandpa [...]
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