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When I first met Lance I was in an altered state. I was sixteen, back in 1963, when you could still buy a Benadryl inhaler, break it open and find a cotton wedge soaked with amphetamine. I'm not sure who first noticed this, but it might have been Jack Kerouac. I hope not, but it probably was. It was late [...]
My mother taught me to fear rats. She still shudders when she recalls the rat-infested tenement overlooking the Harlem River in the Bronx that my Czech refugee family called home when we first arrived in America, in 1970. Strange crunching sounds could be heard emanating from the hollowed walls of our apartment, and after a neighbor proudly showed my mother [...]
"Seats are left," the man assures me over the phone, "but please, hurry, hurry." Sunshine Travel Tours won't take reservations but he provides me with directions to the agency in Chinatown. A frequent traveler to Boston, I was happy to see the ad in the Village Voice offering one way tickets for $15 compared to the Greyhound/Trailways $40 seat. Once [...]
The more games the New York Knicks won the more they raised the ticket prices. I could only afford to see them at Madison Square Garden if they continued to have losing seasons. I’d buy a ticket from a scalper. Instead of charging more he’d sell it for a fraction of what it was worth, because no one wanted to [...]
I was at the bar of Florent very late Sunday night. A snow storm was raging outside. Pastis, that seat of slutty mayhem, sat up the block. There are now tastefully bright lights all over the meat packing district, where there was once just meat and the people who packed it. It was strange to sit at Florent, whose entrance [...]
Everyone has bad days. But for some souls fate comes down hard and fast and delivers a load of bad luck so rotten that the events of that person's life from that point on have to be filed into two categories: before the bad day and after. Around dinnertime on a still, muggy June evening, not far from the arched [...]
Lately when I go for a walk I make a vow not to walk under any scaffolding, in protest of there being so much of it these days. Two minutes later I realize I'm walking under scaffolding. One day I stopped and looked at the scaffolding around the NYU tower at East 8th Street and Mercer and realized it had [...]
Last August, when the Russian woman who waxes my legs in Brooklyn went on vacation, I made an appointment at a spa in SoHo. I'd actually been meaning to switch for some time. It wasn't that I didn't like Vicki—I did. She was dirt cheap, and we shared an interest in politics. Even though her accent was kind of thick, [...]
Late last year the 78-year-old filmmaker and archivist Jonas Mekas debuted his new diary film. The title, awkward but precise, is, "As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty." Its running time is around five hours, so it can only play once in an evening. On the first night of its run, Mekas held a little [...]
I was waiting for the elevator on my floor when I saw a sign on the bulletin board that an elderly painter was going into a nursing home and her work was in the basement, free to residents. I live in Westbeth Artists Housing in the far West Village; the note was from the management office and it said something [...]
I don’t like show tunes and don’t really understand how any one does. But the idea of piano bars intrigues me the same way pick-up basketball games and gay sex clubs do, as a place where men get to play with strangers. So when my mus ical theater friends Jim and Andy invited me to Marie’s Crisis, I went along [...]
In the autumn of 1991 I came to New York to take a fiction writing class. I was 23, fresh out of graduate school, with no savings and little work experience save for two summers clerking in a bookstore in the Maryland suburbs. I wanted to be close to the rarefied air of New York publishing. Inspired by movies like [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper I recently spent an afternoon watching a guy entertaining three of New York's finest on the eastern parapet of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was wearing what looked like a green track suit. "Jumper!" the call went up in the office. The view here is extraordinary: the Brooklyn Bridge, the World Trade Towers, the financial district, the [...]
My first job in Midtown Manhattan was as a clerical assistant in a large law firm on Fifth Avenue. It’s the building of the beast with the illuminated neon red 666 emblazoned across the top of the structure. It wasn’t glamorous work, but I made the best of my surroundings by exploring the neighborhood during my lunch break. My other [...]
A glass came flying through the air and smashed against the wall behind me. It appeared to be aimed at the DJ. He was standing next to me at the end of the bar. The guy who threw it was part of a group of men, slightly foreign, drunk, eccentric, who I had imagined, because of their accents, to be [...]
We met by way of the New York City Marathon; the roller skating marathon. It is little known Big Apple trivia, but in the Fall of 1980, there was a roller-skating marathon that covered the same mileage and territory throughout the five boroughs. One of the participants was my boyfriend T.J. A draft resister who had lived in Europe during [...]
The average Special Education teacher's career lasts a grand total of approximately two years. It's the one fact I remember on the road to my Master's Degree. Actually, remember two. I also remember that teaching in the inner city is the second most stressful job in these United States, next to being an inner city cop. And of course, cops [...]
Roberta Guaspar Tsavaras purchased fifty violins in 1978, while married to a naval officer stationed in Greece. She assembled her collection piecemeal, from stores in Athens and neighboring towns. "The idea was that I would teach violin at schools and when he was transferred to a new base, I would take the violins, show up at the next school, and [...]
I choose what I’m wearing carefully on Tuesdays. I like to show a little midriff, some shoulder. In a bar, before I play, I look around and notice other people’s midriffs and shoulders. I look at the curve of bodies bending across tables and feel my own. I want to laugh the throaty laugh of a James Bond ingenue. I [...]
illustrations: Steve Brodner; Since 1892 New Yorkers have been flocking to The Tenth Street Bath on 10th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A to shvitz, to sweat out the gunk that clogs the pores and clouds the spirit. In the city, we have a fine selection of toxins to choose from: subway juice (that mysterious thick liquid that seeps [...]
"Excuse me, are you from Denmark?" What a line. Yeah, I decide, he looks a little slick, but he’s safe enough. "From Iowa! But what are you doing in the city?" He knows he is charming. He is fortyish, but has smooth brown skin, a Latin accent, and white linen shoes. White linen shoes in this dirt-dusted city, now that [...]
When you walked through the door that first time in September, you became a Riceman …always a Riceman … never a boy, kid, lad, young guy … just a Riceman. Founded in 1938, and in 1940 relocated to a six story red brick building on the corner of what was Lenox Avenue and 124th Street, it was, and is, an [...]
Most of the time, I find that living in a doorman building is like having all the perks of living with my parents, but without any of the frustration. The doormen in my building are wonderful -- in the morning, the daytime doorman tells me that I look nice and then orders me to have a good day, just like [...]
The New York City Marathon is fun to watch for several reasons. The leaves in Central Park are beautiful--still on the trees but fragile and colorful. It's moving to see the look of physical pain on the runner's faces. It's moving to see that zoned out, exultant look on the runner's faces. It's interesting to watch everyone watching these looks [...]
1. Well, that’s it, Noppi, I’m up early again, I can’t sleep. My throat is killing me and I’m coughing. I think it’s the smoke because everyone else has it too. The subways are quiet. People bump into each other and don’t apologize. A woman slips in through the closing doors and takes the seat beside me. Opens her newspaper, [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Some people come to New York for the thrills. Some for romance. My desire starts lower down--well below the knee--in a hidden, private erogenous zone, where I get my kicks. This is the story of my socks life. I was travelling along Broadway in one of those reassuring black Town Cars. My agent was with me. [...]
Charles McAlexander is a big man, maybe 220 pounds and 6 foot 1. He wears an old work shirt that used to be bright red but now is more of a calm royal maroon with the inscription of Brass Lab in gold cursive on the chest pocket of the left-hand side. The button up shirt is having trouble deciding which [...]
We convoyed out to a house in Connecticut. The swimming pool was very warm. There were huge trees in the backyard and they swayed in the breeze, and beneath them, an expanse of lawn. We went shopping at the local Haymarket--which is sort of a Balducci's for Connecticans--and my friend left the key in the car while we were inside [...]
"Hello! If you would like a free internet website, plus a chance to make a lot of money, press one now."--Automated telephone sales pitch delivered on Easter Sunday My God, those heady months of January through April 13th, 2000, when every internet IPO went through the roof and Black Friday was a reference to a bad day in the market [...]
Department of Open Minds The William Alanson White Institute, founded in 1943 by Clara Thompson, among others, is known for its interpersonal approach to analysis. The interpersonal approach suggests that the patient is part of a complex social network that includes the therapist, and therefore the patient’s relationship to the analyst is less formal and more intimate than traditional approaches [...]
We arrived at Giants Stadium. There are four huge spiraling ramps through which the stadium's population of 80,000 enter and exit. They wind their way from the ground level up to the top, a huge cement coil faintly reminiscent of the Guggenheim Museum, though with a more prison vibe. My friend explained that it was a tradition for all the [...]
Photographs by Rachel Sherman Inside Miguel's Barbershop on 942 Amsterdam Avenue, Spanish speaking men sit in barber chairs facing the mirror. It is a sunny Friday in the early afternoon and the shop is busy. I ask a guy named Anthony, who is sitting in the back, about Miguel's. "This is a guy's place," he tells me. The barber working [...]
The first time I heard of the Tango Hotline, I laughed. The name was so apt. A hotline for the tangueros and milongueras who desperately need to find a "milonga" where they can dance. My tango obsession began after I had broken up with a long-time boyfriend. It was May. So I took ballroom dance lessons. At first there was [...]
“Graffiti is alive,” is one of several bits of agitprop that appeared not too long ago on the side of the Brooklyn Bridge. The more drastic any act of suppression is, the more extreme will be the reactions to it. In our zero tolerance, quality of life, war on drugs, law and order prison-industry age, you have to wonder when [...]
The woman sits. Pant legs are chewed. A blue parka soiled with what looks like oatmeal. It’s the Waiting Room. Institutional seat cushions, easily cleaned in case of vomit, spit, coffee, or feces. I pretend to read. The woman’s tongue stabs the air. She has no teeth. "It’s 11:30," she insists, speaking to the receptionist. "Where’s Dr. Forrester?" She’s told [...]
We were on our way to a downtown loft party in Emily's Volkswagen, Emily, Kay and I, when we stopped off to see the ruins of a fire in the waterfront district, on Thirtieth Street and Twelfth Avenue. This whole neighborhood, along the western spine of Manhatan, has always been mysterious to me, with its deserted steamship offices that look [...]
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