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"All my dishes are masterpieces ‘cause my customers deserve the best! They should lick their fingers to the bone," my Dad would say. "Nobody eats here just once unless he dies before the next time he plans to come in," my Dad said. He was always busy cooking and talking at the B-29, the restaurant so named because of the [...]
We got the phone call on a Tuesday night. It was Nick’s boss telling us he hadn’t been to work since Thursday and hadn’t called in sick either. That wasn’t like Nick, and his boss was worried. Nick was an older man who lived downstairs from us. Since he didn’t have a phone and we were his best friends in [...]
My girlfriend, Amanda, and me, and her friend Heather were at Nacho Mama's, drinking. It had just gotten cold. My friend Sal came in. He had been drinking, too. Heather brought up liquor, how old it had become, how tired she was of it, and asked him if he had any drugs. He said he had some K up in [...]
Staying at a disheveled hotel in Midtown across from Madison Square Garden, I call and ask her to meet me at the restaurant downstairs for breakfast. We haven't seen each other since she moved away three years ago and have only spoken on the phone once (when she called to flirt with me after leaving her boyfriend). I walk down [...]
During the past few weeks, representatives from Red Cross have been going around to people who live below Canal St (in Tribeca, oddly enough, not Chinatown) offering them financial compensation whether they needed it or deserved it, or not. They came to my door. After they left,I wrote about the experience. It was an innocent act. That is, writing the [...]
A few drunk men standing around the television in Puffy's Tavern on a Saturday morning is not that unusual for the historic watering hole--back before when Tribeca became DeNiro-ified, a man "Puffy" opened his bar at the corner of Hudson and Harrison at 6 a.m. and closed it at 4 in the afternoon so the local blue collar types could [...]
So I paid $400 to St. Vincent's nursing school and took their EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) training course in February 1989. I went to class three days a week and I also had to do eighteen hours of rounds at St. Vincent's Hospital, which was like, total misery and insanity. Then I found out that getting your EMT license from [...]
I ran away to Manhattan with a rich girl. Well, it was more of her sweeping me away than running away with her. I was actually running away from a different rich girl, who had introduced me to this new rich girl. I was 19 years old, halfway through my studies at a prestigious university in Boston. I had grown [...]
Thomas Beller: You once said that one of your roles, Nora of Doll's House, helped you find out where you stood as a woman today. What did you mean by that? Liv Ullman: I don't believe that one single play will teach you what you are. I think that every time you work on something, whether it is a play [...]
Just short of the 96th street station the kid next to me started to get really agitated. He was digging around frantically in his pockets for a pen, and since I was sitting next to him he kept pushing and bumping me with his shifting. He finally found his pen in his pocket, but he didn't have anything to write [...]
Ever since my first wooshing ride down a log flume, I’ve been enamored of water. From sprinklers to swimming pools to lakes and the Atlantic,water soothes me like no other substance. Except beer. So when I heard the Staten Island ferry served cold brew on its cross-bay excursions, I knew I’d found my manna. A Friday night was chosen. That [...]
My mother was a talented seamstress so for the earlier part of my childhood most of my clothes were homemade. She loved embroidering tiny flowers and animals on dress pockets, basting collars and hand-sewing French hems. This was the late sixties and early seventies and downtown parents had two choices in clothing for kids: shopping for the cheap polyester items [...]
A sloppy silver and rose sunset is visible over the bunker-like structure of the Whitestone Lanes bowling alley, whose sign says: PLAY AMERICA’S GAME/75 LANES OPEN 24 HOURS 7 DAYS. Ahmadullah Raghbat, his uniform and sneakers in a polystyrene shopping bag, stands waiting for the bus. Raghbat is a young Afghani, and though he has lived in New York for [...]
I went to XO on Walker Street last night. It's a small Chinese restaurant, far enough from mott street that little English is spoken there. It's the kind of restaurant where i like to go by myself...sit at the bar, suck down the rice noodle with shrimp and chinese vegetable, and hide behind a paper watching ancient eating rituals unfold. [...]
You could easily have walked right past her. An attractive young woman, about twenty-five years old, sitting quietly on the half-full subway car. Her hair was done, her make-up expertly applied. She sported dangly earrings and a jaunty scarf knotted above a new leather jacket. Nothing unusual about her. Except for the pants -- or more precisely, the absence of [...]
All the names in this article have been changed, except for the author's. November 29, 1998 Carol Suskind, Principal Fielding Elementary Day School Lower Manhattan Dear Carol, As you are probably aware, my son, Luke is a student at Fielding, in Debra’s 4/5’s class. Last week, I found Luke huddled in a corner outside his bedroom, crying. When I asked [...]
Mario is a white African of Portuguese descent. In New York some people tell him, "I didn’t know white people could be from Africa." When they say this, he shakes his head. "Americans are so ignorant!" he says. "They don’t know about anything outside their own country." Mario has come to New York from Mozambique, where I live now. We [...]
Hurrah's began as a nexus for disco (in the early days it was a rival of Studio 54 and Xenon), then moved over into what was still called "new wave." It was booked by Jim Fouratt, famous for coining the slogan "The Man Can't Bust Our Music" at Columbia Records in '68 and for being one of the leaders of [...]
The news crews were outside the old Fillmore East, getting a last shot before the legendary concert hall was razed and turned into apartment buildings. As I walked along Second Avenue to the video store, I saw tv trucks lined up outside. I felt sad; my youth was vanishing. I'd gone past this now boarded up building hundreds of times [...]
Fresh off the train from Westfield, New Jersey, our family stood on the corner of 42nd Street and Park Avenue. Exhilarated by the fact that his breath was suddenly visible, my ordinarily quiet seven-year-old brother James began to speak loudly and quickly, pushing air from his lungs in great hyperbolic gushes. I followed suit. Soon the shivering began, and we [...]
On January 25 at 7:30 in the morning, two raccoons were found dead by Central Park personnel. One was found just below the reservoir and the other in the tangled stems of Shakespeare garden. Instead of just cleaning them up, as they might have done in different circumstances, they called the Urban Park Rangers. The Rangers too had been primed [...]
In the summer of 1980 I was living on East Fifth Street and First Avenue with Alpha Lorraine and I was eighteen, feeling not so much on top of the world as right in the middle of it. Alpha was a new friend and when Yves, my French dancer friend from when I was a dishwasher at Food Restaurant, went [...]
We were from out of town. We had finished school, were about to get engaged, and were moving to New York at the end of the summer. They showed us a “model apartment.” They put the hard sell on us. They asked us for a deposit in the form of a money order (can’t cancel ‘em). Then they asked us [...]
This very quiet bird, with whom I am hoping to build a relationship, is called Number Two. I received Number Two and his ex-companion, Number One, as a Valentine's day present from a woman I used to go with. Her name was Johanna. Johanna used to work in my office--in fact she used to work for me. I felt a [...]
Peggy Darlington has always loved the New York City subway. As a little girl, she rode the trains frequently, and when she wasn’t on a train, she played “train” in her bedroom. One day, Darlington’s parents ordered her to play with dolls. After finding that she had put the dolls on pieces of cardboard to shuttle them around, they finally [...]
My class started the fall semester in the beautiful rooms of newly renovated Fiterman Hall, the south annex of Borough of Manhattan Community College, and finished in a trailer on West Street across from the barge port where trucks dump debris from the World Trade Center. "Have a good weekend and keep up with your reading," I said to my [...]
About a week after the WTC attack we began to hear weeping from the apartment next door. It came to us in the middle of the night, while we were sleeping, a small, very private sound that forced its way into my thoughts until I found myself lying awake listening to it. Its volume rose and fell, as weeping usually [...]
If I leave the windows open in my classroom, I can hear the endless hum of traffic coming from the Long Island Expressway. There's a certain degree of wonder in its sound. So many people, an endless whoosh of thoughts and dreams whipping past me like rush hour- forever. There's this postcard I keep in my classroom that reminds me [...]
I saw it all from a bench in the park, sitting next to some gathered pigeons and a pile of peanut shells. And nearby, across the street, a statue and an American flag. The man with the black hat and the enormous red-shirted gut was sprawled out on a bench and he appeared to be dead. Perhaps he was. A [...]
I hadn't thought of Tiny Teeth in years. But there he was, invoked I guess, by my having told Tom (the manager of the small bookstore I own on the Upper West Side) about him earlier in the day. We don't really hire high school kids, but I'd taken Tiny Teeth on about 10 years ago as a favor to [...]
Allison and I met on the dance floor at Sway. The sign on the wall indicated "NO DANCING" but defiance was in the air that night, and what's wrong with a little good time anyway? I felt like partying, was out to meet somebody, and always loosen up when dancing. I was wearing my Mariachi-inspired studded black jeans, which I [...]
During the summer, approximately 25 to 35 students occupy the brownstone at 305 W. 29th St. and Eighth Avenue, a few blocks from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. I’m living on the third floor, flanked by the kitchen and the staircase; paying a weekly rent of about $200 for a single room with a view of the cigarette butts [...]
During my junior year of high school my mother announced to me that I was unfit to be lived with. I was rude, obnoxious, wild, irritating, irresponsible, undisciplined, unpleasant, and ungrateful. I was therefore to make arrangements to move in with my father and his new wife at the soonest possible date. I was being released from my mother's sprawling [...]
I met the homeless man during a late night cigarette break on my apartment's stoop. He was a black man wearing a tan barn jacket in the dead of winter; it was stained and full of holes. The man was friendly, though, and he smiled at me with a toothy, unshaven face. He pointed at my pack of Winston's and [...]
The play was going to be close. The runner, my best friend Sam, was trying to go from first to third on a ball lined into the gap in right center field. But the guy in right had jumped off with the bat-crack and knifed in smoothly. He’d gloved the ball and was launching a low hard wicked throw to [...]
Brother Theodore astonishes David Letterman Brother Theodore was always a ghost to me. When I returned to Manhattan in the early 1990s, Theodore was a specter haunting downtown. His one-man show, terrible and comic all at once, was still running on 13th Street, and posters boosting the show were everywhere. I saw them at the buildings at the New School [...]
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