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1. March 25th, 2001 Basketball City Chelsea Piers There Were Horses A pick up game at Basketball city. Cold Sunday afternoon. The academy awards that night. Dreading them. Miserable but psyched about the game. We ended up playing four on four full court. On the other team were the guys I play with in my league, on my team was [...]
My first apartment in New York was on the second floor of a seven-story walk-up on MacDougal Street, between West Third and Bleecker. It was a three-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom with a view of a chain-linked pen where the building kept the trash, always bags and bags of it. I was twenty-five and feeling very lucky. I could hardly believe I was [...]
The sidewalk in front of my apartment building was wrapped in crime tape. An ambulance waited idly on East 10th Street. Policemen strode in and out of the lobby. It was a mild winter Saturday afternoon, and I’d come downstairs for my mail. My doorman looked ashen. “A woman jumped,” he said. “18G.” He was the second person to see [...]
What I like most about Law & Order is that it’s always on. For a long time I didn’t watch Law & Order, and then one day I did. I used to turn the TV on, flick around for something to watch, and on nearly every other channel find Law & Order reruns featuring either the first cast, the previous [...]
Of all the streets in New York, 12th Street is the one with which I most identify. I’ve never actually lived on it, but it has threaded its way through my life and clung there. The street represents both some of my best and worst times. Not all of 12th Street, which runs from Avenue C to the West Side [...]
I took a Chaucer English Literature class in 1968 at New York University. I was told Chaucer used a lot of dirty words. An erotic film was made based on ‘The Canterbury Tales.’ I figured the professor wasn’t going to screen it in class but maybe I could take a female classmate to see it when it played at one [...]
She looked like a collection of spheres stuck together to represent the female body. Round little torso, round little head, protruding chipmunk cheeks like those on the marionettes on that TV show “Spitting Image.” Dark little eyes that glared from some bottomless well of anger and pain. Her mail came addressed to two completely different names. Behind her back, everybody [...]
Poke, poke, poke went his finger against my head. I was playing basketball at my local basketball court and some static had developed between me and a guy nicknamed Homicide. I stared straight ahead, trying to ignore his jabbing finger. “You stink!” he yelled, barking right into my face. “You know that?” He was six three, not as tall as [...]
Please join us for our upcoming readings: Wednesday, July 8th 12:30pm Bryant Park: Bryant Park Reading Room Thomas Beller will moderate a panel discussion on writing in New York, with Joseph O'Neill (Netherland), Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin), Jonathan Ames (The Double Life Is Twice as Good) and Alice Mattison (Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn). They will [...]
Some people take their High School Senior Superlatives a bit too seriously. No, I’m not talking about Mary, my class’s “Worst Driver,” devoting her life to turning over a new leaf as a professional chauffer. I’m talking about my very own "Class Clown" award spurring my standup comedy career. Ever since my first time performing comedy at age 18--shortly after [...]
He was puckish and presumptuous, impudent and ebullient; a bantam and bumptious, dastardly and delirious hand-out seeking hotdogger with a bare head, bushy beard, and bushels of personality. On many nights he could be found fast asleep on a bench in Washington Square Park, his belly careening with gin and ale that he had bamboozled tourists into buying him. Born [...]
Yesterday I left for work without having eaten anything all morning. For a person with a normal schedule this would be no problem, but I start work at 12:30 PM and don’t take “lunch” until about 5:00 PM. My office is on Hudson and King Streets and I take the C train to the Spring Street Station. It’s only a [...]
If you have a gloriously Afro’d, insanely talented, sleek sapling of a former student who has given herself a single syllable moniker and released her first hip-hop CD, you want to walk her around your neighborhood like a princess. You want a red carpet to roll out in front of her as she shyly hunts for a smoothie which she [...]
I met John Lennon in Washington Square Park. My friend Susan and I were returning home to the Village from our jobs as drug abuse counselors in the roughest schools in Brooklyn…when we spotted him. It was 1973, and his hat gave him away: a black Beatles’ cap that had become their trademark, a newsboy hat that has recently become [...]
“What happened to your knee?” Not since my pregnancy have so many people elevated a distended part of my body to public discourse. My neoprene knee stabilizer invited countless questions and unsolicited advice from friends and strangers in Greenwich Village, where I live, on the #6 train, and in the physical therapist’s office in Union Square—where I shared stories about [...]
He kneels on the gray-black slate in front of the Jefferson Market, rendering blue eyes in pastels on the sidewalk, the magazine cover of Paul Newman under his left knee--only the eyes done after several hours. I had passed by at 10. He was just starting, no eyes yet, only the box of pastels dumped onto the sidewalk, a few [...]
In the hiatus between semesters during my years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, I often decamped to New York City, ostensibly to find a job during the break, but really an inducement to be somewhere—anywhere—else. One hot summer day while plodding along the sidewalk of MacDougal Street south of Bleecker, I noticed the open door of [...]
It was the first perfect day of spring; the air silky with warmth. People, like the daffodils, were blooming all over Washington Square Park: Bicyclists, street musicians, bag-lunchers, in-line skaters, mothers with strollers. Those who were just standing around, others who were walking—they flew into the air like handkerchiefs tossed by the breeze when the car hit them. I was [...]
I am standing on the F train platform, my toes just over the yellow line. I lean toward the darkness of the train tunnel. In the distance I can see the faint, low-lit squares of train windows passing through the darkness. Then there is the hollow rumble of the F train approaching from in between stops and the shine of [...]
please amend your story about The Fool of Abingdon Square Park. If you would like to be accurate about the facts mentioned in your story, please consider changing that Abingdon Square Park was restored under the auspices of the Greenstreets Program. It was actually funded by the city council in reaction to a petition delivered in 2001 by a trio [...]
I only wanted it to be over, even as I dreaded its arrival. For weeks I walked around in a clenched state of anticipation, unaware of how tense I had become. “An adventure or an exile?” I asked myself. I couldn’t decide. A few days before the big move, I was sitting in front of Rice, a delicious hole in [...]
“Just like a boxer in a title fight you’ve got to walk in that ring all alone You’re not the only one who’s made mistakes but they’re the only things that you can truly call your own” --Billy Joel I was looking at some apartments with my realtor, Harriet Loshin, just west of Union square, near west 12th street. We [...]
Blue never counts the raccoon coat in her estimate. By this time in 1984, t’s too old, even though from a distance it makes her look like a rich person. The coat, which falls to her ankles, is from the 1920s and was her grandfather's. The inside label even spells out his name in baroque cursive writing: David Stewart. She [...]
It’s snowing when our plane touches down in Washington, D.C. Christmas morning, cold and dark. The terminal doors slide open and we are hit with a blast of bitter air. We bundle the girl in blankets and she stares through the car windows at the falling flakes of snow. The wipers beat back and forth and the tires hiss through [...]
On a recent Tuesday morning, at exactly 9:32 AM, Suzanne Seggerman pulled her white, full-sized van, a Chevrolet Gladiator she affectionately refers to as The Gladiator, into a choice parking spot on Bleecker Street near the NYU gym. She was fresh on the heels of the street-cleaning vehicle assigned to this block every Tuesday and Friday between 9:30 and 11:00 [...]
I wouldn’t have noticed her at all if she hadn’t stepped on my foot. Her hair was in a tight braid that bounced against her exposed shoulders as she rushed past. She wore a skimpy red top, extremely tight white pants and high heels. I glanced after her with a tiny bit of indignation – Hey! You stepped on my [...]
I saw him first. He was lounging; a big grey parrot perched above him while lizards slunk and swaggered in a terrarium nearby. Our eyes met; his were big and dark and luminous against pale coloring. He yawned. Stretched one arm up in a dramatic arch. There was another fellow right next to him, but it was he, Clovis Stirling, [...]
I have an intimate relationship with my bike lock. In fact, I dance with it. It is not, at first glance, an obvious dancing partner—a heavy chain swathed in a black nylon sleeve, but then there are many unlikely dance partners in our lives. Just as many people will do an unconscious two-step when they are opening the refrigerator, or [...]
The women lined up early for a chance at the best gift bags. Some had spent the past 20 hours miserable and sleepless on a Greyhound from Iowa, such was the desire to inhale some combination of cupcake accord, sumac leaf note, and diet brambleberry liqueur that was reputed to possess magical and potentially aphrodisiac qualities unknown to the women’s [...]
A.K. is as often used in mild, fond condescension as it is in derision: “Let him alone: He’s just an A.K.”...I make no special plea for alter kocker, but I certainly prefer A.K. to its English equivalent, “old fart.” –Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish We arrive for our weekly game on Mercer near Houston Street, four players just shy [...]
Depending on how you look at it, Kamran Shirazi is famous in the world of chess for his flamboyant and innovative style of play, or for his amazing ability to lose, or perhaps both. He cobbles together a living by combining prize money from chess tournaments with fees from chess lessons, for which he charges eighty dollars an hour. If [...]
MOROCCAN LETTERS Phase 1: The Seduction Jane Bowles liked to call her husband, Paul, a spider. The spider is a dry creature, and she was referring to the spider’s thirst to lure its prey into his net and drain their fluids. She herself suffered that fate. Bowles met Alfred Chester at a dinner party in New York in the winter [...]
There used to be this guy who came to the park in a business suit with a thin black tie and his straw hair slicked back and wet-looking to make the case against Darwin's theory of evolution. He had a clutch of professional-quality charts, which he set up on an easel behind him to help illustrate his points while he [...]
In high school I was friends with two identical twins named Dan and Guy. They had long hair and beards and Dan played the Harmonica. They both did many drugs and sold drugs and got sent away to rehab a bunch of times. I was a little in love with both of them, Guy especially. He didn't say much and [...]
Elisha Cooper, our staff illustrator, spent two weeks, though December 22, 2000, sitting at a small table amidst the bustle of Kate's Paperie in Soho; he sat there all day in front of a stack of his book, A Year In New York, signing and drawing (everyone who bought one got a small portrait of themselves on the front page [...]
Bill Dilworth may have one of New York's most relaxing jobs. He is keeper of the New York Earth Room, a permanent installation by the artist Walter DeMaria, sponsored by the Dia Foundation. The work has been on display at the same location at 141 Wooster Street for over ten years, and Mr. Dilworth has been its guardian for the [...]
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