A Sports Coat is Worth a Thousand Words

My dad reached inside the closet for his new jacket, single breasted, two button, and straight off the rack. It was pencil gray with flecks of black in it and may have had those professorial looking patches on the sleeves, but I’m not sure. He didn’t care much about clothes and the jacket was nothing […]

From New York to New Orleans

Wandering Two Cities, a Youthful Diary   Edward Hopper once said that he identified all the places he’d known according to their architecture.  I used to be the same way.  I noticed people as backdrops to overblown dramas in light and shade.  I looked past them toward ogee roof and filigreed transom; I marveled at […]

Happy Father’s Day

The phone call came on a steamy summer morning, while I was stuck in traffic on the Central Park transverse, the Met’s Temple of Dendur off to my right. A nurse from my father’s hospital equivocated her way through the call. He had been in failing health. “Where are you now?” she finally asked, with […]

The King of New York

I. From a distance the crown almost looks like solid gold. But as I walk farther up 30th Avenue in Astoria, I can tell there is something not quite right about it. It is glinting, sure, but I realize the crown is made of curled paper. It’s from Burger King. I am now only a […]

Piano Piece

A vintage piano stood alone on a deserted city street. Moments earlier, the piano had been saved from oblivion by a man named Oscar, who had stepped out of his apartment just as the workers of the New York City Sanitation Department had been struggling to lift the piano into the whining maw of their […]

My Neighbor Cries a Chain Link Fence

To the young beautiful woman with tears in her eyes who lives above me: now I know why you run in the apartment for hours backandforth backandforth. I know why you don’t talk in the hallway. I know because the building is old and my ceiling is thin. I heard the furniture thunder last night […]

From Ditmars Blvd. (the Last Stop)

N train I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. N train, two dollars and twenty-five cents. N train; go fuck yourself with your Sunday Schedule. N train you are making me lose my mind. You will never be angelic N train, 40 minutes to Queensboro Plaza! N train you are full of excuses. We […]

Reading series: Wednesday! 8pm

Everyone’s Glass Onion

There is something unsettling about having a therapy session at the home of your therapist. It is on par with a Halloween night of childhood trick or treating and having to step through the threshold of a nameless neighbor’s doorway for handful of candy corn or tootsie rolls. Your seven-year-old nose inhales a waft of […]

Supporting Mick Jagger’s Habit

In the glory days of Steinway Street, there was an establishment called Record Spectacular. A combination record store/head shop, it was located between 30th and 31st Avenues, on the west side of the street…and was a meeting place of sorts for music aficionados, potheads, and other 1970s misfits. I still remember walking wide-eyed into Record […]

Dom’s Wife

When you live in an apartment building, you never know who the hell is gonna move in next door. I remember being in my late teens when a Greek family moved out two doors down and an older couple took the apartment. The guy’s name was Dom and he fixed televisions for a living. A […]

Power (Outage) to the People

I slept on my fire escape one night last week but it wasn’t due to martial strife or a daredevil spirit. Rather, the sight of yours truly three flights up sporting boxer shorts and a death grip on the bars came courtesy of Con Edison (with a nod to Mayor Bloomberg). The lights first dimmed […]