You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Crime and Punishment.”
I am writing this on the laptop you stole from me. Remember? No of course you don’t. What an asshole you were! I had gone back to New York to visit my father at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Head Trauma Unit (he had fallen and bashed his brains in on the way to see Sondheim and I swore up and down [...]
I once took the New York City police exam on a whim. In the suburbs of Long Island where I grew up, a large portion of high school buddies already had badges and guns by their early twenties. “Dude,” an acquaintance would say from the stool of a local tavern, “I shot my gun off the Brooklyn Bridge at three [...]
We were living in a tenement apartment building in the Bronx, and it was full of all things common to such. I was doing the breakfast dishes one Saturday morning when I felt something feathery run over my bare foot. Of course, I already knew what it was, but I screamed anyway. Ahhh!!!!!!!!!!!! My four-year-old daughter came rushing to my [...]
In 1971, when I was 11 years old, my world was turned upside down when my parents decided to send me to a Jewish Day School on the Lower East Side. From grades 1 to 5, I’d gone to the Downtown Community School, or DCS as it was called, on East 11th Street. It was a small, racially integrated [...]
I don't know when it happened exactly, but it happened. I have become a cranky old man, closed and rigid and fixed in my ways, despite the fact that in my youth I’d resolved never to grow up, never to become like all the grown ups who lived in my world when I was growing up. My high school yearbook [...]
Always wear a bag on your head if you don't want people to bother you. I figure this out in 1989 while I'm working the midnight to 5am waitressing shift at 7A Cafe in the East Village. It is right across the street from Tompkins Square Park during the height of the riots. The park and surrounding area is a [...]
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 and I heard him - [...]
I was wearing a camel-colored Brooks Brothers skirt suit that my father had bought for my mother in the early 80s when garments from Brooks Brothers were still Made in the USA, and people actually bought polyester suiting. My mother disliked its texture and never wore the outfit, so the material was cardboard stiff by the time she bequeathed it [...]
The week before my high school graduation, I wandered into the Good Humor ice cream garage on East 3rd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue, just a block from my apartment. I was looking for a summer job. A friend of the family, a college kid named Keith, was working the books there, and he took me in to see [...]
Learning to walk the streets of Manhattan means learning how to jaywalk. When we first moved here, several years ago, from California, I was amazed at others and then at myself for jaywalking even while under the gaze of police officers. Crossing the streets in New York means looking and betting on yourself to outrace the oncoming traffic. I am [...]
Yellow police tape stretched across the doorframe of Apartment 5. I had walked past this door every day for the last two years, past its tortured wood, pockmarked like the cigarette-burned arms of its inhabitant. The door was so battered, a neighbor told me, from all the times Katya’s parents threw her out and all the times she returned and [...]
Ran into my neighbor Traubman, a regular Gary Shteyngart except much older, on the sidewalk outside our apartment building near Kings Highway, while headed to the B train to Manhattan and wondering how bad my sciatica would be that day. "Where've you been, I've been thinking about you," Traubman said. He was wearing shorts, scratching his social-security belly. "Why have [...]
In the summer of 1984, I sublet an apartment on East 3rd Street between Avenue A and B, about one hundred yards from the building in which I had spent the first 18 years of my life. I’d been away for six years—the first four at a small college in the midwest followed by two years in a roach infested [...]
Decades ago, when my brother was about ten and I around fourteen, he began to spend an extraordinary amount of time in his room. We lived in an apartment in a sketchy neighborhood in the Bronx. There were muggings, petty and not so petty thefts, and a few cases of violent crimes. Still, we played outside and often in the [...]
*This story is written from the perspective of the author's former roommate. The names have been changed but all events happened as stated. Andy is being a serious cocksucker and holding onto my money. He won't give me any. He says it's for my own good and that I'll just go and spend it on drugs. He's right, but it's [...]
Getting your two year old daughter into a bathing suit in a men’s changing room can be a bit like stuffing an eel into a pillowcase. For some reason I thought the smart move would be to undress myself first, get my trunks on, my flip-flops, grab my towel, then shed Hana down to her bathing self — coat, boots, [...]
The following sonnets are excerpted from Robert Viscusi's forthcoming book, Ellis Island, which will be published in March 2013 by Bordighera Press. Random arrangements of lines from the 624 sonnets that comprise this epic work can be discovered via the Random Sonnet Generator at ellisislandpoem.com. This is the first time these poems have appeared as written by the author. 1.6 i [...]
In the Greater Depression the employment opportunities for a man my age were limited in New York. No company wanted to pay my worth, for a younger man will do the job for a third the wage and his knowledge of labor resistance is zero. However my absolute willingness to work has overcome most obstacles as I labored on the [...]
In the immediate wake of the storm nothing worked. Neither power nor light, neither running water nor heat, neither internet nor ATM, the fundamentals of middle class life, without which we don’t believe we can live happily nowadays. Fish and flesh rotted in the refrigerator. Dirty dishes piled up in the sink. Even your own body began to emit a [...]
As a boy in the early 1960s, I'd go up my grandparents' second floor apartment on York Avenue several times a week. Their hallway was lit by one low watt exposed bulb. The dark hall frightened me. Sometimes my fear was compounded when I'd hear fuzzy radio sounds coming from the usually locked basement. I assumed it was a foreign [...]
In the mid ‘70s I, a lifelong New Yorker, eagerly departed the crazy hustle and bustle of New York City when I landed a job in Birmingham, Alabama. I didn’t expect to miss New York or anything about it. But a few weeks after I moved to Birmingham, suddenly and unexpectedly I began craving almost daily something I would never [...]
He always said, “Hello, I’m so glad to see you? How are you?” even when he no longer knew our names. Starting in the last year, he didn’t care about answers. He cherished his long career as an impresario in the world of music, selecting and programming concerts for major institutions in New York City. After that, he was around [...]
All names in this story have been changed. It is not every day that one visits an Ashram for yoga and encounters a “retired” Mafia soldier, adrift there because of illness and poverty. From my end, I envisioned a documentary film covering his faded world; however, for his own security - though the events occurred many years ago - he wished [...]
“This,” I realized, “I’ve got to see." In and out of grass-roots politics my entire adult life, I’ve marched, demonstrated, phone-banked, written letters and e-mails, signed petitions, sold buttons, attended meetings, gone on the radio, made documentaries, and helped with organizational duties. Early this October, I had joined in one Occupy demonstration in Washington Square Park. But this combination [...]
“I was robbed in front of my apartment on Thursday night,” my ex told me the other day. “The guy said he had a gun.” “What?” I squawked, genuinely surprised. It was the week of Thanksgiving. We were meant to be discussing favorite trimmings alongside the turkey, not armed robbery. “So you've lost everything. Keys, wallet, phone, etc?” “No, he [...]
When my father walked onto the construction site of the Western Electric Building on Broadway and Fulton, he asked a dark-skinned guy in hard hat where Richie Two-ax was. The construction worker eyed my father’s neatly pressed slacks and asked, “Who are you?” “I’m his friend? He told me to meet him here for lunch,” my father said. “Your name [...]
Every Spring, tennis players in New York City who want to play on the city courts have to buy a tennis permit. The Parks Department doubled the price this year to $200 for an adult permit. Seniors only pay $20 . If I can pass for 62, I’ll save $180. I'm unemployed. The first time I tired to pass as [...]
In my youth I wore a red beret. Twenty-some years ago, I was a New York City Guardian Angel who patrolled Restaurant Row with Curtis Sliwa and his wife, Lisa, and about ten other vigilantes. We were a small group who made a lot of noise. We also patrolled the “A” train, which we nicknamed the “Muggers’ Express.” Express trains [...]
When I moved to Little Italy in the fall of ’82, my ground floor studio on Mott Street was directly next door to the Café Espresso. This did not appear to be a fact that bore much significance, as the café was a broken down mess of a place, with faded gold letters peeling off a window crusted with dirt [...]
In the late-70s Fiorucci on East 60th Street was the style center for the disco world of New York. The windows boasted the latest flash fashion from Italy. These trendy threads guaranteed almost immediate entrance into Studio 54 or any exclusive disco in Manhattan. Joey Arias was the store manager in the summer of 1977 and the part-time singer featured [...]
When I took a position at a legal research firm, I became a frequent rider of the subway, sometimes spending more time under than above ground. My new job had me traveling from office to office during the day giving presentations and training attorneys. I hate to drive, so I've never minded the subway. Usually I hold my book or [...]
When Jeffrey and I argue, my mother always weeps. "Shame on you," she says. "I wish my brother, Shmuel, was still here for me to argue with. Shame on you!" My brother and I hang our heads. We wait for her to leave the room, but she is not yet finished. "Is this what I survived Hitler for?" she mumbles. [...]
Tay Tay was my first friend in Bed Stuy. Yes, she stole my money, and yes, she nearly got me kicked out of my apartment, and yes, our relationship further alienated me from my neighbors, but she stuck around. Tay Tay, she was like glue. Let me explain. Crackheads are like seagulls: you feed one, and it comes back every [...]
Kids in America are supposed to like guns. Our movie heroes majestically wield weapons on the silver screen and TV cops dance through primetime gun ballets. Armed with air rifles and plastic weapons my friends and I played WAR in the woods behind my house. Imaginary bullets tore holes through the make-believe Nazis and Japs. None of us ever died [...]
I leap down the stairs, unlock and swing open the wrought iron gate. Priscilla, my best friend and playmate, is leaning against the fire hydrant, fidgeting with her treasured Elvis Pez dispenser. She runs to me, pulls on my sweater, and drags me to the corner of Madison Street. Speechless and excited, she nudges my shoulder and points once, twice [...]
New Dorp Lane, even in 1976, was a traffic jam of cars in search of parking for the shops and restaurants up and down the strip. On the corner of Clawson Street, was Lane Music, its window drawn with a transparent yellow shade. Inside, guitars hung on one wall, while, opposite, were the doors to two practice studios, inevitably, emanating [...]
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