You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Crime & Punishment.”
It sounds like Harlem when black people in New Orleans talk, but way more so. They open their mouths and cane syrup sounds roll out. “Awright, Sugar. Heego, dawlin’,” said the steam table lady serving shrimp as I lunched at a conference that brought me recently to this gorgeous, mangled city. I asked where she was from. “Law Naan,” she [...]
Looking around for the lieutenant, I find him standing alongside the firehouse, staring down into a neat row of freshly clipped hedges. I hurry to his side and he tersely commands, "Get to work." Right then and there, my life changes forever. * For firemen, there is nothing more startling than a Verbal Alarm--the riotous banging of fists on the [...]
At the risk of sounding terribly cliché, I was mugged in New York. It was July, 2005. I was a block away from home when two gentlemen – black, backwards hats – pushed me up against the wall, took the phone out of my hand, and asked if they could make a phone call. I said I was on the [...]
The pivot of this story is not the state of generic poverty that I found myself in upon entering New York. You don't have to be poor to be thrown in jail, but it helps. I had broken some sort of levee on the China Town bus between Philadelphia and New York. That morning I had woken up next to [...]
Inside the firehouse, sweeping floors, cooking meals and maintaining equipment are routine parts of the job. However when the doors go up and the rigs go out you have to be as flexible as Gumby, because you do not know what you are going to be faced with next. While responding to alarms, we always scan the sky for smoke [...]
On a summer evening in 2001, after work and after grilled cheese in the Greek diner on Amsterdam, Jeremy and I are walking through Verdi square, past the 72nd Street station on the 1 and 9, the most treacherously narrow subway platform in all of Manhattan, forever poised on the precipice of disaster. The streets are packed with nervous life [...]
I’d dashed in about a half-hour before closing time. This little toy store in the Village, whose shelves cheerfully overflow with cute wooden toys in primary colors, funny stuffed monkeys and bright plastic puzzles. A friendly, crowded little place devoid of Gameboys and electronic pinging, the kind of place where you can reassure yourself you’re in the company of rational, [...]
I was recently musing about my time as a trainer at Manhattan's most prestigious 1980's gym: The Vertical Club. The place was loaded with the beautiful people and the celebrities they yearned to be. A regular in the weight room was one Bruce Cutler, the late John Gotti's lawyer. The barrel chested Cutler was a popular figure in the trendy [...]
It’s January 2, 1997. I head out to the corner bodega to buy coffee and a New York Times. I wear a robe and slippers. I am still hung over from New Year’s Eve. It is the time of year when the frozen ground in Williamsburg forms an admixture of leftover snow and dog turd matter. I say this because [...]
"Hey, can you spare some coin?" The guy sounded pleasant enough as he approached our car. Todd was tucking his spare keys into the ashtray and I was applying Mac lipstick (ooh baby) to the sounds of John Briggs (a local jazzy techno artist). We climbed out of Todd's shiny 1998 Pathfinder, we were summer-drunk and ready to hit the [...]
Cops. The left lane is for passing only, did you know that? I must have forgotten since driver’s ed class, like I’ve forgotten to take speed limits seriously. Even when you literally can’t afford not to, even in daylight. Which I can’t and which it is. But I’m going ninety in the left lane and ten minutes into my morning [...]
Newer Entries »
