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Shelby Said

by 03/27/2022
Neighborhood: Manhattan

Yesterday, there was a café and now, suddenly, there isn’t. Life disappears while we sleep. The homeless live on many corners. Shelby plants a mattress and pillowson the corner outside the nearby Duane Reade.  Neighbors donate sheets, pillowcases, a woolen blanket and a warm winter coat to help Shelby, as she takes yet another night […]

A Tourist’s Guide to Lower Manhattan

by 08/01/2021
Neighborhood: Lower Manhattan

February 1996 is bitter and icy and windy and numbing. My boyfriend Raz and I have been rendered homeless due to our depravity, immaturity, and stupidity. By day, we relax at the Lower East Side needle exchange, the Beth Israel methadone clinic, or our favorite diner, Leshko’s, on Avenue A. Nighttime is more problematic. We […]

A New York State of Mind

by 01/31/2021
Neighborhood: Manhattan, Subway

When you sit down on a weather-worn bench in New York—one that is dry and bone colored—it feels like you’ve stepped out of your body. You’ve left a building, a crowded café, stepped off of an accordion bus, or out of a bodega. It’s a pause where you take a cigarette break even though you […]

Life and Death in Chinatown

by 11/22/2020
Neighborhood: Chinatown

I didn’t know Chuen Kwok, an 83-year-old homeless man bludgeoned to death last year while sleeping in the entryway of a Chinatown store. Chances are, I wouldn’t have, since I speak neither Cantonese, Fujianese nor Mandarin. I am one of a growing cadre of non-Chinese moving into the neighborhood and contributing to the area’s gentrification. […]

Never Mind the Notes

by 09/27/2020
Neighborhood: Gramercy Park, Murray Hill

“If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” – Louis Armstrong At the time I fancied myself a budding talent, though I’d have been hard pressed to say at what. Singer-songwriter was my latest label, only I sang mostly in the shower and once toweled dry  could never quite manage to make […]

Michael Jackson’s Father

by 07/04/2020
Neighborhood: Bowery

When my son and I moved to the Bowery in the late 1970s, we took our place alongside the slow-marching parade of men and women who moved through those streets like ghosts. Some were devoid of identity and shape and earthbound spirit; others were vivid and sublime.  A black man, a vagabond who trolled the […]

Karma is as Karma Does

by 01/06/2019
Neighborhood: Midtown, Port Authority

The sun was gone, blotted out by the Port Authority’s roof. I disembarked into the effluvium of the upper tunnel and made for the gate. From there, clacking escalators, one flight after another, shunted me toward the bottom floor, the subway level. The vendor stalls had all been shuttered, and the soles of my shoes […]

Will You Marry Me?

by 09/26/2014
Neighborhood: Long Island City, Uncategorized

During the middle of my spring semester, I remembered the homeless man in front of the 21st street CTown. He was the poem in my poetry workshop. He was the protagonist of my memoir workshop free-write. I remembered my love for him. My professor loved him from the first paragraph. I went to high school […]

After the Graveyard Shift

by 01/28/2014
Neighborhood: East Village

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 […]

Can I Get This To Go?

by 07/02/2013
Neighborhood: East Village

As someone who was born and raised in the famous “city that never sleeps,” it comes as no surprise that I have suffered from insomnia since the age of thirteen. Not a believer in medicinal sleep aids, I experimented with every natural sleep remedy suggested by friends, store clerks and of course, the internet. I […]

The Bed Story (Or Why I Never Sell on Craig’s List Anymore)

by 08/22/2012
Neighborhood: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights

Over the course of two years living in Brooklyn, I moved six times, including a failed attempt at cohabitation with my then boyfriend in what turned out to be an illegal sublet. The first thing I did when I moved into my second place, located in the West Indian section of Crown Heights was buy […]

In The Living Room Of The Beggar

by 04/13/2012
Neighborhood: Brighton Beach

He sat sprawled on the furthest side of the Q train, nose plumped with alcohol and ears flushed a chili-pepper red — laughing so hard his breath left two giant spheres of fog on the window. The rest of us were bunched on the other side, in an attempt to escape the stench of human […]