You are currently browsing stories tagged with “In Search of Lost Time.”
Gabriella breezed into St. Stephen’s 6th grade as a new student, and left a battleship wake when she mysteriously disappeared after seventh grade. Gabriella was an adorable Hungarian immigrant with a low voice like Natasha on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Her hair was cut short and bobbed to show off her huge dark almond-shaped eyes and rich lips. Drove [...]
My mother is watching the DON’T WALK sign blink on the corner of 6th Street and Avenue B. My twelve year old twin sister and I have been trekking with mother all over Alphabet City for what seems like hours. I am carrying a plastic bag filled with clothes that mother found a block away in a dumpster. When we [...]
I first passed under Grand Central Terminal’s Sky Ceiling in 1985 as a young actress new to Manhattan, on the way from my job as a Broadway theater bartender to visit my first serious boyfriend in Connecticut. Several times a week, I raced to catch the last New Haven-bound train at 11:20 pm. Winded as I hurried through the Vanderbilt [...]
This is a story about my grandmother, who was young in Manhattan in the 1920s. Speakeasies, nightclubs, drop-waisted dresses, bobbed hair, cloche hats, waist-length strands of dime-store pearls. Even for a middle-class workaday office girl like Frances Thornton, those were heady times. She was among the first of the gals in her office to bob her hair, which caused Chub, [...]
For a long time I used to go down to Pearl Street at the bottom of Manhattan. It was around the time that I had started writing a book about the famous case of the man and the woman who had disappeared from Pearl Street in 1997. The book led to the street and, in time, I became very fond [...]
It was my biggest disappointment in recent memory. I slumped in a blue plastic seat at the JFK terminal to absorb the shock while my plane to sunny St. Martin took off without me. I couldn’t believe I had let my vacation slip through my fingers. I had remembered to pack everything—the sunscreen, the bikinis, the breezy beach read. My [...]
I’m holding the door open for Mr. 11A and his dog, but when he sees the Medical Examiner’s van and the police car parked in front of the building, he stops, leans in close to me, and asks in a stage whisper, “Do they suspect foul play?” I tell him that the police had only been waiting for someone from [...]
Dad used to hunt. He didn't golf, so hunting was another made up reason to get out of the house. He never struck me as the hunting type, but once or twice a year, he'd be off upstate for a long weekend. It was a Yorkville man thing in the 1950s and 1960s. As he was walking out the door [...]
The dark interior smells of leather, glue and shoe polish. It looks as if Jim’s Shoe Repair hasn't had a fresh coat of paint since it opened. In 1932 when Vito “Jim” Rocco walked across the threshold of his shop on East 59th Street between Park and Madison Avenues in Manhattan, it was one of 50,424 throughout the United States. [...]
In Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, 19-year-old Alice – played by Mia Wasikowska – returns to Wonderland, 10 years after her last visit there, to rescue it from the Red Queen. At 26, two decades since my last trip to the rabbit hole, I can only say I envy her. I was six years old in 1990 when my dad [...]
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 [...]
"THE first thing I did when I got off at Penn Station, I went into this phone booth. I felt like giving somebody a buzz. I left my bags right outside the booth so I could watch them, but as soon as I was inside, I couldn't think of anybody to call up.'' So begins the New York adventure of [...]
There are secret portals all over New York City, and without warning you can get sucked into one. I fell down one of those rabbit holes myself in the last icy days of winter and, after the briefest of wonderland experiences, was unceremoniously coughed back up and spat out again. One of my loftier 2009 New Year’s Resolutions was, whenever [...]
We weren’t exactly seasoned foragers. I had only been foraging in the city a few months before I met Neil, who lucked into it the Saturday he rode his bicycle in Prospect Park and found our group picking field greens. But we had come into it in the same way—we were both dealing with break-ups and finding edibles offered some [...]
I’m watching a documentary on the Sundance Channel, Sex In a Cold Climate—the source material for the fictional film, The Magdalene Sisters—and I’m having a flashback. It’s 1936. I’m six years old in St. Joseph’s boarding school in Monticello New York. My mother is ill and recovering from an operation for “lady problems.” About fifty years later, I learned the [...]
That morning in 1949 begins innocently enough in our one-room apartment in the Ansonia Hotel. I am four. My father gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom. I go over to the bathroom door. The keyhole is just the right height. Curious, I peer through it and see my father. I can hardly believe my eyes. Daddy has [...]
The author's childhood home in Greenwich. (Photo by Alexis Rockman) Even after we all were married, with children of our own, my siblings and I would celebrate Mother’s Day in Greenwich. If the weather was good, we ate sandwiches with our mother and father on the porch, watching our children run together, and split apart, calling, screeching, and laughing as [...]
March 2009 will mark the ten-year anniversary of returning to New York City. The first year I lived here, in 1993-94 was a blur: an apartment in the Bronx, working with kids at a neighborhood center, $10 all-you-could-drink Saturday nights at Rockridge on Bleecker, 6 a.m. 4-train rides home, and smoking blunts with the janitor who also dealt crack and [...]
Those given to make art are probably the least well equipped to handle what is demanded of the artist. The criticism. The egos. The business – because when it comes right down to it, the artist is a salesman, and his art is the product. It’s enough to push a borderline personality over the edge. I expound on this theory [...]
“You can’t walk around here! They steal young girls and sell them as slaves.” Grandma’s voice hit a higher pitch with each syllable, her blue eyes sparking with agitation behind the dark rims of her glasses. I was momentarily stunned by her vehemence as much as by her words. We were in the backseat of the family Chevy, a sturdy [...]
When I was a kid in Brooklyn, in the Sixties, the “candy store” was the local hangout, the crossroads of the neighborhood. Actually, these ubiquitous institutions were a combination of soda fountain, luncheonette and newsstand. We probably called them candy stores because as kids the candy we bought there was the center of our culinary universe, or just because they [...]
I met Dan Dinnerstein at a party in 1982, when we were young, single guys in our late twenties. We had a lot in common: we were both were products of the New York State University system, we both came from the same neighborhood in the Bronx (although we hadn’t known each other there), and, at the time, we both [...]
I knew very little about diamonds as a child other than Superman could squeeze coal with his steel-hard hands to create diamonds and my father had bought a diamond ring for my mother. It was a hundredth of the size of the diamonds Superman never gave to Lois Lane, but my mother loved hers, often singing, “Diamonds are a girl’s [...]
“Hi George,” I said, with a wave, as I rushed toward the subway. George, who was sitting in his low-to-the-ground folding chair at his usual post in front of the liquor store, sat up bolt straight, as if I had touched him, giving him a shock of static electricity, and said with some outrage, “How do you know my name?” [...]
There was McCawley’s and its blinds that hadn’t been cleaned in decades. One block over was Connie’s Corner where Chris the German bartender would always announce, “I know your family, Nolan,” cause we lived around the block and Chris served my parents, aunts, uncles and all. On the next was Val’s, used to be Casey’s, where my father went with [...]
East 11th Street between Avenue B and C on the Lower East Side of New York was hot for drugs the summer of 1986. The tenement building on the corner of Avenue B was called ‘the Rock.’ Teenage look-outs steered cokeheads into the tenement. The metal apartment doors were welded shut. A spy hole allowed the dealers to see their [...]
It was the day after the August 15, 2003 blackout. Greenwich Village still didn’t have any electricity. It was roughly 107 degrees outside, so my wife, Kim, and I headed to the healing waters of our neighborhood pool. Strike one. The closest sanctuary -- Tony Dapolito pool on 7th & Clarkson -- was closed, so we made the executive decision [...]
Fuck… you… fireman. I had never known such rage. There was no conscious thought to exiting the rig and beating each member of this group to death. Unguided, my hand found its way to the door handle. But try as I might, the door would not open. That’s when I started to climb out of the rig through the half-open [...]
I moved to New York City on Friday, August 19, 1994. After twenty-one years in South Jersey and four more in Philadelphia, a move to New York seemed to be the most momentous event of my life. As I hooked my gypsy rental van around the Turnpike to face the skyline, even the cars’ lights seemed to make jazz hands. [...]
In commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of “Star Wars,” a number of mailboxes around the city have been made over--shrouded in an industrial strength decal--like R2-D2, my preferred mailbox among them. The USPS website quotes a postal representative as saying it was a “natural fit,” the tone of his hyperbole exuberant. My suspicion is that it has more to do [...]
Even the janitor’s wife has a perfectly good love life and here am I, facing tomorrow, alone with my sorrow, down in the depths of the 90th floor.  --Cole Porter It may not have been the 90th floor, perhaps the 30th or 40th. The exact number is foggy in my memory, but the rest of this “strange interlude” dances before [...]
I spent a good nine months of my life dedicated to Paul Newman. I wasn’t training to eat eggs, or living a strict Newman’s Own diet. I was developing and writing a screenplay that had roles for not only Paul, but his wife, Joanne Woodward, and long-time cohort, Robert Redford. It was a far-fetched idea with high stakes, but few [...]
A few years ago in my father’s eighty-first year, my brother Patrick and I went to his house to spend Thanksgiving. My father lived in the Bronx at that time. We are the only children in the family still living in New York. Neither of us particularly wanted to spend the day in my father’s unkempt, dusty place, but he [...]
Driving along the West Side Highway in New York City, there is a sign that reads: Intrepid Museum returning Fall 2008. And every time I’ve seen it these past two years, I think, “By the time the Intrepid returns, my book will be finished.” I first saw the USS Intrepid in 1999, not as part of a historical tour of [...]
Since my father’s suicide in the Hotel Edison, I made sure never to pass that hotel. I would not even walk down West 47th Street. But suddenly there I was, smack in front of it, thirty-nine years later on a brutally cold night in 2002 with my boyfriend Craig, who innocently suggested we stop in and have a drink. I [...]
My wife is one of an elusive American species: the serious reader. And like many serious readers, she also indulges in crap. For a long stretch she indulged in a guilty pleasure known to many but not known to me, until one Christmas season years ago: the Regency-era paperback romance. These books aren’t the sexed-up bodice-rippers with Fabio-like models on [...]
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