You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Men.”
At the tender age of seventeen, I discovered that tigers were not in fact yellow and brown, but are rather orange and black. It never did much harm, my color deficiency, nor did it prevent me from getting my own way. It certainly never interfered with my love life. However, by no fault of my own, one opportune incident was [...]
I went out with my friend Dylan last night. We met in 2003 on the internet. Tried dating, but were better friends than anything. He was the first person I met when I moved back to New York and looking to date. I had left because my husband was killed in the World Trade Center. Dylan and I went out [...]
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 [...]
In 1963, the year my father killed himself, I was obsessed with Bob A. I was crazy about him. My father hated Bob A. and flew into a fury whenever he heard his name. In Bob A., my father recognized himself, especially when he was young. Though Bob A. was not, as far as I know, a gambler like my [...]
I return from my break to hear Vince screaming in Maltese. It seems two women, a real estate broker and her client, had been getting a little impatient waiting for the elevator and gave the button several long pushes. This would infuriate the most mild-mannered of elevator operators. Vince is not mild-mannered. “Who the fuck you are?! You wait like [...]
After our engagement my family had decided that I would be allowed to talk to Fatmir on the phone. When my niece was engaged she had to make secret phone calls, but my family was modern. In anticipation for the phone call Asllan and Behare went out and took Sokol’s three boys. My Mom and Sokol’s wife were at their [...]
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 [...]
It was me, the girl standing in front of the Krusq, the wedding party, wearing a wedding dress. How did it happen? What went wrong? I had asked God to change things. I didn’t like the man I was going to marry -- but I had no choice. “On the day you were born God wrote on your forehead who [...]
He began calling her everyday from Scotland. Once she heard his voice she couldn’t get enough. The first time she spoke to him she was working at home writing up a press release for one of her authors. She forgot all about work. He emailed her the day before from an online dating site saying that he was coming over [...]
As always when I break up with a boyfriend, I go back to trusted Craigslist. There’s something comforting about shopping for sex on the internet. Safety behind the screen. This time, I was more daring. I wanted a dominant man. This much I knew for sure. I’ve had a lot of mediocre sex in my time. And over the past [...]
The Captain sensed an uneasiness in the room. The two men in front of him were looking off to their right. They had strange expressions on their faces. Was it disgust? Was it fear? Was it an expression of embarrassment or shame? None of these emotions had been noticed by this Captain during several years of physical fitness training. He [...]
If not for the classic red, white and blue rotating stripes on its barber poles, the Mayfair barbershop on 39th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues might go unnoticed among its garish neighbors. Fabric stores clutter the view, along with the other big business in the area: Porn. The sex shops and "XXX" theaters easily beat Mayfair when it comes [...]
We called him Broadway Johnny, and as far as I know, none of us ever learned his last name. Every morning for the past fifteen years, he’d hobble out of Amsterdam House, the nursing home on 112th Street, and head for Straus Park to wait for Cannons, the dark Irish bar on 108th where Hemingway purportedly used to drink, to [...]
Arriving at work for the night tour on October 29, 1974 I discover the firehouse to be as abandoned and silent as a cemetery at midnight, I was spooked by something but wrote it off to the approach of Halloween when in reality it was actually an omen. I am the first member of the night tour reporting in for [...]
Madison Square Park confirms New York as civilized city. The park is a cultured green in Manhattan's punishing grid: the Flatiron Building to its southwest, Broadway to the west, the century-old architecture, the clock tower to the east, buildings that house Credit Suisse First Boston and some of the globe's most powerful corporations, America's wealth, New York's wealth, and the [...]
Today it hit. I woke up with the usual thought—coffee. Despite the heat that caked my mouth like cracked paint, my craving kicked in immediately. I rolled out of bed and as I walked toward the kitchen it suddenly hit. My heart was broken. The heartbreak had been triggered the week before but the realization, like a sluggish messenger inadvertently [...]
Mossy stayed with me for a week in New York and never saw any of the sights. He left the apartment every day and found a breakfast for himself someplace and walked around the east village a little and eventually found his way to the Blue and Gold and started drinking. I’d meet him there later on and ask him [...]
As a survivor of a tragic event, I remember it like it was yesterday and yet, it seems like a dream. The first five weeks were surreal. I don’t know how I got through it. My friends helped. Everyone said I was strong--I wasn’t. I wanted to die. I almost did but I held on bc I figured Jon would [...]
Most people I knew in 1969 thought they would live for ever or die young and pretty. Consequences for bold acts were not important, although less for some than others. I, for example, could push things just so far. There were no lawyers in my family, no connections, no one to bail me out of a jam. Still, stealth and [...]
I scrolled through last Saturday’s call log on my cell phone to find his number. I hadn’t saved it on purpose, never thought I’d be dialing it. Weird, I couldn’t stop thinking about this guy. It wasn’t a crush or anything (the thought of romance with anyone Y-chromosomed made my stomach turn), but I had to admit, his charisma had [...]
The bouncer pulled the door. Daylight, quite a shock. How long were we unconscious, the Important Visiting Friend and I? We squinted our way out into the day, me very reluctantly, him, I recall, more bravely. He wanted to see a movie, as usual. Had he planned to see this film, memorized the location and times the day before? Or [...]
I wouldn’t have noticed her at all if she hadn’t stepped on my foot. Her hair was in a tight braid that bounced against her exposed shoulders as she rushed past. She wore a skimpy red top, extremely tight white pants and high heels. I glanced after her with a tiny bit of indignation – Hey! You stepped on my [...]
The date seemed to be going well. Not mine—I wasn't on a date. The one behind me. "Which do you think?" I whispered to my best friend, Alex, leaning in over my moo goo gai pan. "First? Third?" "You always skip second," she said. She was right. Alex and I smirked at each other. Second dates at kosher places? How [...]
In the past decade, many attempts have been made to assist women in our efforts to meet a significant other. Self-help books with titles like The Rules or He’s Just Not That Into You proliferated, but instead of providing a sense of relief or assurance, they seemed only to add to the mass hysteria. Well, now we can all wipe [...]
June 14th 2006 3:30 pm Philadelphia "Who are these fucking people? They've been following me for years. Why the hell are they bent on exposing me as goddamned fraud?" I did a little research of my own and was disturbed to find that they were not only my closest friends, but my family as well. I called New York from [...]
Hello. The 6th Anniversary of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is here, and the time has come to pay tribute to the site's past. So many pieces are coming in all the time, piling up on the surface of the site, that it's easy to forget how much terrific work has accumulated in the deeper layers of MBN's very own geological record. [...]
Depending on how you look at it, Kamran Shirazi is famous in the world of chess for his flamboyant and innovative style of play, or for his amazing ability to lose, or perhaps both. He cobbles together a living by combining prize money from chess tournaments with fees from chess lessons, for which he charges eighty dollars an hour. If [...]
There used to be this guy who came to the park in a business suit with a thin black tie and his straw hair slicked back and wet-looking to make the case against Darwin's theory of evolution. He had a clutch of professional-quality charts, which he set up on an easel behind him to help illustrate his points while he [...]
My friend Jake is no head turner. He's too skinny and short for most girls, including me, nonetheless he pulls chicks all the time. He's a continuously evolving enigma. Whenever I see him he has a new girl. His luck began changing immediately after high school once he got into promoting clubs. He never stepped foot in a club prior [...]
Robert Longo--the conceptual painter, the avante guard Hollywood director, the expatriate New Yorker--is in the habit of referring to himself as "Longo," just one simple all purpose word, like Sinbad, or, perhaps more relevantly, Bono, the lead singer of U2. When he left a message on our answering machine he said, "This is Longo," and when we called back we [...]
Every few years, on the front page of the Times, a plan is announced by a consortium of merchants and industrialists and bankers to transform Forty-second Street into a squeaky-clean thoroughfare. One recent proposal calls for glass-enclosed atriums (the Ford Foundation, sponsoring the project, is big on Atriums), "bridges crisscrossing 42nd Street, and escalators moving through a complex set of [...]
Autumn, 2000 It is fall in London, where I now live, but I spent ten years in Manhattan so it comes as no surprise that I would remember early dark evenings, dark so suddenly that you know with a flash that summer has gone, and that I would think of crisp mornings when leaves first shuddered at my feet and [...]
Joseph Mitchell is famous for inventing, to a large degree, the tone and style of the New Yorker long profile, of which he is perhaps the unrivaled master (Calvin Trillin has said as much). He is equally (and perhaps a bit more) famous for enduring one of the most grueling and peculiar writer's blocks on record--it lasted from 1964 until [...]
I was reading the fall issue of Esquire Gentleman recently, experiencing the slightly pleasing, slightly lulling sensation of an American fashion magazine, when I came across a photo of Adolf Hitler in a pin-striped suit. It was part of an article on old-fashioned pin-stripe suits, like the ones worn by the Duke of Windsor or Al Capone, who were also [...]
One of the first things a new visitor to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is likely to notice is how well dressed most of the men are. Monsoon rains may turn the streets into shallow lakes, the electricity may be erratic, but the men are fairly consistent in their outfit--a pair of slacks and a neat button down short sleeve shirt. The [...]
I call myself a security consultant because it sounds better than salesman but, essentially, I'm a salesman. I sell security products, primarily safes. My dad preceded me in this. He was with the Mosler Safe Company starting around 1948 and, quite frankly, as a kid, the work sounded very dull to me. I wanted to be a playboy of the [...]
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