You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Men.”
I had come to New York for spring break in search of fixing a broken heart. Probably a silly reason, but the cause and focus of that broken heart was spending the semester in New York at the Hotel Windermere with other theater students from my college in Indiana. Why I thought I could patch things up I'll never know. [...]
I was walking down the steps to the downtown train at West 23rd Street & 7th Avenue. I heard a trumpet being played and someone singing. As I got to the bottom of the stairs, I see this guy sitting on a bench facing me as I was slipping my Metrocard through the turnstyle. He seem to be around 70 [...]
I met him in Starbucks while drinking a cup of coffee. He didn’t look like the kind of man that frequented Starbucks. He was reading a newspaper and I sat down at the table and chairs next to him. Even sitting down he seemed very tall; his hair was neatly shaved off his head, and he had a small graying [...]
A beaten body sat slumped on the back step of an anonymous pumper. We nearly walked right by Danny without recognizing him. Danny’s turnout coat was half open and covered with remnants of the building burning at the corner of Townsend Avenue and the Cross Bronx Expressway. His face and hands were black with soot. Steam seaped from his helmetless [...]
Autumn has arrived and the cooler air has dampened but not ended the fires of this years "Summer Offensive." Somewhere the trees are changing color but here in Hunts Point it has been one of those days. We've already caught more work on this day tour than any company outside the ghetto will see in six months and the smoke [...]
It took me a while to realize that Kenny was missing. I had been out of town for the holidays, visiting family in California. After almost a week without seeing him since my return, I began to grow concerned. I live on the Upper East Side in an area that used to be, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a thriving [...]
Heath Avenue. I recognized the building right away. Public housing always stands out from all other domiciles. It looms, and, like a tall man, commands your attention. But when you look up, expecting to see his face, you see a blank outline, no distinguishing features. No nose. No mouth. No eyes. We parked on the side street around the corner. [...]
Oh man, he's going to die! I live 100 feet from Interstate 95 and from my living room window have an unobstructed view of this sea of vehicles. Having lived here many years the sounds of impending trouble are familiar. So when the horns started blaring it was a cue to look out the window and I did so, just [...]
Christ Zig, what did you do? Whenever I'm asked if the fire department had an effect on my personal life, those six words explode into my brain. It's a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon in 1977 at the Bronx zoo with my wife and three kids. The kids are riding a camel and shouting what all exicited kids shout, "Look at [...]
1. It was a cold, early evening in autumn, and the street was crowded with people. I walked down the street looking down. I was focused on the tiny people in my mind. A friend had been making pottery and attaching these tiny little people to it. She hovered over a large magnifying glass and held each tiny person between [...]
Born and raised on the eastside of Detroit in the 1960's I had grown accustomed to shopping downtown, taking the boat to BobLo Island, the downtown ethnic festivals, the Detroit Art Institute…and the derision from people outside the city. OK, the riots and the murder rate did not help the image of the city. But tourists still visit Germany, and [...]
Photo by Ricky Powell In the midst of the most un-ironic activity in the world--sports--Marv Albert is a burst of jazzy, sardonic, droll Brooklynese. Marv is all about cadence and inflection; his initial notoriety was based on the pronunciation of a single word--"Yes!"--drawn out and shaped like a piece of taffy. For 24 years he has called play-by-play for the [...]
So we thought a movie, and he says “you pick one.” I look into it and suggest either that one about the Rwandan genocide or "Raging Bull" in a new print at the Ziegfeld. “Remember,” I ask him, “remember how at some point they started issuing tickets for actual seats at the Ziegfeld, with seat numbers? I wonder if they [...]
Off Track Betting could be a Greyhound Bus Station at 4 am or a bar where I learned to play spoons. It could be a retiree’s living room. One, someone calls him Bobby, who possesses comfortable gems on his finger and windbreaker. I watch him scribble “faster” at the top of each race, not for the contenders but an incitement [...]
Before I met my husband my one true love was Brooklyn. I’d been living in Carroll Gardens for almost ten years and had watched it turn from a neighborhood I didn’t want to live in (un-cool) to a neighborhood I adored (pretty cool) to a neighborhood I sort of didn’t want to live in (so cool it was at risk [...]
For some reason I was lonely, even though my dream of being a professional actress was coming true. He seemed lonely too. One day he was just there. He appeared in the lobby of the Maiden Lane Theatre on 44th Street. I was rehearsing my first New York City show, a revival of Under the Yum Yum Tree. He was [...]
9/3/05 7:51 PM Whenever I feel melancholy I like to find the nearest basketball court and play until I sweat and my knees buckle. I have kept up this habit for about three years, during which I have lived in five neighborhoods, playing in about as many courts. I played on a strip of black tar in Bushwick that lay [...]
It was a beautiful November afternoon. I was relaxing in my house located in Wagner Projects, when I realized that I had enough money saved up to buy the leather jacket I wanted. So I went in my sneaker box, where I had $500 saved and went to a store called Jan’s. Jan’s is located on 122nd and 3rd Avenue [...]
Although I moved to New York in 1994 with Manhattan in mind, I quickly became fascinated with the city’s boroughs. On weekends I'd take the subway to Coney Island, Brooklyn, Astoria, Queens, or the Bronx Zoo to see the other parts of my new home. Staten Island, however, remained elusive. In my early days, I often took the Staten Island [...]
I came to Washington Park because I did not know where to go. Riding in a cab with my friend John, on his way to study at the NYU library, provided me with a sure and fast way out of his apartment. This morning, a fight had been close to breaking out between the two of us, and the sound [...]
A curved Turkish saber? Yataghan. Faulkner's fictional county? Yoknapatawpha. A musical by Irving Berlin, three words? Yip Yap Yaphank. You don't hear these words every day. But Dad has explained their value. Lots of vowels, certain infrequently-found consonants. They make the puzzle come together. And I am likely to encounter them again, in future Double-Crostics. My father and I sit [...]
I grew up in Windsor Terrace, a fan-shaped neighborhood hinged on a verdant traffic circle near Prospect Park. The circle was a lowlife Mecca, a point of convergence for the neighborhood’s various derelicts, criminals, drunks, addicts, lunatics, loners, vagabonds, and weirdoes. In the summer of my sixteenth year I took a job that occasioned my getting to know a number [...]
I wanted to buy a book the other night. I had read an old review of “The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break” and wanted to pick up a copy. So on my way home, I decided to stop at the Court Street Barnes & Noble. Things were fine when I got off the subway. I was two blocks away from [...]
Mark is a sweet loser, Mark is a horny loner, Mark always complains about life. Mark is an artist who hates to draw. Mark likes women and is hurt by their coldness. Till late 90's he would wear Miami-style printed shirts, his hair was long and wavy. Back in those years he had sharp-toed pleated white Italian shoes and linen [...]
Seventy-five degrees, August, Sunday evening, Manhattan, yet no one is out on the street except for your neighbor and his geriatric Maltese. On nights like these you can’t help but wonder if you’re missing something; maybe everyone you want to be with is just around the corner jammed into a block of bars, restaurants, delis, while you sit on a [...]
"Different day, same shit, old mac, new clip Thirty two hollow tips, gloves, no rubber grip…" The reporter and I stand quietly in the underground garage. We don't want to look like we're interested in shooting anyone, in any sense of that word. Two minutes earlier the reporter received a call in the deli across the street. His desk told [...]
Even though I've trained myself in hand-to-hand combat, I've never been eager to fight and I always surprise myself if I do something brave in that area. One of my proudest moments came when I was about 18. My friend Angelo was dating a girl Gina who had been seeing this other guy from another neighborhood. We'd regularly hang out [...]
Thomas Beller's new book is a collection of essays titled, "How To Be a Man." ** "Those who live out here are very likely living in the cultural shadow of golf. It's not so much the game of golf that influences manners and morals; it's the Zenlike golf ideal." -- "Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia" by David Brooks, NY Times Magazine, [...]
I sit in a tree with pen and paper in hand, planning to writing a letter. The branches under me are smooth and rough in patches, warped like an elephant's trunk. The shade of the tree, the cool breeze and warm sun make me feel good, and calm, and in control. An elderly man stands some ways off, smoking a [...]
Eliot Majors, age 9, slides his queen diagonally across the chessboard, then inexplicably halts one square short. Check. Several watching youngsters groan. "Nooo!" cries one, clutching his chest, and falls to the ground in dramatic disbelief. Maurice Ashley, age 34, removes his dark sun glasses and his leather jacket. "You sure you want to do that?" he says. It doesn't [...]
Whether they are Hispanic, Black, Asian, Jewish, White or Latin, whether they are riding the A, C, D, 1, 2, or, 3, the men who sit with their legs spread wide open on the subway do so with a Cro-Magnum sense of entitlement. illustration by elishacooper.com I asked a bunch of them why, exactly, they are sitting like that. "In [...]
(A Memnoir) In the late 1960's, when I was a little boy, I used to go to Boro Park to visit my grandparents. I was six when they moved from there, so I don't remember too much of the neighborhood or their apartment, and to make things worse my real memories are tangled with memories of photos which I haven't [...]
For three years, I lived with the blinds that came on the windows when I’d moved in: plastic, listing, motel-room-beige blinds. While barely scraping by on a teacher’s salary, purchasing window treatments isn't a high priority. When the blinds finally collapsed, the bare windows looked so tall and bright, so pleased to have been freed-up, that I didn’t have the [...]
The air on the fourteenth floor of 1 Police Plaza is a little thick, and Captain Z. wheezes. "You’re wheezing," I say. "I am not," he says, and pulls out his asthma inhaler, shakes it, and takes a puff. His lung sounds immediately clear. It’s 4:30 on Thursday, August 14, exactly nineteen minutes after the power went out. I had [...]
I’ve always been a bit obsessed by mastheads, and one of my favorite mastheads to peruse is that of The Paris Review. The print is very small, because there are so many names to fit on the page. The normal fluctuations of people arriving and vanishing from a magazine do not apply here; a name might get moved from one [...]
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
