You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Out of Towners.”
It never fails. When I venture outside of midtown, something extraordinary happens. My muse, Madelaine, had a graduation party last weekend at a new downtown club. I invited The Prince of Darkness to accompany me. The Prince of Darkness works like the devil, so, needless to say, it's difficult to get him out of his crypt. The Prince of Darkness [...]
I have no kids and never wanted any, so I was a bit anxious about playing tour guide for my 14 year old niece, Shannon, on her first visit to New York City. But my brother John said she could not wait to see Manhattan. It was quite a trip for an eighth grader from the Jersey Shore. They arrived [...]
When I was seven years old my mother, ignoring my protests, packed me into the station wagon and drove downtown to the Detroit Institute of Art where I proceeded to vomit on the marble floor. I blamed my sick stomach on a sculpture, but it was more likely the stack of pancakes she fed me for breakfast. I tried to [...]
I am one of those people who can't stand New York. The first time I was in New York I was mugged by a young Hispanic man wielding a Phillips head screwdriver. It was long ago, I was young, and not about to give him $20, all the money I had. We went into a restaurant where I asked for [...]
I am not from New York, nor have I ever lived there; the result, mostly, of not being a multimillionaire, nor having friends who are multimillionaires. I was living in Philadelphia, New York's embarrassingly second rate little brother, and had traveled up to "da big city" for the day with my girlfriend, to peruse potential art galleries for her paintings [...]
My story is true. Every detail I will relate is exactly as it happened on a beautiful spring day, May 16, 2000. This story starts in Kingston, NY, where four co-workers from the Ulster County Department Of Social Services prepare for a wonderful, exciting day in New York City. At 6:30 a.m. all four women, Janet, Sue, Gloria and Reine [...]
The flat palm of my hand slammed into the steering wheel again and again. "Fuck me, fuck me, fuck ME!" Yes, I was being vulgar -- and a bad driver -- but it had taken more like five or six hour to get from Washington, D.C. to New York, and now it was going to take another hour before we [...]
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. [...]
La Tacita De Oro, the Chinese-Cuban restaurant on 99th and Broadway has a roast chicken special: One-half chicken (breast, thigh, back and wing) is served with yellow rice and black beans, or salad and fried plantains, for $4.85. I've come to learn that a small population of Chinese migrated to Cuba in the 1930s and then eventually came to America [...]
"Philadelphia is nobody's sixth borough," proclaimed the heading of a column in one of Philly's daily newspapers. "Especially not New York's," the column went on to say. The writer was responding to a New York Times article chronicling the migration of New Yorkers to Philadelphia. It noted that Philadelphians themselves occasionally referred to their city as New York's sixth borough. [...]
I had been living in New York for three years before I saw my first dead body. Sure, there were those moments of uncertainty all New Yorkers experience, when stepping into an empty train car and seeing a body splayed out, usually a poor homeless person who certainly smelled like death; but you were never sure. I even played a [...]
There is no commuter more unqualified to weigh in on the effects of the transit strike than a cyclist who lives and works in Manhattan - which is me. I have been riding a bicycle in the city for the last 12 years and have become so reliant (addicted might be a better word) on it as my means of [...]
“If you want to tell a story – start telling it. It might come out OK. It might not. At least you tried – better than leaving it in the fridge of memory. Sooner or later, like all man-made things, fridge will stop working and all goods will rot.” --Some guy on the steps near Ganga in Varanasi, India 1. [...]
It’s weird, how often you’ll find in out-of-the-way urban areas—below an overpass, next to a river or stream, next to railroad tracks—a pair of jeans, a pair of shoes, unmatching dirty socks, filthy underwear, cast off as if these places were just other rooms, were the private dressing quarters of the damned. I’ve always wondered at this: “These goddamned jeans [...]
On this warm, wet Christmas, I ambled without purpose somewhere in America. I prefer the inevitable disappointment of a sodden Christmas--the remains of an earlier December snowfall dribbling down storm drains, the exiled smokers unshivering, unbothering with jackets, exhalations elongated in the humidity, the theatrical coziness of houses all the more fake against temperatures well above freezing. Through the neighborhood [...]
We had arrived a little late to the Soapbox Car Derby, and the races were already in progress. Hot Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn, occasional wafts of East-River-in-July. First concern, identifying the car of our friend. (It was, without any bias, certainly the best-looking of the cars: a sleek wheeled coffin with a little cockpit for the driver, complete with roses [...]
Have you ever had a great experience or adventure and you want to share it with every one you know, but you just don't know where to begin? Well, that seems to be my particular problem right now. I've been staring at my laptop for at least an hour and I still can't seem to figure out where to start. [...]
For reasons that involve politics, religion and the pursuit of life's persistent questions, I found myself gardening in front of my Church one Sunday afternoon in June 2005. First Church is located in Detroit, on the side of Forest Avenue where students rarely park, lest their cars turn up missing when they return from class. The Church has been a [...]
Dear Muze.com, I was out on the front stoop today, where I have to smoke now that the super of my building has declared the fire escape off limits, on account of he found a few cigarette butts on the pavement underneath. There’s a whole funny story about this, actually, considering my roommate begins tearing his hair out at the [...]
In The City. Manhattan. 41st Street and 8th Avenue, seven-thirty Friday morning. I'm waiting on the M10 bus uptown. I have a new job on 57th street. I'm reading my Daily News when I hear a strident voice say, "I'll give you DOUBLE anything you give me. DOUBLE! You give me a dollar, I'll give you TWO. You give me [...]
My cousins grew up in New York. I met them once in California, where I lived until I was seven. But when we moved to a Oxen Hill, suburb of Washington, DC, we began regular visits. This was in the late sixties. Thanksgiving in Manhattan followed by Christmas in Oxen Hill, or vice versa. My aunt and uncle rented or [...]
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