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Underground Analysis

by 02/08/2016
Neighborhood: All Over

On the subway Thursday morning, a man sat beside me, with his wife or girlfriend (no ring) standing over him. He was about 35, with long wavy hair pulled into pony tail, and a scraggly beard — kind of a 21st-century beatnik look. She was done up like a character from My Cousin Vinny — […]

Hell’s Kitchen and All That Jazz

by 04/09/2015
Neighborhood: Hell's Kitchen

I was dropped off in Hell’s Kitchen with my turquoise vinyl trunk, my art school scholarship, and the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy sensurrounding my dreams. Everybody’s talking at me I don’t hear a word they’re saying Only the echoes of my mind I was eighteen, and ready for the 1970s. On my own. My stepfather-to-be […]

Wild Thing

by 03/11/2015
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

I was walking down Broadway near Lincoln Center at noon on a Thursday afternoon in May with my old friend Ruth Lopez when we came upon two people on the sidewalk, doing it. It was daytime, it was close to lunch even, and yet there they were in flagrante dilecto. The man was on top […]

Scented

by 08/26/2014
Neighborhood: Financial District, Manhattan

I’m not the girl who woke up from another one-night-stand. But I could be, in the view from the Sephora window. It’s raining: The dull Saturday too-early morning pitter-patters against the makeup counters; my nerves, pounding on the exposed brick. I feel like a quasi-well-dressed spy. Partly because “quasi” is the word that won me […]

I Just Want to Stay In and Get High and Watch Netflix

by 07/20/2014
Neighborhood: Bushwick

I was not where I wanted to be. This was because I was out. I was out at a bar called the Narrows in Bushwick–or East Williamsburg if you’re a real estate broker. The bar is called the Narrows because the building is very narrow. But really every building in New York City is narrow. […]

Kant’s (Revised) Critique of Judgement

by 05/16/2014
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

I’m quite sure I could have killed the whole lot of them. I’ve drawn too many skull and crossbones on the margins of my handouts. It’s difficult for me to concentrate on the enthralling discourse on Lacan because I am too disturbed by that Babushka girl and her heinous turtle-neck (not artistic, just embarrassing). Does […]

Vesuvius Ave.

by 05/08/2014
Neighborhood: All Over, Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island

May and the city rejoices in spring, in light and color, in the sheer goodness of life and its improvements. Spring shows us that things do indeed get better; it’s not all decline — old buildings sparkle, trees quiver in green, mundane streets are remade as pageants. However, let’s not get carried away. Sure, it’s […]

Old Brownie

by 02/09/2014
Neighborhood: Midtown

Yesterday was a quiet day on 47th Street. A winter snow was having its way with New York City. Snow piled up on the street. The porters had a hard time clearing the sidewalk and I was having difficulty looking busy. There was nothing to do. No one came into the store. No dealers, no […]

No Slices

by 02/04/2014
Neighborhood: DUMBO, Union Square

Pizza had been on my mind that summer. Who could forget the ever-present sensation of melting? Our skin like sweating cheese, like crusts toasted to a golden brown. We stank, all of us — the garlic you had for lunch, everyone could smell it in the subway car, hiding behind a juicy fragrance. Even nature […]

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 […]

My Neighbor Cries a Chain Link Fence

by 12/31/2013
Neighborhood: Astoria

To the young beautiful woman with tears in her eyes who lives above me: now I know why you run in the apartment for hours backandforth backandforth. I know why you don’t talk in the hallway. I know because the building is old and my ceiling is thin. I heard the furniture thunder last night […]

Fighting For What

by 07/01/2013
Neighborhood: Bowery

Everything happened quick in CBGB’s subterranean toilets. The release of body waste was rivaled by magic-markering a band’s name atop the thousands of previous honorees in the toilet’s hall of fame and while the inhalation of cocaine or heroin in the stalls was more popular than shooting up dope or speedballs, sex within the battered […]