NEW YORK II
Not My Kind of Town
Word Count 1351
I was eighteen, lying in bed in my Greenwich Village sublet when my mother called to tell me she and my sister were moving to New York from Montreal and that I was to start looking for an apartment. "Somewhere on the Upper West Side.”
I rolled over and sobbed into my pillow.
New York had never been my dream. If anything, it was London. But back then I was so under the yoke of my mother's passions, her dreams, her desires, that it was impossible to untangle what was hers and what was mine. So I came to New York to study acting but now, I understood, to play the real-life role of advance scout for my mother.
Upper upper and Lower lower
Word Count 300
Years ago there was an old man who hung out on the streets of Upper Manhattan. He may still be there, I hope so. He had a threadbare but distinguished look, and usually had a bottle in a brown paper bag. Every time I passed, he murmured, pretty lady. It seemed to be his calling, his vocation, to bestow compliments under his breath on 110th and Broadway. Upon receiving several expressions of his appreciation I began to feel a responsibility to look good whenever I hit the street.
When You Tawk like a New Yawka
Word Count 428
Once, as a teenager—bored with studying, anxious over my pending SATs—I asked my mother if I absolutely had to go to college. After all, she hadn’t, nor had my father or older sister. Why was it expected of me?
“I hope you go,” she answered, “and that you’ll come out speaking beautifully.”
We lived in Far Rockaway, a thin strip of Queens flanked by the Atlantic ocean and Jamaica Bay, and what my mother meant was that she hoped my education might wash away the outer-borough New Yorkese that she, my father, sister, and nearly everyone around us spoke. Awe in our coffee. Don’t when doesn’t was called for. Potato and window both ending in a…
Cornelia Street Cafe
Word Count 1227
My first apartment was a tiny studio on Cornelia Street, a narrow, one block long street between West Fourth and Bleecker, just off Sixth Ave. I moved in with nothing but a suitcase; over time I furnished the apartment with a few things I found at Azuma and cast-offs picked up off the sidewalk. For several weeks I slept on a pile of blankets on the bare floor until I finally bought a mattress, but no box spring. For a long time I didn’t have a phone. If someone wanted to get in touch with me, they stood on the sidewalk under my second-floor window and shouted up.
Alternate Side of the Street
Word Count 772
It was a luxury to have a car in New York and an extravagance to keep it in a garage, but we had moved from Los Angeles thirteen years earlier and we just could not give it up. Besides, I worked in the Bronx three days a week and cherished my morning commute up the West Side Highway, NPR burbling on the radio, coffee thermos within easy reach. There was even a big box store on the way home where I’d do the family shopping. The suburban dream with a twist. Then Covid hit, my job went remote and it was no longer possible to justify the garage. Still, how long could it last? A month? Two? Six months tops?
The ‘80’s in the ‘80’s
Word Count 1266
In 1986, I was renting a studio apartment right across the street from The Dakota on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The building was named the Oliver Cromwell, a fancy place where Sigourney Weaver also lived in an apartment probably many times the size of my one room. But like New York City then and now, fancy and barbarous butted up against one another. One rainy midnight after a shift at the restaurant, I found our doorman in his fancy doorman attire, using an improvised spear to try to stab a rat that was circling the garbage bags on the stoop.
On Broadway
Word Count 1050
In early September of 2021, I spent the first part of an evening at NYC’s St. James Theater, rapt by Springsteen on Broadway.
I’ve never been a diehard fan of The Boss, though I love certain Springsteen songs. I was born at the early end of Generation X. His music backdropped countless alternately wild and tender coming-of-age moments.
My companion, Michael, a Boss aficionado, and I, had bonded as sensitive elementary school kids turned tween co-miscreants and make-out bandits, in a small, mostly working-and-middle class town.
We settled into our steep balcony seats. Amidst the Covid-masked crowd’s muffled cacophony, a bright voice rang out my way. One of two nearly duplicate older ladies seated directly below us turned, beamed up.
Lost
Word Count 413
There's an indie film getting great buzz from people whose opinions you trust. This is the last day it's playing at a cinema in the Village. You’re on deadline, you’re crazed, you have no time to do this, but what the hell. You buy tickets online for you and a friend. The friend makes reservations nearby for dinner. You meet at the theater. It’s the wrong theater. Tickets are QR codes, no address. How many theaters are there on 12th Street? You find the right theater. You’ve missed half the film. After the film, you decide it's too cold to walk across town to the place she made reservations. The restaurant around the corner can take you, good! As the entree appears at your table, you know something is wrong. You’ve lost your bracelets. You love those bracelets! They must have fallen off when you took off your gloves at the theater. (You're old! You wear gloves!)
The Versaille
Word Count 1122
After surviving Nazi Germany, my grandmother walked off the Flying Tiger flight from Munich to New York City in 1956 wearing clunky orthopedic shoes on her size ten, bunioned feet. Like her shoes, nothing about our matriarch was delicate. Tall, with thin limbs, a round middle pinched in a sheath dress, Amama combed her thinning hair over a balding head. She lived at the intersection where Broadway, the longest avenue in Manhattan and one of the longest in the world, crosses 91st street, one of 11,500 street corners in the borough. Her descendants are still anchored there, sixty-five years later. The six-floor apartment building where she would rent a room, had double glass doors adorned with gold letters in rolled cursive, The Versaille. The name evokes gilded chandeliers and rich tapestries, but inside she found a lobby with ornate moldings buried under thick layers of cracked paint, the inlay of a star barely visible on the scuffed marble floor.
Wild Cats
Word Count 1,347
“Your sister showed me her tits.” My soon- to- be husband stood wide-eyed in front of me.
I shrugged.
“She’s thirteen!”
I shrugged again. Nothing I could do. Nothing I could ever do. The maelstrom, the whirlwind, the hellion that was my sister, Sophie, had worn me down years ago. I had no fight left in me. I was wrong.
Looking at him, mouth agape, the thought did cross my mind, are we the sort of family a man wants to marry into? I had shown Frank my tits on our first date, and now there was this other sister with apparently the same predilection.
It would be years before Sophie and I and our predilections married up and we became best friends. First, we had to get through constantly trying to kill each other. It took some time.