NEW YORK I
Child In the City
Word Count 1236
Summer, 1979. New York City. My father is sharing an apartment on Charles street in the West Village with Jo Deen, a wholesome stewardess type from the Midwest who sells Amway products on the side. Every lamppost in the neighborhood bears a tattered poster of a missing 6 year old boy named Etan. In the picture, the boy is smiling. He’s missing a tooth. His body will never be found.
My father lives in a renovated police precinct. The only windows look out on a grim courtyard. The divorce agreement stipulates that my sister and I spend a few weeks with him every summer. Nobody seems happy about this. The meat packing district is only three blocks away. When we drive to the West Side Highway, I can see the bloody carcasses swaying on their hooks. The workers wear white aprons spattered with blood. The hookers hang out here too. When we come to a stop sign, one of them leans over and raises her shirt to show my father her breasts. He raises his eyebrows in appreciation. I am 13. I hate New York.
1 Bud, 1 Pack of Cheez Doodles (1979)
Word Count 157
A jazz band today, they pass
the hat too soon, pack up
after one song, we don’t
give them any money. I eat
Chuck’s Cheez Doodles.
Odd Woman in the City
Word Count 3468
I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center-of-the-world, and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby.
At fourteen I began taking that subway ride, walking the length and breadth of the island late in winter, deep in summer. The only difference between me and someone like me from Kansas was that in Kansas one makes the immigrant’s lonely leap once and forever, whereas I made many small trips into the city, going home repeatedly for comfort and reassurance, dullness and delay, before attempting the main chance. Down Broadway, up Lexington, across Fifty-Seventh Street, from river to river, through Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, plunging down to Wall Street, climbing up to Columbia. I walked these streets for years, excited and expectant, going home each night to the Bronx, where I waited for life to begin.
Wild Nights
Word Count 1142
In 1983, I was sixteen years old and beginning my freshman year at Barnard College. Foolishly, I had skipped orientation, wanting to squeeze out the last few days of summer at the beach and thinking myself too cool for pep rallies and awkward get-to-know-you games. My brother, Tommy, already a few years out of Columbia, had assured me it would be fine. But as I dragged my milk crates into the elevator dorm and watched knots of kids heading out onto Broadway together, I got a sensation both queasy and familiar: the party had started without me.
A Wild Taxi Ride
Betsey And Me
Word Count 1689
When I was twelve and saw the play WEST SIDE STORY, I became enchanted with the possibility of moving to New York City from balmy, too-easy West L.A. Some years later, when I heard the Drifters sing the Carole King – Gerry Goffin song UP ON THE ROOF, I felt a further impetus. Who wanted the LA-accented Beach Boys, saluting – in a clean-cut way -- their school and their cars when one could be passionate about a romantic, complex, and difficult truly urban setting, full of soulful yearning? That was my sense of things – rational, not crazy, to me.
One day after the semester was out at the University of California, Berkeley, I sat, all alone, on a plane to New York filled with soldiers en route to Vietnam. While half of the young people on the East Coast were heading to the land of California Dreamin’, days before the glamorous Monterey Pop Festival, I was almost singularly compelled to make a reverse migration I barely understood myself. Not long after I touched down, I picked as a long-term boyfriend an older man who had swapped girlfriends with Norman Mailer and Timothy Leary and who had the vibe of someone darkly, resplendently world-weary. I had been a high school cheerleader in a sunny land – I longed to be cool, like a combination of Susan Sontag and Charlie Parker’s girlfriend, Chan Richardson.
M101
Word Count 1663
She was small and thin, hunched over, clad in a long-sleeved black shirt, mid-calf skirt, tights, lace jacket, and a veil that draped over her forehead. Her hair, also black, looked wet and stuck to her cheeks like a child’s messy mop. Encased in her dark carapace, her face appeared chalk white. I was ten, and it was hard for me to tell how old she was, but she looked ancient, not of this world, and she was coming our way.
A Neighborhood with No Name
Word Count 713
I am a New Yorker who lives in a neighborhood that has no name.
For decades I have rented an apartment that I love on East 23rd Street in Manhattan between Ist and 2nd avenue. When my fellow New Yorkers ask me where I live, I generally say, "East 23rd Street." But, lately, merely providing a street is not enough. Adding cross streets is not enough. Avenues? Not enough either. Everyone seems preoccupied with neighborhoods. "Oh, so you must live in Gramercy Park," they say (with great respect and at least a little awe), "Or—wait a second—isn't that the Flatiron district?"