Category
Note: an earlier version of this piece was published in the literary journal Ganymede Fall 2008 and on the website Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the ancient, antic super of 515 Edgecombe Avenue, an immense, pre-war slab of yellowed bricks and mortar at the corner of 158th Street. His complexion, shaded always…
Continue readingOnce I believed, a long time ago, that he and I were different. Others thought so too, as I’d discover over the years. Even after his death, friends and acquaintances might recall something he said, a peculiar mannerism that made me cringe, or an act of kindness or derision—their reminders forced recognition of how dissimilar we were….
Continue readingIf I’d words for the texture of his hands, Rough would do, as would worn, weather’d or dry. My father’s lives etched along bold fingers, Dusked palms, and creased knuckles cracked with the cry Of a guilty murderer’s confession. When he revealed he’d killed a man, my mind, Submerged with selfish eighteen year-old woes, Came…
Continue readingAt first glance I mistook her for a child. She was tiny, but it was also the way she dressed, in a short dark pleated shirt and denim jacket that made me think Catholic schoolgirl. And it was the size of the man she clung to; he was large and boyish with a drop of light brown…
Continue reading“Hi—you’re Eee-nis, right? Baritone, breathless: without warning, the voice over his right shoulder brushed his ear in a sigh of panic, as if the speaker had been chased by dogs. He hadn’t heard footsteps, or the usual whoosh from the door separating the auditorium’s main stairwell from this tiny chamber that housed the theater department’s bulletin…
Continue readingEven saints have their purgatory. My mother’s is her bedroom, on the second floor of a sunless two-story edifice that she and my late father purchased a few years after I moved to New York, a house that telegraphs its sepulchral aura as soon as one steps across its threshold. One look inside her room and…
Continue readingWhen my father died, he bequeathed neither money nor property. He did, however, leave a motto: “You have to shave everyday.” As a child I watched him tackle this most manly of tasks, a bespectacled black Santa with a face swathed in aerosol foam. No sign of awkwardness or fear informed his razor’s slow, sinuous…
Continue reading
Perhaps he might have noticed the headache first. With the onset of HIV it would have been atypical, a persistent buzzing immune to aspirin, ibuprofen or acetaminophen. Rolling from the base of his skull to the crest of his furrowed brow, it would have been a sensation freighted with the heaviness of an eternal cloudy day. Dan might…
Continue readingTed Davidson’s desk was perched on a platform in the middle of Save Discount’s headquarters, so regardless of where you were in the store, his head and shoulders were always visible, like a judge poised to rain down wrath. Hell sitting on top of heaven, one of the female cashiers mumbled, though everyone knew why he’d…
Continue readingI don’t like change. Worse than the dawdling crowds of small-tourists jamming every midtown Manhattan corner, this particular eccentricity threatened to topple my sanity. With the first warm days came palpable shifts in the landscape: tiny disappearances, incremental vanishings welled up like unexpected storms. Early warnings came in April, when the Plaza announced it would close its doors for…
Continue reading