Category Archives: Stories

NYC, Stories

Dry Harbor Road, 6:37pm

I’ve been going on long runs lately, starting from my house and jogging to points I previously thought impossible. This feels much more productive than running at a park closer to home, where I know I can stop at any time and slunk back to my couch in 5 minutes. But if I run very far away, I have no choice but to run back.

So I’m jogging at one of the extremities of Juniper Valley Park. Across the street, a trio of Tudor houses squished together, a copy of an idea of genteel English towne life. But something looks off, so off that I have to stop running for a moment and figure out exactly what it is.

All three of the houses have chimneys that jut out into their tiny lawns. The faces of these chimneys are mostly concrete, with brick embedded to form cute little shapes. Two of the houses have chimney faces with brick arranged as diamonds, florid pineapples, majestic eagles.

The third house has none of this. Instead, at the very top, bricks spell out what appears to be a year, 1931. The last digit is a bit unclear, as the artist didn’t plan well and ran out of usable room when he reached the fourth number. Beneath that, four letters, staggered in zig-zag shape: S P C R. I get the impression these are initials.

Back in the day, the first two houses must have been furious at this third one. At that time, Queens was a leafy suburb, with little but the Long Island Railroad connecting it to Manhattan and elsewhere. There were still farms nearby, if you can believe that. These folks had made their little escape from the dirt and noise of The City and settled in this quiet spot, in a neighborhood whose very name implied moderation and peace—Middle Village—hoping to recreate some notion of what they assumed to be respectable suburban life.

And then house number three says “eff that” and marked up their chimney like a kid poking his finger through wet sidewalk cement. Monocles were dropped. Fainting couches summoned.

I continue my run and turn a corner. 100 feet down the road, I spot a yellow Mustang with a vanity license plate: LGR 50, flanked by a Rangers logo. It’s that house again, reborn in a different form. Whatever the year and whatever the shell, we just want the world to know there’s someone real inside.

NYC, Stories

Carmine Street, 7:52am

I’ve just exited the subway. Light rain is falling. Very light. One or two drops every minute. It’s the kind of rain you wouldn’t even notice unless you were bald and wearing no hat, like me, and each drop stung your scalp.

Coming around the corner ahead, by Father Demo Square, a chubby kid in a parochial school uniform. White shirt, khaki pants, black-rim glasses. Looks to be about 12. In junior high or almost there. I say chubby because it takes a lot of work to be fat at that age. He is simply trapped in a body that grew out before it grew up. In his left hand, he holds an enormous black umbrella, sheathed in a telescoping plastic holster. If he held it upright, you’d see the umbrella was more than half his height.

The boy looks uncomfortable walking. The umbrella is throwing off his balance. He walks like he’s not quite sure what to do with his legs. Like he doesn’t want to be where he is, but he wants to reach his destination even less.

He nears the point where the street straightens out and becomes 6th Avenue. There, by a sickly little tree sprouting bike locks, a pigeon is startled by his approach. The pigeon is near the boy’s eye level for a split second. During that split second, he raises his umbrella defensively, perpendicular to his body. Like this pigeon is a vampire and the umbrella is a half-finished crucifix.

The pigeon flutters away. The boy puts down his umbrella and looks defeated, utterly defeated. I can almost see a thought bubble above his head, I can’t believe I did that.

Something in me wants to stop the boy and give him some kind of It gets better spiel, but I know that would be a lie. He might outgrow this body, but the Scared Fat Kid stays within you forever. He lopes on his way past me, on his way to a place where is learning how to hate himself.

NYC, Stories

Borden Avenue, 7:18pm

hurlPost-work run down Borden Avenue. Almost done, tiring. I slow down near the ballfields across the street from the Hess station and Mt. Zion. On the field stand two off-the-boat Irish. They’re flaked with sheetrock dust from their day’s work. One stands near home plate, the other near the mound. Both of them have a hurling stick gripped in their hands, and they’re using them to lob a racquetball-sized sphere back and forth.

We had a hurling stick in our house when I was a kid. My dad brought it back from Ardee after he buried my grandfather. Hurling is Irish field hockey, basically. According to my dad, it was a deadly game, much like the brutish Gaelic football my grandfather used to play. Players would line the bottoms of their sticks with blunt metal strips held in place with nails, both to keep the wood from chipping against the turf and so the stick would do maximum damage in close-quarter scrums.

The hurling stick sat in a toy chest in the garage along with a Keith Hernandez Louisville slugger, cracked Wiffle Ball bats, and other blunt instruments, waiting to be unsheathed whenever me and my brothers made up some new game. These games would inevitably break down as we debated the rules, and the hurling stick would be used to avenge some slight, real or imagined. Crying and punishment would ensue, followed by parental threats to take that damn hurling stick away from us, resulting in more crying. No, mom, no, don’t take it away, we’ll be good.

I blamed the stick. It was such a perfectly designed implement of mayhem, it practically begged to be slammed against your brother’s calf. It surely was infused with some dark magic, the spirit that pervaded the sport for which it was intended.

And yet here I see these two men, surely exhausted from a day of work yet using their hurleys to relax, to lightly toss a little ball back and forth, back and forth, violence nowhere to be seen. I stop and look on for a moment while the sun sets behind me, and I feel I’m seeing some spell being snapped, some war being won.