City: New York
Author: Maya Gat
Location: Atlantic Ave and Henry Street

I was dressed to impress. Literally. I had just started seeing this fella, and I suspected, from the story he told me on our first date of old drug habits formed due to back injuries received from a dominatrix ex-girlfriend who pushed him off a balcony out of enthusiasm for a threesome in which they were about to engage, that he was a tad racier than myself.

Actually, racy was understatement—but not a deterrent. In preparation for our second encounter I wore the sexiest shirt I could find: blue and backless, shaped into a “V,” pointing instructively toward my rear. The front was a loose-fitting shear fabric, providing ample room for bounce and suggestion. Coupled with sobering tweed pants and respectably low heels, I thought the suggestion was balanced—sexy enough to catch his attention, tame enough to communicate there wasn’t a price tag attached.

Apparently, I was wrong. The men of Brooklyn had a rather different opinion about my look. From my house to my destination, nearly every man I passed made a comment about my appearance, some incredibly creative, but all exceedingly objectifying. Growing up in New York City I know about catcalls, and in a twisted way I appreciate the occasional “Hey, beautiful.” But on this day, “Hey, beautiful” was a far cry from “Can I taste your vanilla?” which quickly degenerated into an onslaught of obscenities and overly graphic insinuations. By the time a car pulled along side me and drove at the rate of my gait with a man leaning out of the window hissing, “Baby, I wanna ride you all the way to where you’re goin’,” I could only shake my head in shame both for them and for me.

Comments were hitting me from all sides, that awful kissing sound, lips smacking, lips licking, shouts from passing cars: I was under attack and had to think fast. I scanned the intersection of Atlantic and Henry streets for some sort of solution. Across the way there was an apartment complex under construction, diagonally from me a row of brownstones, behind me a Sell it on eBay store alongside a bodega. I spent a moment pondering what I might be able to buy in a Sell it on eBay store that could resolve my predicament before I recalled that you couldn’t actually buy anything from a Sell it on eBay store (hence the sell-it-on-eBay concept)^[1]. So I walked into the bodega.

I bought one item for one dollar there that transformed me from a completely objectified sexual object to an entirely non-noteworthy person. Perhaps instinct told me this item would help, although a comprehensive narrative about the state of sexuality, feminism and our society could have brought me to the same conclusion. Holding my purchase, I lost all semblance of sex appeal instantly. I paraded up and down that same street for over an hour (as my date turned out to be far from punctual).With my new magical power I waltzed in front of the same men who had made me feel so dirty and small with their titles for me and derogatory requests of me, and not one single man made one single comment about what potential ice cream flavor I might taste like, or my need for their company. One item for one dollar from a bodega and I was saved, rendered completely invisible to all those previously insatiable men, rescued by my choice to buy the fucking New York Times.

City: New York
Author: Robb Todd
Location: Times Square

I walk up the avenue toward the lights of Times Square, stopping to spit in the gutter, fighting a summer cold on a warm night with a breeze. I wrote five headlines that will be in tomorrow’s newspaper. Nothing happy. Now I’m meeting my girlfriend in a place I usually avoid, the part of New York that is the least like New York, the part of New York that is hardest for me to love, the part of New York that is the most like the rest of America. I sip a cold beer in a paper bag, and weave between wandering tourists, their eyes toward the sky. Glowing lights ahead, cabbies honking their horns, brakes squealing, random laughter echoing off skyscraper walls, rising above the grinding city noise. I toss an empty can into the trash, and survey the corners for another deli to buy another beer, $2, $2.10, $1.60. Beats bar prices. Shouldn’t be sick still—it’s been a week. Feeling old. Or like a baby. But each sip refreshes. Music, like a marching band, but it’s coming from a bar. A young woman with a purse slung over her shoulder, flip-flops flipping and flopping, glances in every trash can, finally stopping to pluck a large half-eaten pretzel before continuing up the avenue. She doesn’t look homeless or strung out, but she scans the garbage. I walk under scaffolding, through a group of guys wearing cleaning crew uniforms, talking about women, loudly evaluating them as they pass, including the girl with the pretzel. They take up half the sidewalk, bottlenecking the spot. I save my spit for the next block so they don’t mistake a cold for an insult. My girlfriend calls. I tell her to meet me catty-corner from a restaurant with a giant, glowing lobster over its door. I explain what catty-corner means^[1]. Then I wait for her in the light of ads beaming suggestions into the outskirts of Times Square. A Coke does sound nice, shimmering red and white Pavlovian lights. There are ads for booze, drugs, clothes, video games, music, all being sold with sex. There are chain restaurants that promise the very same meal here that you can eat in Topeka and L.A. There are signs for businesses that claim to take care of your money, and places to spend your money to take care of your business. No gimmicks like sex needed. Cash is cash, and this is the neon fruit supermarket. I spit in the gutter, and my lungs have new space for air, and I feel better, because it’s the opposite of more is less, and the opposite of subtraction by addition. A mosquito bites me. My girlfriend calls. She’s on the corner waving. She runs toward me, kisses me, hugs me, and I forget about the ads, finish my beer, ride the subway home. But in bed, next to her in the dark, all I see are the lights, and the lights, and the lights.

City: New York
Author: Paul Weidknecht
Location: Gantry Plaza State Park

Long Island City, Queens. My cousin said it was the best place in the city to see the City, that there wasn’t a better spot to see fireworks on the Fourth. But it wasn’t the Fourth; it was a mild night in August, and he, my brother and I stood there at the end of the Gantry Plaza State Park pier looking out over the East River’s flickering blackness. Across the river, the lights were on at Walter Chrysler’s place, white triangles bright against the dark sky, with the nub of the Empire State, now in yellow, just visible from behind a tower of windows. To the right, the glass of the U.N. Building glowed a vague, quiet green.

We weren’t alone here. Nearby, lovers stood next to each other, leaning over the rail, whispering. A photographer prepared for his art, and after a series of soft clicks had his camera and tripod joined for a skyline shot, an enlarged copy promised to his friend.

One of us looked at Manhattan and mentioned something about calmness, tranquility. The words sounded strange, out of place—who describes New York City as calm?—but we nodded, muttering in agreement; it was calm.

In the distance, a lighted boat appeared. Several minutes later, it angled toward us. A tug, maybe. A ferry, someone else suggested; none of us able to pick up the shape. To our right, on the pier several feet away, fishermen continued casting to anything willing to eat, the whirr of line racing through the rod guides followed by a small splash of light as the bait found the surface of the dark water. The long, tiered boat approached with a loudness, a steady thumping—Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom—the heavy bass of a club’s sound system.

The cruise passed close, with laughter loud over the water, the top deck dense with undulant bodies; rhythmic in their shaking, dipping, swaying. I imagined each in a sheen of sweat, every head thrown back in a joy exaggerated by the moment, their voices folded over each other, like a mirror held up to a mirror that goes on and on.

Then there was a different sort of laughter, now drunken, mocking, sinister. And we knew. They were laughing at us—all of us—the losers on the pier who couldn’t find nightlife in the city that had perfected it. Seconds later we were laughing back reflexively, at the clowns in the floating club who hadn’t noticed serenity gliding right behind them.

And as the boat made its slow wide turn back toward wherever it had come, we listened to the blunt downbeat of the woofers, hearing the DJ shout to the party, “Make some noise!”

City: New York
Author: David Licata
Location: Noguchi Museum

The October afternoon belonged to me, and I wanted to escape myself, to go somewhere I’d always meant to go but hadn’t. I trekked to Long Island City’s Noguchi Museum: by tram over the East River, by foot over the rusting Roosevelt Island bridge and then down an industrial boulevard, finally reaching what was once the artist’s studio^[1]. On the first floor, The Stone Within, a vertical, vaguely cylindrical sculpture almost as tall as I and as wide as my apartment door, captivated me. I slid two fingers along a portion of polished black basalt and burned when I realized how much it felt like her skin.

I walked to the garden and sat on a wooden bench. A girl, seven or so, entered running, chased around the garden’s sculptures by a boy who could only be her younger brother. They giggled and their footsteps crackled on the gravel. Their parents entered seconds later.

“Stay on the path,” their mother said.

The father walked toward a fountain. “Yuki, Pedro, come here,” he said. He was younger than I, Latino, with short black hair and a chiseled, angular face. His fine clothes fit him well.

His children came to him but his wife, dressed in black, bird-like and sad-looking, did not.

“This is my favorite fountain in the whole world,” he said. He lowered his voice to the volume reserved for churches, and I could no longer hear him.

I was disappointed. The ex spoke affectedly of the garden, of the fountain, and I kept trying to see what she had seen here, to understand. Did she view it from this bench? Did her gaze wander to those bamboo trees and follow them upward? Did she think of me? Was she thinking of me now?

“Excuse me,” the father said to me, “would you take our picture?”

“Of course.”

“Mariko!” His wife joined him by the fountain. Water rose through its interior mysteriously and collected in a font, glazed over the top and down its sides and into the ground where the cycle began again. I took two photos of the family. “Great,” he said, looking at the screen. “Can you take one more?”

The family posed again. I said, “Say cheese.”

“Queso,” the father said. He hoisted the boy in the air as I depressed the shutter button; I had captured the son laughing in mid fall.

“Strangers take the best pictures,” the father said. His wife bowed.

On the N train home I didn’t think about the woman who wanted to delete me from her history, whom I desired but who no longer desired me; instead I thought about all the times the word “Anonymous” appeared on placards beside works of art, and I sensed I had done something important, something lasting.

City: New York
Author: Jónas Knútsson
Location: Waverly Place, Greenwich Village

Next door to my apartment in the Village is a private ballroom. On weekends the patrons invade the neighborhood in stretch limos and whoop it up in the perfectly sound-proof den of iniquity, only to pour into the street as the feast draws to a close. The rest is pandemonium, a few feet from my one-way bedroom window. I never peek out as the incorporeal chorus lulls me to sleep.

A brawl. An older man keeps hollering, but the flow of his riff is never broken. I assume no one chooses to engage him.

“I’ve been shot twenty-seven times. Twenty-seven times I’ve been shot.”

During the ruckus, no one says a word except the guy bellowing, “I’ve been shot, twenty-seven times.”

The racket dies down. But the man keeps on shouting about being shot twenty-seven times. The ramblers have either gone home or been beaten to a pulp. But the man goes on shrieking, “I’ve been shot twenty-seven times.”

At last he falls silent.

Maybe he had been shot twenty-seven times.

“We need treatment.”

The woman is hysterical. She calls the man “son of a bitch,” “motherfucker.”

Every accusation is countered with the mantra, “We need treatment, baby. We need therapy.”

The man starts crying. The woman breaks into tears as well, but her torrent of rage flows uninterrupted: “You motherfucking son of a bitch. You son of a bitch motherfucker.”

“We need treatment,” the man concludes.

A long silence follows.

As I drift off into my long-deserved slumber, a lonely grumble ruptures the fragile silence outside:

“I’ve been shot twenty-seven times.”

City: New York
Author: Jill Widner
Location: The Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia

I’m walking down 68th Street toward Wollman Lake, thinking about Joni Mitchell’s 29 skaters and anonymity and the blank face at the window that stares and stares and stares and stares.

Halfway down the block, on the second-floor balcony of a narrow gray stone building, I notice a red and white flag whipping in the wind. On the wall, a small bronze plaque engraved with a Garuda bird reads, “Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia.”

It is an elegant 19th century mansion between Madison and Fifth Avenue. The air is so cold, so bright, the glass in the windows on the upper floors seems to vibrate.

The entrance at the top of the stairs is locked, but another staircase leads to the basement. I turn the knob. This door is open. Inside, behind what must be a security window, a woman is working at a desk. I am so terrible at beginnings. I don’t know what to say.

She is suspicious. “What do you want?”

“I saw the flag outside. I grew up in Indonesia. Nearly 40 years ago. I don’t know what I want. I just know I had to come in.”

“Where did you live, Jakarta?”

“Sumatra.”

“Where?”

“Near Palembang.”

Her face softens infinitesimally. She points across the hall toward another room, where several office workers are moving about behind another glass window. “He is from Palembang.”

I am standing on the public side of the security glass in a narrow waiting room. Except for a straight-backed wooden bench against one wall, the room is empty.^[1] A row of windows near the ceiling is meant to let in the light, but this is the basement of the mansion; the glass is grimy and wrought iron bars block the view of the sidewalk outside. I see the man from Palembang through the security window. He is speaking on the phone. I wait. I look from the bench to the bars on the windows.

It is the man’s parents who are from Palembang. He was raised in Jakarta. But he is familiar with Sungai Gerong, the oil camp across the river from Palembang, where I grew up. Though a little self conscious, a little shy, he seems willing to talk. He is younger than I am. Maybe he is uncertain of his English. He remembers the name of a dish particular to Palembang, a fish from the Musi River simmered in chili sauce. He asks me if I know it. I don’t. It isn’t long before we have run out of things to say.

He walks me to the front door. Hands me his business card. The receptionist is watching us through the security glass. She asks me where I live now.

“Washington.”

“D.C.?”

“State. Washington State.”

Suddenly she is speaking to me in Indonesian. “Tadi kita terbang ke…” I know at once what she is saying. “We flew to Seattle not too long ago.” I don’t know why sometimes it’s so easy and sometimes so hard.

I glance at the business card: Department of Consular Affairs, Consulate General of Indonesia. I turn it over. He has written something on the back. Without reading, I ask, “Does this say, Saya mau pulang?”

He doesn’t understand. “It is my email address.”

“Because I used to say that—Saya mau pulang—or think it—I want to go home. Because this never felt like home. I always thought I would return.”

The woman is skeptical. “Tidak terlalu panas—It isn’t too hot for you?”

I shrug.

Of course, she is probably right. We were expatriates. We had A.C. in every room. What would I have known of the heat.

City: New York
Author: Kit Born
Location: McCrory’s store on 63rd Drive

My friend Danny and I always got into trouble, but what did you expect in 5th Grade?

We were supposed to go back to his house. We had spent the afternoon at my house, which was typical, and it was time for him to go home for dinner. We decided to go back to his house in a very circuitous route. Instead of heading southeast, we decided to head northwest, past our church, past the LIRR tracks and down to McCrory’s.

Danny and I each had five bucks.

We decided that it was time to become spies. We got to the store, passed the crowds of old ladies and plastic flowers, and picked up some Zebra pellet guns (Airsoft has nothing on these!) These guns came with 200 pellets and a sweet shoulder holster – perfect for hiding under our private school cardigans. We rushed for the checkout counter, plunked down our cash, and hit the street.

On the way home, to complete the spy image, Danny busted out a bottle of Brut 33 aftershave, which he insisted on us splashing ourselves with, all over those tight, wide-striped polo shirts.

We weren’t very good spies, as we decided to go back the route we had come, and just as we were about to pass by my house again, there was my mom, waiting, as was Danny’s step-dad. Mom wanted to know why we weren’t at Danny’s house, and where we had gone. I told her we stopped at McCrory’s on the way there, and she reminded me that McCrory’s was in no way on the way to Danny’s house. Moreover, where did I get the idea to spend money without asking her? Sure, I had some money in my piggy bank (which I thought was mine to do with as I pleased) but it was not to be used without permission.

Mom saw what I had bought, marched right over to the trash can and threw it in. This was to by my punishment for not going to Danny’s house straightaway and for spending money on useless, random stuff. Plus, I think my mom didn’t want us playing with guns. (At that time, I never would have thought that as a dad I’d side with my mom now too.)

So ended my career as a spy.

Danny had been a much better spy, as he was wearing his gun under his jacket already. He had no visible evidence. His dad drove him home. I took the heat and spent the next week “in lockup” if you will. Danny brought his heat to school each day and would shoot plastic pellets wherever he pleased when no one was looking. I remember picking up little yellow plastic pellets off the floor and telling myself, “Man, if only I had taken my gun out of the package on the way and hidden it like Danny did.” Over and over, I got to thinking: If only I could go back and do the mission again.

City: New York
Author: Denise Reich
Location: the Unisphere

“Come down,” they coax. Steven and Nick, all of nine and seven years old, are rolling their eyes at me. They’ve already clambered up and back down again like miniature mountain goats. “Just put your foot there. No, there. You’re not even listening!” I shrink back.

“Damn it, we don’t have time for this,” my mother storms, pacing back and forth. “Get down here.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t move. I simply clutch the rusting, peeling hulk of the globe and hang on tight.

The park is in such a state of decay that the fountains at the base of the Unisphere^[1] have been switched off, and the pool, which normally serves as a protective moat, has run dry in the July heat. We’d stepped easily over the shin-high barrier and run in.

We embrace the world. It becomes our personal jungle gym. We shimmy up the base, run around the concave curve and wave. The boys jump down after a few minutes, but my feet grow roots in the steel. I simply stop.

“Come down!” my mother snaps. The boys snicker behind their hands. They’re not even real New Yorkers, they’re just visiting friends, and they have quite an attitude.

I’m not afraid. I like heights. I’m frozen, fixed in place like the taut cables that support the structure from the inside out. The brushed steel of Africa reflects the sun and makes me squint, even in the ample shade.

I am twelve years old, I will be starting the 8th grade in eight weeks, and I am tired. I haven’t eaten since last night, and when I look straight up I’m dizzy. The interior of the globe is as hollow as the open anorexic space below my ribs. We’re both fraying and exhausted. 

I sit down on the base and dangle my feet over the edge, dipping my toes into the air. Nick points at a spot somewhere below my heel. “Look, the step is right there.” I remain motionless, and the quartet below me explodes in frustration again.

A park vehicle pulls up at the edge of the pool, and a tall ranger, clad in regulation green, comes running across the cracked cement. My mother’s face flushes, and I know she’s thinking of ways to explain how I came to be on the Unisphere in the first place, but the ranger bustles by without a word. He climbs halfway up the base and squints at me.

“Need a hand?” The voice is the first gentle one I’ve heard all day. He isn’t furious with me. He can’t fix anything; he can’t stop me from hiding my breakfast and lunch again tomorrow, but he can get me down off the Unisphere. I nod, and he nods back, and extends his hand. I grasp it and the steps sprout out of the metal again, and in a minute I am firmly back on the ground.

City: New York
Author: Anne Germanacos
Location: Broadway between 70th and 71st

My last night in New York for at least six months, I walked through Broadway’s balmy June air, keeping pace with the bodies. I couldn’t avoid the realization that it was time my son grew up. I pictured myself telling him: You’re the age I was when I gave birth to you.

Two nights before, we’d been together on the same street, Broadway between 70th and 71st, walking with the crowds. Throngs of people had moved up the street past the big stores, flowing out in a neat curve where a naked man was performing some kind of sacrament. People were fastidious in avoiding him. Like everyone else, we speeded up but not without looking his way.

The first glance revealed a naked man touching himself. Looking again, sideways, I saw that the naked man’s hands only mimicked a fondling. His penis was uncircumcised, not quite flaccid. I tried not to look but did, though I didn’t want my son to notice my fascination, less for the flesh itself than for its treatment.

We’d been returning from a Broadway show. All day he’d been rude and aggressive. When we reached his apartment, he insisted that I should leave him alone. So I did, for the next two days.

Arriving there now in order to say goodbye, I listened while he sang elaborate ascending scales. I knocked as he hit high F.

City: New York
Author: Ling Ma
Location: The third floor of Henri Bendel

After I gave my resignation notice to my boss on a Friday evening in September, I left my workplace at 40th and Broadway for one of the last times and walked a mile to Henri Bendel^[1] to meet my best friend, and several of her college friends, at the store’s Chocolate Bar. Blocks pass quickly in New York, and on that evening the chilly breeze was nice amid the dusk and the traffic.

Though it was my first time at Henri Bendel, I didn’t linger in the main atrium to smell the Annick Goutal scents (there is a personal favorite in mind that smells like peaches and gasoline, issued once a year) or try a new hand cream. I walked up the spiraled stairs to the third floor, and there they were, a bouquet of post-collegiate girls sitting at a circular corner booth. I saw business wear, identically crossed pairs of legs, fresh-combed manes of hair.

We took turns talking about what we did, what we were doing, all these endlessly interesting things.

“I just quit my job,” I said. It was a relief to say.

“Uh, what?!” my best friend exclaimed. “Why, how, when?” The others devoured me with nervous questions.

I explained that it was something I had decided the previous night. The only way to do it was quickly, before I lost my nerve, and think about the consequences later. It had been my first day job, for which I oversaw from New York the manufacture of Bibles in humid areas of Asian countries. I didn’t hate the work.

My chocolate drink was cold and creamy; it matched the weather. I imagined the air inside my lungs was slowly condensing from the shift in climate—from the chilly weather outdoors to this interior retail roast. Unmoored by a profession, I was a vague, jobless entity now, and I felt myself disengaging from the careerist conversation.

The voices languished, and when there was little left to tally of our meager accomplishments, we gathered our fall jackets.

Between the Chocolate Bar and the exit elevator, one has to walk the length of the curiously situated lingerie department. I looked at all the delicious confections I could no longer afford, flimsy swathes of expensive fabrics in rashes of pinks, abnormal growths of lace, stitched hard blacks. I slowed my pace, marveling at these alien delicacies. 

If there was anything my first job had imparted to me, it was how to dissemble an object, in spite of its interesting whole, down to its unremarkable parts. A Bible—the ultimate exercise in product packaging—can be cross-sectioned and reduced to its paper stock, ribbon marker, mull lining and other assorted offal.

That’s when I knew I wanted to live in New York: in the midst of staring at those fragile bralets and bodysuits, when I refrained from deconstructing anything. I did not want to. More than anything, I wanted to be a sensualist. To live in a city that prizes and offers these luxurious and unnecessary articles at overmarked prices is wasteful, self-defeatist and terribly escapist. Specifically, I wanted to be a sensualist in New York.