From The Recesses

Back when I was a teenager one of my favorite words was “cosmic.” It’s kind of embarrassing now, but I’m sure you had your own silly colloquialisms, so no harm done. I remember many “cosmic” moments in the adolescent years: like when Craig and I wandered up to Grand Boulevard and were hammered to the… »

My grandmother died in late January of 2005, at 93 years of age. The day before she ended this dance, she and I were planning her 94th birthday party and joking about the hospital food. Sometime in the evening a nurse came in and said the doctors wanted to start her on a… »

Earlier this morning, my mother sent me a note through the interwebs. She said that the East Coast was in a deep freeze and that New York City was bracing for a monster snowstorm that might drop up to two feet around the Metro Area. I was telling a friend about the email and the… »

I went to a Christmas piano recital in the States recently. This is not something I do regularly anymore, though between the years of eight and thirteen I struggled through more than a lifetime’s share of my own. I was there because a couple of kids I know are taking lessons, and their mother asked… »

For some of us back in the day – or maybe just the über-alienated twenty-something nihilist pop-culture junkies like me – the movie Taxi Driver was our Wizard Of Oz. And if Travis Bickle was our gun-toting, whore-saving Dorothy, then the piss-yellow brick road that led to the Emerald City was New York City’s 42nd… »

A few years ago the cemetery lost my grandfather.

He’d been buried almost a quarter century before and I’d be surprised if anyone had visited his grave in twenty of those years.  We all loved Grandpa Ray, it wasn’t that we were glad to be rid of him or cursed his memory.  Rather, it just isn’t… »

The bowl of spaghetti with a red clam sauce would normally have been large enough to feed me for a week. But I was famished. It was July and hot, and this was the lunch special for $7.95. It came with a salad, bread and thick red wine served in a small water glass.

The spicy… »

The Misfits’ Club

Back in the late 1990s, when I was teaching in Brooklyn, NY, I had a student named Uran Dragon Kolenovic. And, it seemed that the dragon lived inside Uran’s head.

Uran Kolenovic was a 14-year-old immigrant from Kosovo whose mother and father had sent him to America to live with his grandmother when he… »

I’ve been thinking about prostitutes lately, as one does, right?
Whores, harlots, prostitutes.
Kind of like, “lions, tigers and bears, oh my.” But not exactly.
Yes, that is what has been on my mind: ladies of the night, tarts, trollops. And, besides the obvious reason, DEPRAVITY, I am not exactly sure why.
Perhaps it is because a friend of… »

Sit on the deck chair of this club that otherwise wouldn’t let me in to park cars, much less as a member, and gaze inside with booze-frosted eyes, as if beholding a crux moment of a film shot by Haskell Wexler. Late summer cool cascades off the inlet on northern Long Island, rectangular lights of… »