From The Recesses
From the Recesses – Salting the Ocean
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… full story HERE »
From the Recesses – Mrs. Tiffin’s Christmas Crucible
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… full story HERE »
From The Recesses – Remembrance Of Sleaze Past
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… full story HERE »
From the Recesses – The Day of the Dead
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… full story HERE »
From The Recesses – The Mob and Me
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… full story HERE »
From The Recesses – Of Misfits and Murderers
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… full story HERE »
From the Recesses – Whorticulture
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… full story HERE »
From the Recesses – The Parting Glass
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… full story HERE »
From the Recesses – Horses and Cigarettes
She has green eyes and blonde hair. There are curves that would lead you around the bend and off a cliff, happily. There is a coltish twitch to her walk. In her teens she rode and trained horses. She has won many equestrian medals. Every so often we’d see her in her riding outfit patting… full story HERE »
From the Recesses – God Bless You Mr. Vonnegut
A few nights ago I met a sparkling, lovely couple from some septic backwater of the Great Neighbor to the North. They were overflowing with hope. They had the confidence of youth. They knew that through their activism and energy that their generation would make the difference. Theirs was the cohort that would properly monkey… full story HERE »
RSS Feed for the 'From The Recesses'