Citizen of the Month

the writing and photography of Neil Kramer

Category: New York City (Page 3 of 24)

Fictional Characters of New York #44

June 2, 2015 / / 3 Comments

couple

“Be careful with the wheelchair,” said Ruthie.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years.  I know what I’m doing.” said Beth as she wheeled her older sister through the tiny kitchen and into the dinette, avoiding the tear in the faded yellow linoleum.

For breakfast, Beth made Ruthie scrambled eggs and an English muffin. Same as usual.

“After breakfast, I’ll go pick up your meds from Walgreen’s,” said Beth.

“Have you said hello to the new neighbors yet?” asked Ruthie.

“Why would I do that?  They have no interest in us.”

“Make them some brownies. Be neighborly. After all, we live in the same apartment building.”

“Do we?” asked Beth, sarcasm cracking in her voice. “We don’t even take the same elevator!”

Last year, half of the building went co-op, and a separate entrance and elevator were installed for the new tenants. The McGovern sisters were listed as rent-controlled, still using the decrepit elevator where the button for the seventh floor was perpetually popped-out upside down.

“Buy a brownie mix at the supermarket and make them some brownies. It’s the neighborly thing to do. Besides, you don’t have a real job. What do you do anyway?”

“Take care of you,” Beth mumbled to herself and headed for the front door. It was dark in the apartment because the rent controlled apartments faced the blank side wall of the bank next-door.

Outside, the Brooklyn sun was shining brightly and Beth had to shield her eyes, like a vampire who just left the darkness of an enclosed coffin. As she made her way towards Walgreen’s and the supermarket, she passed the two new neighbors, a young couple in love, carrying a shopping bag from Whole Foods.  They paid two million dollars to live in the building, which gave them the privilege of having a doorman and riding the silver elevator.  They were God’s children with lives as glowing as the stars.

The couple walked past Beth as if she was invisible. Later that day, Beth made them brownies, which they never ate because of the gluten.

Fictional Characters of New York #43

May 28, 2015 / / 4 Comments

fictional character

I’m a third generation New Yorker, but  I’ll be the last in my family to live here. My son has other plans.

“Lift me up so I can see the stars,” he said to me on Second Avenue at night, and I put him atop my shoulders like an Indian prince.

“It’s hard to see the stars here,” I told him. “Too many lights, too many tall buildings.”

He never took an interest in the Art Deco Chrysler Building or the majestic Brooklyn Bridge like I did at his age.  He is intrigued by loftier heights — space, the final frontier.

“One day, I’ll take you to Montana,” I said. “I went there with Grandma and Grandpa when I was your age.  When you look up, you won’t believe how many stars are in the sky.”

“But will you still lift me up so I can see the stars, even in Montana?”

“I’ll always lift you up to see the stars.”

“Even when you’re gone?” he asked.  The maturity of his question surprised me, as if he already understood the concept of death.

And I had no answer for him.  Luckily, he changed the subject at whim, as boys his age tend to do.”

“I don’t want to go to Montana,” he said.  “I’d rather go to Mars.”

“Mars, well, well! Daddy can’t lift you up all the way to Mars.   For that, you’ll need a super-duper rocket.  And you’ll probably have to go on your own because Daddy doesn’t like heights.”

“OK, I’m not afraid,” he said about his future journey in a rocket ship, a trip that he would someday take without me supporting him on my shoulders.

“Will you miss me up in space?” I asked.

“Nah, we can still Skype,” he said.

Flushing, the Song

April 11, 2015 / / 3 Comments

f2

Justin Giarrusso, a composer, recently wrote a choral piece about the five boroughs of New York City titled “Five Boroughs, One City.”   For the Queens section of the piece, he used a poem I wrote on Citizen of the Month in 2008 as his inspiration.

Yay, Queens!

The piece can be heard here

Flushing Poem

“Last stop! Last stop!”
Flushing, what a name!
Tiny women talking
Mandarin in the rain
Alone, I walk by
A mural, Chinese art
A cafe, a hooker
A rusty shopping cart
The downpour, the rushing
The garbage in the street
The yearning, the craving
The summer New York heat.

Fictional Characters of New York #42

March 29, 2015 / / 3 Comments

macys2

“What makes a woman happy?” thought Victor, as he waited for his wife in the shoe section of Macy’s, where they were having a sale.

They were attending a matinee of “On the Town” that afternoon, but Cindy wanted to drive in early from New Jersey and park near Herald Square to go shopping.  Macy’s was decorated with a “spring bloom” theme, even though it was snowing outside in late March.

macys1

In August, Victor will be married to Cindy for ten years, but did he really know her?  Did he know her likes and loves?  He worked long hours on Wall Street to pay for the bills and to do the best for his family, especially Eric, his son, but his wife remained a mystery, besides her affection for Kate Spade bags.

Victor and Cindy rarely talked about anything other than Eric’s schoolwork.  She was worried that he was not advancing as quickly as some of the children of her friends.

“You want him to get into Harvard, don’t you?” she would ask.

“He’s nine years old.  It’s a little early to worry about Harvard.”

Is that what Cindy wanted now out of life — to spend the next ten years making sure Eric got into Harvard?   Is that what everything leading up to the present moment has been about?

The last time Victor had sex — real sex — was on his birthday, as if she was giving him a present.

macys3

We’re going to be late for the show,” said Victor.

“I just want to take a selfie with David and sent it to my sister!” she replied.   “it will be so funny!”

There was a fake statue of David in the lobby of Macy’s surrounded by flowers, and the tourists were eating it up.

macys4

Victor and Cindy went to Florence for their honeymoon.   It seemed like such a long time ago.

Fictional Characters of New York #41

March 21, 2015 / / 6 Comments

light

It was not a good third date.

Sheryl had high hopes about him; he was a perfect gentleman on the first two outings. But he changed tonight, as if he had gotten some bad advice from an ex-fraternity friend on becoming a “player.” He bragged too much about his new job as a securities analyst, and pushed her to order the most expensive cocktail at this trendy restaurant that was “impossible to get a reservation except if you know someone.”

After dinner, she turned down his offer for him to come to her apartment, saying that she was old-fashioned, certainly not expecting his face to redden and words to spew such as “cocktease,” “bitch,” and “user.”

Sheryl never perceived herself in such a negative way before, wondering if she was indeed guilty of breaking the rules of dating.  She apologized to her date and said she was uncomfortable dating.   She’d rather just stay home and read, but her ultimate fantasy — of one day walking through Central Park with a special man, holding his sturdy hand — proved sufficient motivation for her to leave the house wearing the makeup she bought at Macy’s and her prettiest yellow dress.

Sheryl walked home alone. Weaker women would be crushed by the evening’s disappointment, but not Sheryl. As she passed by the abandoned church on Amsterdam Avenue, she saw that the church light, a former beacon of hope to those in need of spiritual guidance, now cracked in disrepair, was still lit, almost miraculously, much as her broken heart still beat strongly in a search for love.

Fictional Characters of New York #40

March 20, 2015 / / 6 Comments

Eddie

The year was 1972.  Eddie was working at his father’s hardware store in Chinatown when the People’s Republic of China Peking Circus came to town as a cultural exchange arranged by President Nixon.

It was a busy in his father’s hardware store, named Yang’s Do-it-Yourself.  It was the first day of Spring, and all the hibernating weekend warriors suddenly awoken to the maintenance jobs left undone during the cold winter month, their wives pushing them to fix the broken doorknobs and misfitting window shades.

But Eddie’s mind was elsewhere.  The NYPD closed off part of Mott Street for a procession of the Chinese performers, a mini-parade, and Eddie was keen on seeing it.   At lunchtime, he left the shop, against his father’s wishes.

Eddie thrilled at the sight of the exotic acrobats and horses which paraded down the grimy, littered Lowe East side street.  The circus performers looked as Chinese as he did, same eyes and dark hair, but they stepped with a precision that made them seem distinctly unAmerican.   If only the Chinese people saw the chaos during a fire drill at an American school like P.S. 100.

“Form a straight line.” Mrs. Goldenberg, his teacher, would yell.  “One at a time.”  And, of course, no one listened.  Americans are like John Wayne.  They do it THEIR WAY.

“I bet there isn’t one Eddie in THIS circus,” Eddie thought to himself.

A few moments later, he saw a woman in the procession wearing a costume with golden wings.  She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.  Her name was Howin, which means “loyal swallow” in Chinese.  He discovered that was her name because he followed her for a mile along the route uptown and waited for her for five hours in the lobby of the Pennsylvania Hotel until he could see her again, completely forgetting about his job back at the hardware store.  That night, his father beat him with a belt, calling him a shameful son who lacked ambition.

Today is the first of Spring, 2015, and Eddie has long forgotten the beating.  Eddie prides himself on remembering the good things in life and not the tragedies, such as his father’s death, his son’s suicide at seventeen, the closing of the shop, his wife’s cancer.  And he will always remember the day and especially the night with Howin, the Communist Chinese circus acrobat visiting on a cultural exchange arranged by then President Nixon, a woman he could barely communicate with in Cantonese or English.

He never again saw Howin, the loyal swallow, but as Eddie, now an old man, walks along Mott Street on this cold first day of Spring, he remembers her golden wings.

The Ghetto United Nations of Queens

March 11, 2015 / / 6 Comments

My bedroom window looks out over an unpretentious supermarket that has been in the same location next to my apartment building for over fifty years, under various owners. You won’t find fancy stuff in this store, like organic kale, but you will find more brands of ethnic rice and beans than any other supermarket in the city. And they also have good pickles.

The supermarket is an ugly box-like structure built in the 1960s, so the last owner decided to pretty the place up in celebration of the neighborhood’s ethnic diversity.  He placed fifty national flags around the perimeter of the parking lot which represent all of the immigrant communities that live in the community.

My friend Barry and I jokingly called it “the ghetto U.N.” but there was also a deep sense of pride in this corny display of flags waving in the wind in the middle of Queens.   The flags were as iconic to this neighborhood as the skating ring at Rockefeller Center is to midtown Manhattan. Whenever I passed by, I quizzed myself on the flags’ countries of origin.  Some were easy — Lebanon, Turkey, India, Israel, Mexico, Japan.  But is that one El Salvador or the Dominican Republic?

The flags were arranged in random order, and it was amusing to see odd relationships developing, like Pakistan and South Korea suggestively rubbing against each other in the fall coolness.

Last spring, I noticed the Taiwanese flag hanging in a tree. It was ripped in half and stuck in the branches on purpose. Flushing has a large Chinese population and there are always political controversies involving Taiwan and China.  Events in Hong Kong have only increased the tensions in the Chinese community. Was this vandalism some sort of political statement?

I mentioned this online, but others thought it was kids playing games, not political media grandstanding.  This was a quiet supermarket in Queens where residents bought their milk and Pepperidge Farm cookies, NOT a hot-boiled environment like Twitter.

A few months ago, I was awoken by an angry voice outside.  I went to the window and saw a bearded man shouting in Arabic and ripping the Israeli flag down from her spot on the Ghetto U.N. display. As the police arrived, he ran away. I mentioned this on Facebook and I sensed a discomfort, as if I was trying to promote Fox News’ Islamophobia rather than sharing a real-life scary incident that I just witnessed.

In retrospect, these two little events at the supermarket were unimportant, not international incidents.  These perpetrators were individuals, and not representatives of agenda. We continue to all live happily in Queens, loving our diverse neighborhood.  I am writing this post from the McDonald’s next to the supermarket. At the tables near me are an elderly African-American couple eating Chicken McNuggets, two Asian dudes with Big Macs, and a Muslim woman wearing a scarf and drinking a Strawberry-Banana smoothie.  America:  Unity in Bad Nutrition.

But something has changed on our block. Something sad. The supermarket has decided to take the flags down — all of them. I have no idea if this has anything to do with the vandals, but whatever the reason, it’s as if New York City has decided to dismantle the Statue of Liberty because it was too much trouble to protect it from being graffiti.

There is a symbolism here that bothers me.  It is a culture that extends from name-calling on social media to the destruction of ancient relics in the Middle East.    It is the power of destruction over creation.

In his song, Imagine, John Lennon wrote the powerful lyrics,

“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too”

He also imagined the flags coming down. But he imagined it happening because of love and peace, not because too many of the flags were getting ripped down in anger and hate.

The Student of Arabic

March 4, 2015 / / 5 Comments

It was a snowy night in the city. I traveled on the F-train, coming home from a literary reading in Brooklyn. A dark-skinned man with Mediterranean features sat across from me, reading from a book written in a foreign language. A strap-hanger, a college-age young man enclosed in a puffy blue parka, stood over the reading man, peering down at his book.

“I’m taking Arabic in college,” said the college guy to the foreign-born reader.

“Cool. But…”

“It’s hard. Arabic is. I could have taken French, but I decided to take Arabic. It’s more useful.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Today, the teaching assistant in my Arabic class — he’s a cool guy from Saudi Arabia — took me aside, and said, “Trevor, you want me to teach you something new?” So, I said, “Sure.” And he taught me how to say ننظر في ذلك ضيق الحمار. Ha ha. You know what that means right?”

“No.”

“It’s “Look at that tight ass.” ننظر في ذلك ضيق الحمار.”

“Hmm.”

“How come you didn’t known that? You’re reading Arabic.”

“Actually, I’m not. I don’t know Arabic. I’m Pakistani.”

“Oh, well. Arabic is hard.”

“Yeah.”

“ننظر في ذلك ضيق الحمار. Look at that tight ass. I’m never going to remember that.”

The Pakistani guy looked my way, hoping to somehow end this uncomfortable conversation.

The college guy sighed sadly, as if he had always made the wrong choices in his life.

“Maybe I should have taken French.”

Truth Quotient:  90%

++++

In three days it’s going to be the 10th anniversary of Citizen of the Month.  For a week, I’ve been debating what I should say in my big “10th Anniversary Post.”  Blogging has been such a big part of my life.   Citizen of the Month never got any big awards or made me any money.   But I’m proud of the way I pretty kept to the same philosophy of writing throughout these years — write whatever the fuck interested me at the moment.   Sometimes funny, sometimes not.  In the real world, I’m a bit of a people-pleaser.   On my blog, I’ve wrote whatever.

Last night, I overheard a completely inane conversation on the subway, so I scribbled notes on my iPhone, and said to myself, “this should be one of the posts celebrating my ten years of blogging.”

Why?  Because no one else will like it.  That to me — is blogging, old school.

I’ll be back on March 7th to thank you for being such good readers and friends.

Lower East Side Tenement Museum Snapshot Event

February 9, 2015 / / 4 Comments

It was a once a year event — cameras were allowed inside the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

From the Tenement Museum website: “We tell the stories of 97 Orchard Street. Built on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1863, this tenement apartment building was home to nearly 7000 working class immigrants.”

As the docent guided us through the building, the other participants were fascinated by how much has changed in the hundred years since my own grandmother lived on the Lower East Side, working in the garment industry.   There  have been breakthroughs in technology, advances in sanitation, and regulations that better protect conditions at work and home.

But as we heard stories about those who lived here, a past generation’s hopes for success, love, and health, I thought about my own life, still living in a small New York City apartment, dealing with making money and work, and using an electronic dating app like Tinder as a modern-day Yentl the Matchmaker.

I understood that most basic human needs are still the same.

desk
laundry
stairs
door
table
photo
room 3
room 2
ship card
tour guide
mailboxes
photos bw
shelf
room 1
bed
magazine cutouts
lights
mirror
fuse
pin cushion
icon

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