MangoZeen

I like Campbell’s Tomato Soup, especially if you add milk as suggested by the directions. It almost tasted home-made and everyone ate it in 1964. The rich, the poor, the in-between, so I was pleased to read in Life Magazine that a New York artist had painted large portraits on the popular soup can. My […]

The flight from Bangkok via Taipei and Anchorage to JFK lasted almost 36 hours. I wish the trip had taken even longer, however we landed on time ending the longest Sunday of my life. The immigration officer asked how long I had been out of the country.
“5 Years.” All of it in Thailand.
“Welcome back.” He […]

I drove a stolen car from Boston to New York in 1976. It wasn’t really stolen. A Back Bay lawyer paid $300 for the disappearance of his Olds 88. I left the Detroit gas-guzzler by the Christopher Street pier. It was after midnight. I switched the plates and left the keys in the ignition. Within […]

Semi-Fiction from Peter Nolan Smith I spent 28 years in the East Village of New York. My apartment was at 256 East 10th Street. I worked nightclubs. CBGBs, Hurrah, Studio 54, and The Milk Bar. I had two motorcycles; a 1964 Triumph and 1970 Yamaha. Dmitri from the East 6th Street Bike Shop introduced Rick, […]

That September morning a jet roared above the East Village. I opened my eyes. Lots of planes and helicopters flew over Manhattan. None this low or fast or loud. Thirty seconds later the windows shook with a muffled thud more a boom than a crash. It wasn’t too far away either.

The screaming children in the […]

Published in ELK 2006 www.elkzine.com/books.html

February’s blizzards buried New York City with two-foot drifts and people conversed about Global Warming as a distant threat in comparison to Iraq. America was gearing up to war and nothing could stop the process, because the President was acting like a pit bull too stubborn to spit out the bone […]

Early in April 2001 a task force supporting the aircraft carrier US Kitty Hawk anchored off Pattaya. Its 12,000 soldiers and sailors invaded the go-go bars of Beach Road and I avoided the chaos without taking into account my Thai girlfriend’s displeasure at having to stay home night after night. “I not leave farm to […]

(published in OPEN CITY MAGAZINE 2002)
Surviving summer in Manhattan depends on air-conditioning for most of its citizens, unfortunately for me AC felt, as if a dirty old man from the Arctic who isn’t Santa Claus was breathing down my neck. Usually a fan provided adequate protection for a day or two of plus-90 temperatures. Three or four […]

The winter of 1987 was cold enough to freeze the Housatonic River passing through the Kent Hills and the town erected an elaborate float on the thick ice. Its sinking signaled the coming of spring and the townspeople organized a pool to reward the person who guessed the date of the ice could no longer […]

New York in the summer of 1981 was everything it wasn’t in the winter of 1979. The temperature boiled the asphalt. Punk had been replaced by New Wave and somehow the city had escaped bankruptcy. Money flowed on the streets and even the East Village exhibited signs of regeneration, since abandoned tenements can only be […]