MangoZeen

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 […]

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 Punk had been replaced by New Wave and somehow the city had escaped bankruptcy.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 […]