Nonfiction

1. I knocked on the picture window of the Marlin Cafe, trying to get the bartender’s attention, so I could get in and have a Sunday morning hangover drink. The Marlin was an old man’s dive on Broadway near Cathedral Parkway, a street that everyone in the neighborhood called 110th Street. Technically, the bar was…

       Twenty years old, sparkly makeup on my eyes and cheeks, I wrap a leg over the back of my uncle’s motorcycle, hoist myself onto the cracked vinyl seat.        He’s the cool uncle. The uncle who’s fifteen years older than me, who dates a model, who sips tequila from wide-mouthed glasses in Chelsea bars. Who gives…

       She’s already fallen twice, first breaking the left hip when she misses a step at the beauty parlor, then her right in a tumble at her old house in Arizona. It’s in this precarious condition that my mother comes back into my life. When her second husband dies, it falls on me, as her only…

Fifty-six years ago I picked up a musical instrument for the first time with intent to commit jazz. It was a trombone left behind by another kid at the jazz record store where we both hung out. (He’d been snatched by Selective Service for the Korean War. I’d 4-F’ed out.) I got a single lesson…

  For once, no flowers. Past midnight, and very quiet along this corridor. The clock on the opposite wall is round, a cartoon clock. Funny, the idea of keeping time, here of all places. Beneath the clock, a square tablet announces in bold what is now the wrong date, April 3.    I could walk…

This is a story about not doing; this is a story about everything else. The trouble with writing is that it’s too easy not to do. Imagine if eating chocolate was as easy not to do as writing. Or paying your mortgage. Or making an eight o’clock class. Imagine if you were firmly convinced that…

I understand women the way junkies understand shooting up. Feel the rush, make the pain go away, and think about the next fix. I don’t know what to do when the glow wears off, when a real person floats to the surface of the dream. It’s the sixties, after all, and what might be pathology…

The time of us on earth is spent lightly on good peas and gravy good enough for a second time in an hour -poem by Jon, when he was eighteen years old, as remembered by my mother Chapter (Dear) Dear Dad Dear Father Dear Jon Dear Pop, (This letter is now a part of the…

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Muriel Spark. I was speaking to her over the phone at her house in Italy, and so, in addition to my great admiration for her and the distance between us in years, there was a substantial geographical distance. Knowing that she hadn’t published her first…