Michael’s New York
Beg, Borrow, Steal is, in large part, about New York, the city I love, my home. Here’s a map of the city as I’ve experienced it, and as I wrote about it in my book. Click on the different locations for selected excerpts and original fine art.
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Hart Island
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Hart Island
Peering down, I could make out a flat treeless landscape, with a few derelict buildings, a ferry slip, and a couple of trenches with a handful of men standing around them, apparently working: New York City’s potter’s field, the most populous cemetery in America.
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Lobster Shift
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Lobster Shift
Clarence phones to give the good news: he has landed a job as motorman on the New York City subway, the consummation of a lifelong romance with trains. “I’ve been operating for five months, but I didn’t want to call you till I was certain the job was mine.”
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Another Way of Starving
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Another Way of Starving
As a street peddler on Fordham Road I specialized in cosmetics – eye pencils, compacts, lip gloss and the like. Dozens of women would surround me, chattering in Spanish while contemplating themselves in the hand-mirrors I provided. “May I try the eye shadow?” “Do you have a darker shade of lipstick?”
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Brotherly Love
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Brotherly Love
My old man was like Zeus’s father Cronos: he couldn’t bear the idea that any of his children might surpass him. Life radiated from the central pulse of his scrap-metal yard. “Which do you think is worth more,” he once asked me, “a commodity or some goddamn idea?”
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A Writer’s Life
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A Writer’s Life
Literary life occurs wherever a writer happens to be, usually in the most “unliterary” places. Our material is everywhere.
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A Tailor’s Fortune
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A Tailor’s Fortune
Jack was a minute, unnoticeable figure, with a forkful of gray-brown hair, a parched voice, and thick tortoiseshell glasses that he seemed constantly to be repairing with a tube of glue and a paper clip. We stood out as the palest tenants in our enormous, government-subsidized apartment complex on Cherry Street.
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Kettle of Fish
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Kettle of Fish
When Tony Bennett crooned “Baby, Ain’t I Good to You” I could hear the tuxedo in his voice, though I understood that it might be rented and would have to be returned in the morning.
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The Interpreter
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The Interpreter
For a year in the late 1980s I worked as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking defendants at Manhattan’s criminal court. My inspiration was Daumier and his courthouse sketchbook. It was a chance to witness the workings of the criminal justice system from backstage.
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Artist Credit for the map, “Another Way of Starving,” “A Writer’s Life,” “Kettle of Fish,” “The Interpreter,” and “Tailor’s Fortune”: Andreas Gurewich.
Artist Credit for “Brotherly Love,” “Lobster Shift,” “Hart Island,” and “A Falsley Young Man”: Anna Greenberg.