"
We used to find teeth in the yard. We used to find wigs, glasses, guns. Everything we found in the yard…nobody came back for them, though." May Timpano describes her life in the house
under the rollercoaster where she and her boyfriend, rollercoaster operator Fred Moran, lived for 36 years in the former
Kensington Hotel which had the
Thunderbolt rollercoaster built around it in 1925. The house -- the model for
Alvy Singer's childhood home in Annie Hall --
burned in 1991 and the roller coaster
was razed in 2000.
posted by jessamyn
on Apr 17, 2009 -
15 comments
Bowed by Age and Battered by an Addicted Nephew 'They went out late. It was ugly weather. Six below zero in the Brooklyn night. Wind took garbage into the air. A blizzard was in the forecast. It was Lincoln's Birthday, 2003, in Brighton Beach. Not a night for humankind, but the sisters, one 73 and the other 70, didn't get holidays off, didn't get snow days.
In years of miserable low points, it was one of the lowest. As they had done the day before and the day before that, Lillian and Julia hobbled out to Coney Island Avenue, a lineup of chromatic storefronts, to beg from strangers in their cars. They were known out there, regulars among the mendicants. The money was for their bilious nephew and his crack habit, their own blood who was smoking up their lives. He had already cost them their house, their savings, their dignity. "I need one more," he would tell them when he desired a hit, "one more."
Not comply and he would fly into crazed tirades, blacken an eye, bruise their ribs. It had been this way for years, since their lives stopped being comprehensible. '
[From the New York Times; they'll want registration, if you haven't already.]
posted by davy
on Dec 12, 2004 -
18 comments
