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penis.”
    â€œHe has one now?”
    â€œSo I’m told but haven’t seen it.”
    The principal’s face told me that he was either new to the story of Harry’s genitals or suffered from acid reflux. I pressed on.
    â€œWithout thinking, my father did the only thing he knew to do when his groin was threatened—hapkido.”
    â€œAn ointment?” the principal asked.
    Now I was confused. I tried to set things right.
    â€œHe picked it up from a Korean.”
    â€œSulu?”
    â€œWas he Korean?” I asked.
    The principal felt the story was either too baffling or too close to the loose rock of racial prejudice to pursue, so he let me go. Things quickly returned to normal, except, of course, for Harry’s crush on me (which, in retrospect, I suspect I’d invented).
    To my list of enemies at the school, which already included the two most popular girls (Greta and Ana—the latter of whom replaced me as Greta’s best friend following the pool party), my father added Harry, the cutest boy.
    The only two who seemed unaffected by the Harry incident were my father (no surprise there) and mother, who believed (proudly) that her husband had administered to Harry what she referred to as the “Vulcan nerve pinch,” and that the entire affair was caused by the hubris of naming a child after a semi-sacred figure.

ARTIE
    THE QUIETEST TIME at the hotel was the morning. Unlike those of other residences, crowded with people en route to work, the lobby of the Chelsea was always empty until about noon. The exceptions to this were Stanley (the owner), the one or two people who had passed out in the lobby the night before without ever making it up to their rooms, and the rotation of homeless people who inhabited it.
    Stanley’s father, who was born in Hungary, purchased the hotel in the 1940s. Stanley took it over when his father became ill. He had been running it ever since.
    To Stanley, the hotel residents fell into two groups, those who weren’t paying rent and those who weren’t paying enough rent, a view that caused great agitation within Stanley. He was there in the lobby every morning to express that agitation.
    People in the hotel were not impressed with Stanley’s suffering. Stanley, they pointed out, lived in a grand apartment in a very fancy neighborhood far from the hotel. The hotel, incontrast, was well over a hundred years old and showed every year of it.
    As tenants passed through the lobby, Stanley would announce how much rent was due and that it had not been paid. It was humiliating. Most of those who owed rent would call the front desk to check if Stanley was in the lobby before exiting the hotel. On those occasions when Stanley left to get a coffee at the Aristocrat, a swarm of tenants would rush out of the hotel.
    For those who could not wait for Stanley’s caffeine break, there was another option. A couple times a day, an employee from the hotel would move from floor to floor collecting trash on a cart. When full, the cart was taken to the basement on the service elevator, rolled onto a platform, and then lifted up from the basement directly to the sidewalk on Twenty-third Street. Bypassing the lobby, the cart went unnoticed by Stanley. One resident who was behind on their rent would hide among the trash bags. Quite often I would hear, “Hello, Nic,” “Give my regards to your parents,” or similar greetings from the trash bags as they passed me in the hallway.
    But it was not just those who were delinquent on their rents who feared Stanley. Even if a tenant paid on time, Stanley was upset with them, for he took the regular payment of rent as a sign that the tenant was paying too little and that he (Stanley) had been outsmarted in the lease negotiations. My father was in this group.
    â€œHow can you live with yourself?” Stanley would ask my father as they passed each other in the lobby.
    â€œDo you have any idea,”