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I knew I had to shift away from my best friend Mark when I felt those tears start up in my eyes at the end of the most beautiful movie I’d ever seen. He sat right next to me, baby-faced and bug-eyed, his braces making him look like he was always in the middle of saying something. I was already embarrassed from when one of the characters, C.W., took his shirt off and I felt my shorts start to get tight. Those two hours I spent with Bonnie and Clyde, my sneakers stuck to the th

The reindeer ears were what made me turn around. They bobbed above the traffic like festive little antennas, attached to a woman who couldn't have been much taller than five feet. She stood on the shoulder of a busy road in a bright red skirt, slightly stooped, watching cars race past. I drove by. Then I looked in the rearview mirror as she grew smaller. Then I pulled over. Helping an elderly woman cross the street has always felt like the gold star of good deeds. I rolled do

The lyrics came to me the moment I opened the loft door. "Billy." Then: "No." Then: "Oh, God." That was the entire song. I sang it loud enough to wake the neighbors. The second I walked into the room, I knew. I dropped to my knees beside the couch and gathered him into my arms. He was cold. His body rocked back and forth with mine like a mannequin's. His skin had turned a shade of white that didn't belong to the living. I picked up the phone and dialed 911. The woman who answ

Once Upon a Time in Paris What he didn't know that night, when he crawled into my hotel bed like Goldilocks finally finding the one mattress that felt just right, was that he'd be the first man I'd slept with in over two decades. How could he? We'd just met. Two Americans in Paris, each on our own mission of self-discovery or pandemic escape, colliding like two lost socks that somehow found their match in the dryer. We met at a bear bar in the Marais on a cobblestone street.

I haven't seen her in weeks. Every day on Lexington Avenue, a block from my office, she'd sit on one of those padded walker-chairs beside a pay phone. I always tried not to stare. She had a short halo of blonde curls in the back, while the hair across her forehead lay perfectly flat, as if pressed there by hand. Sometimes she'd look up and smile. I always smiled back. It crossed my mind more than once to take her picture, but if she caught me, I'd feel as though I'd violated

I arrived in Berlin just in time for the cottonwoods. Their seeds drifted through the air in such numbers that it looked as though God had taken a giant dandelion, blown on it, and forgotten where the fluff landed. The fluff collected along curbs and in doorways. Little tumbleweeds of summer. A breeze would gather them up and send them skittering down the street again. Every city has something it would rather not talk about, but Berlin seems incapable of changing the subject.

The small coffee can half-filled with bacon grease that sat on the back of Grandma’s old gas stove always lent the kitchen the smell that breakfast could be right around the corner. She’d begin every meal with a teaspoon of it thrown into a black cast iron skillet, and the two-bedroom house would come alive as if it were dawn’s first light even if the sun had set an hour before. I sat on the glittery vinyl chair by the yellow linoleum table and watched her, my legs swinging b

The only thing I knew about my great-Aunt Bessie before she passed away while I was in class during my first year of school was that she had her left leg amputated from a bad bout of diabetes, and that she had a trunk that my whole family wanted, especially my grandfather’s side since she was my grandpa’s sister. She lived in a nursing home; I’d heard that at the dinner table, and to hear the family tell it, she had some money, too. I arrived home from school to my mother cry

If I close the door at the bottom of the steep service stairs that lead from the bedrooms to the kitchen, it blocks out the distant light from the Gaffers and Sattler stove, making the stairwell itself a pitch-black downward tunnel. The last thing I do before I corral the dogs into the bedroom is to close the top door to that staircase, the lip of that first stair just a toe’s length away from a very bumpy and painful decline. You’ll never know what hit you. I may not hear yo

As we crossed the sand, he told me about his plans. In two years, he wants to start a camel milk business. He spoke about it the way entrepreneurs everywhere speak about their future companies, with equal parts confidence and hope. Then he told me about his fiancée. Three years ago, a French tourist came to Morocco and she stayed. They've built a life together, but lately he's been worried. Not because she's French. Not because she lives far away. Because she doesn't believe

I’d avoided Paris since I was twenty-four, when a night of too many beers ended with me peeing a hotel’s feather bed. It seemed like the sort of city that deserved a better memory than that. Nearly thirty years later, Paris finally got its revenge. I don’t speak a word of French. When I get nervous, I sometimes default to bad Spanish. Still, everyone was kind. The city opened itself up to me in a way I hadn’t expected. Then, somewhere between the museums, cafés, and wrong tur

Her posture is so perfect that I half expect to find a finishing school textbook balanced on top of her head. It's only when you get closer that you notice the headdress.It rises above her in a regal tower, nearly as tall as Marge Simpson's hair, though the cream-colored fabric has long since surrendered to the soot of the subway. Every evening when I step off the 4 train at Wall Street, she's there. Same bench. Same crossed legs. Same collection of overstuffed bags at her fe

The autopsy took a week. During that week, I imagined all sorts of terrible things. I still do, sometimes. While strangers were busy determining how Billy died, I was handed a task that seemed both ridiculous and impossible. I had to pick out his clothes. Once the county released him to the funeral home, someone asked what he would be wearing. Billy always had more clothes than any man had a right to own. I used to tell him he had the wardrobe of a supermodel, which was funny

There’s walking and then there’s Petra walking. I think my feet are still inside my shoes, but I’m afraid to check. The site is all of the superlatives wrapped in miles of gorgeous carved ancient sandstone. It’s a movie set, only it’s real. My guide, Ali, repeated “Terry” like an overused comma in his running monologue, so there was never a single chance I’d forget my first name. "Terry, this was a tomb. Terry, this was a temple. Terry, this is where Indiana Jones wasn't actu

I’d just finished screaming at my secretary. I might have made her cry. I didn’t know or care. She’d lost the call I’d been waiting for all day. She left my office with a quivering lower lip like I’d just killed her puppy. I scooted back a carefully laid paper tent on my twelve-foot imported marble desk, held a rolled-up bill to my nostril, and repeated what I’d already done five times so far that day. A studio friend called earlier about a woman he’d met who was convinced th

Sleeping while crocodiles roam underneath you. Crazy cool eco-resort built above a thriving croc population. Sri Lanka has some of the most sophisticated design.

The movers are here, swarming my apartment with paper and tape, packing up every tangible memory I have. I’m heading back to LA and I’m kinda freaking out about it. NYC is home, moved here five years and two months ago. I love my neighborhood and my building. The doormen have had my back this whole time. They’re friends. And I made a few really important relationships here, people I’ll miss a whole lot, and I hope to see them when the bad cloud lifts. This city has been grim

I don’t think I’d hit puberty, yet, when I first saw Hitchcock’s remake of his own “The Man Who Knew Too Much” on TV, but when I did, I was hooked on two things: Hitchcock movies and Morocco. Okay, so, Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day take their young son on a holiday to Marrakech. After having dinner with two odd Brits, the next day they head into Jemaa el-Fnaa, the main square deep in the Medina. The camera follows them as the enormous marketplace is slowly revealed. Meanwhile,

It was pure comedy gold when my face kissed the sidewalk on Chambers Street in front of an audience the size of an Equity Waiver house. How does a grown man simply fall face first onto concrete? I'd tell you, but frankly it's none of your business. For the first few days, the scrapes on my nose and lip seemed to be the main attraction. Then my right elbow began throbbing with the persistence of an EDM bass line. By the end of the week, it had become impossible to ignore. The

The office of our friend Jimmey sat in one of the old writers' bungalows tucked deep in the back of the Fox lot, beyond the prop warehouses and soundstages, past the famous New York street. Pee-wee Herman had occupied it years earlier. He left behind a couch. It was impossible to ignore. Each cushion was upholstered in a different pastel color, turquoise next to salmon next to butter yellow, all outlined with black piping. It looked like something a child would design. It loo