By Ben Krull

I turned the knob and nothing happened. Don’t panic, I told myself, as sun poured through the blinds.

It was a 90-degree Sunday earlier this summer and the window air-conditioner in my studio apartment was dead. First came denial: the four-year-old machine just needed to ease into the June heat. All it needed was some rest.

Then came anger: I cleaned my filter every six weeks, just like the operator’s manual instructed. It was too young to die—I’ll sue!

Finally came acceptance: It was a lemon and nothing could be done to change that. I would get a new one and move on.

I headed to PC Richard’s on East 86th Street, where my salesperson matched me with an 8,000 BTU air-conditioner. But the earliest it could be delivered was Friday, five days away.

Checking the long-range forecast I broke into a cold sweat, on top of the hot sweat already dripping from my pores. I bought two desk fans and braced myself.

To get some ideas on how to cope with the heat, I researched ancient cooling techniques. I learned that people once avoided the heat by living in underground caves. My experience with subway platforms dissuaded me from pursuing that cooling option.

Our modern predecessors would sleep on fire escapes on hot evenings. Although my building has a fire escape, I never seriously considered that option.

Apparently the summer streets in old New York weren’t populated by drunken twentysomethings partying into the night, or by cars honking their way through traffic. Besides, the sight of someone curled up on a fire escape at 3 a. m. would likely draw 911 calls from my neighbors.

That left the desk fan as the only defense against my apartment’s tropical conditions. With the fans pointed at my bed, I was able to sleep comfortably through the night. The problem was when I was up and moving around.

My morning coffee made me schvitz like I was in a sauna, while walking out of range of my fans put me in danger of heat stroke.

Even a cold shower couldn’t help. By the time I toweled myself off, I produced enough perspiration to undo the ameliorative effects of soap and deodorant.

The afternoon my new air-conditioner was delivered I was in my apartment, happily clearing space in a closet to store my soon-to-be unneeded fans.

“This unit will never cool your apartment,” the AC installer said. “You need 12,000 BTUs and this is only 8,000.”

I had given the salesperson the wrong measurements for my apartment. I ordered a new machine but it would be two weeks before I could arrange to be present for the delivery.

The heat wave continued, making me feel like I was in a reality television show: Which contestant can hold out the longest? Text “105 In The Shade” to vote!

Clearly God was testing me. I made it through the next two weeks by repeating the mantra “this too shall pass.”

On what was supposed to be the last day of my ordeal the delivery crew was four hours late. Would this endurance test ever end?

This time the installation of my new air-conditioner went as planned. But the old machine developed separation anxiety.

While removing the lemon from my studio, the workmen broke my building’s elevator with the unit inside. They left with the elevator and AC still stuck between floors.

Despite the crew’s tardy entrance and sloppy exit, I was so grateful to have a cool apartment that I gave them a really fat tip.

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Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper East Side.

I worked myself into a frenzy thinking about the tasty food and heartwarming reunions. But not everyone shared my enthusiasm for visiting day at summer camp.

From the ages of nine through 15, I spent my summers at Camp Scatico in upstate New York. I have wonderful memories of sleeping on sagging mattresses in un-air-conditioned bunks, where I participated in water balloon fights and laughed at fart jokes.As visiting day approached I was understandably excited about showing my parents how much I had matured during my time away from home.

My mother and father were always the last parents to arrive, but my wait was rewarded with camp’s most valuable currency: food. The backseat of their car was weighed down with my mom’s crispy-fried chicken, brisket swimming in gravy, various fruit pies and a blimp-sized watermelon.

The feast would be spread on a blanket, as my bunkmates abandoned their parents to share in the banquet. I felt as popular as I did on my birthday in August, when I was presented with a cake in the camp’s dining room, giving me the power to decide which of the dozens of well-wishers crowding around me would receive a piece of cake or a spoonful of frosting.

After lunch my parents and I headed over to the ball fields for the father-son softball game—although my dad always had some type of injury, which kept him on the sidelines. Following the game, it was off to the lake for a swim before saying goodbye.

When my parents left I felt sad—not only because I had to go back to eating overcooked hamburgers and drinking metallic-tasting “bug” juice, but because I missed home. I assumed my parents felt sad as well, and enjoyed visiting day as much as I did.

I knew my mother liked visiting camp. She had been a camper at Scatico and loved reminiscing about the Girl’s Sing and her bunkmates (she never said anything about water balloons or fart jokes).

My dad also went to a summer camp, but hated it. He was overweight and a spaz, making him the target of his camp’s bullies. He carried his nightmarish camp experience into adulthood, to the point where his normally homing pigeon-like sense of direction would abandon him on the drive to Scatico.

“That’s why we were always late to visiting day,” my mother recently told me. “It was the only time I ever saw your father get lost.”

When I confronted my dad about my mother’s revelation, he acknowledged his camp-phobia and admitted that he faked injuries to avoid playing in the father-son softball game: “I was afraid that the other fathers would make fun of me.”

Finding out that my father hated visiting day was nearly as disillusioning as realizing that parents see summer camp as a vacation from their kids. It feels bad to think that while I was happily stuffing my face with watermelon and fried chicken, my dad was having flashbacks to fat jokes and wedgies.

Despite learning about my father’s visiting day traumas, I get nostalgic when my friends tell me about visiting their children at camp. They are looking forward to this summer’s visits and their kids will undoubtedly be happy to see them… especially if they bring a care package stuffed with Ring Dings, Mallomars, jawbreakers and licorice. n

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Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper West Side.

Anderson was accused of skirting New York’s $33,122 campaign donation limit by accepting $250,000 in loans and gifts from her law partner, and funneling the money into her primary campaign. The jury bought Surrogate Anderson’s argument that her maneuver could be interpreted as being legal under New York’s murky campaign finance law—a verdict that has allowed the suspended Surrogate to take the bench.

As a political activist, I have long taken pride in how we Manhattan Democrats choose our judicial candidates. Unlike the hyperpolitical process that prevails in much of the city, Manhattan Democrats have a tradition of valuing merit over party loyalty. As a result, the spectacle of judges being led away in handcuffs was only something that could happen in the outer boroughs, I believed.

Manhattan’s bench wasn’t always so clean. In the heyday of Tammany Hall, party bosses decided who would make the ballot. Judgeships were distributed as political favors. Sometimes bribes were involved.

In the 1970s, reformers—led by the Upper East Side’s Lexington Democratic Club—won control of Manhattan’s Democratic party. To lessen the role of politics in judicial elections, independent screening panels, made up of members of legal associations and community groups, were established to evaluate candidates.

Only candidates approved by the panels are eligible to receive the backing of the party’s political clubs. Then the politics begins.

Deals are negotiated, campaign cash is raised and political consultants hired. This is the process Anderson went through, before winning the Democratic primary and running unopposed in the general election.

Respecting the screening panel’s choices is voluntary for political clubs and elected officials. But Democrats have steadfastly honored the arrangement, as it is regarded as the jewel of the reform movement, the marker that differentiates Manhattan Democrats from our counterparts in the rest of the city. So when Anderson was indicted last fall, I took it as an indictment of the trust that has been placed in the panel system.

I asked political consultant Jerry Skurnik if the screening panels are as free from political influence as their advocates claim they are.

“I’ve heard all sorts of rumors—none that I have been able to substantiate—about panels being fixed for certain candidates,” he said.

But Skurnik thinks the Democrats’ process for choosing nominees is as good as any other way to pick a judge.

“It screens out the clunkers. You never hear of a real turkey getting through a panel,” he said.

If Surrogate Anderson had been convicted, it would have meant that the panel system had failed in its mission to ensure that only quality candidates make the ballot. Her acquittal allows me and other Democrats to maintain our faith in the borough’s judicial election process.

Some observers are unimpressed by the not guilty verdict. In an editorial, the Daily News opined that despite her acquittal, Surrogate Anderson’s questionable campaign finance tactics makes her unfit for the bench. And the Kings County District Attorney might bring charges against Anderson, since some of her campaign finance transactions occurred in Brooklyn.

Whatever you think of Anderson’s conduct during her campaign, a jury has decided it was not criminal. This means that she will get the chance to demonstrate her integrity on the bench and prove that Democrats made a wise choice in putting her there.

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Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper East Side.

While I once commuted amid unobtrusive pocketbooks, nowadays subways are packed with women carrying duffle-sized satchels, leather backpacks and cavernous totes. It is commonplace to see these bags carried in combination: an oversized satchel hanging from the shoulder, a knapsack strapped to the back and a hand clutching a purse. As a hard-core evolutionist, I predict that future generations of females will be born with a kangaroo-type pouch, because of all the bag-schlepping today’s women do.

If a multiple-bag-carrying woman has a free hand, she is often grasping one or more stylish shopping bags from stores like Ralph Lauren, Banana Republic and Henri Bendel. Shopping bags are so popular that Bloomingdale’s sells a plastic version of its Brown Bags (a plastic Little Brown Bag costs $24, a zippered Medium Brown Bag, $35).

Transporting all these bags must be burdensome. If I lugged around as much extra weight as multiple-bag women do, I would have to make daily visits to the chiropractor, or supplement my weight training with steroids.

I know there is more stuff to lug around than ever before. Still, my ancestors emigrated from czarist Russia with fewer bags than most women carry on the subway.

There must be more to the bag-craze than fashion. Is each combination of leather-duffles, pocketbooks and backpacks supposed to convey how much emotional baggage the carrier has? Is there a mass shoe-smuggling operation going on?

I asked a co-worker, who favors a four-bag look, what she carries around.

“Don’t ever ask a woman what’s in her bag,” she snapped.

I tried again with a female friend, who met me for lunch with a humongous satchel.

“I have my iPod, a water bottle, sneakers and a change of clothes for after work,” she said.

When I surreptitiously lifted her bag, its weight was the equivalent of two bowling balls—making me doubt that she gave me a complete inventory of the bag’s contents. To learn what’s inside those bags I’ll have to join the police department’s subway bag-inspection team.

For many women, whatever is in their bags can’t be as valuable as the bags themselves. In Bloomingdale’s, the most expensive bags, such as the Fendi Peekaboo, the Salvatore Ferragamo Miss Vera and Chloe Paratay, don’t even have price tags. An inquiry with a salesperson revealed that they cost the equivalent of a few nights at a luxury hotel (the Fendi was $1,980, the Salvatore Ferragamo $1,450 and the Chloe $1,995). Despite these hefty price tags, I have learned that pricey bags can be a good investment.

My mother, who collects handbags like some people collect art, recently showed me her masterpieces: a mint condition Hermes black Kelly, purchased at Lord and Taylor in 1961 for $125, and an Hermes Constance shoulder bag bought in the early 1970s for $250. According to my mom, the bags now sell for thousands of dollars.

To verify this claim, I surfed the web for used Hermes bags. I found a used Kelly priced at $5,538 and a vintage Constance shoulder bag for $4,495!

If you can’t afford a Hermes bag, or even a Cole Haan Britney studded hobo or a Marc Jacobs mini-satchel (respectively $298 and $345 at Bloomie’s), there’s always Canal Street. I recently went there with my bargain-hunting friend Amy, who bought a Louis Vuitton Hobo knockoff for $30 (bargained down from $35). Her savings can be spent on filling up the bag—with whatever it is that women carry around with them. 

Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper East Side.

Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper East Side.

New York’s basketball picture wasn’t always so bleak. The five boroughs were once as well known for basketball as they were for bagels and nightlife.

The city’s hoops tradition stretches back to the 1920s, when professional teams, such as the Original Celtics and the Harlem Rens, dominated the sport. The playgrounds became feeders for local colleges; New York University, Long Island University and City College became national powerhouses.

As the game evolved, our high schools continued to breed great players, including Bob Cousy, Billy Cunningham, Lew Alcindor and Bernard King. Summer tournaments produced stories of athletic feats by neighborhood hoopsters that rivaled anything seen in the NBA.

The style of play that defined the city game was embodied in the championship Knicks teams of the 1970s, known for teamwork and hard-nosed defense taught by coach Red Holzman, who learned the game on the playgrounds of Brooklyn.

As a teenager growing up on the Upper East Side during the Knicks’ championship run, I reveled in New York’s basketball heritage. I went to a summer camp founded by Nat Hollman, the “Mr. Basketball” of the 1920s, before he became a Hall of Fame coach at City College, where Red Holzman was one of his players. Listening to Hollman tell stories about playing basketball on the rough and tumble Lower East Side gave me a tangible connection to New York’s basketball roots.

In high school, I honed my jump shot in weekend pick-up games on courts in Riverside and Central Parks, and the schoolyards of the Upper East Side. I took pride in being part of the city’s basketball scene, and the tradition of toughness and court savvy that mirrored the street smarts and grit required to flourish in New York’s hard-edged neighborhoods.

But in recent years, New York’s line of basketball greatness has run thin. The city that once produced playground legends like Detroit used to turn out cars has lost its status as a hoops hotbed.

According to a well-respected basketball scouting service, only one of the 100 best high-school players in the country hails from the five boroughs. And a pre-season ranking of the top 25 high school teams did not include a single school from New York.

The demise of New York basketball makes me feel like an Englishman pining for the days of empire. Part of my self-image is grounded in a world that no longer exists.

With the city facing an economic crisis, failing schools and the threat of terrorism, we New Yorkers have more important things to worry about than our falling basketball fortunes. Yet, with New York’s greatness in question, I want to believe that the city’s collective character makes us resilient to anything thrown our way, that we possess an undefeatable toughness reflected in schoolyards and gyms across the five boroughs.

During lean times, past generations of New Yorkers could look to our winning basketball tradition as proof of New York’s unique tenacity. Nowadays, the message from the hardwood is that we are no different from anyone else.

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Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper East Side.

While my studio apartment is too crowded with breakable objects for me to swing a bat like I once did in my spacious childhood bedroom, I still dive on my carpeting, snagging screaming line drives and lay down perfect squeeze bunts using my toilet plunger as my bat.

Pitching is more problematic. I used to be able to go nine innings, throwing my blazing 40-mile-per-hour fastball against a pillow propped up on my Lazy Boy chair, but a recent fall while performing improv (don’t ask) left me with an injured elbow that has limited my pitch count. (I can go deep into a game throwing all knuckleballs, but I have trouble getting the pitch over the dinner tray that doubles as home plate.) To lessen the stress on my arm, I have become a late inning reliever, who always strikes out the side.

Yes. I am really 50 years old.
I also play in the NFL. At 6 feet and 155 pounds of solid skin and bones, I may not look like a football player, but you should see my moves! I fade back into my entranceway and fire a Nerf football into my bedroom area garbage can, or take off for the goal line and fake out a linebacker (my desk chair) before diving into the end zone (my couch).

Despite these heroics, it is increasingly hard to get past the fact that I am older than every professional baseball and football player on the planet. This harsh reality has inspired me to conjure up more age-appropriate fantasies.

This season I have been the retired All-Star, returning to the stadium for an Old Timers game, where I emerge from the dugout (my kitchen area) to high-five my former teammates as the crowd roars. I have also been working on my Hall of Fame induction speech.

“I want to thank all my fans who have traveled to Cooperstown to share this great honor with me,” I say into my bathroom mirror. Then I’ll interview myself on the 25th anniversary of my 800th career home run:

Q: Can you describe the thrill of that moment?

A: It’s what I would dream about while shooting up steroids in Little League, and suddenly the dream was real.

But reminiscing about my playing days is not as exciting as managing in the big leagues. In game seven of the World Series, I walk slowly to the pitcher’s mound (a pile of shirts, ready for the dry cleaners) and raise my arm, signaling that I want the left-hander.

“Good effort,” I’ll say to the exiting pitcher. “Let’s close this out and go celebrate,” I tell the reliever, handing him the ball.

I keep my voice low during these pitching changes, so my neighbor won’t hear me through my thin walls and think I’m nuts. But during the playoffs I can get carried away.

I figure I have 20 years of managing left in me–enough time to win more World Series titles than Torre did. At 70, I’ll buy the Yankees and have the team retire my number during a ceremony at the stadium. Derek Jeter will be there to unveil my plaque.

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Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper East Side.

Gone: the anticipation of waiting for your favorite movie to appear on television. My favorite was The Wizard of Oz, which was broadcast once a year. Every morning of the week The Wizard was scheduled to air, my father would sing songs from the movie, working me into a frenzy. One year a rainbow appeared the afternoon the film played, and I was certain it was a message from the heavens. Today’s children have DVDs of their favorite movies, so watching them is no longer a special event.

Gone: the crank telephone call. Deepening my voice, I’d tell my victim that they had won $10,000 from WXRB radio’s “listen and win” contest. While some people hung up midway through my ruse, others played along. I hope nobody went on a shopping spree, in reliance on receiving my phantom check. Caller I.D. makes such pranks prohibitively risky today.

Gone: the end of the broadcast day. During sleepovers, my friends and I would watch television until a voice announced that it was the end of the broadcast day. The National Anthem would play, before the screen abruptly broke into static.

As the station went off the air I felt like I was in a suspended state, between yesterday and tomorrow. Nowadays, round-the-clock television programming fills the timeless void that marked my sleepovers.

Gone: ticket stubs. I would keep the ticket stub from every arena and stadium I visited; the torn paper marking my passage through the turnstiles and participation in the action. Scanner devices at turnstiles have eliminated the stub, leaving tickets without a trace of its owner’s interaction with the event.

Gone: library check-out cards. The cards, which were inserted in a pocket behind the cover, listed the names of everyone who ever borrowed the book, along with their due date. When my name was written on a card that had decades-old due dates, I felt linked to the past. Libraries now have computerized record-keeping systems. Bar codes occupy the space once reserved for check-out cards.

Gone: the walkie-talkie. My friends and I would talk through walkie-talkies that had a range of about one city block. Enthralled with our ability to communicate at a distance without the constraint of a telephone, we felt like Dick Tracy, with his telephonic-wristwatch. Cell phones make even Dick Tracy’s wristwatch seem passe.

Gone: the novelty of watching a sports team from another city. Aspiring professional athletes like myself could only see teams from outside New York when they played one of our teams, or were on the nationally televised “Game of The Week.” And sometimes even home games weren’t televised. It was so rare to see teams from the West Coast that whenever a superstar like Willie Mays or Wilt Chamberlin came to town, my friends and I would talk about it for days in advance. Fans can now regularly watch sporting events from all over the country and catch highlights on ESPN.

Almost gone: air mail. My parents sometimes received letters from abroad. The odd looking stamps gave the envelopes an exotic air. It gave me the sense that a piece of a foreign country had landed in my apartment. If email had been around 40 years ago it is unlikely that my parents would have received those letters.

Forever with us: the imagination of children, which finds wonder in everything.

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Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper East Side.

After taking my blood pressure, administering an EKG, drawing a blood sample and poking me all over, my doctor, Craig Warschauer, gave me his verdict: “Your EKG is abnormal.”

“What?” I shouted.

“It’s probably a normal variation,” Dr. Warschauer said.

After all my backstroking and low-fat, low-taste eating, I deserved better than an abnormal EKG. I deserved the squiggly lines on the graph to look like the medical equivalent of a Picasso. I deserved the same EKG that I imagine Michael Phelps has.

But Dr. Warschauer, a short, energetic man, who also recently turned 50, wasn’t concerned. “Any recommendation I make will be based on your blood work. My assistant Stephanie will call you with the results.”

For two days my heart beat like a Congo-drum whenever my phone rang. Finally, Stephanie called.

“Everything is fine,” her voice said on my answering machine. “Except”—except? What do you mean EXCEPT?—“you have a slightly elevated kidney reading. Please call me.”

I dialed her number so quickly I nearly dislocated my index finger. Stephanie told me that my creatine level was high and that Dr. Warschauer was referring me to a nephrologist.

Normal variation, creatine, nephrologist. Who knew that turning 50 would increase my vocabulary? While learning that I might have a kidney problem jolted me, I had abandoned my sense of physical infallibility 15 years ago, after being diagnosed with osteoarthritis in my left hip. I stopped jogging, started taking pain medication and learned to resist the temptation to run across the street to beat oncoming cars.

Most of the time the pain is negligible, but some days it is difficult to get around. Having a disease associated with the elderly made me realize that my body could fail me, well before most people are made to face the reality of aging. Although I take solace in knowing that I can get a new hip, kidneys are not so easily replaced. So it was with some trepidation that I went to see Dr. Jon Wang.

Dr. Wang was a cheerful sixty-something man, who spoke with a slight Asian accent. “Your overall health is good,” he said after examining me. “Still, your kidney function is slightly below normal for your age.”

But one blood test is not conclusive. We’ll test you again and if the result is the same, it would confirm that you have CKD, chronic kidney disease.”

I could deal with my CS (chronic sinusitis) and my CMC (chronic morning crankiness), but CKD had a foreboding ring to it. Dr. Wang said that if I have CKD, it’s likely caused by my pain medication, and that cutting the dosage could resolve the problem.

He took a blood sample and told me to come back in three months. I left his office feeling that my medical issues were very manageable.

That evening I had dinner with my friend Rob, who turns 50 in February. Despite ignoring all dietary and exercise guidelines Rob has always enjoyed perfect health—an injustice that has long rankled me. I told him about my kidneys and he told me about a recent check up. “My cholesterol is 230 and my doctor wants me to go on medication!” Rob said, making me feel as though I were not a day over 49.
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Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper East Side.

I want to shout, “I thought you had already ordered…I swear it was a mistake!” Instead I shamefully mumble “sorry,” hoping that nobody else noticed my faux pas.

But the city’s line-etiquette condones some practices that ought to be regarded with the same disdain as cutting:

• Line Holding: this odious custom is common in movie ticket lines. After I wait on line (for unknown reasons New Yorkers say “on line,” while the rest of the country says “in line”) long enough to read the Sunday paper, someone will appear from up the block and walk to the front, where a co-conspirator has held a place for them. I will inevitably end up sitting in the theater’s front row, craning my neck to see the screen, while the late-comer corrals the best seat in the house.

Besides being sleazy, this maneuver discriminates against single people like myself, who do not have an always-available line holder to work with—a disadvantage that also makes it difficult to have my seat held for me while I get popcorn.

• Register Line Roulette: many fast-food restaurants and pharmacies have customers form lines in front of each of their multiple cash registers. I have a talent for choosing the line where the cashier abruptly leaves to get the manager to cancel a sale for a nitwit who thought the toothpaste was three for $2.99, when it was toothbrushes that were on sale. By the time the ritual of drawer opening and form signing is complete, people I saw walk into the store after I got on line have left with their purchases.

I have contacted Al Sharpton about organizing a boycott against multi-register stores that refuse to adopt a single-checkout-line policy.

• The Supermarket Scramble: in this scenario, only one register is open for a line that backs all the way into the produce section when a second register opens, usually without announcement. A Darwinian rush to form a new line ensues, without consideration for the place customers held in the original line. Most maddening is when someone behind me gets to the second register before I do, and holds the place on line for someone who appears with a stuffed shopping cart.

There is a more civil approach. The first time I went food shopping while visiting my brother in Los Angeles, I was shocked to hear the cashier of a newly opened register say “next in line,” before anyone could rush from one register to the next.

Some stores have addressed the city’s checkout outrages by having employees direct customers to the next available register. But line monitors are so suburban.

We New Yorkers have always taken pride in policing ourselves in the public square. I would rather get trampled while racing to an open register than have a college-aged kid from someplace like Idaho tell me how to conduct myself in my natural habitat.

There is one situation, however, where I wish the authorities would exercise greater line-control. That is when I am told by a restaurant maitre d’ that my name is next, only to watch some big macher roll in off the street and get seated ahead of me.
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Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper East Side.