Situated confidently astride his bike, alongside the beginners gripping candy-colored bike frames pedaled with matching sneakers, stands Tyrone Williams—the idol of them all. Known all over the world as “Rone,” Williams pedaled out of the streets of Flatbush, where he grew up, into hip hop fame, and never without his beloved bike dressed up in Yankee logos. Rone finds that wherever he goes, that bike brings New York with him.

Dressed in baggy jeans, a long sleeved black t-shirt, and black Vans, Tyrone speeds his bike from one end of the obstacle course that is Millennium Skate Park to another in seconds, showing off his moves. He quickly twists the handlebars halfway around, counterclockwise, with his right hand—a 180 Bar Spin. Patrons of the park gather round, watching keenly. Some ride BMX bikes themselves. (BMX stands for “bicycle motocross.”) Others glide on inline skates or skateboards. In the world of the skatepark, bikers and skaters are two sibling tribes in the same family, one nation united by speed. They wear the same outfits—tight jeans and voluminous hip-hop shirts. They listen to the same music, either rap—favorites include Juelz Santana and Wu-Tang Clan—or hard rock artists like UnderOath, and speak the same distinct language. “Grease” describes a grimey maneuver; “no-homo” indicates that a rider doesn’t want something they said to be misconstrued as being gay. Both skateboarding and BMX at their roots are freestyle activities with a carefree ethos—sports without teams, without leagues, or even rules, just the quest for ever greater challenges and feats.

Williams’ short, twisted dreadlocks peek out from under his fitted New Era cap as he grinds the pegs of his bike on a rail.

The kids stop to stare. They clap as he lands tricks that will take them years to learn. He’s unmoved and relaxed while he rides; if he’s is showing off, it’s only to be friendly. Whether a trick is extremely hard or quite easy, Williams is adamant about landing every single one. If he messes up or falls he remains composed and never distracted. He rarely chats between tricks and keeps his energy focused on the sport. He tries again and again until he lands his tricks, confident that his efforts paid off.

“Cool. How’d you do that?” a kid no older than 8 asks Tyrone. But he continues to ride. Some kids recognize Tyrone from the music videos he has appeared in, and whisper to one another about it.

Tyrone and his BMX bike were at the center of the action in “Lap Dance”—a 2002 rap-music video by the group N.E.R.D. that inter-cut softcore porn with shots of a pack of BMX riders cruising Brooklyn. That was his first, unlikely stop on a road that has led Williams far from Flatbush, where he grew up.

Russ & Daughters, at 179 Houston between Orchard and Allen, is the Lower East Side’s resident smoked fish shop. It specializes in hand-sliced salty salmon, doughy “New York” bagels, cream cheeses and home-baked sweets, and has been a fixture of the neighborhood for four generations of Russes. The air inside the shop is thick, warm and pungent, with more than a hint of the herring, salmon and sable housed in neat shelves behind those glass cases. Stacked high with colorful fruits, the windowsills overflow with dried apricots, peaches and prunes. Long belts of dried Polish mushrooms dangle from the ceiling.

Running her family business is Niki Federman’s whole life—and she enjoys it. On the street in front of the entrance, she chats with the UPS man about his delivery of cartons of fruit, then pauses to answer a question about the shop’s history she overhears from a passerby.
She is committed to continuing the traditions of family members before her, including her father, Mark Russ Federman, as well as her grandmother and great-grandfather. Russ & Daughters is one of a handful of shops on the Lower East Side to demonstrate such staying power—an infrequent occurrence in the neighborhood and in New York City. It is a piece of the past and a glimpse into the immigrant Jewish community that once was.

This Friday morning, like most, is busy and the small shop is filled with people and the din of the fish business. Two young men, who arrived by taxi, gaze up at the extensive menu, silenced by the number of choices. They step back to watch and learn as an old pro sneaks up on the side of the counter, pointing to the fattest chubs in the case. While the man watches closely as Herman Vargas, Russ & Daughters’ long-time store manager, slices his lox and wraps up his whitefish in white wax paper, he reminisces about his 64 years as a customer. The men behind the counter recognize his face each time he comes in and they smile at his consistent requests. He leans down and whispers about a time 15 years ago when he came in and ordered “a quarter pound of novie, sliced thin enough to feed 14 people,” to the laughter of customers and proprietors alike.

During a rare break in her day, Federman grabs her own lunch: today, it’s a bagel with cream cheese and lox and a lime green can of Dr. Brown’s Ginger Ale—the same color as her eyes. Federman eats from the shop every single day, sometimes for more than one meal. She doesn’t have a favorite sandwich or dish, but she tries to eat something different every day. Usually, she has lunch upstairs in her apartment—her sanctuary away from the bustle and business of the store. Still, she can smell the rugelach being baked in the shop’s kitchen—one of the same smells her grandmother and the rest of her family lived with almost a century ago.

“I think Russ & Daughters has embodied continuity, which is a real rarity in New York where everything changes so quickly,” Federman says. “To have a place that’s been there for so long, and has stuck to a certain way of doing things, a certain quality, is really powerful.”

On the streets of the Lower East Side, Russ & Daughters’ continuity is growing more unique and more obvious. The shop is a one-story neighbor to giant Whole Foods Market, which opened last year and spans an entire block between Bowery and Chrystie Streets. Russ & Daughters’ small neon sign decorated with green and yellow fish seems vastly understated and reminiscent of a street scene from the 1920s or 1930s—or even the 1990s.

Federman’s shop can coexist with the Goliath down the block because it offers something Whole Foods doesn’t. “People know that they can come here and have the same experience and memories that they had growing up and coming here,” Federman says. “We have a lot of customers who come in every morning for their coffee and their daily schmooze. It is unique coming to a place where they feel recognized and people know them in a city where we’re mostly anonymous. Despite all the changes and the development and the history, I think we’re one place that you can go that’s been here throughout, that has sort of survived the whirlwind around it. It’s like a little haven.”

The salad is still a smooth blend of mostly whitefish, with some baked salmon, and the moist chocolate babka is prepared by the shop’s kitchen workers and bakers in the back kitchen, along with the other baked goods. Herring comes straight from a slew of suppliers to Russ & Daughters after it is pickled for preservation; then the Russes finish up with the flavoring process. “The different rounds of pickling take out the salt and add in the flavor,” explains Federman.

Though Whole Foods sells a variety of the items offered by Russ & Daughters, remarkably, the mom and pop business has not been affected in any significant way by the chain’s proximity. One change Federman instituted in time for the 2008 Passover holiday was a great reduction in the kinds of cheeses Russ & Daughters sells. Acknowledging that Whole Foods has a larger selection and that cheese was never a focus of the family business, Federman has decided to replace the cheese in the counter with more homemade sweets. For after Passover, the kitchen staff at Russ & Daughters worked on perfecting recipes for mandel bread—the Eastern European version of Italian biscotti—and black and white loaf.

“I pay no electricity for six months, seven months of the year,” said Metz recently.

That’s because Metz has 18 solar panels on her roof. For the past three and a half years, Metz has been powering her apartment with sunshine.

Located on a quiet residential street a few blocks north of Prospect Park, Metz’s apartment takes up the first two floors of the four-story brownstone she owns. Metz, a 64-year-old retired English teacher with short gray hair and reading glasses on a chain around her neck, first learned about the possibility of solar power through a presentation at the Park Slope Food Coop on Union Street in Brooklyn.

“I had been interested in solar for a long time,” Metz said, “but I had no idea what the potential or what the options were for a brownstone like this” As it turns out, further discussion with the man who gave the presentation and then with a solar installer made it clear that a small solar system would work well on Metz’s home. The house has a flat roof and virtually no shade. A year later, her system was up and running.

The total cost of the system was $30,261, but a rebate Metz received from a New York state incentives programs paid for about half of it. Though it will be a few years before Metz achieves the maximum financial benefit of her solar panels, because of the way she financed the system, when that day comes the payoff will be huge.

“Then I pay only the connection fee to be on the grid and something during the winter,” she said, “so my electric bill effectively goes down from over $1,000 to like a couple of hundred.”

Metz, who once ran for State Assembly as a Green Party candidate, also won’t have to worry so much about rising energy costs in the coming years or the impact she has on the environment.

“I expect electricity will be a lot more expensive, so the savings will be substantial,” said Metz. “And my feeling of doing the right thing will be enhanced. Because I know I’m doing everything I can to use my resources in a sustainable way.”

When giving a tour of her apartment, Metz climbed the rickety ladder up to the roof and admired the solar panels. They are a deep blue color edged in silver, made of silicon, and mounted at a slight angle to catch the maximum amount of sunlight. To the casual observer, the panels are probably not much to look at, but to Metz they are a thing of beauty.

“And look how natural it is,” she said, pointing. “Doesn’t it seem like they just belong here?”

Metz stared out over the other rooftops of her neighborhood—rooftops that are conspicuously empty. Only one other brownstone in her neighborhood has a solar system of its own.

“I was hoping that this district would take an interest in it,” she said, “but I’m afraid it didn’t happen.”

With 14,000 acres of unshaded rooftop space, according to the non-profit organization New York Sun Works, New York City has vast potential for solar energy. However, some critics charge that current government policies and Con Ed practices are stifling the fledgling solar industry. Installers speak of redundant safety and feasibility inspections and stalled paperwork that greatly add to the costs in time and money of each project. While the cost of solar power is steadily decreasing worldwide, the price has actually gone up in New York City. Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC, the city’s effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent in the next two decades, calls for a sizable increase in solar energy in the city. But it falls far short of the progress made in New Jersey, whose $100 million incentives program and solar-friendly electricity policies have made it the best state for solar in the country outside California. All in all, New York remains far behind the curve when it comes to solar.

While solar owners like Metz suffer a financial burden, solar—also called photovoltaic or PV—installers probably experience the worst of New York City’s solar industry pitfalls. Their role as middlemen between the customers and the various local and state agencies involved in installing a solar project is difficult and often frustrating. .

Solar Energy Systems is one such installation company, housed in a six-story industrial warehouse taking up several blocks in the northwest tip of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, past all the small residential streets and mom-and-pop storefronts. Most of the warehouse’s other tenants are artists or craftsmen. On one wall of the office hangs a poster of the trendy Brooklyn restaurant Habana Outpost, whose solar installation was a favorite project of Solar Energy Systems’ owners David Buckner and Chris Moustakis.

Since forming their partnership in 2002, Buckner and Moustakis have struggled to grow their business. After almost six years as a company, Solar Energy Systems is just now breaking even financially.

“I knew it was going to take a while to get a business started up in the industry,” Buckner said. “I didn’t realize how long it was going to take. Like I always say, if I look back I probably wouldn’t have done it because it was tough. Really tough.”

Buckner, 37, and Moustakis, 42, did not always dream of becoming solar installers. They originally set out on the stereotypical New York career trajectory on Wall Street. Yet, as the stock exchange entered the digital age and Buckner’s job as a broker on the stock market floor threatened to become obsolete, he decided he wanted to do something completely different with his life.

“It just happened that this was kind of interesting to me,” said Buckner. “I have a brother who’s in construction. My dad’s a chemical engineer. So I have a little bit of an inkling for it.”

After attending a solar conference in Massachusetts, Buckner began working part-time as a solar installer in 1998. Moustakis joined him a couple of years later, and the two formed a company called Alternative Power with their friend Anthony Pereira. When the two parted ways with Pereira in 2002, Buckner and Moustakis changed the name to Solar Energy Systems.

“I didn’t get into this because it was an environmental thing,” Buckner said. However, “I liked the fact that it’s associated with it and it does reduce emissions.”

Buckner and Moustakis have an easy partnership, cracking jokes and finishing each other’s sentences. Moustakis is the louder of the two and often interrupts his soft-spoken colleague. The two somewhat resemble the comedic duo Laurel and Hardy, although Buckner is a bit taller and Moustakis, though portly, doesn’t have a mustache.

Their senses of humor must have come in handy in the early years in the solar business. In the early 2000s, few people knew solar was even possible in New York. As one of only two or three companies who were installing PV at the time and without any sort of marketing budget, finding customers was sometimes difficult. Moustakis and Buckner experienced long periods when no money was coming in.

“From having a corporate card and running around New York City, being a jackass, to having no income for a couple of years and really like—,” Buckner started to say. “I was bar-backing to kind of make it by for a while.”

Starting Solar Energy Systems with just Buckner and Moustakis meant finishing installations as fast as possible so that they could get back to the office to try to move more units.

“I remember stupidly like being up on roofs—,” Buckner began.

“In the dark with a flashlight,” Moustakis interjected, referring to how the two sometimes worked day and night to put in panels.

“In the dark wiring stuff, flashlight in hand, just trying to get this thing done,” said Buckner.

“We didn’t have enough employees,” said Moustakis.

When Bev is not cleaning up after Sam’s naps, she gets out. In fact, she’s become a sort of local celebrity and can’t walk down the street without being noticed. She makes her rounds, saying hello to certain residents of their apartment building, grocers at the grocery store, baristas at the local coffee shops, the busboys and maître d’s of her favorite restaurants, and the volunteers at the senior center over on Ninth Avenue. Even complete strangers will say “Hi, there!” or “Good morning” as if they were dear friends.

This is because she stands out.

Bev’s coiffure is large and white. She spends hours each week in a hair salon to keep her voluptuous curls intact. “I want it big!” she demands to her stylist in a nasal Brooklyn accent. Throughout the day she’ll look in the mirror disapprovingly, her hair flattened by gravity, and she’ll retreat to the bathroom to spray some noxious congealment to defy Newton’s famous observation, and maybe add a dab of her patent fuchsia lipstick to her lips. Her outfits are meticulously chosen, and she has a flair for color. Her favorite shirt is covered in an orange leopard print. She’s stylish. Even those with eye-problems can see her from blocks away because of the reflection of light from her gold and diamond pieces of jewelry. On any given day she wears at least a total of 6 rings on 10 fingers, a few necklaces and on occasion a broach or two pinned to her lapel. If you ask her, there is a story behind each piece, and a reason she wears each one. But to most people who do not know her, she is just that old lady who looks like an Elizabethan Don King.

Sam has his share of pals, but he has trouble remembering their names. He’s almost ten years older than his wife. When it’s nice out, he likes to sit on a park bench with their dog Buddy and blow kisses to the cherubic aides assisting the elderly in wheelchairs. Bev says she doesn’t mind his flirting, but one gets the sense she disapproves. It’s not so much jealousy at this point; it seems more like an annoyance.

“Oh, that Sammy,” she says throwing up her hands, “he’s such a ladies’ man.”
Their apartment is on the fourth floor of a 22-story red brick apartment building set back from Eighth Avenue by a sprawling, perfectly manicured green lawn littered with “Keep Off The Grass” signs. Their building was constructed with the city’s money in the late 1950s to house industrious middle-income workers looking for an affordable place to live. But now those residents are old and well into retirement, their pensions gradually siphoning off to medical bills and grandkid’s birthday envelopes. Automatic handicapped doors were installed throughout the building in the last ten years, and bright orange flyers are posted on a bulletin board that hangs outside the elevators -offering in-house health care services and bus trips to Atlantic City. Most days it is much too warm in the building for an average human being. Some residents sit idly on benches in the lobby for hours, some in wheelchairs, some with aides, and a visitor gets the eerily distinct impression that they are waiting for someone or something that will probably never come.

That independence was to come at a cost, and not until a decade later. But when it did happen this February, the weight that had held so many in the past lifted.

For 30-year-old Florim Lajqi (pronounced Lie-chee) of the Bronx, it meant friends he’d lost in the war “would be given a proper peace.” He was one of the thousands to fight for the Kosovo Liberation Army against Serb forces in the 1999 Kosovo war, and he was part of the Atlantic Battalion from New York to make the trip to the front lines. But after he returned to New York following the war, the mission never felt as if it were accomplished.

Kosovo came under UN administration and for years remained a part of Serbia. When the former province at last became an independent country earlier this year, Florim felt obligated to return there to witness its birth in person. It was a moment he’d fought for, and a day his friends died fighting for—and he would bring back with him the soil, a part of the earth, from a liberated Kosovo for the people who’d sacrificed their lives.

Florim knew that the moment war in Kosovo became inevitable in 1998, it was his responsibility to drop his life in New York and answer to the growing conflict’s beckoning call. It was a simple choice for the then 21-year-old to join the small contingent of Albanian Kosovar fighters, even though he had, by then, spent most of his life here in the United States, and was attending John Jay College in Manhattan. Florim was urged on by a sense of duty and impassioned by the stories he’d grown up listening to about the events ravaging the Balkans.

His father told of the atrocities the Serbs were committing as the dissolution of Yugoslavia yielded wars from Croatia to Bosnia, and later in Macedonia. The Serbian province of Kosovo however, though experiencing suppression from Belgrade, remained untouched by open conflict until 1998—but it was not at all insulated from the events happening across the region.

As the war raged on in Bosnia, the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, who make up roughly 90 percent of the population, took a different approach to handling Belgrade’s policies. While some called for outright independence, most actively rallied for a return of autonomy to the province, which it previously enjoyed until the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic stripped it on coming to power in 1989.

The repression of Albanians in Kosovo set the precedent for a passive resistance movement that emerged under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova, head of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). Rugova attempted to remind the world of the dangers that Kosovo could face if nothing was done to relieve the Albanians of Serbian persecution. But in the fragile peace among fractured Balkan nations it was easy for outsiders to ignore the growing concerns of the Kosovar Albanians, and many became radicalized amid worsening ethnic tensions and a sagging economy.

As welcomed as Rugova’s movement was, it soon lost its luster and momentum as his pacifist approach yielded little. By 1998, what was previously a whisper of the Kosovo Liberation Army had become a full-blown cry. The demand for independence grew, and violence between the Serb and Albanian sides escalated, prompting Milosevic to instigate a crackdown, eventually culminating in war.

A young Florim Lajqi watched these events with impatience from afar. He had immigrated to the United States when he was 3, but frequent visits to his family’s home near Peja, in western Kosovo, kept the place close to his heart. So when war seemed imminent in the Balkans early on, Florim hoped that any kind of conflict in Kosovo would wait a few years for him to grow up, to be of fighting age.

“I remember some reporters saying that the war might start in Kosovo, and Albania might get involved, and I’m like ‘Oh God, I’m only 12, please, please, I hope it [won’t] start… at least until I’m 16 when I can fight, ‘cause I know… I know my parents won’t let me go.’”

So eager was he to fight in Kosovo against the Serbs that when the province did slide towards war, Florim made sure he enlisted himself at every demonstration held by Albanians in New York, hoping that he would eventually receive a call to join the KLA—and by April, he got his answer.

“The war in Kosovo started in ’98, I was twenty at that time, but as soon as it started I was like ‘perfect, this is perfect, perfect,’ and I was in college at that time and I was going to drop everything, drop all my friends, girlfriends, school—everything, I’m going to fight. This is it.” Florim paused and then recalled saying to himself: “I can never live with myself if I don’t go and fight.”

Before them stood a log cabin assembled from a made-to-order kit. On the house’s deck, a leather-clad crowd huddled around the simmering grill as children chased each other through a maze of Harleys. Americana on acid. Katrina and her three brothers cannonballed into the backyard pool while some of their friends raced dirt bikes. The 60-person party resembled a Boy Scout troop reunion if all the Tiger Cubs, Bobcats, Wolfs, Bears and Webelos grew up and joined the Hell’s Angels. Two tattoo artists sterilized their equipment in a white tent, ready to touch up any of the bikers’ faded ink. Soon the sun began to set, its rays ricocheting off the Appalachians towering overhead.

Donna, then 46, always wanted a tattoo. After scanning through the artists’ tomes of previous work, she convinced her daughter to get the same kind as her mother—like a pair of outstretched bat wings punctured with hearts. Across her lower back, where Jessica Alba, Christina Aguilera, Victoria Beckham, Angelina Jolie, Norah Jones, Anna Kournikova and Eva Longoria all now flaunt lasting skin decals. This was several years before a woman’s lower back tattoo elicited eye rolls and society’s typecasting as one of those girls. It was long before the cultural backlash, sneering remarks, and today’s inescapable catchphrase—the “tramp stamp.”

Just after 10 p.m., Katrina changed into her fleece blue and purple pajamas with smiley face stars, and sat down backwards on a folding metal chair.

“You’re 16, right?” one of the tattoo artists inquired suspiciously.

“Yep,” 15-year-old Katrina responded. Her mom nodded in agreement.

Then the needle pricked Katrina at the base of her spine.

“It was like if you took a pin and jabbed it in my skin, and dragged it across my back for two and a half hours,” Katrina says. “People tell you it’s going to get numb—it’s a total fucking lie.”

As Katrina gnawed on a Pepsi can to distract her from the pain, the second artist began the same process on Donna. Mike, a devout patron of the Manhattan bar Hogs & Heifers (he stopped cutting his hair in the 80s), still had no tattoos of his own. Now he gaped at the two women he loved most while they got theirs: a permanent rite of passage into the biker kingdom.

When asked if she ever regretted her tattoo, Katrina responded, “I never had buyer’s remorse, like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I just did that!’” But back home her boyfriend, Rob, called her tattoo “disgusting,” and they broke up a week later.

For Katrina and her mom, their “backcents” serve as fun reminders of their bonding experience. Rob was one of many disdainers who believe that females with such tattoos use their bodies as billboards, broadcasting their kinky sexual practices to the world. If a man sees a woman’s “tramp stamp,” he might instinctively multiply her imaginary number of sexual partners by 10. Minimum.

Today, Katrina’s wardrobe gives no hint of promiscuity: seafoam sweatshirt with lettering inside the hood, grey t-shirt supporting her Becton High School football team, army green capris, plaid Birkenstock knock-offs from Target and a Stephen Colbert “Wrist Strong” bracelet. Her flat-ironed brown hair complements her minimally made-up face.

“The fact that [Rob's] girlfriend had one on her back was so skanky to him,” Katrina said, sipping her hazelnut coffee at The Grey Dog, a café blocks from her NYU classrooms. Next year she will graduate with a degree in Childhood and Special Education, licensing her to teach elementary school.

Yet conventional frat boy wisdom emphasizes that the bigger a girl’s lower back tattoo, the bigger whore she is. Men who use “tramp stamp” seem to love it like half-off Heinekens. Not only do the words rhyme, but these guys say the term perfectly describes the women possessing this specific tattoo. Until a few years ago, men kept the label to themselves; the password to a he-man, woman-bangers club. But the catchphrase soon gained popularity among the ladies, too, both the have-tats and the have-nots.

Women use the saying when gossiping to single out such anatomy-embellishing peers as sluts. Some of the “stamped” make fun of themselves for acting solely on a youthful impulse; others advocate reclaiming “tramp” so that men can no longer employ it as an insult. A large portion of the tattooed women interviewed for this article still bristle at the “tramp stamp” connotation, which they are now all too familiar with after newspaper writers picked up on the phrase two years ago, giving clout to a risqué, once obscure joke. In recent months, Toys R Us stores nationwide pulled child-size “lower back tattoos” from their sticker machines after parents complained. Thus the debate that began in dive bars went mainstream over whether a “tramp stamp” warrants its reputation and if youngsters should have them. The question reignites lingering issues about double standards, sexual empowerment and “good girls” versus “bad girls” – all converging around a tattoo.

All were on display last winter on stage at Culture Project in Soho, in a show called “Tings Dey Happen.” This was a 90 minute emotional rollercoaster, a one-man show written by Hoyle in which he portrays more than 20 characters, educating the audience about oil politics in Nigeria and the nitty-gritty of globalization. Hopelessness and ambition are in constant juxtaposition; events unfold at a manic pace.

“Tings” is based on the year (2005) that Hoyle spent in Nigeria as a Fulbright scholar, observing how corrupt oil flow stations—transport arenas for crude oil extracted from offshore rigs—affect society. What he created is unlike anything most audience members have seen, but that’s because Hoyle has experienced what they can only imagine.

The Niger Delta has probably never been featured in Condé Nast Traveler. A character in the play says about the region, “Even black people don’t want to come back here no more.” With frequent kidnappings and attacks on the oil infrastructure, the area doesn’t attract many outside visitors, making Hoyle’s trip that much more unique.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation at about 140 million. It gained independence from the United Kingdom October 1, 1960 and 16 years of contentious military rule followed. The country has a history of terrible civil war and longstanding ethnic and religious tension.

It is the world’s 12th highest oil producer and 8th highest oil exporter, producing 3 million barrels of oil a day. Most of the petroleum is shipped to the United States. Former military rulers were over-dependent on the oil sector, mismanaging and corrupting the economy. Influential major oil companies serve as a corrupt government proxy (as a militant in Hoyle’s play puts it: “We go and protest Shell because we know that’s going to make news. We go and protest government and nobody cares”). Democratic elections are a recent, violent phenomenon and much of local politics is dictated by the wills of the Oil Majors: Shell, Chevron, Exxon, Agip, and Elf.

Failed attempts at coups and reforms have led many Nigerians to believe change and stability is not viable. They’ve acclimated to the corrupt government, finding ways to make it work for them. “It’s like the devil you know,” Hoyle says, “is the devil you don’t.”

Dan Hoyle looks shockingly young to be playing in his third one-man show, off-Broadway no less. He has the athletic, attractive look like the slick frat bud who’d be a guy’s best friend and a girl’s one night stand, but what he also boasts is the uncanny ability to morph physically and vocally into characters far removed from his own life. His base is in San Francisco, where performance and intellect is in his blood—his father Geoff Hoyle is an actor and comedian and his mother Mary Winegarden is a lecturer at San Francisco State. At Northwestern University, Dan Hoyle double majored in Performance Studies and History. Much of his inspiration comes from writer-performers like Sarah Jones and Danny Hoch.

His first solo show, “Circumnavigator,” was based on an around-the-world trip to eight countries for three weeks to study globalization. The second show he created, “Florida 2004: The Big Bummer,” was based on his 10-day volunteer stint on John Kerry’s campaign trail. Both played in his native San Francisco. His essays have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle and he wrote for SportsIllustrated.com about his summer as a ballpark peanut vendor.

After a professor forwarded him a New York Times article about the violence in Nigeria, Hoyle applied for a Fulbright grant, awarded to applicants based on academic merit and leadership potential who propose international educational trips. Hoyle proposed the idea of studying the effects of oil politics in Nigeria, and turning the whole thing into his third show. The day he received notice that he’d gotten the Fulbright grant, several workers were killed outside a flow station in Escravos, Nigeria. Nonetheless, his plane took off March 2005.

Hoyle had traveled to more than 30 countries; Nigeria was by far the hardest to live in. How was life in the oil country? “It’s like Manhattan if the sewers didn’t work,” he says, “and the electricity was faulty and the roads were only paved in key places and there’s a lot more police around.”

He found Nigeria dysfunctional. “It’s like a party where the dog ate the cake, and the lights are out, and there’s a hole in the floor but people are still partying,” he said. And what else were they going to do? Things may be run down, and society may be broken, but as Hoyle said, they all just want to have a good time.

And while there’s a lot to be learned about the issues imbedded in “Tings,” it’s ultimately a show about the people. For Hoyle, the Nigerians were an accessible case study. “They have the gift of gab,” he said. “They are some of the best storytellers anywhere.” Most of all, they wanted Hoyle to get it right. “Anyone who told their story felt like justice was on their side,” he said.

He said as he encountered the people, he could see them coming to life on stage. He blended the roles of actor and researcher. “Part of the time I was trying to figure out what was happening,” he said. “And part of the time I was trying to figure out how to become these people.” Some days he went out with a notebook, some days he went out with a mini disc recorder, and some days he just walked and absorbed what was happening around him.

In the show, he encapsulates the bombastic pride of the militants and the vulnerable shyness of the worker he befriended. Early on, the audience is introduced to Cosi, a sniper Hoyle met on the Niger River delta, who kills people to earn money for college. He left his family when he was 14, hustled jobs in the city of Lagos, was in the Navy, quit, stole his two guns, went to Nembe Creek—roughly 250 miles away—and signed up as a fighter. In the whirlwind of the show’s revolving door of characters, the scenes featuring Cosi are the most compelling.

Cosi is controlled. He’s hard-edged. He’s vulnerable and scared, but he’s sure of himself. Hoyle’s physically loud performance shrinks into itself when he becomes Cosi. “Sometimes you have to kill some people to have your own dreams,” Cosi says in the play. As Cosi, Hoyle is always seated stage right, leaning on his knees, eyes piercing into the audience as he delivers his lines.

“Cosi’s hard (to portray) because emotionally sometimes you have to look at the audience being in New York and you’re trying to be in Nigeria,” Hoyle said.

His bond with Cosi is deep. While Hoyle was visiting Nembe Creek, outside a Shell flow station, Cosi played host, sharing his bed with him. He understood what Hoyle needed, helping him to gather sound effects and introducing him to people.

“We couldn’t be from farther places in the world,” Hoyle said. But one hot night, seated at stools at a small outdoor bar, Hoyle reached an understanding. “We’re sitting there and there was this sort of silence and it just struck me that it was profound that I was there experiencing this, and I felt kind of connected to him. And we just kind of felt like two guys hanging out on a Friday night, you know?”

And while Cosi’s scenes were riveting by nature of his character, one particular scene toward the end—a nearly incomprehensible one—captivates because Hoyle speaks in near-perfect, heavy pidgin. “Pidgin” is a unique dialect of English used in some regions of Nigeria. “What I hope the audience does there is really blur their ears and focus their eyes and just try to take in and feel 100 percent in Nigeria,” he said.

For Hoyle, learning pidgin was as much a means of survival as a tool for his play. When he was stopped at checkpoints by rifle-wielding guards, often the only reason he passed through was because he could negotiate in the native language. He said daily life in Nigeria was a constant dance of status-negotiation. If someone had higher status, Hoyle’s physical carriage had to be small and demure, vocally and physically. Sometimes he’d expand and intimidate to assert himself.

Other times the negotiation was an internal debate: whether to remain in the country or leave with the notes he had already made. Several months into his stay, he contracted malaria after he stopped taking preventive pills because they intensified his mood and tripped out his dreams. The Niger Delta is a swampy region, making mosquito bites practically inevitable. “It was hard to be sick in that kind of environment because you don’t feel taken care of the way you’re used to,” Hoyle said.

It is fascinating how believable Hoyle is while portraying the Africans, despite his skin color. Still, some audience members wondered how his color affected the stories he was told and the overall picture he portrays on stage.

“Everywhere I went, in every local dialect, I was called out for my whiteness,” said Rachel Ishofsky, an NYU student who studied in Ghana for a semester. “Strangers would point at me and smile. Some would ask for gifts. Others would want to touch my skin. Racial difference isn’t just a social construct there. White skin means that you’re from the world of the oppressors, or the liberators, or even just the land of Coca
Cola and MTV.”

Yet what Hoyle does in the play is to make skin color irrelevant. In a show ostensibly about racial issues and societal struggles, “Tings” becomes about the universality of the human heart—hearts have no skin color. “The fact that Dan played these characters, that he, in all his whiteness, took on their lives and problems, was a message to everyone in that room,” Ishofsky said. “We don’t need to buy into the system.”

“The fact that he’s white creates subtext,” said Dave Meyers, an audience member of African-American descent. Meyers, who applied for a Fulbright grant to study in Africa, decided to refocus his proposal to cover similar issues to those raised in “Tings.” “Seeing a white person capture that emotion really starts to guilt you, especially since it’s the Westerners who are ruining the Africans’ lives,” he said.

Charlie Varon, the show’s director, agrees that Hoyle offers new insight into what’s going on in a part of the world Westerners often ignore. “Dan takes Nigeria on its own terms,” he said. “It is a country full of energy and hustle, and he’s able to embody that on stage. He commits fully to Nigerian speech, Nigerian body language, Nigerian energy, and the Nigerian way of seeing the world.”

But Hoyle maintains that his show is not meant to make a “charity case” out of the situation in Africa. In the final monologue, a Nigerian official says, “You feel sad for Africa? Don’t feel sad for Africa. We don’t need your pity.”

No, Hoyle is much more humble about his objectives. He’s offering a new way to think: to think like a black man, think like a Nigerian, think differently.

“I kind of have this privilege with the play for 90 minutes to give people this new vocabulary, kind of explain it and try to teach you Nigeria from Nigeria,” he said. “And not just teach you, show you. And if you want to come, you can come. And if you don’t, that’s cool too.”

His last line in the play: “Africa is just da place where bad tings happen. Yes, tings dey happen.”

After “Tings” closed December 22, Hoyle performed another six-week run in San Francisco, where the show won the 2007 Will Glickman Award for Best New Play in the Bay Area. He was also nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award, which recognizes off-Broadway theatre, for Oustanding Solo Show and has toured colleges performing the play.

This summer Hoyle traveled across the country researching a show about small town/rural America. Theatergoers will soon see what he has uncovered—the things that happen there.

Osman and Melinda’s market is hidden deep in Sunset Park, providing for a pocket of Albanian, Arab and Turkish Muslims living on the blocks between the avenues of a continually swelling Chinatown. Just upstairs is Fatih Camii Mosque, established in 1981 by a Turkish Muslim. The mosque, hidden from street view on the second floor, has kept the building like a stronghold for the past 27 years. You won’t find any kind of sign marking its existence. Instead, mountains of produce pour out of Osman and Melinda’s store, protected by plastic sheets that begin hanging from just beside the front door and wrap around the corner. “Birlik Market—Taste the Best at Birlik—Halal Meats,” reads the red and white pinstriped awning, accented by Arabic characters that spell out “Halal” beside the English. Written there side by side, “Halal” and “Birlik” are like a flashing light signaling the existence of Chinatown’s hidden population. “Halal” is an Islamic standard for food, while the Turkish word “Birlik” translates loosely to unity. Many of the neighborhood’s Turkish Muslim residents walking up and down the avenue may not be able to look at Birlik Market without thinking of Turkiye Birlik Partisi, for instance, Turkey’s nationalist Islamic political party.

Eighth Avenue stretches uphill to meet the horizon and a pillar of the Verrazano Bridge, which looms over the neighborhood like a giant domino. Long past sundown, when the night has rendered the pillar invisible, Osman makes his way over to sit by Melinda, rubbing his tired eyes and looking repeatedly at the clock behind him, not paying much attention to his father who has picked up another Turkish newspaper from the stand near the register. When the clock strikes one, the three of them can think about going home together to their Kingsbridge neighborhood in the northwest section of the Bronx.

Melinda waits on most of the customers this time of night with Osman sitting by her side, passing the time speaking to Turkish residents of the area in their shared language or leaping up on Melinda’s orders to help a customer find a product buried in one of the three cherry wood shelves in the back of the store. He watches each customer carefully as they make their way out the door, regarding them not so much with suspicion as with curiosity, waiting to nod goodbye should they look his way.

At about 5’7” Melinda is not much shorter than Osman. She can thank her Dominican father for her dark complexion, which perplexes those who know her much lighter-skinned Puerto Rican mother. Osman, on the other hand, has skin that could be described as porcelain were it not for the layer of black scruff that descends from in front of his ears to the middle of his neck. His angular, almond-shaped eyes look all the larger next to Melinda’s pea-sized ones, magnified a little by the frameless glasses she wears. Dressed in a sports jacket, orange t-shirt, and a baseball cap, Melinda insists that she doesn’t wear makeup at all. Her straightened, thick black hair runs from under her cap past her shoulders, where it bunches up in the back of her jacket’s collar. The style seems to have rubbed off on Osman, who, when he’s at leisure, wears blue slacks, a t-shirt and worn out white tennis shoes. Behind the butcher’s counter though, he’ll probably be wearing a white apron stained with a bit of blood. When he first met Melinda, she was dressed quite differently, in a starched formal shirt and a business suit more appropriate for the bank-managing job she then held.

Melinda managed a Citigroup branch when she came across Osman, who was living solely off the money he made running a pedicab business on West End Avenue. “I was walking just outside of Rockefeller Center and noticed all these pedicabs,” Melinda explains. “And I wondered why they were there, what was going on. I had never seen them there before. So I asked a driver. And he didn’t know any English. So he called Osman over.” She may have been as up front then as she is now, but it was Osman who, after offering her a ride in one of his pedicabs, asked her for her number. She refused the ride, but took his number because, as she says, “You never know what friends you’re going to keep.”

Melinda speaks about how easily Osman eventually fit into her own family, revealing a warm and outgoing man behind the cold stone stare. “He may as well be Latino.” she says. “‘Cause he loves Spanish food. We call him the pseudo-Latino.” She speaks about how he’s won the hearts of her older sister and her mother. “My sister loves him. Loves. Him. She was like his coach on how to get me.”

A forty-something Turkish man, a regular here, walks in and talks with an accent that makes Osman’s sound all-American by comparison. He throws his head back upon hearing the ring of his cell, “My wife is calling again. She thinks she’s the boss, you know, forcing me to come home.” Melinda smiles, thinking about all the times this episode has been repeated every night. “It’s like she’s got a radar on you. “she says. “It’s amazing, always calling when you come in here.” The customer turns to Osman and poses a question to him. “Well, you tell me. Who’s the boss?” Osman resists answering, but eventually leans back and points a finger at Melinda before admitting, “Right here.”

You see, the game of poker can take more from you than just your money. It can savage your dignity. The warm sun doesn’t seem to shine when you have empty pockets. Bitter winds whipping around street corners make you shiver and you think about hunger and death and, of course, the lack of rent. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can manage to cadge a couple of Marlboros to help you reflect on your defeat.

It’s been a while since I sat in a poker room in Manhattan, even though I know they’re up and running. I prefer to sit at small house games, usually with my friends and co-workers. Should I feel the need to play higher stakes, well, Atlantic City is only a short trip away. It wasn’t just my cold hands that caused me to stop playing in the underground circuit—it was my realization that there’s more risk involved than just the chips on the table.

Straddles, one of the clubs I used to go to on Third Avenue and 37th Street, was shut down in mid-October along with its sister club, Fairview. I heard Straddles was reopening and was waiting on a phone call from a friend to get the address. When my friend rang me, though, it was not the news I was expecting: the club had reopened, but a player was murdered.

City Limits, the new club name, had occupied the top floor of a seven-story building on Fifth Avenue and 28th Street for shortly over a week. Around 10 p.m. on Friday, November 2nd, three men wearing ski masks and waving their guns, pushed a guard into the elevator and went up to the poker parlor. When the elevator opened, the three men burst into the room ordering players to give up their cash. As two of the gunmen worked the card players, one of them went to the cashier, who protested, but was severely beaten into giving up the money he kept behind the counter. One of the gunmen working the room, clearly not a master criminal, dropped his shotgun and as he picked up the sawed-off from the floor, hit the trigger and blasted Frank Desena, 55, of Wayne, NJ, in the chest. He was pronounced dead at St. Vincent’s Hospital before midnight. The police explained that the three robbers got away with an estimated $100,000.

Since the incident, only one man has been arrested for the fatal heist. Steven Perez, 21, of Tampa, FL., who was caught on the club’s surveillance tapes, admitted to his part in the robbery. However, it has not been proven that he pulled the trigger and the other two men are still at large.

“Frank was one of the only consistent winners I’d seen play,” said an ex-card dealer, 34, who preferred to remain anonymous, and added, “No one wins in New York.” As a dealer at Playstation for three years before it was closed down in 2005, the ex-dealer often sat at tables with Desena and got to know the older man. Desena was a former math teacher at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, NJ, and the married father of a 16-year-old daughter. I asked the ex-dealer if he thought the murder would affect the world of clandestine card games. He shrugged: “I think it’s going to scare quite a few people away.”

Poker parlor robberies are not unusual, of course. Although only one other was reported in Manhattan on June 15, 2006 at the National Card Room on E. 61st Street, most robberies go unreported. The reason is obvious: operators of illegal gambling facilities are unlikely to call the police for help. Each card house typically has security guards and surveillance cameras, but not one employee is armed in order to avoid RICO Act charges. Not only would the owners be charged with operating a gambling facility, but armed guards fall under chapter 7 in Title 18 of United States Code. This clause prohibits “’impeding’ with employees of the United States while engaged in or on account of the performance of official duties.”

The murder at City Limits was certainly a shock, but not surprising. The underground scene welcomed a diverse crowd, such as cab drivers, bartenders, small-business owners, construction workers, students and professors. Occasionally, there was a celebrity sighting. The Daily News and Page Six have reported the likes of film stars Hank Azaria and Macaulay Culkin, and baseball giant Alex Rodriquez as frequent players in card houses. Yet the parlors have also become more and more saturated with rigid gamblers, not skill players, those without strategy who just play on chance alone.

“Poker isn’t what it used to be a couple years ago,” said Jordan, a 29-year-old bartender in the East Village. Before the crackdown, he had been a regular for a couple of years at Straddles. He explained the type of card playing in these rooms as “degeneracy” and compared the experience of sitting in a poker parlor to being in a room full of problem drinkers. “When I sit at a table [in a card house],” he says, “I feel like I’m at an AA meeting.”

Gaining access to a poker parlor wasn’t a problem either. All it took was a couple hundred bucks and knowing somebody—anybody. Any shmoe that’d been there at least once could vouch for someone new. My first visit consisted of a friend’s friend vouching for me. I was given a name and a number to call when I reached the door on Broadway and 27th Street. “Chip” was at the door before I hit “end call.” He introduced himself as he walked me to the elevator. He directed me to the cashier when we got inside and I was given my membership ID to Fairview Elite – good for entrance to Straddles as well. The next night, before I got to know anyone in the place, I helped my friends to get their IDs.

Thus, I became a regular at Fairview. I went typically on weeknights—the weekends were a bit too busy for my taste. No matter what the night, I must admit: I often thought about how easy it would be for someone to rob the joint.

From the outside, the building looked like any other on the street: a small five-story apartment building. I would step to the buzzer to push the button marked “Fairview Elite.” Above, a camera light turned on. As I got to know some of the workers, I would occasionally stick my tongue out at the camera and extend my pinky and forefinger to add rock-n-roll effect. Sometimes, I just liked to mess with the guy working the door. I was pretty sure he got tired of seeing the same wretched mugs over and over in his monitor.

When the door buzzed open I walked through the hall to the elevator. The small lobby had fading blue walls, with grime that rose two feet off the floor, as if in retreat from the filth of the blue-gray tiles below. The elevator had dark, wood-like panels and smelled of weed. I turned to face the closing door and pushed the button for the third floor. For a moment I tried to consider my game. I guess I was putting on my game face. Sometimes, I thought about how I ended up in a place like this. I thought about my father.

In The Beginning, There Were Cards

When I was a kid, my parents used to host “poker night” at our house in Milford, CT. Their friends would come over to play what’s known as “dealer’s choice.” That is, the dealer, which rotated, had the privilege of deciding the game played: Five Card Draw, Seven Card Stud, Follow the Queen and Seven Card No Peek were some of the favorites. The now popular Texas Hold’em wasn’t a big game 20 years ago. If I promised not to say anything, or give any information away about his hand, my pop would let me sit on his lap to watch him play. He’d show me his cards, but then I was left to observe the table. Occasionally, I’d laugh at someone’s dirty joke, pretending I understood it.

I learned at an early age what hands beat what, and also the different strategies players used. My old man wasn’t a big gambler; he just liked to play clean, low-risk house games with friends. He was strongly against high stakes gambling. He was a good player, though. He was careful, smart. He knew when to bluff and, more importantly, he knew when to fold. He liked to trap his opponents, and wait for them to bet into him—a tactic known as “sandbagging.”

At the end of the night, we would review the night’s game. He’d say something like: “Did you see that one hand, Joe? He thought I was holding a pair, maybe two. He had no idea I had the flush.”

My pop taught me not so much how to read a player on a poker table, but how an opponent may read me. He had no idea that I would hold on to these little lessons. He had no idea that I’d actually take this game seriously and, in a sense, become the sort of gambler he was so against. He would always tell me to never bet what I couldn’t afford to lose. My response was always, “Don’t lose.”

By the time I hit high school, weekend house parties meant taking over the kitchen to play cards. I was always able to find a handful of drunken kids willing to bet some beer money. When I began working, I would find co-workers who played cards and join the weekly games. By the time I moved to New York about three years ago, I’d already been playing Texas Hold’em for a couple of years. I was growing hungry for higher stakes. Unwilling to travel to a casino, though, there was only one place to go: card houses.

I was 25 when I first stepped into Fairview. On my first few visits, I had turned a couple of hundred bucks into a couple of grand. It’s easy to feel like you’re in the big time when you walk away with a wallet you can’t even close because it’s stuffed with Grants and Franklins. On my winning nights, I’d stop by the smoke shop and buy a Macanudo Maduro to celebrate.

On my last few visits to Fairview, however, it had been a while since I sat back and pulled on a nice cigar. I was on a losing streak: cold hands. Every time I thought I had a good hand, it would turn out second place. In poker, that’s first loser. I lost a lot of money, but I was heading to change that. I was ready, like so many pathetic gambling degenerates before me, to change my luck. I kept this hidden from my father.

“The day I found out I was an adult Indigo,” McCarthy wrote in a 2006 blog entry, “will stay with me forever. I was walking hand in hand with my son down a Los Angeles street when this [woman] approached me and said, ‘You’re an Indigo and your son is a Crystal.’ I immediately replied, ‘Yes!’ and the woman smiled at me and walked away.” Shortly after, McCarthy started IndigoMoms.com, an online forum for mothers to discuss their “special little spirits’ soul mission” that she promoted with apparel and an appearance on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show.

Generations of twentysomethings best remember McCarthy as a former Playboy playmate and spunky co-host of MTV’s dating show Singled Out. When her son was diagnosed with autism before his third birthday, McCarthy went on a media crusade to raise awareness about the spectrum disorder. Parents of children with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders heralded her as a leader of the neurodiversity movement, optimistic her celebrity could help their cause. So it came as a slap in the face to them when McCarthy awakened to a phenomenon far removed from mainstream medicine.

In The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived, motivational speakers and metaphysicians Lee Carroll and Jan Tober compiled a mish-mash of interviews and anecdotes related to them by education specialists, New Age gurus, and children and their families detailing “the most exciting…change in basic human nature that has ever been observed”: a worldwide concept of highly sensitive children with a keen intuition, artistic spirit, defiant sense of purpose, and the occasional psychic ability. Some Indigos report channeling spirits and angels, while others claim they are themselves angels who can remember past lives, though possessing a supposed psychic ability is not a requirement to be Indigo. A child is usually Indigo into early adolescence, but the label can apply into adulthood depending on how strongly the personality remains characteristically Indigo. More recently, The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Indigo Children asserts, “Indigo children defy categorization,” before listing a page of celebrities the authors (two other New Age spiritualists) speculate are or were Indigo according to their rubric. Besides the aforementioned, Steve Jobs, George Lucas and Amelia Earhart have all been anointed Indigo. (The Indigo Girls are conspicuously absent.) As the next step in human evolution and supposed catalysts for high levels of spiritual change in the world, Indigos comprise an estimated 95 percent of the children born since 1999, according to the authors. Crystal children are the most recent category emerging on the horizon. Their role is to temper the impact caused by Indigos.

Originating from her observations that some children emanated a purple glow, or aura, about them, Nancy Ann Tappe, a parapsychologist and self-identifying synesthete and psychic, first introduced the term Indigo in the 1980s. Auras are mystical electromagnetic energies also referred to as “life colors” or “chakras.” According to believers, the aura’s color reveals the true nature of a person. The Indigo aura, one of the most highly regarded, is indicative of deep feeling, creativity, sensitivity, and intuition.

But to the average observer untrained in New Age ideology, these hues are nonexistent. Physicians and psychologists examining Indigo children frequently observe behavioral and emotional problems that prompt diagnoses of ADHD, bipolar disorder, Asperger’s and autism, and sometimes worse. Literature on Indigos provides an all-encompassing array of special abilities, quirks, and behaviors these children possess: extreme defiance of authority, nonconformity in generalized social settings, daydreaming, and high creativity are just a few identifying traits of children with Indigo auras—and spectrum disorders, and ADHD. Because many of these characteristics overlap with symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders, skeptics of the Indigo movement argue that parents subscribing to the idea are in denial of their children’s medical conditions and withholding necessary therapies. Others simply chalk it up to lazy parenting: on the online vending site CaféPress.com, one merchant sells a t-shirt that reads, “I’m not BAD. I’m Indigo.”

In spite of this backlash, at least 14 books have been published on how to raise your Indigo child in the last ten years alone, including one this past February. While mainstream media coverage has dwindled (a resurgence egged on by IndigoMoms.com in 2006 caught the attention of ABC News, CNN, and the New York Times), the movement’s momentum is not slowing. Tober and Carroll’s landmark, now in its 38th printing, was translated into Spanish. Seminars by Tober, Carroll, and followers are still selling (and frequently selling out) internationally, some for hundreds of dollars. Dozens of websites and message boards thrive with activity from dedicated parents who believe seeing their children through Indigo-colored glasses has helped in raising them in happiness and good health. And curious mothers and fathers to this day wonder if they should be doing same.