The crowded and noisome fish markets, the vendors sitting in crude shanties filled with counterfeit handbags, the language and lettering: all transported me to a different city that I didn’t understand. ‘I’m not in Manhattan anymore,’ I thought when I first moved into Chinatown two years ago. I felt like an outsider in my own neighborhood. Because I was an outsider.

Now, as I walk Chinatown, I feel I’m at home. Here are some of the people and their places in my neighborhood.

I. Columbus Park

At the Mulberry Street entrance to Columbus Park, two Chinese shoemakers sit on crates, briskly sawing off the worn heels of shoes and nailing on replacements they’ve cut from sheets of rubber. The morning air is filled with the chirps of songbirds in wooden cages, hung in the trees surrounding the entrance.

Lugging his overstuffed backpack, Belgian tourist Dirk Bosraams surveys the groups of men playing Chinese chess, the women playing cards, the chorale wailing Chinese opera. Fresh from a three-week sojourn in Southeast Asia, Bosraams came downtown to visit the park because a friend told him it was a microcosm of Chinese culture in New York. “This park, right now,” he says, tugging at his scruffy traveler’s beard, “is more authentic than some places in Vietnam.”

The small patch of green in the heart of Chinatown was finally restored and reopened after 30 years of neglect on October 25, 2007 as an homage to traditional Chinese architecture. Its pavilion echoes the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, with its slanted slate roof, concrete columns and exposed wooden rafters. Here in my neighborhood, bamboo trees sprout everywhere and the gardens are accented with large jagged rocks. The nights are illuminated by big iron lamps with decorative dragonheads. The park is alive with people tying together the mind, body and soul through cultural activities. Beyond the pavilion, there are even basketball courts for youngsters dreaming of becoming the new Yao Ming.

Columbus Park wasn’t always influenced by Eastern thought. During the mid-1800s it was the heart of the Five Points. This was the most notorious slum in the United States, the subject of Herbert Asbury’s 1927 classic “The Gangs of New York”, and the Martin Scorsese 2002 film loosely based on the book. The dangerous and desperate intersection of Baxter, Worth, Bayard, Mosco and Mulberry, and its surrounding streets from Broadway to the Bowery, was riddled with club-toting, hobnail-boot-wearing gangs like the 40 Thieves, Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies, most of them Irish. But after the almost three-acre park was built in 1890, the turf was reclaimed for family activities, public gatherings and a tentative, emerging Chinese culture. Today, people of all ages and nationalities mix there, enjoying – some as observers, some as participants – the sounds of the World War II era Chinese arias, the languid yet disciplined motions of Tai-Chi, the spirited Chinese chess matches, the strolling herbalists and acupuncturists whose storefronts dot the surrounding neighborhood.

Dirk Bosraams is duly impressed. “Some places are designed to attract tourists,” he says. “But Columbus Park is not. It is designed for people to enjoy themselves.”

The real point, the doubtful say, is not about the money or trade with Cuba. It’s about the trapped Cuban political prisoners and the sustained violations of human rights. If the embargo is lifted before the Cuban people are freed from the rule of the Castro brothers, they might always be trapped. It is the Cuban people and the country of Cuba that they have always been in love with, wanting both enough to leave after Fidel Castro took power in the 1950s and established a hardline communist government. My song, adding to the melancholy whispers of Cuba, is about the obsession a people can have for a place they’ve never seen. It’s a sudden awakening of the Cuban blood in your veins, richer and running deeper than you ever imagined. The food you eat and the accent on your tongue are privately, mysteriously shared by people scattered across this country and others. It’s the tale of every immigrant and all their children.

1. The Drama of Cuban Life

Carmen Pelaez’s Cuba smells like petroleum and cigars. Its grass grows vibrantly green from cracks in the pavement, and tall, regal palm trees shoot from the pebbly ground where rotting buildings have crumbled. Cuba tastes like rich, juicy vegetables grown without fertilizer and bland, government-issue rice littered with tiny rocks. A Mariah Carey or Toni Braxton CD plays as neighbors wait together in long lines for rationed bread.

This is the Cuba that Carmen Pelaez, a curvy, animated young woman with dark hair and long eyebrows, ready to perk up at any hint of sarcasm, found when she stepped out of a plane in Havana almost ten years ago.

A country falling to pieces, the homeland of her exiled parents, and the muse for her one-woman show. “It’s the body of a loved one, the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen, decaying, but still breathing,” Pelaez said. “Which makes it terrible…but amazing. It’s a constant contradiction between beauty and ruin. It’s a two-sided coin.”

This conflict became the theme of her play, “Rum and Coke.” She started writing it before her initial visit, and over the next five years, during three more visits, she continued to craft the play. It consists of five monologues illustrating a young woman’s travels through Cuba–the people she meets, and what she learns.

Since 1998, Pelaez has been performing the play for a variety of audiences, from Los Angeles to New York. She said she loves performing for international communities because she wants her characters to show human experience first, but through a Cuban point of view.

“As an artist, people cannot wait to pigeonhole you,” Pelaez said. “I never thought I was writing a Cuban play. I was writing our story, my story, my family’s story. It just happened to be Cuban women that really impressed me.”

Pelaez’s own story starts in 1971 with her birth in a Jewish neighborhood in Miami. Her parents had left Cuba 12 years earlier because they were against Fidel Castro’s hard communist rule. She grew up with her sister, mother (now an import/export broker), and father, a pilot for Eastern Airlines. Like many immigrants, they created lives in America, with strong dreams of one day returning to their island. Pelaez was raised with this vision from her father, who was “always was very quick to point out that [she is] Cuban and not American.” Her father would only speak Spanish at home and insisted that each of his American daughters proudly state: “Yo soy Cubana.”

“Even though I didn’t feel like I stood out,” Pelaez said, “[America] didn’t feel like my country. It’s like how Americans feel when they go to Zimbabwe or Italy. Over [in Cuba] the stereotypes [on Latinas] don’t exist. You’re not fighting a pre-conception, you just are. And here if you’re not white, you need to be categorized.” In August 1993, the writer with a wide smile and inability to say more than five sentences without cracking a joke moved to New York to attend the Academy of the Dramatic Arts. There she worked as a temp for various publishing companies while writing “Rum and Coke.”

Now Pelaez is a full time actress and writer living in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn with her sister and two dogs. She’s adapting the play into a novel and screenplay. After leaving Miami for New York, Pelaez realized the rest of America wasn’t nearly as aware about Cuba’s struggles. The students at her school wearing Che Guevara shirts clearly didn’t understand the bloody force he and Fidel unleashed, first against the Batista dictatorship, then against the Cuban people. The wide-eyed students saying ‘Oh I love Cuba, I love Fidel” were blinded with naïveté, she said, and couldn’t see that people were starving and struggling to survive under the regime.

Left “dumbfounded by the ignorance” of the people around her, Pelaez questioned whether what her father taught her about Cuba was true. She needed to prove that he was right – or wrong. She decided to visit the island and see for herself. “I’ve never felt so right, than when I was in Cuba,” Pelaez said. “You’re not too loud, your lipstick’s not too red, you’re not the minority. It’s your people, there is an automatic understanding that’s really lovely. Then the reality of what the oppressive country is made me feel like I gotta get out of here.”

In Cuba, Pelaez met the inspirations for her characters: her grandmother, her deceased great aunt who was famous for her paintings, young Cuban prostitutes called jiniteras, and tourists cruising bars for women. Nanita, the grandmother she stayed with, helped guide Pelaez around Havana and showed her the beautiful paintings of Amelia Pelaez, Carmen’s great aunt, hanging on their crumbling walls. Amelia, often called the Picasso of Cuba, died in 1968. In the 1930s, she attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which claims such notable alumni as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. Though it was inspiring to see the works of the great aunt who died before Carmen was born, which are kept exclusively in Cuba by law, the young prostitutes she met were the most heart-wrenching of her encounters.

Before her friend Yelena Mandenberg, also 19, can get a word in, Kira adds with urgency, “You know that there’s a schizo living on Brighton 13th Street?” Her eyes, outlined in electric blue eye shadow, gaze towards the street where she says the schizophrenic man lives. She lowers her voice: “It’s crazy here.”

Kira was born in Moscow; Yelena in Ukraine. But both grew up in the heavily Russian Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach.

They say things like: “I love Brighton, but I hate Russian food and Russian people.”

And, “I love Russians and hate them at the same time.”

And, “I plan to never, ever move, but I hope this neighborhood keeps changing.”

They’ve come of age in a culture established by their grandparents, immigrants from Russia who rarely assimilated. While these teens aren’t about to disavow their Russian heritage, as many of their grandparents seem to fear they will, they feud with their Russian grandparents, whom they see as stuck in their ways.

“The grandmas here are insane,” Kira says, shaking her head.

“I Don’t Remember Why I Loved Russia”

Brighton Beach developed into a neighborhood of second-generation Americans in the 1950s; it was populated by the sons and daughters of Nazi concentration camp survivors. Back then, quirky mom-and-pop shops lined the main drag, Brighton Beach Boulevard, and the mile-long boardwalk along the beach was a popular weekend destination. Drugs and crime spiked in the 1960s, as in many other New York neighborhoods. But as the former Soviet Union relaxed its lockhold on emigration in the 1970s, thousands of Soviet Jews settled in Brighton, reinvigorating the neighborhood. The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 brought another immigrant wave.

Yelena and Kira came with their parents and grandparents in the post-Soviet wave. Kira was 9; Yelena just 2 1/2.

Kira found the transition especially difficult.

“I felt so lonely and misunderstood because I was so different, and it was hard to make friends at first,” Kira recalled. She struggled to learn the American language, and trying to fall in love with a place that seemed so different from Moscow.

“I was upset to come to America; I wanted to keep as much Russia in me as I could,” she said. “But I don’t remember why I loved Russia because, looking from the outside, there isn’t much to love.” She grew up in a loving, well-to-do family, but knows that many of her compatriots in Russia did not. “I miss that perfect time in my life, which happened to be there,” she said.

While both girls have adapted to New York, much of the older generation still struggles to fit in, and, especially as Kira and Yelena see it, to let go of the communist mindset. Young Russian-Americans think their grandparents cling too closely to a culture thousands of miles away.

The Grandma Connection

Even though Brighton Beach is the logical place to retain and nurture Russian culture, the neighborhood is homogenizing. Americanization seems to be threatening the Russian cultural enclave the families of Kira and Yelena came to find. Starbucks and Walgreens stand out on Brighton Beach Avenue. Many of the Russian grocers and restaurants Yelena and Kira remember from their childhoods have disappeared. “One of the only places that hasn’t changed is Jack’s Hairstyling for Men,” Yelena said, of a tiny barbershop tucked in next to an organic food market (and she didn’t know if Jack’s was even Russian). But there’s distinct sense of kinship too, in a neighborhood where mothers live a few blocks away from daughters, and everyone seems busy meddling in somebody else’s business.

The ties between grandchildren and grandparents are especially strong. Andrew Rekheis, 22, a volunteer at a local Russian-Jewish community center, asserts: “For Russian families, there is no such thing as a babysitter. Parents usually have children at a young age, and your grandparents raise you.”

Since the failure of the September 2007 uprising in Burma they helped lead, New York City has become a central place of refuge for Burmese monk-activists, many on the run for their lives.

This office-cum-monastery in Elmhurst, Queens, has been fashioned into the unlikely international headquarters of the monks’ resistance movement. It’s a nexus of prayer, to embody dharma, the Buddha’s tradition of loving kindness and compassion; solace and refuge for displaced monks; and a center of international advocacy for political and social freedom in Burma. The country, renamed Myanmar by its military rulers, has been controlled by military governments since 1962, when a coup toppled the civilian government. None of the periodic protests to demand opening and democracy has had much success.

The monks in America quietly considered the latest report. Their bodies were wrapped in red-orange robes of different shades, twisting from front to back, starting at their ankles and finishing over their left shoulders. At home, traditional Burmese monastic life has been nearly obliterated, they told me. Whether or not they’d ever been in jail, monks in Burma are now afraid to wear their robes. The government has managed to strip away their identities.

“Only here can we keep our traditions alive,” said Ashin Nayaka, a visiting religion professor at Columbia University who was serving as the group’s translator.

The Elmhurst monks are an elite group. The spiritual director, Venerable U Pannya Vamsa, 83, is Burma’s leading expatriate monk dissident. He came to the United States 30 years ago, and built this country’s first Burmese Buddhist temple, in Los Angeles. Opposite him was former political prisoner U Aggadhamma, who survived five years of daily torture. U Kovida – away in California to promote democracy for Burma — was a leader of the September 2007 uprising, the so-called Saffron Revolution.

At 26, U Kovida, from the rice growing land of both Buddhism and Islam, on Burma’s western coast bordering Bangladesh, is youngest of this group of refugee monks, and also considered the most “liberal.” He became a monk at age 12. In 2007, when skyrocketing fuel prices sparked protests, and democracy activists, monks and ordinary people began to take to streets to protest decades of repressive rule, the authorities raided Kovida’s monastery. So Kovida set off for Yangon, the former capital, to join the demonstrations.

“I don’t like to just pray,” he said. “Because it won’t do anything. If you want to be free, breathe, you have to fight.”

In Yangon, 2,000 protesters and 500 monks sat on the tiled floor of 152 foot-high golden domed Sule Pagoda. U Kovida called on 10 fellow monks to help him lead a march, and 15 came forward. They led columns of demonstrators down the streets.

Their leadership was soon felt: around the city, other groups of monks began to organize marches. Led by as many as 50,000 monks, the demonstrators grew to some 150,000 in number, Human Rights Watch reported at the time.
The government soon began a violent crackdown. “The police pulled off the monks’ robes and beat them,” U Kovida remembered.

In 1920, he figured the best investment was real estate. He constructed an apartment building in Heliopolis, a flourishing, quiet neighborhood in Cairo. He designed the building with the help of an architect and built the structure from the ground up. “A self-made man,” my mother calls him.

The structure is two small apartment buildings, side by side. The walls of one fuse into the walls of the other. Whenever I visited this building as a child, I was always amazed at the secret doors that passed from the pantry of one apartment to the hallway of the adjoining building. I suppose that’s what happens when families settle in Siamese-twin homes.

One of my great-grandfather’s first tenants was an Armenian named Kevork Hagopian, who arrived in Cairo in the 1930s. At the time, and for many years after, real estate “contracts” in Cairo were based on good faith and a firm handshake. That’s all my great grandfather required when Hagopian took up residence n the 2690 square foot, three-bedroom first-floor apartment — a New York Dream. Just one small gesture of trust: a handshake. In return, Hagopian promised to pay about seven Egyptian pounds a month in rent. That comes out to about one American dollar.

This was more than 70 years ago.

Hagopian was faithful to the handshake, even after he started going a little crazy. Hagopian wasn’t always crazy, though no one in my family can recall when Hagopian started to get a bit loopy. Maybe when he hit 60, around 1980. It’s hard to pinpoint a moment, but he was still paying his own rent in the ‘60s, so that was a good sign. He aged with the building. As the walls yellowed with time, he got older. He lived unmarried and alone. His social etiquette dried up like the sickly plants that lined his dying first- floor garden. It was always dark in Hagopian’s apartment. No one visited, no one came. He talked to no one except himself. As he got older, his nephew started to pay his rent.

Over the years, the outer walls of that building in Heliopolis have seen a lot: independence, three presidents, one massive nationalization plan, the assassination of one of those presidents, and a couple of wars, to name just a few. No wonder the walls have aged.

Charles, my great-grandfather, died in 1960. After his death, the Heliopolis property was split up and the various apartments passed down to his five children. He had four girls, and one boy. His only son, now the man of the family, dealt with the tenants and rents. One of the girls, Hilda, was my grandmother.

Inevitably, all five offspring had children of their own. Hilda, my grandmother, met my grandfather, a young lawyer of Armenian descent who worked in her father’s office. They got married and had two daughters, one of whom is my mother.

More offspring came. Bits and pieces of the building were passed down further. Ownership of the apartments was scattered across the globe, as the descendents moved to various places. Some stayed in Egypt and lived in the building. Others left. My mother married my father and moved away. Her sister, my aunt, ended up in France with her two sons. A few descendents remained to take care of the aging building.

Which brings us to the present.

Recently, my father’s foreign service job, which led to 23 years of country-hopping, led my parents back to a post in Cairo again, where they originally met. Suddenly we were re-immersed in the world of the Heliopolis building again. The many complications of its many tenants had exploded since its simple beginning in the 1920s. The storeowners on the first floor didn’t have contracts. The fifth floor tenant left her faucet on, causing an impromptu flood of water that poured down on the apartment below. The list of grievances grew longer and longer.

“The delivery was so deadpan; you could tell the kid believed her,” said Sarah Spagnoli, her roommate and friend, recalling Kerry’s little act of deception. “That line was a favorite of hers when asked about her scar. The ability to crack jokes and be at peace with such a horrible experience showed just the kind of strength she has.”

At 20, she was diagnosed with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, a disease that significantly increases her risk of developing numerous forms of cancer while she is still young. Now 25, she has been diagnosed and treated for three forms of cancer – in her bone, breast, and skin. When discussing her journey, though, the details bring her more often to laughter than sadness. Throughout her life, Kerry has had to accept the consequences of her genetic makeup. She’s managed to do that with a large dose of humor, ever since receiving her first diagnosis at the age of 12.

Track Star Dreams

Seventh grade classes were just beginning at Kerry’s small school in Athens, Pennsylvania, a farm town in the north-central part of the state. Kerry had been looking forward to joining the track team, and to skiing that winter. But what felt like a cramp in her right thigh had been bothering her. Soon, it hurt so much that her mother took her to the doctor.

Test results in hand, the doctors broke the news of the real reason for her discomfort: a tumor had invaded her upper-thigh bone. The hospital in Athens lacked the personnel and equipment to treat Kerry, so the family was referred to Henry Mankin, the chief of surgery at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, renowned for his pioneering treatment techniques. To Kerry, Mankin looked like Albert Einsten. And he had a plan. He told Kerry that her leg would not have to be amputated – but that she would have to undergo major surgery, and chemotherapy, instead.

Over the next year, Kerry’s life was all about treatment. Track and skiing were out of the question. Her mother became her main caregiver, sleeping beside her in hospital rooms. Her father, a real estate appraiser, kept busy with his work and dealt with the diagnosis quietly, caring for their other four children – a son and daughter from his wife’s first marriage, and their younger twin girls, Maureen and Eileen.

Within two weeks of her diagnosis, Kerry started chemotherapy at a hospital in Syracuse, NY. Kerry and her mom shuttled between home and hospitals. She would spend a week in the hospital, receiving the chemo and recovering from the side effects, and then return home for about a week, before returning to Syracuse for the next treatment. The prescribed toxic platinum-based chemical sucked 30 pounds from her slightly chubby, 5’2’’ frame. Her hair fell out during the first month of treatment. Doctors attempted to use a bone graft to replace the cancer-riddled portion of Kerry’s leg. A cast stretched from her hip to mid-calf.

Still, she was determined to go to her junior high school’s Halloween dance.

“I painted my entire head white, my eye sockets black, and my mouth black,” she recalled. “My hands were all covered in white. My mom made me a broom handle sickle, and I wore my brother’s black graduation gown. And I went to the dance in my wheelchair.”

She went as Death. The thought still makes her chuckle. Today, the photo taken of her in that costume hangs in a collage on the wall in their front foyer.

“He’s a good-looking guy and what he recognizes is that he wants his clothes to compliment him,” he said. “Someone like Tom Ford walks out into the world with a great level of confidence and his clothes reflect that. I think a lot of guys identify with that.” Mantegna speaks clearly and with self-assurance and knows when to stop. When hearing his voice back through my tape recorder, there were few ums and pauses. He has a thick face, but in a good way, and he certainly doesn’t look the way I expected a tailor to look—I’d envisioned a bespectacled man sitting cross-legged, hand-sewing a garment with measuring tape wrapped around his neck.

In an industry where old-world tailoring techniques are revered and where tailors who have been making the same type of suit practically since before sliced bread argue over what type of shoulder is proper, Mantegna is a tailor for a new generation. He offers his clients a more contemporary-fitting suit. The pants are usually cut in the style of low-rise jeans, and things in general are a little bit tighter, accentuating a client’s best features but sometimes also highlighting their not-so-good ones.

The “Andrews” in Michael Andrews Bespoke, stands for Mantegna’s partner—Andrew Wells, who helped start the business. Both men worked as lawyers and traveled often. On trips abroad they discovered a quick service that Americans seldom consider—custom tailoring. “I started getting my suits made overseas when we would travel,” Mantegna said. “After dragging Andrew through tailor shops and fabric markets on half a dozen trips, he commented that I should try to start my own business because I enjoyed this so much.” Wells doesn’t work for the company any more, but Mantegna calls him his “coach and mentor,” and will often call him when he needs sound advice.

After working as a lawyer in London, Mantegna, who is originally from Atlanta, returned to New York, took a men’s tailoring class at the Fashion Institute of Technology and started Michael Andrews. He continued to practice law, and work on the company on the side, until, he said, “the ship needed a captain. I left when it made economic sense.”

It may be surprising that someone who worked on revising contracts for eight years could switch gears so drastically, but Mantegna said that his ambition was right there from the beginning. “I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. As much as I enjoyed being a lawyer, it was never as fulfilling as creating your own company and really building something from the ground up.”

A Michael Andrews suit takes six to eight weeks to complete. A client will come in, and Mantegna or his head designer, Clark Shaw, 24, will sit down and talk with him about what he’s looking for, and what kinds of clothes are in his wardrobe now. “We try to offer some honest, helpful, fashion advice,” said Mantegna. Then they’ll help the client pick out fabric from the hundreds of swatches in their fabric books. “We hold their hand through the selection process,” Mantegna said. After that, Mantegna takes the measurements—shoulder width, arm length, the size of the bicep, inseam, waist measurement, etc. They also take photos of the client from the side and straight on. Someone will then type up these measurements and send them online to their tailoring place in China. A finished garment will arrive by air in four weeks. The client will come in again for a final in-house fitting and fine-tuning.

At face value, this regime may seem a little strange—and indeed it is different from the way other upper-echelon New York tailoring companies operate. Many of them produce suits on site, literally adjacent to the showroom where a client’s measurements are taken. Others send their orders to London for sewing on prestigious Savile Row. But Mantegna insists that the quality of his suits does not suffer by their being made in China. That also, of course, contains the cost. A regular Michael Andrews suit costs about $1,200. A three-button Armani suit from Neiman Marcus costs $1,700 and may fit okay, but a custom suit, many suggest, will cost less and fit better. Plus you can get those pink buttonholes you’ve been dreaming about.

Parked on the corner of Water and Wall streets in Manhattan’s Financial District, it stays open all day and night in a neighborhood where everything else closes at the end of the workday. Surrounded by banks, office buildings and upscale cafes catering to the Wall Street crowd, the cart brings a nitty-gritty feel to an aseptic part of the city.

At first sight, the fairly large cart looks like a truck, but its tiny wheels and towing hook give it away. The old Ford van that once towed the cart to this seemingly permanent location is forever parked right behind it on the street, like a trusty sidekick. At night, a blue and red electric “open” sign is fastened with a plastic bag to the tin awning lights, illuminating photographs of tasty dishes plastered over much of the outside of the cart.

When I first talked to Sharif, I noticed that he listens with his mouth slightly ajar and his eyes open wide. Maybe it’s this attentiveness that has helped him learn surprisingly good English since he emigrated from Egypt, just three years ago, or maybe he just has trouble hearing over the honking horns and the incessant hum of the power generator. Every time I’ve seen him working, he has been wearing the same thing: an oversized black paint-spattered sweatshirt hung loosely over his wiry frame, a white apron, worn jeans and a faded vintage New York Yankees hat to cover up his already-receding hairline (he’s only 25). He professes a love of baseball, though he still has trouble with the basic rules. “Yankees have good year this year, yes?” he once asked me. I confessed I was from Boston and held up my cell phone to show him proof: the big Boston Red Sox logo set as my background. His expression remained blank; he seemed unaware of the rivalry.

When he’s not working, Sharif spends most of his time in Astoria, Queens, where he sublets a small room from a Pakistani family. He lives alone, having moved alone from Helwan, Egypt, a suburb of Cairo, to New York City in 2005. He has no cell phone, but he’s allowed to receive calls on his landlord’s phone, and he calls his family a few times a month using an international phone card. Back home, he lived with his parents and older sister, until she got married and moved out.

“I very close to my sister,” Sharif said. “When she move from home, I never see her.” When he finished school at 17, he worked at a textile-shipping warehouse for three years, then moved to Cairo to work for his brother-in-law’s taxi company. He wouldn’t go into details, but the two men did not get along. “He was a dog,” said Sharif. “He treat me and my sister very bad.” When he discovered that a cousin of his close friend was doing well in New York City, Sharif decided to make the move. This acquaintance has since moved to Florida, and Sharif is thinking about doing the same thing. “I like New York, but it too expensive,” said Sharif. “I know they say think business long term, but I want to save more. I want family.”

At a more conventional business, Sharif’s night shift would be the third shift, but instead it’s only the second—of two. He and another worker divide the day into two 12-hour shifts, the first beginning at 5:30 a.m. I asked him why the cart stayed open 24 hours. After all, not many people crave a rice dish on their way to work in the morning. He explained that it was just too expensive to park the cart in a garage every night, and since it’s against the law to leave it on the street unattended, the best alternative is to stay open.

Acrid paint fumes waft around the small store, mingling with the even sharper odor of too many sweaty boys, and men. When they’re not playing, they’re building and painting their armies, right in the store. Although the stereotypical nerds show up at Games Workshop (or GW, as the gamers call it), there’s quite a variety of people here. Sometimes you can meet the bright-eyed, 11-year old Alex, or run into Austin, who is in his thirties and getting his doctorate at NYU, or laugh with Ricky, who jokes that he comes to GW to get away from the wife. You can usually talk with David, a 19-year old who calls himself a veteran of the game but really isn’t that good, with no strategy to his fights.

On one of the three tables, a battle rages among the inch-and-a-half high figures, called models. An Ork battalion threatens to decimate a Skaven Deathmaster Snikch, a feared rat assassin wielding two thick, bloody swords. John, a long-haired 20-year-old in a T-shirt and ripped jeans, looks worriedly at his beloved rats, but his opponent, a loud 24-year-old Puerto Rican guy with a Mohawk, in baggy black pants and chains, commands most of the attention in the room.

That’s Joseph Cruz. His friends call him Joe, but he likes to be called Warboss Zagdakka, which in Orkish means “really fast and loud.” He plays with the all-powerful Ork forces, which he describes as “stupid, ugly as fuck, and really kickass.”

Warboss Zagdakka wears square, black-framed glasses, and his chiseled jaw is covered in light stubble. Standing at about 5’10 and 135 pounds, he carries himself with a grungy nonchalance. He shakes a pair of dice in his tanned hands and throws them across the table. He knows he’s going to win; his Orks haven’t lost a battle yet. He rolls up the sleeves of his black hoodie, revealing colorful tattoos creeping up his arms, culminating in a bloody vampire bite on his neck. His tattoos include tribal symbols and Japanese Kanji characters (“direction” and “control”) on each wrist. Scattered along his right arm is a series of yellow faces with varied expressions. He clarifies: “It doesn’t matter if you’re happy, if you feel sad, sick, or like an asshole. It doesn’t matter; you will die.”

Joe’s voice shoots out of his mouth like a bullet exploding from a gun. When he’s nervous, you can barely understand him. He turns away from you often to focus on the game, yelling out exclamations, like “This is tactic #1 – you should probably get the fuck out of there little guy,” and “I don’t have a military structure, shit!”

When you ask Joe if he’s good at Warhammer, he replies, “Sometimes I’m good at it and – fuck! I’m getting a lot of damage! Rest of fleet, engage!” (He can get so absorbed in the battle that he forgets you are there.) After getting to know him, I can predict what he’ll say: “Sometimes I’m good at it and sometimes I’m just fucking awesome!”

The game itself isn’t all that aggressive, and is bound by strict rules. It takes place entirely on the tabletop. Opposing players line up their figures on opposite sides of the table, and before beginning decide how many turns each will take. During each turn, the players move through three phases: movement (units and soldiers travel across the tabletop); shooting (long-distance attacks); and assault (close-range attacks). During each phases, players roll dice to determine actions, such as whether their attacks will hit or miss, whether their soldiers will be wounded, or whether they’ll get to run away. When the turns finish, the game ends, no matter who is left dead or alive. Then each player counts up the number of enemies he’s killed (some figures, or models, are worth more points than others). The player with the highest number of points wins. Battles can last anywhere from hours to days — and multiple battles can be combined to form a campaign.

A veteran gamer describes Joe and his friend John — they started coming to the store together in January 2008 — as “joined at the hip.” But an employee, Kerrigan, thinks of them as “the polar opposites of gaming.” Playing John is always a good time, even if you’re getting “pwned” (beaten), he explained, but playing Joe is more frustrating because he does whatever it takes to win.

“Joe is a power gamer, and if you want a fun game, you don’t play Joe,” says Michael, another employee. “Joe’s a good guy, off the tabletop.”

“Who said that?” Joe later wants to know. “Red-shirt Mike who has never played me?”

Joe refutes the notion of being a “power gamer” – someone who abuses any loopholes in the rules in order to win. He claims that having a good time is the most important thing, but he quickly adds, “Obviously no one plays to lose, or else, why play?”