In May of 1998 I moved to New York with no place to live to continue an affair that promptly ended. For two months I sublet a storefront apartment at 11th and C – my nightly entertainment was eavesdropping through the police lock door on the junkies shooting up on my stoop. Or perhaps they were just waiting.

A month or so before the day in question I had moved into a tiny room in a large apartment on 97th between Fifth and Madison – my co-tenants were three melodramatic gay men (two of whom turned out to be heroin addicts, one of whom had had all of his teeth knocked out some years before), two dogs, and a cat. Having become too claustrophobic for the subway, every night I took the bus up Madison from my job on 27th Street, often falling asleep and waking up ten or twenty blocks north of my destination. I lived on green apples, yogurt, potato chips, and microwaved winter squash that came boxed in frozen orange blocks. On the weekends I would walk all day, often up and down Fifth Avenue – I remember that several blocks in the mid-sixties seemed always to smell of perfume.

The unusual weather in question came on Labor Day, 1998. Earlier in the day I had been walking around in the east fifties, and had walked past a salon with a sign in the window advertising free haircuts for women with long hair who wanted it all cut off. I walked in, and walked out with a close-cropped, Audrey-Hepburn-in-Roman-Holiday sort of haircut that would have looked great had my head occupied someone else’s body.

My college roommate Mimi, a set designer, was working on a movie that was being filmed in a derelict hotel in Asbury Park. It may have been near the water – I can’t remember now. She had invited me to visit, so I boarded the PATH train and headed down. Or, you know, over – I have a terrible sense of direction. I arrived at the train station with enough change for a phone call and no idea where I was going. Because it was a holiday the station itself was closed and locked. There was a covered area outside with a pay phone and benches, populated only by a small and somewhat threatening collection of what seemed to be inhabitants rather than passengers.

I emptied my change into the pay phone and dialed the hotel, reaching a receptionist who seemed to have no idea that there was a movie filming there. She put down the phone and went to investigate, which is to say she returned to eating her lunch, with the phone apparently abandoned nearby – in the background I could faintly hear her discussing something about a mango with her co-worker.

As I listened and waited, still hoping I guess that someone would eventually get back on the phone and at least tell me how to walk to the hotel, the sky suddenly turned a color that I remember as dark grey, though Mimi’s recollection is that the sky was green all day. Moments later, as I peered out from under the covered area at the altered sky, one of a number of newspaper boxes lined up in front of me came abruptly unmoored and flew past – to the right I think, though I am no longer certain.

It is difficult to convey how quickly all of this happened. I was raised in a city, largely indoors, and apart from the occasional outage-inducing thunderstorm was unacquainted with significant weather-related events. But the flying newspaper box was enough to provoke me to run, and so I did: out from under the covered area, through a swirling mass of dust and leaves, and into the nearest building, which turned out conveniently enough to be a police station. Just as I ran in, the lights went out.

The rest is something of a blur. At some point the lights came back on. I explained my predicament to an officer, who said that there were downed wires all around town and it wasn’t safe to walk, so he found someone to drive me to my destination. We drove through streets filled with debris and crackling wires to the hotel, which was grand and dilapidated and featured an unattended gift shop filled with Bruce Springsteen memorabilia. I showed off my new haircut and roamed around for a bit, then made my way back to the train station.

Apparently the tornado had left a tree in the middle of the train tracks, so getting back to Manhattan required us to disembark midway and pile onto a waiting bus to finish the journey. There were no seats remaining by the time I got on, and the bus smelled like vomit. When I returned home my roommate – the one with no teeth, who would refuse to return my security deposit when I fled the city a month later – admired my new haircut. Everyone else hated it.

- Kliene Fliege