Nancy Ruhling's Astoria Characters

She had to work late last night and didn’t get to bed until after 2 a.m. So it’s coffee that Joanna Psoroyannis goes in search of. That, she hopes, will open her doe-like mocha eyes. Model tall, she’s a Greek goddess cloaked in black from the top of her turtleneck to the toes of her knee-high leather boots. She takes up coffee cup and settles into the sofa that faces her flat-screen TV, wrapping her lithe, long legs under her with the ease of a ballerina. Her bookshelves hold ragged…

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The apartment is filled with bikes and Buddhas, avant-garde art and animals. Finster the French bulldog is sitting on the beige rug, the one that matches his fur, guarding the cats Raya and Zophee. The sweet scent of votives mixes with the acrid smell of Billy Bruckner‘s cigarette smoke. Coffee, as fresh as the morning, is brewing. Billy, a cherub with big blue eyes and tattoos who liberally sprinkles his sentences with “dear,” is sitting on the sofa. He doesn’t like to think…

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Sometimes good things happen on bad days; in this case, it was one of those things that almost didn’t happen, but when it did, it made everything better. It was a year after the new century trumpeted its grand entrance when Guillermo Lucerofabbi and Canalp Caner were riding on the subway from Astoria toward Manhattan. They were strangers on the train. And to America. Guillermo, who is known as Willie, was a new arrival from Argentina, and Canalp, who goes by John, had just come from Turkey. Willie,…

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The wind’s whipping across the rooftop, slamming the door, BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The N train’s whoosh-clanking into the Ditmars Boulevard station. Enrico de Trizio and Giancarlo de Trizio start jamming to the rhythm of their new-found city. The brothers — that’s the bespectacled Enrico on the melodica and the ponytailed Giancarlo on the cajón — have never played to the sky before, but once they start, they don’t want to stop. Ah, yes! This is why they came to New…

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It’s a custom in Hawaii to take your shoes off when you enter, so Jeff and Suzi Nauser are in their stocking feet when they answer the door. The framed memorabilia in the narrow entry hall that leads to the heart of their compact three-room apartment is a time capsule of their lives, which inexplicably intersected and intertwined some 15 years ago in the land of the waving palm trees. The black-and-white photos of the hula dancers make Suzi happy when she gets lonely for home; the state pins…

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