"You know what'd make a great movie...?"

Mel was short and leathery and his long beard connected directly with the hair encircling his bald spot as if his head was wreathed in a wiry black bird’s nest. He had ridden a bicycle to the day labor office, so when we were paired up and sent off to a housing development with a couple of shovels, I drove. He had that sort of crisp, stinging smell that you’ll often find on somebody without a home and I was grateful that it was still just cool enough outside that my request to drive with the windows down met with no objection. We arrived at our destination as the sun was still just rising. I’d spent the last month since graduating high school working as an electrician’s assistant and had done my share of digging ditches and hauling away heavy bits of metal, but that work had gotten ensnared in a legal battle and after a few weeks of unemployment and an expensive year of school looming ahead, my father’s exhortation that I get a job had led me to day labor. I figured I could handle labor and I only had another month’s worth of days to do it in.

Once Mel and I arrived, we met up with the foreman in charge of us and he laid out our instructions. We were to go up and down the streets of this larval subdivision and shovel the dirt that the big earth movers had pushed into the gutters back up off the street and into the lots. We got to work, wondering idly if we’d make it around the entire place before our eight hours were up for the day. As we plodded along, scooping up the dirt and squinting away from the rising sun, Mel did his best to make time pass. He told a few colorful stories about the trip to Las Vegas he claimed to have just returned from. His stints as a day laborer apparently supported his embarking on adventures across the southwest. I had begun enjoying myself despite the increasing heat and the disappearance of our cloud cover. We’d cleared a few blocks and seemed to be making decent time when we met our first earth mover. As they graded the ground where a house would be erected sometime in the near future, dirt that we’d just shoveled up was pushed right back into the street. My guts churned in horror as I realized the Sisyphean nature of the task we’d been assigned. Mel just grumbled some swear words and hated the foreman a little more.

It was afternoon, and I knew my liberal application of sunblock had begun to fail me, by the time Mel found out that I was headed off to film school in New York in a month’s time. This led immediately to that statement that few can resist saying after they’ve heard such news.

“You know what’d make a great movie…?”

Except this time it wasn’t followed by an anecdote about something that had happened to a person he knew. Instead he launched into a speech that was something less than a story but was related with intense conviction that he knew exactly how it would work as a movie. It turned out that his ambition was to make a documentary about how aliens had built the pyramids and that there were secret messages embedded in their proportions and the shadows they cast. As my head throbbed and my skin ached from the radiation it was absorbing from the Arizona sun, I began to feel like I was becoming delirious. I reeled, feeling more and more fevered until finally—our eight hours were up! We sought out the foreman and he angrily informed us that he still had us for another two hours. This was the first that Mel or I had heard of a ten hour day, but the foreman assured us that this was what he’d paid for, so we trudged back to our gutters. For one hundred and twenty more minutes, each of them keenly felt, Mel and I shoveled on, chatting about the Bermuda Triangle and watching our progress obliterated behind us as we worked.

Rattle dem bones

When I was in elementary school, we decided that what we really needed was a treehouse. Between Calvin & Hobbes comics, the treehouse we found near Bryan Brown's house, and the successful hours of fun we'd gleaned from playing in ground level forts in the desert, treehouse fever hit the Wharton household and we decided to make a go of it. Matt and I started with an abundance of enthusiasm for the project, but what we had in motivation, we lacked in lumber. This situation led to the dubious realization that the best source of treehouse-worthy wood would be another treehouse. And there happened to be just one such structure out in the desert. We staked it out and deemed it abandoned, and instead of just playing in it ourselves, we decided to take the wood so we could build a treehouse in our own yard. And so it was that Matt, Bryan Brown, Eric Schaumberg and I set off into the desert with hammers in hand.

We set about dismantling the tree house from the top down, stacking the wood at the base of the tree. We'd nearly taken the entire thing down, with only the enormous board that made up the floor left to go. It was at this point that Logan, a high school boy who had always been something of an intimidating figure to us burst out of the door of the house at the top of the wash.

"Hey! Get away from our treehouse!!!"

In a panic, Bryan knocked out the last supporting strut and the floor of the treehouse came crashing down. I tumbled out of the tree into the rocks below, and Eric jumped and found himself hanging from a branch high in the air. Logan had run back into the house and now came barreling out, brandishing a BB gun. Eric dropped from the tree, and the four of us scrambled about, gathering as much wood as we possibly could under our arms. In what felt as intense as any movie adventure we'd imagined ourselves in, with BBs whizzing by and thwacking into our stacks of wood, we finally grabbed up the floor plank and, using it as a shield, dashed off into the desert. We either lost him in the wash or he gave up the chase, but we collapsed behind our house in a pile of wood, thrilled and frightened and alive.

Only in the days after that did we realize that neither of the two trees we had hoped to use were particularly well suited for a treehouse, and after a halfhearted attempt at building one (resulting in more of an art piece with a rope swing than any sort of shelter) we ended up with a pile of rotting wood behind our house.


This last Saturday night, Adam and I went for a walk around Greenpoint. Since he's new to the area, we made a quick survey of a few of my favorite places in the neighborhood, and no such tour would be complete without a trip to the old decaying dock on the East River. It's a nice place to go and explore, or watch the sunset over the city, or just to sit and think. But since I decided to take him over there at ten o'clock at night and the walk over there leads through an unlit alley decorated generously with graffiti, and since there was an ambulance parked at the end of the alley, he was understandably a bit nervous. I'd been out there enough to enjoy how creepy it was and was a little dismissive of his concerns. Then he interrupted whatever conversation we were having to point out something I hadn't seen before.

"Is that a skeleton?"

And sure enough, hanging from a structure of twisted metal, with a rope around its neck and illuminated by the headlights of an unattended ambulance, was a full-sized human skeleton.


We stayed a bit longer, enjoying the macabre little scene, and then went back to Adam's for ice cream and Nintendo. The next day, I told Tom about the skeleton and went back in the evening to take some pictures. The following day, Tom was going to head out and grab some photos himself when he peeked in my room before heading out the door.

"If that skeleton is still down there, I'm going to bring it back."

I don't know if he was asking for permission or for an accomplice, but I offered my help and hopped up to go with him. As we strolled down to the water, I felt my reservations melting away, and while I didn't realize it at the time, the thrill I was tasting on the tip of my tongue was the same flavor as when we made our treehouse raid.


Since neither Tom nor I had brought a knife, Tom used a piece of glass from a broken bottle to saw through the rope holding up the skeleton, cutting his finger in the process. He clambered back down the beam and passed me the skeleton. We walked back home, as casually as two men can walk down the street holding a human skeleton under their arm. Since Tom had done the climb and the cutting, I carried the thing back to our house, hoping to earn with sweat what he'd paid in blood. We both kept looking around to see if any of the surprise in the eyes of the people we passed would curdle into suspicion or recognition, prepared to make a break for it. I started deciding whether I'd be willing to drop the skeleton and run, or if I'd be able to hold onto the skeleton as if it were treehouse lumber.

As we were walking, discussing the ethical and artistic ramifications of what we'd done to the dock, we hit upon a solution that seemed appropriate. Once we got the skeleton back in our house, Tom took a couple of photos of it comfortable in its new environs.



Today, we printed out two of the photos, put them in a beautiful bottle, sealed the bottle with a candle, and headed back out to the river. We clambered back out onto the collapsed beams and hung the bottle with some twine at the same place the skeleton had been.



If it's former owners come looking for it hopefully they'll be satisfied that it has found a home where it belongs. For other visitors to the dock, perhaps a bottle isn't as instantly and ghoulishly satisfying as a hanging skeleton, but for those that take the time to look there still one more thing to be found out there.

And after spending all day itching to get that bottle out there, I feel satisfied tonight that there's no pile of rotting wood left from this adventure.