Where I Was Then

September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday morning. (This is readily available information and not at all revelatory, but it always feels weirdly important to me that I remember this. Your guess as to why is as good as mine.) This was to be the first Tuesday with classes for that semester at NYU. I'd been in the city for a couple of weeks after my dad had helped me move in and driven back to Arizona. I had attended some freshman orientation programs (with help orienting yourself in the city, tips on how to avoid being pickpocketed, and practical-but-off-the-record advice that if you are going to buy drugs, for Pete's sake, don't buy them from undercover cops in Washington Square Park). I had attended one Thursday's worth of classes.  Tuesday was an election day (it must have been a primary? this was definitely before I paid attention to New York politics) and, since my dorm was a polling location, it wasn't initially surprising to see such activity downstairs. But as I went outside, I was surprised to see how many people were gathering. They were crowding the sidewalk and even standing in the street, and my first thought was, "Gee, people in New York REALLY turn out for elections." Then, once I got out onto Union Square West/University Place, I had a clear view of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, already burning.

I did not know anything about what was going on. I was approximately 2-2.5 miles away, but I didn't know the city well enough to know that yet (nor, certainly, did the people I loved back home). I hadn't seen any news that morning, so I didn't know why the towers were burning, just that they were (though of course I didn't see any fire, just the plumes of smoke rising from the tops of the towers; when I moved last year, I was surprised to see how many times I'd doodled the image of the smoking, and then falling, towers in the margins of my notebooks that year). I figured that emergency services would have things in hand, and anyway, I didn't know what else to do, so I went to class. As I walked down the ten blocks to my first class that day, things got scarier. People were huddled around car radios, and as you walked you'd hear different rumors being relayed among all the people who were just standing and staring.

"Bombs in both buildings."
"They've declared war."
"They hit Washington and Chicago and Seattle too."
"A plane hit the building."

I arrived at my first class ("History of the American Musical") and it seemed like, despite whatever was happening out there, we were going to try and get through a normal morning. Soon enough, however, the people sitting by the windows that looked out onto the street below (and Washington Square beyond that) announced that people outside were running up the sidewalk. And then phones started beeping and buzzing, and some of my other classmates informed us that the top of the first tower had collapsed. Our professor dismissed us and told us to go get in touch with whoever we needed to. When I got outside, I was puzzled at first too look downtown and only see one smoking tower. That's when I realized that it wasn't just a few floors that had collapsed, but that the entire tower had fallen. I walked back up to Union Square, figuring I needed to tell my parents that I was okay (and try to get word of the same to my brother at school). The walk home was similar to the walk down, with strange snatches of truth and rumor pulling at my attention. I had nearly reached the dorm when the screams and shouts of disbelief from the people I was passing got me to turn around to see the second tower blossom and fall. I got back upstairs and my roommate and some of his friends were watching the news, helping fill in some of the blanks for me of what had happened.

The rest of that day was spent feeling a weird mix of anticlimax (now what?) and fear (is there going to be another plane? am I safe now?). I remember seeing people walking uptown, covered in dust, and realizing that they must have been down there and that the dust was from the towers. I didn't have any friends of my own at this point, and I lived in an apartment-style dorm that housed relatively few freshman, but I met up with a guy I'd met at an orientation event and we went looking for a hospital where we could donate blood. But even by the time we set out to do it that afternoon, we were turned away because they had more blood than they needed (we learned, with the sick feeling, that of course the people in the towers mostly either got away or would not need blood).

The next days blur together in my memory:

There were armed National Guard checkpoints stopping people from crossing 14th Street without student identification or ID showing you lived down there (there was another "nobody crosses for any reason" line down at Canal Street; over time, the 14th Street blockade opened and the Canal Street one became permeable with ID).

The sirens of emergency vehicles could be heard constantly, for days. (For years, I'd get tense at the sound of low-flying planes, and anxious when I'd hear far-off emergency vehicle sirens.)

The streets had far less traffic than I would become accustomed to, and because of the blockade you could walk down the middle of empty streets below 14th Street. On the second or third day, the wind shifted and the smoke plume (always visible from nearly any place that had a view of the sky downtown) settled in our direction. The smell was not pleasant, and it certainly didn't calm the nerves to see people begin wearing surgical masks. At night, walking around deserted streets, it felt like walking around an imagined Victorian London, with the streetlights rimmed in an eerie glow (just replace the fog in your imagination with the smoke from the still smoldering towers).

One night, I went to a vigil in Washington Square. People gathered with candles and sang. The next night, I went to a vigil in Union Square.

I don't remember when I started seeing American flags hanging from windows, but I did.

There were missing person flyers everywhere. They'd be taped up on light poles and bus stops, and there were stretches where an entire wall or chain link fence would be covered with them. They had photos (wedding photos, prom photos, candid shots with pets and kids) and notes. Sometimes the notes were asking for information about the missing person, and sometimes the notes were written to the missing person, asking them to come home. Or at least get in touch.

We did not return to class for a while (a week? maybe two?), but one of my professors met with any of her students who wanted to show up in Washington Square one day. She just wanted to check in and see how we were doing, and talk about anything we needed to talk about. I didn't have much to say.

One day, my roommate and his friends invited me to the grocery store. We had heard that the emergency responders could use certain types of supplies, so we bought materials for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When we got back to the room we made up as many as we could. Not having much else to contribute, I also threw in the majority of the socks I'd brought with me to the city. The West Side Highway was being used exclusively to take aid workers to and from the site, and big crowds of onlookers gathered to cheer them on, shaking hands with the people returning from the site and handing off care packages to the people on their way down. That was the only time I showed up with more than a bottle of water, but with little else to do, I went over there every day or two, if only to see somebody doing something to help.

The Union Square movie theater (now a Regal, then a UA) was closed immediately after the attack, but sometime in the following days they opened their doors and offered free screenings of all of their movies, with complimentary popcorn and soda, to give people in the area something to do with themselves. I went to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I had seen it once before, back in Arizona at the end of the strange, somewhat lonely summer between high school and New York. My first viewing was in a mostly empty auditorium in Scottsdale, and at that point the movie felt like a kind of private pleasure. But that second viewing in September is one of the most emotional experiences I've had in a theater. The auditorium was so full that there were people sitting on the stairs (and the theater employees didn't make them move). We shared our free popcorn, and an audience that ranged from college kids to young parents to senior citizens (including a woman in a wheelchair) embraced the movie. The sing-along bit about halfway through the movie that had played to silence in Scottsdale was joyous and loud. It's a naughty, defiant movie, but it's also beautiful and filled with aching emotion, and I'll always love it for the solace I felt watching it with that crowd.

I (heart) Greenpoint

Here are some of the things I've loved about living in Greenpoint. Lots of entries about food.

- Jesse & Marisa live there. By summer 2008, I'd lived at 149 Calyer for nearly four years, and Jesse & Marisa had moved in two or three years after me. I was reading some online reviews of Futurama and realized that I recognized the names of two of the critics...from the mailbox downstairs. I poked around to read more of their reviews and thought, "Gee, I bet we'd get along." So I wrote to Jesse through one of the websites (I believe his editor may have forwarded my message on to him?) and proposed that if he was indeed the same Jesse whose name I'd recognized, that we should probably hang out at some point. We got in touch and made a plan to go see The Godfather during a revival at  the Ziegfeld. Six years later, they are two of the best friends I've ever had. I've spent Thanksgivings at both of their mother's homes, been fortunate to attend their wedding, went with them on a road trip out west, and have generally had some of my best times in New York with them.

- 149 Calyer's Roof. Living on the third (top) floor meant that I had ready access to the roof simply by climbing the ladder from my fire escape. I'd go up to read, or to make phone calls, or just to get some sun or enjoy the view (you could see the Empire State Building! the one that King Kong climbed!). When the 4th of July fireworks were over the East River, they were visible from our roof. In 2006, I had a fantastic birthday up there with my mom, Ellen Laux (she made terrific grilled cheese sandwiches!), and Tom and Kelly Blunt. In later years I have really fond memories of going up there with Jesse & Marisa to play Scrabble and share strawberry rhubarb pie.

- Seagulls. Having grown up in the desert, I still find it novel and delightful to have lived somewhere where you can occasionally hear seagulls (or even spot one flying overhead).

- Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop. A Greenpoint institution, Peter Pan has terrific doughnuts (even more amazing if you catch them just out of the kitchen). Tina Fey agrees. They have a red velvet doughnut.

(Bonus mention of Moe's Doughs Donut Shop, a Peter Pan-alike that opened right around the corner from me. And gave out free doughnuts to advertise their grand opening.)

- The loose tile in the bathroom. There was a loose tile on the wall of our bathroom at 149 Calyer. It was down near the floor, tucked behind the door, and it sat amongst the other tiles without seeming amiss, but it wasn't affixed to its place by grout or glue. I used to daydream about finding a map or even a hole with something secret tucked inside behind the tile. About halfway through my time in the building, I created my own note and tucked it behind the tile, figuring maybe the next tenant would find it. (Though now that the building is getting a real renovation, it's probably lost.)

- Newtown Creek. If you lived in Greenpoint long enough, you were bound to have had that summer night where a sewer-y smell wafted over the neighborhood (though I must say it's been a long time since I've noticed it happening). That was thanks to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in northeast Greenpoint. Tucked back on Newtown Creek, an estuary that is locally famous for being diseased (like hepatitis diseased), the treatment plant has these big egg shaped towers. And a few years ago, they opened up the Newtown Creek Nature Walk. This proved to be a small park with some greenery and tables along Newtown Creek. I wouldn't recommend it as a Must Visit for out-of-towners, but I'm pretty fond of it as an earnest attempt to put lipstick on Greenpoint's most embarrassing pig.

- The laundromat. When I moved in to 149 Calyer, there was a laundromat a few doors down. It was incredibly convenient. But after a few year, it became apparent that it wasn't long for this world. The driers broke and they just didn't fix them, offering the option of hanging things up out back. After malingering for months, that first laundromat finally closed. It became a real item of interest to see what would open up in that space. There was a convenience store with extremely limited stock and (my favorite) a vegetarian diner called The William Taft. I loved this place. The employees were really nice, they showed movies out back at night, they were open late, and the food was delicious. They had excellent breakfast food, sandwiches, and baked goods, but the thing I still think about most is probably a sandwich that had slices of avocado, pear, and (I think) walnuts. Sadly, they too closed and the wait to see what would come next began again. And then, finally, we got another laundromat! This one actually took over the space next door as well. It was bigger, shinier, and open until late at night. Oh, it was glorious.

- The library. I've absolutely adored living no farther than five blocks from a Brooklyn Public Library branch for the last ten years.

- Brooklyn Woodwind & Brass. I've never bought anything there (or even gone in!) but I so love walking by and seeing those gleaming instruments in the window. There's a whole window filled with different saxes!

- McCarren Park. It's been fantastic to live a few minutes away from a park for the last ten years. McCarren has nice grassy lawns to lie on and read (or sit on and chat with Jesse & Marisa), an all-weather track (for when it's muddy) and a runners' footpath (for when it isn't). During summer weekends, the park is positively brimming with attractive sunbathers, families with funny kids, all manner of dogs, musicians, and tightrope walkers. It's also the home of...

- The McCarren Park Greenmarket. It's also been fantastic to be a few minutes' walk from a weekly market where I can stock up on my dairy needs (milk, yogurt, ice cream, and egg nog when it's in season), my bakery staples (loaves of bread and sweets like chocolate chip pumpkin bread or macaroons), carrots, pumpkins (when they're in season), bottles of honey, and fruit (apples, peaches, apricots, blueberries, strawberries, rhubarb, and apple cider in the fall). The compost bins provide a handy place to dump a week's worth of apple cores, and sometimes there's a woman there selling tamales!

- The bells of St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church. This church sits prominently on Manhattan Avenue and is a terrific landmark for navigating, has a clock tower which makes for a handy way to spot the time, and has bells that ring on the hour. When I lived at 149 Calyer, I used to find it nice and reassuring to hear the bells ring (and fun to try to count them to identify the time if I hadn't been paying attention to a clock for a while).

- Oasis's $3 falafel sandwich. (Plus $0.50 to add humus.) After years as a just-off-the-L-train treat, Oasis opened a Greenpoint location a year ago, and their falafel sandwiches are terrific. And just three blocks from 45 McGuinness.

- Papacito's (RIP). One of the things I miss about Arizona is the ready access to good Mexican food. So much of what they do up here is Tex-Mex, which isn't quite what I'm looking for. There are certainly good chains for fast food tacos around (Dos Toros Taqueria! Chipotle, etc.), and Greenpoint has Vamos al Tequila, which is a good approximation of going to a restaurant back home, but for a while there the real jewel of Greenpoint was Papacito's. The food was really tasty, their guacamole was delicious, and I made sure to stop by every weekend to pick up three seitan tacos (for $7.75). They sadly closed last year, but I still get those taco cravings.

- Ice cream selection. Greenpoint has some pretty standard options (two Baskin-Robbins and a Hershey's ice cream counter in a Subway sandwich shop), but we've also got a Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory (fantastic butter pecan!), a Van Leeuwen's (I go for the ginger), and (for two shining years) an Uncle Louie G's (peanut butter cookie dough! or a harvest pumpkin milk shake!!!). And when it's late, and you can't find a place to sell you a scoop, there was always...

- God Bless Deli. There are surely other reasons to be grateful for a 24-hour deli just over two blocks from home, but the one I valued the most was that I could get a pint of ice cream at any time, day or night. The God Bless was a handy landmark when giving directions, and an invaluable ice cream supplier, and while they have a shiny new red sign now, I'll always remember it with the green awning.

- Jimmy's Diner's chicken & waffles. In the last year or two that I lived at 149 Calyer, Jimmy's Diner opened a location two blocks away. They have really delicious diner-y breakfast fare, and the dish that really got me was the chicken and waffles. While I like fried chicken well enough, I'd almost never order it at a restaurant (I'm obviously pretty generally pro-waffle). But the Jimmy's chicken & waffles is a giant, terrific waffle with equally terrific fried chicken, gravy, and maple syrup on the side. I never objected in theory to the combination of chicken and waffles, but I didn't really get it. Now I get it.

- Dinner at Erb with Jesse & Marisa. Erb is just a thai restaurant on Manhattan Avenue, and while I quite like the food, what I really like about the place is going with Jesse & Marisa and getting the Early Bird Dinner special (which lasts from 5pm to 9pm). It's something of a default favorite of theirs, and I love just going and sitting with them. And for the record, my go-to is: steamed veggie dumplings, thai iced tea, and tofu pad thai.

- Beloved. I've literally never been inside, but I love that there's a bar that has Godzilla on their sign.

- The post office. I've heard many complaints about the service at the Greenpoint post office, but one thing I couldn't complain about is that when I lived at 149 Calyer I was only one block from the post office.

- Photoplay (RIP). Greenpoint was the home of two great video rental stores (Film Noir Video is still open). Before it closed earlier this year, Photoplay was a reliable institution. They had an amazing selection, the clerks knew their stuff, and Michael, the owner, was a really lovely guy who loves movies. Even when I wasn't renting anything, I still loved to go in there and leaf through the racks.

- Key Food. This is really just a big grocery store of the sort that you'd find back in Apache Junction, so this is a specific (probably nostalgic) pleasure of going to a store with big aisles full of food. Maybe it's just homesickness, but I love having it nearby.

- The Garden. This grocery store is like the heart of Greenpoint to me. They've got swell produce, a dry goods counter with big tubs of nuts, oats, and whatnot, a deli and prepared foods section with pretty good vegetable tamales (and fantastic pizza around lunch time), and a pretty reasonably priced selection of organic/fair trade/etc options. And (burying the lede, I know), the bakery counter has these big (I think vegan) pumpkin whoopie pies.

- Huron Street waterfront. In recent years there have been efforts to provide actual waterfront park spaces, and they are nice. But ever since I moved to the neighborhood, a reliable place to get a beautiful view of Manhattan was to walk down to the end of Huron Street. As you walk that last block, the street basically becomes an alley, with windowless and graffiti strewn buildings on either side, a concrete barrier to hop over, and smashed cement jutting out over the water. And it's just a peaceful, beautiful view. It's also where I found the skeleton.

- Krolewskie Jadlo. Despite living in a predominantly Polish neighborhood, I haven't eaten that much Polish food in the last ten years. I've certainly picked up pierogi from the grocery store, and I had a bad experience on a Thanksgiving (I was spending it alone in New York, so I went to a Polish restaurant for their Thanksgiving meal; the thing I was most looking forward to was stuffing, so I saved what I thought was stuffing for the end of my meal; it turned out to be some kind of cold paste...maybe liver or lard or something? it was hard to remember to feel thankful). But there is a Polish restaurant in Greenpoint that I am particularly fond of. The decor certainly contributes a lot to my affection, and the Polish Plate (basically a little of everything) is a really delicious way to get my yearly fill of Polish cuisine.

- The hall at 149 Calyer. The building I lived in my first nine years in Greenpoint was a three story, three apartment building. I lived on the third floor, which was a decent sized two bedroom apartment (the bedrooms were small, but we had a good amount of space; of course, at various times we actually had three people living in the apartment). The stairways were narrow, but the hall had a somewhat open feeling, with a bit of a skylight above the stairs up to our floor. And the carpet on the stairs and hall was just old and ratty enough that I didn't feel bad about tracking slush or dirt onto it, but not so cruddy that I wouldn't run between the second and third floors on my bare feet. It was a real gift to be living mere seconds away from my best friends in town. But some of my fondest memories of that hallway predate my meeting Jesse & Marisa. The first couple of winters that I lived in the building, at the first big snowfall of the year my roommates and I would rush down to the deserted, lamp-lit streets and wage an epic snowball fight up and down the block. We'd hide behind the parked cars and then dump the snow that had accumulated on top of them onto each other. We'd wrestle around in the snow until we were too cold and soaked through to stay out any longer, and then we'd pile back upstairs and strip down to our t-shirts and underwear on the third floor landing, hanging our slushy clothes out on the bannister before we went inside to warm up. The hallway at 149 Calyer was also the primary haunt of the the Phantom of 149, which could be counted on to appear on...

- Halloween. I love Halloween, but I'm a little at sea when it comes to Halloween in the city. We don't have trick or treaters here the same way as in Arizona (it's fun to go hang out on Manhattan Avenue to see the kids trick or treat at all the stores, but I've never gotten to give candy out myself). But a few years ago, upon heading back upstairs after an evening hanging out at Jesse & Marisa's, I was struck with some kind of inspiration. I assembled a costume from a black sheet, a bird mask and viking helmet I had lying around, and some skeleton gloves I'd made the previous year, took a bucket of candy and went down to reverse trick or treat on the second floor. Thus was born the relatively short lived career of the Phantom of 149 Calyer (now displaced). Around Halloween, he could be found looming at the top of the stairs when Jesse & Marisa got in for the evening.

Lost and found

A correspondence:

from: nathaniel.wharton@gmail.com
to: MissingMyFriend@gmail.com
date: July 10, 2007 7:03 PM
subject: I'm sorry

I hope you find her


from: MissingMyFriend@gmail.com
to: nathaniel.wharton@gmail.com
date: July 10, 2007 9:45 PM
subject: Re: I'm sorry

thanks


from: MissingMyFriend@gmail.com
to: nathaniel.wharton@gmail.com
date: July 16, 2007 11:03 AM
subject: Re: I'm sorry

I found her.
Thanks for your support.

"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.

"Will the bicycle kids retaliate"?

I got my first taste of lawlessness over ten years ago at the Park n’ Swap in Apache Junction, Arizona. At that time, I was a plump elementary school student and my mother’s concern for her family's cholesterol meant that fast food was a somewhat rare indulgence. At the Park n’ Swap, however, where she’d set up shop for her first time, there was not a home-cooked meal to be found, so she gave my brother and I each a bit of money and sent us off in pursuit of sustenance at the McDonalds just across the street. Blessed with this rare opportunity, we agreed that the best course would be to pool our resources and get a twenty-piece Chicken McNugget sack. We made the transaction and, greasy bag of chicken product in hand, we set off back to mom’s table.

We’d only just reentered the Park n’ Swap, thrilled with our purchase which I held up as if it were some sort of talisman, when a kid on a bicycle swooped by and snatched the bag right out of my hand. He convened with his friends, also on bicycles, and the pack of them circled around and rode off. It took a moment for the shock of what had happened to sink in, and in that moment we realized that neither my brother nor I could catch the bicycle kids, that nobody else had either noticed or cared, and that all of the effort our salivary glands were making were now for naught in the absence of those chicken nuggets. We were hungry and powerless, and before those bicycle kids I’d never fallen so low after riding so high.

Ten years later, I was attending school in New York City and had gotten an internship at a television program. As part of the yearly Halloween festivities out at the studio, I decided to participate in the pumpkin-carving contest. I had purchased two pumpkins and spent the rest of the night fashioning a somewhat cartoony version of a dragon's head jack-o-lantern (utilizing items that could be found in my apartment, including light bulbs, paint, make-up, a black wig, and toothpicks). The pumpkin’s innards remained in a grocery bag in our kitchen for a couple of days. And as such things are wont to do, they developed a substantially foul odor. The evening before Halloween, as I set off to catch a midnight movie, I decided to take my bag of pumpkin guts and drop them in a garbage can on the way to the subway. Outside, the low fog and smattering of early trick-or-treaters lent the night an enjoyably spooky vibe. I had only made it a couple of blocks away from home, however, when a fellow walking down the sidewalk toward me body-checked me into the gate, grabbed my bag and ran off. Again, I was frozen for a moment as I confirmed that I was not hurt, that the guy had already rounded the corner, and most importantly, that he’d just stolen a rancid bag of pumpkin guts from me. And it began to dawn on me that while he was not on a bicycle, he surely must have hid it right around the corner to serve as his getaway vehicle. And that he was surely convening with his cronies and smacking his lips as they opened up the bag to get a look at their spoils. And that what had in fact happened what that I had inadvertently visited revenge on the bicycle kids ten years after the McNugget Incident.

I cannot help but wonder, though, whether this latest incident concludes this tale or I’ve instead initiated some cycle of revenge that will continue from here. Will the bicycle kids retaliate? Are we at the dawn of some sort of feud? The pumpkin wielding Hatfields and the bicycle riding McCoys? Will there be little red-haired kids shaking their fists at the kids riding hoverbikes, long after I’m gone? Let us pray that sanity prevails. And in the meantime, I’ll clutch anything delicious a little closer to me as I walk down the street.