Horror Story

Sometimes I take a circuitous route home.  I walk three quarters of a mile on a wooded road, the scenic route, before getting on the #10 bus.  Across the street is the Henry Hudson Bridge.  Yesterday an old man at the stop began talking to me about the horns on my head.  I inched away from him toward the bridge, which I was always curious about.  “Yes we had Enchanted Weekend where I work.  Okay, o-kay –bye bye now,” I said.  So I climbed the stairs to the bridge and had a lovely constitutional.

There’s a building at the end of Palisade Avenue that I wanted to see from the bridge.  At intervals I stared over the bridge at my lovely building, which overlooks the Hudson.  At the Hudson River Museum yesterday, there my building was, immortalized in a painting – a sure sign that I am to inhabit this early 20^th century dwelling one day.  The wind was vigorous.  The palisades were wondrous, and Inwood Hill Park invited below as the leaves are beginning to turn.

I stopped finally to look over the bridge at the water.  At the end of the bridge, the paths led only into Inwood Park.  I had assumed there was a path at the side of the parkway leading to the street.  Should I go back to Riverdale after walking all this way?  A woman was killed in the woods years ago.  People had been attacked.  I never go into the woods alone.  A runner took the curved path into the park.  Maybe he knew the way out.  I followed the runner.

Inwood Hill Park is called a forest.  There are cliffs rising high over Manhattan.  The trees are so thick that you can’t see buildings.  And there is no street noise.

The runner was gone and I was alone. I tried another path, but it led back to where I came from.  I thought of the Blair Witch Project where they try getting out of the woods but go around in circles.  They eventually die in the night.  Now it was dusk.  I heard crickets.

I walked quickly, uphill endlessly, scared as shit.  I was sweating.  I was relieved that the upward climb was over, but there were more paths up there.  Trying to figure out which to take was confusing.

There was an ancient iron lamppost with a broken globe.  I wanted a sliver of glass, a weapon.  Still walking quickly, I pulled a pen from my bag, ready to stab.  I called Eric, panting.  “Eric I’m in the woods.  I’m scared.  I can’t find my way out.  Can you stay on the phone with me?  I need someone to know where I am in case something happens.”  At times I jogged, grateful to be going downhill.  I reasoned that I should stay to the left where the trails led to the foothills.  Eric’s voice faded then I couldn’t hear him.  The call was dropped.

The darkening woods menaced.  It’s ironic about my creature horns — I told people at work that I was a wood creature.  I still had them on — haha.  An old tree on the right had a fantastical orange fungus.  What other monster imagery would I see?  A human threat?  Even in fear I thought fleetingly to take a picture of the fungus.  When would I see something like this again — get this opportunity?  But fear propelled me forward as I couldn’t waste any light.

At Halloween, during Haunted Inwood when actors hired to portray monsters guide kids through the night time woods, festooned with fog and cemeteries, there is a ticklish horror.  This was no ticklish horror.  More dark green paths led to an area where I saw a building way below.  I heard children.  But were they phantom children, like in the Blair Witch Project?  I took another path, trying to get to the building, but it went north.  I planned if necessary to climb down the rocky hills to the streets, veering off of the useless paths, so what if I tore my pants.

I got back on the original path.  At least I knew then that I was headed south where I would eventually get out.  I walked faster, heading for the wide stairs with wooden edges.  As a kid I got lost with my father and brother in these woods.  We came out around here.  I had shown daddy how to get us out.

Through the trees I saw the playground on Dyckman a way down. Would there be witchcraft involved where I’d continue to see the playground but never get on the right path?  I winded around another path then I was out!  I wanted to kiss the ground.  I called Eric back, then left a dramatic message with another friend.  I walked on the avenue at the border of the park, looking up at the dark menace of green looming over me.   I saw friends on my block and told them what happened with an exaggerated spirit of adventure, leaving the horror back in the woods.

Cheap Phone Camera Pictures of a Virtually Zombie-Free Road

I’ve been taking a new way home from work to avoid riding the bus with zombies masquerading as people.  As soon as you turn away they smack their fists in their hands and point at me.  They peel the latex ‘people’ skin from their face to show me decaying flesh then stick it back on before anyone else sees them.  Sometimes the bus is filled with them because they know this is my usual route.

So this is my new route home.

It’s the back roads of Riverdale in the Bronx.   There are others walking here but it’s rather quiet.  Since there are mansions on one side and a few houses speckled on the other by the river, I might be saved by a compassionate homeowner if one of those stinking dead bastards comes.

I imagine this road in the fall when the leaves turn Halloweeny and the moon is huge and orange with the wicked witch flying through it on her broom, and I get all oogie.

That white speck is a zombie but I’m behind the tree.

This walking path is like a country road with the woods and the river.  The people who live here don’t make the path less twiggy and gnarly because they don’t want riff raff like me too comfortable on it.

The road leads back to a luxury apartment area winding east.  At the end where the road curves back is a quaint old apartment complex, units crookedly piled on top of one another on a natural terrace jutting out over the river.  Each unit has an iron terrace and the roofs are rust colored, corrugated.  There’s ivy crawling all over the buildings.  There’s a serene view of the river and the palisades.  Woods are across the street.  Next to that is a prewar building, rather average but attractive, resembling the kind in my neighborhood.  It also juts out over the river.  It’s strange to see a building like that in a privileged position.

I’m going to live there.  That’s also why I walk this route, to get used to it when I have to come home this way, zombies or not.

But now, for my trip home from work this way, after a mile and a half, I get on a bus that zombies refuse to ride.   They don’t know where I live and they’re not blog readers.  A few are starting to get on Facebook, but I blocked them.  Trying to avoid them is exhausting but I don’t want to become a zombie anytime soon, so it’s what I accept.  They want to eat my superior brain and I can’t do anything about that.

My apartment

I work in Riverdale, the part of the Bronx with mansions and luxury apartments.  On the bus I pass neighborhoods and think, “I wonder what it looks like over there?”

After work I walked a different way to the bus stop through private streets with old mansions and got lost.  So I went on an adventure.  The sky was blue with cumulus clouds though it was swampy.  I got sweaty walking.

After walking in circles, I came to a familiar avenue, so I felt comfortable, though the area was strange.  There were swank luxury apartments with pools and terraces.  I figured where west was and walked as far west as I could because I wanted to see what was down by the river.  The streets were quiet, wide and pristine.  The sun glowed on the Whitehall, which actually is a stark white building.  I see it from the parkway, but from this vantage point, it was in another world, facing other privileged dwellings.  From there I walked on the southwest edge of Riverdale which eventually curved east.  There were woods then a school with a big soccer field.  Kids wearing orange uniforms were in there practicing.  Teenagers were in a park hanging out on the swings.  They looked like the cool kids.  I thought of Archie comic books, because the town of Riverdale where they lived is based on here.

My neighborhood is desirable by Manhattan standards, but it’s urban compared to this and in a different sphere.  Since this was a different world when I got home I had a new perspective of my neighborhood.

I felt like a traveler from somewhere else.  My neighborhood was quaint and vibrant.  I appreciated the different types of people, the prewar buildings, tenements, corner stores and congested streets.  The light seemed to shine differently on my own avenue even.  The buildings are neatly lined on the street.  It’s a clean look.  In my lobby I had a new appreciation for the photographs on the wall of this area from the early 1900s.  When I put my key in the grey door, I felt like somebody subleasing from another country.  Inside, I was a guest having a novel experience.  My building is pre-war so though my apartment isn’t big it has character.  I have a dressing area on view from the living room with a fake tiffany lamp and a spotted pig mirror.  I have textured walls and a view of the woods.  I felt like I was experiencing life maybe as an artist in a European apartment on a colorful street.  Sometimes I feel like I could live here forever.  It’s quiet on the street now, because the children are back in school.  Today I’d rather live here than in one of those sprawling Riverdale apartments.

Yay!

Somebody wrote a glowing review of my book on the Amazon site!  You can see the review if you click on the book cover at the side here.   In case you were wondering, my Grandma Hattie made the painting that I turned into the book cover.  I told her the name of my book and she giggled.  I read my stories to her.  She’s 90.  She’s my biggest fan.  My sister put effects on it to make it look like that.  Sometimes I use the bare painting as the header for my blog post.  That’s it up there, a portion of it, huge, looming over my whole page.

My Dad said grandma’s work was folk art.  I have three of her paintings hanging on my wall.  One looks, I swear, like Van Gogh.  If you’ve read a number of my posts you might glean that she’s at the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale.  It’s a reputable senior home in the posh part of the Bronx (yes, the Bronx!) called Riverdale.  Some of Riverdales’s prominent residents:  Joe Kennedy, Carly Simon and Yvonne DeCarlo.  A lot of rich people live there but I don’t know who they are.  Yvonne DeCarlo was a good actress who played in some good movies in the 4os through the 90s.  But to me she’s always been Lily Munster.