City Kids, Brooklyn Streets

I hadn't meant to read it, but I did, the story of the little boy in Brooklyn who was missing...and his horrific and incomprehensible fate. He was just a little boy who got confused and asked a stranger for directions. The rest is chilling and heartbreaking and unimaginable, and I don't know how the people who loved him can endure such anguish, or how they will go on to live and trust and have faith in anything. What are the odds of a little boy choosing the one stranger who turns out to be a monster? Probably miniscule.

The story caught my attention in particular because it happened in Brooklyn, my childhood home, and I even heard mention of Kensington, my own school district, and I have been thinking about the way I wandered those streets as a kid, sometimes solo. It was a different era, of course, but I suppose danger always lurked. We were given free rein back then, armed with a few basic rules, such as crossing at the corner and never getting into anyone's car. There were of course no cell phones, so an emergency dime was a good idea, although ten cents could also buy two candy bars, a very tempting transaction. The streets usually hummed with children––running, exploring, making up adventures––but there were also plenty of crabby grandmothers with their elbows on the window sills, looking out with nosy vigilance, ready to wag a finger and scold, and they wielded real authority.

My best friend Carol and I liked to talk to grown-ups––shopkeepers, mostly, or the man who fixed the traffic light, or a friendly fellow named Albert who was probably in his early 30s. Albert was the one who raised my father's eyebrow and suspicion when I mentioned him in passing.

"Who is this Albert?" he wanted to know, and he was not satisfied with my description of a nice-looking joke-telling man with a pencil-thin mustache much like his. "Why is he hanging around talking to little girls?" he asked. I had just assumed that Albert liked our company, but in my father's voice I heard a joy-killing sort of dissonance. There were creepy things out there, just beneath the surface, that I probably didn't want to know about.And then a scary thing did happen. I was nine years old and walked ten blocks each morning to Public School 179, sometimes with my brothers, and sometimes by myself.

On this particular morning I was alone. I’d left home earlier than usual and the neighborhood was quiet and empty. But I loved the city in the mornings when it was just rousing from sleep; the shops were still closed and kitchen lights were going on and someone was sweeping off a walkway with a rhythmic swishing of broom. It also happened to be spring and a lingering residue of night still clung to the lilacs and forsythia, rendering them especially fragrant.I had plenty of time but moved briskly out of habit, enjoying the percussion of my own steps upon the sidewalk. I felt autonomous and substantial, a purposeful girl in a navy blue skirt who knew where she was going all on her own. I passed mailboxes and maple trees, rows of red brick apartment buildings, and two-family houses bordered by square hedges. Just beyond East 8th Street I began to imagine the sound of another set of footsteps behind me.

“Maybe I’m being followed,” I thought, “just like someone in a detective story.” It was a fun idea and I pretended it was true. I hastened my pace… and the steps behind me accelerated as well. At the very moment when I realized that the steps were not imaginary, I felt a firm hand against my back and was pushed and then pulled into the narrow driveway between two buildings set far back from the street.

All the pretending abruptly drained out of me, and with it my good sense and volition. How quickly I turned into nothing.He was a dark haired man so ordinary in appearance that I cannot recall a single feature of his face. Now he held me against the side of one of the buildings. From within I heard water running through a pipe and the sustained low hum of something electrical. I recognized the reassuring noises of mundane morning routines beginning and noticed for the first time the omnipresent undercurrent of sound beneath the city even in its quiet times. I could feel the cold and roughness of the brick and the alien pressure of the stranger’s weight. There was a vague smell about him, maybe stale tobacco, and something that was dissonant and other, something nauseating, outside of my world, outside of my nine-year-old comprehension. He released his hold on me and I could have run but stood before him meek and paralyzed and baffled.

I held a small stack of school books and a pencil case with a tiny plastic name tag attached to the zipper. He took hold of the name tag and read my name out loud. “Don’t be afraid, Cynthia,” he said, and I was sickened by the sound of my own name issuing from his lips. Now he reached into his trousers and through his fly thrust out a fleshy protrusion that he asked me to touch. It did not occur to me that this was his penis. Actually, penis was a word I did not know, but I had glimpsed what my brother had and it did not resemble this thing.

Perhaps I was in denial, but in truth I think I simply failed to understand. Why would someone corner me and ask me to touch him unless he yearned for touch? Why would someone yearn for touch unless no one ever touched him? Why would no one ever touch him? One look at his freakish anatomy made it clear. I concluded that he was showing me a deformed and swollen thumb so repulsive to others that he had to coerce random humans to touch it.

So this was his modus operandi – walk the early morning streets, drag some unsuspecting soul into an alley, and procure the longed-for feel of skin on skin. For an instant I almost felt pity. But no, that can’t be true. More likely I was protecting myself from my terror and revulsion by inventing a story less threatening than the one I had been dragged into, the one I had no words for, the one I could not begin to understand or react to.

And yet I could not be the one to touch it. There was something very wrong here. Alarms were going off inside my head. He took my hand and tried to guide it towards him. I remained frozen with fear, a dumb animal, an easy victim. Suddenly a new sound as a door opened and slammed and a middle-aged man carrying a briefcase emerged and casually walked down the stairs at the front of the building, mere yards away from where I stood. I opened my mouth to yell for help but my voice was lodged in my throat and not a sound came out. I was a mute and paralyzed creature forever suspended in a sickening moment with a stranger who intended to do something creepy and terrible. The man with the brief case went on his way and the stranger turned towards me.

Then God or survival instinct reappeared and gave me a shove and my will returned and I yanked myself away and I ran as fast as my skinny legs could carry me the entire distance to school where no one had yet gathered but I touched the anchor playground fence as though it were home base. Later I sat in Mrs. Olinger’s fourth grade classroom doing math and history and English, and I didn’t tell anyone what had happened.We were all running a risk, I guess. And learning to navigate, learning to notice, learning that the world was indeed bountiful but we could not lean into it with reckless abandon. I realized even then that I had been spared not because I was smart but because I was lucky, and I understood that not all grown-ups would look out for me.

One afternoon, perhaps a year a so later, instead of going home when school was out, I walked alone to the Woolworth's on Flatbush Avenue, a completely different route that did not lead towards home. Nobody knew I was doing this, but our class was having some sort of a plant fair, whatever that means, and we were all supposed to bring plants to the classroom no later than tomorrow so we could take care of them and watch them flourish. I did not yet have a plant, so my plan was to buy one at Woolworth's, which in those days was an emporium of earthly goods, from green plants to goldfish to goggles and games and the rest of the alphabet too. I carried a quarter, and for 15 cents I bought a tiny little ivy plant in a tiny plastic pot.

But I must have lingered too long in Woolworth's, with all its colorful distractions, because when I stepped outside, it had grown dark and everything looked different. Some of the stores were already beginning to close, and even Flatbush Avenue seemed quiet. I started to walk, holding my little ivy plant, and I turned down one of the side streets that would take me back towards Coney Island Avenue. All I saw were shadows, and I felt a sudden sense of fear. I had walked these streets many times with my mother, but now I wasn't even sure if I was headed in the right direction.

I still had that dime. I hurried back to Woolworth's and went to the phone booth at the front of the store and dialed my house. My father answered and I started to cry. "Stay right there," he said. "I'll be there in a few minutes."I watched through the big plate glass store front. His familiar car pulled up, he stepped outside, and I ran into his arms."I'm glad you had the good sense to call me," he said, hugging me tight.

And I felt safe and loved and grateful.I don't know why I was crying so hard.