More Weird New York Stories

As I reported in my last post, I grew up in Tribeca right by the mighty Hudson river, back in the day we had the Sand dunes we used to call them which were land fill that the world financial center and part of battery park city now rest on. Landfill is water mixed with sand and some concrete too which creates land on water. Me and my friends would play on the dunes, football or just mess around out there seeing who was out there. One day me and my friend were just hanging out on the dunes, we must have been about 13 or 14 or so. As we were walking back out of the dunes we spotted four black kids coming towards us, we didn't know them, they weren't from our neighborhood. We tried to walk away from them but we had to walk towards them to get out of the dunes and back onto West Street. As we got near them they grabbed the both of us and started to threaten us, we tried to struggle but my friend was not a fighter and although I tried to fight, I was small and there were four of them so it didn't matter much, they grabbed us and held us and they found some rope that must have been lying around in one of the sculptures or on the sand. I remember them saying we are going to throw you in the river white boy or something to that effect. Now, if your not familiar with the Hudson river, it's not a place you want to swim in first of all and secondly you definitely don't want to be in there tied up. The Hudson has very dangerous currents which have drowned more than one person who for whatever reason has found themselves in there. I tried not to show I was scared yet at the same time I didn't want to egg them on because who knew, they might really throw us in. We stayed quiet, they tied us up and kept razzing us, trying to scare us, my friend seemed more scared than me. I stayed quiet and just looked at them like I wished they were all dead. After a while they must have got bored with us, because they left us there tied back to back together. It took us another hour to work our way out of the ropes, thank god they didn't tie very good knots, we lived to see another day and weren't dunked in the treacherous hudson river.

I have another story to tell, this one a bit more gruesome. I used to live in a high rise building, when I was maybe 13 or 14, I went to pick up my best friend who lived right downstairs from me behind my building to go to school as I always did. I remember it was a cold snowy day and it had snowed the night before. I would exit my building into a small park area behind the building where there were benches and tree planters with trees in them. As usual, my friend wasn't ready yet so I waited for him outside, it was cold that day. As I looked around, about twenty feet away I thought I saw something in the snow, I wasn't sure what it was because there was some snow on top of it. I began to walk closer and realized it was a person, half buried in the snow. I couldn't understand what they were doing there, were they sleeping? As I got closer I could see the person's face and chest, the rest was buried in the snow, I didn't want to touch them, the man wasn't moving, I had never seen a dead body before and I was strangely facinated. As I looked to my left, I saw the man's legs lying in the tree planter, obviously not connected to his body anymore. Apparently the man had jumped from the roof during the night, which is over 39 stories up, he must have hit the tree planter which was about four feet high and it severed his legs from his body at the stomach area. For some reason I wasn't disgusted by this, it looked strange, I heard a little girl come walking near me and I had to go grab her so she wouldn't see and usher her away, then I told my friend to call security for the building and they came. I felt bad for the poor man and wondered later why he would jump and how scary it must have been, peering off the roof seeing how far you would have to fall before you hit the ground. I later found out the man had cancer and was terminally ill, he was going to die anyway and I guess he wanted to die on his own terms. I never really spoke about this to many people, these are things I guess you sometimes see growing up here in the City. I remember another girl had also jumped from my buildings roof before this, I also saw her body laying on the sidewalk crumpled in the fetal position, I remember the blood trickling from her into a drain on the sidewalk and as I walked away I saw one of her teeth on the sidewalk about twenty to thirty feet away, I imagined the impact of her body hitting the ground and wondered what drove her to it, she was young. I don't think I could jump from my terrace although I have thought about it many times. I guess i'm too chicken. I wonder what these people thought on the way down because it takes a few seconds to hit the ground. I often wonder what the poor souls thought of that jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11, some from three times the height of where I lived and it makes me shudder to have to make that choice. I can remember seeing the New York Times photograph of September 12th 2001 with a picture of a man upside down in the air who had just leapt out of one of the windows to avoid being burned alive, upside down, his tie fluttering on his way to the ground. It makes me shudder to this day as I think of all I have seen and how I manage to stay sane in this place that sometimes can drive you insane. It is not easy.