A world away

Luis took me with him on a real estate listing today to a six-story building in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the neighborhood I was born and raised in. When I saw the building again, it brought back to me an extraordinary incident that happened there, coincidentally 33 years ago to the day, an incident that for me symbolized the end of my innocence.

I vividly and fondly remember my childhood in Flatbush in the 1960s and 1970s. I wouldn't have traded the experience for anything else. We lived in a six-story building on Ocean Avenue called Ethel Arms (which Luis likes to call "Ethel Flabby Arms"). Ocean Avenue was once a sleepy path leading to Sheepshead Bay, but in the 1920s, as immigrant waves kept rolling in, high-rise apartment buildings sprouted all along the avenue, urbanizing it. When I was growing up, Ocean Avenue was a four-lane street, and the most popular sport was dodging cars to get to the other side. Once across, you entered Ditmas Park, where the scenery changed markedly and you felt like you were in the country.

The side streets were--and still are--lined with shade trees and stately Victorian homes dating from the early 1900s. The nearby Pink Palace in Sophie's Choice exemplifies those homes. Erasmus Hall High School, alma mater of Barbra Streisand, Susan Hayward, and Donny Most, was the closest public high school. Movie stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford lived in Flatbush around the time it urbanized. By the early 1970s the only famous local residents I knew of were Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki, a few soap actors, and Barry Manilow and his mother. The giant, fenced-in house across from my building was purportedly the home of a porn director, but I never knew whether that was true.

I always felt safe growing up in Flatbush, and evidently so did my parents, since they let me play unsupervised out on the big, open dangerous street. We weren't really unsupervised, as hundreds of invisible pairs of eyes somehow managed to report unseemly activity to our respective parents. Assaults and thefts were rare, but there did seem to be a fair amount of arson. On Hallowe'en my mother and some friends' parents would escort us to select homes around the neighborhood, including the Ebinger house on E. 19th Street. For those unfamiliar with Ebinger's, it was a family-owned bakery famous for its chocolate blackout cake.

The local movie palaces were the spectacular Loew's Kings (Baroque) and Rialto (Beaux-Arts) theatres, both now houses of worship. I realize now how magnificent some of the local architecture was. I remember old ice-cream parlors like Karp's on Flatbush and Newkirk, where my mother would get me a little cup of Coke syrup to combat an upset stomach.

At the time, I was unaware that the rest of the world was not like mine. Mine was what would be categorized today as "diverse"--a concept that is now enforced politically rather than organically. My building was like a mini-United Nations of different races, religions, and family status. The Pavlicases were a middle-aged Greek couple whose apartment smelled of cardamom, anise, and cumin. Our Jewish neighbor Miriam was a housebound single hemophiliac living with her 80-year-old widowed mother. My best friend, a black girl named Angela Barnes, had a white mom and a black dad. Glenn was a soft-spoken Jamaican man who I think was probably gay. I had friends who were Argentinian, Chinese, Haitian, Italian, Irish, Norwegian, Puerto Rican, Russian. I started studying Spanish on my own when I was 11 by sitting with El Diario and a Spanish dictionary so I could try to understand the Hispanics around the corner. Later, when we moved to an all-Irish block in Sunset Park in my late teens, I realized that worlds like mine were the exception rather than the rule.

In the summer of 1975, I was in love with a beautiful Trinidadian girl named Allison whom I'd been hanging out with for 6 months. When people ask me whether that wasn't a sign that I was straight, I remind them that we were both 12 and neither of us had gone through puberty yet. When we'd watch "Gidget" movies together, I was far more interested in James Darren than Sandra Dee.

Every Sunday morning I went to 10:00 mass at Our Lady of Refuge Church. I sometimes served as a lector, reading from the New Testament before the priest delivered the Gospel reading. I was a faithful churchgoer, a good little Catholic boy who never questioned authority, at least not until much later.

That was the first summer I had been allowed to cross Ocean Avenue by myself and play at my friend Chris's house on E. 19th Street between Ditmas and Newkirk avenues. I had a pretty large group of friends of different ages and backgrounds, and we all hung out together, forming cliques and clubs and factions but in the end always coming back together. Ditmas Park was like living in a suburban community without the sameness. On summer nights a big group of our friends would divide into teams and play Ring-o-levio for hours, using the 16-block grid of Ditmas Park as our playing field.

On August 9 of that year, the news broke that Sam Bronfman, a son of Seagram's heir Edgar Bronfman, had been kidnapped. At first there were reports that Bronfman was tied up in a cave somewhere, but then it was discovered that he was being held in an apartment building right around the corner from our building! My friends and I stood on the corner for long periods, trying to see if there was any action, but all we saw were black cars with tinted windows waiting for something.

One night, a news reporter said that one of the kidnappers was Dominic Byrne, the father of one of my classmates, Tommy. Everyone in the area knew Mr. Byrne, a small, slight Irishman who used to own a liquor store on Newkirk Plaza and then became a limo driver. No one could believe that he could be involved in such a caper because he was so unassuming. There was hushed talk of homosexual activity between Tommy's father and the other kidnapper, a fireman named Mel Lynch. (Lynch later claimed in court that he and Sam Bronfman had met at a gay bar and had been lovers and that Sam was a co-conspirator in the kidnapping, an allegation that was never proved.)

At church the following Sunday, the priest asked everyone to pray for Mr. Byrne, an upstanding usher known to everyone in the community. It was all anyone talked about for weeks. When school started a month later, Tommy wasn't there, though I think eventually he returned after the publicity had died down. Tommy's father went to prison for 3 years, for extortion, not kidnapping.

When I saw the building that was the scene of the crime yesterday I felt a little sad. It was the first time I realized that the kidnapping symbolically signaled the end of the Flatbush I had known and loved, or maybe I'm just older and more cynical.

In October 1975, New York City went bankrupt, and the federal government refused to bail the city out. Garbage piled up on the streets, and crime spiked as cops became scarcer. In 1976 the brand-new 10-speed bike I got for graduation was stolen from me at knifepoint in broad daylight on Ditmas Avenue, half a block from my building.

By 1977, the burning of Bushwick during the NYC blackout and the Son of Sam shootings were further emblems of the city's ailing health. Many of my friends and their families were moving to the suburbs or to other states to escape the worsening climate. My mother was mugged in the vestibule of our building, and my father had his wallet stolen several times. And then, the coup de grace: some random teenager picked up my 8-year-old brother and dropped up him on his head on the grass down the block for no apparent reason. In September 1977, we said goodbye to Flatbush.

It was strange walking around the area. I found a faded patch of concrete where a bunch of us had etched our initials in the then newly paved sidewalk. And there was the fence--or was it the fence?--we climbed over to get to our favorite hiding place during Ring-o-levio. Everything looked the same as it did 30 years ago, only smaller and less magical. Today I live only 3 miles from my childhood home, but in so many respects it's a world away.

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The road rose up to meet me

When I was a wee lad my parents showed me a brochure from Aer Lingus that gave bios of various Irish saints, among them St. Kieran. Aer Lingus had just unveiled its first fleet of Boeing 720s and named them after Irish saints, as they still do today. That, and my mother's corned beef and cabbage, was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of Irish culture. And yet, only one generation stood between me and the motherland. Dad's parents were "right off the boat," arriving a mere 30 years before I was born. Dad met mom while working as an Aer Lingus reservations agent. He was the black sheep of his family, and I never knew whether he wasn't interested in his heritage or whether his strained relationship with his abusive father estranged him. Aside from my family, the only Irish people I knew were my friends Jimmy and Mary Lee, new arrivals from Limerick with brogues and scrappy demeanors. Being Irish meant witnessing my father's hazy drunks and enduring the pungent odor of cheap, stale beer in the dark corners of the local pub.

My cousins Joanie and Denise were Irish stepdancers, and for a few summers I watched them dance at feisanna in East Durham. My aunt and uncle were charter members of their local AOH, and family gatherings often involved a wistful rendition of "Danny Boy." One of my aunts would usually go on about the anti-Papist laws, but I just thought she was crazy. I was American, through and through, and no one was trying to stop me from being Catholic. While my cousins were off spending their summers in Ireland with our relatives, my exposure to Irish culture consisted of eating Irish sodabread made by my Scottish grandmother.

I saw my dad's side of the family fairly often as a child. We lived in Brooklyn, and the rest of the family lived in Astoria and on Long Island. Summers I spent at my cousins' sprawling ranch house in Deer Park, where I learned how to ride a bike and breathed more easily away from the city and the family. At least once a month we had Sunday dinner at my grandparents' apartment in Long Island City. They were of the lace-curtain variety, certainly not the shanty variety--a distinction I would later discover is razor-thin.

Dad's mom died in 1980 of complications from arteriosclerosis, before anyone knew it as Alzheimer's, and Grandpa died 7 years later. By that time I had moved away to DC, partly to get away from my family, particularly my dad. I was terrified of ending up a repressed, belligerent drunk like him, so I became a teetotaler.

But as I came to learn, as much as you fight against the things you hate, you somehow end up being drawn to them. I didn't become a drinker, but I did like to fight. It must have been innate, because gay boys are not supposed to like fighting. I gave up Catholicism and embraced boxing as my religion. It didn't occur to me that I was following a long line of Irish boxers. Irishness was never in my consciousness. I just knew I liked it.

The year before Grandpa died he began losing his battle with emphysema. We all knew he had little time to live. My aunts and uncles organized a family reunion in a public park in Sunnyside, Queens. It's one of the few times we were all together, my grandfather, his five kids, and their fifteen kids, in one place. I came up from Washington, in the middle of summer, to see my aunts and uncles and cousins. In the pecking order of cousins, I'm number 5. I had fun, but I wasn't quite sure I fit in with them. For one thing, there was lots of drinking, which made me uncomfortable, and talk of sports, which, as a newly minted out homo didn't interest me. There was talk of trips to Ireland and Irish music and dance, and the bombs in Northern Ireland and the bloody Protestants. I remember someone talking about Irish performer Carmel Quinn, who I thought was cheesy. I didn't identify with anything Irish. Being Irish was quaint and backwards. It was leprechauns and green beer and four-leaf clovers. Now, when I think back on it, it's ironic: I was a foreign language major interested in every culture but my own.

After Grandpa died, I lost touch with dad's family. Grandpa was the glue that kept us all together. My cousins, who lived towns apart in Long Island, saw each other regularly. E-mail and cell phones were not common in the 1990s, so contact was sporadic at best. And there was one more thing: I was afraid to tell them I was gay.

Every year the family held a reunion, mostly in Long Island, but I never went. The next one I attended was in the mid-1990s. Many of my cousins had married and started having kids of their own. They owned houses and swimming pools and cars. I was still living in Virginia and renting a house. My "secret" still kept me at bay. During the reunion that year I confided in my cousin Joanie. "I was wondering when you were going to say something," she said. Turns out everyone in the family knew, had known for years, and it just wasn't an issue. It made me realize that fear is largely a figment of our fertile minds.

When dad died 7 years ago, it liberated me. No longer would I witness his bloated dramatic performances at family functions. I could be myself, on my own terms. Through the years, every alcoholic in the family had sobered up and stayed that way. My cousins were adults with interesting lives and families.

For years Luis tried to persuade me to apply for Irish citizenship, and I paid it lip service. When I finally decided to do it, I started talking to my dad's family to find out if anyone had done it. Some of them had thought about it but no one had actually applied. I decided to try, but I realized I didn't even know where by grandfather had been born. As it turned out, no one else knew for sure either. When I applied for his birth record from Ireland, the seed had been planted: I realized that I knew only a watered down version of Ireland. I wanted to know where I came from. A big driver was the realization that I am the end of my line. If I couldn't leave a child, at least I could leave the legacy of the family history.

I started reading Irish history, learning the Irish language, and applying for citizenship. I took my first trip to Ireland, became a member of the Irish Arts Center and the Irish Repertory Theater. I built my family tree and have now gone back almost six generations on both sides. (Oh, and I love the Guinness.) Plastic Paddy though I may be, I don't consider myself any more Irish than I was growing up. I just have a different perspective. I still find it ironic that I am descended from a long line of dairy farmers and I'm mildly lactose intolerant.

This year I went to my family reunion on Long Island. I hadn't gone in 4 years, as I'd had other plans when the reunion was held. My cousin PJ proudly announced that his daughter Julia is a world-ranked Irish stepdancer. My cousin Tommy told us stories of visiting our great-grandmother when he was a kid. I showed my aunts the family tree; Aunt Helen, my best source of family information, said she was so thankful that I had done this. I showed off my new Irish passport, which I will christen on our trip to London in December. Now all my cousins want to get theirs.

At the end of the day, PJ gathered us all in his basement to watch Julia perform a few Irish stepdances for us. I watched her raptly, feeling a tear come to my eye, and was glad for the journey I had made.

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Kieran O'Leary is 45 and not single

The first 45 I ever bought was Marie Osmond's "Paper Roses," in 1973. I was 10. That should have been a tipoff. The next one was "Half-Breed," by Cher. Get the picture?

Today I turned the number of revolutions per minute in a staple of my youth: my beloved 7-inch vinyl singles. The days of 33 are past, and hopefully I'm not quite speeding toward 78. (If you don't know what on earth I'm talking about, you're too young to be reading this.)

The first thing I saw when I awoke this morning were six little yellow Post-Its with "Happy Birthday" in familiar handwriting dotting each of our six wardrobes. On the front door were 5 rows and 12 columns of symmetrically arranged Post-Its. (The center one under the peephole said "Harry Birthday," a chiding reference to my former partner.) More sticky notes on the bathroom mirror, the pantry, and inside my laptop.

In the center of the kitchen table Boo Boo Bunny and Boo Boo Kitty, our stuffed avatars, guarded a green vase with 3 dozen pink roses, and a dozen more in the living room.

I opened my sock drawer: another sticky. In the teapot: another. And one in the teacup.

The pinprick that burst the balloon was a message from mom: "I was calling to wish you a happy birthday. I thought I would get you personally, but I guess you're busy doing something." What's a birthday without the gift of maternal guilt?

As Luis can attest, I'm a sentimentalist (and by that, he means pack rat). I keep things that most people would have pitched long ago: my journals, my grade-school report cards, my first love letters, my first ticket stub for a baseball game. Every now and then I revisit those things, to make them real again, to remind myself of where I've been and how they made me who I am today. Andrea would probably say, "That's extra Irish."

Luis was working, and I had no plans. It was kind of muggy out, so I took a bus ride out to Bay Ridge, which took about an hour. First stop, a pizzeria on Third Avenue. I plunked my money down and said in my best Tony Manero voice, "Two. Gimme two." To me Saturday Night Fever is a documentary.

Next stop: Shore Road, which hugs the southwestern coast of Brooklyn from 69th Street to 99th Street. I spend many of my high-school years hanging out there, thinking about what it would be like to live in Manhattan, or The City, as we called it. The houses along the shore look the same as they did 30 years ago, but the old haunts are gone. I used to mock adults who reminisced about the "good old days," but now I understand what they mean. It's not that they were such good old days, but I miss the days when time didn't seem to move so quickly. There was the place where Mark and I took up jogging so we could cruise men. There was the spot where my friends and I had a picnic the day after I got home from my junior year abroad. And there was where I took my prom date before I knew the truth about myself. The signposts are all still there; only the times and I have changed.

I guess what I find unsettling about a birthday, and this one in particular, is the stark reminder of how many summers and winters have passed and the uncertainty of how many lie ahead. I try to remember what I did last year or the year before that, and sometimes I can't. So I guess that's why I hold on to things that help me remember.

My 45s seem so quaint, inefficient, and fragile now. Now I can download a song file in a flash. But then, it's not the 45s I miss so much as the memories stashed between their grooves.

When I get in one of these introspective moods, in the end I am always grateful for my bounteous life. As Dickens said, "Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some." Those dozens of little stickies and roses echo the truth of those words. The turntable may be a relic, but at 45 the disks are still spinning.

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Cropsey crops up

While hiking on a nature trail today near Chester, Connecticut, Jenn, Luis, and I came to a clearing overlooking a stream. As we descended the banks to cool our feet in the water, we noticed a tree trunk covered in a dark red substance. About 5 feet away, on another tree, hung a towel and a baseball cap. The towel also had a reddish substance on it that looked a lot like blood.

"Ooh, maybe Cropsey was here," I said in my best Shaggy voice.

"Who's that?" Jenn said.

"Cropsey," I said, "is the stuff that nightmares are made of."

In the fall of 1972, my Cub Scout troop, Pack 175, went on an overnight hike to Lake Minnewaska, NY, not far from New Paltz. My scoutmaster, Kenny, was jovial yet commandeering. I have no idea how old he was. To a 10-year-old, even 20 seems ancient. His military demeanor fully suited his post, and most of the boys respected him. The assistant scoutmaster, Roger, was quiet but had a mischievous streak. He could be jokey with us even while falling in line with Kenny's leadership style. I recall that he looked like Don Knotts's character Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show.

Our cabins were in a desolate area with no running water or bathrooms. I remember the minute I entered my cabin, I stepped on a rusty nail, which dug into my heel. It hurt, but it didn't go deep. One of the other kids told me I'd get lockjaw from it, but I didn't know whether to believe him. I didn't know what lockjaw was, but it sounded bad, and I kept feeling my jaw to see if I could still move it. When nothing happened by the next day, I figured I was probably going to live.

While some of the kids unloaded their stuff in the cabins, Kenny rounded up five of us--I'd say we were all brown-nosers--and took us on a hike through the woods. The October air grew chillier just as sunset took hold. As a scout I'd learned how to mark a trail and look for the position of the sun overhead, so I wasn't afraid of getting lost. Besides, I knew Kenny would get us back to camp safely.

I don't know how long we hiked--not very long--before we came to a stone structure in a thicket of weeds and grass. Moss grew all over the outside. I could tell at one point that it had been a house, but now it was largely a pile of rubble. Some rooms remained intact, but there was hardly a roof. The sky was turning dark with each minute, making it more difficult to see where we were going. The wind started picking up too, and then suddenly, it started to rain, torrents . We all ran inside the part of the stone house that was covered. Kenny was nowhere to be found. One scout called out his name, and Kenny answered from another part of the house. We followed his voice and saw the glow of his flashlight down below. We climbed down some stairs, and there was Kenny, standing in front of what looked like a steel bed frame.

"Shhhhh," Kenny said, and we all stood still. "He could come back at any moment."

"Who?" whispered Tommy. The rain was beating down full force now, and thunder boomed in the distance.

Just after a particularly loud boom, Kenny said softly, "Cropsey."

We'd never heard of Cropsey before, but just the name was enough to make us feel we didn't want Cropsey to come back.

"This," said Kenny, pointing to the steel bed frame, "is the rack that Cropsey uses..." Another thunder clap came. "...to punish little boys."

If there was ever a time I wanted to wet my pants, that was it. But I didn't. Five 10-year-old boys let out a collective gasp and huddled together. I didn't know how such a rack worked, nor did I care. I didn't want Cropsey to get me.

"Cropsey was a nice man. His son was a Cub Scout. One night his son was out in the woods with some other Scouts and they dared him to jump into Lake Minnewaska. Only the boy couldn't see how deep the water was, and he drowned." We all stood wide-eyed and completely still. One kid was shaking and holding back tears.

"Once a year, on the night of his son's death, Cropsey roams the woods, looking for revenge. Tonight is that night."

I remember thinking, well that explains why Cropsey's not home. I wasn't too worried, though. Kenny wouldn't let anything bad happen to us.

Kenny shone his flashlight to lead us out of the house. What if Cropsey saw the light and followed us? What if he was waiting outside?

We all held hands and made our way out into the woods again. The rain, which had stopped, made the trail muddy. It was pitch black out, and Kenny led the way back to the campsite. I remember looking back, convinced that Cropsey was following us. I could have sworn I saw another light following us.

That night the whole scout pack sat around a big campfire, as Kenny recounted the tale of the vengeful Cropsey. All around us, the snapping of twigs echoed in the woods. Kenny and Roger had walkie-talkies with them. Suddenly, Kenny's walkie-talkie crackled.

"Roger here. Light shining about half a mile ahead. Over."

"10-4," Kenny said. "Nothing to worry about, boys. There's a full moon overhead. Probably just bouncing off something."

Kenny continued telling the grisly tale of Cropsey, of his son's death, and how Cropsey's hand was mangled in an accident (I remember thinking this family was careless) and replaced by a hook that he used to nab innocent campers. Tonight, Kenny said, was the anniversary of his son's death. That's why Roger was on the lookout for anything suspicious.

I doubt any of us slept that night. In our bunk beds, we giggled and tried to scare each other using creepy voices and sneaking up and grabbing each other's legs. In the morning we were all still there. We had evaded Cropsey.

Many years later I was talking to another New Yorker who went to sleepaway camp in the 1970s and told him about the Cropsey story. He said that he had been told a similar tale, but that his Cropsey wielded an axe. Over the years I talked to others who knew about Cropsey, and I wondered where it began and how it spread. After all, this was way before the advent of the Web, and the tale extended to scouts and campers alike.

It turns out that the tale is far more widespread than I imagined. An article called "The Cropsey Maniac" appeared in New York Folklore in 1977. A horribly disfigured Cropsey (or Cropsy) terrorized campers in the 1980 movie The Burning, which was eclipsed by the Friday the 13th series. A book published in 1997 called The Legend of Cropsey: A Legacy of Terror at Summer Camp, by the aptly named Hugo Furst, explains the story.

As we made our way up the banks to dry land, Luis put his finger on the reddish substance. Was it sap? Or blood? Jenn felt the towel, which was still damp. We looked around nervously to see if anyone was lurking. I put my finger on the sticky red stuff, too, and smelled it.

"Barbecue sauce," I said. Jenn smelled it and agreed. That's all it was: just barbecue sauce. That would explain the color of the towel. Maybe.

We walked back through the woods, occasionally turning around to make sure we were all in tow. Cropsey liked to surprise his victims. Even in broad daylight, you could never be too sure. The woods are good at keeping secrets.

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