Summer 1978
The most carefree and happy times Angel, Eddy and Berto ever had were when they rode their bicycles and explored the streets stretching out in every direction beyond Moore Street. They knew all the streets of Williamsburg and rode as far away as the East River piers, over to Greenpoint along Bedford Avenue, and even across the Pulaski Bridge into Long Island City and Roosevelt Avenue.
Or they would go down Myrtle Avenue through downtown Brooklyn, then up Montague Street to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where they once spent an entire afternoon watching people walk by and the boats in New York Harbor. You could even see the Statue of Liberty from there.
They would travel through Bushwick, all the way down Bushwick Avenue until they passed the cemetery and approached East New York, but they went no farther than Jamaica Avenue. Or they would ride down Marcy Avenue into Bed-Stuy and sometimes go as far as Atlantic Avenue.
They took Flushing Avenue all the way out to Metropolitan and followed it into Middle Village until they reached the Lutheran Cemetery, then turned around. They also went out Johnson Avenue and crossed over to Cypress, where they rode all the way out to Cooper Avenue in Ridgewood.
Berto, knowing Julia had forbidden them to go alone into Manhattan, eventually dared the others to cross the Williamsburg Bridge. The boys rode over the pedestrian walkway and went all the way down Delancey Street until it ended at Kenmare and the Bowery. Julia never knew they had defied her and crossed the bridge anyway, but it was the only time they ever did so.
An adventure through the North Side of Williamsburg took them to an abandoned and dilapidated factory somewhere off Kent Avenue near the old Bushwick Inlet. They decided to explore it.
They left their bikes in a narrow alley between the old factory and the neighboring building, climbed the old creaking fire escape on the side of the building, and entered through an open window on the third floor.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be in here,” Eddy said fearfully as their eyes adjusted to the dim light inside.
The place was completely empty except for a few old wooden crates and broken glass covering the cracked concrete floors. With scant sunlight inside, the stairway leading to the upper and lower floors was even darker and more ominous. Stagnant pools of water dotted the floor, and the putrid smell of stale urine hung in the air.
The constant cooing of hundreds of pigeons nesting within the building, along with the mysterious, steady sound of metal scraping somewhere in a dark, eerie corner, filled the space. As they looked around, the boys avoided venturing into the darker areas of the building, preferring to stay close to the scarce light coming through the large windows, their broken panes wide open to the outside. Pigeons and mounds of what seemed to be many years’ worth of pigeon droppings were everywhere. The pigeon shit had a strange, unpleasant, musty odor that permeated the whole space. At irregular intervals, the birds took turns launching into frenzied, short-lived flights through the cavernous interior of the place.
In one corner of the wide-open room was a much smaller room which seemed to have formerly been an office. The scant remains of its door hung unsteadily from rusting hinges. Inside, the floor was littered with rags, all types of trash, lots of used syringes, filthy pieces of clothing, chicken bones in empty carry-out boxes, and broken glass.
“What are those needles doing here?” asked a curious Eddy, receiving no satisfactory answer from the others.
The space had also obviously been used as a toilet, and not just for pissing, for God knows how long. The evidence was voluminous.
On the wall was a large calendar showing the year “1971.” Attached to the calendar was a picture of a mechanic proudly standing next to a green tow truck, and at the bottom of the picture were the words, “Scholes Street Garage, Open 24 Hours.”
The boys stood quietly together at the threshold of the room and peered inside, searching its contents with curious eyes. “Fear not, I am Jesus!” proclaimed a crazy-looking man as he emerged from the shadows of the darkened stairway.
His sudden appearance and bold proclamation scared each of the boys so badly they reacted in their own frightened ways. Angel immediately turned and raised his fists in a fighting posture, as if facing down an aggressive bully. Berto, startled and shaken with fear, crouched to the floor, assuming a defenseless and vulnerable posture. Eddy cried out in terror, “Aahhh!” and ran toward the window through which they had entered. He was so frightened he nearly wet his pants.
“Fear not, children, I am Jesus,” the man said again. “I will not harm you, my children, because you are precious in my sight. Fear not!” he proclaimed emphatically.
“God has brought you here today because he wants you to know how much he loves you,” the man continued.
The three boys, beginning to sense the man was harmless, gradually lost some of their fear and looked at him with curious fascination.
“Who are you?” asked Angel.
“I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Chosen One of the Father, the Lord of the Universe, and this is my house which you have entered. This is a Holy Place, a temple, and I have summoned you here,” answered the man with authority in his voice.
While the man did have long hair and a scraggly beard, he also had deep blue eyes, wore really dirty clothes, smelled horrible, and didn’t look at all like the familiar pictures of Jesus. “Come and sit with me a while,” the man invited them.
Eddy quietly told the others he really wanted to leave.
“Let’s go!” he pleaded in a whisper, but very earnestly.
He added, “I heard crazy men who hang out in old buildings sometimes want to do really bad things to little kids.”
But Angel and Berto told Eddy the man didn’t seem bad, maybe just crazy, and it wouldn’t hurt to talk to him for a little while.
Berto whispered, “He could be some kind of messenger from God, so probably it could be a sin just to run away.”
“There are three of us and only one of him,” Angel declared confidently, “so I’m sure we can fight back if he tries anything funny.”
After the boys agreed among themselves to stick around “for at least a little while,” the man led them to another room hidden behind the stairway.
In the room were a lot of burning candles, providing the only, but still very dim, light. The candles were like the religious ones sold in corner bodegas. Encased in tall glass tubes about a foot high, most had images of saints, crosses, and other religious symbols colorfully painted on them.
For every candle still burning in the room, there were at least three or four more completely used up but still sitting among the others.
There were a few old milk crates lined up against the wall; a two-wheeled shopping cart, like the one Julia used when she did her grocery shopping, filled with frayed-looking books, newspapers, and magazines; several apparently broken old radios; and a few brown paper shopping bags stuffed with what appeared to be dirty clothes.
In the corner, on the floor, was an area covered with old blankets which appeared to be a “bed.”
A small brown and white cat sat in the middle of the room and stared suspiciously at them as they entered.
The man pointed to the milk crates and invited, or rather commanded, the boys to “take a seat,” which they immediately did. The cat stretched its four legs, then suddenly darted toward one of the corners, evidently trying to catch a large cockroach that had run across the floor.
The man sat facing the three boys. He then said, “Let’s get to the point.”
“My name is Jesus, and I am almost two thousand years old, but in this present life I am only thirty-two years old. I expect soon they will come to arrest me and put me to death again,” he said with complete seriousness.
“Before I realized a couple of years ago that my body contains the true spirit of the Anointed One, I used to be known as Jerry Chaskel,” he explained.
The cat, finished with its unsuccessful bid to catch the cockroach, moved toward the boys, sensually rubbed its body against Berto’s left leg, then curled into a circle at his feet and appeared to go to sleep.
The man continued talking, taking no apparent notice of the cat.
“I used to be married . . . I have two sons, but I haven’t seen them for about six years . . . I think they’re ashamed of me and tell everybody I’m dead. I lived with my family in a house over in Glendale, you know, Queens.”
The man spoke to the boys about his life with what seemed to be great sadness.
“I used to work as an accountant, you know, somebody who counts all the money for a business, for a company called Zero Enterprises . . . the company offices were over on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst . . . you know where that is? . . . we sold construction materials, and it was a good job.”
He continued.
“My problem was, Satan’s booze made me into a drunk. I used to drink that sweet, sweet juice all the time . . . even in the morning, as soon as I woke up.
“I would take a few swigs of whiskey or vodka to get the day rolling . . . it was really bad . . . sometimes I didn’t even bother to get out of bed in the morning, and eventually I lost my job . . . I can’t blame them for dumping me. After a while, I didn’t go to work half the time, and I never got anything done.
“My wife and I, we used to fight all the time . . . we got into fistfights a lot, and I hit her really hard sometimes, but she hit me just as hard. One time she hit me in the face with an empty whiskey bottle and knocked out a couple of my teeth.”
He pulled back his upper lip and showed them a gap of missing teeth on the upper left side of his mouth.
“You wouldn’t believe the bloody mouth I had when she knocked them out.”
He stood up just a little and passed gas loudly.
Reacting to his crude manners, the boys laughed out loud in unison. The cat lifted its head for a moment and looked around the room.
“It’s perfectly natural . . . better out than in!” he exclaimed, then laughed loudly himself. “I may be Jesus, but I still have to fart like everybody else.”
The air filled with his pungent odor.
He continued telling them about his life.
“But after I lost my job because of my drinking, my wife threw me out . . . we didn’t get along too well during our last couple of years together . . . I ended up trying to survive on the streets . . . I never thought I would end up being basically a bum, but then God the Father helped me realize my true identity is his only son, Jesus.”
The boys looked at each other with skeptical and amused glances as he continued explaining who he claimed to be.
Noticing their reactions, the man continued.
“I sense you doubt my divinity and my true identity,” he said with a trace of disappointment. “I have given up everything to complete my mission . . . I don’t drink like I used to . . . but even though I am Jesus, I am a human, and I struggle with the temptations of sin sometimes.
“The hardest thing to resist is the booze. Every so often I fail, and I give myself again to the bottle. But I haven’t had a drink now for at least three or four days. When I do, the devil takes over my body, and Jesus has to go back into his spirit form. He doesn’t like it, but he knows this body is only human, and it is weak. But I was just thinking a little while ago . . . this time I will not allow the devil to tempt the body with the drink again.”
He suddenly stood and dramatically raised his hands over the boys, as if he planned to cast some type of spell upon them.
The cat jumped, yowled as if in fear, then quickly fled from the room.
Then the man, almost shouting angrily, proclaimed with a kind of apocalyptic piety:
“My life is now pure, and you are here today because God the Father wants you to be pure as well . . . there will be great darkness in your lives if you do not repent and accept the Lord as your savior.”
The man’s posture and sudden change in manner again made the boys very uncomfortable. Like the cat before them, they too became fearful and anxious to get out of there.
“I told you,” Eddy whispered.
“I think we have to go now, Mister Jesus,” said Angel, looking at the others and pointing toward the doorway with his eyes.
“Yes, I was thinking the same thing,” said the man, sounding suddenly angry. “Truth is, I was about to throw you out anyway.”
“But before you go, I must give you, and you must receive, my blessing. I command it so.”
“Kneel on the floor to receive the blessing,” he demanded.
The boys, not wanting to anger him any further and afraid he might somehow get violent, quickly did as he commanded.
For a second time, the man raised both hands as if to pray over them. For more than a minute he half-sang, half-mumbled an indistinguishable chant which sounded like a mixture of Yiddish, Spanish, English and baby talk.
When he finished the blessing, he said loudly and very sternly, “Now leave this temple and never come back here, lest you wish to fall prey to the evil ones who occupy this place . . . go now . . . run out of here and remember the Father in Heaven loves you and the Lord will protect you when you are on the streets.”
“Get out of here! Run! . . . Go NOW!” he suddenly screamed with urgency.
The three boys hurried out of the room, ran to the window and climbed down the old fire escape. When they reached their bicycles, they jumped on them and sped away from the old factory as fast as they could.
Never again did they go back there, and it would be a long, long time before they even dared to enter another abandoned building without thinking twice about it.
For a while, at least, it seemed Jesus had taught them a lesson about the dangers of roaming around inside old factories and warehouses.
Toward the end of the same year, the old building near Kent Avenue burned down in a spectacular fire, and reports said three homeless men had died in the blaze. According to the news report, the fire apparently started when some of those inside built a fire to keep warm on a bitterly cold winter night.
The report also said the building had been used for years as a hangout for drug addicts and homeless people. There were also stories in the neighborhood about children having once been lured inside, assaulted and abused by a man living there.
Angel always wondered if Jesus was one of those killed in the fire, but he had no way of ever knowing for sure.
