A life in crime

Abandoned houses have long exerted a peculiar fascination over me. When I was three, we moved from our house in Brooklyn to a quiet suburban neighborhood which had a “haunted house” located diagonally across the street from us. If I stood at our front door, it was one of the first things I saw, and I never contemplated it without a shudder. As a derelict building, it was a classic of its kind – crumbling red brick, broken windows, graffiti, overgrown lawn, an obligatory “For Sale” sign, the works. The place was of course a magnet for every beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking, making-out teenager within a 10 block radius. At night you’d see the flickering yellow lights of matches being struck or flashlight beams bouncing dementedly around., a sight that did not inspire confidence in my three year old mind. And sometimes there were…sounds…voices. Who knew what was going on in there?

Gentle reader, you must know where I’m going with this…One day, a couple of my friends organized an expeditionary break-in. Filled with fear and trembling, but in the grips of an irresistible compulsion, I followed them in. Next thing I knew, I was running out screaming my head off like a victim in a horror movie. What transpired in between I have no idea; where that memory should be is a total black-out. Was I transported to the mother ship? Is that when the probe got implanted in my brain?

Could be.

But the experience – whatever it actually was – failed to break me. Five years later, me and my friend Eileen Jones were gleefully breaking into an abandoned carriage house. First we had to grapple our way hand over hand up the twisty ropes of ivy totally obscuring the facade, and then we had to squeeze ourselves in between the long pointy shards of broken glass of an open second story window. It was tough getting in there, let me tell you. Ivy Cottage, we called it. Off-limits, is what my mother called it. Too bad for her, I grew up. Or at least grew more careful.

Because once you get a taste of that B&E frisson, it’s hard to give it up. Just like how for some people, smoking that first joint plunges them directly into the ravages of heroin addiction, or an innocent sip of their Dad’s beer is the irrevocable step #1 leading them straight into the heart of the worst kind of Bowery-bum type alcoholism, some of us should NEVER be allowed to get that first taste. Because it didn’t stop with Ivy Cottage. Next it was Horman’s Castle on Howard Avenue. The Staten Island Monastery, also on Howard Avenue. The old Gramatan Hotel in Bronxville. An abandoned factory in White Plains. The University of Miami’s Experimental Agriculture Lab.

Now I’m a realtor and I can enter abandoned buildings at will, without having to worry about being arrested. Other people actually unlock the doors for me, hand me keys, give me the lockbox codes. Do they understand who they’re dealing with? Evidently not. So lots has changed. But one thing hasn’t. Every unopened door still holds out a promise for me, a mystery that dangles just out of reach. It’s like getting the answer to a question you didn’t even know you had. For a second, opening that door feels like it has the potential to change everything. It’s huge, that moment when your hand is on the knob and you feel the door push open. Because anything could lie on the other side. Anything.