Monsters

Dahl Court in Brooklyn wasn’t, in my opinion, the most idealistic of places to grow up but it certainly was never boring. Our house was the very last one on the dead end street so unlike most of the houses on the block, ours was only attached on one side. The other side abutted a sanitation department garage which was always referred to as the D.S. (Department of Sanitation).

Not being a wimpy little girlie-girl, I often would climb over the wall behind my house and into the vacant lot that was part of the D.S. property. There were a lot of interesting things back there among the tree-sized weeds: empty tubes of model glue, empty liqueur bottles, and cat skeletons. One time someone found a rusty, dull machete. If they had hoped to use it to clear out the weeds, that brainstorm obviously came after emptying many of those bottles because the only thing capable of clearing out that lot would have been a chain saw.

The strange thing is, even after knowing there was a machete found back there, I still didn’t have nightmares of Freddy Kruger-like characters jumping over the wall and chasing me. Nope. What I pictured leaping at me over that wall was a werewolf. Yeah, a supernatural creature is just so much more likely to get me rather than a machete waving madman.

Adding to the scary atmosphere was the fact that there were no street lights on the block. This meant that even after I was well beyond the years of actually believing that a werewolf could grab me, I was still a bit freaked out when I had to walk home in the dark.

Come to think of it, I’m still not terribly fond of the dark although at the present time I no longer imagine yellow glowing eyes watching me.