The Most Bizarre Article I Can Remember Reading

nineteen sixties, by Gabrielle Glancy. What I believe the purpose of this article is is too well, let's get into it, all right. I'll start reading here. There we go. There was danger outside the gate. We understood that you could see it precariously balanced on the very tip of Coney Island. Seagate, where I was raised, as surrounded by water on three sides and divided from the rest of the world by

a two story chain link fence. The fence, broken up only by two actual gates manned by guards, stretches three quarters of a mile long thirty seventh Street from New York Harbor on the north side to the Atlantic Ocean on the south. On our side of the fence, tree lined streets. The closer you get to the ocean the bigger the houses from the beach of via the Aarrenzano Bridge. In the eighteen nineties, the Vanderbilts, Dodges and Morgans built

houses here. In fact, some of the houses on the beach were forty room mansions before they got divided up during the depression. It was a private beach escaped for the rich. You can understand why they fenced a neighborhood off on the other side of the fence where today stand residential high rises were slums. In fact, Seagate was an island on an island. Growing up in the sixties, the place was like one big playground. From the parachute jump on Coney Island, the symbol of my childhood, you

could probably see the Statue of Liberty. The amusement park ride Brooklyn's Eiffel Tower was itself a kind of poor man's Statue of Liberty. It represented the idea that wherever you were, you could have a bigger view of where you could end up. My mother and I lived with my grandparents in the last house before you got to

the fence. We had a view from our kitchen window through chain link of abandoned cars boarded up tenements, garbage, old bicycle frames that have been picked clean, still locked to a pole. In those days, the neighborhood kids had the run of the place. We went outside as soon as we got up and didn't come home until dinner. There was a catwalk to narrow even if in a bicycle, that we kids called the path, which ran between our

house and the fence. The older boys often parked their bikes and our driveway, took the path and came back to pick their bikes up. She's basically painting the picture of a as close to idyllic kind of neighborhood that you can get when it comes when you're in a city, when you're in an I mean, it's an outer borough, but it's still the city considered the city. To me, the city is Manhattan, but you know it's still part

of the city. The path was maybe three feet wide, broken cement overhung in places by my grandmother's private hedge, a privet hedge whose tiny white blossoms carried the scent of my Brooklyn childhood. Half in shadow, half in sun. The path provided a back route in the neighborhood, which we simply referred to as the Gate, perhaps because it ran behind our house along thirty seventh and unseemly Street. The path held the mystery in a danger. At some point,

someone cut a hole in the chain link. In the chain link there, I remember seeing kids and sometimes even grown men slipping through to avoid the guards at the gates. My grandmother warned me to stay away from there, and yet the opening was only four feet from our house. Since our street was a dead end, it created a perfect diamond for the boys in the neighborhood to play stickball.

I knew many of them by sight, even those five or six years older than me, because my grandfather set us up with a stickball resale business when I was four. Quote over the fence was a home run, which meant many pale pink Spaldine balls ended up on our roof. My grandfather sold them back to the boys for five cents less than what they had originally paid for them, and passed the money to me. I'm not gonna even comment at this point. I mean, that's not the point

of this. I have vivid memories on warm summer evenings of my grandfather pulling out the ladder and placing it against the side of the house, untucking his white start shirt and climbing up. I stood at the bottom of the ladder and watched. It seemed like magic. After a few minutes, as if he had been collecting eggs, he came down with a shirt tail apron full of spaldines. There is a picture of her grandfather seemingly changing just jumping right into the subject of the title of the article.

Following the release of the Epstein files in January, I began to notice a lot of posts about him on the I grew Up in Seagate facebook group. Someone posted a class picture with Epstein standing in the back row among a bunch of awkward looking preteen teens at Mark Twain Junior High where my mother taught English during the years he was a student there. The person who posted the photo bragged about attending Epstein's Bob Mitzvah and claimed

that Epstein had grown up in Seagate. I took a screenshot of the kid whose head was circled in red magic marker, and saved it to my phone so I could take a closer look. That's Jeffrey Epstein. I couldn't believe it. I recognized him Epstein. I thought he had been one of our stickball clients. Dizzy and I shot a question at Google where exactly did Jeffrey Epstein grow up? And Boila, I had before me the exact addresses in

Seagate where the Epstein's had lived. As it turned out, I grew up on the same street at the same time as Jeffrey Epstein. That's not a metaphor, it's a fact. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Seagate, Coney Island. Quote. You're not going to believe this, end quote. I said to my cousins when I revealed to them what my Google search had turned up. I then took the opportunity to ask them each in turn if my grandfather had

molested them as he had me. It just seemed like the right moment to bring it up after all these years, because suddenly the whole world was talking about pedophilia. Not really, my oldest cousin, Josie said, but he was weird. My cousins had lived on the other side of the fence in Coney Island. They did not live with my grandparents in Seagate as my mother and I did. Quote. You know, Grandpa was a foreman for Fred Trump when he was building Trump village, don't you, Josie said. One day when

I was there, Donnie came over. How old were you, I asked. She thought for a minute, about eleven, she answered. My cousin Josie and Donald Trump are exactly the same age. I was my grandparent's youngest grandchild by fourteen years, and Josie was the oldest. I have to say I was shocked by the idea of Donald Trump and his father standing in our living room and didn't really believe her. As if this wasn't enough, she added, and of course,

you know the mafia runs Seagate. Incredulous. I reported the contents of this conversation back to my best friend from childhood, Molly Howard. Listen to this, Molly called to her husband, Gabby says, Josie says, Seagate was run by the mafia. Isn't that crazy? Everyone knows that I heard Howard shirt back from the other room. Like us, Howard had also grown up in Seagate. When the Epstein story broke, the pieces both came together and fell apart from me. I

began to think about proximity and coincidence. A few years before, when I was living on the West Coast, I had tried to write about the murder of two teenage girls who were allegedly being sex trafficked by the police and the house next door to ours when a bullet came through my window. As Mary Carr says in her introduction to The Liars Club, quote when fortunate hands, when fortune hands you such characters, why bother to make stuff up? Well, I mean you have to ask that in the mirror, lady.

Following the Epstein revelation, I interviewed one of the now grown up kids on our block in Seagate, Paula, who told me she had reason to believe my grandfather molested Jeffrey Epstein. So you can see what this. The narrative here is Jeffrey Epstein was molested. YadA, YadA. It's not his fault ya da yah. Yeah. I mean, it's just but I have to keep going. Quote, there were seven pedophiles on our street alone, Paula said. A neighbor named Litsky,

she said, was fucking both boys and girls. Okay, think about this. I don't know. I'm assuming most of the people who listen to this are younger than me. I mean I have to assume it because I'm old. If people knew that there was a pedophile in your neighborhood. What would have happened to that person? I'm not even saying vigilante justice. Someone would have called the cops, right,

someone would have gone. If you grew up in the kind of neighborhood I did you know, they probably would have ended up A bunch of fathers would have probably tooken them up, taken them up to the tallest building, the roof of the tallest build. There were seven pedophiles on our street alone. Now we know historically that these

they exaggerate. We know this, so the questions are endless with This is the purpose of this to if you're trying to excuse what Jeffrey Epstein did, you're going to make it seem like the Jewish neighborhood had seven pedophiles on one street. I'm let me repeat this again. Quote there were seven pedophiles on our street alone. End quote. Paula said a neighbor named Litsky, she said, quote was fucking both boys and girls. End quote. Quote did your

grandfather molest Jeffrey Epstein too? End quote? She mused, I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't doubt it. Absurd as it may be, and kind of shocking. I realized that I would not be surprised. I must credit my beloved mother for this paradox, as well for the many other secrets and contradictions that filled our lives. Quote I'm

shocked but not surprised was my mother's mantra. I'm pausing because, all right, like me, she too had been molested by my grandfather, her father, and yet she seemed to find her decision to assign us to the same bed when I was a child neither shocking nor surprising. Perhaps she would not even have considered it a decision. Was the arrangement which rendered me and my grandfather bedfellows a coincidence?

It seems she had bequeathed him to me. Whatever the reasons, my grandfather and I were relegated to a pickle green pullout couch in the living room of the tiny house my grandfather had built up against the fence in Seagate, Coney Island, where he rubbed himself against me every night until I was seven and aged out of his affection. I never thought to question any of this. It felt normal, though slightly I don't know, sour like milk on the

turn What rolling stone ran this? Then there's a picture of Jeffrey Epstein as a child with a with an accordion around his neck, a little guitar in his hand, and a what the hell do they call those things? The candelabra thing? Fuck, I can't remembe. I'm so blown away by this. All right, I'm gonna continue. I wasn't the first to sleep with my grandfather or on the green pull out couch, which, ironically later I also inherited.

Apparently my grandmother had kicked my grandfather out of their bedroom as long ago as nineteen nineteen, the year their first child was born, when they were barely twenty. That was a rough year all the way around. You may recall it was a year of the black Black Sox scandal. I thought that was nineteen eighteen and the Spanish flew. I'm probably wrong, just a few years after my grandparents had come through Ellis Island from Eastern Europe. Oh, such

a blessing, Such a blessing. All my cousins recalled the chicken coops my grandfather used to build in the living room out of bed sheets and chairs. He must have missed his pigeons from back home. There, in the dark of the makeshift coops, my grandfather built a secret island where he played his games with us. How my grandfather could afford to buy a plot of land in the gated community of Seagate in the nineteen thirties and build three rowhouses in a synagogue on our street is as

mysterious as where the guy went every day. There's no mystery, no fucking no one moved here from another country. Broke worked night and day for five years, and then bought up half of Hartford, fucking Connecticut. Can we stop with that fucking bullshit? Dressed in a three piece suit, hat and overcoat even in summer, he left in the morning

and didn't come home until well after dark. My mother always reminded us that Pop had friends in high places, and that he referred to the local judges by their first names. I realize now that an economic divide determined where stickball was played. You wouldn't be batting balls like

that in a part of Seagate where the Vanderbilts lived. Indeed, because our house was the low of the low, the farthest from the beach, the closest to the fence, we became the stickball capital in the neighborhood, And because we owned our house and my grandfather had built it, we had at least a little bit of cachet in the neighborhood where there was a clear division between the rich

and the poor. The Epstein's, on the other hand, runs at a second floor apartment at the end of the street, and a house that, like many of the old mansions, had been divided up and turned into rentals. That as an adult Jeffrey Epstein surrounded himself with the richest people

in the world is probably not an accident. I have wondered, in light of all that has come out about him, if Jeffrey Epstein felt on the poor side of that great divide and sought to right that wrong, he may even have felt that some division or isolation in his own home. The genius son of a gardener and school aid genius. Huh have you seen the way he wrote?

Apparently he skipped two grades, was a music prodigy and something of a math whiz okay, and that way Jeffrey Epstein lived on an island, on an island, on an island. It is no wonder he bought an island for himself when he had the means to do so, he was used to living on one. This is absolutely incredible. This is this may be the most insane article ever written, and I'm going to finish it before it gets taken down. That he used sexual exploitation as some sort of bargaining

chip for that piece of the puzzle. There must have been other factors at play. Was one of those factors my grandfather and my grandfather molest Jeffreystein, as it seems he did many of the other kids in the neighborhood. He might as well have. He might as well have. I know I said that it was not a metaphor that I grew up on the same street as Jeffrey Epstein.

I suppose I have contradicted myself. Indeed, if it wasn't my grandfather who molested Jeffrey Epstein, someone must have literally or metaphorically, there must have been forces around him and inside of him that added up to his breaking bad was Seagate a hotbed for pedophiles, a breeding ground, as it were, probably no more than most places. History and especially current events has shown us that exploitation by rich,

powerful and privilege it is everywhere. Not long ago I came upon a book review that had run in The New York Times in the nineties. The article was titled we have met the Pedophiles and they are us. New York's Times, owned by never Mind. I didn't understand it at first, but I understand it now. When it comes to pedophilia, you don't have to look that far to find it. If you want to know for whom the

bell tolls, it tolls for thee. It is not alarming, pun intended normal though it was for me that my mother's open mouth kiss was what woke me up every morning to get up for school. When I was twelve, I locked my lips, both to keep out my mother and to keep in the family secret that had and passed from her lips to mine. I only half knew how strange all this was when I was a kid. Really, it wasn't until the Epstein scandal broke that I began to see all the pieces of my childhood fit together.

I have often wished these last months that I could tell my mother about Epstein. He grew up on our street, Mom, I would say, he grew up on our street, Mom, I would say, given the family, the neighborhood, the government, the culture, and the world in which we live. I'm pretty sure I know how she would respond, nodding, hands ahead. I'm shocked, but not surprised. I always felt proud to

say I grew up in seagate. I see now, though, that whenever there's an inside the gate and an outside, there will be secrets and danger on both sides of the fence. Going through my mother's effects, recently, I discovered the last thing she scribbled into her writing journal. The words were barely legible because she was ninety two when she wrote them, and had a tremor. A single sentence on the top of the blank page in an otherwise

empty spiral notebook, sexual abuse by my father. Since I am the last of our tribe, I am the only one left to tell the story. The names of all participants in this story have been changed to protect their privacy. Gabrielle Glancy is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and The American Poetry Review. She has just completed a memoir entitled You Win all Right. I Mean, look, sometimes I I pretend to be exasperated by the stuff I'm reading

and what I'm responding to. I admit it. Everything you're hearing me, any noise you hear me is completely involuntary, is I don't I don't understand why this was written, and if it was written for the purpose, I think it was written to try to exonerate Jeffrey Epstein for what he did. Why would you what? Why would you say that your neighborhood was filled with people of your ethnic background and there was like seven pedophiles on your block that were openly engaged and nothing is being done

about it? And what does it say about a culture that's so insular that they would allow it to keep happening? And why would you want that culture anywhere near yours? I don't know what else to say. I guess it's just a matter of is this the typical Yeah, this didn't happen. Yes, some of it happen. It's over exaggerated. But why in the hell, if it's a lie, would someone use this lie where you're trying to exonerate one of your co ethnics by demonizing all of your co

ethnics in the neighborhood you grew up in. I don't know, man, All I know is if there was one open that everyone knew, Hey, that guy is fucking boys and girls. A guy would have been thrown off of a fucking roof. I remember one time the apartment building I grew up in had a had a ground floor apartment, but it had a street level apartment. So to get to the apartments in the building, you had to walk upstairs and

you had to be buzzed in. But there was also a door on the front of the building which was a street level apartment. I remember one time a guy just walked into the neighborhood. No one knew who he was, no one recognized him. I was there, and I must have been twelve or thirteen years old, and this guy, just because the people who lived there would leave the door, you know, wide open during the day because you know it.

We're you know, this neighborhood. We protect it, We protect each other and keep it safe as best we can. Guy walked in, probably ten feet into the apartment, looked around and headed up. I grew up on a hill, and he started walking up the hill. I knocked on the door. I cannot remember the name of the guy who lived there. It's a very long time ago. He grabbed the golf club, chased the guy down and beat him with a golf club to the point where he

compound fractured his arm. That's for looking around somebody's apartment. Now imagine somebody molesting that guy's kid. I know I don't do these very often, but I mean, I just I couldn't pass it up. It's just reading the This is the most I'm going to be thinking about this for I don't know how long. But thank you for your interest, thank you for listening, and I'll link to the article. I'll do it through archive because I have

a feeling I can't see this article staying up. If this we we have graduated out of clown world and into something completely beyond that. If they decide they're and keep this article up, take care. Thank you,