12.(21-22) Bronx Wilderness with Pizza and Spaghetti

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21: Ah, Bronx Wilderness

Getting back to Dan asleep after Ali tucked him into bed and gave him bedtime sex and then slipped from the bed to attend to her own activities, it is Friday night, mid July, the start of her weekend forest life. Previously, Ali had scouted the forest and so she knows the spot she will go to tonight. It is a small, open area in the forest, a glen she calls the Glenn from the Glenn Miller big band.

   Now, she is in the kitchen filling a backpack. She had, previously, stored stuff in an old hollow tree trunk at the Glenn – things she will need.  Fresh water, she knows, is near the Glenn at the high point where there is a Parks Department brick shit-house painted a surprising pink.

   Ali's idea is to learn to live off the land. And she will do it late night and into the weekend.

   In the kitchen now she is making salad. With scissors she cuts lettuce leaves into shreds then takes a raw carrot, shaves off its outer skin and cuts it down center length and slices it into small wedges. Then a green pepper gets cut into the mix and a tomato and a celery stalk with its leaves. Ali does not discard much. Then she adds cut strawberries and apple. And pours in some white vinegar for stimulation. It all goes into a pint jar, the type that housewives 50 years ago would have used to preserve food. She packs a few other things and is ready to go.  
   But first a phone call. Dialing OL 2 7102 she hears the pick-up at the 2^nd ring. 
 “Pronto!” answers an Italian voice. “Luigi! Can I ‘elp?”

   “Hey, Luigi, it's Ali! 'Member me? I was there last week explaining I'm gonna be usin’your store for my nights in forest.”

   “Shuah! Shuah!. Signorina Ali. How ah ya?”

   “OK, say hey! I'm gonna stop in,'bout twenty min's. I wanna take out a cardboard of spaghetti and red sauce and a wedge of plain pizza an’ your special garlic roll.”

   “Shuah! Shuah!”

   “OK, bye-bye.” She hangs up and, singing under her breath “Hey diddle dee dee, Bronx Wilderness for me!”, heads out Dan's door.

   Ali hates to waste electricity using elevators so she walks down the stairs.  
   Now she is out the lobby door into the courtyard. She turns left and again left, 'round the corner where Alfonze's store is dark, and now she is walking, under the rusting, peeling, gray-painted iron of the El train tracks, north on Jerome Avenue on its west side. At Gun Hill Road - the next crossing, north corner, she crosses to east-side Jerome Avenue and walks rapidly along the dark night street till 1, 2, 3 crossings and here she is by Woodlawn Station and on her right, the end store - Luigi’s Pizza and Pasta.

   It is a street-level front store with a painting of crossed American and Italian flags top center of the big window and on both sides of it a big painted 2-foot-square painting, on a viewer's left, of a plate of cooked spaghetti with red tomato-sauce topping and garlic-bread roll on the side and a 25-cent sign, and on the right a same size of a big triangle-wedge pizza with cut red-tomato slices covered with cheese sauce and pepper pieces and showing a 10-cent sign. The store is lit but empty except for a fat man with white chef hat and spaghetti-sauce-stained white apron and a big Italian King Victor Emanuel mustache, who is behind the counter packaging Ali's cardboard plate of spaghetti after giving it a final sprinkle of pepperoni powder.

   “Hey, Nicola!” Ali shouts because he is hard of hearing. “Wha happen to Luigi?“
   "Oh, hello baby. You my Nipponese baby, dontchyaknow?” he says in a non reply. "Mussolini and me we like-a Japan. Ha! Ha! Ha!” He winks. “But donna tella you Luig! He hayta Mussolini.”

   “But where is Luigi? I just spoke to him.”
   “Oh, he do a delivery to local hua house. Dese hungry Bronx hua dey like-a Luigi pizza after dey fucka da customa. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
   He packages her spaghetti and pizza and puts it in a bag with string and handle.

   “Toity five cent, baby” She gives him the 25-cent quarter and 10-cent dime and says. “OK, Nicola, you be here all night, wontchya? In case I want coffee. Then see ya lateh Alligateh."

   To which Nicola replies, “Lika yo styla krokadila! And seeg heila!”

   “Oh you nasty Nazi!” Ali laughs and walks away with a wave of her right hand. She makes a right turn out the door and walks by the El train end-of-line Woodlawn Station, then, crossing Jerome Ave to west side, she continues north.

  The standard map approach to the Glenn is to walk north up the west side of Jerome Avenue, which becomes bare of the El tracks above the Woodlawn Station, and, shortly, to make a left angle turn in order to follow a small side road obliquely  west, down a slope. Near the bottom of the down-sloping side road, is what Ali calls Reading Rock, a 3-foot (1 m.) square, flat surface, 2-foot-high granite rock where she sometimes sits to read, under the road light at night. Across the road from the rock is a winding path about 3 feet wide that leads into the forest and a little way along it on the left is a 3-seater park-bench and over it an 8-foot high night-light post, a single city light that Ali calls the City Light, recalling the Charlie Chaplin 1931 movie. Just past that, on the same side as the bench, is a gray-black glacial rock 7-foot (c.2.5 m.) high that Ali has named Morlock Rock because it recalls the rock in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine from which the monstrous Morlocks issued to oppress the gentle Eloi people and where they dragged the Eloi back down to the depths for disgusting cannibal feasts.

   Now, walking the path, Ali is aware that on her left, the ground slopes upwards and at its top is the pink-brick shit-house whose toilet she never uses because she prefers to do it outside in the forest.
   She continues on the path past Morlock Rock about 30 feet (c.10 m.), and makes a right turn that has her, now, walking into forest on rock and sod, and after a minute she comes to the Glenn.

22: The Brick Shit-house

The Glenn, impenetrable to view in the absolutely black night, is a forest clearing with bushes growing all around. There is a Parks Department picnic table of wood boards with attached benches on concrete base and nearby a stand-up cookout grill you can load with paper and twigs. On the edges of the Glenn are trees with long leaves that, in summer, Ali can use for towel wipes or nose blows. The sod-and-rock ground has a slight downward slope.

   Ali dumps her stuff on the table. She pulls out 2 thick white candles and, striking a match, lights one and uses its heat to melt the wax base of the other so she can stick it to the bench top. The light of the candles is not enough to attract passers-by on the path she came on – the surrounding foliage blocks view – but it gives light to read by.
   Before she starts what she calls a session, she needs to get a supply of water. She retraces her way back to the path and up the slope. At its top she makes out the dark shape of the brick shit-house and by its southwest corner is the fountain on concrete block, its water delivery a rusted small metal dome with a press button on top and a hole in front of the button and when you press down on it, a strong stream of cold spring-water shoots into your face as you stoop over, as Ali is doing now, to taste it and wash and cool her face.

   Absolutely delish! she thinks and fills a 1-quart (c. 1 L.) screw-top soda bottle she has brought, and screws the top back on. Around the shit house is a cement pavement and Ali walks on it, crossing behind the north side and then heads back downhill – stepping carefully through the black night.
   Fifteen steps down the slope and she makes out the dark shape of the big glacial rock and a little further the City Light. 
   Once back at the Glenn she sits down at the bench-table, opens her backpack and takes out a book, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; then her foods and utensils. And she unties Nicola's packaged pizza and pasta. Also a bottle of Concord red wine she brought from Dan's kitchen with a glass.

   “I'll rest a minute or two,” she says out loud and filling the empty backpack with fallen leaves she makes it a pillow and, setting it for her head at the edge of the bench, lies down and, looking up, sees stars.  For next, click 12.23 Morphine Moment - Forest Primeval