Chapter 45: Finding Elphaba at an Abandoned Catering Hall
Colonial Terrace
Peekskill, NY
“I guess my friend said that the plan was to turn this into a nursing home, but then Covid happened, and they just up and left.”
Clad in his worn artist’s beanie, my new urban exploration (“urbex”) friend Stev guided me and another urbex pal, Becky, through the history of the space we snuck into, an abandoned event and catering venue that had been poised to undergo a metamorphosis into a nursing home until Covid struck.
“But yeah, they must’ve recently boarded this up. First time I explored it, the light in here was so brilliant.”
While he didn’t know the basics, Stev definitely knew this particular modern ruin. He’d been here many times before. He’s an artist, and he likes adventure. Becky and I were impressed. I guess, looking back, it was sort of a gamble meeting him, but I had let folks know where I was and whom I was with. The thing about the urbex community, at least in my experience, is that the people are, typically, relatively low-key. Stev is a good example of that. He’s straight-forward, kind, and not a creep.
That said, I’ll be honest: I often have a tough time with straight men, or at least, men who I assume to be straight. I guess, though, in this day and age, a dude like Stev can say, “I’ve got a girlfriend” and still identify as “queer.” Or, he could just be straight. It’s such a toss-up. Either way, the second Stev off-handedly mentioned his girlfriend — historically a signal that he, the heterosexual man, will reflexively employ to make sure that I know that he’s not gay — I could immediately feel my mouth start to code switch into “straight talk.”
This isn’t a new habit. I’ve dealt with this phenomenon my entire life: the desire to revert to “straight talk” or sounding “less gay.” Again, it’s historically a social beacon that I, the homosexual man, will light and send up to make sure a heterosexual man knows that I know he’s not gay, that I’m not gonna “try anything” with him”; a wink that’s not a wink.
It’s like an inner-Babadook, a pollypocket devil that I’m always so sure that I’ve locked in the basement for good, who jumps out and screams, “Don’t be a FAGGOT!” It’s no surprise that this kind of knee-jerk reaction has been built into my coding, the fear of being gay. That’s what I grew up learning, over and over: gay is scary, gay is evil, or gay is meant to be laughed at — or any combo of the three. Those were the only opinions that I was allowed to have about queer people. The person didn’t even necessarily have to be “gay.” The person could simply be, for example:
- the president of the high school anime club, or…
- the fat kid who sings alto in the school choir, or…
- the introvert, who quickly learned to fake extrovert to feel safe in the world, who likes to explore abandoned buildings and listen to musical theatre… me.
Like any human with a journey to self (which many queer people definitely go through), I didn’t like myself for a really long time, but then I got older and began to realize that I get both wiser and dumber by the day, an epiphany that led me finally to understand that I should do what makes me feel good and do it however feels good in my skin and love the things that make me feel good, provided none of it causes me any kind of self-harm.
Against all the odds of these dark anti-LGBTQ+ tides on the horizon, I can navigate the world pretty comfortably in my own skin these days. I’ve decided that nobody is going to steal my joy; but no matter how strong I may have become, it can get temporarily derailed in an instant. Take this moment: Friday afternoon, the day after Thanksgiving 2024, exploring an abandoned almost-nursing home with a well-intentioned, probably-straight man like Stev.
It’s not his fault, of course, but I could feel it in my bones, the de-gayifying code switch. It didn’t last too long, though. Stev is a chill enough dude that, even with the totally reasonable mention of his girlfriend — who is a massive fan of the musical Wicked, just like me — it wasn’t all that challenging to feel at ease around him. In fact, Stev didn’t even mention his girlfriend until Wicked entered our conversation.
We’d been poking about this raptured space for a good hour when Stev and Becky split off from me. I had become especially mesmerized by one particular room that in some way mimicked an empty high school teacher’s lounge. In the short amount of time we were apart, Stev found me marveling at the sparse decor in the room, one of many in the abandoned sanctuary, which was one of the more raptured-like spaces I’d been to in a while. Even without natural daylight, the first floor was cool enough: empty popcorn machines and old, crashed-on-the-floor chandeliers and dented glasses and chipped cups and waiting rooms and offices and bars scattered throughout the kitschy interior design that both Becky and Stev found to be aesthetically pleasing but I found to be aesthetically tacky.
“… and they just up and left.”
The second floor was a whole other universe. The natural sunlight bursting through the intact windows exhumed a spectacular sight of filing cabinets packed with receipts and checks and accounting papers, shelves on every wall with books and trinkets and photograph after photograph after photograph of what seemed like a very happy, heteronormative family. I stared at the family portraits for a while before I began to scan a few 45 LPs scattered all over the ground in the main upstairs hallway. Each plastic record was cracked in some capacity, and they were all identical copies of the 1908 recording of “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” featuring Ernestine Schumann-Heink.
The discovery was apropos of the day after Thanksgiving, and I began to imagine the sounds of a vintage holiday music echoing down the hallways and into a distinct memory from my childhood, one Christmas evening when my father told my brother and me the stories about his own childhood memories of Christmas Eve nights in Lockport, NY when he would fall asleep to the sounds of his mother’s German Christmas records permeating through the floors and ceilings and walls of his modest family house.
I picked up a broken record and carried it and the memories that stirred within me into the next few rooms of the abandoned structure, ending at a room that resembled a high school teachers’ lounge. At the back of the large open space was an open window that led out to the roof of the ground floor where I found a wheelchair staring back at me through the window. As I pondered if I should bring the poor thing inside, out of the cold, Stev found me.
“Becky said I should give this to you.”
I looked down at the book he had in his hands. It was a water-damaged paperback copy of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked. “No fucking way.”
“She said you might like that.”
From the time of jotting down this story, I’ve seen Wicked in theaters four times, and by the time of its publication, I will likely have seen it at least two more times, maybe more. The movie, an adaptation of the Stephen Schwartz Broadway musical (an adaptation of the Maguire novel), brought me out of a very deep funk. Like many Americans, I’d been in one since November 7, 2024, the day I watched my neighbors raise up their latest TRUMP WON flag, while a mentally-ill Bernie Bro veteran shouted obscenities at them, bare feet on the pavement, which only encouraged one of the TRUMP WON house inhabitants to start firing F-word machine guns back across the street.
My front door is sandwiched between these two houses.
These are the types of men I grew up around. They weren’t slinging “FUCK YOUs” back and forth across my front lawn, but they certainly didn’t do much to help me feel safe being myself around pretty much… anyone.
I grew up being told, from day one, that the way that I was inside, and the secret I kept from everybody on the outside, myself included, was bad. So bad, in fact, that I would burn in the spitfires of hell for eternity if I didn’t knock the genetics out of me.
Of course, it’s presumptuous on my part to think that all straight men would have treated me this way had they known about who I truly was. I didn’t even know. How could I? I didn’t see myself represented anywhere, except for as a joke. It wasn’t until Will and Grace aired on television that I suddenly felt like I began to understand the real inner-me, but even then, I had so much internalized homophobia built into me that it was impossible to really love myself until I got sober, found a therapist, and located a community who loves and appreciates me for exactly who I am.
Like Elphaba, I hated myself. Like Elphaba, I had the people who were the closest to me telling me that I needed to tone down who I was. Like Elphaba, kept a secret about my own inner-power hidden a long time until the right people pulled it out of me.
Hell, up until I was 22, five years after I came out, I defended anti-gay marriage sentiments. That, my friends, is brainwashing hard at work. Obviously, I don’t feel this way anymore, but sometimes, I come back to that old, self-hating child.
Watching the fight break out between my neighbors triggered some old habits in me, and for weeks after, I cocooned myself, made sure to stay off social media, became severely anti-social, canceled concert tickets, avoided gatherings, and ordered extra security cameras.
Wicked pulled me out of that spiral. It’s not every day I see myself represented in a movie, and despite how you feel about Wicked, there’s a reason it’s performing so well at the box office: a substantial percentage of the American population also sees themselves in Elphaba. She represents the girl with the purple mohawk, or the fat kid who sings alto in the school choir, or me, the introvert, who quickly learned to fake extrovert to feel safe in the world, who likes to explore abandoned buildings and to listen to musical theatre.
The kid who felt safe inside the abandoned dairy farm down the hill from his childhood home because I could be me there, I could imagine the world as I wished to see it there, I could connect with the truest version of myself there: the kid who still identifies with abandoned buildings because they are surprisingly metaphoric of the queer experience, structures that the world commonly doesn’t want to see, which makes us hide away in our own underground layers of safety and numbers, now more than ever.
When Stev kindly handed me the beat-up paperback copy of Wicked, it was touching, somehow, almost like I caught a glimpse of the world that I could only imagine while seeking refuge inside the abandoned dairy farm, but it was happening, in real-time, inside this abandoned catering hall and event space. I suddenly felt safe with Stev though he’d given me no real reason not to at that point. This gesture, which he probably didn’t even realize was a gesture, completely shifted my energy around him. It’s what led us all up to the rooftop tower where I found the solo broom in an otherwise empty perch.
As I climbed up into that rooftop tower, boosted up with the help of Becky and Steve holding the rickety ladder, I felt the sunlight lean into me from all sides. It was the only piece of the entire facility that had 360 degree light, and as I hoisted myself up and discovered the broom, I couldn’t help but think about Elphaba’s own discovery of her magic broom in the tower at the end of the film. I stared out across the vast and crooked terrain of the crumbling hillside property, and I thought about the final moments of her soul-shaking battle cry in “Defying Gravity.”
So if you care to find me
Look to the western sky
As someone told me lately:
“Everyone deserves a chance to fly”
And if I’m flying solo
At least I’m flying free
To those who’d ground me
Take a message back from me
Tell them how I am defying gravity
I’m flying high, defying gravity,
And soon, I’ll match them in renown
And nobody in all of Oz
No wizard that there is or was
Is ever gonna bring me down…
I held the broom in my hand delicately and felt myself start to cry. These are the moments that keep me coming back to these spaces. A chance to connect with myself deeply, in silence, bending a rule or two, inside buildings that most people would choose to forget or hide or demolish. A moment to reconnect with the real me, the kid in me who loves off-the-beaten-path adventure, using his imagination, and finding beauty in the unseen. I looked toward the horizon, listening to the sound of distant traffic, and I became inspired to remember this moment.
I brought the broom and book back downstairs, past boxes of old documents, past offshoot rooms filled with artifacts of a life that once occupied this space. I returned to the room with the wheelchair that I saved from the cold. Usually, I don’t like staging photos at any given ruin, but this one felt different; it felt personal. It felt like a monument to this moment in time and how I feel about it. It felt like I could wake up tomorrow and keep fighting for my own freedom, for my community’s freedom, willing to push for everyone to get a fair chance to live the so-called “American Dream.”
I don’t even know if I know what that means anymore, but I can say for certain that, if it means finding sanctuary inside abandoned buildings with safe straight people like Stev, then I’m in. Sure, I don’t know him that well at all, but if nothing else, he’s safe.
What else could I ask for right now?
