Monsters from the ID in Eastside Park (from Villains from the Gallows Tree)

I don't know who thought this game up; but I'll kill him when I catch him

at least that's what I'm supposed to do.

We don't have a name for it. Dave calls it “Night of the Living Dead” after the movie with the zombies

That's a good name as any and the others don't mind. 

We only play it when we come here to Eastside Park, down near the bottom around the old stone building with the bathrooms in it, and a kind of porch that runs all around it -- so you can run in a circle in it and never stop.

One of the other kids thinks it's more like the movie with the pod people, where if you fall asleep you become one of them.

We sometimes start out with a dozen or more kids who come here by bicycle – me, Dave, Dennis sometimes even Little Dave -- making  our way through the Eastside of Paterson from the foot of Lakeview Avenue by the projects, through the streets with used car dealers and small warehouses to the rich neighborhood in the big houses which the Jews used to live, only the Jews don't live there anymore -- they have fled out to other places along Route 80 leaving the old house is full of people who are rich but who are not Jews.

The park sits on the corner of the city where Broadway meets Route 21 and where the river bends towards the West and Broadway changes its name to Route 4 as it goes over the bridge into Fair Lawn.

Eastside Park is a layered park, layered like a cake, starting on one level and then with a series of wide steps to connect has levels that eventually reach the low point at the highway.

We ride down the grass hills not the stairs, whooping it up as our bikes ride over the rough turf then level off before the next decline.

Our building -- yes, we call it that -- is down near the highway with a small gravel parking lot to one side.

There are never the cars in it, and very few kids hang around except over by the baseball diamond on the corner near Broadway.

Those kids don't bother us; we don't bother them -- even after we've turned ourselves into monsters.

The game is a little like the kind of tag we used to play in the St. Brendan’s school yard where when you get tagged you stay it and so as many more people get tagged you have more people to worry about, chasing you.

Unlike the game in schoolyard, the monster game has no safe place. You have to outrun or hide from the monsters somewhere in or around the building.

The game starts with only one monster. We usually pick the smallest or slowest kid.

Dave is too quick and big, so we never pick him and usually by the time he gets caught the game is over. 

I'm not fast; but I'm clever and usually last a long time before getting caught -- which means I have to escape a whole bunch of monsters, some of whom pretend not to be monsters in order to lure the rest of us in.

Dennis always gets caught early and -- knowing this -- we avoid him even when he protests and claims he's not a monster, yet he cries when we run away and chases us the way a lost puppy does when seeing someone he mistakes as master and is upset at the master not recognizing or wanting him

I don't know why we like this game so much. But we only play it here this remote corner of the universe where we come for no other purpose except to roll down the grassy hills and to play this game.

I don't even know how it came about, who first thought to assign someone to be the monster, or how it transpired he would win over other monsters. I just know that once we started it, we can’t stop, and somehow must continue as we run from danger to avoid becoming the thing we most fear -- and the more monsters the one monster converts,  the more intense the feelings, my heart pounding in a way it rarely pounds except when in the deepest of trouble with my uncles or the police, and somehow in the midst of it all, it releases something pent up inside of me, a monster I do not know existed until it is gone.

To be the last one standing, still unaffected, the last real human, scared yet pure, fleeing with every sense elevated, listening when sight is not enough, smelling even when all else fails, then enlisting some other faculty you can’t explain, telling you where the trap will spring and how to avoid it, knowing the whole thing is this game no one really wins, this game ending only when all are transformed into monsters, so, that no one goes home gloating or alone, a proud pack of defeated wolves, yapping only about how we avoided this trap or that, or about the moment when we could no longer hold out, defeated yet at that moment also undefeated, each of us returning to home where winning is never an option, and the traps set find no easy release.