An old stove was leaking gas in an old kitchen.
I fixed it.
Three days before Thanksgiving Day, in the year of super
storm Sandy that made many people lose homes to floods, the pipes of the sink
burst in an apartment my mother had lived in since the last days of Watergate.
There was a furious barrage of knocks on our door in the
morning.
The new landlords told her to move to the other side of the
building where long time residents were being concentrated. Democracy faded
into the courtyard walls recently painted battleship gray or the gray across
the waters called Riker’s Island Prison. We were practically shouted to move to
another old apartment not rent stabilized. We were harassed constantly. They
were like telemarketers calling at all hours.
We had our bathtub removed for a week and a-half in the
wintertime. For a month, we were cut off from the outside world when our
mailbox was ripped from the wall. Our complaints, added to a female US mail
carrier, failed to motivate the superintendent to fix the problem. He dangled
keys to another apartment devoid of stove and refrigerator.
Move in now and we’ll get them for you, I was told indifferently.
“Leave your furniture behind. I’m giving you bunk beds,”
ordered a Dominican employee of Paradise Management. The last time I heard an
offer of free bunk beds was in Schindler’s List, a movie that branded itself on
my mind. I think of the scene where peoples’ belongings were thrown out of
windows when our courtyard looked like the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten
Island. We were surrounded by strangers when the landlords brought in homeless
families to charge the city 2, 800 $ per apartment.
My elderly mother pays 488.29.
Still the Dominican did promise 500 dollars if we moved
quickly like the Indians that sold Manhattan for 24 dollars and trinkets. It
was an offer better than the previous Italian landlords’ final solution of
fixing the old building by soaking the rooftop with gasoline to collect on
insurance money. Babies were spared by the intervention of Blue Angels.
Home is not far from Happy Land where over 80 human beings
were burnt alive.
Across our bedroom windows, the funeral parlor is always
crowded with screams of those who lost loved ones. Where’s Jesus? Where’s The
Man of Steel?
On an eerily silent night, I opened the window and sensed a
sickening light scent of cremation that drifted from the remains of the
WTC. It had lumbered miles on mild wind
to remind us we are all connected as sure as the air we need to survive.
I have a Ken Burns on the brain mentality. There are no
great stories without heartbreak and no refunds for answered prayers.
“It was the worse of times…”
This is a mural for myself as well as afterimages of other
kids all gifted. At an early age, I learned to tattoo words and watched them
bleed in a paper garden of good and evil. The urban myth of hell was a real
city of illegal guns and roses. Optimism
was my painkiller next to Saint Joseph’s Orange Favored Aspirin For Children.
When I was a boy, I carried Anne Frank while shadows of
bullies and burnt-out buildings fell over us after school. At P.S 25, Mr.
Marks, my white-haired English teacher, a grandfather figure slightly hunched
with a burden of quiet grief, gave Anne to me to keep. “The torch has been
passed on to a new generation,” said the country’s first Space Age president.
This is my journal, an essay by images and painting by words..
Chapter 1: it was a dark and stormy night.
“We don’t publish
stories by minorities! Anything else,” a woman said before hanging up in a time
of great prosperity for the country because of the newly invented Internet. I
improvise with what she said like I did on golden trumpet in music class.
Writing on Word98 helped me recall a photographic memory in childhood. In an
sixth grade English class at P.S 161, I made a wish to live life like a great
novel, one that would read like the sci-fi of a great comic book. It should be one that breaks the law that
states there are no second acts in American lives and the lives of others
around planet Earth.
I finally returned to my Fortress of Solitude where I saw
Waiting For Super Man and Childhood’s End. This is The Hunt’s Point Public
Library, a place of many endings and new beginnings. This is where I found The
Lost Boys and A Winkle In Time.
This is the house of genius that helped me realize what I
was vaguely dreaming of creating. This is a thanks for my mother who worked in
a pen & pencil factory and drew me my first smile. Now I can fly in
cyberspace and aspire to be like a mild-mannered reporter working at a great
metropolitan newspaper. This story is really on finishing my homework
assignment to make a tour book to draw the highlights of our town.
Truth, justice and the comic books!
Here’s to our public library in The South Bronx of America Where
The Wild Things Are.
The End and here comes sequel.
How To Pitch Nightmares To DreamWorks by Danny Aponte of P.S
161
