An old stove was leaking gas in an old kitchen.
Three days before Thanksgiving Day 2012, the pipes of the
sink burst in an apartment my gray-haired mother had lived in since the last
days of Watergate.
The new landlords told her to move to the other side of the
building where long time residents were being concentrated, for the time being,
without leases. For a month, we were cut off from the outside world when our
mailbox was ripped from the wall. The walls of the courtyard have been painted battleship gray
and the gray across the waters called Riker’s Island Prison.
“Leave your furniture behind. I’m giving you bunk beds,” a
Dominican employee of Paradise Management barked with the look of a Doberman
Pincher. 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 a
landfill in Staten Island.
We were practically ordered to another old apartment not
rent stabilized. 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.
Home is not far from Happy Land where over 80 human beings
were burnt alive. Across our bedroom windows, the funeral parlor became
crowded with screams of those who lost loved ones.
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. I have to get
this story right.
“It was the worse of times…”
The urban myth of hell was a real city of illegal guns and
roses. This is a mural for myself as well as afterimages of other kids all
gifted. I had a photographic memory in childhood. At an early age, I learned to
tattoo words and watched them bleed. I created a paper garden of good and evil
in the so-called media capitol of the world. 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 Internet
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.
Now I have access to fly free in cyberspace
and aspire to be like a mild-mannered reporter working at a great metropolitan
newspaper.
Truth, justice and the comic books!
Here’s to our public library in The South Bronx of America
Where The Wild Things Are.
Lol
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