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For CBS News, I’m Danny Aponte, I said to a tape recorder,
one of my favorite toys. Ford To New York: DROP DEAD was the headline on a
brand name newspaper.
Blue Angels intervened on Italian slumlords caught in the
act of splashing gasoline on a rooftop of our building several blocks away from
Happy Land where dozens of humans died. The Italians didn’t mind the thought of
burning children of all ages in our building.
That was Old Millennium.
This is now.
$10,000.00 offered by a Dominican to get us to move out of
our apartment for one without rent control was like a fake drug deal about to
spatter brains against concrete walls of graffiti. The first offer was for 500
dollars, a sum my mentally disabled mother thought grand enough for me to think
about taking. The landlord had to pay much more over that amount when housing
inspectors issued fines for failure to fix our apartment.
In an act of retaliation hard to prove even for Sonia
Sotomayor, our mailbox seemed to have exploded into twisted metal as seen on
The Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The sight bewildered our US Postal
carrier who said she didn’t know what’s going on in the building and for me to
protect my mother. Trouble comes in threes and then some.
Water came down from upstairs like the beginning of a
biblical global flood that would have concerned a Before Christ National
Security Council on Global Warming. Wet sheet rock fell and could have killed
my mother who knits in a living room opposite a funeral home where ashes of
ashes fell over from Ground Zero on the night of 9/11.
The hole in the ceiling was never going to be fixed like
Paradise Management promised. It was just another chance to see if an apartment
of cracked windows The Polar Vortex had slipped through like a terrorist had
finally worn us out. The abyss of coldness in the Dominican’s eyes reminds me
of a line from a book called Paradise Lost.
It is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.
It’s all about the money, kids.
The building had been brought to charge the city for housing
homeless families. Rent per apartment is in the thousands of dollars in a
region that is a mother of homeless shelters that is right across the river to
Riker’s Island Prison. New York can take the homeless out of shelters but
poorly designed programs can’t take the shelters out of the homeless.
The Dominican and his countrymen were concentrating long
time residents to one side of the building my mother had lived in since the
time of Watergate and of the wasteland our neighborhood had burned into like
parts of Europe after World War II.
Once upon a time, I carried Anne Frank in my arms while
shadows of abandoned buildings and bullies fell over us in The South Bronx of
America. “Leave your furniture behind. I’m giving you bunk beds,” the Dominican
almost barked like a Doberman Pincher a month before Little Sandy made homeless
some of the middle class.
You want to give my mother and me bunk beds, I asked in
disbelief.
It was like a scene from a disturbing movie on The
Holocaust.
The Empire State has become dark shades of Nazism.
Still I had dreams for the city that never sleeps.
In my childhood, I wanted to be Clark Kent.
Reporting for CBS News, I’m Dan Aponte
To Sleep, Perchance To Pitch Nightmares To DreamWorks: Real
Life Comic Book Cyber Journal Of The Better Angels Of Our Nature By Danny
Aponte of P.S 161
Chapter One: It was a dark and stormy knight of Jedi
journalism
Humans suck Ozone Layers!
