My
Re@l Life @s @ Comic Book
Quietly went by a snow-covered billboard alongside a highway
in Pennsylvania.
There Are Heroes Among Us
Sirens screamed and blood was coughed into oxygen mask so
violently paramedics jumped back in the time of Ebola outbreaks and no health
insurance for some Americans.
In a blink of an eye, I relived life as the lights on the
ceilings of Lincoln Hospital became bright as the lights on a cell phone shown
to me by Mark Wilson, a New York Post reporter, who was investigating UFOs
around the building my mother lives in.
I walked light-years in my ocean deep sleep to remember
dreams against nightmares.
I made peace with The God Who Said Vengeance Is His.
In a blink of an eye, I recalled a bright light in front of
my bedroom window when I was a child gifted with photographic memory that can
be a curse.
Bright UFOs made the cover of the newspaper founded by a
Founding Father.
There is proof of aliens everywhere on Earth
One alien is called Poverty
I woke up to the sight of clothes, furniture and toys thrown
out of windows like a scene from a movie on Nazis evicting Jews from Germany.
My disabled mother whispered someone was banging on the
door.
Leave your belongings
behind. I’m giving you and your mother bunk beds, said a rep from Paradise
Management. He wanted us to move into another apartment on the other side of
the building where the new landlords were trying to get two elderly long time
female residents to move to yet another side of the building. It was confusing
and more so due to serious head injuries by the fists of a Neo Nazi in a dorm
room at NYU.
US Marshals would evict by force newer tenants that didn’t
move out within a short time frame. Our side of the building became silent with
vacancies. Machine gun sounds of power tools rattled nerves from morning to
afternoon. They worked on apartments when ours needed work. Our hallway was
filled with building materials and nails on floor that became dangerous for my
mother. At night, it was a ghost town of sawdust.
It went on for weeks.
I learned the building was to become a pit stop for homeless
families to be moved into renovated apartment units rented at thousands of
dollars apiece with New York City paying a part of it. My disabled mother is a
regular tenant who moved in with her husband in the beginning of The Watergate
Scandal.
Paradise Management treated us like the homeless families
given bunk beds.
I saw a baby crib and a big bag of toys left behind in a
small apartment we were being harassed to move in to avoid being taken to court
for failure to renew our lease. I was told not to worry about the crib and
other belongings because it was going into the garbage.
I was told to raise a
letter to appear in Housing Court for the building manager to take a picture to
email to his lawyer to render null and void after the new lease was signed. I
was told there would be no need to appear in Housing Court.
If we had signed that lease, we still had to appear in
Housing Court. Failure to appear meant police would have arrested my disabled
mother and I. Paradise Management had
several Dominicans ready to move our belongings into a smaller apartment on a
higher floor bad for my mother’s legs.
Paradise Management on behalf of the new landlord, Corner
View LLC pressured us by fear of eviction. They wanted us to sign a new lease
that would had made us new tenants subject to new rules and regulations.
When I wasn’t home to protect my mother, she almost signed a
lease to another apartment in the presence of tall breaded men dressed in black
and the short building manager who translated from English into Spanish the
promise of 500 dollars if she signed on the spot.
They were playing Three Card Monte with apartments and
herded us like white mice in a maze in a building where the rat population
increased due to the unsanitary behavior of some of the troubled people moved
out of homeless shelters.
I sent a notarized letter to Corner View LLC for an
installment of a security system in the building that has been vandalized
several times and scenes of violence, drug use and graffiti on walls like toxic
mold. Our mailbox was mutilated as if M-80s blew it up.
It happened two days after Paradise Management employees
entered our apartment without permission and tried to get me to call off a city
inspection. A city inspector was in the next room and heard everything. He
warned them he would call police if they interfered with an investigation. They
left in sullen silence. It’s scary to hear some of them tell me they are my
friends. I must look as stupid as Columbo, a TV cop.
Two days later, I complained to a superintendent about the
mailbox but he did nothing but smirk. A
friend gave me a cellphone to take pictures to show to The Longwood Police
Stationhouse where I filed a report.
I took the unsigned lease to Housing Court where a gray
haired female legal clerk compared it to the old one, which is rent stabilized.
Sweetheart, don’t let your mommy sign. I want you to go to The Department Of
Housing and tell them what is happening in your building, she said, genuinely
concerned.
Dazed by a blazing sun, I walked the highway for hours to
prevent homelessness.
I walked in a heat wave for hours to tell this story to city
officials.
I submit this journal to the future of history from The
South Bronx where my fifth grade English teacher, Mr. Marks, gave me the
letters of a little girl named Anne Frank.
I carried her in my childhood through the shadows of burnt out buildings
and bullies of The South Bronx where my mother and others were practically
doused in gasoline by a previous landlord. Within a short time after the
purchase of the building, Italian-Americans splashed highly flammable liquids
on our rooftop.
Someone saw something. Someone said something. If not for
the timely intervention of Blue Angels, the building would have been quite
possibly another Happy Land---several blocks away from where we live--- where
dozens of lives were burned alive.
I wish the policewoman would had told me it was also a
Federal matter because of the loss of our mail. Our mail was also scattered in
an office to handle the mail of the formerly homeless. I was told not to come
back because we were not part of the program.
I petitioned a mail carrier to go get our mail from that
office.
The superintendent came up to me with keys to another
apartment’s mailbox. They offered $500 to get us to move.
Hell came in the form of Paradise Management.
They had succeeded in concentrating some long time residents
to one side of the building. The holdouts were three elderly women, my mother
being one of them by my counsel.
One senior citizen of them labored to get her lease renewed
after she turned down a sizable cash incentive. They kept calling her to move
out to the point of her refusal to answer the phone, she told me. She said they
were driving her crazy. One of the residents who had signed a new lease had to
go to court a year later to get a renewal lease. I had to call Corner View
several times to get rent receipts. I had to finally pay the post office to run
a trace on the money order/rent money. They issued a replacement check that I
sent to the landlord. As I write this, it has been two weeks of asking for the
receipt from last month. The new superintendent tells me it’s coming in
everyday. Some time back, an employee, who was in charge of recycling garbage,
saw my mother in the courtyard. When are you moving out, he barked in Spanish.
He was the one who told my mother if she wanted anything fixed in her apartment
she would had to pay him in cash.
Then my mother broke her arm when she slipped on a pipe left
behind by workmen ordered by city inspector to fix our bathroom from water
damage due to the faucets left on in an apartment upstairs that was vacant. My
clothes in the closet was soaked and stained and the superintendent was nowhere
to be found. They left junk behind instead of taking it to the garbage. I held
my mother’s hand on the ambulance. Without an apartment renewal lease, how can
one apply for healthcare?
It was the worse of times
In the last century, a Bronx County Courthouse gave me a
lecture on the importance of being beneficial to society. He said The South
Bronx needed lawyers to protect the rights of the elderly and children. He was
encouraging a pathway to the law.
The next best thing is to be a mild mannered reporter.
To be continued
My
Re@l Life @s @ Comic Book
Artwork and journal copyrighted by Daniel Angel Aponte
MRI of my brain by New York Radiology
2017
