Saturday, July 15, 2017

Chapter One: It Was A Dark & Stormy Knight




I staggered up to a patrol car a few feet away from Public School 25, my alma mater

The cop on the passenger side lowered the window and asked what’s wrong.

Sirens screamed to Lincoln Hospital as I coughed up blood into an oxygen mask so violently the paramedics and doctor jumped back in the time of Ebola outbreaks and no insurance for me. Without an apartment renewal lease, how can one apply for healthcare?

Hell came in the form of Paradise Management.

I made my peace with The God Who Said Vengeance Is His.

 In a blink of an eye, I relived my life as the lights on the Lincoln Hospital ceiling became bright as the lights on a cell phone shown to me by a New York Post reporter, Mark Wilson. He was investigating UFOs around the building my mother lives in. I remembered a bright light in front of my bedroom window when I was a child gifted with a photographic memory that can be a curse.

The UFOs made the cover of the newspaper founded by a Founding Father.

There are aliens on Earth. There is proof everywhere.

One alien is called Poverty

I walked light-years in my ocean deep sleep to remember dreams against nightmares.

I woke up to the sight of clothes, furniture and toys thrown out of windows. Our side of the building was silent with vacancies. At night, it was a ghost town. In bleak morning, machine gun sounds of jackhammers rattled nerves. US Marshals would evict by force if newer tenants didn’t move out within a short time frame.

My mother whispered someone was banging on the door. 

I was almost ordered to move out by a rep from Paradise Management who said he used to be a cop in Santo Domingo. He told me to leave our belongings because we were to be given bunk beds in another apartment. The building had become a pit stop for families taken out of shelters and into apartment units rented at thousands of dollars apiece with New York City paying a part of it. The families were given bunk beds. My disabled mother is a regular tenant who moved in with her husband in the beginning of The Watergate Scandal. But Paradise Management treated us like were formerly homeless.

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 the 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.

As always, he lied.

If we had signed the lease, failure to appear in court meant police would have arrested my disabled mother and I.

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

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. 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 tragedy in The South Bronx where dozens of lives were burned alive.   

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 Lt 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. 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.

I wish the policewoman would had told me it was also a Federal matter because of the loss of our mail. The superintendent came up to me with keys to another apartment’s mailbox. They offered $500 to get us to move. 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 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 the scenes of violence, drug use and prone graffiti on walls like toxic mold.  They had succeeded in concentrating the long time residents to one side of the building. One of the residents had to go to court a year later to get a renewal lease. The holdouts were three elderly women, my mother being one of them by my counsel. One of them also 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. 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 before we lose the rent money. They issued a replacement 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.

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


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