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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