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 me what’s wrong.

Sirens screamed to Lincoln Hospital as I coughed up blood into an oxygen mask so violently the paramedics and a 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 to me 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.

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 by the building manager who said he used to be a cop in Santo Domingo now working for Paradise Management. He told me to leave our belongings behind because we were to be given bunk beds. The building had become a pit stop for families taken out of shelters and into apartment units rented at near $3,000,00 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 to raise the letter to appear in Housing Court so can the building manager could take a picture to email to his lawyer to render null and void after the new lease was signed.

As always, he lied.

 I was told not to worry about the crib and other belongings because it was going into the garbage. Paradise Management on behalf of the new landlord, Corner View LLC pressured us by fear of eviction. They wanted us 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. 

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.

Two days later, I complained to the 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 wish the policewoman would had told me it’s 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 The South Bronx.

Then my mother broke her arm when she slipped on a pipe left behind by workmen ordered by city inspector to fix our bathroom. 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

My Re@l Life @s @ Comic Book

Artwork and journal copyrighted by Daniel Angel Aponte

MRI of my brain by New York Radiology

2017