An old stove was leaking gas in an old kitchen.
Three days before Thanksgiving Day, the pipes of the sink
burst in an apartment my anxious mother had lived in since the last days of
Watergate. The new landlords told her to move to the other side of the building
where long time residents were being concentrated, for the time being, without leases.
“Leave your furniture behind. I’m giving you bunk beds,” a Dominican employee
of Paradise Management barked with the look of a Doberman Pincher. It was an
unbelievable offer better than the previous Italian landlords’ final solution
of fixing the problems of an old building by splashing the rooftop with
gasoline to collect on insurance money. Home is not far from Happy Land where
over 80 human beings were burnt alive. The funeral parlor across our bedroom
windows became crowded with screams of those who lost loved ones.
On an eerily silent night, I opened the window and sensed
the sickening light cologne of cremation that drifted from the aftermath of the
WTC. Death’s scent had traveled miles on
the wind to remind us we are all connected as sure as the air we need to
survive.
At an early age, I learned to tattoo my scars on paper.
Optimism was my painkiller next to Saint Joseph’s Orange Favored Aspirin For
Children.
When I was a child, I
carried Anne Frank while shadows of bullies and burnt-out buildings fell over
us in The South Bronx of America. At P.S 25, Mr. Mark, my white-haired English
teacher, was a grandfather figure slightly hunched with a burden of quiet
grief. He gave Anne to me to keep. This is my journal.
This is an essay by images and a painting by words.
This is a mural for myself as well as an afterimage of
children’s’ dreams.
My childhood came to an end at The Hunt’s Point Public
Library, a place of many endings and new beginnings. Once upon a time, I walked
into the garden of good and evil where a dictator waved me over like a stranger
in a car who said he knew my mother. I looked at the table to my right and saw
Anne win me over with her serene smile.
The End.
Here’s to our public library in The South Bronx of America.
Where The Wild Things Are
http://lifeaftermedia.blogspot.com
