An old stove leaked gas in a kitchen three days before Thanksgiving
Day.
The pipes of the sink burst in an apartment my mentally
disabled mother had lived in since the last days of Watergate.
In the year of super storm Sandy that made many people lose
homes to floods, came a furious barrage of knocks on our door in the morning.
“Leave your furniture behind! I’m giving you bunk beds,”
ordered a Dominican employee of Paradise Management.
I slept on a bunk bed when I was a kid. The last time I saw
bunk beds was in Schindler’s List branded to my mind like numbers tattooed on
wrists of children. We were constantly harassed. We were practically shouted to
move to one old apartment to another
I saw clothes and furniture thrown out of windows to
courtyard until it looked like Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. Home is
not far from Happy Land where over 80 human beings were burnt alive near
garbage incinerators in The South Bronx of America.
One night, I opened the window and sensed ashes of ashes
that lumbered miles from the World Trade Center. Get the story right, said
Cronkite of CBS
I stop short of making myths out of the mess of my life.
I have a Ken Burns on the brain mentality.
“It was the worse of times…”
Territorial strangers surrounded us and we had to endure
noises and smells of renovation on the building. As the courtyard walls were
being painted battleship gray, the new Hasidim landlord’s reps told her to move
to the other side of the building where long time residents were being
concentrated
A Dominican promised my mother her 500 dollars if she moved
(quicker than the Indians that sold Manhattan for 24 dollars and trinkets); an
offer better than the previous Italian landlords’ final solution of fixing the
old building by soaking the rooftop with gasoline to collect on insurance
money. Babies were spared by the intervention of Blue Angels.
We had our bathtub removed for a week and a-half in the
wintertime. For a month, we were cut off from Con Edison bill, healthcare
notifications and Social Security when our mailbox was ripped from the wall.
The tampering with Federal property happened two days after the landlords’
workmen saw a housing inspector in our humble home of broken windows and
cracked ceilings that mirrored walls.
The city official warned them not to barge in or else NYPD would be
called. One of the Dominicans had a cold look of anger.
I’ve seen armored cops with heavy guns searching for one of
the landlord’s workers. I’ve seen cops arrested some of the Hispanic homeless
and African American homeless brought into the building where the rent of 2,
800 is paid for by welfare.
I saw the courtyard packed with snow-covered garbage that
warmed and fed a plague of rats. I recorded startled workmen that tried to hit
the rodents like they were piñatas. Our
complaints, added to a female US mail carrier, failed to motivate the landlord
to fix the problems except to order the Salvadorian superintendent to knock on
our door and dangled keys to another apartment devoid of stove and refrigerator
and rent control.
Move in now and we’ll get them for you, I was told
indifferently. I moved my mother’s mailing address to another apartment under
renovation. A Mexican woman asked me if
they gave us the lease. Not yet, I replied to a fellow tenant who rarely talks
to us. She went and got the lease for her family. Our mail was dumped into the
garbage. I was stunned by her ruthlessness as much as by the black woman
upstairs ignoring my pleas for mercy on my mother’s health and allows her 4
children to run over our ceiling from morning to night so brutally I find it
hard to write on A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste In The 21 Century.
If had money, I would buy her kids crayons, drawing books
and books to teach themselves to read. It would wire their brains for education
by getting them an I Pad.
Kindness can get one killed.
People take advantage by thinking compassion is weakness.
All I know about this woman is that she throws cigar wrappers to our fire
escape, has satellite TV and welfare that took her and her kids out of a
homeless shelter.
I think the program is poorly designed.
It should make it mandatory for her kids to be in a summer
reading course at The Public Library.
Sometimes I think she tells her kids to run harder to drive sickness
into my mother who had been examined for breast cancer at Lincoln Hospital.
As I write this, there has been another profanity-laced
dispute out in the courtyard between formerly homeless Hispanics versus other
Hispanics and sometimes versus black people. The F-Word and the N-Word appears
like garbage left on the stairs and graffiti climbing up walls like toxic mold
ever since they all moved in.
It’s A Three-Penny Opera
And the black kids have been running for hours. The
apartment upstairs is like a daycare center over a nursing home. It’s too much
noise pollution and twice the kids’ mother forgot to close the faucet that
flooded my mother’s kitchen floor to the point of me feeling like Jesus walking
on water when Father’s Day fell on a Sunday. No empathy for my mother’s
suffering and my migraine means she cares nothing about American Indians
complaint over the use of Redskins for a football team in Washington.
But if it was called
The Washington Black Skins and owned by a former owner of the Lakers basketball
team, well, do the math on this Race Card. We, The Black People had given some
a sense of Apartheid in America and Apartheid against themselves.
I have African blood coursing through my brains and veins.
But…
Obama isn’t black enough to represent the interests of black
people in Chicago, argued his political (pure blooded?) black opponents that
became absurd like the two-faced aliens in a 1960s Star Trek episode called Let
This Be Their Final Battleground.
Watching that social engineering sci-fi TV show when I was a
kid, I saw that there is no swastika without black and white.
Oh, by the way, Puerto Rican Pedro Espada’s son had an
apartment in our building for the purpose of establishing residency in order to
gain a seat of political power. According to the super, his apartment was bare.
And I never saw much of him because he had a better house and garden to live in
far away from The Baltic Avenue of Real Life Monopoly? So is this all civil
rights are about?
Money?
It’s all about the money, shouted a black politician
arrested for corruption and Jesse Jackson’s son resigned from congress when he
used taxpayers’ money to buy a 5,000- dollar ‘Elmer E Fudd’ rabbit hat sans a
mansion and a yacht
“Martin Luther King must be turning over in his grave” is an
impossible cliché unless a super hurricane pulled his coffin from six feet
under like Katrina dug up graveyards in New Orleans. A massive earthquake of
9.11 will do just as well.
Think I’ll shake things up: I was dating smart black girls
way before my first term paper on Harriet Tubman and The Underground Railroad.
I was eye lynched by blacks and whites. And yeah, I fought for my civil rights
to love when I was assaulted. Unholy shades of Nazism in The City of Rainbow
Racism, Bat Man!!!
Like President Lincoln in the theatre balcony where he was
shot watching Our American Cousin, I stare out the window at night to The City
of Illegal Guns and Roses to the funeral parlor and down the hill is the
halfway house called Rikers’ Island Prison.
On the upside, we’re home to The Bronx Zoo.
Welcome to the jungle
When I was a boy, I carried Anne Frank while shadows of
bullies and burnt-out buildings fell over us after school. At P.S 25, Mr.
Marks, my white-haired grandfather type English teacher, slightly hunched with
a burden of quiet grief, gave Anne to me to keep.
“The torch has been
passed on to a new generation,” said the country’s first Space Age president.
Optimism was our painkiller next to Saint Joseph’s Orange Favored Aspirin For
Abused Children This is my journal, an essay by images and painting by words.
My name was Daniel Angel Aponte. I suffered head injuries by
haters at school. It got worse at the 6th Precinct. The plug of
Higher Education was pulled out of me.
Daniel stands for God Is My Judge.
All I’m fit for is the part of the thief who was nailed next
to A Good Jewish Lawyer.
Once upon a millennium, I wanted The Bronx School of
Science.
I wanted to be a scientist like Albert Einstein or like
Mister Spock on the star trek of the better angels of our nature. I had homework
to draw tourists to our town.
I did it by putting Al Pacino and others from The South
Bronx on police line-ups. These celebrities have books on their lives at The
NYPL. In other words, book them, Dano.
And since The Bronx is the only borough connected to the
mainland, I can put every American on line-ups. After that, it’s High Noon. I
suppose this is community service.
I supposed all this began in an sixth grade English class at
P.S 161 where I made a wish to live life like a great novel, one that would
read like the sci-fi of a great comic book.
At an early age, I learned to tattoo words by watching them bleed in a
paper garden of good and evil. Just write what you know, advised Ms Raesade.
Chapter 1: It was a dark and stormy night.
“We don’t publish
stories by minorities! Anything else,” a woman said before hanging up in a time
of great prosperity for the country because of the newly invented Internet. I
improvise with what she said like I did on golden trumpet in music class.
Writing on old tech Word95&98 helped me recall a photographic memory in
childhood.
This is a mural for myself as well as afterimages of other
dreamers.
This mural should be one that breaks the law that states
there are no second acts in American lives and the lives of others around
planet Earth. However, there are no great stories without heartbreak and no
refunds for answered prayers. In pursuing truth, reporters are imprisoned and
some killed just like Doctors Without Borders.
I finally returned to my Fortress of Solitude where I saw
Waiting For Super Man and Childhood’s End. All Our Yesterdays from A To Z At
The Hunt’s Point Public Library of many endings and beginnings. This is the
story of our lives
This is where I found A Winkle In Time.
This is the house of genius that helped me with what I was
vaguely dreaming of creating in The War of Ideas. This is for my mother who
worked long hours in a pen & pencil factory but still had time to draw my
first smile before I went off to kindergarten.
And here’s to our public library in The South Bronx of
America
Where The Wild Things Are.
How To Pitch Nightmares To DreamWorks by Danny Aponte of P.S
161
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