Game Of Landlords

When I was a boy, bad men became the landlords of the building I lived in.

Within the week of the purchase, they splashed gasoline on the roof.

They didn’t care about the elderly or babies in cribs burning to death.

They cared about the insurance money.

Blue Angels came from nowhere and stopped them

Someone saw something and said something.

Anyone who took up the position of Lord Commander Of The Night Watch

in The South Bronx was sure to have a short life 

I am now Lord Commander

 All the corruption made the city a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

I, like others, wait for true justice to clean up this house of humans.

We wait for the arrival of The Landlord of Planet Earth

Game Of Landlords

Written by Danny Aponte sixth grader at Public School 161

Episode One

Paradise Management In The Time Of Terror

Once upon a time, the schoolboy I was carried Anne Frank while the shadows of bullies and burnt-out buildings fell over us in The South Bronx of America.

The Nazis were landlords that evicted Jews from Germany and into homeless shelters called concentration camps. I walked miles to prevent my disabled mother from becoming homeless in The New Millennium.

On the way to get help, I posted to Facebook and Google pictures of The Bronx with a borrowed Android and took other pictures with words.

I’ve been shell-shocked by sharp knocks on the flimsy door that made my mother hide in her bedroom with a view of the funeral parlor where dust settled from Ground Zero as it did almost everywhere this town.

More hard knocks were followed by silence.

I opened the door and saw a male taping petitions for an eviction.

The court papers was for failure to renew lease to the apartment my mother moved into with her husband in the time of President Richard M. Nixon and the break-in of The Watergate Hotel.

The new landlord’s employees of Paradise Management had refused to renew the leases for newer tenants on our side of the building.

At the time, I did not know the apartments were going to be rented in the thousands of dollars to troubled people with children formerly of shelters for the homeless.

The city was to pay the bulk of the rent.

The Bronx Borough President was cheerful to report progress on homeless families on a Sunday morning public affairs program on the American Broadcasting Company. Like that of abandoned buildings I once explored in The Twilight Zone of my childhood, silence at night was deafening and in the morning power tools and constant banging of hammers woke us up like a wrecking ball through the wall.

Workmen threw out whatever was left behind.

I saw clothes, furniture and toys thrown out windows to the courtyard like a scene in a film directed by Steven Spielberg.

The building manager offered to move us to another side of the building where they were trying to move out two senior citizens to yet other side of the building.

I was shocked me when he said to leave our furniture behind because he was giving my mother and me free bunk beds.

A week later the courtyard was filled with boxes of bunk beds. The building had been turned into a homeless shelter. Profane graffiti crawled on walls like toxic mold.

In a building without cameras, our mailboxes were damaged. 

Our mail went into limbo.

I’ve seen the violence and the drug dealing in the building of doors constantly broken like the car windows shattered by sandbags thrown off the roof. I’ve seen wanted posters in hallways. I videotaped hundreds of rats running out of garbage bags left for weeks. I saw one of the families ring up a grocery bill of nearly 300 food stamps. I saw they had two cases of soda for their children. That would explain the non-stop running over ceilings.

The kids run for hours back and forth and it sounds like a carpet-bombing over the apartments of long time tenants most of them elderly.  What do the parents or single parent do while their children become mindless?  Watch a commercial on TV that states A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste?

Is another generation of cop killers and chokes hold victims?

I’ve seen US Marshals come in to evict those that owed thousands of dollars in back rent. You can take them out of shelters but you can’t take the shelters out of some of them.

 Eventually, Jen, the bright girl upstairs and her family, along with other tenants, made way for the homeless when they packed up and moved to buildings of higher rents.

The building’s manager along with several representatives of the landlord surrounded my mother to try to get her to break her rent-controlled lease for 500 dollars.

That’s a lot of money for my mother who’s been mentally impaired for years and it shows on her face. But something held her back from signing a lease to another apartment. Had she signed the lease it would had made her a new tenant.

Another long time resident took the money and signed a new lease to a smaller apartment. Later on the landlord refused to renew his lease.

The next stop for that befuddled tenant was Housing Court on the Grand Concourse where I spent time learning all I could about the laws and saw the despair of huddled masses of people some in need of translators and legal aid.

I have two leases from the landlord’s reps.

The leases are invalid because they are to other apartments and not the one to our apartment. The next trip was The Division Of Housing on Halsey Street.

I have to recall incidents to establish a pattern of harassment.

There’s more to the journey besides taking pictures of homeless cats and people.

I hurt my leg at the Bernie Sanders Rally in Saint Mary’s Park at night. As of this date I haven’t received a report from the paramedics.

I need it to prove a case against the city for negligence.

I have other things to do too.

I have to control my anger.

Lord Commander Of The Night Watch will keep posting…