Danny Ducks South Bronx

Re@l Life @s @ Comic Book

Bronx County Courthouse judge lectured me on being beneficial to society.

He encouraged me to take a pathway to law school as my community service.

Yes.

Another lawyer is what this world needs. Earth needs more lawyers.

I thanked His Honor in a letter filed away by his secretary

On a road trip into the mountains, I saw a sign in the winter of another state.

We Have Heroes Among Us, quietly sailed by a billboard on a highway in The New Millennium that begins a journal of a mild mannered reporter.

Sirens screamed and blood was coughed so violently into oxygen mask paramedics were startled in the time of Ebola outbreaks and no health insurance for some Americans.

In The Emergency Room, I made peace with The God Who Said Vengeance Is His

I saw a bright light in front of my bedroom window when I was a child with photographic memory. I sank into my ocean deep sleep and walked light-years to remember dreams.

The phenomenon of reliving life in a blink of an eye happened as the frosty white ceilings of Lincoln Hospital became bright as the ones on a cell phone shown to me by a New York Post reporter who investigated UFOs around the building my mother and I live in.

UFOs made the cover of the newspaper founded by a Founding Father.

There are aliens.

Poverty is an alien on this green rich planet

I traveled time in my mind and saw Mr. Marks, a grandfatherly English teacher at P.S 25.

He gave me a book to keep.

The boy I was carried the diary of a girl through shadows of bullies and burnt buildings that fell over us in The South Bronx when it looked like England under siege in WWII.

I climbed to my bunk bed to bring her to life by frozen thoughts conceived decades ago.

I woke up to the sight of clothes, furniture and toys thrown out of windows.

Machine gun sounds of power tools rattled nerves from morning to afternoon.

Apartments were worked on for weeks when ours needed work.

The hallway was crowded with drywalls, lumber and nails.

At night, our side of the building was silent with vacancies.

It was a ghost town covered in sawdust.

Someone is knocking on the door, whispered my disabled mother.

Leave your belongings behind. I’m giving you and your mother bunk beds, said a rep from Paradise Management on behalf of the new landlords.

He wanted us to move into another apartment on the other side of the building where management tried to get two elderly female residents to move to yet another side of the building where a faint scent of Ground Zero drifted upon the night and also weathered a monstrous Nor’easter that effortlessly dragged a roller coaster into the ocean as it caused homelessness among the middleclass of the Garden State across The Hudson River.

Workmen brought boxes upon boxes of bunk beds to the courtyard.

The building was to become a pit stop for homeless families until the city could find them affordable housing in a homeless shelter called The South Bronx.

Families were moved into renovated apartment units that were rented at thousands of dollars apiece with New York City paying a part of it and gave The Bronx President bragging rights on a Sunday talk show on The American Broadcasting System.

One new tenant owed 20 grand to the landlords. US Marshals were summoned to evict by force if the tenant or tenants didn’t move out within a short time frame.

I saw a baby crib and a big bag of toys left behind by tenant 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 there would be no need to appear in Housing Court if we signed the new lease.

Paradise Management had several Dominicans ready to move our belongings into a smaller apartment on a higher floor bad for my mother’s legs.

I was told to raise a notice to appear in Housing Court.

The building manager took a picture to email his lawyer a request to make render null and void the notice if and when they got us to sign the new lease.

If we had signed that lease, we would still had to appear in Housing Court. Failure to appear 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. My mother is a regular tenant who moved in with her husband in the beginning of The Watergate Scandal.

When I wasn’t home to protect my mother, she almost signed a lease to another apartment in the presence of tall breaded men dressed in black and the short building manager who translated from English into Spanish the promise of 500 dollars if she signed on the spot.

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 troubled 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 scenes of violence, drug use and graffiti on walls like toxic mold. Our mailbox was mutilated as if M-80s blew it up.

The destruction of our mailbox 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 complained to a superintendent about the vandalized 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 was also a Federal matter because of the loss of our mail.

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. The superintendent came up to me with keys to another apartment’s mailbox. They offered $500 to get us to move.

The rep from Paradise Management brought a lease to that apartment after I requested it for several weeks.

In desperation, I took the lease to Lincoln Hospital to apply for health care.

Afterward, 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 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---several blocks away from where we live--- where dozens of lives were burned alive.

Paradise Management had succeeded in concentrating some long time residents to one side of the building. The holdouts were three elderly women, my mother being one of them by my counsel.

One senior citizen of them 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.

One of the residents who had signed a new lease had to go to court a year later to get a renewal lease. 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/rent money. They issued a replacement check that I sent to the landlord. As I write this, it has been three weeks of asking for the rent 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

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

My Re@l Life @s @ Comic Book

“I want to get me a cop”, a person of color said gleefully in a jury pool at The Bronx County Courthouse. The comment startled me by its lack of fairness. “If anyone has had a negative experience with police officers, line up against the wall. The judge will see you one at a time to hear your story,” said a tall African-American court officer.

I sat down in darken chambers, a shadow of myself.

The prosecutor, the defense attorney, the translator converting English into Spanish for a Dominican, accused of crimes, were vague outlines as I told the judge of my near death experience at The Sixth Precinct in The Village. I was there to report a murder attempt on my life. I had been punched in the back of the head several times by a white student at NYU after the rebellion in the heights where Dominicans threw bottles of gasoline at firefighters and attacked police officers and then came the attempt to bring down The World Trade Center. The student was a painter who worked on a portrait of Adolph Hitler in his dorm room with the door open for all to see darkness.

Very film noir.

The scene in the judge’s chambers reminds me of a black and white film from the 1950s called D.O.A or Dead On Arrival. This chapter in my life is called Danny Of America.

My recollection takes a page from Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood to tell a true-life case that reads like a novel. I also have a Ken Burns on the brain mentality and as Walter Cronkite of CBS News said, get the story right.

A reporter has to triple check facts to raise reasonable doubt in a court of public opinion.

In spite of hard evidence, what happened is supernatural unbelievable.

I don’t blame anyone for not believing me.

Truth is stranger than science fiction.

Chapter One: It was a dark and stormy night

My Re@l Life @s @ Comic Book

Artwork and journal copyrighted by Daniel Angel Aponte

MRI of my brain by New York Radiology

2017