Code Turkey

 There was a furious knocking on our door that sounded like Rat-Ta-Ta-Ta-Ta of machine guns and the shouting sounded Nazi in enthusiastic intent.

Leave your mother’s bed behind, said an officious voice.

We’re giving her bunk beds.

I saw furniture and other belongings such as suitcases pile up in the courtyard after being thrown out of windows.  They ordered us out of our apartment with the guarantee of moving us into a better apartment on the other side of the building where they were trying to concentrate 2 elderly women to yet another side with different leases.

They were playing 3 Card Monte with apartments turned into devices akin to mazes for white mice to go in the direction they wanted them to go in.

I refused only to find my mother living in one side of the building filled with fading afterimages of the families that lived there. At night, I protected my mother with a bat, knives and pepper spray in case criminals decided on a home invasion.

The next morning, bunk beds filled the courtyard.

The sight of beds placed my mind into a dream state that took me back in time to the boy I was who carried Anne Frank in his arms through the shadows of burnt out buildings and bullies with swastikas stitched to gang colors in The South Bronx of Captain America.  

Deep down in heart, people are good, Anne whispered in my childhood from a top bunk bed at night disrupted by gunfire from time to time.

I heard my mother scream when they inadvertently broke her arm by denying her repairs to the apartment she moved into with her husband in the time of The Watergate Break-In that flooded the country with dismay and lead to the consensual eviction of a president from The White House. 

Unable to get out of bed, I gently lifted my mother to take her to the bathroom. After I helped her ease back in bed, there were hard knocks on the door. I was served papers for eviction for failure to renew the lease. I kept the bad news from my mother to keep her immune system from weakening. Add lawyer to my homecare attendant duty.

Paradise Management is the name of the company that brought Hell to us all the way to The Housing Court on The Grand Concourse 

Opening statements submitted to the future of history…it was the worse of times…

Homelessness Made Easy For Dummies

Copyrighted 2019 by Daniel Angel Aponte