A Literary Collage: Five Tributaries "A Rock in Waters" The place where Danny Apache put the large stone down for his first rest, since all the migrant orange pickers being exploited and loving it which gave the truth to unregulated economic system with its greed disease would not only eat the weak, ignorant and believers in nothing but would also devour itself in the attempt to gain a self-worth in a cloud of denial and a death wish riding on the backs of four different colored horses he had asked one of the workers to smash his head with it but the man refused, would one day in the land of chads stand the storybook castle with all its pseudo majestic money getting splendor. "Humpty Dumpty sat on a steep wall. Humpty Dumpty fell and broke his ding-dong and all the relatives and friends, big and small, could not put the pieces back together again. Danny would go a little insane. END "The Siblings" Three months after his brothers and sisters refused to help Johnny pay off their father's funeral, his sister Alice called. It would take him a couple of years to do sending the funeral parlor one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month which was a bit hard to do on a teacher's salary that just hovered above the poverty line in leave no child behind land. Also a third child soon to join their lives added to the burden which would have been all but diminished if "they" had turned over their insurance checks. Johnny had trustingly never taken his late mother's name off the insurance policy after his father said: "Johnny when I go, this will pay for my funeral." Johnny had taken the paper not looking at it and put it away; believing his father's often told story that a gypsy had told him as a thirty year old man he would live to the age of a hundred and six but his father would die many years before that. "Hello Johnny." Gone was Alice's harsh sounding voice when she told him to go "fuck himself" that she and her husband Gus, whom Johnny would forever call "Gux the Slime and phony Kamikaze shooter downer" were going on vacation to Puerto Pico with their share of the money. "This is your favorite sister Alice. How you doing? Oh, Johnny I was wondering if you could do us a small favor? Could you give us your little home to post bond for our brother Leny?" He couldn't believe these people had like (what had that army Attorney said to sleazy Joe the senator from Wisconsin?) no Shame! "Have you no shame? Have you no honor? No fucking decency?" Johnny Sanque said. Alice giggled like Joe Gobbles had in the little crazy way he had when nervous and angry and then hung up on Johnny instead of answering his sincere question. That was the day his once favorite sister, who had saved him from learning how to fly when Tina of the Troy, Leny One N and Tommy TomTom were trying to convince the four year old Johnny that in truth he could fly from their roof five storeys above the ground all the way to where their father was working construction for the WPA in Pelham Bay when Alice told them she was squealing to their father making them run to their maternal uncle Deo's house where he would protect them from the man who changed his face when he was told by Deo he could not go out with his sister. When Alice called again - waiting an hour for Johnny to cool off - she hung up again stopping from finishing his sentence: "You got some big b-" END "Falling Fall" A loud thunder blast accompanied by frightening streaks of lightening ricocheting throughout his brain were his wife's words. "What are you doing? That's your flesh and blood! What are you doing animal - visitor of sheep pens? That's your daughter!" He peed out of his nose and defecated from his mouth as he stammered looking as awkward as the fearless Mohawk Indian who had fallen from the ninetieth floor from the Empire State Building working just three clouds above him. On the tallest landing of the then tallest building in the world - where King Kong was going to fall to his death to try and save humanity when it still partially believed there were some nobility and ideals to pursue but then it decided these things and God could not overcome what the money could do in the race at who would win in the uncontrolled no rules game of the survival of the fittest - was where he wrestled the womanly-girl Tina of the Troy gently and lovingly to the concrete slab that was glowing inside a deep purple heat the size of a large red-orange flame. END :The Purple Heart Kid" Biaggi so much wanted to get up and feel the vigor he felt as a sixteen year old borrowing Tami Mauriello's robe - the very same man who had staggered the great Joe Louis in the first round in their championship fight only to be knocked out in that very same round since he could not back up on a heel that had been run over by a truck taking a short cut to avoid congested Fordham Road so able to make better time and more money when he was a little boy - that night Biaggi fought and won his first amateur bout and he was proud that he still held the record at the East Harlem Club for knocking out his opponent in eleven seconds of the first round. When he came home to show his mother the trophy for the achievement was when he told his father and the Sanques, who lived in the apartment above visiting, that he was going to be a fighter. When he was bending over to kiss his mother was when his father cold-cocked him - saying he would not tolerate a bum in his family. Biaggi would walk from North Africa up through Italy, all of France and then into Germany. He would receive two purple hearts, flat feet and a Presidential citation from FDR attesting to his bravery and sacrifice. He would never forget his first dream and for all his efforts and the deaths of young people who gave up a life for a death, the country would get cold-cocked as he once did when people began to fear fear itself. END "Al Dente" Uncle Ear Johnny's father's oldest brother - and his father bore responsibility for the nickname born that day they all went to a movie in The East Bronx seeing Charlie Chaplin eating his shoes and Uncle Seppe's ear could be seen covering one-third of the screen - with whom he had a rivalry ever since he was five years old and Seppe, two years older than he, coming back from their first day of school and Seppe reciting the Brazilian alphabet in front of his Black godfather and other land owners while Gaetano couldn't so making their father - and Johnny's father would tell everyone that the guy wasn't his real father - decided that his first born would be the one to get a schooling while Gaetano, the second of a total brood of seven, would begin to learn the art of hard work and would by the age of twelve drive a wagon pulled by four horses delivering items from their dry goods store through a Brazilian forest ... the father would often tell his favorite son, Johnny, of the land of his birth: how, among ferns, brazilwood almost all destroyed by greed, shrub twice the size of his fourteen year old body, how he had confronted the sixteen foot snake blocking his path through a thick forest where streaks of light shone through the many branches of trees becoming themselves more monsters; frightening companions to the snake he was about to kill. He took out his big knife and cautiously slipped between the crooked shapes of trees that were engulfed by twisted fig vines as thick as both his hands joined. He moved softly toward the snake that was pausing to smell the world about it. Gaetano ignored the wetness of leaves touching his half naked body and only the cries of a macaw overcame the loud thumping of his heart - which he feared could be smelled by the snake and only the elation he felt when striking the creature's body to gush blood made him throw away his fear. Again and again he struck down on the demon with its slit eyes and crooked tongue that began to strike out at the insane invisible god attacking. Feeling like a man Gaetano held pieces of the large snake up to the sky as a mighty toucan three feet in size screeched approvingly from high above in the middle branches of an upside-down tree and as he stood there blue butterflies as big as his face flew over his arm .... When their family returned to the land of rocks and stones, because the wealthy landowners could not pay their bills off due to the frost that killed off all their coffee crops, to the town called Stairs, which was the only way to reach it so high in the clouds it was, and Uncle Ear was in uniform with Papa Hemingway dodging German and Austrian artillery in their ambulance recovering mangled bodies since Seppe had been born in the land of the Appian Way but eighteen year Gaetano would tell the carbonari he would not go saying he was a Braziliero so not subject to the insanity of going into a war that was going to end all wars; instead, killing off ninety percent of eighteen year old boys sacrificed to the gods of war as if that could dissuade the greed mongers looking for a meaning in their meaningless lives; believing human life was a small price to pay for the good pseudo aphrodisiac feeling of worth they were reaping and Gaetano told them one day mothers and fathers would go on strike in order to protect their children; not realizing it would only get worse being a seaman coming into the port of Marseilles and all the mariners were asked if they were fascists and those who said they were not would be forced to drink a bottle of castor oil and though he told the French Vichy he was not that at all - not ready to show his temper that was said among everyone matched Mount Vesuvius in its eruptions - and the Frenchmen decided this man who Rudolph Valentino would resemble did not have to drink .... and in their middle years of life, long before Johnny was born, Uncle Ear invited his dear brother to dinner in far away Far Rockaway and when he told his wife Rosaria, suffering from an eye disease, to drop the "macaroni" into the boiling salty water to be blended with gravy made in the juices of meats, so could not be what some people including renowned chefs called a sauce, and after the ten minutes or so of cooking to an al dente state of texture - what came out with the pasta were lady's underwear! Johnny's father - carrier of one of the weakest stomachs in the world - never again would eat at his brother's table. Never never again. He might visit his older brother but when in Far Rockaway he would not eat. END 10-18-07 Jerry Vilhotti: [email protected]
Copyright © 2007 Jerry Vilhotti |