FEBRUARY 2004
By Jerry Vilhotti
Ever since her husband's father killed himself years before, Biagi had changed. It was as if he were trying to swallow up his father and all the past at the same time but she had waited for him to return from the world war and still those cheap bastards who were going for Hitler and the Third Reich to kill off communism, so making their riches grow bigger at the expense of the "riffraff". To this very day they would not allow a national monument for the greatest generation that fought through two wars: the Great Depression and the war against totalitarianism. She knew he would not see it.
"Where are you going again tonight?" he heard his wife say in the long ago past; blinking to fight back her tears from blue-green eyes.
He couldn't say. In his mind as vivid as the color of her eyes, he could see himself again crossing the German school yard resembling an American one, also having left many children behind on purpose for minds that could not think were easier to be led, shooting from the hip, a "nazi" clutching at his throat as if a raw clam were crawling up through his mouth fell to the ground. This memory was quickly followed by the young German woman, whose face could have been his father's, from whom he had ripped off her neck the Cross dangling from her neck and left her standing beside her burning house. He recalled the young recruit killed by the large light beam. Unlike other outfits they did not send the new replacements to places the veterans were cautious to go - at least he never did; always taking them under his wing: "Look kid, when the spot lights go on fight the urge to look up. Don't! Bullets will fucking follow!" That morning he found the nineteen year old in bits and pieces. He was all ready late for his date which was his twentieth in the past month. He had a lot of catching up to do since his long walk from Northern Africa to Germany.
He never did nor ever
would believe that the United States won the war
single-handily as many politicians insisted; clothing
themselves in the blood red, white and blue -
coward-puppets who refused to sacrifice themselves for a
country they said thousands of times they cherished;
becoming part of a club known as "What's In It For
Me" or "Buy One and Get One Free".
They and their money power hungry bosses of the Fourth
World Order were traitors to a people who
might have helped in making a better world for all.
This he would always believe. He knew he would
always be a hyphenated-American and called so by leaders
to make sure they knew their place in the scheme of
things. What had he fought for while earning two
Purple Hearts? Now he thought
of Julius Garfunkle sitting beside him in his
eighth grade class and would kill himself as John
Garfield instead of telling Senator Gobbles Mccarthy
names of former friends who once belonged to the dreaded
communist movement with all its frightening
ideas impeding their ability to make lots of money
that would be so much toilet paper trying to wipe away
the stain on their souls so making them clean once and
for all and Miss Wolf telling them that their
country - though never perfect by any means having
built itself on many lies that would one
day would come to roost - in the hearts
of many stood for freedom and justice for all. Those
were the ideals for which he had
been willing to go die .... During lucid
moments he wondered out loud to all his former comrades
many of whom would not come back asking them what had it
been all about seeing their so-called leader folding
their country into a hand basket before throwing
it over the Grand Canyon? He asked them how a
person who stacked the deck once and would again could
possibly be reelected when he had alienated eighty-five
percent of illegible voters: People who truly
believed in the American principles of equality and
freedom, families of reservists and guardsmen who in
actuality were being drafted, conservationists, legal
immigrants, fiscal conservatives, airlines going bankrupt
in having to pay the increases of fuel, parents and
grandparents of children left behind, seniors on fixed
incomes, those paying for health care costs for millions
that did not have any insurance from Hand Money Over
corporations ... and yet the corporate owned
media was saying their leader was going to win in a
landslide. "Talk about stacking the
deck!" "Biagi, who
were you talking to? Do you need more
water?" she asked this husband she still loved
deeply despite his running around on her trying to
imitate his
father's animalistic
womanizing behavior because Biagi told him he
could not come to live with him, his wife and their two
children - never having forgotten his beatings
trying to make him and his younger brother Tonto
into good hyphenated-Americans.
He was melting away each day a little bit
more. "Just to memories. No
sweetheart, I'll just go to sleep for awhile,"
he said trying to get away from the gripping pain of the
cancer spreading throughout his body. Then he
would dream of being a young man again in The East
Bronx playing stick ball on Arthur Avenue; turning on
johnny pumps for all the young children so they could go
swimming toward the Atlantic Ocean that lay beyond The
Sound.END 1-9-04