MARCH 2004

.WALKING WITH POE'S GHOST
By Jerry Vilhotti©Feb2004

The first night I slept in my brother's apartment which was perched on the twenty-second floor of a building that looked across to the beautiful New York City skyline -  with two buildings screaming silently "Don't do this to us for we have lives to live too - gods of Greed and Control" - due to my mother's plea I do so since she strongly suspected Tom was going out of his mind -  so I lay on the couch with one eye opened, which had me lose much sleep that I really needed to do my job as a teacher in a junior high school situated between Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg; an assignment I asked for wanting to fulfill a promise to myself to pay back a city that gave me a chance to graduate from a college that gave the world a man who had helped cure much of polio with the vaccine he created though not without much difficulty as one college of the university would have allowed me to stay until I died provided I kept paying so much for a credit while the other one more connected to my poor background with guys and dolls really poor and not faking it to getting out of paying tuition but even here I was warned if I went above minus fifteen I would be thrown out and another time when the stern-faced librarian accused me of stealing books out of his library leaving unmentioned that he thought I was intercoursing many of the pretty girls studying which was untrue and only for a ten page argument of mine to a Dean on Inner Security believing my logic of why would I steal books that had nothing to do in my area of study and that perhaps the one who did take them was the guy who called me and told me he found my library card and I thanked him thinking the whole world was made up of honest people and told him to rip it up - which he didn't do!  After serving my four years trying to teach kids to think and telling them the only way out of the slums was education and the ability to think able to see our so-called leaders selling their "beloved country" away to the highest bidders and I'll always believe it wasn't Nietzsche who killed God but greed and the power hungry hypocrites who said they believed in their Savior.  My wife, our one year old son who would be joined by two yet unborn sisters, and I went to live in a simpler place in time somewhere in the Litchfield Hills that had its share of haters and self-haters too but all church goers as well as those others who fiend a goodness - hiding their inner weapons of mass destruction from others with a mask of holiness.      Tom had polio; infected when he was six months old and later I would sincerely believe the disease had spread all the way up to his mind; remembering as an eleven year old seeing an eighteen year old Tom's gigantic tic that had his mouth twirling toward his shoulder in a fitful biting of air that appeared to be attacking him.     The reason for the opened eye?  Tom after slamming his bedroom door three times - I would eventually notice Tom would do things in threes like: take three baths a day, cover three places in the small kitchen with thousands of pennies ....      Tom would do his all night walking in the semi-dark apartment with a butcher knife in hand; speaking in loud whispers to, I surmised, Poe's demons; actually Poe did walk on our cobblestoned streets of the East Bronx after he married his sister-cousin and was familiar with the area when it was known as Fordham Village and part of The Bronx County when he was doing West Point up the road a piece; that if he found that little bastard old born baby who had come into his family stealing his father's and mother's love from him after he had more than earned it with his leg encompassed inside a brace - he would, he promised the ceiling, butcher it into many chunks of pieces.     I'm somewhat bright and after thinking on all this for a few hours, I realized that I was that "little bastard"!!! I was the fucking old born baby!!!
    "Johnny! Johnny did you see the baby?"
    "No Tom. He melted away in a pile of cold snow!" I joked always finding a laugh in Tom's great sense of humor. When we owned our first television set - almost the last ones on the street to buy one since my mother was known to lock up her dollars  deep inside her purse to very seldom come out for air -  he would ask us if the program we were watching was "Fog Theater" or he would say matter-of-factly: "You're all going to go fucking blind!"
    "Will he come back, kid?"
    "Only in your funny dreams," I said while hearing his bedroom door getting slammed three times for the fifth time.
    Christ, it was only March and I still had to go till the end of June, I thought trying hard to go to sleep in one eye but within five weeks my sleepless nights would be over when I asked Tom why wasn't he buying meats, vegetables and fruit with my half of the rent money; seeing for days the freezer filled only with bread?
    "Man lives by bread alone! You get out of here. I don't need a spy around me! Get the fucking out! You call yourself a writer?  You'll never be a fucking Poe - as he was saying this he was miss-catching his butcher knife he was now calling "Bates Motel". 
    I did go; sleeping two nights in my Mustang convertible by my school and I began to realize almost any type of knife could go threw the roof and into my head until our mother heard about this and asked her sister-in-law, our aunt Easter, in the Gunhill section of The Bronx to take me in and reluctantly I did go live in her dark cellar sleeping with Poe's ghost.
    Tom ended up in someplace in Middletown New York after trying to buy two houses with his credit card and while on this search to find Christ - giving all his pennies to the overwhelmed bus driver - was taken to a relaxorium that would attempt to get all the pieces of his brain back together again into some semblance of a sanity.
    I try to eat bread with all my meals.