Follow Your Dream
by Dean Borok
Niño de Jesus Benitez leaped into action as soon as he heard the door latch fail to catch. The first thing he did was to stick his finger down his throat and puke up his medication. Sticking his head out into the corridor and finding it to be deserted in the madrigal hours before dawn, he made a beeline for the emergency stairwell, and in a matter of moments was out of the building, onto the hospital grounds. He inhaled a deep breath of freedom and it made his head glow gold like a Byzantine icon.
The frosty chill of the predawn hour crept up his backside as, dressed only in the backless hospital patient’s muu-muu and paper slippers, Niño de Jesus crept stealthily through the woods of Ward’s Island like a Red Indian, dodging the occasional police cruiser and crossing the footbridge that connects to Manhattan at East 103rd Street.
The creases of his narrow, pock-marked face flowed with tears of prayer and redemption like overflooded streams traversing the parched earth of the Sonora desert during a thunderstorm when the denizens of that inhospitable plain burrow deep in their lairs to escape the consequences of God’s wrath.
He crept through the streets of Spanish Harlem like a thief or a mugger, concealing himself in the shadows or hiding in basement stairwells where garbage cans were stored behind waist-high wrought iron fences, concealing his presence from all but the rats gorging themselves on the bounty of human refuse that overflowed the bins.
He crossed himself as he passed a ceramic statuette of the Black Madonna displayed in the window of the Botanica Chango, a religious devotional shop dedicated to Santeria, Candomblé and the African cult sects of Christianity. Western religion accepts that we are created in God’s image. But everybody knows that images are expressions of interpretation. Physically speaking, we may resemble God to the same extent that one of Picasso’s cubist figures or a child’s finger painting resembles us. This possibility of distortion could reach into the metaphysical realm as well. So, Niño de Jesus Benitez’ spirit world, with its little dolls and burning sacrifices could be interpreted as an acceptable alternative to our so-called “rationalism”. As New York continued to evolve more latin, this tendency became more pronounced, percolating up through society as these animist elements gained more economic and social influence. A few steps further along, he reconsidered, went back and fell
to his knees in devotion to the icon, blubbering in a creepy mix of Spanish and Jivaro, sobbing, praying for redemption, tranquility, comfort.
At length he rose from his knees and made his way to the subway and down the stairs. The people waiting on the platform, mostly Mexican restaurant workers on their way to begin their pre-dawn cleaning jobs, expressed no astonishment at seeing Niño de Jesus Benitez place a hand on each turnstile and gracefully jump over the gate, though they were rather repulsed and offended at the naked display of his lower torso as the surgical dressing gown surged up above his waist like a billowing sail or a parachute. But he ran down the platform away from them and they went back to perusing their folded tabloid newspapers.
Niño de Jesus left the train at midtown and began to walk west toward Twelfth Avenue and the Hudson River. This was the witching hour, when the streets were haunted by starkly mad homeless people in shockingly filthy fashion statements pushing around canvas mail carts filled with beer cans and garbage, so nobody, not even the cops so much as took notice of him in his backless cotton nightdress.
As he approached Eleventh Avenue, his demeanor, already hysterical and delusional, went up an octave like some desiccated movie Mexican driven by thirst towards an anticipation of water. He drove himself desperately to a deserted lot enclosed by a chain link fence just off the West Side Highway. Running up to the fence, he grabbed onto it with both hands and gazed with fascination upon the object of his constant obsession. For the only thing occupying this space was a forklift machine, and not just any forklift but the monster mother of all cargo delivery vehicles. Painted in the most garish purple-fuchsia shade imaginable and standing fifteen feet high with rubber tires almost as tall as a man and forks as long as a New York City taxi, this monster, with its own enclosed, temperature-controlled cockpit, was designed for outdoor pipeline or mineral extraction work. In the relatively more delicate environment of New York, the machine, easily capable of moving a city bus or
a small house, was used by its owner for transporting shipping containers to industrial sites on the West Side. Niño de Jesus frequently had marveled at it on his way to work and one day, when the proprietor had left the gate unlocked, he snuck in for a closer look. Climbing up the ladder on the side and peering into the control booth, he noticed that they had left the key in the ignition. After all, one might reason, who would steal such a monster? Only a crazy man.
From that day forward the machine became a constant landmark of his scattered emotional terrain. The idea of it would pop up when he was riding the subway into town from his rented room in Corona, when he was eating beans and rice in the shared kitchen of his boarding house, when he was watching Mexican gangster movies showing smartly tailored guys with mustaches smattering each other into fragments with machine guns.
If the average person is distracted by thoughts of sex every eight seconds as scientists contend, then Niño de Jesus Benitez, who had not the slightest interest in any form of human contact, who was a fanatical Catholic fundamentalist sober or drunk, had found the ideal vehicle of transferal for all his earthly animal tendencies. The fuchsia forklift took over all his waking thoughts and dreams. He changed his commute so that he could pass it twice each day, crossing himself and uttering a devotional prayer on his way to and from his job as (what else?) a forklift operator.
The fuchsia forklift came to have a deleterious effect on his job performance at the industrial bakery where he worked. His previously close relationship with the dependable little yellow forklift that he drove became strained, the same way a man might devalue his plain but faithful wife after becoming infatuated with a younger, lovelier woman. He began treating her with contempt and insouciance, letting her battery water run low and forgetting to recharge her when he went on break or ended his shift. Sometimes, out of spite, he intentionally banged her against concrete surfaces, damaging her fiberglass body and exposing her insides. Occasionally he would drive her around without first raising her fork, causing sparks to fly as the prongs scraped painfully across the reinforced cement floor. The yellow forklift, which was named Teresa since its last driver had painted his child’s name on it, sadly deteriorated from her previously spunky self and now dripped tears of
hydraulic fluid as she dragged herself forlornly about the premises. Finally, the loading dock foreman, Bolivar Marticorena, took notice and stepped in to champion her.
“It’s a crime the way you abuse this machine,” he asserted.
“Why don’t you go to hell!” retorted Niño de Jesus with the defensive indignation of somebody who knows perfectly well he is being justly accused. Whether Bolivar was right or wrong was beside the point. Niño de Jesus knew the Mexican foreman had it in for him because he was from Ecuador. Besides, he knew Bolivar’s hideous secret, that he was a demon from the depths of hell who had ascended into the world by way of a stairway behind the furnace in the sub-basement of the factory, a filthy, hellish place where the slops from the drainage system fell into a slop sink which connected it to the city’s sewer system. Niño de Jesus sometimes went down there because the foul odor kept others away, and he could get some peace and quiet while he sipped from a pint bottle of Ronrico to steady his nerves. As the old saying goes, once you get past the smell you’ve got it licked, and Niño de Jesus passed many agreeable solitary moments there, alone except for the occasional water bug
or garden variety rodent.
That is, until the day when he heard whistling, chuckling voices coming from behind the giant hundred year-old furnace in a dark corner, towering like a steel mountain behind a blackened lagoon of a cesspool of shiny sewage and putrefied rat carcasses. Intrigued, he squeezed his skinny body into the narrow passage separating the furnace from the wall until he had gotten behind it. There was a solid green door. He tried the handle, but it was locked.
The voices behind the door had gone silent when they heard somebody trying the handle. There was total silence for several seconds, when suddenly a terrifying chorus of howls and screams startled and frightened Niño de Jesus. Panicked, he tried to scramble back through the narrow passage from which he had come, but in his haste he snagged part of his clothing on a piece of metal protruding from the furnace. Unable to move, he heard the voices come right up behind him, mocking him and threatening him in unknown languages of gibberish. Disembodied faces spun around in the air, laughing and menacing as Niño de Jesus, soaked in sweat and praying to Jesus for salvation from these infernal spirits who, enraged that he had discovered their hiding place, now laughingly taunted and threatened him with destruction and the loss of his immortal soul.
He passed out, hanging there like a marionette in this dark, stinking subterranean pit of filth and demons for an immeasurable period of time. Once he woke up to find giant water bugs crawling all over his clothing and body, sucking the salt perspiration. At the end of the short passage, rats stuck their heads in curiously, wondering how long it would take for him to die there so they could begin eating him. Passing out again, he retreated into a dream state of delirium.
At length, he was discovered by the old man, Tato, whose job in the factory it was to search out and kill bugs and rodents, for which purpose he carried with him a little tin first-aid case that he called his “maleta de muerte,” stuffed as it was with the traps and poisons that were his instruments of destruction. He would assemble all the little dead critters he had collected during his shift in a white bakery bag and show them to his boss as proof of his indispensability to the company. His manager, a hardened man of fifty, might very well be biting into a sandwich at the time of such an exhibition, where a glance into the bag would transport him into another little unique dimension of hell, one of water bugs stuck to glue traps, their shells and wings in disarray, many still alive with antennae furiously thrashing about; maggot-ridden corpses of mice stuck to traps with blood flowing out of their mouths and laying in their own droppings. “Muy bueno”, the manager would
tell the old man as he chewed his sandwich. And he meant it. Tato, with his small body and unabashed enthusiasm for squeezing into dark corners of the factory, flashlight in hand, performed an invaluable function. The manager, although repelled by this little menagerie of loathsome filth, was nevertheless heartened by the knowledge that none of these animals would contaminate the food product or, even more horribly, intrude their pointy little heads during a factory tour by customers or a government inspection. “You’re doing a fine job,” he would compliment the little man in fluent, though heavily anglo-inflected Spanish. “Get out there and kill some more!” The old man, elated by this encouragement, would recommence with renewed ardor.
Tato found Niño de Jesus Benitez suspended in the narrow passage behind the furnace, his clothes tangled in the machinery, and helped cut him free with a box cutter. After he had cut him loose, the toothless old man cautioned Niño de Jesus in barely comprehensible Spanish, “Never go there. There are bad things.”
This episode had a major impact on Niño de Jesus’ mind, and he started going down to the sub-basement on a regular basis, not to nip the bottle but to monitor the activity behind the furnace. In the silence, punctuated only by the gurgling and plopping of the rancid, filthy factory waste water flowing through the drainage pipe into the slop sink, he could make out the sounds coming from the green door at the end of the narrow passage, the infernal whistling and chuckling of rats mixed with human voices shrilly screaming and the shouts and pleadings of tortured souls being impaled on spikes, branded with red-hot pokers, having their eyes gouged out. This was the work of the Jews, who ascended a staircase leading from the pit of hell to emerge in modern New York. He formulated a clear picture of this diabolical intrusion of demons and determined that the bakery was a mere front for the methodical infiltration of Jew-demons into the world, a hellish Fifth Column organized to
deliver humanity into the embrace of Satan.
Armed with this knowledge, Niño de Jesus Benitez came to develop a clear understanding of the events of September 11, which, though having occurred many years before, were still the major preoccupation of New York society. He came to realize that the buildings’ collapse, while precipitated by the airplanes having collided into them, actually resulted from fissures in the earth’s crust caused by the Jews burrowing underneath them and weakening their foundations. This little scenario he updated to include fiendish masked lesbians violating priests with massive strap-on dildoes. Niño de Jesus, straining to hear, could distinguish over the roar of the furnace and the rushing flop of sewage into the slop sink the barely audible moans and pleas of priests who, stripped naked and chained to posts, bleeding and sweating, their pathetic moans and pleas for mercy and salvation drowned out by the hellish baritone laughter of the lesbians, were flagellated unmercifully with barbed
wire cat o’ nine tails whips.
He decided to alert a priest, Father Guzman, a saintly man who ministered to the unfortunate Central American undocumented aliens out of St. Anthony’s Parish in Corona. Father Guzman listened sympathetically to Niño de Jesus’ description of the events taking place behind the green door and wrote him a referral for psychiatric counseling, which Niño de Jesus immediately tore up after leaving the priest’s office.
“If they think they’re going to get me, they’re crazy!”
About the only thing that could mitigate these feelings of isolation, conspiracy and rage percolating through the skinny body of Niño de Jesus Benitez was the tranquillizing effect of watching the oozing, gooey blobs of putrefied bakery waste as the plunger forced it into the bowels of the rear-loading garbage truck each morning. The mesmerizing swirls of fermented dough, damaged product, grease, oil, vegetable coloring, purple blueberry, brown cinnamon, egg, whole wheat, brown sugar, pumpernickel, etc., all squished together and molded in texture and shape like a putrid, stinking lava lamp of decay reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock tableau (in actuality, the garbage truck was a vastly more talented artist), aroused in Niño de Jesus feelings of cosmic harmony. The spectacle of all this oozing decayed slop rising, falling and reformulating into kaleidoscopic shapes and textures of filth spoke volumes to him about the cosmic cycle of rebirth, like a pictorial essay in
National Geographic about the birth of the universe illustrated with photos from the Hubbell satellite telescope.
As he sat in his forklift, sprinkled with a light layer of the flour blowing out of the back of the garbage truck like a wedding cake ornament dusted with powered sugar and transfixed by celestial reveries of euphoria, the spell was suddenly broken by an insistant klaxoning of a tooty little car horn.
Stationed directly behind him, a very expensive metallic green German luxury car driven by a well-nourished oriental businessman was insisting on its right of way. This Korean man, impatient and offended to have to have his egress impeded by a dirty, dark-skinned workman riding a battered piece of heavy equipment, felt entirely justified to lean on his horn.
Though the guy was letting his horn do the talking for him, Niño de Jesus got the message loud and clear. In the Asiatic scheme of things, whoever had the money was on top, and the rest of us were suckers. Calmly, he put the forklift in reverse and smashed it into the front end of the beemer. The guy got out and started screaming horribly.
Niño de Jesus drove forward, raised the forks, wheeled the machine around so that it was facing the car face nose to nose, smashed into it and lowered the forks, crushing its hood and flattening its suspension so that the tires were flat onto the pavement like seals’ flippers. The great screaming of metal and crunching noise of destruction greeted the cacophony of oriental screams and curses as the car’s owner helplessly witnessed the willful destruction of his expensive vehicle.
Niño de Jesus jumped off his machine and ran of down the street. He was not arrested until months later, by which time everybody had lost interest in the affair, including the judge who ordered him held in Ward’s Island Sanitarium for psychiatric evaluation.
You can change a name, but that does not alter the essential nature of a thing. You can call a scumsucking maggot Marilyn Monroe, but it still lives in corrupt decay and thrives on the putrefied bowels of a dead thing. When the city fathers attempted to sanitize the image of Hell’s Kitchen by changing its name to Clinton, it was like putting tooth whitener on a decayed black stump of a broken molar. Nobody was fooled except the genius who initiated the concept. It was still a neighborhood of noxious gases and steam rising up like a bitch’s brew from forlorn, desolate streetcorners. Drug addicts waited behind trucks with guns and baseball bats for likely victims. Hookers lifted their skirts at traffic lights to display their wares. Rats the size of dogs demanded, and got, easement rights through people’s living rooms.
Meanwhile, you could look down to the end of the street and see, across the river in New Jersey, the heights of Weehawken, where luxury condominium complexes and Victorian mansions held out a tantalizing mirage of American prosperity and order as though peering across a dimensional void from the desolate wasteland of a Salvador Dali tableau into the benign innocence of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover, taunting the damned souls who would never know it like the key to a jail cell hanging just out of reach of the condemned prisoner.
Niño de Jesus Benitez had occasionally admired that glittering promise, but this night his concentration was fixed on the more attainable goal of the fuchsia forklift with the all-terrain rubber wheels. It was just where he had left it. The sight of it, shining like a purple plum in the moonlight, made his heart leap with joy. All those months that he had been locked in isolation, and the preceding months that he had been free but in an isolation of the soul, the one dream that had kept him from sinking into despair was to get back to this forklift and use what he had learned to confront the defilers of humanity and stop them from dragging our immortal souls through an eternal gauntlet of torment.
The gate to the yard was closed with a chain and a large brass Master lock. Niño de Jesus had been starving himself for months so that he would be skinny enough to squeeze through the narrow opening allowed by the slack in the chain.
He wedged himself through, though just barely, his flimsy hospital gown getting snagged in the chain mesh and torn off his body, leaving him just the paper slippers. He ran to the monster machine and, clambering up the ladder to the cockpit, opened the door and installed himself into the contoured operator’s chair.
His body exploded with an expression of relief as his muscle memory recognized the familiar sensation of being in control of a piece of heavy machinery. The key to the ignition was still there! He turned it and the machine erupted with the rage of life. One lever motivated a chain assembly raising the gigantic forks. Another lever changed their angle of thrust, bringing them closer to the cab. Releasing the air brake, he put the leviathan in gear and aimed it toward the fence, crashing through effortlessly as the gates were torn off their hinges and tossed uselessly into the deserted street.
He set the thing toward the west, barreling the wrong way down the one-way street in the direction of the Hudson River piers. A car approaching from that direction boldly sounded its horn, then, realizing he meant business, meekly pulled over to the side and ceded him right of way.
When Niño de Jesus got to the West Side Highway, traffic was sparse in the pre-dawn hour. He turned left and headed toward the 46th Street Pier, where the Aircraft Carrier Intrepid was moored. This overwhelming expression of American imperial majesty was a floating hotel of death. New York mayors have often been berated for having their own foreign policy, and it’s no wonder, considering that they have their own navy with enough firepower to decimate whole countries.
Crowded onto its flight deck, the Intrepid boasted a dazzling array of technological weaponry: Blackbirds, AWACs, Tomcats, Cobras, HUEYs, Apaches. Berthed opposite it, a nuclear submarine with missle poised in launching position was at the ready. On a barge behind that rested an entire Concorde supersonic jetliner. Deployed on the dock separating the two majestic warships was a little decorative bouquet of tanks, armored vehicles, armored personnel carriers, howitzers and cannon, a little flourish of mayhem displayed like little plaster roses on a child’s birthday cake.
Toward this massive and indomitable concentration of power sped Niño de Jesus Benitez, naked and in control of a stolen forklift, hellbent for leather and propelled forward like Don Quixote on a desperate mission to save the world from the forces of satanic destruction.
Unlike Don Quixote, however, Niño de Jesus had no intention of smashing himself against a superior construct. His concept was marginally more sophisticated, a sort of step-by-step methodology in problem solving, as though devised by a chimp moving a box so he can stand on it to reach a banana suspended by a string.
After he had made the discovery of the satanic demons, lesbians and Jews infiltrating New York by way of the Green Door in the sub-basement boiler room of the bakery, Niño de Jesus Benitez had cast about devising solutions for rescuing humanity’s immortal soul. He spent his lunch breaks squatting on his heels like an Ecuadorian cowboy on the sidewalk in front of the bakery which, as fate would have it, was on the opposite corner facing the mammoth battleship complex. It may seem incongruous, this juxtaposition of imperial might to be facing a cesspool of grease and filth besieged like a frontier outpost by legions of rodents, giant roaches and garbage-eating pigeons, but this has been the condition of imperial might through the ages, grandeur surrounded by decay. Anyway, the Intrepid was a latecomer to this environment, specifically placed there to ignite gentrification of the area.
Many questions perplexed the mind of Niño de Jesus Benitez as he contemplated the multi-faceted dilemma that confronted him. How is it possible for man to judge evil when he himself is born in original sin? If Satan has no concept of evil, can he be said to be doing evil without having a moral parameter for judging his own actions? After all, one might conjecture, if the snake that bites you is just following his nature, how can he be held guilty for that?
Niño de Jesus knew that the dark legions of satanic malediction were onto him for discovering their conspiracy. Obviously, they could have destroyed him at any time, so they must have been saving him for a particularly gruesome fate. Nevertheless, they sent him signals that they were watching. Somehow they had gotten into his locker without breaking the lock and pissed into his bottle of rum, this he knew for a fact. They had put dead rodents into his work boots, so that when he put his foot in, he felt the crunch of the little bones and the squishy sensation of blood and guts all over his feet. Maybe they thought these signals would deter him, but if so they had not appreciated the full measure of their adversary and had underestimated his godly nature. Niño de Jesus Benitez would rather be blown to smithereens on the battlefield of Armageddon in the Final Conflict between Good and Evil than be taken whole and roasted on a spit, writhing for eternity in the fires of
hell, his flesh sizzling in the flames, like some pathetic cringing beast out of a Hieronymus Bosch tableau.
If he was going to be judged, then let it be by God Himself sitting on a high bench and counseled by a jury of celestial angels! Niño de Jesus floored the accelerator pedal of the mammoth forklift and crashed through the wrought iron fence forming the security perimeter surrounding the aerospace complex. The guards in the sentry booth scattered in panic, barely evading the explosive impact as the rampaging machine smashed it into fragments. They drew their sidearms and started blasting away, but the heavily armored vehicle deflected the bullets like fireflies as they pinged uselessly off its reinforced shell. A cacophony of alarms went off, echoing against the mighty hull of the giant carrier, joined within seconds by the insistent burbling of police cruisers approaching at breakneck speed from the north, south and east as the alarm went out that the Intrepid was under terrorist attack.
With pandemonium breaking out all around him, Niño de Jesus Benitez calmly put his plan into effect. As alarms roared and flashing lights popped all around, and bullets bounced off his truck, he used the vehicle to gently nudge the artillery piece closest the highway until its nuzzle was facing directly east, right at the beige and brown façade designed to look like an ersatz Disneyland pirate castle or an Iberian seafood restaurant on Calle Ocho. The pinnacle of this fantastical structure boasted an ardent expression of nationalistic exuberance, New York’s biggest Puerto Rican flag. “¡Mi Bandera Querida!” Right below, shining over the highway as the first rays of the sun heralded the approaching daylight, huge block letters announced “San Juan Bagels. The Bagel With Sabór.”
It was certainly inevitable that in a city where cultural fusion was the spiraling fate of so many conjunctions grinding against each other like screaming gears, that a gastronomic hybrid like the latin bagel would be born. This bagel was the child of Pato Gonzalez, an authentic Puerto Rican Jew who started rolling bagels by hand in the Bronx at age 17 and over the course of many years experimentation developed a product that was more Boricua than Belarus, a bagel that rather than plopping down your gullet like a depth charge, exploded in your mouth with fireworks of spicy flavor and danced a cultivated rumba down your esophagus. It took New York and the world by storm, and was eventually shipped around the planet in frozen containers to Paris, Dubai and Shanghai. It was featured in Tokyo fashion magazines, doctoral theses submitted at Oxford and the Sorbonne, and became local New York color for Hollywood movies.
All this excitement was naturally lost on the low-wage immigrant workers who actually produced the product, and had Niño de Jesus Benitez actually availed himself of Father Guzman’s offer of psychiatric counseling, he may have come to realize that his true resentment of the place had less to do with flagellating baritone lesbians than the inevitable resentment of being forced to work in a hot, steamy, stinking food processing plant producing a gastronomic luxury bakery product that he couldn’t afford.
But no matter, all the conjecture in the world cannot explain away the convoluted machinations of his deranged imagination and their resultant consequences. He wanted to blow the place up, and he now had a cannon in place and pointed directly at it. As bullets rained around him and scores of police cars, sirens wailing and lights flashing, blocked all approaches to the Intrepid, Niño de Jesus Benitez, naked as a jaybird, jumped off the forklift, ran to the back of the cannon and began pulling frantically at the levers.
Naturally, nothing happened. This was the stupidest project ever conceived, by a whack job who had one hour previously escaped from the Ward’s Island Insane Asylum. A pale of silence overtook the whole scenario as the legions of armed cops waited for instructions that would allow them to blow the pathetic little fucker to smithereens, which was pretty much the standard procedure in instances like these.
However, in this instance they were to be denied this small indulgence. In keeping with the city’s business-oriented Republican administration, which was touting a new “kinder, gentler” approach toward its less privileged citizens in order to advance its proposal to host the Olympic games, the city was toying with new gadgets that would keep the idiots alive long enough to stick them under a jail somewhere upstate, where they would rot for an appropriately long term out of the public eye.
With this end in mind, they had contracted with Rudy Giuliani Associates to develop a new line of non-lethal applications to restrain fat ladies brandishing cutlery, deranged pot-head rabbinical students wielding hammers, graffiti artists who refused to go along peacefully, African street peddlers with dark wallets in their hands and the other million-and-one inexplicably bizarre human interactions that altogether define a day in the life of the Naked City.
The latest of these innovations was a remote-control cannon mounted on a kiddie car that fired a weighted net. Naturally, when the device was announced, some cruel soul joked that Giuliani was working on a net large enough to cover the entire city.
For Niño de Jesus, who was standing at the controls of the artillery piece expecting to be disintegrated at any second, as well as the scores of cops fidgeting behind their squad cars hoping for the command to let loose with their Glock pistols and riot guns, the little toy cannon slowly creeping to the center of the scene was an interminable entre-acte of suspense. All the assembled actors stood breathlessly at their posts like a child’s toy soldiers as the technicians from Giuliani Associates calibrated the trajectory of the shot, knowing that if their first attempt failed it would immediately be follow up by a fusillade of bullets, and that the cannon project (and, not incidentally, their jobs) would face meltdown in a cavalcade of media ridicule.
The little cannon exploded with a loud BOOM, and Niño de Jesus Benitez and the assembled police, reporters, dignitaries, traffic copters and spectators watched in awe as the net sped at him, entangling him and throwing him to the concrete. The reality of the force, which had all the velocity of a battering ram, knocked the wind out of him, along with all his illusions. Nothing brings you down to earth like getting arrested. Forgotten were the stairwell behind the Green Door, the lesbians, the forklift and all the other ephemeral constructs of his imagination. All the petty slights, the insults, the million-and-one seemingly important little events that bring you to committing the act evaporate like Gorillas in the Mist once you are confronted with the realities of the New York Criminal Justice System and its shackles, the body odor of the other inmates, the filthy floors and toilets reeking of disinfectant, the rancid baloney sandwiches, moralistic prosecutors seeking to
make points with your ass, greedy judges impatient to get rid of you so that they can make some money. In the instant that Niño de Jesus Benitez’ illusions were peeled away like the layers of an onion, all he was left with was the net, the hard macadam and the blue sky above which seemed to spin ‘round and ‘round in an endless swirl.
The assembled law enforcement officers surged forward in a blue wave. They surrounded him, the initial disappointment at not being permitted to perforate him replaced by curiosity about the nature of their prey. When they saw him for what he was - a cringing, naked little beaner, crying, delusional, tangled in the net and crawling about helplessly like one of Tato’s little creatures stuck to the glueboard, they laughed.
One of the officers, a massive motorcycle cop with black jackboots, a fade haircut and a scorpion tattoo on his thick neck spit a huge glob of bubble gum in the direction of Niño de Jesus. It bounced off him. The cop joked, “You’re in deep shit now, Pedro, this is federal property!”
All the cops laughed.
THE END