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Part One
Chapter 1
New York City—Lower East Manhattan
The horrifying scream became louder as I groggily awakened. I didn’t know what was happening and was terrified to discover what these screams were. Maybe it was a dream, I thought, glancing over to my twin brother, Joey, who was still sleeping. I froze as the blanket covered my frightened body. The spineless hesitation I felt about climbing from my mattress, however, would soon diminish as I gradually slipped off the edge of the bed. I made my way toward the bedroom doorknob. As I inched closer, the screams reverberated off the apartment walls and grew disturbingly louder.
I slowly creaked open the door and heard my mother begging, “No, Michael, no!”
I looked down at the floor and saw a line of blood drops leading toward the kitchen. Barely awake, I followed the puddled drops and saw my mother’s little body moving from side to side as she extended her arms to block the front door so my brother Michael wouldn’t get out.
“No, Michael! No. You don’t need to do this.”
“Mom, just move. Please!”
Mom begged in her accented English, “No, Michael!
My God! Please, Michael, God, please!”
“Mom, please!”
Michael’s forehead was masked with blood dripping profusely over his eyes and face. I had never witnessed this much blood and could not understand why it was happening.
“Please, Michael! Sit down. I’ll clean your head, and it will all be forgotten.”
“No, Mom. I can’t!”
“You can, baby. You can,” Mom said. “Please, sit down!”
“No, Mom! I’m gonna kill ’im!” Michael yelled before he dashed toward the kitchen drawer and grabbed a butcher knife, scattering the roaches off the utensils.
He yanked the kitchen window open, leaped out, and disappeared through the next window over, into the building hallway five stories up. Mom tried to stop him, but he was too strong.
I started to cry, mostly for my mom.
She prayed to God, “Ay! Dios mío, Dios, por favor salva a mi hijo!”
“Mom!” I cried, running toward her. “Mom! What happened?”
“Oh! Dios mío!” Mom prayed aloud.
“Mom? Where’d Michael go? What happened to Michael?”
“Oh, Dios! My baby!”
I pulled Mom’s apron, even though it was spotted with blood, and said, “Mom, Mom, it’s okay, it’s okay—Michael will come back.”
Mom’s eyes were bloodshot as tears streamed down her cheeks, her body exhausted from worrying about Michael’s fate. She struggled toward the kitchen table and sat there quietly. Confused, I stood beside her trying to soothe the pain she felt in her heart, stroking her long black hair with my shaky hand.
She rocked herself back and forth like you would a baby in your arms, and with her hands over her face, she uttered, “God will be with my Michael. God will watch him.”
I later found out that a junkie in the hallway had stabbed Michael because he wouldn’t give him the money in his pocket. I felt an angel was with us that dark morning; it took notice of our prayers, and Michael never found the junkie he was going to kill.
A gripping excerpt from your memoir. I saw the video for Wallace Park and it is wonderfully presented. Makes one want to read the book. I am a twin, too, and spent my elementary school years in a "bad" neighborhood, but nothing like Hells Kitchen. I would agree that experiences like that shape character and make us all much stronger.
It looks like your book has had a tremendous good start and potentially could be a movie.
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