I woke up to shots fired.

I stared at the ceiling before jumping out of bed to go to the window. The courtyard of rats roaming over garbage cans at night was filled with tenants and police two days later.

A young Puerto Rican named Dutch killed an older woman he was having sex with under the influence of Crack. Murder and suicide named the bodies brought out

Another childhood friend gone like Gonzo who hanged himself under the influence of distilled spirits and illegal drugs after his wife died from breast Cancer.

 Literally, it was back to the drawing table to become the captain of The USS Escapism.

I’m safe in my imagination where I’m a super hero

 As I stared at blank paper, flashes of gunshots illuminated my eyes and blood ran cold by the screams of girls in the courtyard. They screamed over and over again.

THEY SHOT ALVIN!!!

Mindlessly, I put on a feather filled blue vest and ran downstairs to the street swelling by mob and police followed by more police.

I looked into the eyes of a cop and he let me pass to the crime scene that was added to a Daily News list of children killed by guns in New York City. 

As the paramedics brought my little brother out of a building, his hand fell from the gurney and something broke. My hearing was gone in the middle of cries for God and Jesus in The South Bronx growing with mosques before 9/11 happened. 

In spite of traumatic shock to the system, I opened a passenger door to a cop car.

What are you doing, demanded an already alarmed officer.

This is the mother and brother of the kid shot, I said.

The officers drove them to Lincoln Hospital.

I looked into the crowd that was parted by the cops like Moses did to The Red Sea.

Where do I begin to piece together a report on why a kid was killed?

A drug dealer in dispute with another scumbag took out a gun.

Alvin was used as a human shield.

End of story.

At night, I drank by the shores of The East River where loamed Riker’s Island Prison and the bright lights of Queens, home to an enchanted female painter I was to love.

A slow boat carried crates that looked like coffins and dark muddy waters into The River Styx that flowed to the land of the dead. On a rooftop of a funeral parlor across the street to the building where Alvin dreamed, a restless trio of Pit Bulls merged by shadows into Cerberus who prevents lost souls from escaping The Underworld.

I loved mythology when I was a book-loving boy.

I stop short of making myth out of the mess of life

I had a photographic memory discovered by a third grade teacher at P.S 62.

I had suffered loss of memories by the ambush of a white supremacist that painted a portrait of Hitler in his dorm room with the door always open for all to see darkness.

I suffered by the persistence of memories.

I saw scenes of my life as I coughed blood into a respirator on the way to Lincoln Hospital. I recalled my toy rifle and toy guns. I recalled being shot at by real bullets while in a game of hide and seek with other kids.

We played in a child’s version of Apocalypse Now.  I became a terrorist on a Puerto Rican gang that carried on their colors the black and white of the Swastika. The thugs were called The Savage Skulls or The SS. They roamed with Doberman Pinchers.

We were kid solders and I was Capt America at home in burnt out buildings several blocks away from The Recruiting Station on Third Avenue.

I later went to enlist in The Air Force as a stepping-stone to outer space. In a tug of war with the flyboys, Marines told me I was Special Forces material.

They appealed to my vanity but I wanted go beyond blue skies.

For some of my friends, it was out of the frying pan and into a baptism of fire at Boot Camps of The United Armed Forces.