Rebel With A Cause In The City of Angels

Second Acts

The Time: 24 hours before The Puerto Rican Day Parade in Manhattan.

I was a few minutes away from a symbol of freedom across the Hudson when I saw a taste of the good life inside the gutted belly of a garbage bag. It was filled with green and gray long boxes of sliver topped aluminum thimble shaped packages of espresso.

Finding art in trash delighted me to no end like a kid on Christmas Day.

In contrast, the garbage truck driver I worked with exploded in a near psychotic fit of rage. “Do you have an espresso machine,” he yelled point blank range. It was less a question and more intimidation most likely generated from envy over a free lancer being genuinely happy with the little discoveries in life. In his unreasonable and violent eyes, I saw my mother’s adulterous husband about to lash me with his belt across my face and back. I saw myself at the age of 14 about to cut my wrist in the bathroom with a Blue Gem razor to end humiliation and physical torment by him and other bullies.

Before I could forever fall asleep, I caught my eyes in the mirror become curious with a thought: If I kill myself I’ll never know how the story ends. I labor to pick up sharp words like a surgeon uses laser to remove brain tumors or prevent heart attacks.

This is a medical report after the autopsy.

O, Danny Boy, ye hardly knew your abilities. Yes, the patient died but the operation was a success. I can’t regain his lost life. I can’t recover years stolen by prisoners of mental or spiritual poverty in a universe that wastes nothing like Albert Einstein believed.

Ashes to ashes, dust-to-dust…

The truck driver threw the garbage bag into the chopper that crushes like depression.

What I saved gave me a chance to smell the coffee.

Saw sun come up Freedom Tower.

It’s morning in America…

End of Act 1

The Big Dipper By Daniel Angel Aponte

HP Scanner Work using Adobe 5.0 installed in Win98

Thomas Doubted by D.Angel Aponte

Garbagelogy is about my travels around the world without leaving New York (thanks to the coma I was put in by head injuries.) I rode on the side of a garbage truck named after the Queen of Spain who gave an Italian navigator currency to discover the New World. I worked off the grid like an illegal alien for 50 bucks a day come drenching non-stop rains or 115-degree heat waves. In a cold winter night I saw Ground Zero for the first time and across the Hudson River, a bright torch of freedom obscured by a raging blizzard . “You guys do a great job,” said Park Ranger Zuras. I shrugged modestly and pointed to a long line of squad cars and a mobile command center. “We have a lot in common with the boys in blue. We both take out the trash,” I said. The Park Ranger chuckled as I dragged heavy barrels past a bronze sculpture that resembled a swirling pile of doggie doo about to turn into Oscar Gold thanks to the Midas touch of imagination. Yep. That’s right. This garbage is going straight to DreamWorks.