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(Synopsis: Niño de Jesus Benitez, having escaped from the mental hospital on Ward's Island, is determined to save the world from the infernal demons, lesbians and Jews whom he is convinced are infiltrating New York City from a hidden stairway leading from Hell to the boiler room of an industrial bakery in Hell's Kitchen)
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.”
See: FOLLOW YOUR DREAM (Conclusion)
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Posted on 12/28/2005
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