FOLLOW YOUR DREAM (A Short Story By 200motels) Conclusion

[Synopsis: Niño de Jesus Benitez, having escaped from the mental hospital on Ward's Island, has commandeered a forklift truck with which he hopes to save the world from the marauding demons from Hell. He approaches the aircraft carrier U.S.S Intrepid, moored at the 46th Street dock at Twelfth Avenue]

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

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Posted on 12/28/2005 ( Permanent Link )
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