AUGUST 2007

"it's a good day from morning till night ...."
By Jerry Vilhotti

"Oh, it's a good day from morning till night ...." A Burywater radio
station's music blared in the background.


Johnny always listened to it before he left for school.

He had loved listening to all the music coming from “The Make Believe
Ballroom Time” which his oldest sister Alice in Wonderland would put on.  He loved  all of those songs like "Amapola", I'll Get By", "Perfidia",
"Serenade in the Night" ....  which would forever be a part of his life.
Then his older brother Leny One N would call the four year old to go fight some kid from "aroun da cawna". Leny always made sure he got the biggest six and seven year olds to fight Johnny so he would get bigger odds. Leny wasn't called the promoter not for nothing! And fight Johnny did - all frightened up inside and winning despite many betting against him who could have been Julie Garfinkle later to become known a "Everybody Dies" John Garfield, Tami M. who would fight the great Joe Louis and actually stagger him in the first round which would be Tami's last punch in the fight, the Beloise brothers good fighters too, Principal Patrie who introduced the future "sure sure" guy into an acting program in his school which did get the tough kid to lose
his stammer which enabled him to articulate and emote better, Ernie Lombardi who was going to college, aroun da odder cawna, being one of the seven blocks of granite who were depriving other football teams from scoring, the three  guys who killed a sadistic cop who would beat up five year old wop kids who were going to grow up to be Lucky Lucianos or Al Capones and were able to walk away after three weeks of Guantanamo beatings adhering to the East Bronx code - " if you don;t talk you walk", Edgar Allen Poe's ghost who had roamed the cobble stoned streets of Fordham Village chasing his inner demons of mass destruction  because they thought the smiling boy with blond curly hair could never get angry enough to protect himself fully. All this was going on while Von Braun, who surrendered to the Americans afraid of what the Soviets were going to do to him after helping to kill millions of
their children, was working hard in Germany on his big bomber impregnated with massive bombs that could drop on the children of New York City just as he did on those living in England as well.


The house was empty: His father, who proclaimed Johnny was his favorite child to all who could hear ever since he was born miraculously coming out of his wife's thirty-nine year old body four years after her miscarriage which Doctor Bulldog Mc Kenna said precluded any more disgusting guineas from coming out of her Valentino hole, had gone to work in the chemical factory that had explosions at least once a month since no safety measures existed to protect the workers but made bigger profits for management and eventually when the great wall knocker downer would begin killing unions so no such thing about safety and fair wage would exist in the land of the homeless and free of the brave.

His mother had gone to work in a garment factory that within a few years
would lose their industry to the South. Then the South, in turn, would
lament that what they had stolen was being gleaned away by Asia and Latin America because of the cheaper wages and his older brother Tommy Tom Tom was in New York City beginning his efforts to get a college education at Brokenland College by courting an older woman from Norwalk who would work to put him through school.  Barbie would become the first of Tom's four wives. His oldest brother Leny Missing N was doing his second year at the “Lepke” Reformatory for attempting a daylight stick up in "beautiful" downtown Burywater which would get flooded by the polluted river taken away from natives called Mattatuck Tribe massacred because they didn't believe in their First Testament God Who had tried to whack all mankind for fucking up , with two older friends, of a smoke shop. The first friend was a former marine who had helped take Iwo Jima and would squeal after just ten minutes of "interrogation". The second friend was a sailor who had helped win the
battle of Midway while his wife was fucking half the half men of the city
who had rooted for the great leader who was going to cleanse the earth of all inferiors while sipping their soup with Hitler's mustache floating among the vegetables.  Both guys had contributed in getting rid of dictators only to have them be replaced by others - one of whom called the village idiot by Nostradamus - would try to do what Hitler couldn't in his cabal that was running the land of the afraid.


Johnny was relived all his siblings were gone except for Alice who had
protected him ever since he could remember from since his other siblings
thought he had stolen their father's love from them and eventually would
join them in their jealousy of the kid who would marry at the age of
nineteen a girl named Linda Ann with strawberry blond hair and eyes of blue and green to help him bring fourth three children who would grow up in their one family home they would "buy" in their late twenties after Johnny would graduate from Harlem Collage.  Alice would elope with a former-sailor who would tell everyone he met he had shot down around a million kamikaze planes all by himself like the Duke and the old Gipper in other theaters to assure their country would win the war with no help from others like limes, dirty communists whose ideas were threatening the fourth world order to begin - like gays were tempting "straights" from leaving their marriages.

Johnny's oldest sibling Tina of the Troy was on her way to destroying her
family of four children and a husband Al who had rescued her from the war she was having with her mother who kept calling her the biggest whore in The Bronx because of the many suitors pursuing her for a good lay. she played golf during the warm months and got many holes in one charging the golfers a five spot for a shot deep inside her while Al worked fourteen hours a day lifting one hundred-pound bales of rubber. Al would die at the age of fifty-two six years after she divorced him for being jealous.


Johnny began his half-mile walk to school and was joined by an eighth grader named Mike the Franciscino.


"So kid you're in the second grade, huh?" Burywater kids would often end their sentences that way. Especially if the one being spoken to weren't part of their race (nationalities were called races in the city that was adjacent to a river that would flood the area every few years until someone got the bright idea to build a dam ten miles north of the town).


"Yeah and you got just another month to go before you escape," Johnny said feeling he had forever to go till he was in eighth grade. He was stuck with the same second grade teacher who had insisted that he be left back since he continued to talk Bronx (dropping most of his R's). She had pinched him severely the day Leny was arrested. She asked him over and over if he were going to be like Leny who not only was a thief but had thrown their principal Miss Moriarity down a flight of stairs the day he quit school. Miss Moriarity looked very much like the father of the country - George Washington.

"Oh, it's a good day from morning till night ...." the radio blared in the
background.


He was an eighth grader and this day the whole class was being taken to the oldest amusement park in the country, four towns to the northeast, for a day of fun as a reward for selling twenty chance tickets, each, to cover their entry ticket and some to support the troops doing a police action in Korea.


By nine O Clock they arrived at the gates where they could see the roller
coaster and the big wheel going full steam. This made for great waves of
thrills to go through stomachs of thirty youngsters.


After an hour of rides, a guy around twenty years old approached Johnny who was being followed by two-thirds of his classmates..


"Hey kid, this is your big escape day, huh?" Johnny nodded aiming for the bumping cars.

"Hey what's your name?"


Johnny told him as he was reaching for his last dollar; money he had earned by doing a friend's paper route while he was going to see his older brother at Fort Dixie before he was shipped over as more fodder for the North Korean war.


"Hey, let me cover this for all you guys and after the ride I'll buy all of
you hot-dogs and sodas!" the guy called Bing O'Mally said. He smelled of
Ivory soap. All those of that race smelled of soap, or so Johnny thought.
Especially during the ethnic war that was going on between his people and the race that had come before them.  When the older guys were torturing "the dirty mic, harp, cabbage eating bastard", Johnny asked why they were doing that? All of the big guys shouted to the ten-year-old: "Because these Christ killers do us the same way - jerk!"


For the rest of the day, Bing bought them rides and food and just before
they were going to board their bus back to Burywater, Bing asked Johnny for a favor: "Listen, kid, can you help me out? I have all my savings on me that I saved for the past four years.  My father's an alcoholic and says he's going to take my money to drink it up. So can you hold this till tomorrow? I'll meet you by the green and you can take out the bus fare. OK?"


Johnny said he would and took the fat roll of about nine hundred dollars
from Bing.

At three in the morning, a loud knocking vibrated throughout the house.
Johnny's father answered the door.


"Mr. Sangue, you have a son named Johnny?  I'm Detective Flaherty.  Can I see him?"


Johnny came out to his father's call.


"Listen kid, do you know a guy named Bing?" Johnny nodded.

"Did he give you some money to hold for him so his father wouldn't get it?"


Johnny nodded and went to his room to get the roll and when he handed the money over, his mother, still in her nightgown, began calling him a thief and began to bite his arm.


Johnny was trying to free himself from her teeth by lifting his arm up and
down. Since his mother was only five-feet tall, six inches shorter than he
nevertheless, she continued to dangle from his arm. Johnny kept smiling and saying it was nothing; afraid the cop was going to take her away.


"No Mrs. Sanque. Your boy didn't steal the money the other boy did and he says Johnny had nothing to do with it."

Johnny was as grateful to the detective as he would be to another even
though, instead of being an American-Irish, he would be an American-Italian who would tell his fellow detectives to let the kid alone. "It wasn't his fault his brother was Leny One N. The kid was just twenty years old when two of Leny's friends had robbed telephone booths while Johnny was asleep in the back seat of their car. He just went for a ride with them after they played poker. Hey the kid has straightened himself out and he’s going to Harlem College. I say let the kid be and let him make something of himself. Don't forget the kid did play baseball for Commercial High and was pretty good too and I think he should have been all city for hitting three hundred and sixty eight against our other high school teams while the other kid from Suffer the Little Children High, Ambrose Kelly, hitting two nineteen, got the award his second year in a row."


The next morning Johnny awoke and put the radio on and as usual the station was playing its theme song: "It's a good day from morning till night ...."
   END 6-26-07