Outside events meant... «Sleepers»
LittleGhost5 марта 2015Outside events meant little. In a society changing radically by the hour, we focused on the constants in our own small, controlled space. It was the sixties, and we watched the images scattered nightly across TV screens with skepticism, never trusting the players, always suspecting a scam. It was the way we were taught to look at the world. Life, we had been told, was about looking out for number one and number one didn't waste time outside the neighborhood. On television, the young protesters we saw spoke about how they were going to change our lives and fix the world. But we knew they didn't care about people like us. While they shouted their slogans, my friends and I went to funeral services for the young men of Hell's Kitchen who came back from Vietnam in body bags. That war never touched those angry young faces we saw on TV, faces protected by money and upper-middle-class standing. They were on the outside yelling about a war they would never fight. To me and my friends, they were working the oldest con in the world and they worked it to perfection. Students would be killed on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy would be shot dead. Governor George Wallace would take one in the spine. Whole sections of American cities were about to burn to the ground. The summer of love was set to bloom. Drugs would go beyond the junkie. The country was on a fast-ticking timer, ready to explode. For me and for my friends, these developments carried no weight. They might as well have occurred in another country, in another century. The mating call of a new generation, one whose foundation was to be built on peace, love and harmony, simply floated past us. Our attention was elsewhere. The summer Senator Kennedy was killed, I found out my father was a convicted murderer, a wife killer who had served nearly seven years in upstate prisons for a crime of passion. The week the students at Kent State were shot down, Tommy's father was stabbed in the chest in Attica prison and was put on a respirator for three months. Michael's mother died of cancer during that summer and Carol Martinez had an uncle who was shot dead in front of an llth Avenue bar. While thousands of angry war protesters filtered into Washington, D.C., we sat with Father Bobby in a third floor hospital ward, praying for John to recover from a punctured lung, a gift from one of his mother's overzealous boyfriends. The man had had too much to drink and John said more than he should have about it and was given a severe beating as a result. He also suffered an asthma attack and was lucky to escape the night with his life. One of the earliest lessons learned in Hell's Kitchen was that death was the only thing in life that came easy.
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