On the first day of school, our
teacher gave us homework to make tour books on our hometowns. For the time
being, she asked us to introduce ourselves and highlight our tourist
attractions. Most of the students were from countries like England and lived in places like Beverly Hills . Everyone
applauded after every student’s brief presentation.
Everyone’s mouth dropped when
they found out I lived in The South Bronx.
The teacher turned pale face and
almost fainted. A few minutes later a rich student from Switzerland
quietly got up and moved to another seat.
I had a marketing problem.
In other words, I was ethnic
profiled at NYU. Also the kids were mean
to me!
They made my homework Mission : Impossible.
“No can’t go out with you,” said
a polite Japanese girl. “You poor! You South Bronx !”
Her words cut me deeply and her laughter made my face redder than the rising
sun over her country. I felt like 007 betrayed by a geisha who let in thugs to
open machine gun fire, as he lay in bed in the opening scene of You Only Live
Twice. “Well, at least he died on the job,” said a British investigator. I
loved escaping into memories of movies when I couldn’t deal with reality. This
was life after high school.
Still I began to dream of a way
to draw tourists into my town with The Big Idea.
I began to spend hours at the
computer lab working with exciting programs like Adobe, Lumina and Word. They
helped to formulate a strategy. I was going to put citizens from our town like
Al Pacino, Colin Powell and now Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor on police
line-ups with the headline Take Another Look At The South Bronx.
And since The Bronx is the only
town connected to the mainland, I was going to capture The American Spirit to
the tune of The Magnificent Seven. I imagined riding with them on horses into
Yankee Stadium for a homecoming ballgame. This is the new Public Image of my
town: IN YOUR FACE! Who am I? I’m not Spider Man breaking his butt on Broadway.
I’m a prisoner of my childhood dream for The Global Village.
Let go, said a voice. Use The
Force.
I experienced an academic second
wind at the university from a Big Bang of so many ideas. Then I was held down on the holy grounds of
higher education and had my memories wiped by a neo Nazi. The plug was pulled out on my brain. My 2001:
A Cyber Space Odyssey began when Win95 reactivated A.I in the year of XP. Read A.I as Amazing Imagination (more
important than knowledge according to Albert Einstein.)
This is Bronx ,
Baseball and Beyond Tron Legacy!
Seriously, this really happened.
Well, I got to go now. I only get
15 to 45 minutes of computer time at The NYPL, my childhood Fortress of
Solitude that helped make a six grader’s wish of living life like A Great
American Novel, one like the science fiction of a Great Comic Book, come true.
To Be Continued
“Don’t let them tell you who you
are. You tell them who you are,” said Charlie Rose at a commencement speech at
some university I never graduated from and yet I did.
Yes, I did.
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