About Adele: shades of letters and syllables, Peter Jalesh [great book club books .TXT] 📗

About Adele: shades of letters and syllables

A broken-up memoirT

This is not an imagined story, I mean a story that anybody would think of as a fiction. Though it is inspired from my life it is far from revealing the truth… By writing it I realized that the story would never get back as truthful as it was in reality.
One can write a limitless number of versions and never get to the bottom of it. The suffering and joyfulness inspired by it could be also distinct from a version to another.
The story took place in New York midtown, the South side if it, that was always called Chelsea.
Those times Chelsea looked like a depressing collection of gray buildings used as warehouses or garages. Once you got there the only thought you may had was to run out as fast as you could.
When I was little my dad would take me by hand and bring me to his office to play with his abacus. His office was located in a building that had a Greek sort of architecture with big stone pillars sustaining arches and nude caryatides that I always imagined resembling my mother. I’d play there until noon when my mom, which worked as a maid in a nearby hotel, would come to pick me up.
I would never forget the moldy smell of cigar smoke mix with dust from the hallway. My dad’s boss was a young man in his twenties, very well dressed and wearing a thin moustache. He would come to give some instructions to my dad in order to impress me.
I saw my dad standing rigid and embarrassed when his boss would come around. When his boss left he’d turn toward me and say: “That pig doesn’t know how much makes two plus two”. I would say in a hurry “Four!” My dad would laugh and say: “You see, you should be my boss”.
When I told mom this story she said that dad should not show disrespect for people that lead”. I told dad about mom’s comment. He said “Woman’s mentality”.
Those times my dad and mom were struggling to stay a notch above the poverty line. Our two bedroom apartment was very small. The living room was small but cozy. My dad bought from a street fare a chandelier that was mounted on the ceiling next to the kitchen and let hang low. When it was lit the living room looked like a million dollar place. I couldn’t take my eyes from its gemstones. Also dad bought a metallic bookcase, painted in green, in which he kept his accounting files.
One day somebody from IRS came and I saw my dad’s hands trembling while searching for some data that the IRS guy wanted. I don’t know what happened but for a couple of days mom was asking “Now what!” and dad was saying “Who knows!”
The building elevator had two doors, one that you could close with your hands; the other door would automatically go down. It was my impression that one had to be careful not to get his feet hit by it though the elevator gate that automatically closed, I remember, was on the outside.
We wouldn’t use the elevator too much because our apartment was at the ground level. The living room had a window facing the street. Most of the time, you couldn’t see the buildings across the street. There was always a merchandise truck stopped in front of the window. The funny thing at night was that you could hear whatever people talked when they passed by our window, sometimes conversations that I wouldn’t be allowed to repeat in front of my parents.
Two flights up, in the apartment 2E lived the superintendent family. Their daughter Adele was beautiful. I thought that the superintendent was like our principal in the school, taking care of the discipline in the building, otherwise I couldn’t explain where Adele’s arrogance was coming from.
When I got into the high school dad used to give me an allowance: a dollar per day. I used to save my dollars for a week with the thought that I needed money to invite Adele to go to a movie. It never happened. She grew taller than me very fast. One day she told me bluntly: “Your voice sounds like a baby voice. Invite me to go to a movie when you’ll grow up”.
I told her that one day I was going to marry her, which made her giggle unstoppably. Those times in my life I felt “inopportune”. Then mysteriously I grew up, my voice changed, my hair got thicker and changed the color from light blond to brown. I liked how my voice sounded when I coughed. Adele began to pay attention to me when we met accidentally.
One day, she was about to fall on the entrance stairs while turning her head to look in my direction. “No more interested to go with me to see a movie?” she asked. I didn’t answer. One of my colleagues, Warren, was bragging some other day that he kissed Adele and fondled her breasts. For me Adele was an impure girl.
I preferred to go and spend the afternoons on a vacant lot and play dice with my school mates. Sometimes I’d lose my whole allowance many times over.
The neighborhood around the vacant lot was gray and depressive. Such place was ideal for petty thieves and illicit street vendors that dealt with stolen stuff and drugs.
I was a well-behaved high school student that time. The school was boring, the sidewalk was dirty, the streets were dusty and the trucks carrying merchandise were ugly and smelling of cheap gas.
The teachers’ faces looked like crumpled. Nobody could sleep well because of the noise of trucks going back and forth and feeding the warehouses with stuff.
Mom used to wear cotton balls during night to help her sleep.
Lately I became part of a group of students that called themselves “Cats”. We were six of us. Whenever we got together during the class breaks it felt like the grim color of the neighborhood vanished. We got together out of boredom. I felt like being part of the group would make me change.
A treat of all of us was that we wanted to be bad boys. Another common trait was that we talked dirt. I was the one that talked the dirtiest language. I don’t know why. One of the fellow “cats” said that I tried to show off and get attention to myself, to be the center of attention. I doubt that. I think it was because I wanted to be accepted.
When we went out together I’d walk behind the group. “You want to be the center of attention but you walk always behind. Why?” The guy who said that aspired to be the master of opinions.
Then there was that short but solid boy, made out of iron; his name was Dorval; he was the one that was made to be a leader. He’d say: “We would have to go and raid that warehouse and get been cans and wrapping aluminum paper”. That’s when my change from an exemplarily good boy into a bad boy happened. It kind of hurt my pride that police could catch us one day and destroy my reputation.
Dorval would call every of our escapades “an action”. We all had flashlights and back bags. Once inside the warehouse we’d search for stuff we thought valued most, like bed sheets, tourism junk, Christmas decorations, figurines…
We had so much fun, some of it originating from fear. The weird and wonderful fact is that we didn’t need that stuff. We did it just to amuse ourselves. I mean most of the time the merchandise we stole was useless.
I tried to sell some of that weird stuff, like woman lingerie, to Adele. She was amazed when I told her that the merchandize was stolen. She was so shocked that I was a thief that she kept screaming and laughing. She even wanted to be part of our team.
Dorval didn’t want to hear about it: “Are you nuts. She is going to denounce us to police. Why did you sell stuff to her? Our agreement was to sell it at the flea market”. I felt very intimidated when Dorval scolded me. Next time when I met Adele I told her that my folks wouldn’t let me out after eight o’clock and that the thievery business is over.
Me and the “cats” had some good “sparkling” opportunities that summer. Since during summer streets are crowded with losers and drunkards we chose warehouses that didn’t have alarm systems or security guards. We’ll put masks on and do the job at midnight time. That time those places looked even gloomier than during day time.
You could sense the hazard of each proposal coming out Dorval’s head: we’ll pick the “Art and Crafts Utensils” building. The building was two blocks from the school. I thought that it was too risky; Dorval called me a chicken and insisted that it was as risky as any other warehouse.
In our group there was that very tall and slim guy named Stan. He’d curse all the time. Not as bad as I did though. He’d say that if he didn’t curse he felt vulnerable. He would sit at the table and say: “This fucking chair is too hard for my ass”. He was bony like a reed stem.
And also there was that brown skinny guy named Spike. He was six feet five inches tall and built like a wrestler. He would say that “misery is always at war with richness”. He’d always read paperback books and talk slowly like reading his words from cue cards. We’d climb up on his shoulders to reach high windows. You could hear him: “Climb up stupid!” and laugh in a slow cadence.
As we got into the Art and crafts building we found nothing of interest. There were canvases and frames and oil and acrylic colors. We got each of us a collection of oil colors and colored chalks. Stan called Dorval’s idea to pick that building “disgusting”. There was also a guard we had to avoid. He was sleeping sound in a booth affixed to the front of the building.
We stayed about half an hour inside trying to not make any noise and searching with flashlights for the goods. My late desire in life to paint must have originated from there, from that warehouse filled with the smell of oil paint and huge rolls of white canvases and frames.
People don’t realize that each of their age is as if they are boarding a train surrounded by a bunch of other people that travel in the same direction and that their fate is common to all those traveling on that train.
And then I was there too, a well “distinguished” cat, and also were there Kenny and Randal, all of us followers.
Dorval had a real instinct when he planned a job. He’d show us the building and also he’d draw a master plan before we got to do the job. He had to put off a couple of jobs that he thought were too dangerous, like the one with the hardware warehouse. Too much noise, he thought.
The best jobs we carried out were in winter. The streets were