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Exiting The Lafayette (Me Too Part 2)

In August of this year my older brother Peter was evicted from the Congregate Living Mental Health Program he had been residing at for over a year. He had a conflict with another Program Participant and the Housing Authority didn’t bat an eyelash about putting a Vietnam Vet with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome out on the street. Peter is on a waiting list for Veteran’s housing and decided in the interim time to stay in Salem, where Veterans can take free classes at the State University, where he is always treated well and given coffee when he drops by the local office of fellow vet/Congressional Representative Seth Moulton. Peter located a cheap room to rent and asked me to help move his few belongings in. When I arrived my heart  sank. This was (although slightly cleaned up and remodeled) the Lafayette Hotel, the place I had spent six hellish hours forty years before.

Now I am sure that Bob has long moved on and hopefully faced judgement for what he put me (and I suspect others) through but it was difficult to set foot inside that building again. I didn’t say anything to Peter about it. The Honduran Cleaning Lady treats him nicely and he hasn’t had any trouble with the other residents. Surprisingly, no one has threatened him with a knife. he attends his AA meetings and visits the local Senior Center. For him the Lafayette Hotel has not been a false refuge.  I’ve been trying to reconstruct mentally some of the poem I wrote in 1978 about that experience. Some of it was just raw anger and four letter words that would make it unpublishable here. What I can retrieve and reconstruct for you goes something like this :

I’m sick and tired hearing about you/ Dirt and stench ex-marine/ Dirt and stench ex-priest/ Dirt and stench ex-possessor of a shred of human compassion/

Go away I’m sick and tired  hearing about/ “Two niggers” you say jumped you in Boston/ about how you think I was the quiet kid on a baseball team you coached I sure as hell don’t remember/

I’m sick and tired hearing about your Dirt and Stench miserable self seeking fullfillment in the midst of my confusion…

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Written by PaulPallazola

4 Comments

    • Some things cut sharper. Almost all of the fragments from the poem refer to things this guy said when he was trying to make himself look good prior to and after forcing my hand. The racist remark startled me. I wasn’t used to current or “ex-priests” calling black people “niggers”. Bob of course, had no idea that at Salem State I had many black friends and that Paul Moran & I were the only white students invited to the African American Student Union’s Kwanza Celebration a few days before.

      He tried to lead me to believe he had been one of my minor little league baseball coaches a decade before. I didn’t buy it. The coaches treated me like crap and I can’t imagine any of them wanting to remind me of the humiliation and callous indifference that second string players like me got there…

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