Once Upon A Time in Hamlin. . .

Hamlin is not the kind of town where you set out to live. My family only ended up there because Hackensack had such a drug problem, and, as immigrants, my parents didn’t have the social mobility to rise up out of bad neighborhood. So we moved to Hamlin, a sleepy little town that modeled itself off of Plasticville, USA. It reminded me of the train set in the window of the secondhand store, tiny houses all in a row, little coal refineries that blew real smoke, and, unbeknownst to my parents, a drug scourge that was so large it could have eaten Hackensack’s for breakfast.

I was only eight years old at the time. People thought I was dumb because I lacked confidence in my ability to speak English. I stuttered, which made people snicker at me or tease me for being dumb. My way of coping was not to speak at all. Perhaps that was why, when I first saw him, I was so mesmerized. I knew with a deep and abiding longing in my heart that no one had a gift of speaking like that without also having a fork in the tongue. I can hear him in my head now, the right-hand man of Robert Whitcomb, the portly real estate magnate set on securing office.

Pietro was his name. I don’t recall the last, but the media called him Piper. He and Whitcomb were an odd couple. Whitcomb, the beefy-handed, red-faced brash politician, and ever at his side, Piper, with his mellifluous voice and snakeskin shoes. There was a story to their oddness. Whitcomb said that in order to rid the city of the drug scourge, he had brought the child of a friend from his days in the ghetto, and that was Piper. I was skeptical. As the child of immigrants, I knew that Whitcomb had no friends in the ghetto. He carried himself carelessly, unlike the people I knew, who clutched change-purses unconsciously at their belt or chests. He couldn’t differentiate between those of different nations. Latino or Asian, no more specific than that, and that was how I knew it was all a big lie.

But Piper was different. No one really knew what his background was, so it was hard to dispute Whitcomb’s backstory, even though we all knew it was manufactured. Piper’s head was shaved and he had tattoos, three tiny teardrops at the corner of his eye. He had light green eyes that seemed at odds with his dark complexion, and his voice was quiet, like a harp. When Whitcomb shouted, he would lean back, with a look of wry amusement on his face, and his tongue would slip out of his mouth and lick his lips as he whispered to Whitcomb about what to say.

It was all about the drug problem, of course. Hamlin was filled with immigrant families, who just didn’t want to have to tell their children why spoons and needles littered the alley. They didn’t want their daughters to prostitute themselves, and they didn’t want their sons to carry shivs in their socks. So the campaign centered on that, and it was highly successful. Whitcomb was angling for the national stage, having succeeded in politics at the state level. He promised to clean up cities like Hamlin, and my parents’ eyes, for the first time in years, had the light of hope in them.

They spoke about him at dinner. We would eat in front of the T.V. Piper had no fear of any drug lords, and when he met “V,” the drug lord notorious in our neighborhood, he put his arm around him and whispered in his ear. Piper smirked then, and there was something about his smirk that was unsettling to me. Three days later, “V” was found shot to death and bleeding out in an alley near Lassiter Street. No one had stopped to help him. No emergency vehicles had responded.

This I found terrifying, actually. The prospect of being in a new neighborhood, so cold that a person could have the lifeblood drain out of him with no one caring, was a terrible kind of knowledge that I could not seem to distract myself from. What was worse was the graffiti that followed. “Die, wretches,” it read in fuzzy black spray paint on the alley above where “V” had been killed. Then others were found. Minor players, small time dealers, who were suddenly, just . . . gone.

The mood changed drastically in Hamlin after that. It seemed as though the townspeople instinctively knew that without the drug problem, windows wouldn’t be broken, and graffiti would stop. Shop owners invested in cans of paint, and could be seen planting flowers, throwing away trash, transforming the town on the outside to match the cutting of the cancer that had already occurred.

It wasn’t enough though. Where there is vulnerability, domination only lies in wait, and that was when Whitcomb and his henchmen began to comb the town. Piper was nowhere to be seen, but he seemed to have been replaced by two heavies, who made rounds to the stores and collected the “crime-free tax,” for having cleaned the city of its vermin. My mother and father did not own a store, but my mother worked at the bodega. Her hands shook when she had to cover on a Friday night, because that was the day that the “tax” was due. My father said not to worry, but he came home one day with a small handgun, and when I went to bed, I could hear him playing with it, loading and unloading the chamber, testing himself on his own facility with it.

My father said that the shop owners were taking a stand. They wouldn’t pay taxes for protection anymore. The drug problem had been dealt with. Now they wanted to go on about their business. Whitcomb began to comb the neighborhood again, accompanied by Piper. But Whitcomb didn’t seem to be himself. Gone was the confident walk, replaced by a pitch in his voice that gave away a raw nerve, and yet Piper seemed to be only emboldened. He danced alongside Whitcomb, telling him what to say and literally prodding him along with a sharp dig of his elbow.

I remember the day that the children went away. It was like a dream. It was Juarez’s day. We had gone to school filled with joy and hope, for on Juarez’s day there would be fireworks, games, dancing and good food. It was March and the sun was white hot, unusual in the state of New York. Our teacher told us that we would have a special visitor, Senator Whitcomb and his Chief of Staff, Piper, would come to the school for an anti-drug demonstration.

We had assembled in the gym. Whitcomb was onstage in a big pinstriped suit, sweat circles forming even through his jacket. Someone had informed him that it was Juarez’s day, and he and Piper had arranged for a big party in the school yard to follow the anti-drug demonstration. Piper had stepped lightly through the aisles, almost effeminately, passing out handouts and candies. There was something sinister in his walk, in the way he seemed to take joy in prancing up the aisles like that. When he came to me, he took my hand and caressed it with his finger. He saw me draw back, surprised and disgusted, and he stared at me with his piercing green eyes, with a look that seemed to go all the way through my own eyes, and which left cold goosebumps on my arms.

My sister pulled my hand and told me that we were going. I didn’t like this. We were supposed to go right home to help our mother with dinner and cleaning up. But I went. And the rest was a blur. There was music, there were fireworks and there was a haze of sweet smoke at the party. I ate a little candy, it was sweet and indescribable, and the next thing I knew my head was swimming. The other children were gone, following Piper in a line toward his car, where he was handing out something, some sort of sweet treat, I imagined. Then I saw him take one child around the neck, just as he had taken “V.” I knew that something terrible, something unspeakable was about to happen.

A man came and carried the child off, took him to the dumpster, where, even above the thumping music and sounds of fireworks, I heard the child scream, a bloodcurdling, high-pitched involuntary scream. The scream of someone who has not the presence of mind to register despair. It was a scream of shock and horror.

He saw me then, Piper did. He saw my dark eyes widen in fear, and he took me by my neck. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. I pulled in air again and again and tried to scream, but nothing. He laughed then. He through back his head and laughed the most demonic, hideous laugh I have ever heard. He knew I couldn’t speak. He let me go, watching as I ran as fast as my legs could carry me back home.

I don’t know what happened after that. My mother says I came home white-faced, and that was when my parents took me to the psychologist. It would be a year before I learned to speak. I still have no memory of what happened that day in Hamlin, but I will never forget that silver-tongued liar who showed me that vengeance is a sword with two sharp edges.