Stealing Flowers
Published by E A St Amant at Smashwords.com
Stealing Flowers – E A St Amant
Copyrighted by E A St Amant May 2006
Smashwords Edition, January 2010
Verses and poems within, by author.
Web and Cover design by: Edward Oliver Zucca
Web Developed by: Adam D’Alessandro
Author Contact: [email protected]
E A St Amant.com Publishers
www.eastamant.com
All rights reserved. No part of this novel may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, emailing, ebooking, by voice recordings, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author or his agent. Stealing Flowers = ISBN -13: 978-0-9780118-2-6. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, companies, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances whatsoever to any real actual events or locales in persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Thanks to the many people who did editorial work on this project and offered their many kind suggestions, including Dr. P Miller and L D’Alessandro, and especially, Robyn Lori Stephenson. Thanks to T R St Amant for helping so kindly on the piloting and flying scenes.
By Edward St Amant
How to Increase the Volume of the Sea Without Water
Dancing in the Costa Rican Rain
Spiritual Apathy
Restrictions
Book of Mirrors
Perfect Zen
Five Days of Eternity
Five Years After
Five Hundred Years Without Faith
Fog Walker
Murder at Summerset
This Is Not a Reflection Of You
The Theory of Black Holes (Collected Poems)
The Circle Cluster, Book I, The Great Betrayer,
The Circle Cluster, Book II, The Soul Slayer,
The Circle Cluster, Book III, The Heart Harrower,
The Circle Cluster, Book IV, The Aristes,
The Circle Cluster, Book V, CentreRule,
The Circle Cluster, Book VI, The Beginning One
Non-Fiction
Atheism, Scepticism and Philosophy
Articles in Dissident Philosophy
The New Ancein Regime
By E O Zucca & E A St Amant
Molecular Structures of Jade
Instant Sober
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter One
Up until turning five-years-old, I lived in New Jersey with my birth mother, Diana Briner, who died in January of 1965. I was never able to find out of what. I don’t have any specific memory of her or of where we lived. My adoptive parents discovered little when they researched it. As I grew up, I lost interest in ever finding out if my birth-mother was Jewish or who my father was or even if my mother died suicidally of a drug overdose. I still don’t much care all these years later. Many experts say that our fate is decided by our heritage, that it’s all genes and spleens. This story is a complete refutation of that.
For the next three years after her death, I moved from institutions at St. Croix, where I could see the Empire State Building from my bedroom, to Gudgeon Place just off Tonelle. It was a grungy house with cockroaches and fleas. At the ripe old age of eight, I landed in the juvenile court system when for the third time I’d been picked up on the streets for truancy. I’d been shoplifting or panhandling each of those times.
I recall little of how I got from one place to another, or how I learned so much so quickly about the streets, but I think most of it was due to the influence of a rough streetwise eleven-year-old, Lloyd Mills, at the time, my only childhood companion. I became the youngest of the residents at 55 Carling Street, Juvenile Group Facility, Essex County, a halfway-home administered under the authority of the State of New Jersey near Lincroft.
I had met Lloyd at Gudgeon Place, but I recognized soon after I’d arrived at Carling Street, I needed his protection to cope inside with the twelve and thirteen-year-old bullies and gave him my full allegiance. Perhaps because I was so tall, no adult actually believed I was only eight years old.
Lloyd used to come into my room at about one o’clock in the morning after the guards had gone to watch television and sleep with me. Sometimes he cuddled against me, sometimes he would want more. He would stay four or so hours. He carried a switchblade which he’d boasted he’d much practice with, and the other boys feared him, as did I. He kept them away from me and made sure my holiday packages from the state weren’t stolen. I remember that I thought our relationship was a tradeoff on the level of life and death, an instinct to survive. I don’t recall ever being affectionate to him in a way which would be called love. I recollect the feeling of boredom with the mechanics of it. I sometimes would fall asleep and he’d get angry. However bad it was, it could never compete with the utter fear I felt of being all alone in the world at eight-years-old. It was the loneliness I recollect most vividly and it didn’t go away until I met Una and the Tappet family.
I think I cried quite often, but even in this period before the Tappets, I recall just selected events. Like I remember one day I found an irresistible kitten that had obviously gone unfed for sometime, and against the rules, smuggled it into the home. I begged Lloyd to steal food from the kitchen to feed it, which he did, and even better, he went to a grocery store and stole real cat food for it. After Lloyd would leave in the middle of the night, Snowball slept with me. It’d tickled my feet in the morning to wake me up. It was a white fluffy ball of fur, but had some black spots around the ears. I remember how small it was and how it needed my protection to survive. I was saving my money to get it to a vet to have it checked out. I loved that kitten and I cried inconsolably when it was run over by a car on Carling Street, even in the face of all the goading I received from the older boys, even Lloyd teased me about it. After all, for toughened boys, the only good cat is a dead cat.
I mention about my relationship with Lloyd so that what happened between me and my stepsister, can be understood more clearly. I’d experienced more about this sort of thing before I reached nine-years-old than most teenagers ever do. My behavior toward Sally was due in part to my amplified sexuality, matched evenly by the naivety of my new family. Parents adopting young boys living in orphanages or public institutions, don’t realize that they are sexually active at nine, eight, and even seven-years-old.
At that time, I attended Westside Park, East Essex State School. I remember it as an okay experience even if I was often truant. They served hot cereal and toast in the morning and they let me have double helpings. I’ve no existent report cards even though I tried to get them, or should I say, someone on my payroll when I was first putting my life story down in words, tried to get them for me. They could find no record of my existence before 1968, let alone my education. Apparently, until I became a Tappet, I’d no history and was a nonentity to the state.
A favorite place of mine at the time was the graveyard where my birth mother lay. I brought Snowball there several times to meet her. Her absence in my life had created a puzzling world of ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes.’ Life seemed so arbitrary and I never seemed to have any fun. I visited her there to talk about it. To t
ry and understand. Perhaps to pray, although no one had ever instructed me in religion until I met Mary Tappet. Piety back then seemed the farthest virtue from me. Stealing and sex seemed more natural. Life stole mothers. Lloyd stole sex. Every Sunday I would steal flowers from this fancy man’s garden to put on my mother’s grave. It’s a large black-gated property at Rookery and Roanoke near Hoboken owned by one of the richest families in Jersey City. In my mind at eight-years-old, if I thought about it at all, it must have seemed a palace beyond my imagination. But really, I don’t remember what I felt as I scrambled through the property stealing their flowers. The electronic gate at the front driveway was always closed on Sundays. But back then, it was no deterrent at all.
In the summer of 1968, all I had to do was rush in through the northern walkway, pick up carnations, roses, or whatever appealed to me, and rush out through the southern gate. I’d worked it three weeks in a row, when on the fourth attempt, laden with another fine bouquet for my mother’s gravesite, I was attacked on my way out with the loot in hand.
The gardener, a tall spindly fellow with a long beard, this story is much about men with long beards, who has since left the employ of the Tappets, must have been lying in wait. I was told later that he had been expecting a hippy and not an eight-year-old boy. Hippies were just then starting to get bad press. I received a blow to the front of the head with the shovel, leading to bleeding, and a serious concussion, I was knocked out, I almost died.
For this, I owe him everything, and although my life completely changed afterwards, to this day, I curse him for it as well. As you will see, this is no mean exaggeration. My new dad, Stan, told me the gardener held a bizarre theory about the missing flowers. Stan called him ‘a conspiracy nut,’ but Mary, my new mother, called him, ‘Just a nut.’
I woke up in the hospital surrounded by a host of strange faces, perhaps ten of them. I’d have run for all my life, except I couldn’t move. Comforting brown eyes from a face full of love and laughter riveted my attention even though I felt half asleep. I had seen black women before, and many of them, but I could see at once that she’d formidable magic beyond her huge presence. Both her knowing gaze, and the happiness she radiated, came to my mind as uncanny. Her brilliant dress fell into a category that isn’t easily explained; it was outlandish but appeared quite natural on her huge frame; offbeat yet well-balanced; bright blue on dark black skin, but made of a texture and a color as befit her. She felt the little bit of my forehead that was exposed and her touch held tenderness and foreboding. I don’t tell you that about Una just because I have known and loved her ever since that moment. I actually remember it happening that way, like a metaphysical second, but who can say for sure. Memories are all we have and scientists say they aren’t that reliable. That’s just the way life is.
“Bryce whacked you good,” she said with a giggle, her voice cheerful and her accent easy on my ears. “You’ll live. The doctors here are expensive.” She winked. “Where are your parents?”
“It was a shovel,” I whispered feebly and then heard another voice.
“Bryce said he tackled you and you hit your head on a stone.”
My gaze moved from the big black face, to a round formless white face with friendly blue eyes and a moustache. He smiled sympathetically, as though he’d entertain the shovel version quite easily. He was in a shining silvery suit but the tie was loose and the jacket opened.
“What’s your name,” he asked, “and why are you stealing Bryce’s flowers every Sunday?”
He seemed nice enough and I weighed telling the truth, especially considering the big black woman, but quickly rejected it. Long ago I’d learned the truth could have bad unintended consequences, and moreover, it was as though the man expected something of me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I believe Bryce used a shovel on you, you poor boy,” a third voice said and I followed it to the face of a white woman, perhaps my mother’s age if she’d still been alive. Her brown hair framed her narrow face. Her black eyes looked right at me, so that I at once looked away. She was their leader, I decided. The way she stood brought her attention. The style of her business dress and her sharp eyes indicated it.
“I think we should phone the police,” she added. “Bryce almost killed him. He’ll have to go!”
Her voice carried authority and scared me, but no one answered her so I spoke up. “I won’t steal anymore flowers,” I promised.
To my delight, everyone laughed. I now chanced a complete look around the room. One plump white woman and a tall old mean-looking man with grey skin, wore white smocks and stood a step or two back. These two I decided were doctors or nurses. Since my treatment by the medical professionals in the past had been deplorable, I instantly feared and hated them.
Two older Chinese men in silk business suits and with kind eyes, looked on, only mildly interested. They seemed to be as confused as I was. One man there, a fit well-tanned young fellow, who stood at the end of the bed, had the likeness of our halfway home councilor, a kind untried soul who seemed to me sometimes to be unworldly. He’d once told me that I was lucky to have a friend like Lloyd, even though I had told him earlier what Lloyd did to me on a nightly basis.
Another man stood near the door as though guarding it. His pale narrow face was in a profile and all I could see was that he had a large nose and droopy ears. He wore a crisp dark blue uniform and held a tiny policeman’s hat, casually twirling it from end to end in his hands. He didn’t look at me and kept his eyes down.
Then a transcendental event occurred to me. I saw Sally.
She slowly pushed through from behind her parents and came right up at the bedside eye to eye with a glossy yellow sucker in her mouth. She was a tall thin eight-year-old with long blond hair and deep translucent eyes. She smiled at me with absolute love and touched my hand. Then she gave me a purple sucker which I greedily seized and hid under the covers. I’d learned from my short lifetime in the homes that you can’t trust anybody with candy.
“Say hello, dear,” the black woman urged.
But Sally said nothing and we stared happily at each other until the woman with the voice-of-authority spoke again.
“Isaac,” she said, “go see what’s keeping them.” The man with the tan left. She looked at me thoughtfully again. “How do we get a hold of your parents?” I shrugged. I didn’t have the slightest idea. “Where’s your mother right now?” she asked further.
“She is at the graveyard,” I answered softly.
“Is that who the flowers were for?” she continued.
I regretfully nodded. She was a clever woman and I was too distracted by her daughter to fight her inquiries. As well, I had grown more tired.
“Where is your father?” she went on.
I shrugged and closed my eyes for a moment. She pulled me back from sleep.
“What’s your name?”
“Christian Donald Briner.”
Afterwards, they let me sleep. When I awoke, they were gone, and I got out of the bed and peed, then took a walk around the hospital. It was a clean dark place full of shadows and coughing. I was in very little discomfort. Several days must have passed. All I could feel of my wound was a clean strip of gauze with no sign of blood.
The number of people in the hospital had greatly increased. This led me to believe an epidemic had broken out in Jersey City. When supper was delivered, I asked a tall wizened nurse why so many people were sick. She patted my head and left without answering me.
After supper, I was given pills, and I dreamt that I was back with my mother. I think she didn’t really have a face but was just the idea of motherhood, like the Virgin Mary. She showed me how to empty my head of the vulgar and horrible things Lloyd had put into it. How to stop the cheap brass from rattling in my brain. They weren’t just sounds that I cleared out of my head either, but the unclean concepts they signified. Lloyd had shown me plenty of pictures of people engaged in all sorts of things and had explained every little d
etail.
“Tonight I will show you the path to a higher plain,” she said, “but first you must let me hold you in my arms a while as you sleep.”
When my head was emptied, she whispered that I was purified and should try to communicate directly with God. I looked up, stunned and lost for words. Even though she held me in her arms, her face lay hidden in the shadows of the dark hospital room, but I could hear her soft voice in my ears.
“Tonight, Jesus will come for you,” she whispered, “and will show you the way.”
I was overjoyed to hear it and when I opened my eyes, a man came to me with piercing blue eyes and a long trimmed beard.
“I’ll take you to a place which few men have seen and returned to tell,” he said. “You’re a good boy and deserve favor, but you may refuse to go. Many cannot come back. The joy, the fulfillment, the pleasures, are nearly irresistible. If you decide to go, you’ll walk the clouds and follow me inside the gates of heaven. If you can leave when I say you must, no matter what enraptures you feel, then you may return to your mother’s arms and you’ll awake unpolluted.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say. His piercing blue eyes looked into my heart and he touched me with his hand. The g-force increased as we sped to heaven, and for several minutes, my stomach was in my throat. I hoped he truly was who he seemed to be. His direct presence in my life would put me further than I had ever been from a nobody-orphan. God himself spoke directly to me now, and I figured that was really something splendid.
“Listen to me carefully,” he said when we arrived, “don’t open your eyes and don’t talk. You must think of only goodness and grace, nothing sinful. Can you do it?” I nodded. “Your very life depends on it,” he continued. “Do you understand that you mustn’t talk nor open your eyes the whole length of time we are beyond the gates?” I nodded again. “Enter here now with me,” he whispered, “and feel all the senses of eternity.”
A sudden roar of music filled my head. I felt the enticing spirits of young virgins swish through me and whisper into my ears to follow them. The smell of cinnamon and exotic spices came to my nostrils. My mouth watered with the taste of a flavor so wonderful that I nearly cried out. Light burned brightly beyond my closed-eyelids which I fiercely fought to keep tight. The wind rushed through my short crop of hair and up my naked backside. I became flush and felt many pleasures rush through all parts of my body. My head exploded in a flurry of delight so that I could hardly breathe. Suddenly, I decided I would stay. What was the point of returning when life up here was so full of pleasure?
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