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
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
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 try 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.