Day CCCXXXII

Hang Tough

      We wrote them letters which they ignored; we wrote the talking heads on TV; those whose programs were supposed to help consumers; and nothing  helped, nada, zilch. I figured they were a bunch of eye witless clowns for their bogus claims. Nobody could help us, we had a lemon, and we were stuck with it. I smoked quite a few cartons during that episode. Believe it or not, we eventually tried prayer, and after eight months of anguish, and stress we got lucky, blessed, and traded it in for a  new Olds. When we went to the Olds guys that jive freaking Citation behaved as advertised, and hummed like a bee. Alleluia! We finally got rid of it. Not long after I quit again. Things keep you from quitting, but you need to be tougher…keep quitting.

     A friend, and customer in the Bronx, had a cool men’s wear shop on Jerome Avenue. Life was so rough in Cuba that one dark night, he took a chance, and put his life in a rickety, dingy rubber dinghy. Somehow by the grace of God he made it to Miami. There he struggled, and one day he made it to New York. He had been a tailor, and a successful haberdasher in Santiago, but Castro had changed that. Then after working as a janitor in a New York hospital for ten years, he saved enough to open another shop. Finally things were going swell for him, for two years it was cool to go to work, be his own man, again. Then suddenly the burglaries began. Manny didn’t smoke but, after the break-ins, he started smoking once in a while. Then it turned into a constant thing, every few weeks they came in through the roof, and for some reason Manny felt it was the same punks, the same damned junkies.