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Indigo BARLESS: A BRONX MEMOIR | Erin Mills Town Centre
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BARLESS: A Bronx Memoir
A raw, unsparing memoir of hunger, abandonment, and improvised family - told entirely in the voice of the boy who lived it.
Anthony Aleman was eleven, alone for days at a stretch on the fourteenth floor of a South Bronx tower, when he learned to stage his own apartment for the social worker: shovel out the dog waste, swallow toothpaste so his breath was clean, line the cabinets with cans no one was allowed to open. He was protecting his mother - a woman who had loved him once, and who was disappearing inch by inch behind a man, a drug, and a thing the boy could only name the Rot.
BARLESS is the account of the years that followed, written without hindsight and without mercy. In the flat present tense of a child who was never taught what he was supposed to feel, Aleman records a body burned in a stairwell, a father he meets just in time to watch him die, a high school with metal detectors and razor blades, foster placements and group homes, and a mother who walks past him on the street for three years without ever looking up.
And on a stoop across from the tower that erased him: a family that owed him nothing, teaching him to fight, to dance, to be Puerto Rican, to be loved.
From the crack-war Bronx to a hundred acres of Florida green to a convent in Syracuse, this is not a story about being saved. It is the record of a boy building a self out of whatever the street handed him.
He spent that childhood on a fourteenth-story windowsill with no bars on it. Nothing holding him in. Nobody there to catch him. He would escape one place after another before learning that a cage doesn't need bars.
What does a child become when nobody ever comes?
BARLESS: A Bronx Memoir
A raw, unsparing memoir of hunger, abandonment, and improvised family - told entirely in the voice of the boy who lived it.
Anthony Aleman was eleven, alone for days at a stretch on the fourteenth floor of a South Bronx tower, when he learned to stage his own apartment for the social worker: shovel out the dog waste, swallow toothpaste so his breath was clean, line the cabinets with cans no one was allowed to open. He was protecting his mother - a woman who had loved him once, and who was disappearing inch by inch behind a man, a drug, and a thing the boy could only name the Rot.
BARLESS is the account of the years that followed, written without hindsight and without mercy. In the flat present tense of a child who was never taught what he was supposed to feel, Aleman records a body burned in a stairwell, a father he meets just in time to watch him die, a high school with metal detectors and razor blades, foster placements and group homes, and a mother who walks past him on the street for three years without ever looking up.
And on a stoop across from the tower that erased him: a family that owed him nothing, teaching him to fight, to dance, to be Puerto Rican, to be loved.
From the crack-war Bronx to a hundred acres of Florida green to a convent in Syracuse, this is not a story about being saved. It is the record of a boy building a self out of whatever the street handed him.
He spent that childhood on a fourteenth-story windowsill with no bars on it. Nothing holding him in. Nobody there to catch him. He would escape one place after another before learning that a cage doesn't need bars.
What does a child become when nobody ever comes?
The largest book retailer in Canada also offers toys, music, home décor, gifts and lifestyle products. What's Inside...Books, Magazines, CD’s and DVD’s, Toys and Gifts, Home Accents, Electronics, Baby’s and Children’s Section, Bath and Body, Kitchen and Bedroom, Stationary Located outside in the exterior plaza.
