Scene 6

Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras has known for years that Sebastian was building an army, for they shared a social club, they shared many drinks, they shared a love for Russian women, they were friends! Raphael had done his best to guide him through his long affair with Dasha Andreava, but there was nothing that could really be done about that.

Sebastian was at the end of the day a romantic in an age when that was mostly uncalled for.

I was told to put together a little convoy of ambulances and armored flatbed trucks and make my way toward the Bronx through the demilitarized zone. Most of the bridges and tunnels are down the only one left is the White Stone. Our aim was to resupply with water and provisions, with rockets and bullets and black bread the fighters serving under General Allamby in the South Bronx.

I may be jumping ahead a little bit, thinks Rafael.

Before there was the war there was dinner.

In the fall of 2015 I attended a small dinner in the ghetto at the home of Ms. Catherine Hall, advertised as 8 to late, but I was mostly on time and so were most of the forty other guests, a wide and motley assortment of ambulance men and women, of teachers and students, and other healthcare workers and also some business men and opportunistas.

We are all there to drink wine and hear a short shall we say lecture by our friend Sebastian Adon, who had recently returned to Brooklyn from his two years in exile near Boston where he’d been studying international development on a sustainable basis, he’d improved his vocabulary in those wilderness camps.

            So there we were it was the year 2015 and month was called October and there were forty mostly strangers sharing wine and a range of other dishes Cat Hall and Sebastian Adon had cooked up for the lecture, discussion, whatever. Sebastian was dresses in a blue uniform similar to an EMS uniform, but not the same, faded from the three months he spent in Cuba, DR and Haiti where it was hand washed. It was blue, it bore his name, it identified him as “instructor”, on one arm a white shield identified him a New York City paramedic, on the other arm, the blue and red flag of Haiti, which was also the flag of the Resistance he hoped to enlist the forty of us in. Many had been involved in the five years of smuggle, deploy teach in Haiti, others had written for or distributed the Banshee Newspaper, before it was suppressed.

Officially we were founding the New York City Shop of the Development Union, Shop #02 since one had been opened a week before in Seim Reip, Cambodia by Arlene Gormley.

That was before the secret police raids drove us underground, well that was nearly a year later of good talks and new friends and West Indian Hillal, red light jazz suppers. That was before Liana came into his life.