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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?
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