My Early Story (24)

 

Eufemio Alvarez’s Automobile Repair – NY

 

I suppose I should close out NY and move on, here are some concluding pictures:

 

Friday nights were often all-night services at the church on Delancey Street. People from many churches would gather, play music, preach, and pray into the wee hours of the morning. If you got hungry you went out and got something to eat and came back.

 

The Colon family on Meserole St. in in Brooklyn were kind to me. They pastored a church, and across from the church was what they called a “mission house.” Missionaries from all over the world used it as a place to stay and a base of operations when visiting the States. I remember a lively pastor from Guatemala, and an older pastor from Columbia. The older man had been persecuted for his faith – placed in a barrel and rolled down a hill, he was a gentle soul.

 

There was another brother, an older man, Brother Maisonette, with whom I traveled to Haiti, who also lived in the mission house.

 

On E. 10th Street in Manhattan I met a building superintendent who had a chicken farm in the basement of the building. Yep, you read correctly – a chicken farm. He opened the stairs from the sidewalk – the kind that have double metal doors embedded in the sidewalk – took me down into the bowels of the building…and I guess there were at least 50 chickens. He was a nice guy, what you might call a “good egg.”

 

On one visit to NY, Eufemio Alvarez demonstrated his ability to deal with troubled automobiles. You may recall that in an earlier post I described him as “mercurial,” here is what I mean.

 

“Where is your car,” I asked Brother Alvarez.

 

“Well, the devil had been giving me problems with that car. It kept breaking down. I’d go to Harlem and it would break down. I’d go to Brooklyn and it would break down. I’d go down FDR Drive and it would break down. The devil kept making my car break down – so I decided to do something about it.”

 

“What did you do?” I asked.

 

“I set it on fire. It won’t break down anymore. I showed the devil I wasn’t going to allow him to trouble me.”

 

See what I mean about being mercurial?

 

I haven’t quite figured out why Brother Alvarez thought he got the better of the devil on that deal, and I haven’t bothered to try to work out the theology behind setting his car on fire – but I guess considering other things I’ve seen over the years that the only person Eufemio hurt was himself and I don’t think he propagated a teaching that folks should start burning their cars when they break down.

 

Come to think of it, he may have been doing his friends and family a favor by burning his car – you'd only have to ride with him a few blocks to know what I mean.  He must have been watching too much Roller Derby because he was forever blocking and passing other cars and (seemingly) trying to knock pedestrians over guardrails. He should have been a taxi driver.