Obscured Americans

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OBSCURED AMERICANS LINH DINH

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Don a Retired Farmer 2. Jimmy the Cook 3. Eddie the Housepainter 4. Dan the Cheese Counter Man 5. B.B. the Bartender 6. Katy the Bartender and Nursing Student 7. Patrick the Ex-Computer Programmer 8. Amanda the Ex-Nurse 9. Rose the Mistress 10. Shane the Fighter, Heroin Chipper and Ghetto Teacher 11. Hank the Small Business Financial Advisor 12. Peter the Food Service Worker 13. Hank the Christian Constitutionalist 14. Michael the Philly Jesus 15. Noam the Straying Hasid 16. Lindy Morelli the Carmelite Nun 17. Eileen Walbank the Ex-Insurance Company Employee 18. Marty the Electrician, Plumber and Ex-Mortician 19. Felix the Artist, Ex-Grocer and Ex-Hospital Worker 20. Tod the Professor, Writer, Musician and Artist 21. Don the Retired Building Contractor 22. J.J. the Ex-Pizza Man and Young Lord 23. Rudy the Retired Math Professor 24. Rudy Dent a 9-11 First Responder 25. Benny the Landlord, Casanova and Covert Operator 26. Melissa the Iraqi Refugee 27. Manon the Aspiring School Counselor 28. Anna the Retired Teacher, Cab Driver and Computer Programmer 29. Amanda the Film Editor 30. Vern the Vietnam Vet 31. Helen the Writer and Aspiring Prepper 32. Chang the Owner of Jenny’s Place and Dollar City

Don a Retired Farmer I’ve prowled around Gary, relaxed in New Harmony and explored downtown Indianapolis after midnight. There is a bronze statue of John Wooden. Kneeling and suited, the basketball coach is surrounded by five young pairs of male legs, their bodies disappearing above the pelvis. It is very creepy and gay. One of these days, I must barge into the dismal looking Whistle Stop, just across the street from Indianapolis’ Greyhound station. I need to see more of Indiana, that’s for sure. In New Harmony, I ate a brain sandwich at the Yellow Tavern, then gave a talk about utopia at the opera house. Out of towners and locals were equally receptive. I concluded, “Why this fear of the unmediated experience, the direct experience? Maybe we can’t stand how beautiful life really is. I think the way to move forward is to say no to these interruptions, to these barriers. It might not be utopia but it’s better than what we have right now.” The one friend I have in Indiana, I haven’t met in person. On July 31st, 2015, 62-year-old Don Hensley emailed to say he appreciated my articles. Then, “Our family farm is gone and I’m the last from the old homestead. Dad made me and my twin brother promise to find any other job but farming. He used to joke that the only certain way he knew to become a millionaire farming was to start out with $10M... You’ve made me shed a tear more than once, but I’m left feeling that I’ve met people I never would have. Home, a job, family and food on the table is really all most of us hope for out of life.” Our subsequent email conversation has revealed a world I know so little about, being a city dweller for most of my life. With automation, fewer farm hands are needed than ever, and

most of those who are still bent over under the sun are fresh arrivals from Latin America, Jamaica and even Thailand. Indoctrinated into the semantics of cement and asphalt, most Americans are entirely divorced from animal logics, fresh manure and plant husbandry. Even growing tomatoes has become a mystery, much less plucking and gutting a chicken. Don is retired and lives with his wife, Deb, in Huntingburg, six miles from Dale, where he was born. His remembrances are too interesting not to share. With a pair of dollar store scissors and Elmer’s glue, I’ve cut and pasted them into this configuration: Some of my fondest memories are of the little tin-roofed log cabin Dad let us build back in the woods. We built a small sandstone fireplace outside, the pot-bellied stove was just for cold weather. No honor could be bestowed on me to compete with the feeling of sitting in my favorite spot with beans & franks simmering near the fire while reading a book and listening to the baby squirrels run up and down the tree at my back while a mama rabbit and her little ones watched from just a few feet away. I’ve never been in any religious institution that felt more hallowed than that little woods during a heavy snow. :) Heavy lifting for me started at the age of 10. During the winter Dad kept the cattle’s access to the water trough penned off. That was so that they wouldn’t get hurt in the frozen muck around it (that’s what you have kids for) so that meant we had to water them at night when we got home from school (Dad worked swing shift at ALCOA). At that age I only weighed about 70lbs. A 5 gallon bucket of water is about 40lbs so that meant that each trip I was carrying about my body weight to the barn through about 12"-16" of a mixture of slush/mud/cowsh*t that wanted to pull your boot off with each step. Dad always kept

around 100 head of cattle, that’s a lot of thirsty animals when they’ve gone all day without water. Since my brother was the ‘chosen twin,’ you can imagine who pretty well always made the most trips. Picking up hay, I was on the wagon handling every bale while my brother walked along with the guys from town grabbing every 6th or 7th. Back at the barn it was the same. I fed the elevator while Danny was in the loft. On a 100 degree day the peak of a hayloft is about 7 degrees hotter than H*ll! Every time I ever brought up getting any kind of pay, I always got the same smart-*ss remark, ‘You ate breakfast this morning, didn’t you?’ I’ve lost track of how many malignant skin tumors I’ve had removed, as well as two basal cell carcinomas and three squamous cell carcinomas on my scalp and face from all the years in the sun. My nose was broken three times before I started the first grade at 5 years old. Dad had told me early in life that I wasn’t welcome when he and Danny left for the day to go to farm sales and auctions. That left me at home with a psychopathic b*tch many times my size that always said that if I wasn’t going with my father and brother, I d*mned sure wasn’t sitting on my lazy *ss. Mom used to stand behind me as I washed dishes and critique every piece before it was allowed to go into the strainer. A fleck of food between the teeth of a fork or on the back of a plate got me a mixing spoon or whatever was handy. It’s taken me many years to come to grips with it. Knowing that you are messed up is one thing, knowing why is another... I really AM a spiritual person, so when people heavily into the Bible want to give me words of encouragement, I accept them

because of the intent in which they’re given... My last breakdown (my 3rd) was considered a medical miracle. It kept a 5 or 6 man team working around the clock to try to figure out. My wife Deb was under tremendous pressure early on the third day to sign the papers and let them turn the machines off. They kept insisting that once you go to less than 5% brain stem function, there is no coming back. My only prognosis was as a vegetable... Then, once again, I came back after six days of being ‘brain dead.’ The lead doctor made the remark that, since they had no answers as to the beginning of the episode or the recovery, he was totally fine with the word miracle. The years of beatings and physical and emotional abuse left me damaged, absolutely... Under periods of great stress I go into what they call a dissociative disorder and the change is so subtle that only a very few that know me are even aware of it. You ask about animal cruelty. The general public is unaware that what is seen in the mainstream media is almost always in connection with ‘factory farming.’ Sometimes, religion is also partly to blame. A man who holds the conviction that we are to have dominion over all the animals of Creation isn’t going to form emotional attachments to any of his livestock. By the same token, an employee at a factory farm holds no more value in a turkey/hog/cow/horse than a furniture factory employee does a center drawer or a modesty panel. It is the slow death of the family farm that is creating the kind of environment that leads to incidents like what you’ve seen in the news. None of the cattle on our farm had any way of knowing it, but they all lived on a ‘Cow Country Club’ in comparison to most other farms. During warm weather they were cycled through three different pastures each with fresh water from a creek and plenty of shade. They could still come to the barn to take

advantage of the salt block and mineral block as well as use the back scratcher apparatus that had a large hemp rope saturated with an oily insect repellent to deal with the spots bugs like to bite where a cow couldn’t reach with their tail. There was also always some kind of hay in the mangers. For instance, to them, the stubble left after soybeans have been harvested was like a candy treat. Dad would bale it so during the summer they had variety in their diet that they also happened to love (unlike factory farm beef which has little room to move around and is only fed corn). Two other things they looked forward to were the ground corn cobs Dad would buy at the mill in bulk (& which I got to help shovel onto the truck) and, believe it or not, they loved to see that Deb and I were coming down to camp. After we’d packed up and gone home, Dad would let them into the woods for a day or two and every bit of ashes from our camp fire would be gone. There are some kind of minerals in the ashes that cows crave to the point of fighting over! The news footage of factory farm abuse is much more upsetting when you have first hand knowledge of just how intelligent some livestock are. We had one heifer we named Curly because of her forehead and she was far too bright for her own good. Dad had one of the old electric fences that are illegal now. They called them ‘weed-burners’ for good reason. The hair on my arms is standing up as I type this just at the memory... If you pulled up something green that was long enough to drop over the wire and still have one end grounded, it would sit there and sizzle until it had burned all the way through your weed. Dad sent Curly to market because she figured out that after a driving wind with rain she could walk the electric fence and put her ear down by the glass insulator on the metal post. If she heard buzzing, she knew the wire was still ‘hot.’ When she found one that was silent, she knew the fence had shorted out and would walk down a bit and then just walk through the

fence knocking it to the ground. After one too many times of rounding up his cattle in a neighbor’s crops during a summer storm, Curly lost a good home. Just something to think about the next time you see a news item about livestock abuse. They are far more self-aware than a lot of people realize. Farmers have to be a combination of veterinarian/accountant/lawyer/weatherman & have a working knowledge of a slew of other fields that don’t come to mind at the moment, yet they’re held in such low regard. A foreman I used to work under insisted that ALL farmers were much more wealthy than they’d ever let on. A direct quote... ‘I’ve never heard a G*d D*mned farmer admit that he’d had a GOOD year!’ People would steal from farmers and think nothing of it. Anybody living in town would go nuts if a farmer parked out front and stripped an entire row of vegetables from their garden or carefully selected blooms from their landscaping to put together a bouquet for his wife’s birthday or their anniversary, but each “corn on the cob season,” 8 to 10 rows of corn would be stripped from the nothern edge of Dad’s field. People from town would fill an entire car trunk with ears of corn and feel no guilt because Dad obviously ‘had plenty.’ I’ve had a deep dislike for Bill Maher after the night (several years ago) when he quipped on CNN’s Larry King Live, ‘I’ve never understood why farmers should get special treatment just because they happen to live in the middle of a big garden.’ Guess he thinks all that happens by itself, just like magic. If he had to buy the building, furnishing, media equipment and all the other necessities in order to get paid to sit and smirk at the camera, I might have a little respect for him. As it is, I just figure he’s not getting enough fiber in his diet...

We have a nationally known poultry processing plant just outside Huntingburg. Over the years I’ve heard some pretty gruesome stories from guys that have worked there (like sticking gross things inside the giblets package, spitting phlegm or tobacco juice into the body cavity). The worst, though, is something that the ‘hangers’ (the guys that take the birds out of the truck and hang them by the ankles on the brackets on the chain feeding them into the plant) know is impossible to get caught at unless someone in authority sees you do it. If a bird fights back and the hanger is mad at it he will grab it by the wings with it facing away from him and jerk back, breaking its spine and making it impossible to carve. If you get one of those turkeys all you can do is pull the meat off the bones with your fingers. The ribs will be splayed outward in some places and in at others. I’ve never hunted and the only fishing I enjoy is catch and release. I have never been in a (physical) fight in my life. There have been shouting matches and times that I was pushed and threatened but I’ve always found a way to somehow either defuse the situation or vacate the area. One of the reasons all the present day violent talk gets to me so much is the idea of having to seriously hurt someone else in defense of myself or my family. At graduation (1970), I enrolled at United Electronics Institute in Louisville, KY. You did the first six months by mail and only those who met the grade requirements got to finish out the last year and a half down there. My grades were near perfect, but Dad informed me that he not only didn’t believe in college but didn’t believe in going into debt to go, either. So I lost all of the money I’d saved up by picking up hay for other local farmers for 50 to 75 cents an hour. I would have been perfectly positioned for the coming tech revolution.... :( I worked for Insight Systems. Part of the reason I was hired was

because of all the modding I had done on my Atari computers. At a time when a new IBM compatible only came with 256K of memory and a monitor that let you display two colors (as long as one of them was black [Big Grin], I’d already heavily modified my Atari 400. I replaced the membrane keyboard with a third party, full-stroke keyboard and tripled the internal memory (16K to 48K). Once I proved to my boss that even the first little 16K Atari could put 256 colors on a TV by running a simple little ten line BASIC program, he offered me a job. Other than about 4 years when I did IT support, I got trapped in the furniture industry much like those in Detroit fell into the black hole of the auto industry (without the benefits of anything like the UAW...). Now I just get by on SSD with too many physical problems to mention. It isn’t as if I wasn’t industrious or hungry, I’ve been a lead-man, a foreman and the Customer Service Manager of a local Value Added Reseller. What it comes down to is something that I was told about 30 years ago... ‘Your Life will be much simpler once you accept the fact that we are all Dixie Cups. Nobody in their right mind ever patches a Dixie Cup. They are a dime a dozen. Throw it away and get another...!’ :( My wife’s cousin and her husband both have taken bus routes to supplement their farm’s income. Around here drivers are locked in at the beginning of the school year and there have been times when, because of fluctuations in fuel prices, they have lost money every time they start a bus. My wife and I don’t know anyone who isn’t struggling in one way or another. Maybe that’s why I appreciate your articles so much. The recession during the Carter years was brutal. Many people today don’t know that the country went through a financial crisis during the late Nixon - Carter years that the country has never recovered from. Double digit inflation is something that doesn’t reset after a recovery. I am much more than sad for

what has happened to our country, I am heartbroken. They were hard times but I still marvel at the change we’ve had in our country. My pay grade was 2nd from the bottom yet a family of three could live on my 40 hour check. Years ago Deb found our old budget box and we could feed three on $13 a week. I filled up my 1965 Plymouth Fury III for a shade over $25 once a month (25 gallon gas tank). Even at that, though, we were falling behind. We had all the bills everybody else does and there was more going out than coming in. I finally swallowed my pride and went to check on some kind of assistance. We got turned down four times! That’s when I got stubborn, broke out my guitar and started doing every pickup job I could find. When I had my first nervous breakdown I was 6’1” and weighed 118lbs. Maybe I should have sent back that big $25 wedding present Mom & Dad gave us for a rainy day... We struggled to live within our means. That usually meant we were broke by Saturday morning. Everybody I owed money to got SOMETHING and that meant there were weeks when we had literally less than $5 to live on. For the first ten years we were married we got by with a 13” Western Auto TV. (Yeah, I know... Wish I still had it. They’re collector's items now!) Deb knew before we were married that I would never be wearing a wedding band... I know three farmers that lost their ring fingers in accidents. Just in case you don’t keep up with the Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon recently tripped at home and caught his ring on the counter on the way to the floor. He was very, very lucky they could save it. None of the guys I know had that chance. A ring is just a ring and my guitar meant too much to me to risk just because of a tradition. On our 30th anniversary I offered to

have one tattooed on, but she didn’t like the idea. Reading about Bernie Sanders having his speech hijacked reminded me that I’ve been wanting to write you about my thoughts on the young lady (black rapper) and her comments about hating America and those ‘white farmers sitting out there in the Midwest.’ [On August 8th 2015, two belligerent Black Lives Matter activists prevented Sanders, our most liberal presidential candidate, from delivering a speech in Seattle. As for the rapper, Don is referring to 23-year-old Azealia Banks. Interviewed by Playboy, she declares, “I hate everything about this country. Like, I hate fat white Americans. All the people who are crunched into the middle of America, the real fat and meat of America, are these racist conservative white people who live on their farms.”] I have no animus toward her because our life experience has been so different that we might as well live on different planets. How could I possibly be mad at someone I will never meet just because there’s no way she’ll ever have a clue? Ever since our oldest grandson first came home from college wanting to lecture everyone about our ‘White Privilege’ it’s been a pet peeve of mine. He’s now 25 and out of college. He’s always been bright. The first time that we had a conversation that I filed away for future reference was when he’d just started his freshman year of high school. I don’t remember exactly which celebration it was, but we were enjoying the visit and chatting about all the usual stuff. Someone brought up a topic that included taxation and I’d just said how I felt about it when he looked up at me and said, ‘Grandpa... Goods and services cost money.’ This insight was delivered as if the thought had never occurred

to me. I just made a mental note that we’d reached a milestone in his growth, but I said nothing to discourage him. The only advice that I give without reservation and often is that, should you find yourself in the presence of someone claiming to have all the answers, run like H*ll the other way because you are talking to either a willful liar or a fool! I was taken aback the first time I was ‘made aware’ of the fantastic boon that my White Privilege had been in my life. I wish I could remember where I read this quote, because it couldn’t be more appropriate than describing what passes for a ‘Higher Learning’ in 2015 America. ‘After a certain point, education becomes indistinguishable from indoctrination.’ My twin brother and I graduated from high school in 1970. There were still lynching and other atrocities happening as we moved up from grade school. The memory of the country during the ‘60s is still fresh in my mind. Just so you understand the irony, shortly after seeing Hendrix perform at Robert’s Stadium in Evansville, Indiana in ‘70 I moved to Nashville hoping to find a miracle. A tiny miracle would have suited me just fine. Between the Musicians’ Union and the good ol’ boy network, I couldn’t even find someone to let me sweep a studio floor! It wasn’t a total washout, though. In short order I made some friends. I met three black brothers (actual siblings) in Centennial Park during a weekend music festival. We became close friends and they were a tremendous help because I had no car and if I had I probably would have become hopelessly lost, anyway. After a while I got the chance to meet their younger sister. We were the same age and Nashville suddenly became a much more enjoyable place to be visiting. With very little money, I couldn’t invite her out for much but it was nice to have a pretty

girl to share a pizza with or catch a movie. Oh yeah, remember that ‘White Privilege’ things. B-U-L-L-S-H*-T!!!! A majority of what my grandson was telling me has absolutely no connection to Nashville in 1970. Depending on where we went, her big brothers either made it known they had my back or wound up making it VERY clear to someone that messing with their sister meant messing with them. Having chaperons is not always a bad thing. Besides, we were just friends and we both knew that however long it lasted, it would still be temporary. Telling me about how I can walk anywhere I want because of my skin color is ludicrous. When we went to the youth center, her brothers even told me that they had my back, but not to take it personal if they seemed a little different. If anything happened, they’d step up in a heartbeat but I should watch myself, anyway. There were only three or four other white guys there but I wound up mostly just losing at pool with some friends of theirs and sitting at the booth nursing a soft drink. The inevitable finally happened... I got to meet Yvonne’s dad. I hadn’t PLANNED on meeting her dad and he SURE hadn’t wanted to meet me!! We reached an agreement in short order and my Privilege didn’t afford me the chance to even tell her goodbye... I know now it wasn’t true, but hearing that Hendrix had died of a drug overdose was like a kick to the gut. ‘So how do you feel about your hero now? F*cked up, didn’t he?’ Those *ssholes I roomed with had to turn on the radio before I would believe them. I went to the closest liquor store and bought a six-pack of Colt 45 tall boys and sat up listening to the marathon tribute a local stations was playing. That was it for me as far as Nashville was concerned. I had to

get out of there. When I called Mom & Dad about getting back to Indiana, Dad said that if I’d come back he’d get me a fulltime job working for a local farmer. Sometimes it feels like my entire life has been one long ‘Good News/Bad News’ joke... Yeah, Dad had a job lined up. I went to work for an elderly farmer and his wife who had a small farm on the county line. It was eight hours a day, five days a week for $1 an hour. Thankfully they were wonderful people and his wife fix noon meals that were so good they should have been illegal. But then Friday came and my ‘White Privilege’ kicked in again. Mom was waiting at the door and deducted rent, laundry, groceries and utilities from that $40 check! By the time I put gas in my motorcycle, I worked all week in the dirt and the heat for $3 or $4 a week! Oh Yeah, and I was still ‘Privileged’ to pick up hay for free whenever Dad baled. When my wife & I got married our ‘wedding gift’ was $25. :( I WILL NOT stand and let someone lecture me about how I don't know what it’s like to be oppressed and taken advantage of. There’s no need to list cliches our grandson came home reciting. I’m sick of hearing them and seeing them all over the media and even sicker of the idea that college takes bright young minds and sends back well indoctrinated malcontents that have forgotten what they originally went for in the first place! He’d wanted a career related to oceanography but came home a self-styled econo-anarchist, whatever the H*ll that’s supposed to be. He lists his current occupation as ‘Struggle & Resist’! Every person I meet is treated as a potential friend until they show me otherwise. I don’t intentionally hurt anyone and am quick to sincerely apologize if I accidentally offend someone. That’s really all you can do. The past is behind. How can we ever see the kind of future that the likes of Dr. King envisioned if we’re always looking behind instead of forward? This country

is in for some really, really rough times... The next time you are on a bus trip do keep an eye out for something. When we are on the road and I see a pile of weathered wood and rusted tin that used to be the barn roof sitting next to a bleak little house still bravely trying to stand and surrounded by crops with no lane going back to it, my heart always breaks a little. There was a time when those paint-less grey walls contained all of someone’s hopes and dreams and the wall echoed with laughter and the slap of bare baby steps... That is another reason I avoid big cities. I see the rows of run down houses crammed together, most likely owned by some slumlord who has as little respect for the houses as he does the people renting from him, and the thought of trying to have a life and family without ever having a place that felt truly your home is so oppressive I can feel it eating away at my spirit. It really is my idea of H*ll on Earth and I wish with all my heart that I were a wise enough man to have some answers.

Jimmy the Cook When I lived closer to Center City, I’d take out-of-town friends to McGlinchey’s or Dirty Frank’s, but since moving to South Philly more than a decade ago, I’d drag people to the Friendly Lounge, because it really is friendly. In Philly, black bars tend to be called “lounge,” but Friendly is the haunt of middle-aged white guys, mostly, though there’s Chinese George and myself, and Vern, a black Vietnam vet, as well as a few others of various shades. A Dominican lady, Maria, advised me to abstain from eggs, cantaloupe and papaya after sundown. An admirer of Rafael Trujillo, she loved the fact that he had people’s fingers chopped off, or their nails yanked out. “I hate criminals. I like law and order.” Mexican guys like to get trashed at the Korean-owned beer joint down the street. With so many men and no women, fights often erupt, so it’s nicknamed Stab and Grab. These tussles are mostly about staring, shouting, pushing or flailing, however. Months can go by before you’ll see a half decent right cross. No one has been killed. Neon-lit, and with tables instead of stools, it attracts few Americans. There was a morose Vietnamese homeless guy who would sit in there by himself, but he died recently, probably from a bruised soul. So huge, the United States is hard to get out of. Airport worker Brent, though, has been all over, and so has George, a selfmade millionaire. Retired building contractor Don went to Mongolia to shoot argalis. He ended up chewing on a raw testicle, “I got sick that day and all of the next day. Oh man, it was terrible!” Art and music teacher Terrence has been to Europe. His favorite destination, though, is Colorado. He’s there skiing right now. Only hours ago, we were admiring a photo he emailed back. OK, enough of my babbling. I want y’all to meet a Friendly

Lounge regular, and to hear him talk at length about his life, for no life is uninteresting. Jimmy is my neighbor, and just about each afternoon, you’ll find him at the far end of the bar in Friendly. By evening, he might drag his scrawny ass to The Dive, a block and a half away. Fifty-five-years-old, Jimmy is a cook in an Italian restaurant. There are always five guys in the kitchen, but no matter the shift, Jimmy is the only white dude. Everybody else is Mexican. I have fun with them. They make me laugh, but sometimes they make me mad, because they do things I’d never do. I have to step back and realize, it’s their culture. I can’t get really mad. They put peppers on everything. They put so much peppers on an expensive piece of meat or fish, you can’t taste it, so I’d say, “Why don’t you guys just eat peppers. It’d be cheaper. Why mess up the fish?” We have about fifty employees, and about half of them are Mexicans. There are no Mexican bartenders, no Mexican servers because your language has to be good, your English has to be good. I’m the only Caucasian in the kitchen, and they’re trying to recruit me. They want me to be Mexican. They’re teaching me Spanish. I’d say, “You need to be working on your English, not me on my Spanish. If we were in Spain, I’d be struggling to speak Spanish. I’d be embarrassed not being able to speak it.” Each day, I learn a few more words of Spanish. Some of the guys are learning English. Some refuse. They insist that this will be the new Mexico. They’re going to change me, and I don’t want to change. The head chef is Mexican, and he’s very articulate, his English is good. Although it’s not his culture, he cares. Same with the

sous chef. Basically, they leave the Mexicans to their own devices, because they’re good at what they do. They’ll get together, they’ll come up with a plan and it works. Don’t try to understand it, don’t try to change it, just let it go. The Mexicans would come to me and have me act as a liaison to management. You need a really good English speaker to communicate with management, which is white. That doesn’t mean I can’t be replaced. There are other guys out there who can do that, and you don’t even have to be white. Your English just has to be good, and you must know the culture. South Philly, you know, the mentality. I’ve worked in restaurants for thirty years, but here for just over three. They pay me pretty good. They take care of me. I get 13 an hour, under the table. I work 50 hours a week. The Mexicans make much less. That’s why they’re hired. The Mexicans make around minimum wage, and they’re grateful for it. Eight bucks is nothing, considering how much that restaurant makes. They can afford to pay more, but they don’t. By the same token, they do that because they can. In the Bible, they would call that usury. That’s right, it’s usury… using people. The illegal Mexicans need to become legal. No free rides. This way, they’re not paying taxes, and they’re not able to be drafted. If you remember back in World War II, there was a thing called the zoot suit riot. Remember that? Illegal immigrants back then turned a blind eye to the war effort. The government said we need your help, and they refused. Because they wore these zoot suits, soldiers on leave would beat them up. That’s the zoot suit riot.

Nowadays, it’s the same thing, and I don’t want to be a Donald Trump guy, but if you gonna come here, you’ve got to learn the language, and insist that your children speak English in public. It’s our common language, not Spanish. When in Rome, do what the Romans do. I resent the fact that they want to change my culture. You’ve got to do what the Italians did, what the Irish did, you’ve got to fit in. Otherwise, why would you be here? If you don’t want to be an American, and act like an American, why would you come here? I think they hold us in contempt, because they think it’s their country still, and it was. A lot of it was. Plus, they’re Native Americans. In my line of work, you have to be strong, in your mind, to take the pressure. It’s the number one industry for heart attack. Over all these different jobs… number one. I’ve seen people leave the restaurant crying, stalking off. It just happened two weeks ago. The owner’s son walked off the job. It was because the other guys were picking on him. He wasn’t able to keep up with us. When the owner’s there, she can protect him, but when she’s not there, he’s just one of the guys. We refused to give him that royal status. Although his mother is good at what she does, he’s not. He has a long way to go. That’s something you never do. You don’t walk off your shift, period. I understand you’re unhappy. We’ll talk about it at the end of the night. You can’t look over and need some lettuce, and the guy’s not there! It’s like going to war. It’s the only restaurant he has ever worked in. He’s in Vermont now, with his family. He’s finding himself. He’s a boy in a man’s

body. He’s 24. He didn’t care about his coworkers. That’s what I find hard to forget. He let us down, man. He’s like a deserter. Restaurant work is physically and mentally exhausting. Some mornings, I’m like, “Man, do I have to go back there and start all over?” But it’s not like they’re going to kill me, I don’t think. You just do it and they pay you. You may be able to handle the stress, but two years down the line, there may be someone you just can’t stand, so you may have to get another job. It’s like in the military, you may have to request a transfer to another company, because there are a couple of guys who are always giving you a hard time, for no reason. They don’t like you. I was stationed in Twentynine Palms, in the desert. I was married, had a daughter. Being in that desert made me realize why Arabs and Jews are always so pissed off! Newsbreak! There’s grass everywhere else! I enlisted right out of Frankfort High School. It was a third black, a third white and a third Hispanic, and every day, there were fights. I was just this scrawny son of a preacher, but I had to learn how to fight. I was tired of getting beaten up. In junior high, a black kid hit one of the teachers with an oak chair, knocked him out. He was pissed because he had failed a test. They had to bring in an ambulance, take the old guy out in a stretcher. In 12th grade, I got my first job as a dishwasher at the Holiday Inn. Seeing that I was a pretty good worker, the head chef soon turned me into a cook.

“Will I get paid more?” I asked him. “Sure,” he said, “and you’ll get to eat all of these shrimp for free too.” I was always hungry so I said yeah. It was weird at first because all of these people were screaming at each other all the time, there was so much stress, but at the end of the day, it was all forgotten. We would drink a punch made of brandy, Coke and oranges, cut into halves, and we would also do coke. We could only do this after the chef had gone home. The sous chef was cool. At the end of the day, we also threw hot, stuffed tomatoes at each other. I was in the marines for six years. After that, I got a job as a manager at Jack in the Box, which I didn’t like. I like to cook. I enjoy cooking. I think it’s an art. Sometimes you can see the customers eat your food. Especially with the very old and the very young, and they have that smile, I like that. Another reason I like it is, if you look at the expression, “food and drink,” food is always first. “Food and entertainment,” “food and shelter,” food is always first. You can get by without shelter, but you can’t get by without food. Food is number one. I’m around seafood all the time, but I can’t really afford to eat from there, but the other night, I splurged on myself and bought three pounds of shrimp. I just sat in front the TV and kept eating… over two or three hours. Instead of popcorn, I was eating shrimp. It was good. I live with my sister. It’s $600 a month, and I pay half, but sometimes I must give her more, because she's doing so bad. I come to the Friendly a lot because it’s like my living room. I don’t have that much space.

My sister is never in the bar, because she’s bipolar. She drinks at home, and smokes a lot of weed. It calms her down. She has to have that. I smoke weed too, but not everyday. I’ve been living with her for six years. She needed help to pay the rent. Her boyfriend left. It’s expensive here. She works in a restaurant too. She’s a server. We don’t say waitress anymore. Server. Her job is really getting to her. She fights with her boss all the time. She’s been there so long, she feels she can fight with him, but she doesn’t realize that… you lose. I mean, you’re not gonna win. Because she has a bad attitude, and shows up late, everyday, they give her a bad section that nobody wants to sit in, so now she makes even less money and hates her job even more. She’s only fifty, so retirement is more than ten years away. This is the time to work as hard as you can, because you know what you’re doing, and you still have your health, but she doesn’t get it. She feels like she should be able to retire right now. She spends all her money on weed, and she smokes the good weed, not the cheap weed. She smokes about a hundred dollars’ worth of it a week. That’s like a car payment, with insurance, then there’s the wine, lots of wine. She doesn’t have children. She wouldn’t be good with children. She wants kids, but it’s easy to want them if you don’t have them. I’ve been married twice, for 11 years altogether. I’m not good at that. I tried. I have no problem saying no, you can’t control me, there’s a limit. I love you, but you can’t have my freedom, and I don’t mean the freedom to have sex with other women, but I don’t

need a list of things that I must do, with all my free time, after work. For me to do this, do that, I must get paid. Otherwise, you’re like a slave owner. I’m only willing to do so much for pussy, and I’m independent enough that I don’t need company. My second wife tackled my mother, slammed her against the wall, and the old lady was 65 at the time. I had to grab her hair. I was ready to hit her when my dad said, “No, you don’t do that.” Another time, she stabbed me with a butterfly knife. Look at these scars. One time, I threw out my knee doing construction work, but I managed to drive, using my right foot for both the gas and the brake. When I got home, I couldn’t stand, it was that bad. I was literally crawling on my belly up the stairs when my wife came out. She wouldn’t help me. She said, “So it looks like you’re going to miss a week of work, huh?” Then she went back inside. I’m not looking to get married. I’d get married, but I’m not one of those guys who have to be with somebody. I do think that’s the way life should be, with a man, a woman and children. I think that’s optimized. That’s the way it’s made, the way it should be. Children need a mother and a father to be brought up right. I do have a daughter. She’s thirty-four. Full-grown. We had a bad falling out. I was in the military. I understand. I was never there. I was always up in the desert, training. I haven’t seen her in, ah, twenty years. I basically try not to think about that. It’s very painful, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Her mother turned her against me. I was an asshole. I tried to call her. Years ago. If she decides one day to contact me, I’ll answer and I’ll meet her. I’ve been with a lot of women. I love women. I’ve been with

138, and I’m working on 139. Any day now. I ain’t dead yet. I love women, but let’s say you have sex with a woman, and she decides to stay over, and you realize she’s not leaving. OK, so you have to either pay rent, or you’ve got to be cooking and cleaning. It’s one or the other. You give her an orgasm, and she may not leave. I don’t care if you fall asleep next to me, but in the morning, I’ve got to go to work, and you can’t stay here while I’m gone. Unless… I get up and you make me some coffee and say you’re going to do my laundry, or you’re going to clean something or fix something, but you can’t just be hanging around to eat all my food, drink all my booze, use all the towels up and leave them lying around so there’s nothing for me to use after work. No! Here’s a joke for you. You know why I like to sleep with homeless women? Afterwards, you can drop them off anywhere! I had a girlfriend once. I was a bartender, and one night she came in all beat up and bloody. Pretty Scottish girl. She wanted a drink, so I said, “It looks like you’ve lost a lot of blood, and you’re half drunk already. I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you if you really want a drink. Go back in my apartment, take a shower, go into my closet and grab a clean shirt, then come back and we’ll see.” Well, she appreciated that very much and fell in love with me. We didn’t have sex or anything. Years went by before we hooked up. I can amuse myself. I can read. I can paint. I love music. I’m off today. It’s my first day off in six weeks. Last night felt so great because I knew tomorrow, I wouldn’t have to worry

about it for 24 hours. I could actually let myself go into solid, deep sleep. It’s like a mini vacation. Normally, I drink a Jagermeister before bed. You come home and you’re all wired up, but you know you must go to sleep like right away, because you’ll have to get up again, so you need something to calm you down. It’s not good. Later, I’m going home and paint. I’ve been doing seascapes, underwater seascapes. I’ve never been deep sea, no, but from watching TV programs and looking at photographs, I’ve done a bit of research. Sometimes I bend it a little bit, make it more abstract. I use oil, acrylic, pastel, anything. I know the smell of turpentine is bad for you, but I like it. I’m fascinated by the sea, always have been, but I can’t live next to the ocean, because it costs money. The cooking, the painting, all the good stuff… to me, that’s life! I can’t be going, “Oh, poor me, I’ve got to go to work, it hurts so much,” and believe me, when you get older like me, your body hurts, but you go anyway, and once you get there, you realize, that’s funny, I’m glad I got up. An hour into work, the pain is gone and you’re running, you’re moving and it’s sunny outside, so you think, OK, at least I’m doing something right. The last guy I voted for was Reagan. I don’t know if I’m gonna vote this time. I don’t really like any of them. I believe the President should be a veteran. Before you send kids into war, you should know what it’s like. The ultimate sign of love for this country is to put your ass on the line for it. Not to be confused with being drafted, which is

forced enlistment. I think our biggest problem is the economy, and the family unit has gone to shit. You used to be able to beat your kids. If I wasn’t afraid of my father growing up, I wouldn’t have listened to my mother. I was just a bad kid. My father would hit me in the face, but not with a closed hand. You know what, I learnt. Respect your mother. For your dad to hit you, and for it to be effective, he has to be respectable. He has to be able to say, “This is why you’re getting it. You have to do what I do. That way, I won’t have to do this any more. Follow what I do. I get up every morning, I go to work, I stop at the bar after work, I come home and there’s dinner on the table. This is the good life, kid.” They don’t want that. Kids don’t want that any more. I’m getting a new place. I’ll have this basement to myself, and it’s only $300, with everything included, all the bills. It’s unheard of. I might take a vacation, which I haven’t done in ten years. I like to fish. I’ll go fishing, but at this point, I don’t care if I catch any fish. I’ll cast a bare hook out there, sit there, watch the birds and just relax. I can’t think too far ahead. I’m the kind of guy who will work until the day I die.

Eddie the Housepainter When 46-year-old Eddie found out I’d been interviewing people, he wanted to talk. “You can write a book about me!” and that’s true enough, but then again, I’ve never met an uninteresting person. Within a minute, Eddie was showing me photos of women on his cell phone. There was plenty of skin and at least one crotch shot. These voluptuous ladies had sent these boudoir selfies to him, Eddie growled, his eyes sparkling. Eddie’s a beefy dude, with a head like an Olmec statue. Though he wears a permanent scowl, it’s a friendly scowl. Eddie was in Friendly Lounge with his housepainting boss, Jimmy, an Italian dude who used to live in the neighborhood. After talking to Eddie, I checked out his FaceBook page. “im a fun loving guy who just wants peace in my life,” he introduces himself, and the first two photos feature Eddie with white women. In one, he’s in some bar and wearing a white T-shirt, “WHITE GIRLS LOVE ME.” With his arms outstretched, Eddie’s surrounded by eight white females and one bald white guy. The women appear to be in their 30’s and 40’s, though one, wearing granny glasses, has sweated, cursed and imbibed her way through nearly six decades, it seems. You go, grandma! In the other photo, two beaming blondes drape themselves all over Eddie. Below these shots, there’s a video of Oprah Winfrey begging her audience to vote for Hillary Clinton, and down the page, there’s a computer animation of Donald Trump making his most grotesque faces while sitting on a toilet. Talking to me, Eddie brought up the pains of being rejected by

his dad all his life. The rates of American children being born out of wedlock have been rising, calamitously, for decades, and currently stand at around 40%. Among blacks, it’s 72%. I’ve known Jimmy since high school. He lives in the suburbs too. I grew up in West Philly, right around the corner from the zoo, then I moved to the suburbs. I've been working with Tony for two years. I was in Boston for ten years. The only reason I came back here was because I had the cancer and everything. After they did the surgery, my family wanted me to come back, you know, be closer to home, in case it happens again. I was doing work. The customers loved the work. Their relatives were from Boston, and they were like, “Do you travel?” I said, “If it’s worth it, yeah.” So they put me on a job up there, and my ex-girlfriend, I stayed at her house for a while, then I bought my own place. When I moved up there, I just got work, work, work, work. I loved it up there! I loved it! I loved it! I loved it! It's funny because I'm not like most black guys, black people, you know. I love the water, being out there on the water, fishing and all types of stuff, and there are so many bodies of water up there. That's where I get my peace of mind, you know what I mean? I sit there and don't have a care in the world. I didn't have my own boat. I was renting the stuff right there. Here, it's not the same because you can't get in the water. I love fresh water. Fresh water is beautiful. I like deep sea fishing, salt water and all that, but freshwater is beautiful. This whole summer, I didn't hit the water at all. I didn't even swim this summer. Did you hear what I just said, Tony? This

whole summer, I didn't even swim. Like, what the fuck! They have lakes up there, and they have park rangers and they've got grills up there, where you can grill, volleyball nets, all that stuff. It’s $4 a car-load, so you can have six people in a car. It only takes $4 to get in there. You can swim, fish, play volleyball, and you can do that almost any time. Everybody kept telling me that it’s crazy to move up there, like they’re so prejudiced up there, but they're not. They were so nice. The first day I got up there, people were opening doors for me. They were like, “Hey, how are you doing?!” It was totally different from here, you know, and I loved it, just loved it. It's not racial at all. There were so many mixed couples, so many Brazilians, Ecuadorians, all types. Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Asians, all, all, everything. They did have a bad rap, but it's just not correct. They do still have certain areas. They still have these little gangs. Like, one of my buddies wanted to take me to a club. We get there, and I have to park down the street. They had already gone inside the club, but I had to park. When I got close, walking, two dudes stopped me. There was a black guy and a Puerto Rican guy. They were like, "Yo, you got the wrong color on." So I opened my mouth, and I said, "You’ve got to be kidding me,” and I was laughing. "You don't know my lifestyle. You’re coming at me like that?" As soon as I opened my mouth, though, they were like, "Oh,

you're not from around here. Where are you from?" I said I'm from Philly, so they were like, "You're cool, man." I laughed at them, basically. There are different levels with me. You get mad, you get angry and you get upset, you know what I'm saying? I try not to get angry, at all. Angry takes me to a totally different place, which is not good, so I try not to do that. I try to stay at one focal point and, even though I'm mad at you right now, I’ll still say something stupid so that you laugh. Let’s say you’re just bothering me. I'll walk outside or something, then come back in, and I'll start fucking with you back, but in a fun way. Even though you were fucking with me in a bad way, I'll come back and fuck with you, in a good way. I always try to turn a negative into a positive. You're not going to defeat me by your words or whatever, you know, because I'm very smart. In the 7th grade, I used to smoke weed and stuff like that, came to class all high, and I still got A's on my tests. They kept me after school, you know, because I was cheating, and I still got the same grade, so they were like, “You’re so smart to be so dumb.” My sociology teacher said, "You shouldn't be getting high. You're too intelligent for that." It stuck with me all my life. Like, me and him are FaceBook friends. I texted him, "Hey Mr. Coleman, blah, blah, blah. Yo, thank you for saying that to me when I took your class," and he was like, "Well, Eddie, I don't remember what I said." I told him, “You said that I was so smart to be so dumb," and I always took that into my brain. My kids are mixed. I love white women. Ha, ha, ha!

We all bleed the same damn color. People don't realize that racism is taught. If you take an Asian kid, a black kid and a white kid and put them in the sandbox, they’re going to play, until somebody say they can't play with that child. It's the parents. The parents may come up to that kid, “Get out of there! You can’t play with them!” You know what I mean? The kids will act how kids act. They don't know no better. They’ll play! Me, I have no problems at all. You respect me, I respect you. Like I said, I have mixed kids, but growing up, I was shot at because I was black. I walked through the wrong neighborhood. Somebody tried to shoot me with a harpoon! I've been through some shit. I can't help it if I'm black. I can't help that. That’s what he does, you know, scuba diving. He didn't hit me. I was lucky I got pushed out of the way. This was growing up in the suburbs, Lansdowne, Yeadon, Upper Darby. I got shot at, you know what I mean, because I walked on the sidewalk. Cops in Darby, they beat me up. It was a domestic call. My wife was white, OK? We had kids, mixed kids. The argument was next door, not my house, but they came at my house, threw me down the steps, beat me up, put me in a cop car, then turned around and told me, “If you don't want to go to the hospital, you better give me your address,” so I gave them my address. They were like, “You don't live there. A white girl lives there.” They were like, “Where you live at?” I gave them the address again. They were like, “You don't live there! You go to the hospital,” so guess what? I went to the hospital. They beat me the fuck up!

They took me from my house. She was living there, with me! I couldn't even fight back. My wife said, “That's my husband,” but they made her go back in the house. This was ‘92. I came home the next day. They ripped my shirt. I had a button shirt. They cut it in the back, with a razor, so I’m walking in my shirt with a hole in it. They made me walk home without no shoes. So I went to my old neighborhood. I talked to my mom and all that, and we went to the Lansdowne police station, because we knew an officer there. They said there was nothing they could do about it, because there’s a code of silence among the police officers, or so they said, so my sister took it to a different level. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Mary Mason? WHAT? My sister took it to a radio station. They had a picture of me. They had a picture of my clothes. They had a picture of me all beat up and everything. Over nothing! Over nothing! Literally. I was beaten up over nothing! I ended up suing them but, again, I was young, so I settled out of court with them. I ended up getting, like, $45,000. If I kept it going, I would have gotten a whole lot more. Like I said, again, then I was selling drugs. I had an arsenal. I had guns and stuff like that, you know. I was going to blow the police station the fuck up, you know what I mean, but the police station was right next to a school, so I couldn’t do that. No, I didn't have a record then. I never got caught. They were arguing next door. It wasn’t us! They went to the wrong house and fucked me up!

I’ve got three friends that are police officers. I trust them, but I don't trust those other ones. As soon as I saw them, it's, “Yes, sir,” whatever, but they threw me to the ground and worked me over! For two years, they harassed me. They banned me from that town. If they saw me driving, they’d pull me over. They were like, “You’ve got two minutes to get out of this town!” I had to move back to my mom for a little while. My wife and kids, too. I never got bitter over that. I get sick of reading stuff now in the news. I think about my children's security. It pisses me off, you know. Like I said, again, I already lived that life. Innocent people getting beaten up by the cops, getting killed, that could have been me, I could have gotten killed. That night. What I was doing was, I was avoiding that act, you know, which was kind of hard to do, because certain roads led that way, so I had to take back streets just to keep away. Again, I was still young too. I was going to blow the hell out of that police station, you know what I mean? I had the artillery to do it, but, again, glory to God and all that. God had my back! Otherwise, that police station and whoever was in it was gone! There’s a kid that I went to school with, they killed him in a cell. Now, when they put you in that cell, they take your shoe strings, they take your belt and they take your shirt from you, so how are you going to hang yourself? He’s 6-4. How do you hang yourself when you’re 6-4 and you’re in a 6-foot cell? You can't!

He was a good kid, but he was a bad kid, you know what I mean? I forget how he got locked up. He got locked up for something. They killed him the same night. They locked him up, then they killed him. You can look it up. It's on the internet still. My wife stayed with me. Five years later, we split up, but it wasn't over that. I had three children with her, my oldest three. She got mad because I moved on. I had another woman. I was just having another kid. I had a reason to dump her, you know what I mean? If you’re in a relationship, and you’re not growing. You’re supposed to grow together. She cheated on me. I'm sure she did. She got caught twice, so when she started doing it, I started doing it. She did it first, she did it first, she started it. All I did was work. I worked, then came home, I swear to God! I was bringing home $1,300 cash a week. I was taking out vent systems, heaters, boilers and all that. I was bringing all this money home. It’s heavy work, back-breaking stuff. All you wanted to do was go home to your shower and that's it. Eat, then sleep. I was mad because she was collecting welfare. It's like, “Why are you collecting welfare?” We've got plenty of money. We had a good life. It's because of her girlfriends. It was like, “You can get this, you get that.” Now, I had no insurance and stuff. I told her, “You can get the medical, and you can get the food stamps, but don’t get the cash,” but she went out and got it all. She got all the benefits, so I ended up in the system. I told the judge, “How are you locking me up, when my kids live with me? Like, what are you talking about? This is my house. My kids live with me and everything.” Well, it was because of her, she was getting welfare, but I didn’t know.

I was getting locked up for a month here, a month there, you know. When they locked you up in the state of Pennsylvania, they suspended your license, so how could you get to work? If you had a driving job, you couldn’t do it. It’s fucked up! I told the judge, again, here you go, “My kids live with me. I don't owe her nothing. Why am I here? If you look at the record, you’ll understand what I'm talking about here. I'm confused. You guys locked me up, like, six fuckin’ times,” so he said, “Ma’am, why is he here?” “Oh, I'm trying to get more money, blah, blah, blah blah,” so he looked and found out that she had a warrant out, so he said to me, “Mr. Calvin, you want me to lock her up? What she's doing is welfare fraud.” I said, “Your honor, no.” I said no. “We’re not together no more. I didn't suffer from you guys. I was in the system. I was in jail six times, but I'm done now.” I said, “No, that's my kids’ mother. Don’t lock her up.” He went to her, and he said, “Ma’am, this is a hell of a nice guy. Why did you do this to him?” She had no answer. She was acting real stupid. I looked at her and I said, “I told you you wasn't going to get no money.” That's what I said to her. “I told you you weren't going to get no money. The judge could have locked you up, no matter what I said. You heard what he said. It was welfare fraud. You're stupid for even bringing me in here.” I had three kids with her, my oldest three. I have a kid that's getting ready to turn four, up in Boston. All of my other kids are here. I've got 24, 21, 20, 16, 15 and one that's getting ready to turn four. I grew up without a father, so

I was going to make sure I'm not going to be like my father, you know what I mean? My three oldest, I put money into their accounts, in their names. They each have $50,000 in their bank account, right now. They've got more money than I do. Now, my younger ones, my 16 and 15-year-old, they've got about $10,000. The baby don't have shit, you know what I mean, but she's going to get hers. I was doing the smart thing with the money. Like I said, I grew up without a father, so I’m going to provide for my kids, no matter what. I'll suffer later, but as long as my kids are OK, then I'm happy. When I did get to know my father, I met him in church. I was 16 years old when I got to meet my father. I went to church with my mom. I was 16. Again, I was selling drugs, but I was also working at McDonald's and going to school. He comes into church, sits behind us and goes like this to my mom. Taps on her shoulder, “Who's that?” She almost cursed in church. “It's a shame you don't know your own son!” I turned around and almost flipped, but then I realized I was in church. I was like, “You made me and you don't know who I am?!” When she got pregnant by him, she was with him for, like, five years. She said, “I'm pregnant,” and the next day, he was gone. My father did this to five other women, the same exact thing, because I have five brothers. He did the same thing to each one of the women. My father, I almost killed him, in church. I was so angry. Yeaah. Yeaah. I was like, “How can you not know who I am? Where was you at?” Like, “Why don't you want me? What did I do to

you? I didn't do anything to you. You made me,” but there was nothing, not a fuckin' word, not a fuckin' word. I never called him dad. I never called him pop. There was nothing until I turned 18. When we graduated high school, I paid for his parking to come see me graduate. That's fucked up. Now, my grandfather and grandma loved the shit out of me. I knew them. I knew them since I was three! My grandparents, they loved me. They knew who I was. My grandpop and grandmom used to always brag about me when I walked down the street, when I walked by the house, everything like that. They’d say, “There goes my grandson.” They would tell people,” There’s my grandson.” My father came to my graduation because I begged him to come. Face to face, I was like, “I'm your son. Aren’t you proud of me for graduating, at least?” He was like, “Well, she has money.” I paid for his parking. I paid for his ticket. We got, like, three graduation tickets, and you had to pay for two more. I paid for it. I paid for him. It was $10 or something. He didn't want to pay $10 to see his son graduate. That's why I made a promise to myself. I said that when I have kids, no matter what happens between me and the girl, my kids are going to know who I am, and that I was there, so that's what I’ve done. Tony gets mad that a lot of his crew don't have cars and stuff, but when my son, my first born, made me a grandpa, I gave him my truck. I know what it's like to be on a bus with kids, grocery shopping and all that, with the kid wrapped around you, and you

carrying bags and getting on a bus. I know what it's like, so I gave him my truck. I told Tony, “I ain’t got no vehicle, man. I gave it to my son. I ain't got no car!” But it made me feel good, because I would never be like my father. Never! When I hear people, because I hear people all the time, like how they hate their mom, how they hate their dad, and I'm like, I can see how you hate your dad, and you must have a reason, but at least you're living together. I didn't have that. All I had was my mom. You've got a mom and a dad, so you should be happy, you're lucky, because I didn't have that.

Dan the Cheese Counter Man Jokers are bad news. You don’t want to sit next to one in a bar. This day, I heard, again, about a man who ordered ten shots of whiskey after getting a blow job, and a man who got a bullet in his ass while humping someone’s wife. “Had he shown up a minute earlier, I’d have gotten shot in the head!” I learnt of a guy who went to the movies with a rooster in his pants. “I know hundreds of them!” Dan threatened.

Flagged months ago, Dan drifted back that morning because he just couldn’t deal with work. When I walked in around 2PM, the 56-year-old was pestering 33-year-old B.B. to go out with him. “I don’t want to go on a date with you.” “I didn’t ask you to go on a date. I just asked if you wanted dinner, that’s all. When are we going out to dinner?” “We’re not.” “We can just talk about things, as friends. It won’t be a date. We can just talk as friends.” “I’m not your friend. You’re just some guy I know from the streets. Can you just leave me alone so I can do my work?” “I just asked if you wanted to go out to dinner, that’s all. I didn’t ask you for nothing else.” “I have nothing against you, but we’re not going to dinner, OK?” “If you want dinner, I can even bring it to you. Do you respect me for that?” “I don’t want anything from you. It’s not personal.” “I didn’t say anything inappropriate. I didn’t say anything bad. Respect don’t cost nothing.” When B.B. had to go to the bathroom, Dan asked, “You need a hand?” Now, you can see why he had been kicked out, and B.B. didn’t endure all this crap for tips, either. Dan doesn’t tip. After his

last cent is gone, he’ll ask for credit. B.B. is just tolerant. To deny anyone of boozy fellowship isn’t cool, she knows. “Oh my God, you’re showing too much leg! Cover that shoulder up! You’re too sexy to work in this bar!” Perched next to Dan was his sister, Renee. She lives in deep South Philly with her husband, Dan and two other tenants. Recently, one of them got shit faced and mouthed off, so she punched him. That’s why her right hand was in a cast. “Only my husband can call me names,” Renee explained. “My tenant’s got a hard head and didn’t even feel it. He’s Italian. I’ve known him since we were kids.” The punched man pays Renee $300 a month, plus $100 in food stamps. It’s a sweet deal. When Renee cooks, she cooks for everybody. I know an old man in her neighborhood who pays nothing to sleeps on a couch. The homeowner just feels sorry for him. During the daytime, though, he must disappear. On Renee’s tiny front lawn, there’s a large American flag, plus a tribal flag. Way before the housing boom, Renee bought her three-story for only $70,000. Back then, there were many more shootings in Point Breeze. Dan pays utilities and buys Renee cigarettes, plus some food and beer. That’s all. Hearing of Renee’s right cross, recently-jailed B.B. said, “You could have been put in handcuffs.” Dan pounced, “I’d love to put some handcuffs on you!” An hour into my conversation with Dan, B.B. texted me, “Jesus Christ, he just goes on and on, and you can barely understand

a word!” When Dan said he was related to Wayne Newton, B.B. shouted from the end of the bar, “Figs Newton!” Just about every syllable was slurred or half swallowed. With his brain sloshed in Budweiser, the white-haired, moustachioed man could barely move his jaw or tongue. Dan also has no front teeth. Don’t tell me, though, that he doesn’t make sense. In my crowd, dental care is an exotic concept. I myself haven’t seen a dentist since 2000, when I was last in Vietnam. In Friendly, I overheard a woman say, “How do you expect me to get a job with no teeth?! How will I eat?” Another, “Say goodbye to your teeth, honey. I hope you liked them when you had them.” I saw a woman in her mid 40’s spit out her false teeth, laughing at a joke, and no, it wasn’t by Dan. His jokes are never funny. Suddenly liberated, those teeth seemed so alive on the floor, I fully expected them to declare something profound or witty, before skipping away from their flustered owner, out the door. When Dan went to the bathroom, Renee leaned over and laughingly recounted the time her brother tried to commit suicide with a garden hose, “But don’t ask him about it. He’ll kill me!” It was unseasonably warm, so the bar door was open. Across the street was the lottery stand with a small counter for customers to scratch their losing tickets. The couple running it are Indians from India. Dan buys $5 from them each day. I’m three quarters Indian. I have a little bit of Irish, Dutch and German in me. I’m descended from Pocahontas, 16th generation. You know, Pocahontas, John Smith and all that. I’m a Tsenacommacah.

The reservation is in Prince Williams County in Virginia. I go there every once in a while, when I get a chance. I’m related to Wayne Newton. Down there, you get everything for free. They don’t pay no taxes. They pay for nothing. It’s not boring. They have a homecoming. They have a powwow. It’s not my style of life. I mean, you’ve got to have a car. I ain’t got no car. I’m not down there because I’m from Philly. I was born in Philadelphia. My cousin has a store on the reservation. He sells souvenirs to tourists, but they’re Cherokee shit. The tourists don’t know no better. This blonde gets on an airplane, right? Beautiful fuckin’ blonde! She goes up and sits in first class. The stewardess comes up. She says, “Ma’am, can I see your ticket?” “Yeah, you can see my ticket. Here’s the ticket.” “Ma’am, this is first class customers only. You’ve got to sit in coach.” “I’m blonde. I’m beautiful. I’m sitting right here. I’m going to California!” So the stewardess says, “OK, I’ll be right back,” and she goes to

get the pilot. The pilot comes out. He says, “Ma’am, what seems to be the problem here? Let me see your ticket.” The pilot looks at it. “Ma’am, you’ve got to sit in coach.” “I’m blonde. I’m beautiful. I’m sitting right here. I’m going to California!” The co-pilot comes out. He whispers into her ear. She gets up and goes to sit in coach! The pilot says, “What the hell did you tell her?!” “I told her this part of the plane don’t go to California.” I started working in the Italian Market in 1969, when I was nine-years-old. I worked there until I was a teenager. Then I moved to Norfolk, VA. My brother was in the navy. I lived with his wife. I had a job at a supermarket, Farmfresh, for over two years, then I worked in a warehouse. I was a driver for RC Cola for nine years. Then I moved back to Philadelphia and worked at Maglio’s Sausage Company, then I worked at a body shop, then I moved to Maryland. I worked at the United States Naval Academy for over three years. Now I run a cheese counter in the Italian Market. I work from 7:30 to 5, and I get $65 a day, under the table. I get a half hour lunch break. I also get tips, so I make about $75 a day. I carry bags of potatoes to people’s cars. You know, wholesale.

I drink three or four beers a day because I have to deal with these fuckin’ people, black people. I hate everybody. Everybody is different. People are so fuckin’ stupid. It’s like, they would ask for a quarter pound of American cheese. Why don’t you get half a pound?! It’s only $2! But they only want a quarter pound, so you have to cut it for them. A quarter pound! You can’t make a sandwich with a quarter pound! “Give me $2’s worth of turkey bacon.” Turkey bacon is $3.99 a pound. “Give me $2’s worth of turkey bacon.” Why don’t you get a whole fuckin’ pound?! You’ll be back in two days! You can’t say shit because the customers are always right. My boss tells me, “Motherfucker, go get me a fuckin’ case of lettuce!” Who are you talking to? I’m 56-years-old, and I ain’t fuckin’ dumb. Motherfuckin’ this, motherfuckin’ that, he’s like that. “There’s a customer. Get behind the fuckin’ counter!” After work, sometimes I go to the parking lot by the Mexican restaurant. I get me two cans of Colt-45 for three bucks, and a $1.25 container of Carolina rice for the pigeons. It’s very relaxing, just sitting there in that parking lot. I have hemochromatosis. My iron level is 766. I have Obamacare. I also get food stamps. I’m trying to get disability. I got shot in my leg. He shot me with a .45. Look at this side. See that right there? That’s my artery. They took a razor and did a little slit. There are still fragments inside. Ten dollars! A black man shot me for $10!

This happened in Annapolis, MD. Bluegrass festival. I brought some girl to her house. It was 3:30 in the morning. I was out partying. It was a bluegrass festival. Horseshoes, fish fry and all that. I got her home. I said, “Look, we’re here!” She was sleeping. It was 3:30 in the morning, 4 O’clock. It was summertime, 2001. I said, “We’re here! We’re here!” Then I felt a gun next to my head. I was in the car. He came to the side window. I was thinking, What is this? Then bam! He shot me in the leg, then he said, “This ain’t no game! Give me your money!” Ten dollars! I gave him $10. I said to him, “I swear to God, I only have $10. Don’t kill me.” He took off. They flew me in a helicopter. They took everything off, my shoes, my clothes, everything. They flew me to Baltimore, Baltimore General Hospital. This girl I used to live with, she stabbed me in the hand. Blood was coming out like a water fountain. Why? Because I threw a handful of change at her. I had a whole bunch of fuckin’ change. She was smoking crack. I hit her right in the fuckin’ face. I was in the bar. Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar. She walked back to the kitchen, grabbed a knife and stabbed me.

This guy’s wife passed away. I let him live with me for $50 a week, in my apartment. My girlfriend then had a baby by him. They were both smoking crack. I had to hide my fuckin’ money. I kept it in my pants, right under my nuts, and she still got it. I have two daughters, from two women. My older one is 26. She’s getting ready to get married. She’s in Georgia. My other daughter is in North Carolina. I have two grandkids, with one on the way. I also have a son, Daniel. You know what’s a gentleman? A guy who can look at a pussy and not get a hard-on. Maybe a gynecologist. If you can count every hair on her cunt and not get a hard-on, you’re a gentleman. Wish me luck. I’m going to win a thousand a week for life. I guess I ain’t going to work again! Shit. With all the things I did in my life, I’m happy to be here. I’m a good-hearted guy, man. I’ll give you the shirt off my back. I gave the shirt off my back, and the socks off my feet, to this person last year. He had nothing. He was homeless. This guy wanted to give me $900 for my van, but I told him, “Just take it.” It didn’t cost me nothing. Someone had given me the van.

I’m a giver, not a taker. I’m an Indian. I don’t let them get to me. One day at a time, man. Isn’t life wonderful?

B.B. the Bartender The flame-like tree and yellow stars from Van Gogh’s Starry Night burn on B.B.’s right shoulder. Blonde, slim and 33, she bartends at Friendly Lounge twice a week. She calls everyone “darling,” as in, “Are you good, darling? You need another one?” When B.B. told me she had lived in the Tenderloin, had drifted much, was fond of Jameson and yearned to write, I trumpeted, “I’ve got something for you!”

My apartment was but half a block away, so I went home and grabbed Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, William T. Vollmann’s Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. “Check these out! These will turn you on and get you going!” B.B. wasn’t familiar with Kawabata and Vollmann, but Jesus’ Son was a favorite. From memory, she quoted from its first tale, “I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.” “It doesn’t get any better than that!” Feeling inexplicably entitled, I then treated myself to a Maigue of Jameson as I heard B.B. confide. We’re white trash. I'm third generation American Irish, you know. When we came to this country, we were trash. We’re still trash now. My aunt's husband would steal her car once a month. He would go, “Honey, I have to go run this errand,” and he would be gone for a week. He would be hacking on MLK or Mickle Boulevard. Generally, his passengers were people who were trying to procure drugs or a prostitute, you know. They’d get pulled over. People would shove their drugs in the car. My aunt would report her car stolen, and the police would recover it in Camden, usually abandoned somewhere because he was off on a crack binge. When she got her car back, she’d call my mom’s house and I’d go over in the middle of the night to search it for drugs. When I found bags of crack, which I always did, she’d give them to me to go sell for her, then I’d

split the money with her. That was normal for me when I was 13-years-old. I had a cousin who was a prostitute. Somebody threw her out of a second story window, with a trash bag full of her clothes after her. She rolled off the roof. My stepfather was a Jehovah’s Witness, so we never celebrated birthdays and things like that. I don’t even know what my mother’s birthday is. When I was a little kid, I had to leave the classroom for all the other kids’ birthdays, and for my own birthday as well. It’s so absurd. I wasn’t allowed to say the Pledge of Allegiance. So much of my life was determined by that religion. My stepfather, he honestly believed that these were the words of God. You’d be hard-pressed to ever convince him that it was just some moron. Just go to the Wikipedia page for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and read how that religion started. It’s absurd. My stepfather, the first woman he ever dated was my aunt, my mother's older sister, and she broke up with him because she thought he was a weirdo. My stepfather was 34-years-old when he started to date my mother. She was his second girlfriend ever. He never had sex with a girl. He never had an intimate relationship with any woman. He never moved out of his parents’ house. He was a 34-year-old virgin who lived at home, and to him, that was the right way to live. And this guy was the preeminent source of information on the world. This man who had zero life experience knew every goddamn thing. My stepfather was abusive physically, emotionally and sexually. He was a pervert, a sicko. He would punish me for the smallest infraction. For breaking a glass, I would be made to stand naked in a corner, on one foot, with my nose touching

the wall, which was impossible. I was only four. I should have been in bed. That’s not even the tip of the iceberg, you know, and he believed he was right. He had a profound, profound mental illness, but not according to him. For all of his religious, self-righteous indignation at my choice to read books and pursue art, since he’s the preeminent source of knowledge for every situation, you know, this all-knowing, Godlike being he designated himself as, he lived in sin with my mother for years. He slept in the same bed with her, having sex with her, and not reproducing children. According to them, sex is for reproducing children, not for the pleasure itself, but he lived in sin with my mother for years. They were together for 10 years before they got married. Even as a child, I called him out on it. Their justification was that we, my brother and I, were such a burden, our sheer existence was such a burden, that the only way to offset that was to live in sin, so they could receive welfare. My mother worked occasionally. When I was little, she would just stay in bed all day. She would get up about half an hour before my stepfather got home from work and pretend she had done things, but she didn't do anything. I would sit there by myself all day. She watched soap operas. For a few years, she worked, then she would be out of work for a few years, then she would find another dead-end job, then she would lose that job. It was just a series of dead-end jobs that she couldn't keep. I’ve always worked. Even when I was a kid, I’ve always had a job. I worked two or three jobs at a time. When I was 18, I worked at a comic book store, and across the street, there was a Toys R Us. For years, I would do their stocks for Christmas, and I did Halloween Adventure. You know, I was a manager for

them. I would travel up and down the East Coast to set them up for the retail season. I was sleeping in my car a lot because I was working so much. I would get out of my job at the comic book store, sleep in my car for a few hours, then go to Toys R Us to work all night. I got my mother a job at Toys R Us. I got her a job at a supermarket where I worked at. She could never hold a job, though, for long. It was always somebody's fault, you know, she couldn't work. My dad had a job with his uncle who owned a sheet metal business in North Philly. My dad died on my 19th birthday, at the exact time that I was born, 8:35PM. He died of a cancer in the fluid that lines your lungs. He had worked around asbestos for one week of his life, 20 years prior to becoming ill. One week. My father was a functioning alcoholic. I didn't see him a lot. He had visitation when we were little, but he would show up too wasted to take us anywhere, or he wouldn't show up at all. We really started to see him when we were, like, 15, 14. He’d come around, and then we wouldn't see him for huge gaps of time. My father, he came back when I was 17, when I was out of the system, when I was free again. I saw him then. My father actually tried. He tried his hardest to stay sober, and he tried to keep me with him. We were sharing a two bedroom apartment with my father, my stepmother, my step brother Steven, my half brother Sean and myself. Me and my dad slept in the living room. I slept on the love seat. My dad slept on the sofa. The judge didn't find that to be a suitable living arrangement. It was far better for me to live in a jail cell, among strangers. My father tried so hard, too. He tried to stay sober to keep me. I know that it hurt him deeply that I got

taken out that time. I know that he felt like it was a personal failure of his. I hadn’t broken any law, so they couldn't put me in jail, but they couldn’t release me because I had nowhere to go, so every 28 days, they would just move me to another facility. Imagine moving every 28 days when you’re a teenager. Imagine changing schools every 28 days. I was stuck in this quagmire for years. There were so many youths that were in a similar predicament. I wasn't in foster care or in a group home. Group homes had a shortage of beds, and they were generally reserved for people who had broken the law. I was locked up in Bordentown, which was a maximum security youth detention. It's where they sent murderers and rapists if they were under 18, you know. I was locked up in Lakeland, which was also a maximum security detention center. I shared a cell with a girl named Belinda. Belinda stabbed her boyfriend to death when she was 14 for a gold chain and a pager. She killed her boyfriend. That's who I shared a cell with. I had a mat on the floor. Belinda, I’ll never forget her. She was 17. She was going to get released on her 21st birthday. I was the last person in New Jersey to use the slave law to sue the state and my parents to get custody of myself. I became emancipated. I was recognized as an adult at 17. I was in the system for five years, so I had five years to look into it. Immediately, they changed the law. You can't do that anymore. I had an extremely dedicated social worker. At the time, I was an asshole and didn't appreciate her for what she did for me, but that woman genuinely cared. Most of them don't, and it’s

because they are underpaid and overburdened. They have massive caseloads and people just fall through the cracks. I could have been one of those. Thankfully, I did have one or two people who were in my corner. Otherwise, things would have turned out much differently. I left home when I was 14, and I have never been back. The last time I saw my mother was at my father’s funeral, when I was 19. My grandmother and I were very close. I lived with her off and on. I quit school my 11th grade year to take care of my grandmother. She passed away when I was 17. After she died, I left for California. At 17, I moved to San Francisco. I had never been out there. The plane ticket was $233, one way. The plan was to just go there and get a job. I had $40 in my pocket and no place to stay. Before I left, I did a little bit of research on Wikipedia. I knew nobody out there. A lucky thing happened to me. When I got to San Francisco International, I found a couple of cameras. To this day, I wonder about the origin of these cameras. On them were all these men of Middle Eastern descent. Obviously, I don't know their national origin but they looked Middle Eastern. There were all these photographs of underpasses and bridges. It's like I found some terrorist’s fuckin’ cameras! I didn't call the police because I needed the money. I hocked them. They were good, high end cameras. I had to feed myself, you know. I got a BART pass. Transportation out there is beautiful. It's not like here where it’s poverty transportation, meant for poor people. Rich people have cars. Out there, it's for everybody to use, and it’s very effective and efficient. I just used my BART pass and traveled all over for a week. I got to know the city. I went on every train and trolley line, you know.

When I first got there, I lived in the YMCA, in the Tenderloin. It was $35 a week. There was a shared bathroom but you had your own private room. It was fine. The Tenderloin is still nicer than any neighborhood I grew up in, and nicer than any neighborhood I lived in in Philly or New Orleans. I found a job within a week, at Trader Joe. Eventually, I moved into a beautiful apartment on Polk Street, three blocks from the wharf. I stayed in San Francisco for just over a year. When I was 30, I moved to New Orleans. I lived there for over two years. New Orleans is like a different world. It's the last Banana Republic. It's as free as you can be and still be in the United States. I got a job immediately but it wasn't a good job. Eventually, I lucked out and got a job at the Dungeon, a heavy metal bar. It's been there since 1969. When I first got there, I went out and bought an 8th of weed, you know, really nice weed. I was going around the city, drinking. I was on my bike, riding around. I ended up locking my bike up, because I got too drunk. Eventually, I wanted to take a cab. The driver agreed to take me back to Araby, which is as far south as you can get in New Orleans and not be in Chalmette, the next town over. The guy drove the dead opposite direction, towards the ghetto. It makes the worst part of North Philly look like a beautiful suburb. The guy drove me to some seedy motel, then tried to jump into the back seat with me, so I ran out of the cab and into the motel. I was just banging on doors. I didn't want to end up murdered or raped or, you know, left in the fuckin’ bayou. The cab driver called the police and said that I refused to pay my fare. The cop then robbed me of all my cash, my whole

paycheck, all my weed, then left me there with no way to get home, with no idea where I was. I don't trust people who don't have a distrust for the police. I have never, ever met a good one. I have friends who have stories that are worse than that. You know what the cop told me? I said, "How can you do this? You're supposed to help me. This man drove me me here and I don't know where I am." He's like, “Call the police!” That's what he told me to do, and laughed, after he had robbed me. The police told me to call the police. I think men's experiences and women’s experiences are much, much different. The cops in Camden would pick up the prostitutes. They would haul them in for solicitation, then take them to Morgan Boulevard and fuck them. If the girls didn't fuck them, they knew they were going to jail, so the police basically raped people. It's like, who cares about her, she's just a whore anyway. The police there was so bad, they had to fire them all. Everything had to be cleaned out, it was so fuckin’ corrupt. They have cameras in place of officers now. They can pinpoint a gunshot within feet of the bullet striking. It's fuckin’ amazing. They can tell an automatic rifle vs. a shotgun. They have cameras throughout the city. There is such a distrust of the police in Camden, people take care of shit themselves, like if they found a pedophile on the block, they would just beat him within an inch of his life. They would rather handle things themselves than call the police. When somebody robbed a house, they would just handle it themselves.

Things happen for a reason. People don't have this distrust naturally. Most white Americans are raised to trust the police. If you want to get a view of humanity, if you want to see how the other half live, go over to Camden and take a walk through the streets. I like gritty cities. I like New York before it got cleaned up. New Orleans, Detroit, Philadelphia. Detroit is great for exploring, if you like urban exploring. There are all these abandoned buildings. Last Christmas, I went out to Detroit and stayed for a while. There's a huge transient population in the United States, and places like San Francisco and Los Angeles attract that. Our system is specifically built that way. Capitalism is designed to create a population of disenfranchised people. Many people have heard of Skid Row, but they can't wrap their minds around it. It’s larger than all of these little, tiny towns in Pennsylvania. It’s massive. New Orleans is much the same way, but they have these squatting laws. You can squat in a building, you know, if you invest money into that building. If you get the plumbing, you can take control of that building and it can be yours legally. I went down there to get serious about my writing, but I became serious about my drinking. I was interested in fiction. I still write, but I haven't had anything published in ages. I always carry a notebook. I think my real life gets in the way of my intellectual or interior life. You have to make money, and the past several years, I've had a lot of moving. Moving is good but also exhausting. I like to switch it up and I like to move around. I've been back to Philly for a year-and-a-half, maybe, not even, and I've moved, like, I can't even tell you, 30 times maybe?

I spent the last two days in Doylestown, at my ex-fiance's place. We've been broken up for about a month. I was in jail for a week about a month ago. It's a long story. Charlie was wasted and accused me of stabbing him. He had a cut about this long. It's a little, tiny cut. He produced the knife. With domestic violence, they don't play around. Having been a victim of domestic violence, I can give you an example. I lived with a man for a year or so. We both drank a lot, like, we drank a lot. He would get into these rages. He was sure that I was cheating on him and I was lying to him, and he would hit me out of nowhere. I never called the police on him but the neighbors did, and he got hauled off to jail. They don't play with that. If they let you go one time, the next time they come out, it's to pull somebody's body. People get killed. I have a good friend who's a criminal defense attorney, one of the best in the state. He took my case for free. Charlie hasn't shown up for any of the court hearings. The last one will be on the 7th of October and it's going to get thrown out, hopefully. I don't want to sue him. I don't want anything. I love him. I want to make things work with him. I adore him. We were engaged for about 6 months, and we'd been together for 2 years. I met Charlie in New Orleans. He's the only reason why I came back here. Charlie is from Philly. He was homesick and he missed his family. Down there, he couldn't make the kind of money he was used to. Our relationship was going to end. He was going to leave and I was going to stay. He asked me to come three times. The third time, he promised that he was going to be good to me, someday. Charlie works with his family. He works in construction, demolition, renovation, that type of things. He's not hard up for

money. He's a fuckup in many ways, but not that way. Charlie’s a 35-year-old child. It's a plague of our generation. I've met people who came from far less than him and have struggled far more, so no, I don't see that as a viable excuse. I was in the Round House for over a day. It doesn't sound like a lot of time until you are incarcerated, when you're in a 4 by 4 by 8, and you share that with two other people, and all you have is an iron bench and a toilet, you know, and a cheese sandwich every 12 hours, and a 6 ounce bottle of water. Twenty-four hours doesn't seem like a long time but it feels like fuckin’ forever when you’re there. I was in county jail for a week. It was a fairly awful experience. It was dehumanizing. It was meant to be dehumanizing. A week is nothing, but it was the last week of the month. I missed my Saturday shift at work. We were moving out of our house. We had to be out of the house before the 1st, so by the time I got out of jail, I had one day to find a place to live and pack all my belongings. If I hadn't been bailed out of jail in time I would have lost everything I owned. I would have been on the street. Bail was $4,000, so it's 410. I got my job back, thankfully. I could have easily lost this job. I would have had no money and no place to stay. I had no phone in jail. When you're arrested, they don’t just give you your things back. They hold it. I had to get a ride back up to State Road to get my things back. It had to be between 9AM and 11AM. They make it very difficult, too, especially if you're poor. They released me at 9 O'clock at night, and I didn't have my phone. They give you a dollar for a transfer and a subway token. That's our system. If they release you from the Round House, they don't give you anything. If I had made bail there before I got to county, I wouldn't have had a dime to my name. It's a terrible system we have in this country.

When I was arrested for this domestic violence incident, this aggravated assault, alleged stabbing, they didn't even ask me anything. They didn't take photos of my bruises and I had these bruises on my face and body. This whole thing is biased. Anybody can make an allegation against you, and you don't get an opportunity to defend yourself. You don't get to speak to the judge. You speak to your public defender at court, five minutes before you get tried, so they don’t know you. They don't care about your case, you know. It doesn't matter. This system is not designed to help or support people. It's not with justice in mind. Most people have no idea. The media portray the Black Lives Matter movement or just my entire generation as, like, this privileged, entitled, PC, spoiled generation, but they have no idea. We’re a generation of kids who grew up alone, with no fathers. When we’re 8 years old, we have keys to our houses, do our own laundry, make our own meals. We've been on our own our whole lives. This is the first generation in American history that are less educated than the generation before us. We’re underpaid. We’ll never own houses. We’ll never pay off college debts. Those of us who did go to college can't pay off student loans. We're underpaid, and there's nothing to do about it. There's nowhere to go, you know. In essence, we're totally screwed. I know this sounds awful, but the best thing that could happen for this country is for the Baby Boomer generation to just die. Like, they ruined everything for everyone. They fucked us all. They could be working class and have a good life. They got the middle class but then they destroyed it. They destroyed it.

Greed destroyed this country. The middle class then and middle class now are not the same thing. There is no true middle class. My mother's generation and the generation before them, they could go to college for a reasonable amount of money. They could get a decent job. There was a salary. Imagine that! Nobody can imagine having a job with a salary, with benefits and health insurance. I have never had health insurance. Never! I don't have Obamacare. When I filed my taxes last year, I didn't even get penalized for it because I didn't make enough money. Technically, I qualify but I don't want to deal with it. I don't want anything from this government. I don't want food stamps. I don't want their money. I don't want anything. Keep it! I don't want to feel beholden. I don't want to feel like I'm getting something for free, you know. My teeth are broken, I go to the dentist and get them fixed myself. I don't mind working for what I have, and I don't mind going without. If you get really sick, you can go to the hospital and say you’re indigent. They can't deny you service in an emergency room. You need to be very specific with the words. You need to say you’re indigent. When they ask you your name, I usually never give them my real name. I have, like, $7,000 in medical debts. You can go bankrupt and it doesn't clear you of medical debts. So many Americans go bankrupt because of medical debts, but they will still owe that money. There is a huge wealth gap in this country between the haves and the have nots. I think a lot of people don't realize it. I think a lot of white, southern, American people think that brown and black people, if you keep them down, if you cut those people out and keep them oppressed, that somehow they’ll be able to buy into a system that was never designed for them in the first

place. That somehow brown and black people are the ones, they’re the cause of the problem. They've been fed that their whole lives. They don’t realize that it's not an issue of race in this country. It's an issue of wealth. It's an issue of class. It’s class warfare. By dividing us in that way and keeping us separate, by keeping us occupied with things that don't matter, we don't see the larger picture, which is the wealth inequity in this country. When you’re mad at the guy who makes $8 an hour at the bank and the CEO is taking $200 million bonuses to rip you off, you’re mad at the wrong person. There's a whole lot of that going on all the time here. The poor white people, they are mad at the government because we have a black president. They're mad at black people and brown people for being poor even though poor whites represent the largest proportion of people getting Medicaid and food stamps. White people receive more of that than any minority in this country, you know, but they think that if they can keep those people dispossessed, they’ll be able to buy into the system where they’ll make more money. They’ll be able to work or buy their way into being in a higher class, but that's not the way it works. I’ve known this one black kid since he was 14 or so. He’s like a little brother. I look out for him. I consider him family, but we don’t share any blood. I love him. He’s got a good head on his shoulders. He’s 19 now. He was born in the hood. There's no opportunity for him. His little brother is in jail. His older brother is in jail. He's the only man in his family that's not arrested. He takes care of his grandmother and his mother. His grandmother is 96-years-old. He supports his brothers. He puts money on their books, pays the lawyers.

He works his ass off. When that phone rings, it means he’s got work. He’s got to hustle off and go sell drugs. I make him come by once a week to say hi to me. He doesn’t get anything out of it. I want to make sure he’s OK. When I was in jail, the only person whose phone number I knew was his, so I called him. Through him, I could talk to other people. If it wasn’t for that kid, I’d be sitting in jail still. I’ve been engaged three times. I’m loyal to a fault. I’ve never cheated. I’ve been cheated on so many times. I don’t understand people who need to do that, and it’s not like I’ve had no opportunities. As a young woman, people hit on you all the time. It seems so sad. You must have such low self esteem to want to be validated in that way, to need that attention. I don’t want that attention. I don’t see the point. It’s just sad. When I was younger, I wanted to be an architect or a writer. I wanted to save enough money so I could travel. People are fascinating. The world is beautiful. The country is huge. The world is massive. There’s so much to see. I’ve never understood people who don’t travel. Most people live and die within 50 miles of where they’re born. That’s statistically a fact. I’ve always had a wanderlust. I’ve always liked traveling. Moving around so much as a kid probably has a big part to do with that. I wanted to tend bar, because that’s a job skill you can take anywhere you go. I never did anything I couldn’t walk away from. If you’re a bartender, drinking is a lifestyle, but I never became addicted. I don’t get drunk anymore. People go, “Oh, I don’t know where I’ll work, and where I’ll live.” That doesn’t even occur to me. Like, I know I’ll figure it

out. I’ll always land on my feet. I’ve slept outside, you know. Things happen. I’ve never gone through a large gap of homelessness, just a couple days here and there. I know plenty of people who feel anger about their hardship and their lot in life, but it didn’t serve me any longer. Forgiveness is an amazing thing. I’m an adult now. I can’t be angry about something that happened 20 years ago. What’s the point? For so long, I was so consumed by anger, I didn’t feel anything else. I couldn’t love. I still don’t trust people. I’m not capable of it. I love my fiance. I have faith that he can change. I want to give him an opportunity that was denied me. If you want a second chance, you must give it. If you want love or forgiveness, you must give it. Being angry made my heart sick, my head sick. I’ve been physically ill from stress, from sadness. I couldn’t get out of bed. You must put a tourniquet on your anger or it will eat you alive. Some people have the hardest time admitting they were wrong in the first place. It’s out of the question, you know. My mother never acknowledged that she was wrong. She was never able to apologize to me because, in her mind, she didn't do anything wrong. She can't even see her part in it. She allowed my stepfather to do what he did to me. She was abusive by her inaction. I’m not angry with her. I feel sorry for her. I wish I could help her. I wish she could step outside of herself and see, that they can both see what they’ve done. I just feel sorry for them. With that being said, I can’t let them be a part of my life. I feel like the luckiest person who ever lived. Most of my friends are dead, or tied down with a bunch of kids they don’t want and can’t take care of. I’m in an occupation that I love, and I have my freedom.

Katy the Bartender and Nursing Student Jonathan Revusky was in Philly for a few days, and I had a great time showing Jon around. We went to Kensington, Fishtown, Camden, Point Breeze, Little Cambodia and Rittenhouse Square, all but the last at the sinking end of the economic scale, places I’m well familiar with. At Jack’s Famous Bar, we ordered a cheesesteak and a roast beef sandwich for just $4 each, my kind of price, and I thought our lunch excellent. In Camden, I steered Jon to a bodega where a cheesesteak was just $3.50. Jon said, “I would never have walked into a place like that, if I wasn’t with you.” Most Americans wouldn’t go to Camden, period, even if you paid them. Jon also introduced me to an alien Philadelphia, for he treated me to fancy joints like Paradiso Italian restaurant and Fogo de Chao Brazilian Steak House. When you can burn a Ben Franklin for dinner, life certainly becomes so much more civilized and soothing, and the lower class is mostly reduced to beautiful and smiling servers. “Is there anything else I can get you?” beamed the wholesome, slim waitress with the cute dimples. Though living comfortably in Spain, Jon is well aware that his homeland is in steep decline. Unlike me, he’s not so sure there will be civil unrest, “I go to places like Brazil, with its vast favelas, and the poor people do carry on. Perhaps Americans will just become poorer and poorer, and get used to it.” As we strolled past Center City’s best collection of chi-chi shops and restaurants, Jon remarked, “Any top-tier Chinese city, like Shanghai, Shenzen, Guangzhou, etc., is, in most respects, so vastly superior to any American city at this point, it’s crazy. Not only do Americans not know this, but, as you pointed out, some would even get violently enraged at you if

you said this. You mean this isn’t the best place in the world??!!” Campaigning, Trump said, “Our airports are like from a thirdworld country,” not that anything is going to be done about it, for we’re worse than broke. Living in a near continent-sized country, it’s not easy to experience any other nation’s achievements, so few Americans have had a chance to be awed, say, by Berlin’s Central Rail Station or Seoul’s Incheon Airport. After Jon left, I returned to one of the bars we hit to interview a bartender I’d known for a while. I thought of Katy because she had spent a decade mingling with the rich, if only as a server. As a housecleaner for many years, I did the same. Katy agreed to talk if I would neither photograph her nor name her Center City bar. Deal! I was born in Frankford. I went to a Catholic grade school, St. Joachim. I read, four years ago, one of the most horrific stories ever. This girl was coming home from the bus. She's walking down Church Street, past St. Joachim. She was pulled into the school yard and raped, brutally. When the police found her, they said she was unrecognizable. It was one of the worst brutalities they had ever seen. She was in a coma for three weeks. Not only that, he gave her AIDS. I remember reading this article and thinking, This is where I grew up. This is where I spent the first eight years of my life. Frankford is like Compton now. I went to Little Flower, then Frankford High School. It was lame growing up in the Northeast. I had no favorite subjects. I love music. Both of my parents were jazz musicians. My mother was a jazz singer. She was so awesome! My father

played drums. He was pretty well known in South Philly. I came out of the womb with music, although I never played anything, which is kind of odd. I can sing a little. I love Miss Ella. I went down to Delaware Avenue to hang out when I was 18. I started to bartend. I worked at the Aztec. I came in, I applied and that was it. I also worked at Rock Lobster. It was really good money. I liked the diversity of people. It was a little glamorous. I got to meet a lot of people. At a restaurant, you don’t have to wait for a table after a while, because you may have waited on that waiter. Things like that. I broke my toe. I was working at Rock Lobster, and I was limping. This guy went, “What’s wrong?” It turned out he was a foot doctor. I said I didn’t have any insurance. He said, “Don’t worry about it.” He operated on my toe, everything, and all for free! I used to be really wild. I did a lot of drugs. My friend was a bartender at the Cave. They had male strippers in the back, lots of bachelorette parties. It’s so fuckin’ hilarious. This lady, she tipped him a ten-dollar food stamp! My manager was meeting a girl after work. She lived in Gladwyne. It’s, like, the most prestigious area in Philly. Very, very money oriented. He just smoked a bowl, so he’s a little paranoid. He thought he was going to get pulled over because he was black. They went through these back roads. He said, “What are these three Great Danes doing in the middle of the road?” They were deer! He was a manager at one of the hottest clubs, so he got a lot of ass. Ha, ha! During the Blizzard of '93, I went to Miami for a vacation and

decided I was going to stay. I still have tons of friends down there. You're just in a better mood when it's sunny out every day. When you have such a bad winter, and everything's gray, gray, the sky, and there's black snow on the ground, and it's piled up, you know what I mean, and it's freezing. You go to Miami, and it's bright! Instead of pigeons outside, you see two dozen parrots. It's beautiful. I was a cocktail waitress at the number one club in the United States. It’s called the Velvet. They’re actually doing a documentary about it. It was so crowded, people would wait for hours to get in. It’s so bizarre. We had the Money Party on Monday nights. You paid the cover, and everybody received an x amount in fake money. It was, like, anything goes. Whoever accumulated the most fake money at the end of the night won a grand prize. People would do the craziest things. Let’s put it this way, no cameras allowed! Girls would be going at it, on the bar. People would get naked. It was out of control. We had a room called the Blue Room. One day, the Sugarhill Gang came in, so the DJ put their song on. There were, like, 14 of us in the room. He got up and he went, “See, I am Wonder Mike, and I’d like to say hello! To the black, to the white, the red and the brown, the purple and yellow!” He picked up my hand and he started singing it, so I was, like, with the lead singer of this band. It was so fuckin’ awesome! He was singing to me. I met Charlie Sheen. He was so down-to-earth. I loved him. He’s one of my favorite people, as far as, like, famous. He started telling me jokes, and if I laughed, he gave me 20 bucks. Then I had to start telling him jokes. If he laughed, he would give me 50 bucks!

A lot of them were cheap. John Cusack was cheap. Charles Barkley was a good tipper. Dave Grohl, of the Foo Fighters, would tip people a thousand dollars. The worst tipper was Prince. He was horrible! Prince told the bouncer he wanted beautiful girls. They had to be drop-dead beautiful. He ran them ragged, then tipped each a dollar. He tipped the DJ a thousand to play his newly released CD. The DJ was already getting paid, like, 700 bucks. Prince was such a dick. There was a music venue next to the club. One of the bouncers told me, “Prince is next door! Prince it next door!” It’s because Sheila E. was performing. I remember standing literally right next to Prince while watching Sheila E. It was such an amazing thing! There were literally, like, 23 people in the whole place, and I was next to Prince! It was so overwhelming. It’s Prince, you know. It’s still Prince! The first time I went to a chic party, I was on this 15-milliondollar yacht. We had, like, Matt Dillon there, Janet Jackson there, and I remember thinking, What the hell am I doing here?! I’m from Frankford! It means nothing, but I remember thinking, My life is so fun. I was so wrapped up in it. I never finished college. Oh my God, it was such a great time. It was the best year of my life. I wish I could go back, for one day. Nah, a week! Ha, ha! I’m from Philly. We didn’t have that kind of interactions. In Miami, you’d walk by and you’d go, “Oh, that looks like Gianni Versace,” and it was Gianni Versace! The last time I was in Miami, I was a clothing stylist. It's when people want to get dressed for really big events. We manufactured our own clothing. It's very performance, very

expensive. It's stage clothing. Beautiful. Crystals. We also had high-end couture. I'd put an outfit together. Very wealthy people would come in. One time, I had this guy who’s on Fortune 500. He brought his wife, her best friend, his daughters, the maid, two hairdressers, and those dresses were like $4,000 a pop. They're so rich, they don't know what to do with their money. I also worked retail. Once, this teenager came in. She was sitting on the couch and she was sobbing. I said, “What’s the matter?” “My dad, he won’t give me money to buy the dress.” Sob, sob. “Really?” “He gave me 5,000 this month. The dress is 4,000, and I only have 2,000.” Sob, sob. Fuckin’ insanity. Insanity! You fuckin’ privileged… Like, get a fuckin’ real problem! I remember this one guy who was hanging out with all the bouncers. He was an heir to Nestle. His parents thought he was going to college in Miami. It's nuts! He partied all the time and wasn't even enrolled. Every time his parents came, he would get the books out and take them around the campus. It was crazy! He thought it was funny as shit. I could never do that to my parents. I came back to Philly because it's my home. I love my city now more than ever. I know people who moved to Brooklyn and New York a decade ago, and they're all moving back. I love it. It's so awesome here. I never got married. I came close four times.

I love kids, even though I never had them. I have a calling for them, especially for children that are underprivileged, sick, anything... It’s just like a soft spot for them. Some people love animals. You know, I love kids. One time, I was meeting my girlfriend on South Street for lunch. I had these crazy shoes on, and these really dark, Jackie O glasses. They were so dark that even in the sun, you could barely see. So I had a couple shots of tequilas, margaritas, and something to eat. I had a little buzz going on. She left to go back to work. Again, getting back to kids. I love them! I can't even walk by a cute kid. Awwww, I have to say something to them. So I'm walking down the street, and I see this little kid, and he got like a wifebeater on, cut-off shorts, Doc Martens, and he was like this big! The kid was so cute, so I went, "Look at you! You're just a little baby! Look at your outfit! I love your outfit! You're such a cute baby!" The people who were with him were just appalled, and the baby was going like this. He stared me down! I took off my glasses. He was a midget! I tried to volunteer for a Vietnamese orphanage. Two years ago, I went onto this website. They said they were looking for volunteers, but it’s a strict process. These babies were so beautiful, but they had these deformities. They need constant medical care. I’m used to instant gratification. I want to do it now, but the reality of it is, I can’t do it now. You have to be a college graduate. If you’re in nursing, or any kind of healthcare, your odds of being accepted are excellent. If you’re in nursing school, it would look good on your resume,

but that’s not why I would do it. I’m going to nursing school because I want to help the sick, but I’m changing my mind about that. Now that I’ve lost so many people in the past two years, I can’t even step foot into a hospital. I can’t even stand the sight of a hospital. My one best friend died in a car accident last year. I lost my mother 18 months ago. My roommate also died last year. I found him dead. Aneurysm, he was 42. Another friend hung himself. One girlfriend overdosed on pills. She did it on purpose. Another friend died of a kidney transplant that didn't take. There was one more person. There was so much, I can't even remember. At that point, I was so tired of hospitals and people being sick. I'm tired of it. It's a disaster because I have all these credits for nursing, and now I don’t want to go. I can’t stand it! Every time I go to a hospital, I’m reminded of my dead dad, my dead friends. Who wants to be reminded of that every time? It smells like death. You must have a calling for it. If you do it for the money, good luck with that! You're going to hate your job. Healthcare is one of the biggest problems we have. My friend who died in a car accident, he had just moved to L.A. A lot of time, when you get a job, you have to wait six months before you can apply for health insurance. When the ambulance came, his friend went to the hospital, but he didn’t, since he didn’t have any insurance. When he got back in his car, he hit a cement wall and died instantly. When they did the autopsy, they found out he had had a concussion prior to hitting the cement wall. That’s a problem in America. It’s an American problem. Johnny didn't go to the hospital because he was afraid of the doctors' bills. It's just a really hard thing. I miss him terribly.

This is the first job I’ve had as a bartender in about ten years. I like people. You see, there are a lot of people who don't like people. I genuinely like people. You hear all the time, “I hate people! I hate people!” I don’t. I’m not an isolater. I can’t spend a lot of time by myself. It’s depressing. I find people very interesting. I like to get to know people. I like to joke around. I like to talk about current events. I like the diversity. This bar, it’s so different than I’ve ever worked. There is so much diversity that walks in here, it's unbelievable. Like you'll have a Mexican from across the street who doesn't speak any English, then you'll have a journalist for National Geographic who’s now just coming back from, like, wherever he was. It’s crazy. It’s crazy! There’s a guy, Chang, that comes in here. He’s really touchy feely. He's so nice. I feel bad for him. His English is not so good. There's a communication barrier, so I went on Google Translate and had a full-blown conversation with the guy. I really got to know him. That bump on his head? He probably fell off the barstool! I swear to God, if you told me 20 years ago, that this is where I'd be right now, I'd never have believed it. I really thought I would have, like, a great career. In whatever. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grow up. Isn’t that terrible? I have this empty hole in my stomach, and it gives me so much anxiety. I was really wrapped up in the scene, really wrapped up. I was ambitious. In my 20’s, I was trying to figure out what my goals were. I wanted to have a purpose, to do something meaningful.

At 30, I was a coke head. Even my drug addiction was glamorized. It wasn’t Kensington and Allegheny. It was Dom Perignom at the Hilton, so it was a lot harder to admit that I had a problem. My rock bottom wasn't like Kensington Avenue. I couldn’t even relate to that kind of addiction, but I wasn't any better than that person at K&A. When you get sober, you realize that drug isn’t the problem, it's just a symptom. You stop doing one thing, and it will metastasize into something else. I stopped doing drugs, and I developed a severe, severe eating disorder. I starved myself. I meditate. I love it. I don’t have a TV at my house. I'm 43 and I don't know what my goals are. It’s giving me a lot of anxiety. I can't sleep at night. You have no idea.

Patrick the Ex-Computer Programmer This week, a 55-year-old tourist from Texas was killed when he fell onto the subway tracks at 13th Street Station. He and his wife had just visited the Liberty Bell. Going by the station the next day, I half expected to see some sort of memorial, but there were no flowers, cards or candles. I was heading to Kensington, a place I have written about repeatedly, the last time ten months ago. Kensington is always in the news for the wrong reasons. So far this year, there have been 34 assaults, 7 rapes and 2 homicides, but summer is still nearly a month away. As a prosecutor once joked to me, “There’s a correlation between ice cream consumption and crime!” On May 10th, a woman who had been beaten to death was found in an abandoned Kensington home, then two days later, a video surfaced of a Kensington crowd casually watching a man repeatedly punching a woman lying on the street. Some even laughed. The man who filmed it said he didn’t want to intervene because “it’s dangerous out here.” On the sidewalk, there was a canopy, the kind erected for food tables during block parties, but this communal gesture is rather farcical in context, for the community not only failed to stop the assault, it didn’t even make the assailant hesitate out of shame or fear. It was somehow natural for him to attack a woman in front of his neighbors. Two men and two women stood under the canopy to watch the violence. Walking down Kensington Avenue, I noticed that all the Vietnamese barbershops have jacked up their cheapest haircut

from five to six bucks. At Jack’s Famous Bar, a pitcher of Yuengling has also gone from $3.50 to $4. Still, these are rock bottom prices. Some overheard bits from Jack’s: “When I was in detox, I was the only one there for alcohol. Everybody else was there for heroin!” “When you hear an ambulance around here, you know what it’s for.” “I told her there ain’t nuttin’ in the pina colada mix you buy in the supermarket. You have to get your own shit to mix with it.” “That’s Madonna from the 70’s. That woman is as old as me!” As is common in bars for old heads, the songs are often nostalgic and speak of loss. “He said he’s goin’ back to find / Ooh, what’s left of his world / The world he left behind / Not so long ago.” Well, there is no going back to a Kensington of half a century ago, for its factories are all gone. This old Irish neighborhood has seen influxes of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Vietnamese. More recently, yuppies and hipsters have crossed into its southern edge. There are also quite a number of drug addicts from all over. This day, I met a worn out young woman from Texas and a 54-year-old man from Maine. With his bearish built, ruddy face and lush, white beard, Patrick would make a perfect Santa Claus. Each day, you’ll find him panhandling at Kensington and Westmoreland, across from the Korean-owned J&J diner. After ten years in Florida, Patrick came to Philly to have better access to drugs. Since he doesn’t drink, Patrick balked at my suggestion to go to Jack’s Famous Bar, so we ended up sitting in J&J, with him sipping a tall glass of milk, and me finishing all too quickly half a pot of coffee. Speaking mostly of despair, Patrick often seemed disdainful. If a man really wants to lie

down and dissolve, there’s nothing anybody can do, but I sure hope to see Patrick again. I left Maine. I wanted something different. I had a friend in Jacksonville, Florida, and things were pretty good for a while, then I discovered crack. It was crack until about five years ago, and it has been dope since. I’ve been on the streets for almost two years. I’ve been clean, on and off, for the last twenty years, but this is the longest stint I’ve been using, you know, every day. Ten to fourteen bags a day, usually, sometimes more. Each bag costs ten bucks. Standing there panhandling, I average about a hundred bucks a day. It all goes to dope pretty much. Since October, I figure I’ve gotten $20,000 just standing there. Saturday, I made about 180. The day before Christmas, I made almost 300. The day before Easter, I made almost 200. The worst day out here is 50, 60 bucks. A hundred a day is nothing. I made six figures. At one job, I made 400 a day sitting at a desk playing with a computer. A hundred a day standing there ain’t no big deal. I think it’s pathetic when people say a hundred a day is great money. That’s sad. You need a new fuckin’ job! That’s fuckin’ minimum wage! I’m a computer guy. Freelancing, I make a hundred an hour. I’ve been a computer guy since I was 12. I discovered the computer back in 1973, in 7th grade. I’m pretty good at it. I have a spot behind Dunkin Donuts. I have a sleeping bag

there. I sleep outside. I haven’t had anything bad happen here. Kensington ain’t half as bad as people think it is. I get my dope from right around the corner. Any situation someone is in, it’s incumbent upon them to change it. Me included. I mean, I’m just stuck. I’d rather be fuckin’ dead, plain and simple. I’ll give you an example. Last June, I shot a bundle of dope, took a couple of bennies, with the intention of not waking up. When I did wake up, I couldn’t stand up. Somehow I wound up with a pinched sciatic nerve in my vertebrae. I’ve been in pain ever since. It’s been almost a year. This is the first time I’ve ever done that, doing dope for the pain. Before, I was just doing dope to do dope. When I get a decent chunk of change, I’ll try it again. Take more bennies, and more dope. I’m fuckin’ tired. If I had a gun, I’d blow my brains out, but I don’t have a gun. My mom is in Maine, but I won’t go back there, because there’s nothing up there. There’s a lot of appeal, but appeal doesn’t pay the bills. The economy is pathetic. I can’t get dope. I can’t get this situation dealt with. I’d be in pain every fuckin’ day. I wake up every day, it’s the same routine. I’d rather be dead. I’m really tired of it. I’m here for one fuckin’ reason. There’s dope right there. That’s the only fuckin’ reason I’m sitting in Kensington. There’s no other reason to be here! I’m not from here. The place is a shit hole. It serves only one

purpose. Dope! Our medical system is a joke. I know people who get pills, prescriptions for pain pills, whatever, and they sell them, OK? I have a legitimate pain, and I can’t even get one. That’s how fucked up our medical system is. It’s pathetic! Across the board, it’s fuckin' pathetic. People like me, they want to put on Methadone or Suboxone... so I want to be a slave to you?! I’d rather be a slave to dope! You want to be a slave to government, for real?! Last time I read about slaves in government, it was Nazi Germany! Fuck government! Government doesn’t do anything right. They spend a lot of money to fuck things up. That’s all government has ever done in our country, and probably historically. I don’t want the government in my life! They’re in my life enough! Those pills are a substitute for heroin. I can get heroin anywhere, any time. To get Methadone, you have to play their games. You have to be here at this time, you have to attend these groups. No, no, no! I’m a Libertarian. I believe in pure, unadulterated freedom. It doesn’t mean you’re free to kill people and rape or burn houses. That’s not what freedom is. Get out of my life! Let me live my life! I’ve been a Libertarian ever since I discovered that being a Democrat was for idiots. I’m proud to say I’ve never voted for a president that won.

My first election, I voted for Carter, but he was too honest and had integrity. That’s not good. I voted Democrat till the mid 80’s. I voted for Ross Perot in the early 90’s. I haven’t voted a number of times, because why do I want to waste my time when there’s nothing worth voting for? I’m a Ron Paul fan. I saw him on my birthday… back in 2012, whatever it was. It was in front of Independence Hall. I stood there in the rain for three hours, on my birthday. It was fun. Yeah, I’m a Ron Paul fan. I’m a Rand Paul fan. Hillary… if that cunt gets elected, I’ll kill myself for sure. I’d like to see someone kill her. She’s an evil whore, an evil bitch. He’s evil, and his bitch is evil. People need to look at who these people really are. Do you know how many people have died because of them? You have Benghazi, which everyone seems to have forgotten about. She’s a piece of shit. I mean, people have been murdered. You know, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, people close to them were getting ready to say stuff, OK, but they conveniently committed suicide, shot gun blast through the back of the head. I don’t know any shot gun where you’re capable of killing yourself by holding the trigger back here… Why go through all that trouble, first of, let alone it's not possible. Nobody seems to care. Yeah, I want to live in a world, and in a country, where no one gives a fuck. Yeah, everybody says, “Don’t kill yourself! Don’t kill yourself!” but what the fuck is there to live for… in this shit hole? I’m 11th generation. My ancestors came here in the early 1600’s. They were the founding fathers of Hampton, New Hampshire.

My 4th great grandfather, in my direct line, was in the Battle of Bunker Hill, OK? On any given day, I wish my 8th great grandfather’s ship had sunk on the way over here. Or any of my other great grandfathers, take any of them out of the picture, and I don’t exist, plain and simple. Without any of those people surviving, I don’t exist, as I am right this second. Yeah, look at what we’ve got! Thanks, grandpa! If they could see what our government has become, they wouldn’t have wasted their time 200 years ago. They’re turning over in their fuckin’ graves. Go down to Independence Mall, stand in the grass, look at Independence Hall and think about the 1700’s and the American Revolution, and how cool all that was, then look this way, then look that way. One of them says DOW! The other one says Wells Fargo! Yeah. Wow. Government of the people, by the people, for the people? Fuck no! You mean these assholes are taking jobs to make $200,000… when they could be doing more, elsewhere? There has to be more to it. Well, there is, boys and girls, it’s called corporation, and they’re all fuckin’ whores to those corporations. Those corporations have sold out America, and the politicians have allowed them to sell out America. They have sent jobs overseas, so people my age… are trying to survive on minimum wage. Minimum wage is meant for fuckin’ kids! I was making minimum wage in 1976, and that two dollars and something an hour had more buying power! I could get four packs of

cigarettes for that $2.35. You can’t even get one for minimum wage today, and the minimum wage is almost three times more. Do the math. It’s fucked up! People don’t give a fuck. Nobody cares enough to try. Nobody cares enough to unite. Two people ain’t gonna make a difference. Two million people might. Everybody is like, Oh, I don’t want to miss… what’s Kim Kardashian wearing? What’s Kim Kardashian sticking up her ass? Whose black dick is she sucking tonight? Really, that’s all people care about. They care more about that whore than they do about their own fuckin’ neighborhood. I don’t see how you can watch all that garbage. I don’t watch any garbage, for real. It’s been shit for as long as I’ve been alive, but I was ignorant. When I was in high school, I was ignorant to what was going on in the world, so everything appeared fine. With my perception, everything was great, but reality wasn’t. I’ve read some, but not as much as I should have. There was a 50-day period where I read 26 books, eight of them by David Baldacci, who I thought was pretty good. Good stuff. I had great jobs, then came the drugs, but I don’t blame the drugs, I blame me. The girl thing and the drug thing are real entwined, and I’ve been a social retard for most of my life, so to satisfy the lust, I got hooked on drugs. No, I’ve never been married. I’ve never had a long term girlfriend. I was a social retard. I don’t think I’m weird, it’s just that I’ve never been good in that department. I don’t know.

I don’t think I’m picky. I don’t want some ugly, 500-pound beast. Who the fuck does? Am I supposed to settle for whoever the fuck wants to sit on my face? I just want to be happy. I just want someone who gives a fuck about me, you know, someone who’s not materialistic and phony and all that bullshit. I don’t want drama! I don’t think any of that’s asking for too much. I think that’s probably pretty normal, what people want, you know. Now that I’m out here, I’m probably not going to find me a girlfriend, ha ha, unless I settle for a Kensington mail order bride, a whore du jour, right over there! A lot of people have perceptions that drug addicts are these types of people, but drug addicts can be anybody, your uncle, your sister, your brother, your nephew, your niece, your next door neighbor, your mailman. I used to think it was only these people, and you’re all weak, the crack thing and stuff, until I tried it, then I knew that everything I had thought about it was wrong. There are people that come down here from the suburbs, then five or six years later return home. They were just coming down for the weekend, or just coming down to get some, and got stuck. Or came down and never made it back home because they’re dead. I’ve known of more people that have died down here than I’ve ever known in my entire life, elsewhere. The ones that overdosed, I envy them, because why the fuck can’t I overdose? I’d overdose, and ten minutes away from being done, and someone would fuckin’ find me. I’d wake up in a fuckin’ hospital! I’ve overdosed three times. Of the people who give me money, the best, over all, are the

Hispanic women, then Hispanic men, white women, black women. Black men and white men are the worst. I pay attention to that. Being a computer guy, I look at numbers and stuff. The ones that you think would, don’t, and the ones that you think don’t, do. I also have repeat customers, so to speak. I’m nothing special, but there is a certain type of person that people expect to be doing that, and I don’t fit that. I’m not some fuckin’ lifelong bum. I’ve been homeless a couple of years. I don’t get in people’s face. I don’t ask anybody for anything. I stand there. If someone wants to give me money, help me out… There is nothing on that sign that isn’t true. People would ask me, “Where do you live? Where is your house?” I’d go, “Dude…” Anybody who’s going hungry, really, if you have to beg to eat, you’re really a fuckin’ moron. There are people that stand there that say they’re homeless that live right around the corner. I have people tell me I can’t be homeless because of the sneakers I wear, but people give me stuff. Everything I’m wearing was given to me. People give me food, all day long. People have bought me meals at this diner. I read... I look at the Bible, and it’s great fiction, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, in the 1690’s, we were hanging women in Salem, Mass, for being witches, for Christ’s sake. You’d think

people would be less naïve than they were in 1692. It amazes me how people would read something and just believe it. The Bible says X Y Z, so it’s X Y and Z. Really, you’re that naïve? You’re that numb? There can’t be more to it, or less to it? Just because some humans wrote these words in a book you call the Bible, you believe it? I never went to church. My parents never forced it upon us, which is why I believe people are the way they are. It was forced upon them. My mom is Russian, but English is the side of my surname, Blake. That’s me. My mom is actually from this shit hole, not Kensington, but Philly. It has nothing to do with me being here, though. I’m just here for the dope.

Amanda the Ex-Nurse With huge tax breaks, Camden has lured several companies to this wrecked city, so a small chunk of downtown is getting spruced up. Shirtless or in wifebeaters, tattooed junkies still lurk around the Walter Rand Transportation Center, but the Third-World clothing stands have been shooed from the shadow of City Hall. Crown Chicken has moved into a less squalid space, and Dunkin’ Donuts has gotten a facelift. A yuppyish-looking bar has opened on Martin Luther King. Much of Camden is still a menacing disaster, however. Shop signs cue you in to where you are: "See an overdose? Call 911 immediately!" "REWARD $12,000 For information leading to the arrest and conviction in the shooting of an 8-year-old girl."

"Demeal Rudoph Has been missing Since monday 8-1-16. Age 15." "DO NOT ENTER WITH MASK OR HOOD. IF SO YOU ARE NOW TRESPASSING." It’s not all bad. In Off Broadway Lounge, old heads can chill and bitch about politics, inept pitching, manipulative lovers and ungrateful children. “She ain’t never gave me a present! Ain’t never gave me a card! Ain’t called me on Father’s Day! My daughter don’t even know when my birthday is. The only time I hear from her is when she’s in trouble. ‘Dad, I need a thousand dollars!’” It’s frighteningly bad. On July 26th, the Courier Post reported, "The city’s homicide toll more than doubled in the first half of 2016 [...] Camden residents also saw an increase in rapes, assaults and motor vehicle thefts during the first six months of 2016." Remember, this is a city that, year in and year out, ranks among the top two or three in the entire nation for murders and rapes, and it has only gotten worse. Don't let a few new buildings downtown fool you. In trash strewn alleys, junkies shoot up all day long. By night, three dozen strung-out whores trawl downtown. In this mostly black city, most of these ladies are white. When I first met Amanda in May of 2015, she was ragged yet cheerful. Showing me stab wounds on her wrinkled belly, the 29-year-old skinny blonde laughed. In March of 2016, I searched for Amanda after not having seen her for six months. Expecting a total wreck, I was cheered to find Amanda looking better and happier. “You like my makeup, baby? I put on some eyeliner!” Declaring she’s off heroin, Amanda showed me her arms. I also admired her new work boots, “You can kick people in the balls with those!”

“Yes, I will!” Tricking on these nastiest of streets, Amanda had been raped, assaulted and jailed, but it looked like she might have turned a corner. Heroin, though, doesn’t let go like that. In 2014, 10,574 Americans died from heroin overdoses, a five-fold increase from just a decade earlier. Last Monday, I checked on Amanda again. I had never seen her so foul and distressed. She was relieved to see me. I was shocked. I’m from Brownville, NJ. My mom was a nurse. My dad was an electrician. Of course, I was good in school. Yup! Hey, baby! I got married at 16. Yes, of course I got married. I didn’t have kids out of wedlock. I’m old-fashioned. I was raised on a farm. My husband was 8 years older than me. He was my brother’s friend. He was nice until we got married, then he started to beat me. He was a roofer. When I was 19, I wanted to join the Army and become a field doctor. I scored 92 on my ASVAB. That’s the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test. I missed by one question a perfect score. Two days later, I found out I was pregnant with my first son, Noah. You can’t be pregnant and in the Marines. I became a nurse instead. I was a nurse for eight years, and I was a good nurse too. My second son is dead. Christopher was only four-year-old when he died of leukemia at Children’s Hospital in Camden. I

had never even been to Camden. An intern nurse had injected him with an antibiotic to which he was allergic. I’d start singing, and Christopher would make up his own words to it. And Noah, my older son, I’d read him a story, right. Ha, ha! He’d say, “Give me the book, mommy, and I’ll read to you and Sugar,” because he called the baby “Sugar,” and he’d fuckin’, he’d open the book to the middle and start reading it, his own fuckin’ version. Ha, ha! The story was Velveteen Rabbit. My little brother is a heroin addict. He introduced me to it. My own family. Yes, indeed. He’s in Bayside Prison. Ha, ha! Four years. My older brother is with his wife and his daughter. Yup! They don’t like me. I’m a junkie. No one will help me. I’m a loser. No one will help me get out of here. I’m going to die. Noah lives with my mom. She just had a heart attack. My mom also has cancer. Pancreatic. I talked to her four days ago. She’s poor. I have an aunt in Toms River, but she has no money either. Last night, I was covered with ants. They were everywhere, biting. One crawled into my ear. I don’t feel good, at all. I’m dope sick. I had no tricks today. Mommy! Where’s my mommy? I want to be with my mommy! I’m dope sick, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I didn’t make any money

today. At all. Dope! Dope! Now! Urgh, urgh, urgh! Please help me, God. Please help me, God. You don’t understand. I’m going to drop dead! My life is in the toilet. My whole life is in the toilet! It’s not fair! I don’t understand why? I used to be so strong. Why did my fuckin’ brother get me to do it then? I didn’t even like to do drugs. My whole life, I did not do no drugs. I can’t use my son as an excuse. It’s my own fault. He would never have wanted me to get high. He’s my boobie bear. He’s my baby. I know I’m not the same person. I apologize, Sir. I love you. There are two places out here that can get you clean. There’s the Urban Treatment Center at 8th and Market, and there’s Project Hope. But there’s a waiting list, honey. You can’t just walk in when you want to. It don’t work like that. There are, like, 500 people ahead of me. I’ve been calling every single day. I’ve been calling, like, a month straight. Ha, ha! This Thursday, I have an appointment. Oh, fuckin’ hell yeah! I’m definitely going. I have no choice.

Hey, baby! Hey, baby! I love those cops. They’re Alvarez and Martin. I said, “I’ll climb all over your ass!” They said, “Not today, Amanda. Behave!” Ha, ha! They could tell that I was dope sick. They said, “You want me to call an ambulance?” I said, “Why? Are they going to give me heroin at the hospital?” “No.” “No?!” Ha, ha! They said, “Go on and be safe!” They don’t give a fuck. One day, I was shooting up, right? I was in an alley, and Martin walked around the corner. He said, “Amanda! Really? Fuckin’ really?!” I said, “Listen, buddy, you know how long it took for me to get this shit? You know how many dicks I had to suck?!” “Please, Amanda, can’t you go hide a little bit?” “I’m going to wrestle your fuckin’ ass. You’re not taking my fuckin’ shit!” I told him I had to suck five dicks, but I had to suck just one! Ha, ha! I come out of an alleyway. I’m all hot. I say, “I just got gang banged by five monkeys!” Ha, ha, ha!

The cops say, “Ewww! You dirty girl!” I joke with them every day. They’re my family. Alvarez and Martin say, “You’re our favorite hooker, Amanda.” That’s what they tell me every day. Ha, ha! I get $20 for head, $40 for fucking. Sometimes, I only charge $10 for a quick bendover. You’ve only got five minutes. Go! Some guys don’t even last five minutes. Ha, ha! Especially when I get them all worked up. Blrrrrr! Blrrrr! Blrrrr! Sometimes, I get a lot more than that. I’ve made a thousand in a day. Once, I got $800. I copped some junk for him, and he got so high, he fuckin’ fell asleep. When I woke up, he was gone, but there was $800 in an envelope, plus a rose and a letter. What a homo, right? What’s this fag shit?! Ha, ha! I have about 10 regulars. They’re old guys in their 60’s and 70’s. They’re all white. Their wives are dead, baby. They can’t get it up anymore. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes I even stay overnight at a guy’s house. Usually, we go to a hotel. They don’t want the neighbors to see. Some of them live far away, too. You want to hear a fucked up story? The other night, this big dude was really grinding on me. He wouldn’t fuckin’ get off me! He was really hurting me, like really hurting me! He couldn’t come, so he only gave me two ones. That’s pretty funny, right?

I’m not going to see that nigger again. Hobobo, works! Who got works? Hey, you faggot! Who’s my boy? You got works?! Works?! Works?! Works?! Boobah, boobah, boobah! Motherfucker! Cocksucker! How are you, baby? Hello, hello! Boop, boop! Oh, oh, oh! My fuckin’ feet hurt, lover! Mother, motherfucker! I’m going to shoot another! Undercover! Dokey, pokey! I finally got down to where I wanted it. Oh yeah, oh yeah! Oh yeah, here we go again, my fuckin’ fucked up friend, I’d do it all again! Right? Right! Ughaaaah! Oh, you’re my angel! I’ve got my angel! Boobah! Look at you, love. How’s my baby? Boom, bugger, boom, bugger, boombah! Do you know the doper man, doper man, doper man? Do you know the doper man that lives on Dreary Lane? The doper man takes it up on Dreary Lane. Ha, ha!

Do you know the nothing man, nothing man, nothing man? Do you know the nothing man that lives on Dreary Lane?

Rose the Mistress Before its rents became astronomical, I lived in Center City, so frequented McGlinchey’s and Dirty Frank’s. Now, I walk into Frank’s and hardly recognize anybody. Uncle Moe, Tommy Hackett and Skinny Dave are long dead, the last from an OD while in his late 30’s. Others have moved away. Last week, though, I ran into Rick, whom I hadn’t seen in 13 years. Reminiscing, Rick pointed to a booth, “I proposed to my wife right there.” Then, to another booth, “That’s where a woman grabbed my dick. I went home with her, but didn’t cheat. I only ate her out, and she only sucked my dick. We didn’t have intercourse.” “I don’t know how you could stop at a certain point,” I marveled. Then, “Oral sex is not cheating?” “No, it’s not.” “You never cheated on your wife?” “Another time, I did sleep with a woman. I dated my wife for ten years before we got married, so it’s only twice in 40 years, if you count the blow job and eating pussy. That’s not bad.” “You’re like a saint, man! Maybe your wife has cheated a little, too. What if she sucked a guy’s dick? Would you consider that cheating?” “Yeah.” “But not the other way around?” “You do have a point.”

“Would you be pissed if she cheated twice in 40 years?” “Definitely!” “Shouldn’t it balance out?” “You do have a point.” Rick’s two lapses don’t quite constitute a double life, but who knows what he’s hiding? Even the most candid don’t confess everything. News of high school teachers having sex with students have become blasé. Often, these are married women with children. Sobbing, a 37-year-old explained to the judge that she habitually mounted her charge because of “self-esteem issues,” a perfectly valid reason. It seems like everybody is sneaking some on the side. If lowly schmucks are already like that, can you imagine all the inconvenient truths crammed into the closets of the super ambitious? The larger the appetite, the greater the propensity for transgressions and lies, and since this applies to entire societies, you should expect the most hubristic to commit the greatest crimes, accompanied by the grossest lies. The shining city upon a hill is a projection, but with a real basement containing torture chambers, false flags and lots of pizzas. Fumbling through the stinking dark, one steps on corpses or zombies, discussing politics. Even Christ may be a horny hustler, according to Cigar Tim, a drinking buddy. At Friendly Lounge, Tim said of a celebrity, “He must get more pussy than Jesus!”

Innocently, I replied, “If he gets laid once, that’s one more than Jesus!” “So the Bible tells you,” Tim snarled. “If you’re God’s son, you’d be at every party, and you’d be, like, ‘You know who my dad is? I’m just saying. This guy’s dad owns a dealership. Guess who my dad is? My dad is God! Yeah, that’s my pop!’” So even the greatest news may be fake. Me, I just think that behind a lie is usually another lie, is another lie, and tranquility rests on mountains of lies. Just now, a two-star general, David Haight, is exposed as having an 11-year affair with an American military contractor he first met in Iraq. Into anonymous sex with multiple partners, they visited swingers’ clubs in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia and elsewhere. Though she targeted and pursued the married father of four, 49-year-old Jennifer Armstrong now laments to USA Today, “I gave him the best years of my life.” This longish preamble leads us to Rose, not her real name, whom I’ve met but twice, both at Friendly. Two years ago, Rose told me she’s from Chicago and had studied acting in college. “Three Sisters” and “The Lower Depths” were her favorites. Though the plays I had seen could be counted on two hands, or maybe just one, I had seen and read the Chekov, and read the Gorky 30 years ago. We also talked about Tennessee Williams. One afternoon last week, Rose reappeared as a different woman. The bar owner and I heard her long before she barged into the nearly empty joint. Rose was that loud. Slurring when not raving, Rose talked with me or her lover, Thomas, first on the phone, then in person when he showed up. With his crew cut, trimness and bomber jacket, Thomas

came off as ex military, and he’s old enough to have fought in Vietnam. Rose is around 40 and perhaps three quarters white, a quarter black. Sitting together, she did most of the talking. Awaiting his treat later, he was comically meek. The old man gladly tolerated his lover’s stream of abuses because here, right next to him, was someone of his daughter’s age. Like so many others, Thomas was cheating not just his wife, but time, God’s medium of universal punishment. Whatever guilt he felt from the first was more than drowned out by the deep, calming pleasure of the second. Where it most mattered, this relatively young woman had accepted, forgiven and salved Thomas, so who cared if she was shooting her mouth off? Though Rose was a horror, frankly, he probably thought I was envious. Adjusting his wedding band, Thomas grinned. At Friendly, the jukebox periodically plays by itself. Roughly five minutes after Thomas’s appearance, Tina Turner belted out “Private Dancer”: I’m your private dancer, a dancer for money. I’ll do what you want me to do. I’m your private dancer, a dancer for money. And any old music will do. Such synchronicities are as good a proof of God’s existence as any, I believe. For obvious reason, I couldn’t take photos of Rose or Thomas, and though the below is too brief a record of her voice, it’s still a clear enough portrait, I think. My job? Which one?! It is very, very temporary. Ushering and ticketing. It is what it is. It ain’t no glamorous position. C’est la

vie! Yes, Thomas, how are you? I’m sorry, I don't speak Mexican. Speak English to me! I ain’t got time for that shit. Fuck, yeah! The rain has stopped. Here’s when the angels come back, but not at ya! Silence, si vous plait! I talk to myself. Language is never a nice thing. Yes, Thomas. I’m inside Friendly. Where are you? I just ordered us food from next door. Can you come inside, please. Thank you. Bye! I don’t have a PhD, but I have a bachelor’s. I’m dating a married man, right now, the guy that’s coming in. I shouldn't be talking, see, because I'll get all cocky, socky. I do love him, though. We've been seeing each for years, and years, and years. Just him and me. Well, apart from his little Mexican wife. Good for her! My name ain't Becky Quick. So, figure it out, but don't ask me what I'm doing with a guy like that. Next door, the sardine sandwich is the best! Aaaah! If I were to go for pho soup, I either go to 11th and Washington, or I go two doors down, but, sardine sandwich, that bitch got it figured out. Thomas, where are you? Yes, but driving is the first fuckin’ problem! I’m not moving, from this seat that I’m in. I’ve got you a spot, OK? Where are you at? Come meet me. I ordered food, and half of that is for you, dumb ass! You little fuckin’ German bitch! You

better come to 8th and Washington and pick me up. Oh, you’re on 8th? All of a sudden, homie is on 8th! 8th and what?! You could be at 8th and Jesus Christ! You’re at 8th and Montrose? Well, you better keep it shipping! Keep it moving! You’re on your way, boo boo. This is Thomas. He had a hard time parking, so I’ll act as if that’s the reason for his ignorance. Isn’t this nice? This is one of the few smoking bars left in town. OK, what do you want? A Yuengling, please! No, I’m not going to fuckin’ meditate! Ooops, what language! Ha, ha! I don’t need you talking from 1966. I need you to not talk! That’s what I need you to do. That would be wonderful, if you could indulge me by, like, silence [French pronunciation]! I’ve known this devil for a year! I’m worried about Tina Turner chasing some cash right now. I’m not worried about you, Thomas. Shut up, and let it play! How about not talking? Thank you. Shut up! Don’t talk. Why do you keep talking? Somebody asks you not to talk, don’t talk!

Shane the Fighter, Heroin Chipper and Ghetto Teacher In the early 90’s, I sometimes worked the door at McGlinchey’s. Lurching in, 6-9 Lloyd Lunz guffawed, “Yo, heavy duty bouncer action tonight!” I was only paid $30 for five hours of carding baby-faced carousers, and it was torture to be sober while everybody got trashed. One night, there was some commotion outside, so I ran out and saw Shane wailing on some suited dude on the asphalt, right in the middle of 15th Street. The dude’s girlfriend was hovering above them, screaming. Shane had been inside, drinking. That day, he discovered his out-of-state sister had gotten pregnant, then given the kid away for adoption. This really pissed Shane off, so he was in a punching mood when the suited dude asked, “Yo, is this a gay bar?” A good answer would have been, “It is now,” but Shane wasn’t trying to be witty. Not long after, Shane got into another fight, this time with him swinging a nunchucks, and no, Shane’s no Chinese kung fu sifu, but an Irish cold beverage enthusiast born in North Camden. Cops had Shane surrounded, but he was too juiced up to drop his weapon on command, so an officer whacked Shane’s head real good with a night stick, before six or seven of them jumped on him. “For the next month, dude, I couldn’t fuckin’ open my eyes in the morning without seeing the ceiling spin. My head was like a balloon.”

Charged with assault, weapon possession, public disorder and resisting arrest, Shane never bothered to show up in court, yet nothing came of it. McGlinchey’s rock bottom prices attracted the dregs of Center City, so there were plenty of screwups and weirdos there. Among its bartenders, though, one man has managed to lift himself up quite nicely. In the 80’s, Fergie arrived from Ireland with just $500. Carless, he walked down the side of a Houston freeway, entered a bar and got hired. Now, Fergie has four Philly taverns, with three quite upscale. All are smartly decorated, with no televisions. I’ve never been to Ireland, but most pubs I’ve seen in England and Scotland have more character, warmth and sense of history than your average American bar. Not just flitting across this earth, they accumulate associations and gravity. Not everyone can have Fergie’s Horatio Alger resume. With no head for ledgers, some folks can barely run a lemonade stand, and I only have to look at a mirror to spot one. Shane’s no businessman either and, frankly, the odds of him surviving to his 50’s, free or behind bars, weren’t terribly high. Miraculously, I ran into the trouble magnet three days ago. In my neighborhood for pho, Shane got sidetracked by Friendly Lounge, and that’s where I found the dude. We hadn’t talked in over two decades. Though Shane said he wasn’t supposed to get too sloshed, I could see that he was way gone. After a while, I suggested he grab a slice of pepperoni to soak up the suds, then weave home before sundown, but Shane simply could not extricate himself from that vice-like barstool. I ended up scrawling a note to his wife, “I DRANK WITH SHANE AT FRIENDLY LOUNGE TODAY. HE IS EXCUSED. HE SAID YOU ARE A WONDERFUL WIFE. LINH DINH.” The entire bar got a big laugh out of it. In his late 30’s, Shane got a degree in education from Arcadia

College. He graduated with honors and hasn’t been in a fight in years. Shane also quit heroin. This is how it happened: You really want me to tell you this story? Me and John went way back. A long time. Fuckin’… everything. He got addicted to heroin, then I started doing a little bit. What they call chipping. You don’t really get too addicted. I was hanging out. My wife was out of town. I was doing heroin and she didn’t even fuckin’ know it. I called John up, because he was my guy, and he was the one who was addicted. He got the dope. I had been out all motherfuckin’ day, drinking like a motherfucker, in McGlinchey’s. It was right around Halloween time. They had all the decorations. I must have had, fuckin’, twelve pints of beer. You’re not supposed to have heroin with alcohol, you know what I mean? John lived around there. There’s an old saying, “I buy, you fly.” John didn’t care how fucked up I was. Actually, he might have, but he wanted the dope. Every once in a while, you snort drugs and you sneeze. John was like, “Dude, man, you’re sneezing up all the drugs!” After I sneezed up two bags of heroin and 14 pints, I went… When you overdose, you turn different colors, right? First you turn red because you can’t breathe, then you turn white, then you turn purple. I woke up with about four EMTs all around me, on the middle of John’s floor. They were like, “How much heroin did you do?! What much heroin did you do?!”

John had called 911, and he actually gave me mouth to mouth. I was actually, kind of, in a way, touched, because John could have gotten in trouble, you know what I mean? When his girlfriend overdosed in his apartment before that, he called me up, “What should I do?!” I was like, “John, you should call the cops.” At least he learnt a lesson. He knew what to do when I overdosed. He helped me out. It’s ER stuff. If you don’t have insurance, too bad! What I told them was, I was drunk, and I smoked a joint that somebody might have laced with heroin. I’m always trying to get out of shit, you know what I mean? How are you going to get out of shit unless you think? Weird thing was, John kept doing heroin for a long time after that, but I stopped, dude. You know what, I found two bags of heroin on the street, and I still have them. I don’t want to sell them because… if I ever want to off myself, you know what I mean? If you do two dime bags a day, that’s 60 bucks, but I’ve been sitting here since 10:30, and it’s, what, four O’clock already? Beer ain’t cheap either. If you smoke pot, that’s the smart fuckin’ thing. Except I smoked pot the other day for the first time in a while, and it made me totally insane, dude. I was crying! I went psychotic! The last time I smoked pot before that was two years ago, when my wife was away. When my wife goes away, dude, all the handles fall off. It was around Saint Paddy’s Day. I smoked pot because I had some in the house. A friend gave it to me. I smoked pot, then I went to Ten Stone, that bar at 20th and South. Last thing I remember. When I woke up, I was in the ER, again! They must have found me on the street.

They said, “You know where you are?” All of a sudden, you wake up and you don’t know where you are. When in the hospital, that’s the first thing they ask you, when you open your eyes, “Do you know where you are?” I was like, “Look, am I under arrest? If I’m not under arrest, I want to leave. Now!” I shouldn’t drink. I know I shouldn’t drink. I’ve been married going on 30 years. I can’t stop myself, sometimes. My wife won’t drink with me any more, man. I’ve got no kids. I’ve got four cats. I love those cats like kids, though. Good cats, man. Anyone messing with my cats, I’d kill the person that mess with my cats. You think it’s funny but it ain’t. I don’t even drink whiskey, I don’t drink bourbon, I don’t do drugs any more, I don’t snort coke any more, I don’t do nothing. Blacking out is sad. Sex was never my issue. It was more violence, and it’s not even that. I’ve never had a problem with anybody. Somebody fuckin’ had a problem with me, that’s all. The cops kicked my ass. You get your ass kicked. People kick your ass. It’s not anything I asked for. You ever seen the movie, Cool Hand Luke? It’s a classic movie about somebody that never did nothing to anybody. My middle name is Luke. Normally, I teach school, but I need to have shoulder surgery because I tore my rotator cuff, and I’m depressed, and I have, ah, anxiety. I taught nine-year-olds in Point Breeze. I taught all kinds of subjects. I had 29 kids. I taught for 13 years, with six years in Point Breeze. I can’t do that any more. Your spirit goes out, you know what I mean? You can’t fuckin’

do it any more… and nothing helps. You go in there the next day, and it’s the same shit. It’s a hard-assed environment. It eats your heart. I’m done, man. I can’t do it any more. I taught in North Philly, West Philly. It’s the same shit. You go into it. Obviously, you’re an idealistic person, you want to make a… You can’t even imagine. My issue is, Where is the entity that created you? Where is the nebulous something that spawned this fuckin’ monster or whatever it is that burst out of the pod? It’s like sci-fi, man. It’s like science fiction craziness. I’m not the monster’s parent. I’m not the elephant man’s parent. If you’re working in that situation, day after day, you’ll start to feel, The people who spawned this person that I’m dealing with don’t care, and if they don’t care, how am I supposed to solve anything? If you have no respect for the life that you fuckin’ gave, that responsibility is gonna fall on me? I’m sorry, dude, that ain’t right. When I was in North Philly, there was a guy I was working with. His name was Van. He told me before he came to the US, they had a hundred kids in the classroom, and the teacher had a bamboo stick or something, and you could hear a pin drop. Something works, right? Something doesn’t work. It’s a breeding ground. Forget reading and writing, you’ve got people whose asshole parents can’t even put on their pants right. Fuck, man, their grandparents can’t even put on their pants right, and the more kids you have, the more money you’ll get, and if you call your kids retarded, you’ll get even more money. That is truly psychotic. You want your kids to be as dumb as fuckin’ possible so you can get the most money from the government. You want eight retarded kids. Do you want

your kids to be stupid? If you go to Point Breeze, the only bar I’d recommend is Sit On It, at 19th and Miflin. Ask for Miss Mary. She’s all right. Back in the old days, you wouldn’t have to make an excuse and say to your wife, “Oh, I’m drunk!” My grandfather’s grandfather was a coal miner up in friggin Hazelton. He had 11 kids, friggin smashed up furniture when he felt like it. You know Willem DeKooning? That guy used to get so drunk, he passed out in the gutter! I don’t go to church much, but the other day, I passed by Saint Patrick and I thought, Why the fuck do people build these buildings for nothing that’s not there? People build these monuments for something that’s not there! Aryans went all the way down to India. After Jesus died, you had all these people proselytizing, all the way to the bottom of India. There are all these churches in Karala, India. It’s a hotbed of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity, but what if all these places of worship, what if all of it is just a bunch of fuckin' bullshit! Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. You can’t have pride! The Shakers’ motto is, “We will put our hands to work, and our hearts to God,” so they would make the most beautiful shit, you know, the simplest crap. You know what my therapist said to me? He said, “Stop whining! Stop being a baby! Stop complaining about this and that,” so you know what? I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want to do! What the hell do you have to explain yourself for?

Hank the Small Business Financial Advisor I had spent four days in Ann Arbor, Dexter and Chelsea. This stay allowed me to experience a whiter and more Norman Rockwell Michigan. On two previous trips, I was confined to mostly black and car wrecked Detroit. Flying out from Detroit Airport, I bought two National coneys and, boy, were they sad. Hotdogs, chili, onion, mustard and buns were like holograms. Though seemingly real, there was nothing there, really. Only the napkins were true. I noticed lots of Muslim women in headscarves, and even a couple in burkas. There was Freedom Center, a lounge for soldiers, military veterans and their families. “Serving Those Who Serve Us.” Staffed by volunteers, it had a donation box outside the door. Snacks were laid on a counter. A young black man chilled on a black recliner. Inside a store, there was a display, “TREAT OUR TROOPS— Purchase any item you wish to donate here and we’ll deliver it to a local agency supporting our troops in this area.” Qualified items included wet napkins, aspirins, mints, chewing gum and candies. A recurring announcement warned travelers to be vigilant for anything suspicious since we’re on “heightened alert.” Since all the TVs were tuned to CNN, I had no choice but to

hear some guy tell Wolf Blitzer that Donald Trump was encouraging Vladimir Putin to tamper with the US election. Our mainstream media feature many professorial, avuncular men who are entirely vapid and phony. They are paid to appear concerned and wise as they spin and lie. Deep down, they must be laughing at their audience’s stupidity. Blitzer is just a variance of Jerry Springer. At the end of the jetbridge, a chirpy sign announced that Spirit Airlines had added more seats to each plane to save its customers money. Whatever, I thought. It’s only an hour and a half flight. I had an aisle seat, with no one next to me. By the window was a man with short hair, in a golf shirt, in his late 30’s. Exhausted, I just wanted to close my eyes until home. As the metal tube taxied, I shifted in my seat, winced, sighed, turned to my right and saw that my row mate was trying to get my attention. “Sir, I just want to warn you that I always get sick on takeoff,” and he mimicked throwing up into the white paper bag, his head bobbing. This odd confession, said too loudly, drew the attention of two other passengers. Nervously smiling, they turned to look. “It’s no problem, man. You do whatever you have to do,” I responded. “Also, I must warn you that I have really bad gas!” As the dude cracked up, I laughed too, “You had me for a moment. That’s pretty good!” Hank was his name, and he was going to Philly on business. A native of Hudson, Michigan (pop. 2,273 and dropping), Hank lives in a Detroit suburb just 30 minutes from downtown.

Leafy, neat and nearly all-white, its proximity to the high crime city keeps housing prices low. Yeah, I’ve been in southern Michigan nearly my whole life. In college, I studied English and education. I wanted to be a teacher. My wife teaches first grade. For nine years, I was a financing executive for Yamaha, but after the 2008 crash, they laid off 4,500 people. All these dealerships went out of business. No one was buying anything. I was out of work for nine months. I taught summer camp and coached football. I became a substitute teacher, then got a full time job in Detroit. I taught courses like world history, civics and English. If I told you the truth about what it was like to teach in Detroit, you’d think I’m the biggest racist. Most people don’t believe me, or they get really angry. People are just ignorant of the reality. It’s worse than anything you can imagine. When I see a 16, 15year-old, I think he’s just a kid, not an adult yet, he’s just a baby, but in the ghetto, a 15-year-old is no baby. He’s thinking like an adult. He’s mean and tough, and he’s always hustling. They aren’t fuckin’ kids anymore. They’d shoot you dead, stab you, steal from you, motherfuck you, in a heartbeat. They break every rule. Let’s say you’re a teacher, and there’s a rule, No gum in the classroom. Let’s say I’m a student. I take out a stick of gum, put it in my mouth, chew it, right in front of you, so you go, “Hey, no gum in the classroom! Spit it out!” They’d look at you straight in the eye and say, “I don’t have any gum. What are you talking about?”

It’s like that with everything. They put more effort into avoiding doing the right thing… Does that make sense? They would rather walk half a mile to avoid picking up a piece of paper, than a hundred feet to bend over to pick up that piece of paper to put it in the garbage. I was one of the very few white teachers. I didn’t teach much. They didn’t show up. On count days for government funding, they give the kids iPads, computers, even phones, just so they will show up and be counted so the school can get its funding. After that, they disappear. They come to school just to socialize or hustle. You might see a kid once every two weeks. If it’s raining out, they’ll stay home. If it’s too cold, they’ll stay home. Their ma, grandma or aunt can’t be bothered, and if you call them in, they’ll make it about every other issue but their kid’s education. Since we’re on a plane, I must watch my language. If we were in a bar… While I was trying to teach, I saw a middle-school girl give her boyfriend a blowjob, so I said something, and you know what the response was? “Why are you looking?” In Detroit, if you have tenure and don’t feel like going to work, you don’t call ahead, OK? Instead, you just call your friend or cousin and say, “Hey, go cover my classes.” Here’s a guy who just walked off the street. Who are you? Oh,

I’m covering for such and such. He’s not a teacher. He has no ID or anything. The principal doesn’t care. To substitute teach in the suburb, you need to have your certification, a background check, a lesson plan. In the hood, a guy can just call his baby mama or some crack head to cover for him. Throw her 25 bucks. The test scores are false. The diplomas don’t mean anything. These high school kids read and write at a second grade level. So what do you expect me to do? It’s a fight you can’t win. I gave all I had, I did my best, I tried. The kids who wanted extra help, I did everything I could. I gave extra help, time, effort. When you’re with them, day in and day out, it hardens you, and you must be so alert, because they’d set you up. They’d shoot and stab you, in a heartbeat. You know who wins an argument in the hood? The one who shouts the loudest the longest. It’s pointless to argue with someone who doesn’t know anything. You can give them all the facts and reasons, but you’re not going to change their way of thinking. It’s like trying to have a debate with this seat. Ghetto schools get so much more money compared to other schools. There are all these special programs, and side money for accessories, equipments and books, and money for extra security guards and counselors. Twenty-six Detroit principals have been found, so far, to embezzle thousands and thousands of dollars. The mayor went to jail in 2008. Everything went through him. People don’t realize how much money there is in Detroit, but it’s all in the suburbs. Inside the city, 90% of the people are on

welfare. It’s a burden on our state. They tax the crap out of us to support Detroit. The unions ruined Detroit. There was a time when the unions served a purpose, there was a need, but it got out of control. You give them an inch and they take a foot, you know what I’m saying? In Detroit, a guy pushing a broom for Ford, Chrysler or GM makes at least $28 an hour, with good health benefits and a nice retirement plan, and we’re talking about some dude with no job skill and no education. That’s why all the factories left. In the South, a skilled worker makes just 15 an hour, and people fight over it. With the union, you can only do what’s in the contract. If my job is to wipe and not lift, then I wouldn’t even lift this magazine right here. I’d have to wait for you to come and do it. If I touched this magazine, I’d be breaking union rules, you know what I’m saying? People who are on welfare for a long time shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If you’re not contributing to society, you shouldn’t be voting, and it’s not about race. If you’re a welfare queen in Appalachia, you shouldn’t be voting either. If you can’t take care of your kids, the worst thing to do is to bring more into the world. If you’re on public assistance and you can’t take care of what you already have, then there’s no friggin reason why you should make three or four more babies. It’s not fair for the kid. He’s born behind the 8 ball from day one. That’s why we should have government-mandated birth control. It’s common sense. My wife and I would love to have ten kids too, but we can’t afford to give them everything they need to get ahead.

If a guy has no regard for life and just kills somebody, he shouldn’t get life. He’s not going to be rehabilitated. We should just put a .22 in his chest. This way, we won’t have to spend $40,000 a year for a piece of shit. There’s no other word for it, he’s a piece of shit. Don’t keep him behind bars, feed him, babysit him, give him medical. We should just shoot his ass. I don’t want to sound inhumane, but we should just take a guy like that about five miles on a boat, and make him jump. I was so glad to be done with teaching in Detroit. Now, I’m a financial advisor. I show people how to access capital, build their business, finance their equipments, find working capital. I show them how to utilize money for growth. I’m a banker. You don’t know how many times I’ve heard from an immigrant, “I came here when I was 19, I spoke no English and I had six bucks in my pocket.” Fifteen years later, they’re running successful businesses. They’ve saved every dime to send every single one of their kids to college. They’ve brought their extended family over and set them up. They all say, “I never would have had this opportunity in my homeland.” They are also minorities, but they don’t need handouts. The Chinese were treated worse than blacks not that long ago, and look at how well they’re doing. It bothers me when people don’t take advantage of what’s available, and don’t contribute, because they make it harder for people who want to do right. I have tons of friends from other countries, from all different religions, all different backgrounds. They tell me, “People have no idea or appreciate what somebody can accomplish in the US, even with all the shit that’s going down.” I came from no money. I worked my tail off. I want my boys to have a step up.

I love to teach, and I love children, but I’m making three times more money in corporate America. My company treats me well. In Philly, I’ll have the use of a house and a 2016 BMW. Maybe I’ll substitute teach when I’m retired. I love a good book. I read all kinds of stuff. When someone can get inside your head with a great book, so that you can’t even put it down to go to sleep, that to me is a true gift. One of my favorite authors is Sherman Alexie. I read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I read about China. I’m really intrigued by the Song Dynasty. I’m voting for Trump. There is a lot of tension right now. Unfortunately, there are a lot of politicians who depend on that animosity for their power. They need people to be poor so they can dangle that carrot in front of them. Here’s what I’m thinking, Don’t piss on my neck and say that it’s raining. Hillary Clinton will piss on your neck and whisper in your ear that it’s raining. Donald Trump will stand behind you and piss on your neck, but he’ll tell you, “I’m pissing on you right now. How do you like that?” I like to know, at least, what I’m getting.

Peter the Food Service Worker Wearing a hoodie to keep warm, I sit at my kitchen table typing this. Should I be finished by dawn, I may reward myself with a trip to Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar, just down the street. It opens at 7AM to serve those who have worked all night. Walking in, I may see hospital, restaurant and factory workers, those most likely to have voted for Trump. It’s quite a sick irony that our economic bottom is drawn to a self-aggrandizing billionaire, with his uber rich cabinet. Since Philly is such a Democratic city, Trump supporters tend to be discreet. Right after he won, however, 56-year-old Maria marched into Friendly Lounge to celebrate, “Of course I voted for Trump. I like a man with cojones! Many of my Dominican friends also voted for Trump.” Maria’s ideal politician is Rafael Trujillo. Before he was assassinated, Trujillo killed more than 50,000 people over 30 years. Maria also condones torture as punishment. Watching television news in Friendly, she’d sometimes prescribe the most ghastly penalties for criminals. “She should have a red hot poker shoved up her vagina!” Though John also voted for Trump, he’d rather not talk about our new president. In Friendly, John is always glued to the video blackjack, and practically nothing, not even a woman in heat, can pull the stolid man from his machine. “How old are you, hon?” “Fifty-eight. Too old for you.”

John is retired and does not seem short of cash. Sometimes, he’d buy the entire bar a round. I think John stays mum about Trump mostly to avoid aggravating Vernon, the black Vietnam vet. Just hearing the name makes Vern lose his composure. Even Melania is not spared. “I’m going to hate this First Lady more than shit itself! She’s a bitch! She’s a piece of shit white trash! Supermodel my ass! She ain’t my fuckin’ supermodel! She ain’t my fuckin’ First Lady.” When not apoplectic over politics, Vern is extremely kind. For example, he regularly brings TV dinners to Angelo, a man who lives out of his car and is always broke. Peter, très gay, also voted for Trump. At Friendly, he’s always the loudest and most emotional. Sometimes he’d even weep into a paper towel. The hurt in Peter’s voice can erupt into a feeble rage that’s more comic than threatening. Beneath the abrasiveness is a soft, sweet man. I’ve been with the same food service company for 22 years. I used to make $25 an hour, but now it’s down to 16.10, and they fuck you up the ass too! I got so sick of it, I applied at just about every restaurant in Center City, but who would you hire, me or some 19-year-old? I was living with this slum lord for seven years. I shared a house with four other people. I paid $400 a month. My room was the size of a napkin. My housemates were filthy. When I went into the bathroom, I was afraid to step on the floor. The ceiling tiles were falling down. The wall tiles were falling out. It’s gross in there! The kitchen was gross too. No one ever washed the dishes. I

never used the kitchen. I had a little refrigerator in my room. Last year, my landlord told me I had two days to get out. Luckily, a lady took me in, and the rent was reasonable. I’m so thankful for that. I was two inches away from sleeping in the gutter. I was scared to death. I’m sixty-years-old. I don’t need this crap. I knew a woman who lived with her three kids in a jungle gym in a park. Is this America? I used to live on South Street. That was nice, but it’s gotten way too expensive. I lived next to the sneaker store. One day, I came home late and saw maybe 20 black guys trying to break into the sneaker store. They were really chimping out, you know. They were just black people acting like black people. It was like the Philadelphia Zoo! They were niggers, basically. Sorry to be using the N word, and my best friend is black too, but these guys were niggers. I didn’t want to open my door and have them fuck me up the ass, so I called 911. I used to hang out at the Westbury, and the bartender would come out and say, “Don’t stand there!” It’s because people would jump from the Parker Hotel. When I was 21, a guy landed on my boyfriend’s car. “Oh my God, there’s a dead guy on my car!” When I was 57, I had a buddy who was 24. We did a lot of drugs together, but that’s all. He did more drugs than I did. He was writing a book, At Twenty-Four. I said, “If you keep this shit up, you won’t see 25,” and I was right. When my dad died, I inherited an old car, but I didn’t need it, so I just parked it on the street. I didn’t even keep it locked because I didn’t want anybody to break into it. I knew people

slept in it, though, because I found condoms. You’re lucky to have somebody to go home to. I always had a lover, a boyfriend, but I haven’t had anybody in eleven years. And it’s not the, you know, but the support. I can’t just go home and say to somebody, “Bitch, I love you!” Have you seen The Purge? In this movie, you have twelve hours once a year to do whatever the fuck you want. You can kill or rape anybody you want! I think people have underestimated Trump. I’m not sure, but I really think something good will come of this. I think he’s going to use his global power to do some good. He might be good for this country. He can’t be any worse than what we’ve got right now. Personally, I’m bothered that I don’t have dental care. I’m being screwed over by Obamacare, and I don’t have any say in the matter. I work hard for a living. I’m doing the best I can to make ends meet. Yeah, I’m pissed off, but who am I going to call? Republican buster? Democrat buster? Nobody cares.

Hank the Christian Constitutionalist America has become an eviscerated country draped in a gigantic flag. Day by day, its culture becomes more grotesque and obscene, a luna park of lunacy. Leached of essence, it burps up slogans, but who’s convinced? What define America, exactly? Paul Craig Roberts narrows it down to the Constitution and Christianity, “All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak.” And, “The other cornerstone of our culture is the Constitution. Indeed, the United States is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the United States would be a different country, and Americans

would be a different people. This is why assaults on the Constitution and assaults on Christianity are assaults on all of us.” You’re not going to get away with that in most American universities! In this nominally Christian country, Christians are routinely caricatured as buffoons and fanatics. They don’t wear crosses as much as burn them on African-Americans’ front lawns. Don’t show them Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ, or they’ll torch the nearest chopped liver joint. These thoughts about Christianity and the Constitution were triggered by my recent encounter with a 70-year-old black man, Hank. Twice a week, he stands outside for about ten hours to inform us all of our systematic degradation. On Mondays, you’ll find Hank and his large sign at UPenn, while on Thursdays, he can be found near Independence Hall, right outside the National Museum of American Jewish History. Hank was dressed very shabbily, and I suspect it’s not really due to poverty, but neglect. He’s simply too preoccupied with his thoughts to bother. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Hank is also wifeless. My father was mostly a truck driver. My mother did domestic work when she was able to, when she wasn't home raising children. I had two brothers and a sister. When we were able to take care of ourselves, when we could go back and forth from school, my mother worked. Back then, you could walk the street as a nine-year-old and not worry about being kidnapped or raped. People can’t do that nowadays. The atmosphere has become so fearful and hostile for everybody. It's considered child abuse to not keep an eye on your kids. We came along. We had wonderful Christmases, wonderful

Easters, a wonderful grandmother, wonderful cousins. Easters were happy occasions, and our grandmother, we would go visit her. I'm not saying everything was peach and cream, but it certainly wasn't all this horror and mess, and all this negative stuff. I went to a parochial school in a negro neighborhood, bordered by the Irish. I went to a high school that was probably 80%, 90% Italians, Irish, Polish, everybody, you know, whites. Also, most of my teachers in grade school were nuns and priests, so they were white also. The neighborhood stores were Jewish, some were Italian. We did have a few Negro shops, and the door-to-door salesmen were a mixed bag. They were colored and whites. It was safe enough then for people to go door-to-door and sell things. The men who were driving horse and wagons were a mixture. I had experiences with all kinds of people. One of our closest friends was Billy Lee. He was a white kid who was brought up by a Chinese family. That wasn't even a consideration. There was no discussion at all of race, in my experience. Billy Lee was friends with my older brother, but he was a friend of mine too. My brother worked in a Chinese restaurant from the time he was 12-years-old. After high school, I went to a seminary. God has always been important to me. I never got married. I was reading Jeremiah the other day. God would not allow Jeremiah to get married, because he wanted him. God said in the first chapter, “I ordain you from your womb. You’re going to be my prophet, and I’m going to make you a destroyer.” Well, he didn’t make Jeremiah a physical destroyer of Israel, but he made Jeremiah the one to preach the destruction of Israel.

I enjoyed being around people. I worked some years in a department store, and the people there were very friendly, very nice. The owners, everybody was really friendly. Mostly, I worked in power generation. I was a maintenance worker at Limerick and Peach Bottom nuclear plants. We maintained all the equipment, pumps, turbines, generators, etc. There was a constant replacement of parts. I also worked at coal and oil plants. When I was growing up, there wasn't an emphasis on everything being about race. Throughout human history, people have disliked somebody for whatever reason, racial reasons, but it wasn't drilled into you by the news media day after day, after day. You didn't get it at school that race is all there is about life. My daily life wasn't filled with any racial animosity or discomfort. I went to church. I was in the Boy Scouts. We went to a camp in the Poconos. One time, somebody said that they put us in this lousy campsite because we were colored, but there were these Jewish kids who were using the same facility, and they were saying, “Maybe they assigned us this campsite because we’re Jews!” It wasn’t serious. I'm not saying we had a life devoid of any racial remarks or comments, but it was never taken seriously. It’s like the word nigger. When I was growing up, I hardly ever heard my father or mother mention the word. I didn’t know the word. One time, I heard the word nigger roach, so I thought nigger roach was some kind of insect! We sat around and talked about baseball. Nobody made a big deal about the word nigger. I could think of one or two occasions when I was called that, but it wasn't something I built my life on. You had Irish being called micks. You had

Italians being called dagos. It wasn't anything serious. Nobody made a major case about it. Now, you’ll go to jail for saying “nigger,” you are so bad. It was a more civil society in the 50’s. There were problems in the southern cities in terms of legal segregation, which they got rid of. You had instances of lynching here and there, I don't know, I wasn't there, but I understand that lynching took place not only against blacks, it was also done on whites, but they've blown it up to be a white-on-black thing. Anything that they could find to be negative about whites, they did, especially in the South, so the governor down there was blocking people from going to school. I'm not saying it wasn't something serious, but you had all these other schools that were not being blocked. In the South, you got the University of Mississippi that wasn't being blocked, and you got all these schools in northern cities that were not being blocked. All these blacks were going to Columbia, Penn University, but they made it out like it was some national calamity. Yes, the laws were unfair, so they corrected them, and that should have been it, but they harped on it in the media every year. They had all these shows and features on ancient racial unfairness, over and over and over and over. It was unnecessary. Now they go on and on about slavery, but when I was in school, I didn't hear about slavery until, I think, 7th grade. My parents and my parents’ parents never talked about slavery. They talked about the Phillies and the Milwaukee Braves. These were people who were tailors and truck drivers. They were professional people. You just didn’t hear this nonsense. Today, children go to school and all they hear about is slave ships and all this slave nonsense. It’s extreme and it's unnecessary. There are more important things in life than to keep bringing

up somebody's great-great-great-grandfather's miserable experience. All tribes, all people, have had some experience with slavery. In America, it was the Christians who actually abolished slavery. It was abolished because Jesus Christ said, “Love your neighbor.” So the Christians who abolished slavery are persecuted the most for being slave owners. Throughout the world, particularly in Africa, there is slavery, even today. It never stopped being a slave continent. Sudanese Arabs have been enslaving Sudanese black Christians all throughout the 20th century, yet all these phonies in this country ignore it. The NAACP ignores it. W. E. B. Du Bois, who was the founder of the group, he joined the Communist Party before he died. He was a Communist all his life, but this isn't talked about. All they want to talk about is what the white man did, what George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did, but they grew up in a world where there's always been, from the beginning of mankind, slavery. It was considered acceptable and moral. Aristotle, Plato and pagan natural law taught that slavery was OK. All throughout Asia Minors, they believed it. In Asia, they believed it. Koreans kept slaves, and the Chinese did. When the Christians understood from Jesus Christ that it was wrong, and they started to abolish it, these enemies of God turned their wrath on the Christians who abolished slavery. Jefferson and Washington were not proponents of it. They derived wealth from it because there it was. You grew up in a household and there were slaves from your father and from your mother, etc, but as they grew older, they understood from the teachings of Jesus Christ that this was not right, so they sought to undo it, but all these people who hate America and hate the views of Jefferson and Washington portray them as evil slave owners.

Even today, there's this Arab group in the Middle East that's enslaving women. Sex slaves, raping little girls and nobody's talking about it. Obama is having his coffee and steak, and he doesn't give a hoot. This new obsession about race is used to manipulate black people in particular. Black people in the cities, coming from the South, were looking to maintain their tradition, which was home and the family, but many caved in to the circumstances. In the city, they were tempted with lax, easy, lenient punishment for committing crimes. When judges were not enforcing the laws, many blacks began to suffer. When behavior breaks down in one instance, it breaks down in other areas. Blacks became not responsible for their children and for their families, so they would leave their wives, or they were impregnating girls and not taking care of their children. The earlier society with black people had traditional mores, traditional rules and behaviors. It was a much better society, much more civil. I remember as a child that there were one or two black families in the neighborhood that people felt you should not associate with, but overall, that was not the case. What has happened is that that one or two black families became the majority. When I was growing up, you did not hear “racism,” or all these other governmental terms. There was no “diversity.” It was America. We were colored or black, but we were Americans. You certainly didn't hear “African-Americans.” You heard a lot of positives about being an American. Joe Louis, a very important black fighter, he talked about how proud he was to be an American. Jackie Robinson was proud to be an American. All that was instilled in us. You didn't grow up to hate your country.

There wasn't antagonism towards law enforcement. Like any group or organization, you’re going to have bad apples here and there, but in general, there was no disrespect for police officers. There wasn't this: He's the enemy so we have to correct and change him. I stopped watching TV a long time ago because it's all antiGod. The commercials have taken on the same air. Anything that’s vulgar and profane, if it insults God, Jesus Christ, they'll push it out right away. When I was growing up, if you said, “Oh, my God,” people would say, “Don't take God's name in vain!” Today, they teach everybody to say that. If a movie comes out, and the scriptwriter only has “Oh, my God” 100 times, they’ll say put it in 200 times, so you grow up hearing oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Everybody is saying it. It’s no big deal. All these T-shirts I see, “Just Do It,” so right away, it conveys a sexual message. There was a time when you would be appalled at a little girl saying a cuss word. Now, you’ll hear them say mother this, mother that. It’s no big deal. All this came about to make sure that future generations would not have the Christian restraints of their parents. Stalin talked about it. Alinsky talked about it. Lenin said, “Give me the children and I’ll change the world.” They all know the way to corrupt and demoralize the people is through the young. Don't let them hear about righteousness, don't let them hear about God. That's why today they are walking around with “Just Do It.” Anything that conveys sex is good. My parents and grandparents would have been appalled. Another thing is, in Catholic schools or public schools, if you misbehaved, your

parents expected the teacher to give you a whopping, and if it got known when you came home, you got another whopping. It was expected that girls should behave better than boys. Today, they teach you, “Well, you're a girl but you're just like a boy, etc. There's no difference. Don't make a big deal about it. Do whatever you want to do.” There's no value in being chaste anymore. A woman can stand around in all kinds of crooked postures. Back in the day, a woman would be ashamed to be standing around with a crooked posture. They're taught to be crude, vulgar and profane. We're seeing the results of two generations of deliberate, godless, profane, vulgar teachings in American society. And all these new words. “Transsexual” didn't exist 50 years ago. These words are made up, which means the things they are talking about are made up. Just like “homosexual,” that word was coined probably in the early 20th century. Prior to that, you never heard such a term. They made it up, then they tell people, “You are a special kind of person. This is who you are. You were born this way.” All of a sudden, you are no longer a man or a woman, you are something else. God didn't just make men and women, he made all these different genders, with rights. They make these things up, then they go to the government and say, “You need special laws for these people.” If you are a man who loves a man, you are still a man who loves a man. You are not something called a homosexual. If you are a woman who thinks she is a man, you are still a woman and not a transsexual. What they're aiming for is to get back to pederasty. NAMBLA,

the North American Man/Boy Love Association is a favorite of the ACLU. Before too long, they’ll say that it’s good for a 12year-old to have a male mentor. Pederasty was encoded in the 8th Century B.C. by this fellow, Lycurgus. He enacted it into law in 8th Century Sparta. Athens took it up later. Other Greek cities began to do that too. You get that from Plutarch, from his Lives. Plato borrowed from Lycurgus, but we never hear about Lycurgus because he’s so close to pederasty. People who are smart want to sneak this stuff in. They don't want to hit you with a broad brush. They sneak around the corner. Under God’s law, there are some things man cannot do. God says, “No! No! No!’ so George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and all these big-headed people who thought so well of themselves, they went to work to push God out of the way. Julian Huxley, Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler were in the same group. They all believed in natural law. John Dewey, too. How he got to be in charge of American education, I'll never know. Marx dedicated his book to Darwin. When Darwin came out with evolution, they loved that. “Oh, wow! Now, we don’t need that Genesis stuff!” They believed that everything depends on what man… What did the Greeks say? Yes, man is the measure of all things. They believed that man decides what’s right and wrong, and they weren’t going to have God get in the way. All these people believed in eugenics, of course. Nietzsche said, “The heck with man.” So this is what they’ve been doing since the end of the 19th century. We had Ralph Waldo Emerson working on it in America. All these forces have been converging together against American society, which is God-based, and against the American Constitution, which is God-based.

Freud was another problem. Psychology has done a terrible thing, because right away, they said, “We’ve got the answer, and it has nothing to do with God.” Freud and Jung said, “Let’s look at the human mind. Let’s push God aside, and let’s figure out what this thing is all about, on our own.” God already told you what the mind of man is. They said, “We’ve got a better idea. Man is divided into these compartments. The subconscious, the unconscious, etc, etc, and this is the libido,” so they built all this other stuff up, just like with evolution. They build up all these scenarios, from their own minds, put it in a book and go to the university, “This is the truth! If you give me the correct answer to this, I’ll make you a B.A., or a B.S.!” A lot of the illness or the evil in society has been deliberately injected into our people through the media and the schools, especially by those people who are hidden. I'm thinking of the planners like John Dewey and Antonio Gramsci. He was an Italian Communist. He said he was going to make American culture stink. He was going to make American culture so bad that it stinks. There's a DVD that’s put together by a state legislator, Curtis Bowers. It’s called Grinding America Down. It’s very good in terms of what some of these Communists, these philosophers, what their intent was for America, and they have succeeded. The Communists have infiltrated American institutions, the schools, the government, the parties, to get rid of the godly foundation of this country, so they can use their own selfish power to run American society. Communism wants to control people, and it wants to control their assets, their riches. We’ve had Communists in this country since the 1920s,

especially with the ACLU under Roger Baldwin, who was its Communist founder. The ACLU is working every day to continuously corrupt political parties, and they've been very successful with Democrats, and the Republicans have not been much of a resistance. William Penn said, and this is from Romans 13, in the Bible, that government comes under the authority of God. He cited the origin of government in God’s Bible. This is where government comes from. Benjamin Franklin said that, “Except the Lord build the house, they build it in vain,” citing from the Bible. He was talking about the Constitution of our country. People think of Ben Franklin as some kind of anti-Christian. He was a Deist, they say. That’s ridiculous! Ben Franklin was a Christian Presbyterian governor who wrote proclamations about prayer in the classroom. Ben Franklin said on June 6th, 1787 that “I’ve lived a long time, and the more I live, the more convincing proofs I see of God’s governance in the affairs of man.” That’s in James Madison’s notes. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin wrote that “atheism is not known in America,” but they don’t teach that. Where did the Founding Fathers come from? Did they come out of nowhere? The founding churches built this country, not the Founding Fathers! In these gift shops, they have these little books about Benjamin Franklin, but it’s all trivial nonsense. Or go into the Bourse Building. A year or two ago, they had a big statue of Franklin, down in the basement. You can ask him a question, “Ah, how many children did you have, Ben?” You push this button and Franklin will answer. It’s just incredible, the length they’ll go to

make our Founding Fathers look silly! A year ago, they had a big display sign of the Founding Fathers drinking champagne. I said to the security, “Do you know the administrator to this building? Well, you tell them I’m out here, and I’m protesting this caricature, this aberration of our Founding Fathers.” He said, “I will.” There used to be a cardboard caricature of Benjamin Franklin, with a mechanical arm that was going up and down, selling hamburgers and hot dogs, in front of the Bourse Building. At the American Philosophical Society, they have a statue of Benjamin Franklin dressed in a toga! They have him dressed as a pagan! George Washington was a very prayerful man. He knelt all over the place. He was always praying. If you ever get hold of a book called George Washington’s Sacred Fire, you will see that George Washington was a person that God touched early in his life, because he was always following God. Columbus said, “The Lord put it in me.” Now, you’d think everybody would know at least one quote from the founder of America? They don’t know one quote from Christopher Columbus! Thomas Paine was not an American citizen. He was a Britisher. He was successful when he wrote that pamphlet, Common Sense, which excited a lot of people because it talked about sunshine patriots, etc. There was a lot of good prose that excited people. As a matter of fact, “Common Sense” was suggested by Benjamin Rush. Thomas Paine wanted to call it, “Plain Truth,” but Rush said, “Common Sense is better.” Thomas Paine was great until one day, he decided to write The Age of Reason. He lost friendships because he blasphemed

God. Paine showed that he was a Deist, if not an atheist altogether. Thomas Paine is celebrated by people in this country who want to continue to tear down America. I stop in Washington Square, and I see people reading all this trivial nonsense about William Penn. On a sign, it mentions how William Penn was concerned about making a green city. The man came here because he was persecuted in England and put in jail! He came here to build a haven for people who were being persecuted! Also, the Quakers were at the forefront in the abolition of slavery, and that should be on the sign, not some nonsense about how he lay out some plants for a park in the city! But that’s what they do. They take you away from the important things, and give you the trivia and entertainment. It’s done deliberately. There is no such thing as a separation of church and state! They made it up, and they’ve gotten everybody to believe it. In 1947, they had a ruling in the Supreme Court, separation of church and state. Before that, God was everybody’s authority. Authority in America was God, then they started this nonsense in the Supreme Court. We’re living under Communists, a Communist in the White House, and this Communist Hillary Clinton, and all these other fools. That’s why we’re in this mess today. The world doesn’t have the respect it had for America anymore. All these Christians are being slaughtered, raped, destroyed, and people are saying, “Where is America?” America didn’t have to save South Korea. America went there out of the love that Christ taught, “Love thy neighbor.” In 1949, Truman said, “All men are created equal because we’re made in the image of God.” A couple years later, when South Korea

was under attack, they came to Truman’s office and cried, and that man said, “You’ve got our troops,” and he sent MacArthur. He didn’t have to. America does these things out of a loving, godly heart. We had a reputation of going to the rescue of people who were in trouble, people who were being besieged by an enemy, by an oppressor. That was our reputation. Today, you have in the Middle East all these slaughters going on, and people are saying, “Oh, my goodness, what happened to America?” America used to be a force for righteousness. Now, it’s acting like an evil nation, because we have an evil man in the White House. Obama doesn’t care. He was brought up as a Communist. His father was, his mother was, all of the family. Stalin gave them direction. Stalin said, “Break them down in their religion, break them down in their morality, break them down in their spiritual life, and America will crumble inside.” Stalin was right.

Michael the Philly Jesus Philly is blessed with a generous allotment of public space at its very center. On any day of the week, weather permitting, there are throngs of people at Love Park, Dilworth Park and near the Clothespin. Around this 45-foot-tall sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, I’ve seen an assortment of petty hustlers selling everything from loosies to oddball T-shirts, such as one that said, “IF YOU SMELL SOMETHING STINKING… IT’S ILL-ADELPHIA BECAUSE WE’RE THE SH!T. Black Israelites can often be found nearby. Wearing studded wrist bands, studded belts and studded vests over studded, knee-length, fringe tunics, they rail against white people and gays. I’ve seen these guys not just

in Philly, but Washington D.C. and Minneapolis. Today, a beefy dude sporting a chain necklace with the Star of David thundered, “God is going to destroy this homosexual land! God is going to destroy this lesbian land! Barack Obama has done as much as he could, to push the homosexual agenda. I remember the don’t ask, don’t tell, in the military. Obama started that! You all love that stinking African, but he’s disgusting. He’s not your people, black man! He’s a conniver! Stop having sex with the big whore… called America.” Among the displays, there’s a plastic kneeling Virgin Mary with “DEVIL” on her forehead, “666” on her right cheek, a moustache drawn with magic marker over her lips, “WHORE” on her chest, and “SLUT!” over her crotch. A board with a white Jesus had “666,” “Image of the Beast” and “IMPOSTER” as captions. Another board, “ISLAM IS IDOL WORSHIP AND A LIE!!” A “WE ARE NOT AFRICANS” board featured unflattering photos of Africans, such as a boy’s face caked with animal feces, a terrified girl being held down and about to have her clitoris sliced and several people with huge lip plates. An explanation, “MUST read and think about this: There were many Dark skin Nations which were created but not all Dark Nations are the same. The original Ishmaelites are dark skin but are not Africans, the East Indians are dark skin but are not Africans, the Natives of Australia are dark skin but are not Africans, neither are you so called Negroes which are dark skin are not Africans according to biblical history and prophecy.” Jesus is black, and only blacks, Hispanics and Amerindians can go to heaven. “The white man is the devil the Bible speaks of. The white man will join the cops to kill the black man! The

white man will become a politician to pass laws to kill the black man, the Hispanic man and the native man! The white man will kill us because we have no protection! The white man was a murderer from the beginning. When Cain murdered Abel, you know that story, God put a mark on him, and the mark is his blood showing forth through his skin. That’s why white people look red! So-called Caucasians ain’t white, they’re red, and it’s not just their necks that’s red, they’re red all over!” A couple years ago, a black lady told me, “You know, they used to only talk about black people as the chosen people, but now they include Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Mexicans. They just want more followers.” Today, the Black Israelites had an unwelcome guest, and that’s Michael Grant, better known as Philly Jesus. Twenty-nineyears-old, Michael has become a fixture around this area. As he pranced and smiled in front the Black Israelites, an old black woman screamed, “Cut that shit out! You ain’t Jesus! Hey people, he got arrested last week! Jesus doesn’t get arrested!” The old woman forgot that Jesus was arrested. I mean, that was the denouement of his earthly visit. Other blacks took photos with Michael and tipped him. A smiling, suited black man shook Michael’s hand. Two kids around 15 asked Michael to bless them, which he promptly did, free of charge. As they walked away, I noticed they were handcuffed to each other. It was some kind of fashion statement. When Michael wasn’t riling up the Black Israelites, he was dancing among the jets of water of Dilworth Park. Done, he stood in the shade of dwarfish trees and told me about his life. After two weeks of unseasonably cold weather, it finally warmed up, so more skin was showing, and more smiles. There were bright colors everywhere. Knowing they won’t freeze that night, even the homeless cheered up.

I dress like this to remind people about Jesus. I’m a Christian, and this is a way for me to share my faith. I’ve been doing this for two years. Sometimes people get angry. People look at me and they don’t know what to think. They’re like, Is he serious? Is he joking? So they come up to me and find out, and I tell them I’m sincere. I’m sincere about what I’m doing. I’m not doing this to mock Jesus. I’m a Christian. Watching Bible movies, you know, watching Jesus movies? God, He led me to do this. They bring Jesus to the movies. I bring Jesus to the streets. I use my passion for the theatrical art to bring Jesus to life. I was raised in the theater, on stage. When I was young, my mom would put me in, like, plays, musicals, so I’ve always had that in me. My mom was an actress, and I’m an actor too. I just use that talent for acting to bring Jesus to life. This is America, so, you know, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, people can express themselves, and dress any way they want, so, you know, that’s what I’m doing. I’m expressing that right. You shouldn’t care what people think of you, you should only do what makes you happy. God, he knows our hearts. People don’t like what they don’t understand, you know. People are quick to judge. Sometimes I get spit at. People spit at me. I get death threats. People say, “I’ll kill you!”

One time I was in a bar, someone took a drink, spit it all over my face, like a glass of wine. They put it in their mouth and spit it all over me, on my white robe, because they were offended. This was at Howl at the Moon on 15th Street. It’s a nightclub. I went in there dressed like this because I want people to know that Jesus was a friend of sinners. He was a friend of everybody. I go to nightclubs to dance, I love dancing, and to drink wine. I only drink wine. I don’t drink hard alcohol or beer, I just drink wine. Red wine. I don’t drink every day. I drink, like, probably two or three times out of a week. I like to have a glass of wine with my dinner. Jesus drank wine. Jesus’ first miracle, He turned water into wine, and at the last supper, He had blood and wine. When I drink wine, I eat bread with it. Before I had Jesus come into my life, I drank the hard stuff. When I used to shoot up heroin, I used to drink bottles of vodka. Hard stuff. Hennessy. Just the other day, I was arrested at the Apple Store. I’m an Apple customer. I have an Apple phone. I go into the Apple Store nearly every day for the last two years. Never had a problem. When I went in there that one time, an employee looked me up and down. He said, “Come on, dude, you’ve got to take this somewhere else!” And I said, “No, I’m allowed in here like everybody else.” So I stood my ground, and I got locked up. They twisted the story. I carry a little cross. It’s a little bigger than me. They said it was blocking an aisle, which is not true. I carry my cross everywhere. I take the bus with my cross. I go into restaurants and bars with my cross. I go everywhere with

my cross. My cross is in the garage today. Now I’ll have to go to court. That wasn’t the first time I was locked up. I was locked up in 2014, because someone handed me money at Love Park. I don’t charge. If someone comes up to me and says, “Yo, can I take a picture with you?” I don’t charge, but tips are welcome, you know. It’s a donation. Someone handed me money, and a cop saw that, so he said I was soliciting, “You have to leave the park.” I said I wasn’t leaving because it’s a public park, so I got locked up, for two hours. People who like what I’m doing, they give me donations. It’s enough to survive. I get something to eat, and I use it for transportation. I bounce around. I don’t have a house of my own, I don’t pay bills, I couch surf. I bounce around between my friends and family. I have a lot of friends. Before this, I used to shoot heroin and smoke crack. I used to rob and steal from people. I used to break in everywhere. I was hooked for seven years. I was run over by a car when I was 19, so the doctors were giving me pills… for the pain, and that’s how I got hooked on drugs. I wasn’t an addict before. I did start to smoke marijuana when I was twelve. I was born in Philly, in the Northeast, around Cottman Avenue. I finished high school. I went to college for a little bit. I studied recording engineering. I’m still doing music. I’m a rapper.

The first single to my album is coming out soon, this summer. It’s called “High.” It has nothing to do with drugs. I’m high on God. I was raised Roman Catholic. I still go to church, but I don’t consider myself a Catholic or follower of any religion. I’m a believer of Jesus. I want to do this forever, until I leave the earth. When I stop looking like Jesus, I’ll turn into Moses. As I get older, and have gray hair, and wrinkles on my face, I’ll be Philly Moses. I don’t know if the country is in trouble. No one knows. Only God knows. God can come back any second. No one knows. It says in the Bible that God will come like a thief in the night. He’ll come when he’s least expected. I just live my life one day at a time and just hope for the best, you know, and try to keep a positive mind. This is the worst it has ever been in human history. With all the wars, you know, all the diseases, it seems like it’s building up. The earth is getting overpopulated with people. There’s more stuff, more technology, which is hurting the earth. Human beings are like parasites to the earth. See all the cars? And they’re, like, giving out all the gas, the carbon monoxide? It’s bad for the atmosphere. The earth is, like, you know, wanting to cleanse itself. That’s why the earth is acting up. That’s why you have these earthquakes. That’s why you have these tornadoes. It’s the earth trying to cleanse itself. The Bible talks about this. These are the signs. The signs will

come. These are the warning signs. The signs are all around us. The end of the world can happen right now. As we’re talking, you can see a big tidal wave just wash over everything, or an asteroid, you know, it can just boom! You never know. The same thing that killed the dinosaurs. Remember the dinosaurs? They’re extinct. Something drastic happened to them. I’m a Democrat. I’m registered as a Democrat. I believe that human beings have the right to vote. I voted for Bernie Sanders. I voted for Obama, yes. Obama is the best president we’ve ever had. Ever. Personally, I don’t agree with the transgender stuff, but it is what it is. In the Bible, you know, it does say you’re not supposed to do stuff like that, according to the words of God, but the Bible also says, everyone is a sinner. No one’s perfect. Only God’s perfect. Jesus saved me when I was at my lowest. I’m a lot better than what I was, I’m off the drugs, but I still have my struggles, you know. As a human, I have doubts, fears, anxieties, like how am I going to get married? Have kids? Sometimes I worry about the future. I’m trying to travel the world, you know, stuff like that, and it takes money to do those things. I’m trying to figure out how to generate an income. I used to be a banquet server. When I was in high school, I used to serve wines and hor d’oeuvres at special events. I used to be a dishwasher. I used to work in a restaurant as a waiter. Stuff like that.

I’ve only been to Florida, Delaware, New Jersey and New York. Last week I went to Times Square for the first time, to scope it out. I was dressed normally. Now I want to go back as Jesus once a week. I like New York because it’s bigger. I like to be around lots of people. My parents don’t agree with this, they don’t like it, but we’re still talking. The last thing I want to say is, “Peace and love. Love one another. Treat others the way you’d treat yourself.”

Noam the Straying Hasid Last year in Leipzig, Germany, I met a young woman who had just returned from Chicago, where her family lived in tony Lincoln Park. She had also studied at Williams College in Massachusetts, where tuition alone was near $50,000. Germany was too white, she complained, and she was ashamed of the anti-immigrant attitude shown by many of her countrymen. For Christmas, she went to Palm Springs, California. Though only in her mid-twenties, she had traveled to dozens of countries. The young woman loved American multiculturalism, and it’s easy to see why. For those above a certain income level, diversity simply means variety, as in choosing between Mexican and Filipino for breakfast, Haitian, Cuban and Panamanian for lunch, then Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Afghan for dinner. One can decide between a Colombian and a Tibetan nanny, and as for paid penetration, why not a Ukrainian one week, then a Thai the next? If one’s an employer, there are billions of reasons to underpay, so that’s nice too. Just keep those borders open. Below deck, in the windowless compartments, the dynamics aren’t quite the same. Though one can also sample a huevos rancheros or a Jamaican beef patty, one may not be able to afford it if one can’t compete for a job against more desperate immigrants. Those who don't make their living as a busboy, dishwasher, line cook, hotel custodian, housepainter, drywaller or gardener, etc., will smirk at this scenario. The unemployed may also be foreign-born, since relentless immigration hurts whomever is already here. In Washington State, Thai farm

workers have been brought in to replace Mexicans. With lives of the working poor constantly threatened and disrupted by immigration, social turmoil is inevitable, for the masses can’t keep making and eating less, and moving into ever worse dwellings, if not onto a sidewalk. The backlash against immigration in all multicultural societies is no last gasp convulsion from the past, but a portent of the future. With nationalism and tribalism resurgent, we’re living through the last days of multiculturalism. None of this tectonic shift is evident in chichi enclaves like the Upper East Side, where I had a reading recently at the Asia Society, or in Boerum Hill, where I also did my shtick. In that rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood, the average listed price for a house is only $3,328,983. Let me see if I have some spare change. Among those at the second event, there was a rather unusual young man, for it’s not every day you find a Hasidic Jew at a celebration of a Tokyo-based literary journal. During the informal chatter afterwards, I got to meet 24-year-old Noam. By bringing different modes of living and thinking into starker contrast, multiculturalism allows each man to reflect on his own upbringing, so that he can forge, step by step, an existence that’s more suitable to his soul. From a diverse buffet, he may choose anything from tai chi, to Sufism, to chemsex. Stepping outside the strictures of Hasidism just six months ago, Noam is at the beginning of this process. Wearing a beige jacket and dark brown slacks, Noam was clean shaven, and his speech was deliberate and concise, even after he had had a few beers mixed with wine. Thoroughly contained, Noam never got agitated nor laughed, though his face sometimes seemed bemused. Our conversation started at the bookstore, continued at a restaurant, and ended on the

street, just before I went underground to head back to the Lower East Side. I never saw Noam again. I like what you said about civilizational decline. In the Talmud, it talks about this relentless decline, from generation to generation. Mankind has been in decline for 4,000 years. My father is dead. I live at home with my mother and three siblings. I have an older brother and an older sister who have moved out. I stopped formal schooling at 13, and I’m just now trying to get the equivalent of a high school diploma. I’d like to go to college. I’ll probably take out a loan. I don’t know what I want to study. At the yeshiva, we spoke Yiddish. I can also read and write Hebrew. I feel embarrassed, because so many other people my age have done so much. I haven’t been anywhere. I spent six months in Israel, but only in an Orthodox community. There are modern places in Israel, like Tel Aviv, but I wasn’t there. Where I was, there was garbage in the middle of the street. Being used to American standards, I didn’t feel comfortable. I also spent a few weeks in Los Angeles, but, again, I was only among other Orthodox Jews. I have never even been to New Jersey. Sometimes I think of myself as a poet. I’d like to publish at least one poem. I need to express what I’ve gone through. My heroes are Biblical, like King David. I’m inspired by them.

Don’t laugh, but I’d like to be great like them. I cannot have a conversation with my sister-in-law, not because I don’t like her, but because it’s not allowed. Even in the home, only certain colors are allowed for decoration. Everything is so bland. Even the cooking. Take the matzo ball, for example. I understand that’s how it was in the ancient world, but I’m uncomfortable with the injunction to annihilate all of your enemy, every single man, woman and child. The Talmud does teach you to respect all living beings, and even inanimate things. At a normal meal, bread is always eaten first, but on the Shabbat, wine is drank before you break bread, and that’s why the bread must be covered by a piece of cloth, to not offend it. In the Talmud, there’s a story about a rabbi who crawled beneath a bed, just so he could learn how his teacher had sex, and there’s another rabbi who hid in the outhouse, just so he could observe how his teacher wiped himself. There is a correct way to do everything. I’m watching television to learn about the world, because you can’t get everything from books. I’m watching sit-coms and commercials. The Twilight Zone is a show from the 60’s. I notice the eyes of the people in it are more focused. They don’t dart around like what you see today. People could still focus then. You’re right, many people can no longer hear you. They purposely ignore or distort what you just said. People who walk around with earphones might as well have a middle finger taped to their forehead. They’re basically saying,

“I don’t want to be here among you!” Of course, we’re all tribal. We have different belief systems. In Capitalism, we no longer see people as people. It’s always, What can I get out of this person? I don’t understand why women put up with pornography. It’s so insulting. Men shouldn’t put up with it, either. It’s so degrading to all of humanity. No, I haven’t read Kafka or Bashevis Singer. I will look them up. I have never heard of Simone Weil. I like the New Yorker because it’s so well-written. I come to all the readings at this bookstore. I don’t know anything about these writers. I don’t even know your name. Can you drink wine after beer? I’ve never done it. Of course, this wine is good. It belongs to another universe! I’ve only had Passover wine. Just coming to the reading tonight was an act of rebellion, because it’s Passover, and I was supposed to be at the synagogue. You have all these rich people come in, and they’re just mumbling the prayers. There’s nothing spiritual about it. My grandma criticized how I was dressed. She said why aren’t you wearing the black coat and the hat? She had a fall two months ago, but I haven’t visited her. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m retaliating against her. I like what you said about the Muslim making Jewish sandwiches for black people. Food brings us together. You know where you can get great food? The corner bodega!

I’d love to have my own space, but I must get a job first. I’ve only had one job in my life. I worked retail. I dealt with other people. I handled it. It wasn’t easy. You talked about the broken people, those who have no time or mental space to work through their problems, but I’m even more broken than they are. I have no peace.

Lindy Morelli the Carmelite Nun In 2017, Chuck Orloski’s 27-year marriage collapsed. Chased from his home and broke, he had to take refuge at Lighthouse, a Scranton group home run by a blind, 54-year-old nun, Lindy Morelli. On Thanksgiving, I came to Lighthouse for five days to stay with my friend, Chuck. The two-story, signless house sits on a narrow residential lane, across from a small Greek Orthodox church, serving a mostly Lebanese congregation. Merely a block away is Main Street, with its handful of restaurants, Keystone, New Foliage, Bandito, Vicenzo’s and Savory Maza, offering, respectively, mediocre burgers and hot dogs, edible Chinese, decent Mexican, pizzas and Lebanese. At Lighthouse, I met Steve, an Oklahoman who had the infuriating habit of throwing Chuck’s canned food away, for they were expired, he falsely claimed. I met cheerful Lee Ann, a middle aged woman who attributed her recovery from kidney cancer to an oil exuding icon at St. George Church. I met Lou, who came by often to help out Lindy. A former seminary student, he had never married and lived alone. My room had been recently occupied by a thoughtful, quiet, middle-aged man who was also a pedophile, it turned out, for one day, the police showed up to handcuff him and take his computer away. Ministering to all sorts of troubled souls, Lindy doesn’t shun criminals and, in fact, has visited prisoners for decades.

In 1981, a 15-year-old, Joseph Aulisio, murdered two children, aged 8 and 4, in Old Forge, just outside Scranton. After hearing the guilty verdict, a gum-chewing Aulisio shouted to his family, “It’s party time!” He then mocked the district attorney, “Ernie, are you going to hug me?” Condemned to death by the jury, Aulisio got his sentence reduced to life, and is now filing for release after the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life terms for juveniles are unconstitutional. Since the mid-90’s, Lindy has been visiting Aulisio in prison. Now, she offers the 51-year-old a room at Lighthouse. One evening after dinner, Lindy and I retreated to a parlor to conduct this interview. Going in, I already knew about Lindy’s preoccupation with Kevin Tower, a Michiganian convicted of double murder. The details of his case, I didn’t discover until afterwards, however. Online, I found but one photo of Tower. It shows a clean shaven, boyish looking man with a flat topped head, dirty blonde hair and thick neck. I read “A Prisoner on the Ladder,” an 800-word screed Tower published, presumably with Lindy’s help, at the very obscure Wilkes-Barre Scranton Independent Gazette. Revealing no facts about his own case, Tower merely compares himself to Jesus. It begins: There He was standing as the crowd yelled, “Crucify, crucify, crucify him!” The crowd consented and gave authority to the punishment. The beating and bloodshed began. Many looked on, at first amused. Then, the blood became apparent. Some left. Then the torn flesh became apparent. Many left. Only a few cold hearts likely remained. The guards were only doing their duties. They were immune. The prosecutor and court were not there. Maybe there was a soul or two who sat and absorbed the pain and cruelty they saw. Perhaps they were chased off.

The government’s case against Tower is laid out quite succinctly in a 2010 document: This case arose out of the murders of defendant’s uncles, Ron and Paul Tower, aged fifty-seven and fortyone, respectively, in July 1995. The Tower brothers were single, lived together at a farmhouse in Remus, Michigan, and were mentally impaired to varying degrees. Ron Tower could not read, could write only his name, was not gainfully employed but performed chores around the farmhouse, was diabetic and depended on his brother for medication, and was extremely shy. Paul Tower could read and write, was employed as a custodian, maintained and administered his own bank accounts, and owned two vehicles, a truck and a 1992 red Ford Escort. The Tower brothers were last seen alive on the afternoon of July 5, 1995, with defendant, at their farmhouse. On July 6, 7, and 8, 1995, withdrawals were made from Paul Tower’s savings account in Big Rapids. On July 9, 1995, Paul Tower’s red Escort was abandoned at an accident scene in Grand Rapids. A witness later identified defendant as the driver of that vehicle and as having fled the scene. On July 13, 1995, human blood and hair were found in various buildings at the Tower farmhouse. On that date, Mecosta County Sheriff’s Detective Richard Rau interviewed defendant, and on the following day Rau arrested defendant for uttering and publishing and unlawfully driving away Paul Tower’s Escort. On July 26, 1995, partially decomposed bodies matching descriptions of Paul and Ron Tower were found in a remote area of Mecosta County. Both had been stabbed and shot with a .22 caliber weapon. Around August 15, 1995, defendant was additionally charged with two

counts of murder, felony firearm, and forging signatures on savings withdrawal slips drawn on Paul Tower’s savings account on July 6, 7, and 8, 1995. Defendant was convicted as charged and his motion for new trial was denied. A 1999 document fleshes out Tower’s history of financial deliquency, drug use and association with prostitutes. He killed his uncles, the state argues, to provide drugs to Heather Gallapoo, a 17-year-old whore: Heather testified that she was sixteen when she met defendant in January 1995. That night they had sex, he paid her fifty dollars, told her he liked her, and she gave him her phone number. After that night she had sex with him about five times, but not for money. She testified that they had “kind of” a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship and she stopped or decreased her prostituting for a time. She testified that her parents liked defendant and were encouraging the relationship, that defendant wanted her to stop prostituting and get off drugs, and that he told her a lot of times that he loved her. He also told her several times that he wanted to marry her and talked about having children. Heather testified that she eventually wanted to get away from defendant, so she would leave home for Becky Cochran’s apartment. Heather then got reported as a runaway and the police picked her up at Becky’s apartment. After that defendant would buy her crack to try to keep her at home. Defendant would take her to buy crack and paid for it a lot of times. Heather testified that defendant was an easy person to get things from and would do whatever she asked. […]

The prosecution properly argued that there was evidence that defendant, a twenty-five-year-old, did not have girlfriends or male friends, did not bring women or male friends to gatherings, liked female companionship but had to pay for it, and that that evidence and his activities of finding Heather, driving her to buy drugs and sometimes waiting for her in his vehicle while she turned tricks, indicated that defendant was different than the person he purported to be. Now 39, Heather Gallapoo still lives in Grand Rapids. Her FaceBook page has “NEVER FORGET WHO YOU ARE” superimposed on images of clouds, as seen from an airplane. The ex femme fatale reveals that she graduated from a community college in 2015, and has held jobs at Burger King and Yummy Work. A post, “Going broke happens. Staying broke is your FAULT.” Another, “the devil doesn’t come to you with his red face and horns, he comes to you disguised as everything you’ve ever wanted.” Two weeks after this interview, the State of Michigan again rejected Tower’s appeal. Lusting after love, Tower killed and wrecked his own life. We can only hope he won’t destroy another who’s also aching to be fully embraced. When it comes to sex, we’re all naked babes in a dark gulley. I have a twin sister. My mother was born into a very poor family. My sister and I were in Saint Joseph, and in the 60’s, that was a big thing, because when a woman was pregnant and couldn’t take care of her children, it was a scandal. So it was a tumultuous beginning for my mother. We came home at 2 1/2. My parents didn’t get married until we came out of the orphanage. They were married for six years. My father is from Italy. He’s a wonderful man. I call him every day.

My sister and I were home for a couple of years, with my family, then I went away to school for the blind, Overbrook. From the beginning of my life, I’ve always felt that, I don’t know, that life was really… empty, somehow. I guess I just felt that way. I had a deep experience, like when I was young, I guess it was a spiritual experience, I felt that God was real, and so when I went away to school, it was a very dark, stark place to be, but I felt that God was with me. It was a very stark way to grow up, I felt, like interiorly, for myself, but I got a very good education, and I had a lot of blessings. The thing that meant the most to me was just what was going on inside my own soul, and how I could love, because I felt, like, love was the most important thing, and it was so absent. It felt like that to me, and it didn’t feel like there was enough love for other people either, so I thought that, for me, that was the most important thing. By the time I was in high school, we had a regular life, as normal as we could. I lived at the school almost my whole life, and we came home, you know, once every couple months or something, but I actually felt like my family died, because I didn’t see them enough, and I wasn’t prepared for the shock of being away at school. My mother is beautiful, generous and loving, but she had some problems, and she couldn’t be as present as she probably would have wanted to. After my parents divorced, my mother then married an alcoholic, so when I came home, it was, like, really tumultuous at home, and it was very, very empty and lonely at school. I felt really at odds, I felt abandoned, and the thing that sort of helped me out was God, because I felt that, like, there just wasn’t anything for me to hang on to.

We went to this camp for the blind in the Summer. It was a wonderful, like, sort of magical place for us, because everything was normal, everything was made normal for the blind, like we could get around, because they had put railing around so you wouldn’t fall into the pool. Things like that. The counselors who worked there were these young people who, you know, it was the early 70’s and 60’s, so they were people who were very conscious of peace and love, and how the world was troubled, and needed a different change, and the counselors had a big impact on my life. I remember when I was at that camp, one of the counselors made me something out of wood. It was, like, a little letter opener. He said, “I know you like to write letters, so this is something I made you.” I treasured this little thing, and I carried it with me wherever I went. I was so excited about it, that somebody would give me something, that I was important to someone, enough for them to do that, but I lost that little thing. I dropped it on the sidewalk, and I was too shy to turn around and ask somebody to get it for me, so I lost it, and I thought, at the time, “How many more losses are there going to be?” Like, life was so full of loss. By the time I was in high school, I started to write poetry, and my faith started to get a lot stronger. I just felt that Jesus was the center of everything, like everything in the universe, everything in my own life, everything in the world. Everything just centered around the life and death, and resurrection of Jesus, because I knew that there was nothing on this earth. Because life was so empty and so harsh, I just was convinced that Jesus was everything, and convinced that the Eucharist was everything, that Jesus was present in the Eucharist,

because when I received Holy Communion when I was young, it just changed my life. So when I went to college, I thought, “What can I do with my life? I don’t know.” I wasn’t, like, exuding confidence or anything. I really didn’t know what to do. I went to a small Christian school. I remember I was really shy when I went out there, because we were brought up in a school for the blind, and they kept saying, “When you get out into the real world, it’s really going to be hard. You’re going to have to do this, and that,” and I thought, “Oh my gosh. What if I can’t?” I was really nervous when I went to the cafeteria, and you had a tray of food, and you’d be, like, carrying the food, and you’d be walking. I’d be thinking, “Oh my gosh, where is the table? What if I fall? What if I drop the tray?” I was just nervous, I just didn’t have confidence, but somehow God just took care of me. I managed to get a bachelor’s degree in theology, then I thought, “What am I going to do now?” All I really wanted to do was to love people. I really wanted to comfort people, that was what I thought, “That’s all I really want to do. I don’t know what else to do.” Then I thought, “Maybe I’ll get a master’s in counseling,” not that I really wanted to be a clinical counselor, “Well, I know what it’s like to be in pain, and suffer and feel pain, so maybe if I do something, maybe I can help somebody else,” so then I got this master’s degree in counseling. When I was in school, I thought, “I really love God. I really want to serve God,” so I think, “Maybe I can become a nun.” I kept thinking about it. It’s all I really wanted to do. I had my heart set on it, and I started to think, “That would be the best way

that I could be happy, because I could serve God. I could love God. I could pray.” I had a deep personal relationship with Jesus, and I thought, “Well, that’s usually what people do when they want to have that kind of life. They become nuns, and they give their lives to other people, they give their lives to God, and they’re happy that way,” so I thought, “Well, that’s what I’ll do, when I got out of school.” I started to look around, and I wrote to, like, a hundred different communities. I got this directory of communities, all around the US or whatever, and they gave a little description of themselves. I thought, “If I can find one that loves the poor and wants to pray, maybe I can fit in there.” I wrote to all those ones, and they all wrote back, almost a hundred of them wrote back and said, “Nope, can’t accept you because you’re blind.” I thought, “What in the world?!” Like, I just thought it was crazy at the time. I really didn’t understand it. Anyway, this was, like, 1989, and by then I already had my master’s degree. So then the bishop here let me take vows, like a nun would take. I took a vow of poverty. I took a vow of celibate chastity, and obedience to the church, and the bishop and all that, and it was the actual vow that a nun took, and I was extremely happy, because I thought, “That’s really what I wanted to do.” “Eventually, I’ll find a community,” I thought to myself. I just didn’t realize that I wasn’t going to find a community. There just wasn’t going to be an opening for me. So I spent, like, my adult life just drifting around, feeling very, very sad and empty because I didn’t have anybody to share it with. I didn’t have anybody to share this most important thing in my life with me, and people didn’t take it that serious either,

because I wasn’t a nun, obviously, but I didn’t know I wasn’t a regular, just a person either. I had a certain commitment, but nobody understood it, so I was kind of like betwixt and between these two different places, and I had to keep a lot of it largely to myself, because there really wasn’t anybody who really understood this deep passion that I had… for God, and for the poor. I really didn’t know who to talk to about it. When I was 19, I thought I’d go to the prison, so I started going into all these different prisons, in the 90’s. Then I started to go visit people in nursing homes, then I started working in the housing projects. I just did everything you could think of, because I just felt in my heart that’s what I was supposed to do, but I kind of felt lost too. I was still living my vows. I renewed them every year, but I was really, really lonely, but I thought, “There has got to be other people like that, who are lonely, like around, in the world.” Then I started reading about Dorothy Day, and I started reading about Catherine Doherty, and I thought, “Well, maybe I can do something like that. Maybe we could get a house. It was just a pipe dream I had, but I thought, “I’m just going to see what happen,” so I started to make all these phone calls, to these different churches, and said, “I have this idea. I want to help the poor.” I had no idea how this ever happened, but they all started to think it was a good idea, and before I knew it, in a couple years, we had a board of directors. We had our nonprofit. We had enough money to run a storefront. Around the 80’s or whatever, I went to a place called Medjugorje. It’s a place where they had alleged Mary apparitions, and normally, I wouldn’t go to a place like that, because I’m not drawn to sensationalism, but one of my friends went there and said, “Lindy, that place is so life-changing. It is

so powerful. Oh, my gosh,” and I was like, “What in the world? What could be powerful? I mean, he has a lot of faith. Why would he go all the way to Yugoslavia to see an apparition, or whatever?” I started to get curious about it. I thought, “I’m going to see what that film is,” and it was so prayerful, and so real. I just was, like, “Oh my gosh! That is so real!” and it wasn’t like I wanted to see the apparition. It wasn’t that. I just knew it was from heaven or something. I just felt it was real, and I thought to myself, “I’ve got to go there.” I felt immediately called. I stayed up all night. I was thinking, “How am I going to get the money to go there?” This was 1987 or whatever. I was 23 or 22. So, I was thinking, “I’ve got to go there, Lord. Please, could you help me figure out a way to go there?” I was, like, really nervous, thinking, “How am I going to get the money?” Then somebody donated the money, and I actually went to Medjugorje. I went there 12 times, believe it or not, over the next… many years. The second time I went there, I met a priest, and he was from Ireland. He was leading a Madjugorje prayer group. By that time, the apparition had been going on for six or eight years, and people from all over the world were going there, and people’s lives were really changed. People went there and they prayed, and they came to terms with their lives, and their problems, and they really got a lot of peace from it. One of Mary’s main messages was peace, pray for peace and be peaceful and, you know, live a peaceful life and turn to God and, you know, put away things that are unpeaceful, and things like that. So the second time I went there, I met this priest. He’s from Ireland, so I joined up with their group. The following Summer, they said, “Well, you could go to Ireland, with our family,” so I

went over there with his family, because I had become friends with his sister. We went to Cork. I don’t know if you ever went to Ireland, but it’s a beautiful place. They had a peat fire, and it was just very… Irish. The priest came from this very troubled family. As soon as I got there, they were all, like, arguing with each other, and I was thinking, “What in the world is going on here? How did I get here? What kind of family is this?” Anyway, for the next twelve days, he started to, well, he was abusing me, and he assaulted me. The last day, he sexually assaulted me. It happened on the plane. For the next couple years, I was, like, trying to get the church to acknowledge this. It happened in ’88, I was in graduate school, then in ’91, I went to the bishop. By the time ’91 came around, I had already written to his superiors. They had already stonewalled me many, many times. I wrote to the cardinal. I wrote to a lot of different prelates. First, I wrote to his American superior. They just said, “Oh, that didn’t happen!” Then I wrote to the cardinal. I got nowhere with that. Then I wrote to his Irish superior. I got nowhere with that. Then I went to our bishop, and our bishop said, “I don’t want to get involved. It didn’t happen here.” Basically, what I’m trying to tell you is, all through the 90’s, while I was doing this work building Lighthouse, while I was, like, in this quandary of, “Lord, what about my vocation? I feel so alone,” I also had this terrible burden of this unresolved thing, and I also had the trauma of the assault. I felt betrayed by the church, I felt abandoned, and I didn’t know what to do, so in ’93, a friend of mine that was a lawyer said, “Why don’t we just, like, write them a letter and tell them we’re going to sue them,” or something like that, which I really didn’t want to do, but we had no choice.

I was going crazy, because, like, it went against everything that I thought. Like, I didn’t want to sue the church, but what can I do? Like, I didn’t know. So we did that, so finally, our bishop arranged for that priest to come over here while he was stationed in Nairobi. After the assault, after I raised the allegation, they relocated him to Nairobi, Kenya. He came over here, and they set up a juridical panel. They recorded our testimonies, then they made a judgement that my allegations were true. The recommended that he gets some kind of psychiatric evaluation and counseling, but they never followed through to let me know whether he actually got them. So years later, I was still trying to figure out if he ever got them, so I really didn’t find out, because every time I wrote them a letter, they never answered me. Finally, in 2003, after begging and pleading with them, the Irish superior, who was a new superior, I said, “All I want to do is go to Ireland, pray and have a mass, and pray for healing, and please ask his sister to come,” because I was friends with one of his sisters, so that’s what we did. We had a beautiful mass of healing. He didn’t come, but his sister came, and I went through a long period of healing. Anyway, that’s not the most important part of my story. That doesn’t define me. Some people think that that would be, like, an experience that would define a person’s life. It didn’t define my life. Every suffering I have had has become a great blessing because I have been learning how to love. The reason I brought up that incident is because, there were three things going on at once. There’s the development of Lighthouse, which was, pretty much, I just prayed and trusted God, depended on whoever God sent, and now we got this house in 2004, which a benefactor bought from us in 2006.

Since 2004, we’ve had, like, 70 different residents living here, people from all walks of life, like mothers and children, people from prisons, people from the streets, people from hospitals, people that had disabilities, people who just needed a home, and needed a chance and all that. So I did my best to help people, and the whole time I was doing that, I was still thinking, “I want to live a more contemplative life.” This is OK to do this work with the poor, but I need somebody to share my life with, my vows with, and my life. By the time I was 40, I had had my vows already for almost 20 years. I was really broken hearted, and I thought, “Why can’t something work out? Like, why can’t I just fit somewhere?” But I just didn’t know where to fit, so then I told my sister this one day, “I’m just going to take my ring off. I guess, maybe I should just get on a website and see if I could get married. I don’t want to get married, but maybe God wants me to, because I can’t be alone like this for the rest of my life. I’m 40 years old. What’s going to happen?!” So anyway, I was really broken hearted. I went on a retreat, and I was just besides myself, thinking, “What am I going to do? How am I going to live these vows by myself? It’s just so terrible. How come the church doesn’t have a place for me?” Throughout my life, people had said to me, “Why don’t you start your own community?” I thought that was utterly ridiculous. I was like, “No, are you kidding me? Like, I’m the shyest person around. I can’t start a community.” People kept saying that to me over the years, “Why don’t you start your own thing?” And I thought, “I never want to start anything.” How did I even do this Lighthouse thing? How did this even happen? I just wanted to go somewhere and peel potatoes, and do what I was told, but it never happened.

Around the time of the retreat, I heard of this spiritual family called Carmel, and I started reading all the Carmelite writers, like from the 12th century or whatever, like Saint Teresa, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Therese, and I started thinking, “Oh my gosh!” All of a sudden, it dawned on me. “I think I’m a Carmelite!” It was such a relief, because I realized that whatever their interior lives were about, how they reached God, how they described their interior lives, how they perceived the world, and how they… lived for God was exactly what I felt, and I thought, “Oh my gosh! Finally, there is a name to give my life.” I was so relieved, but I still didn’t have a community to share it with. That was in 2004, so I went on for next many years, thinking, “I still need a community to share life with. Who would that be? What would that be? Who would understand vows? Who would understand this spiritual journey? Who believes the way I do? I don’t know. Carmelites do, but I can’t go to a traditional Carmelite monastery. They don’t, wouldn’t accept me, and I wouldn’t fit it, because I want to work with the poor. What can I do?” So, that just went on like that, for more years, until around 2010, I had a Carmelite spiritual director that was a friar, and we were trying to work on forming a community for people who had special needs, like disabilities, people who were in prison, people who were confined, and people who couldn’t join traditional religious communities, so we were going to form one of those, and we worked hard on it. We got it all approved and situated. It almost got off the ground. It took four years to get all the paperwork done. By the time we got all the paperwork done, the American province backed out because they couldn’t do it, logistically. You’d think I’d be really disappointed, because I had so many disappointments in the past, but for some reason, for the first

time in my life, I felt really peaceful. This was already around my mid-40’s, and we had worked on this really hard, so I thought, “I don’t know what God wants me to do. There’s some kind of answer for me. I don’t know what it is, but it’s all right.” A few months after that, the Carmelites wrote to me and said, “Well, there’s this person in prison. His name is Kevin Tower, and he’s a Carmelite, and he wants somebody to write to him,” so I said, “OK, I’ll write to him. That’s no big deal. I’ve worked in prison my whole life,” but I was kind of intrigued, because I thought, “Well, he’s a Carmelite. I mean, he’s not just reading the Bible in jail. He made a serious commitment. Like, what in the world?” I started to think to myself, “What’s going on with this Kevin person?” Two years before that, I met somebody who was wrongfully convicted. I’d been writing this manuscript, and somebody that I knew said, “You should get in touch with so and so. He was in prison. He was wrongly convicted. He wrote a book. He was very successful about it,” and so I got in touch with Chris. He came over, brought his book and all that. We became very good friends. I was really blown away by his story, because he told me, “Oh, I was wrongfully convicted. I spent six years in prison for a murder I didn’t commit,” and I was, like, really upset by that, when I read his book. So when I met Kevin, I realized that Kevin was also wrongfully convicted, of two murders that he didn’t commit, so I became very, very, like, arrgh! Like, I just couldn’t live with it, I thought. “Please let us help you,” I said. I just knew, I just knew it, I just knew. I knew because I have a lot of experience with people in prison. I have lots and lots of experience with people on the street. I know whether

somebody is not real, or not. I mean, I just know, because I’ve been around a million times. So I knew that he was completely genuine. I read his transcripts. I just knew something was desperately wrong, so I started begging him to let us help him, let Lighthouse help him, and he said, “It’s too big of a project. Don’t worry. It’s OK,” but I just kept begging and begging. This was, like, three years ago, 3 ½ years ago. Because we were both Carmelites, we had similar ideas about what we wanted to do with our life. We had similar goals, similar thoughts. He is extremely talented. He’s very stable. He’s a very well-adjusted person. Very, very, extremely strong in character, because he’s been in prison for 22 ½ years, and he’s not bitter. He’s just a very extraordinary person, the way he’s living his life, and I thought, “Oh my gosh. Like, most people would be crazy,” but he’s not. I thought to myself, “He’s either crazy. He’s the biggest, craziest person I’ve ever met, or he’s the most, like, unbelievable person.” Anyway, so I got to know him, and I started that, we started to help with the case. So for the last 3 ½ years, I found myself doing, myself! I was doing the investigative work on the case, to try to get new evidence. All of us were involved in it. Lou was involved in it, me, Joe, my friend Joe that’s a really good friend of mine. He’s a friend of Lighthouse. My twin-sister writes to Kevin. But I was doing all this work because we couldn’t afford an investigator. So I started, like, going into the court files, digging up records and everything you could think of, like looking into gun samples and blood samples, and all this forensic stuff that I knew nothing about, and it was extremely traumatic for me, because I loved Kevin, and I never did that work before.

Lou and Joe helped me read everything, looking into books, reading files and writing letters, and digging up stuff in files, and calling people on the phone, and interviewing witnesses, and all that. It was hard. The first year I was involved in it, my health wasn’t good at all. Like, my nervous system was shot from it, because, I mean, all I could do was think about Kevin every day, being in prison, and he didn’t belong there. Like, if I ate a cucumber, I would just feel really sad, thinking, “Oh my God! He hasn’t had any fresh vegetables in years.” It was just a very, extremely, extremely painful thing for me. I got in touch with one of the witnesses in the case, and she told me that they, the prosecution, before Kevin was convicted, went to her in secret and said, “Say this, this and this on the stand, against Kevin. If you do this, then we’ll give you a deal. If you don’t do this, we’re going to convict you of 28 years in prison.” So they forced her to do that, so that Kevin was convicted because of her testimony, and because they also took letters, illegally, from Kevin, and twisted a couple of his statements. But anyway, long story short, for the next three years, until just, until now, actually, I worked nonstop on this case. I traveled back and forth to Michigan, because a benefactor was helping us get back and forth, just going back and forth, back and forth, doing all kinds of things, running all around, and just going out of my mind. But anyway, now we’re at a place where the case is just about resolved, and we’re waiting for the lawyer to get back to us, because they’re trying to make a deal with the prosecution, so Kevin can get released, and he’s going to come here, and he’s going to work here with the ministry, with me.

We have a small, fledging Carmelite community started. It’s not affiliated with the order. It’s approved by our diocese. We have five members all over the country, and one of them was just here, like, over Thanksgiving. When Kevin gets out, he’ll be coming here, and that can be happening like, literally, any day, so we’re just waiting. It could be before Christmas, or it could be a month after Christmas, or it could be by the Spring, but it probably won’t be much longer than that. It has been a really serious, serious struggle. Like, incredibly difficult struggle to do something that I never could do before. I never thought I was able to do this, but somehow, I guess, through God’s grace, I did it. I don’t know how. It was extremely hard. I mean, it has been the hardest thing I ever did. It was harder than the assault, even. It was harder than everything that went with the church or anything, because it was the culmination of a long, long, many years of struggle, many years of waiting, many years of suffering, many years of agony, and to know that Kevin and I, we have the same vocation, we’re going to be together, we’re going to work together and, you know, it’s the conclusion of a long story, and it’s a very difficult conclusion, a very dramatic conclusion, you know, that I wasn’t expecting. I mean, I wasn’t expecting to do that. I didn’t know anything about it. I was scared all the time. Most of the time, I just wake up in a cold sweat, thinking, “How am I going to do it? Is it going to work out?” It has been a very, very, very difficult… time, you know. As for society, I think it’s just getting darker, and darker, and darker, and darker, and darker. It’s just maybe evil is getting stronger, but I think there’s going to be a deciding line, like people that want to be good are going to be good, people that

are going to be in the dark, are going to be in the dark. People are going to want to find, they’re going to need, desperately, they’re going to run to refuges, whether it’s a physical refuge, because they can’t find a way to feed themselves. They’re going to run to, you know, somewhere where they can take shelter, where somebody is going to love them and care about them, because the world is becoming, like, more and more of a jungle, and I think that’s happening rather quickly. We haven’t used the natural resources well. In general, humanity hasn’t used, you know, what we’ve been given to the greatest advantage. We haven’t used it as well as we should, or could, that eventually, things will have to break down before they can be rebuilt. Everyone one of us, in one degree or another, has some kind of what you would call an addiction, and by an addiction, I don’t just mean a drug addiction or anything. It’s just we all have an attachment to something or other that is sort of like a false attachment, and what feed those attachments are lies. I’m very hopeful, because I believe God has a plan, and I just trust Him. I think God is good, and God works through calamities and difficulties. I believe that God has a plan for all of us. I think that good is always going to triumph over evil. I believe in heaven, so everything always comes up equal, in the end. The score gets all straightened out, because I believe God is good. You know, it’s not about this life. This life is just a vale of tears. I mean, we’re not in heaven. Nobody is going to be perfectly happy here. We’re a mess, really, but I’m not discouraged by that, because I think God accepts messes, and works with messes, and knows that’s how we are, and knows that we can’t help it. I think God’s specialty is to fix broken things. You know, the more broken it is, God is just like, “Oh good, let me have at it. I’ll do it.”

That’s what I see, here at the Lighthouse, in my own life and all around. I just see God taking things that are total disasters, and fixing them. The Lighthouse is a welcoming place for the broken hearted. We’re friends to the broken hearted.

Eileen Walbank the ExInsurance Company Employee In Philadelphia, I often see Chinese push their grandchildren around in strollers, so the three-generation households are evidently still common in that community. In China itself, citizens can be fined or even jailed for not visiting their aging parents enough. That there is such a law can only mean that familial bonds are weakening, however, as they are in every modern society. By assuming responsibilities for children and the elderly, the state supplants the family, and this is welcomed by most of us. We want to be free during our best years.

Martin Armstrong observes, “Once upon a time, couples would have three to five children for that was their retirement. The family was everything. Then came Marx who effectively replaced the family with politicians. The family structure has declined steadily since the introduction of socialism. Children no longer save to take care of their parents for that is government’s job.” Having kids is no guarantee that any of them will take care of you, however. There’s a Vietnamese proverb, “One mom can feed ten children, but ten children can’t feed one mom.” Even with lots of money, old age is often a train wreck, so it’s even more ghastly if you’re broke. In Atlantic City, I photographed a 73-year-old white man, Tony. Dressed up like Michael Jackson, he was dancing to “Don’t Stop Till You Have Enough.” His cardboard sign said he had had a stroke and three bypass surgeries. Last Sunday, I stumbled upon Eileen Walbank on the steps of St. John in Center City, Philadelphia. Though her tale was mostly grim, she laughed constantly. My mother grew up on a farm near Pottstown. There was a one-room school, and she was the smartest person in the whole school, I bet you. She could have been running the school, she was so smart. My mother was a sewing machine operator. When she was young, they had all kinds of clothing factories in Philadelphia. When she met my dad, she liked him because he was so goodhearted. My father will give anything to anybody. If he saw a guy starving on the street, he’d go home, get some food from his own house, come back and give it to the guy. He was very generous and good, like Jesus.

He’d do anything to help anybody, a stranger, and he was very friendly. He was good to everybody, but I’ve learnt that you should only be good to people who are good to you. The rest, you can tell, “Go to hell!” They don’t do nothing for you, they don’t help you, they just waste your time. My father went for a walk every single day. This day, he didn’t take the dog for some reason, a wrong reason. They found his body. A criminal had taken his money and threw him in the creek. He was 69. My mother lived to be 87. Frankford wasn’t even dangerous back then. They never found the guy. My father was a carpenter, like Jesus. He worked on schools and apartment houses. I have one sister. She’s still living. I’m trying to find her. She’s in this place where they put people who can’t take care of themselves. I went down to the place, but she wasn’t there. They told me they had moved a bunch of people to another shelter, so I’m still looking for her. She’s older than me by four years, but she’s not as smart. I think when she was a baby, my parents hit her or drop her on the floor. She was never smart, and she should have been because my parents were very smart. Yes, my dad hit me. He would hit you with his belt. If I thought I was going to get hit, I’d run away and I don’t come back for a few days.

You could sleep anywhere. You could sleep at the back of a store. My mother was an asshole, a sweet asshole. She encouraged all the wrong behaviors. She wanted me to become a bookkeeper, and I was no good in math. If that wasn’t the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard! She wanted me to be a payroll clerk in a factory. I don’t want to deal with money. I like to listen to music. I’m a piano player, a good piano player. I like show tunes by Rogers and Hammerstein. I have them all memorized. If you ever find a piano, I’ll play them for you. I won the book contest at the library when I was 10-years-old. I read 57 books. I thought I’d get a very fancy prize, but I was very disappointed. They gave me a book. The books I read the most when I was growing up were about people who become stewardesses. The Vicki Barr series, I read every book. When they ran out, I started to read books about nurses. I was a volunteer at the hospital to get points for my resume. I didn’t like being there at all. First of all, they gave you the worst food. I thought I’d die when I ate that food. They probably gave worse food to the patients. Each time I got near a hospital, it stunk. They stink. They spray them, but they still stink. I knew I wouldn’t be a very good nurse because I’d sneeze, and all the equipment would fall to the floor. Ha, ha, ha! There were also books about life as a veterinarian. I liked that a lot. My mother wouldn’t let me be a veterinarian. She said, “I’m not going to give you money to wipe the ass of some dog.”

I couldn’t be a stewardess because I was afraid of flying. I didn’t want to be a nurse. I never wanted to be a doctor, it took too long, and I didn’t have the money. I wanted to be a school teacher because I wanted to be like my Spanish teacher. I wanted to look like her. Big busted. I wanted to look like Dolly Parton, and sing better than Dolly Parton. I wanted to sing like Dorothy Collins. I was very beautiful, intensely, but nobody saw it that way. I had a boyfriend. He wanted to fuck me. I said, “Forget that, I’m leaving.” You needed a boyfriend to go places. You couldn’t get to the movies if you didn’t have a boyfriend. If you showed up at the movies by yourself, the ones with boyfriends, they insulted you so bad, you started to cry. If you showed up with a girlfriend, they’d call you queer! I didn’t want nobody to call me no queer! If you want to marry me, you’ve got to pay for my meals. You’ve got to pay for my breakfast, lunch and supper if you are that serious, and if you say anything else, you can go fuck yourself. If you want to marry me, give me a certificate that states you’re going to pay for my meals at least for the first year, and if you don’t follow through, the divorce is in the process. After that, you can pay for a car and all the other stuff. One year’s worth of meals. I’m worth it. I lived through the counterculture. I lived through all that sex orgy without having sex. I didn’t know how to have sex.

I was raised by a mother who said you’ll end up in hell, and she’ll beat you to death, if you sleep with a guy or take your clothes off in front of him. I went for 20 years to church. The first year, I listened. The second year, I slept through it. The third year, I started to rewrite the sermons, as best I could, to what they were trying to say. The sermons stunk. The Bible has been around 2,000 years. It’s got the Ten Commandments, which are good ideas to live by. Outside of that, I give it an F-. I figured if I kept going, they’re going to bring out some guy who would say something different, but they kept saying the same fuckin’ things over and over! I went to Temple University for free. I had my bachelor’s in secondary education. I was the valedictorian in my high school. I wasn’t the smartest, but the cleverest. It was a $3,200 scholarship. I wanted to go to Penn. Temple was an inferior school, so I’d spend my time on the Penn campus, trying to meet people who studied at Penn. They had to be rich in order to go there. I met a lot of people who went to Penn, and it’s very good that I did, because one of them helped me to get a job. She was the vice president of an insurance company. My favorite subject was Spanish. I wanted to learn French too, but I didn’t have time. I still want to learn French. I won a scholarship to Uruguay which took me to South America. They paid my way for one year. I lived in Uruguay, across the river from Buenos Aires. Argentina is bigger and much more beautiful than Uruguay,

but they only had a scholarship for Uruguay. I was very lucky. I could live there and learn to speak Spanish better than I could learn in the United States, although in some parts of Philadelphia, all they speak is Spanish. Quiero ganar dinero para vivir bien en este país, así como otros países. I was going crazy listening to the kids give excuses about why they didn’t do their homework. I hated the kids because they were fresh. They would throw stuff at you when you turned your back. They would dirty up your desk, dirty the floor, dirty up the whole room so you would have to stay late to clean it up. These dirty-mouthed slobs would do anything to hurt you, really hurt you. They threw pencils and erasers at you as soon as you turned your back. It was like hell on earth. They were white assholes, with white asshole parents. They taught them to be rotten, just like themselves. I only taught for about three years. I'm glad I left when I did, because I might have thrown the kids through the window. I got a job in insurance, which was much easier, calmer, quieter, easier. I was in the underwriting department. I hated doing it, because I was always making mistakes in math, so they transferred me to claims. That was the best thing that could have happened. I really liked everybody who worked in claims, so I did good. I was there for seven years. I married the first guy who asked me. I married a eunuch. I never had children.

The guy couldn’t make kids, so he had to be a eunuch, or he was physically impaired. He had what it took to be a man, but it didn’t work. Maybe he was a eunuch impersonator! Ha, ha, ha! He had two legs, and his resume said “male,” so I married the male, but he was a very unproductive male. It could have been my fault, thanks to my good luck. I have the best luck in the world. I met the asshole at a dance hall. He came to the dance because his boss said, “I’m only going to promote people who are married.” He had to get married to get an extra two cents in his salary! He thought I liked him, but I didn’t know him very well. Once I got married and had sex with him, that was it. I was ready to head for Canada! The first time was bad, bad, very bad. He kept jumping up and down on me. I started to bleed. I had to get out of there before I bled to death. Inexperienced, that’s the word that’s often used in place of stupid. Ha, ha, ha! I laughed so hard, the gas came out every way it could come out, through my nose, through my ears, through my posterior parts. Every where it could come out, it came out and knocked the good air away! I got my sense of humor from my father. He was always telling jokes. The dirty ones, he saved for the men. By the time he told them to us at supper time, he changed them around so they

wouldn’t be dirty. I was married for nine years, and I still can’t figure out how it lasted that long. I hated the guy from even before I married him. I wanted to get married to get away from home. I figured we’d move somewhere. We ended up living next to his mother. He was a money counter, like in the Bible, the one who betrayed Jesus. He worked in insurance. His name was Chadwick. He was also English, an English bastard. I liked it when people called me Mrs. Chadwick. It was a step up. I was an eagle instead of a doo doo bird. Doo doo was what the dodos do! That’s what the dodos do do. They do do that, when they’re bored! I kept thinking it would get better, but it got worse. I should have divorced him right away, but it didn’t occur to me. It wasn’t an option. My mother was always saying, “You have to get married to be anything in life.” I didn’t care what happened as long as I didn’t get killed. I spent my day in the library. He came home at night. He watched his moron show on TV. I pretended I didn’t hear. By the time bedtime came, he was pretty tired. We had our one minute of sex, then he fell sound asleep and slept until morning, and the procedure was repeated for the next nine years. I was running through the house to get away from him, up and down the stairs. I got very good legs from the exercise, running

away from him. He was dangerous. Finally, after nine years, I saw all these people got divorced, so I found out where they got their lawyers. I got my divorce. He lost, big time. I could have been a good wife if he had some brains, but he had none. His brain was in his ass, and when they gave him an enema, they removed all of it. He had nothing left. I didn’t get married again. I figured it would be the same shit. I didn’t want to meet someone like him. They say you marry the same kind of people. You always pick out the same kind that you like. I was unlucky at cards and unlucky in love. I was unlucky, period. Get a new life. Are you done, John? That’s a John Donne song. John Donne wrote a poem about a bell that chimes. I’m not a poet. I don’t know it. I have Longfellow’s feet. I’m very sweet. It’s rhyme time! John Donne wrote a poem about dying, so you’re finished when you’re done, John! My sister and I used to joke around like this. My sister has a very good brain, but she never had a chance to use it. She was clever, but where it counts, like holding a job, where you need money to get food to eat, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t cook an egg. If she wanted to cook an egg, maybe it would be different, but she didn’t want to. She knew I’d do it for her, because I’d get fed up watching her try 16 times to cook an egg. I have a hot temper. I’m like the Latins. I think I was adopted. I’m really a Cuban Arab. I don’t know what I am, but I tell you I’m not like my parents. I think they adopted me. I inherited

nothing from them except their bad nature. They were ugly. I’m glad I don’t look like them. If you’re ugly and stupid, that’s two reasons not to like you. I didn’t want children, I thought they would be in the way, so it was good that I married a eunuch. It was very convenient. I didn’t want a child that resembled that asshole. My mother always said the worst days of her life were when her children were born, so I figured, The hell with that! I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want to have a bad life. I grew up believing children would make your life lousy. Sometimes, they do. Sometimes, they don’t. I wanted to travel. That was my goal. I figured, It would be cheaper. You can’t take a kid on the road. I’ve been all over the United States. I was out in California, Utah. I wanted to see different things, what people looked like, how they cooked, what they wanted. I went to Los Angeles. It was very pretty. I wanted to see where all the movie stars were, but I found out they don’t want nobody near their houses. I wanted to see what their houses looked like. I wanted to see if they got ten bathrooms, you know, like what you read in the paper. What do you need ten bathrooms for? You only poop once. I went to England. From London, my friend and I, we took a train to Yorkshire. We flew to France, then went to Portugal. We rented a car and crossed into Spain. I wanted to go to Yorkshire because that’s where my father’s relatives were. I met my great-aunt. My relatives were wonderful, wonderful. I love them. They were real funny. They

were telling jokes, like me. I love to tell jokes. Ask me how old I am? I’m so old, I was a waitress at the Last Supper! My relatives never wanted to live in the city. They moved right out to the suburb, to a place called Holmes, near Morton. I have a lot of cousins because my mother had five sisters and three brothers. They all got married and have big families. I’m not in touch with them. I have no reason to be. They thought they were very smart, but they were very dumb assholes. In five minutes, they could tell you about all the awards they won in their lives. In five minutes, I could be a mile away from them, at a restaurant, begging for food outside and getting something good. I had no interest in what they had to say because they were ignorant. I never got along with them. My mother said they were a bunch of pissant relatives with no brains, and she was right. "Pissant" was my father’s special word. He reserved that for people he didn’t like too much. I have no friends out here. I am an original. I don’t mix with other people, because the ones I mix with, they only want to talk about their relatives, so the hell with that. Who wants to hear about someone’s relatives you’ve never met? I’d rather sit here and save my strength, or go to the library and read about what I like. I sleep in the back of the church, on the steps. Not inside. You have to sleep somewhere, so on the steps I sleep at night, and it’s safe. If I don’t like the looks of it here, I go over to 18th and Lombard. It’s all lit up, all night. Nobody in their right mind will

rob you where it’s all lit up. They want to be where it’s dark, where nobody sees. I sit there and watch what’s going on all night, and if I fall asleep, I’m safe because it’s all lit up. There are people coming and going. It might be a drug area. I don’t do drugs, but I see cars coming and going all night, so I think they might be selling drugs from car to car. That’s at 18th and Lombard. I’ve only been on the streets since January, of this year. I’m on Social Security. I get $900 a month. Within three or four days, all the criminals in the city know that the Social security went out, so they go looking for people who are old. When these old people walk down anywhere, or sleep anywhere at night, they come and steal from them. You have to keep your money under your dress, in your underwear. If you're in a supermarket, and there are people around, you don't take it out. You have to keep shopping and shopping, take the same food out, then put it back on the shelf. You have to walk around 15 more times until it's completely empty up front, when there's nobody by the cashier, then you can go up and pay. Someone stole my teeth in the shelter. That’s what goes on, so I said, “The hell with that!” I like it much better on the street. And it’s not safe at all. They rob you there. If someone is nice and gives you 50 cents, you won’t have it for 5 minutes. They’ll find a way to take it from you. The shelter is one of the most dangerous places you can be,

and that’s why I’m on the street. As soon as the weather was OK, I got out. If you’re in the shelter, you can’t take anything in with you. You can’t take a comb or a brush or anything. They won’t let you have your belonging with you. They say they’ll have to put it aside, and you can get it when you leave, but when you go to get it, they say it was stolen. They stole it. They steal big time. It’s not amazing. It’s a fact of life. You think they’re going to help poor people? Forget that! They help themselves to your belonging. If they see something they like, they’ll take it, as soon as your back is turned. They put drug into the water and make you drink from these bottles. They don’t want to help you. They want you to stay there. It looks better for them to have a lot of people on their books. They get paid more, the more people they’ve got in the shelter. You’re their bread and butter, and Brussels sprouts, on their plate. I had a house. My parents bought it in 1937. It’s a beautiful house. Two stories, gas heat, everything you would ever want. I owned the house. It’s still there at 1629 Lewis Street. Two people, they call them squatters, came and pushed me out of my house. I went down to City Hall and told them. They said there’s nothing they can do. I went to the police. They said they can’t handle it. Get the sheriff. I went to the sheriff. He said, “Pay me

300 and I’ll get rid of them all.” I paid him all the money I had in the bank, 300 bucks, but he can’t evict them. He doesn’t want to evict them. He keeps the money. I didn’t let them in. The house was locked. I had gone away for the weekend, and when I came back, they had broken the lock and gone in. The priest gave me 20 bucks when I told him, so I bought food for one week. Now, that money is gone. The city runs a place that feeds people with no homes, so I can get my lunch and my supper, then I come back here and ask people for money, and with that money, I save it so I can get more food and anything else I crave. The church at 5th and Pine gave me these clothes, which are kind of ridiculous. This outfit makes me look like I’m from another country, but it’s warm, so I’m wearing it. I used to dress like everybody else, but now I want to look different so people will notice me. If I wear jeans or nice slacks, people will say, “Look, she has nice clothes. What is she asking for money for?” But if I wear this kind of clothes, I look like an eccentric from a different religious group. I am not. I’m a Catholic. If you look different, people will see you, notice you and figure that you have no brains and no money, then they’ll help you out. I don’t like that free food. I get sick from that free food. They give you stuff that’s all fiber, it makes you shit all day, so I don’t want that food. It’s got something in it that’s no good. It’s supposed to be healthy. It’s called fiber food, but it’s no good for you. You can

eat it once, but after that, don’t eat it anymore, or you’ll spend your life shitting yourself to death. Ha, ha! It’s a shame, but that’s what happens when you eat that food. They get it cheap. They want it to go around, so they put a lot of fiber and stuff to make it look like a lot, like you’re getting a big plate. The state wants to give you a big plate of food, but they ought to give you three rolls of toilet paper with it. It messes up your clothes. What they call meat is not made out of meat. It’s a round patty and looks like what goes into a hamburger, but it’s not the same thing. It’s made out of bread crumbs, and they put some flavoring in it, then they burn it, to make it look like a hamburger. Look at me, I’m strong. I’ve been living for 72 years. I know what to eat, what not to eat. If you eat something that don’t taste good, right away you know you’re eating something wrong. I have a very good idea of what food is supposed to taste like. I know when I’m eating vegetable. I know when I’m eating meat. I know when I’m eating fruit. I can tell from tasting stuff all my life. I know what I’m getting when I bite into it. My mother was the best cook in the whole world, and she could take any kind of food and make it taste good. I go buy myself a sandwich or a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. Peanut butter and bread, that’s what I like. My father was a Democrat, because people in construction were Democrats. I prefer Donald Trump. Hillary has a lot of experience, but he's so much more intelligent. I'd rather be with the smarter person.

I also like his looks. Trump wants to get rid of everybody who doesn't think like he thinks. He wants to kill people. Not everybody will come out and say it, but they all want to. I think that's a very good idea. It solves one problem very easily. Ha, ha, ha, ha! If you get rid of your opposition, you won't have to worry about someone coming at night to send you off. I buy the newspaper, and wherever I stay at night, they have 99 people watching the debates on TV, so I know who says what on these debates, then after the debate, they have 15 people explaining what the hell was said, which you were supposed to figure out the first time. Half of the people are nodding off. The other half don't know what to do with themselves because they're hyper active. I like to watch people to see what they're gonna do. Are they going to scratch their nose, or scratch their behind, or stand up and dance, or shout in a different voice, or open the window? You know, things that matter. It's called noticing what people are like. You look at who's intelligent, and you ask how long they've been there, and what their plans are? When are they leaving? My plan is to get out of this shithouse, if that's possible. To leave the shelter and go to New York. I met several people from New York who are very smart. I want to go up and find out what made them so smart, and do the same thing, so I'll be smart. Smarter. People who walk around with their clothes fuckin' perfect, it's not by accident. They know what looks good. Like him, he

knows what looks good. He's got clothing that looks good. It costs money. He must have a good job, or he couldn't afford all that food that made him fat. He couldn't afford the six meals a day. He couldn't afford all those banana cream pies. That guy wouldn't give me money. Never! He wouldn't give his wife money. I looked at his face. He's a skinflint. He has a selfish mouth. Yeah, if you look at someone's mouth, you can tell right away. If it turns a certain way, like a dog when it's angry, like this. He was mad when he looked at us. We were in his way. We were on his property. He didn't want to look at us, because he doesn't want to look at anything he don't like. I want people who look at you and give you money, because they're the people who know that money is the only way you can solve a problem by buying what you like, and do what you want to do. Smart people give you money. Dumbasses give you clothing and food, especially food they made. You don't say at Christmas time, "What would you like for Christmas? And keep it down to 10 cents!" Some do. I want to go to New York and get the hell away from this place. Start over. I want to go where there are publishing houses, so I can get a job working in one. I’m going to get my book published. I’m writing a journal on how you can survive on the streets with no money. There are tidbits on how to save money as well.

I have ten pages, hidden under a stone. My book will teach you how to live with no money, anywhere. On the street. Off the street. Anywhere. You can live without money, very well, when you find out that you have none.

Marty the Electrician, Plumber and Ex-Mortician Within the shadow of 920-year-old Norwich Cathedral squats the 767-year-old Adam and Eve Pub. Both are spooky, inevitably. A decade ago, I was minding my own business, nursing a pint of Old Peculier, when the mugs above my head started to rattle, the ashtray flew off the bar and Lord Sheffield whispered in me ear, “Spot me a whiskey, mate?” “Sam,” as the ghost is now known, was mortally wounded in 1549 by a butcher during Kett’s Rebellion. At 28, he croaked in the Adam and Eve.

In the US of A, it’s rare to find any building that wasn’t built last week, but there’s plenty of history here too, and even my shithole of a neighborhood bar, the Friendly Lounge, has its lore. It’s owned by two brothers, and their father was the legendary Felix DiTullio, better known as Skinny Razor. He showed Little Nicky Scarfo how to slaughter. Many Mafia targets were last seen being ushered into the Friendly, never to reappear. Maybe they have a centuries-old well in their basement too, just like the Adam and Eve? Now, the Friendly is a scandal-free establishment, with nothing more exciting to happen recently than the appearance of exPhillies Garry Maddox. “He must have some broad in the neighborhood?” someone whispered. “No, Garry ain’t that kind of guy.” Maddox ordered an eight-dollar drink, left a ten-dollar tip. A year after Lord Sheffield's death, John Skelton's "The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng" was published. No priss, the Diss native didn't shy from an ale and piss splattered portrayal of contemporary life, and his Tunnyng gives us a rare glimpse of plebian carousing in 16th century England. (Another East Anglian, Robert Greene, born 1558, bequeaths knowing tales of hustlers, thieves and blackmail artists.) Check out these lines: She breweth noppy ale, And maketh therof port sale To trauellars, to tynkers, To sweters, to swynkers, And all good ale drynkers,

That wyll nothynge spare, But drynke tyll they stare [...] And as she was drynkynge, She fyll in a wynkynge Wyth a barlyhood, She pyst where she stood; Than began she to wepe, And forthwyth fell on slepe. Elynour Rummyng "lerned it of a Jewe" to thicken her ale with chicken shit, but that entire passage must be fantasy. While others are disgusted, such good, solid types having such a great time makes me want to get pissed also. We're only here to stare at each other and palaver. Let's head to the Friendly, then, and b.s. with Marty. Don the hunter may have died without saying goodbye, Felix is hobbling along after his foot operation, Tony got fired for allegedly stealing, Manon landed a better job, the sad Eagles just choked away another one and Marty, as you shall see, will be on the first stool as you walk in. At 74, the raspy-voiced man works even on Thanksgiving, and he downs a few each evening. When Marty speaks of gravy, he means marinara sauce, by the way, and “managut” is a South Philly word. I’ve repeatedly urged Marty to visit Sicily before he keels over. “Go next week, then come back and tell us about it. You’ll bawl like a baby, man, soon as you land!” Once, Marty showed me on his cellphone a beaming, barebreasted lady sitting on her living room carpet. “Would you leave this?”

Just a few days away from his New Jersey lay is out of the question for Marty. I was born in 1942. I was raised in the 50’s, when all the girls were church mouses. I’ve been coming to Friendly Lounge on my own since 1962. Prior to that, I’d come in with my dad on Saturday, because of the spare ribs. They had the best spare ribs in the city. Even the Chinese would come here to get them. This place wasn’t a go-go bar per se. Around 1970 or so, we started getting dancers on Friday night. They would dance on top of the bar. There was also a little stage. One girl used to shoot ping pong balls out, and puffed a cigar. I’ve done plumbing and electrical work for 50 years. I had uncles who were in various trades, so I started hanging with them. One of my buddies, his father used to come in here. He was a master plumber, so that’s how I learned plumbing. I work every day. I’m a one-man band. I do everything myself. I’ve never met anybody who can do it as good as me, and I can also do it quicker. I don’t want to get a call in the middle of night, “Hey, your guy who was here. The faucet is not working right.” I’ve always had a voice like this. I can’t make obscene phone calls. I went from a little boy, to this voice. I’ve been married five times. I’m just a guy that’s not happy. I got them home. I know they’re there. I’m back out at the bar, looking for another one.

You’ve got to remember, guys my age, we grew up at the beginning of free sex, drugs and rock and roll, and I tried to take advantage of it. We opened the door for free sex. Ah, many, many women took on the attitude of guys, back in the day. They wanted to be out there and get laid also. I’ve probably been with 130, 140. No exaggeration. That’s probably cutting it short. I'm the very first person in the world to admit, if there's anybody in the world who should have gotten AIDS, it should have been me. As far as unplanned pregnancies? Every one of them! Yeah, I got three inches cut off, so now I’ve got an even nine. I have seven children, by three women. I have 19 grandkids, and seven great grandkids. I’m in touch with my kids every day. I don’t want to hear from them, but one or the other will call. I’m good friends with them all. Financially, none of my kids, none of my ex wives will ever say I was bad. I was a good provider, horrible husband, good boyfriend, and probably a better father to kids that weren’t mine. I was their father figure. I’ve always had girlfriends. I just married one off last month, in Florida. I’ve got one in upstate New York. I’ve got one over in Jersey. I still do pretty good as far as pussy. I don’t use Viagra, or Cialis, or any of that other shit. How do I do it? I stick it in. I’m not like I was ten years ago. That’s why they’re safe across the country now.

Some guys get nothing because they try too hard. I’ve never, ever in my life chased the cherry. I let them come after me. Back in the day, people like Marco, Joe Mazz and all the pretty boys would try. The girls would look at Marty and think to themselves, Why isn’t he trying? What has he got? I had a wife, at home. I got nothing. That turned girls on. I didn't lie to them and say I was single. I told everyone I was married. The girls wanted the forbidden fruit, too. I like very petite women, with long hair. Very skinny. I’m not a titty guy. Big boobs look good in swim suits and sweaters, and that’s not my playground. I’m a butt guy. If they’ve got a little butt, they’re tiny and they’ve got long hair, they’ve got it going. If they’re not my type, I don’t bother with them. I have no curiosity or interest at all. I have this set of rules that I’ve followed all my life. I’m not a guy who walks around horny. Ninety percent of the time in my life, I had a wife at home. If I left the bar by myself and went home, I’ve got a piece of pussy at home. If a girl turned me on, I fuck the old lady thinking of the girl that turned me on. A dick has no conscience. I’ve turned down more pussy than you can think. I have a set pattern. Every one of my wives, turn them around, other than the color of their hair, they all look the same from the back. I’m very specific. Ask anybody who knows me. My first wife was 4 foot 9. Every one after has been under 5-3. It’s not that I have a philosophy. It’s something that I’ve found that works for me, and when you find something that works,

you tend to use it. I’m not saying it’s right, wrong or politically correct, but it works for me. Each of my kids resents me for one thing or another. I’m not perfect, and I’ve never claimed to be. They’ve all got their issues with me, but as far as being their father, I’ve always been a very good provider, but I was always on the move. I’ve always provided for my family. I’ve made a good living in the course of my lifetime. Money was so easy to make in the 60’s and 70’s, and rent was cheap. My first apartment was $75 a month, and Patty and I had a really nice apartment, at 6th and Wharton. This was in ’63, ’64. I’ve done everything I wanted to do. I bought cars, boats, motorcycles. I’ve had about eight boats in my life. I lived in Florida for 27 years. There’s no sense living in Florida unless you’ve got a motorcycle and a boat. I’ve lived in California. I’ve been to Canada, England, Mexico. Me and one of my wives, we were going to go to Rome for my 62nd birthday. I like biblical, religious stuff. I wanted to see the pyramids, the catacombs, stuff like that. But she died on me, and I didn’t go. I lost all interest. I have a hard time speaking English, let alone various languages. Timmy Cigar and I got into an argument with Adrian one night over the word “irregardless.” I never knew it was not a word, and I’ve been saying it all my life. I lived in south Florida for 27 years. The only thing I know of any Hispanic language is “si.” That’s about it.

I’m a very one-dimensional person. I’m a creature of habits. I eat primarily Pat’s Steaks, after work. It’s not so much cheesesteak any more. It’s a pork sandwich with cheese on it. When I want variety, I go to the Chinese restaurant at Broad and Federal, Mui Chung. I just call, they hear my voice and they know exactly what I want, and it’s ready by the time I get there. I listen to all these people with the health food, and I’ve watched all the health food gurus, and the exercise gurus, died! My teeth didn’t fall out. There is a perfect reason why I have false teeth. I had a bad motorcycle accident back in ‘74. I had beautiful bottoms and fantastic implants, but my gums have shrunk over the years. Had to get rid of the implants. Now, I have big fuckin’ teeth. When I go home with a chick, I pop my teeth out, I pop the eye out and I pull off the wig. I’m not Italian, I’m Sicilian. The reason I’ve never been there is because there’s nobody I know. I’ve got family there, but I don’t know them. To go back and see how the world was built, in old world traditions, that’s pretty amazing. I watch National Geographic every now and then, and I see how modern people are existing and dwelling in cities that are centuries-old, and how they’re adapting. I find that fascinating. People today, their houses have a bathroom for each kid. I’m sure my Sicilian ancestors, there were probably four or five families, with three or four kids each, all sharing the same outhouse. Unless you’re extremely wealthy, there was no such

thing as a 2,000-foot-square house. Only Americans need that much space. South Philly was all Italian. You had your Irish on 2nd Street, and other types on 30th, but in between, it was all Italian. There were fights or disagreements between different factions of Italians, whether they be Sicilian or Calabrese, or whatever. That’s what made South Philly so interesting. The way my mom prepared her pasta and meat dishes was totally different than other Italian sects would do it. We always had a secure area here, in South Philly. We had our own market, on 9th Street. It was just a fantastic place to grow up. The 9th Street Market started out around 1915. South Philadelphia around the turn of the century was primarily Jewish. The Italian influx didn’t really come until around 1915 to 1925. When I was living with my parents, I grew up eating fresh vegetables, freshly killed meat. I never ate anything frozen other than ice cream. Good Italian cooking is dying off. It’s not the same. You go to Villa di Roma when Kaiser and his kids ran it, it was good, it was fantastic. And there was Big Ralph’s and various Italian eateries. It doesn’t appear that it has changed, to new newcomers, but people who grew up here, they know the difference in the way things are made today from 50 years ago. Today, they use convectional ovens, microwaves and not the old wooden ovens or the gas-fired appliances. It’s the ingredients. A pot of gravy, I guarantee you, if you go to Villa di Roma, he still makes a pot of gravy the exact same way

he did when he was twelve-years-old, but the ingredients have changed, therefore the results have changed. That’s why you don’t see too many old mom-and-pop Italian restaurants anymore. With governmental regulations, you can’t have this, you can’t have that and expect it to taste like 50 years ago. I like deep red gravy. Most gravy today is pinkish. It’s not the restaurant owners that are cheating. It’s the FDA governmental regulations saying you can’t eat tomatoes raised in pig shit. My mom and dad raised me strictly on Sicilian food. Until my mom died at 93 in 2000, she was making her own pasta, making her own gravy, every week. My mom would make gallons of gravy every Sunday morning, and she would put it in pails and refrigerate it, until the kids came over. “Come over and get your half gallon of gravy. Here, grab a couple pounds of ravioli, or meat balls, roasted pork, this, that, spaghetti, whatever it is that you like.” My mom used to make it all herself. A couple weeks before she died, she was up at 3:30, 4 O’clock, Sunday morning, making gravy. She'd roll out her dough, and by the time she went to church, then came back, it'd rise. She'd make managut. It's a long shell, stuffed with cheese. My mom would bake it, then put gravy over it. My grandfather came to visit us from Sicily. He stayed here for three or four weeks. My father must have cooked him breakfast, because I can remember daylight behind him. The only regret I have in my life is that my father didn't live long enough. He died when I was 19-years-old. My dad worked a lot. I didn't know him as a man. I only knew him as a father.

You can go out and have a beer with your old man when you’re 23, 24 years old. You don’t have to sit around the couch and listen to him moan and groan about work. My father was in the funeral business. We had a funeral home. I did that for many, many years, into my 40’s. I’d do my other work in the daytime, do bodies at night. A funeral in Europe is a celebration of somebody’s life. It’s not that they have died or expired, or got killed, it’s a celebration of their life. In Europe, they put the grandkids on the body of the deceased. It’s your granddaddy. Say goodbye. Give him a hug. America, they sweep it under the rug. Oh, that’s bad, he died! Only in America do they hide death. They make death into something evil, but it’s not. Everyone of us, unless you’re an astronaut, is going to die on this planet. You’re going to need a funeral director. The rest of the world celebrate the deceased’s life at a funeral. They talk about all the good shit the guy did, what a nice guy he was, or what a prick he was. I’m very jaded when it comes to death, but I’m very respectful. Party while you can. You'll throw a seven before you know it.

Felix the Artist, Ex-Grocer and Ex-Hospital Worker Felix Giordano lives on the 24th floor of Riverview, a subsidized complex for senior citizens. Once a dreaded housing project, it is now pleasant and safe. Most of Felix’ neighbors are black or Asian. Although an artist, Felix keeps his one-bedroom apartment neat. There are no paint drips on the carpet. His walls are covered by paintings and drawings. Partially blocking the Center City skyline, three dozen plants in coffee cans crowd his living room window. Adjacent to Riverview is a Vietnamese Buddhist temple housed in an old Baptist church. Though peeling and missing its cross,

the octagonal spire is still beautiful. All over Philly, oncemagnificent churches decay. Well-preserved Old Swedes’ is a nine-minute-walk away. Dating to 1700, it’s the oldest church in Pennsylvania. Felix never heads in that direction, however. Most days, he takes a 40-second bus ride to the Italian Market, his childhood neighborhood. Around since the late 19th Century, the Italian Market also had many Jewish businesses for decades. Now, over half of the stores and restaurants are owned by Mexicans and Asians. Stretching for half a mile on 9th Street, it’s a place to get rigatoni, pecorino, a five-pound bucket of chicken liver, smoked turkey tails, freshly made tamales, vegetables for cheap or a live duck. You can also buy bargain clothing and batteries that won’t last. Is it 3 O’clock yet? I think it is! This means our chance of finding Felix inside the Friendly Lounge is outstanding. After you, buddy! My great uncle lied about his age to get into the Army. He either died at 14 or 15, depending on who you ask. I don’t even know if he made it overseas. Somebody said he got shot accidentally by one of his co-soldiers. The settlement finally came in 1921, and it got my grandfather and his brother started in business. My grandfather was a fish peddler before that. His family were fishermen in May’s Landing. My grandfather came over in 1900 from Sicily, when he was six-years-old. My grandmother came in 1898. They say she was born on the boat. My grandfather was a master builder. He built his whole store

from the ground up. He grew up working in a brick yard in Jersey. He was also a woodworker. My grandfather had a great reputation for being generous. I found out from talking to old timers that during the Depression, he helped people who were living on the streets. He fed them. The other side of my family came from Campania. My maternal grandfather was a watch maker, clock maker and he had his own business. He was very nice. I didn’t get to meet him enough. My great uncle’s real name was Giacomo, but his grave says James Giordano. My father’s birth certificate says Giuseppe. In those days, they Americanized their names as much as they could. My grandfather’s name was Felice Vitale, but he changed it, or they changed it for him, to Felix Vitale, and we pronounced it as Vaitale instead of Veetale. Now, it’s all about racial pride, and that’s OK, because I have racial pride too. My parents only spoke Italian when they argued, so the only Italian I ever learnt were the bad words. Us Italians invented all of the bad hand gestures, the Italian salute, the one finger salute, the malocchio or the horns. Sicily was invaded by everybody, the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthage, Romans, Arabs, French, Spanish, Austrians, Germans, Americans and Brits. We had to come up with the Mafia to rule ourselves. During World War II, my father was a welder. He was welding on the second story of a battle ship, or maybe it was an aircraft carrier. The story goes that he stepped back to admire his weld

and fell two floors! He had a tracheotomy and lost his voice. He used to be a singer. When I was a little kid, I could hardly hear my old man. For ten years, he couldn’t talk normal. I got hit by a car when I was 14. My father had an $800 insurance policy on me, so I said, “Give me the money,” and I bought some stocks with it. I worked in his grocery store from when I was 7 to when I was 19. I was paid less than minimum wage. He got enough work out of me. I had to get up at 5 each morning and worked until 8, then worked after school until 7. They said I was overpaid. My grandma used to jokingly call me “stu-nod.” It’s a Sicilian slang for “stupid” or “stoned.” My grandma lost two sons during the Spanish Flu pandemic. She never smiled after that. The only smiles I ever saw on her were in photographs, taken before 1918. She tried to beat me with a blackjack. She beat my cousin with an iron pipe, out in public. About the only time we had red meat was when a customer forgot his purchase on the counter. Don’t give me this shit about white privilege. We weren’t even good enough to be slaves! In Italy, a few families owned all of the land for hundreds of years. There was nothing left for anybody else. I bought my own first bike. I bought all my clothes. I bought my confirmation suit. My father took me to get it at a bargain place. He said, “Tell them I’m your uncle.” He didn’t want people to know how cheap he was. I bought my first rug, my first bed, my first TV, my first stereo. While living at home, the only thing I didn’t pay for was rent, and he made sure to tell me that if I didn’t like it, I could always join the Marines. I was a huckster for the first 19 years of my life. Back then, 9th

Street was different. You had to stop people, call them over, get them to buy. You had to yell. I was good at that, except I was shy, so I had to get drunk to do it. At 13, I was almost an alcoholic. Southern Comfort was my drink of choice. These two winos that I worked with would pick it up for me, but I had to buy them muscatel. Later in 1977-78, I was a barker in Seaside Heights. That’s where Jersey Shore was filmed. On the boardwalk, you’re working with drunks and knuckleheads. When I got married in 1972, my wife convinced me to make up with my family, so my father could help me start a business. He didn’t give me any money, but he allowed me to follow him around. My older brother had a store. Many of the Giordanos had stores. My father used to buy for the whole clan, and we divvied up what we wanted. He’s the best buyer I’ve ever seen. He was a true hustler. P.T. Barnum would admire him. He was also the hardest working motherfucker I ever knew. I rented an old barbershop and converted it into a fruit and produce store. I painted the sign myself. Later we moved the business into Reading Terminal. When my wife got sick in 1976, I became a chef at the London Restaurant. I’ve been cooking since I was a little kid. My mother was the best chef I ever knew. Every Italian woman I knew when I was a kid knew how to cook. I didn’t really want to be in the fruit and produce business. I wanted to be an artist all my life. It was the only thing I was really good at, and I think I’m pretty good at it. I never got rich doing it, and I did a lot of other jobs to support that art, but I’ve always painted. I’ve always sculpted.

In 1966, me and two other guys from the Academy drove all the way to Acapulco in a Volkswagen. We drove through all these mountain towns. Kids were selling iguanas on the side of the road as food. We saw the pyramids, stopped in Mexico City, went to the museums and looked at murals, attended a bullfight. In Tamazunchele, the town gay and the town whore both flirted with me. I was 19 and still a virgin. A mamasita, an older lady, said, “No, no, no!” This blonde looked just like Brigitte Bardot, but she had the clap, the mamasita said. No, I did not lose my virginity in Mexico. The only scary part was driving through Mississippi. They asked us if we were “outside agitators”? That’s when they were killing white people from the North for helping black people getting registered to vote and sit at the same lunch counters as white people. Because we had long hair, they thought we were hippies. My friend Jerry said, “Oh, we’re traveling wrestlers.” They liked wrastlers. You know who were working in the back but couldn’t sit in the front? Black people. I got a kick out of that. You’re discriminating against these people, who can’t eat at the counter, but they’re cooking your fuckin’ food! You people are completely out of your minds. That’s what I thought. I didn’t say it. They were staring at us from the windows as we got in the car, just like that scene in Easy Rider. They followed us out of Mississippi into Louisiana. Yeah, they followed us on the highway, in the dark. New Orleans was like night and day to Mississippi. Alabama and Mississippi were bad. You didn’t want to go there and risk

your life. It was like living madness. A lot of people, black and white, don’t know that’s the way it was. Everything is cleaned up now. Shit never happened. Rednecks weren’t rednecks. Black militants weren’t black militants. They all lie about everything. The worst thing to be called in my neighborhood was “nigger lover.” I was called that a lot because I was hanging out with black people, kids I grew up with. In the 70’s, I had two one-man shows in New York and at least three in Philadelphia. My show at Project Artaud in San Francisco was reviewed by both the Chronicle and the Examiner. The Chronicle guy hated my art, so I sent him a packet of Koolaid. I was interviewed on West German TV. I hung out for a while in the Mission District. I also stayed with the monks at Bishop’s Ranch. I cooked and baked for them. In New York in 1980, I met a guy from Tuscany. When he found out I was half Sicilian, he gave me so much attitude, I wanted to slug him. Some Northern Italians call Southern Italians “North Africans.” Look, I’m alive at 69 right now, I think only because I can paint. In 1972, a bunch of us rented two whole buildings, four floors a piece, with a freight elevator. It was only $250 a month. We had so much space, it was unbelievable. I lived there until 1977. We started fighting over the rent. Most of these artsy fartsy types were rich kids from the suburbs. They didn’t want to pay for heat in the wintertime, but they had plenty of money to buy dope from a dealer who came up from Florida. I never ever want to live with rich people again. They’re always

spoiled. They think they have everything handed to them on a silver platter. Tragedies happened. My wife had three miscarriages. The third one almost killed her. From that, we broke up. My marriage lasted almost ten years. I had a really contentious relationship with the first woman I met after the breakup, and it caused thirty years of problems. The relationship only lasted six months, but we had a kid together. I had to fake an orgasm with her because I felt guilty about my ex wife’s inability to have a baby. I thought it was my fault. I went to a psychiatrist for years over that. I couldn’t finish up, yeah, because of the guilt. I could, like the Energizer Bunny, keep her happy, get her off, but I couldn’t get myself off. Women do it all the time. Fake it. I know how to fake it too. One day on the beach when there was thunder and lightning, and I thought I was going to die, I finally had an orgasm. It was very erotic. You ever tried to make love in a thunderstorm? God has fucked up everything, but he got the woman’s body right. It’s a work of art. I was raised Catholic. I was raised to feel guilty about every fuckin’ thing. I thought I had gotten over it at 15, but, you know, the thing about guilt is, it sneaks up on you. Did I do that wrong? Second guessing yourself is the one thing they teach you in catechism. I think I finally got over it when I was 50. At 50, I met a woman and we had a relationship for about six years. We had to go our separate ways for financial reasons.

I don’t give a shit about money. Never did. I became a conscientious objector in 1970, and did my service at a mental hospital. I’m sorry to this day I didn’t join up as a medic. I wouldn’t have minded going overseas and helping people out. At the mental hospital, there was a unit for teenage runaways. I could have been a pervert. These young girls literally threw themselves at me. One came to my apartment. I told a girl who was 17, “When you’re 18, look me up.” I still have a code of ethics. I’d never do what Bill Clinton or Cosby did. Flip a mickey is what we used to call it. I’m surprised people are shocked, because Cosby had it in his routines. He bragged about trying to slip Spanish Fly into a girl’s drink. I had his album in 1962, but I stopped being a fan when Cosby started being a hypocrite, when he told Richard Pryor he shouldn’t work dirty. That’s when I knew Cosby was an asshole. Cosby was being morally superior. You have to walk the walk if you’re going to talk the talk. His shows were all positive for black people, but in reality Cosby was the opposite. Obviously he didn’t shit where he slept. He didn’t hit on his co-stars, as far as we know. You don’t think Clinton took advantage of his station? Every politician I know has done that. The longest job I’ve ever had was at the Woodhaven Center. It’s a place for retarded people. I was there for five years. One of my pet peeves was, I hated the Special Olympics. I’ve seen what it does to people who lose. They get jealous. They have the mentality of a four-year-old. They attack the people who

win. I had to pull a 220-pound man off a 85-pound girl because she beat him in a race. I had to hold him down by myself while the nurse went to find a doctor to give him a shot. This guy was psycho. He was so violent, I broke his thumb just holding his hand. They got violent all the time because of the Special Olympics. Mostly, they just masturbated. It felt good to them, so that’s all they did, day and night. There was one that all the young college volunteer girls wanted to work with. It’s because he wasn’t a bad looking guy, but what he did 95% of the day was masturbate. I said to him, “You keep it in your pants. If you masturbate in front of these girls, we’re going to put you back in the van and not let you participate in the Special Olympics.” It’s not like on TV where they pick each other up and all run to the finish line together. They were vicious. They ran, jumped, did whatever, and nobody kept scores. They did know if they won or lost, though. They weren’t that dumb. In the 30’s, many of these people had been lobotomized. Some of them came from elite families. One was a Mellon. We had two old guys, Dudley and Grasso, living in the same room, and that’s all they did, day and night. The girl who worked with them was all disgusted. They both had at least a foot-long schlong, honest to God. Dudley could also lick his forehead. Deep down, we’re just little four-year-olds. Later, I also worked with Alzheimer patients. They basically reverted to childhood and called for their mama all the time. There was a guy who had been a famous surgeon. He operated

on Eisenhower back in the 50’s. In his 90’s, he was at Friends Hospital. At night, we had to strap him down to basically stop him from pulling his catherer out and wiping feces all over his body. He didn’t know where he was, and he’d bark at people. Apparently he must have done that a lot when he was young. Another guy who smeared shit, we had to lock him in his room, then come back with sheets wrapped all over ourselves like Lawrence of Arabia. We had to spray and disinfect the room, then get a hold of him to slowly clean him off. He used to tell us he was the King of England. It was a real hard job. It wasn’t easy. I had the whole One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest experience. I worked in a psycho ward too. You know that scene where Chief Bromden talked for the first time? That happened to me in real life. I was playing chess with this guy, and he said, “You can’t do that. You’re moving yourself into checkmate!” I hadn’t heard him say anything in over two years! On a full moon, this old guy told me about growing up as a Jewish kid on the Lower East Side in the 1890’s. He had a lot of insights. The next morning, he was back to talking gibberish. Don’t tell me a full moon doesn’t have an effect on people. Just ask any cop or hospital worker about a full moon. I didn’t mind these jobs. I also thought of it as my way of doing something good. I didn’t think that going to Vietnam to kill people because they looked different than me was actually a good thing. My cousin came back from Vietnam in 1970 and was a Communist for a while. I mean, he really hated our government. He lost his arm over there.

He had to prove something to his father, who had been in Pearl Harbor. People always have to prove something to somebody. When we worked in the psychiatric ward, we called ourselves the shit patrol. First thing I did when I got home at 8 in the morning was take all my clothes off and put it in the washer, then I took a long, hot shower to get that stink off of me. No matter what you did, you couldn’t quite get it all out. It permeated you. There was a guy I had to turn over and clean every night to make sure he didn’t get bed sores. He was really nice, a real gentleman, and he was dying of cancer. He asked me for painkillers, so I went to the nurse, but she said to me with a straight face, “I don’t want him to get addicted.” Here’s a guy dying of cancer, and she didn’t want him to get addicted! I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get it for you,” so I went to the head nurse and got the painkillers. The other nurse hated my guts. She was my Nurse Ratched. I’ve had to deal with incompetence in power all my life. My brother tells me, “The only problem with you is that you don’t have fuck you money.” I can say fuck you real easily, but I don’t have the money to back it up. I really am worried about the weird, crypto Facism, Communism that the Clintons are planning. Hillary gets on TV and talks about the vast right wing conspiracy, but she’s the vast right wing conspiracy. Trade agreements like NAFTA ruined this country, and it’s not going to get any better. Police state tactics are being used all over. She’s saying, “Oh, I’m against police brutality against blacks,” but she’s behind it, and it’s against everybody, not just blacks.

It’s divide and conquer. Some people on both the left and right are trying to start a race war. The government is militarizing the police. They want us to live in a police state, and they don’t believe in freedom. Soon, they’ll take away the Second Amendment. They went after the First and have a pretty good choke hold on it already. I watch Russia Today, Japanese TV and French TV because they give me more truth than I’m getting from the American stations. The same people who run MSNBC call the shots at FOX. I’ve stopped watching MSNBC, CNN and FOX because it’s all bullshit. They fight with each other and call each other names, but it’s all part of the game. Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, they all belong in jail, I’m sorry, because they’re all traitors to this country. They’ve betrayed the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. I wanted to vote for Bernie, but apparently my vote didn’t count. They rigged the primaries and everybody knows it. I kind of like Jill Stein. My mother left me some money when she died. I put most of it into an account for my two grandkids. They’ll get it when they’re 25. The way things are going now, college is a joke. My daughter has a master’s degree in business, and she can’t fuckin’ get a job. It’s all about who you know. I want to get a car so I can go to the Pine Barrens to hunt mushrooms, and maybe visit a friend in Montana. That’s about it. I want to hunt mushrooms all the time, whenever I want. I started to do it when I was five-years-old, with my father. It’s

a fond memory that I have. I don’t have that many fond memories of him I really enjoy finding something that’s beautiful, and a good food. I enjoy sharing them with people. I give them away now. I don’t sell the mushrooms anymore. Italians used to pick dandelions, and my grandfather picked watercress in lakes and streams. It’s a wild vegetable. If you don’t learn from your environment, what’s the point of being alive? People are starving to death but they could live off the food that’s growing on the sidewalks. I want to go to Italy before I die. I may go next year. First, I must have an operation on my foot. I want to be able to walk when I get to Italy.

Tod the Professor, Writer, Musician and Artist My writing on society and politics has made me quite a few friends, some I’ve been able to visit on their home turf, from Scranton to Burgazada, to Leipzig. Others have come to me. This week, I had a few beers with Tod, who drove to Philly from Allentown. Billy Joel sings of a post-industrial Allentown where the people are disappointed, restless and adrift, where even an education and hard work may not yield much. Twenty-six years after its release, this song describes just about all American towns. “It’s getting very hard to stay,” except there’s really nowhere to go, besides the often lethal escape to opioids. Fleeing Allentown, Tod took a Greyhound to California, which was expensive enough in the 70’s. Now, with Chinese money flooding in, even a ratty couch in the Tenderloin or Skid Row is out of reach for most Americans. California dreaming is just a goofy song. After eight years in that elusive, faux paradise, Tod returned to Allentown. When Tod first emailed me in 2012, he spoke of living among “backwoods “reactionaries” who “just love disgusting stuff.” With an IQ of 136, Tod has few peers. His work and life aggravations are compounded by his frustrations as an unread writer, unheard musician and unseen artist. It’s presumptuous to call oneself an artist or poet, I know, I’m doing it, too. Speaking as Folly, Erasmus observed:

Poets aren’t so much in my debt, though they’re admittedly members of my party, as they’re a free race, as the saying goes, whose sole interest lies in delighting the ears of the foolish with pure nonsense and silly tales. Yet strange to say, they rely on these for the immortality and god-like life they assure themselves, and they make similar promises to others. “Self-love and flattery” are their special friends, and no other race of men worships me with such wholehearted devotion [...] Of the same kidney are those who court immortal fame by writing books. They all owe a great deal to me, especially any who blot their pages with unadulterated rubbish. But people who use their erudition to write for a learned minority and are anxious to have either Persius or Laelius pass judgment don’t seem to me favored by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous selftorture. They add, change, remove, lay aside, take up, rephrase, show to their friends, keep for nine years and are never satisfied. And their futile reward, a word of praise from a handful of people, they win at such a cost—so many late nights, such loss of sleep, sweetest of all things, and so much sweat and anguish. Then their health deteriorates, their looks are destroyed, they suffer partial or total blindness, poverty, ill-will, denial of pleasure, premature old age and early death, and whatever remaining disasters there may be. Yet the wise man believes he is compensated for everything if he wins the approval of one or another purblind scholar. Having shed 10 pounds recently, Tod appeared trim in his Tshirt and jeans. He wore thin glasses, a scraggly walrus moustache and soul patch, and his white hair was combed straight back. His slight overbite accentuated his age. My father was very poor, from a very small town by the Susquehanna River. It’s a classic American small town,

Wrightsville. His father and my mother’s father were unemployed during the Depression. They lived a block from each other, so my mother and father knew each other in the baby carriage. Their mothers were friends. They were very poor, growing up, but my grandmother, I remember her telling me, “The best time of my life was the Great Depression.” I said, “Why, grandma?” Here’s another one of my little memes, but it’s a great story. She said, “Well, I have a soup bone. The woman down the street has some peas, and the woman up the street, uh, has some bread. We come down, make the soup and feed all the kids in the neighborhood.” My father got into the Air Force, and my mother got into the Navy, during the war. My father flew B-17’s. My mother was a secretary in Washington. He ended up being an instructor. I can’t imagine being an instructor of flight school at 19 or 20. He says, or he said, he’s dead now, right before they sent him to Europe, the war ended, and right before they sent him to Japan, the war ended. He had a twin brother who was also a B17 pilot, and they both did everything together. Neither of them went overseas. After the war, they joined the National Guards, for money, then went to Vanderbilt Law School, all on the G.I. Tod. They could never have afforded it, otherwise. Then my father’s twin brother, who had the same name as me, flew his B-17 into a Tennessee mountain. Nobody knows how it happened. That tore my father up. First big disappointment of my father’s life. The thing that inspired my father to fly was a barnstormer. A barnstormer landed in a farmer’s field, across from his house, when he was a kid. He was babysitting, and Bob Glassick was the boy’s name, and he took him down to the barnstormer.

Imagine nowadays, if you took a kid that you’re babysitting up on a plane, without asking his parents! Bob Glassick just told me at dad’s funeral. He said, “Ed said it was all right, and I believed him, and it was all right.” My father wanted to be a pilot, but I think my mother nixed that, or else he lost his gumption, you know. So anyway, that was his second disappointment. He got his law degree from Vanderbilt and came home, but he never became a lawyer. He never passed the Pennsylvania bar. He got a job at All States Insurance Company. In those days, adjusters, believe it or not, had law degrees. He should have started out in sales, because guys who started out in sales ended up millionaires. He became a small office manager. He really hated that job. He tried to pass the bar again in his 40’s, by studying at night. I’d come home and see him fall asleep over his books, on the living room couch. At some point, we moved to Levittown, and he worked in one of the big Philadelphia offices, but something happened, and he got demoted and sent back to Allentown. I never got the full story about that, but he said that they wanted him to do something that he morally couldn’t do. I don’t doubt it, really. They wanted him to fudge something, and he couldn’t do it. Levittown was brand new. It was all these veterans, and all the houses looked exactly the same. I was six-years-old when I walked out the door, walked three houses down, and started knocking on doors, “Where’s my mommy?! Where’s my mommy?!” Finally, one of the ladies said, “I think you belong in this house!” and she took me down to my house. My family are all sports nuts. My grandfather was a minor league ballplayer and umpire. My uncle was a minor league ballplayer. My grandfather grew up with Babe Ruth, in

Baltimore. My mother watches sports 24 hours a day, if she can. My father watched a lot on TV. So I had to play sports. I played football in high school, although I was also in the chorus, which got me shit from both sides! That’s the kind of guy I am, you know, I’m always in between. I’m never in the crowd. I was in the chorus, a musician, you know, which is for faggots. The football team wouldn’t let me play my junior year. I practiced with them, I was allowed on the bench, but I couldn’t suit up, because I had to go to chorus, and miss one practice a week. I quit the chorus for my senior year, and played on the football team. I wanted to be a defensive player. I didn’t like offense. I didn’t like memorizing plays. You know, I’m a smart guy, but I hated memorizing plays. What I liked was analyzing the other team’s plays, figure out what they were going to do, go and tackle them. I was also the fastest guy on my team, and I was the meanest guy, because I had so many frustrations from high school, which I hadn’t begun to figure out. I wanted to hit somebody. That’s one of the reasons I enjoyed it. Three or four games into the season, they suddenly realized I was the best guy on the defensive line, although everybody else was 200 pounds, and I was 150. They suddenly noticed I was the guy chasing people around the back field, while the rest of my guys were laying on the ground. If they had let me play my junior year, they would have won. So three or four games in, they put me right in the center, and everybody else by the sidelines, because I could hold down four or five guys. I could. I was so fuckin’ mean. I know where the

play is coming. It’s coming right over me. They tailored the defense to tempt the other team to run right over my head. All I had to do was create a clot, right there. I don’t knock them down or anything like that. We won every game from then on. I was also smarter than everybody else. There was a team that blocked at your knees, so I just pushed them to the ground. Nobody else on my team could figure this out. That was my triumph, and nobody knows, because I was on the bottom of the pile, so they never announced my name over the loud speaker. Nobody knew I was on the football team. I didn’t get any of that appreciation from the cheerleaders or anything like that. After high school, I did all kinds of jobs. I was a bricklayer, then I worked at Mack Truck for two or three years. Allentown used to be an industrial town. I did everything. I worked as a chip man. They had a metal finishing plant, and they had all these shavings that came off the finishing, and you have to go and dump the shaves. That was one of the easy jobs. I worked on the line itself. One job I had was screwing on oil filters. Just screwing on one oil filter after another. I worked a high stack of lift trucks. That is some job. High stacks go up two stories, like this, and you take these big containers full of parts, and you have to balance them. It’s like a scaffolding. If you don’t get it all the way in, once in a while, all these tools come raining down, ha, ha! I could have been brained, you know? This was in the 70’s. A lot of the equipment there, I swear, went back to the 20’s. I had this hand-worked crane hooked around pieces of, ah, sheet metal. Big piles of long sheet metal. Tons of

sheet metal. I hook it on the sheet metal, and move it from here to here. Several times, these knife-like, gigantic, ton-sized pieces of sheet metal go flying around, and I go ducking, you know. They could have cut off my head. I quit. I could have gotten pension and all that kind of shit. I hated working in factories, you know, but working in factories looks good to most people, nowadays, compared to what they’re stuck with. I mean, we had benefits. When we were laid off, unions made up our salaries, so we didn’t just get our unemployment, we got our full salaries when we were laid off. We had health care, all that kind of stuff, and pension. I mean, these guys my age who went the whole way until they retired from the place, they’re sitting pretty, compared to me, but I couldn’t have took it. I couldn’t stand it there. See, I’m different from the usual academic because I’ve had other experiences, which also make me strange in academia. I know more than these other people, about other things, and they don’t like that. I know more history than a lot of historians, and I’m an English major. Sorry to get off the topic… On the line, I had to hook this very old-fashioned crane onto each side of the bottom, then come around to the front of the truck, and hook the other side. Well, somehow, when I came around, that crane was swinging. It was this big, huge L of metal, you know, and it slammed up and chipped my front tooth. If it was a little higher, it would knock me out and I’d be killed, you know. They let me sit down for a while, then put me back on the job. I couldn’t stand it in Allentown any more, I still can’t stand it, so, uh, I crossed the country. In Orange County, I lived with 15 people, ten people on bean bags in the living room, and three people in each bedroom. Huge piles of dishes. There was a zoo next door. Lots of Mexicans had chickens in their backyard, and

we had this two-legged dog that used to walk in and scrape his body across the carpet and come out the door. A year later, I was in San Francisco. I lived right on Russian Hill. A bunch of people from Allentown lived there. You have, what do you call it, colonies. People from Hammond, Indiana, lived in another house, on the other side of Russian Hill. This place was beautiful. It was, you know, right after the earthquake, a Victorian, made of redwood. Sixteen-foot ceiling, crystal chandelier, cut glass windows, working gas lights. Beautiful tiles, walls, on the kitchen and on the bathrooms. Out the back window, we had this beautiful view of Alcatraz and Angel Island. It was palatial, and we only paid $300 a month. Mr. Wong was our landlord. Mr. Wong was great, but he kicked us out eventually. What he did was cut the apartment in two, totally modernized it, and charged 1,200 for each side. This was in the late 70’s, when San Francisco started to become Manhattan. I got a job as a cab driver. Veterans Cab. That’s a hell of a job. I worked the night shift, until three in the morning. Ten hours. In the night, there are three kinds of people: the cops, the whores and the cab drivers, so you have a kind of kinship. About two in the morning, three in the morning, you take the whores home to Oakland. It’s a nice, long trip, and they tip me too, then the drag queens come on. They do their shift, late in the morning, at 2 or 3 O’clock, and they work ’til dawn. This is The Tenderloin I’m talking about. You take a break between one and two, ’til the 2 O’clock rush when the bars close. One time, they sent this drunk out into my car, and I took him home. He wasn’t going to pay me, and he was drunk. I just left him out on the street, and he was laying on the ground there. Finally, I decided I’d roll him, you know. I

looked around his pants, and I don’t roll people, but I go, Fuck this shit, I’m going to try to roll somebody! He was wearing those kinds of, like, Indian pants that don’t have any pockets in them, so he didn’t have any money anyway. I couldn’t even roll the guy, but that was my last attempt at crime, you know. My best cab driving friend was Sally Thompson. She was an American Indian, from Ontario, and she was a lesbian. She had the hardest time. She was a junkie. One time, I go to see her and both her arms are broken. It’s because she owed money to these bull dykes, and they broke both her arms. Another time, she fell asleep while she was cab driving, from methadone, and ran into the wall, so she had a steel plate in her head. I remember being with her lesbian friends, over at their house, and they go, “You can come in, Sally, but no problems! We don’t want to hear any problems!” Sally always had… “They broke my arms!” Or, “I just got syphilis!” She was the sweetest. A girlfriend of mine said, “She’s a whore with a heart of gold.” Sally turned tricks occasionally, to get a little extra money. A lot of my old friends are dead, and I thought that if anybody would be dead by now, Sally Thompson would be, but I just looked on FaceBook, and there’s Sally Thompson! She’s got that tough American-Indian blood, I think. I had two different cabs totaled out from under me. One of them, I was hit by a cab driver. Another cab ran a stop light, coming down the hill, totaled me, and I had to continue working! I had to wait four hours, until they got me a new cab, and they forced me to work into the morning, to finish my shift.

The good story is I got mugged! That ruined my cab driving. I picked up a guy in Washington Square. He looked all right. He got in the back, pulled me up on Lombard. It was really dark in there. He sticks a knife on me! Puts his arm around here. I go, “Ah, ah, don’t worry, I’ve got the money here! I’ve got a hundred dollars or so!” I’m pulling it out, but it’s not fast enough for him, so he goes, “Hurry up!” Stabs it in. I give him all the money. “Sorry, that’s it!” Luckily, it didn’t hit the jugular. He stuck it right in the side, and it went straight in, so I guess it didn’t hit any major artery, but I bled like a pig. I was a little upset, yeah. He pulled out my phone, you know, so I couldn’t call the dispatcher. He says, “Lay down! Don’t do that!” then he leaves. I drove the cab back, and they let me off that night, without paying gates and gas, ha, ha! because I had all this blood. My whole shirt was bleeding. After that, it was no good, because you’ve got to take chances, you’ve got to pick up people, but I was scared to pick up anybody else. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. No, not this one, not that one, no! I couldn’t make any money any more. You have to be kinda brave or foolhardy to be a cab driver. The detective asked me to describe him, and look at mug shots. I said I could still remember he had a red wind breaker, with some college on it. He had curly, black hair, and he was missing some teeth. He had bell bottoms on. The detective congratulated me on being an excellent observer! “We never get this good a description, you know.” They put his description up in all of the cab companies, and another cab driver picks him up. The cab driver looks in the

mirror and goes, That’s the guy! Takes him where he’s going, gets on the horn, and the cops are there the next minute. He robbed a whole bunch of other people. They all described him. I never heard what happened to him. Most of the difficulties at the time in San Francisco, crime difficulties, involved Mexicans, you know. I got fag bashed one time, and I’m not gay, but I was living near the Castro. I was walking home in the Haight, walking alone and whistling, but I have been living in the city for about six years, so I’m not a suburban boy any more. I see a Mexican guy coming up the street, over here, and I pass a guy on my right, and I see two guys coming towards me, and I suddenly realize they’re all talking to each other. My mind goes bumping in my head, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! I time it, very careful. I can feel the guy behind me. The two guys, right as they come up before me, I scream bloody murder, and I go, “Raaah!” Running right through them, knock the two right to the sides. He tries to give me a karate kick, but I knock him right over, because I’m already at top speed. I go, vrooom! I run over to the Castro District, where there are lots of guys, walking around, and I ask two gay guys to walk me home. My drummer got fag bashed, too, and these were suburban white boys, coming down the peninsula, in a big van. I think they stopped him in his Volkswagen. He was a Vietnam exMarine. They started after him, you know, but he pulled out his nunchuk, ha, ha! He taught them a lesson. These are my classic stories. It’s like, I have these little formulations, you know, simple ways of describing things that happened in my life, my opinions or anything like that, and

they’re all very good, because they get it across to people, short, because people can’t listen for very long, but every once in a while, I get sick of them. I’ve heard them too many times. Sometimes, I want to change my opinions, just so I don’t have to say that meme again. It’s like, when people ask me why I never get married. Well, the ones who want to marry me, I don’t want to marry, and the ones I want to marry, don’t want to marry me. Nice, sweet and to the point, and people get it. I couldn’t afford to live in San Francisco, so I had to come home with my tail between my legs. I haven’t been to the West Coast in 30 years. I never had the money to go back. Back in Allentown, I worked temp jobs and lived with my parents, which was hellish. I love my parents, but they yell at me all the fuckin’ time. It took me 10 years to go through graduate schools. The $24,000 I borrowed have ballooned to 48,000, with interest, but luckily, I don’t have to pay. If you make less than a certain amount, you can defer paying back your student loan, and in ten years, when I’m 75, it will be absolved. I think Obama put in this rule. Getting my PhD at age 43 meant I would be a permanent adjunct. I’ve never made more than $18,000 a year, teaching, with no benefits and no pension plans. One of those years at Mack Truck, I might, in real money, have earned more than $18,000. I couldn’t stand the Beavis and Butthead undergraduates. Their behavior was out of control, but I couldn’t control them because the administration did not have my back. If the students complained about me, they believed the students and not me, so how could I discipline them? I have to get high

evaluations, or I won’t get more work. How do you get high evaluations? You give higher grades. Basically, you give them A’s and B’s. A B- is an F. Everybody hates teachers. Even teachers hate teachers. Teachers are the evil ones. I figure it’s because they’re like mothers. They’re trying to make you do things you don’t want to do. I don’t know how you can get people to look at it from the teacher’s viewpoint, which is being tortured by people who don’t understand the whole thing, and who also think they don’t need to. They all think, I don’t need this. They’re constantly fighting with me, constantly mocking me, mocking fellow students, talking while I’m talking, threatening me, and this is a prestigious college! I try to do everything I can. I don’t know why. It all comes from my parents, again. They told me to work hard. Work hard and you’ll prosper, they told me. Do your best. I try so hard, every job I’ve ever had. You don’t have to believe me if you want, but everybody tells me I try too hard. Anyway, I have to try very hard to not try too hard for my class. Take it nice and easy, and don’t worry if they don’t learn stuff. For the past year and a half, my father had problems with his lungs. All the doctors said it’s dysphagia, which means it goes down the wrong way. You eat food, and your throat doesn’t work right any more, and the food goes into your lungs. And then he coughed and coughed and coughed, and so they gave him a stomach tube, but you’re still swallowing your spit, and things like that, so a little bit was still going down, and he was still coughing. He wasn’t getting better.

Right before he died, I took him into the hospital one more time. He was coughing blood for a while, along with spit, and they thought that was from his throat. It was dry, because he wasn’t drinking. This young Indian doctor comes in there, and he can’t even talk to my father. He tells my sister, who’s a nurse, what the problem is. They gave him a CAT scan, and they found a mass in his lungs, so apparently he had a tumor or lung cancer, for this whole year, but because it was an X-ray, it just looked like ammonia. He was basically saying, “You’re dying, man. That’s it.” He didn’t tell it very well. He was using these technical terms and all that kind of crap. After they told my father that, he’s still conscious. I’m trying to get everybody to talk to dad about our lives together, you know, have my little nephew tell him about, Oh, I used to walk the dog with dad, down the farm, that kind of stuff, and play with his airplane, you know. But my niece has her two whining kids in there, and they’re on the cellphone, you know, texting everybody who isn’t there about the situation. I’m going, “Come on, guys, pay attention to dad.” I didn’t yell at her or anything like that, but she started yelling at me, and screaming at me, in front of a dying man, and the kids are screaming at me, too, and this is the last time we’re going to be able to talk to my dad. Shortly after, they pump him full of drugs. He goes to sleep, and that’s the last time, pretty much. They’re going to let him die. Don’t let anybody tell you they don’t do euthanasia. My sister who decides is a nurse, and my girlfriend is a nurse, and they both say that’s the way to do it, when they start choking, even though he wasn’t choking when we were all there.

He was talking to me and making jokes and all that kind of stuff, but they just decided it’s time to put him under. The put him under and kept him under, so he couldn’t choke at any time, and throw up. They would have had to suction it out. That’s the theory. It took him five days. They starved him, and didn’t give him any water for five days. He was asleep the whole time. They gave him morphine. Anyway, I slept overnight with him, for five nights, and my sister and mother took over in the daytime, waiting for him to die. It’s like I’m sleeping there, but with one ear open, you know, like they say soldiers do. One ear open, listening to his breathing, for it to stop. Yes, my poor dad. It’s not an easy death. Actually, one time, he woke up, and I got a chance to talk to him just a little bit, and we even made a joke. He had to pee, so I said, “It must be hard to pee when a pretty nurse is holding your dick!” and he laughed at that. It was one of the last things we said to each other. Around the fifth night, my brother from Altoona comes in to town. Big fat guy, truck driver, uh, in shorts. I hate fat guys in shorts. “Don’t you know how you look?” I want to say. Shorts look ridiculous on anybody, but especially that guy. Be that as it may, that’s not what I’ve got against him. What I’ve got against him is, my dad’s asleep, he’s near his last day, and my mother was just in there. I say, “Don’t worry, Mitch, I’m going to move in with mom. I’ll take care of her,” and my brother starts screaming and yelling at me, “You just want the money! You bastard, you better not do that!” He just starts screaming, in front of a dying man.

He thinks I want to go live with her. No, it’s hellish to take care of my mother. She’s very demanding, and she yells at me a lot. She yells at me for sleeping late in the morning, you know, to this day. She tries to make me better, at 65. My 90-year-old mother treats me like I’m five, and tries to make a better person out of me, by nagging at me and yelling at me all the time. I’m a late sleeper, and Hitler was a late sleeper. I’m going to write a song about all the things I have in common with Hitler! He forgot to take out the garbage, several times! Once, a girlfriend hit me on the head with a lamp, because I was sleeping late. With medical advances, we’re living longer, but there has to be a way to make life more meaningful for old people, because all they do during their last 30 years is watch television. They ought to figure out how to not just keep them alive, but keep them healthy, so they can go out and do other things. Nobody wants to use them as advisors. My father knew all this shit about insurance. Why don’t they want to use him? What the hell. For the last year of his life, I wanted to take my recorder over there and quiz him on his life, you know, and I regret it. That’s one of the regrets I’ll always have. On the other hand, I got the feeling that he just wanted to hang around and watch TV with my mother, and he had trouble talking, and he was coughing a lot. I may seem happy and jolly right now, but I’m pumped up with 15,000 milligrams of vitamin B. I’m so fuckin’ depressed about my shit. Vitamin B makes you happy. It’s better than Prozac, because it’s healthier. It’s good for you. It’s sunshine.

He was 93. I shouldn’t be so… sad about it, but I… And he wasn’t that good to me either. Living in the house, I remember times he would yell at me and frighten me, and scared me a lot, but… He did spank me, but not a lot, and so did my mother. Christopher Lasch said, “If children are punished, spanked, they grow up with symptoms of grief and depression. But if they’re not spanked, or physically punished, then they grow up with symptoms of borderline personality and narcissism.” And that’s your present day young people. Personally, I prefer grief and depression. Borderline and narcissism, I’ve been around a lot of people like that. Borderline is when they need a lot of attention, no matter what. They’ll fight with you, just to get attention. All my life, people have screamed at me! I remember you writing something about how we all need to be with other people? I have to disagree. I think we can’t all be happy until we each have our own room. I’ve never had kids. I don’t like them much. I can’t describe it much better… No, I was influenced when I was young by, “Who would bring a kid into this horrible, fuckin’ world?” Who would put kids through what I was put through? I mean, that’s a big part of it, too. I know I was middle class. I wasn’t a junkie, and I wasn’t a paraplegic either. You know what happens there? When people say, “Be happy, you’re not a paraplegic! You’re not a quadriplegic.” I go, “You know what that does when you tell me that? It just makes me feel guilty for thinking I’m better than a quadriplegic,” so that’s not helping me.

When my father died, lately they all tell me, “We’re all going to die, you know.” Why are you telling me that? Don’t say that! Why does everybody say that? I’ve been through nothing but disappointments. All my girlfriends have yelled at me, but this one is better because she has a short attention span. I like that, because I can jolly her up, after she’s yelled for a few minutes. I’ve been with her for 15 years, and we’ve lived together for eight. My girlfriend used to be a geriatric nurse, but she quit. She thought care goes down when the computers come in. Before, nurses would spend all their time taking care of the old people, but now they mostly stand at a computer, entering data or talking, on their cellphone, you know, to one of their ten children! Another thing is nurses get more patients per nurse. People with business administration degrees come in, cut the fat, rationalize and that kind of stuff. The supervisor used to yell at her, and curse at her. He was brought in to fire all the old nurses, and hire young nurses for less money, make them work longer hours, take care of more patients. Nursing homes have become hellholes, thanks to these business majors. Now, my girlfriend stays at home and take care of her mom, who’s going crazy. The old lady accuses my girlfriend of the most horrible things, like sleeping with her own father! My girlfriend’s father was a bit of a wheeler, dealer. He got some money. This makes me think it’s terrible to have money in the family. Her family is more miserable than my family. They’re horrible to each other!

Her father manipulated them all by threatening to cut them out of the will. Typical stuff, you know. They’re always upset, because of the money, and it’s, like, useless. I would rather not have it. They’re a miserable bunch, anyway. The thing that sucks throughout my life is that I spend most of my time, when I’m not being yelled at, constantly worried about being out on the street. Even though I’m an academic, with a PhD, I’ve been frightfully poor all my life. There’s this constant grinding fear in the back of my head. If I lived in Denmark or some place like that, that would be one thing I wouldn’t have to worry about so much. I could get on with other things. I’ve been homeless. When I moved to LA, and I moved out of that house, I was homeless for a week or so. I was in a homeless shelter down in Santa Ana. I had this guy beneath me who would rock the bunk beds. I finally yelled at him, “Stop rocking,” but he couldn’t stop, because he had something wrong with him. I think he had a wound that was itching. I should have just stayed in my car. I studied English because I wanted to become a writer, but I’m also a musician and an artist. Look at my website if you get a chance. On it, I have a collection of short stories, three books about slaves in ancient Rome and a science fiction book. I have five books, but nobody buys them. I self-publish my books and sell them on Amazon. My uncle bought my sci-fi book, but he had to be an asshole about it and only gave it four stars, not five! My nephew, too, bought the same book. He’s also an asshole about it and only gave it four stars! People keep telling me, “You should just do one thing,” but I want to do everything. As a musician, I play country, blues, rock, jazz and classical. I have a YouTube site, with me just

playing guitar of a hundred songs. I got Martin, they make them up there, in Nazareth, they lent me a $5,000 guitar to make my videos. I wanted to have a really good sounding guitar for my videos, but it’s still just me singing the songs, you know. That’s not a professional recording. I have a recording with a group, made in a studio that’s owned by a friend who’s a trust fund baby. It took us years and years and years to make that album. It’s like my rock and roll group album, my garage Beatles band album. It’s out. You can buy it on Amazon today. Two people have bought it, and I’ve had it out for three years! They say what you have to do, and this goes for my books, too, what you’re supposed to do is email reviewers, and beg them to review your stuff. I can’t do that. I tried it once or twice, and I said, “No, that’s enough.” So the marketing of it is 90%, and the making of it is less than 10%. If I can just get some people to read my books, listen to my records and look at my art, online. All I want to be is an artist. All I really want to do is sit, alone, quietly, and make records. I’m making a blues record right now. Lately, I’ve been playing these country swing dances. If a guy wants to meet women, he should go to these country swing dances, because I keep seeing all these very hot women show up with codgers. There just aren’t enough young guys to go around. To dance, these women must be in pretty good shape, so most of them have pretty good bodies. I normally talk a lot, anyway, if anybody wants to listen to what I have to say, but most of the time, I start talking my shit like this, and people start yawning. I’m, like, all right, I’ll stop, but you haven’t yawned once!

Don the Retired Building Contractor Who says there are jobs? I know a guy in Fishtown who can do roofing, plumbing, carpentry, house painting, flooring and electrical wiring. Though O’Neal will work for just a hundred a day, he’s often idle. Even O’Neal’s cousin won’t hire him. “Standing outside Best Buy are Mexican guys who will work for as little as 40 bucks a day, and they’ll bring their own tools too! I can’t compete against that.” O’Neal has six kids, with five still living with him. His wife has no job. Though a klutz from inside the womb, even I got a hundred a

day in the early 90’s as a housepainter. Everything has gone up but wages. O’Neal is voting Trump. In an old school Kensington bar, I saw a white, well-tattooed and crew cut pool player with a “FUCK HITLER” T-shirt. O’Neal interpreted this as anti-Trump. A contractor in my neighborhood, the most ethnically mixed in Philly, has “TRUMP” spray painted in gold on his beat up, white pickup truck. On the driver’s door is a shamrock. A Friendly regular, Mike, wouldn’t admit he’s backing Trump. He only growled, “I ain’t gonna vote for no woman.” Born in Puerto Rico, Mike used to work in a tinsel factory. One man who no longer has to worry about finding work is 64year-old Don. For three decades, my friend and neighbor was a building contractor, with a crew of six employees, usually. When Don was 58, he fell during work and cracked his neck, broke several bones in his right arm and damaged his back. Don retired two years later. His hammering days over, Don imbibes Bud, fishes and still thinks of himself as a hunter. Even with the yews and hearse in sight, lots of people don’t know they’re old. He has a T-shirt, “DON IS MY NAME / HUNTING IS MY GAME.” A “Don’s Hunting Excuses Shirt” has, “Trees were in the way. Scope was foggy. I didn’t miss… those were warning shots. I was reloading. Too dark. Someone distracted me. Safety lock was on. Gun barrel must’ve been bent. Waiting for the big one. The gun jammed. My finger slipped.” It is assumed that Don is suffering from alcoholic anorexia. Sated by beer and Stoli, Don forgets to eat. Deprived of nutrients, his skeleton is starting to skew. Trudging, Don leans on an aluminum cane with foam grip. When times are bad,

though, the old don’t envy but pity the young. Soon enough, perhaps the dead will feel sorry for us all. In Friendly, I’ve caught Don dazed, but never cranky. What’s quoted here has been gathered through half a dozen encounters, the latest just a few hours ago. If Don didn’t have to stumble home to fix something in his basement, we’d still be talking. I got married at 18. It only lasted two years. I have a 42-yearold son. He lives on the Jersey Shore. I got a tattoo of my name when I was 18. It’s my only tattoo. I don’t really regret it. My dad was a beef deboner at Cross Brothers. You know how heavy a side of beef is? It threw out his back. Joe Frazier worked at Cross Brothers. My dad was a bartender at Villa di Roma. You know where it is. He was real popular. You can learn more things in a bar than anywhere else. A lawyer might come in and sit next to you. You buy him a beer, he’ll tell you stuff. I live with my mom and take care of her. She’s 91-years-old. No, she’s not doing too well. We have a five-bedroom house. It’s too big for us. That’s why we’re selling it, finally. We’ll find a smaller house, maybe down by Oregon Avenue. I learnt Italian from my grandma. That’s all she ever spoke. Our dog only listened to her. If I said “get out” in English, the dog would just look at me. He only spoke Italian.

I worked at Claudio’s. You had to know Italian to work on 9th Street back in the day. We’re from Sicily. I haven’t been to Italy. None of us have but my cousins. They didn’t like it. They said the food was bad, but maybe you’re right, maybe they only ate at the touristy places. They said the wine was good, though. Soon as you walked into a place, they’d have a bottle waiting for you, and if you wanted another, they’d only charge you $2. You can’t beat that! You’ve been all over Italy! I like my pasta simple too. I like it white. I like it with just olive oil and lots of grated cheese. We never went back to Italy because we didn’t have any money. I’ll think about it. Maybe I’ll visit Italy. My mom is too sick to go anywhere. She’s lived in South Philly her whole life. She wants to die in South Philly. I’ve lived in South Philly my whole life. I’ve always been a saver. I’d take out my money and count it. I’ve bought gold coins. Yes, gold is definitely going back up. I stopped gambling a long time ago. I lost $27,000 altogether. Last night, my mom wanted ice cream, so I went out to get it for her, and some bread. Sometimes, she falls down and I can’t even pick her up to put her back on the wheelchair. I have to run outside to find somebody to help me. Today, the nurse will come to check on my mom. She comes once a week. After leaving this bar, I’ll go home and brush my teeth. I don’t want the nurse to smell beer on my breath. Oh man, I have a really nice fishing rod. It cost me 200 bucks. Every so often, I go on these fishing trips out on the open sea. It only costs $65 for eight hours. If we don’t catch nothing, the

boat captain will make it ten hours. Usually, we just go for flounders. You want to come? I have 22 guns. On a hunting trip to Idaho, I shot mule deer. We rode horses. They can’t really climb, they’re not like goats. I want to go to North Carolina to shoot birds. Pheasants! The ones in Jersey don’t even bother to fly. About ten years ago, I took a trip to Mongolia with a doctor and a dentist. I figured if I get sick, there’s a doctor right there, and if I need a tooth pulled, I’ll be OK too. I want to go to Africa next. The trip over there took forever. I thought we were never going to land. I read an entire book on the plane, and I never read! In Mongolia, my joints were hurting because of the high altitude. I could hardly walk. I just wanted to go home. I told them, “I need a helicopter! Just get me out of here! I don’t care how much it costs. You can have my gun. I just want to go home!” I ended up killing the first argali of the day, which meant I had to eat a piece of its raw testicle. I got sick that day and all of the next day. Oh man, it was terrible. That was the trip of a lifetime. I have all these photos in an album. I’ll always have it. The Mongolians were the friendliest people, but the food wasn’t too good. When we gave our guides their tips at the end of the trip, they were all sitting on top of the SUV playing cards! On the way back, we stayed for a couple nights in Seoul, South

Korea. That was wonderful. Though I’m retired, I still take a job every now and then. People know me. I have a couple of Mexican guys working for me. I pay each guy a hundred bucks a day. They’re good. They earn it. I’ve always voted Republican, but I don’t know this time. It doesn’t really make a difference. I mean, one person won’t make a difference, it takes the whole country. I may not even vote this time.

J.J. the Ex-Pizza Man and Young Lord Responding to my recent articles about race, “Marx Karl” comments at Intrepid Report: What is Asian racism? In Africa Indians brought by the British to Africa to fulfill middle management posts or run small enterprises treated the whites as superiors and the Africans as inferiors. So in Europe and the US some Asians play Uncle Tom and identify with whites against blacks other Asians who have been on the receiving end of white racism side with blacks […] I reply: Marx Karl, You display remarkable racism and a very poor understanding of human nature by thinking Asians need whites to condition them on how to think about other races. You obviously have no familiarity with any Asian society. By thinking that whites are the catalyst to everything, you are in fact a white supremacist. Believing racism to be strictly a white disease, many progressives conclude that all “people of color” must be in solidarity against whites. In their cartoonish world view, racist and predator whites are pitted against victimized and

prejudice-free blacks, browns and yellows. It has never occurred to these progressives that any man, of any color, has a complex and evolving range of opinions about all races and ethnicities. By sight alone, he will react differently to different types. No one is color blind. Even a slight shift in accent will transform the listener. Few things are as pathetic, comic and infuriating as a progressive striving to show “a person of color” that he’s not racist while referencing, nearly nonstop, to that person’s race. Racial assumptions are often complicated, challenged or refuted through direct encounters, however, and that’s why I’m an alcoholic. (Just kidding.) Going to my local bar, I’m presented with individuals, not types, for as soon as I talk to a man, he’s no longer just some Italian, Irish, black or Chinese guy, and J.J., whom you’re about to meet, is certainly no stereotypical Puerto Rican. He’s just J.J. All these pizzerias are going out of business. It’s the yuppies. They don’t want regular hoagies and pizzas. It has to be whole wheat this, gluten-free that. Regular pizzas just ain’t good enough for them. I’m a Chinese food eater. I worked in Chinatown, New York, from 70 to 73. I grew up right there, Canal Street. I’ve eaten stuff no American people would eat. “Oooh, what is that? It moves!” What the fuck, just eat it! You know, jelly fish and stuff like that, and it’s fuckin’ good. I’ve eaten seaweed. I was eating kale before kale was popular. Now, everybody wants to eat kale. You know these people have eaten this stuff for thousands of years, and you’re just discovering it? My first job, I worked for these two Irish brothers on Canal Street. They sold fruits and vegetables. I was playing hooky from school, so they asked me, “You want to work?” I said sure,

so they gave me a fly swatter. I was like, “What? Am I supposed to swat flies?!” You know how people always grab and squeeze fruits so they would get bruised? My job was to swat people’s hands. On top of my pay, the brothers also gave me food stamps. They would give me, like, thirty or forty bucks of food stamps at a time. The fruit business was just a front. They made real money selling heroin. One of their partners was this old, Chinese mobster. This guy would only take gold for payments, slips of gold, and he would take diamonds from the Jews. You know those Jews with side locks? It’s a hundred degrees out and they have those long coats on. Yeah, these Jews would bring diamonds to the Chinese guy in exchange for heroin. The Chinese guy said to me, “I’m going to ride the black horse as far as I can, to the very edge, but before I get there, I want to have a well of gold.” That’s what he said, “a well of gold”! Later, I had a job at a pizzeria in North Carolina. It was by the freeway. The place was busy as shit. This Sicilian guy, Joe, was taking in 40, 50 thousand dollars a week. One day, this kid showed up, and he was like, “You like to smoke pot?” “Yeah, yeah!” This kid was, like, a crazy redneck kid. I said, “Wow, this is good stuff. How much do you want? How much for an ounce?” “Ooooh… ten dollars?” Ten dollars?! I’m thinking, In New York, we’d be paying 75, 80 dollars an ounce, and he’s saying, “Ten dollars”! His father was the sheriff. He wasn’t the one growing it.

I asked the kid, “What about a big garbage bag?” He said, “Sixty bucks?” I called New York right away, “Yo, come down here and bring the car. We got baaaags! Marijuana, all you can get!” There’s a secret in this country they don’t tell you about. Have you heard of R.J. Reynolds? They and the other tobacco companies were the ones growing this shit, and the sheriffs in those states were protecting them. You know that the sheriff in every state has more power than the FBI? The sheriff can go everywhere. The FBI can’t. You hear all that shit about the KKK and sheriffs… they’re all together, they’re the same people. All that redneck, KKK, sheriff, state police, they’re all together, they’re all related. Cousin Joe, cousin Bob, ba ba bee ba boom! I know a good six or seven L&I and LCB, licenses and inspections, and liquor control guys. I went to eat with an L&I guy, and he pulled out a thick roll like this. Hundreds and twenties. I asked him, “Why do you have to show me that, man?” But you know how it is, they become your friends, they have to impress you. When they take you out to eat, they take you to places where nobody else eats. Right here, I know lots of Vietnamese guys who pay. It’s like, Hi! Hi! They’re hugging and kissing like they’re family. You can have some food on the house, and this is for you to take home. The inspector goes home. There’s some noodles, and something extra at the bottom. Oh yeah, here’s a couple hundred dollars! He gets number five to go, and there’s a little extra!

Happy birthday! Here’s a birthday card, and in the envelope, there’s a couple of hundred bucks. This is for your daughter’s birthday. How’s the family? And they’ll look at you like, ha ha, but they’ll take it. If you don’t pay, they can come in and, you know, there’s something wrong over here, and something wrong over here. They can close you. You can get fucked up. In New York, it’s like that. Here, it’s like that. Jersey is like that. I’ve been in places in the middle of nowhere, it’s like that, so don’t let anybody tell you… Here, you have to pay Brady a hundred grand to become a judge. The Democrats have run this city for, what, fifty-one years now? The Republicans control the liquor board. It hasn’t been audited in 45 years. What’s a fundraiser? What’s a charity event? It’s just a loophole, another way to pay. Pay to play, that’s what it is. Listen, in every culture, in India, Asia, everywhere south of the border, in Jamaica, Haiti, it’s like that. It’s everywhere. Here, too. Then there’s the civic forfeiture law. That’s when they take your house because somebody sold drugs in it. You know they’ve never been audited? Nobody knows where the money goes, if it’s the cops, the state or whoever. Trump is a gangster. People have no idea. First, to build anything with concrete, construction, you have to pay off and be involved with those people. You have to sit down with them. That’s Mafia. You’re in the casino business, goddamn, you’ve got to deal with those people. When he was in the casino business in Atlantic City, he was involved with two of the biggest Asian mobsters in the world, then he broke away from

them, because they were getting him hot. “Listen, we can’t be partners no more.” He sold a hundred million dollars’ worth of properties to this Russian guy. Dmitry R… I can’t pronounce his last name. It turned out this guy’s one of the biggest mobsters in Russia. So, Trump goes on TV and says, “I can work with Putin.” Yeah, because he knows all of them! “I can work with China on trades.” Yeah, because he knows all of them! Hillary gets caught, but they don’t indict her. She’s paid everybody off. She’s got all the judges. If you and me do that, we’ll go to jail. That’s why people hate her. They have computers and models, they know the people in this country are not happy. They know they’re going to have a revolution, what with the cops killing black kids, and even white kids. Hey, man, you’ve got to stop this. We have you on video. You’re a murderer! Now cops got shot, so the cops are thinking, we better cool out! They’ll have to. From 65 to 68, this country burned. You know, they killed Martin Luther King, Kennedy… but then they forgot! That all I need is lighter fluid and a match. Fire is a motherfucker. Make a lot of smoke, you can’t see. You can have robots and drones, but you can’t see through smoke. If I’m a friggin black leader, a radical, I can use the computer to text billions of people. I can say tomorrow, Wednesday— that’s the landing on the moon, right?—I can say, tomorrow, in celebration of the moon landing, you can find an abandoned building or car, and burn it! Just go to Home Depot, nonchalant, black kids, just go buy some lighter fluid. At five O’clock, everybody gonna light it up! Boom, boom, boom, boom! Firemen can’t see. You put a car in the middle of the road, like

we did in 72, with the Young Lords. Abandoned car, right in the middle of the road. Bottles coming down from the roof. Cops won’t come near because nobody wants to get hit with a missile. Back in the day, when we were gangsters, fighting, when we knew the other gang was coming, we’d fill these bottles with water or with sand. We’d have a garbage can. We would drag it up six floors, full of bricks, bottles, everything. They’re missiles. If you hit somebody with one of those, from six floors up, you’re killing him. Fill a bottle with a bit of gasoline, make a little wick, it’s a cop killer. Boom, boom, boom, boom. From 65 to 68, man, this country was in a revolution. Johnson was like, We have to pacify everybody, so he started welfare, food stamps, free lunch. All the radical blacks and Puerto Ricans, they went into city hall, they came out with a job. All these friggin guys. Geraldo Rivera was a Young Lord, Puerto Rican Jew radical. Pablo Guzmán, the newsman from New York, another one. Eddie Acosta. All them guys went in, then came out with jobs. Same thing with the black guys. They went in, they came out with jobs. They pacified them. They drugged them. Timothy Leary was a CIA guy. They told him, “We need you to go in there and start the counter-culture bullshit.” LSD, tune in, drop acid, drop out. He did what they told him, and they gave him millions of dollars. They got people high on marijuana and hashish, and sex, free sex. They said, “Hey, go suck dicks, girls! Go show your tits! Peace! Love!”

Girls want to be naked. If you told them that, tomorrow, they could walk around naked, the whole country, they would do it. All the women out here, fat, ugly, whatever, they will all be naked. Guys would be like, well, I don’t know, they would be a little more intimidated. They don’t want to see another guy’s trunk. They don’t want to see some ugly guy, but all the women would walk around naked. All women, all over the world, they love slavery. They love the system. After the First World War, when Germany wasn’t shit, and their money was worthless, the women would fuck anybody who had money, because they had to eat. I get that. When Hitler came into power, they went with him. They didn’t care if he was killing gays, Jews, whoever. They were like, “Heil, Hitler!” When the Americans won, they went with the Americans! That’s women. In the whole world, it’s always been like that. That’s very rare… great women. If you look at history, patterns, women will follow whoever is in charge, because they love to be in that system of slavery. They want the government to take care of them because they’ve been told since they’re little, “You need a strong man to take care of you.” By their grandmother and their great grandmother. “Oh, you must marry a guy with money.” They’ve been programmed. Now, it’s very rare a woman who wants to be independent, and the feminist movement, the neo-feminist movement, they tried

it, but guess what? They were like, “Yeah! Yeah! We don’t want to wear bras,” but when they got it, they didn’t know what to do next. There was nowhere to go. All these movements, they run out of steam after a while. Yeah, yeah, we want to get married! I don’t care if you marry a dog. If you love the dog, you marry the dog, fuck the dog, that’s on you, I don’t care. I don’t care if two gay guys are fucking and sucking, or two girls are sucking. I’m not going to pay to watch it, but there are people who will pay to watch it. I’ll pay to watch two women do it live, OK, but they better be good looking. I don’t want to see two butch dykes do it. Once they get what they want, then what happens? They don’t know what to do next. You got gay rights! Who cares? You got married! In Orlando, my friend trains people shooting, so he opens up a school called Pink Pistol. They’re all gay, guys, girls, whatever, transgenders, but they’re learning. They’re filing to get the paperwork, so they can carry and have a concealed permit. He started it before the shooting, but it’s getting bigger. It’s going franchise. All of a sudden, all these gay people are for Trump because he’s the only one who will speak up for them. Hillary won’t. So it’s fuckin… you see how crazy shit gets? The Cubans in Miami are mad. They have citizenship, they’re in construction, and here come a bunch of Mexicans to undercut them. The Cubans also remember Elian Gonzalez. They’re going to make Hillary pay for that. Louis Farrakhan is for Trump. He was interviewed by that crazy guy down in Texas, what’s his name, Alex Jones, yeah…

Farrakhan is for Trump. I can’t vote, I’m a criminal, but I’d go with a winner. They’re going to put Trump in. He’s saying all kinds of bullshit. Trump can kill somebody and they’ll still put him in. I don’t take things serious. I’m sixty now. When I look at my cousins in their forties and fifties, and they all have white hair, it’s because they worry. I don’t have white hair. I don’t care. Did you see Trump at the convention last night? He came out with all the smoke. It was like professional wrestling! Trump is the white horse. They’re trying to play him like they did in the Bible. You know the Bible… there’s a white horse coming that will fix everything. Trump’s the sheriff. The sheriff always comes on a white horse.

Rudy the Retired Math Professor Though each life is rich, some are staggeringly so. Over four days in July, I had a series of conversations with Rudy List at his house in Dexter, Michigan. A 74-year-old retired math professor, Rudy introduced me to Hua Luogeng, Zitang Zhang and Terence Tao. In return, I told him about Otto Dix, Cindy Sherman, Honey Boo Boo and Jerry Springer. It was certainly not fair trade. In Rudy’s kitchen, an aging, sick dove cooed. Across the road, field corn grew. No sounds of cars, crickets or cicadas wafted through the open windows, only late summer weather. Darkness came. As we talked for hours, Rudy’s Hong Kongborn wife pretty much left us alone. A realtor, she had enough on her mind.

How can you tell if a mathematician is extroverted? As he’s talking to you, he’ll look at your shoes instead of his shoes! My father started out plastering houses, but he was not a very big man, so when he was 30, he decided he wouldn’t last as a plasterer, the work was just so heavy. He became a machinist. My father worked at Bay City Power Shovels for 25 years until the company fell apart. He spent a couple of years unemployed, then got hired by a place that made molds for casting. When my mother got engaged to my father, she said, “I don’t want an engagement ring. I want a house,” so they built a house. I’ve lived in many houses and several countries, but this house we had in Bay City will always be home. In elementary school, I learnt of Pythagoras' Theorem. I was so fascinated by it that I drew a chalk drawing of its diagram on the basement wall of this house. It was still there 40 years later, in 1994. Neither one of my parents went to a university. My mother never even went to high school. Her parents were illiterate. My mother was so poor growing up, she often ate bread with lard. She had 11 brothers and sisters. From the age of 16, my mother was a hairdresser. She ultimately started her own business and had a very loyal following. I think her customers came for the conversations as much as anything else. My mother very forcefully supported her political views. My father’s first language was German. He didn’t learn English until he went to school. When I was a child, we would all go to my grandparents’ house at Christmas to sing carols in German

and eat traditional German food. My mother also spoke some German. When I was about six or seven, I remember my grandmother cautioning my grandfather that he should speak English outside the house. It was two or three years after the war, and there was a lot of sentiment, still, against the Germans. When I was in 5th or 6th grade, I wanted to learn how to read and write German. Since I went to a German Lutheran school, all the teachers knew German. A couple of other kids and I asked Mr. Ring if he would teach German to us after school. Mr. Ring was overjoyed. I went home and told my mom, “We’re going to learn German in school.” “Das ist gut!” Within three weeks, a petition went around that said, “This is America. We speak English,” so our German lessons were shut down. I got my master’s in mathematics from the University of Michigan, then my PhD from the University of Birmingham, where I also taught. I spent 19 years in England altogether. I also taught for a year in Iraq. Before I started at the University of Mosul, I went to Iran to see a British friend, John. Shortly before I arrived, John’s wife was raped by an Iranian employee, a guy who came by each day to clean up. The Iranians take things like that very seriously. They locked the rapist in a small cage that was just tall enough for him to stand in, and they didn’t give him food or water. His family came by to feed him, of course, but he was kept in the sun as it

got up to 120 degrees. Only John could spare him. His family went to John’s house each day to plead, but John would just spit at them. After several days in the hot sun, the man died. I didn’t like anything about that situation. I wouldn’t have let the guy die. John is a complex person. Working in the oil industry, he was in Peru and on the Red Sea with a bunch of American rednecks. He got to know them pretty well. One night, they showed home movies of themselves hunting Indians. They killed the indigenous people, and had movies of themselves doing it. The guy sitting here showing the movie is the guy in the movie, shooting the person. I said, “So John, what did you do?!” He said, “I didn’t do anything. We were on an oil platform, in the middle of the Red Sea.” This is the sort of shit we don’t know about. You’ll never read it anywhere, but John had all kinds of stories. It’s almost like a government cover-up. You just don’t say anything. Leaving Iran, I hitchhiked from Ahvaz to the Iraqi border. After I showed my papers at the Iranian checkpoint, I walked across the no man’s land separating Iran from Iraq. There were machine guns on either side trained on each other. It was the loneliest two hundred yards I’ve ever walked. Either side could have shot me and blamed it on the other. The guy on the Iraqi side stamped my passport, then went back to fingering his worry beads. There were two taxis nearby, I don’t know why, because there were no travelers. A driver approached and quoted a price, but it was way too high, so I kept walking. I didn’t know how to bargain. Basra was only 15

miles away, but it was 105, and in the desert. After I had walked about 50 yards, the driver ran after me and gave me a fairer price. He even bought me lunch. The Basra bus station was just a big, unpaved lot with various sorts of vehicles. Some of them looked like school buses here, but they’re all beat up, and they carried anything, including goats and chickens. After half an hour or so, I found one that was going to Baghdad. I also learned the words for “this” and “that” in the process. The first thing that happens when you get on a bus is they offer you water. They know you need water. Everybody needs water. They had this big cistern, right near the front of the bus, with a big dipper. The driver offered me water, so I drank it then sat down. While waiting, I watched others board. After drinking, each said “shukran,” so, belatedly, I said “shukran” to the driver. I got along fine in Iraq. There was never any problem, except for one time. I was walking down the street, smoking, and this guy just started yelling. He pointed at me and looked really angry, so I thought, Oh, he wants a cigarette! I took out my pack and offered him one, but this only made him angrier. He yanked the cigarette from my mouth, threw it on the ground then stomped on it. That’s when I realized, It’s Ramadan! You’re not supposed to smoke during Ramadan. It remains the most memorable year of my life. I learnt more in Iraq than anywhere else. It was just a fascinating place, with very old things everywhere. I saw so much that has been destroyed. Living among Muslims, I knew it wasn’t a good idea to say you didn’t believe in God. The first time someone asked me about

my religion, I said I don’t believe in God, I don’t think there is a God. This made them very upset. They were frightened. Like, how can that be? No, no! Some of my students asked what religion I was? They asked if I believed in the Messiah? I just said, “Yeah, that’s what I believe.” I lived with an American in an apartment we rented from a goldsmith. My roommate, Alan, also taught at the university. He was a writer of some sort. I can’t remember what the occasion was, but Alan went to Iran for a week, and when he came back, I found him lying on my bed. Alan always slept stark naked, so there he was, stark naked, on my cot. He said, “Oh, you’ve got to help me.” Alan had stitches in his face, arms, chest and back, all over. I said, “What happened to you?” He said, “While I was over there, I had a nightmare. I saw two men in my room, and they were going to attack me, so I jumped through the window.” Alan was on the second floor. After he landed, he just started running, all bloody and naked. He had no idea where he was. When the cops came, they couldn’t understand Alan, so they made him jog alongside them, all bloody and naked, back to the police station. They didn’t want to get blood in their car. At the station, there was someone who understood English, so they took Alan to the hospital, finally. There, they put all these stitches on him, but without anesthesia. A month later, I heard this terrible rampage coming from his room. I jumped out of bed.

“What’s going on?” “There are two men in my room!” I switched on the light, looked around. Alan had knocked over his table. A bottle of ink had splashed all over. His bed was upside down. His books were everywhere. I didn’t like this situation very much, so I moved, and that’s when I met this Iraqi family. The government was building these cement houses that looked like bunkers, and people from the villages were paid to watch the construction sites. They lived in these tents. There was an old woman and her two children, Fatih and Aziza, and there was Najma, Aziza’s six-year-old daughter. Najma means “star” in Arabic. I started to talk to them a bit, then I started to eat dinner with them. Kids, they’ll repeat a word as many times as you want, so I taught Najma English, and I learnt Arabic from her. One day, I asked Aziza, “Where do you get your food?” “Ah, the people around, they have leftovers, so they give them to us.” By this time, I was speaking Arabic fairly well. You know how to learn a language. Just learn the nouns, nouns, nouns. The connectors will come. They’ll tell you when you’re using them wrong. I told Aziza, “Look, how about this, I’ll buy you the food, you cook it, and we all eat it together?”

I became Abu Lahm, The Father of Meat. I’d go with Aziza, or sometimes just Najma, to the market, and we’d say, “We want this, and we want that.” Quite often there was a shortage of things, but we always came back with something to eat. Once, I went with Najma to get some kebabs, and as we were talking to the kebab seller, some guy came up and said to Najma, “Who is this? What is he doing with you?” She said, “He’s my uncle.” I felt slightly threatened, because it could have gone the wrong way. I did make a note, not to go to town alone with Najma ever again. I noticed Aziza’s eyes were slightly bulging, so I looked at her throat, and it was bulging, so I thought, Goiter! Iraq had a national health service, and it was totally free, so we went to the hospital. It’s nothing like a hospital here. People were sitting on the floor, and some of them were even cooking. It might not have been very hygienic but, Jesus, it was sure comfortable in terms of social interactions. They all got to know each other. We can learn from this. We went into this office where there was a doctor sitting behind a desk, looking important. He spoke to me in English, “What are you here for?” “I think she’s got goiter.” “What is she to you?” “She’s my friend.” “She’s an ignorant peasant.”

“Well, she’s my friend!” When I was in university, I lived in a co-op, and we had people from all over the world. Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Africans. I loved it, I absolutely loved it. One of the guys, Afif, was a Palestinian from Lebanon. He told me how Arabs interact. He said, “Every Arab thinks of himself as an independent country! If he yells, you shouldn’t worry, but when an Arab gets really quiet, that’s when you should worry. In the doctor’s office, I raised my voice a bit, so the guy raised his voice. I pounded my fist on the table and said, “I think she has goiter! She needs treatment! She needs to be looked at!” He looked at me, “OK,” then he said, “We don’t have enough blood. If we’re going to work on her, we need somebody to contribute a pint of blood.” So I gave a pint that day. I had never done this before. Watching this thing fill up, I thought, Jesus, I hope they remember to pull out the needle! Done, I walked out. Aziza asked me, “Did you do it?” I said, “Yeah.” There were all these people milling about, conversing. Aziza announced to everybody at the top of her voice, “He gave blood for me! He gave blood for me!” They all looked and clapped. Whoaaah! I became an instant hero! There was a solar eclipse that year and Aziza got really, really scared. She had no idea what was going on. I tried to explain what was happening, but Aziza wasn’t having any of it. She had no idea there were planets. Aziza knew there was the sun, and it came up each morning. She was back before Copernicus’ time. After the sun came back out, Aziza started smiling again after a

while. I had friends up and down the scale. I knew a guy who worked at the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission. I had met Imad Khadduri in Ann Arbor. When I taught at the University of Birmingham, Imad was there for his PhD in nuclear engineering. For his last six months there, he stayed at my house. Imad is retired now. He has a website that keeps tracks of what’s going on in Palestine. In Baghdad, I stayed at Imad’s dad’s house and, later, after he got married, at his house. Arabs give things away. I actually found out I had to be careful, because if I said something was nice, they would offer it to me. It’s really true. I asked my old landlord to help me buy a coat. He said, “OK, I’ll take you,” so we went out, and he pulled his gate down halfway. He had a bunch of gold in there. As he walked off, I said, “What about that? It’s open.” “Oh, no worries, the others will watch it for me.” Around Christmas of 1974, I visited Lebanon with my friend, Stanley Hoo. Beirut was absolutely beautiful then. We stayed with a friend of ours in Sabra, one of those places that was destroyed in one of those wars in the 80’s. Shatila Massacre, I know exactly where that is. Once, as we were walking from central Beirut back to Sabra, Stan said to me, “We’re being followed.” I looked back and there were these two young guys, maybe 18, 19, and they were just walking behind us. They got closer and closer, then they got right up to us and said, “Where are you

going?” We showed them the address. They said, “Follow us.” They took us down this little street. Stan said to me, “I don’t think this is going to work out too well.” They took us into this garage. There was a jeep with a heavy caliber machine gun on the back of it. They opened a door to this office. There was a guy sitting behind a desk, and a guy standing by the wall with a machine gun. There was just one light bulb hanging from the ceiling. They said, “We would like to ask you some questions.” “OK.” “First, where are your passports?” We show them our passports. Stan’s Chinese. He was carrying an American passport. “Where are you coming from?” “England.” They interrogated us for a while. We explained that we were visiting our friend, Mohammad. Finally, I said, “Please, call this number. Call him up, and he’ll explain.” The guy finally did that. I said to Stan, “Should we just make a run for it?” “We’d get killed for sure.” They brought Mohammad to the garage. His wife was actually an assistant to Yasser Arafat and in the PLO. After everything

was cleared up, the guy behind the desk said, “I’m sorry we gave you any trouble, but we have to be careful.” These were your terrorists! That’s not true. They’re not terrorists! They were just trying to defend their land and get their property back. It’s what anybody would do. I also visited a refugee camp in Tyre. It had been shelled by ships, probably Israeli, but using American weapons. Somewhere around here I have a piece of shrapnel, about that long, that I picked up in Tyre. It killed somebody. In 1980, I went to Zambia to teach for six month. Three weeks after my arrival, the university shut down because of political turmoil, so I had nothing to do. What I saw was not all that distinctive from the United States. Lusaka is a big city. You have people driving around, people going to work, people going to medical school, people working in the university. What I saw was not that different than what I saw here. But I saw, in addition, people who were still living in a traditional lifestyle, out in the bush. They live in these grass huts. They lock their door by putting a branch or a twig across it. They brew beer out there, and it gets pretty strong, and it’s not clear, like the beer here. They don’t filter it. It has a lot of yeast in it. You see women walking down the road, with a stack that high on their heads, and it doesn’t move. I heard a guy say, “Well, women’s heads are made for carrying things, but men’s shoulders are.” It wasn’t like men’s heads are made for thinking or anything. I got a bit enamored of a secretary in the mathematics department, so I visited her at her house. The next day, she

said, “You should not come again.” She explained that such and such a guy, a Zambian, was after her, so he would cast a spell on me and I would die. I told my friend, Ben, about this, and he said that if he went to work and saw a dead chicken on his desk, he would just go home. “Why?” “Nobody should be expected to work if he finds a dead chicken on his desk.” So you have primitive people and non-primitive people in Zambia. It’s a funny mix. The people at the university were not primitive in a sense that, at least on a rational plane, they were mostly like me, but the dean of the faculty of science, the first time he ever wore shoes was at his graduation from college. For the most part, the people at the highest strata were posing as sophisticated Europeans. They had all studied there. I went to Ben’s house for lunch. There was a huge, empty field across from it. Two kids came in, they were maybe ten. They said there was a dead woman out in the field. It was raining. We walked out and saw this woman, dead, obviously raped and murdered the night before, and left in the field. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. We took my Land Rover to the police station to give a report. The guy said, “Well, we have no car available to go and look.” I said, “There has been a murder there. You’re supposed to investigate.” “Well, you know, we can’t get anybody to go.”

“Give me somebody, and I’ll take him there!” They found a photographer to come with us. We watched him daintily, daintily tread across the wet ground, so he could take a picture. That’s it. I don’t know how long she lay there. This astonished me. I didn’t know this kind of thing could happen. After I had returned to England, Ben wrote to say hi, and he said, “By the way, two months later, I found another dead person.” Apparently, these women had taken buses from the villages to Lusaka. After they had hired a taxi at the bus station, the driver just raped and murdered them. By 2001, I was back in Michigan and working for Lockwood Financial, a company I co-founded. On 9/11, I called Paul, a coworker, and he said, “Do you know what’s going on?” “What’s going on?” “Go watch a TV.” I told him I didn’t have a TV, so he said, “Go find one.” I went to this co-op not far from where I lived. There were about ten guys watching one of the World Trade towers burning. I looked at it. Then the fuckin’ thing collapsed! What the fuck is this?! Bin Laden, fuckin’ Bin Laden, I wanted to kill Arabs now. What the fuck is going on?! I wanted to go and kill the people who did this.

Later, I heard about the beheading of a guy from Hillsdale, Michigan, not far from here, so I found a YouTube of it. I watched this guy cut the head off, then put it on the man’s back, and I just got sick. I was so overcome by feelings of hate, despair, anxiety, I had to leave the house. How do you process this? In early 2003, Lockwood Financial had been sold, and I got some money, so I met with a banker. After we talked for a while, we went to lunch. I brought up 9/11 and said some hateful things about the Afghans and Bin Laden, so he said, “You know, three buildings collapsed at the World Trade Center that day.” I said, “Why don’t I know that?” He said, “It’s because nobody will say anything. They don’t want you to know.” At home, I got on the internet and saw Building 7 falling down. I had seen controlled demolitions, and this was controlled demolition. Everybody in the world who sees this will say that it is controlled demolition, so we must do something, but it doesn’t work that way. I started doing research. In 2005, Loose Change came out. I looked at that and thought, OK, this is going to convince anybody, so I phoned my brother. I said, “Paul, 9/11 was an inside job.” He’s like, “What?!” “It’s not what you think it is.” “I can’t believe that. They wouldn’t do that to their own people.” Standard argument.

“Look, I’m sending you this video. Watch it and make up your own mind.” Next day Paul called and said, “We’re all fucked.” There is no way the official story is true. We’re all fucked. I became obsessed by 9/11. I watched and read everything I could. Everything that has happened since 9/11 appeals to that, and it’s all false. After I looked at Building 7, I went back and looked at the other two towers, and I thought, Of course, they’re not collapsing! They’re exploding! What’s wrong with me?! Look at that shit flying out! I’m going to get a bit technical here. Bear with me. During an unassisted gravitational collapse of a structure, the loss of gravitational potential energy is equal to the gain in kinetic energy. After the collapse has finished, all the potential energy the structure had before the collapse has been converted to kinetic energy, and a re-organization of a part of the universe has taken place. The assumption that destruction of the towers was simply a gravitational collapse implies that the totality of the driving force causing the collapse was pointing down. Since a massive amount of debris was thrown in trajectories arcing up and out at up to 70mph, the question arises: What potential energy was the source of that kinetic energy? In 2010, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth had reached a thousand signatures, so they scheduled a press conference in San Francisco. I flew there to attend it. I wanted to see what would happen when the press get there, what would they do? Well, the press didn’t show up! I did get to meet Richard Gage and David Ray Griffin.

By 2008, I had discovered Christopher Bollyn. He had written about 9/11 from the beginning, and Bollyn pointed to Israel. I thought, What does Israel have to do with this? I kept denying this for about a year, but what Bollyn was talking about, I was able to verify from many other sources. Bollyn was telling the truth. I don’t want to be anti-Semitic, I thought. I don’t want to be thought of as anti-Semitic. You go through these stages, you know. Here I am trying to find out the truth, and I’m worried about being anti-Semitic?! It doesn’t make sense! The evidence points there, so that’s where I have to go. It is the Israelis, with complicit elements in our government, which by that time I realized was run by Jews. I got onto the Zionist project. I thought, It has got to be Israeli intelligence, and American intelligence, together, running this operation. There’s no way around it. In 2010, I met Henry Herskovitz at a protest against the bombing of Iran. I had read about Henry, the most vilified and hated person in Ann Arbor. Each Saturday for 13 years now, Henry leads a vigil outside the Beth Israel Synagogue. I joined him, and the more I went, the more I realized that what he was doing was very courageous and the right thing to do. Muslims are bound together by strict obeisance to a religion. This is pretty much the only binding thing, so they really protect that well. They don’t want anything to touch the boundaries. Jews are bound together by identity politics. Henry is no longer a Jew. Gilad Atzmon has come to Ann Arbor a couple of times. He actually interviewed me in front of the synagogue. He asked me, “Why are you here?” I said, “The rabbi has said that the congregation unanimously supports Israel. I’m opposed to people who support Israel, because I’m against genocide.”

No Jewish organization will call for the dismantling of Israel, so they’re all Zionist organizations. The Holocaust is the core element in the foundation of Jewish power, of Zionism. Without that, the whole thing collapses. The same with 9/11. Once 9/11 goes, everything goes. The Jews are unique in the way that they’ve suffered throughout history, there is no other suffering like that, and the Holocaust is the culmination of the suffering of the Jews. We’re still suffering, but you can’t ever erase that. That’s the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the world, OK? That’s pure evil manifest. You rip that away, and they’re no different than anybody else. Jews have suffered, but so has everybody else. The British could decode the Enigma machine, so they knew what the Germans were doing. There’s no mention of gas chambers. The Red Cross inspected the concentration camps, and there’s no mention of it. If there’s anything to the official narrative, there must be some documentation about gas chambers in the German archives, but nobody has found anything about it, and there’s nothing in the Russian archives. Jews declared economic war on Germany, and they were having an effect. The Jews controlled higher education, media and the entertainment industry in Germany in the 30’s. They controlled much of the banking sector. Jews were fighting tooth and nail, economically, with whatever means they could, and Hitler said, “We’ve got to sort out this country, for the Germans,” and Germans supported him. Hitler revived the economy. He started Volkswagen and gave people jobs. Most Germans were elated. The vigil has become the focal point of my week. I look forward to it. Sometimes people give me the finger. Sometimes they

beep the horn and give me a thumb up. My wife sometimes says, “Ummm, you’re always angry. Why?” “It’s because of the state of the world. It’s the unconscious people of the world. I don’t understand why they don’t understand anything.” She says, “Well, you just have to think about something else.” Everything now is propaganda, even football games, and the intention of it all is to make us afraid. They’ve generated this fear that’s inside everybody, and it’s just there, ready. When they say you should be afraid of this, it hooks onto it, the fear is already there, they don’t have to generate it any more. It’s just incredible. And the anger, all of the cops are angry now, all the time. I know a survivalist in northern Michigan. He’s got a degree in chemical engineering. He does consulting one day a week and lives on almost nothing. He said, “People like me are going to take back the country when the revolution comes.” I said, “You’re not going to do anything. You’ve got a gun, and they have all these huge weapons. They’re trained murderers.” “They’re not going to shoot their own people.” “You’re not their people! They’ll shoot at whoever they’re told to. This is what they’ve been trained to do.” That’s what all the first person shooter video games are about. It’s the training vehicle, and the recruiting vehicle for the guys who go do that, especially the drone operators that sit in these places and kill people with drone rockets. They’ve never been on a battle field, but they’ve played a lot of video games.

I don’t want to fly anywhere in the United States. If I have to go to the West Coast, I’ll drive there. I can’t stand the TSA. I don’t understand why people put up with them. Later this year, I’ll go to England to visit my daughter, so I’ll fly from Toronto. Australian airports are OK. Hong Kong airport is OK. Leaving Heathrow once, I was pulled aside because they wanted to check my bag. There was a man and a woman. As the lady took things out, I asked her, “What are you looking for?” “We don’t know.” They both spoke with a non-British accent, so they were immigrants. “We’re just looking for something dangerous.” “Do you ever find anything?” “No.” “Do you know why you’re doing this?” She looked at me, and I said, “It’s because the United States government tells you you have to. They’re setting the rules. It’s because of 9/11, but 9/11 was an inside job.” She said, “I know.” They found nothing. We shook hands. As I was trying to figure out where to go next, which gate, a guy who was on his break came over and said, “I want to hear more about this.” So I told him about Building 7. He didn’t know about it. It was 576 feet tall, with 47 stories, and it fell at about 20 past five in the afternoon. BBC News reported this 23 minutes before it happened. I told him about Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. He was really keen. Chomsky is a smart guy, but I also think he’s a liar. He’s too

smart to really believe what he said about 9/11. I look up at the sky on a clear day and I see the chemtrails, and I think, Why are they doing that? Then I read about the various false flags, Sandy Hook, Boston Marathon, Orlando, etc., and it becomes clear to me pretty quickly that this is all bullshit. Three weeks ago, Newsweek put out a special edition on Hitler. On the cover, there’s a picture of Hitler, with the caption, “CAN HIS EVIL LEGACY EVER BE DEFEATED?” Henry bought it. What he was looking for were gas chambers, because that’s the most evil thing in the world that has ever happened, because the most evil thing in history is the gassing of the Jews. Henry said to me, “Will you read through this for me? I’m not sure I read it carefully enough. I don’t see any mention of gas chambers in there.” I read it, cover to cover, all 98 pages. There are two pages, each half covered by pictures, about the concentration camps. There is no mention of any gas chamber. At the bottom of the first page, there is something about using “gas trucks” and firearms to kill Jews. “gas trucks” Henry said, “What are they doing? I think they’re starting to back away from the myth of the gas chambers.” If the official narrative was accurate, they would certainly concentrate on that. Henry reckons maybe the revisionists are starting to have an effect. On scientific and historic terms, the argument is finished. The revisionists have won. There were no gas chambers. Recently in Michigan, it became law that the official version of the Holocaust must be taught in all public schools. The Jews

still have this myth going. The gas chambers are the central part of the official narrative, just like the 19 hijackers are the central part of 9/11. Each of which is false. Henry thinks we’re going to see a change in emphasis pretty soon. The Jews are going to change the story. They’re going to say, “Nah, nah, we really didn’t mean gas chambers.” Recently, a woman in her mid-60’s showed up at our vigil, and she had a sign, “GOD BLESS ISRAEL.” In response, we now have a sign, “GOD BLESS AMERICA. DELIVER US FROM ISRAEL.” We’ve also made these bumper stickers, “AMERICA FIRST. NOT ISRAEL.” A long time ago, I bought into the open border argument. Why should we have boundaries? They’re just political constructs. Gradually, I figured out that people want these boundaries because they’ve developed a social system which works for them. In 2003, I visited my daughter in Reading, England. I walked around and saw all these Muslims, just sort of taking over. In the 80’s, I was already aware of the Muslim problem. There were lots of Chinese in Reading as well, but they assimilated. They spoke Chinese among each other, but English to everybody else, and the second-generation Chinese were just English. The Muslims tried to remake the social rules, and even the laws, to accommodate them. The destruction of nationalism is a part of the Zionist program. It’s very subversive. They support diversity, every group just doing its own thing. The Zionist own thing, though, is to take over the world. They’re already dominating a huge chunk of it.

Rudy Dent a 9-11 First Responder On February 18th, I was in Detroit to attend a presentation, “The War on Islam: 9/11 Revisited, Uncovered & Exposed.” Sponsored by the Nation of Islam, it featured Kevin Barrett, Richard Gage and Christopher Bollyn. Prefacing, Ilia Rashad Muhammad remarked that 9/11 is more relevant than ever, since it has been used to curb the freedoms of all Americans, especially Muslims. Moreover, it has “literally

impacted America, and the world, like never before.” As a pretext for endless war, 9/11 hasn’t just deformed this whole earth, it threatens to destroy it. Reminding us that false flags are far from unusual, Kevin Barrett cited 10 famous examples from history: Nero allegedly burning Rome; Gunpowder Plot; sinking of the USS Maine; sending of the Lusitania, a passenger ship loaded with explosives, into a war zone; Pearl Harbor; Gulf of Tonkin Incident; Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty; bombing of the USS Cole; 1993 World Trade Center bombing; all the post 9-11 false flags, including Orlando, Charlie Hebdo and the ones in Paris in November of 2015, etc.; 9/11. Richard Gage patiently proved that the collapse of all three WTC buildings couldn’t have been caused by fire. He paid particular attention to Building 7, which was hit by no plane and suffered almost no damage before it collapsed, at free fall speed, into its own footprint. Gage stated that nano-thermite was found in WTC dust samples, and asked why 163,000 tons of concrete pulverized in mid-air? His organization, the 2,500strong Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, simply wants a proper investigation into what happened. Christopher Bollyn began by thanking Louis Farrakhan as “the only religious leader in our nation who has addressed the gigantic, horrendous fraud of 9/11.” Then: 9/11 was carried out to kick start the War on Terror, a Zionist war agenda of aggression, terrorism and conquest which continues to this day [...] We will not have peace as a nation, or a world, if we continue to accept the deception of 9/11 [...] If the government and media are lying to us about 9/11, it means that they are controlled by the very same people who carried out 9/11 [...] Both 9/11 and the War on Terror were conceived and planned in Israel in the 1970’s by Israeli

military intelligence [...] The War on Terror is an Israeli stratagem, a ploy pushed by Netanyahu—since 1979— to trick the United States into waging war against Israel’s enemies. With the 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, the book Terrorism: How the West Can Win and speech after speech, Netanyahu’s central project is the War on Terror. Bollyn pointed out the absurdity of Bibi’s stance considering that Israel was founded on terror, is maintained by terror, and had a master terrorist, Menachim Begin, as one of its prime ministers. All three speakers were raptly received by an audience of about two thousand, all but a dozen of them Black Muslims. Mingling afterwards, I met Rudy Dent, a retired fireman, ex cop and Vietnam vet. Flying from NYC, Dent was only in Detroit for a few hours. This mild, affable man is known for an InfoWars interview, conducted in Times Square on September 11th, 2014. It already has 2.4 million views. Dent spoke of firemen being in Building 7 “calling for additional hand lines to mop up the isolated pockets of fire.” Because no skyscrapers had ever collapse due to fire, they never suspected this 52-story building would suddenly become their tomb. Explaining that fire cannot, by itself, burn hot enough to melt steel, Dent related: What we had in the World Trade Center, and I saw myself, was molten, lava-like pockets of molten steel, all right? I spent the night on the pile searching for bodies, and I saw that with my own eyes. So who are you going to believe? Are you going to believe a bunch of government bureaucrats, or my fellow brothers, which I lost 343 guys that day? And I lost Tommy O’Hagan,

Bruce van Hines and Kenny Cumple, and I can never forget that. I think of that before I go to bed. I think about it first thing in the morning when I wake up, and it’s in honor of them and their family that I will continue to do everything I can to make the rest of the world wake up to the fact that this was a false flag operation. In Detroit, I tagged along as Dent was driven to the airport. We talked about his life, world view and, of course, experience of 9/11. I saw the contradiction in real time, absolutely. You know, I was there in 1993. I was inside the building with the FBI. I saw the immensity of that explosion. It was surreal. I mean, it was fully intended to bring down, to topple the building. It blew a hole in the ground, through the concrete, about three stories down. You know, they waited, then they did it again. In 2001, I was there to see the third building come down, and what caught my attention were not the explosions, because I’m used to explosions. I spent two and a half years in Vietnam, so I’m used to explosions, but when I saw my fellow firefighters jump in a panic reaction to the loud noise of an explosion, which they’re not used to, and they’re not trained for, that’s what shocked me. My fellow firefighters, they’re professional guys, but for the most part, they’re not combat veterans, right? I looked at the building where the explosions came from, and that’s when I saw building 7 come down. You know, the real simple thing anybody can see, from the start, is that if they look at Tower 1 or 2, it’s disintegrating from the top down. It’s being demolished, pulverized and blown up, from the top down, while the base remains solid. The difference with Building 7 is they blow it up from the bottom, and you see the whole building come down intact. That’s

something any layman can look at and say, “Wait a minute! Something’s wrong here. Something is very, very wrong here.” I spoke out right away, on FaceBook, then I met Richard Gage. That’s when I started to speak out on behalf of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Richard brought it to the public’s attention. He broke into the mainstream and had them begrudgingly acknowledge that there was a Building 7. Otherwise, we would still not even know that Building 7 went down, so he was a key player. Given the legitimacy of Architects and Engineers, specifically focusing on their area of expertise, they could not be marginalized and dismissed. The mainstream media interviewed Richard only with the intent of luring him into a trap. That is, of having him make a comment such as, “Well, it’s a conspiracy theory, you know,” but he avoided every trick and trap they tried to lure him into, and he responded by saying, “That’s a political assumption. We’re not political. We are specialists in our area of expertise, and we’re questioning the 9/11 Commission’s findings.” I don’t know if you know this story, but Richard bought pizza for all of his associate architects, just to get them to come in and listen to him. Otherwise, nobody wanted to hear anything about “conspiracy theories,” and against the government, no less. That’s a big stretch and, you know, almost un-American. Being involved with this has cost me friends, family, health. You spend long hours researching it, and that’s time you’re not doing what you’d normally be doing. I used to be very physical. I used to like to do a lot of landscaping. Spending long hours sitting down, researching stuff, takes a toll on your eyes, and it’s not good for your health.

Friends, you know, who are still stuck in cognitive dissonance, you’re at odds with them, and family. Just because they’re family doesn’t mean they’ll go along with you. They’re stuck where they are. It’s a painful trip for everybody. People who’ve really gotten into researching 9/11, something didn’t sit right with them, so somewhere along the line, they had a kind of trauma, you know, a trigger that got them into actually looking into it a bit further, and thinking for themselves. I conveyed my disbelief on the web, on FaceBook, but I knew what I was dealing with. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. I took my time and let my FaceBook friends get to know me. I would address it a little bit at a time, with a little bit of evidence. I’d impartially ask questions. If I went too far, I’d get a deafening silence, because nobody wanted to stick their neck out. It was like saying, “Yeah, I believe in flying saucers.” It’s a touchy subject that affects your credibility. I simply took it real slow. People got to know me then, finally, instead of a deafening silence, people started responding, adding more information, based on their own research. All these videos that were coming out, I’d share them. Now, if you go on the web, the information you’re getting is phenomenal, so it’s not even you sharing what you know, but you benefiting from other people sharing what they know. In the beginning, there were firefighters who were there telling what they saw, as survivors, but a lot of them went out with injuries, with lung problems. I had lung problems myself. We lost a lot of experienced firefighters from that day, and directly afterwards. There were guys who came down really sick. For about two or three months, I had all kinds of gray, black phlegm coming out of my lungs.

We’ve got a new batch of firefighters who are trained and disciplined to follow orders and not question, so they follow the official line that’s handed down the chain of command. This is what happened, this is what the 9/11 Commission said. That’s it. They left it at that. As for the older guys, most of them are gone. They were forced to retire with lung problems and things like that. For the most part, 9/11 is not discussed in the firehouse. I sense, from talking to the guys, right there in the firehouse, that there’s a morale problem. They’re starting to understand that they have no protection from this new kind of, ah, sudden collapse syndrome. If it were to occur again, they would be expected to just charge into a building, as they did before, and put their lives on the line. The training in the New York City Fire Department is absolutely top notch. The people in the research of standard operational procedures are really the best you can get. They don’t want any man to come back and haunt them for a lack of training, but here, you have a situation where there’s no corrective measure to prevent a repeat of what happened. As with soldiers, there is no respect for firemen at all. You know Henry Kissinger. Did you see his famous quote? He said, “Soldiers are dumb, stupid animals to be used.” As a result of that false flag operation, we lost more people on that day than we did at Pearl Harbor. Now, Pearl Harbor was also a false flag. We have broken the Japanese code, and we knew an attack was imminent. FDR had to comply with the wishes of the Zionists, you know, the Globalists’ intent to start World War II. They needed a false flag, so Pearl Harbor was that false flag. From there, they got

their World War II, and their myth of a six-million Holocaust. I researched that, and that’s a complete lie. All you have to do is go to the International Red Cross and look at their detailed findings, because they had access to the socalled concentration camps, which were in fact work camps. Auschwitz itself, I’ve posted on that. There’s a very good video called, “One Third of the Holocaust,” and it explains all that. There’s a lot going on. Right now, as a result of 9/11, we’re sending off our sons and daughters to invade sovereign nations, based on preemptive strikes and false flags, to kill people we have more in common with than the people who are sending us. And they come back in boxes, they come back missing limbs, they come back with traumatic brain injury, post traumatic stress disorder, and currently committing suicide at the rate of 22 per day. You don’t see that on the front page, where it should be, every day. So, that’s another proof that the mainstream media is in the hands of the enemy, and it’s not doing its job. It’s all connected. It’s all part of the big picture. I was arguing with an academic who was doing a detailed research on Hitler and how the Zionists funded his early beginning. OK, fine, that’s all good and well, but if you’re going to look at something, look at every relevant dimension of it. So anyway, I tried to explain that to him, and he said, “Well, what does my research have to do with America?” I said, “Really? Did you really ask me that?! And you’re supposed to be intelligent?” In the time of the Renaissance, there were big, strong warriors who wore heavy armor and were hoisted by a pulley system

onto the saddle of their Clydesdale, right? With their lance, very powerful, they were the tanks of their day. When they got injured, the procedure was to take a sword and put it in the fire until it got orange, then they laid it in the wound to cauterize it. There was no stitching or anything like that. It used to take ten men to try to hold that warrior down, until they discovered that all it took was a young, pretty maiden, you know. All she had to do was put her hand on the back of the warrior’s wrist, and he wouldn’t scream out, he wouldn’t fight back, he would take it, right? Now, that’s a good example of how we have been chained, and given a taboo in our brain against even daring to question the so-called Holocaust, their big cash cow. I’m here to tell you it is an outright, utter lie. In my town, I have a lot of good friends that are Jewish, and there are a lot of decent, good Jewish people who are no different than any of us. They work, they even go to war, pay their taxes, they’re no different than us. They may not even be religious, they’re secular, right? They just happen to be Jewish, but those same people are being used. In America, the population of Jewish people is 2%. Within that 2%, there are 4% who are the hardcore, extremist elements who are the policy makers, who run and control America. We have a sadly predictable, knee jerk reaction that’s instilled in us, so that we feel compassion for the poor Jews who were actually burnt alive in an oven, and all the stories they put out, you know, when in fact, it was nothing but a cover story to cover the real atrocity that they committed, and the millions of people that they exterminated, and the fact that they were behind, that the Rothschild bankers were instigating, orchestrating and profiting from World War II.

So it’s all connected, and our minds have been polluted with over 70 years of indoctrination to actually believe this stuff, and see the world through our enemy’s eyes, being incapable of seeing their lies. When we dare to venture into looking into that, we risk alienating a lot of friends. Living in my town, I saw what was being done by the Ultra Orthodox and Orthodox, the way they took over the town. As a police officer, I believed I could handle myself because I knew the laws, then I found out the laws were being circumvented by politicians who were bought and paid for by the bloc vote, the Ultra Orthodox Jews, a religious hate cult. A really good perspective is Henry Ford’s book, and they bought it all up and destroyed as many as they could. Ford sponsored scholars to go around the world and study the Jewish issue, and they wrote a book called The International Jew, and that’s what the problem is. This Zionist political movement is a globalist movement. They may be born in a country, grew up in it and even be successful in that country, as German Jews were, you know, but they have no loyalty to their hosts. After four years, I was happy to get out of the police department because I could see that the prison industrial complex was a profitable business, by design, just like the Holocaust industrial complex. It’s a vicious, repetitious cycle where you have victims victimizing, and as long as you have an influx of perpetrators to use as slave labor, stamping out license plates, making lights and stuff like that, it’s a profitable business.

Why do you think all these entrepreneurs want to get private prisons and build them? One of them sued the state because they didn’t provide him with enough prisoners. We don’t care if they’re innocent, go out and arrest them!

Benny the Landlord, Casanova and Covert Operator Last Saturday, five eternally misunderstood and oppressed gentlemen fired 41 shots at a crowd at 20th and Susquehanna, killing one and injuring four others, including a 5-year-old boy. The TV news reported that the deceased was a “standout basketball player.” North Philly is generally not good for your health and happiness. Though neighborhoods have cute, idyllic names like Nicetown, Hunting Park and Fairhill, they’re mostly postindustrial, trash strewn, drugged up ghettos with plenty of dead businesses, dilapidated churches, boarded up homes, caged porches and corner bodegas with signs forbidding hoodies, guns and knives. Chinese takeouts dish up beef lo mein, moo shoo pork and fried chicken from behind bullet-proof plexiglass. Graffiti mar just about every flat surface, including, sometimes, beautiful murals celebrating prominent black figures in art, science, politics and civil rights. The northeast corner of North Philly, though, is generally spared from this mayhem and squalor. Composed primarily of Poles, Irish, Ukrainians and Italians, Port Richmond and Bridesburg retain their dignity and orderliness through half a century of economic decline.

On Allegheny, there’s the magnificent St. Aldabert Church, with perhaps the most beautiful altarpiece in the entire city. Founded in 1903, it has masses in both English and Polish. Popular eateries The Dinner House and Syrenka are just down the street, as well as cozy Donna’s Bar, where I’ve had cheap bottles of Okocim, Zywiec and Lech, plus tasty bigos and perogies. Their golabki is also wonderful, I’ve been told. I must get that the next time. Half of one wall is taken up by a wallpaper Manhattan, at night, as seen from Brooklyn. The Twin Towers have not been imploded. A guy in his mid-50’s said, “I had no problems paying child support. In fact, I gave my kids twice as much, because they’re my kids. This one guy told me, a black guy, he said, ‘After they arrest you six times for nonpayment, they’ll stop bothering you.’” “That’s ridiculous,” I laughed. “Why would anyone want to be arrested six times for anything?!” “Even if there was no law, I would still pay, because they’re my kids! Their mom tried to turn them against me, you know, but I’ve never said a bad word about her, because she’s my kids’ mom. As they get older, they can judge me for themselves, see if I was an asshole or not.” Sunday at Donna’s, I met two intriguing characters, Rick and Benny. Bar regulars, they’re good friends. An American-born Colombian in his mid-30’s, Rick said he had just been chased from another neighborhood tavern, after his very first beer there, “At first, I didn’t even know what he was talking about, so he said it again, ‘I think it’s time for you get out of here, buddy.

Beat it!’ I was so shocked, man, I felt like crying. I had never been treated like that.” “That is outrageous.” “And I don’t even look that Hispanic. It was unreal.” “So what did you do?” “I just left, man. I couldn’t process it. I just got off work. I just wanted a beer, that’s all.” This night, Rick had another unpleasant encounter. Talking to me, he reached for what he thought was Benny’s pack of cigarettes, but it belonged to the woman next to him. After she snatched it away, Rick explained his misunderstanding and apologized repeatedly, but the middle-aged lady never lightened up. Stern, she pointed to her pack and blurted several times, “This! You go! Wawa!” Looking hurt, Rick turned to me, “See how quickly that shit comes out?” “I wouldn’t worry about it, man. It doesn’t look like she speaks much English. She can’t understand you, dude!” “And I’ve eaten at her restaurant too. Once. I will never go back there.” Shaking his head, Rick went outside to calm down. Later, Rick told me about his sister. American born, she went to Colombia, ended up working as an escort, then was raped and murdered by two Polish tourists, “But don’t you believe all this shit about Colombia. They make it out like it’s the most dangerous place on earth, but it’s perfectly safe for foreigners. The people are so

nice and friendly, and Colombian women are the most beautiful. You’re constantly looking at this one, and this one. It’s like, you’re constantly walking around with a hard-on, man. Ain’t that right, Benny?” “He’s right,” Benny turned to me, “they are the most beautiful.” “You’ve been there?” “I’ve been everywhere,” Benny smiled. In his mid-60’s, Benny has done just about everything and wants you to know about it. Familiar with this proclivity, the bartender kept asking me, “Is he bothering you?” as Benny went on about himself. Outside, the intermitten downpour had paused, and we were only interrupted once by some vapid disco, blaring from the jukebox. I’m a Tartar, from the Crimea. I’m a part of the Yellow Horde, like you. We’re brothers! My father was ugly, like you, with slanted eyes. Ha, ha! My mother is Polish. The Crimea was its own country, then the Russians came. I hate Russians. They should all be castrated! Look what they did to your country. The Russians and Americans used Vietnam as an experiment. They caused so many people so much pain. They don’t give a shit. Communism is so evil because it destroys your entire culture. It destroys your mind.

Ninety percent of the Jews in the world were in Poland, because no one else wanted them. They destroy everything. I hate Jews. The first time I was in Auschwitz, I saw a plaque that said three million Jews were killed there. Ten years later, I came back and it said 1.8 million Jews were killed in Auschwitz. The last time I was there, the plaque said 800,000, so what the fuck is it? It’s greatly exaggerated. There was no Final Solution. I had a good Jewish friend, Jacob. One morning, he called and asked if he could borrow 4,000 bucks. I was still in bed. This guy had millions, and here he was asking to borrow 4,000 bucks, but he was a good friend, so I went to the bank to get him the money. Two hours later, he paid me back! He was just testing me, you see. Just before he died, he would sometimes give me a hundred bucks and say, “Go get yourself a whore, Benny. I can’t fuck anymore!” His own son didn’t go to his funeral, because he had to close out a business deal that day. That’s the kind of asshole he was. Jacob said to me, “I’m a Jew, but my son, he’s an Israeli!” I speak eight languages. I speak Tartar, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, some English. When I went to Bulgaria, I could make myself understood. All the Slavic languages are very similar. I speak Spanish. By the time I was 19, I had been to 40 countries. I have been to 150 countries. I sold and bought contracts. I did import, export. I own

properties. Have you heard of Radio Free Europe? I worked for it. During the Solidarity movement, I went to Poland with a Swiss passport. I brought them ink, paper, printing equipment. Once I was stopped by the police, so I yelled at them, “Do you know who the fuck I am?! I’m glad you stopped me, because now, you can hold my dick while I take a piss!” They backed off. I bluffed my way out of trouble. I was in Afghanistan a couple of weeks before the Soviets invaded. I was in Vietnam, but only for the pussy! I was in the Special Force, in Grenada. I killed a guy. It’s something I think about every day. I feel so horrible, guilty and ashamed, but it was either me or him. He pointed, I pointed, so I shot him. Nobody should have to kill anybody. I was in this cheap hotel in El Paso, and there was a door between my room and the next. There were all these little holes in the door, you know, eaten away by bugs. I looked into one of these holes and could see, in the next room, a guy who was completely naked, except for his cowboy hat and boots, and there was a senorita, you know, sucking him. He smoked a cigarette while she was doing it. He didn’t say anything, didn’t make a noise. When it was over, he said to her, “Same time, next week.” I’ve been with two thousand women, maybe three thousand. I don’t like to sleep with women. I just like the sex.

I haven’t slept with her [the bartender]. I knew her before she had genital hair. Once in Turkey, I saw a guy fuck a chicken. It was in 1994, near Ankara. I haven’t had chicken since. I just bought a house for $30,000 in Costa Rica. It’s a peaceful place. They're the only country on earth without an army. When my mother passes away, I will move down there. May she live forever. Once I was in Vanuatu, in this tiny place that had no running water, no electricity, but everyone was so relaxed and happy. They cooked with firewood, on the beach. It’s so wonderful. Life should be like that, everywhere.

Melissa the Iraqi Refugee With their vast parking lots and chain stores, strip malls may appear generic, impersonal and characterless, but each harbors an intense web of social interactions, with an infinity of stories to tell, but to even state this is redundant, for there’s no man, woman, child or dog who isn’t, by his lonesome, asshole self, a thousand-page novel. In Scranton recently, I was daily dragged by Chuck Orloski to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Washington Avenue. From its beauteous and ample plate glass window, I could espy the wondrous China Moon across the street, and Dollar Tree, Rite Aid, Brick Oven Pizzeria, Pro Nails and PNC Bank were all within rifle shot distance. Chuck knew just about everybody in Dunkin’ Donuts but the guy sleeping in the corner, with his head on the table. He introduced me to Andy, Hoppie and Melissa. Behind the counter was Ashley. Ashley’s husband, Brian, did a good deed two weeks ago. When the temperature dipped into the 20’s, Brian went to check on Jimmy, a homeless guy who always slept outside Weiss, the dead supermarket. It’s a spot the native Texan liked because it fully caught the morning sun. This morning, Jimmy’s teeth were chattering, and it sure didn’t look like he could survive the next several days, all forecast to be sub-freezing. With another Dunkin’ Donuts buddy, Brian took Jimmy to the West Side Hotel, two miles away, and gave him three nights, at $150 altogether. They also gave him a bag of donuts and breakfast sandwiches.

Ten days later, Brian was $50 short for his gas bill, however, so Chuck lent him $43, all he had in his wallet. When Chuck moved into Lighthouse, a charity home run by a blind Carmelite nun, Hoppie gave his friend an 8-inch TV, for he was certain Andy Griffith, Columbo, X-File, Gunsmoke and the Philadephia Eagles could divert Chuck from always thinking about his many woes. Sitting across from Hoppie, I could see that he was very pleasant, if a bit senile. Next to me was Melissa, an Iraqi refugee. Two of her kids were also at the table. Hearing about her difficulties, Hoppie would exclaim, “God bless you,” or, “I’ll pray for you.” Turning to me suddenly, Hoppie blurted, “Welcome to America!” Before leaving, Hoppie pleaded to Melissa, “And please, pray for me too, for I need your prayer.” Then he got up and did a lurching jig on the open floor, to the mild amusement of the cashiers. They had seen it. Encouraged by their grins, Hoppie kept dancing for a bit too long. Melissa has been in the US for 2 years and 7 months. With no husband here, she must manage six children, aged 18, 16, 14, 11, 8 and 5. Her 16-year-old daughter, Melina, wants to be a cheerleader, but that’s not going to happen, Melissa said. It’s her 14-year-old daughter, however, who’s giving Melissa the most trouble. Mina has discovered sex and at least marijuana. “She likes black guys,” Melina told me. Mina would disappear for days, and once, drove Melissa’s car away and stranded her mother.

Yes, I know Melissa is not yet an American, but she will be one soon enough. Moreover, by wrecking her native country, America has caused Melissa to be here, so she is very much an American product. On Melissa’s left arm was a heart tattoo with a dagger sticking out of it. Her eyebrows had also been tattooed on. Her head was uncovered. I never sleep enough. Like, four hours, five hours. That’s it. I work at Dunkin’ Donuts, from last year, October. We have three thousand pound of dough. Sometimes three thousand pound. More! They pay me 11 an hour. I work hard, hard, hard. You know the jelly? I fill that. Yesterday, I fill 62 baskets. Too much, 62, too much. My neck hurt all the time. Then, I take the sugar jelly. Yesterday, 68. You’re killing me, man. If you work from 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, four hours, they give you 30 minutes. I take overtime, so nine hours, 30 minutes. And they don’t pay you, you know. Other companies pay you. People who work five years, they give them 12. I want to change this work. Horrible. I work at TJ Max. Was bad. Because I work just two days. I have to watch my baby. Saturday and Sunday, because my kid home, I can’t work. He in childcare. The bus pick him up every day, 7:50. I give my baby to the bus, then he come back 3:30.

Sometime, they told me, “You have to work at 4 O’clock.” I have to take my baby, then I have to go to the other school, for my daughters. I never sleep. Never. I told you. I can’t sleep. Sunday off, Monday working, Tuesday off. They don’t give me two days off. Fuck it. No problem. “Because we don’t have the people.” Of course, you don’t have the people, because everybody left. One day, everybody left. Too much. Good people quit. Spanish people, they steal stuff. I just finish my work. I see beside the car, a bucket. They say, “Mommy, don’t touch it.” It’s heavy. I think about telling the manager. I afraid. We have buckets of vanilla, chocolate. Expensive buckets. More than 30 dollar. Used to be nobody take this stuff. They take the glaze. They have friends with stores, so they sell it. We have 24 people. American, Spanish, anybody. Just me, Araby. In my country, the men work. The women watch the kids, the house. In 2003, I live with my mom, and my dad, in Baghdad. When my mom die, when my brothers die, I be married, this time. So I live with my husband, in Kirkuk, then, terrible with that family, so I move back to Baghdad. I live in Baghdad nine years. My father is a farmer. He grow vegetables, fruits, apples, lemons. One day, I stand with my father outside, and American trucks, four! come. We see my brothers come home from fishing. Two, three American soldiers jump from trucks, shoot, tat, tat, tat, tat! They kill my brothers, so we get their bodies, you know. We have a good life, but they break it.

Al Sadr, he die, but his son, his son maybe fight with the American. They shoot them. They just want to be, like, a hero, you know. They don’t care for the people. I say, “Man, what are you talking about?! The American have this one, guns, different. What are you talking about?! You have, ah, ah, Kalashnikov? What do you have? They know where are you. The American, they have everything. Why you kill your people, man? You know, when you make all this stuff, the people are killed. They’re destroyed. The people be die, like, for no reason.” 2014, I pay money for visa. Around 90,000 Iraqi. Six hundred dollar. Me, and my babies. Then I leave from Baghdad to Kirkuk. We stay on the bus for 44 hours. Monday, we come to Turkey, and just sleep the night. I wake up with my children. We sleep in the hotel. It’s not hotel, like apartment? I wake up at 5:30 in the morning. Just take my children to United Nations. So, I just told them, “I want to get out of here, man. I want to get out, because I have the kids. My life is hard in Iraq. My life is difficult, too difficult. My kids, every day, I’m scared to death, you know. When my kids go to school, oh my God, every minute I hear boom! boom! My heart is like this, all the time, every morning. When they come home, I’m scared somebody come and kill them. My kids, you know?” So I just told them, “Please help me!” They take my name. They take my children’s names. So, between there and there, I don’t have a house, I don’t have enough, so I go to my cousin. He was in Turkey. My husband’s uncle, before me he go there. So my cousin, he help me to find house. Five days, I stay with my cousin. I find a house. The Turkey people, they help me. Too much. They bring some stuff. I buy some stuff to my kids. I just stay in the house. My husband, he work. He send me money, to pay the rent.

My husband used to be coming with me, but he, “No, I can’t. I have to work here. La, la, la, la, la…” I told him, “No, you have something going. Why you don’t want to come with me? You lose me, man.” “No, I’m coming behind!” I think he has another woman. Yeah. Exactly. I stay in Turkey almost three years. After three years, he forget. When he forget, I’m looking for another husband. I was, want to go to Estraly. You know Estraly? Yeah, Australia! There, they take care of the people. Here, I see different stuff. It’s hard. The work. One day, you’re not working, you can’t do anything. It’s hard. Australia, they pay you for one year. You have to study, study in the school to learn. You have to, every day, go. If not going to school, they don’t give you your food. Smart. Then, every day, every night, they give you three times, food. It’s nice. Here, it’s difficult. So, I was, want to go to there, Australia. When they told me, “United States,” I told them, “Let me take time. Let me think it,” because my husband, he don’t want me to go to America, because, I don’t know, he has a friend. They told him, “The life in America is hard. The life in Australia or Germany, it’s nice.” The people, they told me, “You’re lucky, girl! You’re lucky, girl! You’re fast! There are people who wait seven years! To get out Turkey.”

When I come here. The social service, they give me 5,000. They rent the house for me, six months. I do not find a job, five months. They have ESL classes, but I don’t go there. Man, I don’t have time. I go one day a week, but I don’t like. I already know this stuff. One month, two month, three month in America, this stuff is easy. I sing. I love to watch music. Everything, music. I love Limp Bizkit. I love Future. Adele. Ali-A. I listen all the time. All the time. Make me forget everything. The music give you… happy. I don’t dance. Not too much. We don’t have the time to dance. I watch American music when I, a child. I watch almost 80%, from all the movies, American. American. I love American music. You know Saudi? Arabia Saudi? They have one channel for American movies. They translate the movies. I love Indiana Jones. Rocky. I love Fast and Furious. Paul Walker, he die. Jackie Chan, I love. Look at this, man. Abu Dhabi. Police cars. Lamborghini. Uh huh. Exactly! When we come to America, we stay a couple hours in New York, then they put me in the car, and we’re leaving to here. Social service, they connect with this people. Yeah, so they found the house. They bought the food. They already made everything for me and my children. Just open the door. Stay here. Even the bed. The beds for the kids. They made food. They made everything, so we just open the door. Stay here.

They help me, a couple months, then bye! The government gave me, I think, five thousand dollar, so they found, for me, bad house. The church, they found, for me, bad house. Bad, bad, bad house. They pay the rent for six months, from my money. They pay for me the stuff, for the house, beds or something, the sofa. Stuff, from my money, so they told me, “Ah, we pay this, we pay this, we pay this, we pay this, we pay this!” They bring a receipt. I just look at it. Then they give me one thousand dollar. They tell me, “This is what we have now, OK? You have to go to the bank. Open your, this one. Here’s a thousand. Maybe you’ll need it.” It’s not enough to do anything. “Keep the money! Keep the money!” I tell them. The people, they understand how they play. They bring bad stuff, and they take all my money, you know? Even the shampoo, they bring for me the cheaper one, you know, that blue one. Bad, bad, bad stuff, they bring my house. Why you spend this money, man? They steal it. Yeah! If they’re just working for help the people, so how everybody, like, have a good car? Yeah, they steal the money from the people! I don’t have a cousin here, nobody in America, so I’m, like, blind. What the heck. If you wish, don’t buy for me nothing, the people will help me. When I live my house, after three days, the people bring for me stuff, you know. Jama, the mosque. The mosque send people. They bring for me everything, everything, so why don’t wait?

The social service, they know the system here. Why you steal my money already, before I come? I lose the money. My stuff is bad. The people help me, so I lose the money, you know. The mosque. Saudi Araby, the people when they study here, in America, so they have a mosque. Some people, like, students, Maghreb, like, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Araby students. The people, they’re nice people. They help. I go to the mosque three times, on the holidays. So I have to bring something to my children. You know, they want something different. They tell me, “I can’t eat that food.” It’s difficult, because it was other culture, so my kids, “Oh mom, I can’t smell that. I can’t smell that food. I can’t.” I tell them, “You have to eat it. No choice. You have to eat it,” then one day, two days, they like it. They eat it. My daughter, this week, she’s not coming home. Four days. Last week, I call the police. I lose the girl. You know, when I told the police, “My daughter, she’s not coming home, three days.” I told them, “I don’t know where she is.” She smoke. Weed. She beautiful, taller than me, beautiful girl. Yo, man, she’s a smart girl. She smart. When I leave the house, she behind me, but she not coming. My son, the big one, he told me, “Mom, I put Mina in the basement.” I say, “No, you don’t want trouble, baby. You get in trouble, for what?”

She not call me. I cut her phone, you know. I cut the line, last week. I told the police, “I cut her line, to stay home, but she never stay home.” I’m just thinking, “If I cut the phone, she stay home. She can’t connect with anyone. She just stay home, and watch her homework,” but she outside for four days. She don’t ask about me. Before, she call me, “Mom, I miss you.” I told her, “You miss me. Come home.” My son, he good boy. I say, “Your brother is your brother. He can’t take your blood. No. Even if he scare you, or something, it’s for a reason, right?” The Arab people different from other people. Like, they accept the girl outside anyway, but she have to respect the house, respect the mama, respect the dad. That’s it. I know what’s going on here. She stay with her friend. She take her around, around, around. They smoke weed. When she finish with that, she come back to the house. The Jordan girl buy. My daughter just smoke. Sometime, my daughter stay with the Spanish girl. I don’t know what she want, man. I don’t understand her. Everybody home. All my kids home. Why she always outside? Sometime, she go to school. She come home after 12 O’clock. She don’t find nobody open the door. I give her the key. She lost it. She sleep outside. I was working. She call me, “Mom, I make my nails. I have no money. I finish now. You have to come now, now! To give me money!”

Fast, I go outside, because they don’t give me half an hour or something. I give her the money. She tell me, “Take me home.” I have to go back to work fast. When she talk to my son, she eat him like crazy, “No, don’t talk with me. You’re not my father! You’re not my mother! So why you talking with me? I call the police for you, OK? You touch me, I call the police.” What he do? He stay in his room. He tell me, “Mom, I go to my room.” I tell him, “OK, baby, stay away from her. I don’t want to lose you together.” He see his sister outside all the time. He think I give her everything, to be outside. No. This week, my car almost break down. I need new work. I need to move, man.

Manon the Aspiring School Counselor Before interviewing 33-year-old Manon, I had never talked to her. She only bartends at Friendly Lounge one day a week. The joint was completely empty when we started at noon. Folks can hardly afford a beer anymore. An hour into our conversation, Jimmy the cook came in to take his midday break, then a stranger appeared. An El Salvadorian, he said his name was Joseph and a cook at Little Caesars. Though friendly enough, his English was belabored, so it wasn’t

easy to chat. He did convey that Philly is a joke compared to NYC, where he spent 13 years. Before that, Joseph was in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Though Manon said she couldn’t drink on a shift, Joseph kept offering to buy her a shot. Shoving three bucks into the jukebox, he then tortured us with nine Bee Gees hits. Eventually, more people came in. Someone played Johnny Cash singing “One Piece at a Time,” which made me think, Hardly anyone writes songs about working class life anymore. Well trashed by then, Joseph got up to leave, but for some reason, he couldn’t open the door, which made everyone laugh. This infuriated the stocky man unexpectedly, so I got up to calm him down. Manon then opened the door for Joseph, which pissed him off even worse. Terrance grinned, “Adios!” That was the last straw. Turning around, Joseph growled, “I speak English!” “And I speak Spanish,” Terrance retorted. Beaming a lethal stare, Joseph spat, “Chinga a tu madre!” After Joseph left, I said to Terrance, “His machismo was hurt because he couldn’t open the door.” “Yeah, he couldn’t go through!” I told Terrance and Manon about my friend Jerome Robinson. Poet, painter, tattoo parlor owner and a member of the Wheels of Soul motorcycle club, Jerome was killed after a teenager had been asked to leave the bikers’ clubhouse in West Philly. Minutes later, the kid returned and shot up the

place. Maybe Joseph will come back to put us in our place? Sure enough, the dude did return, but only to get more sloshed. Glazed eyed, Joseph was as cheerful as ever, with Terrance three stools away. It was no fun to peel myself from such groggy fellowship, but I had to weave home to type up what Manon had said, so here it is: I was raised in Bensalem. Both of my parents were middle school teachers. My mom was an art teacher. My dad was special ed. They’re retired and winter in Sarasota. My mom does a drug and alcohol prevention program up here, and she casually does art. She just had an art show in Sarasota where she sold a couple of pieces. I had a pretty stable, middle class upbringing. I’m an only child. From elementary through high school, I went to private schools. I was raised Jewish. I had my Bat Mitzvah and everything, but we weren’t overly religious. My parents are reformed. We’re culturally Jewish. Admittedly, I didn’t have a whole lot of interest in going to college, but it was a route that I thought might be interesting. I wanted to study English, but my parents convinced me I’d never get a job unless I wanted to teach English or be an academic. I was a really mediocre student in high school. I love reading. I was really interested in poetry and music. I got into Kurt Vonnegut in high school, but I suppose that’s the age where people get into Kurt Vonnegut. I thought psychology was a viable career option. I was thinking that with a bachelor’s degree, I would come out and be a world

renowned psychologist. I had no idea. Ha, ha! I was completely naïve. I’d have been content to go to community college to figure out what I wanted to do, or working or going abroad, but my parents were convinced that if I didn’t go to college immediately, I’d never go, that I’d be a vagrant wandering around the country or something. From my freshman year in high school, I’d go to punk shows in Philly. It was a weird and, ah, integrated scene, and there was a lot of politics involved which sorta inspired me to go into a social justice field. I was drawn to reproductive rights, and that remains a major focus of what I want to do. There was a big community of antiracists. It took a couple years for me to figure out that there were not enough people of color involved in punk at the time, in Philadelphia. It was a predominantly white male, hetero kind of patriarchal scene. As a young woman who was starting to become aware of feminist issues, it was challenging to be in the punk scene, because there were all these dudes who thought you’re just hanging around to be someone’s girlfriend, and you can’t be a part of the music. I’d like to see more women involved, people of color, anyone who’s marginalized or left out. I’m in a band now. The Cats. I sing and write most of the songs, nearly 40 so far. We’ve done two full length albums. We did a small tour of the East Coast, and we’ve played in West Virginia, New Orleans, a bunch of places. I was fortunate enough that my parents were able to pay for my undergraduate. After getting my bachelor’s from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, I worked for seven years before going to graduate school.

I worked in an after school program, a pre-school program, then I was a substitute teacher for three years before I found a job with Philadelphia Women’s Center. It was an abortion clinic. I did counseling and bookkeeping there. I realized how much I liked working and how much I cared for universal access to abortion and reproductive healthcare. In Pennsylvania, there are significant barriers to getting an abortion. I get 5 bucks an hour at the Friendly Lounge, which is more than what most bars pay. I take shifts when I can get them. I’d never bartend before. I was just a regular here. A friend of mine was working, and he broke his leg, so I filled in for him. This was three years ago, so I worked here for two years while I was in school. I left when I had a full time internship, then came back after graduation. I literally don’t know how to bartend if I were to be put in a position elsewhere. I don’t know how to mix drinks, but it’s easy enough here, because this is just a beer and shot bar. I like working here because the regulars have embraced me like a niece or a granddaughter. It’s nice. If there was ever a concern over me working in a bar that’s exclusively men… older men, I’ve never had a problem, because everyone has been protective. They treat me like family. One time, I had to physically restrain a small man, because he was bothering another customer. They were the only two people in here. I actually had to pick him up and move him out the door. This place grounds me. I don’t need formal counseling skills to work here, but this place has exposed me to a lot more people, regular working people. Instead of being in academia, I now have the experience and ability to talk to people, so I’ve developed that part of myself. Though I’m OK as a bar patron, since I’m happy to talk to anybody, as a bartender I’ve learnt

how to adapt to other people and their behaviors, and being able to read people more. Coming to a bar is inherently a social thing. It’s a legitimate way to socialize, especially if you’re working, and you don’t have an outlet anywhere else. It’s totally fair to come into a bar and become a regular and meet people. It really challenges me to remember names and remember specifics about people. It’s a great exercise, especially for a counselor. Eight years ago, I went into Ray’s, had a couple beers. I became somewhat regular, but I didn’t go in there again for a couple of years. When I came back, Pauli was like, “Hey, I haven’t seen you in a while! Do you want this beer, the same beer? Do you want a lager?” I was so impressed, like I can’t believe you remember what I drink. What with all these people. You’ve seen how crazy that place is. I’ve always admired that about bartenders. After I started bartending, I realized how much you absorb from everybody, and how you have to be aware of everything that’s going on. You have to compartmentalize things about people. I’m getting by on the money I saved from my student loans. I owe probably 50 grand, yeah. Holy Family was a pretty reasonably priced program. I haven’t started paying it back yet. I don’t know how much it will be a month. I try not to think about that. People are having a lot of difficulties, and people my age are having a lot of difficulties. Even for myself, looking for a job five years ago as opposed to looking for a job now, it was a lot easier. By going back to school, I took myself out of the job market at the wrong time. Since graduating three months ago, I’ve sent out maybe 70

applications altogether for a job as a school counselor. I don’t think we’re in good shape. The job market sucks. The economy sucks. As far as reproductive rights, there are all these subversive laws that are trying to get passed that will put up more barriers to abortion services. There is so much discord between people, and it’s being illuminated with the election, between Trump supporters and Bernie and Hillary supporters. I compliment Trump for bringing all of these people out of the woodworks, for exposing all of these horrendously bigoted people, but I don’t know what anybody intends to do about that, or how to address basic issues like healthcare, education and immigration. I would welcome people for citizenship, for those who are already here and those who want to enter the country. I don’t think it would be an issue except there aren’t enough good jobs available. Personally, I don’t see what the issue would be to just allow people into the country, whether they are refugees or not. I guess outsourcing is a problem. If we can get more jobs back into the States, that might be a solution. Economics is not an area of expertise of mine, so I don’t want to talk too much about that. I believe in an open border, so that anyone who applies can go in, and even those who enter illegally, I don’t have a problem with that either. There’d have to be some rationale for them to want to come here undocumented. Whatever that’s going on in whatever country, there has to be some incentive for them to come here, instead of staying there. I have my own issue with Bernie Sanders supporters, as in the paternalism, as in, Oh no, he knows what’s best for you. Growing up in the punk scene around these guys, you know, these white guys, they have the answers. It’s frustrating to be a woman. The buzz word is mansplaining. I mean, I’ve found it here too, in the Friendly Lounge. You find it everywhere.

Bernie Sanders, I like his policies. I really think it’s ideal. I think people do have a right to healthcare, that people have a right to education. All of my friends are Bernie supporters. My dad supports Bernie, while my mom backs Hillary. My dad is more left than my mom. He started me on thinking about reproductive rights. Hillary Clinton, I don’t support her. I’m sure you’ve seen videos of how she interacted with people demonstrating at her rallies. It’s like so outrageously dismissive. I don’t understand… Actually, it makes perfect sense, that if you’re a career politician, you don’t know how to interact with an average person who comes to confront you. I’m having a harder time with Democrats, but I’d never support a Republican! I cannot vote for someone who doesn’t respect my reproductive rights. Hillary’s so disingenuous. She’s just sorta riding the coattails of Bernie Sanders’ messaging. I don’t think she’s committed to the kind of progress she’s espousing at the podium. I’m learning more about hers and Bill Clinton’s policies in the 90’s, as far as mass incarceration, and how their programs disproportionately affected low-income black Americans. It’s upsetting to learn about that. If Sanders doesn’t get the nomination, I will vote for Jill Stein. I’m just learning about her. I voted for Kerry, then Obama twice. I just read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and working in the schools, I’ve started to figure out about the school to prison pipeline. I have to know more, if I’m going to

work in the school. There isn’t a blanket solution for every person. You need to meet the needs of the families, of the communities. In Pennsylvania, education funding is a major issue, as in teachers’ pays and benefits. Institutional racism is a big part of the inequity in the classroom. You need to work with the students instead of just, you know, punitive measures, kicking them out or sending them to a disciplinary school. Instead of suspending them, you need to work with what the students need. With classroom overcrowding, teachers have a hard time dealing with that. They’re closing all these schools. Test preparation, I don’t think it’s good. If that were the marker of my achievement as a student, I wouldn’t have passed high school. I know I didn’t test well, so I wouldn’t have been able to go to college. I think that’s unfair. The majority of time in the classroom is preparing for tests, and this doesn’t generate a lot of room for critical thought, discussion or creativity. There is a lot wrong, across the board. Right now, I’m reading a book by Doctor Carl Hart called High Price. I think drugs should be legalized, absolutely, if there are ways to give people who are addicted access to the stuff they want to use. We need clinics that are run ethically, where people aren’t stigmatized. We need to run them as counseling and medical centers. People shouldn’t think it’s a dirty thing to be addicted. Obviously, I don’t think incarceration is the solution to addictions. I find FaceBook is a really good source to browse through news, depending on who you follow, and Twitter, I use a lot just because I’m able to curate what I can see. I go to places like RH

Reality Check, because it talks about legislations and reproductive health issues. I go to Feministing. The Root, I read. It’s blackcentric politics. I read Mother Jones, the Guardian, New York Times. My boyfriend and I rent a house in Point Breeze. It’s 950 a month. I don’t have any intention to have kids. Since I’m devoting my life to working with kids, I don’t want to take care of one of my own after I’m done working at school. I just don’t want to have a kid in my house, for whatever reason, because I like sleeping, and I like a disposable income when I get a job, so, yeah. I thought it kind of funny, and my parents thought it was curious too. They didn’t want to believe that I wouldn’t want to have kids because I spent so much time working with kids, and all of my jobs have been related to working with people and with kids. I don’t think that I could, with any good conscience, have a child. I was having this conversation with a girlfriend the other day… I wouldn’t want to bring a kid into a world where the environment is so unstable, the economy is lousy and, you know, people are being killed by police regularly. It just seems really uncertain, so the best I can do is work with other people’s kids. Marriage, I don’t have a problem with, but I don’t see a reason to get married unless somebody is benefitting from it, as in health insurance or something like that. It’s more of a financial concern, especially among the people that I know. It comes down to a financial decision. My boyfriend and I don’t have a lot of income, between the two of us.

I’ve never yearned for marriage, but I also had a string of bad relationships before this one. I was never confident that those relationships would go anywhere, and emotionally, I wasn’t invested in them. I broke up two long term relationships. I don’t want to… I can’t speak ill of them, but they bordered on manipulative and abusive relationships. Getting out of them took longer than I wanted, but I finally did. The impetus for leaving was, I can’t do this for the rest of my life, and if it continues this way, I would be stuck, so I better make a move right now… My last boyfriend would have been pretty content to keep everything the way it was. Both of them were assholes, but they didn’t sabotage the relationships. I took the initiative because I knew I would be the one to sabotage the relationships. Ten years from now, hopefully I’d be working in a school, and being with the same person. Twenty years from now, I’d like to be doing the same thing, working in a school, and being with the same person, but hopefully with more money, so I’ll have the abilities to travel. I guess these wishes are pretty traditional, yeah.

Anna the Retired Teacher, Cab Driver and Computer Programmer Dom, Friendly Lounge owner, told me this joke, “How is a South Philly guy like Jesus? One, he’s never left his neighborhood. Two, he hangs out with the same 12 guys. Three, his mother thinks he’s God.” Angelo comes in Friendly each morning to read Dom’s newspaper. After half an hour, he’d say, “Dom, you need something?”

“Sure, get me a hot chocolate, will you?” Since Dom would give Angelo a five, it’s a $3 tip for just walking two blocks. Angelo is on social security. Years ago, he got paid after an accident, but blew it on the horses and too many trips to Atlantic City. Now, he can’t afford gas on a truck he shouldn’t have bought. At least Angelo has a house inherited from a woman who thought he was God. With property prices so obscenely inflated, Angelo is having troubles paying taxes. Of course, he can always sell, but where will Angelo go? He's never left the neighborhood. These days, South Philly is as much Asian, Mexican, yuppie and hipster as old school Italian. A 20-minute walk from my door, there’s an Indonesian neighborhood, and 15 minutes in another direction, there’s a Cambodian one. There, you can get a pork or chicken kebab on the sidewalk for just a buck. At 6th and Rittner, there’s the Preah Buddha Temple. It’s quite magnificent, actually, even from the outside. A week ago, I talked to someone who taught public school in Little Cambodia, but Anna got there in a very roundabout way. Let’s hear, then, her story: My mother married three times. We’re very different. I’m not a gold digger or interested in climbing any social ladders. I went to Catholic school for 12 years. In third grade, the nuns told us every day the world was going to end in May of 1960. They claimed this was the third and yet-to-be-revealed message “Lady of Fatima” left to the three children. I felt so much anxiety, I started to sleep walk. I would wake up my parents in the middle of the night and say, “We have to go to church right now.” I imagine the other students were also suffering from anxiety. When I was ten, we moved from the city to the suburbs. We

changed our dinner hour from 5 to 6PM because that’s when people there ate dinner. It was our way of keeping up with the Joneses. We even had a horse stable in the back. It was spring and I found myself sitting on the grass for the first time in my life. I always wanted to be in nature to get away from my parents. I was surrounded by all these large, old trees, and the sun was shining. What happened next may have lasted a millisecond, but for me, it felt like ten minutes. All of a sudden, I saw five figures, all in a line, in the southeastern sky. Let’s just call them a family, because there was a tall figure in the front, followed by a shorter one, then the “children.” Communicating psychically with the tall figure, I said, “Why?” I don’t know why I thought of that, because I was only ten-years-old, but I said, “Why?” I realized I was on planet earth and had been here before, but I had also lived other places besides earth. This thought came to me in a flash. After asking why, I got this message, telepathically of course, from the figure in the front, “You’ve agreed to this, and it will only be for a time. You’ll see us again.” Then they vanished. I never saw them again. Our neighborhood was half Jewish, half Catholic. Everyone was white. My mother really got involved in Democratic politics. We had meetings at our house every week, and I really got the idea that politics, excuse my language, is a bunch of bullshit. They really didn’t give a damn. It was all about promoting themselves and their agenda. I was only a kid when I got this idea. As a teenager, I began to rebel. By 8th grade, I knew that the Catholic Church was lying to me. I went to Temple University to study elementary education. I had no desire whatsoever to teach. None. My mother chose my major for me. I did everything I was told. I was well-trained.

At 19, I got pregnant without having intercourse. Yes, it can happen. Use your imagination. It happened. The next day, my boyfriend told me he had come the previous night and I should be aware I may be pregnant. I though he was crazy because we didn’t have intercourse, but as it turned out, I was pregnant. I ended up married to a man with whom I had broken off an engagement with three months earlier. After I told my parents I was pregnant, I found myself getting married a week later. I didn’t want to marry him. I didn’t want to marry anyone at that time. I was only 19. He needed a wife and kid to avoid the Vietnam War. This “virgin birth” changed the course of my life. I had wanted to go to law school and work for Legal Aid. I had so many plans for my life. I would not want my oldest son, Robert, to know of how he was conceived. In a sense, I felt victimized because of this “immaculate conception.” We were married for four years. I don’t know why I married him. I suppose it was because my parents made me, but he was also handsome, which at the time meant something. I haven’t dated a handsome type since. He was four years older than me and going to La Salle University. I did all of his term papers so he could graduate. He was a good provider and a mild mannered man. He was not abusive. He was in love. Yes, he wasn’t completely using me, but he passed over the fact that I was only 19-years-old. I was very immature because I had been very sheltered by very strict parents. I didn’t know I was being used just so he didn’t have to go to Vietnam. Two years later, we had one more child. We had joint custody when we divorced, but my ex-husband abducted our kids and took them 800 miles away when they

were just 8 and 6-years-old. I never saw my children again. Many years later, my son, Robert told me his step-mom badmouthed me all the time, and my ex-husband allowed it. Robert was wise enough to see through it, but my daughter bought into it and became very close to her stepmother. I could have called the FBI because it was an abduction across state line, but they were living in a farm house in a very nice environment, and what did I have? I was just a single mother in the city. I didn’t want to drag them through the legal hassle again. Robert was the valedictorian at his college. A week after graduation, Robert rode a motorcycle to California and has never returned to the east coast. When Robert was in his 20’s, he and his friends vacationed in Hawaii. They were on the hotel’s balcony when Robert fell off and landed on his face onto concrete. He had to get facial reconstructive surgery. Now, Robert looks Puerto Rican, although he’s German and Hungarian. Robert’s a poet and only works part time. He publishes his poetry on FaceBook. He cares about his poetry, and the shelter dogs he takes to the desert for exercise. He speaks of monkeys a lot in his poetry. Apparently, it is a theme which torments him. All I can determine is that he’s in some kind of emotional pain. Robert lost his mom, me, at eight-years-old, and he wasn’t very close to his stepmom. Robert was the office manager in his former fiancé’s law firm, but her business has gone down, so she can’t afford him full time. Robert had quit another job just to be with her. Although lucrative, it required so much traveling. Their engagement was ended shortly after Robert’s accident. Robert is aware of the methane gas, unstable nuclear plant and Fukushima radiation in California, but he doesn’t want to

leave San Diego. He doesn’t want to be near his family. Robert is a child of two divorces. His father and stepmother divorced when he was still in high school. I haven’t visited Robert because I’ve stopped flying, thanks to the TSA. Robert doesn’t fly for the same reason. I don’t want to go through their radiation machine, and I don’t want to be frisked by the TSA. I don’t like strangers touching me all over my body. Why are Americans so passive about this intrusion? These machines are not monitored as they are in dental and medical offices. We don’t know how much radiation is being inflicted on us when we pass through them. After I became a teacher, I got very anxious and started to have panic attacks at night. Having just gotten out of classrooms after 17 years, I found myself facing another 25 years of being in a classroom. I wasn’t necessarily a talented teacher, as it wasn’t my calling. At my first job in North Philadelphia, the students were mostly black. Across the street from our school, there was a mosque whose members would spend hours washing and shining their Cadillacs. One of my students, Calvin, would throw eggs at these cars from a classroom window after they were done. I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with the city. I had a good friend who was a black, single parent, and I spent time at her apartment in this all black neighborhood. All I had ever known was my white culture in the suburb. People there bored me because they all thought the same way. When I went to Temple, I discovered there was another world out there. When I began teaching, I loved my students. I listened to them and respected them. I became their confidant. They could sense that my heart was with them. Even as a new teacher, I had discipline because they liked me. This was the early 70’s. Although it was hard for me being a new teacher, it was a

much gentler environment then. Now it’s an entirely different story. I found a majority of teachers didn’t really care about a student’s psychological or emotional development. Even the “gifted” teachers seemed to care more about securing a good job with good benefits. I’d say 95% of inner city teachers are on tranquilizers. Either Valium or Xanax. Thankfully, I didn’t have to resort to that. When No Child Left Behind was implemented, students began suffering from stomach pains and anxiety. Bush started NCLB, but Obama made it worse. I never strictly followed the curriculum because it did not take into consideration the needs of the students. I didn’t trust these decisions made by people in the ivory towers. They had never been inside a classroom. Teachers who knew what their students needed were never included in the decision making process concerning the curriculum. When No Child Left Behind was implemented, I had my first exposure to Fascism. It was most frightening to see teachers passively accept this change in education based on standardized tests. Not one teacher spoke up about how harmful this was to the students. When I taught in North Philadelphia, the kids would look out the windows and see the buildings downtown. They would ask me what these buildings were for. They had never been downtown although they only lived a short subway ride away. In my computer lab, I was determined to expand their world and show them how other people lived. An administrator came into my classroom during one of these lessons. She was very upset. She said, “You have to follow the curriculum.” The curriculum was boring and meaningless to these students. I taught computers in a South Philly elementary school for 10

years. Before this, I thought all Asian cultures were the same. I learned about the gangs in Cambodian culture. One of my Cambodian students died, and he didn’t even want to be in a gang. He got shot. On an individual level, we got along fine, but if the Cambodian kids were in a group, they would not acknowledge me. A visiting police officer informed us that an area near the school, between 5th and 7th north of Snyder, had the highest rate of gun crime in the entire city. The Cambodian gangs also had African-American kids. They mixed it up. Of the Asian students, the Vietnamese kids were the most adjusted and happy. I will never forget this one student. He was Cambodian and autistic. His name was Siddhartha, but he preferred to be called Fire Engine. His mom was a bit negligent, but I imagine she was doing the best she could. From the time Fire Engine was 8 to 11 years old, I got to know him pretty well. He didn’t like computers, so I would find myself talking to him three times a week. I was the only one who could get him to talk. I knew how to tap into his mind and get him to laugh. We had so many wonderful conversations. After I left that school, I never saw Fire Engine again. Years later, I found out he had been forced to join a gang. I wonder to this day if he is still alive. I’m sorry, I’m getting all emotional. This gang used Fire Engine to do a lot of their dirty work. This tore me up when I heard this. All I can remember is how happy he was, and how happy he made me. The parents of these students left Cambodia to escape Pol Pot’s reign. In Cambodia, the kids had to form gangs just to survive, even when they were very young. I could see that the Chinese kids were damaged as they got older. I surmised it was because their parents were very strict. There was one seven-year-old boy, Huang, who was in my summer school class. I ate lunch with him every day. Huang

had only been in the US a year. He told me that when he was in China, he would be doing a math problem at the chalkboard, and if he made a mistake, the teacher would whip him on the back of his legs. When he got home, his parents would ask about the marks on his legs, and they’d beat him again! During my last year of teaching, I got very sick and needed two surgeries. I was teaching a thousand kids a week. I felt claustrophobic in the classroom, and I ate terribly. Each day, I wolfed down a hoagie because we only had half an hour for lunch. Lunch meat has a lot of toxins as well as viruses. I changed my diet once I retired. Acupuncture also helped me heal. In the late 70’s, I stopped teaching for the first time to drive a cab in New York City. I wanted to meet people with different world views. Driving a cab also got my mind off of my children, whom I missed so much. I lived in NYC for 13 years. I paid $500 for a one bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. Leasing a taxi cost $90 a night, plus we paid for our own gas. I drove at night time because it was much easier to get around Manhattan. I worked 12 hours a day. During my first week of driving, I picked up four people on Wall Street. The three women sat in the back, and the man sat in the front with me. You’re not supposed to do that, but I trusted them because I picked them up on Wall Street. When we were in the BrooklynBattery Tunnel, the man pulled out a butcher knife, but luckily, he dropped it between the door and the seat, so he couldn’t get to it without opening the door. It was a big knife, the kind that can go through your organs. I was a newbie so my reaction was to speed up. When we emerged from the tunnel, I was fortunate enough to see a couple of Port Authority officers. I reported what happened, the officers retrieved the knife, then I completely blacked out, out of fear. I was 28. Another time, I took two young men from Wall Street to an

outer borough. Instead of paying the $25 fare, they just ran out of the cab. These were the only two negative incidents in six years. Needless to say, I never picked up passengers from Wall Street again. I never had problems with black people. They were so appreciative and tipped me well. Other drivers would not pick them up. In the middle of the night, they got off their restaurant shifts downtown and just wanted to go home. They were hard working people, they just happened to be black. A man who lived in Harlem ran inside his house and came out with a radio to give to me. He felt badly because I had no radio in my cab. I became addicted to cab driving the way other people become addicted to drugs. I loved driving a cab. I met so many people from all over the world who would tell me so many personal stories because they knew they would never see me again. I felt as if it were a higher calling, driving a cab. A lot of people couldn’t believe why I would leave the classroom to drive a cab. I had gone to college after all! I would take a break from driving a cab because it was physically hard work. I was also a clerk on Wall Street. Jerry Rubin knew my boss, so he would come to our office a couple of times a week to have lunch. Rubin himself worked on Wall Street. He was one of them. My mother has a few millions but she won’t help me. I get $900 of social security plus $1060 from my pension. It’s the equivalent of a job that pays $15 an hour after taxes. I was paying 700 for a one bedroom, very small, but my landlord just jacked it up to $770! My neighborhood is being gentrified. If I had any money, I’d buy a small, two bedroom row home. My third child, Joseph, is from another marriage. I brought him home from New York City. Back in Philly, I studied to be a

computer programmer and got a great job. They allowed us the luxury to think. We could sit in the park all day as long as we were thinking and had the project in on time. Our neighborhood was where the country was founded. We lived half a block away from two cemeteries, with some graves going back to the 1600’s. It was a paranormally active neighborhood. I had sightings in various apartments. Sometimes, my bed would be shaken while I was sleeping. My son and I saw a milk crate ascending into the air. When Joseph was six-years-old, he came to me while I was on the computer. I got the chills. Joseph had the demeanor of an older man. He said, “I just want to thank you for the inscription on my tombstone. I really appreciate what you did for me.” Joseph was using a couple of words six year old kids just don’t know. They weren’t in his vocabulary. I said, “You’re welcome.” I didn’t know what else to say. In 2000, I was watching the news on the election. This is the first time in our country's history when the Supreme Court elected the president instead of the people. After I turned off the TV, it came back on by itself, and I could see three figures hovering in the air, but not their feet. It’s common for people to see apparitions without feet. They were all dressed like in the 18th Century. Only two of the figures were clear. I could sense their anger. Above the TV, there was a powerful current of light. When they left, this “electrical” current went right through me and out of the window behind me. It wasn’t heat but a jolt. Living in Society Hill, Joseph would get hit in the head, hard, as he was lying in bed. I didn’t like that, not at all, so we moved in 2001. I found a two bedroom in Bella Vista for just $650. I didn’t know that in the 30’s, a Mafia guy was killed at 7th and Washington, and our new apartment had been his clubhouse. Once I had $80 in a secret pocket in one of my coats. I knew I had it, but then it was gone! I searched all over the closet but

could not find it. Later, I opened the closet and saw $80 on top of my duffel bag, in plain sight. There was no way I could have missed that when I was searching for this cash. Money was always disappearing, then reappearing in odd places at that apartment. Someone would go into my son’s room and speak in my voice, but he couldn’t see me, or Joseph would ask, “What, mom?” and I hadn’t say anything. I used to love Chris Hedges, but I can’t take his moralizing any more. I don’t like his stance on prostitution. Hedges wants to make prostitution illegal all around the world. I used to see the women working on 8th Avenue. I also drove college women, Ivy Leaguers, uptown to meet their dates. There were a lot of rich Japanese men in NYC in the 80’s. I’d take them to the ATM, and together they’d go to these beautiful hotel rooms. The women were living quite well. I could smell their money. I could make the comparison between their situation and my situation. If they cracked down on prostitution, these escort women would not be affected. The only women who would suffer would be the poor ones working the streets. I have very good instincts. I have a very high BDQ. It’s called the bullshit detection quotient. There was a time when I believed Jon Stewart was 100% sincere, but he can’t be, because they’re propping him up. My first stepfather left me some money. In three to six months, I’ll be out of the hole. I’ll have money to eat again. His will is not contested. I’m so glad jeans with holes are in style right now, ha ha, because I can’t afford a pair of jeans at this moment. Before, I could put up with these down times, but when you’re older, it really works on your nerves. When you’re poor in a poor neighborhood, people understand, because everyone is in

the same situation. They help each other. In a middle class neighborhood, no one wants to hear about it. If you don’t have money, it’s your fault. I’m older. I don’t care any more. I’m sick of it. I always voted Democratic, but I didn’t vote for Obama because I could sense there was something wrong with him. I liked the idea of a black President, but I did my research. He’s not who people think he is. I voted Libertarian and I’m not even a Libertarian. I was brainwashed enough then that I had to vote. If we had paper ballots and there was someone to vote for, I’d vote again, but that candidate must be anti-war. The one person I’d vote for is Martin Luther King, but we can’t vote for him, obviously. I didn’t vote in 2012, and I can’t be bothered this time. Machines with their software manipulate the vote outcome anyway. Why do Americans also passively accept this “vote count” with no citizen oversight? It’s pointless to vote any more. The biggest problem confronting our country is Fascism, but it’s only soft Fascism for now.

Amanda the Film Editor Yes, it is a bit odd to include Amanda in my series of obscured Americans. She is a very successful editor of films that have appeared on television and in theaters. Her credits include Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider (1994), Carmen Miranda: Bananas is my Business (1994), The Lost Children of Rockdale County (1999), Drinking Apart (2000), The Last Jews of Libya (2007) and Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness (2011). With Susan Hagedorn, Amanda also directed Deputized, a PBS documentary about the murder of Marcelo Lucero. An Ecuadorian immigrant, he was killed by seven Long Island teenagers out looking for “Mexicans to fuck up.” Jeffrey Conroy, 17-years-old when he fatally stabbed Lucero, was sentenced to 25 years. Hagedorn and Zinoman call their film Deputized because they

feel that the entire community abetted, and thus deputized, these teenagers to go out, hunt and beat up Latinos. It was a sport known locally as “beaner hopping.” Amanda comes from a family of high achievers. Her mother, Joy, is the founder of the Studio Theater in Washington DC. A younger brother, Peter, is head of Vietnamese Studies at UC Berkeley. Another, Jason, is the comedy critic for the New York Times. This April, HarperCollins will publish Jason’s book, Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night. Last week, Amanda and her seven-year-old son, Jonah, drove down from Brooklyn to register voters in Philly. I met my friend of nearly two decades in a park. As Jonah played, we talked about her life. I was born in Bangkok. My dad was a diplomat. Not a spy, a diplomat. That's much more boring than being a spy. We lived in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Laos, then Boston, then Taiwan for a year, then Malaysia for three-and-a-half years, then back to the States, to the DC area. I went to high school in Maryland. I was taken care of by this Thai amah for the first four years of my life. I never saw her again. I have pictures of myself with her. The first time I had acupuncture, I was laying there and all of a sudden, I had this memory of myself crying hysterically at the airport and hugging someone. I described this to my mother, and she said that's exactly what happened, “You were saying goodbye to Ari at the airport. She’s the woman who had taken care of you your whole life.” I spoke Thai with Ari and English with my parents. I think I'm especially able to relate to the race stuff from being the other, growing up. My view is a little wider than most Americans', maybe. I've had other experiences besides my own little New York world.

This is how I adopted Jonah. I put an advertisement in PennySaver, then got an 800 number. Some people were really gross, like these men calling to say, “How much are you going to pay for my baby?” I didn't care if I had a black or white kid. That's the first question his birth mother asked me, if I cared about race? I said no. She said she didn’t either. I said I thought it's better that they’re all mixed up together. I sent her this book about me. To make up this book was the hardest part of the whole thing. I had to talk about my family and me, and what I was going to have for this kid. I sent pictures of me and pictures of kids in my neighborhood. I told her I could afford to pay for his college education. It's a roller coaster when you're adopting. You have a possibility and it may not work out. I was in the room when Jonah was born. I cut the umbilical cord. It was just me and her. I stayed in the hospital overnight with Jonah. His birth mother doesn't want to confuse him. We text a couple of times a year and send pictures. I think she's had another kid, which she didn't tell me. I saw it on FaceBook. Since I'm a single mom, I need people around me to help, and I have a great community of other single moms, with some transracial, some not. Some adopted, some gave birth. I also have my neighbors and friends. We can't walk down the street without people knowing us. If I'm like, “Oh my God, the babysitter is late, I'm late for work,” the neighbors will take Jonah for 30 minutes. I don't go out at night because on top of a movie and dinner is an extra $75 for the babysitter. It's $15 an hour for a babysitter in New York. It's an extra $75, so I don't go out. In the city, camp for the summer is, like, 4,000 bucks. A friend

of mine moved to Long Island and it’s 400 bucks for the whole summer. One year, I made a film for the camp so Jonah could go for free, but then you have to make the film! I stopped buying clothes. It's all hand-me-down for both me and Jonah. It's fine. A friend of mine's son is getting married in LA. I want to go but I can't. It’s expensive to travel with a kid. Jonah's fun to travel with. He's really interested and open and curious. When I was a certain age, I traveled all the time. Now, I have to buy two plane tickets. It’s a big difference. I want to travel with Jonah to Asia. I want to go with him to India. Jonah’s very, very physical. You cannot stop him. He gets a lot of confidence from it. His coach told him to stop scoring at soccer because he scored seven goals. It's, like, let the other kids score! I had to put him in a more competitive soccer league. He's over that. Now, we're on to basketball. He told me he’s going to buy me a house when he gets drafted by the NBA! Jonah's really an amazing kid. The greatest thing about him, and he's had it since he was born, is compassion. Even when he was a little baby, if he heard someone scream or cry, he would look over in that direction. You can't have anything better than that, this caring about somebody else. Jonah is in 2nd grade. At his school, there's this new kid, Dunya, from the Congo. Dunya was attacked by chimpanzees that were chased by poachers. They killed his brother, and Dunya had his lips ripped off. His face was mangled and he also lost several fingers, it’s pretty horrific. The first day of school, Jonah came home, and this is what I mean by his compassion, all Jonah talked about was Dunya. Dunya has only been here for six months, so he doesn’t have much English, but Jonah has become his friend. Dunya’s mom died when he was young. He says he misses his

mom more than he misses his dad. His dad is still in the Congo. Dunya’s living with a foster family. They worked for an NGO. They brought him over and are paying for his surgeries. The principal is my pal. She said she'd gotten calls from some parents, asking to have their kids changed class, because they were scared of Dunya. I think that’s disgusting, and she didn’t like it either. First off, what if that’s your kid? Secondly, what an opportunity it is to have empathy. I mean, how hard is it to teach your kids that this kid has been through fuckin’ hell, so be nice to him, and how lucky are you, you white privileged asshole dicks! The school is so good, although it's not diverse. I'm kind of causing a revolution at the school. I'm insisting that they get real about race. The school did not, last year, do anything for Black History Month. It's there for a reason. Otherwise, you don't learn anything. Jonah didn't know who Rosa Park was. Black history should be done all year round, but it's not done all year round. We are reinstating Black History Month. We are training teachers, the whole bit. We're working with this organization to teach them about social justice. The bulletin board is out with different issues every week. We did one on Black Lives Matter. We did one on Latino history. There's a guy we brought in as a consultant. He had wanted to talk about white privilege at a Quaker school, but since it made parents uncomfortable, he had to leave his job. Although he was their diversity advisor, they didn’t want him to talk about white privilege! One of the women on our school's diversity committee is head of diversity for Microsoft. They're trying to have more training about racial sensitivity. They're trying to find ways to hire more minorities, to have their workforce be more diverse. They do things like training girls in tech. It's kind of like affirmative

action. It's paying back. It's, like, you guys have made all this money! There's a group called Filmmakers for Hillary. These films are shown on the internet, where they can go viral. I'm working with a producer from LA. She wants to do something for Hillary, so she came up with this idea. When Hillary was nominated, a lot of people said to her, “I wish my mother was around to see this,” so we’re asking people to make their own dedication. Do you know Bella Abzug? She was a New York congresswoman who was before her time, and very feminist. Her daughter is in this video, saying, “I wish my mom was here to see this.” Joe Papp, head of the Public Theater, his wife is dedicating it to her grandmother, who was a journalist. I was a Hillary supporter in 2008, when Obama ran. She’s really competent, smart, hard-working. She was my senator. I've always been a feminist, always, and I think it's fuckin' time! I edited this film called Thunder in Guyana. It was shown on PBS 20 something years ago, but it's relevant now. Hillary Clinton is not the first American woman to become the president of a country. There's a woman named Janet Jagan, who became the president of Guyana. She was a Jewish girl from Chicago who married an Indian guy from Guyana. It's a great story. She went down there and they founded the Communist Party of Guyana. Cheddi Jagan was a great figure. He was like, “The Caribbean needs to think of itself as separate from South America and separate from the West.” The name of his most famous book is The West on Trial. Cheddi Jagan was really brilliant. For years, the US tried to depose them. Janet’s maiden name was Rosenberg, so they intimated that she was related to the Rosenbergs. The US incited race riots in Guyana. It was so alarmed because they were Communists. It was the Cold War.

Jagan finally came into power in the 80’s. When he died in office, Janet took over, then she ran and won. Guyana has an interesting mix, with blacks, Indians and even some Chinese. It's a weird colonial mix, then there's this white woman. There's a footage of all these Indian men talking. It's, like, behind-thescene election, with this Jewish grandma. Janet was incredibly passionate. She went there in the 40's and flew in on a seaplane. She never returned to the States. My friend who made the film is a historian, mostly of New York City and the Lower East Side. Suzanne Wasserman has made a few films since. She did one about this Yiddish woman writer, Anzia Yezierska. The New Yorker just wrote an article about how Hillary is not the first American woman president. The first half of it is about Janet Jagan, and the second half is about how Sri Lanka had a woman president in 1952. All these countries have had women presidents. Indira Gandhi, Pakistan. We act like we're such a big deal, but our country is far behind. I'm trying to organize a film series at Lincoln Center about women as leaders, then have this panel discussion about what does it mean that women are finally in power? I think women should be in power. I think America would be in a better place. Even today, this guy said to me, "I don't trust Hillary.” I think that's fuckin' bullshit! It's misogynistic. Why don't they trust her? What does she do that they don't trust her? I really don't understand! Is it because her husband cheated on her that they don't trust her? That's just sick, misogynistic bullshit. Nobody has been able to explain to me what are her lies? What about Trump?! Talk about lies!

Hillary has been working since the beginning of her career for women, for children's rights. When she was a senator, she busted her fuckin’ butt. She worked in the trenches. She's not, like, showy. She's not like, “Hey, look at how great I am! Look what I've done!” The atmosphere now in politics is so insane, so who knows if she can get anything done anyway, but she works, and she knows how to compromise to get shit done. Trump is the last gasp of the Civil War. It’s racism rearing its ugly head. It's white men losing their power, which is true just demographically. When people feel like they’re losing their power, they become more desperate about holding on to it and whatever they have to do to keep it. It’s the most ridiculous desperation that ever was. I want to tell you a story because it's chilling. We were in Kent, Connecticut. It's me and a friend of mine, a professor in urban studies. She is also a white woman with a black son. So the two kids were standing outside this sandwich shop, doing nothing. This middle-aged couple came in, and the woman, I don't think she knew I was Jonah's mother, she looked at me then looked at them, then she went, "Wild animals!" meaning the two black kids. I was pretty freaked out, so I said, "This must be Trump country," and her husband said, "You’re damn right!" He was serious, dead-on serious. It was, like, threatening. All I wanted to do was put my arms around Jonah and run in five hundred different directions. They were emboldened to say that shit because of Trump, then there are all these shootings, one after another, after another, after another. I don't think it's different than what it used to be, but it's now out there because of the press.

You should take a picture of me. I'm in this thing called MOBS, Moms of Black Sons, and I have a T-shirt with pink sparkle! We're having a big march. I didn't wear it today while registering voters. I thought it would scare people away. Would you take some of these stickers? These are names of black people who’ve been shot by the police. I don't even know half of them. I had a Trayvon Martin one, but somebody already took it down. Can you imagine?! I put it up at a little corner store in my neighborhood, and the next day, it wasn't there! I am moved a lot by the racial issue right now, and a part of that is raising my son and protecting him. I would be interested in doing projects that have something to do with race. I got a call recently. It’s a film about hate crimes against Muslims. The director is a Jewish woman. She's so freaked out by Trump that she wants to do something. She’s already interviewed, like, six or seven different Muslim families. I went to see a play on Governors Island. This island was an army base and there's this old mansion. This neighbor of mine is black and he's in the play. It's Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, transposed to the antebellum South and performed inside one of these mansions. I took Jonah and it was great. I was weeping. Like all of Chekov’s plays, it's about people who own the big house and are now losing it. I realized I was weeping for the white woman who was losing her power. The slave's son is buying the plantation because he's the carpetbagger now. I was, like, wow, I'm feeling sorry for her, and I realized she's not being so hateful. It made me feel like maybe I should be a little bit more sympathetic to these white people who are losing power, like there is something painful about losing power, if they weren't being so hateful. In Chekov, you feel compassion, like this old way of life,

this grand way of life, whatever it is, is disappearing. There was a talk afterwards, and I think people were shocked that I felt sympathetic towards Madame so-and-so. She was a kind of Blanche DuBois. It's like her world doesn't exist anymore, and there's a new word which is great, but it made me be sympathetic, not to Donald Trump, but to these poor white people, and I don't mean poor like poor, economically. I mean white people who had power. I did see a lot of poor white people today outside this supermarket on Broad Street. There was a toothless guy. When I was trying to register people, I was shocked at how many people who said, “I don’t care. I don't care about this shit. It doesn't make a difference!” A friend of mine worked on a film about meth. It’s pretty disgusting what it does to people, and in the fuckin’ middle of nowhere! Maybe it's the same thing, like they say, with crack, that it was put into the country to put black people down. Maybe meth was brought in to make these white people more subservient. It's certainly a scourge and nobody's doing anything about it. I worked on a film about underground female fight clubs. These are women who live in the projects and have, like, three different babies by three different baby daddies. They wake up in the morning with zero money in their pockets, and they have to find a way to get $100 sneakers for their kids, because that's what's important. There’s a woman who met her baby daddy at the check cashing place because he’s just gotten his welfare check. The way these women make money is these underground female fight clubs. No pulling hair and no biting are the two rules. These women fight and people bet on them. They’re also hired to go beat people up. These are tough-assed women. They’re all black and every man in the film has gunshot wounds, every fuckin’ one. I’m not exaggerating.

There's a party scene where they all pull up their shirts and each one of them has gunshot wounds. I would have been interested in race, but I wouldn’t have been as invested. With transracial adoption, the thing you can do is to become an ally because you’re in the perfect position to be a very strong ally and advocate. You’re invested, whereas these other white people would rather not talk about white privilege. I have a reason to want to make this better, and to protect Jonah. I like to think I'm confident that Hillary will win, but then people didn't think Brexit would happen either, right? My dad is so pessimistic. He's like, “It's over.” I'm going to move out of the country if Trump wins. I will go to Malaysia or Holland if that dumb guy wins, but here's the problem: the people who voted for Trump will still be around. They have been so emboldened and told that the election’s rigged. The fuckin’ KKK will be marching in the street. It's going to be bad. Hillary, at least, she can do something about it, but it's going to be bad when she wins because of those people. It's just horrible. They’re just so frustrated, bitter and hostile. You know people say, “You have to stay and fight,” but I don't think he's going to win. I can't believe that. I would go to Malaysia. I would move to Malaysia anyway, if I could get a job. Malaysia is not homogeneous, but very multi-racial. It's very interesting, like Guyana. The food is also much better in multi-racial societies! Financially, I'm not doing very well but socially and emotionally I'm doing really well. I'm not doing reality TV anymore. I cannot work 20-hour days. I don't want to do it and I'm not good at it. I'm good at doing documentaries. I'm good at finding a story

that's meaningful. Professionally, I have a very good reputation but I don't take shit, that's my problem. I speak my mind.

Vern the Vietnam Vet Looking for Vern for over a week, I finally found him in the Friendly Lounge. Vivacious Kelly was bartending. Overhearing Vern say how he had to take his helmet off because of the letters “VC,” Kelly looked perplexed, “Why?” “Because VC stands for Viet Cong,” Vern clarified. “Viet Com?” When you’re young and beautiful, you can say just about anything and people will find it delightful, but perhaps I’m just revealing my old fart mind set. Yes, Kelly, VC stands for Viet dot com. Actually, it means venereal coconut. Down the bar, ex roofer Angelo jumped in a few times to thank Vern for his service, while Jimmy the cook stewed over his boss while scratching lottery tickets. Italian Felix sometimes refers to Vern as “the angry black man,” but I’ve seen no evidence of it. Sipping his red wine, he’s always soft spoken and smiling. What’s even more ironic is Felix was known in his younger days for getting into fights. Vern and Felix live in the same old folks' home, where the sex life is much less dormant than you’d think. “Women there don’t have to worry about getting pregnant,” Felix explained. “You should go down there and get some action.” Vern had a different take, “Older women need to regain dignity and understand where the limits are.” OK, then, let’s hear more from the 70-year-old:

My father was a grease monkey. He got up in the wee hours of the morning and I had to cook his breakfast. When my father died in 1970, they replaced him with three men. My mother came from a farm. She wanted to be a dietitian, but she was fortunate enough to become a wire technician for GE. My mother converted us to Catholicism, so I’ve been a Catholic for most of my life. I have five siblings, but one died at birth. I’d go online and look at the house where I was born and raised, and it’s all boarded up! I was blessed with good neighbors. The Taylors and Caseys would have us over. I mean, my family couldn’t afford a record player or TV, but the Caseys would invite us over to watch television, and we would go in our underwear or whatever. It was nice. Their house is boarded up too. They’re dead now. They educated us on how to be above what most people thought what African Americans were, or are, in society. I had a good upbringing. My aunt taught me how to set a table, and what fork, what knife and what spoon to use. I was drafted. I just turned twenty. Women always bring me the bad news. My sister grabbed the mail that day and she came to me. This was in August. I had enrolled at Penn State and wanted to be an architect. I only had a month to go before I’d be in school. They drafted a lot of African Americans from Philadelphia. You had to fill out all of these crazy papers and whatnot. They examined you and so forth. So yes, you’re inducted! Ha ha!

It was a shock because I didn’t know what it meant to have that happen to you. At that time we were still involved in the Korean conflict, and there were other world conflicts, so it was very difficult to understand the significance of what I was being caught up in. I needed to get a letter of deferment, so I got a letter to say that I had already been accepted at Penn State, but the draft board said, No, no! You got your draft notice. You’re in! I missed it by a month, but I don’t regret it. It was a lesson. I had never been exposed to discrimination, so I didn’t know what it was. We needed jungle training, so they sent us to Fort Polk, Louisiana, and it was an experience I would really like to forget, because Fort Polk, Louisiana was one of the dirtiest, most ignorant places I’ve ever experienced. There was a town not far away called Leesville, Louisiana, and I remember taking a bus into town, and there was a guy named Vernon Castle. He was a businessman and he owned everything in town, the motion picture theater, the grocery store, his name was everywhere, and that was the first time ever in my life I saw “WHITE,” and then an arrow pointing, with “COLOURED.” I thought, Kiss my ass, you all can stick this town up your ass. I got back on the bus and never went back into town. I was thinking, I’m going to fight for fuckin’ America and you bastards want to talk this shit?! I never went back into town, never spent another dollar in Louisiana. That night, they gave us our orders on where we would be transferred, Korea or Vietnam. I got my orders. It was around Christmas time. Mine said Vietnam. We were flown to Oakland, California, then Braniff Airlines flew us over. Coming into Saigon at night, I remember the fox holes, and the bunkers with the gunners, along the runway,

protecting the aircraft. I was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division, 3rd Brigade, in Pleiku. The 3rd Brigade had already established a base camp in Pleiku. It was called Titty Mountain. Later a general came and said to us, “You can’t call this Titty Mountain. From now on, we’re going to call it Dragon Mountain!” He didn’t want to say that over the radio. He was a pussy. I was assigned to intelligence. My responsibility was to draw maps and overlays so people in the field understand where they are and where they need to go and whatnot. I had a radio there, which was unusual, ha ha! It was for my own personal use. I listened to whatever they had in Vietnam. It wasn’t music. I listened to… what was her name? Hanoi? Hanoi? Yes, Hanoi Hanah! My name is Vernon, and my last name is Cothran, so I put VC on my helmet. Everybody else had their initials on their helmets. Colonel Shanahan came down and said, “Take that helmet off! You can’t have VC on your helmet!” There was a cook that got mad at the Colonel and cussed him out, so the old man told his staff, I want that guy to be sent to the front line, immediately. He was talking all that crap, so the old man went, “No, uh uh. Off you go!” The first thing you learn is to keep your mouth shut, but the cook was drunk. I don’t know what happened to him. I never saw him again. Being in Vietnam, I thought about my father and my mother, because I’m here, they’re there. If something happens to me, who’s going to take care of them?

I had a friend who wanted to be engaged to me. Maria, Maria Stuckey, bless her soul. Her family lived up the street from us. We had a big house on the corner, and they lived at 4828 Olive Street. Those were good days. I have a picture of her sitting in our living room. That’s just before I was about to leave. She was very concerned, and I appreciated that from her. I couldn’t make a commitment because I didn’t know if I was going to live or die. My priority was I wanted to deal with my mom and dad. That was my priority. In Pleiku, I had a friend who was very articulate, and I liked that. She was able to, ah, comfort me, to give me a feeling of comfort. My friend Bee in Philly always teases me, “There’s your son! There’s your son!” I’d say, “Don’t start any crap! Next thing, you’ll have me getting sued, because somebody wants to say, ‘He’s the father!’” I don’t want to hear about it. It may cost me money. My dad said he was sorry he never served, and that’s why I was proud to go in. My brother went into the Air Force, and I was drafted into the Army. It worked out, you know. The whole experience matured me. When I came home, instead of me being an architect, I became a humanitarian. I started to work for non-profits to develop issues to save… humanity. I became the Executive Director of the Public Housing Agency in Chester County. I managed over 12 hundred units. That was an interesting experience. My board member, Paul Rie, used to tease me. Our office was not far from the YMCA. Paul said, “You know, they hung a black guy in front of that Y.” I thought, Wow, but he and his wife were very good to me. I miss him.

There was an orphanage outside of Pleiku. I never experienced hunger, but when I went to the orphanage, a little kid ran up to me and grabbed my leg. It touched my heart, so, how should I say this… we stole these C-rations. They were just sitting there, getting wet in the rain, so we’d take four or five boxes, as many as we could. We’d put them in a jeep, said we were going to town to get a haircut, get something to eat or do the laundry, whatever, and we’d take them to the orphanage. That was a good feeling. When I came home, I brought that attitude back. When I got here, I looked at people and understood. This is home, man, this shouldn’t be happening here, so I set about trying to correct some of the things and whatnot, so it was all good. We’re all brothers, regardless of the color of our skin. You and I are brothers. Religions and politics cannot change that. We’ll always be brothers because that’s the dynamics of life. Some bastards were such racists. They would come to town and rub their Caucasian skin and say “no same same” to the Vietnamese while pointing to the African American soldiers. They expected different treatment. They were very cocky and arrogant and felt superior even to the population that was there. God is going to straighten all this out. It’s going to be good. I don’t know when because I can’t tell you what his schedule is. He tells me what his schedule is. He’s going to straighten it out here on earth because, like I said, we’re all brothers. If you were in a foxhole, ten, fifteen feet away from me and you ran out of ammo, you’re not going to say, I’m not asking that N person for his rolls. I made some of my best friends in Vietnam. There was an aristocratic clothing store at 17th and Chesnut.

Jackson and Moyer. His grandson was in my unit. Best friends! The Biddle family, his grandson was there. We became good friends. Nigel Virgil Temple West was in my platoon. I met a lot of people, and came home with a lot of friends. My best friend, Frank Norquist, got me home early. He married a diplomat’s daughter. During that time, if you were drafted, you went. Many of the rich kids didn’t wiggle out. A lot of them volunteered. They went in. That changed my whole concept. Those guys were great. I’m careful walking on soft ground now, because I remember the punji stick pits, where they’d defecate on the bamboo ends to infect the wounds of whoever stepped on them. I don’t want to say primitive, you know, but they had weapons that were used centuries ago. I wasn’t a tunnel rat. I was too big to be a tunnel rat. A lot of the women were spies, and they would be mutilated for being spies, and I mean mutilated. When we went up Route 14, the women would follow us on those, ha ha!, Lambrettas that they could fit four or five people. The prostitutes had to go where the money was. If I watch Hamburger Hill, it’s so realistic, it hurts. I don’t need to see movies. The best Vietnam movie is Platoon. I’d go back. It was a great nation, with friendly people. When I was taken out, thank you, Jesus, it was three or four days before the Tet Offensive, when all kinds of hell broke loose. They took me to base camp to grab my things, and then from there, they took me to Saigon. That night, everything got bombed. All hell broke loose. They attacked Saigon too, and three of the guys who had gotten there before me were killed, and didn’t make it home. They died on their last day.

As the Tet Offensive started, I was on a plane, Braniff Airlines, going to Oakland, and when I got there, I kissed the ground. Thank you, Jesus! I was never so glad to see America. You go somewhere where you don’t have any rights or privileges, where it’s “Yes, sir! No, sir!” I was so glad to be out of there. I wanted to get out of my stinking clothes, out of my uniform, turn all of that crap in. My friend Frank called me and said, “I don’t want you to go home for a couple of weeks. I want you to come to West Covina and stay with us.” His brother was a realtor out there. Frank said, “Listen, my brother has a house, but nobody has bought it yet, so you can stay there. We’ll hook up for breakfast and dinner and, you know, check out some things in West Covina.” Frank took me to this house looking out over L.A., and I was thinking, Damn, these people are living large! Ha, ha! That was my first experience of L.A., and my first experience of dealing with people on that level. I understand what money means now, and I want to have money. Frank said, “There’s a sickness in your mind that you need to let rest before you go home.” I tell you, I could have gone back and kill everybody in my family. Sat down, had a meal then gone out to do what I had to do. That’s why I tell people, “You have to understand. When someone teaches you how to kill, it doesn’t go away.” So, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!!!! I went to Frank’s wedding in Omaha. Everyone was as white as snow. I was the only black person. I’ve never been married. I proposed to a girl, but she thought it was a joke. We were working together. I had a Corvette, and she had this chiffon dress on, with all the pleats. The Corvette had leather seats, so she kept saying, “I’m going to get all

sweaty.” My old neighborhood was African American, and it was respectable. People had jobs and could afford their houses. When we moved out of North Philly, my parents were paying $75 a month for mortgage on a four bedroom house. Now, I wouldn’t even drive down 52nd Street. The economy changed. People lost jobs. Everything changed. The system screwed everything up. We need more jobs. Jobs and education are the solutions, especially education. People don’t value composure. When they passed the law that you couldn’t beat your child, the little bastards got cocky and became who they are today. Like my brother said to his 14year-old son, “I’m going to kick your ass and whoop it to the max, and I’m gonna put the phone in front of you, so if you want to call the police, call them, but you better make sure you have a place to live because you won’t stay the fuck here.” I’ve always voted, but I’m not voting this time. I’m not happy with any of the people on the table at this time. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats, I’m not happy with any of them. Hillary is 68-years-old. Marco Rubio would have been a good choice, but he’s too young and he already quit. Donald Trump is an asshole. Ted Cruz is a racist bastard, I don’t care for his shit. He shuts down the country for stupid shit, I don’t want him in. Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, I don’t want him in. To put it bluntly, Yes, I’m anti-Republican. I like Bernie Sanders, because he says it like it is, like it should be… I have a funny feeling that this is going to be the worst election

in the history of America. There are going to be riots. There are already riots. Obama had a Republican Senate and a Republican House. They haven’t given him a chance. He’s still discriminated against, from when he was running for President to the present day. Hillary Clinton had to have a private email service because she didn’t want him in her business. I will not vote for her. Obama got rid of a terrorist. He’s going to elect a Supreme Court representative. He improved the economy and employment for everyone. He has been a cohesive personality, uniting ethnicities of our nation, but it is those ignorant individuals who still live in the age of Hitler and all these other assholes that pulled him down and prevented Obama from accomplishing more. The economy has improved since Obama’s been in. A Republican better raise somebody from the dead, cure somebody of leprosy and walk on water to get my vote. I’ve always voted Democratic. I’m a liberal. I believe in unifying and helping. I just don’t feel that America needs to be the policeman of the world. You saw what happened with the Iraq War. It was bad information. We’re here in the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. All that crap that comes out of the East and Far East… pick up your shit and do something for yourself! I’ll be so glad when the good Lord comes and brings everything back to normal.

Helen the Writer and Aspiring Prepper Millions of Americans still have ties to their ancestral country. Two years ago, I met an 54-year-old man who would periodically visit his family home in Abruzzo. Its grape vines and olive trees had been sold a long time ago, and the house itself was little more than a husk, thanks to thieves, “Locals, not gypsies, have broken in to steal just about everything. Each time they see me, they shout, ‘Ecco l’americano!’ They ask all kinds of questions about this country. I love Italy, but I love America more. Everything is better here. Everything.” Despite all that, he still owned the house, so Italy still held him. My friend, Nguyen Qui Duc, had a successful career in radio broadcasting. He worked for the BBC and NPR. In his mid 40’s, however, Duc decided to move back to Vietnam. Now, he owns two houses and three businesses there, including a Hanoi bar, Tadioto, that has been featured in TIME Magazine, the New York Times and on CNN, etc. When I saw Duc a month ago, he was happy and relaxed, so it’s safe to say he won’t head back this way. In Hanoi, I met several Vietnamese-Americans, including Helen, a 33-year-old Chicago native who had been living in Vietnam for three years. She told me about her ordeals in Vietnamese public hospitals, where you must tip each nurse and doctor to get decent treatment. Used to American standards, Helen had no idea.

My father is a very traditional Vietnamese man. He was born in the 30’s. He also had a really strange life, because he was an orphan. His parents both died when he was eight or nine. His father's body was never recovered because he died on a mountain in a landslide caused by Japanese bombings. His mother's body was never found because she was on a train that was bombed by the Japanese. The last time he saw his mother, she came by the pho stand where he worked and they hugged, then she got on a train. So, he grew up alone, and his whole goal was to have a family. He thinks a lot of security comes from family because he didn’t have it. He married my mother because she was, you know, a hot, traditional Vietnamese woman, and I think later in life, he realized that maybe you should get married to people for other reasons. They’re still together though. My father doesn’t talk about it very much, but he was a part of the South Vietnamese Army. He didn’t see combat. He worked in logistics. He also taught English to other Vietnamese people because he had studied English at university. After his parents died, my father decided to become a poet and changed his name to Văn Sơn [Literature Mountain]. He was an extremely handsome young man and would juggle five to seven girlfriends at a time. I like the story of his first love: he was tutoring a beautiful rich girl who was a few years younger. They’d leave each other love notes in the tree outside her gate. One day, he went to go pick up the love note and it was a letter from her parents, informing him that they’d shipped her away to France and that they’d never accept a penniless orphan as a son-in-law. In fact, I think of this often because I don't think I'd exist had there not been an exodus in 1975. Given the class distinctions, my parents would have never met. There was a big class

difference between them. I think it was a big chip on his shoulder. He was like a Charles Dickens orphan or whatever. My mother’s family has been, I think, always connected to the government, under the French, and before that, mandarins in the imperial government, way back. They were always very wealthy. My grandmother lived in the Old Quarter of Hanoi and her family owned a fish sauce operation. During World War II, my grandmother told me that people were starving, pushing dead bodies in carts on the streets. Her family made congee for everyone on the block. In 1954, my mother was a year old when her parents decided to move to Saigon. They got into a car accident and flipped off the mountain road into a river. French soldiers heard her crying and helped them out. Everyone survived. In the years leading up to 1975, my mother had been set up with the sons of rich families by matchmakers. She tells me that she didn't like any of them and would botch the tea ceremony to make herself look like an unacceptable candidate for daughter-in-law. On April 30th, 1975, my father left on a helicopter from the US Embassy in Saigon, thanks to an American friend of his. My mother's family boarded a boat after a harrowing drive through the city, all 10 of them crammed into their luxury vehicle. She was narrowly missed by bullets on the boat. My parents met on Wake Island in the South Pacific, and then they met again in Chicago at a mah jong and pho party on Argyle Street. At the time, my mother's family was living in Milwaukee. She was 22 when she came to the US. My father is much older. They’re about 20 years apart. They were married a year or two later. My mother moved from Milwaukee to the West Side of Chicago. She was terrified by all of the gunshots from gang

wars in the 1970s, so my father moved them over to Elmwood Park, a suburb. They opened a restaurant. It started out as a hot dog stand in Oak Park, but my father thought, because he had learned how to make pho as a kid, “Why don’t we switch over to Vietnamese food?” It was one of the first Vietnamese restaurants in Chicagoland. The Vietnamese community in Chicago loves my mother’s food. She once sold 2,000 eggrolls at $1 a piece to pay for my braces. She's the type of person who can identify every ingredient in a dish blind-folded and she can also recreate most dishes after tasting them once. Growing up, I felt like my mother wasn’t the type of girl I would have been friends with. She was like a really hot, rich girl. I mean, she’s a kind person, but there are things she didn’t have to think about when she was growing up. She grew up rich, I grew up poor, so I didn’t connect with her very much when I was a teenager. So, she grew up very, you know, in her own bubble, in her own wealthy bubble, and even when they moved to Saigon, she lived in a mansion of some sort. They employed a professional chef in the kitchen, someone who had mastered Vietnamese, Chinese and French cuisine. When I talked to her about what had happened during the war, she said she didn’t really experience much of it because she lived in a bubble and went to a private school. When there are issues to solve, financial issues or whatever, my brother, father and I will jump on and try to figure out what to do, and she’s like, “Everything will work out!” She’s very optimistic in this way that, like, only rich people are, you know? Her big thing is, she really does believe in America. She’s like, “Well, you show up, you work hard, you help people, people help you and everything will be OK.” I think maybe, in some ways, it actually does get her far, like she has a lot of friends

from different walks of life. She’s a social worker in non-profit. She’s a really caring and smart person. My mother scrubbed toilets in a bowling alley, actually, her first year in the US. Then, after she moved to Chicago, she worked for a while for this travel agency run by Japanese Americans, which was really cool. They were old Japanese Americans, who had been interned, so they were really, like, for me, the first non-Vietnamese, Asian Americans I met as a kid. The restaurant eventually went out of business, and my parents had to declare bankruptcy. My father got a job teaching ESL to new Vietnamese refugees. My mother spent most of the 90’s helping other Vietnamese who were new to the US, as a translator, and there was a lot corruption at that time, like older Vietnamese refugees would try to charge newer refugees a lot of money for services. There were guys who were like, “If you want me to drive you to the health department or welfare office, you’ll have to pay me a hundred bucks!” It’s like, “If you want me to translate this for you, if you want me to help you get your benefits.” My mother was the only one, she told me, who was doing everything pro bono. She wasn’t around a lot when I was a kid, because she was out helping the other families. She had a lot of, like, I want to give back mentality. She’s a very kind and generous person. In some ways, she’s kind of naïve, maybe. I think I’m a lot more cynical. Yeah, there was always a struggle with money. It was OK, we managed, but in my early 20’s, my parents were losing their house because of the housing crisis, so they kind of guilt tripped me into buying them a house. They were like, “We’re going to lose our house, but this is what we’re going to do. Since you have a job, and you have really good credit, since you’re, like, 23 and you haven’t fucked your credit up, why don’t you find a loan and we’ll pay the mortgage, right?”

I spent most of my 20’s as a homeowner, but I didn’t even live in the house. It was a subprime, 30-year mortgage. I was 23 and making $18,000 a year, working in a non-profit. So I got a mortgage at 23, which is absurd. Eventually, my parents couldn’t pay the mortgage, so I had to pay most of it. When I was 29, I decided I couldn’t do it anymore, because I had spent most of my 20’s working and paying for this house, in the middle of nowhere, one of those weird new developments in a cornfield. I was like, “I’m going to get rid of this house, you guys have to figure something out, and I’m also moving to Vietnam. I’m done.” So my credit was so fucked, I couldn’t even, like, get an apartment. I couldn’t get a credit card. I couldn’t do anything. It did cause a tension between me and my parents, but over the years, it has worked itself out. I think they realized that it was a big financial strain, but this is a part of, like, the whole thing where my mother just doesn’t understand how money should work, and my father was a little bit, like, OK, she’s very demanding and whatever, so he kind of went along with it. I was working for a non-profit in Chicago, an alternative education program for students who are wards of the state. I worked with teenagers who had re-enrolled into alternative high schools after being expelled. Some students were homeless, and we had educational programming for them to get their HS diploma. One of the students I worked with, Laquan McDonald, was killed by the police in October, 2014. You know, when you work in communities for a while, it’s kind of hard, it’s really draining, and although it was work that was, in many ways, rewarding, I felt I didn’t have any energy to do anything for myself. I wanted to write, and figure out what I wanted to do next. I did feel a little bit trapped.

I didn’t really get a chance in my 20’s to, like, explore what I wanted to do. Maybe I wanted to go back to school or do something else, travel. I was working basically from the time I was out of college until I was 31, and then I sold the house. When the house was sold, I felt like I was untethered, so I could move forward and do what I wanted, so I decided just to move to Vietnam. It’s cheaper to live here, you know? It is the ancestral home, yeah. I felt I had enough Vietnamese to get by, that wasn’t really a concern. My Vietnamese has certainly improved since I’ve been here. You know, I can get what I want, talk to the landlady and have interesting conversations with people every now and then. To me, it seems like there is a lack of diversity of thought here. I realize that people are educated in a single system, you know, a single party government, so it’s, like, not encouraged to debate. You memorize stuff. I taught two kids when I first got here, and there was no space for thinking outside what you’re told to think. You can tell many people are unhappy, but no one says much about it. It’s, like, they’re resigned. This is just the way it is. That’s hard for me, because I was coming from a place where my work was actively trying to change policies in education. I started a student activism group before I left. It’s hard to come from a place where you think you can make a difference. Maybe it’s just an illusion that you can change things, if you try hard enough, but here, it doesn’t feel like there’s much trying to change stuff, you know? The gender thing is really tough here. You know, women my age are married with four or five kids, so it’s already weird that I’m unmarried and I’m here writing a sci-fi novel. They think it’s weird that I would leave my family abroad. I get annoying questions all the time.

When people here meet me for the first time, it’s always the same questions. I get annoyed, because most conversations seem to go the same way. It’s not them – they’re meeting me for the first time, but for me, it’s always the same – Where’s your husband? Why are you not married? Is there something wrong with you? Being here has made me feel more American than anything. You know, I never felt very traditional Vietnamese. I feel like in the US, you’re kind of put in a corner, because of the racism. Here, I feel so American. I disagree with everything, and I feel OK saying it, but it’s not OK to say stuff, so that’s really tough. Body stuff. You’re supposed to be, like, 60 pounds, and you wear, like, white face makeup. I don’t do any of that, you know. There’s a whole beauty thing here where women want to whiten their skin. It’s like a look that you’re supposed to have. It’s sort of a status thing. I have a friend here who’s an accountant. She was told that she was too fat, so she had to lose weight or she’d lose her job. The craziest thing that happened to me, though, was that a friend of mine, a white American guy, got this lead on a job where you record the voiceover for an English textbook. They were like, “Oh, we need a woman, an American woman,” so he’s like, “OK, I’ll bring my friend.” When I got there, they were like, “Oh, we need an American!” He’s like, “She is an American.” “No, she’s not. She’s Vietnamese.” I was like, “Wait. I’m not Vietnamese. You’re looking at my passport,” and we got into this long argument, like a two-hour argument, that was mixed with Vietnamese. I was like, “I’m not Vietnamese. Like, I wasn’t born here. I wasn’t raised here. I don’t speak Vietnamese very well, anyway. My mother tongue is really, at this point, English. And I was an English major in college. I did the voice over for the

Vietnam Women’s Museum, in English. Like, I can record your shitty textbook, for three hours! I can read basic English!” They were like, “No, no, we can’t. We can’t hire you.” She started doing this thing when she was challenged, “Well, the thing is we need people whose grandparents were American.” And my friend was like, “My grandpa was in fuckin’ Auschwitz! He’s not American! I’m just white, right? If you want a white person, just put it in the job description.” They were like, “No, no, it’s not about race. It’s not about discrimination. It’s just whether or not you’re American!” I was like, “What is American? Sitting Bull is dead. English isn’t native to the US, you know.” Oh my God, it was so fucked up. The conversation was absurd. Everything I said, she would come up with a new reason that I wasn’t an American. It was like every reason that you could think of, that like a birther in the US would come up with. Oh, no, no, no, I need to see your passport! I need to see your birth certificate! The final thing was, “You have an Asian accent, so I can’t hire you.” I was like, “You are the first person in the universe to ever tell me I have a quote, unquote Asian accent.” I sound like a fuckin’ Midwesterner. In Chicago, in my twenties, we’d go to punk houses and, you know, they were rundown spaces where you would go see bands play and hang out with your friends. I really thought that would have prepared me for whatever was going to come my way in SE Asia, and I mean like, you know, needles on the floor and shit on the ground. Like human feces.

In Vietnam, sometimes, yeah, there’d be bits of shit floating. There have been bathrooms where there was, like, an inch of water, and there’d be, like, shit in there. Everything is covered in water. I guess I haven’t gotten used to it. Like, I’ve never seen a bathroom that has not been moist. I go to Tokyo and the bathroom is super clean, and you can piss in a convenience store in Tokyo and know you’re not going to get sick. I went to the hospital after I had a motorbike crash, and there were doctors playing cards. This was like three in the morning, and they were like, “Hang on a second. I’ve got to play this hand,” and I’m like actually bleeding, like hemorrhaging, from my mouth. They were like, “Fill out these forms,” and I’m like, “I can’t write on your paper because there’s blood falling from my mouth.” And they were like, “OK, let me take your X-ray,” and all the hospital lights were off, you know, because they were conserving energy. The nurse got lost on the way to the X-ray, and then at the Xray, I’m like, “Where is the jacket thing you’re supposed to put on me so that I don’t get, you know, poisoned by the radiation?” She’s like, “You don’t need that.” “No, I want the thing,” so I told her to go find it. You know, you have to share hospital beds, so they put me in a room with, like, a bunch of old grannies, and the grannies were really mad at me because I didn’t take off my shoes. You’re supposed to take off your shoes. I’m like, “I’m not going to take off my fuckin’ shoes!” The floor was really filthy. I’m already bleeding, and I’m not going to take off my shoes.

My friend picked me up and took me home. They were like, “She’s fine. Just give her some cotton.” The next day, it started bleeding again, and my friend took me to the hospital again, and they were like, “Oh, we can’t treat you. You should have gotten stitches last night. Now, you’re infected, and we can’t treat you. We’re not responsible for that. Go to this other hospital.” The first hospital they sent me to, there was a gang fight outside, so it was a mob fight, OK? Inside, there was a guy screaming on a bed because he had been thrown through a window, and they were pulling glass out of his back, and they were like, “We can’t treat you. You’ve got to go somewhere else.” So they sent us to another hospital, and at that hospital, everyone was sleeping, and the nurses, when they saw me, they were like, “Argh! Ewww! Like, this is so gross!” Finally, the doctor did give me stitches, and it’s fine. Everything is fine. This is why I’m writing sci-fi. It actually came out of my accident, that I’m working on this sci-fi novel. Recently I took a friend to a hospital, and they sent him to this other hospital that was far outside the city. It looks like an evil villain’s high-tech facility growing out of the rice paddies. Taxi drivers were fishing in the stream out front. Inside, all the lights were off and not a single person to be found for six floors. It’s like the zombie apocalypse, like everyone’s dead. Finally, upstairs, I found a nurse who was sitting in the middle of the hallway transferring blood between two bags, spilling it everywhere. This blood cocktail sat on the ground for six hours, I timed it. When they mopped the floors, they used ONLY detergent and no water, so when you walked down the hallway your feet slid all over the soapy film.

The nurses told me I should learn to change my friend's needle and drip when the medicine ran out because they might be busy. I said no. They’re like, “Oh well, so here’s your room. You have to make your own bed.” Then, they give you an appointment where you have to go down yourself to get your X-ray. No one takes you anywhere. No one tells you anything. It’s really sad. I guess no one gets paid enough to do stuff. When I got in a taxi to go home, the driver fucked with the meter and I ended up paying 3x the amount. I was like, “You just picked someone up at a hospital where I was with this sick person for, like, ten hours. Why are you trying to fuck me right now? Like, go do that to a tourist somewhere. Why are you doing that at a hospital?” He did that thing where he lowered his head in shame but nevertheless demanded the money. It’s really depressing. Well, I’ve stayed because I had to heal from my accident. Another part is that it’s very cheap to live here, so you get a lot of free time to do stuff. I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve been to every Southeast Asian country except for the Philippines and, I think, Laos. I’ve been everywhere else, in three years, and that’s working on a salary that’s, like, you know, a third of what I used to make. I’ve been able to travel, paid for surgery and dental work, and, like, travel every other month. Outside of Southeast Asia, I’ve been to Japan and Hong Kong. It’s been really amazing. I don’t know of a situation where I could have done that, any other way. Before this, I wasn’t a big traveler. I would visit friends around the States, New York, LA, San Francisco, you know, different

cities in the States. I went to Europe a few times, Germany and France and, like, Hungary. I didn’t have preconceived ideas about what this part of Asia was like, so I’d just show up in places. I usually don’t do very much research before going to a new place, and I try not to do very touristy things. I show up and just wander around, and kind of hang out in places, so I haven’t seen many, like, major sites, but I’ve been to cities and hung out with different people. I’ve been in nature, jungle areas and stayed in home stays, that kind of thing, just hung out with people and talked, and it has been really cool. Like, you get a really good sense of how life happens in many different ways, you know. It’s very different from the American way of life, and what you’re told in the US, too, I think. Asia is the future. I flew into Hong Kong last June, on a transfer to New York. Hong Kong Airport is phenomenal, a beautiful building, and I showed up in JFK, and, like, it’s a shithole. There are so many parts where you can see that the US is in decline, and there are parts of Asia that are building up, like Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. You go to places in some parts of Asia, and you’re like, “Oh, these are functional, efficient cities with very new, you know, advanced infrastructure. And the US very much feels like old, 20th century. It feels behind.” I think the US is too insular. It hasn’t had to… It’s like when you’re the popular kid in high school, who has the whole world going for you, and you don’t have to do a whole lot of work. You know, like you think you’re really awesome? The nerds work a little bit harder. I think Asia has been trying to catch up, I think. It comes at a cost, but you see a lot of beautiful new buildings and, you know, access to a lot of things… You can get anything here. Like, I had an incredible Italian meal in Cambodia, you know, so it’s not not diverse.

When you have to work a little harder to catch up to the Western world, and you still have a lot of ground to build on, things are just fresher and newer, whereas it doesn’t seem to me like the US sees a need to change or grow. I haven’t been to Europe in, like, ten years, but it doesn’t sound great there right now. If you don’t travel here, I don’t think you know what’s available here, like Bangkok has a really amazing public train system. It’s very fast. It’s very clean. It’s incredible. Then you go to New York, and you’re, like, in this shitty subway that was built in the 19th century, that got flooded during a hurricane. I mean, there are monsoons here. I just think that the American infrastructure is just old, and people don’t invest in it because they don’t feel like they have to. It’s functional, so it’s OK. Singapore is so beautiful and clean. People respect the space they’re in. I don’t feel like there’s very much of that in Vietnam, or, actually, in the US. I don’t want to bash Vietnam, because I think Vietnam has gone through a lot, and I enjoy a lot of things about being here. I don’t know how to put it, I guess everything feels like it’s very present. In that sense, it’s a charming place to be because everything is very much in the present, but there doesn’t seem to be long-term infrastructure for, you know, the future. It doesn’t seem like people really care, like you can see that in the bathroom, for example, where it’s like, “You know what? I’m just going to dump this water here or piss on the toilet seat and not care about the person who comes after.” It’s like, “I take what I can when I can take it,” and I understand why that’s the way it is, but it’s kind of depressing. You see it on the street. The other day, I saw someone hit someone else on a motorbike, and you don’t even stop to help someone because, basically, they’ll just try to milk you for money. That

was advice someone gave me when I first got here – don’t stop for anyone. It’s like, “Oh, you’re the one who hit me,” if you stop to help someone. Most people, their immediate instinct is to help someone up, but if you do that here, if you have that instinct, then you’re kind of fucked over. I don’t feel like a hatred, but it makes me kind of depressed, actually, like I just get depressed a lot here. So you just get to see people at their most present, in a way. We already know that people are really selfish, and self-preservation is really important, so you just see it more so here, because there’s no padding, you know? Of course, I’ve also experienced moments of kindness. I miss the US’s diversity of culture. I worked in mostly AfricanAmerican and Latino communities before, in Chicago. I have friends that are from different places, different cultures, backgrounds, and here, in Vietnam, it’s very, for the most part, just Vietnamese. Still, I feel that there’s a lot of ignorance in the US. My motorbike taxi driver, during the hurricanes in Texas and Puerto Rico, asked me if I knew anyone there, and if everyone was OK? How are people dealing? Like, they read the news, and heard about it. When there was flooding in Hoi An, or in northern parts of Vietnam, not a single person in the US asked me anything about it, like at all. It’s just not reported. Like, no one seems to care or pay attention to anything that happens in other parts of the world. I actually turned off my Facebook newsfeed, so I’m out of the loop on what happens in the US these days. There have been a couple of shootings in the last few months, and, like, some guy in New York did something, I don’t actually know, but my friend mentioned it to me, and I was, like, “Stop! I honestly… I don’t care.” The US can do something about it, and they don’t.

It’s quite difficult being in your 30’s and making friends with Vietnamese people, because most of them have families and kids already, so I don’t meet many Vietnamese people my own age. As for the foreigners, you meet other Westerners, mostly, English speakers. I’ve made a few good friends who are foreigners like me, but beyond my small group of friends, I’m really disinterested in most of the other foreigners. Lately I’ve had horrible conversations with, like, just shitty, white European men, like this Belgian guy who actually said that, “King Leopold colonized Africa because all these savages were infighting anyway, so he saw an economic opportunity.” I was like, “It’s 2017. Like, do you really believe that? Like you believe, quote, people were savages? You’re dehumanizing people, because you expect them to work on your fuckin’ rubber plantations for free.” This guy really thought of it as just an economic opportunity, but refused to acknowledge racism. These are conversations with, like, white European men here, who are, like, you know, guys who live here because they can’t get fucked in their own country, and they’re, like, just fucking young Vietnamese women because they come off as wealthy white dudes, you know. It’s, like, look at your fuckin’ life, dude. You’re doing meth, teaching English to to 8-year-olds, and fucking, like, a 20-year-old when you’re 55, and you have no idea how history works. I mean, these conversations are just so horrible, and I’m like, I do want to go back to my bubble. I don’t want to talk to these guys. I don’t like them, you know, but these are the options, when you’re out with your friends. I met a Marine from Texas recently, who broke down in tears. I mean, it was a really sad conversation. He came to Vietnam because, quote, “It’s easier to fuck chicks here,” so we were like, “All right, so what did you do before this?”

He was in Afghanistan, and he went because he was the best shooter in his high school in Texas. He was also on the track team, he was the fastest runner. He honestly doesn’t think women should be paid the same as men. Like, his mother has a PhD in bio something or other, like his father. They’re both PhDs in whatever science field, and he believes his father should be paid more than his mother. Also, he thinks women shouldn’t work. They should be mothers. I usually don’t encounter people like that, in my community, in Chicago. I’m not saying I want to be closed off to other people, but it’s just like, these conversations are depressing. I’m like, “I understand why you feel this way, this is something you grew up in, but you really think your mother should be paid less? She has a PhD like your father. Don’t you think people with the same skill level should be paid the same?” He was like, “No!” He also started crying and ran away. He felt like I was asking him difficult questions, and he had PTSD, so he, like, couldn’t deal with it, but I wasn’t talking about combat. I was talking about his mother getting paid the same amount as his father. I’m leaving here in two months. I’m gonna hang out with friends on the West Coast for a month, then go back to Chicago in February. I want a Chicago-style hot dog. I miss the cold. There’s no cold here. I miss fresh air. The pollution index here was 390, or something like that, out of 800. You’re dead if you walk outside and it’s 800. Chicago is like 50, so that gives you some scale. I’m going to live in Uptown, which is near Argyle Street, the Vietnamese area. It’s mostly an immigrant community. I’m going to live with my brother, actually, because my credit is so bad, with my house stuff, so I can’t actually rent an apartment.

I want to just be in a quiet place with clean air. I know that I have privilege, that I can leave, and I know that people are suffering here, but there’s nothing I can do about it because if you speak out here, you go to prison. I actually think I’m going to learn how to shoot a gun, when I go back, and I’m actually serious about becoming a prepper. I actually see myself, like, starting a prepper colony with my friends, and just hoard dry and frozen goods, for the impending apocalypse! That’s actually, like, a long-term goal. Actually, I went to Eugene last summer, and they have a whole grocery store of prepper stuff. They have, you know, like beef chili and enchiladas, so there’s diversity in prepper cuisine. Vietnamese are hoarders. I learn from the best. My mother is a hoarder, so she has a lot of stuff, but all of it is expired. I don’t know how spices expire but, you know, they do. She has a lot of stuff that expired, like, a long time ago, but she’s hanging on to it. She’s just working through losing everything, you know. She just wants all that padding around her. She wants all her stuff. The sci-fi novel takes place in Hanoi, in the not-so-distant future, after a climate crisis. Southeast Asia has frozen over because geo engineers have kinda fucked with, like, weather systems. Instead of cooling the planet down, they’ve caused a big freeze, so people living in Hanoi are trying to survive in a frozen tundra. I think it was Margaret Atwood who said that when she writes speculative fiction, she doesn’t need to do a lot imagining. She just looks at the past, the oppression and the cruelty, and applies what people have done before in a future setting. So really, it’s just Hanoi now, but frozen, you know. Resources are gone, people are being exploited for labor, that kind of thing. There are rebels and revolutions, maybe. It’s a stereotypical, derivative sci-fi.

Chang the Owner of Jenny’s Place and Dollar City The jokes about New Jersey keep coming. It has the third highest taxes in the country, yet ranks dead last in fiscal health. Its most successful residents flee.

Those who have never been to New Jersey still sneer at it, thanks to its mostly horrible depiction in the media, as in Jersey Shore, where a cast of morons defame both the state and Italian-Americans. In a South Park episode, Stan Marsh rants, “Having neighbors from New Jersey is the worst. All night long, they keep me awake. They’re either screaming at each other, or making some disgusting sex sounds. It seems that all people from Jersey do is hump and punch each other!” Living in South Philly for decades, I’ve had a different perspective on New Jersey. It’s where the beaches and boardwalks are, a vacationy place, and where South Philadelphians move to, an upgrade from their tight rowhomes. Jersey also has a bunch of charming and fascinating towns, Bordentown, Pitman, Moorestown, etc., each one distinctive. Of course, there are also hollowed out ghettos, and too many sterile, strip malled bedroom “communities,” with the local Wawas or QuickCheks their main social hubs. After each Alcoholic or Narcotics Anonymous meeting, Wawa Warriors can shoot the shit in their favorite convenience store’s parking lot, with all their worldly needs just a glass door away. Driving by in the dark, you can still see them standing there, because there’s nowhere else to go. Many Jersey towns are dry, can you believe it?! Luckily, you can always booze up at the very next town. My favorite bar in the entire world is Billy Boy’s, in the Pine Barrens. I wouldn’t mind just moving into that super fine establishment. They make an honest mashed, sell a dozen steamers for just eight bucks and their tacos are only a dollar each on Tuesdays. In spite of everything, there’s still comfort, quality nutrition and probity left in the world!

Oh, how can the universe not be eternally grateful to New Jersey for gifting it Frank Sinatra, Valium, John Travolta, disco fries and nobody Chuck Wepner, who actually floored Muhammad Ali (by stepping on his foot)?! That fight was billed as “Give the White Guy a Break.” Famous for blocking punches with his crooked nosed, puffed up face, Wepner was known as The Bayonne Bleeder. PayPal me, Governor Murphy! I’m doing my best to send clueless tourists your way, and I’m not talking about drunk Quebecois either. They don’t need no advertising! It’s hard to believe, but I only have three weeks left in this country, so even Philly will dissolve soon enough, much less New Jersey. Last week, I likely saw its beaches for the last time, and on the way back, I stopped in Millville, a town I had never seen. Before Mike Trout made Millville famous and cool, it was dismissed as just another depressed Jersey town, with one website, HomeSnacks, even crowning it as the redneck capital of the state. What stopped me was Jenny’s Place, a bar with a wide, stark frontage, and a dollar store/Asian food market in the back. It appeared a supermarket had been converted. A large and mostly empty parking lot accentuated its barren loneliness. On the edge of town, it was surrounded by nothing. Walking in, I found an old white guy at the bar, and a Chinese man behind it. There were three pool tables. The beer choices were limited and lame, with Stella Artois the only fancy option. Photos of happy clients, plus one of George and Laura Bush, jammed the back wall, beneath a row of police, military and hunting caps. Potato chips, corn chips, beef jerky and sausage sticks were all there were to soak up the suds.

By and by, many folks came in, black and white, with most there to shoot pool, and some were awfully good, too, though none could beat Chang Liu, the bar owner. Casually, he would clean up each table, at the first opportunity. A white guy arrived in a white truck, with “PRIVILEGE” in white stickered onto the rear window. On a side window, there was, “DON’T LAUGH… Your Girlfriend MIGHT BE IN HERE.” A black biker showed up on an asskicking Harley, with rap liberally blasting “nigga,” which prompted Chang to ask, “Why you play that, man? What if a white guy call you a nigger?” “My white friends call me nigga all the time, Chang! There is a difference between ‘nigga’ and ‘nigger.’” On CNN in 2013, Trayvon Martin’s girlfriend, Rachel Jeantel, explained exactly that to Piers Morgan. Though Chang’s dollar store/Asian food market at the back was completely untended, there was a bell at the bar to alert him should someone walk in, and a monitor to show when a customer was ready to pay. A convenient door between the bar and store allowed Chang to quickly run back and forth. In any case, it didn’t look like the sea of made-in-China junk had many takers. Jenny’s Place pays his bills. Five-eight and fat-free, Chang had a scowl even when he smiled. Always ready to spring, he was like a coiled lightweight. Although his English vocabulary was adequate, Chang’s accent was still thick, and he often chopped the s from the end of words. There are many bars here. Larry, Bojo, Railroad Tavern, Old Oar, this place. There are five, but there used to be ten! I own this place 16 years. I been in Millville 21 years. Half my life! I’m 48.

I start out in New York, then I move to north Jersey, then central Jersey, and now I’m here, in south Jersey. I had a store and a restaurant in Wildwood. Chinese food. I work for other people, making Chinese, Italian, French, American food. Making food is hard. I’m sick of it. The health inspector. It’s too much trouble. That’s why I don’t make food here. When I open this bar, the people here didn’t like it. They say, “Hey, you Chinese and you own this bar?” They gave me problems the first five years, but you have to be strong. I beat up a tough guy. Once you do that, then they scare. If you beat up the meanest, toughest guy, then the average, the little guy, he think, I better not mess with that man! Millville used to make glass, but the factories are gone. Two went to China. One to Mexico. I have two son, one daughter. My son, they study at Drexel. Mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. My daughter study dermatology. She want to be a, ah, aesthetician. She has two kids. Her husband has a good job. She’s OK. My wife help me out here. Sometime, I hire a local for a day. I been here 31 years. If you want me to go to another country and fight, I won’t go. Why?! If somebody invade this country, then I fight, because this is my country. Yes, I’ll fight to defend it. Ming Dynasty. Zheng He, he went everywhere, went to Africa, but did China take anything, beat you up, make you a slave? No! China help you. You don’t have this plant? Here is some seed. China don’t steal anything. China help you. If China is big, and you are small, China can be your big

brother, help you out, not like the US. The US used to be good, but no more. The US used to help people, but no more. Now, it bomb, cause trouble, beat people up. Look at Spain. It’s this big, but it took over half the world. China is not like that. I’ve been to nine country. Only in Asia. I don’t travel much. I have no time. I don’t like people from Japan. When I play a tournament in Las Vegas, the Japanese guy want to shake my hand, but I turn away, like this. Ha, ha! If you come in here, I serve you, be nice, but if I don’t like you, I don’t like you. I’m not going to beat you up, but I still don’t like you. Japan treat Chinese people terrible. I understand that everybody is terrible in a war, everybody, but I still don’t like people from Japan. Before, you send money to China, but now, they send money to you! There’s more money there. If you want to buy a store, and you need one million, two million, and you don’t have it, you call your relatives in China and say, “Hey, please help me out here.” That’s how it work now. If I’m 20 something, I stay in China, work there, make money. You know the culture, the language, how they think. It’s easier there. Twenty years ago, most Chinese restaurants in the US were run by people from Canton and Taiwan. Now, 90% of them are run by people from Fujian. If I meet another person from Fujian, he will know somebody

that I know, so we trust each other. We’ll help each other out. That’s how it work. If a person from Fujian move somewhere, he will bring more people from Fujian. That’s how it work. All the Chinese in Africa are from Fujian! Before, the Chinese government stop people from leaving, but now, they say, “Go! Go!” so you find Chinese people everywhere. All empire collapse. They go up, down. They all go down. The US is almost done. When US go down, I go back to China. I say this to everybody, and they all agree with me. Just ask them! They all say, Yeah, the US is going down.